THE BEGINNING OF THE END
While I was at Hicksford I stayed at General Chambliss’s. I was very
happy there. Dan’s camp was not far off, and he came to see me very
often and every morning sent his horses to me. In my rides I used
frequently to take the general’s little son, Willie, along as my
escort, and one morning, when several miles distant from home and with
our horses’ heads turned homeward, who should ride out from a bend
in the road and come toward us but two full-fledged Yankees in blue
uniform and armed to the teeth. My heart went down into the bottom of
my horse’s heels, and I suppose Willie’s heart behaved the same way. We
did not speak, we hardly breathed, and we were careful not to quicken
our pace as we and our enemies drew nearer and nearer, and passed in
that lonely road a yard between our horses and theirs. We did not turn
back; we crept along the road to the bend, until our horses’ tails got
well around the bend. Then Willie and I gave each other a look, and
took out at a wild run for home. We went straight as arrows, and over
everything in our way. I had all I could do that day to stick on Nellie
Grey, who went as if she knew Yankees were behind--only in her mind
it must have been the whole of Grant’s army. Dan laughed our “narrow
escape” to scorn, and said the two Yankees were probably Confederates
in good Yankee clothes they had confiscated. At this time Confederates
would put on anything they found to wear, from a woman’s petticoat to a
Yankee uniform, but Dan never could convince us that those two Yankees
were not Yankees.
After this I rebelled less against going out, as I sometimes had to
do, in “Miss Sally’s kerridge.” This was an old family carriage, a
great coach of state with the driver’s perch very high. The driver,
an old family negro as venerable and shaky in appearance as the
carriage, attached due importance to his office. He thought no piece
of furniture on the place of such value as “Miss Sally’s kerridge.”
He cared for the horses as if they had been babies. This part of the
country had not been so heavily taxed as some others in the support of
the two armies, and a little more corn than was usual could be had.
Uncle Rube was sure that his horses got the best of what was going,
and also that everything a currycomb could do for them was theirs. He
himself when prepared for his post as charioteer wore a suit of clothes
which must have been in the Chambliss family for several generations,
and an old beaver hat, honorable with age and illustrious usage.
When we were taken abroad in “Miss Sally’s kerridge,” we were always
duly impressed by Uncle Rube with the honor done us. On the occasion
of a grand review which took place not far from General Chambliss’s
residence, I, with three other ladies, went in the “kerridge.” The
roads were awful--in those days roads were always awful. Troops were
traveling backward and forward, artillery was being dragged over them,
heavy wagons were cutting ruts, and there always seemed to be so much
rain.
Uncle Rube quarreled all the way going and coming. He sat on his high
perch, and guided his horses carefully along, picking the best places
in the road for “Miss Sally’s kerridge,” and talking at us.
“It’s jes gwine to ruin Miss Sally’s kerridge takin’ it out on sech
roads as dese hyer.... Nuf to ruin er ox-kyart, dese hyer roads is,
much mo’ er fin’ kerridge.... Well, ’tain’ no use fur me ter say
nothin’.... Jest well keep my mouf shut.... Monstratin’ don’ do er bit
er good.... When dey git it in dar haids dey’s gwine, dey’s gwine,
don’t kyeer what happens.... Ain’t gwine heah nothin’, dey ain’t, not
ontwell dey gits Miss Sally’s kerridge broke up.... _I_ say folks orter
go ter ride when de roads is good, and stay at home when de roads is
bad.... An’ lemme take kyeer uv de kerridge.”
With these intermittent mutterings and frank expressions of displeasure
Uncle Rube entertained us until we got to the review stand.
To crown his disgust we were late in starting back home, and at dark
he was leaning forward from his lofty altitude, peering into the road
ahead and seeking vainly “de bes’ place ter drive Miss Sally’s kerridge
along.” He said “dar warn’t no bes’ place,” and was in despair of ever
getting that valuable vehicle home in safety. At last the crash came!
Down went one carriage wheel into a mud-hole! It stuck there, and we
were rooted for the time being. However, I think Uncle Rube would have
got us out but for some untimely assistance. Bob Lee, the youngest
of the Lees, and Bob Mason (the son of the ex-United States Minister
to France, whose home was near General Chambliss’s) came riding by.
They stopped and shook hands with us through the carriage window, and
asserted their gallant intention of getting us out of our mud-hole.
They tried to lead the horses forward, to pull and push “the kerridge”
out, but in vain. Then Bob, to Uncle Rube’s utter amazement and
indignation, made him get down, while he, Bob, mounted the box. Uncle
Rube stood on the roadside, the picture of chagrin and despair.
“Dar ain’t no tellin’ what’s gwi’ happen now!” he exclaimed. “Mars Bob
don’ know how ter manage dem horses no mo’n nothin’. Don’, Mars Bob!
Mars Bob! don’ whoop ’em! Law-aw-dy!”
Bob had gathered the lines in one hand and with the other was laying
the whip on Rube’s pets. The horses, utterly unused to the whip,
plunged like mad. There was an ominous sound!--our axle was broken, and
we were helplessly stuck in the mud.
“Dar now!” wailed Uncle Rube. “What I tole you? I said Miss Sally’s
kerridge gwi’ git ruint! and now it’s done been did. It’s clean ruint,
Miss Sally’s kerridge is. I tole Mars Bob dem horses don’t know nothin’
’bout a whoop. Dey ain’t nuvver bin ’quainted wid er whoop. I bin
er-sayin’ an’ er-sayin’ all erlong dat de kerridge gwi’ git broke, an’
it’s done been did. O Lawdy!”
Our young rescuers borrowed a cart from a farmer near by and got us
home in it. I have forgotten how Uncle Rube managed, if I ever knew.
But I shall never forget the scene when several hours later we all sat
around the fire in the sitting-room, chatting over our adventures,
and Uncle Rube, hat in hand, came to the door and made report to his
mistress of the family misfortune. His eyes were big as saucers. He
laid the blame thick and heavy on “Mars Bob’s” shoulders, exonerating
his horses with great care.
“Dey’s sensubble horses ef anybody jes got de sense ter manage ’em, dey
is.”
And then Miss Sally, in spite of her efforts to preserve a gravity
befitting the calamity, broke down like the “kerridge” and laughed
hysterically.
There was plenty to eat at General Chambliss’s. I always remember that
fact when it was a fact, because it was beginning to be so pleasant and
unusual to have enough to eat. Hicksford hadn’t been raided, and there
were still chickens on the roost, bees in the hive, turkeys up the
trees, partridges in the woods, and corn in the barns. The barn, by the
way, was new, and the soldiers gave a ball in it. We all went and had a
most delightful evening. I well remember that I went in “Miss Sally’s
kerridge,” and that General Rooney Lee and I led off the ball together.
I remember, too, that we had a fine supper: turkeys, chicken-salad,
barbecued mutton, roast pig with an apple in his mouth, pound-cake,
silver-cake, cheese-cake or transparent pudding, “floating island” or
“tipsy squire”; plenty of bread, milk, sure-enough coffee--everything
and enough of it. We danced till morning and leaving our gallant
entertainers in the gray dawn, went off to sleep nearly all day.
The next ball was in an old farmhouse where some of our cavalry were
quartered. We had another good supper--everything good to eat and
plenty of it--like the first. There were no chairs or furniture of any
kind, as I remember, but there were benches ranged around the barn
for us to sit on when resting during the pauses of the dance. After a
dance with him General Rooney Lee led me back to the room where the
banquet was spread to taste something especially nice which he liked
and which I had not touched--eating a good thing when you could get
it was a delightful and serious duty in those days. There was quite a
circle around us, and we were all nibbling, laughing, chatting away
as if there were no such things as war and death in the land, when a
courier in muddy boots strode across the room to the general, saluted,
spoke a few words, and the general walked aside with him. The music
was enticing, and while the general was engaged with the courier I
went back with some one else to the ballroom and took my place in the
lancers. We were clasping hands and bowing ourselves through the grand
chain when the dance was interrupted. The army was to march.
There was great confusion, hurried hand-shaking, sometimes no
hand-shaking at all, no time for good-bys. The soldiers could not
stand on the order of their going. I do not remember how I came to the
farmhouse, but I know that my husband bundled me unceremoniously into
a cart with some people I hardly knew, and sent me home, telling me to
pack my trunk but not to be disappointed if he could not take me with
him. I did not lie down at all. I packed my trunk as soon as I got
home, then sat down and waited, and before long my husband came for me
in an ambulance. His courier, Lieutenant Wumble, was with him, and the
ambulance was driven by an Irishman named Miles. The horses were tied
to the back of the ambulance, and frequently my husband and Lieutenant
Wumble rode ahead reconnoitering. It began to rain. “What made you
always start in the rain?” I have been asked by friends to whom I was
relating my campaigns. What I want to know is, what made it always rain
when I started? Let me but step into an ambulance and immediately it
began to rain. My movements had to be regulated by the movements of the
army, not by the weather, though really the weather seemed to regulate
itself by mine.
We found the roads worse as we advanced. The farther we went the deeper
was the mud. Mud came up to the hubs of our wheels; the mules could
hardly pull their feet up out of the miry mass in some places. At last
we found ourselves regularly “stuck in the mud.” There was no pushing
or pulling the ambulance farther. It was nearly dark, but fortunately
we were near a farmhouse, and at the side of the road where we got
stuck was a stile made by blocks of unequal heights set on either side
of a plank fence. These blocks were simply sections of the round body
of a tree which had been sawed up. On the opposite side of the stile
a pathway led to the house. The mud-hole in which our ambulance was
embedded was about ten yards from the stile. My husband insisted that I
be carried bodily to the stile, and Lieutenant Wumble, who was one of
the most gallant fellows in the world, took it as a matter of course
that he must carry me. He urged that he had been brought along to be
useful and that Dan had never recovered entirely from his wound. But
Dan hooted at the idea! He was very much obliged to the lieutenant, but
really he was used to this sort of thing, and understood lifting ladies
about much better than Wumble. It was not altogether brute strength,
but some science that was required. So Dan stepped out of the ambulance
on to the side of the mud-hole, where of course the ground was not so
muddy as in the center where we were stuck, but where it was rather
slippery, nevertheless. Balancing himself nicely, he took me out, but
just as he poised me on his arm with scientific ease and grace he
slipped and fell backward, sprawling in the mud, and I went over his
head, sprawling, too.
Whereupon Lieutenant Wumble, laughing, came to pick me up, saying as he
did so:
“I told you that you ought to let me carry you. Just lie there, major,
and I’ll come back for you as soon as I set your wife down. Keep quiet,
major,” as Dan swore at the mud and slipped again, “and I’ll pick you
up and get you along all right.”
As Dan dragged himself up he was a perfect mud man, and he had left
the print of himself in the mud behind him. They took us in at the
farmhouse, and sent men to help the driver prize the ambulance out of
the hole. They scraped the mud off me, and a colored woman washed my
clothes and hung them by the fire, so they might be dry by morning. Of
course, this process put me in bed at once. Our supper was poor and the
bed uncomfortable, but it was the best our hosts could do.
After an uncomfortable night we started off again toward Dinwiddie
Court-house, which was to be our next stopping-place. As we journeyed
on we knew that we were getting into most dangerous quarters. The
nearer we drew to Petersburg the nearer we were to the tangle of
Federal and Confederate lines; the nearer to skirmishers and scouts
from both armies. The night got blacker and blacker--you could not see
your hand before you--and the blacker it grew the more frightened old
Miles became. Out of the darkness where, invisible, he sat astride the
invisible mule he drove, he poured an unceasing stream of complaint.
“Arrah! the divil a bit can Oi see where Oi’m goin’. It’s so dark ye
couldn’t see a light if there was any. The mules, intilligint crathurs
they are, maybe they know where they be goin’. It’s more than the
loikes of me does. But what Oi’ve got agin a mule is that they don’t
know an honest Amerikin in gray clothes--or mixed rags it is now--from
a nasty, thavin’ Yankee.”
If we were silent for a few minutes, then Miles spoke out for company’s
sake, or asked unnecessary questions perhaps to find out if we were
there, and that the Yankees hadn’t spirited us away.
“These woods are full of Yankees,” he said. “It’s chock-full of them,
it is. An’ it’s so dark, it is, they could just come out here an’ kill
us all, they could, an’ we’d never know it.”
“Shut your mouth up, you fool!” said my husband, who knew that the
woods were full of Yankees. “If we can’t see them they can’t see us,
and how are they to know but we are Yankees unless you tell them, you
blathering idiot?”
“The divil a bit Oi’ll be tellin’ ’em, the nasty blue thaves. Thrust
Miles O’Flannigan for thet. But they could just come out o’ them woods,
they could, an’ take us all prisoners an’ we’d never know it. An’ the
driver’s the fust man they’d git, sure.”
At last Dan got out, mounted his horse, and rode in front of the
ambulance.
“Now,” said he to Miles, “follow me, and if you open your d---- mouth
again, I’ll blow your brains out.”
Lieutenant Wumble brought up the rear, riding behind the ambulance
with a cocked pistol. And so we rode through the Egyptian darkness of
the night, and the now more than Egyptian silence. Miles’s mouth was
effectually closed. He followed Dan, whom he could not see, by the
sound of his horse’s tread, and as he was careful to keep as close to
him as possible we made better progress.
We had been in the darkness so long that none of us knew our
whereabouts. Presently we heard the low, deep mutterings of thunder.
It came nearer and grew louder rapidly. Suddenly the sky seemed rent!
There came a sheet of white lightning and with it an awful crash which
made my heart stand still. A tree a few feet from us had been struck.
The lightning had shown us that we were only a few miles from the
Court-house. I have never known such a storm as the one through which
we traveled that night. One peal of thunder did not die away before
another began. One instant we were in thick darkness--a darkness that
could be _felt_--the next, ourselves, the woods, the road, were bathed
in a fierce white light. Between the Yankees and the storm that night I
think Miles would have become a gibbering idiot but for the equalizing
influence of Dan’s pistol.
“No trouble for the Yankees to rickonize us--ugh!” the rest of the
sentence would be lost in the darkness, but I knew that Miles was
feeling the salutary muzzle of Dan’s pistol against some part of his
face.
By the time we entered the village the storm had abated. We drove to
the hotel. It was crowded, packed with soldiers; no room for us, nor
food either, and nine o’clock at night!
“Two miles the other side of town there is a place of entertainment
where you can be accommodated, I think,” the hotel proprietor told Dan.
“I don’t go any farther to-night with my wife,” Dan said resolutely.
“It’s not mesilf as wants to be traveling any farther aither,” Miles
put in. “It’s divil a bit of a pleasure ride Oi’m havin’.”
He was promptly silenced, and was made to drive us around to the
various places in the village that had been mentioned; and in spite of
the discouragements received, he added his earnest solicitations to
ours that we might be lodged for the night. But in spite of our own
pleas and Miles’s eloquence, midnight found us out at the two-miles
place. I don’t know how long it had taken us to make those two miles.
We had toiled over muddy roads, through fierce extremes of light and
darkness, and amid deafening thunder, for the storm had come on again
with renewed fury and was at its height when we stopped at the house to
which we had been directed. In response to my husband’s knock an old
man came to the door--the meanest old man I have ever seen before or
since. He said we couldn’t come in, there wasn’t standing room in the
house, the house was full of soldiers. My husband said he _would_ come
in--that he had a lady with him. I think he would have shot that old
man then and there rather than have carried me farther. But the old man
said if he had a lady with him all the more reason why he should not
come in; the soldiers were drinking, and he whispered to Dan, and I saw
Dan give in. He told Dan that he had a cousin in the village who would
house us, and he directed us how to get to this cousin’s house, so we
turned and drove back to the village we had just left. We made better
time on our return, as we were better directed and took a shorter
route, found the house to which we had been sent, and were taken in.
It was a strange old house, built in colonial days, with the veranda
that ran all around it supported by tall Corinthian columns. We woke
the owner up--an old man, who came down to the door shivering, candle
in hand, and led us through a latticed room, then into another room and
up a narrow flight of stairs with sharp turns to a bedroom with dormer
windows and ancient furniture. We were welcome to our lodgings, he
said, but he had nothing to eat in the house--we would be welcome to it
if he had. He looked gaunt and hungry himself.
We had no fire. He left us his candle and went down in the dark himself
and we got to bed as quickly as possible. Lieutenant Wumble, who was
down-stairs looking after Miles and the horses and the mules, got
himself stowed away somewhere.
Next morning my husband was ill; but the old man’s wife gave him some
of her remedies, and with the help of a little money from me got
something for us all to eat. About noon Dan insisted that he was able
to travel, and that he must reach his command that day.
When we arrived at Petersburg my husband put me on the train for
Richmond and bade me good-by. It was the last time I saw him before the
surrender.