More vacant chairs, more broken hearts, more suffering, and starvation nearer at hand was what I found there. Milicent was spending her time in nursing the sick and wounded in the hospital, and winning from them the name that has clung to her ever since. There are old white-haired men in the South who still call her “Madonna.”

CHAPTER XXIII
“INTO THE JAWS OF DEATH”

One lovely morning mother sat at an upper window shelling peas for dinner. The window commanded a view of the Petersburg heights and beyond. Presently she stopped shelling peas, and gazed intently out of the window.

“What is that on the heights, Nellie?” she asked, and then, “What men are those running about on the hill beyond?”

I came to the window and looked out. The hills looked blue.

With a sinking heart I got the field-glass and turned it southeast. The hills swarmed with soldiers in Federal uniforms! Men in gray were galloping up to the Reservoir and unlimbering guns. We heard the roar of cannon, the rattle of musketry. The heavens were filled with fire and smoke. Men in blue were vanishing as they came; they thought Reservoir Hill a fort. That was the ninth of June, when 125 old men and boys saved the town by holding Kautz’s command, 1,800 strong, at bay on the Jerusalem Plank Road as long as they could and long enough to give Graham’s and Studivant’s batteries and Dearing’s cavalry time to rush to the front. The Ninth of June is Petersburg’s Memorial Day, her day of pride and sorrow.

A few days after—mother was shelling peas again—whiz! whack! a shell sung through the air, striking in Bolling Square. Whiz! whack! came another, and struck Mrs. Dunlop’s house two doors from us. Mrs. De Voss, our neighbor on one side, and Mrs. Williams and her two daughters who lived on the other, ran in, pale with terror, and clamored to go down into our cellar. We were like frightened sheep. I half laugh, half cry now with vexation to think how calmly and stubbornly mother sat shelling peas in that window. She was bent on finishing her peas before she moved. Finally we induced her to go with us, and we all went down into the cellar. There we huddled together for the rest of the day, and until late into the night, not knowing what went on above or outside, little Bobby asleep in his mother’s lap, and the rest of us too frightened to sleep. At last, when we had heard no guns for a long time, we crept upstairs and lay down on our beds and tried to sleep. The next morning the shelling began again. Shells flew all around us. One struck in the yard next to ours; another horrid, smoking thing dropped in our own yard. We decided that it was time to abandon the house.

As the firing came from the south and the east, and the Appomattox was on the north of the city, we could only turn to the west. Any other direction and we would have run toward the guns or into the river. With no more rhyme or reason than this in our course we started up Washington Street, running west, but without regard to the order of our going.

Crossing the railroad at Jarrett’s Hotel, I saw a Confederate soldier whom I recognized as an old playmate and friend of Norfolk days. We stopped each other.

“Where did you come from, Harry?”