they must stand or lie still during these endless minutes of waiting,
while the skirmishers are engaged in front. What must have been the
strain upon the nerves and brains of men, not one of whom had as yet
seen a battle, and not one in ten of whom had even received his "baptism
of fire" in a skirmish, as the men in Baillie's battery had done during
the week before! It is at such a time, and not in the heat of battle,
that men's courage is apt to falter, and that discipline alone holds
them to their duty.
The strain was rather relieved of its intensity by the shrieking of a
Hotchkiss shell, which presently burst in the midst of Baillie Pegram's
section and not far from his person. Then came the less noisy but more
nerve-racking patter of musket-balls,--few and scattering still, as the
skirmish-lines were still well in front,--but deadly in their force, as
was seen when two or three of the men suddenly sank to the ground in the
midst of a stillness which was broken only by the whiz of the occasional
bullets.
One man cried out with pain. The rest of those struck were still. The
one who cried out was slightly wounded. The others were dead. And the
battle was not yet begun.
At this moment came a courier with orders. Upon receiving them the
captain hurriedly turned to Baillie, and said:
"Take your section across the Run, at the ford there just to the left.
Take position with the skirmish-line and get your orders from its
commander. Leave your caissons behind, and move at a gallop."
Baillie Pegram was too new to the business of war to understand
precisely what all this meant. Had he seen a little more of war he
would have guessed at once that the enemy was moving upon the
Confederate left along the road that lay beyond the stream, and that his
guns were needed to aid the skirmishers in the work to be done in front
in preparation for the battle that had not yet burst in all its fury. He
would have understood, too, from the order to leave his caissons behind,
that the stand beyond the stream was not meant to be of long duration.
The fifty shots he carried in each of his limber-chests would be quite
enough to last him till orders should come to fall back across the
stream again.
But he did not understand all this clearly. What he did understand was
that he was under orders to take his guns across the stream and use them
there as vigorously as he could till further orders should come.
As he emerged from the woods a few hundred yards beyond Bull Run, he
found a skirmish-line of men lying down and contesting the ground inch
by inch with another line like their own, beyond which he could see the
heavy columns of the enemy marching steadily to turn the Confederate
left flank and force it from its position. Notwithstanding his lack of
experience in such matters, he saw instantly what was happening, and
realised that this left wing of Beauregard's army was destined to
receive the brunt of the enemy's attack. He wondered, in his ignorance,
if Beauregard knew all this, and if somebody ought not to go and tell
him of it.
He had no time to think beyond this, for at that moment the
skirmish-line, under some order which he had not heard, gave way to the
right and left, leaving a little space open for his guns. Planting them
there he opened fire with shrapnel, which he now and then changed to
canister when the enemy, in his eagerness, pressed forward to within
scant distance of the slowly retiring skirmish-line of the Confederates.
Under orders Baillie fell back with the skirmishers, moving the guns by
hand, and continuing to fire as he went.
As the Confederate skirmishers drew near the stream which they were to
cross, the officer in command of them said to Pegram:
"Advance your guns a trifle, Sergeant-Major, and give them your heaviest
fire for twenty-five seconds or so. When they recoil, limber up and
take your guns across the creek as quickly as possible. I'll cover your
movement."
Baillie did not perfectly understand the purpose of this, but he
understood his orders, and very promptly obeyed them. Advancing his guns
quickly to a little knoll thirty or forty yards in front, he opened fire
with double charges of canister, each gun firing at the rate of three or
four times a minute, and each vomiting a gallon of iron balls at each
discharge into the faces of a line of men not a hundred yards away. At
the same moment the riflemen of the skirmish-line rose to their feet,
rushed forward with a yell that impressed Baillie as truly demoniacal,
and delivered a murderous volley of Minie balls in aid of his canister.
The combined fire was irresistible, as it was meant to be, and the
Federal skirmishers fell back in some confusion in face of it.
Then the cool-headed leader of the skirmishers turned to Baillie and
commanded:
"Now be quick. Take your guns across the creek at once. They'll be on us
again in a minute with reinforcements, but I'll hold them back till you
get the guns across--"
He had not finished his order when he fell, with a bullet in his brain,
and his men, picking him up, laid him limply across his horse, which two
of them hurried to the rear, passing within ten feet of Baillie Pegram
as he struggled to get his guns across the run without wetting his
ammunition.
"Poor, gallant fellow!" thought Baillie, as the corpse was borne past
him. "He was only a captain, but he would have made himself a
major-general presently, with his coolness and his determination. He
died too soon!"
Meanwhile Baillie was busy executing the order that the dead man had
given with his last breath, while some other was in command out there in
front and struggling to protect the guns till they could pass the
stream.
It is always so in life. No man is indispensable. When one man falls at
the post of duty, there is always some other to take his place. "Men may
come and men may go," but the work that men were born to do "goes on for
ever."
As Baillie was directing the struggles of his drivers in the difficult
task of recrossing the stream, three shells burst over him in so quick
a succession that he did not know from which of them came the fragment
that cut a great gash in his head and rendered him for the moment
senseless. He recovered himself quickly, and this was fortunate, for his
untrained and inexperienced men were far less steady in retreat under
fire than they had been out there in front, and Baillie's direction was
needed now to prevent them from abandoning in panic the guns with which
they had fought so gallantly a few minutes before.
Under his sharply given commands they recovered their morale, and a few
minutes later Baillie brought his powder-grimed guns again into position
on the left of the battery. Then, half-blinded by the blood that was
flowing freely over his face and clothing, he sought his captain, raised
his hand in salute, and said, feebly:
"Captain, I beg to report that I have executed my orders. My men have
behaved well, every--"
A heavy musketry fire from the enemy at that moment began, and Baillie
Pegram's horse--the beautiful sorrel mare on which Agatha had once
ridden--sank under him, in that strange, limp way in which a horse
falls when killed instantly by a bullet received in any vital part.
By good fortune the sergeant-major was not caught under the animal, but
as he tried to walk toward the new mount which he had asked for, he
staggered and fell, much as the mare had done, but from a different
cause. Complete unconsciousness had overtaken him, as a consequence of
the shock of his wound and the resultant loss of blood.
When he came to consciousness again, he was lying on the grass under a
tree, with a young surgeon kneeling beside him, busy with bandages. For
a time his consciousness did not extend beyond his immediate
surroundings and the terrific aching of his head. Presently the heavy
firing which seemed to be all about him, and the zip, zip, zip of
bullets as they struck the earth under the hospital tree brought him to
a realisation of the fact that battle was raging there, and that he,
somehow,--he could not make out how,--was absent from his post with the
guns. He made a sudden effort to rise, but instantly fell back again,
unconscious.
When he next came to himself there was a sound as of thousands of
yelling demons in his ears, which he presently made out to be the "rebel
yell" issuing from multitudinous throats. There were hoof-beats all
about him, too, the hoof-beats of a thousand horses moving at full
speed. Excited by these sounds, wondering and anxiously apprehensive, he
made another effort to rise, but was promptly restrained by the strong
but gentle hands of an attendant, who said to him, with more of good
sense than grammar:
"Lay still. It's all right, and it's all over. We've licked 'em, and
they's a-runnin' like mad. The horsemen what passed us was Stuart's
cavalry, a-goin' after 'em to see that they don't stop too soon."
Stuart was drunk with delight. He shouted to his men, as he rode across
Stone Bridge: "Come on, boys! We'll gallop over the long bridge into
Washington to-night if some blockhead doesn't stop us with orders, and I
reckon we can gallop away from orders!"
Baillie lay still only because the attendant kept a hand upon his chest
and so restrained him. As he listened, the firing receded and grew less
in volume, except that now and then it burst out in a volley. That was
when one of Stuart's squadrons came suddenly upon a mass of their
confused and fleeing foes and poured a hailstorm of leaden cones in
among them as a suggestion that it was time for them to scatter and
resume their run for Washington.
As the turmoil grew less and faded into the distance, Baillie's wits
slowly came back to him, and thoughts of himself returned.
"Where am I?" was his first question.
"Under a hospital tree on the battle-field of Manassas," answered the
nurse. "You're about two hundred yards in the rear of the position where
your battery has been covering itself with glory all day. It's gone now
to help in the pursuit. But it's had it hot and heavy all day, judging
from the sloppings over."
"The 'sloppings over?' What do you mean?"
"Why, the bullets and shells and things that didn't get theirselves
stopped, like, on the lines, but come botherin' over here by this
hospital tree. Two of 'em hit wounded men, an' finally, just at the
last, you know, the doctor got his comeuppance."
"Was he wounded?"
"Wuss 'n that. He war killed, jes' like a ordinary soldier. That's why
you're still a-layin' here, an' here you'll lay, I reckon, all night,
for they ain't nobody left to give no orders, 'ceptin' me, an' I ain't
nothin' but a detail. But I'm a-goin' to git you somethin' to eat ef I
kin. They's another hospital jest over the hill, an' mebbe they've got
somethin' to eat, an' mebbe they's a spare surgeon there, too. Anyhow
I'm a-goin' to do the best I kin fer you an' the rest."
"How many of us are there?" asked Baillie.
"Only four now--not enough for them to bother about, I s'pose they'll
say, specially sence two on 'em is clean bound to die, anyhow. All the
slightly wounded has been carried away to a reg'lar hospital. That's
their game, I reckon--to take good keer o' the fellers that's a-goin' to
git well, so as to make complaints ef they don't, an' leave the rest
what can't live to make no complaints to die where they is."
Baillie was too weak, and still too muddled in his intelligence, to
disabuse the mountaineer's mind of this misconception. It is only
ordinary justice to say that his interpretation was utterly wrong. There
was never a more heroic set of men than the surgeons who ministered on
the battle-fields of the Civil War to the wounded on one side or on the
other. At the beginning, their department was utterly unorganised, and
scarcely at all equipped, either with material appliances or with
capable human help in the way of nurses, litter-bearers, or
ambulance-men. They did the best they could. When battle was on, they
hung yellow flags from trees as near the firing-line as possible, and
these flags were respected by both sides, so far as intentional firing
upon them was concerned. But located as they were, just in the rear of
the fighters, these field-hospitals were constantly under a heavy fire,
aimed not at them, but at the fighting-line in front, and it was under
such a fire that the young surgeons did their difficult and very
delicate work. The tying of an artery was often interfered with by the
bursting of a shell which half-buried both patient and surgeon in loose
earth. It was the duty of these field-surgeons to do only so much as
might be immediately necessary--to put their patients as quickly as
possible into a condition in which it was reasonably safe to send them,
in ambulances or upon litters, to some better-equipped hospital in the
rear. Very naturally and very properly, the surgeons discriminated, in
selecting wounded men to send to the hospitals, between those who were
in condition to be removed, and those to whom removal would mean death,
certainly or probably. The mountaineer, who had been detailed as a
hospital attendant that day, did not understand, and so he
misinterpreted.
"Where is my hat?" Baillie Pegram asked, after a period of silence.
"Is it the one with a red feather in it?" responded the attendant.
"Yes."
"Well, it's a good deal the wuss for wear," answered the man, producing
the blood-soaked and soil-stained headgear. "I don't think you'll want
to wear it again."
But when the headpiece was brought, the young man, with feeble and
uncertain fingers, detached the feather and thrust it inside his flannel
shirt, leaving the lacerated hat where it had fallen upon the ground.
"Am I badly wounded?" Pegram asked, after a little.
"Well," answered the man, "you've got a good deal more'n I should like
to be a-carryin' around with me. But I reckon you'll pull through,
perticular ef you kin git to a hospital after a bit."
Just then, as night was falling, a pitiless rain began, and all night
long Baillie Pegram lay in a furrow of the field, soaked and suffering.
But he removed the feather from its hiding-place, and held it upon his
chest, in order that the rain might wash away the blood-stains with
which it had been saturated.
When the morning came, and the ambulance with it, the blood-stains were
gone and the feather was clean, though its texture was limp, its
appearance bedraggled, and much of its original colour had been washed
out.
* * * * *
Two or three days later, Agatha Ronald at her home received by mail a
package containing a feather, once red but now badly faded. No note or
message of any kind accompanied it, but Agatha understood. She had
already learned through the newspapers that "Sergeant-Major Baillie
Pegram, after a desperate encounter with the enemy on the outer lines,
had been severely--perhaps mortally--wounded in the head;" and that
"Sergeant-Major Baillie Pegram has been mentioned in General Orders for
his gallant conduct on the field, with a recommendation for promotion,
if he recovers from his wounds, as the surgeons give little hope that he
will."
She wrapped the faded feather in tissue-paper, deposited it in a
jewelled glove-box which had come to her as an heirloom from her mother,
and put it away in one of her most sacred depositories.
A week or two later, she learned that Sergeant-Major Baillie Pegram had
been removed from the general hospital at Richmond to his home at
Warlock, and that he was now expected to recover from his wounds.
XI
_AT WARLOCK_
"It's jes' what I done tole you niggas fust off."
That was Sam's comment upon the situation when his master was brought
home to Warlock, stretched upon a litter.
"I done tole yer what'd happen when Mas' Baillie go off to de wah in dat
way, 'thout Sam to take k'yar of him. An' bar in min' what else I done
tole yer, too. Ain't de chinch-bug done et up de wheat, jes' as I tole
yer? Now, Mas' Baillie, he's a-gwine to die wid that hole in he haid.
Den what's a-gwine to become o' you niggas?"
Sam promptly installed himself as his master's nurse, sitting by him
during the day, and sleeping on the floor by his bedside every night.
For a time it seemed likely that the negro's dismal prophecy of
Baillie's death would be fulfilled, but with rest and the bracing air
of his own home, he slowly grew better, until he was able at last to sun
himself in the porch or under the trees of the lawn.
He chafed a good deal at first over the fact that he had not seen the
major part of the fighting along Bull Run, and it annoyed him still more
that he was likely to lose his share in a campaign which was expected to
bring the war to a speedy and glorious end. It was Marshall Pollard who
laughed him out of this latter regret. During the long waiting-time that
followed the battle of Manassas, Marshall, who had gained a lieutenancy
in his battery, secured several brief leaves of absence in order to
visit the convalescent man at Warlock.
"You're missing nothing whatever, Baillie," he said to him one day, in
answer to his querulous complainings. "We're doing nothing out there in
front of Washington, and, so far as I can see, we're not likely to do
anything for many months to come. When the battle of Manassas ended in
such a rout of the enemy as never will happen again, we all expected to
push on into Washington, where only a very feeble, resistance or none
at all would have been met. When that didn't happen, we confidently
expected that the army at Centreville would be reinforced at once with
every man who could be hurried to the front, and that General Johnston
would push across the Potomac and take Washington in the rear, or
capture Baltimore and Philadelphia, and cut Washington off.
"I don't pretend to understand grand strategy, but this was plain common
sense, and I suppose that common sense has its part to play in grand
strategy, as in everything else. Anyhow, it is certain that that was the
time to strike, and if the army at Manassas had been reinforced and
pushed across the Potomac while the enemy was so hopelessly demoralised
and disintegrated, there is not the smallest doubt in my mind that the
war would have come to an end within a month or two. Instead of that, we
have done nothing, while the enemy has been straining every nerve to
bring new troops into the field by scores of thousands, and to drill and
discipline them for the serious work of war. They have done all this so
effectually that they now have two or three men to our one, half a dozen
guns to our one, and supply departments so perfectly organised that no
man in all that host need go without his three good meals a day, while
we are kept very nearly in a state of starvation, and are now fortifying
at Centreville, like a beaten army, whose chief concern is to defend
itself against the danger of capture."
"Have you ever heard an explanation of this strange state of things?"
asked Baillie. "You see, I've been out of the way of hearing anything
ever since the battle."
"O, yes, I've heard all sorts of explanations. But the real explanation,
I think, is the lack of an experienced general, capable of grasping the
situation and turning it to account. Neither in the field nor in
authority at Richmond, have we a man who ever commanded an army, or even
looked on while a great campaign was in progress. General Johnston and
General Beauregard are doubtless very capable officers in their way. But
until this war came, they were mere captains in the engineer corps,
engaged in constructing Mississippi levees, and that sort of thing.
Neither of them ever in his life commanded a brigade. Neither ever saw a
great battle, or had anything to do with an army composed of men by
scores of thousands.
"Their victory at Manassas simply appalled them. They didn't know at all
what to do next. They will probably become good and capable commanders
of armies before the war is over, but at present they are only
ex-captains of engineers, suddenly thrust into positions for which they
have absolutely none of that fitness which comes of experience."
"But have they not learned enough yet? Will they not now see their
opportunity, and undertake a fall campaign?"
"No. The opportunity is entirely gone. The Federal army is to-day much
stronger in every way than our own. We have pottered away the months
that should have been spent in vigorous and decisive action. The only
man in our army capable of seeing and seizing such an opportunity and
turning it to account--I mean Robert E. Lee--has been kept in the
mountains of Western Virginia, engaged in settling wretched little
disputes among a lot of incapable, cantankerous political brigadiers. It
means a long war and a terrible one, Baillie, and you'll have
opportunity to do all the fighting you want before it is over. But
nothing of any consequence will be done this fall."
The young lieutenant was quite right in his prophecy. Except for a
little contest at Drainesville--amounting to scarcely more than a
skirmish--there was absolutely nothing done until the 21st of October.
Then occurred the small, badly ordered and strategically meaningless
battle of Leesburg, or Ball's Bluff, when the Federals were again
completely defeated. After that came a long autumn of superb campaigning
weather, and a tedious winter of complete inaction. Federal expeditions
besieged some of the forts and islands along the Carolina coasts, thus
preparing the way for a coast campaign which was never made in earnest.
There was fighting of some consequence in Kentucky and Missouri, and as
the winter waned, General Grant made his important campaign against the
forts on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, breaking the Confederate
line of defence in that quarter, and pushing it southward. But in
Virginia, the natural battle-field, absolutely nothing was done during
all those months of weary waiting.
For this strange and strangely prolonged pause in a war which had begun
with a rush and a hurrah, history has been puzzled to find an
explanation. It is true that the Confederate forces were untrained
volunteers, whose endurance and discipline could not have been relied
upon in an aggressive campaign to anything like the extent to which Lee
afterward depended upon the unflinching endurance and unfaltering
courage of these same men. But the Federal army was at that time in much
worse condition. To unfamiliarity with war and to complete lack of
discipline in that army, there was added the demoralisation of
disastrous defeat and panic. General McClellan said in his official
capacity, and with carefully chosen words, that when he was placed in
control in August, he found "no army to command,--a mere collection of
regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw,
others dispirited by recent defeat, some going home." He completed his
description of the situation by saying: "There were no defensive works
on the southern approaches to the capital. Washington was crowded with
straggling officers and men absent from their stations without
authority."
Why the Confederates, with their great victory to urge them on, made no
effort to take advantage of such conditions, but lay still instead,
giving McClellan many months in which to recruit and organise and drill
his forces into one of the most formidable armies of modern times, is
one of the puzzles of history. Perhaps Marshall Pollard's suggestion was
the correct explanation,--namely, that there was no general at Manassas
who knew what to do with a great opportunity, or how to do it.
Seeing that Baillie was becoming excited by this serious talk, his
friend adroitly turned the conversation to less strenuous matters. Half
an hour later The Oaks ladies drove up in their antique, high-hung
carriage, to make that formal inquiry concerning Mr. Baillie Pegram's
convalescence which from the first they had made with great
scrupulousness three times every week.
When they had gone, Pollard asked:
"Have you seen Miss Agatha since that day last spring, when you were
requested not to visit The Oaks?"
For a moment Baillie remained silent. Then he said: "If you don't mind,
I'd rather not talk of that, Marshall."
That was all that passed between these two on that subject during the
week of Marshall's stay at Warlock. How unlike men are to women in these
things! Had these two young men been two young women instead, how
minutely each would have confided to the other the last detail of
experience and thought and feeling! And this not because women are more
emotional than men--for they are not--but because they are not ashamed,
as men are, of the tenderer side of their natures.
XII
_UNDER ESCORT_