House Divided (169 page)

He met her eyes, completely understanding; but he shook his head. “The Weldon road was lost last summer,” he reminded her. “And the Piedmont, from Danville to Greensboro, keeps breaking down.”

“I see. But I can't help it.” She spoke to Tilda. “I'm glad you can be here with Vesta.”

Tilda did not understand. “Why, Cinda?”

It was Brett who answered. “She's going to Jenny.” Vesta squeezed her mother's hand, not dissenting; but Tilda cried in astonishment and concern:

“Oh, Cinda, you can't possibly, can you?”

Brett chuckled. “If anyone can, she can.”

Cinda kissed him as tenderly as though they were alone. “You're my dear husband. Brett Dewain,” she said.

November, 1864-February, 1865

 

 

T
RAV would remember that last winter in front of Richmond as would remember that last winter in front of Richmond as a time when he longed to do something, and do it quickly, but could not know what to do. He had moments of ravening hunger to strike the enemy while he was still strong enough to do so; to strike them in his own person, with his own hand. He regularly wore that long sword which his father once had borne; and to supplement the LeMat which Von Borcke had given him, he belted on a heavy revolving pistol patterned on the Colt Navy model and made by Griswold and Grier at their Georgia armory. Except that the frame was of brass—for iron was scarce in the Confederacy—it was a duplicate of the Colt. Trav gave his weapons solicitous care, drawing the charges and renewing them every damp or rainy day. He was a little self-conscious about his warlike gear, but not even General Longstreet seemed to find it amusing.

“We're going to need every man before we're through,” he said. “And every bullet.”

But that hour of need was to be a long time coming. Too weak to attack, they could only wait for the enemy's move. In late autumn, in order to secure his flank, Longstreet set his men to strengthening the works toward White Oak Swamp; and at Trav's suggestion every road that might be useful to the enemy was broken up with heavy plows, so each rain left them bottomless pits of mud, and bad weather presently put an end to effective movement.

Thereafter, between their forces and the regiments on their front something like a truce was reached. The scattered firing by the
pickets ceased, and on occasion the men bartered with the enemy for small luxuries. Trav resented this. To wait the winter through, with sure defeat coming nearer every day, preyed on him and drew his temper short; he said explosively one day to Longstreet: “They make friends too damned quickly, General. Can't we stop that?”

Longstreet smiled. “Man was designed to be a peaceable animal, Currain; to live in trees and to survive by avoiding danger, rather than by fighting. His natural weapons aren't strong enough to protect him against even small wild creatures. A few rats, if they work together, can kill and devour the strongest man; yes, even a few ants can do it. But man was ambitious to be the master, so he invented weapons. He learned to make nooses, to strike with clubs, to stab, to hurl projectiles. He learned how to kill, so that he could come down out of his tree. He's taught himself to kill; but it's a lesson he has learned, not his natural bent. And it's a lesson he easily forgets. We make men into soldiers, killers; but as soon as we leave them to themselves, they stop fighting and become men again.”

But though he did not interfere with this friendliness between the lines, Longstreet kept his men at work, digging bombproofs, building entrenchments, opening fields of fire, strengthening in every way the defenses they must hold. He wished for cavalry, but the horses were worn out after months of heavy work and scant feed, and General Lee had found it necessary to let many cavalry units withdraw from the front to rest and recuperate their mounts. A day or two before Christmas, Longstreet told Trav that he had suggested to General Lee that the cavalry be mounted on mules.

“Though probably if we tried it, the men would desert in a body, with a few hot remarks about tradition. We're all thinking too much of the past, Currain, and not enough of the future. I'd like to hear some fine word from General Lee that would turn our minds in that direction.”

The General declined Cinda's invitation to share their Christmas. “That's just the day 'Lys Grant might try to take us off guard.” Trav reminded him that at the request of Dr. Platt, the rector of St. Paul's in Petersburg, General Grant had stopped all bombardment of the city on Sunday, so that worshippers might attend church undisturbed; but Longstreet said: “That doesn't prevent his attacking our lines, Sunday
or Christmas or any other day. No, I'll stay here. Tell Cousin Cinda to ask me another time.”

His headquarters were in a house on the Williamsburg road, a short hour's ride outside the city. Not infrequently he and Trav spent the night at the house on Clay Street, and between Longstreet and Lucy a pleasant fondness grew. The bearded man teased her about Garland. What would she say to his bringing Garland to Richmond, instead of leaving him to pine in Lynchburg with his mother? A pity, surely, to keep young hearts so far apart! Lucy, at first confused and hot with pretty blushes at his jesting, learned to answer him in kind. She might coquet with him, declaring that she could not be really fond of Garland when she knew an older man who was so wonderful and for whom—since, alas, he was already wed—her heart was breaking. Playing this comedy with him she passed more and more quickly into young womanhood.

 

Trav envied the General his ability, during these interludes in Richmond, to put aside his cares. At headquarters there was no respite. Each day's reports from divisional and brigade commanders brought new anxieties. Too many soldiers were applying for sick leave without sufficient cause; and the daily losses, a man here and a man there killed by enemy sharpshooters, provoked gloomy thoughts. To die in the heat of battle might serve some purpose; but to die from a random shell or a casual bullet, though it did no good, left you just as dead. On the South Side there was more activity, but in Longstreet's lines north of the river there was little to do except listen to disturbing news and read desperate letters addressed to the soldiers by wives at home who were half-crazed with weariness and with worry for their hungry children. Each morning brought reports of fresh desertions; the numbers began to run to scores.

But Longstreet and his divisional commanders held their men better than the generals on the Petersburg front. “We're more comfortable here, for one thing,” Longstreet explained when Trav spoke of this. “And also, we've not so many conscripts. Pickett on the South Side has ten deserters to Kershaw's one here; five hundred and twelve desertions in one ten-day period to Kershaw's forty-one. That is to Kershaw's credit, but it's no discredit to Pickett.”

Trav knew that Longstreet's affection for Pickett—an affection which Trav had never shared—might color his words; but he did not speak; and Longstreet went on: “The men can't be blamed. We can shoot them—or at least we could if President Davis would let us—but we can't blame them. They're ill-fed; they know there's no longer hope of victory, and they know that the faint hearts in high places who can escape are doing so. The men stand to it better than their officers. Too many of our soft-fingered Richmond dandies plead sick to dodge duty in the winter mud; and the men see these officers take sick leave and fail to recover from their trumped-up ailments. Right now, in my thirteen brigades, I have a major general and seven brigadiers absent. With faltering at the top, Currain, it's a wonder the ranks are as steady as they are.”

The number of desertions steadily increased, particularly after the failure of the Hampton Roads conference, when Confederate commissioners proposed peace and President Lincoln replied that a return to the Union was his only condition. The whisper went through the ranks that this was no longer a fight for freedom, but only to save Jeff Davis's skin. Trav had from Captain Blackford a hint of the despair in high government circles. Mrs. Blackford had come to be with her husband, and they had rooms in the home of Dr. George, at the corner of Grace and Jefferson. The house was one of a row, and Mr. Hunter, the Secretary of State, lived at Mr. Stegar's, next door.

“The walls are thin,” Captain Blackford said. “And after the commissioners returned from Hampton Roads we could hear him sigh, all night long, and groan, and pace up and down.”

It had not occurred to Trav that men like the Secretary of State had their hours of solitary torment and despair. Trav rarely tried to put himself in another's place; but Captain Blackford's word made him wonder. Did President Davis sometimes in lonely darkness sigh and groan and wring his hands and pace the floor? Did Mr. Benjamin? General Lee? General Longstreet?

Not General Longstreet, no; Trav was sure of that. Others might falter and despair, but not Longstreet; no, nor the officers nearest him, who took from him their inspiration. General Field and General Kershaw were as steadfast as ever. Since Kershaw became a divisional commander, he had fought with Early in the Valley and shared the
humiliation of defeat at Cedar Creek; yet when he brought his division back to its work in the First Corps the men were disciplined and reliable. Because General Kershaw was a Camden man, and he and Brett and Cinda were old friends, Trav had some personal acquaintance with him. He wore a heavy mustache so low that it was like a beard; his upper lip appeared to be clean-shaven while his chin was almost concealed by that remarkable mustache. But though it was easy to smile at the visage he chose to present to the world, he was a steady and a competent divisional commander.

Trav believed the First Corps would hold its fighting strength as long as Longstreet himself survived, and one day he said so. Longstreet's eyes lighted with pride.

“But the Yankees have ripped the entrails out of the Confederacy, Currain,” he said. “I talked with Admiral Semmes a day or two ago. Instead of ranging the seven seas in the
Alabama
, he's now commanding a few anchored gunboats here in the river. But when he was making his way back to Richmond, he travelled from Mexico clear across the South; and he saw collapse and destruction everywhere. Plantations ravaged, houses burned, every sugar mill and saw mill and grist mill put to the torch; homeless slaves wandering through the country, stealing, living any way they can. He saw our own soldiers, deserters or disorganized units, drunken, plundering, doing as much harm as Sherman did in his worst fury.” And he repeated: “The body of the South has been eviscerated, Currain. Nothing but head and heart and hands remains.”

 

Trav was slowly beaten into despair. By the first of February Longstreet's artillery had not enough horses to move the guns, and one section of his lines had only two small regiments facing seven of the enemy's. A few days after that peace conference on a Yankee steamer in Hampton Roads, President Davis in a public speech predicted that before summer ended the North would sue for peace. He said Sherman, who had begun to march northward, was hastening to his ruin; said Lincoln would find that when he met the Confederate peace commissioners he had been talking to his masters. Davis's predictions were so absurd that no one took them seriously, and in the army Longstreet's comment seemed to Trav a just one.

“I've thought for a long time that Mr. Davis was a rascal,” the General said. “But he's worse: he's a fool.”

Yet Trav found some Richmond people thought President Davis was right, and were confident of eventual independence, and predicted that England and France would realize that if the North conquered the South she would turn her strength against them. These optimists were vocal; the pessimists kept their opinions to themselves. But if Trav stayed at home over night, when he rode out to headquarters in the early morning he sometimes saw the words “Vae Victis” chalked upon walls; and once on Purcell and Ladd's drug store on Main Street someone had written in huge letters: “The Lord is on our side, but in consequence of pressing engagements elsewhere He could not attend at Fisher's Creek, Winchester, and Atlanta.” More than once Trav saw the police erasing these signs, but they reappeared.

In mid-February, Longstreet said he had written General Lee urging a surprise seizure of gold, to be used to buy supplies with which to feed the army. “The farmers won't take Confederate money,” he pointed out. “But they'll rush to sell their produce for gold.”

“We can't do that legally, can we?” Trav asked.

“Necessity's our law. If we stop to make a law about it, the gold will disappear. No, I'd send men with an armed guard simultaneously to every vault in Richmond and take possession.”

Trav wondered whether such a measure would be worth the indignation it would cause. “Most of the gold in the country is in private hands. I knew a lady in Augusta who buried nineteen thousand dollars in gold in the cellar under a sawdust pile. Some of it was hers, the rest belonged to her relatives.”

“I know who you mean,” Longstreet agreed. “Mrs. Morgan. She also confided in me.” He added honestly: “And I suppose there are many like her. But that nineteen thousand dollars would give a good many soldiers some substantial meals.” He banged his fist on his knee. “Why, Currain, hundreds of these poor fellows are so nearly starved that they're going blind. They can't see a thing at night, and they can't see well even in daylight.”

Trav knew that many men suffered from this affliction. “They'll
get better when the spring sprouts come, when they can eat some green things.”

“A great deal can happen before that,” Longstreet reminded him.

One day the General showed him a note from General Ord, commanding the Union army whose lines faced theirs. “What do you read in that, Currain?”

The note asked for a meeting to discuss measures to end the friendly exchanges between pickets. “Why, General Ord can stop these exchanges whenever he chooses,” Trav pointed out.

“Exactly. So he has some other purpose. We will meet him, hear what it is.”

On the return from that rendezvous between the lines, Longstreet at first was silent. “General Ord thinks it is time to make peace,” he said at last. “He suggests certain amenities, informal, unofficial, which might have good result.”

“What amenities, General?”

“He would have the ladies begin it.” Trav understood from Longstreet's tone that the proposal appealed to him. “You know Louisa and Mrs. Grant are old friends. He suggests they exchange calls. Mrs. Longstreet would go into the Union lines under a flag and pay her respects to Mrs. Grant, and then Mrs. Grant would come into Richmond and return the courtesy. He thinks that might lead to a meeting between 'Lys Grant and General Lee; and that five minutes' frank private talk between them would find a formula for ending all this.” He was briefly silent. “I suppose it will be necessary to consider Mr. Davis and his feelings,” he reflected, and touched his horse. “I think we must ride into Richmond, Currain.”