expressions, some of them localisms, I think, though I do not know
whence they come. Occasionally, too, she frames her English sentences
after a French rhetorical model, and the result is sometimes amusing.
And another habit of hers which interests me is her peculiar use
of auxiliary verbs and intensives. Instead of saying, “I had my
dinner,” she sometimes says, “I did have my dinner,” and to-day when
we had strawberries and cream for snack, she said, “I do find the
strawberries with the cream to be very good.”
Yet never once have I detected the smallest suggestion of “broken
English” in her speech, except that now and then she places the accent
on a wrong syllable, as a foreigner might. Thus, when she first came,
she spoke of something as ex_cel_lent. I spoke the word correctly
soon afterward, and never since has she mispronounced it. Indeed, her
quickness in learning and her exceeding conscientiousness promise to
obliterate all that is peculiar in her speech before you get home
again, unless you come quickly.
The girl doesn’t know what to make of Mammy. That dearest of despots
has conceived a great affection for this new “precious chile,” and
she tyrannises over her accordingly. She refused to let her get up
the other morning until after she had taken a cup of coffee in bed,
simply because no fire had been lighted in her room that morning. And
how Mammy did scold when she learned that Evelyn, thinking a fire
unnecessary, had sent the maid away who had gone to light it!
“You’se jes’ anudder sich as Mis’ Dorothy,” she said. “Jes’ case it’s
spring yo’ won’t hab no fire to dress by even when it’s a-rainin’. An’
so you’se a-tryin’ to cotch yo death o’ cole, jes’ to spite ole Mammy.
No, yo’ ain’t a-gwine to git up yit. Don’t you dar try to. You’se jes’
a-gwine to lay still till dem no-’count niggas in de dinin’-room sen’s
you a cup o’ coffee what Mammy’s done tole ’em to bring jes’ as soon
as it’s ready. An’ de next time you goes fer to stop de makin’ o’ you
dressin’-fire, you’se a-gwine to heah from Mammy, yo’ is. Jes’ you
bear dat in mind.”
Evelyn doesn’t quite understand. She says she thought we controlled
our servants, while in fact they control us. But she heartily likes
Mammy’s coddling tyranny—as what rightly constructed girl could fail
to do? Do you know, Arthur, the worst thing about this war is that
there’ll never be any more old mammies after it is ended?
I’m teaching Evelyn chemistry, among other things, and she learns with
a rapidity that is positively astonishing. She has a perfect passion
for precision, which will make her invaluable in the laboratory
presently. Her deftness of hand, her accuracy, her conscientious
devotion to whatever she does, are qualities that are hard to match.
She never makes a false motion, even when doing the most unaccustomed
things; and whatever she does, she does conscientiously, as if its
doing were the sum of human duty. I am positively fascinated with
her. If I were a man, I should fall in love with her in a fashion
that would stop not at fire or flood. I ought to add that the girl is
a marvel of frankness—as much as any child might be—and that her
truthfulness is of the absolute, matter-of-course kind which knows no
other way. But these things you will have inferred from what I have
written before, if I have succeeded even in a small way in describing
Evelyn’s character. I heartily wish I knew her history; not because
of feminine curiosity, but because such knowledge might aid me in my
effort to guide and educate her aright. However, no such aid is really
necessary. With one so perfectly truthful, and so childishly frank, I
shall need only to study herself in order to know what to do in her
education.
There was a postscript to this letter, of course. In it Dorothy wrote:—
Since this letter was written, Evelyn has revealed a totally
unsuspected accomplishment. She has been conversing with me in French,
and _such_ French! I never heard anything like it, and neither did
you. It is positively barbaric in its utter disregard of grammar,
and it includes many word forms that are half Indian, I suspect. It
interests me mightily, as an apt illustration of the way in which new
languages are formed, little by little, out of old ones.
There was much else in Dorothy’s letter; for she and her husband
were accustomed to converse as fully and as freely on paper as they
did orally when together. These two were not only one flesh, but
one in mind, in spirit, and in all that meant life to them. Theirs
was a perfect marriage, an ideal union—a thing very rare in this
ill-assorted world of ours.
VI
“WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK”
AT midnight on the 3d of May, 1864, a message came to General Lee’s
headquarters. It told him only of an event which he had expected
to occur about this time. Grant was crossing the river into the
Wilderness, his army moving in two columns by way of the two lower
fords.
General Lee’s plans were already formed in anticipation of this or any
other movement of the Army of the Potomac. He needed to learn only
which line of march of the several that were open to him General Grant
would adopt. Now he knew, and instantly his orders were given to carry
out plans previously and completely wrought out in his mind. Grant’s
movement by the lower fords indicated clearly what his plan of campaign
was to be. He had under his orders a veteran army of one hundred and
thirty thousand men, of whom rather more than one hundred thousand were
ready for actual battle. Lee had a total of a little less than sixty
thousand men—forty-five thousand of whom, perhaps, he could put upon
the firing-line, with which to oppose the Federal advance.
Grant’s plan was to push forward rapidly through the Wilderness before
Lee could strike a blow, turn his adversary’s right, and plant his
greatly superior army near Gordonsville, in Lee’s rear, and between
him and Richmond. If he could have accomplished that purpose, the
surrender or destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia would have
been a matter only of a few days, or perhaps a few hours. For if cut
off in this fashion from all its sources of supply, and with no other
army anywhere to come to its relief, the already half-starving Virginia
force would have had no resource except to hurl itself upon Grant’s
double numbers and shatter itself to fragments in a vain effort to
break through impregnable lines. It would have had no possible route of
retreat open to it, no conceivable road of escape, no second line of
defence to fall back upon.
But General Grant was dealing with the greatest master of strategy of
modern times. Grant’s plan of campaign was flawless, but Robert E. Lee
stood in the way.
Lee instantly moved forward to interfere with his adversary’s march
toward Gordonsville, by assailing him in flank. At the same time
he threatened his advance corps on their front, in such fashion as
to compel Grant to recall them and accept battle amid the tangled
underbrush of the Wilderness.
This Wilderness is, perhaps, the very wildest tract of land that lies
anywhere east of the Mississippi. It skirts the southern bank of the
Rapidan for fifteen miles, extending inland from that stream for
about ten miles. Originally it was densely timbered, but in colonial
days, and a little later, the timber was cut away to supply fuel for
the iron-furnaces that once abounded there, but that were afterward
abandoned. As the region does not at all tempt to agriculture, the
abandonment of the iron mines left it a veritable wilderness. Its
surface became covered with densely growing scrub trees, interlaced
with a tangle of vines and imbedded, as it were, in an undergrowth of a
density inconceivable to men who have not acquainted themselves with
the lavish luxuriance of Southern vegetation.
It was in this Wilderness that Lee’s columns struck Grant’s in flank,
and for two days a battle raged there, of which, for difficulty of
conditions, there is scarcely a parallel in the history of warfare.
The men could not see each other at a distance of more than a few rods.
Regiments, struggling through the tangled vines and underbrush, came
unexpectedly upon regiments of the enemy and fought desperately for
the possession of the ground, neither knowing how much or how little
the holding, the conquest, or the loss of the position involved might
signify in a military way.
Orderly fighting was utterly out of the question. Not only was
it impossible for corps commanders to handle their troops with
co-operative intent; even brigades were so broken up, and their several
parts so hopelessly separated and lost to each other in the thickets,
that their commanders knew neither when nor where nor how to set one
regiment to reinforce another at a critical juncture.
It was a veritable Donnybrook Fair on a large scale, where the only
strategy consisted in pushing forward, and the only tactics in striking
with all possible might at the enemy, wherever he was found.
The fighting was desperate on both sides. It was such fighting as
only the most hardened veterans could have been expected to do under
circumstances so unfavourable, such fighting as would have been simply
impossible at any earlier stage of the war. To valour these two armies
had added discipline and long use in war. Their determination was that
of veterans, their courage that of matchless heroes, their endurance
that of insensate machines. Here for the first time the two greatest
armies of modern history had met in their perfection of discipline, of
experience in war, and of that high courage which makes no distinction
between the facing of death and the confronting of a summer shower. To
these war-seasoned men on either side the hum of bullets meant no more
than the buzzing of mosquitoes; battle, no more than a breeze.
But bullets were by no means the only source of trouble and danger.
Several times during the long struggle, the woods caught fire,
literally suffocating men by hundreds who had passed safely through
hail-storms of bullets and successfully met and repelled charges with
the bayonet. Earthworks hastily thrown up with pine-log revetments for
their support, after enabling the men behind them to resist and repel
successive assaults of desperate adversaries, became themselves an
irresistible foe, by the firing of their log fronts and the consequent
emanation of a smoke too stifling for human lungs to breathe and
yet retain capacity for further breathing. The artillery played a
comparatively small and very difficult part in all this. Manœuvring
with guns in that underbrush was well-nigh impossible, and there were
no vantage grounds anywhere from which a gun could deliver its fire at
more than pistol-shot range. So delivering it, either the cannon fire
quickly drove the enemy away, or the fire of the enemy drove the gun
away; and in neither case, after that, could the artillery-men see any
enemy to shoot at.
Nevertheless, Marshall Pollard’s battery managed to expend the greater
part of its ammunition during those days, and that with effect.
Kilgariff was largely instrumental in this. Early in the contest
Pollard had clearly seen the difficulty—nay, the impossibility—of
handling a battery of six guns as a unit in such conditions. He was
subject to orders, of course, but in the execution of his orders
he had a certain necessary discretion, and he exercised it. He had
only two lieutenants present for duty. Each of these, of course, had
immediate command of a section of two guns. The third section fell
to Sergeant-major Kilgariff, as next in command. So to him Marshall
Pollard said:—
“I cannot have you personally with me in this fight. You have a
lieutenant’s duty to do, and I trust you to do it well. I shall try to
keep the battery together, and under my own command so far as I can;
but I foresee that it is going to be impossible to do that completely.
I must leave each section commander to his own discretion, in a very
large degree. Frankly, I have much greater confidence in your ability
to fight your guns for all they are worth than I have in that of either
of the lieutenants. They are good men and true, but they have had no
experience in independent command. You—well, anyhow, you know more
than they do So I am glad that you have the left section. That, of
course, must be the first to be detached. The others I shall try to
keep under my own direction.”
Beyond a mere “Thank you, Captain,” Kilgariff made no response. Half
an hour later his section was detached and sent to a point of special
difficulty and danger. He plunged into action with an impetuosity which
surprised General Ewell, who was in personal command at that point, and
whose uniform habit it was to place himself at the post of danger. But
a moment later, observing the discretion with which Kilgariff selected
a position of vantage and planted his guns, with equal reference to
their effectiveness and their safety from capture by a dash of the
enemy, General Ewell turned to his staff, and said:—
“That young man evidently knows his business. Who is he?”
Nobody knew.
“Then find out,” said Ewell.
Meanwhile, Kilgariff was using canister in double charges, the range
being not greater than two hundred yards. Under this withering fire the
enemy gave way at that point, and Ewell’s whole line advanced quickly.
Again Kilgariff selected his gun position with discretion, and opened
a murderous fire upon the enemy’s key position. But this time he did
not use canister. Still, his fire seemed to have all the effect of
canister, and his target was for a brief while less than fifty yards
distant from the muzzles of his guns.
Presently Ewell himself rode up to the guns, and asked, in his
peculiarly querulous voice:—
“What ammunition are you using, Sergeant-major?”
“Shrapnel, doubled and fuse downward,” answered Kilgariff. “It’s hard
on the guns, I know, but I’ve run out of canister, and must use what I
can, till a new supply comes. I’ve sent for it.”
It should be explained that shrapnel consists of a thin, hollow shell
of iron, filled with leaden bullets. In the centre of each shell is a
small charge of powder, intended only to open the shell twenty-five
yards or so in front of an enemy’s line, and let the leaden bullets
with their initial impetus hurl themselves like hailstones into the
faces of the troops. But Kilgariff was turning his shrapnel shells
reverse way, with their fuses toward the powder charge, so that the
fuses should be melted at the moment of firing, and the shells explode
within the gun, thus making them serve the purpose of canister, which
consists of tin cans filled with iron balls.
“Where did you learn that trick?” queried Ewell.
“Oh, I suppose every artillery-man knows it,” answered the
sergeant-major, evasively. “But here comes a fresh supply of canister,
so I may spare the guns.”
At that moment a rifled gun of the enemy, posted upon a hill eight or
nine hundred yards away, opened upon Kilgariff, through a gap in the
forest, threatening, by the precision of its fire, either to dismount
his guns or to compel his retirement from the position he had chosen.
Instantly he ordered one of his Napoleons to reply. It did so, but
without effect. After it had fired three shots to no purpose, Kilgariff
went to the gun, bade the gunner stand aside, and himself aimed the
piece, with as much of calm in his demeanour as if he had not been
under a double fire.
[Illustration: _“WHO ARE YOU?”_]
The gun was discharged, while Ewell watched the effect through a
field-glass. The shell seemed to strike immediately under the muzzle of
the enemy’s gun, and to explode at the very moment of striking. When
the smoke of its explosion cleared away, Ewell saw through his glass
that the enemy’s gun had been dismounted, its carriage destroyed, and
the men serving it swept out of existence. Dismounting, he walked up to
Kilgariff, and asked simply:—
“Who are you?”
“Owen Kilgariff, sergeant-major of Captain Marshall Pollard’s Virginia
battery.”
“Thank you,” said Ewell, remounting as he issued orders for another
charge along his entire line.
On both days, night ended the conflict, for the time at least, and the
first duty of officers great and small, after darkness set in each
evening, was to get their commands together as best they could and
reorganise them for the next day’s work.
On the Confederate side, it was confidently expected, after the two
days’ fighting, that the next day’s work would consist in vigorously
pressing the rear of Grant’s columns on their retreat across the
river. For every soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia regarded
such retreat as inevitable, and the only difference of opinion among
them was as to what General Lee would do next. The general expectation
was that he would almost instantly move by his left flank for another
invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania, another threatening of
Washington City.
And there was good ground of precedent for these Confederate
expectations. Lee had undoubtedly inflicted a severer punishment
upon Grant than he had before done upon McClellan, Pope, Burnside,
or Hooker, and moreover he had completely baffled Grant’s plan of
campaign, thwarting his attempt to turn the Confederate right and
plant his army in the Confederate rear near Gordonsville. Four times
the Army of Northern Virginia had seen its adversary retreat and
assume the defensive after less disastrous defeats than that which the
Southerners were confident they had inflicted upon Grant in these two
days’ desperate work. Why should they not expect Grant, therefore, to
retreat across the river, as all his predecessors had done under like
circumstances? And why should not Lee again assume the right to decide
where and when and how the struggle should be renewed, as he had done
three times before?
The fallacy in all this lay in its failure to recognise Grant’s
quality, in its assumption that he was another McClellan, another Pope,
another Burnside, another Hooker.
Between him and his predecessors there was this fundamental difference:
they set out to force their way to Richmond by strategy and fighting,
and when they found themselves outmanœuvred and badly damaged in
battle, they gave up their aggressive attempts and contented themselves
with operations for the defence of the Federal capital; Grant had set
out to conquer or destroy Lee’s army by the use of a vastly superior
force whose losses could be instantly made good by reinforcements,
while Lee had nowhere any source from which to draw fresh troops,
and when Grant found his first attempt baffled and his columns badly
damaged in fight, he obstinately remained where he was, sent for
reinforcements, and made his preparations to “fight it out on this line
if it takes all summer.”
Thus, in Grant’s character and temperament the Confederates had
a totally new condition to meet. And there was another supremely
important fact governing this campaign. Grant was the first commander
of the Army of the Potomac who also and at the same time controlled
all the other Federal armies in the field. These he directed with sole
reference to his one supreme strategic purpose—the purpose, namely,
of destroying the Army of Northern Virginia and making an end of the
tremendous resisting power of Robert E. Lee. In that resisting power
he, first of all men, saw clearly that the vitality of the Confederate
cause had its being.
In order that he might destroy that, he had not only concentrated a
mightily superior force against it, and arranged to keep the strength
of his own army up to its maximum by heavy reinforcement after every
battle loss, but he had also ordered all the Federal armies in other
parts of the country to carry on such operations as should continually
occupy every Confederate force and forbid Lee to reinforce the Virginia
army from any quarter as its numbers should decline by reason of battle
losses.
Grant directed Sherman to begin the Atlanta campaign simultaneously
with the beginning of the year’s work on the Rapidan. He ordered
Thomas to hold East Tennessee, and to operate in such fashion as to
occupy all the Confederate forces there. He ordered the Federal armies
west of the Mississippi to abandon their wasteful operations in that
quarter, concentrate in New Orleans, and move at once upon Mobile, in
order to prevent Lee from drawing troops from the Far South.
He filled the valley of Virginia with forces sufficient to compel
Lee to keep a strong army corps there, instead of calling it to his
assistance in Northern Virginia. He sent Butler to the James River
region below Richmond, by way of compelling Lee to keep strong
detachments at Richmond and Petersburg, which otherwise he might have
called to his assistance in the crucial struggle with the Army of the
Potomac.
As one looks back at all this, and clearly discerns Grant’s purpose
and the means he used for its accomplishment, it is easy to see that
both Lee and the Confederate cause were doomed in the very hour of
Grant’s passage across the Rapidan. The only chance of any other issue
lay in the remote possibility that the sixty thousand men of the
Army of Northern Virginia should inflict a decisive and destructive
defeat upon the one hundred and thirty thousand men of the Army of the
Potomac at the outset of the campaign, and in that way bring hopeless
discouragement at the North to their aid.
This they did not succeed in doing at the Wilderness, and when,
after two days’ battling there, Grant moved by his left flank to
Spottsylvania Court House to join battle again, there was scarcely a
veteran in the Virginia army who did not fully understand that the
beginning of the end had come. Yet not one of them flinched from the
further fighting because of its manifest hopelessness. Not one of them
lost the courage of despair in losing hope. Perhaps there was no part
of the titanic struggle which so honourably distinguished those men of
the South as did that campaign in which they doggedly fought on after
they had come to understand that their fighting was futile.
It is natural enough that men should be brave when the lure of hope and
the confident expectation of victory beckon them to the battle front,
but only men of most heroic mould may be expected to fight with still
greater desperation after all doors of hope are closed to them.
From that hour when Grant moved from the Wilderness to Spottsylvania
till the end came, nearly a year later, these men of the South did, and
dared, and endured for love of honour alone, with no hope to inspire
them, no remotest chance of ultimate success as the reward of their
valour. Theirs was a pure heroism, untouched, untainted, unalloyed.
After two days of such fighting as bulldogs do, the struggle in the
Wilderness ended with no decisive advantage on either side. Grant had
secured possession of roads leading out of the Wilderness. On the other
hand Lee had succeeded in completely baffling his adversary’s strategic
purpose, and was still in full possession of that region in his own
rear which Grant had hoped to seize upon with decisive effect. Grant’s
losses in killed, wounded, and prisoners greatly exceeded Lee’s; but as
an offset, he could afford to lose more heavily than the Confederates,
not only because his force outnumbered Lee’s by more than two to one,
but also because he could repair all his losses by reinforcement, while
Lee had no such resource.
Baffled, but not beaten, Grant decided, on the evening of the 7th of
May, to move to the left, passing out of the Wilderness and taking up
a new position—strong both for attack and defence—on a line of hills
near Spottsylvania Court House. It was his hope to possess himself of
this position before Lee should discover his purpose, and to that end
he began his march after nightfall, pushing strong columns forward by
all available roads, while still ostentatiously holding his positions
in the Confederate front, as if to renew the battle in the Wilderness
the next morning.
But his wily adversary anticipated the movement, and discovered it
almost as soon as it was begun. Lee sent his cavalry and a considerable
force of infantry to fell trees across the roads and otherwise obstruct
the march of Grant’s column. Meanwhile, with his main body, he moved in
haste to Spottsylvania Court House. The head of his column reached that
point in advance of Grant, and promptly seized upon the coveted line
of hills which the men, accustomed to such work, proceeded hastily to
fortify, fighting, meanwhile, with such of the Federal commands as had
come up to dispute their possession of the strategic position.