House Divided (182 page)

As Longstreet countermarched, rain began to fall. They turned off by the road to Amelia Springs. Longstreet had said they must reach Burkville before Grant barred the way; but now, miles short of Burkville, Grant had forced them to another northerly detour. Presently a word from Longstreet let Trav understand that this same thought was in the other's mind.

“ 'Lys Grant has moved fast. He's a better guesser than I thought, unless he's heard somehow what we meant to do.”

“He's across our road to Burkville,” Trav agreed.

Longstreet looked at him with hard eyes. “No matter,” he said gruffly. “Farmville will do as well.” But Trav knew this was not so. Farmville was on the road to Lynchburg, and that road led west, not south to General Johnston.

They found Flat Creek at a flood stage, with water out over the road on either side of the creek itself; and the bridge was shaky. Infantry could use it, or could wade the creek; but wagons and artillery must wait till the bridge was strengthened. Trav was left to see to this while the leading divisions pushed ahead.

 

It was dark and the rain had ceased when Trav rode through Amelia Springs. Once, long ago, he had come here with his mother, when she desired to take the waters. In those days, Otterbein Lithia Water was famous, bottled and shipped all over the world; but the Springs were no longer a resort, the hotel was abandoned, even brick buildings were falling into ruin.

At the Springs and beyond, Trav found dangerous congestion. The army's trains, almost a thousand wagons, had left Amelia Court House with orders for Burkville, and using every available road. But since Grant forced a change of plan, Farmville was now the goal; and this meant confusion. Worse, Yankee cavalry had caught some wagons in the swampy ground along the creek on the road to Painesville, and burned them and blocked that road for hours. Now, guns and wagons marching by the route Trav followed encountered another column entering the same road short of Deatonville; and a mass of men and mules and horses shouldered each other along the narrow way.

The mud was deep and the night was raw with the threat of rain to come. The wagons moved slowly with many halts, the men stumbled wearily in the blackness. Trav, to give them room, kept Nig off the road, picking his way through the fields and woods; and the big horse was nervous, catching by infection the tension of haste and fear and weariness and hunger and bewilderment which bound the trudging men. Trav, himself blinded by the darkness, gave Nig his head; for there were flankers out against any sudden rush of enemy cavalry, and when the column halted for even a moment, worn-out men moved off the road and dropped in their tracks. Nig could be trusted not to step on them.

Trav heard officers shouting to awaken these sleepers, and he thought some would be hard to wake, would need to be shaken, or dragged to their feet. He knew that if he surrendered to slumber, no ordinary outcry would rouse him. Even Nig was tremulous, as much with fatigue as with tight nerves.

Into that dreadful plodding, that sleep-walking nightmare, burst sudden tragedy. A man lying in exhausted sleep a little off the road, his dreams disturbed by Nig's passing, uttered a terrible strangled cry and let off his gun. At that flash almost under his nose, the great horse bounded to one side so violently that Trav was almost unseated. Nig crashed into a fence; and even in the darkness Trav saw another horse, tied to the fence, rear high with a scream of terror and the splintering of breaking wood, and then plunge full gallop along the road jammed with men.

Trav brought Nig under control, but ahead of him the other horse was running through the scattering soldiers, the fragment of rail to
which his reins had been secured flailing against his heels; and there was a clamor of shouts, and then screams of pain, and then sudden bursts of musketry. Instantly, in the black confusion, guns were going everywhere, in disorderly but deadly volleys. Nig was wild, and Trav fought to control him, and felt the twitch of a bullet pluck his sleeve, and knew himself the target of some of that fire. He swung Nig away into the cover of the trees and brought him to a halt and heard along the road behind him rapid firing still continue, and the shouts of officers trying to steady the men. There came a brief hush, and he could hear the voices, the excited harangues; and then at some new alarm the men along the road broke down the fence with a universal rush and came running toward the wood where he was, firing back toward the road as they ran.

It was dread of enemy cavalry which had wrought them to this pitch. Sight of Trav and Nig would fan them to a higher frenzy; so Trav guided Nig straight away from the road, and risked a gallop through the scrub oak and dwarf pines, till behind him the firing dwindled and died down and silence came again. He rode on in bitter grief. Not all those bullets could have gone astray. Many must have found human flesh; more than one man must have died in that medley, friend killing friend with no enemy near. But night was a time for panic. Even strong men knew in darkness fears which daylight banished. How much more easily, then, would phantom fears infect these starved skeletons of men whose valor for four years had shone so bright! They could be forgiven. Whatever errors they might now commit could not wipe out the great deeds they had done.

 

Trav came up with the advance and reported to the General. Approaching dawn brought a new sprinkle of rain that retarded coming day and shrouded everything in a gray veil. It fretted them all, as strands of spiderweb may fret one who walks through an untrodden wood, wetting them a little and a little more, forming drops on cheek and beard. Longstreet called a halt. Rest must take the place of food, yet they could not rest for long.

With first light, the General and Trav and a few others, leaving orders for the men presently to follow, rode on toward Rice's Station. They came to a considerable creek, now at the flood and out of its
banks. The road crossed by a rattling bridge of poles and then climbed steeply, circling the heads of deep ravines where little streams were born to work their devious way northward to the Appomattox, keeping to high ground where in the forest dogwoods were showing their first bloom.

When they reached the crest above the valley in which the railroad ran, the drizzle had ceased and the skies began to clear. Longstreet waited there for Field's division to come up, and they rode with the head of the column down the long hill. At the Station, the advance encountered a light force of enemy infantry and scattered them; but a householder reported that several hundred Yankees had gone toward Farmville. They might burn the bridges which the army must use, so Longstreet sent Rosser's cavalry to overtake those Yankees and destroy them. He put his arriving divisions into position to meet any threat from the south, and waited for word from General Lee.

General Rosser returned to report the enemy scattered, the bridge at Farmville safely held; and Trav recognized Burr among the troopers and had brief word with him. “All right, Burr?”

Burr nodded. “But I could sleep a week.” His tones were dull. “Have you seen Papa? Or Rollin?”

“No. I saw your mother in Richmond. They're all right. At least, they were then.”

“Has Sherman taken Raleigh?”

Trav guessed Burr's thought, for Barbara was in Raleigh. “I don't know.” Burr moved on, trotting his tired horse to overtake his comrades.

 

Before that day ended, Longstreet's divisions, with screening cavalry watching the growing enemy strength on the road from Burkville, were well concentrated; but there were no rations for the men. Trav heard that General Lee, having stayed the night before at Amelia Springs, had come up with them; but he did not see the commanding general. He was with Latrobe when a little after dark on Thursday Longstreet summoned them to say they must move on.

“There was some hope of turning south from here,” he said. “But enemy columns are coming up the Burkville road.” He directed Latrobe to draft the orders: trains and batteries to start at once for
Farmville; Field, Heth, Wilcox to follow in that order; the skirmish lines to give the last division an hour's start; Rosser's horsemen to protect the rear. “And every effort must be made to bring along stragglers, and to wake every man who may have fallen asleep.”

Latrobe asked: “Where is Anderson? He should have been up hours ago.”

“General Lee has taken Mahone's division back to find him. They will march to High Bridge while we move to Farmville. Give the orders; then we will ride ahead with the trains.”

A little after ten o'clock they mounted; but they found the road jammed with halted wagons and guns, and rode along the column through the darkness to find where the trouble lay. The bridge over Sandy Run had proved too weak to support a heavy load; and Longstreet set men to unload ammunition wagons and limbers and thus lighten them so they could cross. The ammunition must be carried over and reloaded on the other side. Trav and the others of the staff shared in that work, wading the shallow river to their boot tops; and Trav thought his arms would crack under the heavy burdens, yet found resolution to keep on. Longstreet damned the useless arm that prevented him from working as hard as they; and he damned the bridge and the river and the toiling men, lashing them all alike with a steady and picturesque profanity which made them grin, even while they winced under his bruising tongue.

Not till near dawn was that hard task done. When at last they rode on toward Farmville and came to another bridge and to a third a mile beyond, Trav was profoundly grateful that these bridges were equal to the tasks imposed, so those hours of toil need not be again endured.

 

In Friday's first daylight, they rode through Farmville and across the Appomattox, and they found wagons loaded with rations which had been brought by the South Side Railroad from Lynchburg. The starving men swarmed around the wagons, and little cooking fires sent smoke banners drifting gently upward toward the threatening sky; but Trav, more tired than hungry, sought a patch of new-springing grass where Nig could graze, and himself lay flat along the ground and was instantly asleep.

Yet not for long. A sudden stir waked him, and he saw General Lee ride at a trot to where Longstreet was standing. Trav rose and led Nig, reluctant to leave the good grass, plucking a last mouthful as he yielded to the tug of the reins, toward the group surrounding the commanding general; and he heard General Lee's words. There had been disaster yesterday at Sayler's Creek, back beyond Rice's Station. Trav thought that must be the creek which they had crossed on the pole bridge, before they climbed to the ridge where dogwoods were in bloom. General Lee was saying that there or thereabouts, the rear under Ewell and Kershaw had been cut off and captured; seven or eight thousand men were lost. Worse, the enemy cavalry was now across the Appomattox at High Bridge, and coming up on their flank.

“So you had better not let your men wait to eat their rations,” General Lee directed. “We must move toward Cumberland Church, and at once.”

Trav had never heard of Cumberland Church, but the guns were going behind them, south of Farmville, and there was firing off to the east; so once more the enemy was edging them north again, away from the course they wished to take. He was dumb with weariness and hopelessness; but if Longstreet was shaken by this new blow the big man gave no sign. At his orders the hungry men fell in, gnawing at raw pork and gobbling meal mush which there had not been time to cook. Everything else was thrown into the wagons any way at all; the teamsters caught the infection of haste and whipped their teams away; the columns formed and began to move. From the Farmville bridge, the protecting screen of horsemen came pell-mell toward them before a thrust of blue cavalry; and Longstreet's great voice boomed above the sound of musketry, the cracking whips and the rumble of the wagons.

“Quick—march!” he ordered. Trav saw Lee speak to him; and though the men struck off as briskly as tired men could, he roared a new command. “Double quick—march!” The men obediently began to jog.

Longstreet sent Heth to support the cavalry. General Lee rode on at a canter to the head of the column; but Longstreet waited till the rear was moving, then followed at a walk. Trav, half asleep in his saddle, heard in remote indifference the steady chatter of Heth's
musketry diminishing behind them. From a hilltop a mile north of the river there was a distant view to the eastward, back toward Petersburg; and to the northwest he saw a little group of bold heights not far away, and he glimpsed the distant mountains. When they had gone two or three miles, there was another halt to meet a Yankee thrust against their flank along a crossroad that came in past some coal pits. Mahone's division went that way, with cavalry to help him meet the danger; the infantry halted to be ready for any need while the trains went on.

 

The long day was for Trav a troubled dream. Without the relief of action, he could only wait. That pressure against their flank held them here till dark; then they took up their march and pushed on for hours. At the halt, Trav slept without waking till sun burned away the morning mists. When its full rays struck across his eyes and he roused, the weary men were already on the move; but he saw General Longstreet and Colonel Latrobe and two or three others at breakfast, sitting around a fire by the roadside. He stopped to get a bit of salt pork and a slab of corn bread, and then joined them. General Longstreet said, speaking so quietly that none but the immediate group could hear:

“I've been telling these gentlemen, Major, that 'Lys Grant sent in a flag last night, inviting surrender.” Trav, his mouth full, stopped chewing; then began again. “The commanding general asked my opinion. I said the time had not yet come.”

Trav found that he was trembling, not with fear but with fatigue. His weakness was a hateful thing, and he hid it as he could. He watched Longstreet, and wondered that any man in such an hour could appear so steady and unshaken. He himself felt old and broken and no longer capable of anything. He saw the same dark weariness in the others of the staff, in the soldiers, in the very horses cropping sparse grass and too weak to move from one tuft to the next without a pause and an obviously painful effort.