SOUTHERN SOLDIER STORIES

J. E. B. Stuart—The Cavalier.

Southern Soldier Stories

By
George Cary Eggleston
Author of “A Rebel’s Recollections,” etc., etc.

With Illustrations by R. F. Zogbaum

New York
The Macmillan Company
London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.
1898

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1898,
By The Macmillan Company.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

TO “JOE”

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO THE “JOE” SO OFTEN
MENTIONED IN THESE STORIES
HE WAS MY LOVED COMRADE IN ARMS, AND A
SHARER IN ALL MY WAR EXPERIENCES
HE IS NOW
Dr. Joseph W. Eggleston
OF RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

PREFACE

The use of the first personal pronoun singular in any of these stories does not of necessity mean that the author had anything to do with the events chronicled.

“I tell the story as ’twas told to me.”

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

SOUTHERN SOLDIER STORIES

HOW BATTLES ARE FOUGHT
A PREFATORY EXPLANATION FOR THE BENEFIT
OF THOSE WHO KNOW NOTHING
ABOUT THE MATTER

When squads or scouting parties meet each other, they either fight in an irregular fashion or they run away.

With a systematic battle it is different.

Before a systematic battle, one army selects some place at which to resist the advance of the other.

The advancing army usually cannot leave the other aside and go on by another route to the capital city which it wants to reach, because, if it did, the army left aside would quickly destroy what is called the advancing army’s “communications.”

To destroy these communications would be to cut off supplies of food, ammunition, and everything else necessary to an army.

The army which takes the defensive selects some point that can be most easily defended,—some point where a river or a creek, or a line of hills, or something else, serves to give it the advantage in a fight.

The enemy must either attack that army there, and drive it out of its position, or it must “flank” it out, if it is itself to go forward.

To “flank” an army out of position is not merely to pass it by, which, as explained above, might be dangerous, but to seize upon some point or some road, the possession of which will compel that army to retire.

Thus, when General Lee could not be driven out of his works at Fredericksburg by direct attack, General Hooker marched his army up the river, and by crossing there placed himself nearer Richmond than General Lee was. This compelled General Lee to abandon his position at Fredericksburg, and to meet General Hooker in the open field; otherwise there would have been nothing to prevent General Hooker from going to Richmond, with a part of his greatly superior force, leaving the rest of it to check any operations Lee might have undertaken against his communications.

It is in some such fashion as this that every battle is brought about. One side is ever trying to get somewhere, and the other side is ever trying to prevent it from doing so. Incidentally, each army is trying to destroy the other.

When one army has planted itself in a position of its choice, and the other advances to attack it, this is what happens:—

The army that is standing still throws out lines of pickets in front to watch for the enemy’s advance and report it.

The enemy, as he advances, also throws out a cloud of skirmishers to “feel” of the position and avoid traps and ambushes.

A line of battle often extends over several miles in length, covering all available ground for attack or defence.

Before the advancing general can determine against what part of his adversary’s line to hurl his heaviest battalions, he must study the conditions along that line; namely, by means of his skirmishers.

In the same way the general who is awaiting attack tries to discover through his skirmishers what his enemy’s plan of battle is, and at what points he most needs to concentrate his own men.

While awaiting this information he posts his men—cavalry, artillery, and infantry—wherever he thinks they will be most useful, having reference all the time to their rapid movement during the battle from one part of the line to another, as occasion may demand.

He also holds a considerable part of his army “in reserve.” That is to say, he stations it at points a little in rear of the line of battle, from which he can order all or any part of it to any point where strength may be needed.

In a great battle, involving large bodies of troops, each corps or division commander must do in a smaller way what the general-in-chief does on a larger scale. Each has charge of the battle on a certain part of the line. Each must take care of things within his own jurisdiction, and be ready at a moment’s notice to respond to the demand of the commanding general for troops with which to help out elsewhere.

These are the generalities. Let us now come to the battle itself.

When the skirmishers of the advancing army meet the skirmishers of the resisting army, there is apt to be some pretty hot fighting for a time, and sometimes the artillery is considerably involved in it. But this is not the real thing; it is a mere preliminary to the actual battle.

The army that is standing on the defensive holds its lines in position—every battery placed where it will do the most good, and every infantryman lying down and taking the utmost advantage of every tree stump, log, or inequality of the ground, to protect himself as much as possible.

The men on horseback are either in front with the skirmishers, minutely observing the strength and movements of the enemy, or, having finished that work, are thrown out at the two ends of the lines, called “flanks,” to watch there for possible movements of the enemy that might be otherwise unobserved. They are within call of any part of the line where need of them may arise.

While the skirmishers are doing their work, the heaviest strain of war falls on the nerves of the men in line of battle.

They have nothing to do but wait.

They wait with the certain knowledge that in a few minutes the advancing army will throw men forward, and thus convert its skirmish line into a line of attack; while on their own side they know that their skirmish line, after making all of discovery that temporary resistance can accomplish, will fall back, and that then the crucial conflict will begin.

Then comes the uproar of battle,—the dust, the blood, the advance, the retreat, the shock of arms, the murderous volleys of the infantry, the thunder storm of artillery; in short, the final desperate conflict of determined men for the mastery, all of them directed by cool-headed commanders, sitting on their horses at points of vantage for observation, and directing a reinforcement here, a withdrawal of men there, the hurrying of artillery to one point, an onset of cavalry at another, and at a critical moment an up-and-at-them charge with the bayonets. That usually ends matters one way or the other at the point involved. For only two or three times in any war do men with fixed bayonets on one side actually meet in physical shock men armed with fixed bayonets on the other.

Wherever there is advantage on either side, the general commanding that side throws troops forward in as heavy masses as possible to make the most of it. If one line or the other be broken, every conceivable effort is made to convert the breach into victory. And if victory comes, the cavalry thunder forward in pursuit and in an endeavor to convert the enemy’s defeat into rout.

This is only a general description. I hope that no old soldier on either side will read it. It is not intended for such as they. It is written virginibus puerisque, and for other people who don’t know anything about the subject. It is printed here in the hope that it may enable such persons a little better to understand these stories of strenuous conflict.

JOE

JOE was very much in earnest at Pocotaligo, South Carolina, where a great little battle was fought on the 22d of October, 1862.

That is to say, Joe was not quite seventeen years old, was an enthusiastic soldier, and was as hot headed as a boy well can be.

We had two batteries and a few companies of mounted riflemen—three hundred and fifty-one men all told—to oppose the advance of five thousand. We had only the nature of the country, the impassability of the marshes, and the long high causeways to enable us to make any resistance at all.

Before the battle of Pocotaligo proper began, we went two miles below to Yemassee and there made a stand of half an hour.

Our battery, numbering fifty-four men, received the brunt of the attack.

Joe had command of a gun.

His men fell like weeds before a scythe. Presently he found himself with only three men left with whom to work a gun.

The other battery was that of Captain Elliot of South Carolina; and Captain Elliot had just been designated Chief of Artillery. Elliot’s battery was really not in action at all. Joe seeing Captain Elliot, and being himself full of the enthusiasm which insists upon getting things done, appealed to the Chief of Artillery for the loan of some cannoneers with whom to work his gun more effectively. Captain Elliot declined. Thereupon Joe broke into a volley of vituperation, calling the captain and his battery cowards, and by other pet names not here to be reported.

I, being Joe’s immediate chief, as well as his elder brother, commanded him to silence and ordered him back to his gun. There he stood for fifteen minutes astride a dead man and pulling the lanyard himself. At the end of that time we were ordered to retire to Pocotaligo.

Joe was flushed, powder grimed, and very angry; so angry that even I came in for a part of his displeasure. When I asked him, in order that I might make report for the section, how many shots he had fired, he blazed out at me: “How do I know? I’ve been killing Yankees, not counting shots.”

“How many rounds have you left in your limber-chest, Joe?” I asked.

He turned up the lid of the chest, and replied: “Five.”

“And the chest had fifty, hadn’t it, when you went into action?”

“Of course.”

“Then you fired forty-five, didn’t you?”

“Oh, I suppose so, I don’t know! Confound these technicalities, anyhow! I’m fighting, not counting! Do your own arithmetic!”

It wasn’t a very subordinate speech for a sergeant to make to the commander of his section, but Joe was my brother, and I loved him.

At Pocotaligo he fought his gun with superb devotion and effect. But he remained mad all over and clear through till two o’clock that night. At that hour I was able to persuade him that he had been indiscreet in his remarks to the Chief of Artillery.

“Maybe I was,” he said, grasping my hand; “but you’re not to worry, old fellow; I’ll stand the consequences, and you’re the best that ever was.”

Nevertheless I did worry, knowing that such an offence was punishable without limit in the discretion of a court-martial. It was scarcely sunrise the next morning when I appeared at Captain Elliot’s headquarters. I had ridden for half an hour, I suppose, my mind all the time recalling a certain military execution I had seen; but this morning I imagined Joe in the rôle of victim. I had not slept, of course, and my nerves were all on edge.

I entered headquarters with a degree of trepidation which I had never felt before.

Captain Elliot was performing his ablutions as well as he could, with a big gourd for basin. He nodded and spoke with his head in the towel.

“Good fight, wasn’t it? We have a lot of those fellows to bury this morning. Pretty good bag for three hundred and fifty-one of us, and it was mainly your battery’s cannister that did it.”

I changed feet and said, “Y—e—s.”

I thought to myself that that was about the way I should take to “let a man down easy” in a hard case.

The captain carefully removed the soap from his ears, then turning to me said: “That’s a fighter, that brother of yours.”

“Yes,” I replied; “but, captain, he is very young, very enthusiastic, and very hot-tempered; I hope—I hope you’ll overlook—his—er—intemperateness and—”

“Thunder, man, do you suppose I’ve got any grudge against a fellow that fights like that?” roared the gallant captain.

As I rode back through the woods, it seemed to me about the brightest October morning that I had ever seen, even in that superb Carolina climate.

AROUND THE CAMP-FIRE

IT was a kind of off-night, the 23d of October, 1862, twenty-four hours after the battle of Pocotaligo, on the South Carolina coast.

We had to stop over there until morning, because the creek was out of its banks, and we couldn’t get across without daylight. There were only about a dozen of us, and we had to build a camp-fire under the trees.

After supper we fell to talking, and naturally we talked of war things. There wasn’t anything else to talk about then.

There was the long-legged mountaineer, with the deep voice, and the drawl in his speech which aided the suggestion that he kept his voice in his boots and had to pump it up when anything was to be said. Opposite him was the alert, rapid-speaking fellow, who had come in as a conscript and had made a superb volunteer,—a fellow who had an opinion ready made on every subject that could be mentioned, and who was accustomed to wind up most conversations with a remark so philosophical as to seem strangely out of keeping with the rest of the inconsequent things that he had said. Then there were the two mountaineers who never said anything because they never had anything to say. They had reached that point of intellectual development where the theory is accepted that there ought to be thought behind every utterance; and under this misapprehension they abstained from utterance.

Joe was there, but Joe wasn’t talking that night. Joe was surly and sullen. He had had to kill his horse at Pocotaligo the day before, and all the honors he had harvested from that action had not reconciled him to the loss. The new horse he had drawn was, in his opinion, “a beast.” Of course all horses are beasts, but that isn’t precisely what Joe meant. Besides, he had received a letter from his sweetheart just before we left camp,—she’s his wife now, and the mother of his dozen or more children,—in which that young woman had expressed doubts as to whether, after all, he was precisely the kind of man to whom she ought to “give her life.” Joe was only seventeen years of age at that time, and he minded little things like that. Still again, Joe had the toothache. Besides that, we were hungry after our exceedingly scant meal of roasted sweet potatoes. Besides that, it was raining.

All the circumstances contributed to make us introspective and psychological in our conversation.

The long-legged mountaineer with the deep voice was telling some entirely inconsequent story about somebody who wasn’t known to any of us, and none of us was listening. After a while he said: “He was that sort of a feller that never felt fear in his life.”

From Joe: “There never was any such fellow.”

The long mountaineer: “Well, that’s what he said, anyhow.”

From Joe: “He lied, then.”

“Well,” continued the long-legged mountaineer, “that’s what he said, and he sort o’ lived up to it. If he had any fear, he didn’t show it till that time I was tellin’ you about, when he went all to pieces and showed the white feather.”

“There,” growled Joe, “what did I tell you? He was lying all the time.”

The postscript philosopher on the other side of the fire broke in, saying: “Well, maybe his breakfast went bad on him that morning. An overdone egg would make a coward out of the Duke of Wellington.”

Joe made the general reflection that “some people locate their courage in their transverse colons.”

“What’s a transverse colon?” asked one of the mountaineers. Joe got up, stretched himself, and made no answer. Perhaps none was expected.

“Well,” asked the long-legged mountaineer, “ain’t they people that don’t feel no fear?”

The glib little fellow quickly responded: “Let’s find out. Let’s hold an experience meeting. I suppose we’re a pretty fairly representative body, and I move that each fellow tells honestly how he feels when he is going into battle; for instance, when the skirmishers are at work in front, and we know that the next two minutes will bring on the business.”

“Infernally bad,” growled Joe; “and anybody that pretends to feel otherwise lies.”

The postscript philosopher replied: “I never saw you show any fear, Joe.”

“That’s because I’m too big a coward to show it,” said Joe.

Even the two reticent mountaineers understood that.

One of them was moved to break the silence. At last he had, if not a thought, yet an emotion to stand sponsor for utterance.

“I always feel,” said he, “as though the squegees had took hold of my knees. There ain’t anything of me for about a minute—exceptin’ a spot in the small of my back. I always wish I was a woman or a baby, or dead or something like that. After a while I git holt of myself and I says to myself, ‘Bill, you’ve got to stand up to the rack, fodder or no fodder.’ After that it all comes sort of easy like, you know, because the firin’ begins, and after the firin’ begins you’re doin’ somethin’, you see, and when you’re fightin’ like, things don’t seem so bad. I s’pose you’ve all noticed that.”

From Joe: “In all the works on psychology it has been recognized as a universal principle, that the mind when occupied with a superior consideration is able to free itself from considerations of a lesser sort.”

The mountaineer looked at him helplessly and said nothing.

The postscript philosopher began: “I shall never forget my first battle. It wasn’t much of a battle either, but it was lively while it lasted. Unfortunately for me it was one of those fights where you have to wait for the enemy to begin. I was tender then. I had just left home, and every time I looked at the little knickknacks mother and the girls had given me to make camp life comfortable,—for bless my soul they thought we lived in camp,—every time I looked at these things I grew teary. There oughtn’t to be any bric-à-brac of that kind given to a fellow when he goes into the army. It isn’t fit. It worries him.”

He was silent for a minute. So were the rest of us. We all had bric-à-brac to remember. He resumed:

“We were lying there in the edge of a piece of woods with a sloping meadow in front, crossed by a stone wall heavily overgrown with vines. At the other edge of the meadow was another strip of woods. The enemy were somewhere in there. We knew they were coming, because the pickets had been driven in, and we stood there waiting for them. The waiting was the worst of it, and as we waited I got to feeling in my pockets and—pulled out a little, old three-cornered pincushion. Conscience knows I wouldn’t have pulled out that pincushion at that particular minute to have won a battle. I’ve got it now. I never had any use for a pincushion because I never could pin any two things together the way a woman can, but a man can’t make his womenkind believe that: I’ve kept it all through the war, and when I go back home—if it suits the Yankees that I ever go back at all—I’m going to give it as a souvenir to the little sister that made it for me. And I’m going to tell her that it was that pincushion, little three-cornered thing that it is, that made a man out of me that day.

“My first thought as I pulled it out was that I wanted to go home and give the war up; but then came another kind of a thought. I said, ‘The little girl wouldn’t have given that pincushion to me if she hadn’t understood that I was going off to fight for the country.’ So I said to myself, ‘Old boy, you’ve got to stand your hand pat.’ And now whenever we go into battle I always brace myself up a little by feeling in my breeches pocket and sort of shaping out that pincushion.”

From Joe: “It’s a good story, but the rest of us haven’t any pincushions. Besides that, it’s raining.” I couldn’t help observing that Joe drew that afternoon’s letter out of his pocket and fumbled it a little, while the long-legged mountaineer was straightening out his limbs and his thoughts for his share in the conversation. He said in basso profundo: “The fact is I’m always so skeered just before a fight that I can’t remember afterwards how I did feel. I know only this much, that that last three minutes before the bullets begin to whistle and the shells to howl, takes more out of me than six hours straightaway fightin’ afterwards does.”

From Joe: “There must be a lot in you at the start, then.”

There were still two men unheard from in the experience meeting. Some one of us called upon them for an expression of opinion.

“I donno. I never thought,” said one.

“Nuther did I,” said the other.

“Of course you didn’t,” said Joe.

Then the postscript philosopher, rising and stretching himself, remarked: “I reckon that if any man goes into a fight without being scared, that man is drunk or crazy.”

Then we all lay down and went to sleep.

AN UNFINISHED FIGHT

JACK SWAN was the best swordsman in the regiment—probably the best in the army. Jack was a Marylander, who came south singing “My Maryland,” and heartily believing in the assertion of that song that

“She breathes, she burns, she’ll come, she’ll come,

Maryland, my Maryland!”

Like most men from border states he represented a house divided against itself. In his case the division was peculiarly distressing.

He was an enthusiastic Southerner. His twin brother was an equally enthusiastic Union man. The one was in the one army as a matter of conscience, and the other in the other for precisely the same reason. It was always a grief to Jack that this separation had come between him and the curly-headed twin brother, with whom he had slept in infancy, and who had been his comrade until that terrible fratricidal war had parted them.

He used to talk with us about it around the camp-fire, and was especially sad over it when any of us managed to get off for a day or a week to visit our homes. His home was beyond the lines; and in all that country for which he was fighting there was no human being whom he could call kin.

He had this comfort, however, that his brother and he were never likely to meet in the conflict of arms. For to avoid that the brother had betaken himself to the West and was serving in Mississippi. But there was always the terrible chance that in the shifting of troops they two might some day, unknown to each other, be fighting on opposite sides of the same field. That, in fact, is what happened at Brandy Station, and it happened more dramatically than either of the brothers had anticipated.

The conflict at Brandy Station was perhaps the greatest cavalry fight of the war. It was the one contest in which large bodies of armed and trained horsemen, under the greatest cavalry leaders on either side, met fairly in conflict with little or no interference from troops of other arms.

It was the only contest of the kind, so far as I know, in which highly expert swordsmen met each other fairly in single combat. There was on both sides a chivalric feeling akin to that of the “knights of old,” which prompted men not to interfere when two well-matched cavaliers met each other with naked blades.

Jack Swan was naturally eager for a fray of this sort. He knew and mightily rejoiced in his superb skill with the sabre.

He watched anxiously for his opportunity. Presently it came.

A singularly lithe young fellow from one of the Northern regiments met and slew, in the open field, one of our officers. Thereupon Jack turned to his captain and said: “If I have your leave, captain, I’d like to try conclusions with that young fellow myself. He seems to know how to handle sharp steel.”

The captain nodded assent, and Jack put spurs to his horse. The two men met in midfield. They crossed swords as a couple of gladiators might, while a thousand eyes watched anxiously for the result.

It was manifestly to be a contest of experts, a battle of the giants, for both men were above the average in height and weight, and both knew every trick of the sabre.

Their swords drew fire from each other’s edge at the first onset.

Then they paused strangely and looked at each other. Then Jack deliberately threw his sabre upon the ground and uncovered his head.

His adversary could have run him through on the instant, but the action of Jack seemed to give him pause. He stopped with his sword poised at the tierce thrust. He leant forward eagerly and gazed into the calm eyes of the Confederate. Then he, too, abandoning his purpose, threw his weapon to the ground.

We were all eagerness and curiosity; and neither our eagerness nor our curiosity was relieved when the two men grasped each other’s hand, swung their horses around, and each returned unarmed to his own line.

When Jack rode up he had just six words of explanation to make.

“That man,” he said, “is my twin brother.”

That seemed to be all there was to say. “Blood is thicker than water.”

A FAMILY THAT HAD NO LUCK

THERE were two instances of supreme heroism in the Civil War. One was upon the one side, the other upon the other.

One was the charge of Pickett’s Southerners at Gettysburg. The other was the heroic series of assaults, made by the Northern troops on Marye’s Heights, at Fredericksburg.

General Lee’s works in the last-named battle were high up on the hill. Crossing the field in front of them was a sunken road—a perfect breastwork already formed. The main body of the army was in the works above; but a multitude of us were thrown forward into the sunken road.

The enemy knew nothing of this geographical peculiarity. But their first advance revealed the impossibility of breaking Lee’s lines at that point. The column that advanced was swept away as with a broom before it got within firing distance of the works it supposed itself to be attacking. The men knew what that meant. Wiser than their general, they saw the necessity of selecting some other point of attack. Nevertheless when their commander persisted, they six times came unflinchingly to an assault which every man of them knew to be hopeless. This may not have been war, but it was heroism.

We who faced them there honored it as such.

Just as we tumbled into the sunken road, an old man came in bearing an Enfield rifle and wearing an old pot hat of the date of 1857 or thereabouts. With a gentle courtesy that was unusual in war, he apologized to the two men between whom he placed himself, saying: “I hope I don’t crowd you, but I must find a place somewhere from which I can shoot.”

At that moment one of the great assaults occurred. The old man used his gun like an expert. He wasted no bullet. He took aim every time and fired only when he knew his aim to be effective. Yet he fired rapidly. Tom Booker, who stood next to him, said as the advancing column was swept away: “You must have shot birds on the wing in your time.”

The old man answered: “I did up to twenty year ago; but then I sort o’ lost my sight, you know, and my interest in shootin’.”

“Well, you’ve got ’em both back again,” called out Billy Goodwin from down the line.

“Yes,” said the old man. “You see I had to. It’s this way: I had six boys and six gells. When the war broke out I thought the six boys could do my family’s share o’ the fightin’. Well, they did their best, but they didn’t have no luck. One of ’em was killed at Manassas, two others in a cavalry raid, and the other three fell in different actions—’long the road as you might say. We ain’t seemed to a had no luck. But it’s just come to this, that if the family is to be represented, the old man must git up his shootin’ agin, or else one o’ the gells would have to take a hand. So here I am.”

Just then the third advance was made. A tremendous column of heroic fellows was hurled upon us, only to be swept away as its predecessors had been. Two or three minutes did the work, but at the end of that time the old man fell backward, and Tom Booker caught him in his arms.

“You’re shot,” he said.

“Yes. The family don’t seem to have no luck. If one o’ my gells comes to you, you’ll give her a fair chance to shoot straight, won’t you, boys?”

WILLIAM

IT was during the long waiting time.

The battle of Manassas had been fought in July, and for months afterward, there was nothing for us to do. We had failed to assail Washington, and the enemy was not yet sufficiently recovered from his demoralization—the completest that ever overcame an army—to assail us.

We had time, therefore, to quarrel among ourselves.

Two men had met in a glade in a thicket some distance from the camp. They were taking their quarrel very seriously, and had met to fight it out without the formality of seconds or other familiar frills of the duello. They crossed sabres.

It was then that Billy Gresham broke through the bushes and interposed.

Billy was a recognized “character.” He was a phenomenal egotist, but he rarely used the first personal pronoun singular. Instead of saying “I” or “me,” he usually said “William.” But he said it with an unctuousness and appreciation of its significance that cannot be described in words.

Also Billy Gresham always did what he pleased, without a thought of having to give an account of his conduct to anybody. His extraordinary loquacity was a perfect safeguard against any possible challenge of resentment. He could talk anybody down and close the conversation at his own sweet will. The worst that his adversary could do was to laugh at him, and Billy didn’t mind that in the least. He regarded it rather as a grateful tribute to his humor.

Just as the two men crossed swords, Billy broke through the bushes, and interposed his blade—with a very good imitation of stage heroism—between the combatants. Then, with all the authority of an expert in a matter he knew nothing about, he proceeded to lay down laws of his own extemporaneous invention for the governance of single combat.

“Stop, gentlemen!” he cried out. Then, laying his sword on the ground between them, he said: “You must not cross my sword with yours, gentlemen. To do that would be to put an affront upon William which only blood could efface, and it must be the blood of the offender—not the gore of private William Gresham.”

The two men had come to a pause, of course. Equally of course, they were smiling at the ridiculousness of Billy Gresham’s interference and the absurdity of his chatter.

Still their purpose to fight remained in undiminished intensity. Seeing this, Billy resumed his talk.

“If you are determined to fight,” he said, “you can do so. Far be it from William to interrupt a prearranged engagement for mutual dissection between two of his friends. But William always likes to have a little money up on the probabilities.”

Then pulling out a pocket-book, which was fat with humorous newspaper clippings, but which both men knew to contain nothing more valuable, he caressed it lovingly and said: “Before you proceed, William wants to bet one hundred dollars to ten with one or both of you—you can make it a thousand dollars to a hundred, if you prefer—that neither of you two sublimated idiots can give William a reasonable excuse for this quarrel. Come now, before you enter upon the business of mutual slaughter, make a bet that will provide in some degree for the loved ones dependent on you.”

By that time both men were laughing, for, after all, their quarrel was a trifling one. They would not have quarrelled at all if the intensity of the nervous strain put upon them by the war had been relieved by active duty.

“Now,” said Billy, “William has another bet to make. He offers a hundred to one that if the colonel catches you fellows at this sort of idiotic performance, he’ll take the ‘honor’ out of both of you by making you grub stumps for weeks to come. Put up your swords and shake hands, or else take the bets.”

The absurdity of the situation ended it. Billy remarked: “Now let William give you a tip. There is the enemy to fight; and if William does not hopelessly misunderstand the temper of George B. McClellan’s army, they will give us all the fighting we want without anything of this sort.”

It was Billy who, at the end of the war, protested his loyalty to the Southern cause by vowing that he would never send a letter unless it could go under cover of a Southern postage-stamp. I am credibly informed that for thirty odd years he has kept this vow.

It must have spared him a great deal of trouble.

A CRADLE CAPTAIN

THEY said we had robbed the cradle and the grave to recruit our army.

We had.

The cradle contingent acquitted itself particularly well.

He was a very little fellow. He was said to be fourteen years old. He didn’t look it. In his captain’s uniform he suggested the need of a nurse with cap and apron. But when it came to doing the work of a soldier the impression was different.

It was in 1864, late summer. We were in the trenches outside a fortification engaged in bombarding Fort Harrison, below Richmond. The enemy had captured that work, and it was deemed necessary to drive him out. To that end we had been sent from Petersburg to the north side of James River, with twenty-two mortars to rain a hundred shells a minute into the fort preparatory to the infantry charge.

A gun-boat had been ordered up the river to help in the bombardment. The gun-boat mistook us for Fort Harrison and opened upon our defenceless rear. Its shells were about the size and shape of a street lamp, and they wrought fearful havoc among us.

The Cradle Captain had charge of the signal operator—a stalwart mountaineer of six feet four or so.

The Cradle Captain ordered him to mount upon the glacis and signal the ship to cease firing. The man was not a coward; but the fire was terrific. He hesitated. That Cradle Captain leaped like a cat upon the glacis, which the shells were splitting every second. He pulled out two pistols. He presented one at each side of the mountaineer’s head. Then in a little, childish, piping voice he said: “Get up here and do your duty, or I’ll blow your brains out.”

We rejoiced that the lead, which at that moment laid the little soldier low, came from the enemy’s guns, and not from our own mistaken comrades. The Cradle Captain was glad, too, for as he was carried away on a litter, he laughed out between groans: “It wasn’t our men that did it, for I had made that hulking idiot get in that signal all right, anyhow.”

“Get up here and do your duty.”

WHO IS RUSSELL?

I SAW him for the first time in 1862.

We were stationed on the coast of South Carolina, and never was there an idler set of soldiers than we.

We were in the midst of a great war, it is true, and ours was a fighting battery with dates on its battle banner; but on the coast we had literally nothing to do. The position of our camp was determined by military geography, and it could not be changed. A fight was possible any day, and now and then a fight came. But we knew in advance precisely where it must be waged, and until our foemen chose to bring it about, we had no occasion for marching or bivouacking. They were on the sea islands. We were on the mainland. We had no means of crossing to the islands. They could cross to the mainland whenever they pleased. When they came, it was our business to meet them and keep them from reaching the line of railroad along the coast.

Every little stream and every little inlet was bordered by an impassable morass, which could be crossed only by way of a high and narrow causeway. The places where the roads crossed the streams were, therefore, the predestined battlefields. We were stationed with reference to these crossings.

We idled away the time, and like all idle people near a small railroad station we knew of the comings and goings of everybody in the country round about.

Everybody, that is to say, except Russell.

His coming was a mystery. In fact, he did not come at all. He simply appeared one evening as a looker-on at roll-call.

There was no way by which he could have come to Pocotaligo except by train; and we knew that he had not come by train. The whole body of us regularly attended the incoming of every train, and promptly pumped all the news out of every arriving passenger.

Russell had not come by train. Therefore Russell had not come at all. Yet there he was.

He was a comely young fellow. So shapely were his limbs and so exact the proportions of his frame that no one, without a second look at him, would have realized his symmetry, his extraordinary strength, or his activity. His head was a study for the sculptor. In limbs, torso, features, complexion, and bearing he stood there in the Southern sunset a very model of manly beauty.

When the roll-call was ended, he came up to me, and, touching his hat gracefully, introduced himself.

“My name is William Russell. I shall be obliged if you will let me remain with your men over night. I shall probably ask to enlist to-morrow.”

His words were simple enough, and his manner was that of a modest gentleman; but there was that in his voice that fascinated me beyond measure. Had any other stranger come up to me with a like request, I should have questioned him closely, and possibly have turned him over for the night to the hospitality of one of the messes. With Russell I did nothing of the sort. He was a gentleman visiting our camp. I could do no less than invite him to sup and lodge with me. He had sought no such hospitality, but when I offered it, he frankly accepted it.

I found him to be a particularly agreeable guest. He talked fluently, but modestly, on all subjects as they arose. Before my brother officers came into my quarters for our nightly game of whist, I had discovered that Russell was not only a man of broad general education, but one thoroughly familiar with English, German, and French literature as well. We learned very indirectly that he had travelled extensively, and that travel had wrought in him its perfect work in making him an agreeable companion.

The next morning he expressed a wish to enlist with us. He persisted in this, in spite of our assurances that our rude, uncultivated mountaineers were not fit companions for him.

After his enlistment he carefully avoided everything like presumption upon our previous hospitality, or upon his own evident superiority. He knew the distinction between officers and enlisted men, and he observed it with a rigidity wholly unknown in our rather democratic service. I was glad sometimes to seek him out when I wanted a companion, and on such occasions he responded promptly to my invitations, but he never once came to my quarters, or those of any other officer, uninvited.

He was always quiet and modest, and it was only by accident that we learned little by little how many and varied his accomplishments were. It was not only that he never boasted; he was even shy of letting us find out for ourselves how many things he could do surprisingly well.

The men had built a number of gymnastic structures, and of afternoons their contests of strength and skill were attended by everybody in the neighborhood. For more than a month Russell looked on as a casually interested spectator. One afternoon, however, some of our best gymnasts were trying to accomplish a new and rather difficult feat. When they were ready to abandon the attempt as hopeless, Russell modestly said to the most persistent one among them: “I think if you will reverse the position of your hands you can do that.”

The man reversed his hands, but awkwardly.

“Not that way; let me show you,” said Russell. And going to the bars he quickly did the thing himself with no apparent exertion whatever. Then, as if in mere wantonness of strength and skill, he went rapidly through a series of gymnastic feats of the most difficult sort imaginable, ending the performance with a number of somersaults that would have done honor to an acrobat. When he had done, we all clapped hands and shouted our applause. Russell simply blushed as a woman might and went to his hut.

I never knew him to touch the bars again, so averse was he to anything like display.

When I ventured to ask him in private one day how and where he had acquired his skill, he replied: “Oh, I have no skill to speak of in the matter. It’s merely a trick or two I picked up at a German university.”

In this way we learned one thing after another about the man, though he vouchsafed us no information concerning his past history, except so much as we had discovered in mustering him into service. That consisted of but one fact: that William Russell was born in Kentucky; and that isolated fact was a falsehood, as Russell afterwards informed me.

One day, some months after his enlistment, there was an explosion in camp.

A chief of caisson had been tinkering with a shell from the enemy’s camp which had not burst. It exploded in his hands, literally blowing one of them off midway between the wrist and the elbow. When I came to the poor fellow he was lying on the ground, the blood spurting from the severed artery.

The surgeon and all my brother officers had ridden away, no one knew whither, and I was completely at a loss to know what to do. Before I had time to decide anything, Russell pushed his way through the throng, drew out his handkerchief, knotted it, and quickly tightened it around the man’s arm.

“Will you please hold that steadily?” said he in the calmest possible voice to one of the excited men. Then turning to me and touching his cap, he said: “Will you allow me to go to the surgeon’s quarters for some necessary things? I think I may help this poor fellow.”

“Certainly,” I replied, “if you can do anything for him, do it by all means.”

He walked rapidly, but without a sign of excitement, to the hospital tent, and returned almost immediately with some bottles, bandages, and a case of instruments.

Turning to me he said: “Will you do me the favor to put your finger on the corporal’s pulse and observe its beating carefully? If it sinks or becomes irregular, please let me know immediately.”

With that he saturated a handkerchief with chloroform, and using a peremptory form of speech for the first time in my experience of him, he ordered one of the men to hold it to the wounded corporal’s nose.

“What are you going to do?” I asked in astonishment.

“I am going to amputate this man’s arm, if you have no objection,” he returned, as he opened the case of instruments. And he did amputate it in a most skilful manner, as the surgeon testified on his return. The operation over, Russell gave minute directions for the care of the wounded man.

My astonishment may well be imagined. The men, however, were not surprised. Their faith in Russell was unbounded already. They had so often seen him do as an expert things that nobody had imagined him capable of doing at all, that they had come to think him equal to any emergency, as indeed it seemed that he was.

For myself, I am free to confess that my curiosity was sharply piqued. I determined to question Russell in detail about himself and his past at the first opportunity. When the opportunity came, however, the man’s modest dignity so impressed me that I could not bring myself to do anything so rude and discourteous. I contented myself with saying: “Why, Russell, I didn’t know you were a surgeon?”

“I can hardly claim to be that,” he replied, “though I gave some little attention to the subject while I was abroad.”

It then occurred to me to suggest the propriety of his asking for a surgeon’s commission, as it really seemed a pity that a man so accomplished as he should remain a private in a company made up almost entirely of illiterate mountaineers. He refused to entertain the idea for a moment, saying: “I am entirely contented with my lot and do not care to change.”

One day, not long after this occurrence, I was playing at chess with Russell. Apropos of something or other, I told him an anecdote illustrative of Japanese character.

“Pardon me,” he replied, “but you are misinformed,” and straightway he proceeded to tell me many interesting facts with regard to the Orientals, all of which were evidently the result of personal observation. I presently discovered, as I thought, that Russell had been an officer in the United States navy, and that he had gone to Japan with Commodore Perry’s expedition.

When a month or two later our battery was sent to a little place immediately on the water, and a good deal of boat service was expected of us, our first care was to train our mountaineers in the use of oars and sails. With the exception of Russell, Joe, and myself, not a man in the battery knew the difference between a mast and a keel. It was determined, therefore, to divide the company into boat’s crews for drill, and to make of Russell chief drill sergeant.

When the order providing for this was read on parade, Russell said nothing. But I had hardly reached my quarters before he came, cap in hand, asking to see me in private.

“I must beg you to excuse me from this boat-drill duty; I really can’t do it.”

“But you must,” I returned. “The men must be taught to handle the boats, and your skill and experience are quite indispensable.”

“But I have no skill or experience in the matter,” he replied. “The truth is I do not even know the nomenclature of a boat. I do know the bow from the rudder, but that is the extreme limit of my knowledge on the subject.”

This, from an ex-naval officer, was certainly rather odd, but I could not bring myself to question this modest gentleman further on the subject, or even to suspect his veracity, in which I had learned to repose the most implicit confidence.

He was not at all averse to boating duty in itself. On the contrary, when an oar was put into his hands, his supple muscles lent themselves with a will to the severe physical strain. The man seemed even to rejoice in the opportunity thus given him to bring his magnificent strength into play. When his fellows quitted the boats in utter weariness he, still fresh, would betake himself to a little shell and row her about for hours in mere wantonness of unexpended vitality.

But he knew nothing of boating. He was as awkward as possible at first. He learned rapidly, however, and soon became a graceful oarsman and an expert sailor.

I was puzzled. I could not reconcile the man’s stories of naval service with his evident ignorance of everything pertaining to a boat. Yet I could not doubt the truthfulness of any of his statements. Nobody who knew his gentleness, his modesty, and his translucent integrity as I did could possibly entertain doubt of his truthfulness. The man’s face was of itself a certificate of his entire trustworthiness. His conduct and his manners were unexceptionable always. The man himself was the embodiment of truth.

Accordingly, when I observed some tattoo marks on his arm one day, which he told me were put there while he was in the navy, it did not occur to me to question him as to the truth of that story. On the contrary, I thought at the moment of a possible explanation of the whole matter: Perhaps he had been a surgeon in the service, and if so his technical ignorance of boating was not altogether unaccountable. I was surprised, however, to see that the letters on his arm were not “W. R.” but “W. W.”—a fact of which he volunteered an explanation.

“My name is not Russell,” he said, “but Wallace. Though for a good many years I have preferred to use my mother’s rather than my father’s name.”

As a matter of course I asked him no rude questions. He was altogether too much a gentleman for me to think of such a thing. I accepted his explanation and respected his wish to be called “Russell” still. He imposed no pledge of secrecy upon me, but I kept his secret sacredly, respecting it as a confidential communication from one gentleman to another.

I had hardly settled it in my own mind that Russell’s connection with the navy had been in the capacity of a surgeon, when he came one day with the request that he might be allowed to go to Charleston for the purpose of standing an examination for admission to the navy as an officer.

This time, I confess, I was astonished. And so I went with him to Charleston and before the board. To my surprise, he passed his examination so brilliantly, that he was commissioned at once and put in command of a newly built gun-boat. Shortly afterwards he handled his vessel so well in a fight off the harbor as to secure an official compliment and a promotion.

About a week after that event I learned that he had deserted the navy and was among the missing. Apparently the poor fellow was a man running away from his past, and nothing was so disastrous to him as distinction.

I thus lost sight of Russell, and until August, 1873, I heard no more of him. I was editing a weekly family newspaper in New York at that time, and oddly enough I was just beginning to write this sketch of my singular acquaintance when Russell himself walked into my office at 245 Broadway and asked me if I remembered him. He was well dressed, in a quiet drab suit, and was scarcely at all changed. He told me that he was married and was living at a certain number in West 43d Street; that he was practising law, being senior member of the firm of Wintermute and Russell, for that his real name was Wintermute, and that his partner, Russell, was a cousin on the mother’s side.

He gave me the firm’s card, and begged me to call upon him, both at his house and at his office, which of course I promised to do.

I called first at the house. It was a well-built one of pressed brick, and seemed to wear something of Russell’s own air of quiet dignity, standing as it did in a row of more pretentious brown-stone mansions. The door-plate—for door-plates were then still in use—bore the simple word, “Wintermute.”

“Is Mr. Wintermute at home?” I asked.

“Commander Wintermute is in his library,” answered the lackey, laying special stress upon the naval title.

“Ah, certainly, Commander Wintermute,” I answered. “I had forgotten. Will you give him my card? I am an old friend.”

I was shown into the parlor,—a conspicuously tasteful apartment,—furnished exactly as I should have expected Russell to furnish it.

After a little the door opened, and an elderly gentleman, obviously English, entered, holding my card in a puzzled way before his spectacled nose.

“Pardon me,” he said. “The servant must have misunderstood you. He announced you as an old friend.”

“Yes,” I replied, “I asked for Commander Wintermute.”

“I am he,” replied the gentleman. “Though I certainly fail to recognize either your name or your face. There must be a mistake.”

“There certainly seems to be,” I answered, “unless there is another gentleman in your family. The one I am seeking is William Wintermute, whose mother’s name was Russell.”

“Then I am certainly the man,” responded my companion. “My name is William Wintermute and my mother’s name was Russell. There is no other gentleman living in the house, and so far as I have ever heard there is no other William Wintermute anywhere.”

There was nothing to be done except to apologize and take my leave, which I did as gracefully as I could under the circumstances.

At last I was angry with Russell. I had been puzzled by him often enough. This time I was filled with resentment.

I at once sought out the law office of Wintermute and Russell. The card, which I had preserved, gave me all necessary information as to its whereabouts, and I was not long in finding it. Mr. Wintermute was there. So was Mr. Russell. But neither was the man for whom I was looking. Neither had ever heard of him.

I was still left puzzling over these questions:—

Who is Russell?

Is he after all a liar?

Or is he merely a remarkable coincidence?

In June or July, 1874, I published the foregoing sketch in a little monthly magazine printed in an obscure college town in Illinois, which had a circulation of only a few hundred copies, and lived just five months in all.

It was called the Midland Monthly Magazine, and was issued by a student in the college at Monmouth, Illinois.

Everything that related to Russell was sure in some way to blossom out with all sorts of strange coincidences. This did so. In spite of the obscure way in which my account of the man was published, I had no doubt whatever that it would sooner or later result in some new revelation of or concerning him.

It did so, of course.

The obscure student’s magazine somehow found its way to Bordentown, New Jersey, and into the hands of an editor there. The editor was impressed by the story and reprinted it. It thus fell into the hands of the Reverend Lansing Burroughs, pastor of the First Baptist Church of that town, and late captain of Confederate States Artillery.

I was not surprised when I received from the Reverend Lansing Burroughs, etc., the following letter:—

Bordentown, N. J., Sept. 5, 1874.

My Dear Sir: I have just finished reading a sketch published over your name (copied from somewhere, I suppose) in our local paper, entitled “Who is Russell?” It petrifies me with astonishment. For thirteen years past the question which has bothered me most seriously has been, “Who is Russell?” alias “Wallace,” alias “Wintermute,” for by all these and some other names have I known the mysterious individual. If you have been writing only a fancy sketch, I must tackle one of the strangest problems in mental philosophy. If your story is one of experience, then must I see you and compare notes. I fancy I can horrify you with the story of what Russell once told me had been his history....

Yours very truly,
Lansing Burroughs,

Pastor of the First Baptist Church, Bordentown, N. J. Late captain Confederate States Artillery.

Now it was just like Russell that an account of him, published in a short-lived magazine, of a purely local circulation, out in Illinois, should in some inscrutable way have fallen into the hands of the editor of a little country paper in New Jersey; that this editor should have copied it into his paper; and that one of his readers should happen to be the one other man in existence who was puzzling over the questions with which the sketch ended.

But this was not all. There was still another coincidence. There was that in my correspondent’s letter which revealed to me a fact of which he was apparently unconscious; namely, that this Reverend Lansing Burroughs was an old college mate of my own, whom I had not seen or heard from for sixteen years. Such a coincidence was altogether natural and proper, however, growing as it did out of matters connected with Russell.

I had some further correspondence with the Reverend Mr. Burroughs, and finally we met by appointment and went to Mouquin’s for luncheon and to compare notes. A careful analysis of dates proved beyond doubt that his Russell was my Russell. But our experiences were of a very different sort. Mr. Burroughs had never once had a meeting with the mysterious man which did not bring calamity of some sort upon himself. So far as I was concerned, no ill beyond annoyance and embarrassment had ever come of my acquaintance with him.

The Reverend Mr. Burroughs declares to me his firm conviction that the quiet, singularly shy, well-behaved, modest gentleman, so unusually gifted, especially in the way of a phenomenal genius for lying, is in plain terms THE DEVIL.

As to this, Mr. Burroughs is by profession an expert, and I am not. I therefore venture no opinion. I merely continue to ask, “Who is Russell?”

“JUANITA”

I WAS on guard one night in the autumn of 1861.

It was only ordinary camp guard and not picket duty.

We had fallen back from the line of Mason’s and Munson’s hills, and were camped well in the rear of Fairfax Court House, which now constituted our most advanced outpost.

The army were fortified at Centreville. We had got tired of waiting for McClellan to make the advance for which we were so eagerly ready. We were evidently preparing to go into winter quarters.

We of Stuart’s cavalry were still posted six or eight miles in advance of the main army; but after our summer, passed twenty miles in front, we felt snug and comfortable at “Camp Cooper.”

Nevertheless, when I saw three rockets—red, white, and blue—go up far to the front, it occurred to me that the fact might mean something.

At any rate, I was lonely on post. I had sung “Juanita” under my breath,—and that it wasn’t permitted to sing out loud on post was probably a rule not made with any invidious reference to my voice, though it might well have been,—I say I had sung “Juanita” under my breath till I had exhausted the capabilities of entertainment that reside in that tender musical composition.

So, for the sake of diversion, if for nothing else, I called out: “Corporal of the guard, post number six.”

When the corporal came and I reported what I had seen, he moodily growled something about there being no orders to “report on Yankee fireworks.” Nevertheless, he communicated my report to higher authority.

Fifteen minutes later a hurried messenger came, summoning me at once to General Stuart’s headquarters, half a mile in front.

Mounting, I rode at a gallop. That was the only gait which Stuart tolerated, except in going away from the enemy.

As I rode out of camp I heard “Boots and Saddles” sounded from all the bugles of all the regiments.

I knew then that “something was up.” “Boots and Saddles” always meant something when Stuart gave the order.

When I dismounted at headquarters, Stuart himself was waiting, although it was three o’clock in the morning. His plume and golden spurs gleamed through the dark.

“Tell me quick!” was all he had to say. I answered sententiously: “Three rockets went up: red to right, white to left, and blue in the middle.”

“You mean our right and left, or the enemy’s?” he asked eagerly.

“Ours,” I answered.

He turned quickly and gave hurried orders to staff-officers, orderlies, and couriers. Then turning to me, he said: “You ride with me.” I appreciated the attention.

Five minutes later a great column of cavalrymen were riding at a gallop towards the front. And just as daylight dawned we broke into a charge upon a heavy force of the enemy.

The hostile force was slowly advancing, not expecting us, and we struck it in flank, taking it completely by surprise.

The demoralization of the Manassas, or Bull Run panic had not even yet gone out of the Northern troops. We made short work of their advance and sent them quickly into disorderly retreat.

One of Stuart’s couriers was killed in the charge. I remember, because he rode beside me, and his head fell clean from his body, and the sight sickened me, so that I fought harder for the minute than I thought I could.