the boys for officers, saluting as they passed and always getting an
officer's salute in return! Hilary seen every day with men high and
mighty, who were as quick as the girls to make merry with him, yet
always in their merriment seeming, he and they alike, exceptionally
upright, downright, heartright, and busy. It kept the boys straight and
strong.
Close after came a month or so on the Yorktown peninsula with that
master of strategic ruse, Magruder, but solely in the dreariest
hardships of war, minus all the grander sorts that yield glory; rains,
bad food, ill-chosen camps, freshets, terrible roads, horses sick and
raw-boned, chills, jaundice, emaciation, barely an occasional bang at
the enemy on reconnoissances and picketings, and marches and
countermarches through blistering noons and skyless nights, with men,
teams, and guns trying to see which could stagger the worst, along with
columns of infantry mutinously weary of forever fortifying and never
fighting. Which things the book bravely makes light of, Hilary
maintaining that the battery boys had a spirit to bear them better than
most commands did, and the boys reporting--not to boast the special
kindness everywhere of ladies for ladies' men--that Hilary himself,
oftenest by sunny, but sometimes by cyclonic, treatment of commissaries,
quartermasters, surgeons, and citizens, made their burdens trivial.
So we, too, lightly pass them. After all, the things most important here
are matters not military of which the book does not tell. Of such
Victorine, assistant editor to Miranda, learned richly from Anna--who
merely lent letters--without Anna knowing it. Yet Flora drew little from
Victorine, who was as Latin as Flora, truly loved Anna, and through
Charlie was a better reader of Flora's Latin than he or Flora or any one
suspected.
For a moment more, however, let us stay with the chronicle. At last,
when all was suffered, the infuriated boys missed Ben Butler and Big
Bethel! One day soon after that engagement, returning through Richmond
in new uniforms--of a sort--with scoured faces, undusty locks, full
ranks, fresh horses, new harness and shining pieces, and with every
gun-carriage, limber, and caisson freshly painted, they told their wrath
to Franklin street girls while drinking their dippers of water.
Also--"Good-by!--
"'I'd offer thee this hand of mine--'"
They were bound northward to join their own Creole Beauregard at a
railway junction called--.
XXXII
MANASSAS
Femininely enough, our little borrowed book, Miranda's and Victorine's
compilation of letters from the front, gives no more than a few lines to
the first great battle of the war.
Fred Greenleaf was one of its wounded prisoners. Hilary cared for him
and sought his exchange; but owing to some invisible wire-pulling by
Flora Valcour, done while with equal privacy she showed the captive much
graciousness, he was still in the Parish Prison, New Orleans, in
February, '62, when the book was about to be made, though recovered of
wounds and prison ills and twice or thrice out on his parole, after dusk
and in civilian's dress, at Callender House.
The Callenders had heard the combat's proud story often, of course, not
only from battery lads bringing home dead comrades, or coming to get
well of their own hurts, or never to get well of them, but also from
gold-sleeved, gray-breasted new suitors of Anna (over-staying their
furloughs), whom she kept from tenderer themes by sprightly queries that
never tired and constantly brought forth what seemed totally unsought
mentions of the battery. And she had gathered the tale from Greenleaf as
well. Constance, to scandalized intimates, marvelled at her sister's
tolerance of his outrageous version; but Miranda remembered how easy it
is to bear with patience (on any matter but one) a rejected lover who
has remained faithful, and Flora, to grandma, smiled contentedly.
Anna's own private version (sum of all), though never written even in
her diary, was illustrated, mind-pictured. Into her reveries had
gradually come a tableau of the great field. Inaccurate it may have
been, incomplete, even grotesquely unfair; but to her it was at least
clear. Here--through the middle of her blue-skied, pensive
contemplation, so to speak--flowed Bull Run. High above it, circling in
eagle majesty under still, white clouds, the hungry buzzard, vainly as
yet, scanned the green acres of meadow and wood merry with the lark, the
thrush, the cardinal. Here she discerned the untried gray
brigades--atom-small on nature's face, but with Ewell, Early,
Longstreet, and other such to lead them--holding the frequent fords,
from Union Mills up to Lewis's. Here near Mitchell's, on a lonesome
roadside, stood Kincaid's Battery, fated there to stay for hours yet, in
hateful idleness and a fierce July sun, watching white smoke-lines of
crackling infantry multiply in the landscape or bursting shells make
white smoke-rings in the bright air, and to listen helplessly to the
boom, hurtle and boom of other artilleries and the far away cheering and
counter-cheering of friend and foe. Yonder in the far east glimmered
Centerville, its hitherward roads, already in the sabbath sunrise, full
of brave bluecoats choking with Virginia dust and throwing away their
hot blankets as they came. Here she made out Stone Bridge, guarded by a
brigade called Jackson's; here, crossing it east and west, the Warrenton
turnpike, and yonder north of them that rise of dust above the trees
which meant a flanking Federal column and crept westward as Evans
watched it, toward Sudley Springs, ford, mill, and church, where already
much blue infantry had stolen round by night from Centerville. Here,
leading south from these, she descried the sunken Sudley road, that with
a dip and a rise crossed the turnpike and Young's Branch. There eastward
of it the branch turned north-east and then southeast between those
sloping fields beyond which Evans and Wheat were presently fighting
Burnside; through which Bee, among bursting shells, pressed to their aid
against such as Keyes and Sherman, and back over which, after a long,
hot struggle, she could see--could hear--the aiders and the aided swept
in one torn, depleted tumult, shattered, confounded, and made the more
impotent by their own clamor. Here was the many-ravined, tree-dotted,
southward rise by which, in concave line, the Northern brigades and
batteries, pressing across the bends of the branch, advanced to the
famed Henry house plateau--that key of victory where by midday fell all
the horrid weight of the battle; where the guns of Ricketts and Griffen
for the North and of Walton and Imboden for the South crashed and mowed,
and across and across which the opposing infantries volleyed and bled,
screamed, groaned, swayed, and drove each other, staggered, panted,
rallied, cheered, and fell or fought on among the fallen. Here cried Bee
to the dazed crowd, "Look at Jackson's brigade standing like a stone
wall." Here Beauregard and Johnson formed their new front of half a
dozen states on Alabama's colours, and here a bit later the Creole
general's horse was shot under him. Northward here, down the slope and
over the branch, rolled the conflict, and there on the opposite rise,
among his routed blues, was Greenleaf disabled and taken.
All these, I say, were in Anna's changing picture. Here from the left,
out of the sunken road, came Howard, Heintzelman, and their like, and
here in the oak wood that lay across it the blue and gray lines spent
long terms of agony mangling each other. Here early in that part of the
struggle--sent for at last by Beauregard himself, they say--came
Kincaid's Battery, whirling, shouting, whip-cracking, sweating, with
Hilary well ahead of them and Mandeville at his side, to the ground
behind the Henry house when it had been lost and retaken and all but
lost again. Here Hilary, spurring on away from his bounding guns to
choose them a vantage ground, broke into a horrid mêlée alone and was
for a moment made prisoner, but in the next had handed his captors over
to fresh graycoats charging; and here, sweeping into action with all the
grace and precision of the drill-ground at Camp Callender, came his
battery, his and hers! Here rode Bartleson, here Villeneuve, Maxime with
the colors, Tracy, Sam Gibbs; and here from the chests sprang Violett,
Rareshide, Charlie and their scores of fellows, unlimbered, sighted,
blazed, sponged, reloaded, pealed again, sent havoc into the enemy and
got havoc from them. Here one and another groaned, and another and
another dumbly fell. Here McStea, and St. Ange, Converse, Fusilier,
Avendano, Ned Ferry and others limbered up for closer work, galloped,
raced, plunged, reared, and stumbled, gained the new ground and made it
a worse slaughter-pen than the first, yet held on and blazed, pealed,
and smoked on, begrimed and gory. Here was Tracy borne away to field
hospital leaving Avendano and McStea groveling in anguish under the
wheels, and brave Converse and young Willie Calder, hot-headed Fusilier
and dear madcap Jules St. Ange lying near them out of pain forever. Yet
here their fellows blazed on and on, black, shattered, decimated, short
of horses, one caisson blown up, and finally dragged away to bivouac,
proud holders of all their six Callender guns, their silken flag
shot-torn but unsoiled and furled only when shells could no longer reach
the flying foe.
XXXIII
LETTERS
Hardly any part of this picture had come to Anna from Hilary himself.
Yes, they were in correspondence--after a fashion. That signified
nothing, she would have had you understand; so were Charlie and
Victorine, so were--oh!--every girl wrote to somebody at the front; one
could not do less and be a patriot. Some girl patriots had a dozen on
their list. Some lads had a dozen on theirs.
Ah, me! those swan-white, sky-blue, rose-pink maidens who in every town
and on every plantation from Memphis to Charleston, from Richmond to New
Orleans, despatched their billets by the forlornly precarious post only
when they could not send them by the "urbanity" of such or such a one!
Could you have contrasted with them the homeless, shelterless,
pencil-borrowing, elbow-scratching, musty, fusty tatterdemalions who
stretched out on the turfless ground beside their mess fires to extort
or answer those cautious or incautious missives, or who for the fortieth
time drew them from hiding to reread into their guarded or unguarded
lines meanings never dreamed by their writers, you could not have
laughed without a feeling of tears, or felt the tears without smiling.
Many a chap's epistle was scrawled, many a one even rhymed, in a
rifle-pit with the enemy's shells bursting over. Many a one was feebly
dictated to some blessed, unskilled volunteer nurse in a barn or
smoke-house or in some cannon-shattered church. From the like of that
who with a woman's heart could withhold reply? Yes, Anna and Hilary were
in correspondence.
So were Flora and Irby. So were Hilary and Flora. Was not Flora Anna's
particular friend and Hilary's "pilot"? She had accepted the office on
condition that, in his own heart's interest, their dear Anna should not
know of it.
"The better part of life"--she wrote--"is it not made up of such loving
concealments?"
And as he read the words in his tent he smilingly thought, "That looks
true even if it isn't!"
Her letters were much more frequent than Anna's and always told of Anna
fondly, often with sweet praises--not so sweet to him--of her impartial
graciousness to her semicircle of brass-buttoned worshippers. Lately
Flora had mentioned Greenleaf in a modified way especially disturbing.
If Anna could have made any one a full confidante such might have been
Flora, but to do so was not in her nature. She could trust without
stint. Distrust, as we know, was intolerable to her. She could not doubt
her friends, but neither could she unveil her soul. Nevertheless, more
than once, as the two exchanged--in a purely academical way--their
criticisms of life, some query raised by Anna showed just what had been
passing between her and Hilary and enabled Flora to keep them steered
apart.
No hard task, the times being so highly calculated to make the course of
true love a "hard road to travel," as the singing soldier boys called
"Jordan." Letters, at any time, are sufficiently promotive of
misunderstandings, but in the Confederacy they drifted from camp to
camp, from pocket to pocket, like letters in bottles committed to the
sea. The times being such, I say, and Hilary and Anna as they were: he a
winner of men, yes! but by nature, not art; to men and women equally, a
grown up, barely grown up, boy. That is why women could afford to like
him so frankly. The art of courtship--of men or women--was not in him.
Otherwise the battery--every gun of which, they say, counted for two as
long as he was by--must have lost him through promotion before that
first year was half out. The moment he became a conscious suitor, to man
or woman, even by proxy, his power went from him; from pen, from tongue,
from countenance. And Anna--I may have shown the fact awkwardly, but
certainly you see--Anna was incurably difficult.
Too much else awaits our telling to allow here a recital of their
hearts' war while love--and love's foes--hid in winter quarters, as it
were. That is to say, from the season of that mad kiss which she had
never forgiven herself (much less repented), to the day of Beauregard's
appeal, early in '62, to all the plantations and churches in Dixie's
Land to give him their bells, bells, bells--every bit of bronze or brass
they could rake up or break off--to be cast into cannon; and to his own
Louisiana in particular to send him, hot speed, five thousand more men
to help him and Albert Sidney Johnston drive Buel and Grant out of
Tennessee.
Before the battery had got half way to Virginia Hilary had written back
to Anna his inevitable rhapsody over that amazing performance of hers,
taking it as patent and seal of her final, utter, absolute
self-bestowal. And indeed this it might have turned out to be had he but
approached it by a discreet circuit through the simplest feminine
essentials of negative make-believe. But to spring out upon it in that
straightforward manner--! From May to February her answer to this was
the only prompt reply he ever received from her. It crowds our story
backward for a moment, for it came on one of those early Peninsula days
previous to Manassas, happening, oddly, to reach him--by the hand of
Villeneuve--as he stood, mounted, behind the battery, under a smart
skirmish fire. With a heart leaping in joyous assurance he opened the
small missive and bent his eyes upon its first lines.
As he did so a hostile shell, first that had ever come so near, burst
just in front of his guns. A big lump of metal struck one of them on the
chase, glanced, clipped off half the low top of his forage-cap and
struck in the trunk of an oak behind him, and as his good horse flinched
and quivered he looked unwillingly from the page toward a puff of white
smoke on a distant hill, and with a broad smile said--a mere nonsense
word; but the humor of such things has an absurd valuation and
persistency in camps, and for months afterward, "Ah-r?--indeed!" was
the battery's gay response to every startling sound. He had luck in
catchwords, this Hilary. He fought the scrimmage through with those
unread pages folded slim between a thumb and forefinger, often using
them to point out things, and when after it he had reopened them and
read them through--and through again--to their dizzying close, the
battery surgeon came murmuring privately--
"Cap, what's wrong; bad news?"
"Oh!" said Hilary, looking up from a third reading, "what, this? No-o!
nothing wrong in this. I was wrong. I'm all right now."
"No, you're not, Captain. You come along now and lie down. The windage
of that chunk of iron has--"
"Why, Doc, I shouldn't wonder! If you'll just keep everybody away from
me awhile, yourself included, I will lie down," said the unnerved
commander, and presently, alone and supine, softly asked himself with
grim humor, "Which chunk of iron?"
The actual text of Anna's chunk was never divulged, even to Flora. We do
not need it. Neither did Flora. One of its later effects was to give the
slender correspondence which crawled after it much more historical value
to the battery and the battery's beloved home city than otherwise it
might have had. From Virginia it told spiritedly of men, policies, and
movements; sketched cabinet officers, the president, and the great
leaders and subleaders in the field--Stuart, Gordon, Fitzhugh Lee. It
gave droll, picturesque accounts of the artillerist's daily life; of the
hard, scant fare and the lucky feast now and then on a rabbit or a
squirrel, turtles' eggs, or wild strawberries. It depicted moonlight
rides to dance with Shenandoah girls; the playing of camp charades; and
the singing of war, home, and love songs around the late camp fire,
timed to the antic banjo or the sentimental guitar. Drolly, yet with
tenderness for others, it portrayed mountain storm, valley freshet, and
heart-breaking night marches beside tottering guns in the straining,
sucking, leaden-heavy, red clay, and then, raptly, the glories of
sunrise and sunset over the contours of the Blue Ridge. And it explained
the countless things which happily enable a commander to keep himself as
busy as a mud-dauber, however idle the camp or however torn his own
heart.
From Anna's side came such stories as that of a flag presentation to the
_Sumter_, wherein she had taken some minor part; of seeing that slim
terror glide down by Callender House for a safe escape through the
blockading fleet to the high seas and a world-wide fame; of Flora's
towboat privateer sending in one large but empty prize whose sale did
not pay expenses, and then being itself captured by the blockaders; of
"Hamlet" given by amateurs at the St. Charles Theatre; of great distress
among the poor, all sorts of gayeties for their benefit, bad money, bad
management, a grand concert for the army in Arkansas, women in mourning
as numerous as men in uniform, and both men and women breaking down in
body and mind under the universal strain.
Historically valuable, you see. Yet through all this impersonal
interchange love shone out to love like lamplight through the blinds of
two opposite closed windows, and every heart-hiding letter bore enough
interlinear revealment of mind and character to keep mutual admiration
glowing and growing. We might very justly fancy either correspondent
saying at any time in those ten months to impatient or compassionate
Cupid what Hilary is reported to have said on one of the greatest days
between Manassas and Shiloh, in the midst of a two-sided carnage: "Yes,
General, hard hit, but please don't put us out of action."
XXXIV
A FREE-GIFT BAZAAR
Again it was February. The flag of Louisiana whose lone star and red and
yellow stripes still hovered benignly over the Ionic marble porch of the
city hall, was a year old. A new general, young and active, was in
command of all the city's forces, which again on the great Twenty-second
paraded. Feebly, however; see letters to Irby and Mandeville under
Brodnax in Tennessee, or to Kincaid's Battery and its commander in
Virginia. For a third time the regimental standards were of a new sort.
They were the battle-flag now. Its need had been learned at Manassas;
eleven stars on St. Andrew's Cross, a field blood red, and the cross
spanning all the field!
Again marched Continentals, Chasseurs, and so on. Yet not as before; all
their ranks were of new men; the too old, the too frail, the too young,
they of helpless families, and the "British subjects." Natives of France
made a whole separate "French Legion," in red képis, blue frocks, and
trousers shaped like inverted tenpins, as though New Orleans were Paris
itself. The whole aspect of things was alert, anxious, spent.
But it was only now this spent look had come. Until lately you might
have seen entire brigades of stout-hearted men in camps near by: Camps
Benjamin, Walker, Pulaski and, up in the low pine hills of Tangipahoa,
Camp Moore. From Camp Lewis alone, in November, on that plain where
Kincaid's Battery had drilled before it was Kincaid's, the Bienville,
Crescent City and many similar "Guards," Miles' Artillery, the Orleans
Light Horse, the Orleans Howitzers, the Orleans Guards, the Tirailleurs
d'Orléans, etc., had passed in front of Governor Moore and half a dozen
generals, twenty-four thousand strong.
Now these were mostly gone--to Bragg--to Price--to Lee and Joe Johnston,
or to Albert Sidney Johnston and Beauregard. For the foe swarmed there,
refusing to stay "hurled back." True he was here also, and not merely by
scores as battle captives, but alarmingly near, in arms and by
thousands. Terrible Ship Island, occupied by the boys in gray and
fortified, anathematized for its horrid isolation and torrid sands, had
at length been evacuated, and on New Year's Day twenty-four of the
enemy's ships were there disembarking bluecoats on its gleaming white
dunes. Fair Carrollton was fortified (on those lines laid out by
Hilary), and down at Camp Callender the siege-guns were manned by new
cannoneers; persistently and indolently new and without field-pieces or
brass music or carriage company.
The spent look was still gallant, but under it was a feeling of having
awfully miscalculated: flour twelve dollars a barrel and soon to be
twenty. With news in abundance the papers had ceased their evening
issues, so scarce was paper, and morning editions told of Atlantic
seaports lost, of Johnston's retreat from Kentucky, the fall of Fort
Donelson with its fifteen thousand men, the evacuation of Columbus (one
of the Mississippi River's "Gibraltars") and of Nashville, which had
come so near being Dixie's capital. And yet the newspapers--
"'We see no cause for despondency,'" read Constance at the late
breakfast table--"oh, Miranda, don't you see that with that spirit we
can never be subjugated?" She flourished the brave pages, for which Anna
vainly reached.
"Yes!" said Anna, "but find the report of the Bazaar!"--while Constance
read on: "'Reverses, instead of disheartening, have aroused our people
to the highest pitch of animation, and their resolution to conquer is
invincible.'"
"Oh, how true! and ah, dearie!"--she pressed her sister's hand amid the
silver and porcelain on the old mahogany--"that news (some item read
earlier, about the battery), why, Miranda, just that is a sign of
impending victory! Straws tell! and Kincaid's Battery is the--"
"Biggest straw in Dixie!" jeered Anna, grasping the paper, which
Constance half yielded with her eye still skimming its columns.
"Here it is!" cried both, and rose together.
'"Final Figures of the St. Louis Hotel Free-Gift Lottery and Bazaar'!"
called Constance, while Anna's eyes flew over the lines.
"What are they?" exclaimed Miranda.
"Oh, come and see! Just think, Nan: last May, in Odd-Fellows' Hall, how
proud we were of barely thirteen thousand, and here are sixty-eight
thousand dollars!"
Anna pointed Miranda to a line, and Miranda, with their cheeks together,
read out: "'Is there no end to the liberality of the Crescent City?'"
"No-o!" cried gesturing Constance, "not while one house stands on
another! Why, 'Randa, though every hall and hotel from here to
Carrollton--"
Anna beamingly laid her fingers on the lips of the enthusiast:
"Con!--Miranda!--_we_ can have a bazaar right in this house! Every
friend we've got, and every friend of the bat'--Oh, come in, Flora
Valcour! you're just in the nick o' time--a second Kirby Smith at
Manassas!"
Thus came the free-gift lottery and bazaar of Callender House. For her
own worth as well as to enlist certain valuable folk from Mobile, Flora
was, there and then--in caucus, as it were--nominated chairman of
everything. "Oh, no, no, no!"--"Oh, yes, yes, yes!"--she "yielded at
last to overpowering numbers."