We plunged forward across every ford and along every road that led from Bull Run towards Centreville. At every point we found “chaos come again.”
A squad of ten men, armed only with sabres and pistols, but backed by the Mameluke tradition, would call out to eighty or a hundred fully armed infantry: “Throw down your arms, or we’ll put you to the sword! Throw down your arms, or we’ll put you to the sword!”
The panic-stricken men would obey the order instantly, disregarding the fact that with a single volley they might have swept the insolent squad instantly out of existence.
It was not merely that the army was panic stricken. It was encumbered at every step by a multitude of embarrassing picnickers,—a multitude of men and women who had come out from Washington to see us exterminated and to join in a triumphal march to Richmond. These people had brought out with them more superfluous provisions than our army had eaten for a fortnight. They abandoned their luxuries in the middle of the road and ran. They left champagne enough unopened for a regiment to swim in. They fled precipitately, adding at every step by their own insensate fear to the panic that had already overtaken the troops.
Men cut horses out of vehicles that held helpless women, and madly mounting them abandoned their charges and their duties, in order to escape a present and impending danger to themselves. Fortunately for their charges, the Southerners were not making war on women.
Every woman was instantly assured of her own personal safety. Every horse that was left behind was hitched at once to a vehicle, and the vehicle loaded with women was started under an assurance of safe conduct towards Washington. When the supply of abandoned horses fell short, it was made good by animals from our batteries, and now and then by the riderless horse of one of the Mamelukes who had received a mortal wound.
Along the roads we found many dead men, for whose deaths no coroner would have been able to account—men utterly destitute of wounds, who had died clearly either of fright, or of exhaustion, or of both.
At Cub Run, an ambulance or a caisson broke down on the bridge and obstructed it. The obstruction almost instantly caused a congestion of two or three thousand panic-stricken soldiers and picnickers on the hither side of the stream.
Then came Kemper with his guns. He was as black as a negro with powder smoke. His cannoneers were equally begrimed. From the top of a hill, not more than two hundred yards distant,—pistol-shot range,—he opened fire with canister. The effect upon the crowd was instantaneous and almost startling. Its constituent members dispersed as a covey of partridges does when a shot-gun is fired into its lurking place. Some of them ran up the creek. Some of them ran down the creek. Some of them plunged into the creek, and crossed or drowned, as the case may be.
It was just then that Stuart rode up and cried out: “We’ll go into Washington to-night, boys. And my headquarters will be at Willard’s Hotel.”