A Little Battle
The great battles of a war like ours absorb the attention of historians; yet scattered between these grand climacterics, like local squalls or thunder-showers in the intervals of sweeping storms, there were hundreds of little, unrecorded fights which, to those who felt their fury often meant almost as much as the main tempests.
We found it so in the very last affair in which our regiment took part. Our term of service was all but ended. The men who had been detailed as clerks at headquarters, teamsters, ambulance drivers etc., had been sent back to their companies in anticipation of our speedy mustering out; everything seemed quiet along the Rappahannock; we reckoned our battles all fought and dared at last to believe that home-going for those who were left of us was actually a possibility. "Home again!"—it was all we talked of by day, it coloured our dreams by night as we slept in our pleasant camp under the summer moon.
When therefore, early on a June morning the command came to strike tents and prepare to move, a thrill of expectation went with it through the regiment. But our vision of home quickly melted as we saw the stir of preparation spreading like an advancing wave into all the regiments about us, and its last pathetic remnants were rudely blotted out by the distribution of the ominous twenty extra rounds of cartridge. We handled them gingerly, none too willingly, for they said to us, "Not home this time, boys,—battle once more first; some of you will never see home."
Late in the afternoon a short march brought our division to the hills above the fateful river; for the third time we beheld sleepy old Fredericksburg away at our right, and directly before us the familiar amphitheatre of fields shut in by distant hills. It seemed incredible that twice within six months trampling armies had here been locked in the bloody embrace of mighty battle; no more peaceful sight could be imagined than those gently rolling, grassy plains with their crown of wooded, leafy upland all bathed in the slanting rays of sweet June afternoon sunshine.
A single suspicious blot marred the landscape. Opposite where we stood, at the farther side of the river guarding our old crossing place, the yellow mound of a freshly dug earthwork loomed up; yet for all we could see it might have been a great grave, so silent, so apparently lifeless was it.
But there was no lingering for the view. Down the hill we went, out over the level ground beneath, and from every side we could see the dark lines pouring over the slopes until, with swift and silent precision the division was formed in battle array. In a few moments as if by magic the northern side of the river valley had become alive with the presence of a sternly-marshalled host.
The southern side also awoke. Out from a distant grove a Confederate regiment, the support of the as-yet-invisible picket line came forth. We could see the sheen of their rifles flashing in the sunshine as they hastened toward the earthwork.
As yet not a shot had been fired and scarce a sound was heard; even the tramp of marching feet and the rumble of artillery wheels was muffled by the soft, grassy ground. I can feel even now the queer sensation of unreality, as though it were all a gigantic pantomime, or some eerie flitting of armies of ghosts.
But appearances could not deceive us. We knew too well the Spirit of the Place; we waited its arousal with grave expectation. The feeling in our ranks was picturesquely expressed by a stuttering little fellow in our company when, as we halted for a few moments on the hills above and watched the silent river and apparently-deserted plain and hills, some one ventured the rash opinion that the enemy had decamped. The stammerer quickly replied: