House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  With first light, the General and Trav and a few others, leaving orders for the men presently to follow, rode on toward Rice’s Station. They came to a considerable creek, now at the flood and out of its banks. The road crossed by a rattling bridge of poles and then climbed steeply, circling the heads of deep ravines where little streams were born to work their devious way northward to the Appomattox, keeping to high ground where in the forest dogwoods were showing their first bloom.

  When they reached the crest above the valley in which the railroad ran, the drizzle had ceased and the skies began to clear. Longstreet waited there for Field’s division to come up, and they rode with the head of the column down the long hill. At the Station, the advance encountered a light force of enemy infantry and scattered them; but a householder reported that several hundred Yankees had gone toward Farmville. They might burn the bridges which the army must use, so Longstreet sent Rosser’s cavalry to overtake those Yankees and destroy them. He put his arriving divisions into position to meet any threat from the south, and waited for word from General Lee.

  General Rosser returned to report the enemy scattered, the bridge at Farmville safely held; and Trav recognized Burr among the troopers and had brief word with him. “All right, Burr?”

  Burr nodded. “But I could sleep a week.” His tones were dull. “Have you seen Papa? Or Rollin?”

  “No. I saw your mother in Richmond. They’re all right. At least, they were then.”

  “Has Sherman taken Raleigh?”

  Trav guessed Burr’s thought, for Barbara was in Raleigh. “I don’t know.” Burr moved on, trotting his tired horse to overtake his comrades.

  Before that day ended, Longstreet’s divisions, with screening cavalry watching the growing enemy strength on the road from Burkville, were well concentrated; but there were no rations for the men. Trav heard that General Lee, having stayed the night before at Amelia Springs, had come up with them; but he did not see the commanding general. He was with Latrobe when a little after dark on Thursday Longstreet summoned them to say they must move on.

  “There was some hope of turning south from here,” he said. “But enemy columns are coming up the Burkville road.” He directed Latrobe to draft the orders: trains and batteries to start at once for Farmville; Field, Heth, Wilcox to follow in that order; the skirmish lines to give the last division an hour’s start; Rosser’s horsemen to protect the rear. “And every effort must be made to bring along stragglers, and to wake every man who may have fallen asleep.”

  Latrobe asked: “Where is Anderson? He should have been up hours ago.”

  “General Lee has taken Mahone’s division back to find him. They will march to High Bridge while we move to Farmville. Give the orders; then we will ride ahead with the trains.”

  A little after ten o’clock they mounted; but they found the road jammed with halted wagons and guns, and rode along the column through the darkness to find where the trouble lay. The bridge over Sandy Run had proved too weak to support a heavy load; and Longstreet set men to unload ammunition wagons and limbers and thus lighten them so they could cross. The ammunition must be carried over and reloaded on the other side. Trav and the others of the staff shared in that work, wading the shallow river to their boot tops; and Trav thought his arms would crack under the heavy burdens, yet found resolution to keep on. Longstreet damned the useless arm that prevented him from working as hard as they; and he damned the bridge and the river and the toiling men, lashing them all alike with a steady and picturesque profanity which made them grin, even while they winced under his bruising tongue.

  Not till near dawn was that hard task done. When at last they rode on toward Farmville and came to another bridge and to a third a mile beyond, Trav was profoundly grateful that these bridges were equal to the tasks imposed, so those hours of toil need not be again endured.

  In Friday’s first daylight, they rode through Farmville and across the Appomattox, and they found wagons loaded with rations which had been brought by the South Side Railroad from Lynchburg. The starving men swarmed around the wagons, and little cooking fires sent smoke banners drifting gently upward toward the threatening sky; but Trav, more tired than hungry, sought a patch of new-springing grass where Nig could graze, and himself lay flat along the ground and was instantly asleep.

  Yet not for long. A sudden stir waked him, and he saw General Lee ride at a trot to where Longstreet was standing. Trav rose and led Nig, reluctant to leave the good grass, plucking a last mouthful as he yielded to the tug of the reins, toward the group surrounding the commanding general; and he heard General Lee’s words. There had been disaster yesterday at Sayler’s Creek, back beyond Rice’s Station. Trav thought that must be the creek which they had crossed on the pole bridge, before they climbed to the ridge where dogwoods were in bloom. General Lee was saying that there or thereabouts, the rear under Ewell and Kershaw had been cut off and captured; seven or eight thousand men were lost. Worse, the enemy cavalry was now across the Appomattox at High Bridge, and coming up on their flank.

  “So you had better not let your men wait to eat their rations,” General Lee directed. “We must move toward Cumberland Church, and at once.”

  Trav had never heard of Cumberland Church, but the guns were going behind them, south of Farmville, and there was firing off to the east; so once more the enemy was edging them north again, away from the course they wished to take. He was dumb with weariness and hopelessness; but if Longstreet was shaken by this new blow the big man gave no sign. At his orders the hungry men fell in, gnawing at raw pork and gobbling meal mush which there had not been time to cook. Everything else was thrown into the wagons any way at all; the teamsters caught the infection of haste and whipped their teams away; the columns formed and began to move. From the Farmville bridge, the protecting screen of horsemen came pell-mell toward them before a thrust of blue cavalry; and Longstreet’s great voice boomed above the sound of musketry, the cracking whips and the rumble of the wagons.

  “Quick—march!” he ordered. Trav saw Lee speak to him; and though the men struck off as briskly as tired men could, he roared a new command. “Double quick—march!” The men obediently began to jog.

  Longstreet sent Heth to support the cavalry. General Lee rode on at a canter to the head of the column; but Longstreet waited till the rear was moving, then followed at a walk. Trav, half asleep in his saddle, heard in remote indifference the steady chatter of Heth’s musketry diminishing behind them. From a hilltop a mile north of the river there was a distant view to the eastward, back toward Petersburg; and to the northwest he saw a little group of bold heights not far away, and he glimpsed the distant mountains. When they had gone two or three miles, there was another halt to meet a Yankee thrust against their flank along a crossroad that came in past some coal pits. Mahone’s division went that way, with cavalry to help him meet the danger; the infantry halted to be ready for any need while the trains went on.

  The long day was for Trav a troubled dream. Without the relief of action, he could only wait. That pressure against their flank held them here till dark; then they took up their march and pushed on for hours. At the halt, Trav slept without waking till sun burned away the morning mists. When its full rays struck across his eyes and he roused, the weary men were already on the move; but he saw General Longstreet and Colonel Latrobe and two or three others at breakfast, sitting around a fire by the roadside. He stopped to get a bit of salt pork and a slab of corn bread, and then joined them. General Longstreet said, speaking so quietly that none but the immediate group could hear:

  “I’ve been telling these gentlemen, Major, that ’Lys Grant sent in a flag last night, inviting surrender.” Trav, his mouth full, stopped chewing; then began again. “The commanding general asked my opinion. I said the time had not yet come.”

  Trav found that he was trembling, not with fear but with fatigue. His weakness was a hateful thing, and he hid it as he could. He watched Longstreet, and wondered that any man in such an hour could
appear so steady and unshaken. He himself felt old and broken and no longer capable of anything. He saw the same dark weariness in the others of the staff, in the soldiers, in the very horses cropping sparse grass and too weak to move from one tuft to the next without a pause and an obviously painful effort.

  His breakfast done, he found Nig and took a handful of last year’s dead broom sedge and wiped the caked mud and sweat off the big horse’s flanks; and Nig nuzzled him affectionately. Trav returned to General Longstreet. Colonel Latrobe, who was Chief of Staff since Moxley Sorrel had been promoted to become a brigadier and to take an almost fatal wound in front of Petersburg, departed on some business of command; and Longstreet said affectionately:

  “Well, Currain, you look better since your breakfast ”

  “I’m ashamed to be so worn-out,” Trav confessed. “I’m beaten down, no more strength left in me.”

  Longstreet spoke in an impersonal, reflective tone. “I’m rarely tired.”

  “You never seem tired,” Trav agreed. Then he turned at the sound of an approaching horseman; and General Pendleton rode near, dismounted, dropped the reins over his arm and approached them.

  Longstreet greeted him courteously, and Trav rose and moved aside. Beyond hearing, he watched them speak briefly together; but General Pendleton did not sit down, and General Longstreet did not rise. When Pendleton rode away, Trav returned; but at once he felt a surging anger in the big man; and after a moment, thinking the other might prefer to be alone, he was about to leave him. But Longstreet said gruffly: “Sit down! Sit down!” Trav obeyed; and after a moment Longstreet seemed to laugh to himself, and without looking at Trav he said: “If I hadn’t other business in hand I should have called him to account ”

  He seemed to invite a question. Trav asked: “What was it, sir?”

  “Why, if you please,” said Longstreet scornfully, “some of our general officers believe we should surrender this army, and Pendleton came to ask me to convey their opinion to the commanding general!” He added: “I assured him that if General Lee didn’t know when to surrender without my volunteering the information, he would never know. Pendleton said he would go to General Lee himself; and I told him that if I were in command and he brought me such a message I would invoke the Articles of War and have him shot!”

  Trav did not speak, for he knew guiltily that he too believed the hour for surrender had come. Longstreet after a moment reflected: “I was perhaps too blunt; so doubtless I have made an enemy of General Pendleton—as if we hadn’t, all of us, enough enemies on our hands just now. But such men as he are good haters. If the chance ever comes, he will do me an injury one day.”

  Latrobe returned. “The road will soon be open for us, General,” he reported.

  The march that day was along a road deep in mud, and through a forest of pines with rare small openings on either side, and past shabby cabins where fields had been worked to exhaustion and abandoned. Everywhere along the road they saw silent evidence that this mass of men was no longer an army. They passed wagons broken down and abandoned, guns mired and left hub deep in mud, muskets and cartridge boxes thrown aside by men too tired to carry them further. They passed human debris, too: men who had marched a hundred miles in these six days with no more than an occasional handful of corn to eat, till they fell in their tracks and could only drag themselves to the roadside and lie helpless there. Trav remembered that for almost a year, in the trenches in front of Petersburg, these men had been on short rations. There had rarely been even one day when they could eat their fill, through all the weary winter that was done. It was little wonder that after a week of marching and fighting, marching through mud ankle-deep and which clung to their broken shoes so stubbornly that even with a stick it was hard to scrape it away, they should at last collapse. Many of them lay like dead men, and half a dozen times Trav saw men who surely were dead; and once he dismounted to examine a gaunt boy with long, fair hair, whose open eyes stared upward at the sky. The boy was dead, though with no wound on him; dead of hunger and fatigue, dead of a broken heart.

  He was not the only one. Trav counted a dozen along that dreadful road where the abandoned wreckage of the army, as explicitly as a white flag, confessed defeat.

  That day the enemy pressed them hardly at all. The column moved slowly, for worn-out horses were barely able to drag wagons through the stiffening mud of drying roads. The eternal trees that walled the road, shutting out any distant view, seemed to Trav to make the ordeal even more terrible. Once from a gentle rise beyond New Store they saw, through the notch which the road cut in the woods ahead, distant mountains far away; and sometimes they caught glimpses of three low wooded peaks rising against the sky a few miles to the right. But for the most part they might as well have been making a night march, trudging blindly on. There were no crossroads. The Yankees were coming on behind them in countless hosts. None knew what force might wait to bar their way ahead.

  Their thinned ranks, before night, were somewhat recruited. The woods were full of stragglers from the head of the column whom exhaustion had forced to drop behind, or of men from units which had been crushed and scattered. All the long day these men came out of the fringing forests, some with muskets and some without, begging for any scrap of food. Promises, or the gift of a bit of bacon or a crust of corn bread, drew them into the column; so that at dusk Trav thought the First Corps was by hundreds stronger than when the day’s march began.

  A little before sunset, they overtook an artillery battalion which had drawn off the road, and the commanding officer came to speak to them. “I’m Colonel Hardaway, General,” he reported. “I regret, sir, that we can go no farther. Horses and men are exhausted.”

  “All your horses, Colonel? All your men?”

  “Most of them.”

  Longstreet said gently: “Very well. Abandon the guns you cannot move. Bury them and cover their graves with leaves, so those people won’t find them and use them against us. Bring on what you can.”

  Before Colonel Hardaway turned aside, Trav asked: “Aren’t the Third Richmond Howitzers in your battalion, Colonel?” And when the other said yes, Trav asked Longstreet’s permission to delay a moment here. “Brett Dewain is with the Howitzers,” he explained.

  Trav found Brett slumped beside his gun, and they had a few minutes together. Brett said Cinda and the others were still safe when he left Richmond. “But I don’t know what’s happened to them since. We saw a great glare in the sky, toward morning; and some refugees said the whole city was on fire. The Yankees weren’t there, not then. I suppose General Ewell burned the warehouses, and the fire spread.”

  Trav nodded. Richmond was in another world. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Brett laughed feebly. “My jaws and gums and teeth are sore from chewing parched corn. It’s all we’ve had since Tuesday, and damned little of that. And my feet are blistered raw. We marched to Branch’s Church Sunday night; walked, for fear we’d break down the horses. It seems to me we’ve done nothing since then but march—or run. Cavalry began to cut at us as soon as we passed Amelia Court House. Day before yesterday they really scattered us. Then yesterday we got into a hellhole of a swamp, and the drivers cut the traces and galloped away.” He added grimly: “Oh, not all of them of course. We saved some guns, to lug them this far and bury them here.”

  “It’s almost over, I suppose.”

  Brett nodded. “I suppose so. It’s hard to see how we can go on.”

  Trav said: “I saw Burr at Rice’s Station. He is—tired, of course, and worried about Barbara, with Sherman so near Raleigh.”

  The sun was low; the day had been gentle and cool, with a fine soft breeze. “They’ve let us alone today,” Brett said.

  “They’re just herding us north, keeping us away from Johnston’s army. That’s all they have to do.” Brett did not speak, and Trav looked all around. The oak trees were in tassel, spring was on the flood. “I saw a wild turkey in the woods a while ago,” Trav remarked; and he rose stiffly
, sore muscles lame and aching. “Well, I’ll have to go,” he said. They clasped hands and he climbed into the saddle and rode away.

  The sun was near its setting. Trav passed a roadside church and went on, and the western sky burned red with bright glory and then paled as night came down. When Trav overtook Longstreet, the General asked: “Well, did you see Mr. Dewain?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good!” Longstreet fell into abstracted silence, their horses plodded wearily through the night. Trav mustered strength to speak.

  “They haven’t hit us today.”

  Longstreet made a half-mirthful sound. “ ’Lys Grant’s giving us a chance to think things over.”

  “Did we burn the bridges at Farmville? That would slow them.”

  “Alexander burned them, yes. A little too soon. Fitz Lee wasn’t across, but he found a ford upstream.”

  “I don’t see how the men keep going.”

  “Every man has untapped powers. No one knows what he can do till he’s tried to the uttermost. There’s an exhilaration in doing something you didn’t know you could do. A horse will founder itself. Once a man is tired enough, his own exhaustion feeds his spirit, and he will march himself to death.”

  “Some of the men have done it today, and before today.”

  Longstreet did not speak. After a long time, trains at a halt clogged the road ahead, and Longstreet said: “Well, it’s eleven o’clock. We might as well bivouac here. The men had better be prepared to meet some pressure from the enemy at dawn. I’ll ride on and find the commanding general.”

  Trav and the others stayed behind. When Longstreet returned, the headquarters tents were pitched, the fires burning, pork broiling over the flames. No one questioned him, but after he had eaten he spoke to them.

  “Well, gentlemen, our advance is near Appomattox Station, five or six miles ahead.” He reflected, half to himself: “Two years ago this army with its trains would have made a column sixty miles long. Now, from front to rear, we’re strung along a scant six miles of the Lynchburg pike.” No one spoke, and he said: “General Lee’s headquarters are a mile or two ahead, and General Gordon is close to Appomattox Station. He thought there was no one in front of him; but some Yankee cavalry hit Walker’s guns about nine o’clock, and captured some of them and drove them back on Gordon. Gordon says he has only some two thousand men in hand. His stragglers have been falling back all day, some of them to join us. We’re the body of the army now.”