Altsheler, Joseph - [Novel 05]
Page 35
Vast clouds of smoke floated between us and covered the fleeing Highlanders and most of the slain, but the fire of the cannon and the rifles was undiminished, sweeping the field from every point, and though we could not see
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through the smoke we knew that balls and bullets still found their mark. I hoped that the next lifting of the smoke would show them in retreat, not alone for our vic tory but for their own sake too.
The waves of smoke rolled apart for an instant, split by the cannon fire, and disclosed the wreck that strewed the plain. Far to the right and left it was covered with red-clothed bodies; some regiments were running, others wavered upon the field, and several officers, waving their swords and followed by a few soldiers, were still rushing toward us; then the smoke clouds closed up again and we saw nothing, while the din of arms went on as ever.
Some soldiers dashed out of the fog-bank which hung to the very edge of our parapet of mud and rushed at us; one, a major, reached the top of the parapet and fell dying upon it; another, a tall figure, his face flaming with passion, stood at full height an instant upon the earthwork, then leaped into our ranks and slashed at us with his sword as he cried to us to yield.
" Surrender, cousin! Major Northcote! " I cried; " do you not see that you are alone? "
He looked around him like one dazed, like one who could not believe. Then he slashed savagely at a rifleman, and as the blow was parried on a gun barrel he fell, for he was pierced already with many wounds, and died at my feet. On that very spot, within our lines, where he had come alone, he was buried, by permission of General Jackson, and as a mark of respect for his bravery, many cannon were driven over his grave.
The whole field was now covered by the smoke, and it was so thick that the flare of the cannon and rifles did not cut a way through it, and no sound came to us but the steady roar of the great guns and the crack of the rifles. Mr. Pendleton suddenly put his ear to the earth work, and, seeing him, I did the same.
" What do you hear? " he asked.
" Nothing but the cannonade."
356 A HERALD OF THE WEST.
" No rumble, no tread of advancing footsteps? "
" No."
" Neither do I; the British army has fled."
The smoke-bank still hung before us, dense, imper vious, but no human form, nothing came from it. It en veloped alike the dead, who lay where they fell, and the living, who came no farther.
Slowly our fire died, and a breeze rising from the river began to move the heavy banks of smoke and drive them away. As they lifted the first sight disclosed to us was the rows and heaps of dead, and the wounded who crawled about on the plain.
" Twenty-five minutes," said Courtenay, shutting his watch with a snap.
"What do you mean by twenty-five minutes?" I asked.
" Only twenty-five minutes since the first gun was fired, and we've won the greatest victory in our his- tory."
But from the front came the defiant note of a bugle. Clear and shrill it swelled above our waning fire, and many of the men raised their rifles.
Ta-ra-ra! ta-ra-ra! rang the bugle note, gay, saucy, and defiant.
" Can they have returned to the attack? " I asked in amazement.
" Impossible," said Cyrus Pendleton; " wait! "
The roof of smoke lifted higher and higher, and still the defiant bugle note, never ceasing, rang out. A laugh and a cheer alike rose from our lines when we saw the cause; a little English boy, a bugler charging with his company, had climbed a tree in the plain in front of us and there he remained throughout the battle, blowing his bugle for the charge, and there he was now, perched astride the one bough that the cannon balls had left on the tree, his bugle at his lips, while he blew the notes which called upon his comrades to charge once more over
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the field which he held alone. Some riflemen went out, took down the little soldier, and adopted him.
Up went the clouds and the whole field now lay before us, covered with bodies and soaked with blood. The wounded crawled to us for help, and many unhurt, who had lain flat upon the ground to escape the bullets, came in and surrendered.
The smoke receded farther, and showed us the faint red gleam of the retreating British columns, some of them columns no longer, just huddles of fleeing men, but as far as we could see the field was thickly sown with the dead and wounded. Some of the heaps moved, and an unhurt man who had been stricken down by fear would come forth to surrender. The groans of the wounded made an unceasing lament, a sickening odour of blood arose, and little whiffs of smoke, like the haze of fever swamps, floated about.
I felt, first, that we had paid them back for all we had suffered from them, and then pity.
The red blur of the retreating enemy disappeared under the horizon, and our general passed along the lines praising the courage and markmanship of all. Then we went out to help the wounded and to bring them in, and .in all that astonishing battle only seven men of ours were killed.
Thus we held New Orleans, and the beaten enemy fleeing to his ships .soon left our shores, the last foe that has ever been seen upon them. In a short time the news of the peace came a peace honourable and glorious to us, for in war with the strongest nation of Europe we had shown that we feared no one, either by sea or land, and were prepared to hold our own at any price. We had shown, moreover, that we would protect our rights wher ever they existed, that the seas were free to all, and that one country could not rob another of its people merely because it needed them. All the principles for which we fought against immense odds have become the acknowl-
358 A HERALD OF THE WEST.
edged laws of civilization and humanity, just as those for which we fought in the Eevolution are now the birth right of the Anglo-Saxon race, and none to-day would question them.
Since then no European power has dared to molest us, and I do not think that any one will fight us with arms, though they continue the old campaign of falsehood and abuse. And if Europe should feel aggrieved sometimes because we do not like her, she should remember that she was the cause of it, and thus we leave her to her mass of intrigue and lying which she calls diplomacy and to her standard of manners instead of morals.
But I know the old powers will never forgive us for not standing in awe of them, the last insult to boastful nations.
Nevertheless, I have this to say of the English: I think them the best people in Europe, the only steadfast friends that freedom and the right have there, and though we have quarrelled with them and fought with them and scolded them and been scolded by them, yet we pay them the highest compliment of boasting of no victories, save those we have won over them, and we are glad that we were their colonies and those of no other country. And as I see the better England conquering the worse and leading the nation in the path of justice, I have a little wish, and perhaps an equal hope, that we shall stand to gether again, and always for the right.
CHAPTER XXXII.
A GIRL IN WHITE.
TIIE spring had come again and was ripening into summer when I rode through the gentle sweep of the blue grass toward a house just under the edge of the horizon. The battle smoke was far behind and forgotten, and there was nothing around me but peace, nothing to tell of the muddy delta, the black swamps, and the field of the dead a thousand miles away, only the green grass and the wild flowers rippling under a gentle west wind, and the lazy cattle lying beside a brook flowing in coils of burnished silver through the meadows.
I rode on and the west wind sang in my ears. The old earth had blossomed again and put on her most beau tiful colours. Afar gleamed the pink cone of a peach tree in bloom, and some flowers twining about a stone fence shone in blue and red.
I approached the house and in front of it, among the flowers, a tall girl in white, with a red rose in her hair, awaited me. When I took her hands in mine, I said:
" Marian, I have come back again, and I come for my answer."
And th
en, as her face took the hue of the red rose in her hair, she spoke softly, but not so softly that I could not hear, the answer that I wished.
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THE END.