VI
It was a dark, soft, summer night in Virginia, that of the 1st of July. After the tropical heat of the day, the air was being mercifully cooled, here on the hilltop, by a gentle breeze, laden with just a moist suggestion of the mist rising from the river flats and marshes down below. It was not Mother Nature’s fault that this zephyr stirring along the parched brow of the hill did not bear with it, too, the scents of fruits and flowers, of new-mown hay and the yellow grain in shock, and minister soothingly to rest and pleasant dreams.
Instead, this breeze, moving mildly in the darkness, was one vile, embodied stench of sulphur and blood, and pestilential abominations. Go where you would, there was no escaping this insufferable burden of foul smells. If they were a horror on the hilltop, they were worse below.
It was one of the occasions on which Man had expended all his powers to prove his superiority to Nature. The elements in their wildest and most savage mood could never have wrought such butchery as this. The vine-wrapped fences, stretching down from the plateau toward the meadow lands below, were buttressed by piles of dead men, some in butternut, some in blue. Clumps of stiffened bodies curled supine at the base of every stump on the fringe of the woodland to the right and among the tumbled sheaves of grain to the left. Out in the open, the broad, sloping hillside and the valley bottom lay literally hidden under ridge upon ridge of smashed and riddled human forms, and the heaped débris of human battle. The clouds hung thick and close above, as if to keep the stars from beholding this repellent sample of earth’s titanic beast, Man, at his worst. An Egyptian blackness was over it all.
At intervals a lightning flash from the crest of the outermost knoll tore this evil pall of darkness asunder, and then, with a roar and a scream, a spluttering line of vivid flame would arch its sinister way across the sky. A thousand little dots of light moved and zigzagged ceaselessly on the wide expanse of obscurity underneath this crest, and when the bursts of wrathful fireworks came from overhead it could be seen that these were lanterns being borne about in and out among the winrows of maimed and slain. Above all, through all, without even an instant’s lull, there arose a terrible babel of chorused groans and prayers and howls and curses. This noise could be heard for miles—almost as far as the boom of the howitzers above could carry—and at a distance sounded like the moaning of a storm through a great pine-forest. Near at hand, it sounded like nothing else this side of hell.
An hour or so after nightfall the battery on the crest of the knoll stopped firing. The wails and shrieks from the slope below went on all through the night, and the lanterns of the search parties burned till the morning sunlight put them out.
Up on the top of the hill—a broad expanse of rolling plateaus—the scene wore a different aspect. At widely separated points bonfires and glittering lights showed where some general of the victorious army held his headquarters in a farm-house; and unless one pried too curiously about these parts, there were few enough evidences on the summit of the day’s barbaric doings.
The chief of these houses—a stately and ancient structure, built in colonial days of brick proudly brought from Europe—had begun the forenoon of the battle as the headquarters of the Fifth Corps. Then the General and his staff had reduced their needs to a couple of rooms, to leave space for wounded men. Then they had moved out altogether, to let the whole house be used as a hospital. Then as the backwash of calamity from the line of conflict swelled in size and volume, the stables and barns had been turned over to the medical staff. Later, as the savage evening fight went on, tons of new hay had been brought out and strewn in sheltered places under the open sky to serve as beds for the sufferers. Before night fell, even these impromptu hospitals were overtaxed, and rows of stricken soldiers lay on the bare ground.