The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln Part 72

"This sheep looks like it----"

"Dat sheep?"

"That's what I said, you black thief!"

"Say, man, don't talk lak dat ter me--you sho hurts my feelin's. I nebber stole dat sheep. I nebber go atter de sheep, an' I weren't studyin' 'bout no animals. I was des walkin' long de road past a man's house whar dis here big, devilish-lookin' old sheep come er runnin'

right at me wid his head down--an' I lammed him wid er stick ter save my life, sah. An' den when he fell, I knowed hit wuz er pity ter leave him dar ter spile, an' so I des nach.e.l.ly had ter fetch him inter de camp ter save him. Man, you sho is rude ter talk dat way."

The guard was obdurate until Julius began to describe how he cooked roast mutton. He finally agreed to accept his version of the battle with the sheep as authentic if he would bring him a ten pound roast to test the truth of his conversation.

Julius was still harping on the rudeness of this guard as he fanned the flies off John's table with a sa.s.safras brush at supper.

"I don't know what dey ebber let sech poor white trash ez dat man git in er army for, anyhow!" he exclaimed indignantly.

"We have to take 'em as they come now, Julius. There's going to be a draft this summer. No more volunteers now. Wait till you see the conscripts."

"Dey can't be no wus dan dat man. He warn't no gemman 'tall, sah."

John rose from his hearty supper and strolled along the line of his regiment, recruited again to its full strength of twelve hundred men.

Two fellows who were messmates were sc.r.a.pping about a question of gravy.

One wanted lots of gravy and his meat done brown. The other insisted on having his meat decently cooked, but not swimming in grease. The man in favor of gravy was on duty as cook at this meal and stuck to his own ideas. They suddenly clinched, fell to the ground, rolled over, knocked the pan in the fire and lost both meat and gravy.

John smiled and pa.s.sed on.

A lieutenant was sitting on a stump holding a letter from his sweetheart to the flickering camp fire. He bent and kissed the signature--the fool!

For a moment the old longing surged back through his soul. He wondered if she ever thought of him now. She had loved him once.

He started back to his tent to write her a letter before they broke camp to-morrow morning. Nature was calling in the balmy spring night wind that floated over the waters of the river.

Nature knew naught of war. She was pouring out her heart in budding leaf and blossom in the joy of living.

And then the bitterness of shame and stubborn pride welled up to kill the tender impulse. There were slumbering forces beneath the skin the scenes through which he was pa.s.sing had called into new life. They were bringing new powers both of mind and body. They added nothing to the gentler, sweeter sources of character. He began to understand how men could feed their ambitions on the bodies of fallen hosts and still smile.

He had felt the brutalizing touch of war. With a cynical laugh he threw off his impulse to write and turned into his blanket dreaming of the red carnival toward which they would march at dawn.

As the sun rose over the new sparkling fields of the South on the morning of the 27th of April, 1863, the great movement began.

The Federal commander ordered Sedgwick's division to cross the Rappahannock below Fredericksburg and deploy in line of battle to deceive Lee as to his real purpose while he secretly marched his main army through the woods seven miles above to throw them on his rear.

As the men stood, thousands banked on thousands, awaiting the order to march, John Vaughan saw, for the first time, the grim procession pa.s.s along the lines carrying a condemned deserter, to be shot to death before his former comrades. His hands were tied across his breast with rough knotted rope and he was seated on his coffin.

The War Department had gotten around the tender heart in the White House at last. The desertions had become so terrible in their frequency it was absolutely necessary to make examples of some of these men. The poor devil who sat forlornly on his grim throne riding through the sweet spring morning had no mother or sister or sweetheart to plead his cause.

The men stared in silence as the death cart rumbled along the lines. It halted and the man took his place before the firing squad but a few feet away.

A white cloth was bound over his eyes. The sergeant dealt out the specially prepared round of cartridges--all blank save one, that no soldier might know who did the murder.

In low tones they were ordered to fire straight at the heart of the blindfolded figure. The muskets flashed and the man crumpled in a heap on the soft young gra.s.s, the blood pouring from his breast in a bright red pool beside the quivering form.

And then the army moved.

The stratagem of the Commander was executed with skill. But there was an eagle eye back of those hills of Fredericksburg. Lee was not only a great stark fighter, he was a past master in the arts of war. He had divined his opponent's plan from the moment of his first movement.

By April the 30th, Hooker had effected his crossing and slipped into the rear of Lee's left wing. The Southerner had paid little attention to Sedgwick's menace on his front. He left but nine thousand men on Marye's Heights to hold in check this forty thousand, and by a rapid night march suddenly confronted Hooker in the Wilderness before Chancellorsville.

So strong was the Union General's position he issued an exultant order to his army in which he declared:

"The enemy must now flee shamefully or come out of his defences to accept battle on our own ground, to his certain destruction."

The enemy had already slipped out of his defenses before Fredericksburg and at that moment was feeling his way through the tangled vines and undergrowth with sure ominous tread.

The soul of the Confederate leader rose with elation at the prospect before him. In this tangle called the Wilderness, broken only here and there by small, scattered farm houses and fields, the Grand Army of the Republic had more than twice his numbers, and nearly three times as many big guns, but his artillery would be practically useless. It was utterly impossible to use four hundred great guns in such woods. Lee's one hundred and seventy were more than he could handle. It would be a fight between infantry at close range. The Southerner knew that no army of men ever walked the earth who would be the equal, man for man, with these grey veteran dead shots, who were now silently creeping through the undergrowth of their native woods.

On May the 1st, their two lines came into touch and Lee felt of his opponent by driving in his skirmishers in a desultory fire of artillery.

On the morning of May the 2nd, the two armies faced each other at close range.

With Sedgwick's division of forty thousand men now threatening Lee's rear from Fredericksburg, his army thus caught between two mighty lines of blue, Hooker was absolutely sure of victory. The one thing of which he never dreamed was that Lee would dare, in the face of such a death trap, to divide his own small army. And yet this is exactly what the Southerner decided to do contrary to all the rules of military science or the advice of the strange, silent figure on the little sorrel horse.

When Lee, Jackson and Stuart rode along the lines of Hooker's front that fatal May morning, Jackson suddenly reined in his little sorrel and turned his keen blue eyes on his grey-haired Chief:

"There's just one way, General Lee. The front and left are too strong. I can swing my corps in a quick movement to the rear while you attack the front. They will think it a retreat. Out of sight, I'll turn, march for ten miles around their right wing, and smash it from the rear before sundown."

Lee quickly approved the amazing plan of his lieutenant, though it involved the necessity of his holding Hooker's centre and left in check and that his nine thousand men behind the stone wall on Marye's Heights should hold Sedgwick's forty thousand. He believed it could be done until Jackson had completed his march.

He immediately ordered his attack on the centre and left of his enemy.

The artillery horses were cropping the tender dew-laden gra.s.s with eagerness. They had had no breakfast. The riders sprang to their backs at seven o'clock and they dashed into position.

Lee's guns opened the fateful day. For hours his lines blazed with the steady sullen boom of artillery and rattle of musketry. Hooker's hosts replied in kind.

At noon a shout swept the Federal lines that Lee's army was in retreat.

Sickles' division could see the long grey waves hurrying to the rear.

They were close enough to note the ragged, dirty, nondescript clothes Jackson's men wore. No man in all the Union hosts doubted for a moment that Lee had seen the hopelessness of his position and was hurrying to save his little army of sixty-two thousand men from being crushed into pulp by the jaws of a hundred and thirty thousand in two grand divisions closing in on him. It was a reasonable supposition--always barring the utterly unexpected--another name for Stonewall Jackson, whom they seemed to have forgotten for the moment.

Sickles, seeing the "retreat," sent a courier flying to Hooker, asking for permission to follow the fugitives with his twenty thousand men.

Hooker consented, and Sickles leaped from his entrenchments and set out in mad haste to overtake the flying columns. He got nearly ten miles in the woods away from the battle lines before he realized that the ghostly men in grey had made good their escape. Certainly they had disappeared from view.

It was five o'clock in the afternoon when Jackson's swift, silent marchers began to draw near to the unsuspecting right wing of Hooker's army under the command of General Howard.

Ned Vaughan was in Jackson's skirmish line feeling the way through the tender green foliage of the spring. The days were warm and the leaves far advanced--the woods so dense it was impossible for picket or skirmisher to see more than a hundred yards ahead--at some points not a hundred feet.

The thin, silent line suddenly swept into the little opening of a negro cabin with garden and patch of corn. A kindly old colored woman was standing in the doorway.

She looked into the faces of these eager, slender Southern boys and they were her "children." The meaning of war was real to her only when it meant danger to those she loved.

She ran quickly up to Ned, her eyes dancing with excitement:

"For de Lawd's sake, honey, don't you boys go up dat road no fudder!"