THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME.
With bayonets flashing in the sunlight, with flags flying and keeping
step to the martial music, Southton's brave Company E marched full one
hundred strong to the depot the next day, ready to leave for the war.
Almost the entire town was there to see them off, and hundreds of men,
old and young, filled the air with cheers. Mingling in that throng were
as many mothers, wives, sweethearts and sisters with aching hearts,
whose sobs of anguish were woven into the cheering. Strong men wept as
well. As the train rolled away, Manson fought the tears back that he
might not lose the last sight of one fair girl whose heart he knew was
breaking. When it was all over, and he realized that for months or
years, or perhaps never, would he behold her again, he knew what war and
parting meant. He had obeyed his conscience and sense of duty, and now
he must pay the price, and the payment was very bitter. Of his future
he knew not, or what it might hold for him. He could only hope that when
his hour of trial came that he would not falter, and if the worst must
come that he would find strength to meet it as a soldier should.
War is such a ghastly, hideous horror, and so utterly at variance with
this simple narrative, that I hesitate to speak of it. There can be no
moments of happiness, no rifts of sunshine, and but few gleams of hope
woven into the picture. All must be as war is--a varying but continued
succession of dreaded horror and the fear of death. The first month of
Manson's experience at the training camp was hard only in anticipation,
and but a daily round of duty easily performed and soon passed. Liddy's
frequent letters, each filled with all the sweet and loving words that,
like flowers, naturally spring from a woman's heart, cheered him
greatly; but when the order came to go to the front, the scene changed,
and the reality of war came. He dreaded the first shock, not so much
from fear of death; but lest his courage fail. When it came at
Chancellorsville it was all over before he knew it. Although under fire
for eight hours, he was not conscious of the lapse of time or aught
else, except that he obeyed orders and loaded and fired with the rest;
forgetting that he might fall, or whether he was brute or human. That
night he wrote to Liddy: "We have had our first battle, and for many
hours I forgot even you. I know now that I shall not falter. Poor
Luzerne Norton, one of our academy boys, was killed, also three others
from our company; and seven were wounded."
When the letter reached Liddy her heart sank. To know that one of her
bright and happy schoolmates of a few months before had been shot and
killed, and others wounded, was to have the dread reality of war brought
very near home. "Thank God my boy was spared," she thought. That night
she wrote him the most loving letter he had ever received, concluding
with: "Be brave, my darling, and always remember that come what may I
shall keep my promise."
Then came the battle of Gettysburg, and although his company escaped
with only a few wounded, it was here he first realized the ghastly
horror of a battlefield after the fight is over, and how the dead are
buried.
When his next letter reached the sad-hearted one at home, no mention was
made of this experience, and when she wrote asking why he had never
told her how a battleground looked, or anything about it, he replied:
"Not for worlds would I tell you how we bury the dead, or how they
looked, or anything of the sickening details. Please do not read them in
the papers, for it will do you no good, and cause you needless
suffering. I wish to keep misery from you. Think of me only as doing my
duty, and try to believe (as I do) that I shall come back to you alive
and well."
For the next six months he had no battles to face--only skirmishing and
picket duty. When Christmas came it brought him two boxes of good things
to gladden his heart. One was from his dear old mother, and one was from
Liddy, and tucked away in that, between four pairs of blue socks knit by
her fair hands, was a loving letter and a picture of herself.
Almost a month after came the battle of Tracy City and the fall of brave
Captain Upson. There were others wounded, but none of his company were
killed. It was here Manson received his first promotion to a corporal's
position, and he was afterward made sergeant. In the spring that
followed, and almost one year from the day he first told Liddy of his
love, came the battle of Boyd's Trail. Five days after, when the moon
was full one night, he wrote by the light of a camp fire: "Do you
remember one year ago to-day, and where we were and what I said? I little
realized that day what was in store for me. One thing I must tell you,
however, and that is you can never know how much comfort it has been to
me to live over all the happy hours we have had together. Every little
word and look of love from you has come back to me again and again in my
long, lonesome hours of picket duty, and to-night as I sit by the camp
fire and see the moon shining through the trees I can recall just how I
felt the first time I kissed you, when the same moon seemed to be
laughing at me. Do you remember one night when we were driving across
the plains on our way back from a little party over to Marion, and you
sang that 'Meet Me by Moonlight' ballad? That was three years ago, and
yet I can almost hear your voice now."
When this letter reached Liddy she read it in tears.
For the next year it was with Manson as with all that slowly decreasing
company--one unending round of nervous strain, long marches, sharp
fighting, or, worse yet--carrying the wounded from the battlefield and
burying the dead. They lived poorly, slept on the ground or in the mud
at times, and became accustomed to filth and stench, indifferent to
danger and hardened to death. When a comrade fell those who knew him
best said: "Poor fellow, he's gone," and buried him without a prayer;
but the dead who were personally unknown awakened no more feeling than
so many leaves fallen by the wayside. It could not well be otherwise,
for such is war. Individual cases of heroism were common enough, and
passed almost unnoticed; for they were all brave men who came to fight
and die if need be, and no less was expected.
War makes strange bedfellows, and forms unexpected friendships. It was
after the battle of Gettysburg, when the Tenth Army Corps remained in
camp for several months, and one night while on picket duty, that Manson
met with a curious adventure, and made the acquaintance of a
fellow-soldier by the name of Pullen, belonging to a Maine regiment,
whose existence, and the tie thus formed, eventually led to a sequence
of events of serious import. The enemy were encamped but a few miles
away, and that most dastardly part of warfare, the firing upon pickets
from ambush, was of nightly occurrence. Manson's beat that night was
over a low hill covered with scrub oak, and across part of a narrow
valley, through which wound a small, marsh-bordered stream. The night
was sultry, and the dampness of the swamp formed in a shallow strata of
fog, filling this valley, but not rising above the level of the uplands.
To add to the weirdness of his surroundings, the thin crescent of a new
moon threw a faint light over all and outlined the winding turns of this
mist-filled gorge. Away to the northward a belt of dark clouds emitted
frequent flashes of heat lightning, and occasional sharp reports along
the line bespoke possible death lurking in every thicket. Keeping always
in shadow, and oft pausing to listen, Manson slowly traversed his beat,
waiting only at either end to exchange a whispered "All's well!" with
the next sentry.
What a vigil! And what a menace seemed hidden behind every bush or spoke
in every sound! The faint creak of a tree as the night wind stirred the
branches; the rustle of leaves on the ground or the breaking of a twig
as some prowling animal moved about; the flight of a bird, disturbed at
its rest; the hoot of an owl on the hillside or the croak of a frog in
the swamp were all magnified tenfold by the half-darkness and the sense
of danger near. One end of his beat ended at the brook and here he
waited longest, for the sentry he met there was, like himself, hardly
out of his teens, and unused to war. A bond of fellowship sprang into
existence almost at sight, and made them brothers in feeling at once.
It was while whispering together beside this brook, and oppressed by the
suspense of night and danger near, that they detected a sound of more
than usual ill-omen, and that, the certain one that some creature had
stepped into the stream above, and was cautiously and slowly wading in
it. Hardly breathing, and bending low, the better to catch every sound
that came, they listened with beating hearts until it ceased. Once they
had detected the click of stones striking together as if moved by a
human foot and twice caught the faint plash of a bush or limb of tree
dropping into the water. Then the sounds ceased, and only the faint
murmur of that slow-running stream disturbed the silence.
For a few moments they waited there, and then together crept up out of
the gorge. Just as they emerged from the pall of the fog, and where the
moon's thin disk still outlined that narrow white-blanketed valley, they
paused, looking across, above, below and all around, and listening as
intently as two human beings so environed would when believing danger
near. And as they looked and listened for moments that seemed hours,
suddenly, scarce five rods away, they saw a man slowly emerged from the
bush-covered bank, rapidly cross this narrow gorge, apparently walking
on the fog, and disappear in the dark thicket on the other side!
Forgetting in the first shock of supernatural added to natural fear that
they stood fully exposed in the faint moonlight, they looked at each
other, while a cold chill of dread seemed to check even the power to
think. Manson was the first to recover, and with a quick, "We must
hide," almost hissed, dropped on all fours behind a bush, followed by
his comrade. That the motion betrayed them to watchful eyes is certain,
for the next instant, out from the dark thicket across the gorge there
leaped a flash of red fire, and the ping of a bullet, cutting leaves and
twigs above them, told its own tale. Too scared to think of returning
the fire, or conscious that to do so was unwise, they slowly crawled
deeper into the scrub and along the top of the hillock. All that night
they kept together, and how long it was until the gray light of coming
dawn lifted a little of their burden of fear, no one who has never
skulked along a picket line in darkness and dread can imagine!
When the relief guard came, Manson and his mate tried to discover where
their night-prowling enemy had crossed that narrow gorge, if he had
crossed at all, but could not. Whether ghost, or shadow, or
flesh-and-blood enemy had walked on fog in the faint moonlight before
them, they could not tell, and never afterward were they able to
determine. The only certain fact was that some one had fired at them,
and fired meaning to kill! Wisely, too, they agreed to keep the ghost
part of that experience a secret, and none of their comrades ever knew
they had seen a man walking upon the fog.