Altsheler, Joseph - [Novel 05]

by A Herald Of The West (lit)

  We knew that some Baltimore troops were already on the field, and it was they who were holding it against the attack of the British army which must prevail soon over men so few in number unless we came up in time to help them.

  " Forward! " shouted everybody, and we who had be lieved an hour ago that we could not walk another step broke into a run, leaving the dust clouds rolling behind us. A cheer from our comrades already on the field saluted us as we rushed forward to join them, and we be gan to tread upon each other in an effort to find our proper places in the line of battle. The rifles were pop ping all around us, and a cannon boomed out so suddenly at my side that I jumped into the air. I could see from their white faces that the stomachs of many of the clerks and farmers were growing weak, now that they were to stand in line and face the fire of the enemy.

  The smoke clouds were hanging high in the clear hot air, and, being able to breathe at the normal rate again, I looked toward the enemy. In front of us ran the slight

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  ftnd shallow Eastern Branch, and on the hills beyond it the houses of the shambling village of Bladensburg gleamed through the trees. But the tired little place now saw a martial sight, for the whole British army was marching through it to the attack. I could see them, line after line, in solid, even red ranks, banners aloft, the drums beating the steady rub-a-dub, while the fifes played a shriller tune. The polished bayonets shone in the sunlight, and in front of the squares the sharpshoot ers lurked among the bushes on the river bank and fired steadily upon us. From these bushes came spouts of flame and the sudden red gleam of a sharpshooter's coat, and above them rose the frequent white puffs of smoke which gathered together higher up and made the cloud- bank.

  It was a splendid spectacle, and for a moment my heart stirred at the sight, the first regular army that I had ever seen. These were veterans who had been fight ing Napoleon's French in Spain for years, and knew what war was and how to meet it. Then I sickened as I looked around at our own raw levies good stuff, but untried, unled, half-armed, unfed, and tired to death. Farther off I could see the President himself on horse back looking across the river at the British, and behind him, also on horseback, clustered the Cabinet.

  Zip! zip! a bullet knocked up the dust at my feet.

  " Stand back there a little, Ten Broeck! " sang out some one; " you're as big as a house and make as good a target! "

  I moved the house back, and then a captain ordered us to fire. Crash ran the volley along our line. I sent my bullet into the bushes on the other bank, but whether it hit anything I know not, for the smoke of our volley thickened the air before us and I could not see. Pres ently the smoke drifted away again, and I could see the red squares in the village pressing on toward the river, while the fire of the sharpshooters in front grew

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  fiercer and hotter. Bullets began to whistle around us again, and to draw blood and to take life. Our ranks were jostled about, and tne orders became mixed and multiplied. We knew but one thing to do, and that was to load and fire as fast as we could. Some forgot to take the ramrods out of their rifles, and they whizzed through the air toward Bladensburg to join the other projectiles, which now formed a steady stream.

  We fought with zeal, but without order. The firing was irregular, not by volleys; first a pattering rain of bullets, then the crash of a hundred rifles, and then the rising and falling crackle of gunshots quickly succeed ing each other. Men were falling near me, and some were crying out as the bullets struck them, while others took their wounds in silence. Some faces were white, others blood red; what my own was I knew not. I felt at first a strange nervous weakness, an inclination to collapse, as if all the marrow had been taken out of my bones, but as I loaded and fired my rifle and the shout ing and roaring of the battle increased it passed away, and a fierce desire to sweep forward with the whole army and overwhelm the enemy took its place.

  The air became almost too heavy for breath. The smoke clouds, which hung high when we came upon the field, now lay close to the ground, and great columns and pyramids of dust mingled with them, making us gasp and choke as we fought. Our excited eyes looking through this dull haze magnified and distorted every thing. The soldiers in red, seen dimly on the other shore, grew to giants without shape.

  We could have seen little in this thickening veil of smoke and dust without the flash of the firing. The points of flame twinkled by hundreds as the rifles were discharged, fused and ran like a sword of light along the front of either army, broadened and deepened here and there by the blaze of a cannon shot. The crash of the rifles and the boom of the cannon had united into a steady

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  roar, but sometimes the torrent of the shouting swelled above it. We were a new army, and the men found that the battle fever rose with the use of their own voices, and mingled with this shouting, too, we heard sometimes the groans of the wounded. They were thick among us, and the dead lay on the earth, which was wet and soaked with blood. Tiny red streams flowed between the hillocks, and were then trampled into the earth by heavy boots. The reek of the army arose, and the smell of the blood and sweat and wet uniforms offended our nostrils.

  I remembered how hot and clammy it was. The banks of smoke and vapour enveloped us like a breath from a prairie fire, and I wiped my dripping face more than once with the sleeve of my coat. Even in the fury of the battle I felt my throat parching for water, and I raised my canteen to my lips and drank deeply. Many others were doing the same. How good it felt as it went down and cut away the coated dust! I shouted with new vigour and loaded and fired my rifle faster than before, aiming merely at the red haze in front and never seeing whether the bullet hit or missed.

  My ears were filled with the crackle of the rifles and muskets and the roar of the artillery, but through the smoke and dust I could see that the enemy across the shallow stream was pushing all his forces to the attack. Suddenly he opened fire with Congreve rockets, a missile new to us, which added with their flame and strange shriek to the confusion among the hasty levies. They poured showers of these upon us, and under cover of their fire a heavy red column rushed upon the bridge.

  The column advanced at the double quick in beau tiful order. Above the crackle of the rifles, the pound ing of the artillery, and the hissing of the rockets I could hear the steady beat of their drums and the wailing of the fifes. They were on the bridge now, a solid red mass, rushing forward, the rear ranks pressing on those in front. The artillery and the rifles opened upon them

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  there, pouring balls and bullets into the solid mass. I could see men falling from the bridge into the shallow stream, which in some places was not deep enough to hide their bodies, and there they lay, their red coats showing above the surface of the water and blazing in the sunshine; others, though dead, were held upright in the solid ranks and were carried on in the rush of their living companions. Behind them their artillery in the village replied to ours, and the air was filled with the hissing and shrieking rockets. The dust trampled up by many men rose in clouds, and mingling with the smoke made a dense, reddish-brown fog bank. Our men, untrained soldiers, excited and eager, were shouting at everything, and the roar of many voices, mingling with the thunder of the cannonade and the musketry, stunned our ears with a tumult that ceased not.

  Their sharpshooters swarmed along the river bank, hiding behind bushes, trees, and weeds and crawling in the mud, and their fire was more deadly to us than that of the artillery and rockets. I could hear the whistling of the little bullets all around me, and while we poured our fire into the column on the bridge the fringe of sharp shooters on the bank broadened, crept forward in the mud and water, and avenged their comrades who were falling in the charge. Our raw army, bruised and bleed ing, felt the sting of these hornets, and some cried out that we must clear the bushes and weeds of the sharp shooters, but the officers shouted to them to turn all their fire on the bridge. But scattering shots,
the eddies from the main current of our fire, were sent at the sharpshoot ers, and more than one of the crawling forms in red ceased to crawl and lay still forever. I marked a man who was up almost to his waist in the water, ahead of all his comrades, seeking the shelter of a bush or a bunch of weeds, and firing at us from every covert. Presently he straightened up, dropped his rifle, and fell backward, his body disappearing beneath the water. If it came up

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  again I did not see it, for I turned my eyes to the men upon the bridge our real danger.

  They were halfway across the stream, advancing in solid ranks, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee a col umn that filled the bridge from side to side and the lift ing of the smoke at intervals let me see the faces of the front-rank men, browned most of them by Spanish suns, their eyes gleaming with the excitement which even veter ans feel in the charge. Into this solid column of men the bullets were pattering, and a man would fall, to be shoved back by the feet of his companions while another took his place.

  " We'll beat 'em! We'll beat 'em back! " shouted some one, and the column on the bridge, in truth, was falter ing before the fire that was scorching away their front ranks, but at that moment a body of militia just in front of us received a tremendous discharge of the rockets, and began to quiver and reel like one who has suffered a mor tal blow. " Run! Eun! " shouted somebody among them, and the panic terror in his voice spread like a plague. In a second a hundred were crying " Run ! Run!" and these citizen soldiers, confused, filled with dread of things they saw and did not see, staggered back and were lost. Their companies dissolved like a snow ball before the sun, and by the time we knew what ailed them they were streaming past us, a mob in a panic, a wild riot of terrified fugitives, all order, courage, pride, gone, and only speed to save left.

  " Oh, you cowards! " I heard Cyrus Pendleton shout, and then he swore frightfully.

  But they were not cowards by nature, they simply did not know better and did not have the soldier's training. Be that as it may, they were gone, and the shattered columns on the bridge, seeing them go, raised a cheer and came on again, the drums and the fifes playing back their courage. But our companies closed in on the ground that the others had left, and our fire, slack for a

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  few minutes, increased in vigour. Behind us we heard a great swell in the shouting and were told that it was more of the army arriving on the battlefield, coming in a run many miles under the hot sun and through the thick dust, only to reach us with broken breathing, stiff ened knees, dry hot tongues hanging out, and no knowl edge of what place to take and none to tell them. Some of the Baltimore militia had come sixteen miles without a rest and were dead on their feet.

  But the red columns in front, crumbling before our fire, reeled again and broke to pieces. The companies dissolved, and men hiding among the dense bushes which clothed the banks of the stream were protected from the fire of our artillery, which could not be deflected enough, because of the lay of the ground, to reach them. Then we began to gather more courage and to cheer.

  " We may beat 7 em yet, Phil," said Cyrus Pen- dleton.

  He was loading and firing a rifle like a sharpshooter. The thick dust had made a mask of his face, but the sweat rolling down it in streams had striped it in such manner that he looked like an Indian in his most hideous war paint.

  The fire poured on us from Bladensburg increased. The English, beholding the repulse of their first attack, pushed forward all their artillery and fired with swiftness and precision, while their riflemen swarmed along the river front and seconded the big guns with volleys less noisy but as deadly. Men began to fall rapidly in our ranks, and groans mingled with the multiplied and con fusing orders. Faces of farmers and clerks grew white again, and our lines shook and reeled about.

  The British suddenly rushed forward a second time in massive columns, re-enforcing the defeated men who were hiding in the bushes, and then burst upon us with the full strength of their army, their batteries playing on our lines at their highest pressure. Again that ter-

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  rible cry of panic and terror, the worst of all things, rose from our ranks.

  " We are beaten ! " shouted some one when we were not beaten, but he made it so, for a hundred took up the cry, and a group of riflemen, commanded by our late minister to England, lost their courage and ran away, spreading panic around them. The men of a battery who knew how to shoot, but not to fight, caught the plague of fear, and, throwing down their rammers, competed in the foot race. A terrible tumult, such as I hope never to see again in this world, arose in our army. The mad terror ran from company to company, and the showers of cannon balls, rockets, and rifle bullets falling upon us hastened it and added to the clamour and jumble of the disordered army. Those who ran trampled upon or swept away by force of might those who would stand, and the shouts and commands of the officers were lost amid the more numerous shouts of the men. Some of the officers and some of the men, too, bore themselves with supreme courage, now firing upon the foe who was pressing against us, and then trying to reform our lines and win back the fugitives. One of the wildest and most furious of them all was Cyrus Pendleton, the Indian fighter and fur trader, who, rifle in hand, yelled defiance at the enemy and then reproached the fugitives with their cowardice.

  "Stand, men! Stand, in God's name!" he cried. "We can beat 'em! Look, here come the sailors! They'll fight! Don't you see 'em? "

  What he said was true, for our best men, the marines and sailors under Barney, who fought then as they fought throughout the war, with disciplined order and un flinching bravery, were just then arriving upon the field and getting into position, even as the rout had already begun. But their steady front had no effect upon the others, for the plague of fear spread by the red rain of the British artillery was eating into the hearts of them all. Away went a Baltimore regiment after the other

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  fugitives, and in its wild rush I saw the President and his Cabinet caught up by the press of numbers and car ried off through no choice of theirs, though it was a lucky chance for them and us.

  Fear ran through the ranks like fire in dry grass. Men who had been fighting bravely a minute before were seized with a delirium of terror, and ran, knocking against their comrades in their headlong flight and trip ping-over the dead and wounded. One squad fired into another squad, taking them for attacking British, but others threw away their arms, their rifles pattering in the dust and mud, and some, to lighten themselves for flight, stripped off their coats and flung them down. They were not soldiers, but civilians, untrained, unled, whose faculties had been mastered by a sudden, unrea soning fear, a conviction that the battle was lost when, in fact, the time to win it had just come and they obeyed the only instinct that was left to them self-preservation.

  Unarmed, hatless, coatless, the terrified battalions rushed by, a mob of wild and shouting fugitives. The dust stirred by so many trampling feet rose again in clouds bigger and denser than ever, and hid part of the shame of such a flight, while the British fire scorched the rear of the mob and urged it to greater speed. A wild tumult of shouting rolled over the plain, and the horrible reek of mud and blood and sweat became over powering.

  The sight of all these men, soldiers they called them selves, running so fast and giving themselves up to such an ecstasy of terror had in it something strangely lu dicrous. Here was a rich merchant, a man of dignity, running like a boy; and there a lawyer, and yonder a doctor, and the look on their faces, when the dust was not too thick for my eyes to penetrate it, was so wild, so distorted, that they seemed hideous travesties of men. Then, too, they wasted so much strength in shouting and thev fell over each other so often that the show be-

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  came the most amusing I had ever seen. I laughed until I was stopped by the sound of my own voice, which was hysterical, and then I perceived how unnatural my laugh ter had been and that it wa
s the laugh of tragedy, not of comedy.

  I could have cried now with rage as I saw many others crying, and for the moment I knew not what to do; our soldiers were fleeing away like a herd of buffaloes in a panic rushing over a plain, cannon balls and bullets whizzed around us, clouds of smoke and dust drove in our faces, and one who did not wish to run must be in doubt what else to do.

  " Let's join the sailors and make a fight of it! " shouted a voice in my rear as a hand fell upon my arm.

  I looked around and saw Bidwell, a smoking rifle in his hand, his face covered with dust and grime. But the light of battle was shining in his eyes, and I knew that the lazy dandy had awakened into the man of courage and action. I had been mistaken in him, and I wanted to say so to him then, but there was no time, for we had to make instant choice between joining the sailors, running, or being taken. The British army was almost upon us, and we dashed at full speed toward the sailors, who had stopped on a hilltop and were putting in position a bat tery of five guns. We saw Cyrus Pendleton on the way swept off his feet by a mass of fugitives, but we gave him a rescuing hand and he ran with us to the battery, where we dropped down behind the guns and began to reload our rifles.