CHAPTER XXII.
Pleasanton's advance on Culpeper—Crossing the Rappahannock—The Fight and the Calamity of Rawson's Cross-Roads—Taking of Culpeper—Pleasanton's Volunteer Aide—Townsend versus Coles—The Meeting of two who Loved each other—And the little Ride they took together.
On Sunday the thirteenth day of September, 1863, and Monday the fourteenth, but principally on the former day, took place that running fight which displayed some of the very noblest qualities of the federal cavalry shown during the War for the Union, and which is better entitled than otherwise to be designated as the Battle of Culpeper. One of the first conclusive indications was given in that fight, that while the rebel cavalry, which at the beginning of the war was certainly excellent, had been running down from the giving out of their trained horses, and the deterioration of the quality of their riders through forced conscription,—the Union cavalry, at first contemptible in force and inefficient in comparison to their very numbers, had every day been improving as fast as augmenting, until they had become the superiors of what the best of their foes had been at the beginning of the contest. War can make any thing (except perhaps statesmen) out of a given quantity of American material; but it can unmake as well, when it strains the material existing and creates a forced supply for the vacant places of the dead and the vanquished, out of the infirm and the incapable; and before the end of this conflict the lesson will have been so closely read as never to need a repetition.
The rebels held Culpeper and the south bank of the Rappahannock, and had held the whole of that line for weeks, formidable in their occasional demonstrations, but still more formidable in what it was believed they might do by a sudden crossing of that dividing stream at some moment when the Union forces should be deficient in vigilance, preoccupied, or otherwise embarrassed. They were to be driven back if possible, from their threatening front, or if not driven back, at least struck such a blow as would make early offensive operations on their part improbable. These were the intentions, so far as they can be known and judged, which led to the crossing of the Rappahannock at that particular juncture.
At three o'clock on the morning of that Sunday which was to join with so many other days of battle during the rebellion in proving that "there are no Sabbaths in war,"—at an hour when the thick darkness preceding the dawn hung like a pall over the banks of the rugged stream and the hostile forces that fringed it on either side—the cavalry camps on the north side of the Rappahannock were all astir. All astir, and yet all strangely quiet, in comparison with the activity manifested. No mellow bugle rang out its notes of reveille; there was no rattle of drum or shrieking of fife; the laggard sleeper was awakened by a touch on the shoulder, a shake, or a quick word in his ear. Horses were saddled in silence; and at the commands: "Prepare to mount!" "Mount!" given in the lowest possible tones that could command attention, the drowsy blue-jacketted, yellow-trimmed troopers, all be-spurred and be-sabred as if equal foes to the horses they were to ride and the enemies they were to encounter,—vaulted lightly or swung themselves heavily, according to the manner of each particular man, into their high peaked McClellan saddles that seemed to be all that was left them of their old leader. The squadrons were formed as quietly and with as few words as had accompanied the awakening and the mounting; for if a surprise of the enemy's force was to take place, it was a matter of the highest consequence that no loud sound or careless exclamation should reach the ears of the wary pickets and wide-awake videttes of the rebels hugging close the banks on the south side of the narrow river.
The preparations were at last and hastily completed, long before the gray dawn after the moonless night had begun to break over the Virginia hills lying dark and cool to the eastward. Perhaps that very morning had been selected for the attack because on the night before the new moon had made its appearance and there was no tell-tale lingerer to throw an awkward gleam on an accoutrement and thus tell a story meant to be concealed. Troopers clustered together and formed squadrons, squadrons were merged into regiments which in turn swelled to brigades and brigades to divisions. It was only then that the extensive nature of the movement, which had Pleasanton at the head and Buford, Gregg and Kilpatrick all engaged in the execution, could have been conjectured even by an eye capable of peering through the darkness. It seemed scarcely an hour after the first awakening when the formation was complete and the order to "March!" given; and there was not even yet a gleam of red in the eastern sky when the whole command was in motion.
This large cavalry force, under Pleasanton as we have said, was composed of three divisions, commanded respectively by Buford, Gregg and Kilpatrick, all Brigadiers. The Rappahannock was crossed at as many different points, Buford with the First going over at Starke's Ford; Gregg, with the Second, at Sulphur Springs, four miles distant; and Kilpatrick, with the Third, at Kelly's Ford, nine miles farther down and thirteen miles distant from the place of crossing of the First. Stuart, the famous "Jeb," with his confederate cavalry, was known to be in force on the elevated ground at and around Culpeper Court House, with his pickets and videttes extending to the very edge of the Rappahannock; and a wide sweep of the Union force was believed to be necessary to circumvent him. Detachments of rebel troops were also known to hold all the prominent points between Culpeper and Brandy Station, where the brigades of Lomax and W. F. H. Lee were lying.
Pleasanton was over the river, with all his force before broad daylight—so rapid and successful had been the movement. The roads were dry and in as good order as Virginia roads are ever allowed to be by the powers that preside over highways; and the force, still in the three divisions, swept southward as silently as iron-shod animals have the capacity for bearing iron-accoutred riders. Napoleon la Petit had never yet succeeded in introducing gutta-percha scabbards for the swords of his troopers and gutta-percha shoes for their horses, even into the French cavalry; and the Yankee troops of Pleasanton had all the disadvantages of the usual rattling of bridle-bits, the clattering of sabres within steel scabbards, and the pounding of multitudinous hoofs upon the hard dry earth, the latter occasionally a little muffled by an inch of gray powdery dust, choking the riders as it made their advance less noisy.
Spite of the clanking of hoof and steel, however, the advance was made with such silence and celerity that the greater portion of the rebel pickets on the southern bank of the Rappahannock were captured, while the remainder—here and there one scenting danger afar off and holding an advantage in knowledge of the roads—fled in dismay to report that the whole Army of the Potomac, sappers and miners, pioneers and pontoniers, horse, foot and dragoons, was closing in upon Culpeper.
As the morning advanced and the light grew stronger, so that the danger and the persons of the attacking forces could at once be better distinguished, skirmishing commenced with that portion of the rebel force, stationed in more or less strength at various points and called to arms by their pickets being driven in upon them,—to meet and if possible check the advancing columns. Not long before they discovered that any effectual check to the forces which Pleasanton seemed to be pouring down every cross road and throwing out from behind every clump of woods on the roadsides, was impossible; and they fell back, skirmishing.
At Brandy Station (droll and unfortunate name, destined to supply more bad jokes at the expense of the dry throats of the army than almost any other spot on Virginia soil), a junction of the three divisions of Union troops was effected; and there, while that disposition was being made, a sharp fight took place between the First, under Buford, and the rebel cavalry under Colonel Beale of the Ninth Virginia. But that struggle, though sharp, was only of brief continuance: out-foughten, and it must be confessed, outnumbered, the enemy was driven back from the Station and pursued vigorously.
While the gallant Buford was thus occupied with the First, Gregg, with the Second division was making a detour to the right and pouring down his troopers upon Culpeper from the north by the Ridgeville road, driving before him upon the main body at the Court House a rebel brigade that had held the advance, under General Lomax (an officer whose name, we may as well say, apropos of the bad jokes of war-time, had caused nearly as many of those verbal outrages upon English, as the unfortunate Brandy Station itself).
Kilpatrick, meanwhile, with his Third division had not been idle. (When was he ever known to be idle, except when others held him in check, or ineffective except when some other than himself misdirected his dashing energy?) He had swept around to the left, nearly at the same time that Gregg made the detour to the right, and striking the Stevensburgh road advanced rapidly from the east towards Culpeper and the right of the enemy's position, which rested on Rawson's Cross-Roads, two miles south-east of the Court-House. The rebels here made a stubborn resistance, and steel met steel and pistol-shot replied to sabre-stroke as it had not before done that day; but the odds were a little against them; they were outflanked by that incarnate "raider" of the Sussex mountains of New Jersey, who no doubt could trace back some drop of his blood to Johnny Armstrong the riever of the Scottish border, or the moss troopers of the Bog of Allen in Ireland; and they fell back to the town and beyond it, taking up new positions which they were not destined to hold much longer than those they had abandoned.
But this brief shock of battle between the division of Kilpatrick and the rebels opposed to it, did not roll away from the little hamlet of Rawson's Cross-Roads without the enacting of one of those sad tragedies, in the shedding of the blood of non-combatants, which seem so much more painful than the wholesale but expected slaughter of the field. Near the crossing of the roads there stood one brick house, of two stories, the only one of that material in the vicinity. This house, when Kilpatrick came up, was occupied by the rebel sharp-shooters, partially sheltered by the thick walls and bringing down the federal cavalry from their saddles at every discharge of their deadly rifles. Such obstructions in the way of an advance, especially when they destroy as well as embarrass, are not apt to be treated with much toleration by those who have the power to sweep them away; and immediately when the imminence of the danger was discovered, one of the federal batteries was ordered up to dislodge the sharp-shooters. It dashed up with all the celerity that whipped and spurred and galloping horses could give it, halted within point-blank range, unlimbered, and sent shell, canister and case-shot into and through the obnoxious edifice in a manner and with a rapidity little calculated upon by the mason who quietly laid his courses of bricks for the front and side-walls, in the quiet years before Virginia secession. The sharp-shooters were soon silenced and dislodged—at least all of them who were left after the last deadly discharge of missiles had been poured in by the battery; and the house was at once occupied, when the firing ceased, by a detachment of Union cavalry dismounted for that service. When those men entered the half-ruined building they first became aware of this extraordinary and deplorable tragedy, in which a little blood went so far in awakening regret and horror. They heard cries of pain and shrieks of distress and fear, echoing through the building, in other accents than those which could belong to wounded soldiers—the tones of women! And in the cellar they found the painful solution of the mystery—more painful far, to them, than a hundred times the death and suffering under ordinary circumstances. In that cellar, among smoke, and blood and dust, were huddled twenty or thirty non-combatants, men, women and children; and in their midst lay an old man, quite dead and the upper part of his head half carried away by a portion of shell, while fallen partially across his legs was the body of his son of sixteen, his boyish features scarcely yet stilled in the repose of death from a ghastly hurt that had torn away the arm and a part of the shoulder. Two women lay near, one dying from a blow on the temple which had driven in the bones of the skull like the crushing of an egg-shell, and the other uttering the most heart-rending of the cries and groans under the agony of a crushed leg and a foot literally blown to atoms. A sad sight!—a harrowing spectacle, even for war-time! And how had it been occasioned?
It would seem that on the approach of the cavalry and the commencement of fighting in the neighborhood, this party of non-combatants had crowded into this house—no doubt long to be known in the local traditions of the place as that of James Inskip,—and taken refuge in the cellar, believing that in it, as the only brick house in the vicinity, they would be safest from the missiles of the opposing forces. And so they would have been, safe enough beyond a doubt, had not the rebel commander, unaware of the presence of non-combatants in the building, or heedless of the common law of humanity not to expose them to unnecessary danger in any military operation, recklessly placed his sharp-shooters in shelter there and thus drawn the fire of the fatal battery. Two or three of the shells, crashing through the house, had fallen into the cellar and exploded in the very midst of the trembling skulkers in their place of fancied security,—with the sad results that have been recorded, and which none more deeply deplored than the men who had unwittingly slaughtered the aged and the helpless. Some of the Richmond papers told harrowing stories, a few days after, of the "inhuman barbarity of the dastardly Yankees who wantonly butchered those inoffensive men and helpless women and children in James Inskip's house at Rawson's Cross-Roads"; but they forgot, as newspapers on both sides of the sad struggle have too often done during its continuance, to add one word of the explanatory and extenuating circumstances!
By the time that Kilpatrick, with the Third, had concluded the episode of Rawson's Cross-Roads and driven the opposing forces back upon the town, Buford, with the First, after chasing the rebel cavalry under Beale to moderate satisfaction, had come up from the south, and the junction of the three divisions was accomplished.
On the elevated site of Culpeper and in the uneven streets of that old town which bears, like so many of its compeers, shabby recollections of English aristocracy that for some cause seem to suit it better than the thin pretence of democratic government,—there Stuart, than whom the rebellion has developed no more restless or more active foe of the Union cause, appeared determined to make a last and effectual stand. With a celerity worthy of his past reputation he placed sharp-shooters in houses that commanded the Union advance, planted batteries at advantageous positions in the streets, and threw up barricades of all the unemployed carts and wagons and all the idle timber and loose fence-rails lying about the town, in a manner which would have endeared him to the Parisians of the time of Louis Philippe. Right and left and on every hand, defending these obstructions and supporting the batteries, dashed his mounted "Virginia gentlemen," once the very Paladins of their knightly class, when Fauquier and the White Sulphur saw the pleasant sport of tilting at the ring in the presence of the bright-eyed Queens of Beauty of the Old Dominion,—now brought down to the level and compelled to contest the fatal advance, of a "horde of Yankee tailors on horseback"!
General Pleasanton, the actual as well as nominal head of the Union advance, held his position on an eminence a short distance east of the town, from which an excellent view of the whole situation could be commanded, and whence he directed all the movements with the rapidity of a soldier and the coolness of a man thoroughly in confidence with himself and well assured of the material of his command. He had won with the same troops before, even when placed at disadvantage: that day he felt that the game was in his own hands and that he could play it rapidly and yet steadily. The thing which worst troubled him as from that little eminence he looked out from under his bent brows, over the scene which was to witness so short, sharp and decisive a conflict,—was the knowledge how seriously the stubborn resistance offered by the rebels was likely to peril the non-combatants in the town, and how inevitably, from the same cause, the old town itself, just tumble-down enough to be historical and picturesque, must suffer from the flying shot and shell that know so little mercy. He had hoped, the first surprise succeeding, to take Culpeper against but slight resistance; and it was no part of his plan (it never is part of the plan of any truly brave man!) to batter the town if that measure could be avoided; but the balances and compensations of war are appreciable if not gratifying, musketry on one side is nearly sure to be answered in kind by the other, and artillery (when there happens to be any, and wo to the party without the "big guns" when the other has them at command!)—artillery has a very natural habit of replying to the thunderous defiance sent out by its hostile kinsmen. Culpeper, too well defended, was not the less certain to be taken, while it was the more certain to bear marks of the conflict that only the demolition of half its buildings could erase.
God pity and help the residents of any town given up to the ruthless passions of a fierce soldiery—to plunder and rapine and murder,—after what is so inadequately described as "taking by storm"! When for the moment hell is let loose upon the earth, as if to teach us that if we have yet something of the god lingering in our fallen manhood, we have yet something of the arch-fiend remaining to show how we accompanied him in his fall. When roofs blaze because a reckless hand has dashed a torch therein in the very wantonness of destruction. When the golden vessels of the church service and the sacred little memorials of happy hours in boudoir and bed-room are alike torn from their places, dashed into pieces and ground under armed heels, as if the inanimate objects bore a share of the wrong of resistance and could feel a part of the suffering meted out to it. When murder is for the time licensed and the blood of the defender of his door-stone and his hearth dabbles his gray hair on one or the other of those sacred places, and there is no thought of punishment for the red hand, except as God may silently mete it in the years to come. When—saddest and worst of all,—the matron is outraged before the eyes of her bound and blaspheming husband; and young girls, the peach-bloom of maidenhood not yet brushed from the cheek, are torn shrieking from the arms that would shelter them, to be so polluted and dishonored by a ruffian touch that but yesterday would have seemed impossible to their dainty flesh as the rising up of a fiend from the lower pit to rend the white garments of one of the redeemed in heaven,—so polluted and dishonored that a prayer for the mercy of death bubbles up from the lips at the last word before resistance becomes insensibility.
This wreck of a "storm" of human license is terrible—so terrible that the effects of the convulsions of nature, the tempest, the tornado and even the earthquake, sink into insignificance beside them. Heaven be praised that during the War for the Union, called by our English cousins so "fratricidal," we have as yet known no Badajos or even a sacking of Pekin! But only second to such scenes in horror and scarcely second in terror, have been some of those supplied when the battle issue of the two armies was joined near some quiet country town before lying peaceful and inoffensive, or when military necessity has made its houses temporary fortifications and its streets the points of desperate attacks and as desperate defences. Then what crashing of shot and shell through houses; what demolition of all that had before been sacred; what huddling together of the frightened and the defenceless who never before dreamed that, though war was in the land, it would break so near to them; what mad gathering of valuables and impotent preparations for flight that would be more dangerous than remaining; what whistling of bullets that seemed each billeted for a defenceless breast; what thunderous discharges of cannon that made every non-combatant limb quiver and every delicate cheek grow bloodless; what shouts in the street and cries of terror and dismay within doors; what trembling peeps through half-closed shutters, with an imagined death even in every such momentary exposure; what cowerings in cellars and hidings beneath piles of old lumber in garrets; what reports of defeat or victory to the party that was feared or favored; what claspings of children and ungovernable weepings of hysteria; what prayers and what execrations; what breakings-up and destructions of all that had been, and what revelations of the desolation that is to be!
Such, since the breaking out of the rebellion, has been the situation of many a before-peaceful town, in many a State that once rested happily under the shadow of the Eagle's wing. And such was the situation of one fated old town that day, when Gregg from the north, Kilpatrick from the east and Buford from the south, came up almost simultaneously and their forces charged recklessly into the streets of Culpeper Court-House. The excitement and confusion in the town at once became all that we have so feebly endeavored to indicate—women shrieking in terror, soldiers groaning with their wounds, children crying from fright; and blended with these and a hundred other inharmonious sounds, the shouts in the street, the bugle calls, the hissing of bullets, the rumble of artillery wheels, the broken thunder of the feet of trampling horses, the occasional crash of half-demolished houses, and the hoarse roar of the batteries as they belched out their missiles of death and destruction. Culpeper, for a short period, was a veritable pandemonium in miniature; and no detail can add to the force of that brief but comprehensive description.
Near the railroad bridge spanning the little stream running nearly through the centre of the town, the rebels had discovered a strategic point of no little consequence, and they had posted there a battery of several pieces, well served and annoying the advance of the Third division very materially. The battery seemed to be placed there, not only to obstruct the advance but to protect a train of cars just then being loaded by the rebels above, with munitions and other articles of consequence, preparatory to a start down the railroad southward. Battery D., Second New York Artillery, ordered for that service, ran up its sections at a gallop, unlimbered and poured in shot and shell, grape and canister upon the train, in such disagreeable rapidity as sent the half loaded cars away towards the Rapidan with all the speed that could be suddenly mustered. Still the battery at the bridge remained, firing rapidly and cutting up the head of Kilpatrick's column in a manner calculated to make the General gnash his teeth in indignation. The space to the bridge was uphill, accordingly raked downward by the rebel fire; the bridge itself was narrow and the footing for horses seriously damaged by the railroad tracks that crossed it with their switches and lines of slippery iron. Still it was known that that bridge must be cleared, at any cost, or the advance through Culpeper would be a most bloody one if accomplished at all. Just as Kilpatrick was about to order a charge of cavalry to clear that bridge and if possible capture the pieces, his intention seemed to be anticipated and a squadron of Stuart's cavalry rode down and took post, dismounted, behind the battery, in position to support, while three or four companies of rebel riflemen followed, ready to do deadly execution with their pieces against any troops attempting to charge, and to fall upon that force with resistless fury at the moment of their weakness, if the guns should be ridden over! No pleasant prospect, as the Sussex raider thought, and for a moment he apparently wavered in intention, while the battery played heavily and every instant saw one or more of his best troopers biting the dust of the causeway below.
But this momentary indecision, whether or not it would have continued much longer of his own volition, was not destined to do so when the will of another came into play. A horseman dashed rapidly over to the spot where Kilpatrick was momentarily halted, from Pleasanton a few hundreds of yards away, running a fearful gauntlet of the enemy's fire, as he did so, from a battery that had just wheeled into position and opened down a narrow cross-street to the left,—spoke a few quick words to the General and then awaited the movement that was to follow. And it was not long that he or the commander who sent him needed to wait. The command had been: "Clear that bridge and take the battery, at all hazards!" and Kilpatrick only needed that support of his own judgment to order a charge which he would have been best pleased, if he could only have gone back to be a Colonel for a few moments, to lead in person. His eye rolled questioningly over the Third for a moment, and then the rapid words of command followed. Only a certain number of cavalry could be employed upon that dangerous service, without making the carnage greater by throwing the troopers literally in the way of each other; and it was the Second New York, Harris Light Guard, a troop which had already won honor on every field touched by the hoofs of their horses,—called out for that quick, sharp, perilous duty that every squadron in the command probably coveted.
The gallant Second received the order with loud cheers that came nigh to imitating the well-known rebel fox-hunting yell, for some of their best fellows had fallen ingloriously and the human tiger was not only unchained but set on horseback. They formed column by fours with a rapidity which told of the fierce hunger of conflict; and when the bugles rang out the charge, the dusty and smoke-stained riders returned their now-useless carbines to their slings, drew sabres, and driving their spurs rowel deep into the flanks of horses that seemed almost as anxious as themselves, dashed forward towards the bridge. Their ringing shouts did not cease as they galloped on, and their sword-blades, if they grew thinner in number, still gleamed as brightly as ever in the sunlight, as they measured that narrow but fatal space, while round after round of grape and canister, carbine-bullets, musket-balls and rifle-shots, burst into their faces and mowed down their flanks as they swept on. Saddles were emptied, horses went down with cries of pain more fearful than any that man can utter, and brave men went headlong into the dust from which they would never rise again in life. But the progress of the charging squadron did not seem to be delayed a moment. The rebel gunners of the battery were reloading for yet one more discharge, when, just in the midst of that operation, over the bridge and upon them burst the head of that column which seemed as if nothing in the way of human missiles had power to stay it. Before the gray and begrimed cannoniers could withdraw their rammers the troopers were in their midst. Then followed that fierce cutting and thrusting of artillery swords and cavalry sabres, that interchange of revolver-shots and crushing of human bones under the feet of trampling horses, incident to the taking of any battery that is sharply attacked and bravely defended. A little of this, but still under heavy fire from behind,—and the guns were captured, with all their men and horses left alive.
And yet the work of the Second New York in that quarter was by no means finished. That steady and murderous fire continued from up the street, as the infantry and the dismounted cavalry of the support fell back; and it was only by one more sweeping charge that the annoyance could be removed. Scarcely any one knew whence came the voice that ordered that second charge, but the blood of the troopers was up and they made it gallantly. In three minutes thereafter a broken and flying mass, far up the street, was all that remained of the supporting force; but a fearfully diminished number of the cavalrymen rode back to assist in sending the captured battery to the rear. We shall have occasion, presently, to know something more of these two charges, undoubtedly the most spirited events of a day on which all the Union troops and many of the rebels reflected honor upon the causes they supported.
Immediately after the clearing of the bridge a gallant dash was made by Gen. Custer, the "boy general with the golden-locks" (the man who has made a solemn vow, it is said, never to shorten those locks until he rides victoriously into Richmond) leading the charge in person, with portions of the First Vermont and First Michigan cavalry, against a section of a battery, stationed nearly a quarter of a mile beyond the bridge and within a hundred or two yards of the front of Stuart's main body. These pieces were worked by as obstinate a set of gray-backs as ever rammed home a rebel cartridge; and the gunners, defiant of Custer's detour to the left to escape a direct raking fire, and apparently relying upon the main body lying so near them, continued to load and fire until the federal leader and his men were literally on the top of the pieces and fairly riding them under foot. Guns and caissons were taken, while the support relied upon seemed to be so paralyzed by the daring of the whole affair as scarcely to offer any resistance,—the horses hitched to the pieces, the guns limbered up, and the rebel gunners even forced to mount and drive their lost cannon to join the others in the rear!
A considerable rebel force of cavalry, artillery and infantry were by this time in full retreat below the town, along the line of the Orange and Alexandria railroad; and the Fifth New York cavalry were sent in pursuit. The gallant troopers of the Fifth charged at a gallop the moment they came within sweeping distance of the foe, but the high embankment of the road broke the charge, and the detour necessary to make a more advantageous approach deprived the gallant boys of their half-won laurels and allowed the flying enemy to escape.
While Kilpatrick was thus engaged, Buford and Gregg, with the First and Second, had been by no means idle. Dashing into the town, each from his chosen direction, the troopers of each leaped barricades and drove the rebels before them wherever encountered upon open ground; and a part of the force of either division, dismounted, skirmished from corner to corner and dislodged the sharp-shooters one by one from all their holes and hiding-places. Sometimes stubbornly resisted, at others seeming to have no foe worthy of their steel, the three divisions won their way through the old town; and the cavalry of Stuart, up to that time so often declared invincible, were at last driven pell-mell out of Culpeper and back to the momentary refuge of Pony Mountain. Even there they were again dislodged, the First Michigan cavalry accomplishing a feat which might have surprised even Halstead Rowan of this chronicle—routing a whole brigade by charging up a hill so steep that some of the riders slipped backwards over the tails of their horses, their saddles bearing them company!
The town of Culpeper was finally occupied at one o'clock, p. m.; and not many hours after the ridge behind it and Pony Mountain were in the hands of the dashing cavalrymen. Retreating towards the Rapidan, they were pursued towards Raccoon Ford on the left and centre by Buford and Kilpatrick with the First and Third divisions, while Gregg, with the Second, pushed a heavy Rebel force before him to Rapidan Station. By nightfall the rebels had been driven to the north bank of the Rapidan, where both forces bivouacked that night in line of battle.
Monday morning saw the recommencement of hostilities and the retreat of the rebels to the south side of the river, leaving the federal forces to hold the country between the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, with all the strategic points therein, Culpeper included. Stuart, it was said, had often boasted that "no Yankee force could drive him from Culpeper!" and if such a boast was really made and afterwards so signally disproved by the "horde of Yankee tailors on horseback," the fact only furnishes one more additional proof to Benedick's declaration that he would live and die a bachelor, so soon followed by his marriage with Beatrice,—that humanity is very uncertain and that human calculations are fallible to a degree painful to contemplate!
Such were the general features of the crossing of the Rappahannock and the Battle of Culpeper, one of the sharpest cavalry affairs of the war, and perhaps more important as illustrating the reliability to which the Union horse had attained from a beginning little less than contemptible, than from the mere military advantage gained by the movement. It now becomes necessary to descend to a few particulars connected with the event of the day, and briefly to trace the influence on the fortunes of some of the leading characters in this narration, exercised by the advance of General Pleasanton and his dashing brigadiers.
It has been seen that at a certain period of that day the division of Kilpatrick was held temporarily in check by the rebel battery posted at the railroad-bridge, and that for a moment the General, aware of the necessity of removing the obstruction if the direct advance through Culpeper was to be continued, yet hesitated in ordering the charge which must be made in the face of such overwhelming difficulty, until a peremptory direction from Pleasanton left him no option in the matter. And it is to personal movements of that particular period that attention must at this moment be directed.
Just when he made the discovery through his field glass of the havoc being wrought by the rebel battery and the momentary hesitation, Pleasanton, who did not happen to be in the best of humors with reference to it, was placed in the same situation in which Wellington for a few moments found himself on the day of Waterloo, when he employed the button-bagman with the blue umbrella under his arm, to carry some important orders. He was, in short, out of aide-de-camps. One by one they had been sent away to different points, and it so chanced, just then, that none had returned. Something very much like an oath muttered between the lips of the impatient veteran of forty, and one exclamation came out so that there was no difficulty in recognizing it:
"Nobody here when everybody is worst wanted! I wish the d—l had the whole pack of them!"
"Perhaps I can do what you wish, General."
The words came from a young man in civilian's dress—gray pants and broad-brimmed felt hat, but with a military suspicion in his coat of light blue flannel,—who stood very near the commander, his horse's bridle over arm and a large field glass in hand, and who had apparently been scanning with much interest a scene of blood in which it was neither his duty nor his disposition to take part.
"You?" and the veteran turned upon him, with something very like a laugh on his lips. "You? Humph! Do you know what I want?"
"Some one to carry an order, I suppose!"
"Exactly! Over that causeway, to Kilpatrick at the bridge. Do you see how that flanking battery to the left is raking every thing, and the one in front is throwing beyond Kil's position? The chances are about even that the man who starts never gets there! Now do you wish to go?"
"No objection on that account!" was the reply of the young man, who seemed to be on terms of very easy intimacy with the General, as indeed he was,—a privileged visitor, who had accompanied him in the advance, but eminently "unattached" and thus far neither fighting nor expected to fight.
"The d—l you haven't! Well, ——, that is certainly cool, for you! Never mind—if you like a little personal taste of what war really is, take this," and he scribbled a few words on a slip of paper on his raised knee—"take this and get it to Kilpatrick as soon as you can. If you do not come back again, I shall send word to your family."
"Oh, yes, thank you, General; but I shall come back again!" He had swung himself into the saddle of his gray, while Pleasanton was writing, and the veteran held the paper for one instant in his hand and looked into his face with a strange interest. What he saw there seemed to satisfy him, and he handed the paper with a nod. The volunteer aide-de-camp received it with a bow, and the next moment was flying towards the front of the Third, riding splendidly, running the gauntlet that has before been suggested, but untouched, and delivering his orders in very quick time and at emphatically the right moment. The important movement which immediately followed has already been narrated, in its bearing on the result of the day; but there were other effects not less important when personal destinies are taken into the account.
Gregg, who espied something on the right, that was likely to be hidden from Kilpatrick until it discovered itself by unpleasant consequences, had sent over an aide with a word of warning; and nearly at the same moment when the volunteer messenger from Pleasanton reached the brigadier, the officer from Gregg rode rapidly up from his direction. Both delivered their messages in a breath, and then both fell back at a gesture from the General. The aide from Gregg was turning his horse to ride back again to his post, when he caught a glance at the somewhat strangely attired man who had come in from Pleasanton. From his lower garments that glance naturally went up to his hat, and thence, by an equally natural movement, to his face. The dark brows of the officer bent darker in an instant, and perhaps there was that in his gaze which the other felt, (there are those who assert that such things are possible), for the next instant there was an answering glance and another pair of brows were knitted not less decidedly. Those two men were serving (more or less) in the same cause, but they looked as little as possible like two warm-hearted comrades in arms—much more as if they would have been delighted to take each other by the throat and mutually exert that gentle pressure calculated to expel a life or two!
Pleasanton was just calling out the Second to take the battery and clear the bridge. While he was doing so, the evil genius of one of those men drove them into collision. The messenger from Gregg, who wore the shoulder-straps and other accoutrements of a Captain on staff service, but with a cavalry sabre at his belt,—after the pause of a moment and while the other was still fixedly regarding him, spurred his horse close up to the side of the gray ridden by the civilian, and accosted him in a tone and with a general manner that he seemed to take no pains to render amiable:
"What are you doing here?"
"On staff service, Captain. How is your head?" was the reply, with quite as much of sneer in the tone as the other had displayed of arrogance.
"What do you call yourself just now?—'Horace Townsend' still?" was the Captain's next inquiry.
"To most others, yes: to you, Captain Hector Coles, just now, I am—" and he bent his mouth so close to the ear of the other that he could have no difficulty in hearing him, though he spoke the last words in a hoarse whisper that has even escaped us!
"I thought so, all the while!" was the reply, an expression of malignant joy crossing the face. "The same infernal coward—I knew it!"
The face of the man who had been Horace Townsend seemed convulsed by a spasm of mortal agony the instant after, but it gave place almost as quickly to an expression of set, deadly anger, the eyes blazing and the cheeks livid. He leaned close to the Captain and even grasped his arm as if to make sure that he should not get away before he had finished his whole sentence.
"Captain Hector Coles," he said, still in the same low, hoarse voice, but so near that the other could easily hear—"you called me the same name five or six weeks ago at the Crawford House, and I am afraid that I proved that it belonged to you!"
"I told you that I would kill you some day for that impertinence, and I will!" was the reply of the Captain, terrible anger in his face.
"No—if you kill me at all, and I do not think you will,—it will be because you believe me, with good reason, something more of a favorite with a lady whose name it is not necessary to mention, than yourself!"
This insulting boast of preference and allusion to Margaret Hayley were quite as well understood as they needed to be. There was another livid cheek, just then, and a fierce answering fire in the eye which told how deeply the barb rankled. But before the Captain could speak, to utter words that must have been equally bitter and blasphemous, the civilian continued:
"You challenged me for what I said at the White Mountains, Captain Hector Coles—you man with a swimming in the head! I refused your challenge then, but I accept it now. If you are not the coward you called me, you will fight me here and instantly!"
"Here and now?" These were all the words that the surprised and possibly horrified Captain could utter.
"Exactly!" was the reply, the voice still low and hoarse but rapid and without one indication of tremor. "I told you that I was on staff service. So I am. I have just brought General Kilpatrick orders from General Pleasanton to clear that bridge and take the battery yonder that is doing us so much damage. Ah! by George—there goes another of our best fellows!" This as a round shot came tearing into the ranks just ahead, killing one of the troopers and his horse. Then he resumed, in the same low rapid tone: "You see those New York boys forming there, to do the work. Ride with them and with me, if you DARE, Captain Hector Coles, and see who goes furthest! That is my duel!"
"I?—I am on staff duty—not a mere cavalryman!" There was hesitation in the voice and deadly pallor on the cheek: the civilian heard the one and saw the other.
"Refuse to go with me and fight out our quarrel in that manner," the excited voice went on, "and by the God who made us both, the whole army shall know who is the coward! More—" and again his mouth was very near to the ear of the other—"she shall know it!"
There are spells by which the fiend can always be raised, without much doubt, however troublesome it may be to find any means by which to lay him afterwards. To Captain Hector Coles there was one conjuration irresistible, and that had been used in the present instance. Shame before the whole army was nothing—it may be doubted, in fact, whether he had not known something of that infliction before at least a portion of the army, and survived it without difficulty. But shame before Margaret Hayley, after the boasts he had used, the underrating of others in which he had indulged, and the worship of physical courage which he knew to be actually a foible in her nature?—no, that was not to be thought of for one moment! Better wounds or death, out of the way of both which he had before so skilfully kept, than that! This reflection did not occupy many seconds, and his heavy brow was as black as thunder as he turned short round in the saddle and almost hissed at his tempter:
"Come on, then, fool as well as coward, and see how long before I will teach you a lesson!"
Horace Townsend—as he must still be called—did not say another word in reply. The Light Guard were by that time formed for the charge, and he merely said, in the hearing of all:
"Come—the Captain and I are going to take a ride with the boys! Who will lend me a sword?"
The strange demand for a moment drew general attention to him, and among other regards that of Kilpatrick. The idea of a civilian throwing himself into such a charge seemed to strike him at once, and before one of the orderlies could draw out his weapon and present it, the General had handed his, with the words:
"Here is mine!—Mind that you bring it back again!"
Kilpatrick unslung his sword and held up the scabbard with the blade, but the new volunteer merely drew out the blade with a bow and driving spurs into his gray dashed forward to the head of the column, Captain Hector Coles close beside him. Perhaps no two men ever went into battle side by side, with precisely the same relative feelings, since carving up men with the broadsword became a profession. Neither, it seems almost certain, had the least thought of devotion to the country, of hatred to the rebellion, or even of esprit du corps, moving him to the contest. The one was intent upon revenging an insult received long before, by getting the other killed in proving him a coward,—and may have had another but still personal motive: that other was equally anxious to keep up his own reputation in the eyes of a woman, and to get removed out of his way a man whom he believed to be a rival, but who was really no more in his way than Shakspeare's nobody who "died a' Wednesday." Both half blind with rage and hate, and both, therefore—let the truth be told—bad soldiers! Both following a petty whim or facing death as a mere experiment, and neither with the most distant thought of the fate that rode close behind, to protect or to slay, and each alike inevitably!
Just then the bugle rang out, the commands "Column forward! Trot, march! Gallop, march! Charge!" rang out in quick succession, and away dashed the Second, with the results that have already been foreshadowed in the general account of the movement. But though armies and the various smaller bodies that form armies, are great aggregates of manhood, they are something more; and who can measure, in reading an account of that bridge so gallantly carried, that attack so splendidly repulsed, or that point of battle held against every odds, with the conclusion—"Our loss was only two hundred [or two thousand], in killed and wounded,"—who can measure, we ask, the amount of personal suffering involved in that movement and its result?—who can form any guess at the variety of personal adventure, depression, elevation, hope, fear, delirious joy and maddening horror, going to make up that event spoken of so flippantly as one great total?
The rebel battery beyond the bridge had been throwing round shot and shell, as has already been observed, reaching far beyond Kilpatrick's front and doing heavy damage. It was inevitable that as the advance of the attacking column was seen, that fire should be redoubled. And before they had crossed half the intervening distance the rain of bullets from the supporting rebel riflemen began to blend with the fall of heavier projectiles, making a very storm of destructive missiles, more difficult for horsemen to breast than any opposing charge of their own weight could have been, splitting heads, crashing out brains, boring bodies full of holes from which the blood and the life went out together, and hurling horses and riders to the ground with such frequency that wounded men had their little remaining breath trampled out by their own comrades and every fallen animal formed a temporary barricade over which another fell and became disabled. Through the air around them rang the scream of shell and the shrill whistle of bullets, blended with the inevitable cry that rose as some bullet found a fatal mark, and the roar of agony when a horse was hurled desperately wounded and yet living to the ground. The shout with which the troopers had at first broken into their charge, did not die away; and it did not cease, in fact, until the command had done its work—until the battery was taken and the supports scattered by the supplementary onset; but with what sounds it was blent before the cavalrymen reached the rebel guns, only those who have listened to the same horrible confusion of noises can form the most distant idea. To all others the attempt at description must be as vague as the thought of Armageddon or the Day of Falling Mountains!
If those sights and sounds cannot be described, who shall describe the sensations of those who then for the first time rode point-blank into the very face of death? Not we, certainly. The very man who has experienced them can tell no more, one hour after, of what existed at the time, than one moment's rift in a drifting cloud reveals of the starlit heaven above.
What Captain Hector Coles really felt when first meeting that iron and leaden storm so unlike the usual accompaniments of his "staff service," may be guessed but can never be known. He rode on gallantly, at least for a time: that was quite enough.
What the ci-devant Horace Townsend experienced may be easily enough indicated, and in one word—madness. He was stark, raving mad! The anger felt a few moments before; the novelty of the position; the motion of a horse that bore him nobly: the sword, that was no holiday weapon but a thing of might and death, clasped by his unaccustomed but nervous hand; the shouts of fierce bravery, the groans of anguish and the scream of missiles; above all, the rousing for the first time of that human tiger which sleeps within most of us until the fit moment of awakening comes—no witches' cauldron on a blasted heath ever brewed such a mixture to craze a human brain, as that he was so suddenly drinking; and it may be said that his rational self knew nothing of what followed. He was riding on—it might have been on horseback on the solid earth, in a fiery chariot through the air, or on the crest of a storm-wave at sea—he could have formed no idea which. When he came within striking distance of the foe, he was swinging that heavy sword of Kilpatrick's, at something, everything, he knew not what, that seemed to stand in his way. Nothing appeared to hurt him, nothing to stop him or the gallant gray he rode. There was a red mist over his eyes, and the thunder of twenty judgments rang in his ears: he knew no more. He was mad, stark mad—so drunk with the wine of human blood and the fiendish joy of battle, that the powers of heaven might have looked down in pity on him as upon a new and better developed descendant of the original Cain, smiting all his brothers to a death that could not satisfy the hot thirst of his evil soul.
Only once he seemed to be for a moment clearly conscious. It was when they rode full upon the battery, trampling down men and horses and sabring every thing that had life, but under a fire which seemed to rain from the opened windows of hell. He saw a man who had thus far kept at his side, recoil, rein his horse backward, leap over the fallen friends and foes who barred his flight, and dash down the track towards the bridge. He saw, and knew Captain Hector Coles; and in his madness he had reason enough left to shout "Aha! Coward! Coward!" and then the red mist closed again over his eyes and he fought on. He did not see what followed before the flying man reached the bridge—the fragment of a shell that struck him in the back and literally tore him in pieces, horse and rider going down and lying stone dead together.
He could not have told, under oath, who gave the command for that supplemental charge upon the supporting force. And yet his tongue uttered it, and he was in the front, still waving his sword through the red mist and letting it fall with demoniac force upon every thing that stood in his way,—when the last hope of the rebels was thus broken. He had known but little, most of the time: after that he knew literally nothing except that his fierce joy had turned to pain. As if through miles of forest he heard the notes of the bugles sounding the recall; and he had a dim consciousness of hearing the soldiers speaking of him in words that would have given him great pleasure had he been alive to appreciate them! Then he was back at the bridge. Kilpatrick was there, somebody cheered, and the General held out his hand to him. He tried to hand him back the sword that had done such good service, said: "I have brought it—back—" and spoke no more. Then and only then, as he fell from his blown and beaten gray, they knew that his first charge had a likelihood of being his last—that a Minie bullet, received so long before that some of the blood lay dried upon his coat, had passed through him from breast to back,—thank God not from back to breast!—so near the heart that even the surgeon could not say whether it had touched or missed it!