They turned in the embrasure and looked far and wide. It seemed a world of camp-fires. Far to the east, in the direction of City Point, some river battery or gun-boat was sending up rockets. Westward a blue fort began a sullen cannonade and a grey fort nearly opposite at once took up the challenge. “Fort Gregg,” said Cary, “dubbed by our men ‘Fort Hell,’ and Fort Mahone called by theirs ‘Fort Damnation.’”
For all that the night itself was so clear and the stars so high and splendid, there was a murk discernible everywhere a few feet above the earth, rising like a miasma, with a faint, distasteful odour. Through it all the fires lit by men shone blurred. The cannon continued to thunder, and above their salients gathered clouds of coppery smoke. A half brigade passed on its way to strengthen some menaced place, and a neighbouring fire showed in series its face and form. The men looked dead for sleep, hollow-eyed, hollow-cheeked. They dragged their limbs, their heads drooped, their shoulders were bowed. They passed like dull and weary sheep. Fort Hell and Fort Damnation brought more guns into action.
Cleave passed his hand before his eyes. “It’s not,” he said, “the way to settle it.”
“Precisely not,” answered Cary. “It is not, and it never was, and it never will be. And that despite the glamour and the cry of ‘Necessity!’”
“Little enough glamour to-night!”
“I agree with you. The glamour is at the beginning. The necessity is to find a more heroic way.”
The two went down from the embrasure and presently said goodnight. Cleave rode on—not to the house in which he was quartered, but to the portion of the lines where, he was told, would be found a command for which he had made enquiry. He found it and its colonel, asked a question or two, and at once obtained the request which he made, this being that he might speak to a certain soldier in such a company.
The soldier came and faced Cleave where the latter waited for him beside a deserted camp-fire. The red light showed both their faces, worn and grave and self-contained. Off in the night and distance the two forts yet thundered, but all hereabouts was quiet, the fires dying down, the men sinking to rest. “Stafford,” said Cleave, “I have been lying wounded for a long while, and I have had time to look at man’s life, and the way we live it. It’s all a mystery, what we do, and what we do not do, and we stumble and stumble!...” He held out his hand. “Don’t let us be enemies any longer!”
CHAPTER XLII
APRIL, 1865
A Confederate soldier, John Wise, speaks of the General-in-Chief. “I have seen many pictures of General Lee, but never one that conveyed a correct impression of his appearance. Above the ordinary size, his proportions were perfect. His form had fullness, without any appearance of superfluous flesh, and was as erect as that of a cadet, without the slightest apparent constraint. No representation that I have ever seen properly conveys the light and softness of his eye, the tenderness and intellectuality of his mouth, or the indescribable refinement of his face....