Joseph A. Altsheler – The Complete Collection

Chapter 33

Denser and denser grew the throng that knelt at his feet and begged for his prayers, and there was the sound of weeping. Then he ceased suddenly and, closing his eyes and bending his head, began to pray. Involuntarily the fifty thousand, too, closed their eyes and bent their heads.

He called them brands snatched from the burning; he devoted their souls to God. There on their knees they had confessed their sins and he promised them the life everlasting. New emotions began to stir the souls of those who mourned. Death? What was that? Nothing. A mere dividing place between mortality and immortality, a mark, soon passed, and nothing more. They began to feel a divine fire. They welcomed wounds and death, the immortal passage, and they longed for the battlefield and the privilege of dying for their country. They thought of those among their comrades who had been so fortunate as to go on before, and expected joyfully soon to see them again.

Prescott looked up once, and the scene was more powerful and weird than any he had ever seen before. The great throng of people stood there with heads bowed listening to the single voice pouring out its invocation and holding them all within its sweep and spell.

The preacher asked the blessing of God on every one and finished his prayer. Then he began to sing:

"I've found a friend in Jesus, He is everything to me, He's the fairest of ten thousand to my soul; The Lily of the Valley in Him alone I see-- All I need to cleanse and make me fully whole.

"He's my comfort in trouble, In sorrow He's my stay; He tells me every care on Him to roll. He's the Lily of the Valley, the Bright and Morning Star He's the fairest of ten thousand to my soul."

He sang one verse alone, and then the soldiers began to join, at first by tens, then by hundreds and then by thousands, until the grand chorus, rolling and majestic, of fifty thousand voices swelled through all the forest:

"He's the Lily of the Valley, the Bright and Morning Star, He's the fairest of ten thousand to my soul."

The faces of the soldiers were no longer sad. They were transfigured now. Joy had come after sorrow and then forgiveness. They heard the promise.

"The best of all ways to prepare soldiers for battle," said a cynical voice at Prescott's elbow.

It was Mr. Sefton.

"But it is not so intended," rejoined Prescott.

"Perhaps not, but it will suffice."

"His is what I call constructive oratory," presently continued the Secretary in a low voice. "You will notice that what he says is always calculated to strengthen the mind, although the soldiers themselves do not observe it."

"But no man could be more sincere," said Helen.

"I do not doubt it," replied the Secretary.

"It is impossible for me to think that the men singing here may fall in battle in a few days," said Helen.

The singing ended and in a few minutes the soldiers were engaged in many avocations, going about the business of the day. Prescott and Mr. Sefton took Helen back to the house and then each turned to his own task.

Several officers were gathered before a camp-fire on the following morning mending their clothes. They were in good humour because Talbot was with them and gloom rarely endured long in his presence.

"After all, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" said Talbot. "Will it profit me more to be killed in a decent uniform than in a ragged one?"

"Don't you want to make a respectable casualty?" asked Prescott.

"Yes; but I don't like to work so much for it," replied Talbot. "It's harder to dress well now than it is to win a battle. You can get mighty little money and it's worth mighty little after you get it. The 'I promise to pay' of the Confederate States of America has sunk terribly low, boys."

He held up a Confederate bill and regarded it with disgust.

"It would take a wheelbarrow full of those to buy a decent suit of clothes," he said. "Do you know the luck I had yesterday when I tried to improve my toilet?"

All showed interest.

"More than six months' pay was due me," said Talbot, "and thinking I'd buy something to wear, I went around to old Seymour, the paymaster, for an installment. 'See here, Seymour,' I said, 'can't you let me have a month's pay. It's been so long since I have had any money that I've forgotten how it looks. I want to refresh my memory.'

"You ought to have seen the look old Seymour put on. You'd have thought I'd asked him for the moon. 'Talbot' he said, 'you're the cheekiest youngster I've met in a long time.'

"'But the army owes me six months' pay,' I said. 'What's that got to do with it?' he asked. 'I'd like to know what use a soldier has for money?' Then he looked me up and down as if it wouldn't work a footrule hard to measure me. But I begged like a good fellow--said I wanted to buy some new clothes, and I'd be satisfied if he'd let me have only a month's pay. At last he gave me the month's pay--five hundred dollars--in nice new Confederate bills, and I went to a sutler to buy the best he had in the way of raiment.

"I particularly wanted a nice new shirt and found one just to suit me. 'The price?' I said to the sutler. 'Eight hundred dollars,' he answered, as if he didn't care whether I took it or not. That settled me so far as the shirt question was concerned--I'd have to wait for that until I was richer; but I looked through his stock and at last I bought a handkerchief for two hundred dollars, two paper collars for one hundred dollars each, and I've got this hundred dollars left. Oh, I'm a bargainer!"

And he waved the Confederate bill aloft in triumph.

"I'd give this hundred dollars for a good cigar," he added, "but there isn't one in the army."

One of the men sang:

"I am busted, mother, busted. Gone the last unhappy check; And the infernal sutler's prices Make every pocket-book a wreck."

Prescott sat reading a newspaper. It was the issue of the Richmond Whig of April 30, 1864, and his eyes were on these paragraphs:

"That the great struggle is about to take place for the possession of Richmond is conceded on all sides. The enemy is marshaling his cohorts on the Rapahannock and the Peninsula, and that a last desperate effort will be made to overrun Virginia and occupy her ancient capital is admitted by the enemy himself. What, then, becomes the duty of the people of Richmond in view of the mighty conflict at hand? It is evidently the same as that of the commander of a man-of-war who sails out of port to engage the foes of his flag in mortal combat. The decks are cleared for action; non-combatants are ordered below or ashore; the supply of ammunition and food is looked to, and a short prayer uttered that Heaven will favour the right and protect the land and the loved ones for whom the battle is waged.

"We sincerely hope and pray that the red waves of battle may not, as in 1862, roll and break and hiss against the walls of the capital, and the ears of our suffering but resolute people may never again be saluted by the reports of hostile guns. But our hopes may be disappointed; the enemy may come again as he has come before, and, for aught we know, the battle may be fought on these hills and in these streets. It is with a view of this possible contingency that we would urge upon our people to make all needful preparation for whatever fate betides them, and especially to give our brave and unconquerable defenders a clear deck and open field. And above all, let the living oracles of our holy religion, and pious men and women of every persuasion, remember that God alone giveth the victory, and that His ear is ever open to the prayer of the righteous."

* * * * *

Prescott's thoughts the next morning were of Lucia Catherwood, who had floated away from him in a sort of haze. It seemed a long time since they parted that night in the snow, and he found himself trying to reproduce her face and the sounds of her voice. Where was she now? With that army which hung like a thunder cloud on their front? He had no doubt of it. Her work would be there. He felt that they were going to meet again, and it would not be long.

That day the Southern breeze blew stronger and sweeter than ever. It came up from the Gulf, laden with a million odours, and the little wild flowers in delicate tints of pink and purple and blue peeped up amid the shades of the forest.

That night Grant, with one hundred and thirty thousand men and four hundred guns, crossed the Rapidan and advanced on the Army of Northern Virginia.

The fiercest and bloodiest campaign recorded since history rose from the past was about to begin.

CHAPTER XVII

THE WILDERNESS

There is in Virginia a grim and sterile region the name of which no American ever hears without a shudder. When you speak to him of the Wilderness, the phantom armies rise before him and he hears the thunder of the guns as the vast struggle sweeps through its shades. He sees, too, the legions of the dead strewn in the forest, a mighty host, and he sighs to think so many of his countrymen should have fallen in mutual strife.

It is a land that deserves its name. Nature there is cold and stern. The rock crops up and the thin red soil bears only scrub forest and weary bushes. All is dark, somber and lonely, as if the ghosts of the fallen had claimed it for their playground.

The woodchopper seeks his hut early at night, and builds high the fire for the comfort of the blaze. He does not like to wander in the dark over the ground where vanished armies fought and bled so long. He sees and hears too much. He knows that his time--the present--has passed with the day, and that when the night comes it belongs again to the armies; then they fight once more, though the battle is soundless now, amid the shades and over the hills and valleys.

Now and then he turns from the fire and its comradeship and looks through the window into the darkness. He, too, shudders as he thinks of the past and remembers the long roll, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and the others. Even the poor woodchopper knows that this melancholy tract of ground has borne more dead men's bones than any other of which history tells, and now and then he asks why, but no one can give him the answer he wishes. They say only that the battles were fought, that here the armies met for the death struggle which both knew was coming and which came as they knew.

The Wilderness has changed but little in the generation since Grant and Lee met there. The sullen soil is sullen and unyielding still. As of old it crops up here in stone and there turns a thin red tint to the sun. The sassafras bushes and the scrub oaks moan sadly in the wind, and few human beings wander over the desolate hills and valleys.

At Gettysburg there is a city, and the battlefield is covered with monuments in scores and scores, and all the world goes to see them. The white marble and granite shafts and pillars and columns, the green hills and fields around, the sunshine and the sound of many voices are cheerful and tell of life; you are not with the dead--you are simply with the glories of the past.