Part 7

Then it was that the captain invented a totally new cavalry manœuvre, with a marching command wholly unknown to the books on tactics. He said to us in a low, quiet, but incisive voice: “Form quickly in two single files; advance and split the girl out. I’ll take her on my crupper.”

It was a pretty manœuvre, and as Charlie rode out between the two single files with the young woman on the crupper, we cheered quite as lustily as we fired. Then we didn’t know exactly what to do. We had an appreciation of the fact that Charlie wanted to get the woman out of range as quickly as possible. But we also had a realizing sense, drawn from experience, of Charlie Irving’s extreme reluctance to ride away from an enemy who could be faced.

It was Field Mann, the orderly sergeant, who saw the right way out. He called out to us, in quite unmilitary language: “Don’t retreat, boys, Charlie’s sure to come back as soon’s he’s got her safe; meantime we’ll fight ’em. Form in line under the cherry trees.”

We had them at a disadvantage. They were still in the glare of light from the windows, while we were in the darkness, and we were sixty mounted men to eleven cavalrymen, whose horses had been captured. Moreover we had carbines, and they had none.

By the time we had made an alignment under the trees, and before Field Mann could give another order, the captain came running up on foot, leaped into the saddle of one of the captured horses, and quickly gave a command that completely surrounded the house.

We had those men penned; but just then their comrades at the neighboring picket post discovered that there was trouble on hand, and advanced upon us.

It was an exciting fight there in the darkness and under the trees, so exciting that Stuart quickly sent two other companies to our reinforcement.

At the end of an hour, we marched back with some prisoners; the rest of our foes had scattered and disappeared. When we got to the camp-fires behind the hills, Charlie Irving dismounted, and greeting the lady, who was laboriously mending a torn gown with a hairpin, said: “I hope you managed to ride Selim? He’s a demon sometimes, and not at all courteous to ladies. But there was nothing for it but to trust you to him.” She murmured something courteous in reply. Then turning with blazing eyes to the Federal officer who had been in command of the party, she asked: “What were you going to do with me, if I hadn’t been rescued?”

He replied: “I suppose you would have been hanged as a spy.”

And it was true.

After breakfast the next day--I remember that breakfast consisted of some green corn taken from a neighboring field and roasted in the ashes with the husks on, and by the way that’s the best way to cook green corn--we escorted the lady back to her home, and under Stuart’s orders stationed two cavalry companies in front as a guard.

There is no doubt, I suppose, that the lady was a spy, and that her green window blind had communicated much valuable information.

But no; there was no courtship, no marriage, no honeymoon, no romance, to follow. The lady was forty-five, if a day; and besides that, Irving was already engaged to a girl down South.

YOUNGBLOOD’S LAST MORNING

We were all well used to seeing men shot, but this was different.

It was a soft, warm, mellow autumn morning. It was a day suggestive of all gentleness. A purple, Indian-summer haze enveloped the earthworks and the camps. Nature had issued an invitation to peace and repose. The cannon were not at work. Nobody on either side had been tempted to bombard anybody else. Even the mortars and the sharp-shooters were still.

It was not the kind of morning for the bloody work of war.

Yet a young man was to be killed within the hour. He was to be killed deliberately, in cold blood, by sentence of a court-martial, and with great pomp and ceremony; and nobody, even in his heart, could say nay to the justice of the sentence.

For Youngblood had done an infamous thing.

There were many desertions to the enemy about that time. The war was manifestly drawing to a close, and men who lacked self-sacrificing devotion were getting tired of its hardships and privations. In order to stop these desertions, orders had been issued that any soldier arresting another in the act of going to the enemy should have a thirty days’ furlough.

Youngblood was on picket one day with another man. He proposed to that other man that they both should desert, and they started together toward the enemy’s lines. According to Youngblood’s story, it was his purpose to arrest his comrade, and thus earn a furlough at the expense of the other fellow’s life. Whether this story was true or not doesn’t much matter. The other fellow arrested him.

In any case, he deserved to pay the penalty he did. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced. The sentence was approved by all the authorities, including the war department. This morning it was to be carried out.

It was about ten o’clock, Youngblood’s regiment was formed into three sides of a hollow square. Near the entrance to the square, on the right, rested Youngblood’s coffin. Beside it was Youngblood’s grave.

Presently an ambulance drove up, bearing the prisoner and his attendant guards. As he stepped lightly and lithely from the ambulance, we saw him to be a fine specimen of young manhood. He was twenty-three or twenty-four years of age; tall, well built, and full of elastic vigor. He was handsome, too, and of refined and gentle countenance.

There was no sign of flinching in him: nothing that denoted the coward which his explanation of his crime had shown him to be.

It seemed something more than a pity to put a fellow like that to death.

He took his place in front of the guards and just in rear of the band, and the dead march began.

He walked alone.

Slowly, and with cadenced step, the procession moved around inside the square. And as it passed me, I was curious to observe the condemned man’s behavior. His step was as steady and as firm as that of any man in the guard. I looked at his hands to see if there were any convulsive clutching of the fingers. There was none. I doubt if any man in all that regiment felt so calm in mind or so well poised in nerve as Youngblood looked.

Having completed the seemingly endless march around the three closed sides of the square, the procession turned to the right, and crossed its open end to the point of execution.

There an officer stepped forward and read to Youngblood the findings and sentence of the court which had condemned him, with the formal endorsements approving them and ordering the sentence executed. The guard which had the prisoner in charge divided to the right and left, and Youngblood was left standing alone in front of his coffin, and beside his open grave.

At the word of command he knelt upon the coffin and folded his arms across his chest. Again at the word of command twelve soldiers stepped out in front of him with guns in their hands. Six of these guns carried ball cartridges, and six were blank. No man in the firing squad was permitted to know whether his gun had a bullet in it or not.

The officer in command spoke scarcely above his breath, but so hushed was the time that his words were audible to the three thousand men there assembled, as he said to each alternate man: “Fire at his head,” and to the intervening man: “Fire at his chest.” Then turning his back, which was perhaps not an officer-like thing to do, the lieutenant gave in a husky voice the word of command.

“Ready, aim, fire.”

There was a sharp crack from twelve rifles fired simultaneously. There was a whirr and whistle of six bullets that had passed through the head or chest of the doomed man, and hurtled off into the fields beyond. Army rifles fire with tremendous force.

The dead man’s body rose to its feet and fell limply forward.

Five minutes later all that was left of Youngblood was buried beneath six feet of earth.

There was no merriment in any of the camps that day, or the next, or the next. Even our scant rations were not much relished by those of us who had witnessed this scene.

And yet, as I said at the beginning, we were all well used to seeing men killed.

BILLY GOODWIN

I never have known whether Billy Goodwin was a brave man or not.

He was certainly not afraid of anything; but the absence of fear from his composition was so complete that I was always in doubt whether he was entitled to credit for never yielding to that emotion.

His fearlessness seemed like the color of his sandy hair and his pale blue eyes--something over which he had no control.

At Cold Harbor, in 1864, when an artillery duel was going on, plus a tremendous sharp-shooter fire, Billy, with his back to the enemy, lazily lounged upon the breastworks. All the rest of us were crouching behind them.

I remember as an incident that he was eating a sandwich. It was composed of two halves of a hard-tack biscuit and a slice of raw pickled pork--his entire rations for the day. He was carefully holding his hand under his chin, in order to save all the crumbs. We weren’t wasting crumbs in those days.

A lieutenant, who had already been mentioned in orders for gallantry, cautiously pushed up his head to peer over the breastworks on which Goodwin was sitting. Billy placed his hand upon the prematurely bald head of the lieutenant, shoved him down, and said: “Keep below the dirt, or you’ll get a bullet through your billiard ball. Don’t you know this is no time to be exposing yourself?”

I have elsewhere celebrated Billy. In doing so I have suggested that, while he had a high sense of personal duty, he had no sense whatever of personal danger.

On that terrible 30th of August, 1864, when the mine was exploded at Petersburg, Goodwin was detailed to act as courier for General Lee and General Beauregard.

A Northern negro soldier had broken somehow out of the crater and through the lines. He rushed madly into headquarters. He struck frantically at General Lee with his bayonet. General Beauregard parried the blow with his sword. The negro turned and ran out of the door. Beauregard, in his excitement, called out to Goodwin, “Go and kill that man!”

Stepping quickly, as was his custom, Billy gave pursuit. A few moments later he returned. He presented himself in all his superb length of limb. He gave the military salute to General Beauregard. When that officer asked: “What is it, orderly?” Billy replied: “I beg respectfully to report that I have killed that man in accordance with orders.”

That was Billy. As a soldier he was a good kind. He obeyed all orders without questioning them. He did all his duties as he understood them. But, as I have said, I have never been able to determine whether he was really a brave man, or whether he was merely a man so constituted as to be insensible to personal danger.

But I will say this for Billy, which may help to decide this point,--

We were marching from Spottsylvania to Cold Harbor. We marched for fifty-six hours at the double quick. Now and then we had to fight at the quadruple quick. We had no food. We had no sleep. We had no rest.

Near the end of this tremendous strain Billy came to me under a tree, where I was snatching a five minutes’ repose. He said, with an air of great mystery: “I’ve got a coon for my mess. I bought it of a nigger back there. So I don’t want this piece of corn-bread. I wish you’d take it. I know you’re hungry.”

We did not readily accept food from each other in those days, lest we starve each other.

I struggled to resist this proffer, but Billy insisted on that coon as satisfying all his personal wants. At last, therefore, I accepted the three or four ounces of powder-grimed corn-bread which he pressed upon me.

I learned afterwards that Billy had lied.

There wasn’t any coon.

MANASSAS

I call it Manassas.

That is the name we Southerners gave it. We won that battle more completely and more conspicuously than any other battle was won by either side during the Civil War.

It is the right of the victor always to name the action. We named it Manassas. In the North it is called Bull Run.

We reached Manassas after two days and nights of ceaseless marching, at ten o’clock on the evening of the 20th of July, 1861.

We knew that trouble was at hand; otherwise Stuart would not have swung us at such a breakneck speed across the mountains from the valley to this point. We were six hundred strong.

Six hundred young Virginians, cradled in the saddle, and who had shot wild turkeys as soon as we were able to digest them. There was another battalion of cavalry present, under Colonel Radford, numbering perhaps three hundred men. But the story had gone forth in the Northern army that we were thirty thousand of the finest horsemen ever known since the days of the Mamelukes.

That story had its part in creating the panic at Manassas.

I believe we were good horsemen. There were men among us who might have given the Mamelukes points, both in horsemanship and in the use of the sabre. But if our nine hundred men had been the thirty thousand reported, we should have thundered into Washington on the night of Sunday, July 21, 1861, and would have ended the war then and there, in spite of the presidential stupidity which feared that “aggression” might anger a people with whom we were at war.

We lay that night in an open field, each man having his horse tethered to his left arm, and each man booted, spurred, sabred, and pistolled for instant action.

The bugle sounded no reveille that morning. A shell from the enemy’s camp, which fell in the midst of the regiment, saved the bugler the trouble.

With a laugh, which was almost a chuckle, Stuart called out: “That’s ‘boots and saddles,’ boys,” and in an instant we were on our horses.

The first great battle of the war had begun.

It was not until noon, or nearly that, that the cavalry had any real work to do. I didn’t look at my watch, but it must have been about noon when Stuart swept us at a tremendous pace through a regiment or two of Zouaves, and back again over the same ground. I saw no Zouaves for the reason that there was too much dust to see anything; but it was understood when the charge was over, that we had driven them back. And half a dozen empty saddles in our own ranks attested the fact that they had not been driven back without a stubborn and manly resistance.

A little later, we cavalrymen were ordered up to the support of some batteries that had temporarily run out of ammunition. Our reputation as Mamelukes sufficed at that point to prevent a charge, so that our real work in the battle did not begin until the panic in McDowell’s army set in.

Then Stuart rose in his stirrups and shouted at the top of his voice: “They’re licked, boys! They’re licked! They’re licked!”

Then hastily he rattled off orders. The substance of them was that we were to divide the cavalry into squads of ten and twenty men each, and proceed at once in pursuit.

“If there aren’t officers, and non-commissioned officers enough, let anybody command a squad. This is business.”

As the several squads started at a gallop after the enemy, Stuart called out to each: “Attack any force you find. There is no cohesion left among ’em.”

In that command he struck the key-note of the whole situation. Seasoned soldier that he was, he knew that without cohesion, soldiers are helpless, and numbers count for nothing.

We plunged forward across every ford and along every road that led from Bull Run towards Centreville. At every point we found “chaos come again.”

A squad of ten men, armed only with sabres and pistols, but backed by the Mameluke tradition, would call out to eighty or a hundred fully armed infantry: “Throw down your arms, or we’ll put you to the sword! Throw down your arms, or we’ll put you to the sword!”

The panic-stricken men would obey the order instantly, disregarding the fact that with a single volley they might have swept the insolent squad instantly out of existence.

It was not merely that the army was panic stricken. It was encumbered at every step by a multitude of embarrassing picnickers,--a multitude of men and women who had come out from Washington to see us exterminated and to join in a triumphal march to Richmond. These people had brought out with them more superfluous provisions than our army had eaten for a fortnight. They abandoned their luxuries in the middle of the road and ran. They left champagne enough unopened for a regiment to swim in. They fled precipitately, adding at every step by their own insensate fear to the panic that had already overtaken the troops.

Men cut horses out of vehicles that held helpless women, and madly mounting them abandoned their charges and their duties, in order to escape a present and impending danger to themselves. Fortunately for their charges, the Southerners were not making war on women.

Every woman was instantly assured of her own personal safety. Every horse that was left behind was hitched at once to a vehicle, and the vehicle loaded with women was started under an assurance of safe conduct towards Washington. When the supply of abandoned horses fell short, it was made good by animals from our batteries, and now and then by the riderless horse of one of the Mamelukes who had received a mortal wound.

Along the roads we found many dead men, for whose deaths no coroner would have been able to account--men utterly destitute of wounds, who had died clearly either of fright, or of exhaustion, or of both.

At Cub Run, an ambulance or a caisson broke down on the bridge and obstructed it. The obstruction almost instantly caused a congestion of two or three thousand panic-stricken soldiers and picnickers on the hither side of the stream.

Then came Kemper with his guns. He was as black as a negro with powder smoke. His cannoneers were equally begrimed. From the top of a hill, not more than two hundred yards distant,--pistol-shot range,--he opened fire with canister. The effect upon the crowd was instantaneous and almost startling. Its constituent members dispersed as a covey of partridges does when a shot-gun is fired into its lurking place. Some of them ran up the creek. Some of them ran down the creek. Some of them plunged into the creek, and crossed or drowned, as the case may be.

It was just then that Stuart rode up and cried out: “We’ll go into Washington to-night, boys. And my headquarters will be at Willard’s Hotel.”

It was just then also that couriers came, bearing the paralyzing presidential order to stop the pursuit at Cub Run.

It was just then that the despondency of the Mamelukes began.

A little later it rained.

MY LAST NIGHT ON PICKET

My period of service in the cavalry was about to expire. I was not tired of the cavalry service; on the contrary, I was very much in love with it. Any full-blooded man must have been so under such leadership as Stuart’s.

But for reasons pertaining to Joe, I had sought and obtained a transfer to the artillery.

Joe was just sixteen.

The infantry regiment in which he had gone out had been so cut to pieces in a fierce fight that it was dissolved. Joe and a bullet-riddled flag were about all there was left of it.

Therefore Joe had enlisted in a battery of artillery. He was as brave a fellow as is made, and as cantankerous and self-assertive as a brave boy is apt to be. I felt it necessary to be with him to keep him from being unnecessarily killed or court-martialled, and to exercise over him that mature, paternal influence which the superior age of twenty-one justified.

This was my last night of cavalry service. It was late autumn in 1861. The company was ordered on picket at Fairfax Court House. The enemy was very urgent just then, and gave us a good deal of trouble on the picket lines.

I was ordered to a post underneath a very broad and low spreading tree, so that when I sat upon my horse I was not visible from the thicket in front, and would not have been even if it had been broad daylight.

That thicket was full of sharp-shooters, and when I went on post about seven o’clock in the evening, I was instructed to preserve absolute silence in self-protection, and warned that it would probably not be possible to relieve me until morning.

My mare was a restless creature at ordinary times, but she had learned the whole art of picket duty. If I had been anywhere else, she would have champed the bit, and pawed the ground, and snorted in her restlessness. Standing there at night, with a bullet whistling over her head every minute or two, she was as still as the traditional mouse.

I sat there all night on her back with pistols drawn, and in a silence such as nobody but a picket thus placed ever maintains.

Just as the day was dawning, or rather just as the gray in the eastern sky began to suggest the possibility of dawn, a sergeant crawling on his belly approached me from the rear. In a whisper I called out, “Who goes there?” He, also in a whisper, let me know his identity. He had come to order my withdrawal from the post.

Not until we had reached a point a hundred yards in the rear was anything further said. There I found the company drawn up in line with Charlie Irving at its head.

“Many shots from the thicket?” asked Charlie.

“Two or three to the minute,” I answered, “throughout the night.”

“All right,” he replied, “we’ll scoop those fellows in; they’re getting to be obnoxious.”

Then in a low tone he told us precisely what we were to do, and we were to do it without further orders. He was to lead, of course, but he wanted to give as few commands as possible, in order to make his movement successful.

Silently we moved off over the soft turf to the left. Crossing the road below the thicket we struck a gallop and quickly surrounded the space occupied by the sharp-shooters. It was the work of but a few minutes to close in upon and capture them. Two of our saddles were emptied in the operation, and five of the sharp-shooters were left unburied in the brush; the rest we took with us to headquarters, another company having replaced us on picket.

Among the prisoners was one little fellow, apparently not over fifteen or sixteen years of age. His features were clear cut and delicate and his clothing was worn as if it had belonged to somebody else.

When we had got well to the rear and the daylight was broad, Charlie Irving looked at the little fellow and said: “How old are you, my boy?”

“Twenty-two,” he replied, “but I’m a girl.”

That girl was sent back under a flag of truce. We didn’t know what else to do with her.

GRIFFITH’S CONTINUED STORY

It was in the early summer of 1864. We were in the trenches at Spottsylvania.

It had been raining continuously all day, with now and then a heavy downpour, just to remind us that a little rain ought not to matter to old soldiers. By the use of fragments of fence rail and such other sticks as we could secure to stand upon, we managed to avoid sinking below our ankles into the soft, red, Virginian mud.

It was a little after two o’clock in the morning, but we were all awake and on duty. For it was not General Grant’s purpose at that time to allow us much of repose. We had stood in the trenches and in the rain all day, and we must stand in the trenches and in the rain all night, and as much longer as it might please the enemy to keep us there.

The night was one of the blackest I have ever known. There was no possibility of sending couriers anywhere, and all orders had, therefore, to be passed from mouth to mouth up and down the lines.

Every few minutes a great downpour of bucketfuls would come; and, worse still, every now and then the enemy would rush forward in the darkness and come upon us at pistol-shot range without notice.

It was Ulysses S. Grant we were fighting, and that was the line on which he was going to “fight it out, if it took all summer.”

We felt the need of entertainment, so somebody called out to a sergeant: “Tell us a story.”