The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War
The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War The Little RegimentThree Miraculous SoldiersA Mystery Of HeroismAn Indiana CampaignA Grey SleeveThe VeteranCopyright
The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War
Stephen Crane
The Little Regiment
I
The fog made the clothes of the men of the column in the roadway
seem of a luminous quality. It imparted to the heavy infantry
overcoats a new colour, a kind of blue which was so pale that a
regiment might have been merely a long, low shadow in the mist.
However, a muttering, one part grumble, three parts joke, hovered
in the air above the thick ranks, and blended in an undertoned
roar, which was the voice of the column.
The town on the southern shore of the little river loomed
spectrally, a faint etching upon the grey cloud-masses which were
shifting with oily languor. A long row of guns upon the northern
bank had been pitiless in their hatred, but a little battered
belfry could be dimly seen still pointing with invincible
resolution toward the heavens.
The enclouded air vibrated with noises made by hidden colossal
things. The infantry tramplings, the heavy rumbling of the
artillery, made the earth speak of gigantic preparation. Guns on
distant heights thundered from time to time with sudden, nervous
roar, as if unable to endure in silence a knowledge of hostile
troops massing, other guns going to position. These sounds, near
and remote, defined an immense battle-ground, described the
tremendous width of the stage of the prospective drama. The voices
of the guns, slightly casual, unexcited in their challenges and
warnings, could not destroy the unutterable eloquence of the word
in the air, a meaning of impending struggle which made the breath
halt at the lips.
The column in the roadway was ankle-deep in mud. The men swore
piously at the rain which drizzled upon them, compelling them to
stand always very erect in fear of the drops that would sweep in
under their coat-collars. The fog was as cold as wet cloths. The
men stuffed their hands deep in their pockets, and huddled their
muskets in their arms. The machinery of orders had rooted these
soldiers deeply into the mud, precisely as almighty nature roots
mullein stalks.
They listened and speculated when a tumult of fighting came from
the dim town across the river. When the noise lulled for a time
they resumed their descriptions of the mud and graphically
exaggerated the number of hours they had been kept waiting. The
general commanding their division rode along the ranks, and they
cheered admiringly, affectionately, crying out to him gleeful
prophecies of the coming battle. Each man scanned him with a
peculiarly keen personal interest, and afterward spoke of him with
unquestioning devotion and confidence, narrating anecdotes which
were mainly untrue.
When the jokers lifted the shrill voices which invariably belonged
to them, flinging witticisms at their comrades, a loud laugh would
sweep from rank to rank, and soldiers who had not heard would lean
forward and demand repetition. When were borne past them some
wounded men with grey and blood-smeared faces, and eyes that rolled
in that helpless beseeching for assistance from the sky which comes
with supreme pain, the soldiers in the mud watched intently, and
from time to time asked of the bearers an account of the affair.
Frequently they bragged of their corps, their division, their
brigade, their regiment. Anon they referred to the mud and the cold
drizzle. Upon this threshold of a wild scene of death they, in
short, defied the proportion of events with that splendour of
heedlessness which belongs only to veterans.
"Like a lot of wooden soldiers," swore Billie Dempster, moving his
feet in the thick mass, and casting a vindictive glance
indefinitely: "standing in the mud for a hundred years."
"Oh, shut up!" murmured his brother Dan. The manner of his words
implied that this fraternal voice near him was an indescribable
bore.
"Why should I shut up?" demanded Billie.
"Because you're a fool," cried Dan, taking no time to debate it;
"the biggest fool in the regiment."
There was but one man between them, and he was habituated. These
insults from brother to brother had swept across his chest, flown
past his face, many times during two long campaigns. Upon this
occasion he simply grinned first at one, then at the other.
The way of these brothers was not an unknown topic in regimental
gossip. They had enlisted simultaneously, with each sneering loudly
at the other for doing it. They left their little town, and went
forward with the flag, exchanging protestations of undying
suspicion. In the camp life they so openly despised each other
that, when entertaining quarrels were lacking, their companions
often contrived situations calculated to bring forth display of
this fraternal dislike.
Both were large-limbed, strong young men, and often fought with
friends in camp unless one was near to interfere with the other.
This latter happened rather frequently, because Dan, preposterously
willing for any manner of combat, had a very great horror of seeing
Billie in a fight; and Billie, almost odiously ready himself,
simply refused to see Dan stripped to his shirt and with his fists
aloft. This sat queerly upon them, and made them the objects of
plots.
When Dan jumped through a ring of eager soldiers and dragged forth
his raving brother by the arm, a thing often predicted would almost
come to pass. When Billie performed the same office for Dan, the
prediction would again miss fulfilment by an inch. But indeed they
never fought together, although they were perpetually upon the
verge.
They expressed longing for such conflict. As a matter of truth,
they had at one time made full arrangement for it, but even with
the encouragement and interest of half of the regiment they somehow
failed to achieve collision.
If Dan became a victim of police duty, no jeering was so
destructive to the feelings as Billie's comment. If Billie got a
call to appear at the headquarters, none would so genially prophesy
his complete undoing as Dan. Small misfortunes to one were, in
truth, invariably greeted with hilarity by the other, who seemed to
see in them great re-enforcement of his opinion.
As soldiers, they expressed each for each a scorn intense and
blasting. After a certain battle, Billie was promoted to corporal.
When Dan was told of it, he seemed smitten dumb with astonishment
and patriotic indignation. He stared in silence, while the dark
blood rushed to Billie's forehead, and he shifted his weight from
foot to foot. Dan at last found his tongue, and said: "Well, I'm
durned!" If he had heard that an army mule had been appointed to
the post of corps commander, his tone could not have had more
derision in it. Afterward, he adopted a fervid insubordination, an
almost religious reluctance to obey the new corporal's orders,
which came near to developing the desired strife.
It is here finally to be recorded also that Dan, most ferociously
profane in speech, very rarely swore in the presence of his
brother; and that Billie, whose oaths came from his lips with the
grace of falling pebbles, was seldom known to express himself in
this manner when near his brother Dan.
At last the afternoon contained a suggestion of evening. Metallic
cries rang suddenly from end to end of the column. They inspired at
once a quick, business-like adjustment. The long thing stirred in
the mud. The men had hushed, and were looking across the river. A
moment later the shadowy mass of pale blue figures was moving
steadily toward the stream. There could be heard from the town a
clash of swift fighting and cheering. The noise of the shooting
coming through the heavy air had its sharpness taken from it, and
sounded in thuds.
There was a halt upon the bank above the pontoons. When the column
went winding down the incline, and streamed out upon the bridge,
the fog had faded to a great degree, and in the clearer dusk the
guns on a distant ridge were enabled to perceive the crossing. The
long whirling outcries of the shells came into the air above the
men. An occasional solid shot struck the surface of the river, and
dashed into view a sudden vertical jet. The distance was subtly
illuminated by the lightning from the deep-booming guns. One by one
the batteries on the northern shore aroused, the innumerable guns
bellowing in angry oration at the distant ridge. The rolling
thunder crashed and reverberated as a wild surf sounds on a still
night, and to this music the column marched across the
pontoons.
The waters of the grim river curled away in a smile from the ends
of the great boats, and slid swiftly beneath the planking. The
dark, riddled walls of the town upreared before the troops, and
from a region hidden by these hammered and tumbled houses came
incessantly the yells and firings of a prolonged and close
skirmish.
When Dan had called his brother a fool, his voice had been so
decisive, so brightly assured, that many men had laughed,
considering it to be great humour under the circumstances. The
incident happened to rankle deep in Billie. It was not any strange
thing that his brother had called him a fool. In fact, he often
called him a fool with exactly the same amount of cheerful and
prompt conviction, and before large audiences, too. Billie wondered
in his own mind why he took such profound offence in this case;
but, at any rate, as he slid down the bank and on to the bridge
with his regiment, he was searching his knowledge for something
that would pierce Dan's blithesome spirit. But he could contrive
nothing at this time, and his impotency made the glance which he
was once able to give his brother still more malignant.
The guns far and near were roaring a fearful and grand introduction
for this column which was marching upon the stage of death. Billie
felt it, but only in a numb way. His heart was cased in that
curious dissonant metal which covers a man's emotions at such
times. The terrible voices from the hills told him that in this
wide conflict his life was an insignificant fact, and that his
death would be an insignificant fact. They portended the whirlwind
to which he would be as necessary as a butterfly's waved wing. The
solemnity, the sadness of it came near enough to make him wonder
why he was neither solemn nor sad. When his mind vaguely adjusted
events according to their importance to him, it appeared that the
uppermost thing was the fact that upon the eve of battle, and
before many comrades, his brother had called him a fool.
Dan was in a particularly happy mood. "Hurray! Look at 'em shoot,"
he said, when the long witches' croon of the shells came into the
air. It enraged Billie when he felt the little thorn in him, and
saw at the same time that his brother had completely forgotten
it.
The column went from the bridge into more mud. At this southern end
there was a chaos of hoarse directions and commands. Darkness was
coming upon the earth, and regiments were being hurried up the
slippery bank. As Billie floundered in the black mud, amid the
swearing, sliding crowd, he suddenly resolved that, in the absence
of other means of hurting Dan, he would avoid looking at him,
refrain from speaking to him, pay absolutely no heed to his
existence; and this done skilfully would, he imagined, soon reduce
his brother to a poignant sensitiveness.
At the top of the bank the column again halted and rearranged
itself, as a man after a climb rearranges his clothing. Presently
the great steel-backed brigade, an infinitely graceful thing in the
rhythm and ease of its veteran movement, swung up a little narrow,
slanting street.
Evening had come so swiftly that the fighting on the remote borders
of the town was indicated by thin flashes of flame. Some building
was on fire, and its reflection upon the clouds was an oval of
delicate pink.
II
All demeanour of rural serenity had been wrenched violently from
the little town by the guns and by the waves of men which had
surged through it. The hand of war laid upon this village had in an
instant changed it to a thing of remnants. It resembled the place
of a monstrous shaking of the earth itself. The windows, now mere
unsightly holes, made the tumbled and blackened dwellings seem
skeletons. Doors lay splintered to fragments. Chimneys had flung
their bricks everywhere. The artillery fire had not neglected the
rows of gentle shade-trees which had lined the streets. Branches
and heavy trunks cluttered the mud in driftwood tangles, while a
few shattered forms had contrived to remain dejectedly, mournfully
upright. They expressed an innocence, a helplessness, which
perforce created a pity for their happening into this caldron of
battle. Furthermore, there was under foot a vast collection of odd
things reminiscent of the charge, the fight, the retreat. There
were boxes and barrels filled with earth, behind which riflemen had
lain snugly, and in these little trenches were the dead in blue
with the dead in grey, the poses eloquent of the struggles for
possession of the town, until the history of the whole conflict was
written plainly in the streets.
And yet the spirit of this little city, its quaint individuality,
poised in the air above the ruins, defying the guns, the sweeping
volleys; holding in contempt those avaricious blazes which had
attacked many dwellings. The hard earthen sidewalks proclaimed the
games that had been played there during long lazy days, in the
careful, shadows of the trees. "General Merchandise," in faint
letters upon a long board, had to be read with a slanted glance,
for the sign dangled by one end; but the porch of the old store was
a palpable legend of wide-hatted men, smoking.
This subtle essence, this soul of the life that had been, brushed
like invisible wings the thoughts of the men in the swift columns
that came up from the river.
In the darkness a loud and endless humming arose from the great
blue crowds bivouacked in the streets. From time to time a sharp
spatter of firing from far picket lines entered this bass chorus.
The smell from the smouldering ruins floated on the cold night
breeze.
Dan, seated ruefully upon the doorstep of a shot-pierced house, was
proclaiming the campaign badly managed. Orders had been issued
forbidding camp-fires.
Suddenly he ceased his oration, and scanning the group of his
comrades, said: "Where's Billie? Do you know?"
"Gone on picket."
"Get out! Has he?" said Dan. "No business to go on picket. Why
don't some of them other corporals take their turn?"
A bearded private was smoking his pipe of confiscated tobacco,
seated comfortably upon a horse-hair trunk which he had dragged
from the house. He observed: "Was his turn."
"No such thing," cried Dan. He and the man on the horse-hair trunk
held discussion in which Dan stoutly maintained that if his brother
had been sent on picket it was an injustice. He ceased his argument
when another soldier, upon whose arms could faintly be seen the two
stripes of a corporal, entered the circle. "Humph," said Dan,
"where you been?"
The corporal made no answer. Presently Dan said: "Billie, where you
been?"
His brother did not seem to hear these inquiries. He glanced at the
house which towered above them, and remarked casually to the man on
the horse-hair trunk: "Funny, ain't it? After the pelting this town
got, you'd think there wouldn't be one brick left on
another."
"Oh," said Dan, glowering at his brother's back. "Getting mighty
smart, ain't you?"
The absence of camp-fires allowed the evening to make apparent its
quality of faint silver light in which the blue clothes of the
throng became black, and the faces became white expanses, void of
expression. There was considerable excitement a short distance from
the group around the doorstep. A soldier had chanced upon a
hoop-skirt, and arrayed in it he was performing a dance amid the
applause of his companions. Billie and a greater part of the men
immediately poured over there to witness the exhibition.
"What's the matter with Billie?" demanded Dan of the man upon the
horse-hair trunk.
"How do I know?" rejoined the other in mild resentment. He arose
and walked away. When he returned he said briefly, in a
weather-wise tone, that it would rain during the night.
Dan took a seat upon one end of the horse-hair trunk. He was facing
the crowd around the dancer, which in its hilarity swung this way
and that way. At times he imagined that he could recognise his
brother's face.
He and the man on the other end of the trunk thoughtfully talked of
the army's position. To their minds, infantry and artillery were in
a most precarious jumble in the streets of the town; but they did
not grow nervous over it, for they were used to having the army
appear in a precarious jumble to their minds. They had learned to
accept such puzzling situations as a consequence of their position
in the ranks, and were now usually in possession of a simple but
perfectly immovable faith that somebody understood the jumble. Even
if they had been convinced that the army was a headless monster,
they would merely have nodded with the veteran's singular cynicism.
It was none of their business as soldiers. Their duty was to grab
sleep and food when occasion permitted, and cheerfully fight
wherever their feet were planted until more orders came. This was a
task sufficiently absorbing.
They spoke of other corps, and this talk being confidential, their
voices dropped to tones of awe. "The Ninth"—"The First"—"The
Fifth"—"The Sixth"—"The Third"—the simple numerals rang with
eloquence, each having a meaning which was to float through many
years as no intangible arithmetical mist, but as pregnant with
individuality as the names of cities.
Of their own corps they spoke with a deep veneration, an idolatry,
a supreme confidence which apparently would not blanch to see it
match against everything.