That terrible, unforgettable day rolled back upon him. He was just a few months ordained. He had just been appointed chaplain in the Union army. All unseasoned and unschooled in the ways and business of a battlefield, he had found himself that day in the sand dunes before Fort Fisher. Red, reeking carnage rioted all about him. Hail, fumes, lightning and thunder of battle rolled over him and sickened him. He saw his own Massachusetts troop hurl itself up against 18 the Confederate breastworks, crumple up on itself, and fade away back into the smoke. He lost it, and lost himself in the smoke. He wandered blindly over the field, now stumbling over a dead man, now speaking to a living stricken one: Here straightening a torn body and giving water; there hearing the confession of a Catholic.
Now the smoke cleared, and Curtis’ troops came yelling across the flat land. Once, twice they tried the trenches and were driven back into the marshes. A captain was shot off the back of a big white horse. The animal, mad with fright and blood scent, charged down upon him as he bent over a dying man. He grabbed the bridle and fought the horse. Before he realised what he was doing, he was in the saddle riding back and forth across the field. Right up to the trenches the horse carried him.
Within twenty paces of their guns lay a boy, a thin, long-legged boy with a long beardless face. He lay there marking the high tide of the last charge––the farthest of the fallen. The chaplain, tumbling down somehow from his mount, picked up the writhing boy and bundled him across the saddle. Then he started walking back looking for his own lines.
Now here was the boy talking to him across the mists of twenty-five years. And the boy, the man, was dying. He had picked the boy, Tom Lansing, up out of the sand where he would have 19 died from fever bloat or been trampled to death in the succeeding charges. He had given him life. And, as Tom Lansing had said to his daughter, he had given that daughter life. Now he knew what Lansing was going to say.
“I didn’t know you then,” said Lansing. “I don’t know who you are now, Chaplain, or what you are.
“But,” he went on slowly, “if I’d agiven you a message that day you’d have taken it on for me, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course I would.”
“Suppose it had been to my mother, say: You’da risked your life to get it on to her?”
“I hope I would,” said the Bishop evenly.
“I believe you would. That’s what I think of you,” said Tom Lansing.