on Sunday evening, brought away down
here--" The call piped nearer.

"Victory!" echoed Constance. "I heard it as pl'--"

"Beauregard! Tennessee!" exclaimed both sisters. They flew to the
veranda, the other two following. Down in the gate could be seen the old
coachman, already waiting to buy the paper. Constance called to him
their warm approval. "I thought," murmured Miranda, "that Beauregard was
in Miss'--"

Anna touched her, and the cry came again: "Great victory--!" Yes, yes,
but by whom, and where? Johnston? Corinth? "Great victory at--!" Where?
Where, did he say? The word came again, and now again, but still it was
tauntingly vague. Anna's ear seemed best, yet even she could say only,
"I never heard of such a place--out of the bible. It sounds
like--Shiloh."

Shiloh it was. At a table lamp indoors the Doctor bent over the fresh
print. "It's true," he affirmed. "It's Beauregard's own despatch. 'A
complete victory,' he says. 'Driving the enemy'--" The reader ceased and
stared at the page. "Why, good God!" Slowly he lifted his eyes upon
those three sweet women until theirs ran full. And then he stared once
more into the page: "Oh, good God! Albert Sidney Johnston is dead."




XLIII


THAT SABBATH AT SHILOH

"Whole theatre of action."

The figure had sounded apt to Anna on that Sunday evening when the
Doctor employed it; apt enough--until the outburst of that great and
dreadful news whose inseparable implications and forebodings robbed her
of all sleep that night and made her the first one astir at daybreak.
But thenceforward, and now for half a week or more, the aptness seemed
quite to have passed. Strange was the theatre whose play was all and
only a frightful reality; whose swarming, thundering, smoking stage had
its audience, its New Orleans audience, wholly behind it, and whose
curtain of distance, however thin, mocked every bodily sense and
compelled all to be seen and heard by the soul's eye and ear, with all
the joy and woe of its actuality and all its suspense, terror, triumph,
heartbreak, and despair.

Yet here was that theatre, and the Doctor's metaphor was still good
enough for the unexacting taste of the two Valcour ladies, to whom Anna
had quoted it. And here, sprinkled through the vast audience of that
theatre, with as keen a greed for its play as any, were all the various
non-combatants with whom we are here concerned, though not easily to be
singled out, such mere units were they of the impassioned multitude
every mere unit of which, to loved and loving ones, counted for more
than we can tell.

However, our favourites might be glimpsed now and then. On a certain
midday of that awful half-week the Callenders, driving, took up
Victorine at her gate and Flora at her door and sped up-town to the
newspaper offices in Camp street to rein in against a countless surge of
old men in fine dress, their precious dignity thrown to the dogs, each
now but one of the common herd, and each against all, shouldering,
sweating, and brandishing wide hands to be the first purchaser and
reader of the list, the long, ever-lengthening list of the killed and
wounded. Much had been learned of the great two-days' battle, and many
an infantry sister, and many a battery sister besides Anna, was
second-sighted enough to see, night and day, night and day, the muddy
labyrinth of roads and by-roads that braided and traversed the wide,
unbroken reaches of dense timber--with their deep ravines, their long
ridges, and their creek-bottom marshes and sloughs--in the day's journey
from Corinth to the bluffs of the Tennessee. They saw them, not empty,
nor fearlessly crossed by the quail, the wild turkey, the fox, or the
unhunted deer, nor travelled alone by the homespun "citizen" or by
scouts or foragers, but slowly overflowed by a great gray, silent,
tangled, armed host--cavalry, infantry, ordnance trains, batteries,
battery wagons and ambulances: Saw Hilary Kincaid and all his heroes and
their guns, and all the "big generals" and their smart escorts and busy
staffs: Saw the various columns impeding each other, taking wrong ways
and losing priceless hours while thousands of inexperienced boys,
footsore, drenched and shivering yet keen for the fight, ate their
five-days' food in one, or threw it away to lighten the march, and
toiled on in hunger, mud, cold and rain, without the note of a horn or
drum or the distant eye of one blue scout to tell of their oncoming.

They saw, did Anna and those sisters (and many and many a wife and
mother from Callender House to Carrollton), the vast, stealthy, fireless
bivouac at fall of night, in ear-shot of the enemy's tattoo, unsheltered
from the midnight storm save by raked-up leaves: Saw, just in the
bivouac's tortuous front, softly reddening the low wet sky, that huge,
rude semicircle of camps in the dark ridged and gullied forests about
Shiloh's log meeting-house, where the victorious Grant's
ten-thousands--from Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa,
Wisconsin, Michigan, as new to arms as their foe, yet a band of lions in
lair--lay dry-tented, full fed and fast asleep, safely flanked by
swollen streams, their gunboats behind them and Buell coming, but
without one mounted outpost, a scratch of entrenchment or a whisper of
warning.

Amid the eager carriage talk, in which Anna kept her part, her mind's
eye still saw the farther scene as it changed again and the gray dawn
and gray host furtively rose together and together silently spread
through the deep woods. She watched the day increase and noon soar up
and sink away while the legions of Hardee, Bragg, Polk and Breckinridge
slowly writhed out of their perplexed folds and set themselves, still
undetected in their three successive lines of battle. She beheld the
sun set calm and clear, the two hosts lie down once more, one in its
tents, the other on its arms, the leafy night hang over them resplendent
with stars, its watches near by, the Southern lines reawaken in
recovered strength, spring up and press forward exultantly to the awful
issue, and the Sabbath dawn brighten into a faultless day with the boom
of the opening gun.

As the ladies drew up behind the throng and across the throat of
Commercial Alley the dire List began to flutter from the Picayune office
in greedy palms and over and among dishevelled heads like a feeding
swarm of white pigeons. News there was as well as names, but every eye
devoured the names first and then--unless some name struck lightning in
the heart, as Anna saw it do every here and there and for that poor old
man over yonder--after the names the news.

"Nan, we needn't stay if you--"

"Oh, Miranda, isn't all this ours?"

The bulletin boards were already telling in outline, ahead of the list,
thrilling things about the Orleans Guards, the whirlwind onset of whose
maiden bayonets had captured double its share of the first camp taken
from the amazed, unbreakfasted enemy, and who again and again, hour by
hour, by the half-mile and mile, had splendidly helped to drive
him--while he hammered back with a deadly stubbornness all but a match
for their fury. Through forests, across clearings, over streams and bogs
and into and out of ravines and thickets they had swept, seizing
transiently a whole field battery, permanently hundreds of prisoners,
and covering the strife's broad wake with even more appalling numbers
of their own dead and wounded than of the foe's: wailing wounded,
ghastly, grimy dead, who but yesterday were brothers, cousins and
playmates of these very men snatching and searching the list. They told,
those boards, of the Washington Artillery (fifth company, never before
under fire) being thanked on the field by one of the "big generals,"
their chests and wheels shot half to splinters but no gun lost. They
told of all those Louisiana commands whose indomitable lines charged and
melted, charged and withered, over and over the torn and bloody ground
in that long, horrible struggle that finally smoked out the "Hornets'
Nest." They told of the Crescent Regiment, known and loved on all these
sidewalks and away up to and beyond their Bishop-General Polk's Trinity
Church, whose desperate gallantry had saved that same Washington
Artillery three of its pieces, and to whose thinned and bleeding ranks
swarms of the huddled Western farm boys, as shattered and gory as their
captors and as glorious, had at last laid down their arms. And they told
of Kincaid's Battery, Captain Kincaid commanding; how, having early lost
in the dense oak woods and hickory brush the brigade--Brodnax's--whose
way they had shelled open for a victorious charge, they had followed
their galloping leader, the boys running beside the wheels, from
position to position, from ridge to ridge, in rampant obedience of an
order to "go in wherever they heard the hottest firing", how for a time
they had fought hub to hub beside the Washington Artillery; how two of
their guns, detached for a special hazard and sweeping into fresh action
on a flank of the "Hornets' Nest," had lost every horse at a single
volley of the ambushed foe, yet had instantly replied with slaughterous
vengeance; and how, for an hour thereafter, so wrapped in their own
smoke that they could be pointed only by the wheel-ruts of their recoil,
they had been worked by their depleted gunners on hands and knees with
Kincaid and Villeneuve themselves at the trails and with fuses cut to
one second. So, in scant outline said the boards, or more in detail read
one man aloud to another as they hurried by the carriage.

"But," said Anna, while Flora enjoyed her pallor, "all that is about the
first day's fight!"

"No," cried Constance, "it's the second day's, that Beauregard calls 'a
great and glorious victory!'"

"Yes," interposed Flora, "but writing from behind his fortification' at
Corinth, yes!"




XLIV


"THEY WERE ALL FOUR TOGETHER"

Both Constance and Victorine flashed to retort, but saw the smiling
critic as pale as Anna and recalled the moment's truer business, the
list still darting innumerably around them always out of reach. The
carriage had to push into the very surge, and Victorine to stand up and
call down to this man and that, a fourth and fifth, before one could be
made to hear and asked to buy for the helpless ladies. Yet in this
gentlewomen's war every gentlewoman's wish was a military command, and
when at length one man did hear, to hear was to vanish in the turmoil on
their errand. Now he was back again, with the list, three copies! Oh,
thank you, thank you and thank you!

Away trotted the handsome span while five pairs of beautiful eyes
searched the three printed sheets, that bore--oh, marvellous
fortune!--not one of the four names writ largest in those five hearts.
Let joy be--ah, let joy be very meek while to so many there is
unutterable loss. Yet let it meekly abound for the great loved cause so
splendidly advanced. Miranda pointed Anna to a bit of editorial:

"Monday was a more glorious day than Sunday. We can scarcely forbear to
speculate upon the great results that are to flow from this decisive
victory. An instant pursuit of the flying enemy should--"

Why did the carriage halt at a Gravier Street crossing obliquely
opposite the upper front corner of the St. Charles Hotel? Why did all
the hotel's gold-braided guests and loungers so quietly press out
against its upper balustrades? Why, under its arches, and between
balcony posts along the curbstones clear down to Canal Street, was the
pathetically idle crowd lining up so silently? From that point why, now,
did the faint breeze begin to waft a low roar of drums of such grave
unmartial sort? And why, gradually up the sidewalks' edges in the hot
sun, did every one so solemnly uncover? Small Victorine stood up to see.

At first she made out only that most commonplace spectacle, home guards.
They came marching in platoons, a mere company or two. In the red and
blue of their dress was all the smartness yet of last year, but in their
tread was none of it and even the bristle of their steel had vanished.
Behind majestic brasses and muffled drums grieving out the funeral
march, they stepped with slow precision and with arms reversed. But now
in abrupt contrast there appeared, moving as slowly and precisely after
them, widely apart on either side of the stony way, two single
attenuated files of but four bronzed and shabby gray-jackets each, with
four others in one thin, open rank from file to file in their rear, and
in the midst a hearse and its palled burden. Rise, Anna, Constance,
Miranda--all. Ah, Albert Sidney Johnston! Weep, daughters of a
lion-hearted cause. The eyes of its sons are wet. Yet in your gentle
bosoms keep great joy for whoever of your very own and nearest the awful
carnage has spared; but hither comes, here passes slowly,