CHAPTER XXVI

THE IRON CHESS-GAME

War is not a matter of prancing steeds, troops charging, heroic feats of arms. These spectacular adjuncts typify war as the little finger-nail of one hand might typify the whole human body.

War itself is a huge problem in mathematics; combined with an element of puzzle and gross chance.

In short, a game. An iron game, more like chess in its general mode of playing than any other.

Here in brief was the iron chess-game situation in the early autumn of 1862; an all-important crisis in the long-drawn contest:

Lee had wearied at last of acting solely on the defensive. Since the Civil War’s outset, the Confederates had thus far contented themselves with defending their own territory. On Virginia fell the brunt of the fighting. The Old Dominion had from the very first been the chief battleground of the two conflicting forces.

There the South had won victory after victory; with ludicrous ease defeating its more numerous and better-equipped Northern foes. McClellan in vain had hurled his forces against Richmond. In Northern Virginia, at Manassas, the North had also been beaten; there and nearly everywhere else throughout the length and breadth of the State.

Lee, master strategist, had confuted every Federal plan. Jackson, by a wizardry of generalship, had all but annihilated various Union armies in the mountain district.

It had all been easy conquest for the South, prepared and self-girded beforehand for the conflict.

And now, finding the defensive so simple, Lee had determined to take the aggressive; to cease merely to defend his own and to strike a blow at the very heart of the North to carry war directly and vehemently into the enemy’s own well-bulwarked territory itself.

His plan was clever.

Maryland, adjoining Virginia to the north, had ever been loud in protestations of sympathy to the South. The State had all but seceded. It was alive with ardent Confederate well-wishers.

The song “Maryland, My Maryland,” vied with “Dixie” itself. From a thousand Baltimoreans and other Southern sympathizers Lee had received word that the moment his armies should set foot in Maryland the whole State would rise as one man to his support.

Lee, believing all this, decided to invade the North by way of Maryland, where aid and reënforcements by the wholesale presumably awaited him. Thence he planned to march straight to Pennsylvania, and so through to New York, and even, perhaps, to Boston itself.

Washington, too, might prove vulnerable to a flank attack.

In front of him, seeking to bar his way, lay the Army of the Potomac, sullen from many beatings, yet fearlessly awaiting a chance to check the invader. But Lee, having outwitted and outfought that same army so often in Virginia, had scant doubt he could do the same thing in Maryland.

He hoped to dodge the Army of the Potomac in his northward march, forcing it to follow him to some point where he could conveniently thrash it and drive it back, demoralized. In such an event the whole North would lie practically helpless and paralyzed before him, and there would be no troops to spare for a counter invasion of Virginia.

The plan was as simple as it was shrewd. And on September 5, 1862, Lee proceeded to put it into operation.

First bewildering his foes as to his exact position and projects, he safely crossed the Potomac with his whole army into that land of much promise, the State of Maryland.

Here his first setback awaited him.

Maryland had been noisy and voluble in loyalty to the South. But, now that the moment had come to prove that loyalty, the State failed to “rise as one man” to Lee’s support.

In fact, it failed ignominiously to rise at all.

Maryland, as a whole, received Lee coolly. There was no demonstration in his favor. The erstwhile ardent Marylanders did not care to go on record as favoring Lee. For should his invasion fail they were likely thus to find themselves in the unenviable position of the small boy who has prematurely gone to the help of the school bully’s victim.

There had been plenty of sympathy for Lee. There was no aid there for him.

And Bret Harte’s parody on “Maryland, My Maryland,” was sung derisively throughout the North; a parody beginning:

In battle thou art strangely meek, Maryland, my Maryland! Thy politics are changed each week, Maryland, my Maryland!

The Army of the Potomac dashed to the defense of the invaded State.

As Lee marched out of Frederick, McClellan marched into the town. The hour for the decisive clash drew near; the clash that should once and for all decide the invasion’s fate.

In Washington--where the fear of the Union capital’s falling into Lee’s hands was monstrously acute--Abraham Lincoln’s rugged face grew paler and more haggard.

To his advisers he announced that he had taken a solemn vow. A vow that, should the invasion be repelled, he would at once issue a proclamation freeing the slaves.

Word of this pledge reached Lee through underground channels. And the Southern leader knew the promise would be kept; moreover, that, on the heels of such a repulse, the Emancipation Proclamation would prove well-nigh a death-blow to all hope of the South’s ultimate success.

The die was cast. The death duel was at hand.

* * * * *

Thus stood the situation on the September day that Dad and Battle Jimmie, on borrowed horses, cantered forth from camp and on to the Frederick road.

Behind them the far-spread Union camps buzzed and hummed and fermented. Excitement was in every breath of air; excitement and the suspense of stark expectancy.

Days would probably pass before the bulk of the Army of the Potomac would be set in motion. But every man knew just what was coming.

Every man knew that the next move would bring the rival forces to grips, and under more pregnant circumstances than ever before.

Wherefore the vast camp stirred and muttered like waking monsters underseas at the surface turmoil of mounting wave and wind-blown foam-crest that presages storm.

Ahead for some distance the road was half-choked with provision trains, ammunition wagons, and baggage carts, through which Dad and the boy threaded their way with no great degree of ease.

The fields on either hand were dotted with couriers and returning skirmish-parties taking short cuts back from Frederick, the town whence Lee’s rear guard, under General D. H. Hill, had departed scarce fifteen hours earlier, which had been formerly occupied by the Union vanguard a short time afterward--three hours, in fact.

As the man and the boy jogged along the press in the road grew thinner and thinner, and in time resolved itself into a semi-occasional stray rider or belated wagon or two.

Dad rode with the careless ease of a lifelong equestrian to whom the saddle was as familiar as a rocking-chair; and his sorrel mount’s occasional passaging and curvets gave the rider not the remotest trouble, nor so much as a conscious thought.

With Battle Jimmie it was different. Until the last few months he had never been astride a horse. And hitherto most of his rides had been on the broad back of some caisson or baggage horse whose lumbering gallop was highly uncomfortable, but to whose moorings--or harness--it was possible to cling with an unsportsmanlike grip that was highly needful, in the light of his inexperience.

Of late, though, Dad had taken his grandson’s equestrian education in hand, with the result that Jimmie now restrained the keen yearning to seize the pommel of his army saddle or the equally tempting mane of his mount in the effort to stick on. He rode in shortened stirrups, sat his saddle stiffly, held the reins as nearly as possible after the correct and approved army fashion--and during the entire operation was as physically miserable as it was possible for him to be.

His horse to-day, a huge, raw-boned bald-face, would have proven a handful for a more expert rider. Jimmie sawed viciously at the brute’s hard mouth more than once; and the horse retaliated by jerking back his head and then suddenly leaning on the bit with a tug that all but pulled the reins free from the rider’s grubby little hands.

Dad viewed the boy’s efforts with covert amusement; now and then, as in the case of the jerked reins, offering a word or two of criticism, then of brief, if kindly spoken, advice.

“I can stay aboard,” panted Jimmie brokenly, as the horse broke into a hard trot that shook the breath from his lungs. “I can stay aboard, all right. But I could get more fun out of a nice gun-carriage without strings or a--Gee, Emp!” he interrupted himself, apostrophizing the many-breeded dog that frisked coquettishly along just ahead of him. “You ain’t got a ghost of an idea how lucky you are to have four feet instead of riding something that has. And when _you_ sit down you’ve always got something to sit on that won’t jog you up in the air again. Say, Dad, what old duffer ever invented the fool idea that folks mustn’t hang on by the pommel and the mane?”

“The same man, I suppose,” responded Dad, “who invented all the rules that pester us. The rule that you mustn’t run away when you’re scared, and that you must tell the truth when a lie would seem to help, and that you must share the half rations you’re so hungry for with the chap who hasn’t any; and every other rule that’s hard to obey and that makes man something better than an animal.

“Stick on, son. It’ll come easier by and by. Everything does. And the outside of a horse is the best thing for the inside of a man. There’s nothing else on earth to equal riding. It’s--Keep the hand lower and the heels higher, son! Ball of the foot, not the instep, in the stirrup. So!”

“It’s funny,” mused Jimmie, “how we happened to take this Frederick road when there are so many others. If we aren’t careful we’re liable to run into the Third Ambulance Corps wagon train before long. Emp!” he went on, hastily, forestalling any possible retort, “you and I are a lonely pair of youngsters, aren’t we? I wonder if you ever had a grandmother. Maybe dogs don’t. I don’t remember mine.

“But sometimes it kind of almost seems to me as if maybe I can look forward to her, Emp. And it makes me feel pretty good. ’Cause I think she’s just the dandiest little lady that ever fell in love with the dandiest man that ever was, or ever will be, Emp.”

“Jimmie!” remarked Dad, sternly. “Your shoulders are hunched over like a black bear cub’s. Square them when you ride. Don’t look more like a meal-sack or a Cherokee squaw than you can help.”

The boy straightened himself to erect military carriage. And at once the jarring trot of the big horse shook his spine excruciatingly.

He slowed his mount to a walk, thereat, with promptitude.

“Want to turn back, son?” queried Dad. “Had enough of it?”

There was a wistfulness in the kind query that went to the boy’s jouncing heart and made him resolve to be shaken to a pulp sooner than deprive Dad of a chance to see the one woman in the ambulance corps.

“Nope!” he lied blithely. “I’m getting to enjoy it fine.”

Their horses plodded along at a comfortable walk, neck and neck, and the boy breathed more easily and shifted his position in the torturing saddle. Emp took advantage of the slackened pace to dart to the roadside and begin to explore truculently a quite-deserted woodchuck hole.

“Sic ’im, Emp!” encouraged Jimmie. “Dig ’im out, boy! Wrassle ’im!”

Thus exhorted, Emp bent his entire canine energy to the task of unearthing a woodchuck from the hole where no woodchuck was. The dog’s yellow forepaws flew like pistons, widening the mouth of the hole; and his red little tongue was speedily flaked with earth.

Backward from the swift-plied paws, as he dug, flew a cloud of yellow dust.

And a generous share of that same yellow dust was hurled against the spotless gaiters and new baggy trousers of a corporal of Zouaves who chanced to be passing by, on foot, at that side of the road.

The corporal, with a single glance at the cause of this defacing of his dandified raiment, swore fluently and launched a kick at the highly industrious Emp. Jimmie cried out in indignant protest. The kick, conscientiously, but too hastily, delivered, barely grazed the flank of the burrowing dog.

Emp, at the alien touch, ceased his excavations and whirled about to investigate. He was just in time to witness the start of the second and even more vicious kick.

With admirable strategy, Emp leaped to one side as the gaitered calf swung past him and, in practically the same motion, sunk his white little teeth in the Zouave’s other gaiter.

The whole series of maneuvers had occupied scarcely a second, hardly enough time for the two riders to bring their mounts to a halt. The Zouave, with a yell, whipped out the bayonet from his belt and made a right-murderous lunge at the puppy which clung to his leg.

The fierce thrust that should have impaled the little dog did not find its intended lodgment. Instead, the bayonet hopped free of the Zouave’s grasp as though endowed with life, and tumbled into the ditch at the far side of the road.

The man nursing his numbed right hand, glowered upward; to find towering above him a giant horseman, bared sword flashing in ready and righteous menace.

“It says on this blade,” drawled Dad, in an almost confidential tone, to the wrath-dumb Zouave--“it says ‘_Draw me not without cause_.’ But I guess the man who made up that motto wouldn’t have thought the less of me for drawing sword to save a poor, fluffy puppy-dog from getting spitted like a turkey. There’s worse uses for a white man’s sword than to save the life of one of God’s little wards.”

“The brute bit me!” growled the Zouave.

“Only when a _grosser_ brute kicked him,” corrected Dad. “I’m no pet-animal coddler, my friend, and sometimes a dog needs punishment--almost as much as a human does. But always from his own master, and never by a kick. Just bear that in mind, and you won’t force a superior officer to work a swordsmanship disarming trick on you again.”

The man, shifting his ground so that the sun no longer dazzled him, saw for the first time that his quiet-voiced conqueror wore the insignia of a major.

He swallowed back a hot mouthful of oaths, sulkily raised his hand in salute, then slouched across the road in search of his flown bayonet.

“You see, Jimmie,” began Dad, turning, “there’s no harm done, and--”

He broke off with an exclamation of amaze. Jimmie was nowhere in sight. Neither up nor down the road, far as eye could travel.

The boy and his horse seemed to have been caught up to the skies or to have sunk into the solid earth!