Chapter V: Part 5

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.

“If I had eaten that cracker half an hour ago, it would have been safe,” he said. “I should have had none left for next time, but I have none left as it is. That shows how foolish it is to save anything. Whew! how my head aches. I wish it was from overeating, but even the doctor couldn’t lay it to that just now. The next time I stand up to watch the firing, I’ll put my cracker--if I have any--in a safe place down by the breastworks, where it won’t get wounded, poor thing! By the way, here’s a little piece left, and that’ll get shot while I sit here talking.” And with that he jumped down into the ditch, carefully placed the mouthful of hardtack at the foot of the works, and resumed his interested observation of the artillery duel.

Trifling of that kind was constant among the men throughout that terrible campaign from the Wilderness to Petersburg, and while it yielded nothing worth recording as wit or humor, it has always seemed to me the most remarkable and most significant fact in the history of the time. It revealed a capacity for cheerful endurance which alone made the campaign possible on the Confederate side.

With mercenary troops or regulars the resistance that Lee was able to offer to Grant’s tremendous pressure would have been impossible in such circumstances. The starvation and the excessive marching would have destroyed the morale of troops held together only by discipline. No historical criticism of our Civil War can be otherwise than misleading if it omits to give a prominent place, as a factor, to the character of the volunteers on both sides, who, in acquiring the steadiness and order of regulars, never lost their personal interest in the contest, or their personal pride of manhood as a sustaining force under trying conditions. If either side had lacked this element of personal heroism on the part of its men, it would have been driven from the field long before 1865. It seems to me the most important duty of those who now furnish the materials out of which the ultimate history of our Civil War will be constructed to emphasize this aspect of the matter, and in every possible way to illustrate the part which the high personal character of the volunteers in the ranks played in determining the events of the contest. For that reason I like to record one incident which I had an opportunity to observe at Cold Harbor.

Immediately opposite the position occupied by the battery to which I belonged, and about six or eight hundred yards distant across an open field, lay a Federal battery, whose commander was manifestly a man deeply in earnest for other and higher reasons than those that govern the professional soldier: a man who fought well, because he fought in what he felt to be his own cause and quarrel.

His guns and ours were engaged almost continuously in an artillery duel, so that I became especially interested in him, particularly as the extreme precision of his fire indicated thoroughness and conscientiousness of work for months before the campaign began. One day--whether before or after the great assault, I cannot now remember--that part of our line which lay immediately to the left of the position occupied by the battery to which I belonged was thrown forward to force the opposing Federal line back. It was the only large movement in the way of a charge over perfectly open ground that I ever had a chance to observe with an unobstructed view, and merely as a spectator.

When we, with a few well-aimed shells, had fired a barn that stood between the lines, and driven a multitude of sharp-shooters out of it, the troops to our left leaped over our works and with a cheer moved rapidly across the field. The resistance made to their advance was not very determined,--probably the Federal line at that point had been weakened by concentration elsewhere,--and after a brief struggle our men crossed the slight Federal earthworks and pressed their adversaries back into the woods and beyond my view. It was a beautiful operation to look at, and one, the like of which, a soldier rarely has an opportunity to see so well; but my attention was specially drawn to the situation of the artillery commander, to whom I have referred as posted immediately in our front. His position was the pivot, the point where the Federal line was broken to a new angle, when that part of it which lay upon his right hand was pressed back while that on his left remained stationary.

He fought like a Turk or a tiger.

He directed the greater part of his fire upon the advancing line of Confederates, but turned a gun every few minutes upon our battery, apparently by way of letting us know that he was not unmindful of our attentions, even when he was so busily engaged elsewhere.

The bending back of the line on his right presently subjected him to a murderous fire upon the flank and rear,--a fire against which he had no protection whatever,--while we continued a furious bombardment from the front. His position was plainly an untenable one, and so far as I could discover with a strong glass, he was for a time without infantry support. But he held his ground and continued to fight in spite of all, firing at one time as from two faces of an acute triangle.

His determination was superb, and the coolness of his gunners and cannoneers was worthy of the unbounded admiration which we, their enemies, felt for them. Their firing increased as their difficulties multiplied, but it showed no sign of becoming wild or hurried. Every shot went straight to the object against which it was directed; every fuse was accurately timed, and every shell burst where it was intended to burst. I remember that in the very heat of the contest there came into my mind Bulwer’s superb description of Warwick’s last struggle, in which he says that around the king-maker’s person there “centred a little WAR,” and I applied the phrase to the heroic fellow who was so superbly fighting against hopeless odds immediately in front of me.

Several of his guns were dismounted and his dead horses were strewn in the rear. The loss among his men was appalling, but he fought on as coolly as before, and with our glasses we could see him calmly sitting on his large gray horse directing his gunners and patiently awaiting the coming of the infantry support, without which he could not withdraw his guns. It came at last, and the batteries retired to the new line.

When the battalion was gone and the brief action over, the wreck that was left behind bore sufficient witness of the fearfulness of the fire so coolly endured. The large gray horse lay dead upon the ground; but we preferred to believe that his brave rider was still alive to receive the promotion which he had so well won.

A PLANTATION HEROINE

It was nearing the end.

Every resource of the Southern states had been taxed to the point of exhaustion.

The people had given up everything they had for “the cause.”

Under the law of a “tax in kind,” they had surrendered all they could spare of food products of every character. Under an untamable impulse of patriotism they had surrendered much more than they could spare in order to feed the army.

It was at such a time that I went to my home county on a little military business. I stopped for dinner at a house, the lavish hospitality of which had been a byword in the old days.

I found before me at dinner the remnants of a cold boiled ham, some boiled mustard greens, which we Virginians called “salad,” a pitcher of butter-milk, some corn-pones and--nothing else.

I carved the ham, and offered to serve it to the three women of the household. But they all declined. They made their dinner on salad, butter-milk, and corn-bread, the latter eaten very sparingly, as I observed. The ham went only to myself and to the three convalescent wounded soldiers, who were guests in the house.

Wounded men were at that time guests in every house in Virginia.

I lay awake that night and thought over the circumstance. The next morning I took occasion to have a talk on the old familiar terms with the young woman of the family, with whom I had been on a basis of friendship in the old days that even permitted me to kiss her upon due and proper occasion.

“Why didn’t you take some ham last night?” I asked urgently.

“Oh, I didn’t want it,” she replied.

“Now, you know you’re fibbing,” I said. “Tell me the truth, won’t you?”

She blushed, and hesitated. Presently she broke down and answered frankly: “Honestly, I did want the ham. I have hungered for meat for months. But I mustn’t eat it, and I won’t. You see the army needs all the food there is, and more. We women can’t fight, though I don’t see at all why they shouldn’t let us, and so we are trying to feed the fighting men--and there aren’t any others. We’ve made up our minds not to eat anything that can be sent to the front as rations.”

“You are starving yourselves,” I exclaimed.

“Oh, no,” she said. “And if we were, what would it matter? Haven’t Lee’s soldiers starved many a day? But we aren’t starving. You see we had plenty of salad and butter-milk last night. And we even ate some of the corn-bread. I must stop that, by the way, for corn-meal is a good ration for the soldiers.”

A month or so later this frail but heroic young girl was laid away in the Grub Hill church-yard.

Don’t talk to me about the “heroism” that braves a fire of hell under enthusiastic impulse. That young girl did a higher act of self-sacrifice than any soldier who fought on either side during the war ever dreamed of doing.

TWO INCIDENTS IN CONTRAST

INCIDENT NUMBER ONE

The Masters place at Amelia Court House was a dream of beauty. Major Masters himself was a man of exquisite taste, and his wife and daughter had been devoted for years to the creation of beauty there.

They had had the expert aid of Thomas Giles. Thomas Giles was a lawyer by profession, but being a man of large wealth, and having nobody dependent upon him, he had devoted a considerable share of his attention for years to his two fancies--architecture and landscape gardening.

It had been his long-continued custom to spend his time from Friday afternoon till Monday of each week at the Masters place, developing its possibilities of beauty. He had spent both his own money and that of Major Masters very lavishly in this endeavor, and the result was a notable one.

When the Federal army reached the court house in hot pursuit of General Lee, during that last retreat which ended the war, there was a rush made by the soldiers for comfortable camping grounds on the Masters place. One man had even begun to cut down a stately tree for firewood, when the general commanding rode up. Taking in the situation at a glance, the general turned to one of his aids and said: “Take a squad of twenty men, and drive everybody out of that place quick. Then tell the adjutant-general to post a close guard around it and allow no man to enter it during our stay, upon any pretence whatever.”

Then, turning to his staff as the officer rode away to execute his orders, he said: “That place has cost years of growth as well as years of intelligent endeavor to create it. As we are not vandals, I shall not suffer it to be destroyed.”

I regret that I cannot here record the name of that officer. I would if I knew it.

INCIDENT NUMBER TWO

At McPhersonville, on the coast of South Carolina, there lived a young woman of extraordinary learning.

The fame of her learning, especially in botany, had even crossed the ocean; and it was she whom Baron Von Humboldt had selected to prepare for him--for use in his writings--an account of the flora of that region.

In recognition of her scholarly service, Baron Von Humboldt had sent to her--each volume inscribed with his own hand--the only copy ever owned in the United States of the German government’s magnificent édition de luxe of “Cosmos.”

It was a work published without regard to expense, and in narrowly limited edition, at a fabulous price per copy.

When the final collapse came, and Sherman’s army was sweeping northward from Savannah, a detachment under the command of a lieutenant visited the house of this young woman. Building a bonfire in the front yard, it proceeded to destroy all the food that it could find. Then, in a spirit of pure vandalism, the lieutenant ordered his men to bring out and burn the books in that superb library. The young woman was in tears and terror, of course, but her scholarly impulses rose superior to her timid, feminine instincts. She went up to the lieutenant, coarse brute that he was, and begged for the preservation of her unique “Cosmos.”

She explained to him what it was and how much it meant to scholarship. She begged him to take it with him and present it to Yale, or Harvard, or Princeton, or to the Astor library, or to any other institution of learning to which it might become a possession of glory.

_He slapped her in the face, and with his own hands threw the precious volumes into the fire._

A nation at war must select its human instruments with regard to their capacity for fighting, and with very little regard to anything else. Whether the officer be a gentleman or a blackguard is a matter that counts for little so long as he knows how to fight.

But I regret that I cannot here record the name of _this_ officer also.

HOW THE SERGEANT-MAJOR TOLD THE TRUTH

So far as I know, the sergeant-major never told a lie in his life; but he came very near it that night at Grahamville.

Grahamville is a village on the Charleston and Savannah railroad, and this was in 1862, when the enemy held the sea islands along that coast. Whenever they landed and advanced toward the railroad, it was our business to march down and meet them at such points of vantage as the marshes and causeways afforded.

The battery had been stationed at Grahamville about two months, and, as the enemy had been inactive all that time, there was nothing whatever to do; nothing, that is to say, except to practise with pistols on the bullet-proof hide of an antique alligator, which used to lie upon a log in the swamp in front of us sunning himself and apparently rather enjoying the impingement of bullets upon his ribs. We had pretty well exhausted that amusement; so when the news came that there was to be a dance at Tucker’s,--about twelve miles in rear of Grahamville,--the captain, the one lieutenant on duty, and the surgeon promptly accepted the invitation. They omitted the formality of sending to headquarters for leave of absence. They simply went.

The sergeant-major, who carried on a voluminous correspondence with various young women in different parts of the Confederacy, had letters to write and preferred to remain behind. Besides that, his boots were broken out on both sides, and his linen coat--the only thing he had that was cool enough for such an occasion in such a climate--had only one button on it, and that one a black one sewed on with white thread. The sergeant-major rather valued himself upon his personal pulchritude, and preferred solitude in the camp to any unfavorable exhibition of himself and his wardrobe. So the sergeant-major was left in command of the battery.

It was on that particular night, of course, that the enemy concluded to make a threatening landing on the coast below. Hurried orders came from General Clingman for the battery to move forward at once. The sergeant-major received the orders, had the assembly blown, and promptly moved forward with the guns. He was a very earnest and conscientious young man. That is why he came so near telling lies that night. He was fond of his officers and very much devoted to their welfare. It would have gone hard with them had their absence become known to the commanding general.

As the sergeant-major rode along in the murkiness of a cloudy, Southern midnight at the head of the battery, General Clingman rode up and asked, “Where’s your captain?”

“He’s in rear,” said the sergeant-major. Now, strictly speaking, this was the exact truth. The captain was in rear--twelve or fifteen miles in rear! Nevertheless the sergeant-major felt an uncomfortable consciousness that his words conveyed to the mind of the general an impression that was not quite accurate. When the general inquired about the one other officer supposed to be on duty at that time, the sergeant-major replied: “He also is somewhere in rear at the moment.” You see the sergeant-major was getting used to this sort of thing.

The general replied; “Well, it’s no matter, you can take the orders and communicate them.”

Thereupon he gave instructions as to the disposition of the guns in case of a fight. After that he rode to the front. It was his habit to be at the front as his force approached an enemy.

An hour or two later our returning cavalry reported that the enemy had returned to his island camp. Our long night march had gone for nothing. We were a little bit disappointed, but as we had marched during all the hours of darkness, and as the gray was beginning to split the eastern sky, we were not very reluctant to turn back towards camp and breakfast.

But when, soon after the return march began, the sergeant-major saw the general riding up, he felt a trifle uneasy. You see he was not yet an artist in prevarication. His life-long habit of telling the truth sat heavily upon him. Nevertheless, when the general asked for the captain and lieutenant, the sergeant-major said, with as much of nonchalance as he could assume: “They’re somewhere in _front_, I think, general,” and the general rode away satisfied. When the battery reached camp, the officers had just returned from the dance at Tuckers. They were frantic with apprehension and rage at finding their command gone to fight the enemy and they not with it. They were minutely questioning the camp servants as to the movement. And when the sergeant-major rode up at the head of the column of guns, they assailed him with a volley of questions, which, if they had been shells, would have struck the enemy off any field: the sergeant-major rather enjoyed this part of the proceeding.

“What kind of a time did you have at Tucker’s?” he asked.

“Oh, confound Tucker’s!” answered the captain. “Speak, can’t you, man, and tell us about this thing. Did the general ask after us, and what did you tell him?”

“Well,” answered the sergeant-major, “he did ask, and I told him the truth, but not the whole truth. My conscience is a little bit bruised and sore over it, and the next time you fellows go off to a dance without letting the general know, I’m going to tell him the whole truth. Is there anything to eat?”

TWO GENTLEMEN AT PETERSBURG

At that point where the great mine was blown up at Petersburg, the lines of the two armies were within fifty yards of each other.

In the fearful slaughter that ensued, the space between the rival breastworks was literally piled high with dead men, lying one on top of the other. Only in one other place, namely, at Cold Harbor, was there ever so much of slaughter within so small a space.

It was evident, apart from all considerations of decency, that for the comfort of both sides some arrangement must be made for the burial of these dead men. Neither side could have lived long in its works otherwise.

Accordingly, a cartel was arranged between General Grant and General Lee. It was stipulated that there should be a cessation of hostilities for a specified number of hours for the purpose of burying the dead.

It was arranged that two lines should be formed twelve feet apart in the middle of the space between the works; that one line should be composed of Federal sentinels, the other of Confederates; that the space between these two lines should be a neutral ground, accessible to both sides; but that no person from either side should cross the line established by the other side. It was agreed that the dead men who had fallen within the Confederate line should be dragged to the neutral ground by Confederate soldiers, and there delivered to Federal troops to be carried within their lines for burial.

There were no Confederate dead there, of course. All of our men who had been killed were killed within our own works. So every corpse on our side of the neutral ground was dragged by a rope to that common space and there delivered to its official friends.

It was specially stipulated in the cartel that no officer or soldier on either side should take advantage of the truce to appropriate property of any kind lying upon the field, whether upon the one or the other side of the neutral ground. Swords, pistols, sashes, everything of the kind must, by agreement, be left precisely where they were.

Many of us, of course, went out to the neutral ground to look over the situation. There was a certain gruesome delight even in standing upon ground, where for a month or more it had been impossible for a twig or a blade of grass to grow without instant decapitation, and where for months to come it would be equally impossible for anything having material substance to exist. The very turf itself had been literally skinned from the surface of the earth by a continuous scything of bullets. For a month it had been impossible for any soldier on either side even to shoot over the breastworks, for he who tried to do so was sure to be instantly destroyed. The fire on either side had to be through carefully sand-bag-guarded port holes. And even the port holes had to be protected by hanging blankets behind them to conceal the sky, lest their darkening by a human head should invite a hailstorm of alert and waiting bullets.

Of course every man who, during the truce, wandered over this perilous space for an hour, must have been impressed, if he had any imagination at all, with the historical interest of the occasion. Every one desired naturally to carry away some memento of the event. Only one man yielded to this impulse, and he did so thoughtlessly. He was a captain of Confederate infantry.

He saw lying on the ground a star that had been cut by a bullet from some officer’s coat collar.

It was a worthless bauble, valuable only as a souvenir. He picked it up and pocketed it. Instantly he was arrested by the Confederate guards and taken before the officer in command of the Confederate line.

That officer immediately and with great dignity went to the Federal commander and said: “I desire under the terms of the cartel to surrender this officer to you for such punishment as a court-martial of your army may see fit to inflict. He has violated the cartel.”

“What has he done?” asked the Federal officer.

“He has taken possession of property left upon the field, contrary to the terms of the truce.”

“Would you mind telling me,” asked the Federal officer, “the exact nature and extent of his offence?”

A little explanation followed, the Confederate commander remaining stern and uncompromising in his determination to deliver the man for punishment, asking no favors or mercies for him, and offering no apologies for that which he deemed a breach of honor.

When the Federal officer had learned the exact facts of the situation, he made the usual military salute and said to the Confederate commander: “I thank you. You have been very honorable and very punctilious, but the officer’s fault has been merely one of inadvertence. I beg to return him to you with the assurance that we have no desire to punish so brave a man as he must be, in order to hold his commission in your army, for an act that involved no intention of wrong.”

Here were two brave men--two gentlemen--met. Naturally they understood each other.

OLD JONES AND THE HUCKSTER

It is a fixed principle of military law that no person is allowed to sell supplies within the lines of a camp without permission of the commandant.

It is also a fixed principle of military law that he must sell only at prices approved by the commandant.

I shall never forget how I first learned of these military rules. We were at Camp Onward and old Jones had just become our colonel.

One day a farmer came to the camp with a heavily laden wagon. It was in the summer of 1861, when food in Northern Virginia was abundant, and when our money was as good as anybody’s.

Our farmer had among his supplies, dressed turkeys, suckling pigs, lamb, mutton, watermelons, cantaloupes, string beans, Lima beans, green peas, and in brief almost all those things that we read about on the bill of fare of a swagger hotel, kept on the “American Plan.”

He had butter also, and lard. He had eggplants and pumpkins, and a great many other things.

We were a rather hungry lot, and were strongly inclined to buy of him.

But this farmer had evidently made up his mind to get comfortably rich off that single wagon load of provisions. Two years later we should not have been surprised at his prices, but at that time we were appalled. Nevertheless, some of us were buying with the recklessness of men who do not know at what hour a bullet may draw a red line below all accounts.

Just then old Jones came out in his yellow coat and his pot hat, looking greatly more like a farmer than the wagon man did. Speaking through his nose, and with that extraordinary deliberation which always made his conversation a caricature of human speech, he asked: “What are you chargin’ for turkeys? What are you chargin’ for butter?” And so on through the list, receiving a reply to each query, and carefully noting it in his thoroughly organized mind.

Then he turned to one of the men and said: “Send the regimental commissary to me.”

When the commissary came he said to him: “Take these supplies, and distribute them equitably among the different messes according to their numbers.”

By this time the farmer had become alarmed. He said: “Who’s goin’ to pay for all this?”

“I am,” said old Jones. “In my own way.”

“Well, hold on,” said the farmer.

“No, I reckon we won’t hold on,” said old Jones.

“But I’ll send for the colonel of the regiment,” said the farmer.

Then old Jones replied with a relish: “I am the colonel of this regiment. And I have ordered these food supplies distributed to the men in the messes. The regimental commissary will obey my orders. And as soon as your wagon is emptied, you will get out of this camp in a considerable of a hurry,”--perhaps he used a shorter word than “considerable,”--“or I’ll hang you in front of headquarters. There’s no court of appeals in this camp. Now git!” as the last of the supplies were taken out of the wagon by the regimental commissary.

We were all a little bit sorry that the poor farmer should lose his entire load. And yet we sympathized with old Jones’s remark as he walked away.

“I’ll teach these thieves that they can’t loot a camp that I’m a runnin’.”

A DEAD MAN’S MESSAGE

Dick Fulcher was the best natured man in the battery, and he was nothing else.

He was entirely ignorant and entirely content to be so. He could neither read nor write, and we could never persuade him to try to learn. He had nothing resembling pride in his composition apparently, nothing that it would do to call a character.

One morning the alarm came that the enemy had landed below, and we were ordered hurriedly forward. Fulcher had just taken post as stable-guard, and was, therefore, under no obligation of duty to go. He quietly threw down the musket he was carrying, and, going up to the sergeant-major, said: “Major, can’t I be taken off guard? I want to go with the battery into the fight.”