House Divided (183 page)

His breakfast done, he found Nig and took a handful of last year's dead broom sedge and wiped the caked mud and sweat off the big horse's flanks; and Nig nuzzled him affectionately. Trav returned to General Longstreet. Colonel Latrobe, who was Chief of Staff since Moxley Sorrel had been promoted to become a brigadier and to take
an almost fatal wound in front of Petersburg, departed on some business of command; and Longstreet said affectionately:

“Well, Currain, you look better since your breakfast ”

“I'm ashamed to be so worn-out,” Trav confessed. “I'm beaten down, no more strength left in me.”

Longstreet spoke in an impersonal, reflective tone. “I'm rarely tired.”

“You never seem tired,” Trav agreed. Then he turned at the sound of an approaching horseman; and General Pendleton rode near, dismounted, dropped the reins over his arm and approached them.

Longstreet greeted him courteously, and Trav rose and moved aside. Beyond hearing, he watched them speak briefly together; but General Pendleton did not sit down, and General Longstreet did not rise. When Pendleton rode away, Trav returned; but at once he felt a surging anger in the big man; and after a moment, thinking the other might prefer to be alone, he was about to leave him. But Longstreet said gruffly: “Sit down! Sit down!” Trav obeyed; and after a moment Longstreet seemed to laugh to himself, and without looking at Trav he said: “If I hadn't other business in hand I should have called him to account ”

He seemed to invite a question. Trav asked: “What was it, sir?”

“Why, if you please,” said Longstreet scornfully, “some of our general officers believe we should surrender this army, and Pendleton came to ask me to convey their opinion to the commanding general!” He added: “I assured him that if General Lee didn't know when to surrender without my volunteering the information, he would never know. Pendleton said he would go to General Lee himself; and I told him that if I were in command and he brought me such a message I would invoke the Articles of War and have him shot!”

Trav did not speak, for he knew guiltily that he too believed the hour for surrender had come. Longstreet after a moment reflected: “I was perhaps too blunt; so doubtless I have made an enemy of General Pendleton—as if we hadn't, all of us, enough enemies on our hands just now. But such men as he are good haters. If the chance ever comes, he will do me an injury one day.”

Latrobe returned. “The road will soon be open for us, General,” he reported.

The march that day was along a road deep in mud, and through a forest of pines with rare small openings on either side, and past shabby cabins where fields had been worked to exhaustion and abandoned. Everywhere along the road they saw silent evidence that this mass of men was no longer an army. They passed wagons broken down and abandoned, guns mired and left hub deep in mud, muskets and cartridge boxes thrown aside by men too tired to carry them further. They passed human debris, too: men who had marched a hundred miles in these six days with no more than an occasional handful of corn to eat, till they fell in their tracks and could only drag themselves to the roadside and lie helpless there. Trav remembered that for almost a year, in the trenches in front of Petersburg, these men had been on short rations. There had rarely been even one day when they could eat their fill, through all the weary winter that was done. It was little wonder that after a week of marching and fighting, marching through mud ankle-deep and which clung to their broken shoes so stubbornly that even with a stick it was hard to scrape it away, they should at last collapse. Many of them lay like dead men, and half a dozen times Trav saw men who surely were dead; and once he dismounted to examine a gaunt boy with long, fair hair, whose open eyes stared upward at the sky. The boy was dead, though with no wound on him; dead of hunger and fatigue, dead of a broken heart.

He was not the only one. Trav counted a dozen along that dreadful road where the abandoned wreckage of the army, as explicitly as a white flag, confessed defeat.

That day the enemy pressed them hardly at all. The column moved slowly, for worn-out horses were barely able to drag wagons through the stiffening mud of drying roads. The eternal trees that walled the road, shutting out any distant view, seemed to Trav to make the ordeal even more terrible. Once from a gentle rise beyond New Store they saw, through the notch which the road cut in the woods ahead, distant mountains far away; and sometimes they caught glimpses of three low wooded peaks rising against the sky a few miles to the right. But for the most part they might as well have been making a night march, trudging blindly on. There were no crossroads. The Yankees were coming on behind them in countless hosts. None knew what force might wait to bar their way ahead.

Their thinned ranks, before night, were somewhat recruited. The woods were full of stragglers from the head of the column whom exhaustion had forced to drop behind, or of men from units which had been crushed and scattered. All the long day these men came out of the fringing forests, some with muskets and some without, begging for any scrap of food. Promises, or the gift of a bit of bacon or a crust of corn bread, drew them into the column; so that at dusk Trav thought the First Corps was by hundreds stronger than when the day's march began.

A little before sunset, they overtook an artillery battalion which had drawn off the road, and the commanding officer came to speak to them. “I'm Colonel Hardaway, General,” he reported. “I regret, sir, that we can go no farther. Horses and men are exhausted.”

“All your horses, Colonel? All your men?”

“Most of them.”

Longstreet said gently: “Very well. Abandon the guns you cannot move. Bury them and cover their graves with leaves, so those people won't find them and use them against us. Bring on what you can.”

Before Colonel Hardaway turned aside, Trav asked: “Aren't the Third Richmond Howitzers in your battalion, Colonel?” And when the other said yes, Trav asked Longstreet's permission to delay a moment here. “Brett Dewain is with the Howitzers,” he explained.

 

Trav found Brett slumped beside his gun, and they had a few minutes together. Brett said Cinda and the others were still safe when he left Richmond. “But I don't know what's happened to them since. We saw a great glare in the sky, toward morning; and some refugees said the whole city was on fire. The Yankees weren't there, not then. I suppose General Ewell burned the warehouses, and the fire spread.”

Trav nodded. Richmond was in another world. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Brett laughed feebly. “My jaws and gums and teeth are sore from chewing parched corn. It's all we've had since Tuesday, and damned little of that. And my feet are blistered raw. We marched to Branch's Church Sunday night; walked, for fear we'd break down the horses. It seems to me we've done nothing since then but march—or run. Cavalry began to cut at us as soon as we passed Amelia Court House.
Day before yesterday they really scattered us. Then yesterday we got into a hellhole of a swamp, and the drivers cut the traces and galloped away.” He added grimly: “Oh, not all of them of course. We saved some guns, to lug them this far and bury them here.”

“It's almost over, I suppose.”

Brett nodded. “I suppose so. It's hard to see how we can go on.”

Trav said: “I saw Burr at Rice's Station. He is—tired, of course, and worried about Barbara, with Sherman so near Raleigh.”

The sun was low; the day had been gentle and cool, with a fine soft breeze. “They've let us alone today,” Brett said.

“They're just herding us north, keeping us away from Johnston's army. That's all they have to do.” Brett did not speak, and Trav looked all around. The oak trees were in tassel, spring was on the flood. “I saw a wild turkey in the woods a while ago,” Trav remarked; and he rose stiffly, sore muscles lame and aching. “Well, I'll have to go,” he said. They clasped hands and he climbed into the saddle and rode away.

 

The sun was near its setting. Trav passed a roadside church and went on, and the western sky burned red with bright glory and then paled as night came down. When Trav overtook Longstreet, the General asked: “Well, did you see Mr. Dewain?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good!” Longstreet fell into abstracted silence, their horses plodded wearily through the night. Trav mustered strength to speak.

“They haven't hit us today.”

Longstreet made a half-mirthful sound. “ 'Lys Grant's giving us a chance to think things over.”

“Did we burn the bridges at Farmville? That would slow them.”

“Alexander burned them, yes. A little too soon. Fitz Lee wasn't across, but he found a ford upstream.”

“I don't see how the men keep going.”

“Every man has untapped powers. No one knows what he can do till he's tried to the uttermost. There's an exhilaration in doing something you didn't know you could do. A horse will founder itself. Once a man is tired enough, his own exhaustion feeds his spirit, and he will march himself to death.”

“Some of the men have done it today, and before today.”

Longstreet did not speak. After a long time, trains at a halt clogged the road ahead, and Longstreet said: “Well, it's eleven o'clock. We might as well bivouac here. The men had better be prepared to meet some pressure from the enemy at dawn. I'll ride on and find the commanding general.”

Trav and the others stayed behind. When Longstreet returned, the headquarters tents were pitched, the fires burning, pork broiling over the flames. No one questioned him, but after he had eaten he spoke to them.

“Well, gentlemen, our advance is near Appomattox Station, five or six miles ahead.” He reflected, half to himself: “Two years ago this army with its trains would have made a column sixty miles long. Now, from front to rear, we're strung along a scant six miles of the Lynchburg pike.” No one spoke, and he said: “General Lee's headquarters are a mile or two ahead, and General Gordon is close to Appomattox Station. He thought there was no one in front of him; but some Yankee cavalry hit Walker's guns about nine o'clock, and captured some of them and drove them back on Gordon. Gordon says he has only some two thousand men in hand. His stragglers have been falling back all day, some of them to join us. We're the body of the army now.”

Trav asked: “What will we do?”

Longstreet said calmly: “Why, bivouac, sleep, wake tomorrow, and march on.”

“To what?” Trav persisted, in dull rebellion at this long futile folly.

“To whatever waits, Major. We will march till we find some barrier we cannot break.” The big man's tone hardened. “And then we'll break it, if our orders so direct.”

Trav nodded, moving wearily aside. He led Nig to a patch of new grass to let the big horse crop what he could. Away from the fire, darkness settled smotheringly down, and Trav hated the night. They had been groping in the dark for days, plodding along unfamiliar roads where the mud was churned deep under their laboring feet, threading their way among monotonously similar hills and valleys, seeking always to turn southward but finding always those blue-clad men across their path. This army was like a penned animal running
along beside a fence in search of any opening and finding none. It was breathless with its own haste to be free, and exhausted by its many failures.

He could not rest; and at last he mounted and went slowly toward the front. The road he followed was a congestion of wagons halted either in the road itself or in park just off the highway; and soldiers slept or sprawled in limp exhaustion or sat in muttering groups among the trees on either side.

He came after a little to a clearing, and saw in the moonlight a building beside the road, and heard men's voices and a word or two. Half a dozen men were sitting in talk on the steps of the building. He thought it a church and asked a question. Yes, this was New Hope Church, they said. He caught a sardonic amusement in the voice of the man who spoke; and he remembered with a curious pang that there was a New Hope Church not far from Chimneys, on the road to Martinston.

“Where is the advance?” he asked.

“Two or three miles ahead.”

Trav moved on. After a mile or so the road descended steeply and then climbed to the crest of a low ridge and then descended gradually into more open land. He saw scattered campfires in the valley below him; and he saw other campfires burning on the opposite heights. A group of horsemen came up the road toward him, and he spoke to one of them.

The officer was of Gordon's staff. He said those fires yonder on the heights were Gordon's men. “But if you were there, you could see Yankee fires beyond.” General Lee had summoned General Gordon; they were riding back in obedience to that summons.

The officer went on to overtake the others, but Trav rode slowly down the hill. Nig's hoofs woke hollow echoes from a bridge across a little stream. Up the hill beyond lay a village, with a courthouse around which the road divided and then united to become one road again and to go on toward the west. Gordon's men were there; and beyond, at no great distance, fires marked the enemy lines.

Trav needed to ask no questions. Their situation was clear enough. With the enemy across their front, and the enemy pressing their rear, they were hopelessly penned. Lee's great Army of Northern Virginia,
that army which for almost a year had manned forty miles of defenses against all the force Grant could bring to bear, was now just a weary huddle of exhausted, hungry men.

Trav rode slowly back toward Longstreet's bivouac, scarce heeding his surroundings; but half a mile or so beyond the stream, and a little off the road to the right, he saw a small fire burning. Beside it stood General Lee; and Longstreet, puffing at his pipe, sat on a log across the fire. Trav recognized Gordon and Fitz Lee. Peyton Manning and Colonel Latrobe were at the roadside, too far away to overhear the group in council there, and Trav paused with them.