X
_IN ACTION_
It was midnight when the battery to which Baillie was attached reachedManassas Junction. The men were weary and half-starved after three daysof fighting and marching, and the horses, worn out with dragging theguns and caissons over well-nigh impassable roads, were famishing forwater. But an effort to secure water and forage for them failed, and sodid an effort to secure water and rations for the men.
For on the eve of the first great battle of the war the Southern armywas in a state of semi-starvation which grew worse with every hour thatbrought fresh relays of troops but no new supplies of food. Already hadbegun that course of extraordinary mismanagement in the supplydepartments at Richmond which throughout the war kept the Army ofNorthern Virginia constantly half-starving or wholly starving, evenwhen, as at Manassas, it lay in the midst of a land of abounding plenty.
All the efforts of the generals commanding in the field to remedy thisstate of things by drawing upon the granaries and smoke-houses roundabout them for supplies that were in danger of presently falling intothe enemy's hands, were thwarted by the stupid obstinacy of acrack-brained commissary-general. It was his inexplicable policy, whilethe army lay at Manassas with an unused railroad reaching into the richfields to the west, to forbid the purchase of food and forage thereexcept by his own direct agents, who were required to send it all toRichmond, whence it was transported back again, in such meagrequantities as an already overtaxed single track railroad could manage tocarry.
Red-tape was choking the army to death from the very beginning, and itcontinued to do so to the end, in spite of all remonstrances.
Even in the matter of water the men at Manassas were restricted to a fewpints a day to each man for all uses, simply because the commandinggeneral was not allowed the simple means of procuring a more adequatesupply.
This, however, is not the place in which to set forth in detail thosefacts of perverse stupidity which have been fully stated in officialreports, in General Beauregard's memoirs, and in other authoritativeworks. Such matters are mentioned herein only so far as they affectedthe events that go to make up the present story.
When the Army of the Shenandoah began to add its numbers to that alreadygathered at Manassas, a way out was found, so far at least as water wasconcerned, by sending the regiments and batteries, as fast as they came,to positions near Bull Run, some miles in front, where water at leastwas to be had. Baillie's command, worn out as it was, and suffering fromhunger, was hurried through the camp and forced to march some wearymiles farther before taking even that small measure of rest and sleepthat the rapidly waning night allowed. It was nearly morning when themen and horses were permitted to drink together out of the muddy streamwhich was presently to mark the fighting-line between two armies infierce battle for the mastery.
It was nearly sunrise when a cannon-shot broke the stillness of apeculiarly brilliant Sunday morning and summoned all the weary men totheir posts. A little later the battery with which we are concernedreceived its orders and was moved into position on the line. Itscomplement of commissioned officers being short, Sergeant-Major BailliePegram had command of the two guns which constituted the left section,and had a lieutenant's work to do.
Troops were being hurried hither and thither in what seemed to Baillie'sinexperienced eyes a hopeless confusion. But as he watched, he saw ordergrow out of the chaos,--a manifestation of the fact that there was onemind in control, and that every movement, however meaningless it mightseem, was part and parcel of a concerted plan, and was intended to haveits bearing upon the result.
In the meanwhile the occasional report of a rifle had grown into acontinuous rattle of musketry on the farther side of the stream, wherethe skirmishers were hotly at work, their firing being punctuated nowand then by the deeper exclamation of a cannon. But the work of the dayhad not yet begun in earnest. The main line was not yet engaged, andwould not be until the skirmishers should slowly fall back upon it fromtheir position beyond the stream.
To men in line of battle this is the most trying of all war'sexperiences. Then it is that every man questions himself closely as tohis ability to endure the strain. Nerves are stretched to a tension thatthreatens collapse. Speech is difficult even to the bravest men, and thelonging to plunge into the fray and be actively engaged is well-nighirresistible.
All this and worse is the experience even of war-seasoned veterans whenthey must stand or lie still during these endless minutes of waiting,while the skirmishers are engaged in front. What must have been thestrain upon the nerves and brains of men, not one of whom had as yetseen a battle, and not one in ten of whom had even received his "baptismof fire" in a skirmish, as the men in Baillie's battery had done duringthe week before! It is at such a time, and not in the heat of battle,that men's courage is apt to falter, and that discipline alone holdsthem to their duty.
The strain was rather relieved of its intensity by the shrieking of aHotchkiss shell, which presently burst in the midst of Baillie Pegram'ssection and not far from his person. Then came the less noisy but morenerve-racking patter of musket-balls,--few and scattering still, as theskirmish-lines were still well in front,--but deadly in their force, aswas seen when two or three of the men suddenly sank to the ground in themidst of a stillness which was broken only by the whiz of the occasionalbullets.
One man cried out with pain. The rest of those struck were still. Theone who cried out was slightly wounded. The others were dead. And thebattle was not yet begun.
At this moment came a courier with orders. Upon receiving them thecaptain hurriedly turned to Baillie, and said:
"Take your section across the Run, at the ford there just to the left.Take position with the skirmish-line and get your orders from itscommander. Leave your caissons behind, and move at a gallop."
Baillie Pegram was too new to the business of war to understandprecisely what all this meant. Had he seen a little more of war hewould have guessed at once that the enemy was moving upon theConfederate left along the road that lay beyond the stream, and that hisguns were needed to aid the skirmishers in the work to be done in frontin preparation for the battle that had not yet burst in all its fury. Hewould have understood, too, from the order to leave his caissons behind,that the stand beyond the stream was not meant to be of long duration.The fifty shots he carried in each of his limber-chests would be quiteenough to last him till orders should come to fall back across thestream again.
But he did not understand all this clearly. What he did understand wasthat he was under orders to take his guns across the stream and use themthere as vigorously as he could till further orders should come.
As he emerged from the woods a few hundred yards beyond Bull Run, hefound a skirmish-line of men lying down and contesting the ground inchby inch with another line like their own, beyond which he could see theheavy columns of the enemy marching steadily to turn the Confederateleft flank and force it from its position. Notwithstanding his lack ofexperience in such matters, he saw instantly what was happening, andrealised that this left wing of Beauregard's army was destined toreceive the brunt of the enemy's attack. He wondered, in his ignorance,if Beauregard knew all this, and if somebody ought not to go and tellhim of it.
He had no time to think beyond this, for at that moment theskirmish-line, under some order which he had not heard, gave way to theright and left, leaving a little space open for his guns. Planting themthere he opened fire with shrapnel, which he now and then changed tocanister when the enemy, in his eagerness, pressed forward to withinscant distance of the slowly retiring skirmish-line of the Confederates.
Under orders Baillie fell back with the skirmishers, moving the guns byhand, and continuing to fire as he went.
As the Confederate skirmishers drew near the stream which they were tocross, the officer in command of them said to Pegram:
"Advance your guns a trifle, Sergeant-Major, and give them your heaviestfire for twenty-five seconds or so. When they recoil, limber up andtake your guns across the creek as q
uickly as possible. I'll cover yourmovement."
Baillie did not perfectly understand the purpose of this, but heunderstood his orders, and very promptly obeyed them. Advancing his gunsquickly to a little knoll thirty or forty yards in front, he opened firewith double charges of canister, each gun firing at the rate of three orfour times a minute, and each vomiting a gallon of iron balls at eachdischarge into the faces of a line of men not a hundred yards away. Atthe same moment the riflemen of the skirmish-line rose to their feet,rushed forward with a yell that impressed Baillie as truly demoniacal,and delivered a murderous volley of Minie balls in aid of his canister.The combined fire was irresistible, as it was meant to be, and theFederal skirmishers fell back in some confusion in face of it.
Then the cool-headed leader of the skirmishers turned to Baillie andcommanded:
"Now be quick. Take your guns across the creek at once. They'll be on usagain in a minute with reinforcements, but I'll hold them back till youget the guns across--"
He had not finished his order when he fell, with a bullet in his brain,and his men, picking him up, laid him limply across his horse, which twoof them hurried to the rear, passing within ten feet of Baillie Pegramas he struggled to get his guns across the run without wetting hisammunition.
"Poor, gallant fellow!" thought Baillie, as the corpse was borne pasthim. "He was only a captain, but he would have made himself amajor-general presently, with his coolness and his determination. Hedied too soon!"
Meanwhile Baillie was busy executing the order that the dead man hadgiven with his last breath, while some other was in command out there infront and struggling to protect the guns till they could pass thestream.
It is always so in life. No man is indispensable. When one man falls atthe post of duty, there is always some other to take his place. "Men maycome and men may go," but the work that men were born to do "goes on forever."
As Baillie was directing the struggles of his drivers in the difficulttask of recrossing the stream, three shells burst over him in so quicka succession that he did not know from which of them came the fragmentthat cut a great gash in his head and rendered him for the momentsenseless. He recovered himself quickly, and this was fortunate, for hisuntrained and inexperienced men were far less steady in retreat underfire than they had been out there in front, and Baillie's direction wasneeded now to prevent them from abandoning in panic the guns with whichthey had fought so gallantly a few minutes before.
Under his sharply given commands they recovered their morale, and a fewminutes later Baillie brought his powder-grimed guns again into positionon the left of the battery. Then, half-blinded by the blood that wasflowing freely over his face and clothing, he sought his captain, raisedhis hand in salute, and said, feebly:
"Captain, I beg to report that I have executed my orders. My men havebehaved well, every--"
A heavy musketry fire from the enemy at that moment began, and BailliePegram's horse--the beautiful sorrel mare on which Agatha had onceridden--sank under him, in that strange, limp way in which a horsefalls when killed instantly by a bullet received in any vital part.
By good fortune the sergeant-major was not caught under the animal, butas he tried to walk toward the new mount which he had asked for, hestaggered and fell, much as the mare had done, but from a differentcause. Complete unconsciousness had overtaken him, as a consequence ofthe shock of his wound and the resultant loss of blood.
When he came to consciousness again, he was lying on the grass under atree, with a young surgeon kneeling beside him, busy with bandages. Fora time his consciousness did not extend beyond his immediatesurroundings and the terrific aching of his head. Presently the heavyfiring which seemed to be all about him, and the zip, zip, zip ofbullets as they struck the earth under the hospital tree brought him toa realisation of the fact that battle was raging there, and that he,somehow,--he could not make out how,--was absent from his post with theguns. He made a sudden effort to rise, but instantly fell back again,unconscious.
When he next came to himself there was a sound as of thousands ofyelling demons in his ears, which he presently made out to be the "rebelyell" issuing from multitudinous throats. There were hoof-beats allabout him, too, the hoof-beats of a thousand horses moving at fullspeed. Excited by these sounds, wondering and anxiously apprehensive, hemade another effort to rise, but was promptly restrained by the strongbut gentle hands of an attendant, who said to him, with more of goodsense than grammar:
"Lay still. It's all right, and it's all over. We've licked 'em, andthey's a-runnin' like mad. The horsemen what passed us was Stuart'scavalry, a-goin' after 'em to see that they don't stop too soon."
Stuart was drunk with delight. He shouted to his men, as he rode acrossStone Bridge: "Come on, boys! We'll gallop over the long bridge intoWashington to-night if some blockhead doesn't stop us with orders, and Ireckon we can gallop away from orders!"
Baillie lay still only because the attendant kept a hand upon his chestand so restrained him. As he listened, the firing receded and grew lessin volume, except that now and then it burst out in a volley. That waswhen one of Stuart's squadrons came suddenly upon a mass of theirconfused and fleeing foes and poured a hailstorm of leaden cones inamong them as a suggestion that it was time for them to scatter andresume their run for Washington.
As the turmoil grew less and faded into the distance, Baillie's witsslowly came back to him, and thoughts of himself returned.
"Where am I?" was his first question.
"Under a hospital tree on the battle-field of Manassas," answered thenurse. "You're about two hundred yards in the rear of the position whereyour battery has been covering itself with glory all day. It's gone nowto help in the pursuit. But it's had it hot and heavy all day, judgingfrom the sloppings over."
"The 'sloppings over?' What do you mean?"
"Why, the bullets and shells and things that didn't get theirselvesstopped, like, on the lines, but come botherin' over here by thishospital tree. Two of 'em hit wounded men, an' finally, just at thelast, you know, the doctor got his comeuppance."
"Was he wounded?"
"Wuss 'n that. He war killed, jes' like a ordinary soldier. That's whyyou're still a-layin' here, an' here you'll lay, I reckon, all night,for they ain't nobody left to give no orders, 'ceptin' me, an' I ain'tnothin' but a detail. But I'm a-goin' to git you somethin' to eat ef Ikin. They's another hospital jest over the hill, an' mebbe they've gotsomethin' to eat, an' mebbe they's a spare surgeon there, too. AnyhowI'm a-goin' to do the best I kin fer you an' the rest."
"How many of us are there?" asked Baillie.
"Only four now--not enough for them to bother about, I s'pose they'llsay, specially sence two on 'em is clean bound to die, anyhow. All theslightly wounded has been carried away to a reg'lar hospital. That'stheir game, I reckon--to take good keer o' the fellers that's a-goin' togit well, so as to make complaints ef they don't, an' leave the restwhat can't live to make no complaints to die where they is."
Baillie was too weak, and still too muddled in his intelligence, todisabuse the mountaineer's mind of this misconception. It is onlyordinary justice to say that his interpretation was utterly wrong. Therewas never a more heroic set of men than the surgeons who ministered onthe battle-fields of the Civil War to the wounded on one side or on theother. At the beginning, their department was utterly unorganised, andscarcely at all equipped, either with material appliances or withcapable human help in the way of nurses, litter-bearers, orambulance-men. They did the best they could. When battle was on, theyhung yellow flags from trees as near the firing-line as possible, andthese flags were respected by both sides, so far as intentional firingupon them was concerned. But located as they were, just in the rear ofthe fighters, these field-hospitals were constantly under a heavy fire,aimed not at them, but at the fighting-line in front, and it was undersuch a fire that the young surgeons did their difficult and verydelicate work. The tying of an artery was often interfered with by thebursting of a shell which half-buried both patient and
surgeon in looseearth. It was the duty of these field-surgeons to do only so much asmight be immediately necessary--to put their patients as quickly aspossible into a condition in which it was reasonably safe to send them,in ambulances or upon litters, to some better-equipped hospital in therear. Very naturally and very properly, the surgeons discriminated, inselecting wounded men to send to the hospitals, between those who werein condition to be removed, and those to whom removal would mean death,certainly or probably. The mountaineer, who had been detailed as ahospital attendant that day, did not understand, and so hemisinterpreted.
"Where is my hat?" Baillie Pegram asked, after a period of silence.
"Is it the one with a red feather in it?" responded the attendant.
"Yes."
"Well, it's a good deal the wuss for wear," answered the man, producingthe blood-soaked and soil-stained headgear. "I don't think you'll wantto wear it again."
But when the headpiece was brought, the young man, with feeble anduncertain fingers, detached the feather and thrust it inside his flannelshirt, leaving the lacerated hat where it had fallen upon the ground.
"Am I badly wounded?" Pegram asked, after a little.
"Well," answered the man, "you've got a good deal more'n I should liketo be a-carryin' around with me. But I reckon you'll pull through,perticular ef you kin git to a hospital after a bit."
Just then, as night was falling, a pitiless rain began, and all nightlong Baillie Pegram lay in a furrow of the field, soaked and suffering.But he removed the feather from its hiding-place, and held it upon hischest, in order that the rain might wash away the blood-stains withwhich it had been saturated.
When the morning came, and the ambulance with it, the blood-stains weregone and the feather was clean, though its texture was limp, itsappearance bedraggled, and much of its original colour had been washedout.
* * * * *
Two or three days later, Agatha Ronald at her home received by mail apackage containing a feather, once red but now badly faded. No note ormessage of any kind accompanied it, but Agatha understood. She hadalready learned through the newspapers that "Sergeant-Major BailliePegram, after a desperate encounter with the enemy on the outer lines,had been severely--perhaps mortally--wounded in the head;" and that"Sergeant-Major Baillie Pegram has been mentioned in General Orders forhis gallant conduct on the field, with a recommendation for promotion,if he recovers from his wounds, as the surgeons give little hope that hewill."
She wrapped the faded feather in tissue-paper, deposited it in ajewelled glove-box which had come to her as an heirloom from her mother,and put it away in one of her most sacred depositories.
A week or two later, she learned that Sergeant-Major Baillie Pegram hadbeen removed from the general hospital at Richmond to his home atWarlock, and that he was now expected to recover from his wounds.
The Master of Warlock: A Virginia War Story Page 10