XVI
THE STARVING TIME
THE stress of war had now fallen upon every Southern household. Its terrors had invaded every home. Its privations made themselves manifest in scanty food upon tables that had been noted for lavish and hospitable abundance, and in a score of other ways. The people of Virginia were not only standing at bay, heroically confronting an invading force three or four times outnumbering their own armies, but at the same time starvation itself was staring them in the face.
The food supplies of Virginia were exhausted. Half the State had been trampled over by contending armies, until it was reduced to a desert so barren that—as Sheridan picturesquely stated the case—“the crow that flies over it must carry his rations with him.” The other half of the State, already stripped to bareness, was compelled during that terrible summer, almost wholly to support the army at Richmond and Petersburg and the army in the valley, for the reason that the means of drawing even scanty supplies from the well-nigh exhausted country farther south were practically destroyed. Little by little Grant had extended his left southward and westward until it crossed the Weldon Railroad south of Petersburg, thus severing that most important line of communication. In the meanwhile the Federal cavalry was continually raiding the South Side Railroad and the Richmond and Danville Line, tearing up tracks, burning the wooden bridges, and so seriously interrupting traffic as to render those avenues of communication with the South practically valueless, so far at least as the bringing of supplies for the armies was concerned.
Thus Virginia had not only to bear the calamities of the war, but also, single-handed, to maintain the armies in the field, and Virginia was already stripped to the point of nakedness.
Yet the people bore all with patriotic cheerfulness. They emptied their smokehouses, their corncribs, and their granaries. They sent even their milky herds to the slaughter, by way of furnishing meat for soldiers’ rations, and they went thereafter without milk and butter for lack of cows, as they were already going without meat. Those of them who were near enough the lines desolated their poultry yards, and lived thereafter upon corn pone, with greens gathered in the fields and such perishable fruits as could in no wise be converted into rations.
The army was being slowly destroyed by the daily losses in the trenches, which, excluding the greater losses of the more strenuous battles, amounted to about thirty per cent a month in the commands that defended the most exposed points. Thus Owen Kilgariff’s mortar command of two hundred and ten men lost sixty-two within a single month, and some others lost still more heavily for lack of the wise discretion Kilgariff constantly brought to bear upon the problem of husbanding the lives and limbs of his men while getting out of them the uttermost atom of effective service of which they were capable.
Whenever a severe mortar fire was opened upon his line of pits, he would station himself in a peculiarly exposed position on top of the earth mound that protected his magazine. From that point he could direct the work of every gun under his command and at the same time do much for the protection of his men. A mortar shell can be seen in the air—particularly at night, when its flaming fuse is a torch—and its point of contact and explosion can be calculated with a good deal of precision. It was Kilgariff’s practice to watch for the enemy’s shells, and whenever he saw that one of them was likely to fall within one or other of his pits and explode there with the certainty of blowing a whole gun detachment to atoms, he would call out the numbers of the exposed pits, whereupon the men within them would run into the boom-proofs provided for that purpose and shelter there till the explosion was over.
In the meanwhile, he, posted high upon the magazine mound, was exposed not only to the mortar fire that endangered his men, but still more to a hail-storm of musket bullets and to a ceaseless flow of rifled cannon shells that skimmed the edge of his parapet, with fuses so skilfully timed and so accurately cut that every shell exploded within a few feet of his head.