Chapter 69
He wore a grey Confederate coat All b.u.t.toned down before--"
"Don't like it that way? All right--"
"He wore a blue d.a.m.n-Yankee coat All b.u.t.toned down before--"
The Stonewall Brigade pa.s.sed a new-made grave in a small graveyard, from which the fence had been burned. A little further on they came to a burned smithy; the blacksmith's house beside it also a ruin, black and charred. On a stone, between two lilac-bushes, sat a very old man.
Beside him stood a girl, a handsome creature, dark and bright-cheeked.
"Send them to h.e.l.l, boys, send them to h.e.l.l!" quavered the old man. The girl raised a sweet and vibrant voice: "Send them to h.e.l.l, men, send them to h.e.l.l!"
"We'll do our best, ma'am, we'll do our best!" answered the Stonewall.
The sun mounted high. They were moving now through thick woods, broken by deep creeks and bits of swamp. All about were evidences enough that an army had travelled before them, and that that army was exceedingly careless of its belongings. All manner of impediments lay squandered; waste and ruin were everywhere. Sometimes the men caught an odour of burning meat, of rice and breadstuffs. In a marshy meadow a number of wrecked, canvas-topped wagons showed like a patch of mushrooms, giant and dingy. In a forest glade rested like a Siegfried smithy an abandoned travelling forge. Camp-kettles hacked in two were met with, and boxes of sutlers' wares smashed to fragments. The dead horses were many, and there was disgust with the buzzards, they rose or settled in such clouds. The troops, stooping to drink from the creeks, complained that the water was foul.
Very deep woods appeared on the horizon. "Guide says that's White Oak Swamp!--Guide says that's White Oak Swamp!" Firing broke out ahead.
"Cavalry rumpus!--h.e.l.lo! Artillery b.u.t.ting in, too!--everybody but us!
Well, boys, I always did think infantry a mighty no-'count, undependable arm--infantry of the Army of the Valley, anyway! G.o.d knows the moss has been growing on us for a week!"
Munford sent back a courier to Jackson, riding well before the head of the column. "Bridge is burned, sir. They're in strong force on the other side--"
"Good!" said Jackson. "Tell Colonel Crutchfield to bring up the guns."
He rode on, the aide, the courier, and Maury Stafford yet with him. They pa.s.sed a deserted Federal camp and hospital, and came between tall trees and through dense swamp undergrowth to a small stream with many arms. It lay still beneath the blue sky, overhung by many a graceful, vine-draped tree. The swamp growth stretched for some distance on either side, and through openings in the foliage the blue glint of the arms could be seen. To the right there was some cleared ground. In front the road stopped short. The one bridge had been burned by the retreating Federal rearguard. Two blue divisions, three batteries--in all over twenty thousand men--now waited on the southern bank to dispute the White Oak Crossing.
Stafford again pushed his horse beside Jackson's. "Well, sir?"
"I hunted once through this swamp, general. There is an old crossing near the bridge--"
"Pa.s.sable for cavalry, sir?"
"Pa.s.sable by cavalry and infantry, sir. Even the guns might somehow be gotten across."
"I asked, sir, if it was pa.s.sable for cavalry."
"It is, sir."
Jackson turned to his aide. "Go tell Colonel Crutchfield I want to see him."
Crutchfield appeared. "Where are your guns, colonel?"
"General, their batteries on the ridge over there command the road, and the thick woods below their guns are filled with sharpshooters. I want to get the guns behind the crest of the hill on this side, and I am opening a road through the wood over there. They'll be up directly--seven batteries, Carter's, Hardaway's, Nelson's, Rhett's, Reilly's, and Balthis'. We'll open then at a thousand yards, and we'll take them, I think, by surprise."
"Very good, colonel. That is all."
The infantry began to arrive. Brigade by brigade, as it came up, turned to right or to left, standing under arms in the wood above the White Oak Swamp. As the Stonewall Brigade came, under tall trees and over earth that gave beneath the feet, flush with the stream itself, the grey guns, now in place upon the low ridge to the right, opened, thirty-one of them, with simultaneous thunder. Crutchfield's manoeuvre had not been observed. The thirty-one guns blazed without warning, and the blue artillery fell into confusion. The Parrotts blazed in turn, four times, then they limbered up in haste and left the ridge. Crutchfield sent Wooding's battery tearing down the slope to the road immediately in front of the burned bridge. Wooding opened fire and drove out the infantry support from the opposite forest. Jackson, riding toward the stream, encountered Munford. "Colonel, move your men over the creek and take those guns."
Munford looked. "I don't know that we can cross it, sir."
"Yes, you can cross it, colonel. Try."
Munford and a part of the 2d Virginia dashed in. The stream was in truth narrow enough, and though it was deep here, with a s.h.i.+fting bottom, and though the debris from the ruined bridge made it full of snares, the hors.e.m.e.n got across and pushed up the sh.o.r.e toward the guns. A thick and leafy wood to the right leaped fire--another and unsuspected body of blue infantry. The echoes were yet ringing when, from above, an unseen battery opened on the luckless cavalry. The blue rifles cracked again, the horses began to rear and plunge, several men were hit. There was nothing to do but to get somehow back to
The thirty-one guns sh.e.l.led the wood which had last spoken, and drove out the skirmishers with whom it was filled. These took refuge in another deep and leafy belt still commanding the stream and the ruined causeway. A party of grey pioneers fell to work to rebuild the bridge.
From the crest on the southern side behind the deep foliage two Federal batteries, before unnoted, opened on the grey cannoneers. Wooding, on the road before the bridge, had to fall back. Under cover of the guns the blue infantry swarmed again into the wood. Sh.e.l.l and bullet hissed and pattered into the water by the abutments of the ruined bridge. The working party drew back. "d.a.m.nation! They mustn't fling them minies round loose like that!"
Wright's brigade of Huger's division came up. Wright made his report.
"We tried Brackett's ford a mile up stream, sir. Couldn't manage it. Got two companies over by the skin of our teeth. They drove in some pickets on the other side. Road through the swamp over there covered by felled trees. Beyond is a small meadow and beyond that rising ground, almost free of trees. There are Yankee batteries on the crest, and a large force of infantry lying along the side of the ridge. They command the meadow and the swamp."
So tall were the trees, so thick the undergrowth, so full the midsummer foliage that the guns, thundering at each other across the narrow stream, never saw their antagonists. Sharpshooters and skirmishers were as hidden. Except as regarded the pioneers striving with the bridge, neither side could see the damage that was done. The noise was tremendous, echoing loudly from the opposing low ridges and rolling through the swamp. The hollow filled with smoke; above the treetops a dull saffron veil was drawn across the sky. The firing was without intermission, a monotonous thunder, beneath which the working party strove spasmodically at the bridge, the cavalry chafed to and fro, and the infantry, filling all the woods and the little clearings to the rear, began to swear. "Is it the Red Sea down there? Why can't we cross without a bridge? n.o.body's going to get drowned! Ain't more'n a hundred men been drowned since this war began! O Great Day in the Morning! I'm tired of doing nothing!"
General Wade Hampton of D. H. Hill's division, leaving his brigade in a pine wood, went with his son and with an aide, Rawlins Lowndes, on a reconnoitring expedition of his own. He was a woodsman and hunter, with experience of swamps and bayous. Returning, he sought out Jackson, and found him sitting on a fallen pine by the roadside near the slowly, slowly mending bridge. Hampton dismounted and made his report. "We got over, three of us, general, a short way above. It wasn't difficult. The stream's clear of obstructions there and has a sandy bottom. We could see through the trees on the other side. There's a bit of level, and a hillside covered with troops--a strong position. But we got across the stream, sir."
"Yes. Can you make a bridge there?"
"I can make one for infantry, sir. Not, I think, for the artillery.
Cutting a road would expose our position."
"Very good. Make the bridge, general."
Hampton's men cut saplings and threw a rude foot-bridge across the stream where he had traversed it. He returned and reported. "They are quiet and unsuspecting beyond, sir. The crossing would be slow, and there may be an accident, but cross we certainly can."
Jackson, still seated on the fallen pine, sat as though he had been there through eternity, and would remain through eternity. The gun thundered, the minies sang. One of the latter struck a tree above his head and severed a leafy twig. It came floating down, touched his shoulder like an accolade and rested on the pine needles by his foot. He gave it no attention, sitting like a graven image with clasped hands, listening to the South Carolinian's report. Hampton ceased to speak and waited. It was the height of the afternoon. He stood three minutes in silence, perhaps, then glanced toward the man on the log. Jackson's eyes were closed, his head slightly lifted. "Praying?" thought the South Carolinian. "Well, there's a time for everything--" Jackson opened his eyes, drew the forage cap far down over them, and rose from the pine.
The other looked for him to speak, but he said nothing. He walked a little way down the road and stood among the whistling minies, looking at the slowly, slowly building bridge.
Hampton did as Wright and Munford had done before him--went back to his men. D. H. Hill, after an interview of his own, had retired to the artillery. "Yes, yes, Rhett, go ahead! Do something--make a noise--do something! Infantry's kept home from school to-day--measles, I reckon, or maybe it's lockjaw!"
About three o'clock there was caught from the southward, between the loud wrangling of the batteries above White Oak, another sound,--first two or three detonations occurring singly, then a prolonged and continuous roar. The batteries above White Oak Swamp, the sharpshooters and skirmishers, the grey chafing cavalry, the grey ma.s.ses of unemployed infantry, all held breath and listened. The sound was not three miles away, and it was the sound of the crash of long battle-lines. There was a curious movement among the men nearest the grey general-commanding.
With their bodies bent forward, they looked his way, expecting short, quick orders. He rested immobile, his eyes just gleaming beneath the down-drawn cap, Little Sorrel cropping the marsh gra.s.s beside him.
Munford, coming up, ventured a remark. "General Longstreet or General A.
P. Hill has joined with their centre, I suppose, general? The firing is very heavy."
"Yes. The troops that have been lying before Richmond. General Lee will see that they do what is right."
Stafford, near him, spoke again. "The sound comes, I think, sir, from a place called Glendale--Glendale or Frayser's Farm."
"Yes, sir," said Jackson; "very probably."
The thunder never lessened. Artillery and infantry, Franklin's corps on the south bank of White Oak, began again to pour an iron hail against the opposing guns and the working party at the bridge, but in every interval between the explosions from these cannon there rolled louder and louder the thunder from Frayser's Farm. A sound like a grating wind in a winter forest ran through the idle grey brigades. "It's A. P.
Hill's battle again!--A. P. Hill or Longstreet! Magruder and Huger and Holmes and A. P. Hill and Longstreet--and we out of it again, on the wrong side of White Oak Swamp! And they're looking for us to help--_Wish I was dead!_"
The 65th Virginia had its place some distance up the stream, in a tangled wood by the water. Facing southward, it held the extreme right; beyond it only mora.s.s, tall trees, swaying ma.s.ses of vine. On the left an arm of the creek, thickly screened by tree and bush, divided it from the remainder of the brigade. It rested in semi-isolation, and its ten companies stared in anger at the narrow stream and the deep woods beyond, listening to the thunder of Longstreet and A. P. Hill's unsupported attack and the answering roar of the Federal 3d Army Corps.
It was a sullen noise, deep and unintermittent. The 65th, waiting for orders, could have wept as the orders did not come. "Get across? Well, if General Jackson would just give us leave to try!--Oh, h.e.l.l! listen to that!--Colonel, can't you do something for us?--Where's the colonel gone?"
Cleave was beyond their vision. He had rounded a little point of land and now, Dundee's hoofs in water, stood gazing at the darkly wooded opposite sh.o.r.e. He stood a moment thus, then spoke to the horse, and they entered the stream. It was not deep, and though there were obstructions, old stakes and drowned brushwood, Cleave and Dundee crossed. The air was full of booming sound, but there was no motion in the wood into which they rose from the water. All its floor was marshy, water in pools and threads, a slight growth of cane, and above, the tall and solemn trees. Cleave saw that there was open meadow beyond.
Dismounting, he went noiselessly to the edge of the swamp. An open s.p.a.ce, covered with some low growth; beyond it a hillside. Wood and meadow and hill, all lay quiet and lonely in the late sunlight.
He went back to Dundee, remounted, pa.s.sed again through the sombre wood, over the boggy earth, entered the water and recrossed. Turning the little point of the swamp, he rode before his regiment on his way to find Winder. His men greeted him. "Colonel, if you could just get us over there we'd do anything in the world for you! This weeping-willow place is getting awful hard to bear! Look at Dundee! Even he's drooping his head. You know we'd follow you through h.e.l.l, sir; and if you could just manage it so's we could follow you through White Oak Swamp--"
Cleave pa.s.sed the arm of the creek separating the 65th from the rest of the brigade, and asked of Winder from the first troops beyond the screen of trees. "General Winder has ridden down to the bridge to see General Jackson."