“The moon shone so that April night—that night after you overtook the carriage upon the road—and at last we understood ... I sat here all that night, in the moonlight.”
“The garden where I said good-bye to you, a hundred years ago, the day after a tournament.... It does not look dead and cold and a winter night. It looks filled with lilies and roses and bright, waving trees—and if a bird is not singing down there, then it must be singing in my heart! It is singing somewhere!—Love is best.”
“Love is best.”
A week from this day he passed through Richmond on his way to the front. Richmond! Richmond looked to him like a prisoner doomed, and yet a quiet prisoner with a smile for children and the azure spaces in the winter sky. People were going in streams into the churches. The hospitals, they said, were very full. In all the departments, it was said, the important papers were kept packed in boxes, ready to be removed if there were need. No one any longer noticed the cannon to the south. They had been thundering there since June, and it was now March. There was very little to eat. Milk sold at four dollars a quart. And yet children played about the doors, and women smiled, and men and women went about the day’s work with sufficient heroism. “Dear Dick Ewell” had charge of the defences of Richmond, the slightly manned ring of forts, the Local Brigade, Custis Lee’s division at Chaffin’s Bluff. In the high, clear March air, ragged grey soldiers passed, honoured, through the streets, bugles blew, or drums beat. One caught the air of Dixie.
Cleave rode out over Mayo’s Bridge and south through the war-scored country to Petersburg and the grey lines, to division headquarters and then to the Golden Brigade. The brigade and he met like tried friends, but the Sixty-fifth and he met like lovers.
The lines at Petersburg!—stretched and stretched from the Appomattox, east of the town, to Five Forks and the White Oak Road, stretched until now, in places, there was scarcely more than a skirmish line, stretched to the breaking-point! The trenches at Petersburg!—clay ditches where men were drenched by the winter rains, pierced by the winter sleet, where they huddled or burrowed, scooping shallow caves with bayonet and tin cup, where hands and feet were frozen, where at night they watched the mortar shells, and at all hours heard the minies keening, where the smoke hung heavy, where the earth all about was raw and pitted, where every muscle rebelled, so cramped and weary of the trenches! where there were double watches and a man could not sleep enough, where there were nakedness and hunger and every woe but heat, where the sharpshooters picked off men, and the minies came with a whistle and killed them, and the bombs with a shriek and worked red havoc, where men showed a thousand weaknesses and again a thousand heroisms! Oh, the labyrinth of trenches, forts, traverses, roads, approaches, raw red clay, and trampled herbage, hillock and hollow, scored, seamed, and pitted mother earth, and over all the smoke and noise, blown by the March wind! And Petersburg itself, that had been a pleasant town, was a place of ruined houses and deserted streets! A bitter havoc had been wrought.
The night of his return to the front Cleave stood with Fauquier Cary in an embrasure whence a gun had just been taken to strengthen another work, stood and looked first over the red wilderness of their own camp-fires, and then across a stripe of darkness to the long, deep, and vivid glow that marked the Federal lines. The night was cold but still, the stars extraordinarily bright. “For so long in that quiet room at Greenwood!” said Cleave. “And now this again! It has almost a novel look. There! What a great shell!”
“Fireworks at the end,” answered Cary. “It is the end.”
“Yes. It is evident.”
“I have been,” said Cary, “for a day or two to Richmond, and I was shown there certain papers, memoranda, and estimates. I wish you would listen to three or four statements out of many.—‘Amount needed for absolutely necessary construction and repair of railroads if they are to serve any military purpose $21,000,000.’—‘The Commissary debt now exceeds $70,000,000.’—‘The debt to various factories exceeds $5,000,000.’—‘The Medical Department asks for $40,000,000, at least for the current year.’—‘The Subsistence Bureau and the Nitre and Mining Bureau as well as other Departments are resorting to barter.’—‘Requisitions by the War Department upon the Treasury since ’61 amount to $1,737,746,121. Of the requisition for last year and this year, there is yet unfurnished $160,000,000. In addition the War Department has a further arrearage of say $200,000,000.’—This was a letter from one of the up-river counties patriotically proposing the use of cotton yarn or cloth as specie—thus reducing the necessity for the use of Treasury notes to the smallest possible limit! Let us see how it went.—First it proposed the removal of all factories to safe points near the mountains, where the water-power is abundant and approach by the enemy difficult. Next the establishment of small factories at various points of like character. Around these, as centres, it goes on to say, ‘the women of our country who have been deprived of all and driven from their homes by the enemy should be collected, together with the wives and daughters of soldiers and others in indigent circumstances. There they would not be likely to be disturbed by the enemy. Thus distributed they could be more easily fed, and the country be greatly benefited by their labours, which would be light and highly remunerative to them, thereby lessening the suffering at home and the consequently increasing discontent in the army. Cotton would be near at hand, labour abundant, and the necessity of the transportation of food and material to and from great centres of trade greatly reduced. We would furnish the women of the country generally with yarns and a simple and cheap pattern of looms, taking pay for the same in cloth made by them—’ et cætera!... How desperate we are, Richard, to entertain ourselves with foolery like this!—But the act to use the negroes as soldiers will go through. We have come to that. The only thing is that the war will be ended before they can be mustered in.”