Campaigns Of A Non-Combatant, And His Romaunt Abroad During The War Part 25

She had the large dark eyes of the professional _modello_, and a bosom as ripe as t.i.tian's Venus. Her feet were small, and her hands very white and beautiful. But of me she took no more notice than if I had been a bird alighting upon the window, or a mouse peeping at her from the edge of his knot-hole.

Old Stagg, who was commonly grave as a clergyman, now and then left his easel to alter her position, and when he was done, she gathered up her clothes, which had lain in a heap on the floor, and took her few silver pieces with a "_Mille grazie, Signore!_" and went home to take dinner with her little brothers.

A studio in Florence costs only fifteen or twenty francs a month,--seldom so much. There are a series of excellent ones in the same Via Seragli, in a very large dismantled convent. There is a well in the centre of its great courtyard, and innumerable ropes lead from it to the various high windows of the building, on which buckets of water are forever ascending. All this of which I speak refers to a year ago, when Florence was not a capital; doubtless, studios command more at present.

The models at Florence were to me strange personages. There was a drawing-school which I sometimes attended, where one old woman kept three daughters, aged respectively twenty, seventeen, and thirteen years. They lived pretty much as they were born, and while they posed upon a high platform, the old woman took her seat near the door and looked on with grim satisfaction. She was very careful of their moral habits, but the second one she lost by an excess of greed. She resolved to make them useful by day, as well as by night, and put them to work at the studios of individual artists. But as no one artist wanted three models, the girls had to separate, and, out of the mother's vigilance, the second one, Orsolo, went to the atelier of a wicked and handsome fellow, and met with the usual romance of her cla.s.s.

The oldest girl, Luigia, married a man-model, and their nuptials must have been of a most prosaic character.

Among the many men who thus stood for the artists, was one old fellow, tall, and bearded, and ma.s.sively characterized, who used to remain motionless for hours; until he seemed to be dead. He had been a model in every stage of life, from childhood to the grave, and represented every subject from Garibaldi to Moses.

The walks in and around Florence occupied all my Sabbaths. Stagg and I used to stroll up to Fiesole, by the villa where Boccaccio's party of story-tellers met, and look up old pictures in the village church; we measured the proportions of the chapel on the hill of Saint Miniato, and he endeavored in vain to imitate the hue of the light as it fell through the veined marble of Serravezza; we spent contemplative afternoons in the house of Michael Angelo, and went up to Vallambrosa, at the risk of our necks, to look at a Giotto no bigger than a tea-plate. In Florence there is enough out-of-door statuary to make one of the finest galleries in the world. The majesty of Donatello's "Saint George" arises before me when I would conceive of any n.o.ble humanity, and the sweep of Orgagna's great arches give me an idea of vastness like the sea; in the Pitti palace only giants should abide; the Campanile goes up to heaven as beautiful as Jacob's ladder, and in the perpetual twilight of the Duomo I was not of half the stature I believed when roaming under the loftier sky.

I saw a jail in Florence, and it troubled me; who in that beautiful city could do a crime? How should old age, or bad pa.s.sions, or sickness, or shame, exist in that limpid atmosphere, in the shadow of such architecture, in the presence of those pictures?

CHAPTER XXVIII.

A CORRESPONDENT ONCE MORE.

Again on the way to Was.h.i.+ngton! I have made the trip more than sixty times. I saw the Gunpowder Bridge in flames when Baltimore was in arms and the Capital cut off from the North. I saw from Perryville the State flag of Maryland waving at Havre de Grace across the Susquehanna. I saw at the Was.h.i.+ngton Navy Yard the blackened body of Ellsworth, manipulated by the surgeons. I moved through the city with McClellan's onward army toward the transports which were to carry it to the Peninsula. The awful tidings of the seven days' retreat came first through the Capital in my haversack, and before Stonewall Jackson fell upon the flank of Pope, I crossed the Long Bridge with the story of the disaster of Cedar Mountain. In like manner the crowning glory of Five Forks made me its earliest emissary, and the murder of the President brought me hot from Richmond to partic.i.p.ate in the pursuit of Booth and chronicle his midnight expiation.

Again am I on the way to the city of centralization, to paint by electricity the closing scenes of the conspirators, and, as I pa.s.s the Pennsylvania line, the recollection of those frequent pilgrimages--pray G.o.d this be the last!--comes upon me like the sequences of delirium.

As I look abroad upon the thrifty fields and the rich glebe of the ploughman, I wonder if the revolutions of peace are not as sweeping and sudden as those of war. He who wrote the certain downfall of this Nation, did not keep his eye upon the steadily ascending dome of the capitol, nor remark, during the thunders of Gettysburg, the as energetic stroke of the pile-drivers upon the piers of the great Susquehanna bridge. We built while we desolated. No fatalist convert to Mohammed had so sure faith in the eternity of his inst.i.tutions. More masonry has been laid along the border during the war than in any five previous years. We have finished the Treasury, raised the bronze gates on the Capitol, double-railed all the roads between New York and the Potomac, and gone on as if architecture were imperishable, while thrice the Rebels swept down toward the Relay.

And we have done one strategic thing, which, I think, will compare with the pa.s.sing of Vicksburg or the raid of Sherman; we have turned Philadelphia.

This modern Pompeii used to be the stumbling-block on the great highway.

It was to the direct Was.h.i.+ngton route what h.e.l.l-gate was to the Sound Channel. We were forbidden the right of way through it, on the ground that by r.e.t.a.r.ding travel Philadelphia would gain trade, and had to cross the Delaware on a scow, or lay up in some inn over night. New Jerseymen, I hear, pray every morning for their daily stranger; Philadelphia has much sinned to entrap its daily customer. But Maillefert--by which name I designate the inevitable sledge which spares the grand and pulverizes the little--has built a road around the Quaker City. It is a very curious road, going by two hypothenuses of about fifteen miles to make a base of three or four, so that we lose an hour on the way to the Capital, all because of Philadelphia's overnight toil.

The bridge at Perryville will be one of the staunchest upon our continent: the forts around Baltimore make the outlying landscapes scarcely recognizable to the returning Maryland Rebels. At last,--woe be the necessity! we have garrisoned our cities. The Relay House is the most picturesque spot between the two foci of the country. Wandering through the woods, I see the dirty blouses of the remnant of "the boys"

and the old abatis on the height looks sunburnt and rusty; away through the gorge thunders the Baltimore and Ohio train, over what ruins and resurrections, torn up a hundred times, and as obstinately relaid, until all its engineers are veteran officers, and can stand fire both of the furnace and the musket. Everybody in the country is a veteran; the contractor, who ran his schooner of fodder past the Rebel batteries; the correspondent, whose lean horse slipped through the crevices of dropping sh.e.l.ls; the teamster, who whipped his mule out of the mud-hole, while his ammunition wagon behind grew hot with the heaviness of battle; the old farmer, who took to his cellar while the fight raged in his chimneys, but ventured out between the bayonet charges to secure his fatted calf.

Annapolis Junction has still the sterile guise of the campaign, where the hills are bare around the hospitals, and the railway taverns are whittled to skeletons. I have really seen whole houses, little more than sh.e.l.ls, reduced to meagreness by the pocket-knife. The name of almost everybody on the continent is cut somewhere in the South; Virginia has more than enough names carved over her fireside altars to inscribe upon all her mult.i.tudinous graves.

There are close to the city fine bits of landscape, where the fields dip gracefully into fertile basins, and rise in swells of tilled fields and orchard to some knoll, enthroning a porticoed home. Two years ago all these fields were quagmires, where stranded wheels and the carca.s.ses of hybrids, looked as if a mud-geyser had opened near by. The gra.s.s has spread its covering, as the birds spread their leaves over the poor babes in the wood, and we walk we know not where, nor over what struggles, and shadows, and sorrows.

I pity the army mule, though he never asked me for sympathy. Who ever loved a mule? You can love a lion, and make him lick your hand: some people love parrots, and owls; and I once knew a person who could catch black snakes and carry them lovingly in his bosom; but I never knew a beloved mule. Yet this war has been fought and won by hybrids. They have pulled us out of ruts and fed us, and starved for us. The mule is the great quartermaster. See him and his brethren yonder in corral,--miserable veterans of no particular race, slab-sided, and capable of holding ink between their ribs. They mounch, and mounch, and wear the same stolid eye which you have seen under the driver's lash, and in the vaulting moment of victory. No stunning receptions greet them, no cheers and banquets when Muley comes marching home; over at _Giesboro_ they come in crippled, die by the musket without a murmur, and are immediately boiled down and forgotten.

I was once beaten by a rival correspondent upon a prominent battle, by riding a mule with my despatches. He walked into a mud-puddle just half way between the field and the post-office, and stopped there till morning.

Here we are, at Was.h.i.+ngton. I have been in most of the cities of Europe: some of them have dirty suburbs, but the first impression of the Capitol City is dreary in the extreme; a number of the lost tribes have established booths contiguous to the terminus, wherein the filthiest people in the world eat the filthiest dishes; a man's sense of cleanliness vanishes when he enters the District of Columbia. I have been astonished to remark how greatness loses its stature here. Mr.

Charles Sumner is a handsome man on Broadway or Beacon Street, but eating dinner at Thompson's, his shoulders seem to narrow and his fine face to grow commonplace.

Above the squalid wideness of ungraded streets and the waste of shanties propped upon poles above abysses of vacant lots, where two drunken soldiers are pummelling each other, towers the marvellous dome with its airy genius firmly planted above, like the ruins of Palmyra above contemporary meanness. Moving up the streets, in dust and mud-puddle, you see shabbily ambitious churches, with wooden towers; hotels, the curbs whereof are speckled with human blemishes, sustaining like hip-shotten caryatides the sandstone-wooden columns. Within there is a pandemonium of legs in the air, and an agglomeration of saliva, ending with an impertinent clerk and two crescents of lazy waiters, who shy whisks, and are ambitious to run superfluous errands, for the warrant to rob you. Of people, you see squads; of residents, none. The public edifices have not picked their company, neither have the public functionaries. There is a quant.i.ty of vulgar statuary lying around, horses standing on their tails, and impossible Was.h.i.+ngtons imbedded in arm-chairs; but the n.o.ble facade of the treasury always suggests to me Couture's great picture of the Decadence, where, under a pure colonnade, some tipplers are carousing. If we are to have statues at the Capital, let us make them with uplifted hands, and shame upon their grave, contemplative faces.

Shall we ever make Was.h.i.+ngton the representative Capital of the country?

Certainly all efforts to improve the site worthy of the seat of gigantic legislation have hitherto failed. The sword and the malaria have attacked it. Every year sees the President driven from his Mansion by pestilential vapors, and the sanitary condition of the city is extraordinarily bad. The carca.s.ses of slain horses at Giesboro send their effluvia straight into Was.h.i.+ngton on the wind, and the "Island,"

or that part of the city between the river and the ca.n.a.l, is dangerous almost all the year.

Moreover, the entire river front of the city seems to be untenable, except for negroes; the Was.h.i.+ngton monument stands on the yielding plain in the rear of the Chief Magistrate's, a stunted ruin, finding no foundation; and much of the great Capital reserve near by, would be a dead weight, if any effort were made to dispose it of, as building lots.

The small portion of Was.h.i.+ngton lying upon Capitol Hill, is the most salubrious and covetable; but it is a lonesome journey by night around the Capitol grounds to the city. The finest residences lie north of the President's house, but the number of these grows apace, and the quant.i.ty of capital invested in private real estate, remains almost stationary.

We recall but two or three citizens of Was.h.i.+ngton who have spent their money on the spot where they have made it. Corcoran was the most generous; he erected a museum of art, and Government has made it a Commissary depot! But how few of the ill.u.s.trious Senators, Chief Justices, Generals, etc., who draw their sustenance from the Capital, care a penny to decorate it? Compare the home of Governor Sprague on 6th Street, to his splendid mansion at Providence, or the Club House of the Secretary of State, to his place at Auburn. Was.h.i.+ngton has power, but it cannot attract. It is the solitary monarch, at whose feet all kneel, but by none beloved. Strangers repair to it, grow rich, and quit it with their earnings. Government works n.o.bly to imitate the Palaces of the Caesars, and the public edifices leave our munic.i.p.al structures far beneath, but these marble and granite piles seem to mock the littleness of individual ambition. Two hotels have been built during the war, both of the caravansary cla.s.s, but the city, for four years, has been miserably incompetent to entertain its guests, or to command their respect.

Was.h.i.+ngton, to be a city, lacks three elements--commerce, representation, health; the environs are picturesque, and the new forts on the hill-tops little injure the landscape.

But the question is not premature, whether Was.h.i.+ngton city will ever answer the purposes of a stable seat of government, and reflect the enterprise, patriotism, and taste of the American people.

I have sometimes thought that these huge public buildings,--now inadequate to accommodate the machinery of the Government,--would, at some future day, be the nucleus of a great _lycee_, and that Was.h.i.+ngton would become the Padua of the Republic, its University and Louvre, while legislation and administration, despairing of giving dignity to the place, would depart for a more congenial locality.

At any rate, the old Federal theory of a sylvan seat of government has failed.

For a sequestered and virtuous retreat of legislation, we have corruption augmented by dirt, and business stagnation aggravated by disease. There are virtues in the town; but these must be searched for, and the vices are obvious.

CHAPTER XXIX.

FIVE FORKS.

I commence my account on the battle-field, but must soon make the long and lonely ride to Humphrey's Station, where I shall continue it.

I am sitting by Sheridan's camp-fire, on the spot he has just signalized by the most individual and complete victory of the war. All his veterans are around him, stooping by knots over the bright f.a.gots, to talk together, or stretched upon the leaves of the forest, asleep, with the stains of powder yet upon their faces. There are dark ma.s.ses of horses blackened into the gray background, and ambulances are creaking to and fro. I hear the sobs and howls of the weary, and note, afar off, among the pines, moving lights of burying parties, which are tumbling the slain into the trenches. A cowed and s.h.i.+vering silence has succeeded the late burst of drums, trumpets, and cannon; the dead are at rest; the captives are quiet; the good cause has won again, and I shall try to tell you how.

Many months ago the Army of the Potomac stopped before Petersburg, driven out of its direct course to Richmond. It tried the Dutch Gap and the powder-s.h.i.+p, and sh.e.l.led and shovelled till Sherman had cut five States in half, and only timid financiers, sutlers, and congressional excursionists paid the least attention to the armies on the James. We had fights without much purpose at our breastworks, and at Hatcher's Run, but the das.h.i.+ng achievements of Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley overtopped all our dull infantry endeavors, and he shared with Sherman the entire applause of the country. No one knows but that behind these actors stood the invisible prompter, Grant; yet prompters, however a.s.siduous, never divide applauses with the _dramatis personae_; and therefore, when Sheridan, the other day, by one of those slas.h.i.+ng adventures which hold us breathless, appeared on the Pamunkey and crossed the peninsula to City Point, even the armies of the Potomac and James were agitated. The _personnel_ of the man, not less than his renown, affected people. A very Punch of soldiers, a sort of Rip Van Winkle in regimentals, it astonished folks, that with so jolly and grotesque a guise, he held within him energies like lightning, the bolts of which had splintered the fairest parts of the border. But n.o.body credited General Sheridan with higher genius than activity; we expected to hear of him scouring the Carolina boundary, with the usual destruction of railways and mills, and therefore said at once that Sheridan would cut the great Southside road. But in this last chapter Sheridan must take rank as one of the finest military men of our century. The battle of "Five Forks" was, perhaps, the most ingeniously conceived and skilfully executed that we have ever had on this continent. It matches in secretiveness and shrewdness the cleverest efforts of Napoleon, and shows also much of that soldier's broadness of intellect and capacity for great occasions.

Sheridan had scarcely time to change his horses' shoes before he was off, and after him much of our infantry also moved to the left. We pa.s.sed our ancient breastworks at Hatcher's Run, and extended our lines southwestward till they touched Dinwiddie Court House, thirty miles from City Point. The Rebels fell back with but little skirmis.h.i.+ng, until we faced northward and reached out toward their idolized Southside Railway; then they grew uneasy, and, as a hint of their opposition, fought us the sharp battle of Quaker Road on Thursday. Still, we reached farther and farther, marvelling to find that, with his depleted army, Lee always overmatched us at every point of attack; but on Friday we quitted our intrenchments on the Boydtown plank-road, and made a bold push for the White Oak road. This is one of the series of parallel public ways running east and west, south of the Southside, the Vaughan road being the first, the Boydtown plank-road the second, and the old Court-House road the third. It became evident to the Rebels that we had two direct objects in view: the severing of their railway, and the occupation of the "Five Forks." The latter is a magnificent strategic point. Five good roads meet in the edge of a dry, high, well-watered forest, three of them radiating to the railway, and their tributaries unlocking all the country. Farther south, their defences had been paltry, but they fortified this empty solitude as if it had been their capital. Upon its princ.i.p.al road, the "White Oak," aforenamed, they had a ditched breastwork with embrasures of logs and earth, reaching east and west three miles, and this was covered eastward and southeastward by rifle-pits, masked works, and felled timber; the bridges approaching it were broken; all the roads picketed, and a desperate resolve to hold to it averred. This point of "Five Forks" may be as much as eight miles from Dinwiddie Court House, four from the Southside road, and eighteen from Humphrey's, the nearest of our military railway stations. A crooked stream called Gravelly Run, which, with Hatcher's, forms Rowanty Creek, and goes off to feed the Chowan in North Carolina, rises near "Five Forks," and gives the name of Gravelly Run Church to a little Methodist meeting-house, built in the forest a mile distant. That meeting-house is a hospital to-night, running blood, and at "Five Forks" a victor's battle-flags are flying.

The Fifth Army Corps of General Warren, has had all of the flank fighting of the week to do. It lost five or six hundred men in its victory of Thursday, and on Friday rested along the Boydtown plank-road, at the house of one Butler, chiefly, which is about seven miles from Five Forks. On Friday morning, General Ayres took the advance with one of its three divisions, and marched three-quarters of a mile beyond the plank-road, through a woody country, following the road, but crossing the ubiquitous Gravelly Run, till he struck the enemy in strong force a mile and a half below White Oak road. They lay in the edge of a wood, with a thick curtain of timber in their front, a battery of field-pieces to the right, mounted in a bastioned earthwork, and on the left the woods drew near, encircling a little farm-land and negro-buildings.

General Ayres's skirmish-line being fired upon, did not stand, but fell back upon his main column, which advanced at the order. Straightway the enemy charged headlong, while their battery opened a cross fire, and their skirmishers on our left, creeping down through the woods, picked us off in flank. They charged with a whole division, making their memorable yell, and soon doubled up Ayres's line of battle, so that it was forced in tolerable disorder back upon General Crawford, who commanded the next division. Crawford's men do not seem to have retrieved the character of their predecessors, but made a feint to go in, and, falling by dozens beneath the murderous fire, gave up the ground. Griffin's division, past which the fugitives ran, halted awhile before taking the doubtful way; the whole corps was now back to the Boydtown plank-road, and nothing had been done to anybody's credit particularly.

General Griffin rode up to General Chamberlain in this extremity.

Chamberlain is a young and anxious officer, who resigned the professors.h.i.+p of modern languages in Bowdoin College to embrace a soldier's career. He had been wounded the day before, but was zealous to try death again.

"Chamberlain," said Griffin, "can't you save the honor of the Fifth corps?"

The young General formed his men at once,--they had tasted powder before,--the One Hundred and eighty-fifth New York and the One Hundred and ninety-eighth Pennsylvania. Down they went into the creek waist deep, up the slope and into the clearing, muskets to the left of them, muskets in front of them, cannon to the right of them; but their pace was swift, like their resolve; many of them were cut down, yet they kept ahead, and the Rebels, who seemed astonished at their own previous success, drew off and gave up the field. Almost two hours had elapsed between the loss and the recovery of the ground. The battle might be called Dabney's Farm, or more generally the fight of Gravelly Run. The brigades of Generals Bartlett and Gregory rendered material a.s.sistance in the pleasanter finale of the day. An order was soon after issued to hasten the burial of the dead and quit the spot, but Chamberlain pet.i.tioned for leave to charge the Rebel earthwork in the rear, and the enthusiasm of his brigade bore down General Warren's more prudent doubt.

In brief, Griffin's division charged the fort, drove the Rebels out of it, and took position on the White Oak road, far east of Five Forks.

While Griffin's division must be credited with this result, it may be said that their luck was due as much to the time as the manner of their appearance; the Rebel divisions of Pickett and Bushrod Johnston were, in the main, by the time Griffin came up, on their way westward to attack Sheridan's cavalry. Ayres and Crawford had charged as one to four, but the forces were quite equalized when Chamberlain pushed on. The corps probably lost twelve hundred men. In this action, the Rebels, for the first time for many weeks, exhibited all their traditional irresistibility and confidence. The merit of the affair, I am inclined to think, should be awarded to them; but a terrible retribution remained for them in the succeeding day's decrees.

The ill success of the earlier efforts of Sheridan, show conclusively the insufficiency of ever so good cavalry to resist well organized and resolute infantry. Concentrating at Dinwiddie Court House, he proceeded to scour so much of the country that he almost baffled conjecture as to where his quarters really were. As many thousand cavalry as const.i.tute his powerful force seem magnified, thus mounted and ever moving here and there, to an incredible number. The Court House, where he remained fittingly for a couple of days, is a cross-road's patch, numbering about twelve scattered buildings, with a delightful prospect on every side of sterile and monotonous pines. This is, I believe, the largest village in the district, though Dinwiddie stands fourth in population among Virginia counties. At present there is almost as great a population underground as the ancient county carried on its census. Indeed, one is perplexed at every point to know whence the South draws its prodigious armies. Some English officers have been visiting Dinwiddie during the week, and one of them said, curtly: "Blast the country! it isn't worth such a row, you know. A very good place to be exiled, to be sure, but what can you ever make of it!"