advanced, as I learned when we entered the same class. Like myself he
had been an omnivorous reader; but where I had read with a disposition
to select and criticise and differ, he appeared to have read with the
most hospitable mind I ever knew. He gave at least a _quasi_-belief to
everything that literature had to offer for his entertainment. He was
very slender, even to frailty of body. He had a thin and not handsome
face, rather sharp features, lips on which there was a singularly
joyous smile, and great gray eyes filled with an extraordinary sadness.
The mouth and eyes contradicted each other so flatly, that during all
the years of our acquaintance I was never quite able to persuade myself
that they properly belonged to the same countenance; that one or the
other portion of the face was not always hiding behind a mask. The
effect was indescribable; and among all the men and women I have ever
known I have seen nothing else like it.
I knew nothing about the man except as I had caught from conversation
that his name was Bernard Poland. Yet the moment I saw him, and
listened to his chatter, I made up my mind that he should be my closest
friend. I felt that between him and me there would grow up that
intellectual sympathy which is the only secure basis of friendship
between men.
Not that he and I were at all alike in any way. Indeed, two more
utterly unlike personalities it would be difficult to find or imagine.
I was serious; he playful, always. I was robust and inclined to plume
myself somewhat upon my muscularity; while he was delicate both in
frame and health, and cared next to nothing for any of the rougher
sports in which I took almost an insane delight. Intellectually, too,
we were exact opposites, as I have already hinted. I was inclined
to doubt and to question all things, rejecting all that I failed
to comprehend and account for; he was something of a mystic--not
superstitious, but abounding in faith, and still more in the
possibilities of faith.
He was never quite ready, dogmatically, to reject anything, however
incapable of proof it might be, so long as it was also incapable of
positive and conclusive refutation.
He was not credulous exactly, yet he scouted no superstition which was
not either manifestly or demonstrably absurd.
All this I learned afterwards, however. At present I was not even
acquainted with him, though I had made up my mind to introduce myself
after the free and easy manner that obtains among schoolmates.
When he had finished his bantering talk with his fellow-student, he
walked away to his room, which was in sight as I sat there in the
portico. The other student strolled down the roadway leading to the
great gates. He had no sooner gone than Bernard Poland came out again,
and walking up to me said: “You and I ought to be friends, and will be,
I think. My name is Bernard Poland. What’s yours? This is a singular
way to introduce oneself, but I can’t help it. The moment I saw you
sitting there I made up my mind that you and I would be chums. What do
you say, old fellow?”
To say that I was astonished is to express my feelings feebly. I was
startled, almost frightened, at his words, which were identically
those that I had been revolving in my mind as a possible or impossible
introductory address to him.
We were friends at once. And though I have known many other
friendships, I have known none closer or more satisfactory than that
then formed with Bernard Poland. We became, as he said, “Chums.”
During the long vacation Bernard spent many weeks with me at my home,
and I in turn visited him in a delightful old Virginian house, where
father, mother, brother, and sister held him in tenderest regard as
their chief object of affection.
After our college days were done we missed no opportunity of spending
a day or a week together, our affection suffering no diminution and
knowing no change.
One day in 1859, or about that time, we were riding together over
a beautiful region in Northern Virginia. We talked of a hundred
things, as was our custom. Among them a number of metaphysical and
psychological things came up for discussion.
“Do you know,” said Bernard presently, “I sometimes think prophecy
isn’t so strange a thing after all as most people think it. I really
see no reason why any earnest man might not be able to foresee the
future now and then in moments of exaltation.”
“There’s reason enough to my mind,” I replied, “in the fact that future
events do not exist as yet. We cannot know that which is not, though we
may shrewdly guess it at times. But when we do, we are only arguing
from known or suspected causes to their necessary consequences. And
that is in no proper sense prophecy at all.”
“Your argument is good enough, but the premises are bad, I think,”
replied my friend, meditatively, his mouth wreathed with a smile, but
his great sad eyes looking solemnly into mine.
“How so?” I asked.
“Why! I doubt the truth of your assumption that future events do not
exist as yet.”
“Well, go on; I’m ready to hear your explanation or your theory or
whatever else it is,” said I, laughingly.
“Oh, I don’t know that the idea is mine at all. I suppose that
others have gone over the ground before me, though I think, perhaps,
my application of the thought is new. What I have in mind is this:
Past and Future are only divisions of TIME. They do not belong at
all to Eternity. We, living in Time, cannot divest ourselves of its
trammels. We cannot conceive of any event without assigning a Time
relation to it; without investing it with the trammels and harness and
paraphernalia of Time. To us every event must be Past, or Future, with
reference to other events. But is there, in reality, any such thing as
a Past or a Future? If there is any such thing as Eternity, it now is
and always has been and ever must be. Time is a mere delusion: a false
medium, through which we look at things askant. As there can be no such
thing as Time in Eternity, there can be no such thing there as a Past
or a Future event. If Eternity is anything more than Time exaggerated
and extended,--if, indeed, there is any such thing as Eternity,--it is
not subject to the laws and conditions of Time. There can be no Past
and no Future there; but only an Eternal NOW.
“The absolute truth is not that which we see through a distorting
medium of Time, but that which we should see if we were in Eternity and
freed from the illusions of Time. To beings who see thus clearly and
truthfully, all things must exist in an eternal Present. All things
that have been or shall be, _now are_. What we call ‘Memory,’ is only
a mode of consciousness, and to know a Future event is a precisely
similar mode of consciousness. Memory and prevision are only different
ways of knowing a fact that now is. I see no reason to regard the one
as any more truly impossible than the other.
“I grant that in its ordinary Time-clogged state the mind is not
capable of discovering those occurrences which to us seem future ones.
But it seems to me that there are, or at least may be, conditions of
mind in which one rises above the trammels of Time and sees things as
they are. Every true poet is at times a prophet by reason of this
exaltation of soul. And all the well-attested prophets are poets of the
first order.”
My friend had no opportunity to finish, nor I to reply to his
wire-drawn metaphysics, as we were joined at this stage of the
conversation by an acquaintance of the earth earthy, whose talk was of
crops.
When he quitted us we were nearing a line of hills to which Bernard
directed my attention.
“There!” he exclaimed. “That would make a magnificent battlefield.”
I knew his enthusiastic fondness for the study of military history and
the details of battles. In common with most other people who have seen
nothing of war, I had never been able to picture a battle in my mind;
and in reading history I had always found it difficult to comprehend
the topographical descriptions of battlefields, or to understand the
influence of hill and dale, of copse and stream, upon the issue of a
combat. Bernard had mastered the whole subject. He had often moulded in
soft earth for my instruction miniature, but exact, representations of
many famous battlefields.
The ground we were on was a chain of hills crossing a public
thoroughfare, and my friend soon grew enthusiastic in his account of
how one army would be posted here, and the other there; how the flanks
of each would rest upon certain protected points and how the attacking
force would try to carry this or that position.
“If the attacking general knows his business,” he said, “he will strain
every nerve to drive his adversary from that little knoll there. And
if he succeeds in planting a battery or two there, properly supported,
his enemy will have to charge him out of the place or reconstruct his
own lines, and to reconstruct them will cost him half the value of his
position.”
A new look came into Bernard’s face. The smile had gone from his
lips, the great sad look was in his eyes. Gazing at me with intense
earnestness, he cried out: “He _must_ drive them back. If they once
hold that knoll--”
Bernard paused, grew very pale, and then said with some difficulty with
his vocal organs: “Let’s gallop away from here.”
I followed his retreating form, and when we drew rein again, we were a
full mile distant from the place of this field lecture. My friend had
meantime regained his color and composure, but the old smile had not
yet returned to his lips.
“Are you ill, Bernard?” I asked.
“No, I am quite well, thank you.”
“Then what--”
“I’ll tell you all about it if you won’t laugh at me,” he said, his
lips resuming something of their ordinary expression. “The fact is, all
that was prophecy, or prevision, or what you please to call it. While
I was explaining an imaginary and possible battle, it became real.
THAT BATTLE IS A FACT. I saw the two armies as plainly as I see you,
and when the enemy planted that battery there on the hill, driving our
forces away, I was among the troops ordered to charge them as a forlorn
hope, and _I fell right there, in front of the guns, riddled with
canister shot_. I was ahead of the line, for some reason, and just as I
fell our men were driven back by a counter-charge right over my body.
My friend, prevision is possible. Prevision is a fact. The battle, the
charge, the counter-charge, and my death, right there, are what we call
Future events. But I know them now as well as I know anything else. I
saw it all. I know it for truth.”
I was horrified. I tried to draw his mind away from the distressing
picture he had conjured up. He seeing my purpose said: “I am not
demented, and this doesn’t trouble me in the least. It is all fact, but
I am not unhappy about it. I turned pale, it is true--any man would
with half a dozen canister shot passing through his body. But I am not
frightened, not demoralized, and not in the least apprehensive. I don’t
know when all this is to happen, and as our country is at peace with
all the world, I think it is not likely that the battle will come soon.
BUT IT WILL COME. Be sure of that. Now let’s talk of something else.”
With that he resolutely dismissed the subject, and he never referred to
it again.
* * * * *
During the terrible campaign of 1864, the command to which I belonged,
after a hard day’s march, was sent at ten o’clock at night to take post
upon the line.
All night long we lay there expecting the furious onset of the enemy,
whose plan it seemed to be to keep us perpetually marching or fighting.
With the early dawn came the battle. And as daylight revealed the
features of the newly chosen battlefield, I recognized it as precisely
the one that Bernard and I had ridden over several years before. On my
right, less than half a mile away, a furious struggle was in progress.
I looked and saw our troops driven back from the little eminence on
which he and I had stood. The enemy hurried two batteries forward, and
planting them there opened a fierce, enfilading fire upon that part of
the line in which I stood.
I saw at once that if those batteries should remain there, we must
retire and reconstruct our lines. We stood our ground, however, in the
hope that the critical position might be recovered. Quickly an attempt
was made to that end. A heavy body of infantry was thrown forward
with desperate impulse, and straining my eyes with an intensity of
eagerness, which I had never felt before, I saw one slender form in
advance of the line. A dense volume of powder smoke immediately shut
out the view.
When it cleared away the enemy’s batteries were still there. Our men
had been repulsed. A minute later a second charge was made and it
proved successful.
But I knew that I had lost a friend there.
The battle over, I scanned every list of killed and wounded I could
find, but could learn nothing of my friend from them. I had every
reason to believe that he was not there at all. He had been taken
prisoner some months before and paroled. When I had last heard from
him he was quietly pursuing his studies at home while waiting for his
exchange.
I tried to console myself with this and with the reflection that the
partial fulfilment of his prophecy was quite accidental and constituted
no reason for assuming its complete fulfilment.
We were on the march or in action all the time, too; and I had plenty
of occupation with which to drive depressing thoughts from my mind.
We finally sat down before Petersburg, and the eternity of an eight
months’ siege began. I was sent to Richmond on some military errand,
and while there availed myself of the opportunity to visit some friends.
[Illustration: THE LAST THAT WAS SEEN OF BERNARD POLAND.]
“Where is Bernard?” I asked as lightly as I could, of one who was
intimate with his family.
“Haven’t you heard?” he replied. “The poor fellow was exchanged in the
spring, was elected first lieutenant of a company, and was killed, it
is supposed, in one of the battles, I forget which. He was in command
of his company, when it was ordered to charge some field batteries on
a little hill, and his men say he was last seen ten or a dozen feet in
advance of the line, just before a counter-charge drove them back. As
the counter-charge was preceded immediately by a volley of canister,
the smoke hid him from view. But there seems to be no doubt that he
fell there, riddled with canister shot.”
A few days later I received a letter from one of Bernard’s brother
officers, in which, after recapitulating the facts already set forth,
he went on to say: “Before we were ordered to the charge, Bernard
specially requested me, in the event of his death that day, to write
you an exact description of the spot on which he fell. He said, ‘He
will remember it.’ Though what he meant by that, I have never been able
to guess. But in loyalty to the love I bore him, I have taken this
first opportunity to comply with the last request he made on earth.”
The author of that letter who now occupies a prominent position in
public life will understand, after reading this sketch, what Bernard
meant in saying that I would remember the spot on which he fell.
A BREACH OF ETIQUETTE
We had marched nearly all night, in order to join Jeb Stuart at the
time appointed. This was in the early summer of 1861.
We regarded ourselves with more or less of self-pity, as
sleep-sacrificing heroes, who were clearly entitled to a full day’s
rest.
Jeb Stuart didn’t look at it in that way at all. He was a soldier,
while we were just beginning to learn how to be soldiers. These things
make a difference.
We hadn’t got our tents pitched when he ordered us out for a scouting
expedition under his personal command.
Our army lay at Winchester. The enemy was at Martinsburg, twenty-two
miles away. Stuart, with his four or five hundred horsemen, lay at
Bunker Hill, about half-way between but a little nearer to the enemy
than to his supports. That was always Stuart’s way.
In our scouting expedition that day, we had two or three “brushes” with
the enemy--“just to get us used to it,” Stuart said.
Finally we went near to Martinsburg, and came upon a farmhouse. The
farm gave no appearance of being a large one, or one more than
ordinarily prosperous, yet we saw through the open door a dozen or
fifteen “farm hands” eating dinner, all of them in their shirt-sleeves.
Stuart rode up, with a few of us at his back, to make inquiries, and we
dismounted. Just then a slip of a girl,--not over fourteen, I should
say--accompanied by a thick-set, young bull-dog, with an abnormal
development of teeth, ran up to us.
_She distinctly and unmistakably “sicked” that dog upon us._ But as
the beast assailed us, the young girl ran after him and restrained his
ardor by throwing her arms around his neck. As she did so, she kept
repeating in a low but very insistent tone to us: “Make ’em put their
coats on! Make ’em put their coats on! Make ’em put their coats on!”
Stuart was a peculiarly ready person. He said not one word to the
young girl as she led her dog away, but with a word or two he
directed a dozen or so of us to follow him with cocked carbines into
the dining-room. There he said to the “farm hands”: “Don’t you know
that a gentleman never dines without his coat? Aren’t you ashamed of
yourselves? And ladies present, too! Get up and put on your coats,
every man jack of you, or I’ll riddle you with bullets in five seconds.”
They sprang first of all into the hallway, where they had left their
arms; but either the bull-dog or the fourteen-year-old girl had taken
care of that. The arms were gone. Then seeing the carbines levelled,
they made a hasty search of the hiding-places in which they had
bestowed their coats. A minute later they appeared as fully uniformed,
but helplessly unarmed Pennsylvania volunteers.
They were prisoners of war at once, without even an opportunity to
finish that good dinner. As we left the house the young girl came up
to Stuart and said: “Don’t say anything about it; but the dog wouldn’t
have bit you. He knows which side _we’re_ on in this war.”
As we rode away this young girl--she of the bull-dog--cried out: “To
think the wretches made us give ’em dinner! And in their shirt-sleeves,
too!”
THE LADY OF THE GREEN BLIND
The house looked a little bit odd, but we made allowances for the
times, although this was in 1861, soon after the battle of Manassas.
There were seven windows in front, and they all had white shades except
one. That one had a dark green Holland blind. We remarked on the fact
when the blind was put up, but we thought little of it until we were
instructed one day to watch that blind at night and report its doings.
There was a Federal picket post near the house.
We reported many of the performances of that blind without any visible
results. But one night it was suddenly drawn entirely down, having
before been rolled entirely to the top. When that was reported to the
company’s headquarters under a tree, a little way in the rear, the
captain immediately ordered us to mount.
We rode at a swinging gallop up to the house, and under quietly given
orders seized the eleven horses that were tied in the grounds. A
moment later a force of dismounted cavalrymen came out of the house
with a woman in charge. It was pitch dark, even to us. To men right
from the light, and standing within the glare of the doorway, the night
must have been absolutely blinding.
We could have shot down the whole detachment without difficulty, but we
understood in a moment that there was a woman to be rescued, and in a
volley her danger would have been as great as theirs.
We waited therefore for orders.
Then it was that the captain invented a totally new cavalry manœuvre,
with a marching command wholly unknown to the books on tactics. He said
to us in a low, quiet, but incisive voice: “Form quickly in two single
files; advance and split the girl out. I’ll take her on my crupper.”
It was a pretty manœuvre, and as Charlie rode out between the two
single files with the young woman on the crupper, we cheered quite as
lustily as we fired. Then we didn’t know exactly what to do. We had an
appreciation of the fact that Charlie wanted to get the woman out of
range as quickly as possible. But we also had a realizing sense, drawn
from experience, of Charlie Irving’s extreme reluctance to ride away
from an enemy who could be faced.
It was Field Mann, the orderly sergeant, who saw the right way out. He
called out to us, in quite unmilitary language: “Don’t retreat, boys,
Charlie’s sure to come back as soon’s he’s got her safe; meantime we’ll
fight ’em. Form in line under the cherry trees.”
We had them at a disadvantage. They were still in the glare of light
from the windows, while we were in the darkness, and we were sixty
mounted men to eleven cavalrymen, whose horses had been captured.
Moreover we had carbines, and they had none.
By the time we had made an alignment under the trees, and before Field
Mann could give another order, the captain came running up on foot,
leaped into the saddle of one of the captured horses, and quickly gave
a command that completely surrounded the house.
We had those men penned; but just then their comrades at the
neighboring picket post discovered that there was trouble on hand, and
advanced upon us.
It was an exciting fight there in the darkness and under the trees,
so exciting that Stuart quickly sent two other companies to our
reinforcement.
At the end of an hour, we marched back with some prisoners; the rest of
our foes had scattered and disappeared. When we got to the camp-fires
behind the hills, Charlie Irving dismounted, and greeting the lady,
who was laboriously mending a torn gown with a hairpin, said: “I hope
you managed to ride Selim? He’s a demon sometimes, and not at all
courteous to ladies. But there was nothing for it but to trust you to
him.” She murmured something courteous in reply. Then turning with
blazing eyes to the Federal officer who had been in command of the
party, she asked: “What were you going to do with me, if I hadn’t been
rescued?”
He replied: “I suppose you would have been hanged as a spy.”
And it was true.
After breakfast the next day--I remember that breakfast consisted of
some green corn taken from a neighboring field and roasted in the ashes
with the husks on, and by the way that’s the best way to cook green
corn--we escorted the lady back to her home, and under Stuart’s orders
stationed two cavalry companies in front as a guard.
There is no doubt, I suppose, that the lady was a spy, and that her
green window blind had communicated much valuable information.
But no; there was no courtship, no marriage, no honeymoon, no romance,
to follow. The lady was forty-five, if a day; and besides that, Irving
was already engaged to a girl down South.
YOUNGBLOOD’S LAST MORNING
We were all well used to seeing men shot, but this was different.
It was a soft, warm, mellow autumn morning. It was a day suggestive of
all gentleness. A purple, Indian-summer haze enveloped the earthworks
and the camps. Nature had issued an invitation to peace and repose.
The cannon were not at work. Nobody on either side had been tempted
to bombard anybody else. Even the mortars and the sharp-shooters were
still.
It was not the kind of morning for the bloody work of war.
Yet a young man was to be killed within the hour. He was to be killed
deliberately, in cold blood, by sentence of a court-martial, and with
great pomp and ceremony; and nobody, even in his heart, could say nay
to the justice of the sentence.
For Youngblood had done an infamous thing.
There were many desertions to the enemy about that time. The war was
manifestly drawing to a close, and men who lacked self-sacrificing
devotion were getting tired of its hardships and privations. In order
to stop these desertions, orders had been issued that any soldier
arresting another in the act of going to the enemy should have a thirty
days’ furlough.
Youngblood was on picket one day with another man. He proposed to that
other man that they both should desert, and they started together
toward the enemy’s lines. According to Youngblood’s story, it was his
purpose to arrest his comrade, and thus earn a furlough at the expense
of the other fellow’s life. Whether this story was true or not doesn’t
much matter. The other fellow arrested him.
In any case, he deserved to pay the penalty he did. He was tried,
convicted, and sentenced. The sentence was approved by all the
authorities, including the war department. This morning it was to be
carried out.
It was about ten o’clock, Youngblood’s regiment was formed into three
sides of a hollow square. Near the entrance to the square, on the
right, rested Youngblood’s coffin. Beside it was Youngblood’s grave.
Presently an ambulance drove up, bearing the prisoner and his attendant
guards. As he stepped lightly and lithely from the ambulance, we saw
him to be a fine specimen of young manhood. He was twenty-three or
twenty-four years of age; tall, well built, and full of elastic vigor.
He was handsome, too, and of refined and gentle countenance.
There was no sign of flinching in him: nothing that denoted the coward
which his explanation of his crime had shown him to be.
It seemed something more than a pity to put a fellow like that to death.
He took his place in front of the guards and just in rear of the band,
and the dead march began.
He walked alone.