In March came the President’s second inaugural address. A newspaper containing a report of it floated early into camp and came into Bannister’s hands. He read the address word by word, sentence by sentence again and again. Then he called together the men who were fond of listening to him and read it to them.
“You will not find,” he said, “in all history, nor in all literature, a clause so sublime in thought, so simple in diction, so sweet with divine charity as this; listen: ‘With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’
“Gentlemen, that is Abraham Lincoln, than whom no man who ever lived in America has had a higher aim, a sweeter spirit, or a more prophetic vision.”
All winter Grant had sat before Petersburg, grim, silent, relentless, pushing here and there ever a little farther to the front, seeking the exhaustion of his enemy, waiting for the auspicious moment to let fall the blow which should lead quickly to the inevitable end. To Lee’s army looking from the heights on the tented foe in front of them by day, on the thousand camp-fires gleaming there at night, it seemed as though a ravenous monster, white-toothed, fiery-eyed, lay crouching before them, stretching out a sharp claw now and then, waiting pitilessly until the exhausted foe, weak and helpless, should fall, an easy prey, into its clutches. Surely no soldier, no army, ever held out more bravely against more fearful odds, in more desperate straits, than did this remnant of Lee’s tattered host, in its final effort to save the Confederate capital from falling into the hands of its enemies. Yet every drum-beat trembling on the soft spring air was but the knell of Richmond’s hope; every passing hour brought nearer and nearer her unavoidable doom.
Late in March Grant threw out a force on his left, under Sheridan, to meet and turn, and crush if possible, Lee’s right flank, and thus precipitate the fall of Petersburg. It was at Five Forks that the two armies met and clashed in the last decisive battle of the war. Overwhelmed in front, cut off from the main column on the left, borne down upon from the rear, fighting twice its numbers on every side, the little army of Confederate veterans, with a thousand of its men already captured, and a thousand lying dead and wounded along the barricades it had so stoutly defended, broke and fled helplessly and hopelessly to the west, only the darkness of night saving it from utter annihilation at the hands of Sheridan’s pursuing cavalry.
But on that field of Five Forks, after the blue-clad hosts had swept over it across the enemy’s redoubts, and only the grim harvest of battle was left, dread rows of fallen men and horses struggling and groaning among the silent dead, Rhett Bannister lay, at the edge of the White Oak road, his shoulder pierced by a minié ball, his dim eyes seeking vainly for the child of his heart. And just beyond lay Bob, stretched on the greensward, his blood-splashed face turned upward to the twilight sky, seeing nothing, knowing nothing of battle or victory, of friend or foe, deaf alike to the dying thunders of the conflict, to the exultant shouts of the victors, to the heart-stirring cry of that father who would joyously have given his own life that his son might live.
[CHAPTER XI]
THE GREAT TRAGEDY
But Bob Bannister was not killed at Five Forks, nor did he die of his wounds. A fragment of a bursting shell had struck his head, torn loose the scalp, laid bare the skull, felled him with a crash, and left him insensible for hours. He did not know when he was carried from the field; but, later on, he realized that he was being jolted over rough roads, that somewhere there was a great pain of which he was dimly conscious, and that now and then a cup of water was placed most refreshingly to his parched lips. When he did come fully to himself it was the day after the battle, and he was in the army hospital at City Point, one of the hundreds of occupants of the long rows of cots that lined the walls. His head was swathed in bandages, a blinding pain shot back and forth across his eyes, and in his mouth was still that insatiable thirst. On the cot beside him lay his father, who had also been ordered by the field surgeon to the hospital at City Point. Those minié balls made ugly wounds, as thousands of veterans of both armies can testify, and Rhett Bannister certainly needed surgical skill and careful nursing. But the surgeon who sent him to City Point, and who knew and loved both him and his son, had a deeper thought in mind. That wound of Bob’s, under certain conditions, might suddenly lead to something very grave, and—well, it was a good idea for the boy to have his father at his side. But, for stalwart manhood and clean and vigorous youth, wounds yield readily to proper treatment, and, before many days had passed, both father and son were well on the road to recovery.