House Divided (155 page)

Longstreet's eyes were open; he weakly blew the blood out of his mouth. “Tell General Field to take command.” He had to spit to clear his mouth again. “Press them!” he whispered.

General Field reached his side, uttering a sorrowing word; but Longstreet made a fierce gesture, laboring to speak. “Press them. Don't let them rally.”

There was urgency in voice and eyes. General Field stood up to obey; and Longstreet spoke Lee's name. Moxley Sorrel came to hear his labored words. “Tell—situation. Tell General Lee—we have them!”

Sorrel rode to find the commanding general. After a little, Dr. Cullen staunched the hemorrhage and looked up and met Trav's eyes. “He can be moved,” he said.

Trav called men; he sent Lieutenant Dunn to bring a stretcher. He heard someone say that General Jenkins was dead from the same volley that had struck Longstreet. Captain Manning came to help him; Trav asked some desperate question, and Manning told him what had happened. In the smoke and the confusion, the men of the Twelfth Virginia were mistaken for Yankees; shots and then a volley were exchanged.

“We rode right into the cross fire,” Manning said. “We barely prevented a second volley.”

General Anderson came to Longstreet's side, and painfully Longstreet explained to him the waiting opportunity, the position of the battle. “Press them hard,” he urged. “Hard. Quick. No pause.” He choked, his voice failed.

The stretcher was ready. Trav helped lift him on it; he placed the General's hat over his face to shield his eyes from the sun. They began to carry him to the rear, past Jenkins's men moving into the action; and a man here and there called a question.

“Is he dead?”

Trav answered them. “No, just wounded.”

Someone muttered doubt, and Longstreet seemed to hear, for he lifted his hat from his face and dropped it. “Let them see me alive,” he muttered. The nearest men saw the movement and raised a shout of gladness. Trav, walking behind the stretcher, heard the affection in those shouting voices and his eyes filled with proud tears.

He saw General Lee coming with Moxley Sorrel from the woods on one side, and he spoke to Longstreet. “General Lee's there! He'll drive them.” Longstreet's lips moved contentedly.

Behind him Trav heard Captain Manning, choked with sorrow and with rage, cry: “Shot by our own men! Just like Jackson!”

Colonel Taylor answered him. “And within a few miles of the same spot, and just a year later. And—like Jackson—just when he had the winning hand.”

A soldier touched Trav's arm. The man led Nig. Trav had forgotten the great horse. He mounted and overtook the others. Colonel Taylor spoke in a low tone: “We'll take him straight to Meadow Farm. Dr. Cullen says he can stand it.” And he said admiringly, “Did you hear him? No thought for himself; just urging us to press on, drive them.”

They reached the ambulance. Trav dismounted to help lift Longstreet in, and to make the big man more comfortable he took off the General's boots and his coat. His socks were white. Trav himself had put on fresh socks and underwear while the men rested at midnight last night, and he thought Longstreet must have done the same. Under his coat Longstreet wore only a thin undervest, darkly stained now
with blood that had spilled from that wound in his throat. His eyes opened; he saw Trav and smiled faintly under his heavy beard and muttered a request.

“Stay near me, Currain.”

“I will, General,” Trav promised; and when the other had been lifted into the ambulance, he gave Nig to a courier to lead and stood upon the rear step of the vehicle. Longstreet was very pale, his high forehead white as snow. He lay motionless, but once with his hand he lifted the blood-sticky undershirt off the wound for a moment, filled his great lungs, lay still again with eyes not quite closed.

The ambulance moved on, ringed by the cluster of horsemen. Behind them the din of battle began to fade. Trav, listening, thought there was a lull in the staccato of the muskets. Perhaps the Yankees were being driven beyond easy hearing. He wished to go back, to take his part in that fine triumph; but Longstreet had bidden him stay near, so he would not leave the man he loved who lay helpless now.

Near Parker's Store a messenger from General Lee brought word of continued gains, and asked for a report on Longstreet's wound. Lieutenant Dunn wrote the reply: the surgeons agreed that the hurt was serious but not necessarily fatal. The brief delay had given Longstreet some rest and relief from the torment of the journey; but when they reached Meadow Farm the big man was exhausted. Mrs. Taylor was there to take him in charge.

A night's rest brought strength back to him; but the news from the battle he had fought so well was disappointing. He had left the enemy broken and in flight, but after he was wounded there had been too much delay in aligning the formations, a long and costly pause. Not till late afternoon were the brigades thrown forward, and by that time the Yankees had rallied and entrenched. They beat back the assaulting troops and held their ground.

By way of compensation, the surgeons said General Longstreet's wound promised well. The bullet had smashed through his throat and right shoulder, and he had lost much blood; but unless there were complications, he would recover.

In the meantime he must be removed to some place of greater safety, and Longstreet himself suggested Lynchburg. “I'll go to Mrs. Longstreet's kinfolks there,” he said. “She's in Augusta, but she can join
me.” It was decided that Trav and Captain Goree would go with him.

Toward dusk, word came that Grant, after two or three days of heavy punishment, now lay inactive; and Colonel Taylor thought he would withdraw across the Rapidan as Hooker had done a year before. But Longstreet shook his heavy head. “Not 'Lys Grant.” He spoke harshly, wincing with pain. “He won't retreat as long as he has a regiment that he can order forward. He'll march around our right for Richmond.”

His prediction proved a true one. Next morning when they rode toward Orange Court House to put him aboard the Lynchburg train, they heard far away to the east the guns opening at Spottsylvania.

April—September, 1864

 

 

C
INDA would all her life remember the month of April in 1864 as a peaceful interlude, the happier by contrast with the bloodstained summer of darkening despair that was to follow. In April Julian and Anne were radiant with expectation; and Vesta too was shining with an inner content, dwelling on the threshold of realization. So April was a happy time, and Anne's baby boy was born on the last day of the month, and named for Brett Dewain.

But that same day came a foreshadowing of greater griefs when little Joe Davis, the President's son, left for a moment unattended by his nurse, fell from the low balcony of the White House and was killed. All Richmond shared that sorrow, and it came close to Cinda. She liked Mrs. Davis, and if they were not intimates yet they were friends; and she knew the Davis children, rioting and handsome and lively youngsters. Cinda and Vesta went together to the White House to offer sympathy; and the day the baby was buried Cinda wept to see the President and Mrs. Davis standing erect and steadfast beside the open grave.

There was a great crowd; it seemed that everyone in Richmond, and certainly every child in Richmond, was there. “And everybody so sorry for them,” Cinda said to Vesta afterward. “But a week from now they'll turn on Mr. Davis again, blame him for all our troubles.”

“Well, of course, everyone loves babies, and everyone's sorry for people who lose them; but just because his baby died doesn't make Mr. Davis a good president!” Vesta spoke strongly. “Hungry people have to blame somebody, when flour costs three or four hundred dollars a barrel!”

“Oh I know! And of course it's silly to be sad over just one little baby being killed, when the armies will soon be killing each other again.”

Vesta tucked her hand through her mother's arm. “We can't stop them, Mama.”

“Can't anyone stop them?” Cinda cried, but she answered her own question. “No. I know....”

 

On the Wednesday following they heard the first rumble of the coming storm. Tilda stopped at the house on Fifth Street to say there was a dispatch from General Lee, that Grant's army was moving. “And that means work for all of us,” Tilda pointed out. “The trains of wounded will be coming.”

“We'll be as ready as we can be,” Cinda promised. “As long as men are bound to fight, that's all women can do.”

That day too they heard gunfire toward York River, and next day Yankee troops were landing on the Peninsula; and the day after, two or three score enemy vessels put men ashore by the thousands at Bermuda Hundred. There was skirmishing along the Chickahominy, and the local militia marched to the defenses; but the peril at Richmond's very door was averted, and Saturday's dispatches from Lee reported successful battle against Grant's tremendous army.

At the hospital Cinda heard that Longstreet had been wounded. “Badly, they say,” she told Vesta, when she brought the news home. Vesta wished to cheer her.

“Pooh! The Yankees can't really hurt that big man!”

Cinda herself had had that same unreasonable certainty that Cousin Jeems was invulnerable; so to know that he had been shot was a shaking thing. If he could be hurt, then no one was safe. She tried not to think of Brett and Burr; yet they too must have faced the Yankee fire.

At church on Sunday they heard that Grant's first advance had been thrown back with heavy loss; but that evening the wounded came in a thickening flood. Some of the hurt men were not only wounded but terribly burned, and the wards were pitiful with their groans. From those who were able to talk Cinda heard of the fire that swept the battlefield, when helpless men could only lie and watch the greedy
little flames run among the dried leaves to gnaw at them. There was one boy, a Texan, a fair-haired child still in his 'teens, with a mercifully broken back so that though his feet and legs were charred like dead sticks he felt no pain.

“The woods were all smoke,” he said. “You couldn't see what you were doing. That's how it happened Old Pete was shot. The old Bull-of-the-Woods rode into a cross fire from our own men.” Cinda, listening to this boy, thought of his mother, his father; of what his home must be. They were fine people certainly to have so fine a son. She knew by his unnatural loquacity that he would not live the night, so since he was full of talk she stayed with him. “Bullets flying everywhere,” he said with shining eyes. “I guess half the men in the Texas brigade were hit, but we smashed them, drove them back. I was lucky. Some of us couldn't get away from the fire, but my arms were all right, so I dragged myself over to the road.” His quick tongue ran a while, till she saw his feverish color fade and his lips pale. When his words began to lag, she touched his head, said he must sleep; and he smiled and promised and closed his eyes. She turned to leave him, but as she did so his mouth opened in a strained stiff way, as though he wished to speak, or as though something choked him. His jaw locked with a little click; and while she stood beside him his closed eyes half opened. He was a slender, bright-haired youngster, very much like Julian; but she turned away. Living men needed her now.

She became inured to hideous sights and sounds and smells; and she had long ago learned to do tasks of which she would once have been incapable. These helpless men were as dependent as babies. To make them as clean and as comfortable as possible was no harder than to do the same for a baby, once you set your heart to the task. It was your heart, not your physical body, which gave you the needed strength. There were nights when she did not go home at all. She had a room, no more than a closet, where she had sometimes slept; but so many wounded needed beds that she gave up her cot to them. There was always a chair, or perhaps a bed from which some poor body had just been borne to the death house, where she could drop down for a moment's rest and rise again.

Wounded from the Wilderness were still arriving when a new host came from the first clash at Spottsylvania. Since there was no room
for them indoors they were lifted out and laid on the ground while the ambulances departed for a fresh load. Tilda and the ladies she mustered were busy at the depot where, when a train arrived, the wounded men were unloaded and left on the pavement to await transportation to the hospitals, while the emptied cars rattled away to the northward to bring back another load. Day and night the trains came, and while the hurt men waited, ladies gave them what comforts were possible, working under broiling sun or by the smoky glare of pine-knot torches held high in dark hands, providing blankets against the night cold, shade against the sun, some fashion of pillow for the weary heads, and always water, water, water for the parched and thirst-burned throats. There was need for such attendance at the hospitals, too; for when the wards were full, men must wait again, in the hot sun under clouds of ravenous flies or in merciful night that made the flies sluggish with cold. Sometimes the surgeons worked among them where they lay. Once Cinda, stepping out of her ward for a moment's breath, saw Tilda with a severed arm and an amputated leg hugged like babies to her bosom as she trudged toward the refuse trench; and Cinda had an insane desire to laugh at this obscene horror. Tilda was so awkward, and so smeared with blood and grime, and so absorbed in her efforts not to trip over the helpless men among whom she picked her way. God bless her!

There was so much to do: keep the flies away; see to it that water dripped steadily upon the bandages; go constantly from man to man to watch for those in need of sudden care. Vesta, though Cinda wished her to stay at home where she might be sheltered from these terrors, came to help as she could.

“But I'm not much good,” she told Cinda, smiling through tears. “I just blunder along. They're very patient with us, aren't they?—the men, I mean. I wanted to do something for one of them and he said he was all right, and I said: ‘Let me wash your face. You'll be so much cooler,' and he grinned and said: ‘Why, all right, ma'am; but you'll be the ninth lady that's washed my face today.'”

Once Cinda saw the girl kneeling beside a pallet on the floor where a man lay dying; and Cinda went to her and Vesta whispered: “He's French, Mama; talking French. I don't know enough French even to comfort him.”

Cinda leaned nearer the man tossing restlessly in burning fever; she murmured uncertainly:
“Notre père, qui est en ciel—”
The man instantly was motionless, seeming to listen, his lips soundlessly following the words to the end:
“A toi soit la pouvoir, la gloire à jamais.”
With the last words his lips were still, and a little parted. Cinda waited, Vesta standing beside her, till after a moment she was sure. She stood up, pressing her hands to her temples; but you must not let yourself feel anything. She called the nearest orderly.

“Take him to the death house,” she said.

Vesta cried in an anguished protest: “Oh, Mama!”

“Hush, Honey,” Cinda warned her. “There are seventeen men lying on the ground outside waiting for a bed.”

The day after, Cinda persuaded the girl to stay at home; but toward sunset she saw Vesta in the doorway, some warning in her eyes, and went quickly toward her. Vesta tried to smile reassurance.

“It's all right, Mama. I'm sure it's all right. But Burr's home.”

Cinda crossed her arms, wiping her hands on her sleeves. “He is hurt?”

“Yes. But not badly. But I thought maybe one of the surgeons—thought maybe you could come.”

Burr was more than all these others. “What is his hurt?”

“Why, both his hands.” Vesta spoke uncertainly. “He says some of his fingers are gone.”

Cinda nodded, cold and calm. A surgeon would be needed. Dr. Mason, chief surgeon of the Department of Richmond, happened at the moment to be in her ward. She appealed to him, and he said he would come when he could. His office was in Belvin's Block on Twelfth Street, opposite the end of Bank Street; to stop would not take him out of his way. Cinda thanked him. Vesta had brought the carriage, Diamond held the reins. “We'll have to give up the carriage,” Cinda thought, as she climbed in. “We mustn't keep horses when they're needed so.” She said: “Diamond, hurry.”

 

At home she found Burr lying on the sofa in her room, and he was white with pain. Cinda knew that a wound in the hand meant a peak of anguish; yet she faced him smiling. He was her son, but she could
do as much for him as she had done for the sons of other women. She kissed him, carefully casual. To be casual was to be strong.

“Now let me look at them, Sonny.”

His hands were bundles of twisted, filthy rags; he himself was dirty, worn, gaunt, his eyes red with sleeplessness. She would not let herself see this. His hands first. When the soiled bandage came stickily away, color drained out of his cheeks.

“June gave me brandy, Mama,” he said carefully. “Can I have some more?”

“Of course, all you like.” Brandy was the next best thing to chloroform.

Vesta held the glass to his lips while Cinda plucked the last wrapping off his right hand. The thumb was cleanly gone, the forefinger shattered and dangling by a thread. She felt a moment's gratitude; such a wound might make it impossible for him to fight again. He could never hold a sabre, or pull a trigger; she was sure of that. Under her quiet direction, old June brought hot water, castile soap, scissors, clean linen. Vesta began to scrape lint.

The oozing blood would do no harm. Cut away the proud flesh; then fresh bandages. Cinda worked in a steady concentration. There, that hand would do till Dr. Mason came. Now the other.

“More, Vesta,” Burr whispered, and gulped the brandy she gave him.

On the left hand, thumb and forefinger were untouched, but the other fingers were shattered. “Well,” Cinda commented, “put both hands together and you've a whole one, Burr.”

The brandy loosed his tongue. “One bullet did it all,” he said. “It just happened to catch both my hands in line. It tore my reins out of this one and my pistol out of the other. I wrapped them up as well as I could and came home.”

“Where were you?”

“Out at Yellow Tavern, not far from here. Their cavalry rode around us and headed for Richmond, and we had to race to catch them. General Stuart's wounded, Mama.”

Fresh bandages were in place. “There! Dr. Mason will come as soon as he can. Now we'll give you a bath, put you to bed.”

“I can sleep for a week.” On the way to his room, their hands under
his arms, he talked in volleys. That was the brandy. Good. Morphine was better, but brandy would help. While he lay half-asleep, Cinda and June undressed him and bathed him from head to foot; and Cinda yearned over his lean young body, the ribs stretching the skin. When they were done he slept as quickly as a tired dog.

Downstairs, Vesta asked: “Mama, did you hear him say General Stuart's hurt?” But Cinda only nodded. Burr was more than Jeb Stuart with his laughter and his fine uniforms and his flowing plumes. Every woman in the South loved Jeb Stuart, but Burr was Cinda's own.

Dr. Mason was cheerfully reassuring. “As good as ever in a week or two,” he promised. Not quite, Cinda thought; not with those maimed hands. Yet it was true that his hurts were mercifully slight. Anguish of torn nerves and smashed bone could be endured if life were safe. Dr. Mason spoke gravely of Stuart's hurt. “The Yankee cavalry were heading for Richmond,” he said. “He held them long enough to give time to man our defenses toward Ashland. They're bringing him to Dr. Brewer's home.” That was almost in the country, half a mile out Grace Street.

Vesta asked: “Is he badly hurt?”

“Fatally, I fear.”

 

In the morning Burr made light of his own injuries. “I can still handle reins and sabre, or at least a pistol.” He said that in the Wilderness the cavalry was not heavily engaged. “But then we had to hold Grant's advance at Spottsylvania till the First Corps could come up.”