Billy Maydew, rising from the wet earth at four o’clock, found that the rain was coming down and the world was wrapped in fog. “Thunder Run Mountain can’t see Peaks of Otter this morning!” he said. He stood up, tall and lean and twenty-one, and stretched himself. “Hope grandpap and the dawgs air setting comfortable by the fire!”
Certainly the Stonewall Brigade, Johnson’s division, Ewell’s corps, was not warm and comfortable. Felled wet trees did as well for breastwork and traverse and abatis as dry, but they were not so good for camp-fires. The fires this streaming break-of-day were a farce. The ground behind the breastworks was rough and now very muddy, and the great number of stumps of trees had a dismal look. Where a fire was kindled the smoke refused to rise, but clung dark, thick, and suffocating. The air struck shiveringly cold, and the woods north and east and west of the sharp salient were as invisible as a fog-mantled coast. Billy, standing high in the angle’s narrowest part, had a curious feeling. He had never been on a ship or he might have thought, “I am driving fast into something behind that fog.” As it was, he shook off the slight dizziness and looked about him—at the thronged deck where everybody was trying to get breakfast, at the long trenches, each side of the salient and rounding the point, at the log and earth breastworks and the short traverses, at the abatis of felled trees, branches outward, much like the swirl of waves to either side the ship’s prow. He looked at the parapets where the guns had been, and then, brigade headquarters’ fire being near, he listened to an aide from the division commander. “General Johnson says, sir, that he has sent again for the guns, sent for the third time. They’re coming, but the road is frightfully heavy. He says the moment they are here, get them into position and trained. In the mean time keep the sharpest kind of lookout.”
Billy had not thought much of it before, but now it came over him. “We air in a darned defenceless position out here.”
He went back to where his mess was struggling with a fire not big enough to toast hard-tack. He had hardly joined them when a drum beat and an order rang the length and breadth of the salient. Fall in!
He was down in one of the trenches, the Sixty-fifth with him, right and left. Turning his head, he saw Cleave stand a moment looking at the platforms where the batteries had been and now were not, then walk along the trenches and speak to the men. Lieutenant Coffin he saw, too, slight, pale, romantic-looking, and troubled at the moment because he had unwittingly stepped into a mud-hole which had mired him above the knee. He had a bit of scrap iron and with it was scraping the mud away, steadying himself, shoulder against a tree.
Billy smiled. “Ain’t he a funny mixture? Hates a speck of mud ’most as much as he hates a greyback! Funny when I think of how I used to hate him!” He looked along the line and at the companies in reserve and at the clusters of officers, with here or there a solitary figure, and at the regiments of the Stonewall Brigade, and the other brigades of Johnson’s division, and then out through a crack between two logs, to the picket line beyond the abatis and to the misty wood. “I don’t know that I hate anybody now,” said Billy aloud.
“Don’t you?” asked the man next him. “I wouldn’t be a namby-pamby like that! I couldn’t get along without hating, any more than I could without tansy in the spring-time!”
“Oh, thar air times,” said Billy equably, “when I think I hate the Yanks.”
“Think! Don’t you know?”
Billy was counting the cartridges in his cartridge-box. “Why,” he said when he had finished, “sometimes of course I hate them like p’ison oak. But then thar air other times when I consider that—according to their newspapers—they hate me like p’ison oak, too. Now I do a power of wrong things, I know, but I air not p’ison oak. And so, according to what Allan calls ‘logic,’ maybe they air not p’ison oak either. Thar was a man in the Wilderness. The fire in the scrub was coming enough to feel the devil in it—closer and closer. And his spine was hurt and he couldn’t move, and he had his shoulder against a log, one end of which was blazing. He was sitting there all lit up by that light, and he had his musket butt up and was trying to beat out his brains. Me and Jim Watts got him out, and he was from Boston and a young man like me, and I liked him just as well as ever I liked any man. He put his arms around my neck and he hugged me and cried, and I hugged him, too, and I reckon I cried, too. And Jim and me got him out through the scrub afire. He wa’n’t no p’ison oak, no more’n I were.”