In which Windham Drops Out of the Fight--and Mavering Remarks on Human
Adaptability
There was a steep hill-side, and below it a swift river, on the left the
little village of Falmouth huddled in a gully, and beyond the village a
higher hill, with a white house on the crest. Across the river, and
farther down, the town of Fredericksburg was on fire in places, ruins
here and there smoking lazily. From the town it was half a mile of
meadow-land, hollowed and hillocked but flat in its main result, to the
line of low hills, where the smoke rested thick and white, and the
artillery did not rest at all, but growled and yelled unpacified.
Certain regiments had watched since noon from this hill, seen column
after column go over the dipping meadows, and sometimes a half,
sometimes a third, come back. About four they marched down through the
huddled village, crossed on a pontoon bridge into Fredericksburg, and
drew up beyond the town. The shells shrieked over them. One exploded
against a little wooden shanty, scattering splinters and dust. Two or
three men dropped. One of them sat up at Gard's feet and rubbed his
face.
"Are you hurt?"
"No, I'm scared."
"That's nothing."
"No, that's nothing."
The little cabin took fire. The flames crept up the dry, worm-eaten
boards. The men turned and watched them.
A young lieutenant, who was small, and had a round, jolly face, came and
walked beside Gard.
"You see, those other fellows seemed to lose about two-thirds; so a
fellow will be pretty apt to go in and stay there. About two to one."
"About that. But the old man might mean somebody to go in and stay there
alive. He might have that idea. Yours isn't inspiring."
"Oh, I only meant--I was thinking you might let my people know if I'm
potted."
"All right."
"I'll do the same if--"
"No matter, Billy. I haven't any. Look out for your end men. They're
nervous."
In a few moments the column was gone, scurrying away over hollows and
flat stretches. Gard lay on his face near the stone foundations and
smoking ashes of a barn in a field. "Out of this fight," he thought, and
turned over. His muscles seemed to have all become dissolved and loose.
He lifted the edge of his coat and looked under. "It looks like a bad
one." The blood did not flow steadily, but leaped and was bright red.
"It ought to be picked up. It is an artery. If I knew how I might pick
it up!" It was a slanting trench, indefinitely deep, and pumping up
blood from the bottom. There must be smashed bone in it somewhere. You
could tell from the slant the direction of the point where the shell had
burst. Two other men lay near by, one of them still living, but with the
top of his head crushed; he was kicking a hole in the ground with his
heel.
"I might try."
He made an effort, and in a moment his hands dropped back on the grass
again, hands red, wet, and feeble. The immense noise of the cannonading
became a hum in his ears and then was silent. A little white cloud in
the sky seemed to spread over the blue and turn gray. He closed his
eyes.
It would be like this, after all. It had always seemed a difficulty, a
knotted problem that speculation could not untie. It did not seem like a
knot or a difficulty now, but more like a solution, a smoothing, a quiet
explanation. One thought life so difficult and death the hardest knot in
its logic, but if one found death to be the answer instead of the worst
difficulty, looked upon in that way it might even seem to be a simple
answer. A gradual oblivion--not exactly that--a blending of noises into
chords and glassy harmonies--it was more like that.
The noises of the field were all gone, and there was no more earth or
sky, no men visible running past with rifles, no roar, echo, concussion,
nor moan of the flying missiles. But the silent vacancy was filling
again with other forms and sounds, whispering voices, faces that leaned
and smiled, others that threatened, some that turned from him and cried
out and fled. One of those that fled was the Father Superior. One of
those that leaned and smiled was Helen. But there did not appear any
reason for either, unless the Father Superior might be frightened at
seeing what a lost soul looked like face to face. Helen wore a broad,
white collar. Afterwards she came again with a blue ribbon around her
neck, dressed in white, looking fragile, and said, "I'll fight for you;
I don't care who they are." Who were "they?" Most of the forms were
strangers, but Fritz Moselle sat at a cloudy organ that pealed with
thunder and shot lightning from the top of its precipice of pipes. And
he played till the yellow stars jumped down and sang anthems, and
Mavering came stalking after them, saying. "They are an interesting and
peculiar people on that secular comet up there, and the best liars I
know; in the pursuit of which interest. O Fritz, I'm going to pick up my
kit and go back." Mrs. Mavering would not go, and Madonna said, "Be kind
to Gard," to the _bonus Deus_, who seemed puzzled. Helen came and sobbed
over him and stretched out her hands. He caught at them, missed, and
fell several years through spaces and spaces. Innumerable faces were
plastered against the sides of the pit, innumerable lips cried to him,
but he thought, "They all have issues of their own." A great voice,
heavy, stolid, and cold, called, "Eternity around, divinity within,"
but no one really agreed with it. A gust of wind drove down the pit and
blew him like a dried leaf, while he cried out helplessly, and fled
another year before the wind, till a slim hand gripped his wrist and
stopped him. The grip was sinewy. The gusts and the stolid voice went
driving past them down the pit. It was useless to count the faces
plastered against the sides. He could not raise his hands; to raise his
eyelids was a dragging effort, sad and slow. It was night. The air was
damp and cold. They were carrying him on a stretcher. Their steps
sounded on the pontoon bridge. The water rippled below, or else it was
the rain beating on the tent, murmuring, murmuring. Helen was saying
"You _must_ stay," and held his wrist, and he said, "I never saw
anything make up its mind the way you do," so that they both laughed,
and the pit echoed like a bass drum which made them laugh more, and then
echoed with infinite thrilling moans which frightened them. And he
whispered in the darkness, "It's fun we're in the same pit," and she
whispered back, "Yes, gorgeous."
* * * * *
"It fills me with benignant admiration"--so reads one of Mavering's
articles, dated "This 21st of December, one mile, possibly two--Heaven
help us and call it three--from the Rappahannock," and entitled
"Illustrated Speculations"--"It fills me with benignant admiration, this
human adaptability. I have seen to-day the troops returning from what
they called, with apparent justice, 'The Mud March,' a futile
procession, with no other result than mud. For all night had the wind
howled, the rain smitten them compositely with sleet and snow; they had
splashed since dawn in profound mud, and are now partially dried and
partially comfortable in ingenious ways, but in the main still wearing
mud, finding themselves adaptable to mud, arguing that mud adds a
certain density to clothing, a casing and protection to the features
against the atmospheric and social hostility of Virginia. I have seen
the author of _Leaves of Grass_ in a brigade hospital camp, holding the
hand of a bearded, piratical-looking stranger from Michigan, who will
die to-night and without doubt adapt himself to whatever shall be his
lot. But this poet and tilter at conventions--what convention he is
tilting at now seems obscure, what poetry he meditates with lines of
ungainly sprawl. I merely record that he sits in a brigade hospital
tent, holding the hand, hour after hour, of one whom he knows not from
mythical Adam, proving himself, I infer, in his own way adaptable. I
have seen one Captain Windham, of the 3d Regiment, ----, a man known to
me these half-dozen years, a suggestive person with a problematical
mind, musician and scout, bred in a monastery, and tending speculatively
God knows where, but likely, from his looks, to be presently disembodied
and 'blown with restless violence about the pendent world,' a condition
to which, I believe profoundly, he will readily adapt himself. He lies
pumped empty of blood, and with a shell wound more or less terrific, in
the tent where sits the author of _Leaves of Grass_. The rain beats
slowly on the tent. I see the dim shining thereof, and of other tents
around it, lantern-lit. Under the high floor of a house-porch I feed a
fire surreptitiously with the lattice-work, and look out into the night,
and consider the life of man, its beautiful inconsequence. It is as good
a place as any other, this sub-portican retreat in the midnight pause of
bellowing war. It serves me and the time. Have I not lived? Have I not
slept in fine linen and stridden a horse, and looked into eyes that
smiled for me, and had a bullet hole through my hat, and bowed from a
platform to a sea of faces? And were they any better, intrinsically,
than this? Why, then, my mud-encased and mud-protected soldiery, my
Michigan pirate, my monastery-bred visionary and scholastic adventurer,
both of the latter now floating on the edge of the downward-and-gone, my
poet of catalogues and statistics in defiant metre, preacher of the
gospel of muscular affection, now practising that gospel--we are all, I
conclude, doing very well where we are. Human adaptability! Or is it in
some measure a fluid type peculiar to this continent?
"Enters here one with shoulder-straps and an ill-conditioned face, which
he pokes in and inquires curiously, 'Why I am burning up a house full of
patients?' In reply, 'If I were burning up a house, without doubt there
would be reasons. But I distinguish, I am not burning up a house, but
lighting a torch of intelligence for a public in the dark. Remarking,
'Oh! You're smoking up through the floor of the porch. Look out!' he
withdraws.
"Which reminds me to go up the river to-morrow and find the end of a
telegraph wire that is approachable and unabsorbed by the military.
"A singular convocation of atoms is this same war, wherein atomic egoism
is at times the more violently asserted, and again disturbed and
modified. The semi-translucent but resisting barrier that separates the
human atom from the human atom is assaulted and impinged against almost
to penetration or shattering. In this upheaval atoms tend back to
inorganic unity. The roots of existence are exposed, the primeval
reappears. Nevertheless I have not seemed anywhere more 'an individual
and an egoist,' to quote the problematical musician, than now, sheltered
here from the sombre rain, burning another man's green lattice-work for
private comfort, and possessed of an occurrent idea or desire, if it
were possible, to inquire of this Windham how fares his individual
egoism, and whether the adventure apparently before him is, in his
opinion, one worthy of a sportsman.
"The scripture of the immortal bard mentions a 'thrilling region of
thick-ribbed ice.' Imagination suggests an acclimatization of the
disembodied essence to Arctic needs, some ingenious utilization of
Northern Lights, and confesses its suggestions feeble. My imagination
is not what it once was. Gray hairs of me display their tenuous
forewarning. 'The times are waxing late.' Without pretending a polemical
interest in this war, I have candidly to state that it looks to me like
both engines in the ditch. 'The jig,' in the stately words of Job, 'is
about up.' The rain echoes that oracular opinion, and the brigade
hospital tents glimmer distantly, where lies that problematical
cross-breed of a monastery and later conditions, where sits the author
of _Leaves of Grass_ hour after hour, holding the hand of a piratical
stranger from Michigan."