His One Woman (11 page)

An observation balloon, tethered to a cart, was the subject of much interest and comment, much of it ribald—but its occupants could probably see more than the representatives of Washington society who had made this long and tiring journey apparently only to admire the scenery.

Suddenly puffs of smoke, both black and white, rose above the trees and the cannons' roar grew louder and louder. Lines of soldiers, clad in blue and grey, appeared out of the murk below them, only to disappear again.

‘How very disappointing,' drawled one middle-aged Senator. ‘It's almost impossible to tell what, if anything, is happening.'

Sophie and Aunt Serena Hope had joined them from the carriage. Aunt Serena had brought her opera glasses with her, and occasionally passed them to Marietta and her daughter, but little more could be seen with them than without them. After a time some of the men offered learned—and patronising—explanations of the course of the battle to the women,
although how accurate they were, since little could be seen, Marietta found it hard to tell.

Sophie was no happier out of the carriage than in it. She could hardly have said herself what it was that she had expected to see, but, as was common with her, she soon became bored.

Marietta, on the other hand, was trying to understand everything about her. Among the growing crowd of spectators were foreign diplomats, as well as many of her Washington friends, who had made this hazardous trip. Unlike Sophie, they were determined to enjoy themselves even though, in their ignorance of the unseen death and mutilation below them, they found the whole experience anti-climactic.

Sophie, indeed, complained bitterly that so far she had seen nothing but puffs of smoke and trees, as well as a few men vanishing into the distance. ‘If it were not for the trees,' she sighed, ‘we might have had a better notion of what was happening.'

Marietta, however, was grateful at not having to witness the gory details of the actual fighting, and could only wonder how Sophie, who screamed at a bleeding finger, would react if the battle drew near enough for her to make out the shattered limbs and the broken bodies which must surely lie below them.

What none of them understood when they opened their hampers and picnicked on the grass was that the battle was beginning to move towards them while the Northern troops fell slowly back.

Jack and Russell were now on the edge of the battle area itself, which was being fought around Bull Run stream, or Manassas as it was sometimes called. Russell had led a horse with him and was determined to get into the thick of things, particularly since various senior officers had confidently informed him that ‘our side is whipping Johnny Reb' when his experiences in the recent Crimean War led him to believe that quite the opposite was happening!

Jack, being an innocent in these matters, had no idea who was in the right, but he was worried that the noise of battle was growing nearer and nearer when, if the North was winning, it ought to be diminishing. What surprised him, as it surprised the watchers on the hill, was how aimless it seemed to be. He had, quite wrongly, visualised something neat and tidy taking place. Instead, all was haphazard: parties of men ran across his line of sight; occasionally a troop of horsemen emerged from the grey and black smoke—only to disappear again.

A little time later Russell disappeared, too. He mounted his horse and rode off into the thick of things in order to have something tangible to put in his despatch. When, in the early afternoon, it became quite plain that the battle was drawing nearer and nearer, Jack ordered his horse and buggy to be ready for a rapid departure. He was beginning to suspect that Russell had been right and that the rebels were winning.

Above him the spectators were still in a state of innocent optimism, believing that the battle was al
most won. They were joined by a group of senior officers who assured Hamilton Hope that all was well.

‘We shall shortly have them on the run,' one of them said importantly, ‘and after that, the way to Virginia and victory will lie clear before us. It won't be long before we can all go home.'

Everyone around him began to cheer, quite unaware that at that very moment the Southern troops had broken Northern resistance, and that the home army was retreating across the turnpike road which they had crossed to get at the Rebels' batteries. Instead, it was the Northern batteries which had been captured and consequently a massive general retreat had begun; a retreat which neither General McDowell nor his officers could control.

Once started, the retreat took on a life of its own. Shell-shocked officers and men began to make for the rear, carrying all before them: caissons, supply wagons, the commissariat, medical carts and orderlies, everything streaming madly back towards Centerville and the hope of safety.

The spectators from Washington lay directly in their path and were quite unaware that a massive retreat, involving the whole Union Army, had begun. At first they merely saw small groups of men walking listlessly away from the action, heads hanging. An odd wagon careered by. So far the battle had seemed so inconsequential that no one realised exactly what was happening.

Suddenly a group of men, mixed up with every different kind of conveyance, came towards them at the run, shouting, ‘Git, darn yer, git. We're whipped, we're whipped.'

Men were throwing their weapons away in order to make their flight from certain death the more rapid. Some of them, hampered by the spectators who still did not fully understand what was happening, shook their fists at them as they passed, cursing them for their presence, for being in the way of their retreat from the intolerable which lay behind them.

The spectators, realising at last that the supposed victory had turned into a rout, ran towards their carriages, shouting to the drivers to point them towards home and prepare to leave at once.

Marietta's party had been sitting at some distance from the Hopes' carriage when the unthinkable began to happen. They dashed towards it; Hamilton Hope was the first to reach it. He climbed in and, taking the reins from the driver, began to wheel it rapidly in the direction of Washington, shouting to the others to hurry up and jump aboard.

Marietta, already prepared, pushed her Aunt Serena into the carriage, before turning back for Sophie—only to discover that she had mislaid her bonnet, taken off when the sun had moved away from them, and was hunting about for it.

‘Leave it,' exclaimed Marietta impatiently. ‘We've no time to lose,' and when Sophie wailed ‘No' and ran away from her, she seized her hand and began to drag her towards the carriage and safety. She was
hampered in this not only by Sophie's crinoline cage, which restrained her movements, but also by Sophie's determination to take her time since she was more annoyed by Marietta's urgency than by the approaching danger.

So much so that, although Hamilton Hope was shouting to them to hurry, they were still outside the carriage when a wagon, out of control, careered by with soldiers hanging out of it. Its driver was purple in the face and desperate, and on seeing that the Hopes' carriage was directly in its path he shouted, ‘Out of my way, damn you,' and brought his whip down, hard, on the flank of the nearest Hope horse.

With a shrill neigh the horse bolted, taking the carriage with it, instantly to be carried away in the midst of the struggling mass of men and wagons. Within seconds it was lost to Sophie's and Marietta's sight, its driver unable to return to help or to collect them.

Sophie began to scream, only for the sound to be lost in the thunder of the retreat gathering pace around them. Marietta, terrified that the pair of them would be trampled underfoot, tried to push Sophie off the road. Behind them the bellowing guns had moved up, and were now firing directly at them. Sophie screamed again when a shell landed among the crowd of men and conveyances in their rear, leaving the dead and dying sprawling on the road.

Marietta, indeed, tried to keep her head while Sophie progressively lost hers. There was no question of regaining the Hopes' carriage, and chivalry had
died in the
sauve qui peut
of the general retreat. Holding Sophie firmly by the hand, she pushed and shoved her way through the cursing mob, trying to avoid being run down by men on horseback, and by men driving carts and carriages of all description.

In the general panic no one made any attempt to assist the two helpless women: it was doubtful, indeed, whether anyone actually registered their presence. In the end Marietta forced the pair of them off the road in an attempt to reach the open fields beyond, where they might not be trampled in the rush.

Sophie's screaming, alternated with sobbing, was now continuous but somehow Marietta managed to drag her to the edge of a cornfield through which parties of frantic soldiers were running in an attempt to escape from the dreadful battle which had been raging since dawn.

As soon as they stopped Sophie sat down, shouting at Marietta, ‘Whatever you say, I can't run any more. I can't, I can't. I shall wait here until Papa comes for me.'

‘You must carry on walking,' said Marietta, still panting from the effort of trying to save them both. ‘If you want to escape death or dishonour—or perhaps both, since your father is, by now, far ahead of us and unable to turn back. You will find it easier to run if you take off your crinoline cage and gather up your skirts.'

Far from calming Sophie, this useful advice set her screaming again. The tears running down her face, she demanded her father, her mother, anyone and
anything which would deliver her from this nightmare.

Exasperated, Marietta said, as reasonably as she could, ‘Since there is no one here to save us, Sophie, we must try to save ourselves and we shan't do that by crying and lamenting. We must try to be practical.'

This didn't answer, either. The bravado which Sophie had assumed since dawn, and before the rout began, had quite disappeared. It had been lost at the moment when she was confronted with the stark realities of war. Left to herself, she would have stayed on the ground and refused to rise. Someone else must save her, preferably a man, and certainly not Marietta, whom she resented more bitterly than ever for her brave attempts to save them both from a terrible fate.

She underestimated her cousin's determination to survive. Marietta pulled Sophie to her feet, slapped her hard on the cheek and began to lift her skirts in order to rip the crinoline cage from her.

Sophie's screams stopped. She shrieked at her cousin, ‘You beast, you beast, you hit me,' but she consented at last to help Marietta to untie her crinoline cage. She stepped out of it and, complaining bitterly, allowed Marietta to use her sash to tie up her skirts so that she could walk more freely.

They set off again. Marietta gripped Sophie's hand as firmly as she could, while Sophie howled at her, ‘I shall never forgive you for hitting me, never. No,
never,' before wrenching her hand away and sitting down again.

‘Oh, damn that,' said Marietta, forgetting everything ladylike by which she had always lived. ‘Think rather how we are to get home again—and we shan't do that by cursing each other.'

She took Sophie's hand again, pulled her to her feet, and began to drag her along in the direction in which she thought Centerville lay. If they could reach there they might yet survive—but it would have to be by their own efforts: the retreating troops were ignoring their plight, concerned only with trying to save themselves.

They walked and stumbled for about a mile with Marietta taking progressively more and more of Sophie's weight, occasionally half-carrying her. The further Marietta led them away from the road where they might be trapped, the rougher the ground grew until they came to one of the many shallow streams for which the district was famous.

Sophie collapsed on to the bank. Exhaustion was preventing her from screaming. She whispered in a dull, defeated voice, ‘I really can't go any further. You can't ask me to. Someone will have to carry me across the water.'

Marietta's patience snapped again. Dragging Sophie along was tiring her to the point of collapse, but somehow she had, so far, managed to find a reserve of strength which she had not known she possessed. Despite her dislike for her cousin, she had no wish to save herself and return to Washington on her own,
leaving Sophie behind to suffer whatever doom awaited her.

She hauled Sophie to her feet, and shook her violently, shouting into her face, ‘If you won't try to save your own life, at least think a little of mine. I didn't even want to come on this stupid expedition, and if you won't help yourself I shall leave you here to be a plaything for the Rebel soldiers when they capture you.'

Sophie was so astonished by Marietta's ferocity that she allowed herself to be dragged into the water. Both of them slipped and stumbled on the stones, their skirts growing progressively heavier as they worked their way across the stream. Sophie's light shoes were useless for this sort of work and Marietta's own strong pair fared little better: they were not intended for a forced march across open country.

Their dreadful walk now began to take its toll on Marietta. Her strength was gradually being drained by the efforts of supporting her cousin, who was still making so little effort to help herself. Both women were bathed in sweat; their wet hair clung to their heads and faces, their clothing to their bodies; their feet were blistered and their breathing had turned into a desperate loud panting.

Marietta dared not allow them to rest, for she was fearful that if they stopped Sophie would not be able to start again; only the knowledge that the Confederate Army was hard on their heels kept her going. Once they had left the stream behind she saw that the traffic on the road had slackened a little.

There had been a break in the retreat, caused later, she was to find, by the road bridge, further downstream from where they had crossed, being hit by a shell, thus splitting the retreat into two. It also meant that gun and private carriages were stranded on the wrong side from Washington. At the time, seeing that the retreating crowd had thinned, Marietta steered Sophie back towards the road where walking would be easier for them.