Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Good-bye,” said the boy. “I wish you the luck of the 6th Lancers. Since Hanover Court-House nobody calls ’em ‘fresh fish’ — just because they charged a few Johnnies with the lance and took a few prisoners and lost thirty horses.”

  Berkley laughed. “Thanks; and I wish you the luck of the 5th

  Zouaves. They’re into everything, I hear, particularly hen-coops

  and pigpens. Casson says they live high in the 5th Zouaves. . .

  Good-bye, old fellow . . . will you remember me to your father?”

  “I will when he lets me talk to him,” grinned Stephen. “We’re a disciplined regiment — I found that out right away — and there’s nothing soft for me to expect just because my father is colonel and Josiah Lent happens to be major.”

  The regimental bands played the next day; the distant cannonade had ceased; sunshine fell from a cloudless sky, and the army watched a military balloon, the “Intrepid,” high glistening above the river, its cables trailing in gracious curves earthward.

  Porter’s 5th Corps now formed the rear-guard of the army; entire regiments went on picket, even the two regiments of Lancers took their turn, though not armed for that duty. During the day there had been some unusually brisk firing along the river, near enough to cause regiments that had never been under fire to prick up a thousand pairs of ears and listen. As the day lengthened toward evening, picket firing became incessant, and the occasional solid report of a cannon from the shore opposite disclosed the presence of Confederate batteries, the nearness of which surprised many an untried soldier.

  Toward sundown Berkley saw a business-like cavalry officer ride into camp with an escort of the 5th Regulars. Men around him said that the officer was General Philip St. George Cooke, and that the chances were that the regiments of the reserve were going into action pretty soon.

  About 3 o’clock the next morning boots and saddles sounded from the head-quarters of the Cavalry Reserve brigade and the 5th and 6th United States Cavalry, followed by Colonel Rush’s Lancers, rode out of their camp grounds and were presently followed by the 1st United States and a squadron of Pennsylvania carbineers.

  The troopers of the 8th Lancers watched them ride away in the dawn; but mo orders came to follow them, and, discontented, muttering, they went sullenly about their duties, wondering why they, also, had not been called on.

  That nobody had caught the great Confederate cavalryman did not console them; they had to listen to the jeers of the infantry, blaming them for Stuart’s great raid around the entire Union army; in sickening reiteration came the question: “Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?” And, besides, one morning in a road near camp, some of the 8th Lancers heard comments from a group of general officers which were not at all flattering to their own cavalry.

  “You see,” said a burly colonel of engineers, “that this army doesn’t know what real cavalry looks like — except when it gets a glimpse of Jeb Stuart’s command.”

  An infantry colonel coincided with him, profanely:

  “That damned rebel cavalry chases ours with a regularity and persistence that makes me ill. Did the world ever see the like of it? You send out one of our mounted regiments to look for a mounted rebel regiment, and the moment it finds what it’s lookin’ for the rebs give a pleased sort of yell, and ours turn tail. Because it’s become a habit: that’s why our cavalry runs! And then the fun begins! Lord God Almighty! what’s the matter with our cavalry?”

  “You can’t make cavalry in a few months,” observed a colonel of heavy artillery, stretching his fat, scarlet-striped legs in his stirrups. “What do you expect? Every man, woman, and child south of Mason and Dixon’s Line knows how to ride. The Southerners are born horsemen. We in the North are not. That’s the difference. We’ve got to learn to be. Take a raw soldier and send him forth mounted on an animal with which he has only a most formal acquaintance, and his terrors are increased twofold. When you give him a sabre, pistol, and carbine, to take care of when he has all he can do to take care of himself, those terrors increase in proportion. Then show him the enemy and send him into battle — and what is the result? Skedaddle!

  “Don’t make any mistake; we haven’t any cavalry yet. Some day we will, when our men learn to ride faster than a walk.”

  “God!” muttered a brigadier-general under his white moustache; “it’s been a bitter pill to swallow — this raid around our entire army by fifteen hundred of Jeb Stuart’s riders and two iron guns!”

  The half dozen lancers, lying on their bellies in the grass on the bank above the road where this discussion took place remained crimson, mute, paralysed with mortification. Was that what the army thought of them?

  But they had little time for nursing their mortification that morning; the firing along the river was breaking out in patches with a viciousness and volume heretofore unheard; and a six-gun Confederate field battery had joined in, arousing the entire camp of Claymore’s brigade. Louder and louder grew the uproar along the river; smoke rose and took silvery-edged shape in the sunshine; bugles were calling to the colours regiments encamped on the right; a light battery trotted out across a distant meadow, unlimbered and went smartly into action.

  About noon the bugles summoned the 3rd Zouaves. As they were forming, the camps of the 8th Lancers and the 10th Light Battery rang with bugle music. Berkley, standing to horse, saw the Zouaves leaving the hill at a jog-trot, their red legs twinkling; but half way down the slope they were halted to dress ranks; and the Lancers, cantering ahead, turned westward and moved off along the edge of the river swamp toward the piled-up cloud of smoke down stream.

  After them trotted the 10th New York Flying Battery as though on parade, their guidons standing straight out behind the red-and-white guidons of the Lancers.

  The Zouaves had now reached wet land, where a staff officer met Colonel Craig and piloted him through a field of brush and wild grass, and under the parapets of an emplacement for big guns, on which men were nonchalantly working, to the beginning of a newly laid road of logs. The noise of musketry and the smoke had become prodigious. On the logs of the road lay the first big pool of blood that many of them had ever seen. What it had come from they could not determine; there was nothing dead or dying there.

  The men glanced askance at the swamp where the black shining water had risen almost level with the edges of the road; but the Colonel and his staff, still mounted, rode coolly over it, and the regiment followed.

  The corduroy road through the heavily wooded swamp which the 3rd Zouaves now followed was the only inlet to the noisy scene of local action, and the only outlet, too.

  Except for watching the shells at Blue Bridge, the regiment had never been in battle, had never seen or heard a real battle; many had never even seen a wounded man. They understood that they were going into battle now; and now the regiment caught sight of its first wounded men. Stretchers passed close to them on which soldiers lay naked to the waist, some with breasts glistening red and wet from unstopped haemorrhage, some with white bodies marked only by the little round blue hole with its darker centre. Soldiers passed them, limping, bloody rags dripping from thigh or knee; others staggered along with faces the colour of clay, leaning on the arms of comrades, still others were carried out feet first, sagging, a dead-weight in the arms of those who bore them. One man with half his fingers gone, the raw stumps spread, hurried out, screaming, and scattering blood as he ran.

  The regiment passed an artilleryman lying in the water whose head, except for the lower jaw, was entirely missing; and another on his back in the ooze whose bowels were protruding between his fingers; and he was trying very feebly to force them back, while two comrades strove in vain to lift him.

  The regiment sickened as it looked; here and there a young zouave turned deathly pale, reeled out of the ranks, leaned against a tree, nauseated, only to lurch forward again at the summons of the provost guard; here and there a soldier disengaged his white turban from his fez and dropped it to form a sort of Havelock; for the verti
cal sun was turning the men dizzy, and the sights they saw were rapidly unnerving them.

  They heard the tremendous thunder and felt the concussion of big guns; the steady raining rattle of musketry, the bark of howitzers, the sharp, clean crack of rifled field guns dismayed them. Sometimes, far away, they could distinguish the full deep cheering of a Union regiment; and once they caught the distant treble battle cry of the South. There were moments when a sudden lull in the noise startled the entire regiment. Even their officers looked up sharply at such times. But ahead they could still see Colonel Craig riding calmly forward, his big horse picking its leisurely way over the endless road of logs; they could see the clipped gray head of Major Lent under its red forage-cap, steady, immovable, as he controlled his nervous mount with practised indifference.

  It was broiling hot in the swamp; the Zouaves stood bathed in perspiration as the regiment halted for a few minutes, then they moved forward again toward a hard ridge of grass which glimmered green beyond the tangled thicket’s edges.

  Here the regiment was formed in line of battle, and ordered to lie down.

  Stephen wiped his sweaty hands on his jacket and, lifting his head from the grass, looked cautiously around. Already there had been fighting here; a section of a dismantled battery stood in the road ahead; dead men lay around it; smoke still hung blue in the woods. The air reeked.

  The Zouaves lay in long scarlet rows on the grass; their officers stood leaning on their naked swords, peering ahead where the Colonel, Major, and a mounted bugler were intently watching something — the two officers using field glasses. In a few moments both officers dismounted, flung their bridles to an orderly, and came back, walking rather quickly. Major Lent drawing his bright, heavy sword and tucking up his gold-embroidered sleeves as he came on.

  “Now, boys,” said Colonel Craig cheerfully, “we are going in. All you’ve got to do can be done quickly and thoroughly with the bayonet. Don’t cock your muskets, don’t fire unless you’re told to. Perhaps you won’t have to fire at all. All I want of you is to keep straight on after me — right through those dry woods, there. Try to keep your intervals and alignment; don’t yell until you sight the enemy, don’t lose your heads, trust your officers. Where they go you are safest.”

  He dropped his eye-glasses into his slashed pocket, drew out and put on a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. The soldiers saw him smile and say something to Major Lent, saw him bare his handsome sword, saw the buglers setting the shining bugles to their lips.

  “Now, charge, you red-legged rascals!” shouted Major Lent; and up from the grass rose a wave of scarlet and flashing steel.

  Charge! Charge! echoed the bugles; a wailing storm, high among the tree tops, passed over them as they entered the dry woods on a run; branches crashed earthward, twig’s and limbs crackled down in whirling confusion. But there was nothing in the woods except smoke — and the streaming storm shrilling overhead, raining down on them leaves and boughs and splintered sticks.

  The belt of woodland was very narrow; already the men could see sunlight on the farther edge, and catch glimpses of fields; and still they ran forward, keeping their alignment as best they might among the trees; and came, very soon, to the wood’s edge. Here they were halted and ordered to lie down again; and they lay there, close to the ground among the dead leaves, while from above living leaves rained on them in never-ending showers, and the wild tempest sped overhead unchecked.

  Far out across the fields in the sunshine, looking diminutive as toys in the distance, four cannon puffed smoke toward them. The Zouaves could see the guns — see even the limbers and caissons behind, and the harnessed teams, and the cannoneers very busily at work in the sunshine. Then a long low wall of white smoke suddenly appeared along a rail fence in front of the guns, and at the same time the air thickened with bullets storming in all about them.

  The Colonel and the Major had run hastily out into the field. “Get

  up! Get up!” shouted the company officers. “Left dress, there!

  Forward! Don’t cock your rifles; don’t fire until you’re told to.

  Steady there on the left. Forward! Forward!”

  “Now yell, you red-legs! Yell!”

  As they started running, their regimental colours fell, man and nag sprawling in the grass; and the entire line halted, bewildered. The next instant a zouave had lifted the colours, and was running forward; and: “Get on there! Continue the movement! What in hell’s the matter with you Zouaves!” shouted their lieutenant-colonel. And the sagging scarlet line bellied out, straightened as the flanks caught up, and swept out into the sunshine with a cheer — the peculiar Zouave cheer — not very full yet, for they had not yet lost the troubled wonder of things.

  Stephen, running with shouldered musket, saw close ahead a long line of blue smoke and flame, but instead of the enemy there was nothing hidden behind the smoke except a long field-ditch in which dry brush was burning.

  Into the ditch tumbled the regiment, and lay panting, coughing, kicking out the embers, and hugging the ground closely, because now the storm that had swept the tree tops was shaving the weeds and grass around them; and the drone of bullets streaming over the ditch rose to a loud, fierce whine.

  Up in the blue sky little white clouds suddenly unfolded themselves with light reports, and disappeared, leaving jagged streamers of vapour afloat here and there; the near jarring discharge of artillery shook the ground till bits of sod fell in particles, crumbling from the ditch’s edge; the outrageous racket of musketry never slackened.

  Lying there, they heard a sudden burst of cheering, and far to the left saw another regiment come tumbling into the ditch and crouch, huddled there in a blue line stretching as far away as they could see. And again the firing increased to a stunning roar, and there were more cheers; and, to their right, another regiment came running and rolling into the ditch.

  Officers, recklessly erect, stood here and there along the interior of the ditch; then from the lair of each regiment flags emerged, bugles blew clear and impatient; there came an upheaval of bayonets, and the three regiments scrambled to their feet, over the ditch’s edge, and surged forward into the sunshine.

  Across the fields Stephen saw guns being limbered up; and drivers lashing their horses to a gallop across a bridge. The regiment on their left was firing by wings as it advanced, the regiment on the right had broken into a heavy run, yelling: “Hey! We want them guns! Wait a second, will yer? Where you takin’ them guns to?”

  There was a new rail fence close in front of the Zouaves, barring their way to the bridge; and suddenly, from behind it, men arose with levelled muskets; and the Zouaves dropped flat to the volley that buried the fence in smoke.

  “Now, boys!” cried Colonel Craig, “we’ve got to have that bridge! So we’ll finish this business right here with the bayonet. Come on and let’s end it now!”

  Major Lent ran forward and started to climb the smoky fence; everywhere the Zouaves were swarming along the newly split rails or driving their bayonets through the smoke at the gray phantoms clustering behind. Shots rang out, the crack of stock against stock, the ringing clamour and click of steel filled the air.

  The zouave next to Stephen lurched up against him spouting blood from the neck; on the other side of him another, a sergeant, too, had gone stark mad, apparently, and was swinging his terrible sabre bayonet without regard to friend or foe; and still another man of his squad, swearing horridly, had clutched a ghostly enemy in the smoke across the fence and was trying to strangle him with his bare hands.

  Stephen, bewildered by a blow which glanced from his head to his left shoulder, clung to his musket and tried to stagger forward, but a bayonet seared his right temple, tearing the scalp and letting down a rush of blood all over his face and eyes. Blinded, the boy called instinctively: “Father! I’m hurt! Could you help me!”

  Colonel Craig turned white under his tan, and looked back.

  “I can’t help you, my boy. Sergeant, will you look after my son
?” And he ran forward into the infernal network of bayonets, calling out: “Get through there, boys. We might as well clean up this mess while we’re about it. Pull down that fence! Never mind those men behind it! — rush it! Kick it over! Now come on! I don’t ask you to do anything that I don’t do. Major Lent and I will take you through. Come on and take that bridge!”

  A captain, fighting back the bayonets with his sword, suddenly floundered to the fence top and clung, balanced on his belly, shouting hysterically:

  “Look at the Lancers! Look at ’em coming! Now, Zouaves! Pull down the fence and give them a chance to charge the bridge!”

  Over a low swell of land some horsemen trotted into view; behind them the horizon was suddenly filled with the swimming scarlet pennons of the Lancers. A thousand horses’ heads shot up against the sky line, manes tossing; a thousand lance points fell to a glittering level.

  They were cheering shrilly as they came on; the Zouaves heard them, the gray infantry regiment gave way, turned, filed off, retreating toward the bridge at a slow trot like some baffled but dangerous animal; and after it ran the Zouaves, firing, screaming, maddened to hysteria by their first engagement, until their panting officers and their bugles together barely managed to halt them short of the edges of utter annihilation just as a full Confederate brigade rose grimly from the wood’s edge across the stream, ready to end their hysterical yelling for ever.

  Stephen, sitting on the grass among the dead and stricken, tied his bloody turban, pulled the red fez close over it, smeared the blood from his eyes, and, clutching his musket, stood up unsteadily.

  He could see the charge of the 8th Lancers — see the horsemen wheel and veer wildly as they received the fire of the Confederate troops from the woods across the stream, squadron after squadron sheering off at a gallop and driving past the infantry, pell-mell, a wild riot of maddened horses, yelling riders, and streaming scarlet pennons descending in one vivid, headlong torrent to the bridge. But the structure was already hopelessly afire; and the baffled carbineers of the advance reined up at the edge of the burning timbers and sent an angry volley after the gray infantry now jogging back into the woods beyond. Then, suddenly, the Zouaves heard the Lancers cheering wildly in the smoke of the burning structure, but did not know what it meant.