Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  To the north, immense quantities of stores — clothing, provisions, material of every description were on fire, darkening the sky with rolling, inky clouds; an entire army corps with heavy artillery and baggage crossed the river enveloped in the pitchy, cinder-laden smoke from two bridges on fire. The forests, which had been felled from the Golden Farm to Fair Oaks to form an army’s vast abattis, were burning in sections, sending roaring tornadoes of flame into rifle pits, redoubts, and abandoned fortifications. Cannon thundered at Ellison’s Mills; shells rained hard on Gaines’s Farm; a thousand simultaneous volleys of musketry mingled with the awful uproar of the cannon; uninterrupted sheets of light from the shells brightened the smoke pall like the continuous flare of electricity against a thundercloud. The Confederacy, victorious, was advancing wrapped in flame and smoke.

  At Savage’s Station the long railroad bridge was now on fire; trains and locomotives burned fiercely; millions of boxes of hard bread, barrels of flour, rice, sugar, coffee, salt pork, cases of shoes, underclothing, shirts, uniforms, tin-ware, blankets, ponchos, harness, medical stores, were in flames; magazines of ammunition, flat cars and box cars loaded with powder, shells, and cartridges blazed and exploded, hurling jets and spouting fountains of fire to the very zenith.

  And through the White Oak Swamp rode the Commander-in-chief of an army in full retreat, followed by his enormous staff and escort, abandoning the siege of Richmond, and leaving to their fate the wretched mass of sick and wounded in the dreadful hospitals at Liberty Hall. And the red battle flags of the Southland fluttered on every hill.

  Claymore’s mixed brigade, still holding together, closed the rear of Porter’s powder-scorched corps d’armee.

  The Zouaves of the 3rd Regiment — what was left of them — marched as flankers; McDunn’s battery, still intact, was forced to unlimber every few rods; and the pouring rain turned to a driving golden fire in the red glare of the guns, which lighted up the halted squadrons of the Lancers ranged always in support.

  Every rod in retreat was a running combat. In the darkness the discharge of the Zouaves’ rifles ran from the guns’ muzzles like streams of molten metal spilling out on the grass. McDunn’s guns spirted great lumps of incandescence; the fuses of the shells in the sky showered the darkness with swarming sparks.

  Toward ten o’clock the harried column halted on a hill and bivouacked without fires, food, or shelter. The Zouaves slept on their arms in the drenched herbage; the Lancers, not daring to unsaddle, lay down on the grass under their patient horses, bridle tied to wrist. An awful anxiety clutched officers and men. Few slept; the ceaseless and agonised shrieking from an emergency hospital somewhere near them in the darkness almost unnerved them.

  At dawn shells began to plunge downward among the Dragoons. McDunn’s battery roused itself to reply, but muddy staff-officers arrived at full speed with orders for Claymore to make haste; and the starving command staggered off stiffly through the mud, their ears sickened by the piteous appeals of the wounded begging not to be abandoned.

  Berkley, his face a mass of bloody rags, gazed from his wet saddle with feverish eyes at the brave contract surgeons standing silent amid their wounded under the cedar trees.

  Cripples hobbled along the lines, beseeching, imploring, catching at stirrups, plucking feebly, blindly at the horses’ manes for support.

  “Oh, my God!” sobbed a wounded artilleryman, lifting himself from the blood-stained grass, “is this what I enlisted for? Are you boys going to leave us behind to rot in rebel prisons?”

  “Damn you!” shrieked another, “you ain’t licked! What’n hell are you runnin’ away for? Gimme a gun an’ a hoss an’ I’ll go back with you to the river!”

  And another pointed a mangled and shaking hand at the passing horsemen.

  “Oh, hell!” he sneered, “we don’t expect anything of the cavalry, but why are them Zouaves skedaddlin’? They fit like wild cats at the river. Halt! you red-legged devils. You’re goin’ the wrong way!”

  A Sister of Charity, her snowy, wide-winged headdress limp in the rain, came out of a shed and stood at the roadside, slender hands joined imploringly.

  “You mustn’t leave your own wounded,” she kept repeating. “You wouldn’t do that, gentlemen, would you? They’ve behaved so well; they’ve done all that they could. Won’t somebody tell General McClellan how brave they were? If he knew, he would never leave them here.”

  The Lancers looked down at her miserably as they rode; Colonel

  Arran passed her, saluting, but with heavy, flushed face averted;

  Berkley, burning with fever, leaned from his saddle, cap in hand.

  “We can’t help it, Sister. The same thing may happen to us in an hour. But we’ll surely come back; you never must doubt that!”

  Farther on they came on a broken-down ambulance, the mules gone, several dead men half buried in the wet straw, and two Sisters of Charity standing near by in pallid despair.

  Colonel Arran offered them lead-horses, but they were timid and frightened; and Burgess gave his horse to the older one, and Berkley took the other up behind him, where she sat sideways clutching his belt, white coiffe aflutter, feet dangling.

  At noon the regiment halted for forage and rations procured from a waggon train which had attempted to cross their line of march. The rain ceased: a hot sun set their drenched clothing and their horses’ flanks steaming. At two o’clock they resumed their route; the ragged, rain-blackened pennons on the lance heads dried out scarlet; a hot breeze set in, carrying with it the distant noise of battle.

  All that afternoon the heavy sound of the cannonade jarred their ears. And at sunset it had not ceased.

  Berkley’s Sister of Charity clung to his belt in silence for a while. After a mile or two she began to free her mind in regard to the distressing situation of her companion and herself. She informed Berkley that the negro drivers had become frightened and had cut the traces and galloped off; that she and the other Sister were on their way to the new base at Azalea Court House, where thousands of badly wounded were being gathered from the battles of the last week, and where conditions were said to be deplorable, although the hospital boats had been taking the sick to Alexandria as fast as they could be loaded.

  She was a gentle little thing, with ideas of her own concerning the disaster to the army which was abandoning thousands of its wounded to the charity and the prisons of an enemy already too poor to feed and clothe its own.

  “Some of our Sisters stayed behind, and many of the medical staff and even the contract surgeons remained. I hope the rebels will be gentle with them. I expected to stay, but Sister Aurelienne and I were ordered to Azalea last night. I almost cried my eyes out when I left our wounded. The shells were coming into the hospital yesterday, and one of them killed two of our wounded in the straw. Oh, it was sad and terrible. I am sure the rebels didn’t fire on us on purpose. Do you think so?”

  “No, I don’t. Were you frightened, Sister.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said naively, “and I wished I could run into the woods and hide.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “Why, no, I couldn’t,” she said, surprised.

  The fever in his wound was making him light-headed. At intervals he imagined that it was Ailsa seated behind him, her arms around his waist, her breath cool and fragrant on his neck; and still he knew she was a phantom born of fever, and dared not speak — became sly, pretending he did not know her lest the spell break and she vanish into thin air again.

  What the little sister said was becoming to him only a pretty confusion of soft sounds; at moments he was too deaf to hear her voice at all; then he heard it and still believed it to be Ailsa who was speaking; then, for a, few seconds, reality cleared his clouded senses; he heard the steady thunder of the cannonade, the steady clattering splash of his squadron; felt the hot, dry wind scorching his stiffened cheek and scalp where the wound burned and throbbed under a clotted bandage.

  When the regiment halted to fill cante
ens the little sister washed and re-bandaged his face and head.

  It was a ragged slash running from the left ear across the cheek-bone and eyebrow into the hair above the temple — a deep, swollen, angry wound.

  “What were you doing when you got this?” she asked in soft consternation, making him as comfortable as possible with the scanty resources of her medical satchel. Later, when the bugles sounded, she came back from somewhere down the line, suffered him to lift her up behind him, settled herself, slipped both arms confidently around his waist, and said:

  “So you are the soldier who took the Confederate battle flag? Why didn’t you tell me? Ah — I know. The bravest never tell.”

  “There is nothing to tell,” he replied. “They captured a guidon from us. It evens the affair.”

  She said, after a moment’s thought; “It speaks well for a man to have his comrades praise him as yours praise you.”

  “You mean the trooper Burgess,” he said wearily. “He’s always chattering.”

  “All who spoke to me praised you,” she observed. “Your colonel said: ‘He does not understand what fear is. He is absolutely fearless.’”

  “My colonel has been misinformed, Sister. I am intelligent enough to be afraid — philosopher enough to realise that it doesn’t help me. So nowadays I just go ahead.”

  “Trusting in God,” she murmured.

  He did not answer.

  “Is it not true, soldier?”

  But the fever was again transfiguring her into the shape of Ailsa Paige, and he remained shyly silent, fearing to disturb the vision — yet knowing vaguely that it was one.

  She sighed; later, in silence, she repeated some Credos and Hail Marys, her eyes fixed on space, the heavy cannonade dinning in her ears. All around her rode the Lancers, tall pennoned weapons swinging from stirrup and loop, bridles loose under their clasped hands. The men seemed stupefied with fatigue; yet every now and then they roused themselves to inquire after her comfort or to offer her a place behind them. She timidly asked Berkley if she tired him, but he begged her to stay, alarmed lest the vision of Ailsa depart with her; and she remained, feeling contented and secure in her drowsy fatigue. Colonel Arran dropped back from the head of the column once to ride beside her. He questioned her kindly; spoke to Berkley, also, asking with grave concern about his wound. And Berkley answered in his expressionless way that he did not suffer.

  But the little Sister of Charity behind his back laid one finger across her lips and looked significantly at Colonel Arran; and when the colonel again rode to the head of the weary column his face seemed even graver and more careworn.

  By late afternoon they were beyond sound of the cannonade, riding through a golden light between fields of stacked wheat. Far behind in the valley they could see the bayonets of the Zouaves glistening; farther still the declining sun glimmered on the guns of the 10th battery. Along a parallel road endless lines of waggons stretched from north to south, escorted by Egerton’s Dragoons.

  To Berkley the sunset world had become only an infernal pit of scarlet strung with raw nerves. The terrible pain in his face and head almost made him lose consciousnesss. Later he seemed to be drifting into a lurid sea of darkness, where he no longer felt his saddle or the movement of his horse; he scarcely saw the lanterns clustering, scarcely heard the increasing murmur around him, the racket of picket firing, the noise of many bewildered men, the cries of staff-officers directing divisions and brigades to their camping ground, the confused tumult which grew nearer, nearer, mounting like the ominous clamour of the sea as the regiment rode through Azalea under the July stars.

  He might have fallen from his saddle; or somebody perhaps lifted him, for all he knew. In the glare of torches he found himself lying on a moving stretcher. After that he felt straw under him; and vaguely wondered why it did not catch fire from his body, which surely now was but a mass of smouldering flame.

  For days the fever wasted him — not entirely, for at intervals he heard cannon, and always the interminable picket firing; and he heard bugles, too, and recognised the various summons. But it was no use trying to obey them — no use trying to find his legs. He could not get up without his legs — he laughed weakly at the thought; then, drowsy, indifferent, decided that they had been shot away, but could not remember when; and it bothered him a good deal.

  Other things bothered him; he was convinced that his mother was in the room. At intervals he was aware of Hallam’s handsome face, cut out like a paper picture from Harper’s Weekly and pasted flat on the tent wall. Also there were too many fire zouaves around his bed — if it was a bed, this vague vibrating hammock he occupied. It was much more like a hollow nook inside a gigantic pendulum which swung eternally to and fro until it swung him into senselessness — or aroused him with fierce struggles to escape. But his mother’s slender hand sometimes arrested the maddening motion, or — and this was curiously restful — she cleverly transferred him to a cradle, which she rocked, leaning close over him. Only she kept him wrapped up too warmly.

  And after a long while there came a day when his face became cooler, and his skin grew wet with sweat; and on that day he partly unclosed his eyes and saw Colonel Arran sitting beside him.

  Surprised, he attempted to sit up, but not a muscle of his body obeyed him, and he lay there stupid, inert, hollow eyes fixed meaninglessly on his superior, who spoke cautiously.

  “Berkley, do you know me?”

  His lips twitched a voiceless affirmative.

  Colonel Arran said: “You are going to get well, now. . . . Get well quickly, because — the regiment misses you. . . . What is it you desire to say? Make the effort if you wish.”

  Berkley’s sunken eyes remained focussed on space; he was trying to consider. Then they turned painfully toward Colonel Arran again.

  “Ailsa Paige?” he whispered.

  The other said quietly: “She is at the base hospital near Azalea. I have seen her. She is well. . . . I did not tell her you were ill. She could not have left anyway. . . . Matters are not going well with the army, Berkley.”

  “Whipped?” His lips barely formed the question.

  Colonel Arran’s careworn features flushed.

  “The army has been withdrawing from the Peninsula. It is the commander-in-chief who has been defeated — not the Army of the Potomac.”

  “Back?”

  “Yes, certainly we shall go back. This rebellion seems to be taking more time to extinguish than the people and the national authorities supposed it would require. But no man must doubt our ultimate success. I do not doubt it. I never shall. You must not. It will all come right in the end.”

  “Regiment?” whispered Berkley.

  “The regiment is in better shape, Berkley. Our remounts have arrived; our wounded are under shelter, and comfortable. We need rest, and we’re getting it here at Azalea, although they shell us every day. We ought to be in good trim in a couple of weeks. You’ll be in the saddle long before that. Your squadron has become very proud of you; all the men in the regiment have inquired about you. Private Burgess spends his time off duty under the oak trees out yonder watching your window like a dog. . . . I — ah — may say to you, Berkley, that you — ah — have become a credit to the regiment. Personally — and as your commanding officer — I wish you to understand that I am gratified by your conduct. I have said so in my official reports.”

  Berkley’s sunken eyes had reverted to the man beside him. After a moment his lips moved again in soundless inquiry.

  Colonel Arran replied: “The Zouaves were very badly cut up; Major Lent was wounded by a sabre cut. He is nearly well now. Colonel Craig and his son were not hurt. The Zouaves are in cantonment about a mile to the rear. Both Colonel Craig and his son have been here to see you—” he hesitated, rose, stood a moment undecided.

  “Mrs. Craig — the wife of Colonel Craig — has been here. Her plantation, Paigecourt, is in this vicinity I believe. She has requested the medical authorities to send you to her house for your con
valescence. Do you wish to go?”

  The hollow-eyed, heavily bandaged face looked up at him from the straw; and Colonel Arran looked down at it, lips aquiver.

  “Berkley — if you go there, I shall not see you again until you return to the regiment. I—” suddenly his gray face began to twitch again — and he set his jaw savagely to control it.

  “Good-bye,” he said. . . “I wish — some day — you could try to think less harshly of me. I am a — very — lonely man.”

  Berkley closed his eyes, but whether from weakness or sullen resentment the older man could not know. He stood looking down wistfully at the boy for a moment, then turned and went heavily away with blurred eyes that did not recognise the woman in bonnet and light summer gown who was entering the hospital tent. As he stood aside to let her pass he heard his name pronounced, in a cold, decisive voice; and, passing his gloved hand across his eyes to clear them, recognised Celia Craig.

  “Colonel Arran,” she said coolly, “is it necessa’y fo’ me to request yo’ permission befo’ I am allowed to move Philip Berkley to my own house?”

  “No, madam. The brigade surgeon is in charge. But I think I can secure for you the necessary authority to do so if you wish.”

  She thanked him haughtily, and passed on; and he turned and walked out, impassive, silent, a stoop to his massive shoulders which had already become characteristic.

  And that evening Berkley lay at Paigecourt in the chintz-hung chamber where, as a girl, his mother had often slept, dreaming the dreams that haunt young hearts when the jasmine fragrance grows heavier in the stillness and the magnolia’s snowy chalice is offered to the moon, and the thrush sings in the river thickets, and the fire-fly’s lamp drifts through the fairy woods.