Officers’ mess spread its table on the golden, fallen leaves of a hickory beside a sliding, ice-cool rivulet. The four hundred and odd men were scattered, in perhaps fifty messes, through the grove. The smoke of their fires rose straight and blue. The metal of the stacked muskets reflected a thousand little saffron flames. The leaves drifted down. The day was ineffably sweet, cool, and fragrant. Caw! caw! went the crows in a neighbouring field.
The Sixty-fifth believed in friendship. It believed in cousins. It believed in the tie of the County. The river, winding between willow and sycamore from croft to croft,—the chain of little valleys, the end of one touching the beginning of another,—the linked hills, each with its homestead,—the mountains with their mountain cabins,—all was so much framework in and over and about which flowed the mutual life. In its consciousness hill called to hill and stream to stream—Thunder Run to other runs and creeks—other mountains to Thunder Run Mountain. The Sixty-fifth experienced a profound unity—a unity bred of many things. Physical contiguity played its part, a common range of ideas, a general standard of conduct, a shared way of seeing, hearing, tasting. Upon all was the stamp of community in effort, community in danger, community in event. It was not to the erection of separateness that brothers, cousins, friends, acquaintances, even in a minor degree enemies, shared heat and cold, the burning sun or the midnight, stumbling darkness of the road, storm and fatigue and waking through the night, hunger, thirst, marchings and battles and the sight of battle-fields, that their hearts together failed, shrivelled, darkened, or expanded, rose and shouted. So deeply alike now was their environment and the face of their days that their own faces were grown strangely alike. Sometimes the members of the Sixty-fifth differed in opinion, sometimes they squabbled, sometimes they waxed sarcastic, sometimes they remarked that the world was too small for such or such a comrade and themselves. Then came the battle—and when in the morning light they saw such or such an one, it was “Hello, Jim—or Jack—or Tom! I’m right down glad you weren’t killed! Fuss at you sometimes, but I’d have missed you, all the same!”
The Sixty-fifth sat cross-legged in the coloured wood near Rappahannock, and ate its diminutive corn-pone and diminutive rasher of bacon. No Confederate soldier ever felt drowsily heavy after dinner. Where there was so little to digest, the process accomplished itself in the turn of a hand. There was little, too, to smoke, now—worse luck! But there was always—except in the very worst straits—there was always something out of which might be gotten a certain whimsical amusement.
The Sixty-fifth had had an easy march, and was going to have another one. The Sixty-fifth knew this country like a book, having fought over most steps of it. It had a pleasant feeling of familiarity with this very wood and the shining stretch of road narrowing toward a dark wood and the Rappahannock. The Sixty-fifth had every confidence in Marse Robert, commanding all; in Old Dick, commanding the Second Corps, in Alleghany Johnson, commanding the division; in Walker, commanding the Stonewall; in Colonel Erskine, commanding the Sixty-fifth. Its confidence in the Sixty-fifth itself was considerable. Dinner done, it fell, lying beneath the trees, now to jokes and now to easy speculation.
“What is Marse Robert moving us for?”
“Meade’s walking again. Stalking up and down north side of Rappahannock. Same as Burnside last year. Marse Robert’s bringing us and the ——th and ——th, over from Orange, to lay the ghost.—Oh, and I forgot the horse artillery!”
“Horse artillery’s all right, down there by that sumach patch, eating parched corn.... This is what you might call golden weather. Listen to the crows. Caw! caw! caw! Just like old Botetourt.”
“If I were Allan Gold, I’d let that shoe alone. He can’t mend it.”
“Whose shoe is it? Allan’s?”
“No. It’s Lieutenant Coffin’s. He’s had a pale blue letter, and it said that the young lady was visiting in Fredericksburg—and ain’t we on the road to Fredericksburg?”