On that twentieth day of July, 1861, the women gathered together were full of high hope and confidence. Some were perched upon goods boxes, arranged to serve as seats. Some were tripping about on foot, gliding hither and thither in gladness, as girls do in a dance, simply because their nerves were tuned to a high pitch, and their sympathetic feet refused to be still. But for the most part they sat in their carriages, with the tops thrown back in defiance of the fervour of the sun. Defiance was in the air, indeed, and the troops on their way to the battle-field were not more resolute in their determination to do and to dare, than were the dames and damsels there gathered together in their purpose to disregard sunshine and circumstance, while bestowing their smiles upon these men, their heroes.
After the fashion of the time among volunteers who were presently to become war-worn into veterans, but who were never to be reduced to the condition of hireling regulars, the men were free, as soon as a halt was called, to move about among the feminine throng, greeting their acquaintances when they had any, and being cheerily greeted by strangers, in utter disregard of those conventions with which womanhood elsewhere than in Virginia surrounds itself. There womanhood had always felt itself free, because it had always felt itself under the protection of all there was of manhood in the land. No woman in that time and country was ever in danger of affront, for the reason that no man dared affront her, lest he encounter vengeance, swift, sure, and relentless, at the hands of the first other man who might hear of the circumstance. No Virginian girl of that time had her mind directed to evil things by the suggestion of chaperonage; and no Virginia gentleman was subjected to insulting imputation by the refusal of a woman's guardians to entrust her protection against himself, as against all others, to his chivalry. So far was the point of honour pressed in such matters, that no man was free even to make the most deferential proposal of marriage to any woman while she was actually or technically under his charge and protection. To do that, it was held, was to place the woman in an embarrassing position, to subject her to the necessity of accepting the offer on the one hand, or of declining it while yet under obligation to accept escort and protection at the hands of the man making it.
Under this rigid code of social intercourse, which granted perfect freedom to all women, and exacted scrupulous respect for such freedom at the hands of all men, the intercourse between gentlemen volunteers and the young women who had come to visit them in camp was even less restrained than that of a drawing-room, in which all are guests of a common host, and all are guaranteed, as it were, by that host's sponsorship of invitation.
In all their dealings with the volunteers, the women of Virginia brought common sense to bear in a positively astonishing degree, reinforcing it with abounding good-will and perfect confidence in the manhood of men as their sufficient shield against misinterpretation. And they were entirely right in this. For "battle, murder, and sudden death," would very certainly have been the part of any man in those ranks who should have failed in due respect to this generosity of mind on the part of womanhood. The dignity of womanhood was never so safe as when women thus confidently left its guardianship to the instinctive chivalry of men.
For a time after the halt, Baillie Pegram was too busy to inquire whether or not any friends of his own were among the throng. For something had happened to Baillie Pegram over there in the Valley of the Shenandoah two or three days before. The gun to whose detachment he belonged as a cannonier had been detached and sent to an exposed position on the Martinsburg road. The sergeant in command of it had been killed by a bullet, and the two corporals—the gunner and the chief of caisson—had been carried to the rear on litters, with bullets in their bodies. There was absolutely nobody in command of the gun, but Baillie Pegram was serving as number one at the piece—that is to say, as the cannonier handling the sponge and rammer. Seeing the badly weakened gun-crew disposed to falter for lack of anybody to command them, and seeing, too, the necessity of continuing the fire, Baillie assumed an authority which did not belong to him in any way.
"Stand to the gun, men!" he cried. "If any man flunks till this job is done, I'll brain him with my rammer-head, orders or no orders."
A moment later the faltering of number three called upon him for the execution of his threat, and he instantly did what he had said he would do, felling the man to the grass, stunned for the time by a quick blow with the iron-bound rammer-head. Then he called upon number five to take the recreant's place, and that gun continued its work until the hot little action was over.
