square. And as it passed me, I was curious to observe the condemned
man’s behavior. His step was as steady and as firm as that of any man
in the guard. I looked at his hands to see if there were any convulsive
clutching of the fingers. There was none. I doubt if any man in all
that regiment felt so calm in mind or so well poised in nerve as
Youngblood looked.
Having completed the seemingly endless march around the three closed
sides of the square, the procession turned to the right, and crossed
its open end to the point of execution.
There an officer stepped forward and read to Youngblood the findings
and sentence of the court which had condemned him, with the formal
endorsements approving them and ordering the sentence executed. The
guard which had the prisoner in charge divided to the right and left,
and Youngblood was left standing alone in front of his coffin, and
beside his open grave.
At the word of command he knelt upon the coffin and folded his arms
across his chest. Again at the word of command twelve soldiers stepped
out in front of him with guns in their hands. Six of these guns carried
ball cartridges, and six were blank. No man in the firing squad was
permitted to know whether his gun had a bullet in it or not.
The officer in command spoke scarcely above his breath, but so hushed
was the time that his words were audible to the three thousand men
there assembled, as he said to each alternate man: “Fire at his head,”
and to the intervening man: “Fire at his chest.” Then turning his back,
which was perhaps not an officer-like thing to do, the lieutenant gave
in a husky voice the word of command.
“Ready, aim, fire.”
There was a sharp crack from twelve rifles fired simultaneously. There
was a whirr and whistle of six bullets that had passed through the head
or chest of the doomed man, and hurtled off into the fields beyond.
Army rifles fire with tremendous force.
The dead man’s body rose to its feet and fell limply forward.
Five minutes later all that was left of Youngblood was buried beneath
six feet of earth.
There was no merriment in any of the camps that day, or the next, or
the next. Even our scant rations were not much relished by those of us
who had witnessed this scene.
And yet, as I said at the beginning, we were all well used to seeing
men killed.
BILLY GOODWIN
I never have known whether Billy Goodwin was a brave man or not.
He was certainly not afraid of anything; but the absence of fear from
his composition was so complete that I was always in doubt whether he
was entitled to credit for never yielding to that emotion.
His fearlessness seemed like the color of his sandy hair and his pale
blue eyes--something over which he had no control.
At Cold Harbor, in 1864, when an artillery duel was going on, plus
a tremendous sharp-shooter fire, Billy, with his back to the enemy,
lazily lounged upon the breastworks. All the rest of us were crouching
behind them.
I remember as an incident that he was eating a sandwich. It was
composed of two halves of a hard-tack biscuit and a slice of raw
pickled pork--his entire rations for the day. He was carefully holding
his hand under his chin, in order to save all the crumbs. We weren’t
wasting crumbs in those days.
A lieutenant, who had already been mentioned in orders for gallantry,
cautiously pushed up his head to peer over the breastworks on which
Goodwin was sitting. Billy placed his hand upon the prematurely bald
head of the lieutenant, shoved him down, and said: “Keep below the
dirt, or you’ll get a bullet through your billiard ball. Don’t you know
this is no time to be exposing yourself?”
I have elsewhere celebrated Billy. In doing so I have suggested that,
while he had a high sense of personal duty, he had no sense whatever of
personal danger.
On that terrible 30th of August, 1864, when the mine was exploded at
Petersburg, Goodwin was detailed to act as courier for General Lee and
General Beauregard.
A Northern negro soldier had broken somehow out of the crater and
through the lines. He rushed madly into headquarters. He struck
frantically at General Lee with his bayonet. General Beauregard parried
the blow with his sword. The negro turned and ran out of the door.
Beauregard, in his excitement, called out to Goodwin, “Go and kill that
man!”
Stepping quickly, as was his custom, Billy gave pursuit. A few moments
later he returned. He presented himself in all his superb length
of limb. He gave the military salute to General Beauregard. When
that officer asked: “What is it, orderly?” Billy replied: “I beg
respectfully to report that I have killed that man in accordance with
orders.”
That was Billy. As a soldier he was a good kind. He obeyed all orders
without questioning them. He did all his duties as he understood them.
But, as I have said, I have never been able to determine whether he was
really a brave man, or whether he was merely a man so constituted as to
be insensible to personal danger.
But I will say this for Billy, which may help to decide this point,--
We were marching from Spottsylvania to Cold Harbor. We marched for
fifty-six hours at the double quick. Now and then we had to fight at
the quadruple quick. We had no food. We had no sleep. We had no rest.
Near the end of this tremendous strain Billy came to me under a tree,
where I was snatching a five minutes’ repose. He said, with an air of
great mystery: “I’ve got a coon for my mess. I bought it of a nigger
back there. So I don’t want this piece of corn-bread. I wish you’d take
it. I know you’re hungry.”
We did not readily accept food from each other in those days, lest we
starve each other.
I struggled to resist this proffer, but Billy insisted on that coon as
satisfying all his personal wants. At last, therefore, I accepted the
three or four ounces of powder-grimed corn-bread which he pressed upon
me.
I learned afterwards that Billy had lied.
There wasn’t any coon.
MANASSAS
I call it Manassas.
That is the name we Southerners gave it. We won that battle more
completely and more conspicuously than any other battle was won by
either side during the Civil War.
It is the right of the victor always to name the action. We named it
Manassas. In the North it is called Bull Run.
We reached Manassas after two days and nights of ceaseless marching, at
ten o’clock on the evening of the 20th of July, 1861.
We knew that trouble was at hand; otherwise Stuart would not have swung
us at such a breakneck speed across the mountains from the valley to
this point. We were six hundred strong.
Six hundred young Virginians, cradled in the saddle, and who had shot
wild turkeys as soon as we were able to digest them. There was another
battalion of cavalry present, under Colonel Radford, numbering perhaps
three hundred men. But the story had gone forth in the Northern army
that we were thirty thousand of the finest horsemen ever known since
the days of the Mamelukes.
That story had its part in creating the panic at Manassas.
I believe we were good horsemen. There were men among us who might
have given the Mamelukes points, both in horsemanship and in the use
of the sabre. But if our nine hundred men had been the thirty thousand
reported, we should have thundered into Washington on the night of
Sunday, July 21, 1861, and would have ended the war then and there,
in spite of the presidential stupidity which feared that “aggression”
might anger a people with whom we were at war.
We lay that night in an open field, each man having his horse tethered
to his left arm, and each man booted, spurred, sabred, and pistolled
for instant action.
The bugle sounded no reveille that morning. A shell from the enemy’s
camp, which fell in the midst of the regiment, saved the bugler the
trouble.
With a laugh, which was almost a chuckle, Stuart called out: “That’s
‘boots and saddles,’ boys,” and in an instant we were on our horses.
The first great battle of the war had begun.
It was not until noon, or nearly that, that the cavalry had any real
work to do. I didn’t look at my watch, but it must have been about
noon when Stuart swept us at a tremendous pace through a regiment or
two of Zouaves, and back again over the same ground. I saw no Zouaves
for the reason that there was too much dust to see anything; but it was
understood when the charge was over, that we had driven them back. And
half a dozen empty saddles in our own ranks attested the fact that they
had not been driven back without a stubborn and manly resistance.
A little later, we cavalrymen were ordered up to the support of some
batteries that had temporarily run out of ammunition. Our reputation as
Mamelukes sufficed at that point to prevent a charge, so that our real
work in the battle did not begin until the panic in McDowell’s army set
in.
Then Stuart rose in his stirrups and shouted at the top of his voice:
“They’re licked, boys! They’re licked! They’re licked!”
Then hastily he rattled off orders. The substance of them was that we
were to divide the cavalry into squads of ten and twenty men each, and
proceed at once in pursuit.
“If there aren’t officers, and non-commissioned officers enough, let
anybody command a squad. This is business.”
As the several squads started at a gallop after the enemy, Stuart
called out to each: “Attack any force you find. There is no cohesion
left among ’em.”
In that command he struck the key-note of the whole situation. Seasoned
soldier that he was, he knew that without cohesion, soldiers are
helpless, and numbers count for nothing.
We plunged forward across every ford and along every road that led
from Bull Run towards Centreville. At every point we found “chaos come
again.”
A squad of ten men, armed only with sabres and pistols, but backed by
the Mameluke tradition, would call out to eighty or a hundred fully
armed infantry: “Throw down your arms, or we’ll put you to the sword!
Throw down your arms, or we’ll put you to the sword!”
The panic-stricken men would obey the order instantly, disregarding the
fact that with a single volley they might have swept the insolent squad
instantly out of existence.
It was not merely that the army was panic stricken. It was encumbered
at every step by a multitude of embarrassing picnickers,--a multitude
of men and women who had come out from Washington to see us
exterminated and to join in a triumphal march to Richmond. These people
had brought out with them more superfluous provisions than our army had
eaten for a fortnight. They abandoned their luxuries in the middle of
the road and ran. They left champagne enough unopened for a regiment
to swim in. They fled precipitately, adding at every step by their own
insensate fear to the panic that had already overtaken the troops.
Men cut horses out of vehicles that held helpless women, and madly
mounting them abandoned their charges and their duties, in order to
escape a present and impending danger to themselves. Fortunately for
their charges, the Southerners were not making war on women.
Every woman was instantly assured of her own personal safety. Every
horse that was left behind was hitched at once to a vehicle, and the
vehicle loaded with women was started under an assurance of safe
conduct towards Washington. When the supply of abandoned horses fell
short, it was made good by animals from our batteries, and now and
then by the riderless horse of one of the Mamelukes who had received a
mortal wound.
Along the roads we found many dead men, for whose deaths no coroner
would have been able to account--men utterly destitute of wounds, who
had died clearly either of fright, or of exhaustion, or of both.
At Cub Run, an ambulance or a caisson broke down on the bridge and
obstructed it. The obstruction almost instantly caused a congestion of
two or three thousand panic-stricken soldiers and picnickers on the
hither side of the stream.
Then came Kemper with his guns. He was as black as a negro with powder
smoke. His cannoneers were equally begrimed. From the top of a hill,
not more than two hundred yards distant,--pistol-shot range,--he opened
fire with canister. The effect upon the crowd was instantaneous and
almost startling. Its constituent members dispersed as a covey of
partridges does when a shot-gun is fired into its lurking place. Some
of them ran up the creek. Some of them ran down the creek. Some of them
plunged into the creek, and crossed or drowned, as the case may be.
It was just then that Stuart rode up and cried out: “We’ll go into
Washington to-night, boys. And my headquarters will be at Willard’s
Hotel.”
It was just then also that couriers came, bearing the paralyzing
presidential order to stop the pursuit at Cub Run.
It was just then that the despondency of the Mamelukes began.
A little later it rained.
MY LAST NIGHT ON PICKET
My period of service in the cavalry was about to expire. I was not
tired of the cavalry service; on the contrary, I was very much in love
with it. Any full-blooded man must have been so under such leadership
as Stuart’s.
But for reasons pertaining to Joe, I had sought and obtained a transfer
to the artillery.
Joe was just sixteen.
The infantry regiment in which he had gone out had been so cut
to pieces in a fierce fight that it was dissolved. Joe and a
bullet-riddled flag were about all there was left of it.
Therefore Joe had enlisted in a battery of artillery. He was as brave
a fellow as is made, and as cantankerous and self-assertive as a brave
boy is apt to be. I felt it necessary to be with him to keep him
from being unnecessarily killed or court-martialled, and to exercise
over him that mature, paternal influence which the superior age of
twenty-one justified.
This was my last night of cavalry service. It was late autumn in 1861.
The company was ordered on picket at Fairfax Court House. The enemy
was very urgent just then, and gave us a good deal of trouble on the
picket lines.
I was ordered to a post underneath a very broad and low spreading tree,
so that when I sat upon my horse I was not visible from the thicket in
front, and would not have been even if it had been broad daylight.
That thicket was full of sharp-shooters, and when I went on post about
seven o’clock in the evening, I was instructed to preserve absolute
silence in self-protection, and warned that it would probably not be
possible to relieve me until morning.
My mare was a restless creature at ordinary times, but she had learned
the whole art of picket duty. If I had been anywhere else, she would
have champed the bit, and pawed the ground, and snorted in her
restlessness. Standing there at night, with a bullet whistling over her
head every minute or two, she was as still as the traditional mouse.
I sat there all night on her back with pistols drawn, and in a silence
such as nobody but a picket thus placed ever maintains.
Just as the day was dawning, or rather just as the gray in the eastern
sky began to suggest the possibility of dawn, a sergeant crawling on
his belly approached me from the rear. In a whisper I called out, “Who
goes there?” He, also in a whisper, let me know his identity. He had
come to order my withdrawal from the post.
Not until we had reached a point a hundred yards in the rear was
anything further said. There I found the company drawn up in line with
Charlie Irving at its head.
“Many shots from the thicket?” asked Charlie.
“Two or three to the minute,” I answered, “throughout the night.”
“All right,” he replied, “we’ll scoop those fellows in; they’re getting
to be obnoxious.”
Then in a low tone he told us precisely what we were to do, and we
were to do it without further orders. He was to lead, of course, but
he wanted to give as few commands as possible, in order to make his
movement successful.
Silently we moved off over the soft turf to the left. Crossing the road
below the thicket we struck a gallop and quickly surrounded the space
occupied by the sharp-shooters. It was the work of but a few minutes
to close in upon and capture them. Two of our saddles were emptied in
the operation, and five of the sharp-shooters were left unburied in the
brush; the rest we took with us to headquarters, another company having
replaced us on picket.
Among the prisoners was one little fellow, apparently not over fifteen
or sixteen years of age. His features were clear cut and delicate and
his clothing was worn as if it had belonged to somebody else.
When we had got well to the rear and the daylight was broad, Charlie
Irving looked at the little fellow and said: “How old are you, my boy?”
“Twenty-two,” he replied, “but I’m a girl.”
That girl was sent back under a flag of truce. We didn’t know what else
to do with her.
GRIFFITH’S CONTINUED STORY
It was in the early summer of 1864. We were in the trenches at
Spottsylvania.
It had been raining continuously all day, with now and then a heavy
downpour, just to remind us that a little rain ought not to matter to
old soldiers. By the use of fragments of fence rail and such other
sticks as we could secure to stand upon, we managed to avoid sinking
below our ankles into the soft, red, Virginian mud.
It was a little after two o’clock in the morning, but we were all awake
and on duty. For it was not General Grant’s purpose at that time to
allow us much of repose. We had stood in the trenches and in the rain
all day, and we must stand in the trenches and in the rain all night,
and as much longer as it might please the enemy to keep us there.
The night was one of the blackest I have ever known. There was
no possibility of sending couriers anywhere, and all orders had,
therefore, to be passed from mouth to mouth up and down the lines.
Every few minutes a great downpour of bucketfuls would come; and,
worse still, every now and then the enemy would rush forward in the
darkness and come upon us at pistol-shot range without notice.
It was Ulysses S. Grant we were fighting, and that was the line on
which he was going to “fight it out, if it took all summer.”
We felt the need of entertainment, so somebody called out to a
sergeant: “Tell us a story.”
“No, no,” said Johnny Garrett, “let Griffith tell a story, for he never
finishes, and this is a long night.”
The suggestion was applauded and insisted upon. Whether Griffith
blushed or not, it was much too dark to see; but after a little
chaffing he consented to tell the story. Just as he began Billy
Goodwin, who always wanted to gamble on everything, offered to bet
three to one that he would never finish.
“Shut up, Goodwin,” said Johnny Garrett, “and let him begin, anyhow. If
he don’t get through by the middle of the night, I’ll negotiate the bet
with you.”
Thereupon Griffith began.
“Well, ’taint much of a story--only a bear story.”
“Bet two to one he never gets to the bear,” said the incorrigible
Goodwin.
“Be quiet, will you?” cried some one at the right of the company. The
man next to him mistook this adjuration for a command sent down the
line; so, to the astonishment of everybody to the left of us, the word
was passed from mouth to mouth: “_Be quiet, will you! Be quiet, will
you! Be quiet, will you!_”
“Well,” said Griffith, “’twas about six year ago, or maybe seven. No,
lemme see--’twas the same year that Jim Coffee married Mirandy Adams.
Must have been eight year ago, I s’pose.”
Just then came the order down the line: “Perfect silence! Enemy
advancing!”
The next minute a line of bayonets broke out of the fog in front of us,
and a flaring fire blazed forth in our faces. The charge upon us was a
determined one, and for full three minutes it required all our efforts
to repel it. After that the artillery silenced all conversation by
pouring a shower of shot and shell into the retiring assailants.
“Still ready to make that bet,” said Billy Goodwin. But Griffith began
again undaunted. He was a phlegmatic person, whose mind was never
driven from its not very large purposes by any shock--even that of a
shower of canister.
“Well, as I wuz a-sayin’, it wuz about six or eight year ago--it don’t
really matter, I s’pose, how long ago it wuz--”
“No,” said Billy Goodwin, “let her rip.”
“Well, as I wuz a-sayin’--” Just then the enemy charged again.
Griffith had captured a Henry rifle two days before, in the battle of
the Wilderness, and it was loaded with fourteen ball cartridges. With
that deliberation which characterized him in everything, he delivered
those fourteen shots in the face of the enemy, who by that time had
retired. Then he turned and began to fill the magazine of his rifle
again, saying: “Well, you see, as I wuz a-sayin’, Peter Coffee he taken
a cawntract for a bridge over Tye River. Now Peter always pertended
that he knew how to lay out bridge work. Of course I knew better. I’d
been to Fletcher Massie’s school with him, and I knew just how little
’rithmetic he knew. Fletch, he carried me through the rule o’ three,
and you can’t lay out bridge work till you’ve _bin_ through the rule o’
three.”
The day was dawning, and just then came an order for us to move to the
right, the extreme right, four or five miles away. We marched at once.
Grant was making his celebrated move by the left flank.
When we got into position, it was necessary to throw up such earthworks
as we could with our bayonets, using fence rails for revetments. This
occupied us during most of the day, and scattered as we were, we were
not able to listen to the remainder of Griffith’s story.
That afternoon, to our surprise, we received a ration of three-quarters
of a pound of flour to each man. When we had baked it, I happened to go
by Tom Booker’s position and saw him eating the entire cake. Tom looked
at me pitifully as I remonstrated with him for eating three days’
rations in advance, and he said with tears in his voice if not in his
eyes: “I know it, but I’m go’n’ t’ fill my stomach once, if I starve
for it. I _wish_ I was a woman or a baby.”
A few minutes later came the order to move; our battery was at that
time unhorsed. It had been planned to leave it in the rear, because
its guns could not be moved for lack of horses, but with one voice the
men had demanded the privilege of taking rifles and going with the
battalion as sharp-shooters.
On this march the battalion was the rear guard of the army, and our
rifle-armed battery was the rear guard of the battalion.
For fifty-six hours we marched without food or sleep, pausing every
fifteen minutes to fight awhile, and then double-quicking to catch up.
There was no chance for Griffith in all this. But when we got to Cold
Harbor, and went into the works, Billy Goodwin at a favorable moment
insisted that he should resume his story.
“You see I’ve got three bets on it,” said Billy.
Just then a grape-shot passed through George Campbell’s foot, and
distracted our attention for a time. Then came General Field, who
ordered us to burn a barn in front that was full of sharp-shooters.
The first two or three shots from the battalion did the business.
The sharp-shooters ran with all their might across a thousand yards
of space, while we poured upon them the sharpest rifle fire we could
deliver. Some of them got to cover, and some of them didn’t.
It was not till we moved to Bottom’s Bridge that Griffith had a chance
to resume his story. There we were all sick from having eaten boiled
potato vines, for lack of other food. Being too ill to go to sleep, we
demanded a continuation of the story.
“Well, as I wuz a-sayin’,” said Griffith, “I’d gone clean through the
rule o’ three in Fletch Massie’s school, and Peter Coffee he knew it.
As I told yuh, he’d taken the cawntract to lay out this bridge work; so
he got his wife to write to me to come up and do the ’rithmetic. Well,
just as I wuz startin’ up, Bill Linsey says to me,--you know he kept
a store down there at Arrington, he says to me, says he, ‘Griffith,
there’s a runlet o’ cider that’s got twenty gallon in it. Can you lif’
it?’ I says, ‘Yes, I can lif’ it and drink out o’ the bung, if you’ll
let me drink es much es I please.’ I lifted it and took a big swallow
of the sweet stuff, then I says, ‘I can carry it up the mountain,’ says
I, and he says, says he, ‘On your back?’ says he, an’ I says, ‘Yes,
on my back,’ says I. An’ he says, says he, ‘Well, you can have it ef
you’ll agree to carry it up the mountain on your back, and not take no
lift frum nobody.’”