freaks of extraordinarily good luck, which so often save men from
disaster in war, our first shot severed the gun-boat’s rudder post. Our
second shell passed through her boiler and exploded in her furnace; not
only setting fire to her, but with the escaping steam driving the men
from the gun decks. This left her with only one available gun--a swivel
on the poop.
But that was a sixty-four pound howitzer, one or two shots from which
would have swept us off that island like so much dust. Our good luck
continuing, however, that gun burst at the first fire.
The ship had been a formidable, heavily armed gun-boat, carrying
several eight-inch rifles; but she had been destroyed by two field
pop-guns. She slipped her cables, and drifted around the point with
fire bursting from every port hole. We quickly limbered up and galloped
to another point of attack.
We found the ship’s company escaping over the sides in the boats and
rowing for the marsh beyond. We opened upon them at short range, sank
several of the boats, and then shelled the marsh for scatterers.
When I learned later from Captain Elliot how formidable that ship had
been, I was filled with a great contempt for gun-boats. I was anxious
to get a chance at a gun-boat every morning before breakfast.
I got it presently. With that same section I was ordered a few days
later to Combahee Ferry. There was a gun-boat there. My orders were the
same as before.
This gun-boat was a little, low, insignificant looking sloop. She
seemed to me almost contemptibly easy game. I galloped my guns to
within four hundred yards of her, and ordered them in battery.
We opened fire. The gun-boat for a time paid no attention to us. But
by the time that we had thrown three or four shells at her, she lazily
undertook to attend to our case, in much the same way that a man
brushes a pestilent fly from his nose.
She opened on us with one of those great guns which pitch shells about
the size of a normal nail keg two or three miles, apparently without
effort.
Her first shot revealed to me the fact that I had entirely
misunderstood gun-boats.
It was obvious that a single one of those shells, should it burst
anywhere in the neighborhood of my guns, would put a final end to that
section of artillery and to all that went to constitute it.
During the next five minutes we bumped those guns at a gallop over the
old cotton rows, until we reached the cover of the woodland.
Whether that little sloop carried one gun or twenty, I never knew.
But the rapidity of her fire, as we crossed that old cotton field,
convinced me, for the time being, that she carried at least a hundred.
TWO MINUTES
He spent the evening singing “Lorena.”
He had had a sort of day-off that day, and had visited all of his
friends.
The author of that song had made it read:--
“A hundred weeks have passed, Lorena,”
but our guest improved upon that, and made the lover rather aged by
singing it:--
“A hundred _years_ have passed, Lorena,
Since last I held thy hand in mine.”
This was the only positive evidence we had that he had been calling.
He stayed with us that night, and was not feeling well enough the
next day even to sing “Lorena.” The next day after that he found some
serious work to do.
The way of it was this: He was a third lieutenant in the engineers. It
was after the great mine explosion at Petersburg, and the engineers
were busily engaged at that time using all their devices for the
discovery of other mines. They had found one in process of construction
in front of General Grade’s lines. They had proceeded at once to run
a deeper tunnel under this one. They had loaded the end of it, just
underneath the enemy’s works, with an incredible amount of gunpowder,
and on that morning it was to be fired.
A slow-match had been brought from the powder to the mouth of the mine.
It was lighted, and a period of waiting ensued. The match had evidently
gone out. Where, nobody knew or could guess. The general in command
of that part of the line turned to the captain of engineers and said:
“The mine must be blown up at once; will you go in and light the match
again?”
The captain hesitated, saying: “I don’t know; it may go off at any
moment.”
Thereupon he who had sung “Lorena” stepped forward, touched his cap to
the general, and said: “With your permission, _I_ will go in and fire
it.”
“Thank you,” said the general; “go.”
The man picked up the torch and started into the mine. It seems that
the slow-match had gone out within a very short distance of the powder
magazine. But disregarding that he touched the torch to it, set it off
again, and ran with all his might for the mouth of the opening.
It was two minutes’ work. The mine went off just before he reached the
outlet, and the air pressure literally blew him out of it. He fell
sprawling on his face. He was considerably bruised and scratched in his
contact with the gravelly ground, but he was not in any serious way
injured. Picking himself up, grimed as he was, he took off his cap,
and dusting himself like a schoolboy who has fallen in the street, he
approached the commanding officer and said: “General, I have the honor
to report that I have fired the mine and that it has gone off.”
The general touched his cap and replied: “I had observed that fact, and
I thank you very much. I beg to say that I will make an official report
of the circumstance.”
Two days later we all touched our caps to a freshly made
brigadier-general of the engineers. The captain who had hesitated
remained a captain.
SI TUCKER--COWARD AND HERO
I was in command of Fort Lamkin, a mortar fort, in rear of General
Bushrod Johnson’s lines at Petersburg in 1864.
The fort was named for our immediate commander, from whose command we
had been detached for this service.
One day Lamkin himself came to me when I was at his headquarters. He
was obviously in trouble.
“This boy, Si Tucker,” he said, “is the son of one of the best friends
I ever had in the world. The boy is a coward. He literally _lives_ in
a rat hole. I have repeatedly pulled him out by the legs, only to have
him crawl back again the moment I let go of his ankles. I don’t know
what to do. It’s my duty, of course, to prefer charges of cowardice
against him; and if I do, he will certainly be shot--and his father is
my best friend.”
He paused meditatively, and then said with eagerness in his voice: “Why
can’t you take him?”
I agreed at once. I told him I would take the boy with me to my pits,
and make “either a soldier or a stiff” out of him within the next
twenty-four hours. I was under no obligations to his father; I had
never even met any of his relatives, and I had seen too many years of
service to have much patience with cowardice.
The boy was sent for and ordered to go with me. We walked down towards
Blandford church. At the proper point we turned out of the Jerusalem
plank road across the fields towards Fort Lamkin. Half-way there and on
the top of a little hill, which was especially exposed to the gaze of
the sharp-shooters, I made Si Tucker sit down by my side. There we came
to an understanding.
I told him that he had been assigned to me to be shot out of hand, or
to be court-martialled for cowardice, which at that particular juncture
of the war meant very much the same thing. I explained to him that he
was about to join a detachment, composed exclusively of men specially
selected for their courage--every one of them a volunteer for what was
deemed a peculiarly dangerous service.
I explained further that I should require him to do his duty as they
did theirs.
“You have managed to make for yourself,” I said, “the reputation of a
coward. You have now one last chance to redeem yourself. You must do
that, or you must die.”
The sharp-shooters were, in the meantime, picking at us most
uncomfortably as we sat there. My experience as an old soldier strongly
suggested to me that we ought to move. The position was of that kind
that military men call untenable. Nevertheless, I thought it best to
keep Si Tucker there a minute longer, for purposes of observation, if
nothing else.
“At our pits,” I said, “we have one uniform rule of procedure. When a
bombardment begins, the men go to their guns. I take my stand on top
of the magazine mound to watch the enemy’s fire and direct our own. If
I see that a mortar shell is about to fall into one of the gun pits, I
call out the pit number, and the men run into the bomb-proof until the
explosion is over. No man ever goes into a bomb-proof till this order
is given. You must do as the rest do. If you run to a bomb-proof before
I have given the order, it will be my imperative duty to shoot you then
and there; and I shall certainly discharge that duty. Do you fully
understand that, Si?”
He thought he did, and as the sharp-shooters were by this time becoming
pestilently personal in their attentions, we resumed our walk.
Half an hour after our arrival at Fort Lamkin, a bombardment began.
I didn’t want to shoot that boy. I distinctly preferred to make a
soldier rather than a “stiff” out of him. So, instead of taking my
customary stand on the mound of earth over the magazine, I ordered Joe
to that post, and placed myself in the gun pit to which Si Tucker had
been assigned, taking care to stand between him and the mouth of the
bomb-proof. I spoke to him as I passed.
“Remember what I told you. If you forget, it is instant death.”
He remembered. For nearly two hours he stood there quaking and
quivering, but not daring to seek safety by retreat to a bomb-proof.
By the time that the outburst was over, Si Tucker had learned his first
lesson in war. He had learned to realize that a man may endure a lot of
very savage fire, and yet come out of it alive.
A few hours later, when the guns were at work again, Si was steady
enough in his nerves to carry shells to the guns. The next day he was
even able during a bombardment to cut fuses--a delicate operation
requiring a steady hand.
Within two or three days he had become as good a soldier as we had in
all that band of men specially picked for their unflinching courage.
When the great mine explosion occurred a few weeks later, I had
occasion to rebuke Si Tucker for a fault quite unrelated to cowardice.
We had been ordered to go with our mortars as near as possible to the
crater, and to drop a continual rain of shells among the thousands of
helpless fellows in that awful pit.
It was cruel, ghastly work. But it was war. And a poet has justly
characterized war as a “brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art.” Or as
General Sherman once said,--and he knew,--“War is all hell.”
We were within sixty yards of the crater. Each one of our mortars was
belching from three to five shells a minute into that hole; but Si
Tucker’s enthusiasm was not satisfied. Having no personal duty to do at
the moment, he began plugging shells with long fuses, lighting them,
running with them to the margin of the pit, and tossing them in as hand
grenades. He was greeted by a tremendous volley of musketry at each
repetition of this performance, but he did it three times before we
could stop him.
That evening, near the gloaming, he did another thing. The lines had by
that time been restored. The men in the crater--those of them who had
not been killed--had been driven back to the Federal side. We became
aware of the fact that a poor fellow of our own was lying grievously
wounded near the Federal side of the fifty yards that separated our
works from the enemy’s. He had been lying there through all that long,
fierce summer day. The explosion at daylight had cast him there.
His groans and his cries for help and for water were piteous in the
extreme. We listened to them heartbroken but helpless--all but Si
Tucker.
Si began stripping off his clothes; we thought he had gone mad. But
when we asked him why he was stripping himself, he replied: “Never you
mind.”
With that, stripped to the skin, he leaped over the works, ducked
his head low, and ran through that hailstorm of bullets to where the
wounded man lay. Grasping him quickly, he slung him upon his back like
a bag of meal, and ran back with all his might.
As he crossed the works he fell headlong.
The surgeon found three bullets in his body.
Nobody in the battery ever remembered after that, that Si Tucker had
once been a coward.
After all, it is perhaps mainly a question of nerves.
WAR AS A THERAPEUTIC AGENT
Doctor Towns was a wealthy gentleman in Mississippi.
For a good many years he had employed Miss R---- of Massachusetts
as governess for his daughters. She had lived all these years as an
honored member of his family, with every social opportunity that
Mississippi society afforded.
At last the two girls outgrew the need of a governess. One of them was
sent abroad to study art at Nuremberg. The other got married.
Upon the occurrence of this event Doctor Towns went to the young lady,
Miss R----, and suggested that as her services had been of incalculable
value to his daughters he was anxious to secure for her, now that
they no longer needed her, an equally good situation in some other
gentleman’s family.
He explained that he had already written to a friend in Alabama
strongly recommending her, and that his friend desired her to come on
at once.
Apparently this pleased Miss R---- very greatly. She packed her trunks
that night with the aid of the colored maid who had been assigned to
her service. She was to leave in the morning.
In the morning word came down from her chamber that she was unable to
get up. Every attention and every sympathy was shown her, and after a
day or two Doctor Towns, finding himself baffled to discover disease of
any kind, sent for another physician. The other physician was equally
unsuccessful. The simple fact was that the young woman could not get
out of her bed. Why she could not get out of her bed was a problem that
the medical men were wholly unable to solve. The young woman’s appetite
was excellent, and all her functions seemed to be in an entirely normal
condition.
Nevertheless, she could not get up.
Week after week she lay there, attentively waited upon by the servants,
assiduously visited by the family, sympathetically condoled with by
friends, but still utterly unable to arise from her bed. Her salary was
continued all the while, of course.
The servants at last became suspicious.
To their minds it seemed incredible that she should live so long and
so comfortably without exercise. They suspected that she got up in the
night and walked the floor. To test this they gently sprinkled her
floor with pulverized starch while she slept, and then turned out the
lights. But weeks of experimentation of this character utterly failed
to reveal that the young woman ever got out of her bed.
She read the newspapers with great diligence every day, and she read
all the new books that came out, for they all came to Doctor Towns’s
household.
She even wrote now and then, lying there in bed, for newspapers and
magazines with which she had established connections. She was a
brilliant woman, and her matter was acceptable in the market.
She lay thus, for eighteen months. Then came secession.
The newspapers were filled with it. When at last war became an obvious
fact, and escape from the South to any Northern person disinclined
to Southern policies was manifestly a matter of but a few days, Miss
R---- suddenly, I may almost say miraculously, recovered. She got up
one morning and packed her trunks before six o’clock. At seven, when
the family breakfast was served, she appeared in the dining-room, and
calmly asked: “Will you kindly send me to the railroad station, Doctor
Towns? I’m going North to-day.”
No explanation was ever asked or ever given.
Miss R---- went North. That was all.
“NOTES ON COLD HARBOR”[1]
I always think of our arrival at Cold Harbor as marking a new phase of
the war.
By the time that we had reached that position, we had pretty well got
over our astonishment and disappointment at the conduct of General
Grant.
I put the matter in that way because, as I remember, astonishment and
disappointment were the prevailing emotions in the ranks of the army
of Northern Virginia when we discovered, after the contest in the
Wilderness, that General Grant was not going to retire behind the river
and permit General Lee to carry on a campaign against Washington in the
usual way, but was moving to the Spottsylvania position instead.
We had been accustomed to a program which began with a Federal advance,
culminated in one great battle, and ended in the retirement of the
Union army, the substitution of a new Federal commander for the one
beaten, and the institution of a more or less offensive campaign on
our part.
This was the usual order of events, and this was what we confidently
expected when General Grant crossed into the Wilderness. But here was a
new Federal general, fresh from the West, and so ill informed as to the
military customs in our part of the country, that when the battle of
the Wilderness was over, instead of retiring to the north bank of the
river, and awaiting the development of Lee’s plans, he had the temerity
to move by his left flank to a new position, there to try conclusions
with us again.
We were greatly disappointed with General Grant, and full of curiosity
to know how long it was going to take him to perceive the impropriety
of his course.
But by the time that we reached Cold Harbor, we had begun to understand
what our new adversary meant, and there, for the first time I think,
the men in the ranks of the army of Northern Virginia realized that the
era of experimental campaigns against us was over; that Grant was not
going to retreat; that he was not to be removed from command because he
had failed to break Lee’s resistance; and that the policy of pounding
had begun, and would continue until our strength should be utterly worn
away, unless by some decisive blow to the army in our front, or some
brilliant movement in diversion,--such as Early’s invasion of Maryland
a little later was intended to be,--we should succeed in changing the
character of the contest.
We began to understand that Grant had taken hold of the problem of
destroying the Confederate strength in the only way that the strength
of such an army, so commanded, could be destroyed, and that he intended
to continue the plodding work till the task should be accomplished,
wasting very little time or strength in efforts to make a brilliant
display of generalship in a contest of strategic wits with Lee. We at
last began to understand what Grant had meant by his expression of a
determination to “fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.”
Our state of mind, however, was curiously illustrative of the character
of the contest, and of the people who participated in it on the part of
the South. The Southern folk were always debaters, loving logic, and
taking off their hats to a syllogism.
They had never been able to understand how any reasonable mind could
doubt the right of secession, or fail to see the unlawfulness and
iniquity of coercion, and they were in a chronic state of astonished
incredulity, as the war began, that the North could indeed be about to
wage a war that was manifestly forbidden by unimpeachable logic.
In the same way, at Cold Harbor, we were all disposed to waste a good
deal of intellectual energy in demonstrating to each other the absurd
and unreasonable character of General Grant’s procedure. We could show
that he must have lost already in that campaign more men than Lee’s
entire force, and ought, logically, to acknowledge his defeat and
retire; that having begun the contest with an overwhelming advantage in
point of numbers, he ought to be ashamed to ask for reinforcements; and
that while continuing the process of suffering great losses, in order
to inflict much smaller losses on us, he could ultimately wear us out,
it was inconceivable that any general should consent to win in that
unfair way.
In like manner we were prepared to prove the wicked imbecility of
his plan of campaign--a plan that could only end by placing him in a
position below Richmond and Petersburg, which he might just as well
reach by an advance from Fort Monroe, without the tremendous slaughter
of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, etc.
In view of General Grant’s stolid indifference to considerations of
this character, however, there was nothing for us to do but fight the
matter out.
We had no fear of the ultimate result, however plainly our own
perception of facts pointed to the inevitable destruction of our power
of resistance. We had absolute faith in Lee’s ability to meet and repel
any assault that might be made, and to devise some means of destroying
Grant. There was, therefore, no fear in the Confederate ranks of
anything that General Grant might do; but there was an appalling and
well-founded fear of starvation, which indeed some of us were already
suffering. From the beginning of that campaign our food-supply had been
barely sufficient to maintain life, and on the march from Spottsylvania
to Cold Harbor it would have been a gross exaggeration to describe it
in that way.
In my own battery, three hard biscuits and one very meagre slice of fat
pork were issued to each man on our arrival, and that was the first
food that any of us had seen since our departure from Spottsylvania,
two days before. The next supply did not come till two days later, and
it consisted of a single cracker per man, with no meat at all.
We practised a very rigid economy with this food, of course. We ate the
pork raw, partly because there was no convenient means of cooking it,
but more because cooking would have involved some waste. We hoarded
what we had, allowing ourselves only a nibble at any one time, and
that only when the pangs of hunger became unbearable.
But what is the use of writing about the pangs of hunger? The words are
utterly meaningless to persons who have never known actual starvation,
and they cannot be made other than meaningless. Hunger to starving
men is wholly unrelated to the desire for food as that is commonly
understood and felt. It is a great agony of the whole body and soul as
well. It is an unimaginable, all-pervading pain, inflicted when the
strength to endure pain is utterly gone. It is the great, despairing
cry of a wasting body--a cry of flesh and blood, marrow, nerves, bones,
and faculties for strength with which to exist and to endure existence.
It is a horror which, once suffered, leaves an impression that is never
erased from the memory, and to this day the agony of that campaign
comes back upon me at the mere thought of any living creature’s lacking
the food it desires, even though its hunger be only the ordinary
craving, and the denial be necessary for the creature’s health.
When we reached Cold Harbor, the command to which I belonged had been
marching almost continuously day and night for more than fifty hours
without food; and, for the first time, we knew what actual starvation
was. It was during that march that I heard a man wish himself a
woman,--the only case of the kind I ever heard of,--and he uttered the
wish half in grim jest, and made haste to qualify it by adding “or a
baby.”
Yet we recovered our cheerfulness at once after taking the first nibble
of the crackers issued to us there, and made a jest of the scantiness
of the supply. One tall, lean mountaineer, Jim Thomas by name, who
received a slight wound every time he was under fire, and was never
sufficiently hurt to quit duty, was standing on a bank of earth slowly
munching a bit of his last cracker and watching the effect of some
artillery fire which was in progress at the time, when a bullet carried
away his cap and cut a strip of hair from his head, leaving the scalp
for a space as bald as if it had been shaved with a razor. He sat
down at once to nurse a sharp headache, and then discovered that the
cracker he had held in his hand was gone, leaving a mere fragment in
his grasp. At first he was in doubt whether he might not have eaten it
unconsciously; but he quickly discovered that it had been knocked out
of his hand and crushed to bits by a bullet, whereupon as he sat there
in an exposed place, where the fire was unobstructed, he lamented his
loss in soliloquy.