第11章 The Burial of the Guns(3)

At Winchester a sudden and impetuous charge for a while swept everything before it, and carried the knoll where the old battery was posted;but all the guns were got out by the toiling and rapidly dropping men, except the Cat, which was captured with its entire detachment working at it until they were surrounded and knocked from the piece by cavalrymen.

Most of the men who were not killed were retaken before the day was over, with many guns; but the Cat was lost.She remained in the enemy's hands and probably was being turned against her old comrades and lovers.

The company was inconsolable.The death of comrades was too natural and common a thing to depress the men beyond what such occurrences necessarily did; but to lose a gun! It was like losing the old Colonel;it was worse: a gun was ranked as a brigadier; and the Cat was equal to a major-general.The other guns seemed lost without her;the Eagle especially, which generally went next to her, appeared to the men to have a lonely and subdued air.The battery was no longer the same:

it seemed broken and depleted, shrunken to a mere section.

It was worse than Cold Harbor, where over half the men were killed or wounded.

The old Captain, now Colonel of the battalion, appreciated the loss and apprehended its effect on the men as much as they themselves did, and application was made for a gun to take the place of the lost piece;but there was none to be had, as the men said they had known all along.

It was added -- perhaps by a department clerk -- that if they wanted a gun to take the place of the one they had lost, they had better capture it.

"By ----, we will," they said -- adding epithets, intended for the department clerk in his "bomb-proof", not to be printed in this record --and they did.For some time afterwards in every engagement into which they got there used to be speculation among them as to whether the Cat were not there on the other side; some of the men swearing they could tell her report, and even going to the rash length of offering bets on her presence.

By one of those curious coincidences, as strange as anything in fiction, a new general had, in 1864, come down across the Rapidan to take Richmond, and the old battery had found a hill-top in the line in which Lee's army lay stretched across "the Wilderness" country to stop him.The day, though early in May, was a hot one, and the old battery, like most others, had suffered fearfully.Two of the guns had had wheels cut down by shells and the men had been badly cut up; but the fortune of the day had been with Lee, and a little before nightfall, after a terrible fight, there was a rapid advance, Lee's infantry sweeping everything before it, and the artillery, after opening the way for the charge, pushing along with it; now unlimbering as some vantage-ground was gained, and using canister with deadly effect; now driving ahead again so rapidly that it was mixed up with the muskets when the long line of breastworks was carried with a rush, and a line of guns were caught still hot from their rapid work.As the old battery, with lathered horses and smoke-grimed men, swung up the crest and unlimbered on the captured breastwork, a cheer went up which was heard even above the long general yell of the advancing line, and for a moment half the men in the battery crowded together around some object on the edge of the redoubt, yelling like madmen.The next instant they divided, and there was the Cat, smoke-grimed and blood-stained and still sweating hot from her last fire, being dragged from her muddy ditch by as many men as could get hold of trail-rope or wheel, and rushed into her old place beside the Eagle, in time to be double-shotted with canister to the muzzle, and to pour it from among her old comrades into her now retiring former masters.Still, she had a new carriage, and her record was lost, while those of the other guns had been faithfully kept by the men.This made a difference in her position for which even the bullets in her wheels did not wholly atone; even Harris, the sergeant of her detachment, felt that.

It was only a few days later, however, that abundant atonement was made.

The new general did not retire across the Rapidan after his first defeat, and a new battle had to be fought: a battle, if anything, more furious, more terrible than the first, when the dead filled the trenches and covered the fields.He simply marched by the left flank, and Lee marching by the right flank to head him, flung himself upon him again at Spottsylvania Court-House.That day the Cat, standing in her place behind the new and temporary breastwork thrown up when the battery was posted, had the felloes of her wheels, which showed above the top of the bank, entirely cut away by Minie-bullets, so that when she jumped in the recoil her wheels smashed and let her down.This covered all old scores.

The other guns had been cut down by shells or solid shot;but never before had one been gnawed down by musket-balls.

From this time all through the campaign the Cat held her own beside her brazen and bloody sisters, and in the cold trenches before Petersburg that winter, when the new general -- Starvation -- had joined the one already there, she made her bloody mark as often as any gun on the long lines.

Thus the old battery had come to be known, as its old commander, now colonel of a battalion, had come to be known by those in yet higher command.