The artillery and the balance of the trains must cross by the pontoon bridge. Bonfires were built on the northern and the southern bank, but all the wood was wet, and the flickering light proved deceitful as any darkness. The rolling smoke mounted and overhung the landings like genii from Arabian bottles. With sullen noise the guns crossed, hour after hour of sullen noise. The wagons with the wounded crossed. A heavy wagon, in which the badly hurt were laid thick, missed its way, and, with its horses, went blindly over the side into the rushing water, where all were drowned. After the guns and the wagons came the men of Longstreet’s corps. Dawn found the First not yet over-passed, while the Third waited on the pebbly stretch between the water and the hills. In the mean time Ewell and the Second had undertaken the ford.
That which, a month before, had been a pleasant summer river,—clear, wide, and tranquil, not deep, and well known by now to the Second Corps,—was to-night a monster of the dark, a mill-race of the Titans. The heaped wood set afire on either bank lit the water but a few yards outward. Between the several glares was darkness shot with rain, shaken by wind. And always the bonfires showed thronging men, a broad moving ribbon running upwards and back from the water’s edge, and between these two throngs a void and blackness. It was like a vision of the final river—a great illustration out of “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Company by company went down into the river; company by company slowly mounted on the farther side, coming up from the water into strange light, beneath tall shadowy trees. The water was up to the armpits. It was cold and rushing water. The men tied their cartridge boxes around their necks; they held their muskets above their heads; now and again a short man was carried across upon the shoulders of a tall and strong man. Sergeant Billy Maydew carried Lieutenant Coffin across thus.
The Sixty-fifth kept its cartridges dry, held its muskets high. It had crossed into Maryland with song and joke and laughter, stepping easily through water to the mid-thigh, clear water, sparkling in the sun. It returned into Virginia through a high and stormy water, beneath a midnight sky. The sky of its fortunes, too, was dark. There was no singing to-night; each man, breasting the flood, needed all his wits merely to cross. The red light beat upon the Sixty-fifth going down from the Maryland shore, rank after rank, entering the water in a column of three. Rank by rank, the darkness swallowed it up, officers and men, colonel, lieutenant-colonel, captains, lieutenants, the chaplain, the surgeons, the noncommissioned officers, all the men, Thunder Run men, men from the mountainous Upper Valley counties,—all the Sixty-fifth, rank by rank dipped out of the light into the darkness. The darkness swallowed the regiment, then the darkness gave it again to the light on the Virginia shore. Up to the gate of the fortress, through the red flare of torches, came the Sixty-fifth. A man with a great rich, deep voice, broke into song in the night-time, in the wind and rain, as he came up beneath the sycamores. He sang “Dixie,” and the Sixty-fifth sang it with him.
All night, endlessly across the river, out of light into darkness, then into light again, came the slowly unwinding ribbon of the regiments. All night the Second Corps was crossing by the ford as all night the First was crossing by the unstable bridge of boats. In the grey morning there crossed A.P. Hill and the Third. The last brigade was Lane’s North Carolinians. It made the passage, and then Stuart drew his thousands steadily to the waterside. Meade’s advance, Kilpatrick and Buford, saw from the hill-tops the river dark with swimming horsemen.
CHAPTER XVII
BREAD CAST ON WATER
Prison X had a catechism which it taught all the newly arrived.
Question. Where are we?
Answer. In the North.
Q. Do we find the North interesting?
Ans. We do not.