House Divided (110 page)

Longstreet's eyes swept approvingly across the pleasant fertile fields that ran with the road; and at last he spoke. “This is fine country, Currain. Some day I'm going to quit the army and find a smooth bit of turf under a shady tree and just sit there for the rest of my life!”

“I'd probably plow up the turf and plant something.”

The big man nodded, only half hearing. “Yes, some day I'll turn civilian.” And after a moment he said thoughtfully. “You know, Currain, army life is strange. Here are thousands of us in closest companionship day after day, and yet each one of us is always alone. Have you ever noticed, at headquarters or in camp, how often a man draws apart by himself? There's a difference between comradeship and friendship, isn't there? You can be comrades with a stranger. Friends, even when they're apart, are still friends; but comrades, after the hot moment of action is passed, are no longer comrades.” He nodded over his shoulder. “These gentlemen here, and the soldiers on the road yonder, are all knit together in a military comradeship; yes, and close knit too. But separate them and they're individuals again.” Currain made an assenting sound and Longstreet added: “It may be an armor we put on. If we loved our comrades too much, we could not endure it when they die.”

“I guess that's so.”

“Whatever the reason, the thing is true. If you doubt it, Currain, watch them in their leisure. At work, or at table, or at some jest together, they're laughing and genial; but the moment nothing any longer holds them together, see how quickly each withdraws himself
into silence, into another room, another place. Men value their privacy; they like to be alone.”

“I like to run into people I know,” Trav said. “Get news of friends and kin. I've got some friends in the Eleventh North Carolina that I want to look up when the army draws together again.” He added as though this made a difference: “But of course, they were my friends before the war.”

An elderly gentleman rode out from a great house they passed and saluted them, introducing himself. “Thomas Paynton, General.” Any march brought such incidents as this. The gentlemen of the neighborhood were apt to ride a few miles with you, seeking what information you cared to give them, volunteering information that was often useful. Trav dropped back to let Mr. Paynton ride by the General's side, and their talk was random till Longstreet remembered that in Charlestown, now not far ahead, John Brown had been hanged, and spoke of it.

“Yes,” Mr. Paynton agreed. “Yes, I talked with that man, after his capture.” And he explained: “He came to my home during my absence to try to work on my negroes. They saw in him only an old man with a long beard who wanted to give them pikes with which to kill their white folks. Of course they were frightened, so they never spoke of it till after he was safe in jail; but then my old Andrew saw the maniac and recognized him and told me. I was sufficiently curious so that I went to see Brown before he was hanged, told him Andrew recognized him. Brown admitted it without any evidence of shame. He said I need never fear my negroes, that he could not move them at all, that they were completely loyal.”

“I had not known that Brown tried to excite the people.”

“Oh yes. He was in the neighborhood for some time before he turned to actual violence; visited many plantations hereabouts. When he found he could not enlist any black men as his recruits, he decided they were afraid to rise, that a bold stroke might give them their cue.”

“He knew as little about the black people as any other abolitionist,” Longstreet commented. “I've sometimes thought it must puzzle those ignorant fanatics up North, if they have enough intelligence to be puzzled, to see millions of slaves loyally protecting our women and children and our homes while we march off to war. You know, if
there were even one slave insurrection anywhere in the South, every soldier in Lee's army would desert and go home to protect his family, and the war would be over.”

“Of course,” Mr. Paynton agreed. “And if there were even a grain of truth in the lies preached by men like Garrison and Beecher and Emerson, the slaves would have butchered us long ago. But I suppose there were liars on both sides. Massachusetts at one end of the country, and South Carolina and Alabama at the other, equally ignorant, fed us lies for thirty years. Lies and abuse, flung back and forth by ignorant men, were bound to lead to battle in the end.”

“Lies are the tools of politicians.” Longstreet spoke sternly. “Good tools, too; because you can never catch up with a lie. And a lie is usually more interesting than the truth, so it's listened to more readily. The politicians feed us lies till they persuade us we believe things we really don't believe at all. It's their talk, poured into our ears or thrown at us by the newspapers, that brought us into this war. People will always be easily led to war as long as they believe what they hear and what they read, instead of thinking for themselves. And of course the lie most easily believed is that they're better than other men. The abolitionists think they're better than we are, and we think we're better than they are. So we're all fighting to prove it.”

Mr. Paynton amended that. “The abolitionists never could have done it without the Republicans to help. I suppose the worst insult you can throw at a Southerner for the next hundred years will be to call him a Republican.”

The next hundred years? Yes, that was the question: not what was best and wisest for today, but for tomorrow, for the years to come. Suppose the Confederacy established itself; suppose the Union fell. Was that, after all, conceivable? Longstreet at his own thoughts shook his head. No, it was not. Any victory the South won would be only temporary. Inevitably the force of a common language, common interests, blood ties, a shared heritage, would draw North and South together again.

But then this war, these battles, all were a bloody futility. He fell into an abstracted silence; and when Mr. Paynton presently, as though feeling himself dismissed, said good-by and turned homeward, Longstreet rode alone. The countryside was increasingly familiar. Bunker
Hill, where after Sharpsburg he had spent some weeks, was off to the west not far away. From the Shenandoah there was a rising swell of ground to the rolling plateau along which ran the Valley pike, with the masses of North Mountain paralleling the road to the westward. In the pastured lands beside the road, bone-gray ledges frequently broke the sod. Sometimes these ledges might extend for long distances, set on edge so that slanting slabs like toppling grave stones rose two or three feet above the green turf.

Off there to the westward, as the road he followed approached its junction with that which his men had taken, he saw a low cloud of dust stirred up by thousands of tramping feet; and his thoughts returned to his present problems. The army was a serpent stretched to its utmost length along many miles of road, with South Mountain to guard the flank toward the enemy; but they would presently enter Yankee territory. Then they must draw more closely together. They would have to live off the country; and as for fighting, they carried no more than enough artillery ammunition for one great battle. The soldiers could replenish their cartridge boxes from the wagons, but unless they won a battle and captured powder and shells and solid shot and canister and grape, the great guns would become useless baggage.

General Lee hoped this northward thrust would draw the enemy army out of his beloved Virginia. He hoped to fight a defensive battle where victory might earn a rich reward. He hoped at the worst to keep the fighting north of the Potomac till summer waned.

But suppose instead of victory they met defeat, or fought a drawn battle. What then? A strong uneasiness made Longstreet lift his horse to a trot. At Kearneysville he found Garnett's brigade, with Colonel Hunton for this day at its head, and he heard that General Lee was gone toward Martinsburg and pushed on to rejoin the commanding general. The rolling levels gave way to many little hills, and from the crest of each he could see behind him the line of marching men, the guns, the wagons of his First Corps on the move, crawling steadily northward along the undulating road. Above them hung the dust, and Longstreet thought the dust seemed to dull the sun, and he glanced upward. The sun was in fact obscured, but not by the dust. A thin mist of cloud, scored by barely perceptible lines, was drawn like a veil across the western sky. That promised rain tonight, or tomorrow.
Suppose, somewhere up there in Pennsylvania where they now were bent, they met a shattering disaster, and rains raised the river to flood stage behind them. What then?

This road they followed, this region they traversed, woke sombre thoughts. Hagerstown was not far away. Last September he had been at Hagerstown when a messenger brought word that McClellan was fighting to cross the South Mountain and strike their scattered forces. Then came the desperately hurried concentration and that bitter day of death at Sharpsburg. Longstreet looked off that way. South Mountain was a dim shadow in this increasing haze, but he could make out the notch of the gap through which McClellan came. The ford where after that bloody day at Sharpsburg this army crossed back into Virginia to lick its wounds was only a few miles to the eastward. Probably a crow could fly from here to last September's battlefield in five minutes, ten at the most. Longstreet remembered the dead who strewed that field, and the nightlong cries of wounded as they died; and he wondered whether those dead men might not just now feel the pound of marching feet as this army passed, and rouse from their shallow graves, and—what was that shuddering line he had read somewhere? —come to squeak and gibber at old comrades, and to call derisive greetings to living men who would soon be dead as they.

He set his jaw, forcing himself to forget that disastrous field so near the line of march they followed now. Last September Lee had only thirty or forty thousand men to face McClellan's hundred thousand, but now Lee led twice that many seasoned veterans toward Pennsylvania. The issue must be different this year.

He pushed through Martinsburg and on along the Valley pike. The road, a crushed limestone macadam, had once been hard and smooth; but for two years the tides of war had scoured it, the wheels of cannons and caissons and supply trains and the hoofs of horses and the feet of traveling men had beaten it and broken it. The damage they did, frost and snow and rain extended; so now it was in many places impassable for vehicles. At such spots the breaks had been by-passed, wagons and guns turning off into the fields; and when the ruts they cut became too deep, they took new ways. Every fence rail for miles had been burned for camp fires, and the highway, bordered by the scallops of the many turnouts like so much rude embroidery, was marked by the skeletons of
wagons wrecked and abandoned, by the decayed carcasses of horses or of mules.

Longstreet continued on this highway till, a few miles beyond Martinsburg, he found Lee's bivouac where a singing creek flowed into a great bend of the Potomac. Its music was sweet in the hush of the evening, and the hamlet, not surprisingly, was called Falling Waters. Longstreet spoke to the commanding general. Had the warm day helped those persistent rheumatic twinges? Yes, they were better, Lee assured him. Yes, all went well.

Next morning they woke to a drenching rain. The day began in sobering fashion. With a hard task ahead, the men must be kept strictly in hand, and though General Lee usually dealt lightly with offenders, this was not a time for mercy. So at dawn there was one execution in Pickett's division, and there were four in that of General Rodes. Longstreet from his tent heard the spatter of those fusillades. The sound was muffled. Probably the poor devils had been marched down to some glade among the willows by the river, where the steep banks would stop any bullets that went astray; and Longstreet imagined the squads with levelled muskets, the men about to die, the condemned and their executioners alike drenched by the steady rain and the drip from sodden trees.

When they had breakfasted they mounted, and at eleven o'clock they reached the ford at Williamsport. The Potomac, though it was here a wide and shallow stream, had long ago cut for itself a steep-sloped valley; and the road descended sharply to the narrow bottoms choked with willows, and crossed them to the waterside. Pickett's division was in the lead, and although the hard rain had already soaked them through and through, nevertheless the men, preparing to wade across, stripped off their trousers. As he approached the other bank Longstreet saw a group of ladies, looking under their umbrellas like an overnight growth of strangely tinted mushrooms, waiting to welcome General Lee into Maryland. Then one of the trouserless soldiers called in shrill warning:

“Shet yore eyes, ladies! Here we come!”

Pickett turned to hush the man with a stern word; then, splashing back to his place at Longstreet's side, he said with a chuckle: “That's
Red Wheatley of the First Virginia. He's the regimental clown, keeps the men in good humor on the hardest march.”

Longstreet had looked around to identify the jester, a brick-faced stalwart whose hat was all brim and no crown, his flaming hair plastered down by the steady rain. “He needs a new hat,” he commented, in mild amusement.

“He claims he likes that one,” Pickett explained. “Says he's afraid that red hair of his will catch fire if he keeps it dry!”

When they rode up from the ford, General Lee spoke to the waiting ladies with a gentle courtesy. Longstreet thought one of them, so small she seemed like a child, was no bigger than Louisa. Last night a courier had brought Lee dispatches from Richmond; but there was nothing from Mrs. Longstreet, and Longstreet wished he had some word. This was her fifth month; and during her pregnancies her worst times came with an inexorable regularity. She would be feeling badly through the days just ahead.

Pickett's men took the road that followed the valley of Conococheague Creek toward Greencastle, but Longstreet rode with General Lee to a roadside grove beyond the last houses of Williamsport. While they were at mess, a youngster brought a basket of raspberries as a present for General Lee. The boy was the age Gus would have been if he were still alive, and Longstreet made friends with him, at ease as he had always been with children. He called Trav to discuss in serious tones whether they could not use this young man on the staff, and the boy grinned and squirmed delightedly.