The Crisis — Complete

by Winston Churchill

  CHAPTER VIII. A STRANGE MEETING

  The story of the capture of Vicksburg is the old, old story of failureturned into success, by which man is made immortal. It involves thehistory of a general who never retraced his steps, who cared neitherfor mugwump murmurs nor political cabals, who took both blame and praisewith equanimity. Through month after month of discouragement, and workgone for naught, and fever and death, his eyes never left his goal. Andby grace of the wisdom of that President who himself knew sorrow andsuffering and defeat and unjust censure, General Grant won.

  Boldness did it. The canal abandoned, one red night fleet and transportsswept around the bend and passed the city's heights, on a red river.The Parrotts and the Dahlgrens roared, and the high bluffs flung out thesound over the empty swamp land.

  Then there came the landing below, and the cutting loose from abase--unheard of. Corps behind cursed corps ahead for sweeping thecountry clear of forage. Battles were fought. Confederate generals inMississippi were bewildered.

  One night, while crossing with his regiment a pontoon bridge, StephenBrice heard a shout raised on the farther shore. Sitting together ona log under a torch, two men in slouch hats were silhouetted. That onetalking with rapid gestures was General Sherman. The impassive profileof the other, the close-cropped beard and the firmly held cigar thatseemed to go with it,--Stephen recognized as that of the strange CaptainGrant who had stood beside him in the street by the Arsenal He had notchanged a whit. Motionless, he watched corps after corps splash by,artillery, cavalry, and infantry, nor gave any sign that he heard theirplaudits.

  At length the army came up behind the city to a place primeval, wherethe face of the earth was sore and tortured, worn into deep gorges bythe rains, and flung up in great mounds. Stripped of the green magnoliasand the cane, the banks of clay stood forth in hideous yellow nakedness,save for a lonely stunted growth, or a bare trunk that still stoodtottering on the edge of a banks its pitiful withered roots reaching outbelow. The May weather was already sickly hot.

  First of all there was a murderous assault, and a still more murderousrepulse. Three times the besiegers charged, sank their color staffsinto the redoubts, and three times were driven back. Then the blue armysettled into the earth and folded into the ravines. Three days in thatnarrow space between the lines lay the dead and wounded suffering untoldagonies in the moist heat. Then came a truce to bury the dead, to bringback what was left of the living.

  The doomed city had no rest. Like clockwork from the Mississippi's banksbeyond came the boom and shriek of the coehorns on the barges. The bigshells hung for an instant in the air like birds of prey, and then couldbe seen swooping down here and there, while now and anon a shaft ofsmoke rose straight to the sky, the black monument of a home.

  Here was work in the trenches, digging the flying sap by night anddeepening it by day, for officers and men alike. From heaven a host ofblue ants could be seen toiling in zigzags forward, ever forward, alongthe rude water-cuts and through the hills. A waiting carrion from hervantage point on high marked one spot then another where the blue antsdisappeared, and again one by one came out of the burrow to hurry downthe trench,--each with his ball of clay.

  In due time the ring of metal and sepulchred voices rumbled in theground beneath the besieged. Counter mines were started, and through thenarrow walls of earth commands and curses came. Above ground the sapswere so near that a strange converse became the rule. It was "Hello,Reb!" "Howdy, Yank!" Both sides were starving, the one for tobacco andthe other for hardtack and bacon. These necessities were tossed across,sometimes wrapped in the Vicksburg news-sheet printed on the whiteside of a homely green wall paper. At other times other amenities wereindulged in. Hand-grenades were thrown and shells with lighted fusesrolled down on the heads of acquaintances of the night before, whoreplied from wooden coehorns hooped with iron.

  The Union generals learned (common item in a siege) that the citizensof Vicksburg were eating mule meat. Not an officer or private in theVicksburg armies who does not remember the 25th of June, and the hourof three in an afternoon of pitiless heat. Silently the long blue fileswound into position behind the earth barriers which hid them from theenemy, coiled and ready to strike when the towering redoubt on theJackson road should rise heavenwards. By common consent the riflecrack of day and night was hushed, and even the Parrotts were silent.Stillness closed around the white house of Shirley once more, but notthe stillness it had known in its peaceful homestead days. This wasthe stillness of the death prayer. Eyes staring at the big redoubt weredimmed. At last, to those near, a little wisp of blue smoke crept out.

  Then the earth opened with a quake. The sun was darkened, and a hotblast fanned the upturned faces. In the sky, through the film ofshattered clay, little black dots scurried, poised, and fell again asarms and legs and head less trunks and shapeless bits of wood and iron.Scarcely had the dust settled when the sun caught the light of fiftythousand bayonets, and a hundred shells were shrieking across thecrater's edge. Earth to earth, alas, and dust to dust! Men who ranacross that rim of a summer's after-noon died in torture under tier upontier of their comrades,--and so the hole was filled.

  An upright cannon marks the spot where a scrawny oak once stood ona scarred and baked hillside, outside of the Confederate lines atVicksburg. Under the scanty shade of that tree, on the eve of theNation's birthday, stood two men who typified the future and the past.As at Donelson, a trick of Fortune's had delivered one comrade of oldinto the hands of another. Now she chose to kiss the one upon whom shehad heaped obscurity and poverty and contumely. He had ceased to thinkor care about Fortune. And hence, being born a woman, she favored him.

  The two armies watched and were still. They noted the friendly greetingof old comrades, and after that they saw the self-contained Northernerbiting his cigar, as one to whom the pleasantries of life were past andgone. The South saw her General turn on his heel. The bitterness of hislife was come. Both sides honored him for the fight he had made. But wardoes not reward a man according to his deserts.

  The next day--the day our sundered nation was born Vicksburgsurrendered: the obstinate man with the mighty force had conquered. Seethe gray regiments marching silently in the tropic heat into the foldsof that blue army whose grip has choked them at last. Silently, too, theblue coats stand, pity and admiration on the brick-red faces. The armsare stacked and surrendered, officers and men are to be parolled whenthe counting is finished. The formations melt away, and those who formonths have sought each other's lives are grouped in friendly talk. Thecoarse army bread is drawn eagerly from the knapsacks of the blue, smokequivers above a hundred fires, and the smell of frying bacon brings awistful look into the gaunt faces. Tears stand in the eyes of many a manas he eats the food his Yankee brothers have given him on the birthdayof their country.

  Within the city it is the same. Stephen Brice, now a captain in GeneralLauman's brigade, sees with thanksgiving the stars and stripes flutterfrom the dome of that court-house which he had so long watched fromafar.

  Later on, down a side street, he pauses before a house with itsface blown away. On the verge of one of its jagged floors is an oldfour-posted bed, and beside it a child's cot is standing pitifully,--thetiny pillow still at the head and the little sheets thrown across thefoot. So much for one of the navy's shells.

  While he was thinking of the sadness of it all, a little scene wasacted: the side door of the house opened, a weeping woman came out, andwith her was a tall Confederate Colonel of cavalry. Gallantly giving herhis arm, he escorted her as far as the little gate, where she bade himgood by with much feeling. With an impulsive movement he drew some moneyfrom his pocket, thrust it upon her, and started hurriedly away thathe might not listen to her thanks. Such was his preoccupation thathe actually brushed into Stephen, who was standing beside a tree. Hestopped and bowed.

  "Excuse me, seh," he said contritely. "I beg your pardon, seh."

  "Certainly," said Stephen, smiling; "it was my fault for getting in yourway."

&nb
sp; "Not at all, seh," said the cavalry Colonel; "my clumsiness, seh."He did not pass on, but stood pulling with some violence a very longmustache. "Damn you Yankees," he continued, in the same amiable tone,"you've brought us a heap of misfortune. Why, seh, in another week we'dbeen fo'ced to eat niggers."

  The Colonel made such a wry face that Stephen laughed in spite ofhimself. He had marked the man's charitable action, and admired hisattempt to cover it. The Colonel seemed to be all breadth, like a card.His shoulders were incredible. The face was scant, perchance from lackof food, the nose large, with a curved rim, and the eyes blue gray. Hewore clay-flecked cavalry boots, and was six feet five if an inch, sothat Stephen's six seemed insignificant beside him.

  "Captain," he said, taking in Stephen's rank, "so we won't qua'l as towho's host heah. One thing's suah," he added, with a twinkle, "I've beenheah longest. Seems like ten yeahs since I saw the wife and childrendown in the Palmetto State. I can't offer you a dinner, seh. We'veeaten all the mules and rats and sugar cane in town." (His eye seemed tointerpolate that Stephen wouldn't be there otherwise.) "But I can offeryou something choicer than you have in the No'th."

  Whereupon he drew from his hip a dented silver flask. The Colonelremarked that Stephen's eyes fell on the coat of arms.

  "Prope'ty of my grandfather, seh, of Washington's Army. My name isJennison,--Catesby Jennison, at your service, seh," he said. "You havethe advantage of me, Captain."

  "My name is Brice," said Stephen.

  The big Colonel bowed decorously, held out a great, wide hand, andthereupon unscrewed the flask. Now Stephen had never learned to likestraight whiskey, but he took down his share without a face. The exploitseemed to please the Colonel, who, after he likewise had done the liquorjustice, screwed on the lid with ceremony, offered Stephen his arm withstill greater ceremony, and they walked off down the street together.Stephen drew from his pocket several of Judge Whipple's cigars, to whichhis new friend gave unqualified praise.

  On every hand Vicksburg showed signs of hard usage. Houses with gapingchasms in their sides, others mere heaps of black ruins; great treesfelled, cabins demolished, and here and there the sidewalk ploughedacross from curb to fence.

  "Lordy," exclaimed the Colonel. "Lordy I how my ears ache since yourdamned coehorns have stopped. The noise got to be silence with us, seh,and yesterday I reckoned a hundred volcanoes had bust. Tell me," said he"when the redoubt over the Jackson road was blown up, they said a niggercame down in your lines alive. Is that so?"

  "Yes," said Stephen, smiling; "he struck near the place where my companywas stationed. His head ached a mite. That seemed to be all."

  "I reckon he fell on it," said Colonel Catesby Jennison, as if it were amatter of no special note.

  "And now tell me something," said Stephen. "How did you burn oursap-rollers?"

  This time the Colonel stopped, and gave himself up to hearty laughter.

  "Why, that was a Yankee trick, sure enough," he cried. "Some ingeniouscuss soaked port fire in turpentine, and shot the wad in a large-boremusket."

  "We thought you used explosive bullets."

  The Colonel laughed again, still more heartily. "Explosivebullets!--Good Lord, it was all we could do to get percussion caps.Do you know how we got percussion caps, seh? Three of ourofficers--dare-devils, seh--floated down the Mississippi on logs. Onefellow made his way back with two hundred thousand. He's the pride ofour Vicksburg army. Not afraid of hell. A chivalrous man, a forlorn-hopeman. The night you ran the batteries he and some others went across toyour side in skiffs--in skiffs, seh, I say--and set fire to the housesin De Soto, that we might see to shoot. And then he came back in theface of our own batteries and your guns. That man was wounded by a trickof fate, by a cussed bit of shell from your coehorns while eating hisdinner in Vicksburg. He's pretty low, now, poor fellow," added theColonel, sadly.

  "Where is he?" demanded Stephen, fired with a desire to see the man.

  "Well, he ain't a great ways from here," said the Colonel. "Perhaps youmight be able to do something for him," he continued thoughtfully. "I'dhate to see him die. The doctor says he'll pull through if he can getcare and good air and good food." He seized Stephen's arm in a fiercegrip. "You ain't fooling?" he said.

  "Indeed I am not," said Stephen.

  "No," said the Colonel, thoughtfully, as to himself, "you don't looklike the man to fool."

  Whereupon he set out with great strides, in marked contrast to hisformer languorous gait, and after a while they came to a sort of gorge,where the street ran between high banks of clay. There Stephen saw themagazines which the Confederates had dug out, and of which he had heard.But he saw something, too, of which he had not heard, Colonel CatesbyJennison stopped before an open doorway in the yellow bank and knocked.A woman's voice called softly to him to enter.

  They went into a room hewn out of the solid clay. Carpet was stretchedon the floor, paper was on the walls, and even a picture. There wasa little window cut like a port in a prison cell, and under it a bed,beside which a middle-aged lady was seated. She had a kindly face whichseemed to Stephen a little pinched as she turned to them with a gestureof restraint. She pointed to the bed, where a sheet lay limply over theangles of a wasted frame. The face was to the wall.

  "Hush!" said the lady,--"it is the first time in two days that he hasslept."

  But the sleeper stirred wearily, and woke with a start. He turned over.The face, so yellow and peaked, was of the type that grows even morehandsome in sickness, and in the great fever-stricken eyes a high spiritburned. For an instant only the man stared at Stephen, and then hedragged himself to the wall.

  The eyes of the other two were both fixed on the young Union Captain.

  "My God!" cried Jennison, seizing Stephen's rigid arm, "does he look asbad as that? We've seen him every day."

  "I--I know him," answered Stephen. He stepped quickly to the bedside,and bent over it. "Colfax!" he said. "Colfax!"

  "This is too much, Jennison," came from the bed a voice that waspitifully weak; "why do you bring Yankees in here?"

  "Captain Brice is a friend of yours, Colfax," said the Colonel, tuggingat his mustache.

  "Brice?" repeated Clarence, "Brice? Does he come from St. Louis?"

  "Do you come from St. Louis, sir?"

  "Yes. I have met Captain Colfax--"

  "Colonel, sir."

  "Colonel Colfax, before the war! And if he would like to go to St.Louis, I think I can have it arranged at once."

  In silence they waited for Clarence's answer Stephen well knew what waspassing in his mind, and guessed at his repugnance to accept a favorfrom a Yankee. He wondered whether there was in this case a specialdetestation. And so his mind was carried far to the northward to thememory of that day in the summer-house on the Meramee heights. Virginiahad not loved her cousin then--of that Stephen was sure. But now,--nowthat the Vicksburg army was ringing with his praise, now that he wasunfortunate--Stephen sighed. His comfort was that he would be theinstrument.

  The lady in her uneasiness smoothed the single sheen that covered thesick man. From afar came the sound of cheering, and it was this thatseemed to rouse him. He faced them again, impatiently.

  "I have reason to remember Mr. Brice," he said steadily. And then, withsome vehemence, "What is he doing in Vicksburg?"

  Stephen looked at Jennison, who winced.

  "The city has surrendered," said that officer.

  They counted on a burst of anger. Colfax only groaned.

  "Then you can afford to be generous," he said, with a bitter laugh."But you haven't whipped us yet, by a good deal. Jennison," he cried,"Jennison, why in hell did you give up?"

  "Colfax," said Stephen, coming forward, "you're too sick a man to talk.I'll look up the General. It may be that I can have you sent Northto-day."

  "You can do as you please," said Clarence, coldly, "with a--prisoner."

  The blood rushed to Stephen's face. Bowing to the lady, he strode out ofthe room. Colonel Jennison, running after him, caught him in t
he street.

  "You're not offended, Brice?" he said. "He's sick--and God Almighty,he's proud--I reckon," he added with a touch of humility that wentstraight to Stephen's heart. "I reckon that some of us are too dernedproud--But we ain't cold."

  Stephen grasped his hand.

  "Offended!" he said. "I admire the man. I'll go to the General directly.But just let me thank you. And I hope, Colonel, that we may meetagain--as friends." "Hold on, seh," said Colonel Catesby Jennison; "wemay as well drink to that."

  Fortunately, as Stephen drew near the Court House, he caught sight ofa group of officers seated on its steps, and among them he was quick torecognize General Sherman.

  "Brice," said the General, returning his salute, "been celebrating thisglorious Fourth with some of our Rebel friends?"

  "Yes, sir," answered Stephen, "and I came to ask a favor for one ofthem." Seeing that the General's genial, interested expression did notchange, he was emboldened to go on. "This is one of their colonels, sir.You may have heard of him. He is the man who floated down the river on alog and brought back two hundred thousand percussion caps--"

  "Good Lord," interrupted the General, "I guess we all heard of him afterthat. What else has he done to endear himself?" he asked, with a smile.

  "Well, General, he rowed across the river in a skiff the night we ranthese batteries, and set fire to De Soto to make targets for theirgunners."

  "I'd like to see that man," said the General, in his eager way. "Whereis he?"

  "What I was going to tell you, sir. After he went through all this, hewas hit by a piece of mortar shell, while sitting at his dinner. He'srather far gone now, General, and they say he can't live unless he canbe sent North. I--I know who he is in St. Louis. And I thought that aslong as the officers are to be paroled I might get your permission tosend him up to-day."

  "What's his name?"

  "Colfax, sir."

  The General laughed. "I know the breed," said he, "I'll bet he didn'tthank you."

  "No, sir, he didn't."

  "I like his grit," said the General, emphatically, "These young bloodsare the backbone of this rebellion, Brice. They were made for war. Theynever did anything except horse-racing and cock-fighting. They ride likethe devil, fight like the devil, but don't care a picayune for anything.Walker had some of 'em. Crittenden had some. And, good Lord, howthey hate a Yankee! I know this Colfax, too. He's a cousin of thatfine-looking girl Brinsmade spoke of. They say he's engaged to her. Be apity to disappoint her--eh?"

  "Yes, General."

  "Why, Captain, I believe you would like to marry her yourself! Take myadvice, sir, and don't try to tame any wildcats."

  "I'm glad to do a favor for that young man," said the General, whenStephen had gone off with the slip of paper he had given him. "I like todo that kind of a favor for any officer, when I can. Did you notice howhe flared up when I mentioned the girl?"

  This is why Clarence Colfax found himself that evening on a hospitalsteamer of the Sanitary Commission, bound north for St. Louis.