The Song of the Rappahannock. Dodd Ira Seymour

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СКАЧАТЬ his hurt were great or small, was pale as death and wore a fixed expression, not of terror but of stony despair. They all walked slowly and wearily and if you asked one of them, "How is the battle going?" you got the invariable answer, "Our regiment is all cut to pieces;" and they said it in a tone of tired reproach as though you ought to know and had insulted them by asking, or else with an inflection which meant, "Presently you will catch it yourselves." It was a procession of spectres and cold cheer it furnished for us, hurrying forward toward the ever-nearing and now frightful tones of the Song; yet I think the emotion uppermost in our minds was not precisely fear but a sort of awful curiosity: we burned to see as well as hear the dreadful mystery beyond the pines; the Song seemed to come from a deadly but luring siren whose call we must obey.

      But night was now coming fast and all the ways began to darken; and just when we expected to emerge into the heart of battle, as though an invisible conductor had suddenly raised his wand, as abruptly as it began the Song ceased and there was a great silence. We had heard though we had not seen the fight at Salem Church, a bitterly contested but drawn battle in which many hundreds of brave men fell. The Sixth Corps had begun to feel the weight of Lee's army.

      The night which followed was one of those sweet nights of early summer when earth seems not to sleep, but to unloosen her bands and lie down to play with her merry brood of new-born children. Yet there was strange mystery abroad: everywhere a weird sound – was it of sorrow or of foreboding, nature's wail or nature's warning? It seemed to mingle both as the May moon shone down on those who died to-day and those who were to die to-morrow. I have often heard the spirit-like cry of the whippoorwill, but never as I heard it that night. It came from every tree and bush, from every side and all around until it pervaded all the air. Perhaps I thought more of it because I was not one of the fortunate ones who could sleep undisturbed. The first serjeant was among the missing, the second serjeant had to take his duty and I was obliged to act as "commissary," rouse a detail of sleepy and unwilling men, stumble through the fields with them until we found the supply train and bring back a load of rations for the company; but I never hear a whippoorwill that I do not think of that night.

      In the morning we found a little brook near our lines; it was a welcome friend; it offered us water for coffee and for a much-needed wash and its banks were speedily lined with chaffing, gossiping, half-dressed soldiers. But the coffee-pots had scarce begun to send their grateful fragrance through the lines when that monotonously awful Song broke forth again. From the hills in our rear which we had victoriously assaulted yesterday, came screaming shells from an enemy's battery. Our breakfast was cut short: "Fall in, men!" "Attention, battalion!" The orders flew from rank to rank, and soon the lines were formed. A pleasant Virginia mansion stood on rising ground near by, and the pretty lawn in front offered a good position which was speedily taken by one of our batteries, the horses ruthlessly trampling down the flowers and shrubbery; and there before that peaceful home the war-dogs began their baying answer to the hostile shots. Meantime the regiments were in motion and as we crossed a field below the house its fleeing occupants went by us. I was near enough to see them closely: an intelligent-looking man with his fair, pale wife and two little children. They were friends of our foes, but every heart ached for them and we let them pass in respectful silence. I noticed that the man's face bore the same set, despairing expression that I had seen the day before in the faces of the wounded men. A new and horrid discord sounded in the Song as that sad little company went by.

      The firing soon ceased; but all the morning we marched and counter-marched taking up first one, then another position, while now and then in the valleys below we caught glimpses of the brown ranks of the Confederates who seemed pouring in from all sides. The situation was evident even to us in the ranks. Hooker had abandoned the Sixth Corps and Lee was concentrating all his available force to crush us. Things looked desperate. I remember that Joe tried all day to keep the bearings of the river in mind, and proposed that, if worst came to worst we should, even under fire attempt to swim it rather than go to Andersonville.

      But the day passed quietly, all the afternoon we lay in a little field with woods on three sides, in apparent security and the men talked and joked and laughed as though battles were a far-off story. Thus time wore on, until toward evening a distant cannon shot sounded; then another, and a spent shell came harmlessly over the tree-tops tumbling end over end to the ground; and then, all at once, pandemonium seemed let loose. It was the Song in another of its wild and wonderful variations. As yesterday at Salem Church there was no prelude of skirmish fire; but unlike yesterday's evening Song, this did not begin with the growl of the bulldogs. All instruments of wrath and war seemed taking part in it, and it came, not from our front alone but from the right, from the left, from the woods before us; while out in the open space a battery of ours was savagely firing at an enemy we could not see. Quickly but quietly we formed in line. Even now I can see my dear comrade, Serjeant W – , passing along the company front counting off the files in his grave, careful way. Then he took his place next the captain, and I saw him no more: he fell in the battle, a noble young Christian, with a wife and child waiting for him in the far-away home to which he never returned.

      Presently our orders came, and we moved at double-quick past the wood out into a larger field which sloped gently toward a dry ditch and then rose in the same manner on the farther side. Coming over the opposite crest of the slope, in full view was a brigade of the enemy; another body of them was well up into the wood in front of the field we were leaving; beside us now was our battery already mentioned: we could hear the captain shouting his orders for the timing of the shells in seconds and half-seconds. It was getting too hot for him: his horses were beginning to fall and to save his guns he was, as we passed him, calling out to his men to "limber up and be off."

      Every incident of that scene is wonderfully vivid to me even to-day. I was conscious of none of "the frenzy of battle," but, instead, every sense seemed more than naturally quickened. I remember that, as we entered the larger field and the panorama of war opened full before me and the Song roared its diapason I thought and said to myself, "How inexpressibly grand this is!" And I noticed everything: the very colour of the ground and of the evening light and the brown ranks of the oncoming foe; and a little tragedy that was being enacted at one side, which I always think of as illustrative of the sort of stuff which was to be found in that old Army of the Potomac and of the grit which makes the Anglo-Saxon the hardest of all men to conquer. A small regiment of veterans, either a Maine or a Wisconsin regiment – I never certainly knew which – was in that field, and as we came near they were being outflanked by the enemy who were penetrating the woods at close range. Their position was untenable, they were suffering severely and the regulation move for them would have been to fall back; but instead they deliberately changed front and moved up nearer, wheeling slowly by battalion, not an easy manœuvre even on the parade ground; and they did it without ceasing or even slackening their fire; and all the while they had to close up the gaps left in their ranks by men who were dropping, dropping, dropping, to the savage fire of the foe.

      I suppose the commander of the division thought such raw troops as we, fit only for sacrifice. At any rate, we were rushed to the bottom of the field and posted in the ditch to check the onset of a Confederate brigade as best we might. It is needless to say that we suffered severely, or that we could hold our desperate position only for a little while. But our fire must have told, for the enemy swerved to the right as we opened on them; yet they kept coming on and soon began to outflank us.

      The same strange intensity of perception with which I entered the field stayed with me and photographed its scenes upon my mind. I can see the man several files away, just too far for me to reach, who vexed me because in his excitement he would, every time he fired shoot before he aimed with his rifle pointed toward the sky; and little S – , a boy whom we were all fond of, shot through the body yet coolly walking off toward the rear saying, "Well, boys, I'm hit!" And I can hear our brave but eccentric lieutenant-colonel shouting: "Give it to them! Give them Blissom!" And I remember that just above my head there seemed to be a stratum of flying bullets so that in loading, every time I was about to raise my arm to ram down the charge I said to myself, "Here goes a bullet through this arm." And yet, at the same time I noticed the vicious snips with which the grass-blades all about were being cut. How any one escapes in close battle СКАЧАТЬ