A breezy day and a sunny landscape. An open country to right and left
and forward; behind, a wood. In the edge of this wood, facing the open
but not venturing into it, long lines of troops, halted. The wood is
alive with them, and full of confused noises--the occasional rattle of
wheels as a battery of artillery goes into position to cover the
advance; the hum and murmur of the soldiers talking; a sound of
innumerable feet in the dry leaves that strew the interspaces among the
trees; hoarse commands of officers. Detached groups of horsemen are well
in front--not altogether exposed--many of them intently regarding the
crest of a hill a mile away in the direction of the interrupted advance.
For this powerful army, moving in battle order through a forest, has met
with a formidable obstacle--the open country. The crest of that gentle
hill a mile away has a sinister look; it says, Beware! Along it runs a
stone wall extending to left and right a great distance. Behind the wall
is a hedge; behind the hedge are seen the tops of trees in rather
straggling order. Among the trees--what? It is necessary to know.
Yesterday, and for many days and nights previously, we were fighting
somewhere; always there was cannonading, with occasional keen rattlings
of musketry, mingled with cheers, our own or the enemy's, we seldom
knew, attesting some temporary advantage. This morning at daybreak the
enemy was gone. We have moved forward across his earthworks, across
which we have so often vainly attempted to move before, through the
debris of his abandoned camps, among the graves of his fallen, into the
woods beyond.
How curiously we had regarded everything! how odd it all had seemed!
Nothing had appeared quite familiar; the most commonplace objects--an
old saddle, a splintered wheel, a forgotten canteen--everything had
related something of the mysterious personality of those strange men who
had been killing us. The soldier never becomes wholly familiar with the
conception of his foes as men like himself; he cannot divest himself of
the feeling that they are another order of beings, differently
conditioned, in an environment not altogether of the earth. The smallest
vestiges of them rivet his attention and engage his interest. He thinks
of them as inaccessible; and, catching an unexpected glimpse of them,
they appear farther away, and therefore larger, than they really are--
like objects in a fog. He is somewhat in awe of them.
From the edge of the wood leading up the acclivity are the tracks of
horses and wheels--the wheels of cannon. The yellow grass is beaten down
by the feet of infantry. Clearly they have passed this way in thousands;
they have not withdrawn by the country roads. This is significant--it is
the difference between retiring and retreating.
That group of horsemen is our commander, his staff and escort. He is
facing the distant crest, holding his field-glass against his eyes with
both hands, his elbows needlessly elevated. It is a fashion; it seems to
dignify the act; we are all addicted to it. Suddenly he lowers the glass
and says a few words to those about him. Two or three aides detach
themselves from the group and canter away into the woods, along the
lines in each direction. We did not hear his words, but we know them:
"Tell General X. to send forward the skirmish line." Those of us who
have been out of place resume our positions; the men resting at ease
straighten themselves and the ranks are re-formed without a command.
Some of us staff officers dismount and look at our saddle girths; those
already on the ground remount.
Galloping rapidly along in the edge of the open ground comes a young
officer on a snow-white horse. His saddle blanket is scarlet. What a
fool! No one who has ever been in action but remembers how naturally
every rifle turns toward the man on a white horse; no one but has
observed how a bit of red enrages the bull of battle. That such colors
are fashionable in military life must be accepted as the most
astonishing of all the phenomena of human vanity. They would seem to
have been devised to increase the death-rate.
This young officer is in full uniform, as if on parade. He is all agleam
with bullion--a blue-and-gold edition of the Poetry of War. A wave of
derisive laughter runs abreast of him all along the line. But how
handsome he is!--with what careless grace he sits his horse!
He reins up within a respectful distance of the corps commander and
salutes. The old soldier nods familiarly; he evidently knows him. A
brief colloquy between them is going on; the young man seems to be
preferring some request which the elder one is indisposed to grant. Let
us ride a little nearer. Ah! too late--it is ended. The young officer
salutes again, wheels his horse, and rides straight toward the crest of
the hill!
A thin line of skirmishers, the men deployed at six paces or so apart,
now pushes from the wood into the open. The commander speaks to his
bugler, who claps his instrument to his lips. _Tra-la-la! Tra-la-la!_
The skirmishers halt in their tracks.
Meantime the young horseman has advanced a hundred yards. He is riding
at a walk, straight up the long slope, with never a turn of the head.
How glorious! Gods! what would we not give to be in his place--with his
soul! He does not draw his sabre; his right hand hangs easily at his
side. The breeze catches the plume in his hat and flutters it smartly.
The sunshine rests upon his shoulder-straps, lovingly, like a visible
benediction. Straight on he rides. Ten thousand pairs of eyes are fixed
upon him with an intensity that he can hardly fail to feel; ten thousand
hearts keep quick time to the inaudible hoof-beats of his snowy steed.
He is not alone--he draws all souls after him. But we remember that we
laughed! On and on, straight for the hedge-lined wall, he rides. Not a
look backward. O, if he would but turn--if he could but see the love,
the adoration, the atonement!
Not a word is spoken; the populous depths of the forest still murmur
with their unseen and unseeing swarm, but all along the fringe is
silence. The burly commander is an equestrian statue of himself. The
mounted staff officers, their field glasses up, are motionless all. The
line of battle in the edge of the wood stands at a new kind of
"attention," each man in the attitude in which he was caught by the
consciousness of what is going on. All these hardened and impenitent
man-killers, to whom death in its awfulest forms is a fact familiar to
their every-day observation; who sleep on hills trembling with the
thunder of great guns, dine in the midst of streaming missiles, and play
at cards among the dead faces of their dearest friends--all are watching
with suspended breath and beating hearts the outcome of an act involving
the life of one man. Such is the magnetism of courage and devotion.
If now you should turn your head you would see a simultaneous movement
among the spectators--a start, as if they had received an electric
shock--and looking forward again to the now distant horseman you would
see that he has in that instant altered his direction and is riding at
an angle to his former course. The spectators suppose the sudden
deflection to be caused by a shot, perhaps a wound; but take this
field-glass and you will observe that he is riding toward a break in the
wall and hedge. He means, if not killed, to ride through and overlook
the country beyond.
You are not to forget the nature of this man's act; it is not permitted
to you to think of it as an instance of bravado, nor, on the other hand,
a needless sacrifice of self. If the enemy has not retreated he is in
force on that ridge. The investigator will encounter nothing less than a
line-of-battle; there is no need of pickets, videttes, skirmishers, to
give warning of our approach; our attacking lines will be visible,
conspicuous, exposed to an artillery fire that will shave the ground the
moment they break from cover, and for half the distance to a sheet of
rifle bullets in which nothing can live. In short, if the enemy is
there, it would be madness to attack him in front; he must be manoeuvred
out by the immemorial plan of threatening his line of communication, as
necessary to his existence as to the diver at the bottom of the sea his
air tube. But how ascertain if the enemy is there? There is but one
way,--somebody must go and see. The natural and customary thing to do is
to send forward a line of skirmishers. But in this case they will answer
in the affirmative with all their lives; the enemy, crouching in double
ranks behind the stone wall and in cover of the hedge, will wait until
it is possible to count each assailant's teeth. At the first volley a
half of the questioning line will fall, the other half before it can
accomplish the predestined retreat. What a price to pay for gratified
curiosity! At what a dear rate an army must sometimes purchase
knowledge! "Let me pay all," says this gallant man--this military
Christ!
There is no hope except the hope against hope that the crest is clear.
True, he might prefer capture to death. So long as he advances, the line
will not fire--why should it? He can safely ride into the hostile ranks
and become a prisoner of war. But this would defeat his object. It would
not answer our question; it is necessary either that he return unharmed
or be shot to death before our eyes. Only so shall we know how to act.
If captured--why, that might have been done by a half-dozen stragglers.
Now begins an extraordinary contest of intellect between a man and an
army. Our horseman, now within a quarter of a mile of the crest,
suddenly wheels to the left and gallops in a direction parallel to it.
He has caught sight of his antagonist; he knows all. Some slight
advantage of ground has enabled him to overlook a part of the line. If
he were here he could tell us in words. But that is now hopeless; he
must make the best use of the few minutes of life remaining to him, by
compelling the enemy himself to tell us as much and as plainly as
possible--which, naturally, that discreet power is reluctant to do. Not
a rifleman in those crouching ranks, not a cannoneer at those masked and
shotted guns, but knows the needs of the situation, the imperative duty
of forbearance. Besides, there has been time enough to forbid them all
to fire. True, a single rifle-shot might drop him and be no great
disclosure. But firing is infectious--and see how rapidly he moves, with
never a pause except as he whirls his horse about to take a new
direction, never directly backward toward us, never directly forward
toward his executioners. All this is visible through the glass; it seems
occurring within pistol-shot; we see all but the enemy, whose presence,
whose thoughts, whose motives we infer. To the unaided eye there is
nothing but a black figure on a white horse, tracing slow zigzags
against the slope of a distant hill--so slowly they seem almost to
creep.
Now--the glass again--he has tired of his failure, or sees his error, or
has gone mad; he is dashing directly forward at the wall, as if to take
it at a leap, hedge and all! One moment only and he wheels right about
and is speeding like the wind straight down the slope--toward his
friends, toward his death! Instantly the wall is topped with a fierce
roll of smoke for a distance of hundreds of yards to right and left.
This is as instantly dissipated by the wind, and before the rattle of
the rifles reaches us he is down. No, he recovers his seat; he has but
pulled his horse upon its haunches. They are up and away! A tremendous
cheer bursts from our ranks, relieving the insupportable tension of our
feelings. And the horse and its rider? Yes, they are up and away. Away,
indeed--they are making directly to our left, parallel to the now
steadily blazing and smoking wall. The rattle of the musketry is
continuous, and every bullet's target is that courageous heart.
Suddenly a great bank of white smoke pushes upward from behind the wall.
Another and another--a dozen roll up before the thunder of the
explosions and the humming of the missiles reach our ears and the
missiles themselves come bounding through clouds of dust into our
covert, knocking over here and there a man and causing a temporary
distraction, a passing thought of self.
The dust drifts away. Incredible!--that enchanted horse and rider have
passed a ravine and are climbing another slope to unveil another
conspiracy of silence, to thwart the will of another armed host. Another
moment and that crest too is in eruption. The horse rears and strikes
the air with its forefeet. They are down at last. But look again--the
man has detached himself from the dead animal. He stands erect,
motionless, holding his sabre in his right hand straight above his head.
His face is toward us. Now he lowers his hand to a level with his face
and moves it outward, the blade of the sabre describing a downward
curve. It is a sign to us, to the world, to posterity. It is a hero's
salute to death and history.
Again the spell is broken; our men attempt to cheer; they are choking
with emotion; they utter hoarse, discordant cries; they clutch their
weapons and press tumultuously forward into the open. The skirmishers,
without orders, against orders, are going forward at a keen run, like
hounds unleashed. Our cannon speak and the enemy's now open in full
chorus; to right and left as far as we can see, the distant crest,
seeming now so near, erects its towers of cloud and the great shot pitch
roaring down among our moving masses. Flag after flag of ours emerges
from the wood, line after line sweeps forth, catching the sunlight on
its burnished arms. The rear battalions alone are in obedience; they
preserve their proper distance from the insurgent front.
The commander has not moved. He now removes his field-glass from his
eyes and glances to the right and left. He sees the human current
flowing on either side of him and his huddled escort, like tide waves
parted by a rock. Not a sign of feeling in his face; he is thinking.
Again he directs his eyes forward; they slowly traverse that malign and
awful crest. He addresses a calm word to his bugler. _Tra-la-la!
Tra-la-la!_ The injunction has an imperiousness which enforces it. It is
repeated by all the bugles of all the sub-ordinate commanders; the sharp
metallic notes assert themselves above the hum of the advance and
penetrate the sound of the cannon. To halt is to withdraw. The colors
move slowly back; the lines face about and sullenly follow, bearing
their wounded; the skirmishers return, gathering up the dead.
Ah, those many, many needless dead! That great soul whose beautiful body
is lying over yonder, so conspicuous against the sere hillside--could it
not have been spared the bitter consciousness of a vain devotion? Would
one exception have marred too much the pitiless perfection of the
divine, eternal plan?