Part 9

I naturally felt a little warm towards Beavers. I owed him my life. Therefore when he suggested some alcoholic celebration of the incident I compromised on a cigar. However little you may esteem a man, it is difficult to snub him a few minutes after he has saved your life.

Beavers went to the baggage-master and said something to him which I didn’t hear. The baggage-master shook his head in dissent.

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Beavers; “it’s five dollars to you, old man.”

“Oh, well, that’s different,” said the baggage-master, and two minutes later Beavers was searching one of his trunks. Presently he came up with a wad of papers in his hand and we returned to the cabin. There he spread out some architectural designs for a gorgeous monument, and said: “Look at that. That’s the design of the monument I’ve just put up over that wife of mine. She was a mighty good sort, and I’ve spent good money to give her a proper send-off. I’ve paid five thousand dollars to the architect for the design, and fifteen thousand dollars to have it built. You see business is good with me just now. I’ve got a faro bank at Louisville and another at Evansville and two at Cairo, and another at St. Louis, and three at Memphis and one at Vicksburg, and two at New Orleans. As for me I _run the river and make what there is in it_.”

Suddenly a thought occurred to him.

“By the way,” he said, “you remember about Little Lamkin’s Battery? Well, he’s on board.” Beckoning to a negro nurse, he said: “Bring that little rascal here.”

A few minutes later the nurse returned, having a peculiarly bright, three-year-old boy in charge, whom I greeted as an old friend. After talking with the little chap for a few moments I turned to Beavers and said: “What are you going to make out of him, Beavers?”

“Something better than his father is,” he replied, “for his mothers sake; and that reminds me you’re just out of the war and you’ve got your way to make. It won’t do for you to know _me_. If you ever meet me goin’ up and down the river, I’ll cut you dead and don’t you say nothing.”

CURRY

Curry was our mess cook.

He was a great rascal, but one of the best cooks in the world. And besides he was discriminative in his rascality. He never did any dishonest thing towards us; but he was capable of any conceivable crime, if he could commit it in our behalf.

He was a pure-blooded negro of the brown or semi-copper-colored variety. He was without a trace of beard, as that variety of negro usually is. His voice was a falsetto.

His devotion was dog-like. If the state of South Carolina held anything that his mess needed, and there was any conceivable way in which it could be got, he got it. Frankly without morals,--unless devotion to his mess was a moral sentiment,--and illimitable in resource as he was, he generally so managed matters that we should live well.

We would buy a pig or a lamb, and have a fore quarter for dinner. The next day Curry would give us a hind quarter. The next day another fore quarter; and so on until that member of the mess who had a statistical mind would begin to reflect that there are really only four quarters to an animal, while we had had from fifteen to twenty quarters from this one. Then Curry would be summoned, and indignantly asked: “Where have you been getting all this meat we have been eating?”

The question never disturbed Curry in the least. He was always ready with the answer: “I buyed it from one man, sir.”

When asked who the man was, he never knew. And when questioned as to payment, he always assured us that the “one man, sir,” was coming that afternoon for his money.

The “one man, sir,” always came that afternoon. His charge was always the same: $2.50 in Confederate currency, or something less than twenty-five cents in real money.

The pretence was a bit flimsy, but it answered Curry’s purpose. His mess was well fed, and he was not caught in his raids upon the pig-pens and sheep-folds thereabouts.

Curry was a slave, and we hired him from the estate to which he belonged as a chattel. One day we were ordered to move from South Carolina to Virginia. Curry came to us and asked to be taken with us. When we explained to him that we could not legally take him out of the state, he deliberately proposed to run away in order to go with us. Having no alert perception of the difference between crime and good conduct, he could not see why we should not abet him in this proposed violation of law. But when we made it clear to him that, for reasons inscrutable to his mind, we could not permit him to go with us out of the state, he fell into melancholy.

That night we had some roast pig for dinner; and Curry had not “buyed it from one man, sir.”

The only reply he would make to our questionings was: “I done got it fur de mess, sir. De mess has been good to me.”

* * * * *

Early next morning--the day on which we were to leave--the enemy landed below, and we were ordered forward to meet them. As we unlimbered in battery and opened fire, Curry rode up on an antique mule, stolen for the occasion from the battery blacksmith. Leaping from his steed he went to the gun that was most short-handed, took a vacant place, and began fighting like an artilleryman. When the head of the mess rode up to him and said: “What are you doing here, Curry?”

His reply was: “Ise takin’ a hand.”

The fight was hot for ten minutes. At the end of it poor Curry lay stretched upon the grass--a bullet through his chest. One of us went to him and said something--no matter what. He looked up and said: “I can’t go wi’ de mess to Virginy. You’ll have to take some no ’count nigger. But Ise fought wi’ de mess anyhow, and you’ll find de res’ o’ dat pig hangin’ up de chimbly.”

GUN-BOATS

A gun-boat went aground one night in an inlet off Chisholm’s Island, near Port Royal, South Carolina.

As soon as the news came to us, we set out to attack her.

We marched all night, and in the early gray of the dawn we reached the palmetto-studded island. The gun-boat had, in the meantime, got off the bar on the high tide, and was riding quietly at anchor, four hundred yards from the nearest available point on the shore.

I had command of two field pieces. Captain Elliot, the chief of artillery, ordered me to inspect the vessel and “act according to circumstances.” He said: “If you find her too strong to be attacked with field guns, retire quietly across the island. If you find her not too strong, attack her, and I will send you any reinforcements necessary.”

I took Joe with me.

We crawled up to the brink of the stream, and took a good look in the gray morning light.

But that look didn’t tell either of us anything. Neither of us knew enough about naval architecture and armament to have the slightest idea whether the boat out there in the stream was formidable or otherwise.

“Well, what do you think, Joe?” I asked. “I don’t think,” he answered; “I don’t know anything about it; but my notion is that we’d better give her a shot or two, anyhow.”

“Well, the way I look at it,” said I, “is this: Elliot and those other fellows know, and we don’t. They’ll see her from some point of view. If they think her not formidable, and we don’t attack, they’ll blame us. If we attack, and she proves too formidable--well, we’ve got good horses and we can run. Order up the guns, Joe.”

A minute later we opened fire with two twelve pounders. By one of those freaks of extraordinarily good luck, which so often save men from disaster in war, our first shot severed the gun-boat’s rudder post. Our second shell passed through her boiler and exploded in her furnace; not only setting fire to her, but with the escaping steam driving the men from the gun decks. This left her with only one available gun--a swivel on the poop.

But that was a sixty-four pound howitzer, one or two shots from which would have swept us off that island like so much dust. Our good luck continuing, however, that gun burst at the first fire.

The ship had been a formidable, heavily armed gun-boat, carrying several eight-inch rifles; but she had been destroyed by two field pop-guns. She slipped her cables, and drifted around the point with fire bursting from every port hole. We quickly limbered up and galloped to another point of attack.

We found the ship’s company escaping over the sides in the boats and rowing for the marsh beyond. We opened upon them at short range, sank several of the boats, and then shelled the marsh for scatterers.

When I learned later from Captain Elliot how formidable that ship had been, I was filled with a great contempt for gun-boats. I was anxious to get a chance at a gun-boat every morning before breakfast.

I got it presently. With that same section I was ordered a few days later to Combahee Ferry. There was a gun-boat there. My orders were the same as before.

This gun-boat was a little, low, insignificant looking sloop. She seemed to me almost contemptibly easy game. I galloped my guns to within four hundred yards of her, and ordered them in battery.

We opened fire. The gun-boat for a time paid no attention to us. But by the time that we had thrown three or four shells at her, she lazily undertook to attend to our case, in much the same way that a man brushes a pestilent fly from his nose.

She opened on us with one of those great guns which pitch shells about the size of a normal nail keg two or three miles, apparently without effort.

Her first shot revealed to me the fact that I had entirely misunderstood gun-boats.

It was obvious that a single one of those shells, should it burst anywhere in the neighborhood of my guns, would put a final end to that section of artillery and to all that went to constitute it.

During the next five minutes we bumped those guns at a gallop over the old cotton rows, until we reached the cover of the woodland.

Whether that little sloop carried one gun or twenty, I never knew. But the rapidity of her fire, as we crossed that old cotton field, convinced me, for the time being, that she carried at least a hundred.

TWO MINUTES

He spent the evening singing “Lorena.”

He had had a sort of day-off that day, and had visited all of his friends.

The author of that song had made it read:--

“A hundred weeks have passed, Lorena,”

but our guest improved upon that, and made the lover rather aged by singing it:--

“A hundred _years_ have passed, Lorena, Since last I held thy hand in mine.”

This was the only positive evidence we had that he had been calling.

He stayed with us that night, and was not feeling well enough the next day even to sing “Lorena.” The next day after that he found some serious work to do.

The way of it was this: He was a third lieutenant in the engineers. It was after the great mine explosion at Petersburg, and the engineers were busily engaged at that time using all their devices for the discovery of other mines. They had found one in process of construction in front of General Grade’s lines. They had proceeded at once to run a deeper tunnel under this one. They had loaded the end of it, just underneath the enemy’s works, with an incredible amount of gunpowder, and on that morning it was to be fired.

A slow-match had been brought from the powder to the mouth of the mine. It was lighted, and a period of waiting ensued. The match had evidently gone out. Where, nobody knew or could guess. The general in command of that part of the line turned to the captain of engineers and said: “The mine must be blown up at once; will you go in and light the match again?”

The captain hesitated, saying: “I don’t know; it may go off at any moment.”

Thereupon he who had sung “Lorena” stepped forward, touched his cap to the general, and said: “With your permission, _I_ will go in and fire it.”

“Thank you,” said the general; “go.”

The man picked up the torch and started into the mine. It seems that the slow-match had gone out within a very short distance of the powder magazine. But disregarding that he touched the torch to it, set it off again, and ran with all his might for the mouth of the opening.

It was two minutes’ work. The mine went off just before he reached the outlet, and the air pressure literally blew him out of it. He fell sprawling on his face. He was considerably bruised and scratched in his contact with the gravelly ground, but he was not in any serious way injured. Picking himself up, grimed as he was, he took off his cap, and dusting himself like a schoolboy who has fallen in the street, he approached the commanding officer and said: “General, I have the honor to report that I have fired the mine and that it has gone off.”

The general touched his cap and replied: “I had observed that fact, and I thank you very much. I beg to say that I will make an official report of the circumstance.”

Two days later we all touched our caps to a freshly made brigadier-general of the engineers. The captain who had hesitated remained a captain.

SI TUCKER--COWARD AND HERO

I was in command of Fort Lamkin, a mortar fort, in rear of General Bushrod Johnson’s lines at Petersburg in 1864.

The fort was named for our immediate commander, from whose command we had been detached for this service.

One day Lamkin himself came to me when I was at his headquarters. He was obviously in trouble.

“This boy, Si Tucker,” he said, “is the son of one of the best friends I ever had in the world. The boy is a coward. He literally _lives_ in a rat hole. I have repeatedly pulled him out by the legs, only to have him crawl back again the moment I let go of his ankles. I don’t know what to do. It’s my duty, of course, to prefer charges of cowardice against him; and if I do, he will certainly be shot--and his father is my best friend.”

He paused meditatively, and then said with eagerness in his voice: “Why can’t you take him?”

I agreed at once. I told him I would take the boy with me to my pits, and make “either a soldier or a stiff” out of him within the next twenty-four hours. I was under no obligations to his father; I had never even met any of his relatives, and I had seen too many years of service to have much patience with cowardice.

The boy was sent for and ordered to go with me. We walked down towards Blandford church. At the proper point we turned out of the Jerusalem plank road across the fields towards Fort Lamkin. Half-way there and on the top of a little hill, which was especially exposed to the gaze of the sharp-shooters, I made Si Tucker sit down by my side. There we came to an understanding.

I told him that he had been assigned to me to be shot out of hand, or to be court-martialled for cowardice, which at that particular juncture of the war meant very much the same thing. I explained to him that he was about to join a detachment, composed exclusively of men specially selected for their courage--every one of them a volunteer for what was deemed a peculiarly dangerous service.

I explained further that I should require him to do his duty as they did theirs.

“You have managed to make for yourself,” I said, “the reputation of a coward. You have now one last chance to redeem yourself. You must do that, or you must die.”

The sharp-shooters were, in the meantime, picking at us most uncomfortably as we sat there. My experience as an old soldier strongly suggested to me that we ought to move. The position was of that kind that military men call untenable. Nevertheless, I thought it best to keep Si Tucker there a minute longer, for purposes of observation, if nothing else.

“At our pits,” I said, “we have one uniform rule of procedure. When a bombardment begins, the men go to their guns. I take my stand on top of the magazine mound to watch the enemy’s fire and direct our own. If I see that a mortar shell is about to fall into one of the gun pits, I call out the pit number, and the men run into the bomb-proof until the explosion is over. No man ever goes into a bomb-proof till this order is given. You must do as the rest do. If you run to a bomb-proof before I have given the order, it will be my imperative duty to shoot you then and there; and I shall certainly discharge that duty. Do you fully understand that, Si?”

He thought he did, and as the sharp-shooters were by this time becoming pestilently personal in their attentions, we resumed our walk.

Half an hour after our arrival at Fort Lamkin, a bombardment began.

I didn’t want to shoot that boy. I distinctly preferred to make a soldier rather than a “stiff” out of him. So, instead of taking my customary stand on the mound of earth over the magazine, I ordered Joe to that post, and placed myself in the gun pit to which Si Tucker had been assigned, taking care to stand between him and the mouth of the bomb-proof. I spoke to him as I passed.

“Remember what I told you. If you forget, it is instant death.”

He remembered. For nearly two hours he stood there quaking and quivering, but not daring to seek safety by retreat to a bomb-proof.

By the time that the outburst was over, Si Tucker had learned his first lesson in war. He had learned to realize that a man may endure a lot of very savage fire, and yet come out of it alive.

A few hours later, when the guns were at work again, Si was steady enough in his nerves to carry shells to the guns. The next day he was even able during a bombardment to cut fuses--a delicate operation requiring a steady hand.

Within two or three days he had become as good a soldier as we had in all that band of men specially picked for their unflinching courage.

When the great mine explosion occurred a few weeks later, I had occasion to rebuke Si Tucker for a fault quite unrelated to cowardice. We had been ordered to go with our mortars as near as possible to the crater, and to drop a continual rain of shells among the thousands of helpless fellows in that awful pit.

It was cruel, ghastly work. But it was war. And a poet has justly characterized war as a “brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art.” Or as General Sherman once said,--and he knew,--“War is all hell.”

We were within sixty yards of the crater. Each one of our mortars was belching from three to five shells a minute into that hole; but Si Tucker’s enthusiasm was not satisfied. Having no personal duty to do at the moment, he began plugging shells with long fuses, lighting them, running with them to the margin of the pit, and tossing them in as hand grenades. He was greeted by a tremendous volley of musketry at each repetition of this performance, but he did it three times before we could stop him.

That evening, near the gloaming, he did another thing. The lines had by that time been restored. The men in the crater--those of them who had not been killed--had been driven back to the Federal side. We became aware of the fact that a poor fellow of our own was lying grievously wounded near the Federal side of the fifty yards that separated our works from the enemy’s. He had been lying there through all that long, fierce summer day. The explosion at daylight had cast him there.

His groans and his cries for help and for water were piteous in the extreme. We listened to them heartbroken but helpless--all but Si Tucker.

Si began stripping off his clothes; we thought he had gone mad. But when we asked him why he was stripping himself, he replied: “Never you mind.”

With that, stripped to the skin, he leaped over the works, ducked his head low, and ran through that hailstorm of bullets to where the wounded man lay. Grasping him quickly, he slung him upon his back like a bag of meal, and ran back with all his might.

As he crossed the works he fell headlong.

The surgeon found three bullets in his body.

Nobody in the battery ever remembered after that, that Si Tucker had once been a coward.

After all, it is perhaps mainly a question of nerves.

WAR AS A THERAPEUTIC AGENT

Doctor Towns was a wealthy gentleman in Mississippi.

For a good many years he had employed Miss R---- of Massachusetts as governess for his daughters. She had lived all these years as an honored member of his family, with every social opportunity that Mississippi society afforded.

At last the two girls outgrew the need of a governess. One of them was sent abroad to study art at Nuremberg. The other got married.

Upon the occurrence of this event Doctor Towns went to the young lady, Miss R----, and suggested that as her services had been of incalculable value to his daughters he was anxious to secure for her, now that they no longer needed her, an equally good situation in some other gentleman’s family.

He explained that he had already written to a friend in Alabama strongly recommending her, and that his friend desired her to come on at once.

Apparently this pleased Miss R---- very greatly. She packed her trunks that night with the aid of the colored maid who had been assigned to her service. She was to leave in the morning.

In the morning word came down from her chamber that she was unable to get up. Every attention and every sympathy was shown her, and after a day or two Doctor Towns, finding himself baffled to discover disease of any kind, sent for another physician. The other physician was equally unsuccessful. The simple fact was that the young woman could not get out of her bed. Why she could not get out of her bed was a problem that the medical men were wholly unable to solve. The young woman’s appetite was excellent, and all her functions seemed to be in an entirely normal condition.

Nevertheless, she could not get up.

Week after week she lay there, attentively waited upon by the servants, assiduously visited by the family, sympathetically condoled with by friends, but still utterly unable to arise from her bed. Her salary was continued all the while, of course.

The servants at last became suspicious.

To their minds it seemed incredible that she should live so long and so comfortably without exercise. They suspected that she got up in the night and walked the floor. To test this they gently sprinkled her floor with pulverized starch while she slept, and then turned out the lights. But weeks of experimentation of this character utterly failed to reveal that the young woman ever got out of her bed.

She read the newspapers with great diligence every day, and she read all the new books that came out, for they all came to Doctor Towns’s household.

She even wrote now and then, lying there in bed, for newspapers and magazines with which she had established connections. She was a brilliant woman, and her matter was acceptable in the market.

She lay thus, for eighteen months. Then came secession.

The newspapers were filled with it. When at last war became an obvious fact, and escape from the South to any Northern person disinclined to Southern policies was manifestly a matter of but a few days, Miss R---- suddenly, I may almost say miraculously, recovered. She got up one morning and packed her trunks before six o’clock. At seven, when the family breakfast was served, she appeared in the dining-room, and calmly asked: “Will you kindly send me to the railroad station, Doctor Towns? I’m going North to-day.”

No explanation was ever asked or ever given.

Miss R---- went North. That was all.

“NOTES ON COLD HARBOR”[1]

I always think of our arrival at Cold Harbor as marking a new phase of the war.

By the time that we had reached that position, we had pretty well got over our astonishment and disappointment at the conduct of General Grant.

I put the matter in that way because, as I remember, astonishment and disappointment were the prevailing emotions in the ranks of the army of Northern Virginia when we discovered, after the contest in the Wilderness, that General Grant was not going to retire behind the river and permit General Lee to carry on a campaign against Washington in the usual way, but was moving to the Spottsylvania position instead.