Much later, having been carried on—the whole wagon train now crossing—in a commissary wagon travelling light, he rejoined his brigade and regiment. He found the Sixty-fifth in a mood of jubilation bivouacked in the dusk Maryland countryside, with a glow yet in the west and the fireflies tinselling all the fields. Steve came in for supper, and between slow gulps of “real” coffee related an adventure in the straw field, marvellous as the “Three Turks’ Heads.” His mess was one of “left-overs,” seven or eight of the stupid, the ne’er-do-weel or the slightly rascally sort, shaken together in the regiment’s keen sifting of human nature. Totally incredulous, save for a deficient one or two, the mess yet found a place for Steve, if it were only the place of a torn leaf from a rather sorry jest-book. The ne’er-do-weel and the slightly rascally, most of whom were courageous enough, began to describe for his benefit the chevaux-de-frise of forts around Washington. They made Steve shiver. He went to bed frightened, and arose under the stars, still frightened.
This day, the tenth of July, the Second Corps marched twenty miles. The day was one of the hottest of a hot summer. Not the lightest zephyr lifted a leaf or dried the sweat on a soldier’s brow. The dust of the Georgetown Pike rose thick and stifling until it made a broad and deep and thick and stifling cloud. There was little water to be had throughout the day. The Second Corps suffered profoundly. That night it lay in the fields by the roadside near Rockville. The night was smoking hot, and the men lay feverishly, moving their limbs and sighing, troubled with dreams. The bugles sounded under a copper dawn and they rose to an eleventh of July, hot, dust-clogged, and thirsty as had been the tenth.
There were sunstrokes this day, exhaustion from heat, a trail of involuntary stragglers, men limping in the rear, men sitting, head on knees, beneath the powdered wayside growth, men lying motionless in the ditch beside the road. Horses fell and died. There were many delays. But through all heat, great weariness, and suffering, Early, shrill-voiced and determined, urged the troops on upon the road to Washington. The troops responded. Something less than eight thousand muskets moved in the great dust of the pike, forty guns, and ahead, the four small cavalry brigades of McCausland, Imboden, W.L. Jackson, and Bradley Johnson. “— —!” said Early. “If we can’t take it, at least we can give it a quaking fit!—increase the peace clamour! It’s worth while to see if we can get to the outer fortifications before they pour their — — numbers into them!”
The Second Corps marched fast, now by the Silver Spring Road, Imboden’s cavalry ahead, Jackson’s on the flank, full before them Fort Stevens, very visible in the distance, Washington. The men moistened their lips, talked, for all the dust in their throats, the blood beating in their temples, and the roaring in their ears. “Take it! Could we take it?”—“By supernal luck—a chance in a million—if they were all asleep or dazed!”—“Take it and end the war—O God, if we could!”—“Run up the Stars and Bars—Play ‘Dixie’ everywhere—Live! at last live after four years of being born!”—“Take Washington—eight thousand of us and the cavalry and the twelve-pounder Napoleons—” From the front broke out a long crackling fire. “Cavalry in touch—cavalry in touch.” Rodes’s division, leading, came into line of battle. As it did so rose in the south between Fort Stevens and the city a great dust cloud. “— —!” said Early. “There isn’t a plan or a cannon numbers won’t spike!—Skirmishers to the front!”
“Every prominent point,” says a Federal officer, speaking of the Washington fortifications,—“every prominent point, at intervals of eight hundred to one thousand yards, was occupied by an enclosed field fort; every important approach or depression of ground, unseen from the forts, was swept by a battery for field-guns; and the whole connected by rifle trenches which were in fact lines of infantry parapets, furnishing emplacement for two ranks of men, and affording covered communication along the line, while roads were opened wherever necessary, so that troops and artillery could be moved rapidly from one point of the immense periphery to another, or under cover, from point to point along the line. The counterscarps were surrounded by abatis; bomb-proofs were provided in nearly all the forts; all guns, not solely intended for distant fire, placed in embrasures and well traversed. All commanding points on which an enemy would be likely to concentrate artillery ... were subjected not only to the fire, direct and across, of many points along the line, but also from heavy rifled guns from points unattainable by the enemy’s field-guns.” There were twenty thousand blue troops, garrison and reserves, and in addition, at two o’clock of this day, began to arrive Ricketts’s and Emory’s divisions of the Sixth and Nineteenth Corps, sent by Grant.
The eleventh and the twelfth there was heavy skirmishing. During these days the Second Corps saw that it could not take Washington. The heat continued; now through quivering air, now through great dust clouds they saw the dome of the capitol. It was near, near! The Second Corps was closer to Washington than ever in this war had been the North to Richmond; it was very near, but there is the possible and there is the impossible, and it was not possible for the Second Corps to make entry. On the night of the twelfth it withdrew from before Washington and marching to the Potomac crossed by White’s Ford into Loudoun County. Fifteen thousand blue troops pursued, but the grey crossed the river in safety. They crossed singing “Swanee River.” It was the last sally of the beleaguered South forth upon the beleaguerer’s ground. Henceforth, the battle thundered against the very inner keep of the fortress.
Marching through great dust and heat and glare and weariness back through Maryland to the Potomac, the Second Corps gathered up from the roadside and the byways and the hedges its stragglers, involuntary or otherwise. A dozen hours from Washington it gathered out of a cornfield Steve Dagg.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE CRATER
At Petersburg, on the Appomattox, twenty miles south of Richmond, June went by in thunder, day and night, of artillery duels, with, for undersong, a perpetual, pattering rain of sharpshooters’ bullets, torn across, at intervals, by a sharp and long sound of musketry. In the hot and sickly weather, under the hovering smoke, engineers of the Army of Northern Virginia, engineers of the Army of the Potomac worked like beavers. The grey line drawn by Beauregard early in the month was strengthened and pieced out. Over against it curved a great blue sickle of forts, with trenches and parapets between. Grey and blue alike had in the rear of their manned works a labyrinth and honeycomb of approaches, covered ways, pits, magazines, bomb-proofs, traverses. The blue had fearfully the advantage in artillery. Grey and blue, the lines, in part, were very close, so close that there would be little warning of assault. The Army of Northern Virginia, now, in numbers, not a great army, had to watch, day and night. It watched with an intensity which brought a further depth into men’s eyes, deep enough now in all conscience, deep enough in the summer of 1864!
On the twenty-second, Grant attempted to extend his flank upon the left toward the Weldon Railroad. Lee sent A.P. Hill out against this movement. Hill, in his red battle shirt, strong fighter and prompt, swung through an opening left unaware between the two corps, the Second and Sixth, and, turning, struck the Second in the rear. After the fiercest fighting the blue, having lost four guns and several stands of colours, and seventeen hundred prisoners, drew back within their lines.