When the two friends reached the outer gates of Warlock plantation on their way to the Court-house, Marshall, to whose queer ways his friend was thoroughly well used, called a halt.
"Let us dismount," he said, "and consider what we are doing."
When they had seated themselves upon the carpet of pine-needles, the meditative youth resumed:
"Does it occur to you, Baillie," he asked, "that when you and I pa.s.s through yonder gate, we shall leave behind us for ever the most enjoyable life that it ever fell to the lot of human beings to lead? Do you realise that we may never either of us come back through that gate again, and that if we do, it will only be to find all things changed? We are at the end of a chapter. The next chapter will be by no means like unto it."
"I confess I don"t quite understand," answered the less meditative one.
"Well, this easy-going, delightful Virginian life of ours has no counterpart anywhere on this continent or elsewhere in the world, and we have decided to put an end to it. For this war is going to be a very serious thing to us Virginians. Virginia is destined to be the battle-field. Greater armies than have ever before been dreamed of on this continent are going to trample over her fields, and meet in dreadful conflict on the margins of her watercourses. Her homes are going to be desolated, her fields laid waste, her substance utterly exhausted, and her people reduced to poverty in a cause that is not her own, and in behalf of which she unselfishly risks all for the sake of an abstraction, and in defence of a right on the part of other States which Virginia herself had seen no occasion to a.s.sert in her own defence.
Whatever else happens in this war, all that is characteristic in Virginian life, all that is peculiar to it, all that lends loveliness to it, must be sacrificed on the altar of duty.
"I don"t at all know how the change is to come about, or what new things are destined to replace the old; but I see clearly that the old must give way to something new. Perhaps, after all, that is best. Ours has been a beautiful life, and a peculiarly picturesque one, but it is not in tune with this modern industrial world. It has its roots in the past, and the past cannot endure. We have thus far been able to go on living in an ideal world, but the real world has been more and more a.s.serting itself, and even if no war were coming on to upset things, things must be upset. Railroads and telegraphs have come to us rather in spite of our will than by reason of it. We have realised their convenience in a fashion, but they are still foreign and antagonistic to our ideas. The older gentlemen among us still prefer to make long journeys on horseback rather than go by rail, while very many of them insist resolutely upon sending their womankind always in private carriages, even when they go long distances to the mountains for the summer.
"We are living in the past and fighting off the present, but the present will successfully a.s.sert itself in the end. You have yourself rejected all the overtures of the speculators who have wanted to open coal mines on Warlock plantation, but the time will come when you"ll be glad to be made richer than any Pegram ever dreamed of being by the sinking of mine shafts among your lawn trees.
"If you are lucky enough to survive this war, you"ll see a new labour system established, and learn to regard the men who work for you, not as your dependents, for whom you are responsible, and for whose welfare you feel a sympathetic concern, but as so many "employees," to be dealt with through a trades union, and kept down to the lowest scale of wages consistent with their living and working.
"I am not advocating the new, or condemning the old. I am only pointing out the fact that the new is surely destined to triumph over the old, and replace it.
"The negroes in Virginia are beyond question the best paid, the best fed, the best housed, and altogether the best cared for labouring population on earth. They are secure in childhood and in old age and in illness, as no other labouring people on earth are. They are happy, and in important ways they are even freer than any other labouring cla.s.s ever was. But they are slaves, and modern thought insists that they would be better off as free men, even though freedom should bring to them a loss of happiness and a loss of that well-nigh limitless liberty which they enjoy as bondsmen, under care of kindly masters.
"Mind you, Baillie, I am not arguing for or against the claims of modern thought. I am only pointing out the fact that it is resistless, and will have its way. All history teaches that. Even chivalry, armed as it was from head to heel, and limitlessly courageous as it was, could not hold its own against commercialism, when commercialism became dominant as the thought that represented the aspirations of men. Not even prejudice or sentiment can prevail against progress.
"John Ruskin is even now protesting in the name of aesthetics against the scarring of England with railroad embankments, and the pollution of England"s air with the vomitings of unsightly factory chimneys; but neither the extension of the British railway system nor the multiplication of British factories halts because of his protests.
"Henry Clay was never so eloquent as when pleading against protective tariffs as something that threatened this country with a system like that of Manchester, in which men were divided into mill owners and mill operatives, with antagonistic interests; yet Henry Clay was forced by the conditions of his time to become the apostle of industrial protection by tariff legislation.
"My thesis is that no man and no people can for long stand in the way of what the Germans call the _zeitgeist_--the spirit of the age. Neither, I think, can any people stand apart from that spirit and let it pa.s.s them by. That is what we Virginians have been trying to do. The time has come when we are going out to fight the _zeitgeist_, and the _zeitgeist_ is going to conquer us."
"You expect the South to fail in the war, then?" asked Baillie.
"I don"t know. We may fail or we may win. But in either case the old regime in the Old Dominion will be at an end when the war is over.
Virginia will become a modern State, whatever else happens, and the old life in which you and I were brought up will become a thing of the past, a matter of history, the memory of which the novelists may love to recall, but the conditions of which can never again be established.
"Fortunately, none of these things needs trouble us. They make no difference whatever in our personal duty. Virginia has proclaimed her withdrawal from the Union, under the declared purpose of the Union to make war upon her for doing so. It is for us to fight in Virginia"s cause as manfully as we can, leaving G.o.d, or the Fates, or whatever else it is that presides over human affairs, to take care of the result.
"Come! The time is pa.s.sing; we must hurry in order to catch that train which represents the modern progress that is destined to ride over us and crush us. Good-bye, old Virginia life! G.o.d bless you for a good old life! May we live as worthily in the new, if we survive to see the new!"
VIII
_A RED FEATHER_
The sun shone with the fervent heat of noonday in mid-July, as the long line of cannon and caissons came lumbering down the incline of the roadway that leads from the mountainside into the little railway village. The breath of the guns was still offensively sulphurous, for there had been no time in which to cleanse them since their work of yesterday. The officers and non-commissioned officers on their horses, and the cannoniers who rode upon the ammunition-chests, were powder-grimed and dusty--for there had been no opportunity on this hurried march for those ablutions that all soldiers so eagerly delight in.
There were no shouted commands given, for this battery had been three times under fire, and one of the first things an officer learns in real war is not to shout his orders except when the din of battle renders shouting necessary. Three months ago on parade the captain of this battery would have bellowed, "Forward into battery!" by way of impressing his importance upon the lookers-on. Now that he had learned to be in earnest, he merely turned to his bugler, and said, as if in a parlour, "Forward into battery, then halt."
A little musical s.n.a.t.c.h on the bugle did the rest, and with the precision of a piece of mechanism, the guns were moved into place, each with its caissons at a fixed distance in the rear, and the command, "At ease," was followed by a stable-call, in obedience to which the drivers set to work to feed and groom their horses. For while men may be allowed to go grimed and dirty on campaign, the horses at least must be curried and rubbed and sponged into perfect health and comfort whenever there is opportunity.
Here at the little railway station were a.s.sembled all the womankind from a dozen miles round about. These had come to look upon the Army of the Shenandoah, with which Johnston, after several days of skirmishing in the valley with the Federals under Patterson, was hurrying onward to Mana.s.sas to join Beauregard there, in the battle which was so obviously at hand.
The women of every degree had come, not merely to see the spectacle of war, but to cheer the soldiers with smiles and words of encouragement, and still more to minister in what ways they could to their needs. The maids and matrons thus a.s.sembled were gaily clad, for war had not yet robbed them of the wherewithal to deck themselves as gaily as the lilies do. They were full of high confidence and ardent hope, for war had not yet brought to them, and for many moons to come was not destined to bring to them, the realisation that defeat and disaster are sometimes a part of the bravest soldiers" fortune. These women believed absolutely and unquestioningly in the righteousness of the Southern cause, and they had not yet read the history of Poland, and La Vendee, and the Huguenots with discretion enough to doubt that victory always in the end crowns the struggles of those who stand for the right.
How much of disappointment and suffering this curiously perverse reading of history has wrought, to be sure! And how confidently, in every case, the men and women on either side of a war commend their cause to Heaven, in full confidence that G.o.d, in his justice, cannot fail to give victory to the right, and cannot fail to understand that they are right and their enemies hopelessly wrong. Probably every educated woman among those who were a.s.sembled at the little village on that twentieth day of July, 1861, had read Motley"s histories; every one of them knew the story of Poland and of Ireland and of La Vendee and the Camisards; but they still believed that G.o.d and not the guns decides the outcome of battles.
In one article of their faith at least they were absolutely right. They believed in the courage, the devotion, the unflinching prowess of the men who had enlisted to fight for their cause. They had come now, at the approach of a first great battle, to bid these men G.o.dspeed. Four years later, when war had well-nigh worn out the gallant Army of Northern Virginia, and when the very hope of ultimate victory, over enormously superior numbers and against incalculably superior resources, was scarcely more than an impulse of faith-inspired insanity, these women of the South were still present and helpful wherever their presence could cheer, and wherever their help was needed.
To-day, they looked to the morrow for a victory that should make an end of the war. The victory came with a startling completeness wholly unmatched in all the history of battles. But the end did not come, and the war wore itself out, through four long years of brilliant achievement, alternated with terrible disaster. At Petersburg these women did not look to the morrow at all, but their courage was the same, their cheer the same, their devotion the same. It was still their chosen task to encourage the little remnant of an army which still held the defensive works with a line stretched out to attenuation. To the very end--and even after the end--these brave women faltered not nor failed.
When the war began, the women of the South made a gala-day of every day when soldiers were in sight. As the war neared its calamitous end, all days were to them days of mourning and of always willing self-sacrifice.
On that twentieth day of July, 1861, the women gathered together were full of high hope and confidence. Some were perched upon goods boxes, arranged to serve as seats. Some were tripping about on foot, gliding hither and thither in gladness, as girls do in a dance, simply because their nerves were tuned to a high pitch, and their sympathetic feet refused to be still. But for the most part they sat in their carriages, with the tops thrown back in defiance of the fervour of the sun.
Defiance was in the air, indeed, and the troops on their way to the battle-field were not more resolute in their determination to do and to dare, than were the dames and damsels there gathered together in their purpose to disregard sunshine and circ.u.mstance, while bestowing their smiles upon these men, their heroes.
After the fashion of the time among volunteers who were presently to become war-worn into veterans, but who were never to be reduced to the condition of hireling regulars, the men were free, as soon as a halt was called, to move about among the feminine throng, greeting their acquaintances when they had any, and being cheerily greeted by strangers, in utter disregard of those conventions with which womanhood elsewhere than in Virginia surrounds itself. There womanhood had always felt itself free, because it had always felt itself under the protection of all there was of manhood in the land. No woman in that time and country was ever in danger of affront, for the reason that no man dared affront her, lest he encounter vengeance, swift, sure, and relentless, at the hands of the first other man who might hear of the circ.u.mstance.
No Virginian girl of that time had her mind directed to evil things by the suggestion of chaperonage; and no Virginia gentleman was subjected to insulting imputation by the refusal of a woman"s guardians to entrust her protection against himself, as against all others, to his chivalry.
So far was the point of honour pressed in such matters, that no man was free even to make the most deferential proposal of marriage to any woman while she was actually or technically under his charge and protection.
To do that, it was held, was to place the woman in an embarra.s.sing position, to subject her to the necessity of accepting the offer on the one hand, or of declining it while yet under obligation to accept escort and protection at the hands of the man making it.
Under this rigid code of social intercourse, which granted perfect freedom to all women, and exacted scrupulous respect for such freedom at the hands of all men, the intercourse between gentlemen volunteers and the young women who had come to visit them in camp was even less restrained than that of a drawing-room, in which all are guests of a common host, and all are guaranteed, as it were, by that host"s sponsorship of invitation.
In all their dealings with the volunteers, the women of Virginia brought common sense to bear in a positively astonishing degree, reinforcing it with abounding good-will and perfect confidence in the manhood of men as their sufficient shield against misinterpretation. And they were entirely right in this. For "battle, murder, and sudden death," would very certainly have been the part of any man in those ranks who should have failed in due respect to this generosity of mind on the part of womanhood. The dignity of womanhood was never so safe as when women thus confidently left its guardianship to the instinctive chivalry of men.
For a time after the halt, Baillie Pegram was too busy to inquire whether or not any friends of his own were among the throng. For something had happened to Baillie Pegram over there in the Valley of the Shenandoah two or three days before. The gun to whose detachment he belonged as a cannonier had been detached and sent to an exposed position on the Martinsburg road. The sergeant in command of it had been killed by a bullet, and the two corporals--the gunner and the chief of caisson--had been carried to the rear on litters, with bullets in their bodies. There was absolutely n.o.body in command of the gun, but Baillie Pegram was serving as number one at the piece--that is to say, as the cannonier handling the sponge and rammer. Seeing the badly weakened gun-crew disposed to falter for lack of anybody to command them, and seeing, too, the necessity of continuing the fire, Baillie a.s.sumed an authority which did not belong to him in any way.
"Stand to the gun, men!" he cried. "If any man flunks till this job is done, I"ll brain him with my rammer-head, orders or no orders."
A moment later the faltering of number three called upon him for the execution of his threat, and he instantly did what he had said he would do, felling the man to the gra.s.s, stunned for the time by a quick blow with the iron-bound rammer-head. Then he called upon number five to take the recreant"s place, and that gun continued its work until the hot little action was over.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""_If any man flunks--I"ll brain him_""]
A slouchy-looking personage had been standing by all the while. At the end of it all he demanded Baillie Pegram"s name and rank, and the name of his battery. That evening Baillie Pegram"s captain sent for him, and said:
"I am going to make you my sergeant-major. I have General Jackson"s request to recognise your good conduct under his eye to-day. Even without his suggestion I should wish to have you with me as my staff sergeant. I have kept that post open until now, in order that I might choose the best man for it."
It should be explained that the rank of sergeant-major is the very highest non-commissioned rank known to military life. Ordinarily, the sergeant-major is a regimental non-commissioned officer. But following the French system, the Confederate regulations allowed every battery of field-artillery a sergeant-major, if its captain so desired. He outranked all other non-commissioned officers, and usually exercised a lieutenant"s command in battle--always if any commissioned officer were absent or disabled.
Thus it came about that Sergeant-Major Baillie Pegram was too busy on that morning to look up acquaintances among the spectators gathered there. He had orders to execute, and details of many kinds to look after, including the making out of that morning report which every company in the service must daily render, and upon which the commanding general must rely for information as to the exact number of fighting men he has available for duty.
Baillie had just completed this task, when some one brought him news that a lady in a carriage near by wished to speak with him. Having nothing now to do, he responded to the call, and found Agatha Ronald awaiting him. She sat in her carriage alone. In her lap was a work-basket, fully equipped for that mending which these women always came prepared to do when soldiers were pa.s.sing by. Baillie had no mending to be done, but Agatha bade him remove his jacket and deliver it into her charge.
"We"ve heard what happened in the Valley the other day," she said, "and it is not seemly for a sergeant-major to be on duty without the insignia of his rank. Red is the artillery colour, I believe, and your marks are three chevrons, with three arches connecting them, are they not?
Fortunately, I brought a roll of red braid. So let me have your coat, please, and I"ll readjust your costume to your rank."