SI TUCKER—COWARD AND HERO
I WAS in command of Fort Lamkin, a mortar fort, in rear of General Bushrod Johnson’s lines at Petersburg in 1864.
The fort was named for our immediate commander, from whose command we had been detached for this service.
One day Lamkin himself came to me when I was at his headquarters. He was obviously in trouble.
“This boy, Si Tucker,” he said, “is the son of one of the best friends I ever had in the world. The boy is a coward. He literallylivesin a rat hole. I have repeatedly pulled him out by the legs, only to have him crawl back again the moment I let go of his ankles. I don’t know what to do. It’s my duty, of course, to prefer charges of cowardice against him; and if I do, he will certainly be shot—and his father is my best friend.”
He paused meditatively, and then said with eagerness in his voice: “Why can’t you take him?”
I agreed at once. I told him I would takethe boy with me to my pits, and make “either a soldier or a stiff” out of him within the next twenty-four hours. I was under no obligations to his father; I had never even met any of his relatives, and I had seen too many years of service to have much patience with cowardice.
The boy was sent for and ordered to go with me. We walked down towards Blandford church. At the proper point we turned out of the Jerusalem plank road across the fields towards Fort Lamkin. Half-way there and on the top of a little hill, which was especially exposed to the gaze of the sharp-shooters, I made Si Tucker sit down by my side. There we came to an understanding.
I told him that he had been assigned to me to be shot out of hand, or to be court-martialled for cowardice, which at that particular juncture of the war meant very much the same thing. I explained to him that he was about to join a detachment, composed exclusively of men specially selected for their courage—every one of them a volunteer for what was deemed a peculiarly dangerous service.
I explained further that I should require him to do his duty as they did theirs.
“You have managed to make for yourself,” I said, “the reputation of a coward. You have now one last chance to redeem yourself. You must do that, or you must die.”
The sharp-shooters were, in the meantime, picking at us most uncomfortably as we sat there. My experience as an old soldier strongly suggested to me that we ought to move. The position was of that kind that military men call untenable. Nevertheless, I thought it best to keep Si Tucker there a minute longer, for purposes of observation, if nothing else.
“At our pits,” I said, “we have one uniform rule of procedure. When a bombardment begins, the men go to their guns. I take my stand on top of the magazine mound to watch the enemy’s fire and direct our own. If I see that a mortar shell is about to fall into one of the gun pits, I call out the pit number, and the men run into the bomb-proof until the explosion is over. No man ever goes into a bomb-proof till this order is given. You must do as the rest do. If you run to a bomb-proof before I have given the order, it will be my imperative duty to shoot you then and there; and I shall certainly discharge that duty. Do you fully understand that, Si?”
He thought he did, and as the sharp-shooters were by this time becoming pestilently personal in their attentions, we resumed our walk.
Half an hour after our arrival at Fort Lamkin, a bombardment began.
I didn’t want to shoot that boy. I distinctly preferred to make a soldier rather than a “stiff”out of him. So, instead of taking my customary stand on the mound of earth over the magazine, I ordered Joe to that post, and placed myself in the gun pit to which Si Tucker had been assigned, taking care to stand between him and the mouth of the bomb-proof. I spoke to him as I passed.
“Remember what I told you. If you forget, it is instant death.”
He remembered. For nearly two hours he stood there quaking and quivering, but not daring to seek safety by retreat to a bomb-proof.
By the time that the outburst was over, Si Tucker had learned his first lesson in war. He had learned to realize that a man may endure a lot of very savage fire, and yet come out of it alive.
A few hours later, when the guns were at work again, Si was steady enough in his nerves to carry shells to the guns. The next day he was even able during a bombardment to cut fuses—a delicate operation requiring a steady hand.
Within two or three days he had become as good a soldier as we had in all that band of men specially picked for their unflinching courage.
When the great mine explosion occurred a few weeks later, I had occasion to rebuke Si Tucker for a fault quite unrelated to cowardice. We had been ordered to go with our mortars asnear as possible to the crater, and to drop a continual rain of shells among the thousands of helpless fellows in that awful pit.
It was cruel, ghastly work. But it was war. And a poet has justly characterized war as a “brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art.” Or as General Sherman once said,—and he knew,—“War is all hell.”
We were within sixty yards of the crater. Each one of our mortars was belching from three to five shells a minute into that hole; but Si Tucker’s enthusiasm was not satisfied. Having no personal duty to do at the moment, he began plugging shells with long fuses, lighting them, running with them to the margin of the pit, and tossing them in as hand grenades. He was greeted by a tremendous volley of musketry at each repetition of this performance, but he did it three times before we could stop him.
That evening, near the gloaming, he did another thing. The lines had by that time been restored. The men in the crater—those of them who had not been killed—had been driven back to the Federal side. We became aware of the fact that a poor fellow of our own was lying grievously wounded near the Federal side of the fifty yards that separated our works from the enemy’s. He had been lying there through all that long, fierce summer day. The explosion at daylight had cast him there.
His groans and his cries for help and for water were piteous in the extreme. We listened to them heartbroken but helpless—all but Si Tucker.
Si began stripping off his clothes; we thought he had gone mad. But when we asked him why he was stripping himself, he replied: “Never you mind.”
With that, stripped to the skin, he leaped over the works, ducked his head low, and ran through that hailstorm of bullets to where the wounded man lay. Grasping him quickly, he slung him upon his back like a bag of meal, and ran back with all his might.
As he crossed the works he fell headlong.
The surgeon found three bullets in his body.
Nobody in the battery ever remembered after that, that Si Tucker had once been a coward.
After all, it is perhaps mainly a question of nerves.