The regiment leaped to their feet and started up the hill. They had lost two hundred men in their first sweep. There were six hundred left.
"Hold your fire until I give the word!" the Colonel shouted.
The smoke was hanging low, and they had made two hundred yards before the blue line saw them through the haze. The hill blazed and hissed in their faces. The ma.s.sed infantry behind the guns found their marks. Men dropped right and left, sank in grey heaps or fell forward on their faces--some were knocked backwards down the slope. Yet without a pause they climbed.
Three hundred yards more and they would be on the guns. And then a sheet of blinding flame from every black-mouthed gun in line double shotted with grape and canister! The regiment was literally knocked to its knees. The men paused as if dazed by the shock. The sharp words of cheer and command from their officers and they rallied. From both flanks poured a murderous hail of bullets--guns to the right, left and front, all screaming, roaring, hissing their call of blood.
The Colonel saw the charge was hopeless and ordered his men to fire and fall back fighting. The grey line began to melt into the smoke mists down the hill and disappeared--all save Ned Vaughan. His eyes were fixed on that battery when the order to fire was given. He fired and charged with fixed bayonet alone. He never paused to see how many men were with him. His mind was set on capturing one of those guns. He reached the breastworks and looked behind him. There was not a man in sight. A blue gunner was ramming a cannon. With a savage leap Ned was on the boy, grabbed him by the neck and rushed down the hill in front of his own gun before the astounded Commander realized what had happened. When he did it was too late to fire. They would tear both men to pieces.
The regiment had rallied in the woods at the edge of the field from which they had first charged.
Ned Vaughan led his prisoner, in bright new uniform of blue, up to the Colonel and reported.
"A prisoner of war, sir!"
The Colonel took off his hat and gazed at the pair:
"Aren"t you the boy who held my horse?"
Ned saluted:
"Yes, sir."
"Then in the name of Almighty G.o.d, where did you get that man?"
Ned pointed excitedly to the hilltop:
"Right yonder, sir,--there"s plenty more of "em up there!"
The Colonel scratched his head, looked Ned over from head to heel and broke into a laugh.
"Well, I"ll be d.a.m.ned," he said at last. "Take him to the rear and report to me to-night. I want to see you."
Ned saluted and hurried to the rear with his prisoner.
The sun was slowly sinking in a sea of blood. The red faded to purple, the purple to grey, the grey into the shadows of night and still the guns were thundering from their heights. It was nine o"clock before they were silent and Lee"s torn and mangled army lay down among their dead and wounded to wait the dawn and renew the fight. They had been compelled to breast the most devastating fire to which an a.s.saulting army had been subjected in the history of war. The trees of the woods had been literally torn and mangled as if two cyclones had met and ripped them to pieces.
The men dropped in their tracks to s.n.a.t.c.h a few hours" sleep.
The low ominous sounds that drifted from the darkness could not be heeded till to-morrow. Here and there a lantern flickered as they picked up a wounded man and carried him to the rear. Only the desperately wounded could be helped. The dead must sleep beneath the stars. The low, pitiful cries for water guided the ambulance corps as they stumbled over the heaps of those past help.
The clouds drew a veil over the stars at midnight and it began to pour down rain before day. The sleeping, worn men woke with muttered oaths and stood against the trees or squatted against their trunks seeking shelter from the flood. As the mists lifted, they looked with grim foreboding but still desperate courage to the heights. Every rampart was deserted. Not one of those three hundred and forty guns remained.
McClellan had withdrawn his army under the cover of the night to Harrison"s Landing.
It would be difficult to tell whose men were better satisfied.
"Thank G.o.d, he"s gone from there anyhow!" the men in grey cried with fervor.
Now they could get something to eat, bury their dead and care for all the wounded. McClellan"s Peninsula Campaign had ended. His Grand Army had melted from a hundred and ten thousand fighting men in line to eighty-six thousand. The South had lost almost as many.
From the wildest panic into which the advance of his army had thrown Richmond, the Confederate Capital now swung to the opposite extreme of rejoicing for the deliverance, mingled with criticism of their leaders for allowing the Federal army to escape at all.
The gloom in Washington was profound.
An excited General rushed to the White House at two o"clock in the morning, roused the President from his bed and pleaded for the immediate dispatch of a fleet of transports to Harrison"s Landing as the only possible way to save the army from annihilation.
The President soothed his fears and sent him home. He was not the man to be thrown into a panic. Yet the incredible thing had happened. His army of more than two hundred thousand men, under able generals, had been hurled back from the gates of Richmond in hopeless, bewildering defeat, and he must begin all over again.
One big ominous fact loomed in tragic menace from the smoke and flame of this campaign--the South had developed two leaders of matchless military genius--Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It was a fact the President must face and that without fear or favor to any living man in his own army.
He left Washington for the front at once. He must see with his own eyes the condition of the army. He must see McClellan. The demand for his removal was loud and bitter. And fiercest of all those who asked for his head was the iron-willed Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, his former champion.
CHAPTER XIV
THE RETREAT
John Vaughan had become one of his General"s trusted aides. His services during the month"s terrific struggle had proven invaluable. The Commander was quick to discern that he was a man of culture and possessed a mind of unusual power. More than once the General had called him to his headquarters to pour into his ears his own grievances against the authorities in Washington. Naturally his mind had been embittered against the man in the White House. The magnetic personality of McClellan had appealed to his imagination from their first meeting.
The General was particularly bitter on the morning the President was expected. His indignation at last broke forth in impa.s.sioned words to his sympathetic listener.
The tragic consequence of the impression made in that talk neither man could dream at the moment.
Pacing the floor with the tread of a caged lion McClellan suddenly paused and his fine blue eyes flashed.
"I tell you, Vaughan, the wretches have done their worst. They can"t do much more----"
He stopped suddenly and drew from his pocket the copy of a dispatch he had sent to the war office. He read it carefully and looked up with flashing eyes:
"I"ll face the President with this dispatch to Stanton in my hands, too.
They would have removed me from my command for sending it--if they had dared!"
He slowly repeated its closing words:
"I know that a few thousand more men would have changed this battle from a defeat to a victory. As it is, the Government must not and cannot hold me responsible for the result. I feel too earnestly to-night. I have seen too many dead and wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that the Government has not sustained this army. If you do not do so now, the game is lost. If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you, or to any other person in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army----"
He paused and his square jaws came together firmly.
"And if that be treason, they can make the most of it!"
"I am curious to know how he meets you to-day," John said with a smile.
An orderly announced the arrival of the President and the Commanding General promptly boarded his steamer. In ten minutes the two men were facing each other in the stateroom a.s.signed the Chief Magistrate.
Lincoln"s tall, rugged figure met the compact General with the easy generous att.i.tude of a father ready to have it out with a wayward boy.