We looks lak men ob war—”
They had sung it sitting on the ground around camp-fires the night before when they had been told that they would lead the charge—the great charge that was going to take Blandford Church and Cemetery, and then Petersburg, and then Richmond, and was going to end the war and make all coloured people free, and give to every one a cabin, forty acres, and a mule, and the deathless friendship of the Northern people.
“We looks lak men er-marchin’ on,
We looks lak men ob war—”
They had not led that grotesquely halted charge, but now they, too, were required for victims by the crater. Burnside sent an order, “The coloured division to advance at all hazards.”
It advanced, got somehow past the crater and came to a bloody, hand-to-hand conflict with the grey. The fighting here was brutal, a maddening short war in which, black and white, the always animal struggle of war grew more animal yet. It was short. The coloured division broke and fell back into the crater.... All the grey batteries, all the grey infantry poured fire into this place where Burnside’s white and coloured troops were now inextricably mixed. At ten o’clock up came Mahone with three brigades and swept the place.
By two o’clock the Confederate lines were restored and the battle of the crater ended. This day the blue had been hoist by their own petard. The next day Grant sent a flag of truce asking a cessation of hostilities until he could gather his wounded and bury the dead. Lee gave four hours.
During this truce grey soldiers as well as blue pressed to the edge of the crater to observe and wonder. They were used to massacre and horror in great variety, but there was something faintly novel here. They came not ghoulishly, but good-naturedly—“just wanting to see what gunpowder could do!” They fraternized with the blue at work and the blue fraternized with them, for that was the way the grey and blue did between hostilities. They spoke the same language, they read the same Bible, they had behind them the same background of a far island home, and then of small sailing-ships at sea, and then of a new land, huge forests, Indians, wolves; at last towns and farms, roads, stages, packet-boats, and railway trains. They had to an extent the same tastes—to an extent like casts of countenance. The one used “I guess” and the other used “I reckon,” and they differed somewhat in temperament, but the innermost meaning was not far from being the same. At the worst an observer from a far country might have said, “They are half brothers.” So they fraternized during the truce, the grey this afternoon, the more triumphant, and the blue the more rueful.... “Hello, Yanks! You were going to send us to Heaven, weren’t you? and instead you got sent yourselves!”—“Never mind! better luck next time! You certainly made a fuss in the world for once!”—“How many pounds of gunpowder? ‘Eight thousand.’ Geewhilikins! That was a sizable charge!”—“If you’d been as flush of gunpowder as we are, you might have made it twenty, just as easy!”—“There’s a man buried over there—see, where the boot is sticking up!”—“Yes, you blew some of us into Heaven—twenty-two gunners, they say, and about three hundred of Elliott’s men—just enough to show your big crowd the way!”—“That junk-heap over there’s Pegram’s guns.”—“Such a mess! White men and black men and caissons and limbers.”—“I thought that body was moving; but no, it was something else.”—“Got any tobacco?”—“We’d like first-rate to trade for coffee.”—“There’s a man crying for water. Got your canteen?—mine isn’t any nearer than a spring a mile away. I’ll take it to him—know what thirst means—been thirsty myself and it means Hell!”—“Well, it was a fine mine, if it did go a bit wrong, and you deserve a lot of credit—though I don’t think some of your generals do!”—“Yes, that’s so! People stay what they always were, even through war. Lee stays Lee and Grant stays Grant, and Meade stays Meade, and A.P. Hill stays A.P. Hill. And some others stay what they always were, too,—more’s the pity!”—“Here, we’ll help cover this row.”—“Did you see little Billy Mahone charging? Pretty fine, wasn’t it?”—“Saw your Colonel Marshall and General Bartlett when they were taken prisoner. They seemed fine men. Yes, that’s so! We ain’t got a monopoly, and you ain’t got a monopoly.”
The truce would last until full dark. Now, as the sun went down in a copper sky, most of the work was done. In great numbers the wounded had been lifted from the floor and sides of the crater; in great numbers the dead had been lowered into trenches, shallow trenches, the earth just covering the escaped from life. There were yet blue working-parties, a faint movement of blue and grey watchers, but the crater was lonely to what it had been. Only the wild débris remained, and the mounds beneath which life had gone out and been buried. There seemed a silence, too, heavy with the approaching night. A grey pioneer detail that had been engaged in repairing a work that flanked the vast excavation rested on spade and pick and gazed into the place. An infantry company of A.P. Hill’s, marching to some assigned post, was halted for five minutes and allowed to break ranks. Officers and men desired to look at the big hole in the ground.
In groups or singly they peered over the edge or scrambled halfway down the loose earth of the sides. The sun’s rim had dipped; the west showed a forbidding hue, great level washes of a cold and sickly colour. Steadily this slope of the great earth wheeled under, leaving the quenchless hearth of the sun, facing the night without the house of light. It was all but dusk. One of the soldiers of this company was Maury Stafford. He stood alone, his back to a great projecting piece of timber and looked into the pit and across to the copper west. “Barring prison,” he thought, “for simple horror I have never seen a worse place than this.”