THE VALLEY
Early’s task in the Valley throughout this summer and autumn was to
preserve a threatening attitude toward blue territory on the other
side of the Potomac, to hinder and harass Federal use of the
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and to
render the Northern Capital so continuously anxious that it might at
any time choose to weaken Grant in order to add to its own defences.
In addition he had presently Sheridan to contend with, Sheridan
strengthened by Hunter, returned now from the Kanawha Valley to the
main battle-grounds.
Sheridan’s task in the Valley was to give body to the Northern
reasoning as to the uses, at this stage of the game, of that section.
With war rapidly concentrating as it now was, the Northern Government
saw the Valley no more as a battle-ground, nor as of especial use to
the blue colour on the chessboard. But it was of use to the grey,
especially that rich portion of it called the Shenandoah Valley.
Moreover it was grey; scourge it well and you scourged a grey
province. Make it untenable, a desert, and the loss would be felt
where it was meant to be felt. Sheridan, with Hunter to aid,
devastated as thoroughly as if his name had been Attila. McCausland
made a cavalry raid into Pennsylvania and, in reprisal for Hunter’s
burnings, burned the town of Chambersburg. It did not stop the
burnings across the river; they went on through the length and breadth
of the Valley of Virginia. Over the mountains, in Northern Virginia,
in the rolling counties of Fauquier and Loudoun, was “Mosby’s
Confederacy,” where the most daring of all grey partisan leaders
“operated in the enemy’s lines.” Mosby did what lay in man to do to
help the lower Valley. He “worried and harassed” Sheridan by day and
by night. But the burning and lifting went on. When late autumn came,
with winter before it, a great region lay bare, and over it wandered a
vision of drawn faces of women and a cry of small children.
Sheridan in person did not come until the first week in August. Late
in July Early fought the Army of West Virginia, Crook and Averell, at
Winchester—fought and won. Here the Golden Brigade did good service,
and here the “Fighting Sixty-fifth” won mention again, and here Steve
Dagg definitely determined to renounce the Confederate service.
Life had taken on for Steve an aspect of ’62 in the Valley—only worse.
In a dreadful dream he seemed to be recovering old tints, repeating
old experiences from Front Royal to Winchester—but all darkened and
hardened. In ’62 the country was still rich, and you could forage, but
now there was no foraging. There was nothing to forage for. Then the
old Army of the Valley had been ill-clad and curiously confident and
cheerful, with Mr. Commissary Banks double-quicking down the pike,
before Old Jack! Now the Second Corps was worse-clad, and far, far
from the ancient careless cheer. It still laughed and joked and sang,
but less often, and always, when it did laugh, it was with a certain
grimness as of Despair not far off. On night and day marches, you
heard song and jest, indeed, but you heard heavy sighs as well—a heavy
sighing in the night-time or the daytime, as the army moved on the
Valley Pike. Now confident good cheer in others was extraordinarily
necessary to Steve. When it flagged, it was as though a raft had sunk
from beneath him. Yes, it was ’62 over again, but a homesick, strange,
far worse ’62! Daily life grew to be for him a series of shocks, more
or less violent, but all violent. Life went in magic-lantern
slides—alternate blackness and frightful, vivid pictures in which
blood red predominated. Steve developed a morbid horror of blood.
August came. At Moorefield occurred a cavalry fight, Averell against
McCausland and Bradley Johnson, the grey suffering defeat. On the
seventh came Sheridan with the Sixth and the Nineteenth Army Corps and
Torbert’s great force of cavalry. The blue forces in the Valley now
numbered perhaps forty-five thousand, with some thousands more in
garrison at Martinsburg and Harper’s Ferry. Lee sent in this month
Kershaw’s division and Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry, but in a few weeks,
indeed, Kershaw must be recalled to Petersburg, where they needed
every man—every man and more! In the Valley August and the first third
of September went by in marchings and counter-marchings, infantry
skirmishing and cavalry raids. The third week of the latter month
found the grey gathered behind the Opequon.
Mid-September and the woods by the Opequon turning red and gold. “Ah,”
said the Sixty-fifth, “we camped here after Sharpsburg, before we went
over the mountains and fought at Fredericksburg! But it isn’t as it
was—it isn’t as it was—”
Gordon and Breckenridge and Ramseur and Rodes, with Fitz Lee’s cavalry
sent up from Tidewater, all camped for a time beside the Opequon. The
stream ran with an inner voice, an autumn colouring was on the land.
“But it isn’t bright,” said the men, “it isn’t bright like it was that
fall!”—“Isn’t time yet for it to be bright. Bright in October.”—“Yes,
of course—but that fall it was bright all the time! The seasons are
changing anyhow.”—“What’s that the Bible student’s saying? ‘_The lean
kine and the lean ears of corn_—’” Opequon flowed on, brown and clear,
but much of the woodland by Opequon had been hewed away, and the
bordering lands were not now under cultivation. All were bare and
sorrowful. There were no cattle, no stock of any kind. The leaves
turned red and the leaves turned yellow and the wind murmured through
the hacked and hewed forest, and the nights were growing chill. “Do
you remember,” said the men, “the day that Heros von Borcke brought
Old Jack the new uniform from Jeb Stuart?”—“Do you remember the
revival here?”
“We’re tenting to-night on the old camp-ground.
Give us a song to cheer—”
The seventeenth and eighteenth all divisions moved nearer to
Winchester. The nineteenth the battle of Winchester had its moment in
time,—a battle very fortunate for the Confederates early in the day,
not at all so fortunate later in the day,—a fierce, dramatic battle,
in which the blue cavalry played the lion’s part,—blue cavalry very
different, under Sheridan in ’64, from the untrained and weakly
handled blue cavalry of the earlier years,—a battle in which Rodes was
killed and Fitzhugh Lee wounded, in which killed and wounded and
missing the blue lost upward of five thousand, and in killed and
wounded and captured the grey lost as many—a bitter battle!
Steve had to fight—he could not get out of it. He was out on the
Berryville road—Abraham’s Creek at his back. The Sixty-fifth was about
him; it was steady and bold, and he got some warmth about his heart
out of the fact. In the hopeful first half of the day, with a ruined
stone wall for breastwork, with Nelson’s and Braxton’s guns making a
shaken grey rag of the atmosphere, with Ramseur standing fast, with
Gordon and Rodes sweeping to Ramseur’s aid, with Breckenridge, the
“Kentucky Gamecock,” fighting as magnificently as he looked, with
Lomax and Fitz Lee, with the storm and shouting, and the red field and
blue and starry cross advanced, with about him the strength of the
Golden Brigade and the untroubled look of the Sixty-fifth, Steve even
fought as he had never fought before. He tore cartridges, loaded and
fired, and he grinned when the wind blew the smoke, and the opposite
force was seen to give way. When the Golden Brigade went forward in a
charge, he went with it a good part of the way. But then he stumbled
over a stone and fell with an oath as of pain. The Golden Brigade and
the Sixty-fifth went on and left him there near a convenient cairn of
stones with a reddened vine across it. His action had been largely
automatic; he had no longer in such matters the agony of choosing; as
soon as fear entered his heart his joints acted. Now they drew him
more securely behind the heap of stones. Far ahead, he heard, through
the thunder of the guns, the voice of the Golden Brigade, the voice of
the Sixty-fifth Virginia charging the foe. He looked down, and to his
horror he saw that he was really wounded.
This was high noon, and at high noon the grey thought with justice
that they had the field, had it, despite the fall of Rodes, a general
beloved. Now set in a level two hours of hard fighting to hold that
field.... And then wheeled on the afternoon, and the tide definitely
turned. Crook’s corps, not until now engaged, struck the left on the
Martinsburg Pike, and the blue cavalry, disciplined now and strong,
came in a whirlwind upon the rear of this wing, pushing it and a
cavalry brigade of Fitz Lee’s back—back—back through Winchester—back
on the centre and right, now furiously attacked by all three arms. The
tide raced to its ebb with the grey.... Gordon found his wife in the
street in Winchester, pleading with Gordon’s men to go back and strike
them anyhow. Her tears were streaming. “The first time I ever saw
Confederate lines broken, and I hope it will be the last!”
They were broken. It was not wild panic nor rout, but it was a lost
battle, known as such at last by even the most stubbornly determined
or recklessly brave. By twilight the Second Corps was in retreat,
moving in order up the Valley Pike, sullen and sorrowful, torn and
decimated and weary, heartsick with the dead and wounded and captured
left behind. Kernstown! They looked at the old field with unseeing
eyes.
Steve, behind his cairn of stones, had viewed with agony a blue
cavalry charge coming. It passed him in dust and thunder, the hoof of
a great chestnut actually striking his shoulder. It passed, but the
dust had not settled before infantry of Rodes, pressed this way,
overran his fraction of the field, behind them another wild cavalry
dash. It was sickening to see the horses ride men down, ride them down
and strike them under! It was sickening to see the sabres flash,
descend all bright and rise so red! It was sickening to hear cries,
oaths, adjuration, and under all a moaning, moaning! And the smoke, so
thick and stifling, and a horror even of taste and smell ... Steve,
with a flesh wound across his thigh where a bullet had glanced, got up
and ran, dropping blood.
As he went he found about him the wildest confusion. Units and groups
of cavalry, infantry, and artillery were shaken together as in a
glass. Here infantry preponderated, here mad horses, larger than
nature, appeared to rear in the smoke, and here panting men tried to
drag away the guns. Here were the wounded, here were shouting and
crying, here were officers, impassioned, rallying, appealing,
coercing, and here were the half-sobbing answers of their men. “Lost,
lost!” said in effect the answers of the men. “Lost, lost! You, the
leaders, know it, and we know it. You would lead us to noble death,
but we must keep to life if we can. We have fought very well, and now
we are tired, and there is something to be said for knowing when you
are beaten and trying another tack.”—“Lost, lost!” said the shot and
shell. “Lost, lost!” said the wind whistling from the sabres of
Merritt’s charging cavalry. “Lost, lost!” said the autumn night.
“Lost, lost!” said the dust on the Valley Pike.
Steve tried to get taken on in an ambulance, but the surgeon in charge
first laid practised fingers around his wrist, and then told him to go
to hell—in short to walk to hell—and leave ambulances for hurt folks.
“Gawd!” thought Steve, “’n’ I saved this army on the road to
Buford’s!”
Night came on, night without and night within. The outer night was a
night of stars. Myriads and myriads, they showed, star clouds in the
Milky Way, and scattered stars in the darker spaces. The air was very
clear, and the starshine showed the road—the long, palely gleaming,
old, old, familiar road. Within, the night was dark, dark! and peopled
with broken hopes. _Tramp, tramp!_ on the Valley Pike. _Tramp, tramp!_
with sore and tired feet, with hot and tired hearts. _Tramp, tramp!_
and all the commands were broken, officers seeking for their men and
men for their officers, a part of one regiment marching with a part of
another, all the moulds cracked. _Tramp, tramp! Tramp, tramp!_ and
fathers were weeping silently for sons, and sons for their fathers,
and brothers for brothers, and many for their country. _Tramp, tramp!_
and there came a vision of the burning Valley, and of Atlanta burning,
burning, for not one house, said the dispatches, had Sherman left
standing, and a vision of the trenches at Petersburg, and a vision of
Richmond, Richmond perhaps crashing down in ruin to-night, wall and
pillar, and the flames going up. _Tramp, tramp!_ and a flame of wrath
came into the marching hearts, welcome because it warmed, welcome
because anger and hate gave at least a strength, like a pale reflex of
the strength of love, welcome because before it fled the shadows of
weakness, and in it despair grew heroic. Now the men, exhausted as
they were, would have turned, and gone back and struck Sheridan.
_Tramp, tramp! Tramp, tramp!_ and there came a firmness into the
sound. Throughout the night, now it came and now it went, and now it
came again.
The night went by, though it was long in going. Dawn came, though it
was slow in coming. When it was light we saw Massanutten, and the
north fork of Shenandoah, and Fisher’s Hill. “This is a good place to
stand,” said Early, and began to build breastworks. In the afternoon
up came Sheridan, something over twice as many-numbered as the grey,
and all flushed with victory, and took his stand on Cedar Creek,
several miles from Fisher’s Hill. All day the twenty-first and part of
the twenty-second he reconnoitred, and in the night-time of the
twenty-first he placed Crook and the Army of West Virginia in the deep
forest between Little North Mountain and the Confederate left. They
stayed there hidden until nearly sundown of the twenty-second. Then he
brought them out in a flank attack, so sudden and so swift!... And at
the same moment all his legions struck against the centre.
Steve heard the cry, “Flanked!—We are flanked!” He witnessed the
rush of arms, and then he waited not to see defeat—which came. He
fled at once. Halfway to Woodstock he stopped at a Dunkard’s house,
where an old, long-bearded man gave him a piece of bread and asked
no questions, but sat looking at him with dreamy, disapproving eyes.
“Yes, the soldier could sleep here, although to be a soldier was to
be a great sinner.” Steve did not care for that. He slept very well
for an hour on the floor of a small bare room above the porch. At
the end of that time he was awakened by a sound upon the pike. He
sat up, then went on all fours across to the window and put out his
head. “Gawd! they’re comin’ up the pike—retreatin’!” He felt a wild
indignation. “The Second Corps ain’t any more what it used to be!
Retreatin’ every whipstitch like it’s been doin’.” _Tramp, tramp!
Tramp, tramp!_ He heard them through the dark, clear night, growing
loud now upon the limestone pike. “Well, I ain’t a-goin’ along! I’m
tireder than any dawg!—’n’ hurt besides.” He lay down beneath the
window and shut his eyes. But he could not keep the sound out, nor a
picture of the column from winding through his brain. “They ain’t
got any shoes, ’n’ they’re gettin’ so ragged, ’n’ hunger-pinched.
They’re gettin’ hunger-pinched. They’ve fought ’n’ fought till
they’re most at a standstill. They’ve fought mighty hard. Ain’t
anybody ever fought any harder. But now they’re tired—awful tired.
No shoes, ’n’ ragged, ’n’ hunger-pinched—Coffin, ’n’ Allan, ’n’
Billy, ’n’ Dave, ’n’ Jim Watts, ’n’ Bob White, ’n’ Reynolds, ’n’ all
of them. Even Zip the coon’s hunger-pinched. They’ve all got large
eyes, ’n’ they’ve fought most to a standstill, ’n’ the flags are
gettin’ heavy to carry....” _Tramp, tramp! Tramp, tramp!_ He dozed
and heard the gun-wheels in a half dream, crossing a bridge with a
hollow sound. Wheels and wheels and a hollow sound. Memory played
him a trick. He was lying in a miry, weedy ditch under a small
bridge on the road between Middletown and Winchester. The guns were
passing over his head, _rumble, rumble, rumble!_ And then a plank
broke and a gun-wheel came down and tried to knock him into Kingdom
Come.... He woke fully with a violent start and the sweat cold upon
his body.... The column was directly passing,—he heard voices,
marching feet, officers’ orders, wheels, hoofs, marching feet,
voices,—all distant, continuous sound broken, become a loud,
immediate, choppy sea. “Go on!” whispered Steve. “Go on! I ain’t
a-goin’ with you.”
The column went on, marching by the little dark and silent house, on
up the pike, beneath the stars, toward Woodstock, and some pause
perhaps beyond. It moved so near that Steve heard at times what the
soldiers said. He gathered that Fisher’s Hill was a word of gloom and
would remain so. On it went, on it went, until from van to rear ten
thousand men had passed. And then, as the sound of the sea was
lessening, a knot of officers drew up almost beneath the window. They
spoke in slow, tired, dragging voices. “Orders are no halt until we’ve
passed Woodstock.—Six miles yet. Where then? I do not know.—Fight
again? Yes, of course—fight to the bitter end! I don’t suppose it’s
far off.—Here’s Berkeley. Well, what’s the news, Captain?”
“Sheridan’s after us, sir.... Listen!”
They listened. “Yes.... Coming up the pike.... I should say he has
thirty thousand infantry and as many horse as we have of all three
arms. Well! let the curtain ring down. We’ve made good drama.”
When they were gone, Steve rose and leaned cautiously out of the
window. Yes, he could hear the Yankees, he could hear them coming.
They were far off, but they were coming, coming.—A light burst forth
in the night, in the north, then another and another. “They’re firin’
barns and houses as they pass.”—Below him rose a final clatter of
horses’ hoofs, voices, curt orders, oaths—the grey rear guard drawing
off, following the main body. Steve ran downstairs and out into the
road. He stopped a horseman. “For Gawd’s sake, comrade, take me on
behind you! I marched with the boys till I just dropped, ’n’ I said,
‘Go on, ’n’ maybe a horse or a wagon’ll be good to me.’—I got a sore
hurt in the leg—”
“All right,” said the horseman. “Get up!” and they went on up the pike
with the sky red behind them, and night before. “It’s most the end, I
reckon.”
Woodstock—and a halt below at Narrow Passage—then on a windy, dusty
day to New Market, while Sheridan paused and finally went into camp at
Mount Jackson—then aside from the Valley Pike, eastward by the Port
Republic road—then into the great shady amphitheatre of Brown’s
Gap—and here quiet at last, quiet and rest. Again it was an old, old
camping-ground. The Second Corps stared, sombre-eyed, with faces that
worked. “Old Jube is all right—but, O God, for Stonewall Jackson!”
Weeks went by. The woods changed, indeed. The leaves brightened and
brightened, and now they began to fall in every wind. To and fro,
forth from the gaps of the Blue Ridge and back to their shelter, moved
the Army of the Valley, to and fro—to and fro. In these days came
Kershaw, sent by Lee—twenty-seven hundred infantry and Cutshaw’s
battery. The Second Corps welcomed South Carolina. “You’re the fiery
boys! ‘Come, give us a song to cheer!’—Never have forgotten how you
taught us to cook rice!—in the first century, along about First
Manassas. Never have forgotten, but the commissary’s out of rice.”
In these days Sheridan, keeping his main force between New Market and
Woodstock, began with that great force of Torbert’s cavalry to harry
the Valley as it had not yet been harried. He wrecked the Central
Railroad and burned bridges and sent the Confederate stores at
Staunton up in flames. That was all right; that was understood—but
Sheridan stopped there as little as would Attila have done. Before
winter came, he swept the Valley bare as Famine’s hand; he made it so
bare that he said himself, “A crow, flying over the Valley of
Virginia, would have had to take his rations with him.”
A little past the middle of October Early determined to attack. With
Kershaw and with Rosser’s small reinforcement of cavalry, he could
bring into the field a force little more than a third the size of the
blue army now lined up behind Cedar Creek. But forage and supplies
were gone; it was risk all or lose all. “‘Beggars must not be
choosers,’” said Early, and the Second Corps went back to the Valley
Pike and marched toward Fisher’s Hill. It marched through a country
where all was burned,—houses, mills, barns, wheat and straw and hay,
wagons and farm implements, smithies, country stores and
hostelries,—all, all charred and desolate. It saw women and children,
crouching for warmth against blackened chimney-stacks.
It marched hungry itself and now with tattered clothing—all the small
divisions, the small brigades, the small regiments—all the defenders
of the Valley, taking now so little room on the Valley Pike. It
marched with a fringe of stragglers, with a body of the sick and
straggling bringing up the rear. Nowadays men straggled who had never
done that before; nowadays men deserted who were not deserters by
nature. And mostly these deserted because a cry, insistent and wild,
reached them from home. “Starving! We are starving and homeless. I,
your mother, am crying for bread!—I, your wife, am crying for
bread!—We, your children, are crying for bread! We are sick—we are
dying—we will never see you again—”