FIGHTING FOR THE FLAG
For three days, Robert Barnwell Bannister had been a soldier of the
United States. On the evening of the third day he sat at the opening
of his tent studying a small volume of infantry tactics which had
fallen into his hands. Inside the tent his comrade and tent-mate, a
young fellow hardly older and no less patriotic and enthusiastic than
himself, just in from two hours of picket-duty, lay resting on a rude
board couch, with a block of wood and a coat for a pillow, singing
softly to himself a rude bit of doggerel that had recently become
popular in camp.
“Mud in the coffee and niggers in the pork,
Lobskous salad to be eaten with a fork,
Hardtack buns--oh, but soldiering is fun;
Never mind the grub, boys, we’ll make the Johnnies run.”
After a moment he called out:--
“Say, Bob, here’s a conundrum. What’s the difference between a
bounty-jumper and a--”
“Oh, button up!” replied Bob, who was studying out a peculiarly
difficult infantry formation, and did not wish to be interrupted.
“All right! now you’ll never know,” responded his comrade.
For a few moments there was silence, then the voice in the tent was
again heard singing rude rhymes of war.
“We are goin’ to drop our thunder,
Johnny Reb, Johnny Reb;
You had better stand from under,
Johnny Reb, Johnny Reb;
You will see the lightnin’ flash,
You will hear the muskets crash,
It will be the Yankees comin’,
Johnny Reb, Johnny Reb;
And we’ll git you while you’re runnin’,
Johnny Reb.”
Above the tent, below it, all about it, from Warrenton to Turkey
Run, was encamped Meade’s great army. There were seasoned veterans,
raw volunteers, conscript regiments, all accepting and enduring with
philosophic fortitude the hardships and vicissitudes of army life.
Here and there camp-fires had been lighted, here and there a belated
meal was being eaten. It was an hour for rest and relaxation from the
stern duties of war, only the picket force being thrown to the front in
triplicate lines, to protect the army from surprise.
Bob Bannister looked well in his suit of army blue. He bore himself
with soldier-like precision, and a dignity befitting his occupation.
Young, enthusiastic, good-natured, intensely patriotic, he had at
once become a favorite with the men of his company. His every duty,
performed with intelligence and alacrity, marked him in the eyes of the
officers as one destined to promotion. As he sat there in the twilight,
still studying his book, an orderly approached him and inquired:--
“Are you private Bannister?”
“That is my name.”
“You are wanted at company headquarters.”
Wondering what it could mean, private Bannister laid aside his book
and went with the orderly up the company street to the captain’s
quarters. Inside the tent a candle was burning on a rude table by
which the captain was seated. Standing about, against the inner walls,
were a half-dozen men whose faces the boy could not recognize in the
semi-darkness.
Bob advanced to within a few paces of the table, saluted, and stood at
attention.
“Private Bannister,” said the captain, “I want to know if you recognize
this person?”
He nodded, as he spoke, toward a man dressed in civilian costume,
standing near the entrance to the tent. Bob turned and peered into the
shadows. The man stepped forward.
“Father!”
“Rob!”
And then Bob rushed into his father’s arms.
For a moment no one spoke. But the soldiers who saw the meeting never
forgot it.
“Father, what does it mean?”
[Illustration: “FATHER, WHAT DOES IT MEAN?”]
Bannister, his voice lost in emotion and his eyes dim with tears,
pointed to a paper lying on the captain’s table. He had tried to
imagine how Bob would look in uniform, but he had not thought to
see quite so straight, manly a figure, clear of eye, handsome of
countenance, “every inch a soldier.” And the words of Mary Bannister,
when he read Bob’s letter to her, came back into his mind and voiced
his sentiment: “I’m proud of him. He’s the bravest boy in the world.”
“Private Bannister,” said the captain, “your father is here in custody
of Lieutenant Forsythe of the regular army, who brings with him this
letter.”
The captain then read impressively, with a sense of its true
importance, the President’s letter to General Meade. When he reached
the end and read the name “A. Lincoln,” every man in the tent lifted
his cap reverently from his head.
“This communication,” continued the captain, “was delivered to the
general commanding, by him endorsed and delivered to the division
commander, then to the commander of our brigade, to the colonel of
the regiment, and in due course has reached me. It has been endorsed
as follows by all the officers through whose hands it has passed: ‘If
not prejudicial to the service, let the President’s wish be carried
out.’ There is therefore nothing left for me to do except to give the
order for your discharge, and the mustering in of your father to take
your place. Permit me to add, however, that we shall regret to lose
you. During your brief term of service you have been a good soldier, a
credit to the company and the army.”
In the silence that followed, the captain half rose from the table as
if to close the interview. Then Bob found his voice.
“But, Captain Howarth,” he said, “I don’t want to be discharged. I
don’t want to go home. I want to stay. I am old enough. I can march.
I can do picket-duty. I can fight. But I can’t go back home now, it’s
simply impossible.”
The captain dropped back into his seat, incredulous. Among the men
standing against the tent-wall there was a buzz of approving voices.
Rhett Bannister put his arm about the boy’s shoulders affectionately.
“You’re right, my son,” he said. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have asked
it. I didn’t think. I didn’t realize; but--you’re right.”
Then Lieutenant Forsythe stepped forward.
“Permit me,” he said, “to make a suggestion. I talked much with this
man on my way down here. I believe he will make a good and earnest
soldier. The son has already proved his ability and patriotism. Why
not keep them both? I am sure it will not militate against the spirit
of the President’s order.”
“Right you are!” exclaimed Sergeant Anderson, stepping out from the
shadow where he had stood dreading lest he should lose his protégé, of
whom he had grown wondrously fond.
“Good!” said the other men.
“Let it be done,” responded the captain. And it was done.
In less than two hours Rhett Bannister was also a soldier of the United
States. And so he and his son served their country in the ranks. They
ate by the same camp-fire, slept in the same rude tent, and marched,
shoulder to shoulder, through the autumn mists and the winter slush and
mud of old Virginia. At Mine Run, a month after they were sworn in,
they had their first baptism of fire, and bore themselves with such
coolness and bravery as to elicit compliments for both from Captain
Howarth. In winter-quarters, with the monotony of camp-life and the
round of daily duties pressing on them, their spirits never flagged.
Both by precept and example they radiated courage and cheerfulness to
all their company. When, occasionally, a spirit of dissatisfaction
showed itself in the ranks, when impatience with those in command
became manifest, when poor and scanty fare and wretched clothing were
the rule, it was Rhett Bannister, cool and logical, free of speech and
earnest in manner, who moved among the men and counseled patience, who
pointed out to them their duty and appealed to their patriotism, and
never without success. “His influence with the soldiers,” said Captain
Howarth, one day, “is worth a thousand courts-martial.”
There was one time in particular when murmurings of discontent broke
forth, when the winter rains of Virginia were coldest and most
piercing; when food was scarce and foraging forbidden; when Meade,
under whom the soldiers had fought at Gettysburg, was discredited
and displaced, and Grant, whom they did not know, was given supreme
command; when the authorities at Washington seemed stricken with
lethargy and blindness, and the anti-war sentiment in the North,
increasing with dangerous rapidity, came filtering down to ears and
hearts in the ranks not unwilling to receive it. Then it was that Rhett
Bannister, the one-time hater of the administration, detractor of the
army, denouncer of the war, went out among his comrades, from man to
man, from tent to tent, from company to company, urging duty, pleading
patriotism, counseling patience.
“You think you have troubles,” he said one night to a group of
murmuring men, crowded into a smoky tent, while the cold rain dripped
through the tattered canvas, and the wind howled dismally among
the pines outside. “You think you have hardships and burdens and
afflictions in the service of your country. Let me tell you something.
I have seen Abraham Lincoln. I have talked with him face to face. I
have read in his sad eyes and hollow cheeks, and the lines creasing his
forehead, the story of his suffering. Boys, that man is bearing the
burdens of this country and the woes of her people on his heart. Every
drop of blood that is shed is as though it came from his body, every
groan of a wounded soldier is as though it came from his lips, every
tear from the eyes of those left desolate is as though it furrowed his
face. You cannot conceive the immensity of the burdens he is bearing,
or the weight of suffering he endures. Yet he is patiently, faithfully,
earnestly, prayerfully, with tremendous power of will and strength of
soul, pressing on toward the hoped-for end, and by God’s grace he is
going soon to bring us all back out of the shadows of war into the
light of a victorious peace. Boys, when you think you have burdens to
bear, remember Abraham Lincoln.”
And they did. No man who heard those impassioned words that night ever
again opened his lips in complaint of his commanders.
Letters came from Mount Hermon almost daily, sometimes a half-dozen in
a bunch. People up there wanted Rhett Bannister and his son to know
that they were appreciated at home. But the letters that came from
Mary Bannister, strong, cheerful, splendid letters, were the ones that
brought most joy to the hearts of their recipients. At last she felt
that the ban had been lifted, and that she was once more a woman among
women. She was not insensible, indeed, to the dangers that surrounded
her loved ones night and day. She knew well enough that any mail might
bring her terrible tidings about one or both of them. But such anxiety
was as nothing to the agony of mind she had endured through many weeks
before her son and husband went down to the war. And as there drifted
up to her ears now and again news of the brave conduct and manly
bearing of those so near and dear to her, she went about her household
labors, happy in the thought that from this time forth she could look
any man or woman in the face and say: “Behold my heroes!”
One day there came down to Rhett Bannister a letter from Sarah Jane
Stark. A wise, impetuous, laudatory letter, such as no one on earth
could write save Sarah Jane Stark herself. Over the first two pages
Bannister laughed like a boy, but when he had finished the last line of
the letter, tears were streaming down his face.
“To think,” she wrote, “that the one-time copperhead of Mount Hermon is
serving his country in the ranks. I would give Billy my cat to see you
in your blue uniform, and you know how much I love Billy. And that dear
boy! I never cried about a boy in my life before, you know that; but I
cry about that boy of yours every time I hear from him! I’m so proud of
him, and so fond of him! Heaven bless both of you!”
And down at the end of the letter a postscript was hidden away. It
said:--
“I’ve induced Mary Bannister to come up to town with Louise and live
with me this winter. It’ll be pretty lonely down at your place, and
I’ve got a big house and plenty of room, and I want company, and I want
her. She’s such a dear, brave, patient little woman, and we’ll have a
glorious time together.”
So, with no disquietude on account of their loved ones at home on their
minds, Rhett Bannister and his son faced the enemy and, with their
comrades in arms, fared on.
When Grant, in the spring of ’64, began his arduous and bloody campaign
from the Rappahannock to the Rapidan and from the Rapidan to the James,
they were in the forefront of the conflict. Yet they seemed to lead
charmed lives. Out from the tangled depths and thousand pitfalls of The
Wilderness, from the forest scarred and seamed across with fire and
shell and bullet, from the ghastly field with its blood-soaked herbage
and its piled-up heaps of dead, they came unscathed. At Spottsylvania
Court-House and up and down and across the North Anna, through all
of May they marched and fought. At Cold Harbor, in the early days of
June, they faced, with their comrades, the merciless fire of those
Confederate riflemen, until, scorched, winnowed, withered, the Union
army, with ten thousand dead and wounded on the field, retired from
the hopeless and unequal contest. Yet father and son came out of it
without serious injury. Shocked, sickened, exhausted, they were indeed;
scratched here and there by hissing bullets, but otherwise unharmed.
Again, in the awful fiasco before Petersburg, in the crater left by the
exploding mine, hemmed in, helpless, horribly entangled, black soldiers
and white falling by hundreds under the pitiless enfilading fire of a
thousand down-pointed Confederate guns, even from that pit of death
they escaped, wrenched, bruised, battered, buffeted, but whole.
So, through all that summer they fought, in the bloodiest, cruelest
campaign recorded in history, shallow trenches filled with dead
everywhere proclaiming the awful sacrifice at which Grant was forcing
the desperate and depleted armies of the South into their final
strongholds.
As his officers had predicted from the beginning, Bob Bannister was
rapidly promoted. For meritorious conduct, for brave deeds, to fill
vacancies above him as the grim tragedy of war played itself out, he
donned his corporal’s stripes, exchanged them for a sergeant’s, added
the orderly’s diamond, and finally, in the fall of ’64, his shoulders
were decorated with the straps of a first lieutenant. When this
happened his company held a jubilee. He was a mere boy, indeed, not
long past eighteen, possibly the youngest commissioned officer in the
Army of the Potomac; but the men of his command trusted him, believed
in him, loved him, and would have followed him wherever he chose to
lead, even to the gates of death.
But Rhett Bannister was not promoted. That was not, however, the
fault of his officers. Nor was it that his conduct was not splendidly
soldier-like and meritorious,--it was simply because he would not have
it so. It was after Cold Harbor that Captain Baker called him one
night to company headquarters,--Howarth had long ago been invalided
home,--and said to him:--
“Bannister, I am going to make a sergeant of you.”
“But, captain--”
“Oh, I know how you feel, but there’s no help for it. Brady’s dead,
Holbert’s a prisoner, and Powelton and Gray can’t do the work. You must
take it.”
“Captain, I beg of you not to do it. Be good to me. I’ll fight
anywhere. I’ll take any mission. I’ll face any danger. But I can’t
accept an office in the army of the United States. I told you this when
you spoke of making me a corporal. I repeat it now. If I were to accept
this honor I never could fight again, I never could look the boys in
the face again, I would feel so cowardly and ashamed and dismayed.
Don’t do it, captain, I beseech you, don’t do it! Let me fight in the
ranks and be contented and happy as I am to-night.”
And the captain gave heed to his protest, knowing that it came from his
heart; and so he continued to fight in the ranks, honored, trusted,
and loved by all his comrades. In the midst of the political campaign
of ’64, when the contest for the office of President of the United
States was stirring the North as no political contest had ever stirred
it before; when Lincoln’s enemies felt that they had won the victory,
and that the battle of the ballots on election day would only ratify
it; when Lincoln himself gave up the hope that he would be permitted
to lead the nation back to peace and safety; when only the votes of
the soldiers in the field could by any possibility save the day, Rhett
Bannister turned politician and went out electioneering. From man
to man he went, from company to company, from regiment to regiment,
earnest, anxious, persuasive, pleading with his whole heart and soul
the cause of Abraham Lincoln. And when the November ballots were
counted, and the overwhelming majority proved that the people in the
North as well as the soldiers in the field had confidence in the great
War President, no heart in the Army of the Potomac beat with more
exultant pride and unbounded happiness than did the heart of Rhett
Bannister, the Lincoln conscript.
In March came the President’s second inaugural address. A newspaper
containing a report of it floated early into camp and came into
Bannister’s hands. He read the address word by word, sentence by
sentence again and again. Then he called together the men who were fond
of listening to him and read it to them.
“You will not find,” he said, “in all history, nor in all literature,
a clause so sublime in thought, so simple in diction, so sweet with
divine charity as this; listen: ‘With malice toward none, with charity
for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s
wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his
widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just
and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’
“Gentlemen, that is Abraham Lincoln, than whom no man who ever lived
in America has had a higher aim, a sweeter spirit, or a more prophetic
vision.”
All winter Grant had sat before Petersburg, grim, silent, relentless,
pushing here and there ever a little farther to the front, seeking the
exhaustion of his enemy, waiting for the auspicious moment to let fall
the blow which should lead quickly to the inevitable end. To Lee’s army
looking from the heights on the tented foe in front of them by day, on
the thousand camp-fires gleaming there at night, it seemed as though
a ravenous monster, white-toothed, fiery-eyed, lay crouching before
them, stretching out a sharp claw now and then, waiting pitilessly
until the exhausted foe, weak and helpless, should fall, an easy prey,
into its clutches. Surely no soldier, no army, ever held out more
bravely against more fearful odds, in more desperate straits, than did
this remnant of Lee’s tattered host, in its final effort to save the
Confederate capital from falling into the hands of its enemies. Yet
every drum-beat trembling on the soft spring air was but the knell
of Richmond’s hope; every passing hour brought nearer and nearer her
unavoidable doom.
Late in March Grant threw out a force on his left, under Sheridan,
to meet and turn, and crush if possible, Lee’s right flank, and thus
precipitate the fall of Petersburg. It was at Five Forks that the
two armies met and clashed in the last decisive battle of the war.
Overwhelmed in front, cut off from the main column on the left, borne
down upon from the rear, fighting twice its numbers on every side, the
little army of Confederate veterans, with a thousand of its men already
captured, and a thousand lying dead and wounded along the barricades it
had so stoutly defended, broke and fled helplessly and hopelessly to
the west, only the darkness of night saving it from utter annihilation
at the hands of Sheridan’s pursuing cavalry.
But on that field of Five Forks, after the blue-clad hosts had swept
over it across the enemy’s redoubts, and only the grim harvest of
battle was left, dread rows of fallen men and horses struggling and
groaning among the silent dead, Rhett Bannister lay, at the edge of
the White Oak road, his shoulder pierced by a minié ball, his dim eyes
seeking vainly for the child of his heart. And just beyond lay Bob,
stretched on the greensward, his blood-splashed face turned upward to
the twilight sky, seeing nothing, knowing nothing of battle or victory,
of friend or foe, deaf alike to the dying thunders of the conflict, to
the exultant shouts of the victors, to the heart-stirring cry of that
father who would joyously have given his own life that his son might
live.