XXV. — HUNTED DOWN.
On the morning of the 7th of April, and throughout the 8th, the horrors of the retreat culminated.
The army was fighting at every step. Hope had deserted them, but they were still fighting.
On every side pressed the enemy like bands of wolves hunting down the wounded steed.
Gordon and Longstreet, commanding the two skeleton corps of infantry, and Fitzhugh Lee the two or three thousand cavalry remaining, met the incessant attacks, with a nerve which had in it something of the heroic.
Fitz Lee had commanded the rear guard on the whole retreat. All along the route he had confronted the columns of Sheridan, and checked them with heavy loss.
At Paynesville he had driven Sheridan back, killing, wounding, and capturing two hundred of his men. At Highbridge he captured seven hundred and eighty more, killing many, among the rest the Federal General Read. On the morning of the 7th, beyond the river, he drove back a large column, capturing General Irwin Gregg.
That was a brave resistance made by the old army of Northern Virginia, reader, as it was slowly advancing into the gulf of perdition.
Beyond Farmville there was no longer any hope. All was plainly over. I shrink from the picture, but here is that of one of my friends. “It became necessary to burn hundreds of wagons. At intervals the enemy’s cavalry dashed in and struck the interminable train, here or there, capturing and burning dozens on dozens of wagons. Hundreds of men dropped from exhaustion, and thousands let fall their muskets from inability to carry them any farther. The scenes were of a nature which can be apprehended in its vivid reality only by men who are thoroughly familiar with the harrowing details of war. Behind, and on either flank, a ubiquitous and increasingly adventurous enemy; every mud-hole and every rise in the road choked with blazing wagons; the air filled with the deafening reports of ammunition exploding, and shell bursting when touched by the flames; dense columns of smoke ascending to heaven from the burning and exploding vehicles; exhausted men, worn-out mules and horses, lying down side by side; gaunt famine glaring hopelessly from sunken lack-lustre eyes; dead mules, dead horses, dead men, everywhere; death many times welcomed as God’s blessing in disguise—who can wonder if many hearts tried in the fiery furnace of four unparalleled years, and never hitherto found wanting, should have quailed in presence of starvation, fatigue, sleeplessness, misery, un-intermitted for five or six days, and culminating in hopelessness?"{1}
{Footnote 1: The Hon. Charles Francis Lawley, in the London Times.}
They did not “quail,” they fell. It was not fear that made them drop the musket, their only hope of safety; it was weakness. It was an army of phantoms that staggered on toward Lynchburg—and what had made them phantoms was hunger.
Let others describe those last two days in full. For myself I can not. To sum up all in one sentence. The Army of Northern Virginia, which had for four years snatched victory upon some of the bloodiest battle-fields of history, fought, reeled, fired its last rounds, and fell dead from starvation, defying fiercely with its last breath, gurgling through blood in its throat, the enemy who was hunting it down to its death.
Call it what you will, reader—there was something in those men that made them fight to the last.