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THE LITTLE REGIMENT
AND OTHER EPISODES OF THE
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
By
STEPHEN CRANE
CONTENTS
THE LITTLE REGIMENT
THREE MIRACULOUS SOLDIERS
A MYSTERY OF HEROISM
AN INDIANA CAMPAIGN
A GREY SLEEVE
THE VETERAN
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.
It was as if their respect for other corps was due partly to a wonder
that organisations not blessed with their own famous numeral could take
such an interest in war. They could prove that their division was the
best in the corps, and that their brigade was the best in the division.
And their regiment--it was plain that no fortune of life was equal to
the chance which caused a man to be born, so to speak, into this
command, the keystone of the defending arch.
At times Dan covered with insults the character of a vague, unnamed
general to whose petulance and busy-body spirit he ascribed the order
which made hot coffee impossible.
Dan said that victory was certain in the coming battle. The other man
seemed rather dubious. He remarked upon the fortified line of hills,
which had impressed him even from the other side of the river. "Shucks,"
said Dan. "Why, we----" He pictured a splendid overflowing of these
hills by the sea of men in blue. During the period of this conversation
Dan's glance searched the merry throng about the dancer. Above the
babble of voices in the street a far-away thunder could sometimes be
heard--evidently from the very edge of the horizon--the boom-boom of
restless guns.
III
Ultimately the night deepened to the tone of black velvet. The outlines
of the fireless camp were like the faint drawings upon ancient tapestry.
The glint of a rifle, the, shine of a button, might have been of threads
of silver and gold sewn upon the fabric of the night. There was little
presented to the vision, but to a sense more subtle there was
discernible in the atmosphere something like a pulse; a mystic beating
which would have told a stranger of the presence of a giant thing--the
slumbering mass of regiments and batteries.
With tires forbidden, the floor of a dry old kitchen was thought to be
a good exchange for the cold earth of December, even if a shell had
exploded in it, and knocked it so out of shape that when a man lay
curled in his blanket his last waking thought was likely to be of the
wall that bellied out above him, as if strongly anxious to topple upon
the score of soldiers.
Billie looked at the bricks ever about to descend in a shower upon his
face, listened to the industrious pickets plying their rifles on the
border of the town, imagined some measure of the din of the coming
battle, thought of Dan and Dan's chagrin, and rolling over in his
blanket went to sleep with satisfaction.
At an unknown hour he was aroused by the creaking of boards. Lifting
himself upon his elbow, he saw a sergeant prowling among the sleeping
forms. The sergeant carried a candle in an old brass candlestick. He
would have resembled some old farmer on an unusual midnight tour if it
were not for the significance of his gleaming buttons and striped sleeves.
Billie blinked stupidly at the light until his mind returned from the
journeys of slumber. The sergeant stooped among the unconscious
soldiers, holding the candle close, and peering into each face.
"Hello, Haines," said Billie. "Relief?"
"Hello, Billie," said the sergeant. "Special duty."
"Dan got to go?"
"Jameson, Hunter, McCormack, D. Dempster. Yes. Where is he?"
"Over there by the winder," said Billie, gesturing. "What is it for,
Haines?"
"You don't think I know, do you?" demanded the sergeant. He began to
pipe sharply but cheerily at men upon the floor. "Come, Mac, get up
here. Here's a special for you. Wake up, Jameson. Come along, Dannie, me
boy."
Each man at once took this call to duty as a personal affront. They
pulled themselves out of their blankets, rubbed their eyes, and swore at
whoever was responsible. "Them's orders," cried the sergeant. "Come! Get
out of here." An undetailed head with dishevelled hair thrust out from a
blanket, and a sleepy voice said: "Shut up, Haines, and go home."
When the detail clanked out of the kitchen, all but one of the
remaining men seemed to be again asleep. Billie, leaning on his elbow,
was gazing into darkness. When the footsteps died to silence, he curled
himself into his blanket.
At the first cool lavender lights of daybreak he aroused again, and
scanned his recumbent companions. Seeing a wakeful one he asked: "Is Dan
back yet?"
The man said: "Hain't seen 'im."
Billie put both hands behind his head, and scowled into the air. "Can't
see the use of these cussed details in the night-time," he muttered in
his most unreasonable tones. "Darn nuisances. Why can't they----" He
grumbled at length and graphically.
When Dan entered with the squad, however, Billie was convincingly asleep.
IV
The regiment trotted in double time along the street, and the colonel
seemed to quarrel over the right of way with many artillery officers.
Batteries were waiting in the mud, and the men of them, exasperated by
the bustle of this ambitious infantry, shook their fists from saddle and
caisson, exchanging all manner of taunts and jests. The slanted guns
continued to look reflectively at the ground.
On the outskirts of the crumbled town a fringe of blue figures were
firing into the fog. The regiment swung out into skirmish lines, and the
fringe of blue figures departed, turning their backs and going joyfully
around the flank.
The bullets began a low moan off toward a ridge which loomed faintly in
the heavy mist. When the swift crescendo had reached its climax, the
missiles zipped just overhead, as if piercing an invisible curtain. A
battery on the hill was crashing with such tumult that it was as if the
guns had quarrelled and had fallen pell-mell and snarling upon each
other. The shells howled on their journey toward the town. From short-
range distance there came a spatter of musketry, sweeping along an
invisible line, and making faint sheets of orange light.
Some in the new skirmish lines were beginning to fire at various
shadows discerned in the vapour, forms of men suddenly revealed by some
humour of the laggard masses of clouds. The crackle of musketry began to
dominate the purring of the hostile bullets. Dan, in the front rank,
held his rifle poised, and looked into the fog keenly, coldly, with the
air of a sportsman. His nerves were so steady that it was as if they had
been drawn from his body, leaving him merely a muscular machine; but his
numb heart was somehow beating to the pealing march of the fight.
The waving skirmish line went backward and forward, ran this way and
that way. Men got lost in the fog, and men were found again. Once they
got too close to the formidable ridge, and the thing burst out as if
repulsing a general attack. Once another blue regiment was apprehended
on the very edge of firing into them. Once a friendly battery began an
elaborate and scientific process of extermination. Always as busy as
brokers, the men slid here and there over the plain, fighting their
foes, escaping from their friends, leaving a history of many movements
in the wet yellow turf, cursing the atmosphere, blazing away every time
they could identify the enemy.
In one mystic changing of the fog as if the fingers of spirits were
drawing aside these draperies, a small group of the grey skirmishers,
silent, statuesque, were suddenly disclosed to Dan and those about him.
So vivid and near were they that there was something uncanny in the
revelation.
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