THE BROTHERS MEET
When Julius, who had returned to John Vaughan's service, saw those piles
of dead men on the field of Cold Harbor he lost faith in the Union
Cause. He made up his mind that the past month's work had more than paid
for that letter to the President and he took to the woods on his own
hook.
He lay down to sleep the night he deserted in a clump of trees near the
Confederate outposts and rested his head on a pillow of pine straw. When
he waked in the morning at dawn he felt something tickle his nose. He
cautiously reached one hand up to see what it was and felt a lock of
hair. He rose slowly, fearing to look till he had gained his feet. He
turned his eyes at last and saw that he had been sleeping on a dead
man's head protruding through the shallow dirt and pine straw that had
been hastily thrown over it the first day of the battle.
With a yell of terror he started on a run for his life.
He never stopped until he had flanked Lee's army by a wide swing, made
his way to the rear and joined the Confederacy.
Grant had now changed his plan of campaign. He determined to capture
Petersburg by a _coup_ and cut the communication of Lee and Richmond
with the South. The _coup_ failed. The ragged remnants of Lee's army
which had been left there to defend it, held the trenches until
reinforcements arrived.
He determined to take it by a resistless concerted assault. On the 16th
he threw three of his army corps on Beauregard's thin lines before
Petersburg, capturing four redoubts. At daylight, on the 17th, he again
hurled his men on Beauregard and drove his men out of his first line of
defense. All day the defenders held their second line, though Grant's
crack divisions poured out their blood like water. As night fell the
dead were once more piled high on the Federal front and the Confederate
dead filled the trenches.
As the third day dawned the fierce, assault was renewed, but Lee had
brought up Anderson's Corps with Kershaw and Field's division and the
blue waves broke against the impregnable grey ranks and rolled back,
leaving the dead in dark heaps.
As the shadows of night fell, Grant withdrew his shattered lines to
their trenches.
_He had lost ten thousand five hundred more men and had failed._
He began to burrow his fortifications into the earth around Petersburg
and try by siege what had been found impossible by assault. Further and
further crept his blue lines with pick and axe and spade and shovel,
digging, burrowing, piling their dirt and timbers. Before each blue
rampart silently grew one in grey until the two siege lines stretched
for thirty-seven miles in bristling, flaming semicircle covering both
Richmond and Petersburg.
Again Grant planned a _coup_. He chose the role of the fox this time
instead of the lion. He selected the key of Lee's long lines of defense
and set a regiment of Pennsylvania miners to work digging a tunnel under
the Confederate fort known as "Elliot's Salient," which stood but two
hundred yards in front of Burnside's corps.
The tunnel was finished, the mine ready, the fuses set, and eight
thousand pounds of powder planted in the earth beneath the unsuspecting
Confederates.
Hancock's division with Sheridan's cavalry were sent to make a
demonstration against Richmond and draw Lee's main army to its defense.
The ruse was partly successful. There were but eighteen thousand behind
the defenses of Petersburg on the dark night when Grant massed fifty
thousand picked men before the doomed fort. The pioneers with their axes
cleared the abatis and opened the way for the charging hosts. Heavy guns
and mortars were planted to sweep the open space beyond the Salient and
beat back any attempted counter charge.
The time set for the explosion was just before dawn. The fuse was lit
and fifty thousand men stood gripping their guns, waiting for the shock.
A quarter of an hour passed and nothing happened. An ominous silence
brooded over the dawning sky. The only sounds heard were the twitter of
waking birds in the trees and hedgerows. The fuse had failed. Two heroic
men crawled into the tunnel and found it had spluttered out in a damp
spot but fifty feet from the powder. It required an hour to secure and
plant a new fuse. Day had dawned. Just in front of John Vaughan's
regiment a Confederate spy was caught. He could hear every word of the
pitiful tragedy.
He was a handsome, brown-eyed youngster of eighteen.
He glanced pathetically toward the doomed fort, and shook his head:
"Fifteen minutes more and I'd have saved you, boys!"
He turned then to the executioners:
"May I have just a minute to pray?"
"Yes."
He knelt and lifted his head, the fine young lips moving in silence as
the first rays of the rising sun flooded the scene with splendor.
"May I write just a word to my mother and to my sweetheart?" he asked
with a smile. "They're just over there in Petersburg."
"Yes."
They gave him a piece of paper and he wrote his last words of love, and
in a moment was swinging from the limb of a tree. Only a few of the more
thoughtful men paid any attention. It was nothing. Such things happened
every day. God only kept the records.
The new fuse was set and lighted. The minutes seemed hours as the men
waited breathlessly. With a dull muffled roar from the centre of the
earth beneath their very feet the fort rose two hundred feet straight
into the sky, driven by a tower of flame that stood stark and red in the
heavens. And then with blinding crash the mighty column of earth, guns,
timbers and three hundred grey bodies sank into the yawning crater. The
pit was sixty-five feet wide and three hundred feet long.
The explosion had been a complete success. The undermined fort had been
wiped from the landscape. A great gap opened in Lee's lines marked by
the grave of three hundred of his men.
Burnside's division rushed into the crater and climbed through the
breach. His men were met promptly by Ransom's brigade of North
Carolinians and held. The Union support became entangled in the hole,
stumbled and fell in confusion.
General Mahone's brigades hastily called, rushed into position, and a
general Confederate charge was ordered. In silence, their arms trailing
by their sides, they quickly crossed the open space and fell like demons
on the confused blue lines which were driven back into the crater and
slaughtered like sheep. The Confederate guns were trained on this
yawning pit whose edges now bristled with flaming muskets. Regiment
after regiment of blue were hurled into this hell hole to be torn and
cut to pieces.
A division of negro troops were hurried in and the sight of them drove
the Southerners to desperation. It took but a moment's grim charge to
hurl these black regiments back into the pit on the bodies of their
fallen white comrades. The crater became a butcher's shambles.
When the smoke cleared four thousand more of Grant's men lay dead and
wounded in the grave in which had been buried three hundred grey
defenders.
Lee's losses were less than one third as many. Grant asked for a truce
to bury his dead and from five until nine next morning there was no
firing along the grim lines of siege for the first time since the day
Petersburg had been invested.
So confident now was Lee that he could hold his position against any
assault his powerful opponent could make, he detached Jubal Early with
twenty thousand men and sent him through the Shenandoah Valley to strike
Washington.
Grant was compelled to send Sheridan after him. In the meantime he
determined to take advantage of Lee's reduced strength and cut the
Weldon railroad over which were coming all supplies from the South.
Warren's corps was sent on this important mission. His attack failed and
he was driven back with a loss of three thousand men. He entrenched
himself and called for reinforcements. Hancock's famous corps was
hurried to the assistance of Warren.
John Vaughan's regiment was now attached to Hancock's army. As they were
strapping on their knapsacks for this march, to his amazement Julius
suddenly appeared, grinning and bustling about as if he had never
strayed from the fold. His clothes were in shreds and tatters.
"Where have you been all this time, nigger?" John asked.
"Who, me?"
"And where'd you get that new suit of clothes?"
"Well, I'm gwine tell ye Gawd's truf, Marse John. Atter dat Cold Harbor
business I lit out fur de odder side. I wuz gittin' 'long very well dar
wid General Elliot in de Confederacy when all of er sudden somfin'
busted an' blowed me clean back inter de Union. An' here I is--yassah.
An' I'se gwine ter stick by you now. 'Pears lak de ain't no res' fur de
weary no whar."
John was glad to have his enterprising cook once more and received the
traitor philosophically.
Lee threw A. P. Hill's corps between Warren and Hancock's advancing
division. Hancock entrenched himself along-the railroad which he was
destroying.
Hill trained his artillery on these trenches and charged them with swift
desperation late in the afternoon. The Union lines were broken and
crushed and the men fled in panic. In vain "Hancock the Superb," who had
seen his soldiers fall but never fail, tried to rally them. In agony he
witnessed their utter rout. His trenches were taken, his guns captured
and turned in a storm of death on his fleeing men. He lost twelve stands
of colors, nine big guns and twenty-five hundred men.
As the darkness fell General Nelson A. Miles succeeded in rallying a new
line and stayed the panic by a desperate countercharge.
Once more the grapple was hand to hand, man to man, in the darkness.
John Vaughan had fired the last load, save one, from his revolver, and
sword in hand, was cheering his men in a mad effort to regain their lost
entrenchments. Blue and grey were mixed in black confusion. Only by the
light of flashing guns could friend be distinguished from foe. A musket
flamed near his face and through the deep darkness which followed a
sword thrust pierced his side. He sprang back with an oath and clinched
with his antagonist, feeling for his throat in silence. For a minute
they wheeled struggled and fought in desperation, stumbling over
underbrush, slipping to their knees and rising. Every instinct of the
fighting brute in man was up now and the battle was to the death for
one--perhaps both.
John succeeded at last in releasing his right hand and drawing his
revolver. His enemy sprang back at the same moment and through the
darkness again came the sword into his breast. He felt the blood
following the blade as it was snatched away, raised his revolver and
fired his last shot squarely at his foe. The muzzle was less than two
feet from his face and in the flash he saw Ned's look of horror, both
brothers recognizing each other in the same instant.
"John--my God, it's you!"
"Yes--yes--and it's you--God have mercy if I've killed you!"
In a moment the older brother had caught Ned's sinking body and lowered
it gently on the leaves.
"It's all right, John, old man," he gasped. "If I had to die it's just
as well by your hand. It's war--it's hell--all hell--anyhow--what's the
difference----"
"But you mustn't die, Boy!" John whispered fiercely. "You mustn't, I
tell you!"
"I didn't want to die," Ned sighed. "Life
was--just--becoming--real--beautiful--wonderful----"
He stopped and drew a deep breath.
John bent lower and Ned's arm slipped toward his neck and his fingers
touched the warm blood soaking his clothes.
"I'm--afraid--I--got--you,--too,--John----"
"No, I'm all right--brace up, Boy. Pull that devil will of yours
together--we've both got it--and live!"
The younger man's head had sunk on his brother's blood-stained breast.
"Now, look here, Ned, old man--this'll never do--don't--don't--give up!"
The answer came faint and low:
"Tell--Betty--when--you--see--her--that--with--my--last--breath--I--spoke
--her--name--her--face--lights--the--dark--way----"
"You're going, Ned?"
"Yes----"
"Say you forgive me!"
"There's--nothing--to--forgive--it's--all--right--John--good-bye----"
The voice stopped. The battle had ceased. The woods were still. The
older brother could feel the slow rising and falling of the strong young
chest as if the muscles in the glory of their perfect life refused to
hear the call of Death.
He bent in the darkness and kissed the trembling lips and they, too,
were still. He drew himself against the trunk of a tree and through the
beautiful summer night held the body of his dead brother in his arms.
His fevered eyes were opened at last and he saw war as it is for the
first time. It had meant nothing before this reckoning of the dead and
wounded after battle--sixty thousand men from the Rapidan to Cold Harbor
in thirty days--ten thousand five hundred in the futile dash against
Petersburg--four thousand in the crater--five thousand five hundred more
now on this torn, twisted railroad, and all a failure--not an inch of
ground gained.
These torn and mangled bundles of red rags he had watched the men dump
into trenches and cover with dirt had meant nothing real. They were only
loathsome things to be hidden from sight before the bugles called the
army to move.
Now he saw a vision. Over every dark bundle on those blood-soaked fields
bent a brother, a father, a mother, a sister or sweetheart. He heard
their cries of anguish until all other sounds were dumb.
The heaps of amputated legs and arms he had seen so often without a sigh
were bathed now in tears. The surgeons with their hands and arms and
clothes soaked with red--he saw them with the eyes of love--scene on
scene in hideous review--the young officer at Cold Harbor whose leg they
were cutting off without the use of chloroform, his face convulsed, his
jaws locked as the knife crashed through nerve and sinew, muscle and
artery. And those saws gnawing through bones--God in heaven, he could
hear them all now--they were cutting and tearing those he loved.
He heard their terrible orders with new ears. For the first time he
realized what they meant.
"Give them the bayonet now----"
The low, savage, subdued tones of the officer had once thrilled his
soul. The memory sickened him.
He could hear the impassioned speech of the Colonel as the men lay flat
on their faces in the grass--the click of bayonets in their places--the
look on the faces of the men eager, fierce, intense, as they sprang to
their feet at the call:
"Charge!"
And the fight. A big, broad-shouldered brute is trying to bayonet a boy
of fifteen. The boy's slim hand grips the steel with an expression of
mingled rage and terror. He holds on with grim fury. A comrade rushes to
his rescue. His bayonet misses the upper body of the strong man and
crashes hard against his hip bone. The man with his strength seizes the
gun, snatches it from his bleeding thigh and swings it over his head to
brain his new antagonist, when the first boy, with a savage laugh,
plunges his bayonet through the strong man's heart and he falls with a
dull crash, breaking the steel from the musket's muzzle and lies
quivering, with the blood-spouting point protruding from his side. He
understood now--these were not soldiers obeying orders--they were
fathers and brothers and playmates, killing and maiming and tearing each
other to pieces.
Lord God of Love and Mercy, the pity and horror of it all!
It was one o'clock before Julius, searching the field with a lantern,
came on him huddled against the tree with Ned's body still in his arms,
staring into the dead face.