One Kind of Officer
I
OF THE USES OF CIVILITY
“Captain Ransome, it is not permitted to you to
know anything. It is sufficient that you obey my order—which
permit me to repeat. If you perceive any movement of troops in your
front you are to open fire, and if attacked hold this position as
long as you can. Do I make myself understood, sir?”
“Nothing could be plainer. Lieutenant Price,”—this
to an officer of his own battery, who had ridden up in time to hear
the order—“the general’s meaning is clear, is it not?”
“Perfectly.”
The lieutenant passed on to his post. For a moment
General Cameron and the commander of the battery sat in their
saddles, looking at each other in silence. There was no more to
say; apparently too much had already been said. Then the superior
officer nodded coldly and turned his horse to ride away. The
artillerist saluted slowly, gravely, and with extreme formality.
One acquainted with the niceties of military etiquette would have
said that by his manner he attested a sense of the rebuke that he
had incurred. It is one of the important uses of civility to
signify resentment.
When the general had joined his staff and escort,
awaiting him at a little distance, the whole cavalcade moved off
toward the right of the guns and vanished in the fog. Captain
Ransome was alone, silent, motionless as an equestrian statue. The
gray fog, thickening every moment, closed in about him like a
visible doom.
II
UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES MEN DO NOT WISH TO BE SHOT
The fighting of the day before had been desultory
and indecisive. At the points of collision the smoke of battle had
hung in blue sheets among the branches of the trees till beaten
into nothing by the falling rain. In the softened earth the wheels
of cannon and ammunition wagons cut deep, ragged furrows, and
movements of infantry seemed impeded by the mud that clung to the
soldiers’ feet as, with soaken garments and rifles imperfectly
protected by capes of overcoats they went dragging in sinuous lines
hither and thither through dripping forest and flooded field.
Mounted officers, their heads protruding from rubber ponchos that
glittered like black armor, picked their way, singly and in loose
groups, among the men, coming and going with apparent aimlessness
and commanding attention from nobody but one another. Here and
there a dead man, his clothing defiled with earth, his face covered
with a blanket or showing yellow and claylike in the rain, added
his dispiriting influence to that of the other dismal features of
the scene and augmented the general discomfort with a particular
dejection. Very repulsive these wrecks looked—not at all heroic,
and nobody was accessible to the infection of their patriotic
example. Dead upon the field of honor, yes; but the field of honor
was so very wet! It makes a difference.
The general engagement that all expected did not
occur, none of the small advantages accruing, now to this side and
now to that, in isolated and accidental collisions being followed
up. Half-hearted attacks provoked a sullen resistance which was
satisfied with mere repulse. Orders were obeyed with mechanical
fidelity; no one did any more than his duty.
“The army is cowardly to-day,” said General
Cameron, the commander of a Federal brigade, to his
adjutant-general.
“The army is cold,” replied the officer addressed,
“and—yes, it doesn’t wish to be like that.”
He pointed to one of the dead bodies, lying in a
thin pool of yellow water, its face and clothing bespattered with
mud from hoof and wheel.
The army’s weapons seemed to share its military
delinquency. The rattle of rifles sounded flat and contemptible. It
had no meaning and scarcely roused to attention and expectancy the
unengaged parts of the line-of-battle and the waiting reserves.
Heard at a little distance, the reports of cannon were feeble in
volume and timbre: they lacked sting and resonance. The guns
seemed to be fired with light charges, unshotted. And so the futile
day wore on to its dreary close, and then to a night of discomfort
succeeded a day of apprehension.
An army has a personality. Beneath the individual
thoughts and emotions of its component parts it thinks and feels as
a unit. And in this large, inclusive sense of things lies a wiser
wisdom than the mere sum of all that it knows. On that dismal
morning this great brute force, groping at the bottom of a white
ocean of fog among trees that seemed as sea weeds, had a dumb
consciousness that all was not well; that a day’s manœuvring had
resulted in a faulty disposition of its parts, a blind diffusion of
its strength. The men felt insecure and talked among themselves of
such tactical errors as with their meager military vocabulary they
were able to name. Field and line officers gathered in groups and
spoke more learnedly of what they apprehended with no greater
clearness. Commanders of brigades and divisions looked anxiously to
their connections on the right and on the left, sent staff officers
on errands of inquiry and pushed skirmish lines silently and
cautiously forward into the dubious region between the known and
the unknown. At some points on the line the troops, apparently of
their own volition, constructed such defenses as they could without
the silent spade and the noisy ax.
One of these points was held by Captain Ransome’s
battery of six guns. Provided always with intrenching tools, his
men had labored with diligence during the night, and now his guns
thrust their black muzzles through the embrasures of a really
formidable earthwork. It crowned a slight acclivity devoid of
undergrowth and providing an unobstructed fire that would sweep the
ground for an unknown distance in front. The position could hardly
have been better chosen. It had this peculiarity, which Captain
Ransome, who was greatly addicted to the use of the compass, had
not failed to observe: it faced northward, whereas he knew that the
general line of the army must face eastward. In fact, that part of
the line was “refused”—that is to say, bent backward, away from the
enemy. This implied that Captain Ransome’s battery was somewhere
near the left flank of the army; for an army in line of battle
retires its flanks if the nature of the ground will permit, they
being its vulnerable points. Actually, Captain Ransome appeared to
hold the extreme left of the line, no troops being visible in that
direction beyond his own. Immediately in rear of his guns occurred
that conversation between him and his brigade commander, the
concluding and more picturesque part of which is reported
above.
III
HOW TO PLAY THE CANNON WITHOUT NOTES
Captain Ransome sat motionless and silent on
horseback. A few yards away his men were standing at their guns.
Somewhere—everywhere within a few miles—were a hundred thousand
men, friends and enemies. Yet he was alone. The mist had isolated
him as completely as if he had been in the heart of a desert. His
world was a few square yards of wet and trampled earth about the
feet of his horse. His comrades in that ghostly domain were
invisible and inaudible. These were conditions favorable to
thought, and he was thinking. Of the nature of his thoughts his
clear-cut handsome features yielded no attesting sign. His face was
as inscrutable as that of the sphinx. Why should it have made a
record which there was none to observe? At the sound of a footstep
he merely turned his eyes in the direction whence it came; one of
his sergeants, looking a giant in stature in the false perspective
of the fog, approached, and when clearly defined and reduced to his
true dimensions by propinquity, saluted and stood at
attention.
“Well, Morris,” said the officer, returning his
subordinate’s salute.
“Lieutenant Price directed me to tell you, sir,
that most of the infantry has been withdrawn. We have not
sufficient support.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I am to say that some of our men have been out
over the works a hundred yards and report that our front is not
picketed.”
“Yes.”
“They were so far forward that they heard the
enemy.”
“Yes.”
“They heard the rattle of the wheels of artillery
and the commands of officers.”
“Yes.”
“The enemy is moving toward our works.”
Captain Ransome, who had been facing to the rear of
his line—toward the point where the brigade commander and his
cavalcade had been swallowed up by the fog—reined his horse about
and faced the other way. Then he sat motionless as before.
“Who are the men who made that statement?” he
inquired, without looking at the sergeant; his eyes were directed
straight into the fog over the head of his horse.
“Corporal Hassman and Gunner Manning.”
Captain Ransome was a moment silent. A slight
pallor came into his face, a slight compression affected the lines
of his lips, but it would have required a closer observer than
Sergeant Morris to note the change. There was none in the
voice.
“Sergeant, present my compliments to Lieutenant
Price and direct him to open fire with all the guns. Grape.”
The sergeant saluted and vanished in the fog.
IV
TO INTRODUCE GENERAL MASTERSON
Searching for his division commander, General
Cameron and his escort had followed the line of battle for nearly a
mile to the right of Ransome’s battery, and there learned that the
division commander had gone in search of the corps commander. It
seemed that everybody was looking for his immediate superior—an
ominous circumstance. It meant that nobody was quite at ease. So
General Cameron rode on for another half-mile, where by good luck
he met General Masterson, the division commander, returning.
“Ah, Cameron,” said the higher officer, reining up,
and throwing his right leg across the pommel of his saddle in a
most unmilitary way—“anything up? Found a good position for your
battery, I hope—if one place is better than another in a
fog.”
“Yes, general,” said the other, with the greater
dignity appropriate to his less exalted rank, “my battery is very
well placed. I wish I could say that it is as well
commanded.”
“Eh, what’s that? Ransome? I think him a fine
fellow. In the army we should be proud of him.”
It was customary for officers of the regular army
to speak of it as “the army.” As the greatest cities are most
provincial, so the self-complacency of aristocracies is most
frankly plebeian.
“He is too fond of his opinion. By the way, in
order to occupy the hill that he holds I had to extend my line
dangerously. The hill is on my left—that is to say the left flank
of the army.”
“Oh, no, Hart’s brigade is beyond. It was ordered
up from Dry-town during the night and directed to hook on to you.
Better go and——”
The sentence was unfinished: a lively cannonade had
broken out on the left, and both officers, followed by their
retinues of aides and orderlies making a great jingle and clank,
rode rapidly toward the spot. But they were soon impeded, for they
were compelled by the fog to keep within sight of the
line-of-battle, behind which were swarms of men, all in motion
across their way. Everywhere the line was assuming a sharper and
harder definition, as the men sprang to arms and the officers, with
drawn swords, “dressed” the ranks. Color-bearers unfurled the
flags, buglers blew the “assembly,” hospital attendants appeared
with stretchers. Field officers mounted and sent their impedimenta
to the rear in care of negro servants. Back in the ghostly spaces
of the forest could be heard the rustle and murmur of the reserves,
pulling themselves together.
Nor was all this preparation vain, for scarcely
five minutes had passed since Captain Ransome’s guns had broken the
truce of doubt before the whole region was aroar: the enemy had
attacked nearly everywhere.
V
HOW SOUNDS CAN FIGHT SHADOWS
Captain Ransome walked up and down behind his
guns, which were firing rapidly but with steadiness. The gunners
worked alertly, but without haste or apparent excitement. There was
really no reason for excitement; it is not much to point a cannon
into a fog and fire it. Anybody can do as much as that.
The men smiled at their noisy work, performing it
with a lessening alacrity. They cast curious regards upon
their captain, who had now mounted the banquette of the
fortification and was looking across the parapet as if observing
the effect of his fire. But the only visible effect was the
substitution of wide, low-lying sheets of smoke for their bulk of
fog. Suddenly out of the obscurity burst a great sound of cheering,
which filled the intervals between the reports of the guns with
startling distinctness! To the few with leisure and opportunity to
observe, the sound was inexpressibly strange—so loud, so near, so
menacing, yet nothing seen! The men who had smiled at their work
smiled no more, but performed it with a serious and feverish
activity.
From his station at the parapet Captain Ransome now
saw a great multitude of dim gray figures taking shape in the mist
below him and swarming up the slope. But the work of the guns was
now fast and furious. They swept the populous declivity with gusts
of grape and canister, the whirring of which could be heard through
the thunder of the explosions. In this awful tempest of iron the
assailants struggled forward foot by foot across their dead, firing
into the embrasures, reloading, firing again, and at last falling
in their turn, a little in advance of those who had fallen before.
Soon the smoke was dense enough to cover all. It settled down upon
the attack and, drifting back, involved the defense. The gunners
could hardly see to serve their pieces, and when occasional figures
of the enemy appeared upon the parapet—having had the good luck to
get near enough to it, between two embrasures, to be protected from
the guns—they looked so unsubstantial that it seemed hardly worth
while for the few infantrymen to go to work upon them with the
bayonet and tumble them back into the ditch.
As the commander of a battery in action can find
something better to do than cracking individual skulls, Captain
Ransome had retired from the parapet to his proper post in rear of
his guns, where he stood with folded arms, his bugler beside him.
Here, during the hottest of the fight, he was approached by
Lieutenant Price, who had just sabred a daring assailant inside the
work. A spirited colloquy ensued between the two officers—spirited,
at least, on the part of the lieutenant, who gesticulated with
energy and shouted again and again into his commander’s ear in the
attempt to make himself heard above the infernal din of the guns.
His gestures, if coolly noted by an actor, would have been
pronounced to be those of protestation: one would have said that he
was opposed to the proceedings. Did he wish to surrender?
Captain Ransome listened without a change of
countenance or attitude, and when the other man had finished his
harangue, looked him coldly in the eyes and during a seasonable
abatement of the uproar said:
“Lieutenant Price, it is not permitted to you to
know anything. It is sufficient that you obey my
orders.”
The lieutenant went to his post, and the parapet
being now apparently clear Captain Ransome returned to it to have a
look over. As he mounted the banquette a man sprang upon the crest,
waving a great brilliant flag. The captain drew a pistol from his
belt and shot him dead. The body, pitching forward, hung over the
inner edge of the embankment, the arms straight downward, both
hands still grasping the flag. The man’s few followers turned and
fled down the slope. Looking over the parapet, the captain saw no
living thing. He observed also that no bullets were coming into the
work.
He made a sign to the bugler, who sounded the
command to cease firing. At all other points the action had already
ended with a repulse of the Confederate attack; with the cessation
of this cannonade the silence was absolute.
VI
WHY, BEING AFFRONTED BY A, IT IS NOT BEST TO AFFRONT B
General Masterson rode into the redoubt. The men,
gathered in groups, were talking loudly and gesticulating. They
pointed at the dead, running from one body to another. They
neglected their foul and heated guns and forgot to resume their
outer clothing. They ran to the parapet and looked over, some of
them leaping down into the ditch. A score were gathered about a
flag rigidly held by a dead man.
“Well, my men,” said the general cheerily, “you
have had a pretty fight of it.”
They stared; nobody replied; the presence of the
great man seemed to embarrass and alarm.
Getting no response to his pleasant condescension,
the easy-mannered officer whistled a bar or two of a popular air,
and riding forward to the parapet, looked over at the dead. In an
instant he had whirled his horse about and was spurring along in
rear of the guns, his eyes everywhere at once. An officer sat on
the trail of one of the guns, smoking a cigar. As the general
dashed up he rose and tranquilly saluted.
“Captain Ransome!”—the words fell sharp and harsh,
like the clash of steel blades—“you have been fighting our own
men—our own men, sir; do you hear? Hart’s brigade!”
“General, I know that.”
“You know it—you know that, and you sit here
smoking? Oh, damn it, Hamilton, I’m losing my temper,”—this to his
provost-marshal. “Sir—Captain Ransome, be good enough to say—to say
why you fought our own men.”
“That I am unable to say. In my orders that
information was withheld.”
Apparently the general did not comprehend.
“Who was the aggressor in this affair, you or
General Hart?” he asked.
“I was.”
“And could you not have known—could you not see,
sir, that you were attacking our own men?”
The reply was astounding!
“I knew that, general. It appeared to be none of my
business.”
Then, breaking the dead silence that followed his
answer, he said:
“I must refer you to General Cameron.”
“General Cameron is dead, sir—as dead as he can
be—as dead as any man in this army. He lies back yonder under a
tree. Do you mean to say that he had anything to do with this
horrible business?”
Captain Ransome did not reply. Observing the
altercation his men had gathered about to watch the outcome. They
were greatly excited. The fog, which had been partly dissipated by
the firing, had again closed in so darkly about them that they drew
more closely together till the judge on horseback and the accused
standing calmly before him had but a narrow space free from
intrusion. It was the most informal of courts-martial, but all felt
that the formal one to follow would but affirm its judgment. It had
no jurisdiction, but it had the significance of prophecy.
“Captain Ransome,” the general cried impetuously,
but with something in his voice that was almost entreaty, “if you
can say anything to put a better light upon your incomprehensible
conduct I beg you will do so.”
Having recovered his temper this generous soldier
sought for something to justify his naturally sympathetic attitude
toward a brave man in the imminence of a dishonorable death.
“Where is Lieutenant Price?” the captain
said.
That officer stood forward, his dark saturnine face
looking somewhat forbidding under a bloody handkerchief bound about
his brow. He understood the summons and needed no invitation to
speak. He did not look at the captain, but addressed the
general:
“During the engagement I discovered the state of
affairs, and apprised the commander of the battery. I ventured to
urge that the firing cease. I was insulted and ordered to my
post.”
“Do you know anything of the orders under which I
was acting?” asked the captain.
“Of any orders under which the commander of the
battery was acting,” the lieutenant continued, still addressing the
general, “I know nothing.”
Captain Ransome felt his world sink away from his
feet. In those cruel words he heard the murmur of the centuries
breaking upon the shore of eternity. He heard the voice of doom; it
said, in cold, mechanical, and measured tones: “Ready, aim, fire!”
and he felt the bullets tear his heart to shreds. He heard the
sound of the earth upon his coffin and (if the good God was so
merciful) the song of a bird above his forgotten grave. Quietly
detaching his sabre from its supports, he handed it up to the
provost-marshal.