VIII: April 3, 1865

VIII

APRIL 3, 1865

I

BUT GRANT DIDN’T TAKE RICHMOND FROM COLD HARBOUR.

His obstinate hammering at Lee’s army had cost him about seven to one for nearly a month’s fighting and now he was stopped in his tracks where McClellan had stood two years before. Like McClellan, he retreated to the James, with the difference that Butler was there with an army waiting to join him. And the siege of Petersburg began.

Slowly the terrible summer wore away. Sometimes there would be a lull when only the videttes and the artillery would keep up an occasional interest. Sometimes there would be a spell of bitter fighting, when Grant tried a jab here or there to make Lee shift his thin lines and concentrate them anew where the pressure seemed heaviest.

One night in the middle of July bonfires burned all along Pickett’s front, and Grant sent out scouts to learn why. They reported that the fires burned in celebration of the birth of a son to Pickett. Grant grunted and fingered his beard thoughtfully. Like Longstreet and Jackson and McClellan and Lee, he, too, belonged to that old brotherhood of the Mexican War, during which Second Lieutenant George Pickett, fresh from West Point, had recklessly planted the stars-and-stripes on the parapet at Chapultepec under heavy fire.

Pickett’s good news spread through the Federal camp, and there were other old friends of his there besides the commander. They had all fought for the same thing once. “Well, let’s strike a light for the young Pickett ourselves,”

said Grant, and soon the bonfire salute ran the length of the Federal lines as well. A few days later a baby’s silver service, engraved to George Pickett, Jr., was sent across the lines by flag of truce, from Pickett’s former comrades in arms to Pickett’s son.

Cabot Murray was now wearing a major’s shoulder straps at Grant’s City Point headquarters, where his ability to get into and out of Richmond undetected was in some demand. But although he entered the town more

than once as the autumn passed, bringing out from Elizabeth Van Lew and others information of Lee’s dwindling resources and their disposition in the fortifications, and although he lingered dangerously more than once, he never saw Eden even from a distance; while at the same time she never left the house any more without the dread of meeting him again.

At the end of October, after a number of small but costly bickerings around the edges of Richmond and Petersburg, Grant and Butler went into winter quarters, their lines extending in a broad crescent from New Market north of the James across it westward to the middle one of the three railroads which ran south from Petersburg.

Dabney and Charlotte were married at Christmas-time, Dabney protesting, Charlotte declared, every step of the way. Dabney’s contention was that whereas when General Ewell, for instance, had lost a leg at Groveton, they had sent to England and got an artificial one right through the blockade, and the General was up and on it as good as new again before Chancellorsville—now it was almost impossible to get artificial legs and Charlotte would therefore have to marry a man on crutches. Charlotte was understood to say with some indignation and many embellishments that she nevertheless preferred Dabney on crutches to General Ewell on his artificial leg, which so tickled Dabney that almost before he knew it the date was set.

Gran and Sue and Myrta could not come to Richmond for the wedding, but they sent Pharaoh with two enormous hampers which by the grace of God escaped the notice of the Yankee outposts along the road and arrived safely, with the compliments of the Williamsburg adjutant, in Franklin Street. Everyone else came, for the lines were drawn close around Richmond now, and even Lee was constantly in and out of the city, where his wife lay ill in their Franklin Street house.

Ransom had many stories to tell of his general—and most of them were difficult to hear without a mist in the eyes. The army’s love for Marse Robert, said Ransom, had become almost a religion, and everything that Lee did in response to it was just right, so that at each encounter the men who worshipped him redoubled their devotion. He told how a backwoods soldier instead of saluting the impressive figure on the big grey horse as he passed, absent-mindedly greeted it with a respectful, “Howdy do, dad,” and the general responded with unblinking courtesy, “Howdy do, my man,” to the suppressed delight of his scandalized Staff riding behind him. Lee’s

heart was wrung, said Ransom, by the privations of his men, who lived in rat-holes on wormy rations, burned green firewood, and tried to clean themselves without soap. Then even the percussion caps ran low, which they complained spoiled the pickets’ fun. When some one sent Lee a turkey as a gift, or a pound of coffee, or a warm knitted garment, or some other small hard-won luxury, he received it with polite thanks and passed it on to his hospitals. After being very low with dysentery at Cold Harbour, he was in good health now and gave little sign of the gnawing anxiety he must have felt as they approached a winter of growing despair. Books he craved, and would always accept the loan of them. A borrowed copy of Hugo’s new masterpiece went the rounds of the whole camp at Petersburg and was read to tatters, being affectionatey known to the literate soldiers who thumbed it as Lee’ s Miserables.

Thousands of the best men had been killed in battle, or disabled, and it was evident to all but the very youngest and stoutest hearts that now the odds were hopeless. The troops were starving in their tracks, the horses were feeble skeletons, the conscription barrel had been scraped bare—no food, no fuel, no transport, no reinforcements—but the grey army held on.

The front lines were so close together in many places that the pickets could chaff each other without lifting their voices, and traded Yankee coffee for Rebel tobacco by waving a white handkerchief. Many an unofficial truce was made, too, for the gathering of the green firewood in thickets exposed to sharp-shooting fire or for the rescue of a wounded comrade. And many a generous warning came at the end of such arrangements—“Watch yourself, Johnny, we’re opening up,” or “Low bridge, Yank, here it comes!” It was not a hating war—not any more. Fighting would be bitter again in the heat of battle. But during the winter lull they were still one people, speaking the same language, with the same religions and the same bedrock beliefs. That, said Ransom, was the worst part of it.

There was dancing at the reception after Charlotte’s wedding on Christmas Eve, in what used to be the drawing room, with the cots of the wounded crowded edge to edge into the dining-room beyond and the double doors left open between so that those who were able could be propped up to see and the rest could hear, and every single one of them had a sip of wine and a crumb of cake. Charlotte hadn’t wanted dancing on account of

Dabney’s leg, but Dabney himself insisted on it, and she was wise enough to realize that the last thing to do was to seem to coddle his feelings.

They were a singularly touching pair, in that city of heartbreak and glory. Dabney stood well over six feet on his crutches, and Charlotte was all of five feet three in her little scuffed shoes, but her tactful care of him was a thing to see. She never hovered nor fussed, but somehow when he was ready to rise from a chair Charlotte was always there to slide the crutch deftly under his arm, doors opened before him by magic, she never dropped things nor needed things done which would require of him the small services he would normally have rendered. Eden was not the only one who noticed that as they left the church together one leaf of the heavy door would have been allowed by the crowd to swing back against him but for Charlotte’s small, quick hand braced against it. And yet, with all that, Charlotte could hardly be said to have grown up, and she still made him laugh.

Charlotte’s brother, Grafton, came to the wedding, of course, and during the ceremony Eden felt his humble eyes upon her—too humble—was that it? But anyhow she softened towards him. At least he never took anything for granted. At least—

They had the first dance together. Everyone was waltzing now in Richmond, it kept up one’s spirits, they said. And so it did, Eden thought, as she circled the room on Grafton’s somewhat rigid arm. He danced as he did everything else, efficiently politely, with an air of distinction and grace. He was breaking his heart over her, she knew, and yet nothing warm and vital and urgent passed from him to her as he held her. What was lacking, she wondered, revolving obediently in silence. Why was it so different from that other waltz in the drawing room at Williamsburg, when a voice said, so near that the breath of the low words stirred her hair, It was time I came to Virginia….

It is time, she told herself severely, that you put all that behind you—

time to forget him and make some sort of life with what is left. Why must it be so hard? Why haven’t I the decency to love one of my own people, so I can hold up my head in this town and be proud of my man, like Charl?

“It could have been us to-night, Eden,” Grafton was saying, below the music, his lips barely moving. “It could have been a double wedding, if only—”

“I know, Grafton, I’m sorry.”

“I’ve got two more days.”

“Oh, Grafton, I—” The words ran down to nothing. Perhaps if she took hold of things now with both hands—perhaps if she simply laid hold of life suddenly and lunged, it would come out all right. Worth trying, maybe—?

“I don’t want to be a nuisance,” Grafton was saying humbly. “But look at them, Eden—don’t you envy them?”

Dabney was sitting in an armchair at the end of the room and Charlotte stood beside him in her wedding dress which had once been the drawing room lace curtains, with her mother’s veil. The guests swirled around them, and Charlotte would not dance, but stood radiant at Dabney’s side, including him in every word she spoke and every laughing glance she gave.

Well, yes, anyone would envy the shining, blatant happiness which lighted Charlotte’s little pointed face, and the graver, almost spellbound look of Dabney, who had suffered an active man’s agony of maiming in body and soul and now found himself shielded and adored and looked up to and married, by God, in spite of it. But that, Eden knew, was different from herself and Grafton. Grafton was second choice. Worse, he knew it. If only he wouldn’t apologize for it, if only he would be a little masterful and sure of himself. Even Dabney, with one leg, bossed Charlotte around like anything. One couldn’t marry a doormat. Or could one, if the doormat were good and kind and faithful, and on the right side—the losing side, maybe, but one’s own?

“I can’t help noticing,” Grafton was saying now with his gentle obstinacy, “that you aren’t wearing his ring any more. I thought—that is, I wondered—”

“I sold it,” and Eden, and—

“Oh,” said Grafton, really astonished, and—

“For money to buy medicines after the Wilderness battles,” she explained patiently.

“Will he—mind?”

“I can’t imagine that he could—even if he is a Yankee!” She owed him that much, anyway.

Grafton was silent, turning it over in his thoughts, and then the music ended and a new dance began, this time with Sedgwick as her partner. It was a relief to get to Sedgwick.

“Do you think it’s ever any good,” she asked him, “to try and make do with second choice?”

He looked down at her in some surprise, and she noticed that even his cousinly arm was less impersonal and wooden than Grafton’s had been, and his style in the dance was more exciting. Her heart cried out that Grafton was a bore and she couldn’t bear him, and her pride insisted that he was very presentable and deserved something of her, more than she could ever give.

“I know what’s the matter with you,” Sedgwick said in his much too penetrating way. “Dabney and Charlotte look so almighty pleased with themselves everybody longs to go and do likewise. Look out, Eden.”

“Then you don’t advise me to try and make something out of—out of—”

“Out of Grafton?” He grinned. “Not much to go on, is there!”

“Oh, Sedgwick, really—!”

“Well, you asked me. You wouldn’t feel the way Charl looks, Eden. Not with Grafton.”

“No,” she agreed meekly, and they finished the dance in silence. At the end of it, before she was claimed by the next man, Sedgwick said briefly,

“Sleep on it first, whatever you do.”

II

That was easy enough to say, Eden thought irritably, tossing and turning in the dawn while Sally slept like the dead beside her. Half a dozen of Sally’s best beaux had been killed, but there were always more where those came from, and Sally was too kind-hearted—or something—to marry any one of them and disappoint the others.

After breakfast on Christmas Day, as Eden went the rounds of the wards on her duties, young black Jock looked in at the door mysteriously and beckoned her out into the hall. When she got there he opened one paw on a small square box wrapped in white paper.

“Lady brang it early dis mawnin’,” he whispered. “Said give it to you when nobody was lookin’.”

“What lady?” Eden asked, as she took it from him and concealed it in her own hand.

“White lady, in farmin’ clothes—like from de market, mebbe. Come to de kitchen door she did.”

Eden guessed at once—Elizabeth Van Lew, disguised in homespun and a sun bonnet to hide her face, delivering Cabot’s Christmas present for him.

Almost she guessed what it would be. But not quite. She was not quite prepared, when she opened the box behind the locked door of the bedroom she had to share with Sally new, to find that he had got her the same ring back again, or another just like it.

She hid it from Sally underneath the pile of ruffled petticoats at the back of her bureau drawer and went downstairs again feeling badly shaken. You didn’t have to try and make anything of Cabot. He was already there, the complete lover, and a bit more.

She was angry, and amused, and shaken. She couldn’t wear his ring, she had sold it. She didn’t intend to wear his ring, because she was not going to marry him. He dared her to sell it again, dared her not to marry him. It was unforgivable of him, reckless, risky, and presuming. But she loved it, and she wanted to laugh. Not at Cabot, exactly—but at the impudence of such a gesture from him in the face of what she had said to him. And she was shaken. Yankee he might be, and spy he might be, but coward, no, nor suppliant. And there went Grafton’s chances once more, blasted once more, and maybe just in time.

It was a fantastically gay winter in the overcrowded, dilapidated, doomed city of Richmond. With the defending lines so close, all the young officers who had been famished so long for feminine society and music and diversion could get a taste of them again, and thought nothing of doing a dozen miles on horseback through slush and snow to a dance and back again to their posts before dawn. Often they went direct from the ballroom or the bridal bed to some small front-line affair which brought their death.

Besides the perpetual weddings, almost every night there were amateur theatricals, charades, and contribution parties, where everybody was supposed to bring a bit towards the refreshments and there was never enough of anything to go around. The women wore turned and mended and threadbare finery among the mourning dresses, and there were maimed and invalid men among the dancers, but all wore the grey.

Not a day passed without its dribble of casualties from the trenches to the east of the city or the fortifications to the south, and though the

condition of the roads prevented any general engagement there was hardly a night that the tramp of feet in the cold streets was not heard as weary, ragged, shivering reinforcements raced from one threatened spot to another, almost as though Grant hoped to wear them out with marching. “You would think he always knew exactly what places we have weakened in order to strengthen others as fast as we make the shift,” Ransom cried in discouragement. “He must have a nearly perfect spy system right inside the city!” And Eden, hearing, felt hot with shame as though she herself, instead of Elizabeth Van Lew and others like her, had betrayed the tired grey men to Cabot Murray and his kind.

It was a bitterly cold winter too, so that Eden, as she broke the ice in the pitcher on her washstand in the mornings, tried to remember how it was in the old days at home when she and Sue woke to a blazing fire on the hearth and Mammy poured steaming water from a bright copper kettle into the washbowls before the two girls even left the warm bed. Coal was ninety-five dollars a ton in Richmond, and wood went up to one hundred and thirty-five dollars a cord, but the fires were kept burning in the wards all night at the Crabb house, and even then the water froze in the pitchers on the other side of the room.

But spring came early, in 1865, while the news got worse and worse.

Sherman’s army had left Atlanta in smoking ruins and marched south and east to the tune of John Brown’s Body, committing theft and plunder and devastation, sometimes outrage and murder, all in the name of foraging—

leaving in their wake a greater horror than anything Virginia had suffered so far as a battlefield. They came to Savannah and paused there to rest and refit before swinging northward again to teach the Carolinas that war was hell. Charleston was evacuated before them, and they burned defenceless Columbia to cinders amid terrible scenes. The back door to Richmond was forced, and Lee’s supply lines could now be cut in all directions. It was supposed that he would have to evacuate Richmond. But where would he go?

At the very end of March Grafton Crabb was sent home with a wounded hand after an action on the east. He had not wanted to leave the line, but what had seemed a trifling injury got worse instead of better till blood poisoning threatened. Louise and Charlotte fussed over his dressings and

persuaded him to keep quiet, but he was a bad patient and was inclined to follow Eden dolefully about the place till she almost went out of her mind.

It was a relief to her when he was well enough to go to church with Dabney and Charlotte on Sunday the second of April. The tocsin had been ringing off and on since dawn, mingling horridly with the church bells as the morning went by, and the guns were livelier than usual below the town.

There were rumours of bloody fighting near Petersburg. Eden was on duty in the wards when the church party returned early, all looking rather white.

President Davis had been handed a message which caused him to rise hastily and leave the church, and a few minutes later Dr. Hoge had stopped the service midway to announce that Richmond was to be evacuated that night. He advised the congregation to go home at once and make their preparations. “For what?” Eden asked grimly, and Charlotte said, “For not evacuating,” and went away to take off her bonnet and hoop and help serve the patients’ dinner.

During the early afternoon the streets were full of a growing confusion.

Wagons were driven hurriedly toward the Capitol to be loaded with archives and sent on to the Danville railway station. People started packing again, and the demand for carriages began to be clamorous. It was like the early days of the war, when the fighting at Seven Pines and Mechanicsville had sent the timid ones scurrying southward. Richmond had become inured to alarms since then. But still a sort of panic was beginning.

Dabney and Grafton went out into the streets together, one on crutches and one with his left hand bandaged and in a sling, to see and hear what was going on. They were gone so long that anxiety rose at home. When they returned they could not conceal their knowledge that things were just about as bad as possible. Petersburg had been given up and Lee was retreating westward along the Appomattox. His message to President Davis had advised the Government to move that night, and the Government seemed to be going to pieces. Some one had ordered all the liquor stores to be destroyed, and gallons of spirits were being emptied into the gutters with the inevitable results. The same shortsighted policy had ordered the commissary stores thrown open to the public and a mob was becoming unmanageable there.

“I wish we could get Mother out of Richmond,” Grafton said hopelessly, but Charlotte objected.

“She’s not able to travel. She senses something in the air, and her heart is much worse today. What about Mrs. Lee?”

“The same. Bedridden, I think.”

“But surely we needn’t be afraid—” Eden began and stopped uncomfortably, remembering the dreadful stories about what had happened to civilians in Columbia and Atlanta and Savannah. She looked at Grafton.

“Oughtn’t you to get away before the Yankees come in?” she asked gently.

“That’s what I’ve been telling him,” Dabney said. “They won’t bother to take me prisoner with this leg, but Grafton ought to leave while he can.”

“They won’t be here before tomorrow,” Grafton reminded them indifferently. He didn’t seem to care much whether he was taken prisoner or not.

Black Jock ran in from the rear of the house, looking scared.

“Marse Grafton—Unc’ Daniel says kin he have de loan of a gun, please, suh.”

“A gun? Certainly not. What for?”

“Says he got to proteck de carriages an’ hosses, suh. Says somebody sure gwine take ’em by force effn we don’ hire ’em out willin’.”

Grafton looked at Eden doggedly.

“I hate to have you stay here. Are you sure you hadn’t better—”

“Of course I’m sure. We can’t all go and leave our patients, and I certainly won’t leave Charlotte and Aunt Louise and Sally. What is that strange noise? Listen.”

“That’s the mob at the commissary. They’re beginning to get drunk and fight over loot. The whole town is going to be hell by nightfall, Eden!”

“Well, give Uncle Daniel a gun, then!” she cried recklessly. “Lock the stables and put him on guard. We’ll want the horses some day if not now!”

“If there is anything you value,” Dabney was saying quietly to Charlotte,

“your mother’s jewellery, whatever silver is left—we’d better be thinking of a place to hide it.”

“Oh, Dabney, you don’t think the Yankees would dare—”

“We won’t have to wait for the Yankees, Charl. There’s going to be mob rule in Richmond to-night. Get your treasures together and Grafton will help me bury them in the cellar before he goes.”

Eden had nothing to save but the ring. As soon as she could slip away she went up to the bedroom and locked the door, snatched the ring from its

box at the back of the bureau drawer and threaded it on a ribbon which she tied around her neck with the ring hanging down inside her bodice. She had barely finished when the handle of the door turned and Sally’s voice said impatiently, “Eden? Are you in there? Why is the door locked? What are you doing? Do you think I ought to burn my letters?” When Eden opened the door Sally grabbed her arm with a cold, shaking hand. “Eden, do you think the servants will—?”

“Our servants? Of course not! Dabney says the darkies in the streets are just standing around in a daze anyway—they don’t know what any of it means.”

“But if they start drinking—Eden, I’m terrified, what shall we do? There goes that awful bell again! Will they bombard us before they come in?”

“Why should they, when we’re evacuating? What’s the matter with you, Sally, the Yankees are human beings just like us! They’ll come in the same way they did at Williamsburg, there’s nothing to be afraid of!”

“Look what they did at Columbia!”

“That was Sherman.”

“Well, this is Grant! What’s the difference? Eden, you can hear the mob now with all the doors and windows shut, it’s getting louder all the time. I’d rather it was the Yankees than that mob!”

“Now, stop it, Sally, you’re just working yourself up! We’ll be perfectly safe here, this is a hospital. Anyway, the men have to be fed their supper.

Come and help me with the trays.”

By the time darkness fell there was pandemonium in the business district around the stores and banks, and looting was spreading. The local companies called up by the tocsin melted away again as fast as they came.

Several small fires got started and were more or less extinguished.

Everyone stayed inside behind locked doors if they cared about their own property, for anything left unguarded was subject to plunder. The excitement had penetrated Mrs. Crabb’s bedroom at the top of the house, and she was much worse, and Grafton spent the evening at her bedside.

About ten he came into the parlour where the others sat trying to read and talk and knit, trying not to listen to what was going on outside.

“I’m going for the doctor,” he said. “Come and lock the door behind me and don’t open it till I knock three times and then three times again.”

When he returned, Charlotte and Louise were sitting with Mrs. Crabb.

Eden recognized his signal and let him in and they locked the door again.

Everything had got much worse in the streets, and the doctor said there was a rumour that the warehouses and bridges were to be blown up when the retreating army had been safely withdrawn. President Davis had fled southward to join his wife, instead of towards Appomattox and Lee.

Everywhere the grim, weary men in grey were snatching a few minutes to say goodbye to their families and hurrying away to join the retreat. The doctor wanted Grafton to leave at once, but Grafton went upstairs with him and stayed till dawn, when Mrs. Crabb died.

No one had gone to bed in the house that night. Sally and Dabney and Eden were still sitting in the parlour when Grafton came in. They could tell by his face what had happened.

“I can go now,” he said, and his voice was quite steady. “May I…please speak to Eden alone?”

As the others left the room Eden went to him and led him gently to Dabney’s chair, by the centre-table under the lamp. Before she could find words for his comfort he had collapsed across the table, his face hidden in his good arm, his thin body racked by long, dry sobs.

Eden was horrified. She had never seen a man cry before, and Grafton of all men, who never had any visible emotion whatever. She hung above him, her arms around his shoulders, saying soft, incoherent, soothing things as to a heartbroken child, until as suddenly as he had begun he was quiet again.

Slowly he dragged himself up so that his head rested on his hand, staring down at the table-cover under his elbow. The room was grey with dawn.

“I’m sorry, I—don’t know what came over me,” he said into the silence.

“Or rather, I do know, quite well. It’s not because of Mother—that was for the best. It’s not being crippled and useless. It’s because there is nothing left to do, Eden. We’re beaten.”

“Yes, I suppose we are,” she whispered. And as she stood there holding him, seeing in the cold dawn which had overspread the lamplight the powder and blood-stains on his shabby grey coat, the careful mending where a big jagged hole had been, the drag of the white sling across his sagging shoulders—as she stood there, he was suddenly all the grey-clad men everywhere that morning, he was the Confederacy, he was her people, at the end of the long road. A sickening wave of feeling surged through her,

which was part pity for him and part her own searing sense of defeat and despair, part a lifetime of associations, common memories, and familiar scenes in both their lives, and part sheer hysteria in the dawn.

“We’ve lost,” he was saying, motionless under her hands. “We haven’t lost just the war, we’ve lost everything—our best men, our homes, our way of living—our world. There’s nothing left. We’re beaten. We’re finished.

It’s over. We’re beaten—beaten— beaten!”

“But some of us are still alive,” she said very quietly, it seemed to her very sanely. “Some of us are still young. And we have to find something to do with our lives, don’t we—what’s left of them.”

He turned his head a little, catching at one word she had said.

“We?” he repeated breathlessly.

“Yes, Grafton.”

“Eden—you d-don’t mean—”

“Yes, Grafton.”

He caught at her silently with his one good hand, and she held his head against her breast as she stood beside his chair—and remembered, like a shooting pain, how once she had stood beside Cabot’s chair in Libby Prison….

“But I don’t understand,” Grafton said after a moment. “The war is over.

You could—marry him now. You could get out of this—forget it—be happy somewhere.” He raised his face to her, still unbelieving. “You mean you’re going to marry me—after all? Are you sure?”

“Yes, Grafton.”

“I should have thought—well, I should have expected it to be the other way around,” he persisted, begging reassurance, and she laid her hands either side of his haggard face, looking down.

“Poor Grafton—how very little you know about women, my dear.”

As she spoke, a terrific explosion shook the house, followed by a moment’s intense silence, which was broken by yells and shouts and running feet and the spatter of horses’ hooves and soon the wild peal of the tocsin again.

Sally flung open the door of the parlour and ran in.

“Eden, they are bombarding us! Oh, won’t this night ever end! Grafton, you must go, do you want the Yankees to catch you and put you in prison?”

Grafton rose almost briskly and pulled himself to his full height, smoothing his rusty grey tunic under the sling, running a quick, anxious hand over his hair, with a new air of dignity and purpose as he smiled down at Eden.

“I certainly don’t intend to be caught,” he said. “I’m going back to the line and stay there—as long as there is a line. That’s not gunfire you hear, Sally, we’re blowing up the bridges and the gunboats behind us. Goodbye, my dearest—” Eden gave him his kiss, unembarrassed, while Sally stared tactlessly from the threshold. “And whatever happens now,” he whispered, his face against hers, “I’ve won!”

III

When Cabot said to Eden that he would be one of the first Federal officers to enter Richmond he was not guessing. His intimate knowledge of the city and the elements of co-operation inside it made certain that he would be attached to the occupation force when the time came. At the end of March Grant had withdrawn most of the troops which lay north of the James facing the elaborate defences to the south-east of the city and thrown them into the attack on Lee along the Appomattox. General Weitzel was left in command of the skeletonized Army of the James, and Cabot was with him.

They knew at Federal headquarters that the entrenchments ahead of them were two lines deep, well-gunned, and planted with torpedoes—

manned largely by the local defence troops and convalescent regulars from Richmond. The front lines were so close together that the videttes of either side were within speaking distance of each other, and all day on that Sunday the Federal lookouts posted in the tree-tops kept the grey men under observation, waiting for the first sign of withdrawal. The sun went down in a bank of cloud, and as darkness fell a strange bluish mist settled over the ground.

With the troops held under arms all night, massed in bivouac in column behind the sallies on the New Market road, Cabot did not expect to sleep.

The army was ready for the final assault on Richmond. If the entrenched defenders, most of them green or partly incapacitated, put up a fight it might come to a battle through the streets as they fell back—a possibility

which left him sick with anxiety. More than once he went out alone into the still, starless night, so full of tension and uncertainty, and heard the low-voiced videttes reporting to their relief before catfooting back to their reserve posts. Once he flung himself down with his ear against the earth—

there seemed to be nothing, and yet he was sure there ought to be, not sure that he couldn’t hear faint rumblings, subterranean and obscure, while the foreground remained completely quiet.

With the first gleam of dawn he was out again, straining his eyes towards where Richmond was—and then, while he looked, a column of flame flared upward above the city on the distant boom of some mighty explosion.

Instantly his immediate surroundings came to life—questions, exclamations, speculation—General Weitzel shot out of his quarters in shirt and trousers with his field glasses in his hand—they clustered round him while he peered tensely at a lowering sky tinged with red.

“Blowing up the bridges, maybe—sounded like ammunition to me—

might be the arsenal, then—might be the gunboats too—”

Weitzel remarked briefly that the enemy lines in front of them were oddly quiet.

Slowly the grey light grew. The picket line was deployed as skirmishers and pushed forward cautiously towards the reddish clay banks they had confronted so long. Word soon came back from them—the Confederate front line had been withdrawn during the misty night. The order for general assault went out.

Cabot drank a cup of black coffee, standing. His eyes were on the black smoke stabbed with fire which was rolling high into a pall above Richmond as more explosions shook the dawn. His stomach was hollow and treacherous. his heart action was a disgrace to any veteran of four years’

war. But this was Eden. It seemed to him that the whole Federal Army was moving in on Eden who waited, defenceless and incalculably dear to him, directly in its path. And Richmond—Richmond was already afire.

At last, when it was still barely light, he was allowed the relief of action.

The headquarters cavalry was going in under a staff major to reconnoitre and Weitzel sent him with it. At last he felt the saddle under him, and was on his way to Eden. They overtook and passed jubilant columns of infantry at the double-quick, and wildly driven artillery, racing to be the first to enter

the captive city. At the steamboat landing just below Richmond the Rebel ironclads lay sullenly, apparently deserted. As the cavalry came abreast of the lowest one it blew up with a terrible concussion, bits of it sailing over their heads into the fields beyond. No one was hit, and they rode on into streets thick with smoke and cinders and loud with the explosion of magazines where cartridges rattled like musketry fire above the steady, awful roar of unchecked flames and the crash of falling walls.

The arsenal had gone up, and the waterfront was blazing and the fire was spreading into the business and residential districts. The commissary stores in Cary Street had caught, driving back the drunken, brawling mob which had held carnival there all night. A little group of mounted grey-clad men waited on Mayo’s Bridge at the foot of Fourteenth Street till the last of their own ambulances and cavalry rearguard had reached the Manchester side, which had already begun to catch fire too. Then in the face of the Federal cavalry galloping up Main Street they applied the torch to barrels of tar and pine knots soaked in kerosene stacked at the bridgehead and retired, leaving the north end of the bridge enveloped in flames and smoke which covered their retreat.

Richmond had been set ablaze by the reckless, crazy hands of its desperate defenders. The Federal cavalry detachment rode to the western edge of the fire, which was then about Tenth and Cary Streets and still several blocks short, to Cabot’s relief, of the end of Franklin Street opposite Capitol Square. The demoralized population was doing nothing to stop its progress. As the Federal horsemen circled back through the shuttered residential district where everyone remained behind closed doors, Weitzel and his Staff were riding in past the wrecked gunboats at the landing. Not far behind them came the first infantry column, in dress formation with three bands playing Union airs.

The headquarters cavalry swept in through the gates of the Square and took possession of the Capitol building. The park was already full of people who had fled there during the night to escape the fire, and who were still strewn about the lawn in despair and exhaustion. When Weitzel’s impressive arrival took place the open space inside the iron railings was further crowded by the horses and attendants of the Staff and corps commanders who accompanied him, and everyone was choking and gasping with streaming eyes in the smoky, cinder-filled air, which was

stirred by a light southerly breeze carrying the fire towards them from the river front.

Weitzel lost no time in turning his victorious troops into firefighting squads to pass water from all available sources and blow up buildings in the path of the fire, and make every possible effort to save the rest of the city—

so that the crash of dynamited walls was soon added to the din. Having satisfied himself on the way in that the house which sheltered Eden was still intact, though uncomfortably near the creeping edge of the fire, Cabot devoted himself to firefighting. All around the fringe of the main fire little fires caught from flying cinders and sparks, and detachments were constantly answering calls from frantic house-owners whose roofs or porches had developed menacing tongues of flame.

Towards noon, when it had begun to look as though nothing could control the conflagration and the whole city might be left in ashes, Cabot on a sweating, singed horse, himself black with smoke and dirt, was sent with his now veteran crew to the roaring block where the War Office blazed, imperilling the Spotswood Hotel and General Lee’s house, just beyond which the Crabb mansion stood. A guard had been posted outside General Lee’s, and an ambulance was waiting at the curb to remove Mrs. Lee if it should become necessary.

They had laid a dynamite charge and Cabot was clearing his men from the area when a small, desperate figure in a white apron and cap raced out into the street and caught at his knee. His horse, its nerves being pretty well shattered by now, shied violently and he had a horrid moment when he thought it had knocked her down.

“Get away from here, girl, we’re blowing up this wall!” he shouted, trying to get the animal’s forefeet on the ground again.

“Oh, please, please come and help!” she was crying. “Our stables are on fire and we can’t get the horses out! Please help us to save the horses, there’s only old Daniel and he—”

He controlled his horse, collected two dismounted troopers who were black in the face as niggers, and followed her down Franklin Street. She led him through the garden of the Crabb house and there in the stableyard a group of women were trying to throw buckets of water on the smouldering corner of the kitchen. Beyond them, the roof of the stable crackled with fire

and a man on crutches stood staring at it while a coloured boy hovered uncertainly around the red hot doorway as though about to try a dash inside.

“Boy! Come away from that barn!” Cabot yelled, and—

“Dabney, I’ve got some soldiers to help!” cried Charlotte, and just then the dynamite charge went off at the War Office with a fresh shower of fiery cinders and flying flame.

Eden ran towards the grimy men in blue and caught the arm of the foremost.

“Oh, please be quick—our coachman went in for the horses—he’s too old—you’ve got to get him out—!” Then she recognized Cabot.

“Well, I said I’d be here, didn’t I!” His teeth gleamed white in his dirty face. “We’ll get him out, give me your apron.” He seized it from her. “I want another one—you, there, give this man your apron!” Charlotte handed hers to one of the troopers, who followed Cabot’s example of sousing it in the half bucket of water Mammy held, and with the aprons wrapped around their faces they ran into the open stable door.

It was only a minute, or perhaps two, that she had to wait, till he came in sight again lugging old Daniel like a sack of potatoes under one arm, with the trooper just behind him grasping the halter of a plunging horse in each hand. But to Eden all eternity passed while she stood paralysed watching the molten maw of the stable. Cabot freed himself of the steaming apron and tossed it at the second trooper who had gone to meet him.

“Look alive, son, there are two more horses in there!” he shouted, and the trooper dived in at the stable door and brought them out, all in the day’s work, while Cabot stood old Daniel on his feet and made sure he was all right before Mammy led him away to restoratives. Then Cabot turned to look for Eden, and beside her stood Dabney in his worn grey uniform with a crutch under his arm. The eyes of the two men met gravely. Then Cabot said, “Well, Dabney—I’m sorry—I guess it’s about over. I wish there was anything to say—”

Dabney held out his right hand.

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