"The first day's fight is over. It is renewed next day, and, when the tired guns give over with the sun, a group of soldiers are gathered round a man. 'Who is it?' 'Who is it?' 'I thought you knew—why, it is the man who saved the Tenth Brigade—and was rewarded on the spot—Captain Thomas W.!'
"With the sunrise, came the foe! 'Pass the word along the line, there—Captain Clark is wanted at the tent of the General-in-Command!' He goes.
"' Captain Clark, do you see yonder battery of the enemy? It must be taken, or we are lost. If I give you command of a regiment whose colonel was killed yesterday, can you take it?' 'I will try.' ... 'General, the battery on the left is ours,' says an aide-de-camp an hour afterwards. 'It is taken, and all its men are either dead or prisoners!' 'Indeed! So soon? Greet the commander in my name, and salute him as Colonel Thomas W.'
"Another day dawns on the ensanguined field—a field where privates were heroes and generals poltroons! Hard fighting is before us. Up, up the soldiers spring; and on, on to death or victory they rush. Oh, it was a splendid sight—those death-defying demi-gods, who, had they in previous battles had but a Man to lead them, would have taken fifty rebel strongholds in as many hours. But such was not the drift of the 'pretty little game.' More men must die, more ditches must be dug, and more human bones must fill them, else how can Ministers carry out their whims; how else can the enemy be fought and placated at the same time? It isn't Constitutional! besides which it hurts the prospect for the Presidency of the re-United States—which prospect would be forever marred, and the 'little game' played out, if we fought without gloves, and violated our Constitutional obligations by kicking the wind out of the foe, who is trying might and main to strangle the Nation. He might hereafter say: 'You, sir, fought without gloves on!' which wouldn't do, you know.
"'Damn that Colonel Thomas W. If the fellow keeps on at that rate, we'll surely whip somebody—badly. Curse the fellow, he don't believe in the glove business, or in the "Erring Sisters' theory,"' soliloquized somebody on a certain day. 'This'll never do! Aid, come here; go tell Colonel Clark take possession of the Valley down yonder, and hold it at all hazards till nightfall!' 'But, General, he has only seven hundred men—the foe is thirteen thousand strong!' 'So much the worse for'—he meant Clark, but said, 'the enemy—they will fight like tigers.' And the aid transmitted the order—shaking hands with the Colonel as he rode away, muttering, 'Poor fellow! His goose is cooked for a certainty! What a pity he stands in somebody's light—somebody who is jealous of even a private's fame. Ah me!' and he rode back to headquarters, wondering whose turn next it would be to face the forlorn hope—such a singular number of which this Rebellion has developed.
"But there was no flinch in Colonel Thomas W.—no flinch in his men. They all saw the hazard; but they were Men and Soldiers. They knew how to obey orders, when their superiors did not. But then again, they had no hopes of success in a general election; they had no 'little game.'
"'Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do or die.'
And they done it!
"On, on, like more than Spartan heroes, on they dashed, literally, as absolutely as anything earthly can be, 'into the jaws of death—into the mouth of hell.' I have a minnie bullet on my table that plowed a furrow through a brother's heart of mine in that same dreadful valley! Away they went—that gallant band, that gallant man; and many a bullet went crashing through skulls and bones as they went; and many a soul sped its way to God ere the cohort reached the knoll in the valley. Once there, they were no longer men—they were as sublime exemplar gods. But a man fell—fell before the resistless force of a hundred horses charging with all of Treason's vehement strength, and the gallant man went down, and the thunder of iron hoofs exploded in his ear, and then the cloud passed on.
"And Thomas Clark went down—down, as Truth, and Justice and I went down; but he rose again—so ever does Truth and Justice; and as for me, Je renais de mes cendres—let those beware by whom I fell.... Down to the gory soil he went; but even while the woman sat there in the grotto, gazing till her eyeballs fairly ached with intensity—sat gazing with suppressed breath, so still was she—sat gazing, her blood on fire, her pulse beating three hundred to the minute, beating with a deep, fierce, tumultuous fire; sat gazing stilly, while her heart bounded and thumped within its bony citadel as if impatient of its duress, and longing to burst its tabernacle, and let the imprisoned soul go free; sat gazing, while her eyes, large grey eyes, all the while gleamed with a light that proved her capable of giving birth to heroes—even while thus she gazed on the wheeling squadrons, the charging hosts, and the great guns, as they gave forth their fiery vomit, charged with sudden deaths—the man, Tom Clark, sprung to his feet again, and, as he staunched his blood with one hand, he pointed with the other at the foe. 'Follow me!' he cried. 'See! we are reinforced! On to victory—on!' And his voice rose above the tempest, and it flew over the spaces, and it fell upon the ears of a 'great man,' and the 'great man' wrung his hands, and he thought: 'Not dead yet! Damn the fellow! He will make us win a victory—and that'll never do! Dear me! that cursed fool will spoil my little game! Oh, for night, or a fresh division of—the enemy! I must reinforce him, though, else it'll get into that infernal Tribune—or into that cursed George Wilkes' paper—and that'll spoil my little game! Ho, there! Aid, go tell General Trueman to reinforce Colonel Thomas W. My little game!' and he arranged his epaulettes and gave his moustache an additional killing twist. In the meantime, Tom Clark had charged the enemy with bayonets with the remnant of his own force, followed by hundreds whom his example had transformed into something more sublime than fighting soldiers.