There was plenty to eat at General Chambliss’s. I always remember that fact when it was a fact, because it was beginning to be so pleasant and unusual to have enough to eat. Hicksford hadn’t been raided, and there were still chickens on the roost, bees in the hive, turkeys up the trees, partridges in the woods, and corn in the barns. The barn, by the way, was new, and the soldiers gave a ball in it. We all went and had a most delightful evening. I well remember that I went in “Miss Sally’s kerridge,” and that General Rooney Lee and I led off the ball together. I remember, too, that we had a fine supper: turkeys, chicken-salad, barbecued mutton, roast pig with an apple in his mouth, pound-cake, silver-cake, cheese-cake or transparent pudding, “floating island” or “tipsy squire”; plenty of bread, milk, sure-enough coffee—everything and enough of it. We danced till morning and leaving our gallant entertainers in the gray dawn, went off to sleep nearly all day.
The next ball was in an old farmhouse where some of our cavalry were quartered. We had another good supper—everything good to eat and plenty of it—like the first. There were no chairs or furniture of any kind, as I remember, but there were benches ranged around the barn for us to sit on when resting during the pauses of the dance. After a dance with him General Rooney Lee led me back to the room where the banquet was spread to taste something especially nice which he liked and which I had not touched—eating a good thing when you could get it was a delightful and serious duty in those days. There was quite a circle around us, and we were all nibbling, laughing, chatting away as if there were no such things as war and death in the land, when a courier in muddy boots strode across the room to the general, saluted, spoke a few words, and the general walked aside with him. The music was enticing, and while the general was engaged with the courier I went back with some one else to the ballroom and took my place in the lancers. We were clasping hands and bowing ourselves through the grand chain when the dance was interrupted. The army was to march.
There was great confusion, hurried hand-shaking, sometimes no hand-shaking at all, no time for good-bys. The soldiers could not stand on the order of their going. I do not remember how I came to the farmhouse, but I know that my husband bundled me unceremoniously into a cart with some people I hardly knew, and sent me home, telling me to pack my trunk but not to be disappointed if he could not take me with him. I did not lie down at all. I packed my trunk as soon as I got home, then sat down and waited, and before long my husband came for me in an ambulance. His courier, Lieutenant Wumble, was with him, and the ambulance was driven by an Irishman named Miles. The horses were tied to the back of the ambulance, and frequently my husband and Lieutenant Wumble rode ahead reconnoitering. It began to rain. “What made you always start in the rain?” I have been asked by friends to whom I was relating my campaigns. What I want to know is, what made it always rain when I started? Let me but step into an ambulance and immediately it began to rain. My movements had to be regulated by the movements of the army, not by the weather, though really the weather seemed to regulate itself by mine.
We found the roads worse as we advanced. The farther we went the deeper was the mud. Mud came up to the hubs of our wheels; the mules could hardly pull their feet up out of the miry mass in some places. At last we found ourselves regularly “stuck in the mud.” There was no pushing or pulling the ambulance farther. It was nearly dark, but fortunately we were near a farmhouse, and at the side of the road where we got stuck was a stile made by blocks of unequal heights set on either side of a plank fence. These blocks were simply sections of the round body of a tree which had been sawed up. On the opposite side of the stile a pathway led to the house. The mud-hole in which our ambulance was embedded was about ten yards from the stile. My husband insisted that I be carried bodily to the stile, and Lieutenant Wumble, who was one of the most gallant fellows in the world, took it as a matter of course that he must carry me. He urged that he had been brought along to be useful and that Dan had never recovered entirely from his wound. But Dan hooted at the idea! He was very much obliged to the lieutenant, but really he was used to this sort of thing, and understood lifting ladies about much better than Wumble. It was not altogether brute strength, but some science that was required. So Dan stepped out of the ambulance on to the side of the mud-hole, where of course the ground was not so muddy as in the center where we were stuck, but where it was rather slippery, nevertheless. Balancing himself nicely, he took me out, but just as he poised me on his arm with scientific ease and grace he slipped and fell backward, sprawling in the mud, and I went over his head, sprawling, too.
Whereupon Lieutenant Wumble, laughing, came to pick me up, saying as he did so:
“I told you that you ought to let me carry you. Just lie there, major, and I’ll come back for you as soon as I set your wife down. Keep quiet, major,” as Dan swore at the mud and slipped again, “and I’ll pick you up and get you along all right.”
As Dan dragged himself up he was a perfect mud man, and he had left the print of himself in the mud behind him. They took us in at the farmhouse, and sent men to help the driver prize the ambulance out of the hole. They scraped the mud off me, and a colored woman washed my clothes and hung them by the fire, so they might be dry by morning. Of course, this process put me in bed at once. Our supper was poor and the bed uncomfortable, but it was the best our hosts could do.
After an uncomfortable night we started off again toward Dinwiddie Court-house, which was to be our next stopping-place. As we journeyed on we knew that we were getting into most dangerous quarters. The nearer we drew to Petersburg the nearer we were to the tangle of Federal and Confederate lines; the nearer to skirmishers and scouts from both armies. The night got blacker and blacker—you could not see your hand before you—and the blacker it grew the more frightened old Miles became. Out of the darkness where, invisible, he sat astride the invisible mule he drove, he poured an unceasing stream of complaint.
“Arrah! the divil a bit can Oi see where Oi’m goin’. It’s so dark ye couldn’t see a light if there was any. The mules, intilligint crathurs they are, maybe they know where they be goin’. It’s more than the loikes of me does. But what Oi’ve got agin a mule is that they don’t know an honest Amerikin in gray clothes—or mixed rags it is now—from a nasty, thavin’ Yankee.”
If we were silent for a few minutes, then Miles spoke out for company’s sake, or asked unnecessary questions perhaps to find out if we were there, and that the Yankees hadn’t spirited us away.