House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  Cinda felt a resentful irritation at this babbling woman; yet there were many in Richmond as fearful as she. Last spring the enemy had been almost at the gates. General Lee and his men had driven them out of Virginia, and on the rising tide of success had marched into Maryland, and everyone thought victory was near and certain. But Sharpsburg, no matter how loyally you pretended it had been a victory, had forced Lee to retreat; and now Burnside had marched deep into Virginia again, and General Lee seemed unwilling to fight him. When early in November a deep snow blanketed the northern part of the state, everyone had hoped winter would lock the armies in mud and give them all a respite until spring; but since then the weather had been fine enough and now there was again a secret sense of danger in every Richmond home.

  “I don’t see how I can do anything, take anyone in,” Cinda confessed. With Julian at home and still needing watchful care, she had not even returned to her service in the hospital. “My son and Mr. Dewain may come home at any time, and we’re crowded as it is. But I’ll do anything I can—except take strangers here.”

  She held to that decision, though in the days that followed more and more of these refugees came to Richmond. Once the train that brought them away from their homes was fired upon by the Yankees Yet Fredericksburg had not been bombarded; probably it would not be. They fled from their own fears; but Cinda thought they might quite as well have stayed at home. Certainly there was danger here in Richmond too. A plague of smallpox began to sweep the city, and the disease this year seemed to be particularly fatal. Dr. Brock proposed to vaccinate healthy children and save the scabs with which to immunize adults; and Mrs. Brownlaw was busy persuading parents to allow their children to be used for this purpose. Cinda was glad Jenny’s children and Barbara’s baby were far away, so that she need not refuse Mrs. Brownlaw’s insistences.

  The problem of housing the increasing throng of refugees was a daily burden. Some could find temporary lodging in the hospitals which were almost empty now. But it became daily more certain that unless winter came to make any movement by the armies impossible, there would be a battle presently on the Rappahannock yonder. The first Sunday in December was a day of bitter cold, and Cinda found ice in the pitcher in her bed room when she rose that morning; but at once the cold moderated, and Thursday’s train from the North brought word that the shelling of Fredericksburg had at last begun. That night was soft and warm. Next day Richmond heard that the Yankees had crossed the river. There followed rumors, each more frightening than the last, of battle, of victory, of defeat. Saturday afternoon Tilda came in a flutter of excitement, half fear and half anticipation, with a report that President Davis had gone to Mississippi! She thought it was shameful for him to run away when the Yankees might come bursting into Richmond any minute! Cinda said flatly:

  “I don’t believe he’s gone, Tilda. You mustn’t credit everything you hear. Or if he has gone, be sure he went for a good reason. Anyway, babbling all sorts of wild tales can’t help.”

  Sunday morning, the fourteenth of December, was like a day in spring, warm and fair and beautiful; and Cinda’s spirits rose. Surely on such a day there could be no great wrong anywhere in the world She and Julian went to church. Mrs. Currain no longer stirred out of the house, and Vesta, whose baby was a short two months away, now stayed secluded; so they went alone. At the church gate Cinda saw Mrs. Davis the center of a group of ladies; and she joined them and heard the news of battle the day before.

  This had been a bloody repulse for the Yankees, but a day of tragedy too. General Cobb was dead, General Hood desperately wounded, none knew how many others hurt or slain. Cinda at her prayers that day whispered: “Dear God, must we always wait and wait, never knowing when the word we fear will come? It wouldn’t be so hard if it weren’t for the waiting and the waiting. Please, God, don’t make us wait longer than we must. I can stand anything, anything, once I know it. But to wait and wait and not to know——”

  Yet from that waiting for news of her dear ones there was no quick escape. That day and the next the wounded began to arrive; and to drown her own terrors Cinda returned to her work at Chimborazo Hospital. Tuesday afternoon Julian came on his crutches the long way to find her there with word that Brett and the others were safe.

  “Mr. Barksdale, on General Longstreet’s staff, came with a trainload of wounded and brought you a letter from Trav,” he said. “I opened it, Mama. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not, darling.” She snatched the letter.

  “They’re all right,” he told her. “Papa, and Burr, and Uncle Faunt.”

  Cinda’s eyes raced along the lines. “He’s seen them all,” she whispered. “He’s seen them all.”

  So for that time the shadow and the terror passed. There would be other battles, other waitings; but of them Cinda refused to think, not now, not till she must. General Lee reported that Burnside’s army had withdrawn again to the hills beyond the Rappahannock, and winter came to bring what passed for peace. They could taste security awhile.

  Saturday night Trav came home, and he stopped at Cinda’s before going to Clay Street. He said that Brett and the others hoped to be here for Christmas. He was sure there would be no more fighting for a time. “They put General Burnside in command in McClellan’s place,” he reminded Cinda. “But we beat them terribly. The soldiers say Burnside is burned not only on the sides, but all over now.” They laughed together, the quick nervous laughter that marks release from strain; and he added: “He won’t try anything till his scars heal. General Longstreet has gone to Lynchburg for Christmas.” He stood hat in hand, and he turned now toward the door. Julian asked some eager question; but Trav said he must go home. “I’m anxious to see the children.” Cinda noticed that he did not speak of Enid. “Maybe we can come to dinner tomorrow.”

  “Do!” she agreed, shivering at the cold blast when the door was opened. “We’ll try to keep you warm.”

  Next day at dinner and afterward, no one mentioned the battle till Mrs. Currain had gone for her nap. Vesta went with her; but Lucy and Peter stayed hanging on Trav’s words, and Julian pressed him to long talk. Trav spoke at first with obvious reluctance. “Why, Julian, it wasn’t a battle; it was just slaughter. Our men were in a sunken road behind a wall, and the Yankees kept marching up to us across an open field and we shot them down. It was horrible!”

  Enid protested: “I declare, Trav, I think you just hate to have us kill Yankees!”

  Cinda looked at her, and Trav said: “Well, this was so easy, like butchering hogs. General Longstreet said that as long as our ammunition held out, a bird couldn’t have flown across that slope the poor fellows tried to climb. I had to just stand and watch and not do anything, and that made it worse. All those lines of men in blue marching toward us, and then our muskets and our cannon playing on them, and when the smoke cleared, most of them would be lying there, or crawling, or squirming, or screaming. And they weren’t blue any longer. They were so near us you could see through your glasses the red blots on their uniforms, and red pools of blood on the ground.” His face twisted with a sort of pain. “And during the night, our men went out and stripped the shoes and uniforms off the dead men, so next day they were white instead of blue or red. It made me sick.”

  Enid said provokingly: “I suppose you’d have felt all right if they’d been ours.” He turned his eyes toward her in a heavy way, and Cinda thought Enid watched him with a puzzling eagerness, but when he spoke it was to them all.

  “The hard part of it was the waiting,” he said. The waiting? She knew that torment. To busy her fingers would steady her, so she crossed to get her knitting. Trav’s eyes followed her movement, and she thought he understood, for he said: “I ought not to tell you about these things. They sound worse, put in words. At the time, you’re so excited you don’t really feel it till afterward; but sitting here listening to me talk about it, you all can’t understand that. So it seems to you really worse than it seemed to us in the middle of it. But I said the hardest part was wai
ting, waiting for each new attack to get near enough so we’d start to kill them. You here at home have to wait too; so you can understand how hard that is.”

  Cinda, her eyes on her knitting, said yes, they knew. Even Julian said: “I know it’s bad just before the shooting starts.”

  “We’d had weeks of it, really,” Trav reminded them. “Waiting for the shooting to start. I think everybody hated that, except General Longstreet. He never seems to be bothered. Even General Lee gets upset, gets angry at little things. When his head begins to twitch in a jerky little way, they say that’s a sign he’s mad inside, apt to let off at anyone who comes near him.

  “And I suppose it was harder on him than on anyone. He must have blamed himself for going into Maryland in such a hurry. You know our men were worn out before the fight at Sharpsburg. I don’t think he expected the Yankees could put an army together again so quickly after he smashed them at Manassas. He probably thought he could march right to Baltimore or Philadelphia before they were ready to meet him. It turned out he was wrong, and he must realize that. The strain shows on him. His hair is almost white now, and his beard too.”

  “I was in Washington when Sharpsburg was fought,” Cinda reminded him. “After Manassas they were in a panic there; and of course lots of people here thought the war would be all over by this time.”

  “Well, it’s a long way from over,” Trav admitted. “The Northern army will be stronger than ever in the spring.” He added quickly: “But so will we. We got stronger every day after the army fell back into Virginia. Stragglers and deserters came back, or were brought back.” Cinda, remembering Streean’s assertion that most men in the army fought only because they were made to, closed her eyes. “There was time to rest, and we had plenty to eat, plenty of everything except shoes.”

  “Are you still handling the commissary?” she asked.

  “No, Major Moses does that now. He’s better at it than I was. No, I’m just an aide. General Longstreet seems to like to keep me with him.” He grinned. “He wouldn’t even let me ride Nig during the battle last week. He said Nig would get me into trouble. He said I’d better stay afoot so he could keep an eye on me.”

  “Good for him! I shall thank him for that.”

  “We’d been at Fredericksburg quite a while,” he went on. “We’d stayed in the Valley till the Yankees showed signs of moving, but early last month we fell back to Culpeper, keeping between them and Richmond, waiting to see what McClellan would try to do. Then they put Burnside in his place. General Longstreet thought it was as good as a victory for us when they took McClellan out. He thinks McClellan is the best general the North has—unless it’s General Grant.”

  “How do Cousin Jeems and General Lee get along?” Cinda asked.

  “Oh, fine,” Trav assured her. “General Longstreet is wonderful, and General Lee knows it. Longstreet was perfect, in this fight last week; never excited, always doing the right thing. The men like him. He doesn’t baby them, but he’s always taking care of them; little things like teaching them to boil their meat instead of frying it, for instance. They’re a lot healthier since he set them to doing that. And teaching them to rake away the ashes from their cooking fires so they can sleep on the warm ground where the fire was. He’s stern when he should be, and severe when he should be; but they know he’s fair. Lee and he are as close as brothers. You can see it whenever they’re together. Longstreet never says ‘Yes’ to Lee when he should say ‘No,’ and Lee nearly always takes his advice.” He added thoughtfully: “Longstreet likes to let the Yankees do the attacking. Jackson and Lee always want to attack. Maybe it’s because I like him, but I think Longstreet’s right. We don’t have to whip the Yankees. They have to whip us.”

  “They can’t!” Julian said proudly. “They never can.”

  Trav went on, weary with remembrance: “So we had a month of waiting. The worst part of that was seeing the poor people leave their homes in Fredericksburg. General Longstreet said that was the saddest thing he’s seen in the war. It was pretty bad, old men and women and children plodding along through the mud and the rain,”

  “Most of them came to Richmond,” Cinda said.

  He nodded. “We were pretty nervous till Jackson got there,” he said. “For fear the Yankees would attack. But after that we felt better. Everyone was sure we’d beat them.” He laughed. “There was a lot of skylarking. When it snowed, the men would have regular battles with snowballs. One day General Hood’s whole division turned out to try to lick General McLaws’ division. They fought all over General Stuart’s headquarters. It wasn’t all a joke either. There were a couple of broken legs, and a snowball hit one man in the eye and knocked it out.” His voice suddenly was husky. “I tell you it was sort of wonderful! Most of those men were barefoot in the snow, and they were sleeping nights right on the ground. Some of them hadn’t even blankets.”

  Julian laughed delightedly. “I’ll bet if General Burnside had seen that snowball battle he wouldn’t have dared attack us!” And he said: “Uncle Trav, I’ve never been to Fredericksburg. What does it look like?”

  “Why, it’s a gray little town sloping up from the river to low hills. The slopes are mostly cleared land, and there’s level ground along the river, but there were woods on the hills where we were.” He seemed to recall a series of pictures, his eyes shadowed. “The fog hung in the valley every morning, enough to hide the town; but we could see across above it to the hills where the Yankee guns were. The day they laid their bridges across the river they bombarded the town. Everybody knew they were going to, and not all the townspeople had left, so all morning they were climbing up to where we were, men and women and children, toting everything they could carry. The fog was still too thick to see; but after a while a cloud of dust and smoke began to drift up through the fog, where the shells had knocked houses down, or set them on fire. When the fog finally lifted, we could see houses burning.”

  He hesitated, and they waited silently till he went on: “They laid their bridges that day and commenced to cross.”

  Julian asked: “Couldn’t you stop them?”

  “General Lee wanted them to cross and attack us where we were,” Trav explained. “He was sure we could beat them. We watched them crossing all next day. We could see wagon trains and artillery coming down to the river on the other side, and long columns of infantry, and their bands were playing and the flags flying. It was a wonderful, terrible thing to see. They came across and deployed along the railroad in the low ground, and dug ditches, and put their batteries in place. There were so many of them it didn’t seem possible we could beat them. But there wasn’t even any artillery fire that day, except to check ranges. We just waited.”

  “And next day they attacked you?” Julian prompted.

  “Yes. There was some fighting off to our right. I didn’t see that—it was mostly in some woods on General Jackson’s front. But the worst part was in the fields above the town. The Yankees would come out of town and form in some low ground and start toward us. They’d have about a quarter of a mile to come, up hill all the way. Our men were behind a high stone wall, in a road that runs along just where the hill begins to get steeper. The road was wide enough and the wall was high enough so that when a man stepped back across the road from the wall to load his gun he was safe, couldn’t be hit by shots from the attacking regiments. They’d let the Yankees come close enough so they couldn’t miss, and then shoot them.” He wiped his eyes with his hand as though to shut out the sight. “Next day there must have been three or four thousand Yankees lying dead in a place about three hundred yards one way and half a mile the other.”

  Julian asked in a hushed tone: “Where were you?”

  “With General Longstreet, on one of the hills a little back and to one side. Telegraph Hill they call it. General Lee was there with us most of the time. We could see the whole thing through our glasses.”

  Julian had more questions. “What happened after you beat them?”

  Trav answered re
luctantly: “Why, nothing, except the truce to bury the dead Yankees. That night after the battle there were the most gorgeous Northern lights I’ve ever seen, and the men said the skies were setting off fireworks to help us celebrate; but someone said that couldn’t be, because they were Northern lights, so they wouldn’t help the South celebrate. That made the men laugh; but everyone was so strung up it didn’t take much to make us laugh. But we didn’t laugh next day, watching the Yankees try to bury all the men we’d killed. It had turned bitter cold in the night, so they had to rip the bodies loose from the frozen ground. We’d see two men pulling at a dead man’s arms to pull him loose. And they couldn’t dig real graves. They put two or three hundred bodies into an ice house owned by a man named Wallace and just left them there to stay frozen till spring.” He clenched his fists. “Let’s not talk any more about it, Julian.”

  Enid said with mock seriousness: “Yes, Julian, it hurts Uncle Trav’s feelings. He’s so soft-hearted! And he says it didn’t amount to anything, really; didn’t accomplish anything.”

  Cinda thought angrily that Enid seemed to go out of her way to demean Trav in their eyes. Trav spoke evenly. “I didn’t say quite that, Enid. We killed two or three of them for every one of us they killed; but they can afford that. They’ve plenty of men. We didn’t lose. That’s something. But we didn’t gain.”

  Cinda exploded. “Nobody ever seems to gain, Trav! It’s just more and more men killed, our men and theirs, and nothing settled.”

  He nodded. “I’d like to know some way to end it, Cinda.”

  “The North won’t give up,” Julian reminded him. “And neither will we.”

  “I would,” Trav said harshly. “I’d give up! Nothing’s worth the things I’ve seen.”