House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  “Two thousand!” the other cried. “Three thousand, gold!” Trav did not turn his head. “Gold, man! Gold!” But the way was clear of him, the cart moved on. Trav saw Enid huddle closer to Mrs. Longstreet, staring at the famine-ridden throng through which they made their way; but Lucy’s head was as high as Mrs. Longstreet’s, her lovely face equally composed.

  At the station Enid without a word scuttled into one of the cars, but Mrs. Longstreet thanked Trav graciously. “Tell the General not to be concerned for me. I will be in Lynchburg. I’ll take care of Mrs. Currain.” Then smiling at Lucy and Peter, she added: “The children and I.”

  Trav nodded, and Lucy hugged him close and kissed him fondly. “We’ll be all right, Papa. You take care of yourself, won’t you?” He helped them into the car, then turned back to Big Mill, who still guarded the cart and held Nig.

  “You’ll find soldiers loading rations at the store house,” Trav said. “Give the cart to them. They can use it. Then come to Mr. Dewain’s.”

  “Yas suh.”

  Trav’s place now was with General Longstreet; but he went first to Cinda’s and stayed till Mill came. When he rode down through town the sun had set and night was near. The crowd in the streets eddied and swirled, grudgingly making way for him. As he passed the station, a train was just departing. Perhaps Enid and the children were in those cars. Riding across Mayo’s Bridge, moving slowly in the press of men and wagons, he watched the train crawl away up river and disappear in darkness. Some day, perhaps, they would all be together again. It was on Lucy his thoughts dwelt most of all.

  In Manchester he saw some of General Ewell’s regiments in motion. When he rode out along the Petersburg Turnpike he began to hear ahead of him, still miles away, the thunder of the guns; and occasionally he saw a flicker of light as in the gathering dusk a shell burst too high. The turnpike was crowded with a moving stream of refugees; carts and wagons and men and women and children riding and walking in a general frantic rush to escape from the doomed city, hurrying blindly anywhere at all, panting and stumbling through the darkness. Richmond tonight would be humming like a hive of disturbed bees.

  He rode on toward Petersburg till about ten miles from Richmond he came to an artillery battalion crossing the turnpike and marching westward, under command of Major Stiles. The Major told him Mahone’s division was ordered to Chesterfield Court House to cover the withdrawal of Kershaw and the others from the North Side, that Longstreet was marching westward from Petersburg by the Hickory Road.

  If that were true, as it must be, there was no need to go to Petersburg; so Trav turned toward Chesterfield Court House. The night was dark and this countryside was strange to him, but the road seemed to ascend slightly over gently rolling ground, winding through woodland. After a few miles, he saw lighted windows in a large house to the right of the road, and turned aside to ask how he might best intercept Longstreet. The house was a miniature of Great Oak, wings a story and a half high connected by enclosed passages with the main central structure. He found frightened ladies there bravely pretending courage, and at his request they summoned an old Negro and bade him go with Trav and put him on the way.

  With the Negro for a guide, Trav rode through the Court House and then took a byroad; and the Negro, trotting at his stirrup, kept him company while they crossed a wide level grown to pine and scrub oak and dipped into a ravine and splashed through a shallow brook. But Trav, in a hurry to rejoin his command, fretted at their slow pace. Could he not just follow this byway and surely come to the Hickory Road? The Negro assented so eagerly that Trav guessed the man had already reached the limits of the region he knew. Trav rode on alone, and the road wound its way across a rolling plateau and descended after two or three miles into a ravine where a larger creek was deep enough to splash his feet in the stirrups. Beyond, he came to a fork, and took the road that seemed most travelled, and this road descended into swampy ground and met another road at an angle. Many cart tracks and side roads confused his progress, and he sweated with weariness and bewilderment and haste. When at last he came to a highway filled with men and wagons and guns, he knew a vast relief.

  To his question, a mounted officer told him this was Hill’s corps. “Or what’s left of it. General Hill’s dead.” He added grimly: “He had to relieve himself, turned into a patch of woods, ran into the Yanks. We’re part of Longstreet’s command now.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Up ahead.”

  Trav rode on, thinking absently of Powell Hill who had done great deeds and now was dead. A halt came down the marching column, and the men fell out to rest; but Trav pushed ahead. At first dawn he saw a great leaping fire beside the road, and men sitting around it, and tethered horses among the trees near-by. He turned Nig that way and recognized Longstreet and secured Nig and went forward.

  Longstreet greeted him cheerfully. “Well, Major, I think I would know the hoof beats of that black beast of yours, even in the dark. Glad you’re with us again.”

  “I saw Mrs. Longstreet on the cars, General; saw the train start for Danville.”

  “Thank you. And Mrs. Currain?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was Kershaw on the move?”

  “Yes, sir, and General Ewell too.”

  “Mahone’s division has gone to Chesterfield Court House to cover them.”

  “I met them. They said that you were on this road. How far back is Petersburg?”

  “We’ve done fifteen or sixteen miles since dark, in spite of the mud.”

  “I left Richmond at dark. I must have ridden twenty-five or thirty miles.” Trav added in half question: “It seems a long time since you started for Petersburg Saturday.”

  Longstreet nodded. “Yes. We reached General Lee’s headquarters before day. His rheumatism is severe again; he had not risen. I reported to his bedside. He said our right, Pickett and Fitz Lee, had been crushed. He at first directed me to march to bolster the right; but while I was still with him, word came that our lines in his immediate front were broken. By that time it was light enough so that from his front door we could see the Yankee skirmishers moving across the open toward us.” The bearded man hesitated, said sadly: “He asked me to stop them; but the trains bringing Field’s division had not yet reached the Petersburg station. Luckily, Benning came up with his Rock Brigade. He had only six hundred men, but they checked the Yankee skirmishers; and at Fort Gregg it cost ’Lys Grant seven or eight hundred casualties to overcome our handful in the Fort. That gave us delay till night, saved us from being broken into fragments then and there.”

  “What now?”

  “Why, a race to round their left and turn south and unite with General Johnston. We marched all night on empty stomachs, and we’ve nothing for breakfast, so this will be a hungry day; but General Lee has ordered a trainload of supplies to meet us at Amelia Court House. Thinking about that will help.” He rose. “It’s time to take the road.”

  Their orders were to cross the Appomattox at Bevill’s Bridge, and they pressed on at the best pace the half-starved men could muster. The winding road was all up and down, the hills neither long nor arduous yet by their monotonous persistence wearisome. When after a ten-mile march the head of the column descended toward the river, they saw flooded lowlands. The water was across the road; and the picket riding in advance came splashing back to report the bridge impassable.

  “Impassable?” Longstreet demanded. “It’s there, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, General; but a horse would have to swim to reach the nigh end of it.”

  Longstreet grunted angrily. “Well then, we’ll have to go up river to Goode’s.” It was impossible to march the men through the tangled bottoms along the river, so the column doubled on itself, a courier bore orders to the rear, and they returned a mile or two to the first fork and took the road, deep with mud, that paralleled the river.

  When at dusk they reached Goode’s Bridge, Gordon’s brigades and trains were already crossing there, and they must wait their tu
rn. All that night the bridge creaked and bobbed under men and guns; but Tuesday morning, with Yankee horsemen on their left keeping the column in view, so that the men had to be constantly alert against a sudden thrust, they pushed on.

  Longstreet raged at the delay. “A few more such disasters and we’ll lose the race. If Grant guesses what we’re up to, he has the shortest road to cut us off. We got a day’s start yesterday, but we must hold it to get through Burkville before he can intercept us there.”

  Trav knew Burkville, the junction of the South Side and the Danville railroads. “We’ll be in Amelia Court House this afternoon. That’s halfway there.”

  Longstreet muttered something Trav could not hear. The march that day was easier, and he thought this was fortunate. Few of the men had eaten anything since Sunday morning, and they were weak with hunger, and lagged easily. But there would be rations waiting at Amelia Court House, and once their stomachs were full they would be fit for anything.

  When they rode into the Court House, General Lee was there before them, and Trav saw Longstreet meet him and heard Lee’s word.

  “The rations are not here, General,” Lee said. His head twitched sidewise in the way he had when he was angry. “The train came here as ordered, and it was fully loaded; but it was summoned to Richmond to bring off the personnel and records of the Government and did not wait to unload the cars.” He added gravely: “But the men can do no more without food, so we must stop and collect what provisions there are in the neighborhood.”

  The commanding general spoke no word of blame for that error; but General Longstreet, when he turned back to give orders for foraging, was not so restrained, and his anger infected them all. Grant’s men would have moved at once in hard pursuit to make up the lead which the hard-marching Confederates had won, but now that lead would be lost while every horse and every wagon and every available man was put to the task of gathering food from the nearest farms.

  They worked in a hard rage, damning the delay; and Trav heard from angry men a dozen stories to account for the failure of supply. No one knew who gave those orders for the train to go on to Richmond, but Trav felt that he must share the guilt. Perhaps this was the very train upon which Enid and the children had escaped. Probably the rations had been dumped off the cars at Richmond and abandoned there, to make room for fleeing refugees. He worked in a passionate zeal, to atone for as much of the fault as he must share; but he heard Mr. Davis damned on every side by famished soldiers, and by sweating muleteers who cursed their animals and the President of the Confederacy with an equal eloquence. To save his own neck from a stretching, they said, old Jeff Davis would let the men who for four years had fought for him starve on their feet, while he scuttled like a scared hen to the safety they could never hope to reach.

  Trav did not seek to silence them. Rage might make them forget their hunger. Most of the foragers returned empty-handed, since this countryside had long since been combed clean to supply the lines around Petersburg. The corn cribs offered the only substantial contribution. The lucky regiments received an issue of two ears of dry corn on the cob per man. They parched it, and added salt if they had salt, and put it in their pockets to chew as they went on.

  They were almost twenty-four hours at Amelia Court House. A little after noon on Wednesday, they marched toward Burkville in a doubled column. The road was muddy, but the railroad right of way was seductively level, with cuts through the low hills, and fills to cross the swampy bottoms; and the men, seeking the least arduous footing, abandoned the highway for the railroad. Trav saw where here and there wooden beams faced with strap iron had been used to replace wornout rails. Even the railroad was starved!

  They pushed on toward Jetersville, till the advance reported that enemy skirmishers barred the way; and the columns halted while General Lee rode to survey the situation. Since the region was strange to them all, and no maps were available, Longstreet set Trav and others to find someone who knew the countryside and the available near-by roads; but beyond their own door yards and their immediate surroundings, none of the men and women to whom Trav talked knew more than he. By the time he reported this to General Longstreet, Lee’s decision had been made. Rather than risk an attack on the enemy in their front they would seek a way around.

  As Longstreet countermarched, rain began to fall. They turned off by the road to Amelia Springs. Longstreet had said they must reach Burkville before Grant barred the way; but now, miles short of Burkville, Grant had forced them to another northerly detour. Presently a word from Longstreet let Trav understand that this same thought was in the other’s mind.

  “ ’Lys Grant has moved fast. He’s a better guesser than I thought, unless he’s heard somehow what we meant to do.”

  “He’s across our road to Burkville,” Trav agreed.

  Longstreet looked at him with hard eyes. “No matter,” he said gruffly. “Farmville will do as well.” But Trav knew this was not so. Farmville was on the road to Lynchburg, and that road led west, not south to General Johnston.

  They found Flat Creek at a flood stage, with water out over the road on either side of the creek itself; and the bridge was shaky. Infantry could use it, or could wade the creek; but wagons and artillery must wait till the bridge was strengthened. Trav was left to see to this while the leading divisions pushed ahead.

  It was dark and the rain had ceased when Trav rode through Amelia Springs. Once, long ago, he had come here with his mother, when she desired to take the waters. In those days, Otterbein Lithia Water was famous, bottled and shipped all over the world; but the Springs were no longer a resort, the hotel was abandoned, even brick buildings were falling into ruin.

  At the Springs and beyond, Trav found dangerous congestion. The army’s trains, almost a thousand wagons, had left Amelia Court House with orders for Burkville, and using every available road. But since Grant forced a change of plan, Farmville was now the goal; and this meant confusion. Worse, Yankee cavalry had caught some wagons in the swampy ground along the creek on the road to Painesville, and burned them and blocked that road for hours. Now, guns and wagons marching by the route Trav followed encountered another column entering the same road short of Deatonville; and a mass of men and mules and horses shouldered each other along the narrow way.

  The mud was deep and the night was raw with the threat of rain to come. The wagons moved slowly with many halts, the men stumbled wearily in the blackness. Trav, to give them room, kept Nig off the road, picking his way through the fields and woods; and the big horse was nervous, catching by infection the tension of haste and fear and weariness and hunger and bewilderment which bound the trudging men. Trav, himself blinded by the darkness, gave Nig his head; for there were flankers out against any sudden rush of enemy cavalry, and when the column halted for even a moment, worn-out men moved off the road and dropped in their tracks. Nig could be trusted not to step on them.

  Trav heard officers shouting to awaken these sleepers, and he thought some would be hard to wake, would need to be shaken, or dragged to their feet. He knew that if he surrendered to slumber, no ordinary outcry would rouse him. Even Nig was tremulous, as much with fatigue as with tight nerves.

  Into that dreadful plodding, that sleep-walking nightmare, burst sudden tragedy. A man lying in exhausted sleep a little off the road, his dreams disturbed by Nig’s passing, uttered a terrible strangled cry and let off his gun. At that flash almost under his nose, the great horse bounded to one side so violently that Trav was almost unseated. Nig crashed into a fence; and even in the darkness Trav saw another horse, tied to the fence, rear high with a scream of terror and the splintering of breaking wood, and then plunge full gallop along the road jammed with men.

  Trav brought Nig under control, but ahead of him the other horse was running through the scattering soldiers, the fragment of rail to which his reins had been secured flailing against his heels; and there was a clamor of shouts, and then screams of pain, and then sudden bursts of musketry. Instantly, in the black confusion,
guns were going everywhere, in disorderly but deadly volleys. Nig was wild, and Trav fought to control him, and felt the twitch of a bullet pluck his sleeve, and knew himself the target of some of that fire. He swung Nig away into the cover of the trees and brought him to a halt and heard along the road behind him rapid firing still continue, and the shouts of officers trying to steady the men. There came a brief hush, and he could hear the voices, the excited harangues; and then at some new alarm the men along the road broke down the fence with a universal rush and came running toward the wood where he was, firing back toward the road as they ran.

  It was dread of enemy cavalry which had wrought them to this pitch. Sight of Trav and Nig would fan them to a higher frenzy; so Trav guided Nig straight away from the road, and risked a gallop through the scrub oak and dwarf pines, till behind him the firing dwindled and died down and silence came again. He rode on in bitter grief. Not all those bullets could have gone astray. Many must have found human flesh; more than one man must have died in that medley, friend killing friend with no enemy near. But night was a time for panic. Even strong men knew in darkness fears which daylight banished. How much more easily, then, would phantom fears infect these starved skeletons of men whose valor for four years had shone so bright! They could be forgiven. Whatever errors they might now commit could not wipe out the great deeds they had done.

  Trav came up with the advance and reported to the General. Approaching dawn brought a new sprinkle of rain that retarded coming day and shrouded everything in a gray veil. It fretted them all, as strands of spiderweb may fret one who walks through an untrodden wood, wetting them a little and a little more, forming drops on cheek and beard. Longstreet called a halt. Rest must take the place of food, yet they could not rest for long.