Up on the crest of Kennesaw, Edward Cary, lying with his men behind a work of earth and logs, saw the sun rise and the sun set, and often in the dead of night the solemn pomp of stars. All around him, beneath the stars, were the shadowy forms of sleeping men. The footfall of the pickets could be heard, that and the breathing of the sleepers. Slowly came on the grey dawn; reveille sounded and the day’s work was before you. Night came again and the stars and the shadowy forms of men—though not all, who were breathing the night before, breathed now where they slept.
Cary’s mind ranged far from the comfortless top of Kennesaw. First of all and oftenest it looked southward, across the forest, to where, in a farmhouse near Smyrna Church, Désirée slept or waked. It paused there, suspended, watching her where she lay, then passed from the quiet room and swept in widening circles around the core of life.... This Georgian battle-ground! Fifty days now of a great strategic campaign—Dalton and the spring-time far behind—Atlanta and the pitched battle that must toss victory into this camp or into that drawing nearer. The Army of Tennessee, stanch and cheerful even in the rain-filled rifle-pits on Kennesaw; gaunt, heroic, like its brother the Army of Northern Virginia.... Not the Georgia battle-grounds alone;—all battle-fields—all the South one battle-field, fringed and crossed with weary, weary, weary marches! Suddenly he saw how red were the rivers and how many houses were blackened ruins. There was a great loneliness, and he thought he saw children straying, lost, across the plain. Edward sat up and rested his forehead on his hands. “What is it all for?” he thought. “It is absurd.” The sky was clear to-night. He looked up at the Great Bear and the Dragon. “We are in a world of contradictories. There is the heroic, the piteous, and the beautiful, there is a loud and sweet music,—and yet it is all in the service of the King of the Dwarfs, of a gnome with a gnome’s brain.... How to change the service?”
In the cold hour before the dawn, he slept, to be presently awakened by the sound of the pickets’ pieces and a night attack. Half an hour’s fighting rolled it back, down Kennesaw, but when it was done the men were kept awake lest the wave should return.
They talked, behind the breastworks, while the stars faded. “Wish it was a false alarm! Wish I’d wake up and find myself asleep.”
“O God, yes! In my bed at home.”
“Talking about false alarms—Did you ever hear about Spaulding?”
“What Spaulding?—No.”
“It was in Mississippi;—Grant somewhere near, but nobody knew how near;—all of us scattered over a few hills and marshes, keeping pretty good lookout, but yet knowing that nobody could be within a day’s march of us. In comes Spaulding in haste to headquarters, to the general’s tent. In he comes, pale and excited, and he brings a piece of news that was indeed alarming! He had been on a hill overlooking the river—I forget its name—there’s such an infinity of rivers in this country! Anyhow he had seen the most amazing thing, and that was what he had come like lightning back to the camp to tell the general about. A column of the enemy was crossing the river—they had laid pontoons and they were crossing by them and by a ford as well. It was a large force—a division undoubtedly, possibly a corps. Artillery was crossing as he looked. The ford was black with infantry, and there was cavalry on the farther bank. A man on a great black horse was directing. On this side was a man on a very tall grey horse, a man with a bloody handkerchief tied round his head under his hat. The troops saluted him as they came out of the water. All were crossing very silently and swiftly. Spaulding had run all the way from the hill; he had to put his hand to his side as he talked, he was so breathed.—Well, immediately there was activity enough at headquarters, but still activity with a doubt, it was so amazing! What were the pickets doing—to say nothing of the cavalry? Well, the long roll was beaten, and everybody scurried to arms, and off went two aides at full speed to the hilltop to examine that thief in the night-time crossing, and Spaulding went behind the one on the strongest horse. He was just as calm and sure. ‘Yes, it’s amazing, but it’s so! I think the man on the black horse is Grant. I couldn’t see the face of the man on the grey horse—only the bloody cloth around his head.’ Well, they got there, all the fuss behind them of the regiments forming—they got to the hilltop and there was the river sure enough before them, just as the aides knew it would be. ‘Now, you see!’ says Spaulding, for he had been hurt by the way everybody, even the general, said, ‘Impossible!’—‘See what?’ say the aides. ‘Are you mad?’ asks Spaulding impatiently. ‘The bridge and the ford and the crossing guns and infantry, the man on the black horse and the man on the grey with the cloth around his head.’—One of the aides rides down the hillside toward the river and finds a picket. ‘Have you seen anything unusual up or down or across the river?’ ‘No,’ says the picket, or words to that effect. ‘Have you?’[‘Have you?’]—Well, that aide goes back and he takes Spaulding by the shoulders and shakes him. And then the two, they stand on either side of him, and the one says, ‘Look now, and pretty quick about it, and tell us what you see!’—‘You damned fools,’ says Spaulding, ‘I see[‘I see] a column crossing, infantry and artillery, a man on a black horse directing, and a man on a grey horse with a bloody cloth—’ And then he stopped speaking and stared, the colour going out of his face and his eyes starting from his head. And presently he just slipped like water down between them and sat upon the earth. ‘Great God!’ he said, ‘there isn’t anything there!’—So they took him back to headquarters, the drums still beating and everybody getting into ranks—”
“What did they do to him?”
“Well, if he’d been a drinking man he’d have been drumhead court-martialled and shot. But he wasn’t—he was a nice, clean, manly kind of young fellow, a great mathematician, and the boys all liked him, and his officers, too. And he was so covered with confusion ’twas pitiful. The general’s a mighty good man. He said those things happened sometimes, and he quoted Shakespeare that there are more experiences in heaven and earth—or words to that effect. Spaulding was put under arrest, and there was enquiry and all that, but at the last he was given a caution and sent back to his regiment. But he kind of pined away and took to mooning, and in the next battle he was killed—and killed, that was the funny thing, by a pistol shot from a man on a grey horse with a bloody handkerchief tied round his head! He shot Spaulding through the brain.”