Chapter XIV: The Cave

On the thirteenth of June grey countermines were begun from all the
main grey works. The men worked continuously upon these, and in the
night-time they strengthened the breaches made by the daily fierce
cannonade. With the few hundred entrenching tools, with the improvised
spades, the bayonet picks, with earth carried in camp-buckets, with
all ingenious makeshifts, they burrowed and heaped continuously. But
they laboured, now, somewhat weakly. They were so tired. The heat of
that Southern land was frightful, and the confinement in the trenches
was frightful. The thought began to sicken at those deep troughs in
the earth. In the scanty sleep of officers and men they pressed upon
the brain; they grew to seem trenches in the brains, troughs filled
with dead thoughts, thoughts that still suffered. There was no relief
from the trenches, no relief at all, except when a wound came—a bad
wound—or fever came—serious fever with delirium—when the wounded or
the fevered was borne with some risk from shells and minies to the
hospital. Even in the hospital the trenches stayed in the brain. It
came that, in the trenches, the tired, tired soldiers looked with
something like envy upon the wounded or the fevered as he was borne
away. “That fellow’s going to get some sleep.”—“Stop your nodding,
Jimmy!—nodding same as if you were in church!”—“Captain’s
calling!”—“Go ’way! If you jerk your head back like that you’ll break
your neck.”—“I wouldn’t care,” said Jimmy, “if it just meant sleeping
on and on.”—“It wouldn’t. You’d be fighting again somewhere else in a
jiffy!—O God! these trenches.”

Officers and men were dead for sleep. Officers and men had never
dreamed of such fatigue. Officers and men handled sword and musket
with hands that were hard to keep ennerved and watched the foe with
eyes over which the lids would droop. It was growing ghastly at
Vicksburg, and the June sun beat down, beat down. In the infrequent
times when the river was clear of smoke it lay glittering like
diamonds and topazes, paining the weary eye. North and east and south
the cloud rarely lifted. A thinner battle cloud overhung the
seven-mile Confederate line. The grey could not spend powder as might
the blue, nor did they have the blue’s great horde of guns. But what
with the blue and what with the grey all Vicksburg and its environs
dwelled day after day, week after week, in a battle murk. The smoke
was always there; the smell, the taste, were always there. The
pitiless sun was no less hot for the ashen gauze through which it
struck. Shorn of its beams, it rose and moved through the muddy blue,
and set like a thick red-gold buckler, from behind which came lances
of heat and madness. With the night there came drenching dews and the
mist from the river. Heat and cold beat on the same men, cramped
forever in the same trenches.

On the tenth day of the siege the eighteen thousand fighting men had
been put on half-rations. Later these were greatly reduced. At first
five ounces of poor corn or pea flour were issued daily; later the
amount fell to three ounces. The mules in the place were slaughtered,
but the meat gained in this way fed but a few. After mid-June the cats
disappeared from the town. In the spring Vicksburg had had its fair
vegetable gardens. Now every eatable root below or stalk or seed above
the ground was gone. The small, unripe fruit, peach or quince or fig,
the hard green berries, were gathered, stewed, and eaten. All things
were eaten that could be eaten, but the men grew large-eyed, and their
physical strength flagged. From almost the beginning the water had
been bad. The men in the river batteries and the troops upon the right
suffered most where all suffered much. The Federal shot and shell had
slain, in the first days of the siege, a number of horses and mules.
It being the first of the siege and starvation not yet above the
horizon, these animals were dragged in the night to the river and
thrown in. Now the cisterns were exhausted, the wells were
insufficient. They were forced to draw by night the water from the
edge of the river, filled with maggots as it was. They dug shallow
wells in the hollows and dips of the land and placed sentinels over
them to see that the water was not wasted. The water was there for
drinking or for the slight cooking that went on; there was never any
for washing. Some men forgot the feel of cleanliness; others set their
lips and did without. Powder-grime and sweat; drenching rains that
lined and floored every trench with miserable mire; fierce, beating
suns that made the mire into a dust that stiffened the hair and choked
the pores; effluvia, blood, refuse that could not be carted away, that
there was not time to bury,—the trenches at Vicksburg and the slight
camps behind grew like a bad dream, vague and sickening. Hunger that
could not be fed dwelled in Vicksburg, weariness that could not find
rest, insufficient sleep, dirt, thirst, wounds, disease. Fever was
there hugely, fever and flux, exhaustion, debility, and also
hyperexcitement; strange outbreaks of nature and strange sinkings
together. Once there was a hint of cholera. Two surgeons stood over
the man who had been lifted from the trench and now lay writhing on
the earth under a roof of dried pine boughs.

“It looks mighty suspicious,” said one in a weary voice, barely rising
above a whisper. “That’s why I called you. It would be the last
stroke.”

The other nodded. “You’re right there. I’ve seen it once before, off a
ship at Tampa, but I’m not sure that this is it. There’s a mock here
of everything in the world that’s awful, so it may be a mock of that,
too.”

“I’ve heard that chloroform is good. One part chloroform, three parts
water, two—”

“Yes. There isn’t any chloroform.”

The man died, but, whatever it had been, that particular disease did
not spread. Others did. They spread apace.

A grey mine was started from within the Third Louisiana Redan by
sinking a vertical shaft and then digging outward a gallery under the
Federal sap. Night and day the grey worked, and night and day worked
the blue. The grey worked hungry, the blue worked fed. The grey worked
heavy-lidded, with long, long shifts. The blue worked, rested and
refreshed, with short shifts. The blue had every modern appliance for
their work, the grey had not. The grey worked with desperation upon
their inclined gallery; the blue drove steadily and apace toward the
salient of the redan.

Now and then there were assaults where the enemy thought his cannon or
his mines had made a practicable breach. These were driven back, and
then the great guns belched flame and thundered. The grey guns
answered where answers were most strongly indicated; never had they
had ammunition to spend on mere pleasure of defiance. Now here, now
there, along the lines, leaping from place to place like lightning,
musketry flamed and crackled. Always the blue minies kept up their
singing, and always the many and deadly sharpshooters watched to pick
off men and officers. The gunboats and the mortars from the Louisiana
shore helped with a lavish hand the land guns. Day chiefly saw the
bombardments, but there were nights when the region shook; when the
bombs, exploding, reddened the sky; when, copper-hued, saffron-tinged,
the clouds rolled over the place; when there was shriek and thunder,
light and murk, glare and horror of the great city of Dis.

Désirée could not rest within the cave or on the bench among the ivy
sprays. Hard-by was now a field hospital, and now each morning she
left the ruined garden, mounted a little rise of ground, descended it,
and found herself under a shed-like structure amid ghastly sights and
sounds of suffering. Here she ministered as best she might. Like other
Southern women she was familiar with plantation accidents. She knelt
and helped with capable hands, preferring to be there and occupied
than to sit in the torn garden and hear upon the wind the sobbing and
crying of this place. At night, lying upon her pallet, she sometimes
stopped her ears against it. Sight horrified the brain, but hearing
twisted the heartstrings. She never fancied that she distinguished
Edward’s voice; if he were hurt he would not cry aloud. But she
trembled to hear the others crying, and though she loved life she
would have died for them if she could have thereby stopped the crying.

Now and again she went into the town. It was a place now of thin-faced
heroism, large-eyed endurance, seldom-speaking women, patient
children. Hunger was in the town as well as at the lines, hunger and
fever, hunger and fever! Mourning was there, too; not loud but deep.
There were so many widows, so many orphans. There were sisters with a
brother’s death upon their hearts; there were betrothed girls who now
would never marry. All were brave, with a dumb heroism. The past told.
Aryan emigrants, women of the dark Teutonic forest, Pictish women,
women of a Roman strain, Angle and Dane and Celt and Saxon, Gaul and
Iberian and Hebrew,—yes, and women of Africa,—the wide past of
famished sieges, of back to the wall, of utter sacrifice, came again
to the town of Vicksburg upon the Mississippi River.

Désirée returned to Cape Jessamine. The ruined garden was ruined now,
indeed, torn by shot and shell, sunbaked, withered, dead. Post, beam,
and rafter of the burned house no longer stood like a hieroglyphic
against the sky. An exploding shell had wrecked the last support and
all had fallen. Désirée, passing close, one day, saw a snake among the
warped timbers. The trees had lost all greenness. They, too, suffered
deadly injury from the shells. The flowers were all withered. They
could not bloom in that heavy and sulphurous air. The bed of
mignonette grew yellow and thin and wan. It lost its odour. The birds
were gone long ago. One neither heard the buzz of bees nor saw a
butterfly. It was as though a wizard’s wand were waving away life and
loveliness.

Désirée kept her beauty, but it grew beauty of the inner outward,
beauty of a myriad complexities, subtleties, intensities. Memory was
there and forecasting, and everything heightened. She had her Leonardo
look; she went from hour to hour, not unsmiling, but the smile was
remote from mirth and near to thought. Her physical being was clean,
poised, and strong. She fared as scantily as all the others, but she
did not perceptibly weaken. Or if the body weakened, she drew deep
upon the innermost reserve and braced nerve and muscle with her will.
The field hospital thought her tireless.

As she left the garden one day, a mine was sprung under the nearest
salient and a breach made through which a blue wave at once undertook
to pour. The grey meeting it, there followed three minutes of shock
and roar, when the blue went back. It was an ugly breach, and while
the grey cannon thundered it must be quickly mended. All the men
possible fell to digging, while sand bags were brought and great
bolsters of earth wrapped in old tenting. “Hurry!” said the captains.
“Dig fast!”

Désirée went nearer and nearer. A man with a spade, making some
headway with a hillock of earth, which, as he loosened, another
scraped into a sack, fell dead, the brain pierced by a sharpshooter’s
bullet. The man with the sack made a “_Tchk!_” with his tongue, then
turned to shout for another digger. His eyes fell on Désirée.

“What are you doing here, ma’am? This ain’t no place for a woman.”

Désirée bent and took the spade from the dead man’s grasp. “I am
strong,” she said, “and I like to dig. Hold the sack open.”

She worked for an hour, until the breach was fully mended. At the last
her fellow worker and she struck the dirt from their hands, and,
straightening themselves, looked at each other.

“You do fine,” he said. “I reckon you must have had some digging to do
once.”

“Yes, I had,” she answered. “For a long time and much of it. I am
coming again.”

The next day there was a bombardment that shook earth and sky. When,
in the late afternoon, it was over, the air rested thick as on the
slopes of a volcano in action, dusk and thick and heavy with the
sullen odour of strife. Through the false twilight, Désirée, now at
the cave, saw looming figures, litter-bearers. She knew they would
come in at the ruined gate, and they came. She met them by the fallen
house. “I am not badly hurt,” said Edward’s voice. “Don’t think it!
And how blessed to have Cape Jessamine to come to—”

The time wore on toward late June. The month of roses, here, was a
month of red flowers of death. Outward from the Third Louisiana Redan
dug feverishly the grey miners driving a gallery beneath the Federal
sap. Outward from the blue lines dug fast and far the blue sappers,
making for the Third Louisiana Redan that crowned a narrow ridge.
Within the redan, seeing the explosion approach, the grey built a
second parapet some yards behind the first. On the twenty-fifth the
explosion came. The salient was wrecked, six men who were digging a
shaft were buried alive. Through the thick smoke and infernal din was
pushed a blue charge, hurrahing. The grey were ready at the second
parapet. The Sixth Missouri, held by Forney in reserve, poured into
the injured works. “_Yaaaaih!_” they yelled; “_Yaaaaih! Yaaaaihhhh!_”
and checked the blue with a deadly volley. Their colonel—Colonel
Erwin—mounted the shattered parapet. He waved his sword. “Charge, men,
charge!” A minie killed him, but his men poured over the parapet.
There was fierce hand-to-hand fighting. Dark came, the blue holding
ditch and slope of the outer, now ruined parapet, the grey masters of
the inner works.

In the middle of the night the two Confederate mines beyond the
stockade redan were exploded, filling up the Federal sap and parallels
and destroying their sap rollers. There was also this night a transfer
of guns, a Dahlgren gun being added to the battery facing the enemy’s
works on the Jackson road, and a ten-inch mortar mounted on the
Warrenton road. Off and on, throughout this night, arose a fierce
rattle of musketry, came an abortive blue attempt to storm the grey
line. Half the grey men watched; the other half slept upon its arms.

Life in the town grew tense and vibrant. Also something high and clear
came into it and a certain _insouciance_. The caves gave parties.
There was no room to dance and there was nothing to eat; but parties
the slight gatherings were called. In the hospitals the wounded ceased
to blench at the crashing shells. The surgeons and nursing women went
lightly between the pallets, nor turned their heads because a roof was
struck. The large-eyed children played quietly in the cave mouths, or
gathered about some woman who told them of Cinderella and Beauty and
the Beast. The negro mammies crooned the babies to sleep. Officers and
men passed through the streets, exhibiting a certain wan jauntiness.
Commissariat and quartermasters said pleasant things about the
squirrel’s store with which they must feed an army, and the
powder-horn and pouch of shot from which they must keep it in
ammunition. The noncombatant citizens did their share toward keeping
up the general spirits. Songs appeared, and there was a general and
curious readiness to laugh. A Vicksburg newspaper faced with a
thoughtful brow the giving-out of paper and a consequent suspension of
issue. It did not want to suspend. It viewed a forlorn little
wall-paper shop, and it went across and purchased the dusty stock. The
next morning it came out with a backing of noble arabesque, of morning
glories on trellises, of green and gold leaves and cabbage roses.

Down at Cape Jessamine undeniably there was happiness. Edward Cary’s
wound was not grave. It disabled, kept him lying, thin and pale, on
the pallet which for light and air Désirée had dragged near to the
cave entrance. But there was no fever. His superb, clean manhood told.
The two of them kept bodily poise, and with it the mental. They were
happy; a strange, personal happiness in the midst of menace and the
gathering public woe. It was not selfishness; they would have laid
aside bliss itself like a gold mantle and gone down to lazar rags and
the cold and dark forever if they could thereby have rescued their
world. That could not be; they were here on a raft together in the
midst of the ocean; they could only serve themselves and each other.
They had had few days and hours together. The lover’s passion was yet
upon them; each to the other was plainly aureoled. He lay with the
veil of ivy drawn back so that he might see the battle cloud. She
tended him, she prepared their scanty food, she brought water at
nightfall from the little spring. Sometimes she left him to go help
awhile in the field hospital. But he was as badly hurt as many there;
with a clear conscience she might choose to tend this wounded soldier.
She did so choose.

The hot days went by beneath the bowl of brass that was the sky. The
murk came up to the cave, the steady thunder shook the ivy sprays.
Désirée sat upon the earth beside the pallet. Sometimes they talked
together, low-voiced; sometimes, in long silent spaces, they looked
each on the aureoled other. He was most beautiful to her, and she to
him. A faint splendour dwelled in the cave and over this part of the
withered garden, a strange, transforming, golden light. They smelled
the honeysuckle, they smelled the mignonette. They thought they heard
the singing of the birds.

On the twenty-sixth the mortars upon the Louisiana side began again to
throw huge shells into the town, while the gunboats opened a rapid and
heavy firing upon the lower batteries. This continued. On the
twenty-eighth the grey exploded a mine before the lunette on the
Baldwin’s Ferry road, where the Federal sap was within six yards of
the ditch. At point after point now, the blue line held that near the
grey. At places the respective parapets were fearfully close. There
was fighting with hand grenades, there was tossing of fire-balls
against the sap rollers behind which worked the blue miners.

Night attacks grew frequent; all the weakened grey soldiers lay on
their arms; no one, day or night, could leave the trenches. The
wounded, the fevered, the hunger-weakened, the sleepless—Vicksburg’s
defenders grew half wraith, half scarecrow.

In the dead night of the twenty-ninth, after five hours of a sultry
and sullen stillness, every blue cannon appeared to open. From the
Louisiana shore, from the river, from the land, north, east, and
south, came the blast.

Désirée parted the mat of ivy and watched with Edward from the mouth
of the cave.

“The twenty-ninth!” he said. “It is, I think, the beginning of the
end. I doubt if we can hold out another week.”

She sat on the earth beside him, her head against the pillow. Lip and
ear must be near together; at any distance the blast carried the voice
away. “The beginning of the end.... You think General Johnston will
not come?”

“How can he? I saw the force that he had. It is not possible. He is
right in refusing to play the dare-devil or to sacrifice for naught.
He should have been listened to in the beginning.”

“And we cannot cut our way out?”

“Evacuate? How many could march ten miles? No. Troy’s down—Troy’s
down!”

“Richmond is Troy.”

“... That is true. Then this is one of the small Asian towns.”

Without the ivy sprays there was a red and awful light. They saw the
world as by calcium. The stars were put out, but the flashes burnished
the piled battle clouds. Bronze and copper and red gleamed the
turreted fierce clouds. Below were now sharply shown, now hidden, the
Vicksburg lines, the heaped, earthen front. Redan and redoubt and
lunette and the long ragged rifle-pits between,—now they showed and
now the smoke drove between.

“It repeats and repeats,” said Edward. “Life’s a labyrinth, and the
clue broke at the beginning.”

“Love is the clue.”

“Love like ours? There must be many kinds of love.”

“Yes. But love in all its degrees. From love of thought to love of the
snake that I saw again to-day. Love in all its degrees casting out
hate in all its degrees. Love that lives and lets live. Love that is
wise.”

“Is it always wise?”

“It can be made so. All other clues will break like packthread.”

The light grew intenser. Houses in the town had been set afire. Air
and earth shook, all the heavy, buried strings vibrated. Sound rolled
against the ear like combers of a sea, deep, terrific, with a ground
swell, with sudden, wild accesses as when world navies are wrecked.
The smell of powder smoke gathered, familiar, familiar, familiar!
Marching feet were heard, going down to the lines—the City Guard
probably, called to come and help.

“Packthread,” said Edward. “All this to break like packthread and go
out like flaming tow.... Love and Thought the sole weavers of
relations. Love and Thought the related and the relation....”

The rapid and heavy cannonading stopped with the amber dawn. The
Federal sappers were again under the Third Louisiana Redan. They
worked behind a timber-and-wire screen against which in vain the grey
threw hand grenades and fire balls. Lockett, the chief engineer, had a
barrel, filled with a hundred and twenty-five pounds of powder and
carrying a time fuse of fifteen seconds, rolled over the parapet
toward the blue shelter. The explosion sent the timber screen in a
thousand fragments into the air; behind it there came a shouting and
running. All this day there was heavy firing from the river.

The morning of July first all division commanders received from
General Pemberton a confidential note. It stated succinctly that
apparently the siege of Vicksburg could not be raised and that
supplies were exhausted. There remained an attempt at evacuation. The
note asked for reports as to the condition of the troops and their
ability to make the marches and endure the fatigues necessary to a
successful issue. The major-generals put the note before the
brigadiers, and the brigadiers before the colonels. There was but one
answer. The _morale_ of the men was good—yes! and again yes! But for
the rest, for their physical condition, so hungry, so tired, so
staggering from weakness....

This was in the morning. At one in the afternoon of this first of July
the enemy exploded their great mine under the Third Louisiana Redan.
The fuse was lit, the fuse burned, the spark reached fifteen hundred
pounds of powder. There was an awful, a rending explosion. Earth,
defences, guns, men and men and men were blown high into the air. The
Sixth Missouri suffered here. There was made a crater twenty feet deep
and fifty across. The Third Louisiana Redan was no more.

All day the second, a part of the day the third, the blue land
batteries, the blue gunboats, the blue mortars bombarded Vicksburg. On
the Fourth of July the place surrendered.