The Long Roll Part 8

"'T would be just right an' fittin'," remarked Mrs. Cole, "if half the men in the world went about with a piece of pasteboard round their necks an' written on it, 'Pity the Blind!' Dinner's most ready, Tom,--an' I don't see how I'm goin' to tell him good-bye myself."

An hour later, in his small bare room underneath the mossy roof, with the small square window through which the breezes blew, Allan stood and looked about him. Dinner was over. It had been something of a feast, with unusual dainties, and a bunch of lilacs upon the table. Sairy had on a Sunday ap.r.o.n. The three had not been silent either; they had talked a good deal, but without much thought of what was said. Perhaps it was because of this that the meal had seemed so vague, and that nothing had left a taste in the mouth. It was over, and Allan was making ready to depart.

On the floor, beside the chest of drawers, stood a small hair trunk. A neighbour with a road wagon had offered to take it, and Allan, too, down the mountain at three o'clock. In the spring of 1861, one out of every two Confederate privates had a trunk. One must preserve the decencies of life; one must make a good appearance in the field! Allan's was small and modest enough, G.o.d knows! but such as it was it had not occurred to him to doubt the propriety of taking it. It stood there neatly packed, the shirts that Sairy had been ironing laid atop. The young man, kneeling beside it, placed in this or that corner the last few articles of his outfit. All was simple, clean, and new--only the books that he was taking with him were old. They were his Bible, his Shakespeare, a volume of Plutarch's Lives, and a Latin book or two beside. In a place to themselves were other treasures, a daguerreotype of his mother, a capacious huswife that Sairy had made and stocked for him, the little box of paper "to write home on" that had been Tom's present, various trifles that the three had agreed might come in handy. Among these he now placed Christianna's gift. It was soft and full and bright--he had the same pleasure in handling it that he would have felt in touching a damask rose. He shut it in and rose from his knees.

He had on his uniform. They had been slow in coming--the uniforms--from Richmond. It was only Cleave's patient insistence that had procured them at last. Some of the companies were not uniformed at all. So enormous was the press of business upon the authorities, so limited was the power of an almost purely agricultural, non-manufacturing world suddenly to clothe alike these thousands of volunteers, suddenly to arm them with something better than a fowling-piece or a Revolutionary flintlock, that the wonder is, not that they did so badly, but that they did so well.

Pending the arrival of the uniforms the men had drilled in strange array. With an attempt at similarity and a picturesque taste of their own, most of them wore linsey shirts and big black hats, tucked up on one side with a rosette of green ribbon. One man donned his grandfather's Continental blue and buff--on the breast was a dark stain, won at King's Mountain. Others drilled, and were now ready to march, as they came from the plough, the mill, or the forge. But Cleave's company, by virtue of Cleave himself, was fairly equipped. The uniforms had come, and there was a decent showing of modern arms. Billy Maydew's hunting-knife and spear would be changed on the morrow for a musket, though in Billy's case the musket would certainly be the old smoothbore, calibre sixty-nine.

Allan's own gun, left him by his father, rested against the wall. The young man, for all his quietude, his conscientious ways, his daily work with children, his love of flowers, and his dreams of books, inherited from frontiersmen--whose lives had depended upon watchfulness--quickness of wit, accuracy of eye, and steadiness of aim. He rarely missed his mark, and he read intuitively and easily the language of wood, sky, and road. On the bed lay his slouch hat, his haversack, knapsack, and canteen, cartridge-box and belt, and slung over the back of a chair was his roll of blanket. All was in readiness. Allan went over to the window. Below him were the flowers he had tended, then the great forests in their May freshness, cataracts of green, falling down, down to the valley. Over all hung the sky, divinely blue. A wind went rustling through the forest, joining its voice to the voice of Thunder Run. Allan knelt, touching with his forehead the window-sill. "O Lord G.o.d," he said, "O Lord G.o.d, keep us all, North and South, and bring us through winding ways to Thy end at last." As he rose he heard the wagon coming down the road. He turned, put the roll of blanket over one shoulder, and beneath the other arm a.s.sumed knapsack, haversack, and canteen, dragged the hair trunk out upon the landing, returned, took up his musket, looked once again about the small, familiar room, then left it and went downstairs.

Sairy and Tom were upon the porch, the owner of the wagon with them.

"I'll tote down yo' trunk," said the latter, and presently emerged from the house with that article upon his shoulder. "I reckon I'll volunteer myself, just as soon 's harvest's over," he remarked genially. "But, gosh! you-all'll be back by then, telling how you did it!" He went down the path whistling, and tossed the trunk into the wagon.

"I hate good-byes," said Allan. "I wish I had stolen away last night."

"Don't ye get killed!" answered Sairy sharply. "That's what I'm afraid of. I know you'll go riskin' yourself!"

"G.o.d bless you," said Tom. "You've been like a son to us these five years. Don't you forget to write."

"I won't," answered Allan. "I'll write you long letters. And I won't get killed, Aunt Sairy. I'll take the best of care." He took the old woman in his arms. "You two have been just as good as a father and mother to me. Thank you for it. I'll never forget. Good-bye."

Toward five o'clock the wagon rolled into the village whence certain of the Botetourt companies were to march away. It was built beside the river--two long, parallel streets, one upon the water level, the other much higher, with intersecting lanes. There were brick and frame houses, modest enough; there were three small, white-spired churches, many locust and ailanthus trees, a covered bridge thrown across the river to a village upon the farther side and, surrounding all, a n.o.ble frame of mountains. There was, in those days, no railroad.

Cleave's hundred men, having the town at large for their friend, stood in no lack of quarters. Some had volunteered from this place or its neighbourhood, others had kinsmen and a.s.sociates, not one was so forlorn as to be without a host. The village was in a high fever of hospitality; had the companies marching from Botetourt been so many brigades, it would still have done its utmost. From the Potomac to the Dan, from the Eastern Sh.o.r.e to the Alleghenies the flame of patriotism burned high and clear. There were skulkers, there were braggarts, there were knaves and fools in Virginia as elsewhere, but by comparison they were not many, and theirs was not the voice that was heard to-day. The ma.s.s of the people were very honest, stubbornly convinced, showing to the end a most heroic and devoted ardour. This village was not behindhand. All her young men were going; she had her company, too. She welcomed Cleave's men, gathered for the momentarily expected order to the front, and lavished upon them, as on two other companies within her bounds, every hospitable care.

The wagon driver deposited Allan Gold and his trunk before the porch of the old, red brick hotel, shook hands with a mighty grip, and rattled on toward the lower end of town. The host came out to greet the young man, two negro boys laid hold of his trunk, a pa.s.sing volunteer in b.u.t.ternut, with a musket as long as Natty b.u.mpo's, hailed him, and a cl.u.s.ter of elderly men sitting with tilted chairs in the shade of a locust tree rose and gave him welcome. "It's Allan Gold from Thunder Run, isn't it?

Good-day, sir, good-day! Can't have too many from Thunder Run; good giant stuff! Have you somewhere to stay to-night? If not, any one of us will be happy to look after you.--Mr. Harris, let us have juleps all round--"

"Thank you very kindly, sir," said Allan, "but I must go find my captain."

"I saw him," remarked a gray-haired gentleman, "just now down the street. He's seeing to the loading of his wagons, showing Jim Ball and the drivers just how to do it--and he says he isn't going to show them but this once. They seemed right prompt to learn."

"I was thar too," put in an old farmer. "'They're mighty heavy wagons,'

I says, says I. 'Three times too heavy,' he says, says he. 'This company's got the largest part of its provisions for the whole war right here and now,' says he. 'Thar's a heap of trunks,' says I. 'More than would be needed for the White Sulphur,' he says, says he. 'This time two years we'll march lighter,' says he--"

There were exclamations. "Two years! Thunderation!--This war'll be over before persimmons are ripe! Why, the boys haven't volunteered but for one year--and even that seemed kind of senseless! Two years! He's daft!"

"I dunno," quoth the other. "If fighting's like farming it's all-fired slow work. Anyhow, that's what he said. 'This time two years we'll march lighter,' he says, says he, and then I came away. He's down by the old warehouse by the bridge, Mr. Gold--and I just met Matthew Coffin and he says thar's going to be a parade presently."

An hour later, in the sunset glow, in a meadow by the river, the three companies paraded. The new uniforms, the bright muskets, the silken colours, the bands playing "Dixie," the quick orders, the more or less practised evolutions, the universal martial mood, the sense of danger over all, as yet thrilling only, not leaden, the known faces, the loved faces, the imminent farewell, the flush of glory, the beckoning of great events--no wonder every woman, girl, and child, every old man and young boy who could reach the meadow were there, watching in the golden light, half wild with enthusiasm!

Wish I was in de land ob cotton, Old times dar am not forgotten Look away! look away! Dixie Land.

At one side, beneath a great sugar maple, were cl.u.s.tered a number of women, mothers, wives, sisters, sweethearts, of those who were going forth to war. They swayed forward, absorbed in watching, not the companies as a whole, but one or two, sometimes three or four figures therein. They had not held them back; never in the times of history were there more devotedly patriotic women than they of the Southern States.

They lent their plaudits; they were high in the thoughts of the men moving with precision beneath the great flag of Virginia, to the sound of music, in the green meadow by the James. The colours of the several companies had been sewed by women, sitting together in dim old parlours, behind windows framed in roses. One banner had been made from a wedding gown.

Look away! look away!

Look away down South to Dixie!

The throng wept and cheered. The negroes, slave and free, belonging to this village and the surrounding country, were of an excellent type, worthy and respectable men and women, honoured by and honouring their "white people." A number of these were in the meadow by the river, and they, too, clapped and cheered, borne away by music and spectacle, gazing with fond eyes upon some nursling, or playmate, or young, imperious, well-liked master in those gleaming ranks. Isaac, son of Abraham, or Esau and Jacob, sons of Isaac, marching with banners against Canaan or Moab, may have heard some such acclaim from the servants left behind. Several were going with the company. Captain and lieutenants, and more than one sergeant and corporal had their body-servants--these were the proudest of the proud and the envied of their brethren. The latter were voluble. "Des look at Wash,--des look at Washington Mayo!

Actin' lak he own er co'te house an' er stage line! O my Lawd! wish I wuz er gwine! An dat dar Tullius from Three Oaks--he gwine march right behin' de captain, an' Ma.r.s.e Hairston Breckinridge's boy he gwine march right behin' him!--Dar de big drum ag'in!"

In Dixie land I'll take my stand, To live and die in Dixie!

Look away! Look away!

Look away down South to Dixie!

The sun set behind the great mountain across the river. Parade was over, ranks broken. The people and their heroes, some restless, others tense, all flushed of cheek and bright of eye, all borne upon a momentous upward wave of emotion, parted this way and that, to supper, to divers preparations, fond talk, and farewells, to an indoor hour. Then, presently, out again in the mild May night, out into High Street and Low Street, in the moonlight, under the odour of the white locust cl.u.s.ters.

The churches were lit and open; in each there was brief service, well attended. Later, from the porch of the old hotel, there was speaking. It drew toward eleven o'clock. The moon was high, the women and children all housed, the oldest men, spent with the strain of the day, also gone to their homes, or their friends' homes. The Volunteers and a faithful few were left. They could not sleep; if war was going to be always as exciting as this, how did soldiers ever sleep? There was not among them a man who had ever served in war, so the question remained unanswered. A Thunder Run man volunteered the information that the captain was asleep--he had been to the house where the captain lodged and his mother had come to the door with her finger on her lips, and he had looked past her and seen Captain Cleave lying on a sofa fast asleep. Thunder Run's comrades listened, but they rather doubted the correctness of his report. It surely wasn't very soldier-like to sleep--even upon a sofa--the night before marching away! The lieutenants weren't asleep.

Hairston Breckinridge had a map spread out upon a bench before the post office, and was demonstrating to an eager dozen the indubitable fact that the big victory would be either at Harper's Ferry or Alexandria.

Young Matthew Coffin was in love, and might be seen through the hotel window writing, candles all around him, at a table, covering one pale blue sheet after another with impa.s.sioned farewells. Sergeants and corporals and men were wakeful. Some of these, too, were writing letters, sending messages; others joined in the discussion as to the theatre of war, or made knots of their own, centres of conjectures and prophecy; others roamed the streets, or down by the river bank watched the dark stream. Of these, a few proposed to strip and have a swim--who knew when they'd see the old river again? But the notion was frowned upon. One must be dressed and ready. At that very moment, perhaps, a man might be riding into town with the order. The musicians were not asleep.

Young Matthew Coffin, sealing his letter some time after midnight, and coming out into the moonlight and the fragrance of the locust trees, had an inspiration. All was in readiness for the order when it should come, and who, in the meantime, wanted to do so prosaic a thing as rest?

"Boys, let us serenade the ladies!"

The silver night wore on. So many of the "boys" had sisters, that there were many pretty ladies staying in the town or at the two or three pleasant old houses upon its outskirts. Two o'clock, three o'clock pa.s.sed, and there were yet windows to sing beneath. Old love songs floated through the soft and dreamy air; there was a sense of angelic beings in the unlit rooms above, even of the flutter of their wings.

Then, at the music's dying fall, flowers were thrown; there seemed to descend a breath, a whisper, "Adieu, heroes--adored, adored heroes!" A scramble for the flowers, then out at the gate and on to the next house, and so _da capo_.

Dawn, though the stars were yet shining, began to make itself felt. A coldness was in the air, a mist arose from the river, there came a sensation of arrest, of somewhere an icy finger upon the pulse of life.

Maxwelton's braes are bonnie, Where early fa's the dew, And 't was there that Annie Laurie Gie'd me her promise true,--

They were singing now before an old brick house in the lower street.

There were syringas in bloom in the yard. A faint light was rising in the east, the stars were fading.

Gie'd me her promise true Which ne'er forgot shall be--

Suddenly, from High Street, wrapped in mist, a bugle rang out. The order--the order--the order to the front! It called again, sounding the a.s.sembly. _Fall in, men, fall in!_

At sunrise Richard Cleave's company went away. There was a dense crowd in the misty street, weeping, cheering. An old minister, standing beside the captain, lifted his arms--the men uncovered, the prayer was said, the blessing given. Again the bugle blew, the women cried farewell. The band played "Virginia," the flag streamed wide in the morning wind.

Good-bye, good-bye, and again good-bye! _Attention! Take arms! Shoulder arms! Right face!_ FORWARD, MARCH!

CHAPTER VI

BY ASHBY'S GAP

The 65th Virginia Infantry, Colonel Valentine Brooke, was encamped to the north of Winchester in the Valley of Virginia, in a meadow through which ran a stream, and upon a hillside beneath a hundred chestnut trees, covered with white ta.s.sels of bloom. To its right lay the 2d, the 4th, the 5th, the 27th, and the 33d Virginia, forming with the 65th the First Brigade, General T. J. Jackson. The battery attached--the Rockbridge Artillery--occupied an adjacent apple orchard. To the left, in other July meadows and over other chestnut-shaded hills, were spread the brigades of Bee, Bartow, and Elzey. Somewhere in the distance, behind the screen of haze, were Stuart and his cavalry. Across the stream a brick farmhouse, ringed with mulberry trees, made the headquarters of Joseph E. Johnston, commanding the forces of the Confederacy--an experienced, able, and wary soldier, engaged just now, with eleven thousand men, in watching Patterson with fifteen thousand on the one hand, and McDowell with thirty-five thousand on the other, and in listening attentively for a voice from Beauregard with twenty thousand at Mana.s.sas. It was the middle of July, 1861.

First Brigade headquarters was a tree--an especially big tree--a little removed from the others. Beneath it stood a kitchen chair and a wooden table, requisitioned from the nearest cabin and scrupulously paid for.

At one side was an extremely small tent, but Brigadier-General T. J.

Jackson rarely occupied it. He sat beneath the tree, upon the kitchen chair, his feet, in enormous cavalry boots, planted precisely before him, his hands rigid at his sides. Here he transacted the business of each day, and here, when it was over, he sat facing the North. An awkward, inarticulate, and peculiar man, with strange notions about his health and other matters, there was about him no breath of grace, romance, or pomp of war. He was ungenial, ungainly, with large hands and feet, with poor eyesight and a stiff address. There did not lack spruce and handsome youths in his command who were vexed to the soul by the idea of being led to battle by such a figure. The facts that he had fought very bravely in Mexico, and that he had for the enemy a cold and formidable hatred were for him; most other things against him. He drilled his troops seven hours a day. His discipline was of the sternest, his censure a thing to make the boldest officer blench. A blunder, a slight negligence, any disobedience of orders--down came reprimand, suspension, arrest, with an iron cert.i.tude, a relentlessness quite like Nature's. Apparently he was without imagination. He had but little sense of humour, and no understanding of a joke. He drank water and sucked lemons for dyspepsia, and fancied that the use of pepper had caused a weakness in his left leg. He rode a raw-boned nag named Little Sorrel, he carried his sabre in the oddest fashion, and said "oblike"

instead of "oblique." He found his greatest pleasure in going to the Presbyterian Church twice on Sundays and to prayer meetings through the week. Now and then there was a gleam in his eye that promised something, but the battles had not begun, and his soldiers hardly knew what it promised. One or two observers claimed that he was ambitious, but these were chiefly laughed at. To the brigade at large he seemed prosaic, tedious, and strict enough, performing all duties with the exact.i.tude, monotony, and expression of a clock, keeping all plans with the secrecy of the sepulchre, rarely sleeping, rising at dawn, and requiring his staff to do likewise, praying at all seasons, and demanding an implicity of obedience which might have been in order with some great and glorious captain, some idolized Napoleon, but which seemed hardly the due of the late professor of natural philosophy and artillery tactics at the Virginia Military Inst.i.tute. True it was that at Harper's Ferry, where, as Colonel T. J. Jackson, he had commanded until Johnston's arrival, he had begun to bring order out of chaos and to weave from a high-spirited rabble of Volunteers a web that the world was to acknowledge remarkable; true, too, that on the second of July, in the small affair with Patterson at Falling Waters, he had seemed to the critics in the ranks not altogether unimposing. He emerged from Falling Waters Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson, and his men, though with some mental reservations, began to call him "Old Jack." The epithet implied approval, but approval hugely qualified. They might have said--in fact, they did say--that every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!

The Army of the Shenandoah was a civilian army, a high-spirited, slightly organized, more or less undisciplined, totally inexperienced in war, impatient and youthful body of men, with the lesson yet to learn that the shortest distance between two points is sometimes a curve. In its eyes Patterson at Bunker Hill was exclusively the blot upon the escutcheon, and the whole game of war consisted in somehow doing away with that blot. There was great chafing at the inaction. It was hot, argumentative July weather; the encampment to the north of Winchester in the Valley of Virginia hummed with the comments of the strategists in the ranks. Patterson should have been attacked after Falling Waters.

What if he was entrenched behind stone walls at Martinsburg? Patterson should have been attacked upon the fifteenth at Bunker Hill. What if he has fifteen thousand men?--what if he has _twenty_ thousand?--What if McDowell is preparing to cross the Potomac? And now, on the seventeenth, Patterson is at Charlestown, creeping eastward, evidently going to surround the Army of the Shenandoah! Patterson is the burning reality and McDowell the dream--and yet Johnston won't move to the westward and attack! _Good Lord! we didn't come from home just to watch these chestnuts get ripe! All the generals are crazy, anyhow._

It was nine, in the morning of Thursday the eighteenth,--a scorching day. The locusts were singing of the heat; the gra.s.s, wherever men, horses, and wagon wheels had not ground it into dust, was parched to a golden brown; the mint by the stream looked wilted. The morning drill was over, the 65th lounging beneath the trees. It was almost too hot to fuss about Patterson, almost too hot to pity the sentinels, almost too hot to wonder where Stuart's cavalry had gone that morning, and why "Old Joe" quartered behind the mulberries in the brick farmhouse, had sent a staff officer to "Old Jack," and why Bee's and Bartow's and Elzey's brigades had been similarly visited; almost too hot to play checkers, to whittle a set of chessmen, to finish that piece of Greek, to read "Ivanhoe" and resolve to fight like Brian de Bois Gilbert and Richard Coeur de Lion in one, to write home, to rout out knapsack and haversack, and look again at fifty precious trifles; too hot to smoke, to tease Company A's pet c.o.o.n, to think about Thunder Run, to wonder how pap was gettin' on with that thar piece of corn, and what the girls were sayin'; too hot to borrow, too hot to swear, too hot to go down to the creek and wash a shirt, too hot--"What's that drum beginning for? _The long roll! The Army of the Valley is going to move! Boys, boys, boys! We are going north to Charlestown! Boys, boys, boys! We are going to lick Patterson!_"