"This is the sergeant,
Who like a bold and hardy soldier fought."
--SHAKESPEARE.
After having been well treated at General Keyes's headquarters, I had
been given a seat in an ambulance going back to Newport News. The
officer who had questioned me proved to be one of the general's aides.
The negro Nick had succeeded in avoiding the rebels, and had delivered
my message, with which my handwriting showed identity; moreover, General
Keyes, when the matter was brought to his attention, immediately
declared with a laugh that his friend Khayme's protégé was a "brick."
The physical and mental tension to which I had been continuously
subjected for more than two days was followed by a reaction which,
though natural enough, surprised me by its degree. I lay on a camp-bed
after supper, utterly done. The Doctor and Lydia sat near me, and
questioned me on my adventures, as they ware pleased to term my
escapade. Lydia was greatly interested in my account of my visit to the
woman's house; the Doctor's chief interest was centred on Nick.
"Jones," said he, "you were right from a purely prudential point of view
in testing the negro well; but in your place I should have trusted him
the instant I learned that he was a slave."
"But, Father," said Lydia; "you surely don't think that all the slaves
wish to be free."
"No, I don't; but I believe that every man slave, who has independence
of character sufficient to cause him to be alone at night between two
hostile armies, wishes to be free."
"You are right, Doctor," said I; "but you must admit, I think, that at
the time I could hardly reason so clearly as you can now."
This must have been said very sleepily, for Lydia exclaimed, "Father,
Mr. Berwick needs rest."
"Yes, madam; he needs rest, but not such as you are thinking of. Let me
fully unburden himself in a mild and gentlemanly way; then he can sleep
the sleep of the just."
"Oh, Father, your words sound like a funeral service."
"I am alive, Miss Lydia; and you know the Doctor believes that the just
live forever."
"The just? I believe everybody lives forever, and always did live."
"Even, the rebels?" then I thought that I should have said
"slaveholders."
"Rebels will live forever, but they will cease to be rebels, that is,
after they have accomplished their purposes, and rebellion becomes
unnecessary."
"Then, you admit at last that rebellion, and consequently war, are
necessary?"
"No, I don't see how you can draw such an inference," said the Doctor;
"rebellion cannot make war necessary, and hostility to usurped authority
is always right."
"How can there be such without war as a consequence?" I asked languidly.
"Father," said Lydia, "please let Mr. Berwick rest."
"Madam, you are keeping him from going to sleep; I am only making him
sleepy."
Lydia retired.
I wondered if the Doctor knew to the full what he was saying. He
continued: "Well, Jones, I'll let you off now on that subject; but I
warn you that it is the first paper on the programme for to-morrow. By
the way, you will have but a few days' rest now; your regiment is
expected on the tenth."
"Glad to hear it, Doctor."
"So you think the Confederate lines are very strong?"
"Yes, they are certainly very strong, at least that part of them that I
saw. What they are near Yorktown, I cannot say, of course."
"I can see one thing," said the Doctor.
"What is that?"
"The map we have is incorrect."
"How so?"
"It makes the Warwick creek too short and too straight."
"I found it very long," said I; "and it is wide, and it is deep, and it
cannot be turned on the James River side except by the fleet."
"The fleet is not going to turn that line; the fleet is doing nothing,
and probably will do nothing until the _Merrimac_ is disposed of."
"Doctor, how in the world do you get all your information?"
"By this and that," said the Doctor.
"How we are to get at the rebels I can't see," said I.
"On the Yorktown end of their line," replied the Doctor.
"It seems to me a singular coincidence," said I, "that our troops should
have been advancing behind me all day yesterday."
"Do you object?" he asked.
"Not at all; I was about used up when they found me. What I should have
done I don't well see."
"You would have been compelled to start back," he said.
"Yes," said I, "and I had no food, and should have been compelled to
wait till night to make a start."
Dr. Khayme was exceedingly cheerful; he smoked incessantly and faster
than he usually smoked. The last thing I can remember before sleep
overcame my senses was the thought that the idol's head looked alive,
and that the smoke-clouds which rose above it and half hid the Doctor's
face were not mere forms that would dissipate and be no more; they
seemed living beings--servants attendant on their master's will.
* * * * *
The next day was cold and damp. I went out but little. I wrote some
letters, and rested comfortably. The Doctor gave me the news that
Yorktown had been invested, and that there was promise of a siege
instead of a battle.
"They have found the Confederate lines too strong to be taken by
assault," said he; "and while McClellan waits for reënforcements, there
will be nothing to prevent the Confederates from being reënforced; so
mote it be."
"What! You are not impatient?"
"Certainly not."
"And you are willing for the enemy to be reënforced?"
"Oh, yes; I know that the more costly the war the sooner it will end."
"I think McClellan ought to have advanced before," said I; "he is likely
to lose much time now."
"He has plenty of time; he has all the time there is."
"All the time there is! that means eternity."
"Of course; he has eternity, no more and no less."
"That is a long time," said I, thinking aloud.
"And as broad as it is long," said the Doctor; "everything will happen
in that time."
"To McClellan?"
"Why not to McClellan? To all."
"Everything is a big word, Doctor."
"No bigger than eternity."
"And McClellan will win and will lose?"
"Yes."
"I hardly understand, Doctor, what you mean by saying that everything
will happen."
"I mean," said he, "that change and eternity are all the conditions
necessary to cause everything to come to pass."
"The rebels will win and the North will win?"
"Yes; both of these seemingly contradictory events will happen."
"You surely are a strange puzzle."
"I give myself enough time, do I not?"
"But time can never reconcile a contradiction."
"The contradiction is only seeming."
"Did both Confederates and Union troops win the battle of Bull Run?"
"The Confederates defeated the Federals," said the Doctor; "but the
defeat will prove profitable to the defeated. What I mean by saying both
North and South will win, you surely know; it is that the divine
purpose, working in all the nations, will find its end and
accomplishment, and this purpose is not limited, in the present wicked
strife, to either of the combatants. What the heart of the people of
both sections wants will come; what they want they fight for; but it
would have come without war, as I was about to tell you last night, when
you interrupted me by going to sleep."
"Yes," said I, laughing, "you were going to tell me how rebellion could
exist and not bring war."
"And Mr. Berwick made his escape," said Lydia.
"But you promised to give it to me to-day, Doctor."
"Give it to me! That is an expression which I have heard used in two
senses," said the Doctor.
"Well, you were giving it to me last night; now be so good as to give
it."
"Better feel Mr. Berwick's pulse first, Father."
"You people are leagued against me," said he; "and I shall proceed to
punish you."
"By refusing me?"
"No; by giving it to you. I said, did I not, that rebellion does not
necessarily bring war?"
"That is the postulate," I replied.
"Then, first, what is rebellion?"
"Rebellion," said I, "rebellion--rebellion," seeking a definition,
"rebellion is armed hostility, within a nation or state, to the
legalized government of the nation or state."
"I am willing to accept that," said the Doctor; "now let us see if there
have not been cases of rebellion without war. What do you say of
Jeroboam and the ten tribes?"
"I say that there was about to be war, and the Almighty put a stop to
it."
"That is all I pray for," said the Doctor; "then, what do you say of
Monk?"
"What Monk?"
"The general of the commonwealth, who restored Charles the Second."
"Monk simply decided a dilemma," said I. "I don't count that a
rebellion; the people were glad to settle matters."
"Well, we won't count Monk; what do you say--"
"No more, Doctor," I interrupted; "I admit that rebellion does not bring
war when, the other party won't fight."
"But it is wrong to fight," he said.
"Then every rebellion ought to succeed," said I.
"Certainly it ought, at least for a time. What I am contending is that
every revolution should be peaceable. Would not England have been wiser
if she had not endeavoured to subdue the colonies? Suppose the principle
of peace were cherished: the ideas that would otherwise cause rebellion
would be patiently tested; the men of new or opposite ideas would no
longer be rebels; they would be statesmen; a rebellion would be
accepted, tried, and defeated by a counter rebellion, both peaceable. It
is simply leaving things to the will of the majority. Right ideas will
win, no matter what the opposition to them. Better change the arena of
conflict. A single champion of an idea would once challenge a doubter
and prove his hypothesis by the blood of the disputant; you do the same
thing on a great scale. The Southern people--very good people as you and
I have cause to know--think the constitution gives them the right, or
rather cannot take away the right, to withdraw from the Union; you
Northern people think they deserve death for so thinking, and you
proceed to kill them off; you intend keeping it up until too few of them
are left to think fatally; but they _will_ think, and your killing them
will not prove your ideas right."
"And so you would settle it by letting them alone? Yes, I know that is
what you think should be done. But how about slavery?" I asked, thinking
to touch a tender spot.
"The North should have rebelled peaceably against slavery; many a
Southern man would have joined this peaceable rebellion; the idea would
have won, not at once, neither will this war be won at once; but the
idea would have won, and under such conditions, I mean with the South
knowing that the peaceable extension of knowledge concerning principle
was involved, instead of massacre according to the John Brown idiocy, a
great amelioration in the condition of the slave would have begun
immediately. The South, would have gradually liberated the slaves."
"Doctor, you are saying only that we are far from perfection."
"No; I am saying more than that; I am saying that we ought to have
ideals, and strive to reach them."
* * * * *
On the 12th we learned that Hooker's division had landed at Ship Point,
and had formed part of the lines investing Yorktown. On the next day I
rejoined my company. Willis gave a yell when he saw me coming. The good
fellow was the same old Willis--strong, brave, and generous. We soon
went off for a private chat.
"What have you been doing with, yourself all this time?" he asked.
"I've been with. Dr. Khayme--at Newport News, you know. Our camp was
never moved once; what have you been doing?"
"Same old thing--camp guard, and drill, and waiting our turn to come.
Say, Berwick, do you know the new drill?"
"What new drill?"
"Hardee."
"You don't say!"
"Fact. Whole division."
"Do you like it better?"
"Believe I do."
"We'll have no time to drill here," said I; "we'll have enough to do of
another sort."
Yet I was compelled to make the change, which referred to the manual of
arms, Hardee's tactics, in which system the piece is carried in the
right hand at shoulder arms, having been substituted for Scott's, which
provides for the shoulder on the left side. There was no actual drill,
however, and my clumsy performance--clumsy compared with that of the
other men of the company who had become accustomed to the change--was
limited to but little exercise, and was condoned by the sergeants
because of my inexperience.
I noticed that Willis did not mention Lydia's name. I did not expect him
to mention it, though. I knew he was wanting to hear of her; and I did
not feel that I ought to volunteer in giving him information concerning
the young lady. He asked me about Dr. Khayme, however, and thus gave me
the chance to let him know that the Doctor himself would move his
quarters to the rear of our lines, but that his daughter would remain at
the hospital at Newport News until the army should advance
beyond Yorktown.
And now, for almost a full month, we fronted the rebel lines of
Yorktown. Our regiment was in the trenches much of the time, and
frequently in the rifle-pits. The weather was bad; rain fell almost
every other day, and at night we suffered from cold, especially on the
picket-lines, where no fires were allowed. I suppose I stood the
hardships as well as most of the men, but I could not have endured much
more. Willis's programme of the campaign had been completely upset; he
had said that we should take Yorktown in a week and pursue the routed
rebels into Richmond, and now we were doing but little--so far as we
could see--to bring matters to a conclusion. The artillery of the rebels
played on our lines; and our guns replied; the pickets, too, were
frequently busy popping away at each other, and occasionally hitting
their marks. Ever since the siege of Yorktown, where I saw that great
quantities of lead and iron were wasted, and but few men hurt,--though
Dr. Khayme maintained that the waste became a crime when men were
killed,--I have had a feeling of disgust whenever I have read the words
"unerring rifles." More lies have been told about wars and battles, and
about the courage of men, and patriotism, and so forth, than could be
set down in a column of figures as long as the equator. From April 13 to
May 4 the casualties of the Army of the Potomac before Yorktown did not
reach half of one per cent. The men learned speedily to dodge shells,
and I remember hearing one man say that he dodged a bullet. He saw a
black spot seemingly stationary, and knew at once that the thing was
coming in a straight line for his eye. The story was swallowed, but I
think nobody believed it, except the hero thereof, who was a good
soldier, however, and ordinarily truthful. How can you expect a man, who
is supremely interested in a small incident, to think it small? For my
part, it was a rarity to see even a big shell, unless it was a tired
one. I dodged per order, mostly. Of course, when I saw the smoke of a
cannon, and knew that the cannon was looking toward me, I got under
cover without waiting for the long roll; but it was amusing sometimes to
hear fellows cry out, "I see a shell coming this way," at the smoke of a
gun, and have everybody seeking shelter, when no sound of a shell would
follow, the missile having gone into the woods half a mile to our
right or left.
I grew more attached to Willis. If the Army of the Potomac had in its
ranks any better soldier than this big red-headed sergeant, I never saw
him. He was ready for any duty, no matter what: to lead a picket squad
into its pits under fire; to serve all night on the skirmish detail in
place of a sick friend; to dig and shoot and laugh, and swear, in
everything he was simply superb. That I do not quote his cuss-words must
not be taken as an indication, that they were commonplace. Everything he
did he did with his might, almost violently. He was a good shot, too,
within the range of the smooth-bore. The rebel pickets--most of
them--seemed to be better armed than we were; it was said that they had
received some cargoes of long Enfields--nine hundred yards' range,
according to the marked sights, and no telling how far beyond--by
blockade-runners. They could keep us down behind the pits while they
would walk about as they chose, unless a shell from one of our batteries
was flung at them, in which case they showed that they, too, had been
studying the dodging lesson. Willis was greatly disgruntled over the
fact that the rebels were the better armed, and frequently his temper
got the upper hand of him. A bullet went through his hat one day when he
was trying vainly to pick off a man in a rifle-pit; Willis's bullet
would cut the dirt a hundred yards too short; the Enfield Minié ball
would go a-kiting over our heads and making men far to our rear look
out. Sometimes Willis was very gloomy, and I attributed this condition
to his passion for Lydia, though, on such a subject he never opened his
mouth to me.
One dark rainy night, about the 21st, I believe, Willis and I were both
on the picket detail. It came my time for vedette duty, and Willis was
the sergeant to do the escort act. There had been skirmishing on this
part of the line the preceding day, but at sunset, or the hour for
sunset if the weather had been fair, the firing had ceased as we marched
up and relieved the old pickets. We were in the woods, the most of us,
but just here, on the right of our own detail, there were a few
rifle-pits in the open, the opposing skirmish, lines being perhaps four
hundred yards apart, and our vedette posts--we maintained them only at
night--being about sixty yards in advance of our pits, and always
composed of three men for each post. We found our three men numb with,
cold, two lying near the edge o£ the woods, in a big hole made by a
shell, while the other stood guard. They had seen nothing and heard
nothing except the ordinary sounds of the night. The clouds reflected
the peculiar glow of many fires in front. It was not long till day. The
two men, my companions on post, whispered together, and then proposed
that I should take the first watch. Willis had returned to the line
with the relieved vedettes. I had no objection to taking the first
watch, yet I hesitated, simply because the two men had whispered. I
fancied there was some reason for the request, and I asked bluntly why
they had decided it was my turn without giving me a voice in the matter.
You know it is the custom to decide such affairs by lot, unless some man
volunteers for the worst place. They replied that they were old friends,
and that as I was a stranger to them, the detail being made up from
various companies, they preferred lying together.
This explanation did not seem very satisfactory, for the reason that in
two hours we should all be relieved; yet I consented, and they lay down
in the hole, which was little more than a mud-puddle, for fear of some
sudden volley from the rebels.
The position of the man on watch at this point was just at the left
oblique from the other men, say about ten paces, and very near to a tree
which stood apart from the rest of the forest, a scraggy pine of second
growth, not very tall, but thick and heavy, with its limbs starting
from the trunk as low as eight feet from the ground. I stood near this
tree, within reach of it by a leap. Our nearest vedette posts, right and
left, were a hundred yards from me--the one on the left being in the
woods, that on the right in the open. The country called the Peninsula
is low and flat and very swampy in many parts, and the great quantity of
rain that had now fallen for days and days had rendered the whole land a
loblolly, to use a common figure. I saw that just in front of me, about
thirty yards, there was a shallow ravine, and I began to think that it
was possible for an enterprising squad of rebels to sneak through this
ravine and get very near us before we knew it, and perhaps capture us;
such things had been done, if the truth was told, not only by the
rebels, but by many other people at war.
Beyond the ravine were the Confederates, their skirmish line about three
hundred yards beyond it, and their nightly vedette posts nobody knew
where, for they used similar economy to ours in withdrawing their
vedettes in the day. The Doctor's talks, many of which I can but barely
mention, had opened my eyes a little to the possibility of accurate
inferences, that is to say, his philosophy of cause and effect, or
purpose, as he liked better to call it, had been urged upon me so
frequently and so profoundly that I had become more observant; he had
made me think of the relations of things. Philosophy, he had said,
should be carried into everyday life and into the smallest matters; that
was what made a good fisherman, a good farmer, a good merchant, and a
good soldier, provided, he had added, there could be such a thing. This
ravine, then, had attracted me from the first. I saw that it presented
opportunity. A few rebels might creep along it, get into the woods, make
prisoners of the vedettes on several posts, and then there would be a
gap through which our skirmish line might be surprised.
I went quietly forward in the edge of the woods until I stood near the
ravine, and examined it as well as I could for the darkness. It did not
extend into the forest, for the roots of the trees there protected the
soil from washing away. The undergrowth at my left was not very dense; I
judged that in daylight one could see into the forest a hundred yards or
more. At my right, the gully began and seemed to widen and deepen as it
went, but nothing definite could I make out; all was lost in the night.
My examination of the spot had been made very quickly, for I was really
transgressing rule in leaving my post, even for a more forward place but
thirty yards away, and I was back at my tree in less than a minute.
The two men were yet lying in the hole; they had not observed my short
absence, I was glad to see. I did not know these men, and I would not
like them to know that I had left my post. Yet I felt that I had done
right in leaving it; I had deserted it, technically speaking, but only
to take a proper precaution, in regard to the post itself. Then, what is
a man's post? Merely the ground with which the soles of his feet are in
touch? If he may move an inch, how far may he move? Yet I was glad that
the men had not seen me move and come back, and I was glad, too, that
they had made the proposal that I should take the first watch, for I had
discovered danger that must be remedied at once. It was almost time now
for one of these men to take my place.
My fear increased. The motionless men at my right, unconscious of any
new element of danger, added to my nervousness. I must do something.