An Echo Of Antietam Part 1

AN ECHO OF ANTIETAM.

By Edward Bellamy .

1898.

I

The air was tremulous with farewells. The regiment, recruited within sight of the steeples of Waterville, and for three months in camp just outside the city, was to march the next morning. A series of great battles had weakened the Federal armies, and the authorities at Was.h.i.+ngton had ordered all available men to the front.

The camp was to be broken up at an early hour, after which the regiment would march through the city to the depot to take the cars. The streets along the route of the march were already being decorated with flags and garlands. The city that afternoon was full of soldiers enjoying their last leave of absence. The liquor shops were crowded with parties of them drinking with their friends, while others in threes and fours, with locked arms, paraded the streets singing patriotic songs, sometimes in rather maudlin voices, for to-day in every saloon a soldier might enter, citizens vied for the privilege of treating him to the best in the house. No man in a blue coat was suffered to pay for anything.

For the most part, however, the men were sober enough over their leave-taking. One saw everywhere soldiers and civilians, strolling in pairs, absorbed in earnest talk. They are brothers, maybe, who have come away from the house to be alone with each other, while they talk of family affairs and exchange last charges and promises as to what is to be done if anything happens. Or perhaps they are business partners, and the one who has put the country's business before his own is giving his last counsels as to how the store or the shop shall be managed in his absence. Many of the blue-clad men have women with them, and these are the couples that the people oftenest turn to look at. The girl who has a soldier lover is the envy of her companions to-day as she walks by his side. Her proud eyes challenge all who come, saying, "See, this is my hero. I am the one he loves."

You could easily tell when it was a wife and not a sweetheart whom the soldier had with him. There was no challenge in the eyes of the wife. Young romance shed none of its glamour on the sacrifice she was making for her native land. It was only because they could not bear to sit any longer looking at each other in the house that she and her husband had come out to walk.

In the residence parts of the town family groups were gathered on shady piazzas, a blue-coated figure the centre of each. They were trying to talk cheerfully, making an effort even to laugh a little.

Now and then one of the women stole un.o.bserved from the circle, but her bravely smiling face as she presently returned gave no inkling of the flood of tears that had eased her heart in some place apart. The young soldier himself was looking a little pale and nervous with all his affected good spirits, and it was safe to guess that he was even then thinking how often this scene would come before him afterwards, by the camp-fire and on the eve of battle.

In the village of Upton, some four or five miles out of Waterville, on a broad piazza at the side of a house on the main street, a group of four persons were seated around a tea-table.

The centre of interest of this group, as of so many others that day, was a soldier. He looked not over twenty-five, with dark blue eyes, dark hair cut close to his head, and a mustache trimmed crisply in military fas.h.i.+on. His uniform set off to advantage an athletic figure of youthful slender-ness, and his bronzed complexion told of long days of practice on the drill-ground in the school of the company and the battalion. He wore the shoulder-straps of a second lieutenant.

On one side of the soldier sat the Rev. Mr. Morton, his cousin, and on the other Miss Bertha Morton, a kindly faced, middle-aged lady, who was her brother's housekeeper and the hostess of this occasion.

The fourth member of the party was a girl of nineteen or twenty. She was a very pretty girl, and although to-day her pallid cheeks and red and swollen eyelids would to other eyes have detracted somewhat from her charms, it was certain that they did not make her seem less adorable to the young officer, for he was her lover, and was to march with the regiment in the morning.

Lieutenant Philip King was a lawyer, and by perseverance and native ability had worked up a fair practice for so young a man in and around Upton. When he volunteered, he had to make up his mind to leave this carefully gathered clientage to scatter, or to be filched from him by less patriotic rivals; but it may be well believed that this seemed to him a little thing compared with leaving Grace Roberts, with the chance of never returning to make her his wife. If, indeed, it had been for him to say, he would have placed his happiness beyond hazard by marrying her before the regiment marched; nor would she have been averse, but her mother, an invalid widow, took a sensible rather than a sentimental view of the case. If he were killed, she said, a wife would do him no good; and if he came home again, Grace would be waiting for him, and that ought to satisfy a reasonable man. It had to satisfy an unreasonable one. The Robertses had always lived just beyond the garden from the parsonage, and Grace, who from a little girl had been a great pet of the childless minister and his sister, was almost as much at home there as in her mother's house. When Philip fell in love with her, the Mortons were delighted. They could have wished nothing better for either. From the first Miss Morton had done all she could to make matters smooth for the lovers, and the present little farewell banquet was but the last of many meetings she had prepared for them at the parsonage.

Philip had come out from camp on a three-hours' leave that afternoon, and would have to report again at half-past seven. It was nearly that hour now, though still light, the season being midsummer. There had been an effort on the part of all to keep up a cheerful tone; but as the time of the inevitable separation drew near, the conversation had been more and more left to the minister and his sister, who, with observations sometimes a little forced, continued to fend off silence and the demoralization it would be likely to bring to their young friends. Grace had been the first to drop out of the talking, and Philip's answers, when he was addressed, grew more and more at random, as the meetings of his eyes with his sweetheart's became more frequent and lasted longer.

"He will be the handsomest officer in the regiment, that's one comfort. Won't he, Grace?" said Miss Morton cheerily.

The girl nodded and smiled faintly. Her eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g, and the twitching of her lips from time to time betrayed how great was the effort with which she kept her self-command.

"Yes," said Mr. Morton; "but though he looks very well now, it is nothing to the imposing appearance he will present when he comes back with a colonel's shoulder-straps. You should be thinking of that, Grace."

"I expect we shall hear from him every day," said Miss Morton. "He will have no excuse for not writing with all those envelopes stamped and addressed, with blank paper in them, which Grace has given him. You should always have three or four in your coat pocket, Phil."

The young man nodded.

"I suppose for the most part we shall learn of you through Grace; but you mustn't forget us entirely, my boy," said Mr. Morton. "We shall want to hear from you directly now and then."

"Yes; I 'll be sure to write," Philip replied.

"I suppose it will be time enough to see the regiment pa.s.s if we are in our places by nine o'clock," suggested Miss Morton, after a silence.

"I think so," said her brother. "It is a great affair to break camp, and I don't believe the march will begin till after that time."

"James has got us one of the windows of Ray & Seymour's offices, you know, Philip," resumed Miss Morton; "which one did you say, James?"

"The north one."

"Yes, the north one," she resumed. "They say every window on Main Street along the route of the regiment is rented. Grace will be with us, you know. You must n't forget to look up at us as you go by-as if the young man were likely to!"

He was evidently not now listening to her at all. His eyes were fastened upon the girl's opposite him, and they seemed to have quite forgotten the others. Miss Morton and her brother exchanged compa.s.sionate glances. Tears were in the lady's eyes. A clock in the sitting-room began to strike: "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven."

Philip started.

"What time is that?" he asked, a little huskily. No one replied at once. Then Mr. Morton said: "I am afraid it struck seven, my boy."

"I must leave in ten minutes then," said the young man, rising from the table. The rest followed his example.

"I wonder if the buggy will be in time?" said he.

"It is at the gate," replied Miss Morton. "I heard it drive up some time ago."

Unmindful of the others now, Philip put his arm about Grace's waist and drew her away to the end of the piazza and thence out into the garden.

"Poor young things," murmured Miss Morton, the tears running down her cheeks as she looked after them. "It is pitiful, James, to see how they suffer."

"Yes," said the minister; "and there are a great many just such scenes to-day. Ah, well, as St. Paul says, we see as yet but in part."

Pa.s.sing in and out among the shrubbery, and presently disappearing from the sympathetic eyes upon the piazza, the lovers came to a little summer-house, and there they entered. Taking her wrists in his hands, he held her away from him, and his eyes went slowly over her from head to foot, as if he would impress upon his mind an image that absence should not have power to dim.

"You are so beautiful," he said, "that in this moment, when I ought to have all my courage, you make me feel that I am a madman to leave you for the sake of any cause on earth. The future to most men is but a chance of happiness, and when they risk it they only risk a chance. In staking their lives, they only stake a lottery ticket, which would probably draw a blank. But my ticket has drawn a capital prize. I risk not the chance, but the certainty, of happiness. I believe I am a fool, and if I am killed, that will be the first thing they will say to me on the other side."

"Don't talk of that, Phil. Oh, don't talk of being killed!"

"No, no; of course not!" he exclaimed. "Don't fret about that; I shall not be killed. I've no notion of being killed. But what a fool I am to waste these last moments staring at you when I might be kissing you, my love, my love!" And clasping her in his arms, he covered her face with kisses.

She began to sob convulsively.

"Don't, darling; don't! Don't make it so hard for me," he whispered hoa.r.s.ely.

"Oh, do let me cry," she wailed. "It was so hard for me to hold back all the time we were at table. I must cry, or my heart will break. Oh, my own dear Phil, what if I should never see you again! Oh! Oh!"

"Nonsense, darling," he said, crowding down the lump that seemed like iron in his throat, and making a desperate effort to keep his voice steady. "You will see me again, never doubt it. Don't I tell you I am coming back? The South cannot hold out much longer. Everybody says so. I shall be home in a year, and then you will be my wife, to be G.o.d's Grace to me all the rest of my life. Our happiness will be on interest till then; ten per cent, a month at least, compound interest, piling up every day. Just think of that, dear; don't let yourself think of anything else."

"Oh, Phil, how I love you!" she cried, throwing her arms around his neck in a pa.s.sion of tenderness. "n.o.body is like you. n.o.body ever was. Surely G.o.d will not part us. Surely He will not. He is too good."

"No, dear, He will not. Some day I shall come back. It will not be long. Perhaps I shall find you waiting for me in this same little summer-house. Let us think of that. It was here, you know, we found out each other's secret that day."

"I had found out yours long before," she said, faintly smiling.

"Time 's up, Phil." It was Mr. Morton's voice calling to them from the piazza.

"I must go, darling. Good-by."

"Oh, no, not yet; not quite yet," she wailed, clinging to him. "Why, we have been here but a few moments. It can't be ten minutes yet."

Under the influence of that close, pa.s.sionate embrace, those clinging kisses and mingling tears, there began to come over Philip a feeling of weakness, of fainting courage, a disposition to cry out, "Nothing can be so terrible as this. I will not bear it; I will not go." By a tyrannical effort of will, against which his whole nature cried out, he unwound her arms from his neck and said in a choked voice:- "Darling, this is harder than any battle I shall have to fight, but this is what I enlisted for. I must go."

He had reached the door of the summer-house, not daring for honor's sake to look back, when a heartbroken cry smote his ear.

"You have n't kissed me good-by!"

He had kissed her a hundred times, but these kisses she apparently distinguished from the good-by kiss. He came back, and taking her again in his embrace, kissed her lips, her throat, her bosom, and then once more their lips met, and in that kiss of parting which plucks the heart up by the roots.

How strong must be the barrier between one soul and another that they do not utterly merge in moments like that, turning the agony of parting to the bliss of blended being!

Pursued by the sound of her desolate sobbing, he fled away.

The stable-boy held the dancing horse at the gate, and Mr. Morton and his sister stood waiting there.

"Good-by, Phil, till we see you again," said Miss Morton, kissing him tenderly. "We 'll take good care of her for you."

"Will you please go to her now?" he said huskily. "She is in the summer-house. For G.o.d's sake try to comfort her."

"Yes, poor boy, I will," she answered. He shook hands with Mr. Morton and jumped into the buggy.

"I 'll get a furlough and be back in a few months, maybe. Be sure to tell her that," he said.

The stable-boy stood aside; the mettlesome horse gave a plunge and started off at a three-minute gait. The boy drew out his watch and observed: "He hain't got but fifteen minutes to git to camp in, but he 'll do it. The mare 's a stepper, and Phil King knows how to handle the ribbons."

The buggy vanished in a cloud of dust around the next turn in the road. The stable-boy strode whistling down the street, the minister went to his study, and Miss Morton disappeared in the shrubbery in the direction of the summer-house.

II

Early next morning the country roads leading into Waterville were covered with carts and wagons and carriages loaded with people coming into town to see the regiment off. The streets were hung with flags and spanned with decorated arches bearing patriotic inscriptions. Bed, white, and blue streamers hung in festoons from building to building and floated from cornices. The stores and places of business were all closed, the sidewalks were packed with people in their Sunday clothes, and the windows and balconies were lined with gazers long before it was time for the regiment to appear. Everybody-men, women, and children -wore the national colors in c.o.c.kades or rosettes, while many young girls were dressed throughout in red, white, and blue. The city seemed tricked out for some rare gala-day, but the grave faces of the expectant throng, and the subdued and earnest manner which extended even to the older children, stamped this as no ordinary holiday.

After hours of patient waiting, at last the word pa.s.ses from mouth to mouth, "They are coming!" Vehicles are quickly driven out of the way, and in a general hush all eyes are turned towards the head of the street. Presently there is a burst of martial music, and the regiment comes wheeling round the corner into view and fills the wide street from curb to curb with its broad front. As the blue river sweeps along, the rows of polished bayonets, rising and falling with the swinging tread of the men, are like interminable ranks of foam-crested waves rolling in upon the sh.o.r.e. The imposing ma.s.s, with its rhythmic movement, gives the impression of a single organism. One forgets to look for the individuals in it, forgets that there are individuals. Even those who have brothers, sons, lovers there, for a moment almost forget them in the impression of a mighty whole. The mind is slow to realize that this great dragon, so terrible in its beauty, emitting light as it moves from a thousand burnished scales, with flaming crest proudly waving in the van, is but an aggregation of men singly so feeble.

The hearts of the lookers-on as they gaze are swelling fast. An afflatus of heroism given forth by this host of self-devoted men communicates itself to the most stolid spectators. The booming of the drum fills the brain, and the blood in the veins leaps to its rhythm. The unearthly gayety of the fife, like the sweet, shrill song of a bird soaring above the battle, infects the nerves till the idea of death brings a scornful smile to the lips. Eyes glaze with rapturous tears as they rest upon the flag. There is a thrill of voluptuous sweetness in the thought of dying for it. Life seems of value only as it gives the poorest something to sacrifice. It is dying that makes the glory of the world, and all other employments seem but idle while the regiment pa.s.ses.

The time for farewells is gone by. The lucky men at the ends of the ranks have indeed an opportunity without breaking step to exchange an occasional hand-shake with a friend on the sidewalk, or to s.n.a.t.c.h a kiss from wife or sweetheart, but those in the middle of the line can only look their farewells. Now and then a mother intrusts her baby to a file-leader to be pa.s.sed along from hand to hand till it reaches the father, to be sent back with a kiss, or, maybe, perched aloft on his shoulder, to ride to the depot, crowing at the music and clutching at the gleaming bayonets. At every such touch of nature the people cheer wildly. From every window and balcony the ladies shower garlands upon the troops.

Where is Grace? for this is the Upton company which is pa.s.sing now. Yonder she stands on a balcony, between Mr. Morton and his sister. She is very pale and the tears are streaming down her cheeks, but her face is radiant. She is smiling through her tears, as if there was no such thing on earth as fear or sorrow. She has looked forward to this ordeal with harrowing expectations, only to find herself at the trying moment seized upon and lifted above all sense of personal affliction by the pa.s.sion of self-devotion with which the air is electric. Her face as she looks down upon her lover is that of a priestess in the ecstasy of sacrifice. He is saluting with his sword. Now he has pa.s.sed. With a great sob she turns away. She does not care for the rest of the pageant. Her patriotism has suddenly gone. The ecstasy of sacrifice is over. She is no longer a priestess, but a brokenhearted girl, who only asks to be led away to some place where she can weep till her lover returns.

III

There was to be a great battle the next day. The two armies had been long manoeuvring for position, and now they stood like wrestlers who have selected their holds and, with body braced against body, knee against knee, wait for the signal to begin the struggle. There had been during the afternoon some brisk fighting, but a common desire to postpone the decisive contest till the morrow had prevented the main forces from becoming involved. Philip's regiment had thus far only been engaged in a few trifling skirmishes, barely enough to stir the blood. This was to be its first battle, and the position to which it had been allotted promised a b.l.o.o.d.y baptism in the morning. The men were in excellent heart, but as night settled down, there was little or no merriment to be heard about the camp-fires. Most were gathered in groups, discussing in low tones the chances of the morrow. Some, knowing that every fibre of muscle would be needed for the work before them, had wisely gone to sleep, while here and there a man, heedless of the talk going on about him, was lying on his back staring up at the darkening sky, thinking.

As the twilight deepened, Philip strolled to the top of a little knoll just out of the camp and sat down, with a vague notion of casting up accounts a little in view of the final settlement which very possibly might come for him next day. But the inspiration of the scene around him soon diverted his mind from personal engrossments. Some distance down the lines he could see the occasional flash of a gun, where a battery was lazily sh.e.l.ling a piece of woods which it was desirable to keep the enemy from occupying during the night. A burning barn in that direction made a flare on the sky. Over behind the wooded hills where the Confederates lay, rockets were going up, indicating the exchange of signals and the perfecting of plans which might mean defeat and ruin to him and his the next day. Behind him, within the Federal lines, clouds of dust, dimly outlined against the glimmering landscape, betrayed the location of the roads along which artillery, cavalry, infantry were hurrying eagerly forward to take their a.s.signed places for the morrow's work.

Who said that men fear death? Who concocted that fable for old wives? He should have stood that night with Philip in the midst of a host of one hundred and twenty-five thousand men in the full flush and vigor of life, calmly and deliberately making ready at dawn to receive death in its most horrid forms at one another's hands. It is in vain that Religion invests the tomb with terror, and Philosophy, shuddering, averts her face; the nations turn from these gloomy teachers to storm its portals in exultant hosts, battering them wide enough for thousands to charge through abreast. The heroic instinct of humanity with its high contempt of death is wiser and truer, never let us doubt, than superst.i.tious terrors or philosophic doubts. It testifies to a conviction, deeper than reason, that man is greater than his seeming self; to an underlying consciousness that his mortal life is but an accident of his real existence, the fas.h.i.+on of a day, to be lightly worn and gayly doffed at duty's call.

What a pity it truly is that the tonic air of battlefields-the air that Philip breathed that night before Antietam-cannot be gathered up and preserved as a precious elixir to reinvigorate the atmosphere in times of peace, when men grow faint of heart and cowardly, and quake at thought of death.

The soldiers huddled in their blankets on the ground slept far more soundly that night before the battle than their men-folk and women-folk in their warm beds at home. For them it was a night of watching, a vigil of prayers and tears. The telegraph in those days made of the nation an intensely sensitive organism, with nerves a thousand miles long. Ere its echoes had died away, every shot fired at the front had sent a tremor to the anxious hearts at home. The newspapers and bulletin boards in all the towns and cities of the North had announced that a great battle would surely take place the next day, and, as the night closed in, a mighty cloud of prayer rose from innumerable firesides, the self-same prayer from each, that he who had gone from that home might survive the battle, whoever else must fall.

The wife, lest her own appeal might fail, taught her cooing baby to lisp the father's name, thinking that surely the Great Father's heart would not be able to resist a baby's prayer. The widowed mother prayed that if it were consistent with G.o.d's will he would spare her son. She laid her heart, pierced through with many sorrows, before Him. She had borne so much, life had been so hard, her boy was all she had to show for so much endured,-might not this cup pa.s.s? Pale, impa.s.sioned maids, kneeling by their virgin beds, wore out the night with an importunity that would not be put off. Sure in their great love and their little knowledge that no case could be like theirs, they beseeched G.o.d with bitter weeping for their lovers' lives, because, forsooth, they could not bear it if hurt came to them. The answers to many thousands of these agonizing appeals of maid and wife and mother were already in the enemy's cartridge-boxes.

IV

The day came. The dispatches in the morning papers stated that the armies would probably be engaged from an early hour.

Who that does not remember those battle-summers can realize from any telling how the fathers and mothers, the wives and sisters and sweethearts at home, lived through the days when it was known that a great battle was going on at the front in which their loved ones were engaged? It was very quiet in the house on those days of battle. All spoke in hushed voices and stepped lightly. The children, too small to understand the meaning of the shadow on the home, felt it and took their noisy sports elsewhere. There was little conversation, except as to when definite news might be expected. The household work dragged sadly, for though the women sought refuge from thought in occupation, they were constantly dropping whatever they had in hand to rush away to their chambers to face the presentiment, perhaps suddenly borne in upon them with the force of a conviction, that they might be called on to bear the worst. The table was set for the regular meals, but there was little pretense of eating. The eyes of all had a far-off expression, and they seemed barely to see one another. There was an intent, listening look upon their faces, as if they were hearkening to the roar of the battle a thousand miles away.

Many pictures of battles have been painted, but no true one yet, for the pictures contain only men. The women are unaccountably left out. We ought to see not alone the opposing lines of battle writhing and twisting in a death, embrace, the batteries smoking and flaming, the hurricanes of cavalry, but innumerable women also, spectral forms of mothers, wives, sweethearts, clinging about the necks of the advancing soldiers, vainly trying to s.h.i.+eld them with their bosoms, extending supplicating hands to the foe, raising eyes of anguish to Heaven. The soldiers, grim-faced, with battle-lighted eyes, do not see the ghostly forms that throng them, but shoot and cut and stab across and through them as if they were not there,-yes, through them, for few are the b.a.l.l.s and bayonets that reach their marks without traversing some of these devoted b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Spectral, alas, is their guardians.h.i.+p, but real are their wounds and deadly as any the combatants receive.

Soon after breakfast on the day of the battle Grace came across to the parsonage, her swollen eyes and pallid face telling of a sleepless night. She could not bear her mother's company that day, for she knew that she had never greatly liked Philip. Miss Morton was very tender and sympathetic. Grace was a little comforted by Mr. Morton's saying that commonly great battles did not open much before noon. It was a respite to be able to think that probably up to that moment at least no harm had come to Philip. In the early afternoon the minister drove into Waterville to get the earliest bulletins at the "Banner" office, leaving the two women alone.