The Long Roll

by Mary Johnston

The engine pushing the railroad gun alternately puffed and shrieked through dark woodland and sunset-flooded clearing. A courier appeared, signalling with his hat. "General Magruder's there by the bridge over the cut! Says, 'Come on!' Says, 'Cross the bridge and get into battery in the field beyond,' Says, 'Hurry up!'"

The siege-piece and the engine hurried. With a wild rattle and roar, the crew all yelling, black smoke everywhere, and the whistle screaming like a new kind of shell, the whole came out of the wood upon the railroad bridge. Instantly there burst from the blue batteries a tremendous, raking fire. Shot and shell struck the engine, the iron penthouse roof over the siege-piece, the flat car, the bridge itself. From the car and the bridge slivers were torn and hurled through the air. A man was killed, two others wounded, but engine and gun roared across. They passed Magruder standing on the bank. "Here we are, general, here we are! Yaaih! Yaaaih!"

"Th' you are. Don't thop here! Move down the track a little. Other Richmond howitthers coming."

The other howitzers, four pieces, six horses to each, all in a gallop, captain ahead, men following in a mad run, whips crackling, drivers shouting, came all in thunder on the bridge and across. The blue shells flew like harpies, screaming, swooping, scattering ruin. A red gleam from the declining sun bathed the wild train. In a roar of sound the whole cleared the bridge and plunged from the track to the level field. Forward into battery, left oblique, march!

McLaws on the right, hard pressed, sent to Magruder for reinforcements. The 13th and 21st Mississippi answered. Kershaw, supported by Semmes and Kemper, advancing under an iron hail by deserted camp and earthwork, ordered the 2d, 3d and 7th South Carolina to charge. They did so, with a high, ringing cry, through the sunset wood into the fields, by the farm and the peach orchard, where they and the blue lines stubbornly engaged. On both sides, the artillery came furiously into action.

The long twilight faded, the stars began to show. The firing slackened, died to occasional sullen outbursts, then to silence. On both sides the loss was heavy; the action remained indecisive. The grey rested on the field; the blue presently took up again their line of retreat toward White Oak Swamp. They left in the hands of the grey their dead, several hundred prisoners, and twenty-five hundred men in hospital. In the hot and sultry night, dark, with presage of a storm, through a ruined country, by the light of their own burning stores, the blue column wound slowly on by the single road toward White Oak Swamp and its single bridge. The grey brigades lit their small camp-fires, gathered up the wounded, grey and blue, dug trenches for the dead, found food where they might and went hungry where there was none, answered to roll call and listened to the silence after many names, then lay down in field and wood beneath the gathering clouds.

Some time between sunset and the first star Steve Dagg found himself, he hardly knew how, crouching in a line of pawpaw bushes bordering a shallow ravine. The clay upon his shirt and trousers made it seem probable that he had rolled down the embankment from the railroad gun to the level below. That he was out of breath, panting in hard painful gasps, might indicate that he had run like a hare across the field. He could not remember; anyhow here he was, a little out of hell, just fringing it as it were. Lying close to earth, between the smooth pawpaw stems, the large leaves making a night-time for him, Steve felt deadly sick. "O Gawd! why'd I volunteer in, seein' I can't volunteer out?" Behind him he heard the roaring of the guns, the singing of the minies. A chance shell went over his head, dug itself into the soil at the bottom of the ravine, and exploded. The earth came pattering upon the pawpaw leaves. Steve curled up like a hedgehog. "O Gawd! I ain't got a friend in the world. Why didn't I stay on Thunder Run and marry Lucinda Heard?"

At dark the guns ceased. In the silence his nausea lessened and the chill sweat dried upon him. He lay quiet for awhile, and then he parted the pawpaw bushes and crept out. He looked over his shoulder at the field of battle. "I ain't going that-a-way and meet that gunner again—damn him to everlasting hell!" He looked across the ravine toward the west, but a vision came to him of the hospital in the wood, and of how the naked dead men and the severed legs and arms might stir at night. He shivered and grew sick again. Southward? There was a glare upon all that horizon and a sound of distant explosions. The Yankees were sweeping through the woods that way, and they might kill him on sight without waiting for him to explain. A grey army was also over there,—Lee and Longstreet and A. P. Hill. He was as afraid of the grey as of the blue; after the railroad gun he was afraid of a shadow. Finally, he turned northward toward the Chickahominy again.

The night, so dark and hot, presently became darker by reason of masses of clouds rising swiftly from the horizon and blotting out the stars. They hung low, they pressed heavily, beneath them a sulphur-tainted and breathless air. Lightnings began to flash, thunder to mutter. "Yah!" whimpered Steve. "I'm going to get wet again! It's true. Everything's agin me."

He came again upon the swampy margin of the Chickahominy. It was wide, threaded by motionless waters, barred and banded with low-growing swamp shrubs, set with enormously tall and solemn trees. Steve, creeping between protruding roots, heard a screech owl in the distance. It cried and cried, but then the thunder rolled more loudly and drowned its hooting. He came flush with the dark stretch of the river. "Gawd, do I want to get across, or do I want to stay here? I wish I was dead—no, I don't!" He faced the lightning. "Gawd, that was jes' a mistake—don't take any notice of it, please.—Yaaah!" He had set his foot on a log, which gave beneath it and sank into deep water. With a screech like the owl's he drew back and squeezed himself, trembling, between the roots of a live-oak. He concluded that he would stay here until the dawn.