Chickamauga (25 page)

These were things I knew would stay with me always, the sound of that scream, the twin reflection in those eyes. They were with me now as Colonel Frisbie stood over me, repeating my name: “Lundy. Mr Lundy!” I looked up, like a man brought suddenly out of sleep, and saw him standing straddle-legged in high dusty boots.”

“Sir?”

“Come on, Lieutenant. Time to go.” He turned and then looked back. “Whats the matter with you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, not having heard the words themselves, only the questioning tone.

He turned back, and now for the first time in all the months I had known him, the pretense was gone; he was a man alone. “Whats the matter?” he said. “Dont you like me?”

It was out, and as soon as he had said it I could see that he had surprised himself even more than he had surprised me. He wished he could call the question back. But he stood there, still naked to the elements.

“Yes sir,” I said. “I have come to feel very close to you through these past fourteen months.”

I got up and walked to where the orderly held our horses. Colonel Frisbie came on behind me; for a moment I had almost liked him; God knows he had his problems; but now he was himself again. The troops had already fallen into column on the road. We marched, and the sun was completely gone. Behind us the glow of burning had spread along the eastern sky. As we marched westward through a blue dusk the glow receded, drawing it upon itself. The colonel lit another cigar; its smoke had a strong, tarry smell as its ruby tip shone and paled, on and off and on and off, like a signal lamp. When he turned in the saddle, looking back, leather creaked above the muffled clopping of hoofs in the cooling dust.

“Looks lower,” he said. He smoked, still looking back. The cigar glowed. I knew he was watching me, thinking about my answer to his question; he hadnt quite understood it yet. Then he turned to the front again. “Catch quick, burn slow. Thats the way those old ones always go.”

I did not answer. I did not look back.

As we went up the levee, having crossed the swampy, canebrake region that lay between the river and the lake—a wilderness belonging less to men than to bears and deer, alligators and moccasins, weird-screaming birds and insects that ticked like clocks in the brush—the colonel drew rein and turned his horse aside for the troops to pass. I took position alongside him on the crest, facing east toward where the reflection had
shrunk to a low dome of red. Then suddenly, as we looked across the wilderness and the lake, the house collapsed and loosed a fountain of sparks, a tall column of fire that stood upright for a long minute, solid as a pillar outlined clearly against the backdrop of the night. It rose and held and faded, and the glow was less than before, no more than a gleam.

“Roof fell in,” the colonel said. “Thats all, hey?”

I did not answer. I was seeing in my mind the dead face, the eyes with their twin reflection; I was hearing the lame woman scream; I was trying to remember something out of the Book of Job:
Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
And:
Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.
I was still trying to remember the words, but could not, when the last of the troops filed past. The words I remembered were those of the mad woman on the lawn. “Calling yourself soldiers,” she said. “Burners is all you is.” I twitched the reins, following Colonel Frisbie down the western slope of the levee, over the gang-plank and onto the gunboat again.

A few weeks after the Fourth of July the noon train brought home two men who had been in the great battle at Gettysburg. Although they wore uniforms they did not seem to be soldiers; they were more like men seen riding home in a wagon after an accident at the colliery. Their beards were untrimmed, their jackets spotted and half buttoned, and one of them could not put on his cap because his head was wrapped in bandage. The other had lost a foot and his pant-leg was folded over and pinned. He could not manage his crutch coming down the steps of the coach and called out: “Will some son of a bitch give me a hand?” But before anyone could reach him he lost his balance and fell forward, knocking down a man and woman who had gone to help him. The soldier with the bandaged head ignored the confusion at his feet and shouted: “Where’s Mary? Mary, where the hell are you, God damn you to hell.”

“Here I am, John. Here I am,” cried a woman in the crowd.

“Well, come and get me, God damn you, woman.”

The crowd then realized that although the man’s eyes were not covered, he was blind. The remaining civilian members of the fife and drum corps were on hand to escort the wounded men to their homes, but no
one now thought of a welcoming parade. The fifers put their instruments back in their boots and the drummers slung their drums over their shoulders and soon the station platform was deserted.

You have heard from a great many people who did something in the war,
¹
is it not fair and right that you listen a little moment to one who started out to do something in it, but didn’t? Thousands entered the war, got just a taste of it, and then stepped out again permanently. These, by their very numbers, are respectable and are therefore entitled to a sort of a voice—not a loud one but a modest one, not a boastful one but an apologetic one. They ought not to be allowed much space among better people—people who did something. I grant that, but they ought at least to be allowed to state why they didn’t do anything and also to explain the process by which they didn’t do anything. Surely this kind of light must have a sort of value.

Out West there was a good deal of confusion in men’s minds during the first months of the great trouble—a good deal of unsettledness, of leaning first this way, then that, then the other way. It was hard for us to get our bearings. I call to mind an instance of this. I was piloting on the Mississippi when the news came that South Carolina had gone out of the Union on the 20th of December, 1860. My pilot mate was a New Yorker. He was strong for the Union; so was I. But he would not listen to me with any patience; my loyalty was
smirched, to his eye, because my father had owned slaves. I said in palliation of this dark fact that I had heard my father say, some years before he died, that slavery was a great wrong and that he would free the solitary Negro he then owned if he could think it right to give away the property of the family when he was so straitened in means. My mate retorted that a mere impulse was nothing—anybody could pretend to a good impulse, and went on decrying my Unionism and libeling my ancestry. A month later the secession atmosphere had considerably thickened on the Lower Mississippi and I became a rebel; so did he. We were together in New Orleans the 26th of January, when Louisiana went out of the Union. He did his full share of the rebel shouting but was bitterly opposed to letting me do mine. He said that I came of bad stock—of a father who had been willing to set slaves free. In the following summer he was piloting a Federal gunboat and shouting for the Union again and I was in the Confederate army. I held his note for some borrowed money. He was one of the most upright men I ever knew but he repudiated that note without hesitation because I was a rebel and the son of a man who owned slaves.

In that summer of 1861 the first wash of the wave of war broke upon the shores of Missouri. Our state was invaded by the Union forces. They took possession of St. Louis, Jefferson Barracks, and some other points. The Governor, Claib Jackson, issued his proclamation calling out fifty thousand militia to repel the invader.

I was visiting in the small town where my boyhood had been spent, Hannibal, Marion County. Several of us got together in a secret place by night and formed ourselves into a military company. One Tom Lyman, a young fellow of a good deal of spirit but of no military experience, was made captain; I was made second lieutenant.
We had no first lieutenant; I do not know why; it was long ago. There were fifteen of us. By the advice of an innocent connected with the organization we called ourselves the Marion Rangers. I do not remember that any one found fault with the name. I did not; I thought it sounded quite well. The young fellow who proposed this title was perhaps a fair sample of the kind of stuff we were made of. He was young, ignorant, good-natured, well-meaning, trivial, full of romance, and given to reading chivalric novels and singing forlorn love-ditties. He had some pathetic little nickel-plated aristocratic instincts and detested his name, which was Dunlap; detested it partly because it was nearly as common in that region as Smith but mainly because it had a plebeian sound to his ear. So he tried to ennoble it by writing it in this way:
d’Unlap.
That contented his eye but left his ear unsatisfied, for people gave the new name the same old pronunciation—emphasis on the front end of it. He then did the bravest thing that can be imagined, a thing to make one shiver when one remembers how the world is given to resenting shams and affectations, he began to write his name so:
d’Un Lap.
And he waited patiently through the long storm of mud that was flung at this work of art and he had his reward at last, for he lived to see that name accepted and the emphasis put where he wanted it by people who had known him all his life, and to whom the tribe of Dunlaps had been as familiar as the rain and the sunshine for forty years. So sure of victory at last is the courage that can wait. He said he had found by consulting some ancient French chronicles that the name was rightly and originally written d’Un Lap, and said that if it were translated into English it would mean Peterson:
Lap,
Latin or Greek, he said, for stone or rock, same as the French
pierre,
that is to say, Peter:
d’,
of or from;
un,
a or one; hence, d’Un Lap, of or from a stone or a Peter; that is to say, one who is the son of a stone, the son of a Peter—Peterson. Our militia company were not learned and the explanation confused them; so they called him Peterson Dunlap. He proved useful to us in his way; he named our camps for us and he generally struck a name that was “no slouch,” as the boys said.

That is one sample of us. Another was Ed Stevens, son of the town jeweler, trim-built, handsome, graceful, neat as a cat; bright, educated, but given over entirely to fun. There was nothing serious in life to him. As far as he was concerned, this military expedition of ours was simply a holiday. I should say that about half of us looked upon it in the same way; not consciously, perhaps, but unconsciously. We did not think; we were not capable of it. As for myself, I was full of unreasoning joy to be done with turning out of bed at midnight and four in the morning for a while, grateful to have a change, new scenes, new occupations, a new interest. In my thoughts that was as far as I went; I did not go into the details; as a rule one doesn’t at twenty-four.

Another sample was Smith, the blacksmith’s apprentice. This vast donkey had some pluck, of a slow and sluggish nature, but a soft heart; at one time he would knock a horse down for some impropriety and at another he would get homesick and cry. However, he had one ultimate credit to his account which some of us hadn’t; he stuck to the war and was killed in battle at last.

Jo Bowers, another sample, was a huge, good-natured, flax-headed lubber, lazy, sentimental, full of harmless brag, a grumbler by nature; an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar and yet not a successful one, for he had had no intelligent training but was allowed to come up just any way.

This life was serious enough to him, and seldom satisfactory. But he was a good fellow, anyway, and the boys all liked him. He was made orderly sergeant; Stevens was made corporal.

These samples will answer—and they are quite fair ones. Well, this herd of cattle started for the war. What could you expect of them? They did as well as they knew how but, really, what was justly to be expected of them? Nothing, I should say. That is what they did.