“There is nothing more from Virginia. But here is a letter from Ripley, Mississippi. Forrest has been through that place, the enemy after him—”
“Read that!”
On creaked the slow train, past the windows unrolled the Georgia countryside, and where one saw a road one saw grey troops, grey infantry, grey artillery, grey wagon-trains, all moving with the train of the wounded, moving deeper into Georgia, moving toward Atlanta. They moved nor fast nor slow, and if it was an army in retreat it did not look the rôle. On went the train, in the heat, with the wounded. No sun tormented, but the pall of the clouds held in the heat. There had been two buckets of water to each car, but the water gave out before they had been fifteen minutes from Resaca.
Hardee’s corps, reaching Calhoun, moved by Johnston’s orders out upon the Rome road to where was met the Snake Creek Gap road to Adairsville, upon which road the enemy was advancing. Here Hardee deployed, formed a line, and held the blue in check while the remainder of the grey came up. Joe Wheeler, in the rear, retarded all advance from Resaca itself. The blue passage of the Oostenaula met, too, with certain delays. Sherman, moving from Dalton behind Rocky Face to cut the grey lines at Resaca, found the Army of Tennessee there before him. Moving now behind Oostenaula to come upon the rear of the grey at Calhoun, he found himself, as at Resaca, again face to face.
Back in front of Resaca, under the darkening sky, upon the mound in front of Stevenson’s line, above the ravine which had filled with a blue host, stood yet the four guns which had been cut off early in the day. “I covered the disputed battery with my fire,” says Stevenson, “in such a manner that it was utterly impossible for the enemy to remove it, and I knew that I could retake it at any time, but thought it could be done with less loss of life at night, and therefore postponed my attack. When ordered to retire I represented the state of things to the general commanding, who decided to abandon the guns.” And says Hood: “During the attack on General Stevenson a four-gun battery was in position thirty paces in front of his line, the gunners being driven from it and the battery left in dispute. The army withdrew that night, and the guns, without caissons or limber-boxes, were abandoned to the enemy, the loss of life it would have cost to withdraw them being considered worth more than the guns.”
These four pieces constituted the only material lost or abandoned during the seventy days. Now they stood there in a row with their grey friends and comrades gone, with the blue rear guard not yet come to take them; stood there in a solitude after throngs, in a silence after sound. The sky was iron grey, the grass was trampled, the dead lay upon the slope. The guns were all alone. Their metal was cold, their lips no longer red; they stood like four sentinels frozen in death. They stood high, against the wide and livid heaven. The cloudy day declined; the night came dark and close, and into its vastness the guns sank and disappeared like the guns of an injured ship at sea.
CHAPTER XXV
THE WILDERNESS
“It might[“It might] have been guessed from the first,” said Cleave. “Only, fortunately or unfortunately, mankind never makes such guesses. Given, with all our talk to the contrary, North and South, a common stock, with common qualities, common intensities of purpose; then given the division of the whole into two parts, two thirds of the mass on that side of the line, one third on this; then, in addition, push to the larger side manufacturing towns and the control of the sea—and it ought not to have taken an eagle’s vision to see on which side the dice would fall.”
Allan pondered it. “There have been times from the beginning—from First Manassas on—when we lacked little of winning. A very little more several times and they would have cried, Peace!”
“That is true. It wasn’t impossible, impossible as it looked. It only wasn’t at all probable.”