XLIII
THAT SABBATH AT SHILOH
"Whole theatre of action."
The figure had sounded apt to Anna on that Sunday evening when theDoctor employed it; apt enough--until the outburst of that great anddreadful news whose inseparable implications and forebodings robbed herof all sleep that night and made her the first one astir at daybreak.But thenceforward, and now for half a week or more, the aptness seemedquite to have passed. Strange was the theatre whose play was all andonly a frightful reality; whose swarming, thundering, smoking stage hadits audience, its New Orleans audience, wholly behind it, and whosecurtain of distance, however thin, mocked every bodily sense andcompelled all to be seen and heard by the soul's eye and ear, with allthe joy and woe of its actuality and all its suspense, terror, triumph,heartbreak, and despair.
Yet here was that theatre, and the Doctor's metaphor was still goodenough for the unexacting taste of the two Valcour ladies, to whom Annahad quoted it. And here, sprinkled through the vast audience of thattheatre, with as keen a greed for its play as any, were all the variousnon-combatants with whom we are here concerned, though not easily to besingled out, such mere units were they of the impassioned multitudeevery mere unit of which, to loved and loving ones, counted for morethan we can tell.
However, our favourites might be glimpsed now and then. On a certainmidday of that awful half-week the Callenders, driving, took upVictorine at her gate and Flora at her door and sped up-town to thenewspaper offices in Camp street to rein in against a countless surge ofold men in fine dress, their precious dignity thrown to the dogs, eachnow but one of the common herd, and each against all, shouldering,sweating, and brandishing wide hands to be the first purchaser andreader of the list, the long, ever-lengthening list of the killed andwounded. Much had been learned of the great two-days' battle, and manyan infantry sister, and many a battery sister besides Anna, wassecond-sighted enough to see, night and day, night and day, the muddylabyrinth of roads and by-roads that braided and traversed the wide,unbroken reaches of dense timber--with their deep ravines, their longridges, and their creek-bottom marshes and sloughs--in the day's journeyfrom Corinth to the bluffs of the Tennessee. They saw them, not empty,nor fearlessly crossed by the quail, the wild turkey, the fox, or theunhunted deer, nor travelled alone by the homespun "citizen" or byscouts or foragers, but slowly overflowed by a great gray, silent,tangled, armed host--cavalry, infantry, ordnance trains, batteries,battery wagons and ambulances: Saw Hilary Kincaid and all his heroes andtheir guns, and all the "big generals" and their smart escorts and busystaffs: Saw the various columns impeding each other, taking wrong waysand losing priceless hours while thousands of inexperienced boys,footsore, drenched and shivering yet keen for the fight, ate theirfive-days' food in one, or threw it away to lighten the march, andtoiled on in hunger, mud, cold and rain, without the note of a horn ordrum or the distant eye of one blue scout to tell of their oncoming.
They saw, did Anna and those sisters (and many and many a wife andmother from Callender House to Carrollton), the vast, stealthy, firelessbivouac at fall of night, in ear-shot of the enemy's tattoo, unshelteredfrom the midnight storm save by raked-up leaves: Saw, just in thebivouac's tortuous front, softly reddening the low wet sky, that huge,rude semicircle of camps in the dark ridged and gullied forests aboutShiloh's log meeting-house, where the victorious Grant'sten-thousands--from Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa,Wisconsin, Michigan, as new to arms as their foe, yet a band of lions inlair--lay dry-tented, full fed and fast asleep, safely flanked byswollen streams, their gunboats behind them and Buell coming, butwithout one mounted outpost, a scratch of entrenchment or a whisper ofwarning.
Amid the eager carriage talk, in which Anna kept her part, her mind'seye still saw the farther scene as it changed again and the gray dawnand gray host furtively rose together and together silently spreadthrough the deep woods. She watched the day increase and noon soar upand sink away while the legions of Hardee, Bragg, Polk and Breckinridgeslowly writhed out of their perplexed folds and set themselves, stillundetected in their three successive lines of battle. She beheld thesun set calm and clear, the two hosts lie down once more, one in itstents, the other on its arms, the leafy night hang over them resplendentwith stars, its watches near by, the Southern lines reawaken inrecovered strength, spring up and press forward exultantly to the awfulissue, and the Sabbath dawn brighten into a faultless day with the boomof the opening gun.
As the ladies drew up behind the throng and across the throat ofCommercial Alley the dire List began to flutter from the Picayune officein greedy palms and over and among dishevelled heads like a feedingswarm of white pigeons. News there was as well as names, but every eyedevoured the names first and then--unless some name struck lightning inthe heart, as Anna saw it do every here and there and for that poor oldman over yonder--after the names the news.
"Nan, we needn't stay if you--"
"Oh, Miranda, isn't all this ours?"
The bulletin boards were already telling in outline, ahead of the list,thrilling things about the Orleans Guards, the whirlwind onset of whosemaiden bayonets had captured double its share of the first camp takenfrom the amazed, unbreakfasted enemy, and who again and again, hour byhour, by the half-mile and mile, had splendidly helped to drivehim--while he hammered back with a deadly stubbornness all but a matchfor their fury. Through forests, across clearings, over streams and bogsand into and out of ravines and thickets they had swept, seizingtransiently a whole field battery, permanently hundreds of prisoners,and covering the strife's broad wake with even more appalling numbersof their own dead and wounded than of the foe's: wailing wounded,ghastly, grimy dead, who but yesterday were brothers, cousins andplaymates of these very men snatching and searching the list. They told,those boards, of the Washington Artillery (fifth company, never beforeunder fire) being thanked on the field by one of the "big generals,"their chests and wheels shot half to splinters but no gun lost. Theytold of all those Louisiana commands whose indomitable lines charged andmelted, charged and withered, over and over the torn and bloody groundin that long, horrible struggle that finally smoked out the "Hornets'Nest." They told of the Crescent Regiment, known and loved on all thesesidewalks and away up to and beyond their Bishop-General Polk's TrinityChurch, whose desperate gallantry had saved that same WashingtonArtillery three of its pieces, and to whose thinned and bleeding ranksswarms of the huddled Western farm boys, as shattered and gory as theircaptors and as glorious, had at last laid down their arms. And they toldof Kincaid's Battery, Captain Kincaid commanding; how, having early lostin the dense oak woods and hickory brush the brigade--Brodnax's--whoseway they had shelled open for a victorious charge, they had followedtheir galloping leader, the boys running beside the wheels, fromposition to position, from ridge to ridge, in rampant obedience of anorder to "go in wherever they heard the hottest firing", how for a timethey had fought hub to hub beside the Washington Artillery; how two oftheir guns, detached for a special hazard and sweeping into fresh actionon a flank of the "Hornets' Nest," had lost every horse at a singlevolley of the ambushed foe, yet had instantly replied with slaughterousvengeance; and how, for an hour thereafter, so wrapped in their ownsmoke that they could be pointed only by the wheel-ruts of their recoil,they had been worked by their depleted gunners on hands and knees withKincaid and Villeneuve themselves at the trails and with fuses cut toone second. So, in scant outline said the boards, or more in detail readone man aloud to another as they hurried by the carriage.
"But," said Anna, while Flora enjoyed her pallor, "all that is about thefirst day's fight!"
"No," cried Constance, "it's the second day's, that Beauregard calls 'agreat and glorious victory!'"
"Yes," interposed Flora, "but writing from behind his fortification' atCorinth, yes!"
Kincaid's Battery Page 43
