Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876

For the second time on that memorable day it looked for a few moments as if Palmer would have to face his men about and fight to the rear. Preparations to do this were made on the right of the division, but, fortunately, the appalling disaster which seemed imminent in the complete encompassing of the four divisions of the left was averted. The enemy yielded at last to the stubborn resistance, and Reynolds re-established his line—not upon the old ground entirely, but to conform to the altered situation. He was now the right of the army upon the original field, and four divisions comprised all that was left of the Army of the Cumberland in the position of the morning.

The divisions of the centre and the right—where were they? Brannan, and Wood, and Negley, and Davis, and Van Cleve, and gallant Sheridan, who held stubbornly his division even amid the panic at Stone River—where were they? And Rosecrans, commander of the army; Thomas, the hero in every fight; rash McCook and unfortunate Crittenden, chiefs of corps? Gone with the centre and the right of the army; gone with the reserves and the artillery; gone with the ammunition-trains; gone with everything that belonged to the Army of the Cumberland except four divisions of unconquered soldiers with half-filled cartridge-boxes and with hearts that knew no fear.

All gone? No! In the hush which came after Reynolds's desperate defence, and while hearts were yet beating fast from watching the doubtful fight, there arose far off to the right and rear a roar of musketry, telling that somewhere in the distance the flags of the Army of the Cumberland still waved before the foe, as they did with us. Long afterward we knew that this was Thomas—he who would not leave the field amid the wreck which surrounded him—Thomas, with his fragments, posted on a commanding ridge and bravely beating off the thickening foes about him.

The story of the disaster is an old one. It is hardly necessary to tell how Wood, in the main line on the right of Brannan, received an order from Rosecrans to support Reynolds, the second division in line to the left of Wood; how the gallant soldier hesitated to obey an order from which such disaster might come; how McCook, chief of corps, told Wood the order was imperative, and promised to put a reserve division into the line to take his place; how Wood withdrew from the line, as ordered, at the fatal moment when the enemy was preparing to attack; how the furious foe pressed through the gap, cut the army in two, struck the lines to right and left in flank and rear, swept the centre, the right wing and the reserves off the field, and doubled up and crushed the left wing as far as Reynolds's division, whose fortune has been told. All this is familiar enough now, but those who remained on the field in the four divisions of the left knew nothing of it then. They only knew that the line was broken beyond Reynolds, and that, although somewhere in the distance was a force which had not yet fled nor surrendered, they were left to bear alone the battle against Bragg's victorious army. The odds were five or six to one—perhaps more, maybe less. It did not matter to be precise: Bragg had men enough to put a double line of troops entirely around the four divisions. That was enough.

It was after midday when the disaster was complete and the divisions of Baird, Johnson, Palmer and Reynolds were able to understand the situation. I need not recount in detail the repeated attempts of the enemy to crush the line of the four divisions at one point and another. If the reader can recall the description of the first attack on Palmer's division, he will have a very fair example of the work which busied us at intervals during those long hours. The enemy was, of course, not unaware of his great success in dividing the army and driving off the greater part of it; nor was he lacking in efforts to improve the advantage by destroying the divisions which yet confronted him. Every attack, however, resulted in failure, and the assailants retired each time with heavy losses. At length it was evident to us that it had become difficult to bring even Longstreet's boasted troops up to attacks which met such sure and bloody repulses. There were but four divisions against an army, but the four would not be taken or driven.

With hands and faces blackened by the smoke and dust of battle those men stood devotedly to their posts, their ranks thinned by every assault, but their aim as fatal as ever. But one dread possessed them: ammunition ran short, and there were no supplies. In the intervals between the enemy's assaults the cartridge-boxes of dead comrades along the line and in the open field, where were the fierce struggles of the morning, were emptied of their contents to replenish the failing stock of the survivors. More precious than food and water, though they were sorely needed, were these inheritances from the dead.

The long afternoon wore slowly away. Night could not come too soon, but it seemed that never before was it so tardy. Officers and men were tortured by thirst. Their tongues were swollen and their lips black and distended, often to bursting. Speech became difficult or absolutely impossible. Officers mumbled their commands, and prayed silently for darkness to save them from enforced surrender or flight when the last cartridge should be spent.

Meantime, the relentless but cautious foe was carefully feeling his way around the flanks, apparently unwilling to venture boldly into the rear of the little army which he could not move by attack in front. A group of officers stood by their horses in rear of Hazen's brigade when the crack of an Enfield rifle was heard from the woods in rear across the open field. A bullet came whizzing into the group and killed a colonel's horse. Other shots followed from the same direction. The woods behind us were evidently occupied by the enemy's skirmishers. A captain volunteered to take his company and clear the woods, but ammunition was too scarce to waste on sharpshooters.

Word came at last, in some way, that Thomas, whose firing we heard far to the right and rear, was sorely pressed. A consultation was held by the four division generals. They needed a commander, but who should it be? Who would take command of that beleaguered force and undertake to extricate it from its surrounding peril or deliver it over to Thomas? Would Palmer? No. Would Reynolds? No. The stern duty of fighting their divisions until they could fight no longer, and doing then whatever desperate thing might be possible—that they would not fail in; but that responsibility was as great as they cared to assume. Up came Hazen then. "I'll take my brigade across that interval," said he, "and find Thomas if he's there." Palmer objected: it would make a gap in his line; it would expose one of his brigades to a thousand chances of destruction—for who could tell what forces of the enemy were in that interval or watching it?—and finally, it would take away the brigade which had most ammunition, for Hazen had husbanded his store. But something must be done. If the four divisions could hold out until night, somebody must command them and take them out if it could be done. Thomas was the proper commander, and he was needed. It was agreed that Hazen should make the attempt.

The brigade was withdrawn from the line which it had faithfully held all day, and some disposition made to fill the gap. Hazen formed his regiments in close masses, faced them to the right and rear, covered his front with a trusty battalion as skirmishers, waved an adieu to the comrades left behind, and plunged into the unknown forest in the direction of Thomas's firing. On and on went the brigade and came nearer and nearer to the ridge which Thomas held. Suddenly, the skirmishers strike obliquely an opposing line. They brush it away in an instant, but the warning is not lost. Keep more to the rear: no fighting now, though you should whip three to one. The fate of the four divisions rests upon that. With quick and steady tread the regiments move on. They clear the wood at last, climb the end of a ridge through a field of standing corn, and burst into an open field at the summit amid the wild cheers of Thomas's exhausted men, while Thomas himself, beloved of all the army, rides down to take Hazen by the hand. And not a moment too soon.

Almost at the very instant Thomas's skirmishers along the front of the ridge broke out into a rattling fire, and were seen falling back. The enemy was about to make his final effort, and it was to be against the flank where now lay Hazen's brigade. Quickly deploying his regiments, Hazen placed them in four lines, closed one upon another, and the men lay flat upon their faces. The yell of the enemy was heard in the wood below, and in a moment the declivity in front was covered with the heavy lines of the assailants. Then the first of Hazen's regiments was brought to its feet and poured its volley straight into the faces of the oncoming foe. The next regiment, and the next, and then the last, followed in quick succession. The echoes of the last volley had hardly died away before the enemy, who came on so confident and so strong, had disappeared, crushed and broken, into the forest, leaving the hillside strewn with his dead and wounded.

So ended the fighting. Night came down and shrouded the fierce combatants from each other's sight.

The dusky ranks take up the unfamiliar march with faces from the foe. Their drums are silent, and their bugles voice-less as the spirit-horns which marshal their heroic dead upon the farther shore. The shadowy ranks pass on into the night. Bearing their close-furled banners and their empty guns, they pass on into the sad and silent night of Chickamauga to await the glorious sun of Mission Ridge.

ROBERT LEWIS KIMBERLY.

NOTE.—The writer is aware that this narrative of the battle of Chickamauga differs so materially from the commonly-received impressions of that event that it ought to be supported by more than his own authority. The reader will observe that the main narrative is made up of the experiences of one command, that to which the writer belonged, and of which he can therefore speak as of things which he saw. For the statements of the general battle reference is made to official reports, as follows: (1) In regard to the first day's battle, see report of General W.S. Rosecrans, which may be found in vol. vii. of Putnam's Rebellion Record, p. 222 and following pages. (2) In regard to the complete isolation of the four divisions of the left during the second day, and the final opening of communication with General Thomas, see General W.B. Hazen's official report on p. 238 of the volume above quoted.

The writer also quotes, by permission, from letters from Generals Hazen and Thomas J. Wood, addressed to him within the present year. General Hazen says: "Do not forget about the length of time Thomas was cut off from us—how we could hear nothing from him; how neither Reynolds nor Palmer would assume command," etc. General Wood says, in reference to the great disaster on the second day: "About 11 A.M. I received the following order from General Rosecrans: 'The commanding general directs that you close up on Reynolds as fast as possible, and support him.' As there was an entire division (Brannan's) between my division and Reynolds, I could only close upon the latter and support him by withdrawing my division from line and passing in rear of Brannan to the rear of Reynolds. This I did. Of course I knew it was an order involving perhaps the most momentous consequences, but General McCook concurred with me that it was so emphatic and positive as to demand instant obedience. I write you stubborn facts, and you can use them as such."

General Wood has been so severely criticised for his obedience to this fatal order that perhaps I should add this further explanation, contained in the letter from which I have quoted above: "After the battle was over, and it was apparent that Rosecrans's ill-considered order had led to a disaster, he offered as an explanation of it the statement that some staff-officer had reported to him that Brannan was out of line, and that he intended I should close to the left on Reynolds, and that I overlooked this direction to close to the left on Reynolds. Certainly, I overlooked it, or rather I did not see it, for it was not there to be seen. On the contrary, I was ordered to close up on Reynolds, and for a purpose—viz., to support him. I remark also that it was impossible for any man, on reading Rosecrans's order to me, to even remotely conjecture that it was based on the supposition that Brannan was out of line. He had previously ordered me to rest my left on Brannan's right, and I had reported to him that I had done so. Colonel Starling (of Crittenden's staff) testified before the McCook-Crittenden court of inquiry that he was with Rosecrans at the time the latter directed the order to be sent to me, and told him that Brannan was not out of line."

THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.

BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA KEMBALL."

CHAPTER XXXVII.

UNWORTHY

The storm had passed with the night, and the day was bright and joyful—almost hard in its brightness and cruel in its joy; for while the sun was shining overhead and the air was musical with the hum of insects and the song of birds, the flowers were broken, the tender plants destroyed, the uncut corn was laid as if a troop of horse had trampled down the crops, and the woods, like the gardens and the fields, were wrecked and spoiled. But of all the mourners sighing between earth and sky, Nature is the one that never repents, and the sun shines out over the saddest ruin as it shines out over the richest growth, as careless of the one as of the other.

Edgar came down from the Hill in the sunshine, handsome, strong, jocund as the day. As he rode through the famous double avenue of chestnuts he thought, What a glorious day! how clear and full of life after the storm! but he noted the wreckage too, and was concerned to see how the trees and fields had suffered. Still, the one would put forth new branches and fresh leaves next year; and if the other had been roughly handled, there was yet a salvage to be garnered. The ruin was not irreparable, and he was in the mood to make the best of things. Do not the first days of a happy love ever give the happiest kind of philosophy for man and woman to go on?

And he was happy in his love. Who more so? He was on his way now to Ford House as a man going to his own, serene and confident of his possession. He had left his treasure overnight, and he went to take it up again, sure to find it where he had laid it down. He had no thought of the thief who might have stolen it in the dark hours, of the rust that might have cankered it in the chill of the gray morning. He only pictured to himself its beauty, its sweetness and undimmed radiance—only remembered that this treasure was his, his own and his only, unshared by any, and known in its excellence by none before him.

He rode up to the door glad, dominant, assured. Life was very pleasant to the strong man and ardent lover—the English gentleman with his happiness in his own keeping, and his future marked out in a clear broad pathway before him. There was no cloud in his sky, no shadow on his sea: it was all sunshine and serenity—man the master of his own fate and the ruler of circumstance—man the supreme over all things, a woman's past included.

Not seeing Leam in the garden, Edgar rang the bells and was shown into the drawing-room, where she was sitting alone. The down-drawn blinds had darkened the room to a pleasant gloom for eyes somewhat overpowered by the blazing sunshine and the dazzling white clouds flung like heaps of snow against the hard bright blue of the sky; yet something struck more chill than restful on the lover as he came through the doorway, little fanciful or sentimental as he was.

Leam, who had not been in bed through the night, was sitting on the sofa in the remotest and darkest part of the room. She rose as he entered—rose only, not coming forward to meet him, but standing in her place silent, pale, yet calm and collected. She did not look at him, but neither did she blush nor tremble. There was something statuesque, almost dead, about her—something that was not the same Leam whom he had known from the first.

He went up to her, both hands held out. She shrank back and folded hers in each other, still not looking at him.

"Why, Leam, what is it?" he cried in amazement, pained, shocked at her action. Was she in her right mind? Had she heard of his former attentions to Adelaide, divined their ultimate meaning, and been seized with a mad idea of sacrifice and generosity? It must be with Adelaide, he thought, rapidly reviewing his past. He was absolutely safe about Violet Cray, who had never known his name; and those later Indian affairs were dead and as good as buried. What, then, did it mean?

"No, not till you have heard me," said Leam in a low voice. "And never after."

"My darling! what is it?" he repeated.

"You must not call me dear names: I am unworthy," said Leam. "No," checking him as he would have spoken, smiling with a sense of relief that her craze—if it was a craze—went to the visionary side of her own unworthiness, and was not due to any knowledge of his misdemeanors, as she might think them. "Do not speak. I have to tell you. I had forgotten it," she went on to say in the same tense, compressed manner—the manner of one who has a task to get through, and has gathered all her strength for the effort, leaving none to be squandered in emotion—"I was so happy in these last days I had forgotten it. Now I have remembered, and we must part."

Edgar was grieved to see her in such deadly trouble, for it was easy to see her pain beneath her still exterior, but he was confident, and if grieved not afraid. Leam's little life, so innocent and uneventful as it must have been, could hold no such tremendous evil, could have been smirched with no such damning stain, as that at which she seemed to hint. Grant even that there had been something more between her and Alick Corfield than he would quite like to hear—which was his first thought—still, that more must needs be very little, could but be very simple. His wife must be spotless—that he knew, and he would marry none whose past was not as unsullied as new-fallen snow, as unsullied as must be her future—absolute purity—the unruffled emotions of a maidenhood undisturbed until now even by dreams, even by visions. He owed it to himself and his position that his wife, man of many loves as he was, should be this; but at the worst the childish affection of brother and sister, which was all that could possibly have been between Leam and that awkward young gangrel Alick Corfield, could have nothing in it that he ought to take to heart or that should influence him. Yes, he might smile and not be afraid. And indeed her delicate conscience was another grace in his eyes. He loved her more than ever for the honesty that must confess all its little sins. Sweet Leam! Leam having to confess! Leam! she who was almost too modest for an ordinary lover's comfort, needing to be tamed out of her savage bashfulness, not to be reproved for transgressing the proper reticence of an English maid. It was a pretty play, but it was only a play.

"Come and sit by me and make full confession, my darling," he said lovingly.

"I will stand where I am. You sit," said Leam, without looking at him.

He seated himself on the sofa. "And now what has my little culprit to say for herself?" he asked pleasantly, putting on a playful magisterial air.

"It is over," said Leam, her hands pressed in each other with so tight a clasp that the strained knuckles were white and started. "You must not love me: I cannot be your wife."

"Why?" He showed his square white teeth beneath the golden sweep of his moustache, his moist red lips parted, always smiling.

"I have done a great crime," said Leam in a low, monotonous voice.

"A crime! That is a large word for a small peccadillo—larger than any sin of yours merits, my sweetheart."

"You do not know," said Leam with a despairing gesture. "How can you know when you have not heard?"

"Well, what may be its name?" he asked, willing to humor her.

She paused for a moment: then with a visible effort, drawing in her breath, she said, in a voice that was unnaturally calm and low, "I killed madame."

"Leam!" cried Edgar, "how can you talk such nonsense? The thing is growing beyond a joke. Unsay your words; they are a wrong done to me."

He had started to his feet while he spoke, and now stood before her with a strangely scared and startled face. Naturally, as such a man would, he was resolute not to accept such a terrible confession, and one so unlikely, so impossible; but something in the girl's voice and manner, something in its sad, still reality, seemed to overpower his determination to find this simply a bad joke which she was playing off on his credulity. And then the thing fitted only too well. He had heard half a dozen times of Madame de Montfort's sudden death, and how very strange it was that the draught which she had taken so often with impunity before should have been found so laden with prussic acid on the first night of her homecoming as to kill her in an instant—how strange, too, that not the strictest search or inquiry could come upon a trace of such poison bought or possessed by any member of the family, for what police-officer would look to find a sixty-minim bottle of prussic acid concealed among the coils of a young girl's hair? And when Leam said in that quiet if desperate manner that it was she who had killed madame, her words made the whole mystery clear and solved the as yet unsolved problem.

Nevertheless, he would not believe her, but said again, passionately, "Unsay your words, Leam: they offend me."

"I cannot," said Leam.

He laughed scornfully. "Kill Madame de Montfort. Absurd! You could not. It was impossible for a girl like you to kill any one," he cried in broken sentences. "How could you do such a thing, Leam, and not be found out? Silly child! you are raving."

"I put poison into the bottle, and she died," said Leam in a half whisper.

"Leam! you a murderess!"

She quivered at the word, at the tone of loathing, of abhorrence, of almost terror, in which he said it, but she held her terrible ground. She had begun her martyrdom, her agony of atonement for the sake of truth and love, and she must go through now to the end. "Yes," she said, "I am a murderess. Now you know all, and why you must not love me."

"I cannot believe you," he pleaded helplessly. "It is too horrible. My darling, say that you have told me this to try me—that it is not true, and that you are still my own, my very own, my pure and sinless Leam."

He knelt at her feet, clasping her waist. He was not of those who, like Alick, could bear the sin of the beloved as the sacrifice of pride, of self, of soul to that love. He himself might be stained from head to heel with the soil of sin, but his wife must be, as has been said, without flaw or blemish, immaculate and free from fault. Any lapse, involving the loss of repute should it ever be made public, would have been the death-knell of his hopes, the requiem of his love; but such an infamy as this! If true it was only too final.

"Oh, no! no! do not do that," cried Leam, trying to unclasp his hands. "Do not kneel to me. I ought to kneel to you," she added with a little cry that struck with more than pity to Edgar's heart, and that nearly broke her down for so much relaxing of the strain, so much yielding to her grief, as it included.

"Leam, tell me you are joking—tell me that you did not do this awful thing," he cried again, his handsome face, blanched and drawn, upturned to her in agony.

She put her hands over her eyes. "I cannot lie to you," she said. "And I must not degrade you. Do not touch me: I am not good enough to be touched by you."

He loosened his arms, and she shrank from him almost as if she faded away.

"Why did you deceive me?" he groaned. "You should not have let me love you, knowing the truth."

"I did not know that you loved me, or that I loved you, till that night," she pleaded piteously. "If I had known I would have prevented it. I have told you as soon as I remembered."

"You have broken my heart," he cried, flinging himself on the sofa, his face buried in the cushions. And then, strong man as he was, a brave soldier and an English country gentleman, he burst into a passion of tears that shook him as the storm had shaken the earth last night—tears that were the culmination of his agony, not its relief.