When the two friends reached the outer gates of Warlock plantation on their way to the Court-house, Marshall, to whose queer ways his friend was thoroughly well used, called a halt.
"Let us dismount," he said, "and consider what we are doing."
When they had seated themselves upon the carpet of pine-needles, the meditative youth resumed:
"Does it occur to you, Baillie," he asked, "that when you and I pass through yonder gate, we shall leave behind us for ever the most enjoyable life that it ever fell to the lot of human beings to lead? Do you realise that we may never either of us come back through that gate again, and that if we do, it will only be to find all things changed? We are at the end of a chapter. The next chapter will be by no means like unto it."
"I confess I don't quite understand," answered the less meditative one.
"Well, this easy-going, delightful Virginian life of ours has no counterpart anywhere on this continent or elsewhere in the world, and we have decided to put an end to it. For this war is going to be a very serious thing to us Virginians. Virginia is destined to be the battle-field. Greater armies than have ever before been dreamed of on this continent are going to trample over her fields, and meet in dreadful conflict on the margins of her watercourses. Her homes are going to be desolated, her fields laid waste, her substance utterly exhausted, and her people reduced to poverty in a cause that is not her own, and in behalf of which she unselfishly risks all for the sake of an abstraction, and in defence of a right on the part of other States which Virginia herself had seen no occasion to assert in her own defence. Whatever else happens in this war, all that is characteristic in Virginian life, all that is peculiar to it, all that lends loveliness to it, must be sacrificed on the altar of duty.
"I don't at all know how the change is to come about, or what new things are destined to replace the old; but I see clearly that the old must give way to something new. Perhaps, after all, that is best. Ours has been a beautiful life, and a peculiarly picturesque one, but it is not in tune with this modern industrial world. It has its roots in the past, and the past cannot endure. We have thus far been able to go on living in an ideal world, but the real world has been more and more asserting itself, and even if no war were coming on to upset things, things must be upset. Railroads and telegraphs have come to us rather in spite of our will than by reason of it. We have realised their convenience in a fashion, but they are still foreign and antagonistic to our ideas. The older gentlemen among us still prefer to make long journeys on horseback rather than go by rail, while very many of them insist resolutely upon sending their womankind always in private carriages, even when they go long distances to the mountains for the summer.
"We are living in the past and fighting off the present, but the present will successfully assert itself in the end. You have yourself rejected all the overtures of the speculators who have wanted to open coal mines on Warlock plantation, but the time will come when you'll be glad to be made richer than any Pegram ever dreamed of being by the sinking of mine shafts among your lawn trees.
"If you are lucky enough to survive this war, you'll see a new labour system established, and learn to regard the men who work for you, not as your dependents, for whom you are responsible, and for whose welfare you feel a sympathetic concern, but as so many 'employees,' to be dealt with through a trades union, and kept down to the lowest scale of wages consistent with their living and working.
"I am not advocating the new, or condemning the old. I am only pointing out the fact that the new is surely destined to triumph over the old, and replace it.
"The negroes in Virginia are beyond question the best paid, the best fed, the best housed, and altogether the best cared for labouring population on earth. They are secure in childhood and in old age and in illness, as no other labouring people on earth are. They are happy, and in important ways they are even freer than any other labouring class ever was. But they are slaves, and modern thought insists that they would be better off as free men, even though freedom should bring to them a loss of happiness and a loss of that well-nigh limitless liberty which they enjoy as bondsmen, under care of kindly masters.
"Mind you, Baillie, I am not arguing for or against the claims of modern thought. I am only pointing out the fact that it is resistless, and will have its way. All history teaches that. Even chivalry, armed as it was from head to heel, and limitlessly courageous as it was, could not hold its own against commercialism, when commercialism became dominant as the thought that represented the aspirations of men. Not even prejudice or sentiment can prevail against progress.
"John Ruskin is even now protesting in the name of æsthetics against the scarring of England with railroad embankments, and the pollution of England's air with the vomitings of unsightly factory chimneys; but neither the extension of the British railway system nor the multiplication of British factories halts because of his protests.
"Henry Clay was never so eloquent as when pleading against protective tariffs as something that threatened this country with a system like that of Manchester, in which men were divided into mill owners and mill operatives, with antagonistic interests; yet Henry Clay was forced by the conditions of his time to become the apostle of industrial protection by tariff legislation.
"My thesis is that no man and no people can for long stand in the way of what the Germans call thezeitgeist—the spirit of the age. Neither, I think, can any people stand apart from that spirit and let it pass them by. That is what we Virginians have been trying to do. The time has come when we are going out to fight thezeitgeist, and thezeitgeistis going to conquer us."
"You expect the South to fail in the war, then?" asked Baillie.
"I don't know. We may fail or we may win. But in either case the old régime in the Old Dominion will be at an end when the war is over. Virginia will become a modern State, whatever else happens, and the old life in which you and I were brought up will become a thing of the past, a matter of history, the memory of which the novelists may love to recall, but the conditions of which can never again be established.
"Fortunately, none of these things needs trouble us. They make no difference whatever in our personal duty. Virginia has proclaimed her withdrawal from the Union, under the declared purpose of the Union to make war upon her for doing so. It is for us to fight in Virginia's cause as manfully as we can, leaving God, or the Fates, or whatever else it is that presides over human affairs, to take care of the result.
"Come! The time is passing; we must hurry in order to catch that train which represents the modern progress that is destined to ride over us and crush us. Good-bye, old Virginia life! God bless you for a good old life! May we live as worthily in the new, if we survive to see the new!"
The sun shone with the fervent heat of noonday in mid-July, as the long line of cannon and caissons came lumbering down the incline of the roadway that leads from the mountainside into the little railway village. The breath of the guns was still offensively sulphurous, for there had been no time in which to cleanse them since their work of yesterday. The officers and non-commissioned officers on their horses, and the cannoniers who rode upon the ammunition-chests, were powder-grimed and dusty—for there had been no opportunity on this hurried march for those ablutions that all soldiers so eagerly delight in.
There were no shouted commands given, for this battery had been three times under fire, and one of the first things an officer learns in real war is not to shout his orders except when the din of battle renders shouting necessary. Three months ago on parade the captain of this battery would have bellowed, "Forward into battery!" by way of impressing his importance upon the lookers-on. Now that he had learned to be in earnest, he merely turned to his bugler, and said, as if in a parlour, "Forward into battery, then halt."
A little musical snatch on the bugle did the rest, and with the precision of a piece of mechanism, the guns were moved into place, each with its caissons at a fixed distance in the rear, and the command, "At ease," was followed by a stable-call, in obedience to which the drivers set to work to feed and groom their horses. For while men may be allowed to go grimed and dirty on campaign, the horses at least must be curried and rubbed and sponged into perfect health and comfort whenever there is opportunity.
Here at the little railway station were assembled all the womankind from a dozen miles round about. These had come to look upon the Army of the Shenandoah, with which Johnston, after several days of skirmishing in the valley with the Federals under Patterson, was hurrying onward to Manassas to join Beauregard there, in the battle which was so obviously at hand.
The women of every degree had come, not merely to see the spectacle of war, but to cheer the soldiers with smiles and words of encouragement, and still more to minister in what ways they could to their needs. The maids and matrons thus assembled were gaily clad, for war had not yet robbed them of the wherewithal to deck themselves as gaily as the lilies do. They were full of high confidence and ardent hope, for war had not yet brought to them, and for many moons to come was not destined to bring to them, the realisation that defeat and disaster are sometimes a part of the bravest soldiers' fortune. These women believed absolutely and unquestioningly in the righteousness of the Southern cause, and they had not yet read the history of Poland, and La Vendée, and the Huguenots with discretion enough to doubt that victory always in the end crowns the struggles of those who stand for the right.
How much of disappointment and suffering this curiously perverse reading of history has wrought, to be sure! And how confidently, in every case, the men and women on either side of a war commend their cause to Heaven, in full confidence that God, in his justice, cannot fail to give victory to the right, and cannot fail to understand that they are right and their enemies hopelessly wrong. Probably every educated woman among those who were assembled at the little village on that twentieth day of July, 1861, had read Motley's histories; every one of them knew the story of Poland and of Ireland and of La Vendée and the Camisards; but they still believed that God and not the guns decides the outcome of battles.
In one article of their faith at least they were absolutely right. They believed in the courage, the devotion, the unflinching prowess of the men who had enlisted to fight for their cause. They had come now, at the approach of a first great battle, to bid these men Godspeed. Four years later, when war had well-nigh worn out the gallant Army of Northern Virginia, and when the very hope of ultimate victory, over enormously superior numbers and against incalculably superior resources, was scarcely more than an impulse of faith-inspired insanity, these women of the South were still present and helpful wherever their presence could cheer, and wherever their help was needed.
To-day, they looked to the morrow for a victory that should make an end of the war. The victory came with a startling completeness wholly unmatched in all the history of battles. But the end did not come, and the war wore itself out, through four long years of brilliant achievement, alternated with terrible disaster. At Petersburg these women did not look to the morrow at all, but their courage was the same, their cheer the same, their devotion the same. It was still their chosen task to encourage the little remnant of an army which still held the defensive works with a line stretched out to attenuation. To the very end—and even after the end—these brave women faltered not nor failed.
When the war began, the women of the South made a gala-day of every day when soldiers were in sight. As the war neared its calamitous end, all days were to them days of mourning and of always willing self-sacrifice.
On that twentieth day of July, 1861, the women gathered together were full of high hope and confidence. Some were perched upon goods boxes, arranged to serve as seats. Some were tripping about on foot, gliding hither and thither in gladness, as girls do in a dance, simply because their nerves were tuned to a high pitch, and their sympathetic feet refused to be still. But for the most part they sat in their carriages, with the tops thrown back in defiance of the fervour of the sun. Defiance was in the air, indeed, and the troops on their way to the battle-field were not more resolute in their determination to do and to dare, than were the dames and damsels there gathered together in their purpose to disregard sunshine and circumstance, while bestowing their smiles upon these men, their heroes.
After the fashion of the time among volunteers who were presently to become war-worn into veterans, but who were never to be reduced to the condition of hireling regulars, the men were free, as soon as a halt was called, to move about among the feminine throng, greeting their acquaintances when they had any, and being cheerily greeted by strangers, in utter disregard of those conventions with which womanhood elsewhere than in Virginia surrounds itself. There womanhood had always felt itself free, because it had always felt itself under the protection of all there was of manhood in the land. No woman in that time and country was ever in danger of affront, for the reason that no man dared affront her, lest he encounter vengeance, swift, sure, and relentless, at the hands of the first other man who might hear of the circumstance. No Virginian girl of that time had her mind directed to evil things by the suggestion of chaperonage; and no Virginia gentleman was subjected to insulting imputation by the refusal of a woman's guardians to entrust her protection against himself, as against all others, to his chivalry. So far was the point of honour pressed in such matters, that no man was free even to make the most deferential proposal of marriage to any woman while she was actually or technically under his charge and protection. To do that, it was held, was to place the woman in an embarrassing position, to subject her to the necessity of accepting the offer on the one hand, or of declining it while yet under obligation to accept escort and protection at the hands of the man making it.
Under this rigid code of social intercourse, which granted perfect freedom to all women, and exacted scrupulous respect for such freedom at the hands of all men, the intercourse between gentlemen volunteers and the young women who had come to visit them in camp was even less restrained than that of a drawing-room, in which all are guests of a common host, and all are guaranteed, as it were, by that host's sponsorship of invitation.
In all their dealings with the volunteers, the women of Virginia brought common sense to bear in a positively astonishing degree, reinforcing it with abounding good-will and perfect confidence in the manhood of men as their sufficient shield against misinterpretation. And they were entirely right in this. For "battle, murder, and sudden death," would very certainly have been the part of any man in those ranks who should have failed in due respect to this generosity of mind on the part of womanhood. The dignity of womanhood was never so safe as when women thus confidently left its guardianship to the instinctive chivalry of men.
For a time after the halt, Baillie Pegram was too busy to inquire whether or not any friends of his own were among the throng. For something had happened to Baillie Pegram over there in the Valley of the Shenandoah two or three days before. The gun to whose detachment he belonged as a cannonier had been detached and sent to an exposed position on the Martinsburg road. The sergeant in command of it had been killed by a bullet, and the two corporals—the gunner and the chief of caisson—had been carried to the rear on litters, with bullets in their bodies. There was absolutely nobody in command of the gun, but Baillie Pegram was serving as number one at the piece—that is to say, as the cannonier handling the sponge and rammer. Seeing the badly weakened gun-crew disposed to falter for lack of anybody to command them, and seeing, too, the necessity of continuing the fire, Baillie assumed an authority which did not belong to him in any way.
"Stand to the gun, men!" he cried. "If any man flunks till this job is done, I'll brain him with my rammer-head, orders or no orders."
A moment later the faltering of number three called upon him for the execution of his threat, and he instantly did what he had said he would do, felling the man to the grass, stunned for the time by a quick blow with the iron-bound rammer-head. Then he called upon number five to take the recreant's place, and that gun continued its work until the hot little action was over.
A slouchy-looking personage had been standing by all the while. At the end of it all he demanded Baillie Pegram's name and rank, and the name of his battery. That evening Baillie Pegram's captain sent for him, and said:
"I am going to make you my sergeant-major. I have General Jackson's request to recognise your good conduct under his eye to-day. Even without his suggestion I should wish to have you with me as my staff sergeant. I have kept that post open until now, in order that I might choose the best man for it."
It should be explained that the rank of sergeant-major is the very highest non-commissioned rank known to military life. Ordinarily, the sergeant-major is a regimental non-commissioned officer. But following the French system, the Confederate regulations allowed every battery of field-artillery a sergeant-major, if its captain so desired. He outranked all other non-commissioned officers, and usually exercised a lieutenant's command in battle—always if any commissioned officer were absent or disabled.
Thus it came about that Sergeant-Major Baillie Pegram was too busy on that morning to look up acquaintances among the spectators gathered there. He had orders to execute, and details of many kinds to look after, including the making out of that morning report which every company in the service must daily render, and upon which the commanding general must rely for information as to the exact number of fighting men he has available for duty.
Baillie had just completed this task, when some one brought him news that a lady in a carriage near by wished to speak with him. Having nothing now to do, he responded to the call, and found Agatha Ronald awaiting him. She sat in her carriage alone. In her lap was a work-basket, fully equipped for that mending which these women always came prepared to do when soldiers were passing by. Baillie had no mending to be done, but Agatha bade him remove his jacket and deliver it into her charge.
"We've heard what happened in the Valley the other day," she said, "and it is not seemly for a sergeant-major to be on duty without the insignia of his rank. Red is the artillery colour, I believe, and your marks are three chevrons, with three arches connecting them, are they not? Fortunately, I brought a roll of red braid. So let me have your coat, please, and I'll readjust your costume to your rank."
Agatha spoke glibly, but it was under manifest constraint. She forced and feigned a lightness of mood which she did not feel, and her manner deceived Baillie Pegram completely, as it was meant to do.
"What a fool I am," he thought, "to expect anything else. She was embarrassed when I last saw her, and worried, but that was all on account of her aunts. She is her own mistress to-day, and—well, it is better so. There'll be a fight to-morrow, and that's fortunate."
At that point the girl interrupted his meditations by saying, in her assumed tone of lightness, which he so greatly misinterpreted:
"I know there is war between your house and mine, but I'm going to give aid and comfort to the enemy, if it comforts you to have your chevrons properly sewed on."
"There can surely be no war between me and thee," he answered, with earnestness in his tone. "At any rate, I do not make war upon a woman, and least of all—"
"You must not misunderstand, Mr. Pegram," the girl broke in, looking at him earnestly out of her great brown eyes. "I esteem you highly, and I am sorry there is trouble between your house and mine. But I am not disloyal to the memory of my father. You must never think that. It is only that you are a gentleman who has been kind to me, and a soldier whom I honour. But the war endures between your house and mine."
Had she slapped him in the face with her open palm, she could not have hurt his pride more deeply. He snatched his jacket from her hand. Only one sleeve was finished, and the needle still hung from it by a thread.
"I'll wear it so," he said. "I, at any rate, have no house. I am the last of my race, and let me say to you now—for I shall never see you again of my own free will—that the war between our houses will completely end when I receive my discharge from life."
Then a new thought struck him.
"It is not for Baillie Pegram, the master of Warlock, that you have done this," touching the braided sleeve, "but for Baillie Pegram, the soldier on his way to battle. Let it be so."
Stung by his own words, and controlled by an impulse akin to that which had seized him at the gun two days before, he reached out and plucked from her headgear the red feather that she wore there, saying:
"Here! fasten that in my hat. I've a mind to wear it in battle to-morrow. Then I'll send it back to you."
What demon of the perverse had prompted him to this action, he did not know, but the girl in her turn seemed subject to its will. Instead of resenting what he had done, she took the feather and with some quickly plied stitches fastened it securely to his already soiled and worn slouch hat. Then handing it back to him, she said:
"Good-bye. God grant that when the feather comes back to me, it be not stained to a deeper red than now."
At that moment the bugle blew. Baillie touched his hat, bowed low, and said:
"At least you are a courteous enemy."
"And a generous one?" she asked.
But he did not answer the implied question.
When he had gone, Agatha bent low over her work-basket, as if in search of something that she could not find. If two little tear-drops slipped from between her eyelids, nobody caught sight of them.
Presently another bugle blew, and as Baillie Pegram's battery took up the march, the guns and men of Captain Skinner took its place. But this time there was no mingling of the men with the spectators. Captain Skinner was too rigid a disciplinarian to permit that, and he knew his ruffians too well. The moment the battery halted, the sergeant of the guard posted his sentries, and the men remained within the battery lines.
Seeing this, Agatha tripped from her carriage, and, work-basket in hand, started to enter the battery. She was instantly halted by a sentry, whose appearance did not tempt her to dispute his authority. She therefore simply said to him, "Call your sergeant of the guard, please." To the sergeant, when he came, she said, "Will you please report to Captain Skinner that Miss Agatha Ronald, of Willoughby, asks leave to enter the battery lines, in order to do such mending for the men as may be needed?"
But it was not necessary for the sergeant to deliver his message, for Captain Skinner, way-worn and dusty, at that moment presented himself, and greeted the visitor.
"It is very gracious of you," he said, "but, my dear young lady, my men do not belong to that class with which alone you are acquainted. You had better not visit my camp."
"Your men are soldiers, sir," she said, "and their needs may be quite as great as those of any others. We are not living in drawing-rooms just now. I crave your permission to enter the battery."
The captain touched his hat again, signed to the sentry to let the young woman pass, and then, turning to the sergeant of the guard, said:
"Post ten extra sentinels among the guns, with orders to arrest instantly any man who utters an oath or in any other way offends this young lady's ears. See to it yourself that this order is obeyed to the letter."
The captain's stern commands were not needed, and the extra sentinels had no work to do in restraining the men from offensive speech and conduct. They courteously saluted as Agatha passed them by, and when they learned what her kindly mission was, they hurriedly brought armfuls of saddle-blankets and arranged them as a cushion for her on the top of a limber-chest. Perched up there, she called for their torn garments, and nimbly plied her needle and her scissors for the space of half an hour before observing the sentry who had been posted nearest to her. His slouch hat, indeed, was drawn down over his eyes in such fashion that but little of his face could be seen. But looking up at last in search of further work to do, she recognised the form of Marshall Pollard. Instantly a deep flush overspread her face, and, dismounting from the limber-chest, she approached and addressed him. He presented arms and said to her in French, so that those about them might not understand:
"Pardon me, mademoiselle, but it is forbidden to speak to a sentinel on duty." With that he recovered arms and resumed the monotonous pacing of his beat.
As the girl hurried out of the battery, flushed and agitated, she again encountered Captain Skinner.
"Has anybody been rude to you, Miss Ronald?" he asked, quickly.
"No, Captain Skinner, I have only praise for your men. They have been courteous in the extreme. I predict that they will acquit themselves right gallantly in to-morrow's battle."
"O, they're fighters, and will give a good account of themselves if this muddled railroad management lets us get to Manassas before the fighting is over."
With thanks to Agatha for her kindness, Captain Skinner bowed low in farewell.
Springing into her carriage she gave the command, "Home," and drove away without waiting to see the remainder of the Army of the Shenandoah as it moved, partly by train, and partly on march, toward the scene of the coming battle.
During the homeward ride the girl laughed and chatted with her companions with more than her usual vivacity, quite as if this had been the gladdest of all her gala-days. But the gaiety was forced, and the laughter had a nervous note in it which would have betrayed its impulse to her companions had they been of closely observant habit of mind.
But when she reached home Agatha excused herself to her friends, and shut herself in her room. Throwing off her hat, but making no other change in her costume, she stretched herself upon the polished floor, after a habit she had indulged since childhood whenever her spirit was perturbed. For an hour she lay there upon the hard ash boards, with her hands clasped under her head, thinking, thinking, thinking.
"God knows," she thought, "I have tried to do my duty, and it is bitterly hard for a woman. In loyalty to my dead father's memory, I have insulted and wounded the only man I could ever have loved, and sent him away from me in anger and wretchedness. And even in doing that—even in being cruel to him and to myself, I have fallen short of my duty as Agatha Ronald. I have weakly yielded something at least of that proud attitude which it is my duty to my family traditions to maintain. I have recognised the state of war, but I have parleyed with the enemy. And Baillie Pegram is at this hour wearing a plume plucked from my hat and fastened into his by my own hands. God forgive me if I have been disloyal! But is it disloyalty?"
With that question echoing in her mind she sat up, staring at the wall, as if trying there to read her answer.
"Is it my duty to cherish a feud that is meaningless to me—to hate a man who has done no wrong to me or mine, simply because there was a quarrel between our ancestors before either of us was born? I do not know! I do not know! But I must be true to my family, true to my race, true to the traditions in which I have been bred. I have fallen short of that in this case. I must not err again. I must never again forget, even for a moment, that Baillie Pegram is my hereditary enemy."
Then she caught herself thinking and almost wishing that a Federal bullet might end her perplexity—that Baillie Pegram might never live to see her again. "I wonder," she thought, "if that is what Christ meant when he said that one who hates his neighbour is a murderer in his heart. It is all a blind riddle to me. Here have I been brought up a Christian, taught from my infancy that hatred is murder, and taught at the same time that it is my highest duty, as a Ronald, to go on hating all the Pegrams on earth because my father and Baillie Pegram's grandfather quarrelled over something that I know absolutely nothing about!"
Presently the girl's mind reverted to the second meeting of that eventful day,—her encounter with Marshall Pollard. She wondered why he had enlisted in company with such men as those who constituted Captain Skinner's battery, for even thus early those men had become known as the worst gang of desperadoes imaginable,—a band that must be kept day and night under a discipline as rigid and as watchful as that of any State prison, lest they lapse into crimes of violence. She wondered if this meant that the peculiarly gentle-souled Marshall Pollard was trying to "throw himself away," as she had heard that men disappointed in love sometimes do,—that he wished to degrade himself by low associations.
"And I am the cause of it all," she mourned. For she knew that Marshall Pollard had loved her with the love of an honest man, and that his life had been darkened, to say the least, by her inability to respond to his devotion. In this case she should have had the consolation of knowing that she had been guilty of no wilful, no conscious wrong, but, in her present mood, she was disposed to flagellate her soul for an imagined offence.
"He came to me," she reflected, "loving me from the first. Little idiot that I was, I did not understand. I liked him as a girl may like a boy,—for I was only a girl then,—and I did not dream that the affection he manifested toward me meant more than that sort of thing on his part. Those things which ought to have revealed to me his state of mind meant nothing more to me then than do the little gallantries and deferences which all men pay to all women. How bitterly he reproached me at the last for having deceived him and led him on with encouragements which I at least had not intended as such. Are all women born coquettes? Is it our cruel instinct to trifle with the souls of men, as little children love to torture their pets? Have we women no principles, no earnestness, no consciences—except afterward, when remorse awakens us? Are we blind, that we do not see, and deaf that we do not hear? Or is it our nature to be cruel, especially to those who love us and offer us the best that there is in their strong natures?
"I remember how we stood out there in the grounds, under the jessamine arbour, as the sun went down; and how at last, when I had made him understand, he plucked a sprig of the beautiful, golden flowers from the bunch that I held in my hand, and how I bade him beware, for that the jessamine is poisonous, and how he replied, 'Not more poisonous than it is to love a coquette.'
"I remember that he gave me no chance to answer, no opportunity to protest again my innocence of such intent as he had imputed to me in his passionate speech, but turned his back and stalked away, with that stride which I saw again to-day, as he paced his beat. That was two years ago—and to-day I have seen him again in such company as he would never have sought but for me,—the willing companion of ruffians, the associate of desperadoes, the messmate of thieves!"
Agatha was on her feet now, and nervously laying aside one after another of the little fripperies with which she had decorated her person that day. She found herself presently half-unconsciously searching for the gown that she must wear at dinner, though her never-failing maid had laid it out long before her home-coming, that it might be in readiness for her need.
A sudden thought came into the suffering girl's mind.
"These two men, whose lives are hurt by their love for me, will suffer far less than I shall. They are soldiers as strong to endure as they are strong to dare. They have occupation for all their waking hours. They will be upon the march, in battle, or otherwise actively employed all the time. In remembering more strenuous things they will forget their sorrows and throw aside their griefs as they cast away everything when they go into battle that may in any wise hinder their activity or embarrass their freedom. I must sit still here at Willoughby, and think, and think, and think."
Then like a lightning flash another thought came into her mind, and she spoke it aloud:
"Why should I be idler than they are? Why should I sit here brooding while they are toiling and fighting for Virginia? I am no more afraid of death or of danger than they are, and while women may not fight, there are other ways in which a woman of courage may render quite as good a service. I'll do it. I'll take the risks. I'll endure the hardships. I'll render my country aservice that shall count."
With that she rang for her maid and bade her prepare a cold plunge bath. When she descended to dinner, an hour later, Agatha no longer chattered frivolously, as she had done in the carriage, by way of concealing her emotions, but bore herself seriously, as became her in view of the prospect of battle on the morrow.
In that hour of agonising thought, Agatha Ronald had ceased to be a girl, and had become an earnest, resolute woman, strong to do, strong to endure, and, if need be, strong to dare. Life had taken on a new meaning in her eyes.
It was midnight when the battery to which Baillie was attached reached Manassas Junction. The men were weary and half-starved after three days of fighting and marching, and the horses, worn out with dragging the guns and caissons over well-nigh impassable roads, were famishing for water. But an effort to secure water and forage for them failed, and so did an effort to secure water and rations for the men.
For on the eve of the first great battle of the war the Southern army was in a state of semi-starvation which grew worse with every hour that brought fresh relays of troops but no new supplies of food. Already had begun that course of extraordinary mismanagement in the supply departments at Richmond which throughout the war kept the Army of Northern Virginia constantly half-starving or wholly starving, even when, as at Manassas, it lay in the midst of a land of abounding plenty.
All the efforts of the generals commanding in the field to remedy this state of things by drawing upon the granaries and smoke-houses round about them for supplies that were in danger of presently falling into the enemy's hands, were thwarted by the stupid obstinacy of a crack-brained commissary-general. It was his inexplicable policy, while the army lay at Manassas with an unused railroad reaching into the rich fields to the west, to forbid the purchase of food and forage there except by his own direct agents, who were required to send it all to Richmond, whence it was transported back again, in such meagre quantities as an already overtaxed single track railroad could manage to carry.
Red-tape was choking the army to death from the very beginning, and it continued to do so to the end, in spite of all remonstrances.
Even in the matter of water the men at Manassas were restricted to a few pints a day to each man for all uses, simply because the commanding general was not allowed the simple means of procuring a more adequate supply.
This, however, is not the place in which to set forth in detail those facts of perverse stupidity which have been fully stated in official reports, in General Beauregard's memoirs, and in other authoritative works. Such matters are mentioned herein only so far as they affected the events that go to make up the present story.
When the Army of the Shenandoah began to add its numbers to that already gathered at Manassas, a way out was found, so far at least as water was concerned, by sending the regiments and batteries, as fast as they came, to positions near Bull Run, some miles in front, where water at least was to be had. Baillie's command, worn out as it was, and suffering from hunger, was hurried through the camp and forced to march some weary miles farther before taking even that small measure of rest and sleep that the rapidly waning night allowed. It was nearly morning when the men and horses were permitted to drink together out of the muddy stream which was presently to mark the fighting-line between two armies in fierce battle for the mastery.
It was nearly sunrise when a cannon-shot broke the stillness of a peculiarly brilliant Sunday morning and summoned all the weary men to their posts. A little later the battery with which we are concerned received its orders and was moved into position on the line. Its complement of commissioned officers being short, Sergeant-Major Baillie Pegram had command of the two guns which constituted the left section, and had a lieutenant's work to do.
Troops were being hurried hither and thither in what seemed to Baillie's inexperienced eyes a hopeless confusion. But as he watched, he saw order grow out of the chaos,—a manifestation of the fact that there was one mind in control, and that every movement, however meaningless it might seem, was part and parcel of a concerted plan, and was intended to have its bearing upon the result.
In the meanwhile the occasional report of a rifle had grown into a continuous rattle of musketry on the farther side of the stream, where the skirmishers were hotly at work, their firing being punctuated now and then by the deeper exclamation of a cannon. But the work of the day had not yet begun in earnest. The main line was not yet engaged, and would not be until the skirmishers should slowly fall back upon it from their position beyond the stream.
To men in line of battle this is the most trying of all war's experiences. Then it is that every man questions himself closely as to his ability to endure the strain. Nerves are stretched to a tension that threatens collapse. Speech is difficult even to the bravest men, and the longing to plunge into the fray and be actively engaged is well-nigh irresistible.
All this and worse is the experience even of war-seasoned veterans when they must stand or lie still during these endless minutes of waiting, while the skirmishers are engaged in front. What must have been the strain upon the nerves and brains of men, not one of whom had as yet seen a battle, and not one in ten of whom had even received his "baptism of fire" in a skirmish, as the men in Baillie's battery had done during the week before! It is at such a time, and not in the heat of battle, that men's courage is apt to falter, and that discipline alone holds them to their duty.
The strain was rather relieved of its intensity by the shrieking of a Hotchkiss shell, which presently burst in the midst of Baillie Pegram's section and not far from his person. Then came the less noisy but more nerve-racking patter of musket-balls,—few and scattering still, as the skirmish-lines were still well in front,—but deadly in their force, as was seen when two or three of the men suddenly sank to the ground in the midst of a stillness which was broken only by the whiz of the occasional bullets.
One man cried out with pain. The rest of those struck were still. The one who cried out was slightly wounded. The others were dead. And the battle was not yet begun.
At this moment came a courier with orders. Upon receiving them the captain hurriedly turned to Baillie, and said:
"Take your section across the Run, at the ford there just to the left. Take position with the skirmish-line and get your orders from its commander. Leave your caissons behind, and move at a gallop."
Baillie Pegram was too new to the business of war to understand precisely what all this meant. Had he seen a little more of war he would have guessed at once that the enemy was moving upon the Confederate left along the road that lay beyond the stream, and that his guns were needed to aid the skirmishers in the work to be done in front in preparation for the battle that had not yet burst in all its fury. He would have understood, too, from the order to leave his caissons behind, that the stand beyond the stream was not meant to be of long duration. The fifty shots he carried in each of his limber-chests would be quite enough to last him till orders should come to fall back across the stream again.
But he did not understand all this clearly. What he did understand was that he was under orders to take his guns across the stream and use them there as vigorously as he could till further orders should come.
As he emerged from the woods a few hundred yards beyond Bull Run, he found a skirmish-line of men lying down and contesting the ground inch by inch with another line like their own, beyond which he could see the heavy columns of the enemy marching steadily to turn the Confederate left flank and force it from its position. Notwithstanding his lack of experience in such matters, he saw instantly what was happening, and realised that this left wing of Beauregard's army was destined to receive the brunt of the enemy's attack. He wondered, in his ignorance, if Beauregard knew all this, and if somebody ought not to go and tell him of it.
He had no time to think beyond this, for at that moment the skirmish-line, under some order which he had not heard, gave way to the right and left, leaving a little space open for his guns. Planting them there he opened fire with shrapnel, which he now and then changed to canister when the enemy, in his eagerness, pressed forward to within scant distance of the slowly retiring skirmish-line of the Confederates.
Under orders Baillie fell back with the skirmishers, moving the guns by hand, and continuing to fire as he went.
As the Confederate skirmishers drew near the stream which they were to cross, the officer in command of them said to Pegram:
"Advance your guns a trifle, Sergeant-Major, and give them your heaviest fire for twenty-five seconds or so. When they recoil, limber up and take your guns across the creek as quickly as possible. I'll cover your movement."
Baillie did not perfectly understand the purpose of this, but he understood his orders, and very promptly obeyed them. Advancing his guns quickly to a little knoll thirty or forty yards in front, he opened fire with double charges of canister, each gun firing at the rate of three or four times a minute, and each vomiting a gallon of iron balls at each discharge into the faces of a line of men not a hundred yards away. At the same moment the riflemen of the skirmish-line rose to their feet, rushed forward with a yell that impressed Baillie as truly demoniacal, and delivered a murderous volley of Minie balls in aid of his canister. The combined fire was irresistible, as it was meant to be, and the Federal skirmishers fell back in some confusion in face of it.
Then the cool-headed leader of the skirmishers turned to Baillie and commanded:
"Now be quick. Take your guns across the creek at once. They'll be on us again in a minute with reinforcements, but I'll hold them back till you get the guns across—"
He had not finished his order when he fell, with a bullet in his brain, and his men, picking him up, laid him limply across his horse, which two of them hurried to the rear, passing within ten feet of Baillie Pegram as he struggled to get his guns across the run without wetting his ammunition.
"Poor, gallant fellow!" thought Baillie, as the corpse was borne past him. "He was only a captain, but he would have made himself a major-general presently, with his coolness and his determination. He died too soon!"
Meanwhile Baillie was busy executing the order that the dead man had given with his last breath, while some other was in command out there in front and struggling to protect the guns till they could pass the stream.
It is always so in life. No man is indispensable. When one man falls at the post of duty, there is always some other to take his place. "Men may come and men may go," but the work that men were born to do "goes on for ever."
As Baillie was directing the struggles of his drivers in the difficult task of recrossing the stream, three shells burst over him in so quick a succession that he did not know from which of them came the fragment that cut a great gash in his head and rendered him for the moment senseless. He recovered himself quickly, and this was fortunate, for his untrained and inexperienced men were far less steady in retreat under fire than they had been out there in front, and Baillie's direction was needed now to prevent them from abandoning in panic the guns with which they had fought so gallantly a few minutes before.
Under his sharply given commands they recovered their morale, and a few minutes later Baillie brought his powder-grimed guns again into position on the left of the battery. Then, half-blinded by the blood that was flowing freely over his face and clothing, he sought his captain, raised his hand in salute, and said, feebly:
"Captain, I beg to report that I have executed my orders. My men have behaved well, every—"
A heavy musketry fire from the enemy at that moment began, and Baillie Pegram's horse—the beautiful sorrel mare on which Agatha had once ridden—sank under him, in that strange, limp way in which a horse falls when killed instantly by a bullet received in any vital part.
By good fortune the sergeant-major was not caught under the animal, but as he tried to walk toward the new mount which he had asked for, he staggered and fell, much as the mare had done, but from a different cause. Complete unconsciousness had overtaken him, as a consequence of the shock of his wound and the resultant loss of blood.
When he came to consciousness again, he was lying on the grass under a tree, with a young surgeon kneeling beside him, busy with bandages. For a time his consciousness did not extend beyond his immediate surroundings and the terrific aching of his head. Presently the heavy firing which seemed to be all about him, and the zip, zip, zip of bullets as they struck the earth under the hospital tree brought him to a realisation of the fact that battle was raging there, and that he, somehow,—he could not make out how,—was absent from his post with the guns. He made a sudden effort to rise, but instantly fell back again, unconscious.
When he next came to himself there was a sound as of thousands of yelling demons in his ears, which he presently made out to be the "rebel yell" issuing from multitudinous throats. There were hoof-beats all about him, too, the hoof-beats of a thousand horses moving at full speed. Excited by these sounds, wondering and anxiously apprehensive, he made another effort to rise, but was promptly restrained by the strong but gentle hands of an attendant, who said to him, with more of good sense than grammar:
"Lay still. It's all right, and it's all over. We've licked 'em, and they's a-runnin' like mad. The horsemen what passed us was Stuart's cavalry, a-goin' after 'em to see that they don't stop too soon."
Stuart was drunk with delight. He shouted to his men, as he rode across Stone Bridge: "Come on, boys! We'll gallop over the long bridge into Washington to-night if some blockhead doesn't stop us with orders, and I reckon we can gallop away from orders!"
Baillie lay still only because the attendant kept a hand upon his chest and so restrained him. As he listened, the firing receded and grew less in volume, except that now and then it burst out in a volley. That was when one of Stuart's squadrons came suddenly upon a mass of their confused and fleeing foes and poured a hailstorm of leaden cones in among them as a suggestion that it was time for them to scatter and resume their run for Washington.
As the turmoil grew less and faded into the distance, Baillie's wits slowly came back to him, and thoughts of himself returned.
"Where am I?" was his first question.
"Under a hospital tree on the battle-field of Manassas," answered the nurse. "You're about two hundred yards in the rear of the position where your battery has been covering itself with glory all day. It's gone now to help in the pursuit. But it's had it hot and heavy all day, judging from the sloppings over."
"The 'sloppings over?' What do you mean?"
"Why, the bullets and shells and things that didn't get theirselves stopped, like, on the lines, but come botherin' over here by this hospital tree. Two of 'em hit wounded men, an' finally, just at the last, you know, the doctor got his comeuppance."
"Was he wounded?"
"Wuss 'n that. He war killed, jes' like a ordinary soldier. That's why you're still a-layin' here, an' here you'll lay, I reckon, all night, for they ain't nobody left to give no orders, 'ceptin' me, an' I ain't nothin' but a detail. But I'm a-goin' to git you somethin' to eat ef I kin. They's another hospital jest over the hill, an' mebbe they've got somethin' to eat, an' mebbe they's a spare surgeon there, too. Anyhow I'm a-goin' to do the best I kin fer you an' the rest."
"How many of us are there?" asked Baillie.
"Only four now—not enough for them to bother about, I s'pose they'll say, specially sence two on 'em is clean bound to die, anyhow. All the slightly wounded has been carried away to a reg'lar hospital. That's their game, I reckon—to take good keer o' the fellers that's a-goin' to git well, so as to make complaints ef they don't, an' leave the rest what can't live to make no complaints to die where they is."
Baillie was too weak, and still too muddled in his intelligence, to disabuse the mountaineer's mind of this misconception. It is only ordinary justice to say that his interpretation was utterly wrong. There was never a more heroic set of men than the surgeons who ministered on the battle-fields of the Civil War to the wounded on one side or on the other. At the beginning, their department was utterly unorganised, and scarcely at all equipped, either with material appliances or with capable human help in the way of nurses, litter-bearers, or ambulance-men. They did the best they could. When battle was on, they hung yellow flags from trees as near the firing-line as possible, and these flags were respected by both sides, so far as intentional firing upon them was concerned. But located as they were, just in the rear of the fighters, these field-hospitals were constantly under a heavy fire, aimed not at them, but at the fighting-line in front, and it was under such a fire that the young surgeons did their difficult and very delicate work. The tying of an artery was often interfered with by the bursting of a shell which half-buried both patient and surgeon in loose earth. It was the duty of these field-surgeons to do only so much as might be immediately necessary—to put their patients as quickly as possible into a condition in which it was reasonably safe to send them, in ambulances or upon litters, to some better-equipped hospital in the rear. Very naturally and very properly, the surgeons discriminated, in selecting wounded men to send to the hospitals, between those who were in condition to be removed, and those to whom removal would mean death, certainly or probably. The mountaineer, who had been detailed as a hospital attendant that day, did not understand, and so he misinterpreted.
"Where is my hat?" Baillie Pegram asked, after a period of silence.
"Is it the one with a red feather in it?" responded the attendant.
"Yes."
"Well, it's a good deal the wuss for wear," answered the man, producing the blood-soaked and soil-stained headgear. "I don't think you'll want to wear it again."
But when the headpiece was brought, the young man, with feeble and uncertain fingers, detached the feather and thrust it inside his flannel shirt, leaving the lacerated hat where it had fallen upon the ground.
"Am I badly wounded?" Pegram asked, after a little.
"Well," answered the man, "you've got a good deal more'n I should like to be a-carryin' around with me. But I reckon you'll pull through, perticular ef you kin git to a hospital after a bit."
Just then, as night was falling, a pitiless rain began, and all night long Baillie Pegram lay in a furrow of the field, soaked and suffering. But he removed the feather from its hiding-place, and held it upon his chest, in order that the rain might wash away the blood-stains with which it had been saturated.
When the morning came, and the ambulance with it, the blood-stains were gone and the feather was clean, though its texture was limp, its appearance bedraggled, and much of its original colour had been washed out.
Two or three days later, Agatha Ronald at her home received by mail a package containing a feather, once red but now badly faded. No note or message of any kind accompanied it, but Agatha understood. She had already learned through the newspapers that "Sergeant-Major Baillie Pegram, after a desperate encounter with the enemy on the outer lines, had been severely—perhaps mortally—wounded in the head;" and that "Sergeant-Major Baillie Pegram has been mentioned in General Orders for his gallant conduct on the field, with a recommendation for promotion, if he recovers from his wounds, as the surgeons give little hope that he will."
She wrapped the faded feather in tissue-paper, deposited it in a jewelled glove-box which had come to her as an heirloom from her mother, and put it away in one of her most sacred depositories.
A week or two later, she learned that Sergeant-Major Baillie Pegram had been removed from the general hospital at Richmond to his home at Warlock, and that he was now expected to recover from his wounds.
"It's jes' what I done tole you niggas fust off."
That was Sam's comment upon the situation when his master was brought home to Warlock, stretched upon a litter.
"I done tole yer what'd happen when Mas' Baillie go off to de wah in dat way, 'thout Sam to take k'yar of him. An' bar in min' what else I done tole yer, too. Ain't de chinch-bug done et up de wheat, jes' as I tole yer? Now, Mas' Baillie, he's a-gwine to die wid that hole in he haid. Den what's a-gwine to become o' you niggas?"
Sam promptly installed himself as his master's nurse, sitting by him during the day, and sleeping on the floor by his bedside every night. For a time it seemed likely that the negro's dismal prophecy of Baillie's death would be fulfilled, but with rest and the bracing air of his own home, he slowly grew better, until he was able at last to sun himself in the porch or under the trees of the lawn.
He chafed a good deal at first over the fact that he had not seen the major part of the fighting along Bull Run, and it annoyed him still more that he was likely to lose his share in a campaign which was expected to bring the war to a speedy and glorious end. It was Marshall Pollard who laughed him out of this latter regret. During the long waiting-time that followed the battle of Manassas, Marshall, who had gained a lieutenancy in his battery, secured several brief leaves of absence in order to visit the convalescent man at Warlock.
"You're missing nothing whatever, Baillie," he said to him one day, in answer to his querulous complainings. "We're doing nothing out there in front of Washington, and, so far as I can see, we're not likely to do anything for many months to come. When the battle of Manassas ended in such a rout of the enemy as never will happen again, we all expected to push on into Washington, where only a very feeble, resistance or none at all would have been met. When that didn't happen, we confidently expected that the army at Centreville would be reinforced at once with every man who could be hurried to the front, and that General Johnston would push across the Potomac and take Washington in the rear, or capture Baltimore and Philadelphia, and cut Washington off.
"I don't pretend to understand grand strategy, but this was plain common sense, and I suppose that common sense has its part to play in grand strategy, as in everything else. Anyhow, it is certain that that was the time to strike, and if the army at Manassas had been reinforced and pushed across the Potomac while the enemy was so hopelessly demoralised and disintegrated, there is not the smallest doubt in my mind that the war would have come to an end within a month or two. Instead of that, we have done nothing, while the enemy has been straining every nerve to bring new troops into the field by scores of thousands, and to drill and discipline them for the serious work of war. They have done all this so effectually that they now have two or three men to our one, half a dozen guns to our one, and supply departments so perfectly organised that no man in all that host need go without his three good meals a day, while we are kept very nearly in a state of starvation, and are now fortifying at Centreville, like a beaten army, whose chief concern is to defend itself against the danger of capture."
"Have you ever heard an explanation of this strange state of things?" asked Baillie. "You see, I've been out of the way of hearing anything ever since the battle."
"O, yes, I've heard all sorts of explanations. But the real explanation, I think, is the lack of an experienced general, capable of grasping the situation and turning it to account. Neither in the field nor in authority at Richmond, have we a man who ever commanded an army, or even looked on while a great campaign was in progress. General Johnston and General Beauregard are doubtless very capable officers in their way. But until this war came, they were mere captains in the engineer corps, engaged in constructing Mississippi levees, and that sort of thing. Neither of them ever in his life commanded a brigade. Neither ever saw a great battle, or had anything to do with an army composed of men by scores of thousands.
"Their victory at Manassas simply appalled them. They didn't know at all what to do next. They will probably become good and capable commanders of armies before the war is over, but at present they are only ex-captains of engineers, suddenly thrust into positions for which they have absolutely none of that fitness which comes of experience."
"But have they not learned enough yet? Will they not now see their opportunity, and undertake a fall campaign?"
"No. The opportunity is entirely gone. The Federal army is to-day much stronger in every way than our own. We have pottered away the months that should have been spent in vigorous and decisive action. The only man in our army capable of seeing and seizing such an opportunity and turning it to account—I mean Robert E. Lee—has been kept in the mountains of Western Virginia, engaged in settling wretched little disputes among a lot of incapable, cantankerous political brigadiers. It means a long war and a terrible one, Baillie, and you'll have opportunity to do all the fighting you want before it is over. But nothing of any consequence will be done this fall."
The young lieutenant was quite right in his prophecy. Except for a little contest at Drainesville—amounting to scarcely more than a skirmish—there was absolutely nothing done until the 21st of October. Then occurred the small, badly ordered and strategically meaningless battle of Leesburg, or Ball's Bluff, when the Federals were again completely defeated. After that came a long autumn of superb campaigning weather, and a tedious winter of complete inaction. Federal expeditions besieged some of the forts and islands along the Carolina coasts, thus preparing the way for a coast campaign which was never made in earnest.
There was fighting of some consequence in Kentucky and Missouri, and as the winter waned, General Grant made his important campaign against the forts on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, breaking the Confederate line of defence in that quarter, and pushing it southward. But in Virginia, the natural battle-field, absolutely nothing was done during all those months of weary waiting.
For this strange and strangely prolonged pause in a war which had begun with a rush and a hurrah, history has been puzzled to find an explanation. It is true that the Confederate forces were untrained volunteers, whose endurance and discipline could not have been relied upon in an aggressive campaign to anything like the extent to which Lee afterward depended upon the unflinching endurance and unfaltering courage of these same men. But the Federal army was at that time in much worse condition. To unfamiliarity with war and to complete lack of discipline in that army, there was added the demoralisation of disastrous defeat and panic. General McClellan said in his official capacity, and with carefully chosen words, that when he was placed in control in August, he found "no army to command,—a mere collection of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, some going home." He completed his description of the situation by saying: "There were no defensive works on the southern approaches to the capital. Washington was crowded with straggling officers and men absent from their stations without authority."
Why the Confederates, with their great victory to urge them on, made no effort to take advantage of such conditions, but lay still instead, giving McClellan many months in which to recruit and organise and drill his forces into one of the most formidable armies of modern times, is one of the puzzles of history. Perhaps Marshall Pollard's suggestion was the correct explanation,—namely, that there was no general at Manassas who knew what to do with a great opportunity, or how to do it.
Seeing that Baillie was becoming excited by this serious talk, his friend adroitly turned the conversation to less strenuous matters. Half an hour later The Oaks ladies drove up in their antique, high-hung carriage, to make that formal inquiry concerning Mr. Baillie Pegram's convalescence which from the first they had made with great scrupulousness three times every week.
When they had gone, Pollard asked:
"Have you seen Miss Agatha since that day last spring, when you were requested not to visit The Oaks?"
For a moment Baillie remained silent. Then he said: "If you don't mind, I'd rather not talk of that, Marshall."
That was all that passed between these two on that subject during the week of Marshall's stay at Warlock. How unlike men are to women in these things! Had these two young men been two young women instead, how minutely each would have confided to the other the last detail of experience and thought and feeling! And this not because women are more emotional than men—for they are not—but because they are not ashamed, as men are, of the tenderer side of their natures.