question. No confidence was to be placed in mails at that disturbed
time, and of course Kilgariff would not ask for or accept even the
sick furlough which the increasing inflammation of his neglected
wound rendered exceedingly desirable, so long as there was well-nigh
continuous fighting in progress at the front.
Altogether, Owen Kilgariff was sorely beset with puzzling uncertainty
of mind. He was in action during most of the day after the night he had
spent with Campbell, but neither weariness nor loss of sleep enabled
him to close his eyes during the following night. He lay throughout
the hours of darkness stretched upon the ground under a great chestnut
tree, weary but with wide-open eyes, staring upward at the stars that
showed through the leaves, and thinking to no purpose.
One thought occurred to him at last which caused him suddenly to sit
up, and for a moment made his heart bound.
His vigil of ceaseless thought and perplexity had taught him much of
his own soul’s condition which he had but vaguely guessed at before.
It had shown him clearly what his feeling was toward Evelyn Byrd. He
understood now, as he had not done before, that his love for the girl
was the supreme passion of his life—the limitless, all-embracing,
all-conquering impulse of a strong nature which had schooled itself
to repression and self-sacrifice. He saw clearly that all this
self-discipline—greatly as it had enabled him to endure and to make
sacrifice—had given him no strength adequate to his present need. He
had thought to conquer his passionate love; he knew now that he could
never conquer it. He had thought to put it out of his mind as a longing
for the unattainable; he knew now that it would for ever refuse to be
dismissed.
“So long as I live,” he thought, “I must bear this burden; so long as
I live, I must suffer and be still. For I shall at any rate retain
too much of manhood and courage to win Evelyn’s love or to sadden her
life by linking it with my own. My honour, at any rate, shall remain
unspotted. Fortunately, a bullet or a sabre stroke is likely to solve
all my riddles for me before this year comes to an end—and so much the
more imperative is it that I arrange quickly for the disposal of her
papers to her best advantage. But what is best? If these papers reveal
to her the cruel fact that her father was an adventurer, a gambler, a
swindler—and they must if they reveal anything—will it not be a great
wrong to let her have them at all? And yet who but herself has a right
to decide that she shall not receive whatever revelation the documents
may make?”
Then it was that the thought came to Kilgariff which made him sit up
suddenly.
“She is the daughter of that man. Is there not in that fact an offset
to my disability? Am I not free to tell her concerning myself, after
she has learned her own origin, and to stand with eyes on a level with
her own, asking her to be my wife?”
No sooner had he formulated the thought thus than he rejected it as
unworthy. For a time he scourged himself for permitting the suggestion
to arise in his mind, but presently he comforted himself by recalling
the words of a great divine who, speaking of evil thoughts quickly
dismissed, said:—
“I cannot prevent the birds from flying over my head, but I can forbid
them to make nests in my hair.”
“I will not let that bird make a nest in my hair,” thought Kilgariff,
resolutely, and greatly to the relief of his troubled conscience.
At that moment the reveille sounded in all the camps, and Kilgariff
rose to his feet, stripped himself to the waist, sluiced his head,
shoulders, and chest in the cold water of a neighbouring spring,
resumed his clothing, and was ready for the day’s duties, whatever
their nature might be. But his vigil had not brought him any nearer
than he was before to the solution of the problems that so greatly
perplexed him. It had only added a new and distressing self-knowledge
to the burdens that weighed upon his mind. He had never feared death;
now he looked upon it as a chance of welcome release from a sorely
burdened life. Thenceforth he thought of the bullets as friendly
messengers, one of which might bear a message for him.
XV
IN THE TRENCHES
OPERATIONS in front of Petersburg had by this time settled down into a
sullenly obstinate struggle for mastery between the two finest armies
of veterans that ever met each other anywhere in the world. It is
no exaggeration to characterise those armies by such superlatives.
For in them it was not only organisations—regiments, brigades, and
divisions—that were war-seasoned, but the individual men themselves.
They had educated themselves by four years of fighting into a personal
perfection of soldiership such as has nowhere else been seen among the
rank and file of contending armies.
The slender lines of hastily constructed earthworks behind which
these two opposing hosts had confronted each other at the beginning
of that supreme struggle of the war, had been wrought into other and
incalculably stronger forms by work that had never for one moment
ceased and would not pause until the end.
The breastworks had been raised, broadened, and strengthened under the
direction of skilled engineers. At every salient angle a regular fort
of some sort had been constructed and heavily armed for offence and
defence.
In rear of these lines every little eminence had been crowned by a
frowning fortification, as sullen in appearance and as capable of
destructive work as the Redan or the Malakoff at Sebastopol.
At brief intervals along the outer lines traverses had been built at
right angles to the works, as a protection against all enfilading fire.
The fields just behind the lines were intricately laced with trenches
and protective earthworks of every kind. Without these the men in front
would have been completely cut off from communication with the rear, by
a resistless, all-consuming fire.
Great covered ways—protected passages—were cut as the only avenues by
which men or supplies could be moved even for the shortest distances.
Every spring that could yield water with which to quench the thirst of
the fighting men was defended by jealous fortifications.
There was no more thought now of enumerating the actions fought, or
naming them. There was one continuous battle, ceaseless by day or by
night, in which dogged resistance opposed itself daily and hourly to
desperate assault, both inspired by a courage that did not so much
resemble anything human as it did the struggle of opposing and titanic
natural forces. Did the reader ever see the breaking up of the ice in
a great river or lake, under the angry impulse of flood and storm? As
the great ice floes in that case assailed the rocks with seemingly
resistless fury, and as the rocks stood fast in the courage of their
immovability, so at Petersburg the opposing forces met, day after day,
with the courage and determination of inanimate forces.
Every great gun that either side could bring from any quarter was
placed in position, so that the fire, continuous by day and by night,
grew steadily greater in volume and more destructive in effect.
In this matter of guns, as well as in numbers of men, the Federals had
enormous advantage. They had arsenals and foundries equipped with the
most improved machinery to supply them, and they could draw freely
upon the armouries of Europe, besides. The Confederates had no such
resources. The few and small shops within their command were antiquated
in their equipment and very sharply limited in their capacity. But they
did their best.
As soon as regular siege operations began, the Federals set to work
establishing mortar batteries at every available point. Mortars are
very short guns fired at a high “elevation”; that is, pointing upward
at an angle of forty-five degrees to the horizon, or more than that, so
as to throw shells high in air and let them fall perpendicularly upon
an enemy’s works, breaking down defences and reaching points in rear of
works to which ordinary cannon fire cannot penetrate.
The lines were so close together—at one point only fifty yards
apart—that everything had to be done under cover of some kind, and
thus mortars became a vitally necessary arm with which to break down
the enemy’s cover. The Confederates had none of these guns at first,
but their foundries were at least capable of manufacturing so simple
a weapon in a rude but effective fashion, making the mortars of iron
instead of brass, and mounting them in oaken blocks heavily banded
with wrought iron. In a very brief time the mortars began to arrive,
and their numbers rapidly increased, but there were very few of the
officers who knew how to handle a weapon so wholly different from
ordinary guns both in construction and in methods of use.
This scarcity of mortar-skilled officers in the lower grades gave Owen
Kilgariff his opportunity. The thought occurred to him suddenly on the
day after his vigil, and he acted upon it at once.
He wrote to Arthur Brent, addressing his letter to Wyanoke, whence it
would of course be forwarded should Doctor Brent be at Petersburg still.
I want you, Arthur [he wrote], to use your influence in my behalf
in a matter that touches me closely. For several reasons I want to
be ordered from this place to Petersburg. For one thing, there is a
matter of business, vitally interesting to you and me and closely
involving the welfare of others. I simply must see you concerning it
without delay. If I can get to Petersburg, I can see you, for Wyanoke
is near enough to the beleaguered city for you to visit me in the
trenches. There are other reasons, but the necessity of seeing you is
the most important and the least personal to myself, so I need not
bother you now with the other considerations that move me to desire
this change, which you can bring about if you will—and I am sure you
will.
I should ask for the transfer of the battery now under my command, if
I did not know that it would be idle to do so. For some reason General
Early seems to have taken a fancy to me, and still more to two highly
improved rifle guns that I recently added to the battery by capture.
He will never let me go unless compelled by orders to do so.
But I see another way. I learn that our mortar fire at Petersburg is
less effective than it should be, by reason of our lack of battery
officers skilled in handling that species of ordnance. Now that is a
direction in which I could render specially valuable service, not only
by commanding many mortar pits myself, and instructing the men, but
also by teaching our unskilled battery officers what to do with such
guns, and how to do it. If you will personally see General Lee’s chief
of artillery and lay the case before him, I am sure he will order me
transferred to the trenches. You can tell him that I was graduated at
Annapolis, taking special honours in gunnery. You need tell him no
more of my personal history than that after graduation I resigned from
the navy to study medicine, and that you learned to know me well in
our student days at Jena, Berlin, and Paris.
Do this thing for me, Arthur, and do it as quickly as possible. And
as soon as I reach Petersburg, make some occasion to see me there,
bearing in mind that to see you with reference to matters of vital
importance to others is my primary purpose in asking for this transfer.
Arthur Brent was at Wyanoke when this letter came, but he hastened
to Petersburg to execute his friend’s commission. He told more of
Kilgariff’s personal history than Kilgariff had suggested. That is to
say, he told of his gallantry at Spottsylvania and of its mention in
general orders. He had neither to urge nor beseech. No sooner was the
chief of artillery made aware of the facts than he answered:—
“I want such a man badly. Orders for his immediate transfer to the
lines here shall go to-day.”
So it came about that before the end of that week, Owen Kilgariff stood
in a drenching rain-storm and nearly up to his knees in the mud of a
mortar pit at Petersburg, bombarding a salient in the enemy’s lines.
The storm of bullets and rifle shells that raged around his pits was
as ceaseless as the downpour of rain, but as calmly as a schoolmaster
expounding a lesson in algebra, he alternately instructed his men and
explained to the half a dozen subaltern officers who had been sent to
him to learn. He was teaching them the methods of mortar range-finding,
the details of powder-gauging for accuracy, the art of fuse-cutting,
and all the rest of it, when out of a badly exposed covered way came
Doctor Arthur Brent to greet him.
XVI
THE STARVING TIME
THE stress of war had now fallen upon every Southern household.
Its terrors had invaded every home. Its privations made themselves
manifest in scanty food upon tables that had been noted for lavish
and hospitable abundance, and in a score of other ways. The people
of Virginia were not only standing at bay, heroically confronting an
invading force three or four times outnumbering their own armies, but
at the same time starvation itself was staring them in the face.
The food supplies of Virginia were exhausted. Half the State had been
trampled over by contending armies, until it was reduced to a desert so
barren that—as Sheridan picturesquely stated the case—“the crow that
flies over it must carry his rations with him.” The other half of the
State, already stripped to bareness, was compelled during that terrible
summer, almost wholly to support the army at Richmond and Petersburg
and the army in the valley, for the reason that the means of drawing
even scanty supplies from the well-nigh exhausted country farther south
were practically destroyed. Little by little Grant had extended his
left southward and westward until it crossed the Weldon Railroad south
of Petersburg, thus severing that most important line of communication.
In the meanwhile the Federal cavalry was continually raiding the South
Side Railroad and the Richmond and Danville Line, tearing up tracks,
burning the wooden bridges, and so seriously interrupting traffic as
to render those avenues of communication with the South practically
valueless, so far at least as the bringing of supplies for the armies
was concerned.
Thus Virginia had not only to bear the calamities of the war, but also,
single-handed, to maintain the armies in the field, and Virginia was
already stripped to the point of nakedness.
Yet the people bore all with patriotic cheerfulness. They emptied their
smokehouses, their corncribs, and their granaries. They sent even their
milky herds to the slaughter, by way of furnishing meat for soldiers’
rations, and they went thereafter without milk and butter for lack
of cows, as they were already going without meat. Those of them who
were near enough the lines desolated their poultry yards, and lived
thereafter upon corn pone, with greens gathered in the fields and such
perishable fruits as could in no wise be converted into rations.
The army was being slowly destroyed by the daily losses in the
trenches, which, excluding the greater losses of the more strenuous
battles, amounted to about thirty per cent a month in the commands that
defended the most exposed points. Thus Owen Kilgariff’s mortar command
of two hundred and ten men lost sixty-two within a single month, and
some others lost still more heavily for lack of the wise discretion
Kilgariff constantly brought to bear upon the problem of husbanding the
lives and limbs of his men while getting out of them the uttermost atom
of effective service of which they were capable.
Whenever a severe mortar fire was opened upon his line of pits, he
would station himself in a peculiarly exposed position on top of the
earth mound that protected his magazine. From that point he could
direct the work of every gun under his command and at the same time
do much for the protection of his men. A mortar shell can be seen in
the air—particularly at night, when its flaming fuse is a torch—and
its point of contact and explosion can be calculated with a good deal
of precision. It was Kilgariff’s practice to watch for the enemy’s
shells, and whenever he saw that one of them was likely to fall within
one or other of his pits and explode there with the certainty of
blowing a whole gun detachment to atoms, he would call out the numbers
of the exposed pits, whereupon the men within them would run into
the boom-proofs provided for that purpose and shelter there till the
explosion was over.
In the meanwhile, he, posted high upon the magazine mound, was exposed
not only to the mortar fire that endangered his men, but still more to
a hail-storm of musket bullets and to a ceaseless flow of rifled cannon
shells that skimmed the edge of his parapet, with fuses so skilfully
timed and so accurately cut that every shell exploded within a few feet
of his head.
Perhaps he was thinking of the kindly bullet or the friendly shell
fragment that was to make an end of his perplexities. Who knows? Yet
his exposure of himself was not reckless, but carefully calculated for
the preservation of his men. It was only such as was common among the
Confederate officers at Petersburg, where the percentage of officers to
men among the killed and wounded was greater than was ever recorded in
any war before or since.
By this exposure of his own person Kilgariff undoubtedly saved the
lives of many of his men, all of whom were volunteers who had offered
themselves to man a position so dangerous that the chief of artillery
had refused to order mortars to occupy it, and had reluctantly
consented to its occupation by Kilgariff and his desperately daring men
as volunteers in an excessively perilous service. He might have reduced
his losses still more if he had been willing to order his subordinates
at the several groups of pits to expose themselves as he did in the
interest of the men. But this he refused to do, on the ground that to
order it would be to exact more than even a soldier’s duty requires of
the bravest man.
One of his sergeants—a boy of fifteen, who had won promotion by
gallantry—had indeed emulated his captain’s example in the hope of
sparing his men. But the second time he did it, a Hotchkiss shell
carried away his head and shoulders, and the world suffered loss.
The hospital service, under such conditions, was terribly overtaxed,
and for relief the plantation houses were asked to receive and care for
such of the wounded as could in any wise be removed to their hospitable
shelter. Thus, presently, every half-starving family in the land was
caring for and feeding as best it could from three to a dozen wounded
men.
At Wyanoke Dorothy had met this emergency by establishing a regular
hospital camp, in which she received and cared for not less than fifty
wounded officers and men. With the wise foresight that was part of her
mental make-up, and aided by Arthur’s advance perceptions of what this
terrible campaign was likely to bring forth, Dorothy had begun early
in the spring to prepare for the emergency. She had withdrawn a large
proportion of the field hands from the cultivation of crops, and set
them at work raising garden stuff instead. To the same end, she had
diverted to her gardens a large part of the stable fertiliser which was
ordinarily spread upon corn, wheat, or tobacco lands. She had said to
Arthur:—
“There is nothing certain after this year except disaster. We must
meet disaster as bravely as we can, and leave the future to take care
of itself. I shall devote all our resources this year, outside the
poppy fields, to the production of food stuffs—vegetables, fowls, and
pigs—with which to feed the wounded who must presently come to us.”
Thus it came about that Dorothy was able to care for fifty wounded men
at a time, when the mistresses of other plantations as great as Wyanoke
and Pocahontas found themselves sorely taxed in taking ten. And as
the wounded men were impatient to get back into the trenches as soon
as their injuries were endurably half healed, the ministry of mercy
at Wyanoke was brought to bear upon many hundreds of brave fellows
during that most terrible of summers, and the fame of Dorothy Brent
as an angel of mercy and kindness spread throughout the army, fairly
rivalling that of her mother—unknown as such—Madame Le Sud. Madame
Le Sud, defiant alike of weariness and danger, poured water down many
parched throats on Cemetery Hill at Petersburg, until at last a Minié
ball made an end of her ministry; and on that same day a dozen brave
fellows fell while carving her name on a rude boulder which marked the
place of her final sacrifice. The places of those who fell in this
service were promptly taken by others equally intent, at whatever cost,
upon marking for remembrance the spot on which that woman gave up her
life who had ministered so heroically to human suffering.
All these things are only incidents illustrative of that heroism on the
part of women which the poet, if we had a poet, would seize upon as
the vital and essential story of the Confederate war. If that heroism
could be properly celebrated, it would make a literature worthy to
stand shoulder to shoulder with the hero-songs of old Homer himself.
But that story of woman’s love and woman’s sacrifice has never been
told and never will be, for the reason that there is none worthy to
tell it among those of us who survive of those who saw it and knew the
self-sacrificing absoluteness of its heroism.
Into all this work of mercy Evelyn Byrd entered not only with
enthusiasm, but with the tireless energy of healthy youth and with a
queer sagacity—born, perhaps, of her strange life-experience—which
enabled her sometimes to double or quadruple the beneficent effects of
her work by the deftness of its doing.
Her enthusiasm in the cause rather astonished Dorothy, at first. If
the girl had been brought up in Virginia, if her home had always been
there, if she had had a people of her own there, with a father and a
brother in the trenches, her devotion would have been natural enough.
But none of those reasons for her enthusiasm existed. She had probably
been born in Virginia, or at least of Virginian parentage, though even
that assumption rested upon no better foundation than the fact that
she bore a historic Virginian name. She had lived elsewhere during
her childhood and youth. She had come into the Southern country under
compulsion, and three fourths of the war was over before she came. So
far as she knew, she had no relatives in Virginia, and very certainly
she had none there whom she knew and loved.
Yet she was passionate almost to madness in her Virginianism, and she
was self-sacrificing even beyond the standards of the other heroic
women around her.
That she should enter passionately into any cause into which she
enters at all [wrote Dorothy to Arthur during one of his absences
at the front] is altogether natural. Her nature is passionate in an
extreme degree, and, good as her judgment is when it is cool, she
sends it about its business whenever it assumes to meddle with her
passionate impulses. She has certain well-fixed principles of conduct,
from which she never departs by so much as a hair’s breadth—chiefly,
I imagine, because they are principles which she has wrought out
in her mind without anybody’s teaching or anybody’s suggestion.
They are the final results of her own thinking. She regards them as
ultimates of truth. But subject to these, she is altogether a creature
of impulse. Even to save one she loves from great calamity, she
would not think of compromising the most trivial of her fundamental
principles; yet for the sake of one she loves, she would sacrifice
herself illimitably even upon the most trivial occasion. It is a
dangerous character to possess, but a most interesting one to study,
and certainly it is admirable.