The Long Roll

by Mary Johnston

The troops, moving at dawn to the Chickahominy, over a road and through woods which testified in many ways of the blue retreat, found the Grapevine Bridge a wreck, the sleepers hacked apart, framework and middle structure cast into the water. Fitz John Porter and the 5th Army Corps were across, somewhere between the river and Savage Station, leaving only, in the thick wood above the stream, a party of sharpshooters and a battery. When the grey pioneers advanced to their work, these opened fire. The bridge must be rebuilt, and the grey worked on, but with delays and difficulties. D. H. Hill, leading Jackson's advance, brought up two batteries and shelled the opposite side. The blue guns and riflemen moved to another position and continued, at short intervals, to fire on the pioneers. It was Sunday the twenty-ninth; fearfully hot by the McGehee house, and on Turkey Hill, and in the dense midsummer woods, and in the mosquito-breeding bogs and swamps through which meandered the Chickahominy. The river spread out as many arms as Briareus; short, stubby creeks, slow waters prone to overflow and creep, between high knotted roots of live-oak and cypress, into thickets of bog myrtle. The soil hereabouts was black and wet, further back light and sandy. The Valley troops drew the most uncomplimentary comparisons. To a man they preferred mountains, firm rolling champaign, clean rivers with rocky bottoms, sound roads, and a different vegetation. They were not in a good humour, anyhow.

Ewell was at Dispatch Station, seven miles below, guarding Bottom's Bridge and tearing up the York River Railroad. Stuart was before him, sweeping down on the White House, burning McClellan's stations and stores, making that line of retreat difficult enough for an encumbered army. But McClellan had definitely abandoned any idea of return upon Yorktown. The head of his column was set for the James, for Harrison's Landing and the gunboats. There were twenty-five difficult miles to go. He had something like a hundred thousand men. He had five thousand wagons, heavy artillery trains, enormous stores, a rabble of camp followers, a vast, melancholy freight of sick and wounded. He left his camps and burned his depots, and plunged into the heavy, still, and torrid forest. This Sunday morning, the twenty-ninth, the entrenchments before Richmond, skilful, elaborate pieces of engineering, were found by Magruder's and Huger's scouts deserted by all but the dead and a few score of sick and wounded, too far gone to be moved. Later, columns of smoke, rising from various quarters of the forest, betrayed other burning camps or depots. This was followed by tidings which served to make his destination certain. He was striking down toward White Oak Swamp. There the defeated right, coming from the Chickahominy, would join him, and the entire great force move toward the James. Lee issued his orders. Magruder with Huger pursued by the Williamsburg road. A. P. Hill and Longstreet, leaving the battlefield of the twenty-seventh, crossed the Chickahominy by the New Bridge, passed behind Magruder, and took the Darbytown road. A courier, dispatched to Ewell, ordered him to rejoin Jackson. The latter was directed to cross the Chickahominy with all his force by the Grapevine Bridge, and to pursue with eagerness. He had the directest, shortest road; immediately before him the corps which had been defeated at Gaines's Mill. With D. H. Hill, with Whiting and Lawton, he had now fourteen brigades—say twenty thousand men.

The hours passed in languid sunshine on the north bank of the Chickahominy. The troops were under arms, but the bridge was not finished. The smoke and sound of the rival batteries, the crack of the hidden rifles on the southern side, concerned only those immediately at issue and the doggedly working pioneers. Mere casual cannonading, amusement of sharpshooters, no longer possessed the slightest tang of novelty. Where the operation was petty, and a man in no extreme personal danger, he could not be expected to be much interested. The troops yawned; some of the men slept; others fretted. "Why can't we swim the damned old trough? They'll get away! Thank the Lord, I wasn't born in Tidewater Virginia! Oh, I'd like to see the Shenandoah!"

The 65th Virginia occupied a rise of sandy ground covered with hazel bushes. Company A had the brink of it, looking out toward the enormously tall trees towering erect from the river's margin of swamp. The hazel bushes gave little shade and kept off the air, the blue above was intense, the buzzards sailing. Muskets were stacked, the men sprawling at ease. A private, who at home was a Sunday School superintendent, read his Bible; another, a lawyer, tickled a hop toad with a spear of grass; another, a blacksmith, rebound the injured ankle of a schoolboy. Some slept, snoring in the scanty shade; some compared diaries or related, scrappily enough, battle experiences. "Yes, and Robinson was scouting, and he was close to Garland's line, and, gosh! he said it was short enough! And Garland rode along it, and he said, said he, 'Boys, you are not many, but you are a noble few.'" Some listened to the booming of the sparring batteries; two or three who had lost close friends or kinsmen moped aside. The frank sympathy of all for these made itself apparent. The shadiest hazel bushes unobtrusively came into their possession; there was an evident intention of seeing that they got the best fare when dinner was called; a collection of tobacco had been taken and quietly pushed their way. Some examined knapsack and haversacks, good oilcloths, belts, rolled blankets, canteens, cartridge-boxes and cartridges, picked up upon the road. Others seriously did incline to search for certain intruders along the seams of shirt and trousers; others merely lay on their backs and looked up into Heaven. Billy Maydew was one of these, and Steve Dagg overturned the contents of a knapsack.

It was well filled, but with things Steve did not want. "O Gawd! picters and pincushions and Testaments with United States flags in them—I never did have any luck, anyhow!—in this here war nor on Thunder Run neither!"

Dave Maydew rolled over. "Steve says Thunder Run didn't like him—Gosh! what's a-going to happen ef Steve takes to telling the truth?"

Sergeant Coffin turned from contemplation of a bursting shell above the Grapevine crossing. "If anybody finds any letter-paper and doesn't want it—"

A chorus arose. "Sorry we haven't got any!"—"I have got some—lovely! But I've got a girl, too."—"Sorry, sergeant, but it isn't pale blue, scented with forget-me-nots."—"Just think her a letter—think it out loud! Wait, I'll show you how. Darling Chloe—Don't get angry! He's most gotten over getting angry and it becomes him beautifully—Darling Chloe—What're you coming into it for, Billy Maydew? 'Don't tease him!'—My son, he loves to be teased. All lovers love to be teased. Darling Chloe. It is Sunday morning. The swans are warbling your name and so are half a dozen pesky Yankee Parrotts. The gentle zephyrs speak of thee, and so does the hot simoom that blows from Chickahominy, bringing an inordinate number of mosquitoes. I behold thy sinuous grace in the curls of smoke from Reilly's battery, and also in the slide and swoop of black buzzards over a multitude of dead horses in the woods. Darling Chloe, we are stranded on an ant heap which down here they call a hill, and why in hell we don't swim the river is more than at the moment I can tell you. It's rumoured that Old Jack's attending church in the neighbourhood, but we are left outside to praise God from whom all blessings flow. Darling Chloe, this company is not so unpopular with me as once it was. War is teaching it a damned lot, good temper and pretty ways and what not—It is teaching it! Who says it is not?—Darling Chloe, if you could see how long and lean and brown we are and how ragged we are and how lousy—Of course, of course, sergeant, you're not! Only the high private in the rear rank is, and even he says he's not—Darling Chloe, if I could rise like one of those damned crows down there and sail over these damned flats and drop at your feet in God's country beyond the mountains, you wouldn't walk to church to-day with me. You'd turn up your pretty little nose, and accept the arm of some damned bombproof—Look out! What's the matter here? 'The last straw! shan't slander her!'—I'm not slandering her. I don't believe either she'd do it. Needn't all of you look so glum! I'll take it back. We know, God bless every last woman of them, that they don't do it! They haven't got any more use for a bombproof than we have!—I can't retract handsomer than that!—Darling Chloe, the Company's grown amiable, but it don't think much so far of its part in this campaign. Heretofore in tableaux and amateur theatricals it has had a star rôle, and in this damned Richmond play it's nothing but a walking shadow! Darling Chloe, we want somebody to whoop things up. We demand the centre of the stage—"

It was so hot on the little sandy hill that there was much straggling down through the woods to some one of the mesh of water-courses. The men nearest Steve were all turned toward the discourser to Chloe, who sat on a lift of sand, cross-legged like an Eastern scribe. Mathew Coffin, near him, looked half pleased, half sulky at the teasing. Since Port Republic he was a better-liked non-commissioned officer. Billy Maydew, again flat on his back, stared at the blue sky. Steve stole a tin cup and slipped quietly off through the hazel bushes.

He found a muddy runlet straying off from the river and quenched his thirst, then, turning, surveyed through the trees the hump of earth he had left and the company upon it. Beyond it were other companies, the regiment, the brigade. Out there it was hot and glaring, in here there was black, cool, miry loam, shade and water. Steve was a Sybarite born, and he lingered here. He didn't mean to straggle, for he was afraid of this country and afraid now of his colonel; he merely lingered and roamed about a little, beneath the immensely tall trees and in the thick undergrowth. In doing this he presently came, over quaking soil and between the knees of cypresses, flush with the Chickahominy itself. He sat down, took his own knees in his arms and looked at it. It was not so wide, but it looked stiller than the sky, and bottomless. The banks were so low that the least rain lifted it over. It strayed now, here and there, between tree roots. There was no such word as "sinister" in Steve's vocabulary. He only said, "Gawd! I wouldn't live here for choice!" The country across the stream engaged his attention. Seen from this bank it appeared all forest clad, but where his own existence from moment to moment was in question Steve could read the signboards as well as another. Certain distant, southward moving, yellowish streaks he pronounced dust clouds. There were roads beneath, and moving troops and wagon trains. He counted four columns of smoke of varying thickness. The heavier meant a cluster of buildings, holding stores probably, the thinner some farmhouse or barn or mill. From other signs he divined that there were clearings over there, and that the blue troops were burning hayricks and fences as well as buildings. Sound, too—it seemed deathly still here on the brim of this dead water, and yet there was sound—the batteries, of course, down the stream where they built the bridge, but also a dull, low, dreary murmur from across,—from the thick forest and the lost roads, and the swamps through which guns were dragged; from the clearings, the corn and wheat fields, the burning depots and encampments and houses of the people—the sound of a hostile army rising from the country where two months before it had settled. All was blended; there came simply a whirring murmur out of the forest beyond the Chickahominy.