The calm fell on Sunday. Edward and Désirée, sitting beneath the pine tree, marked the cannons’ diminuendo. It was a hot and heavy day and the dead and wounded were on their hearts. Yet to them, too, it was fearfully an everyday matter. The time to visualize what will fall under the harrow of war is before the harrow is set in motion. Afterwards comes in Inevitableness with iron lips, and Fatalism with unscrutinizing gaze, and Use with filmed eyes, and Instinct with her cry, “Do not look too closely, seeing one must keep one’s senses!” and Old Habit with her motto, “True children do as their fathers did.”—And so at last, on both sides, from the general to the drummer-boy, from the civil ruler to the woman scraping lint, no one looks very closely at what falls beneath the harrow. Madness lies that way, and in war one must be very sane. No one escaped the taint of not looking, not even the two beneath the pine tree.
Off in the horizon clouds were piling up. Presently there was heard a mutter of thunder. Edward and Désirée watched the sky darken and the big pine begin to sway. In the distance there was yet an occasional boom of cannon. “That is toward Dallas,” said Edward. “Earth thunder and heaven thunder.”
The lightning flashed. The earth voices began to lose out, the aërial ones to gather strength. A wind lifted the dust and the small dry débris of grass and herb. The old pine cones came shaking down. The thunder began to peal. Désirée rose. “We must go indoors. It has the right of way now—the old, old storm.”
As they reached the cabin the thunder grew loud above them. The dust of the earth went by in a whirlwind. Rain was falling, in heavy pellets like lead, but as yet it had not lightened the oppression. The two leaned against the doorway and watched. A blinding flash, a sound as of falling battlements of the sky, and the pine tree was blasted before them.
CHAPTER XXX
KENNESAW
The blue army was massed beyond Noonday Creek, in front of Pine Mountain, and on the Burnt Hickory road. The grey held a line from Gilgal Church to a point beyond the Marietta and Ackworth road. It was the fourteenth of June—news just received by way of Atlanta of Grant’s movement toward the James. On the crest of Pine Mountain was a grey outpost—Bates’s Division of Hardee’s corps. At Gilgal Church, Johnston, on his chestnut horse, was in conversation with that churchman-militant with a Spartan name—Lieutenant-General Leonidas Polk. Hardee rode up. “General, I should be grateful if you would come with me to the top of the mountain yonder. Bates there is too exposed.”
The three, Johnston with Hardee and Polk, rode through the thick brush, by a narrow and rough bridle-path, up to the crown of the low mountain. Dismounting in the rear of Bates’s works they went forward on foot, the men saluting where they lay behind heaped logs. Overhanging the slope was a parapet, and the three walked here, opening their field-glasses as they walked. Before them stretched the wooded country, and full in sight, the heavy lines of the foe. Not a thousand feet away a field-battery held a hilltop.
“Wait till nightfall,” said Johnston, “then let Bates join you at Gilgal.”
He lowered his field-glass. Out of the mouth of one of the blue cannon on the hilltop came a puff of white smoke. The shot cut away a bough of the oak under which the three were standing. “Certainly this parapet is too exposed,” said Hardee. “Come this way, General.” As they moved diagonally across the spur, the blue guns opened full pack. A shot passed through the breast of Leonidas Polk, sometime Bishop of Louisiana. He fell, lying at full length upon the summit, dead, with a pleasant look upon his face.
On the sixteenth, grey left and blue right shifted positions, coming again to face each other. There was skirmishing and cavalry fighting. On the nineteenth, the two fencers again changed ground. The grey left, Hardee, now stretched across the Lost Mountain and Marietta road; the grey right, Hood, lay beyond the Canton road; and Loring, who had succeeded Polk, held flank and crest of Kennesaw Mountain. At once, grey and blue, the interminable entrenching began again, the grey throwing up earthworks and defences, the blue making lines of approach. Throughout the latter half of June, hour after hour, day after day, night after night, there was fighting. The first half of the month it had poured rain. Torrent after torrent had successfully interfered with man’s operations. Under streaming skies, with the earth semi-liquid, the roads bottomless, the unending forest like oozy growths of an ocean floor, entrenching, manœuvres for advantage of position, attack and parry—one and all had been attended with difficulties. General Rain and General Mud had as usual put their unrecorded fingers into the current of events. But now, though sun and cloud still fought, the roads were drying and there was fighting every day.