"Come—the Captain and I are going to take a ride with the boys! Who will lend me a sword?"
The strange demand for a moment drew general attention to him, and among other regards that of Kilpatrick. The idea of a civilian throwing himself into such a charge seemed to strike him at once, and before one of the orderlies could draw out his weapon and present it, the General had handed his, with the words:
"Here is mine!—Mind that you bring it back again!"
Kilpatrick unslung his sword and held up the scabbard with the blade, but the new volunteer merely drew out the blade with a bow and driving spurs into his gray dashed forward to the head of the column, Captain Hector Coles close beside him. Perhaps no two men ever went into battle side by side, with precisely the same relative feelings, since carving up men with the broadsword became a profession. Neither, it seems almost certain, had the least thought of devotion to the country, of hatred to the rebellion, or even of esprit du corps, moving him to the contest. The one was intent upon revenging an insult received long before, by getting the other killed in proving him a coward,—and may have had another but still personal motive: that other was equally anxious to keep up his own reputation in the eyes of a woman, and to get removed out of his way a man whom he believed to be a rival, but who was really no more in his way than Shakspeare's nobody who "died a' Wednesday." Both half blind with rage and hate, and both, therefore—let the truth be told—bad soldiers! Both following a petty whim or facing death as a mere experiment, and neither with the most distant thought of the fate that rode close behind, to protect or to slay, and each alike inevitably!
Just then the bugle rang out, the commands "Column forward! Trot, march! Gallop, march! Charge!" rang out in quick succession, and away dashed the Second, with the results that have already been foreshadowed in the general account of the movement. But though armies and the various smaller bodies that form armies, are great aggregates of manhood, they are something more; and who can measure, in reading an account of that bridge so gallantly carried, that attack so splendidly repulsed, or that point of battle held against every odds, with the conclusion—"Our loss was only two hundred [or two thousand], in killed and wounded,"—who can measure, we ask, the amount of personal suffering involved in that movement and its result?—who can form any guess at the variety of personal adventure, depression, elevation, hope, fear, delirious joy and maddening horror, going to make up that event spoken of so flippantly as one great total?
The rebel battery beyond the bridge had been throwing round shot and shell, as has already been observed, reaching far beyond Kilpatrick's front and doing heavy damage. It was inevitable that as the advance of the attacking column was seen, that fire should be redoubled. And before they had crossed half the intervening distance the rain of bullets from the supporting rebel riflemen began to blend with the fall of heavier projectiles, making a very storm of destructive missiles, more difficult for horsemen to breast than any opposing charge of their own weight could have been, splitting heads, crashing out brains, boring bodies full of holes from which the blood and the life went out together, and hurling horses and riders to the ground with such frequency that wounded men had their little remaining breath trampled out by their own comrades and every fallen animal formed a temporary barricade over which another fell and became disabled. Through the air around them rang the scream of shell and the shrill whistle of bullets, blended with the inevitable cry that rose as some bullet found a fatal mark, and the roar of agony when a horse was hurled desperately wounded and yet living to the ground. The shout with which the troopers had at first broken into their charge, did not die away; and it did not cease, in fact, until the command had done its work—until the battery was taken and the supports scattered by the supplementary onset; but with what sounds it was blent before the cavalrymen reached the rebel guns, only those who have listened to the same horrible confusion of noises can form the most distant idea. To all others the attempt at description must be as vague as the thought of Armageddon or the Day of Falling Mountains!
If those sights and sounds cannot be described, who shall describe the sensations of those who then for the first time rode point-blank into the very face of death? Not we, certainly. The very man who has experienced them can tell no more, one hour after, of what existed at the time, than one moment's rift in a drifting cloud reveals of the starlit heaven above.
What Captain Hector Coles really felt when first meeting that iron and leaden storm so unlike the usual accompaniments of his "staff service," may be guessed but can never be known. He rode on gallantly, at least for a time: that was quite enough.
What the ci-devant Horace Townsend experienced may be easily enough indicated, and in one word—madness. He was stark, raving mad! The anger felt a few moments before; the novelty of the position; the motion of a horse that bore him nobly: the sword, that was no holiday weapon but a thing of might and death, clasped by his unaccustomed but nervous hand; the shouts of fierce bravery, the groans of anguish and the scream of missiles; above all, the rousing for the first time of that human tiger which sleeps within most of us until the fit moment of awakening comes—no witches' cauldron on a blasted heath ever brewed such a mixture to craze a human brain, as that he was so suddenly drinking; and it may be said that his rational self knew nothing of what followed. He was riding on—it might have been on horseback on the solid earth, in a fiery chariot through the air, or on the crest of a storm-wave at sea—he could have formed no idea which. When he came within striking distance of the foe, he was swinging that heavy sword of Kilpatrick's, at something, everything, he knew not what, that seemed to stand in his way. Nothing appeared to hurt him, nothing to stop him or the gallant gray he rode. There was a red mist over his eyes, and the thunder of twenty judgments rang in his ears: he knew no more. He was mad, stark mad—so drunk with the wine of human blood and the fiendish joy of battle, that the powers of heaven might have looked down in pity on him as upon a new and better developed descendant of the original Cain, smiting all his brothers to a death that could not satisfy the hot thirst of his evil soul.
Only once he seemed to be for a moment clearly conscious. It was when they rode full upon the battery, trampling down men and horses and sabring every thing that had life, but under a fire which seemed to rain from the opened windows of hell. He saw a man who had thus far kept at his side, recoil, rein his horse backward, leap over the fallen friends and foes who barred his flight, and dash down the track towards the bridge. He saw, and knew Captain Hector Coles; and in his madness he had reason enough left to shout "Aha! Coward! Coward!" and then the red mist closed again over his eyes and he fought on. He did not see what followed before the flying man reached the bridge—the fragment of a shell that struck him in the back and literally tore him in pieces, horse and rider going down and lying stone dead together.