The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South Part 87

While Sheridan rode against Richmond, Lee and Grant were struggling in a pool of red at the "b.l.o.o.d.y Angle" of Spottsylvania. The musketry fire against the trees came in a low undertone, like the rattle of a hail storm on the roofs of houses.

A company of blue soldiers were cut off by a wave of charging gray. The men were trying to surrender. Their officers drew their revolvers and ordered them to break through. A sullen private shouted:

"Shoot your officers!"

Every commander dropped in his tracks. And the men were marched to the rear. Hour after hour the flames of h.e.l.l swirled in endless waves about this angle of the Southern trenches. Line after line of blue broke against it and eddied down its sides in slimy pools.

Color bearers waved their flags in each other's faces, clinched and fought, hand to hand, like devils. Two soldiers on top of the trench, their ammunition spent, choked each other to death and rolled down the embankment among the mangled bodies that filled the ditch.

In this ma.s.s of struggling maniacs men were fighting with guns, swords, handspikes, clubbed muskets, stones and fists. Night brought no pause to save the wounded or bury the dead.

For five days Grant circled his blue hosts in a whirlpool of death trying in vain to break Lee's trenches. He gave it up. The stolid, silent man of iron nerves watched the stream of wagons bearing the wounded, groaning and shrieking, from the field. Lee's forces had been handled with such skill the impact of numbers had made but little impression.

Thirty thousand dead and mangled lay on the field.

The stark fighter of the West was facing a new problem. The devotion of Lee's men was a mania. He was unconquerable in a square hand-to-hand fight in the woods.

A truce to bury the dead followed. They found them piled six layers deep in the trenches, blue and gray locked in the last embrace. Black wings were flapping over them unafraid of the living. Their red beaks were tearing at eyes and lips, while deep below yet groaned and moved the wounded.

Again Grant sought to flank his wily foe. This time he beat Lee to the spot. The two armies rushed for Cold Harbor in parallel columns flashing at each other deadly volleys as they marched. Lee took second choice of ground and entrenched on a gently sloping line of hills. They swung in crescent as at Fredericksburg.

With consummate skill he placed his guns and infantry to catch both flanks and front of the coming foe. And then he waited for Grant to charge. Thousands of men in the blue ranks were busy now sewing their names in their underclothing.

With the first streak of dawn, at 4:30, they charged. They walked into the mouth of a volcano flaming tons of steel and lead in their faces.

The scene was sickening. Nothing like it had, to this time, happened in the history of man.

_Ten thousand men in blue fell in twenty minutes._

Meade ordered Smith to renew the a.s.sault. Daring a court martial, Smith flatly refused.

The story of the next seventy-two hours our historians have refused to record. Through the smothering heat of summer for three days and nights the shrieks and groans of the wounded rose in endless waves of horror.

No hand could be lifted to save. With their last breath they begged, wept, cried, prayed for water. No man dared move in the storm-swept s.p.a.ce. Here and there a heroic boy in blue caught the cry of a wounded comrade and crawled on his belly to try a rescue only to die in the embrace of his friend.

When the truce was called to clear the shambles every man of the ten thousand who had fallen was dead--save two. The salvage corps walked in a muck of blood. They slipped and stumbled and fell in its festering pools. The flies and vultures were busy. Dead horses, dead men, smashed guns, legs, arms, mangled bodies disemboweled, the earth torn into an ashen crater.

In the thirty days since Grant had met Lee in the wilderness, the Northern army had lost sixty thousand men, the bravest of our race.

Lee's losses were not so great but they were tragic. They were as great in proportion to the number he commanded.

Grant paused to change his plan of campaign. The procession of ambulances into Washington had stunned the Nation. Every city, town, village, hamlet and country home was in mourning. A stream of protest against the new Commander swept the North. Lincoln refused to remove him. And on his head was heaped the blame for all the anguish of the bitter years of failure.

His answer to his critics was remorseless.

"We must fight to win. Grant is the ablest general we have. His losses are appalling. But the struggle is now on to the bitter end. Our resources of men and money are exhaustless. The South cannot replace her fallen sons. Her losses, therefore, are fatal!"

War had revealed to all at last that the Abolition crusade had been built on a lie. The negro had proven a bulwark of strength to the South.

Had their theories been true, had the slaves been beaten and abused the Black Bees would surely have swarmed. A single Southern village put to the torch by black hands would have done for Lee's army what no opponent had been able to do. It would have been destroyed in a night. The Confederacy would have gone down in hopeless ruin.

Not a black hand had been raised against a Southern man or woman in all the raging h.e.l.l. This fact is the South's vindication against the slanders of the Abolitionists. The negroes stood by their old masters.

They worked his fields; they guarded his women and children; they mourned over the graves of their fallen sons.

And now in the supreme hour of gathering darkness came the last act of the tragedy--the arming of the Northern blacks and the training of their hands to slay a superior race.

In the first year of the war Lincoln had firmly refused the prayer of Thomas Wentworth Higginson that he be allowed to arm and drill the Black Legions of the North. Later the pressure could not be resisted. The daily murder of the flower of the race had lowered its morale. It had lowered the value set on racial trait and character. The Cavalier and Puritan, with a thousand years of inspiring history throbbing in their veins, had become mere cannon fodder. The cry for men and still more men was endless. And this cry must be heard, or the war would end.

Men of the white breed were clasping hands at last across the lines under the friendly cover of the night. They spoke softly through their tears of home and loved ones. The tumult and the shout had pa.s.sed. The jeer and taunt, blind pa.s.sion and sordid hate lay buried in the long, deep graves of a hundred fields of blood.

Grant's new plan of campaign resulted in the deadlock of Petersburg.

The two armies now lay behind thirty-five miles of deep trenches with a stretch of volcano-torn, desolate earth between them.

The Black Legions were ma.s.sed for a dramatic ending of the war. Grant, Meade, and Burnside had developed a plan. Hundreds of sappers and miners burrowed under the sh.e.l.l-torn ground for months, digging a tunnel under Lee's fortress immediately before Petersburg.

The tunnel was not complete before Lee's ears had caught the sound. A counter tunnel was hastily begun but Grant's men had reached the spot under the center of Elliot's salient before the Confederates could intercept them.

Grant skillfully threw a division of his army on the north side of the James and made a fierce frontal attack on Richmond while he gathered the flower of his army, sixty-five thousand men with his Black Legions, before the tunnel that would open the way into Petersburg.

Lee was not misled by the a.s.sault on Richmond. But it was absolutely necessary to meet it, or the Capital would have fallen. He was compelled, in the face of the threatened explosion and a.s.sault, to divide his forces and weaken his lines before the tunnel.

His men were on the ground beyond the James to intercept the column moving toward Richmond. When the a.s.sault failed, Hanc.o.c.k and Sheridan immediately recrossed the river to take part in the capture of Petersburg and witness the end of the Confederacy.

The tons of powder were stored under the fort and the fuse set. The Black battalions stood ready to lead the attack and enter Petersburg first.

At the final council of war, the plan was changed. A division of New Englanders, the sons of Puritan fathers and mothers, were set to this grim task and the negroes were ordered to follow.

High words had been used at the Council. The whole problem of race and racial values was put to the test of the science of anthropology and of mathematics. The fuse would be set before daylight. The charge must be made in darkness with hundreds of great guns flaming, shrieking, shaking the earth. The negro could not be trusted to lead in this work. He had followed white officers in the daylight and under their inspiration had fought bravely. But he was afraid of the dark. It was useless to mince matters. The council faced the issue. He could not stand the terrors of the night in such a charge.

The decision was an ominous one for the future of America--ominous because merciless in its scientific logic. The same power which had given the white man his mastery of science and progress in the centuries of human history gave him the mastery of his brain and nerves in the dark. For a thousand years superst.i.tion had been trained out of his brain fiber. He could hold a firing line day or night. The darkness was his friend, not his enemy.

The New Englanders were pushed forward for the attack. The grim preparations were hurried. The pioneers were marshaled with axes and entrenching tools. A train pulled in from City Point with crowds of extra surgeons, their amputating tables and bandages ready. The wagons were loaded with picks and shovels to bury the dead quickly in the scorching heat of July.

The men waited in impatience for the explosion. It had been set for two o'clock. For two hours they stood listening. Their hearts were beating high at first. The delay took the soul out of them. They were angry, weary, cursing, complaining.

The fuse had gone out. Another had to be trained and set. As the Maine regiments gripped their muskets waiting for the explosion of the mine, a negro preacher in the second line behind them was haranguing the Black Battalions. His drooning, voodoo voice rang through the woods in weird echoes:

"Oh, my men! Dis here's gwine ter be er great fight. De greatest fight in all de war. We gwine ter take ole Petersburg dis day. De day er Juberlee is come. Yes, Lawd! An' den we take Richmon', 'stroy Lee's army an' en' dis war. Yas, Lawd, an' 'member dat Gen'l Grant an' Gen'l Burnside, an' Gen'l Meade's is all right here a-watch-in' ye! An' member dat I'se er watchin' ye. I'se er sargint in dis here comp'ny. Any you tries ter be a skulker, you'se gwine ter git a beyonet run clean froo ye--yas, Lawd! You hear me!"

He had scarcely finished his harangue when a smothering peal of thunder shook the world. The ground rocked beneath the feet of the men. Some were thrown backwards. Some staggered and caught a comrade's shoulder.

A pillar of blinding flame shot to the stars. A cloud of smoke rolled upward and spread its pall over the trembling earth. A shower of human flesh and bones spattered the smoking ground.

The men in front shivered as they brushed the pieces of red meat from their hands and clothes.

The artillery opened. Hundreds of guns were pouring sh.e.l.ls from their flaming mouths. The people of Petersburg leaped from their beds and pressed into the streets stunned by the appalling shock and the storm of artillery which followed.

The ground in front of the tunnel had been cleared of the abatis.

Burnside's New England veterans rushed the crater. A huge hole had been torn in Lee's fortifications one hundred yards long and sixty feet wide and twenty-five feet in depth.

The hole proved a grave. The charging troops floundered in its spongy, blood-soaked sides. They stumbled and fell into its pit. The regiments in the rear, rushing through the smoke and stumbling over the mangled pieces of flesh of Elliott's three hundred men who had been torn to pieces, were on top of the line in front before they could clear the crumbling walls.

When the charging hosts at last reached the firm ground inside the Confederate lines, the men in gray were rallying. Their guns had been trained on the yawning chasm now a struggling, squirming, cursing ma.s.s of blue. Slowly order came out of chaos and Burnside's men swung to the right and to the left and swept Lee's trenches for three hundred yards in each direction. The charging regiments poured into them and found the second Confederate line. Elliott's men who yet lived, driven from their outer line by the resistless rush of the attack, retreated to a deep ravine, rallied and held this third line.