Chapter III: Part 3

“How long since you had meat?” I asked.

“About three weeks,” she replied. “That is to say, since the last big raiding party came by.”

“Have you no pigs left?”

“No, we haven’t a living animal of any kind.”

“Whose sheep are those I saw as I rode up?”

“They belong to a neighbor,” she answered. “They’re what’s left of a large flock. When the raiders were here those five sheep ran into the bushes and escaped. But even if they were ours, you know, we couldn’t kill one.”

I remembered then that a law of the Confederacy made it a crime severely punishable to slaughter a sheep, even one’s own. They were wanted by the government for their wool to clothe the army.

Waiving all this aside as a matter of small moment, our hostess pressed us again to dismount for supper.

At this point Johnny Garrett lied:

“Oh, we can’t stay to supper, and the fact is we couldn’t eat if we did. It’s only half an hour since we ate the best part of a ham out of our haversacks. And besides we’ve got to get to Gordonsville to-night.”

I am afraid I was accessory after the fact to the telling of that lie. At least I didn’t contradict it.

We pushed on a little way till we had got out of sight of the house. Then we stopped by mutual consent under a tree and dismounted.

“The grass is pretty good,” I said, “and we’ll let the horses crop it while we wait for it to get good and dark.” It did not seem necessary to mention what we were to wait for darkness for.

“Yes,” said Johnny, “there are the sheep, and I’ll keep an eye on them.”

When it was thoroughly dark we committed a double crime.

It was sheep stealing as well as a violation of the other law, but we were not in a mood to consider such things just then. Under cover of the darkness we killed the fattest sheep in the lot, dressed it as well as we could, and then by the light of some matches I wrote a little note on a leaf from my memorandum book. It said simply this:--

“There is no law to forbid some hungry women to eat a sheep that somebody else has killed in violation of law.”

Pinning this to the carcass we carried the mutton to the house, and hung it to a tree where it would be seen with the dawn.

We felt as well about this thing as if we had been engaged in some highly moral act.

A LITTLE REBEL

It was an odd kind of a situation. It was in 1862, and we were on the coast of South Carolina defending the railroad line between Charleston and Savannah.

We had no infantry supports, and artillery is supposed to be helpless without such supports. But as there was nothing on the other side, except those pestilent sharp-shooters in the Hayward mansion, we did not need support.

It was our business to shell that mansion, burn it, and drive the sharp-shooters out. I may say, parenthetically, that we didn’t like the business. Mr. Hayward, who was familiarly known as “Tiger Bill,” had been the friend of our battery ever since we had succeeded in putting out a fire that had burnt some thousands of panels of fence for him. It is true that his friendship for us was in the main a reflex of his enmity to the Charleston Light Dragoons and the Routledge Mounted Riflemen. He favored us mainly to spite them. Nevertheless he favored us. He sent a wagon every morning to our camp loaded with vegetables, fruits, suckling pigs, and whatever else his dozen plantations might afford.

Naturally, we did not like the job of burning one of his country houses. But as business is business, so in war orders are orders.

Half a dozen shells did the work. Flames burst from the house in every direction, and the enemy’s sharp-shooters who had been using it as a vantage ground rapidly retreated across the cotton fields to the woodlands beyond under fire of our guns.

Our captain, a great bearded warrior, six feet four inches high, and as rough as men are made in appearance, was suddenly seized with a tender thought. Turning to me, he said: “There may be some poor devil wounded in that house and likely to be roasted. Let’s ride over there and see.”

We put spurs to our horses, dashed through the sharp-shooters’ fire, and a few minutes later began exploring the lower quarters of the house, the fire being above. We found nothing till we came to the cellar. There we discovered a little girl, anywhere from two to three years old,--I’m not a good judge of little girls’ ages,--sitting in a little rocking-chair, and singing “Dixie.”

The captain grabbed her suddenly and ran to the open air with her, for the volumes of smoke were rapidly penetrating to the cellar. When he got her out, he said: “Who are you?”

She replied, in a piping little voice, “I’m _Lulalie_.”

Whether this meant that her name was Lula Lee, or Eulalie, or what, we could not make out.

“Where is your mamma?” asked the captain.

“She’s dead--she died when I was born.”

“Where is your papa?”

“I don’t know. Those ugly other people took him away. When he saw ’em coming, he took me to the cellar, and told me to stay there so the shellies wouldn’t hit me.”

“Where’s your maumey?” (Maumey meaning in South Carolina “negro nurse.”)

“I don’t know,” she answered. “Those ugly other people took all the colored folks away.”

Just then the battery advanced with its colors flying. Looking up the little girl recognized the Confederate battle banner and said: “That’s _my kind of a flag_. I don’t like that ugly other striped thing.”

Manifestly the child was without protectors. We adopted her in the name of the battery.

When we returned to the camp several serious questions arose. Jack Hawkins, one of the ex-circus clowns of the battery, suggested that first of all we must secure a chaperone for her. When asked what he meant by that, he said with lordly superiority: “Well, you see, chaperone is French for nurse. We want a nurse for this little child.”

“Nonsense,” said Denton, the other ex-circus clown, “you don’t know any more about the proprieties than you do about French. Chaperone means somebody to look after a church, and this little girl isn’t even a chapel. We’ll look after her, and we don’t want no nurse to help.”

The captain, with his long beard, was holding the little child in his arms all this time, and she suddenly turned around to him and seizing his beard said: “I like your big whiskers. They are like my papa’s. You don’t bite, because you’ve got hair on your face?”

“No, dear,” he replied, “I don’t bite such as you.”

But he was very much given to biting, all the same--as the enemy had more than once found out.

“First of all,” said Denton, who was nothing if not practical, “the little girl’s got to have some clothes.”

Denton was a tailor, as well as a clown, and naturally his thoughts were the first to run in that groove.

“I ain’t much used to making girl’s clothes, but a tailor’s a tailor, and if anybody’ll provide me the materials, I’ll undertake to fix up some gowns for her.”

Tom Booker, who was much given to riding around the country, said at once: “I know where the mortal remains of an old store repose, up at Gillisonville, about nine miles away. If I had any money--”

Every man thrust his hand into his pocket, and each drew out what he had. The sum total was more than adequate. When Tom returned a few hours later there were no “mortal remains” of that store left. He brought back with him thirty-seven yards of highly colored calico, of different patterns, one red blanket, a box full of galloon trimming, something that he called “gimp,” two bolts of domestic, three cans of tomatoes, and two bottles of chow-chow, besides a dozen quarter cases of sardines and two kegs of cove oysters.

He dumped the merchandise on the ground with the remark: “There, I’ve closed that store.”

Denton made some invidious remarks reflecting upon Tom’s taste in the selection of calicoes, etc., adding the suggestion that there was galloon enough and “gimp” enough in the invoice “to upholster all the women in Charleston for the next six months--if they liked that kind of thing.”

Nevertheless, he set to work with a will. Within a day or two the little lady was provided with gowns and night-gowns, and underclothes sufficient in quantity, at least, though perhaps not made strictly in accordance with the latest fashions in gear of that kind. Indeed, Denton had succeeded in making her look very much hindsidebefore. The little girl’s gowns all buttoned down in front. But the little girl was pleased with what she called the “gownies” and sometimes the “pritties.” Their barbaric colors tickled her taste so much that Denton decided to make her a cloak out of the flaming red blanket.

When it was put on her, her glory was complete. She said: “It looks like my kind of a flag,” referring to the red of the battle banner.

* * * * *

She was taken away from us presently by a committee of good women of the neighborhood. She became the protégée of a lady whose whole life had been given to caring for other people, including our battery.

Denton, however, put in a claim to the privilege of continuing to fashion her clothes.

“You see I’ve got the whole stock of that store on my hands; and since I learned dress-making, I’ve a fancy to perfect myself. And you see I’ve got fond of the little girl.”

A couple of tears trickled down the hoary old sinner’s cheek, and Mrs. Hutson consented.

Every day after roll-call the captain sent a delegation to the Hutsons’ house to ask after the battery’s child. Every day when we drilled at the guns the little girl herself came in her barbaric costume to see what she called her “shooties,” meaning the cannoneers.

We had to part with our little girl presently, we being under orders, and she stationed. As we moved away from the station on our flat cars, she stood upon the platform, and waved “her kind of a flag” at us, crying, throwing kisses, and calling out: “Good-by, you good shooties.”

I think the morals of the battery were distinctly better after this little episode.

TWENTY-ONE

After the battle of Bull Run, or Manassas, as we called it, the region north of Fairfax Court House was a No-man’s land.

Little by little we occupied it during that summer, even to Mason’s and Munson’s hills. But the process of occupation was slow. When we pressed forward immediately after the battle all that region was _terra incognita_.

About half the people inhabiting it were loyal to one side; about half to the other. So in asking information we had to be circumspect.

But we had assurance that the Hopes were loyal to our side. So when Lieutenant Billy Wilds was sent out with a party of us, on scouting duty, he naturally went to the Hope mansion for information.

He got it in abundance. Charlotte Hope, the daughter of the house, came out to give it to us, and she was very enthusiastic. She was a brunette, full of life, full of health, and full of enthusiasm for the cause. Besides, she knew how to sit gracefully on a rail fence. She had a rich contralto voice that had narrowly escaped being a bass. She was beautiful to her finger tips. She “had a way with her” that was fascinating beyond belief.

As she sat there on the rail fence, explaining the geography of the region round about, we all fell in love with her as troopers should, so far at least as to be ready to do any conceivable deed of derring-do in her behalf. But Lieutenant Wilds fell in love with her in fuller fashion, as was afterwards made manifest.

She sat there on the fence curled up most entrancingly and expounded the geography of the country with great minuteness. But when she tried to tell us just where a certain strong Federal post was, which we very much wanted to attack, she grew impatient of words.

Turning to a negro boy she said: “Saddle Saladin. I’ll go and show them.”

Three minutes later she was in the saddle. Half an hour afterwards Charlie Irving, our captain who had joined us and taken command, gently ordered her to the rear. As I have related in another book of reminiscences she refused to obey. She said: “I believe you are going to charge those fellows, and I want to see the fun.”

Well, she saw the fun. We made the charge. At the end of it Lieutenant Wilds was more in love with her than ever.

As we escorted her back to her home she broke into song. Her song was the old English ballad which begins:--

“In days of old, when knights were bold,
And barons held their sway.”

As she sang, she laid special stress upon two passages in the ballad. One was the line where the hero says:--

“I’ll live for love or die.”

The other was, where as death overcomes him he sings:--

“I’ve kept the vow I swore.”

The song seemed, whether prophetically or otherwise, to have entered this young girl’s soul and to have taken possession of her spirit.

It was not long afterwards that we learned that our gallant young lieutenant was engaged to be married to Charlotte Hope. The marriage was to take place as soon as the war was over. At that time we regarded this as a postponement of only a few months at most. We expected to win then and we expected to win quickly.

Whenever Lieutenant Wilds was sent upon a scouting expedition, he found it imperatively necessary to call at the Hope mansion for geographical and other information, though by this time we had all become familiar with every road and footpath in that quarter of Virginia.

It was a little fiction we were all pleased to love him for. One day about a month later, while we were waiting in the yard for Lieutenant Wilds to secure the necessary geographical information indoors, a Federal force attacked us. The lieutenant came out promptly, swung himself into the saddle, and ordered a charge. We fought there under the cherry trees for full fifteen minutes. At the end of the contest the enemy was driven away, and we pursued--but three of our saddles were empty.

One of them was that of Lieutenant Wilds.

* * * * *

It was Charlotte’s wish that Lieutenant Wilds should be buried in the family grave-yard of the Hopes. It was also her wish that his company should attend the funeral.

We brought two other companies along to stand guard and prevent any possible interruption of the ceremonies. We buried our comrade with all military honors. We fired the conventional salute over the grave.

Then we proceeded to attack a military force which had come up, intent upon disturbing the obsequies.

But before we moved off, Charlotte, who had been dry-eyed from the first, came to one of us and said: “He was just twenty-one. It will take just twenty-one to pay for him.”

* * * * *

It was only two or three days later when Charlie Hopper rode into the camp on a magnificent chestnut-sorrel mare. We did not know him.

He said he didn’t want to enlist. He merely wanted to join the company. He explained that if he enlisted he would be a man under pay. And he didn’t want pay, he said, for the work he wanted to do. Only give him rations and a chance and he would be satisfied.

His idea of a chance soon developed itself. He wanted to be as continually as possible in the presence of the enemy, anywhere, anyhow. He wanted to shoot all the “Yankees” he could. For that purpose he had brought with him the first Whitworth rifle I ever saw, with its long range, its telescopic sights, and its terrible accuracy of fire.

He seemed about sixteen years old. He didn’t tell us anything about himself, not even where he came from. But he had a long talk, and a confidential one, with Charlie Irving. After that Charlie paid him special attention. He detailed him upon every scouting expedition that had “business” in it. Sometimes when scouting expeditions were slack, the young fellow would go off by himself and remain for a day or two in close proximity to the enemy’s lines.

Each day he wore upon his breast a little tag with a number on it.

One day when the number had reached seventeen, he and I lay together behind a sycamore log, shooting at a peculiarly pestilent picket post. After one of his shots he called out, “Eighteen.” The next shot was simultaneous, he and I firing together. The man at whom we fired fell forward over his log, evidently dead.

Charlie Hopper turned to me and said: “You fired at the same moment I did; it’s a disputed bird. I can’t count him.”

Full of curiosity I asked: “What do you mean, Hopper?”

He answered: “Nothing--Just counting--Settling a score!”

It was only a few days later when we were at Falls Church. Young Hopper’s score read twenty, when he asked permission to ride out and personally encounter an officer who had separated himself from his command. The permission was given. Hopper leaped upon his mare, drew his sword, and galloped toward the officer. They met in mid field. The officer fired just as the boy clove him to the saddle. Hopper fell forward on his horse and rode back to the lines.

As he rolled off the saddle, he said: “I’m done for, boys, but I’ve made it twenty-one without counting a single disputed bird.” Then, feebly, he broke into song, singing,--

“I’ve kept the vow I swore.”

Before we buried him in the _Hope cemetery_ the next day, the captain told me that Charlie Hopper was none other than Charlotte Hope.

But I had guessed the secret that day when she had refused to count the “disputed bird.”

A BEEF EPISODE

We had no rations at Bluffton, in South Carolina.

The sea was there with its multitudinous fish, and crabs and shrimps, and with its mountainous banks of oysters. There were turkeys and deer and squirrels in the woods, and quail and marsh fowl in the fields. We were expected to take care of ourselves.

But one cannot shoot turkeys, or deer, or squirrels with a twelve-pounder Napoleon. And as for the sea food, while we rejoiced in it for a time, we became desperately weary of it after a while.

We began, therefore, to frequent Bull Island. Bull Island lay near Hilton Head, which the enemy occupied. Bull Island had been abandoned at the beginning of the war, and the cattle on the plantations there had gone wild, breeding as buffalo might.

Here was a source of supply. We resolved to avail ourselves of it. About twice a week we sent expeditions over there in whale-boats, and killed a bullock or a cow or two, dressed the meat and brought it home, taking care to bring the skin also, in order that our half-crazy doctor might experiment on it with his new process for quick tanning. As an incident, I may remark that not one of us ever got a pair of boots out of those hides.

The enemy on Hilton Head were also more or less in lack of beef. They, too, discovered Bull Island, and frequented it with a purpose similar to our own.

One day Joe went over there with sixteen men in a boat carrying that number of oars, and pretty well rigged for sailing. He had no sooner got his command into the cane-brake in search of cattle, than he discovered a party of Federals immediately in front of him. In the dense growth of the forest he could have no idea whatever of his enemy’s strength. His one thought was, to avoid the capture of his force. To that end he must make as brave a show of strength as possible. He therefore ordered his little squad of men to scatter themselves out over a line of three or four hundred yards, and to keep up as continuous a fire as possible.

The enemy’s line seemed to be of about equal length, and their fire about the same as his. It was a little before ten o’clock in the morning when this thing began, and it was not until after dusk that the two forces sneaked simultaneously to their boats.

Neither had any beef, and each discovered that the other was numerically about equal to itself.

So far as we were ever able to discover, nobody had been killed or wounded on either side. A day had been wasted in futile firing through the cane. Both sides had been disappointed of their provisions.

Neither had injured the other, neither had gained any benefit, and the cattle had had a good time.

Thirty years afterwards Joe and the sergeant on the other side met, and one said to the other: “After all it would have been better if we had turned our backs on each other that day. There were cattle on both sides.” The other answered: “Yes, but that would have been the wise way of peace; we were engaged in the barbarism of war.”

BERNARD POLAND’S PROPHECY

I do not pretend to understand it at all.

The best theories I have ever been able to form, whether physiological or psychological, or a mixture of the two, have utterly failed to account to my mind for the facts in Bernard Poland’s case.

I tell the story, therefore, without trying to explain it.

In the year 1857 I became a student in a Virginian college not far from Richmond. When I took possession of my quarters in the building three or four days before the session began, I was an entire stranger to every one there. As I had already spent two years in another college, I knew the importance of using circumspection in the choice of friends in such a place, so that I was in no hurry to make acquaintances. It was my deliberate purpose, indeed, to avoid all intercourse with my fellow-students, until such time as I should discover who and what they were.

But one morning--the next after my arrival, I think it was--as I sat in the great stone portico, two students, evidently old acquaintances, and both of them members of the college during the previous year, stood near me discussing some matter or other, I forget what.

The younger was bantering and teasing the other by expressing all sorts of unconventional, radical, and even revolutionary opinions, which his friend took the trouble seriously to combat, greatly to the younger man’s amusement, as I could see. Their conversation did not impress me in the least, except as it revealed to me something in the younger man’s mind and character which fascinated me unaccountably.

His age was about the same as mine. His scholarship was about equally 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.

“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.

Slowly, and with cadenced step, the procession moved around inside the 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.