Joseph A. Altsheler – The Complete Collection

Chapter 38

They were at the edge of the forest now, and here the air was thicker and darker. The mists and vapours floated among the trees and lay like warm, wet blankets upon their faces. They saw now many moving figures, some bending down as if they would lift something from the earth, and others who held lights. Occasionally they passed women like themselves, but not often. Some of the men were in gray uniform and some in blue, but they passed and repassed each other without question, doing the work they had come there to do.

Here in the forest the area of burnt ground was larger, and many coils of smoke rose languidly to join the banks of it that towered overhead. The still objects, too, were lying as far as one could see, in groups here, somewhat scattered there, but the continuity never broken, many with their faces upturned to the sky as if they awaited placidly the last call. Helen was struck by this peace, this seeming confidence in what was to come. The passage, then, had not been so hard! Here, when she stood in the centre of it all, the old feelings of awe returned, and the real world, the world that she had known before this day, swung farther and farther away.

There was still but little noise, for those who yet lived were silent, waiting patiently, and the vast peace was more powerful in its impression upon the mind than any tumult could have been. Helen looked up once at the skies. They were black and overcast. But few stars twinkled there. It was a fit canopy for the Wilderness, the gloomy forest that bore such a burden. From a far point in the southwest came the low rumble of thunder, and lightning, like the heat-lightning of a summer night, glimmered fitfully. Then there was a faint, sullen sound, the report of a distant cannon shot. Helen started, more in anger than terror. Would they fight again at such a time? She felt blame for both, but the shot was not repeated then. A signal gun, she thought, and went on, unconsciously going where the strong young figure of Lucia Catherwood led the way. She heard presently another distant cannon shot, its solemn echoes rolling all around the horizon, but she paid no heed to it. Her mind was now for other things.

An inky sky overhung the battlefield and all it held. Those nights in the Wilderness were among the blackest in both ways this country has ever known. Brigades and batteries moving in the dense scrub, seeking better places for the fresh battle on the morrow, wandered sometimes through each other's lines. Soldiers, not knowing whether they were among friends or enemies, and not caring, drank in the darkness from the same streams, and, overpowered by fatigue, North and South alike often slept a soundless sleep under trees not fifty yards from one another; but the two Generals, who were the supreme expression of the genius of either side, never slept. They had met for the first time; each nearly always a victor before, neither had now won. The result yet to come lay hidden in the black Wilderness, and by smoking camp-fires they planned for the next day, knowing well that they would meet again in a combat fiercer, longer and deadlier than ever, the one always seeking to drive on, the other always seeking to hold him back.

The Wilderness enclosed many secrets that night, hiding dead and living alike. Many of the fallen lay unseen amid the ravines and hollows, and the burning forest was their funeral pyre. Never did the Wilderness more deserve its name; gloomy at any time, it had new attributes of solemn majesty. Everything seemed to be in unison with those who lay there--the pitchy blackness, the low muttering of distant thunder, the fitful glimmer of the lightning, the stems of trees twisted and contorted by the gleam of the uncertain flashes, the white faces of the slain upturned to the sky seen dimly by the same light, the banks of smoke and vapour yet floating through the forest, the strange, repellent odours, and the heavy, melancholy silence.

Those who had come upon the field after the night began worked without talk, the men from either side passing and repassing each other, but showing no hostility. The three women, too, began to help them, doing the errand upon which they had come, and their service was received without question and without comment. No one asked another why he was there; his duty lay plain before him.

It was Lucia Catherwood who took the lead, neither Helen nor Mrs. Markham disputing her fitness for the place, too apparent to all to be denied; it was she who never flinched, who, if she spoke at all, spoke words of cheer, whose strength and courage seemed never to fail.

Thus the hours passed, and the character of the night in the Wilderness did not change. There was yet compared with the tumult of the day a heavy, oppressive silence; the smoke and the vapours did not go away, the heavy atmosphere did not thin, and at intervals the distant thunder rumbled and the fitful lightning glared over a distorted forest.

The three worked in silence, like those around them, faithful, undaunted. Mrs. Markham, the cynical and worldly, was strangely changed, perhaps the most changed of the three; all her affectations were gone, and she was now only an earnest woman. And while the three worked they always watched for one man. And this man was not the same with any one of the three.

It was past midnight and Helen did not know how long she had been upon the battlefield, working as she did in a kind of a dream, or rather mist, in which everything was fanciful and unreal, with her head full of strange sights and unheard sounds, when she saw two men ride side by side and silently out of the black forest--two figures, one upright, powerful, the other drooping, with head that swayed slightly from side to side.

She knew them at once despite the shadows of the trees and the faint moonlight--and it was what her thoughts had told her would come true. It had never occurred to her that the one who sat in the saddle so erect and so powerful could fall; nor had he.

She and Mrs. Markham advanced to meet them. Harley's head swayed slightly from side to side, and his clothing showed red in the dim moonlight. Wood held him in the saddle with one hand and guided the two horses with the other. Both women were white to the lips, but it was Helen who spoke first.

"I expected you," she said to Wood.

Wood replied that Harley was not hurt save by exhaustion from his previous wounds. He had come, too, at a critical moment, and his coming had been worth much to the South. But now he was half unconscious; he must rest or die. The General spoke in simple words, language that one would have called dialect, but Helen did not think of those things; his figure was grander than ever before to her, because, despite the battle, he had remembered to bring back her brother.

Mrs. Markham was quiet, saying no word, but she went with them to the house, where Harley was placed on the very bed on which he had slept the night before. Lucia Catherwood did not turn back, and was left alone on the field, but she was neither afraid nor lonely. She, too, was looking for some one--one whom she was in dread lest she find and whom she wished to find nevertheless. But she had a feeling--how or whence it came she did not know--that she would find him there. Always while she helped the others, hour after hour, she looked for him, glancing into every ravine and hollow, and neglecting no thicket or clump of bushes that she passed. She believed that she would know him if she saw but the edge of his coat or his hand.

At last she reached the fringe of the battlefield. The fallen forms were fewer and the ground less torn by the tramplings of men and horses and the wheels of guns, though the storm had passed, leaving its track of ruin. Here, too, were burned spots, the grass still smouldering and sending up tiny sparks, a tree or two twisted out of shape and half-consumed by flames; a broken cannon, emblem of destruction, lying wheelless on the ground. Lucia looked back toward the more populous field of the fallen and saw there the dim lights still moving, but decreasing now as the night waned. Low, blurred sounds came to her ears. As for herself, she stood in the darkness, silvered dimly by a faint moonlight, a tall, lithe young figure, self-reliant, unafraid.

She began now to search every hollow, to look among the bushes and the ravines. She had heard from men of his own company that he was missing, and she would not turn back while he was unfound. It was for this that she had come, and he would need her.

She was on the farthest rim of the battlefield, where the lights when she looked back were almost lost, and it seemed to be enclosed wholly by the darkness and the vapours. No voice came from it, but in the forest before her were new sounds--a curious tread as of many men together stepping lightly, the clanging of metal, and now and then a neigh coming faintly. This, she knew, were the brigades and the batteries seeking position in the darkness for a new battle; but she was not afraid.

Lucia Catherwood was not thinking then of the Wilderness nor of the vast tragedy that it held, but of a flight one snowy night from a hostile capital, a flight that was not unhappy because of true companionship. Formed amid hard circumstances, hers was not a character that yielded quickly to sentiment, but when the barriers were broken down she gave much.

She heard a tread in the brushwood. Some horses, saddles on and bridles hanging--their riders lost, she well knew how--galloped near her, looked at her a moment or two with wide eyes, and then passed on. Far to the right she heard a faint cannon shot. If they were going to fight again, why not wait until the next day? It could not be done in all this darkness. A blacker night she had never seen.

She came to a tiny valley, a mere cup in the bleak, red ridges, well set with rich green grass as if more fertile soil had gathered there, but all torn and trampled, showing that one of the fiercest eddies of the battle had centred in this spot. At the very edge lay two horses with their outstretched necks crossed united in death. In the trampled grass lay other dark figures which she could not pass without a shudder.

She paused here a moment because it seemed to be growing darker. The low rumble of thunder from the far western horizon came again, all the more threatening because of its faintness and distance. The lightning gleamed a moment and by its quick flash she saw the one she was seeking.

He lay at the far edge of the little valley where the grass had grown richest and tallest, and he was almost hidden by the long stems. It was his face that she saw first, white and still in the lightning's glare, but she did not believe that he was dead. Ah! that could not happen.

Raising his head in her arms, she rested it upon her knee, moistening his lips with water that she carried in a flask. She was a strong woman, both physically and mentally, far beyond the average of her s*x, and now she would not yield to any emotion. No; she would do what it was necessary to do, and not until then would she even put her finger upon his wrist to find if the pulse were still beating.