22 The Bladensburg Races

Just as we had finished falling back the news came that the British were marching direct on Bladensburg, and we poured forward again in our old tracks to meet them, covered with sweat and dust and our bones full of the weariness of five days and nights of nearly continuous marching.

“I’ll bet you a dollar, Ten Broeck,” said Bidwell to me as we tugged and panted in the hot sun, “that when we get to Bladensburg we’ll find that it’s the only place without its British.”

On we went under the hot sky and through the drifting dust, which rasped our throats and filled our eyes and whitened us at last into the semblance of a common uniform. Stray puffs of wind caught up the dust and whirled it about us and over us in vast impenetrable clouds.

We might have been despondent, we might have been weak of heart as well as knee, but we had such good company, for the President and his whole Cabinet galloped along with us, sharing in our sweat, our dust, and our weariness. As we dragged the long, lame line of the army over a little hill we heard the faint crack of scattered rifle shots off Bladensburg way, and on the dusty horizon we could see the smoke. While we listened the shots swelled to a volley and the puffs of smoke gathered into a cloud. This smelled of battle, and we quickened our tired pace. The firing increased, and the rattle of the rifles was punctuated by the deeper boom of cannon. Bidwell was wrong; Bladensburg was the one place with its British, and I believed that, in truth, we were about to have a battle. So did the others, for many at once undertook its management, and the only thing upon which all agreed was the necessity to hasten on. Amid noise and confusion we broke into a trot, while the sun grew hotter and hotter and the clouds of dust bigger and thicker, hiding from us the smoke-bank over Bladensburg and the flare of the firing there. But nothing could shut out from our ears the incessant crack of the rifles and the rolling crash of the artillery. Sometimes, as the smoke lifted, I could see around me the white faces of the raw civilians, who had never before known anything more formidable than the plough handle or the yardstick, and the talk, the clamour of many voices, sank in a way that was sudden and suggestive.

We knew that some Baltimore troops were already on the field, and it was they who were holding it against the attack of the British army which must prevail soon over men so few in number unless we came up in time to help them.

“Forward!” shouted everybody, and we who had believed an hour ago that we could not walk another step broke into a run, leaving the dust clouds rolling behind us. A cheer from our comrades already on the field saluted us as we rushed forward to join them, and we began to tread upon each other in an effort to find our proper places in the line of battle. The rifles were popping all around us, and a cannon boomed out so suddenly at my side that I jumped into the air. I could see from their white faces that the stomachs of many of the clerks and farmers were growing weak, now that they were to stand in line and face the fire of the enemy.

The smoke clouds were hanging high in the clear hot air, and, being able to breathe at the normal rate again, I looked toward the enemy. In front of us ran the slight and shallow Eastern Branch, and on the hills beyond it the houses of the shambling village of Bladensburg gleamed through the trees. But the tired little place now saw a martial sight, for the whole British army was marching through it to the attack. I could see them, line after line, in solid, even red ranks, banners aloft, the drums beating the steady rub-a-dub, while the fifes played a shriller tune. The polished bayonets shone in the sunlight, and in front of the squares the sharpshooters lurked among the bushes on the river bank and fired steadily upon us. From these bushes came spouts of flame and the sudden red gleam of a sharpshooter’s coat, and above them rose the frequent white puffs of smoke which gathered together higher up and made the cloud-bank.

It was a splendid spectacle, and for a moment my heart stirred at the sight, the first regular army that I had ever seen. These were veterans who had been fighting Napoleon’s French in Spain for years, and knew what war was and how to meet it. Then I sickened as I looked around at our own raw levies—good stuff, but untried, unled, half-armed, unfed, and tired to death. Farther off I could see the President himself on horseback looking across the river at the British, and behind him, also on horseback, clustered the Cabinet.

Zip! zip! a bullet knocked up the dust at my feet.

“Stand back there a little, Ten Broeck!” sang out some one; “you’re as big as a house and make as good a target!”

I moved the house back, and then a captain ordered us to fire. Crash ran the volley along our line. I sent my bullet into the bushes on the other bank, but whether it hit anything I know not, for the smoke of our volley thickened the air before us and I could not see. Presently the smoke drifted away again, and I could see the red squares in the village pressing on toward the river, while the fire of the sharpshooters in front grew fiercer and hotter. Bullets began to whistle around us again, and to draw blood and to take life. Our ranks were jostled about, and the orders became mixed and multiplied. We knew but one thing to do, and that was to load and fire as fast as we could. Some forgot to take the ramrods out of their rifles, and they whizzed through the air toward Bladensburg to join the other projectiles, which now formed a steady stream.

We fought with zeal, but without order. The firing was irregular, not by volleys; first a pattering rain of bullets, then the crash of a hundred rifles, and then the rising and falling crackle of gunshots quickly succeeding each other. Men were falling near me, and some were crying out as the bullets struck them, while others took their wounds in silence. Some faces were white, others blood red; what my own was I knew not. I felt at first a strange nervous weakness, an inclination to collapse, as if all the marrow had been taken out of my bones, but as I loaded and fired my rifle and the shouting and roaring of the battle increased it passed away, and a fierce desire to sweep forward with the whole army and overwhelm the enemy took its place.

The air became almost too heavy for breath. The smoke clouds, which hung high when we came upon the field, now lay close to the ground, and great columns and pyramids of dust mingled with them, making us gasp and choke as we fought. Our excited eyes looking through this dull haze magnified and distorted everything. The soldiers in red, seen dimly on the other shore, grew to giants without shape.

We could have seen little in this thickening veil of smoke and dust without the flash of the firing. The points of flame twinkled by hundreds as the rifles were discharged, fused and ran like a sword of light along the front of either army, broadened and deepened here and there by the blaze of a cannon shot. The crash of the rifles and the boom of the cannon had united into a steady roar, but sometimes the torrent of the shouting swelled above it. We were a new army, and the men found that the battle fever rose with the use of their own voices, and mingled with this shouting, too, we heard sometimes the groans of the wounded. They were thick among us, and the dead lay on the earth, which was wet and soaked with blood. Tiny red streams flowed between the hillocks, and were then trampled into the earth by heavy boots. The reek of the army arose, and the smell of the blood and sweat and wet uniforms offended our nostrils.

I remembered how hot and clammy it was. The banks of smoke and vapour enveloped us like a breath from a prairie fire, and I wiped my dripping face more than once with the sleeve of my coat. Even in the fury of the battle I felt my throat parching for water, and I raised my canteen to my lips and drank deeply. Many others were doing the same. How good it felt as it went down and cut away the coated dust! I shouted with new vigour and loaded and fired my rifle faster than before, aiming merely at the red haze in front and never seeing whether the bullet hit or missed.

My ears were filled with the crackle of the rifles and muskets and the roar of the artillery, but through the smoke and dust I could see that the enemy across the shallow stream was pushing all his forces to the attack. Suddenly he opened fire with Congreve rockets, a missile new to us, which added with their flame and strange shriek to the confusion among the hasty levies. They poured showers of these upon us, and under cover of their fire a heavy red column rushed upon the bridge.

The column advanced at the double quick in beautiful order. Above the crackle of the rifles, the pounding of the artillery, and the hissing of the rockets I could hear the steady beat of their drums and the wailing of the fifes. They were on the bridge now, a solid red mass, rushing forward, the rear ranks pressing on those in front. The artillery and the rifles opened upon them there, pouring balls and bullets into the solid mass. I could see men falling from the bridge into the shallow stream, which in some places was not deep enough to hide their bodies, and there they lay, their red coats showing above the surface of the water and blazing in the sunshine; others, though dead, were held upright in the solid ranks and were carried on in the rush of their living companions. Behind them their artillery in the village replied to ours, and the air was filled with the hissing and shrieking rockets. The dust trampled up by many men rose in clouds, and mingling with the smoke made a dense, reddish-brown fog bank. Our men, untrained soldiers, excited and eager, were shouting at everything, and the roar of many voices, mingling with the thunder of the cannonade and the musketry, stunned our ears with a tumult that ceased not.

Their sharpshooters swarmed along the river bank, hiding behind bushes, trees, and weeds and crawling in the mud, and their fire was more deadly to us than that of the artillery and rockets. I could hear the whistling of the little bullets all around me, and while we poured our fire into the column on the bridge the fringe of sharpshooters on the bank broadened, crept forward in the mud and water, and avenged their comrades who were falling in the charge. Our raw army, bruised and bleeding, felt the sting of these hornets, and some cried out that we must clear the bushes and weeds of the sharpshooters, but the officers shouted to them to turn all their fire on the bridge. But scattering shots, the eddies from the main current of our fire, were sent at the sharpshooters, and more than one of the crawling forms in red ceased to crawl and lay still forever. I marked a man who was up almost to his waist in the water, ahead of all his comrades, seeking the shelter of a bush or a bunch of weeds, and firing at us from every covert. Presently he straightened up, dropped his rifle, and fell backward, his body disappearing beneath the water. If it came up again I did not see it, for I turned my eyes to the men upon the bridge—our real danger.

They were halfway across the stream, advancing in solid ranks, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee—a column that filled the bridge from side to side—and the lifting of the smoke at intervals let me see the faces of the front-rank men, browned most of them by Spanish suns, their eyes gleaming with the excitement which even veterans feel in the charge. Into this solid column of men the bullets were pattering, and a man would fall, to be shoved back by the feet of his companions while another took his place.

“We’ll beat ’em! We’ll beat ’em back!” shouted some one, and the column on the bridge, in truth, was faltering before the fire that was scorching away their front ranks, but at that moment a body of militia just in front of us received a tremendous discharge of the rockets, and began to quiver and reel like one who has suffered a mortal blow. “Run! Run!” shouted somebody among them, and the panic terror in his voice spread like a plague. In a second a hundred were crying “Run! Run!” and these citizen soldiers, confused, filled with dread of things they saw and did not see, staggered back and were lost. Their companies dissolved like a snowball before the sun, and by the time we knew what ailed them they were streaming past us, a mob in a panic, a wild riot of terrified fugitives, all order, courage, pride, gone, and only speed to save left.

“Oh, you cowards!” I heard Cyrus Pendleton shout, and then he swore frightfully.

But they were not cowards by nature, they simply did not know better and did not have the soldier’s training. Be that as it may, they were gone, and the shattered columns on the bridge, seeing them go, raised a cheer and came on again, the drums and the fifes playing back their courage. But our companies closed in on the ground that the others had left, and our fire, slack for a few minutes, increased in vigour. Behind us we heard a great swell in the shouting and were told that it was more of the army arriving on the battlefield, coming in a run many miles under the hot sun and through the thick dust, only to reach us with broken breathing, stiffened knees, dry hot tongues hanging out, and no knowledge of what place to take and none to tell them. Some of the Baltimore militia had come sixteen miles without a rest and were dead on their feet.

But the red columns in front, crumbling before our fire, reeled again and broke to pieces. The companies dissolved, and men hiding among the dense bushes which clothed the banks of the stream were protected from the fire of our artillery, which could not be deflected enough, because of the lay of the ground, to reach them. Then we began to gather more courage and to cheer.

“We may beat ’em yet, Phil,” said Cyrus Pendleton.

He was loading and firing a rifle like a sharpshooter. The thick dust had made a mask of his face, but the sweat rolling down it in streams had striped it in such manner that he looked like an Indian in his most hideous war paint.

The fire poured on us from Bladensburg increased. The English, beholding the repulse of their first attack, pushed forward all their artillery and fired with swiftness and precision, while their riflemen swarmed along the river front and seconded the big guns with volleys less noisy but as deadly. Men began to fall rapidly in our ranks, and groans mingled with the multiplied and confusing orders. Faces of farmers and clerks grew white again, and our lines shook and reeled about.

The British suddenly rushed forward a second time in massive columns, re-enforcing the defeated men who were hiding in the bushes, and then burst upon us with the full strength of their army, their batteries playing on our lines at their highest pressure. Again that terrible cry of panic and terror, the worst of all things, rose from our ranks.

“We are beaten!” shouted some one when we were not beaten, but he made it so, for a hundred took up the cry, and a group of riflemen, commanded by our late minister to England, lost their courage and ran away, spreading panic around them. The men of a battery who knew how to shoot, but not to fight, caught the plague of fear, and, throwing down their rammers, competed in the foot race. A terrible tumult, such as I hope never to see again in this world, arose in our army. The mad terror ran from company to company, and the showers of cannon balls, rockets, and rifle bullets falling upon us hastened it and added to the clamour and jumble of the disordered army. Those who ran trampled upon or swept away by force of might those who would stand, and the shouts and commands of the officers were lost amid the more numerous shouts of the men. Some of the officers and some of the men, too, bore themselves with supreme courage, now firing upon the foe who was pressing against us, and then trying to reform our lines and win back the fugitives. One of the wildest and most furious of them all was Cyrus Pendleton, the Indian fighter and fur trader, who, rifle in hand, yelled defiance at the enemy and then reproached the fugitives with their cowardice.

“Stand, men! Stand, in God’s name!” he cried. “We can beat ’em! Look, here come the sailors! They’ll fight! Don’t you see ’em?”

What he said was true, for our best men, the marines and sailors under Barney, who fought then as they fought throughout the war, with disciplined order and unflinching bravery, were just then arriving upon the field and getting into position, even as the rout had already begun. But their steady front had no effect upon the others, for the plague of fear spread by the red rain of the British artillery was eating into the hearts of them all. Away went a Baltimore regiment after the other fugitives, and in its wild rush I saw the President and his Cabinet caught up by the press of numbers and carried off through no choice of theirs, though it was a lucky chance for them and us.

Fear ran through the ranks like fire in dry grass. Men who had been fighting bravely a minute before were seized with a delirium of terror, and ran, knocking against their comrades in their headlong flight and tripping over the dead and wounded. One squad fired into another squad, taking them for attacking British, but others threw away their arms, their rifles pattering in the dust and mud, and some, to lighten themselves for flight, stripped off their coats and flung them down. They were not soldiers, but civilians, untrained, unled, whose faculties had been mastered by a sudden, unreasoning fear, a conviction that the battle was lost—when, in fact, the time to win it had just come—and they obeyed the only instinct that was left to them—self-preservation.

Unarmed, hatless, coatless, the terrified battalions rushed by, a mob of wild and shouting fugitives. The dust stirred by so many trampling feet rose again in clouds bigger and denser than ever, and hid part of the shame of such a flight, while the British fire scorched the rear of the mob and urged it to greater speed. A wild tumult of shouting rolled over the plain, and the horrible reek of mud and blood and sweat became overpowering.

The sight of all these men, soldiers they called themselves, running so fast and giving themselves up to such an ecstasy of terror had in it something strangely ludicrous. Here was a rich merchant, a man of dignity, running like a boy; and there a lawyer, and yonder a doctor, and the look on their faces, when the dust was not too thick for my eyes to penetrate it, was so wild, so distorted, that they seemed hideous travesties of men. Then, too, they wasted so much strength in shouting and they fell over each other so often that the show became the most amusing I had ever seen. I laughed until I was stopped by the sound of my own voice, which was hysterical, and then I perceived how unnatural my laughter had been and that it was the laugh of tragedy, not of comedy.

I could have cried now with rage as I saw many others crying, and for the moment I knew not what to do; our soldiers were fleeing away like a herd of buffaloes in a panic rushing over a plain, cannon balls and bullets whizzed around us, clouds of smoke and dust drove in our faces, and one who did not wish to run must be in doubt what else to do.

“Let’s join the sailors and make a fight of it!” shouted a voice in my rear as a hand fell upon my arm.

I looked around and saw Bidwell, a smoking rifle in his hand, his face covered with dust and grime. But the light of battle was shining in his eyes, and I knew that the lazy dandy had awakened into the man of courage and action. I had been mistaken in him, and I wanted to say so to him then, but there was no time, for we had to make instant choice between joining the sailors, running, or being taken. The British army was almost upon us, and we dashed at full speed toward the sailors, who had stopped on a hilltop and were putting in position a battery of five guns. We saw Cyrus Pendleton on the way swept off his feet by a mass of fugitives, but we gave him a rescuing hand and he ran with us to the battery, where we dropped down behind the guns and began to reload our rifles.

We had a few moments for breath, and I looked at the army streaming in mad haste and terror from the field. We were on a low hilltop, and the fugitives poured around us and by us as if we were a rock in the middle of a torrent. But among the sailors and marines there was perfect order, though they were only four hundred against ten or fifteen times their number, for our army was now disappearing on the Washington road, leaving a trail of dropped weapons and a vast cloud of hovering dust to mark its flight.

I saw the sailor Patterson at one of the guns, and he noticed me too, for he said:

“We can’t beat ’em now, Mr. Ten Broeck, but we’ll let ’em know they’ve had a battle.”

The cannoneers were loading their pieces, and for a moment there was a pause in the rush of the battle, while the British prepared to hurl the full strength of their army upon our little force. Far away toward Washington was the immense cloud of dust which rolled over our fleeing men and followed them as a banner of disgrace. About the field lay dead bodies, the enemy’s and ours, and some of the hurt sat up and tried to tend their sores.

The British were now abreast of us in the main road, and our commander shouted to the battery to fire. All five guns were discharged at once, and the round shot plunged straight into the solid ranks of the British. I saw their army quiver and give to the shock, but in a moment they recovered and swept upon us in a long and deep semicircular line which threatened to envelop and strangle us.

But the sailors were expert at the guns; they reloaded with incredible speed and poured another deadly volley at close range into the charging ranks. When the smoke lifted we gave a resounding cheer, for their lines had been broken and they were giving ground. I believed then for an instant that we would beat them off, but I saw in the next instant that it was impossible in the face of such numbers.

They reformed their lines and pressed on again in an overwhelming mass, and those of us who had rifles began a fire in their faces which broke holes in their front ranks but could not stop their onward march. The cannon were reloaded, and again our ears trembled with the concussion of the guns as they were fired all together. Back went the British a second time, leaving their dead and wounded in our front, and a third time they came to the charge only to be driven back as before. The odour of mingled blood and dust and burnt gunpowder arose, but, carried away by zeal and the drunkenness of momentary success, we thought little of it.

After the third repulse they hesitated, then sent a formidable column up a ravine, from which it passed and dividing again assailed us on both flanks and in the rear, while the great force in front of us made its fourth charge at our faces. We were enveloped by fire and steel; the cannon and the rifles flashed in our eyes, the smoke floated over us so thickly that at times it hid our comrades, and as the hostile and overwhelming lines drew more tightly around us I had a curious feeling of strangulation, as if it were my throat and not our company that was compressed. I choked with the dust and the smoke, and then a heavy weight was hurled against me with such violence that at first thought I believed myself to have a fatal wound, but it was only a dead man driven upon me by the cannon ball that had killed him. His blood was over me and mingled with my own sweat and dust, and thus we fought, while the hot sun poured burning rays straight down upon our heads, and the choking clouds of dust and smoke drove in our faces.

Let me say again that our sailors and marines fought here as they always fought, whether on land or sea, with the utmost valour and tenacity. Though pressed now on every side by overwhelming numbers, with the remainder of our army out of sight and rushing, wild with terror, into Washington; with no hope of success, and defeat the only thing sure, they fought on. Such is the result of discipline and training where the material is good.

The solid ranks of the enemy pressed more closely upon us, the dust and smoke clouds thickened. Suddenly our commander went down, badly wounded. Some of those in our front ranks, crushed by the mere weight of numbers, yielded, and it was plain to all that in a minute or two more our little band would be broken and shattered.

“Come!” shouted Cyrus Pendleton to me. “When it’s useless to fight any longer, Philip, it’s time to save yourself!”

It was the cautious old Indian fighter, the best of all fighters, the man who never sacrificed anything to false gallantry or bravado, who spoke, and seeing the truth of his words I dashed with him and Bidwell, who appeared just then at our side, at a thin point of the British line. A grenadier, bayonet presented, barred our way. I smashed at his head with a clubbed rifle, and I felt but did not see the blow, for I turned my head away. The fur trader fired a pistol at another, and then, leaping over their bodies, we dashed through the line down the hill and out into the plain beyond. A bullet or two whizzed by us, but in the wild turmoil of flame and dust and smoke and trampling regiments and shouting men we were not noticed more, and, short of breath, we passed off the field in the track of the fleeing army.

“It seems to me that we are running away,” said Cyrus Pendleton grimly.

“It looks like it.”

Ahead of us were other fleeing forms, and the plain was spotted with discarded rifles. I was oppressed by anger, shame, and grief, and as the fury of the battle died my muscles relaxed and I felt as if I could drop through weariness, but my will bore me on. Now that my back and not my face was turned to the enemy, a breath of that panic that had swept away regiments touched me. I was sure that they were firing at me from behind, and I felt a fierce desire to rush forward at the utmost speed and take myself out of range. My heels were becoming master, and I made an involuntary movement to throw away my rifle to lighten myself and quicken my flight. But I had enough pride and will to rule my heels and to crush down the sense of fear which overmasters when it is permitted to go far. I restrained my pace to an ordered flight, and kept my weapons for future use.

But the anger and the shame remained. We were now in the trail of the dust cloud that the fugitives had kicked up, and we choked and sputtered and our weariness grew. The sun blazed through the dust, and we seemed to be the chosen focus of his rays. I looked at Cyrus Pendleton and Bidwell. Their tongues were hanging out and their faces were masked in dirt that was wet and sticky with sweat. Overhead the sun grinned at us and poured his hottest beams upon our heads. Behind us the uproar of the battle quickly sank to nothing, and we knew that the sailors left alive had surrendered to overpowering force. The cannon and the rifles echoed for a few moments, and the hum of many voices, the shuffling of feet, the confused clamour of an army, arose in its place, and then, too, died away as we raced on toward Washington.

“Friends,” said Bidwell suddenly, “you must stop!”

“Stop!” I said in surprise. “Not now! it’s too early!”

“Only a minute or two!”

“What for?”

“To see me die.”

We stopped abruptly, appalled at his words, the suddenness of them, the calmness with which they were spoken, but we saw at the first glance that they were true. Death was already upon him or he would not have spoken in such a strange fashion, and I noticed now a deep red blur upon his coat, where the bullet received in the whirlwind of the battle, and perhaps unnoticed at the time, had passed. I was smitten with a sudden great remorse, because I had sneered at him and despised him, and yet when the hour came he had proved himself of the finest and truest steel, and in so doing had lost his life.

I seized him in my arms, for he was about to fall, and bore him to the roadside, intending to put him down there on the grass. But I saw farther away a dense clump of trees, and with an eye to the pursuing British army I hastened to them, carrying the dying man and followed by Cyrus Pendleton, aghast at the fate of Bidwell, to whom he was really attached, and the collapse of his sanguine schemes of grandeur. I hastened into the clump of trees and put Bidwell down upon the grass.

“Thank you, Phil,” he said, with his dying breath. “I tried to make a good soldier. I gave the best that was in me.”

He spoke true words, for he had given his life. He tried to reach out his hand and I took it, but as I took it he died, and I have never been ashamed of the tear that fell then from my eyes. Mr. Pendleton seemed stupefied, as if his world were coming to an end, but I roused him and told him that we must dispose of Bidwell’s body before we could continue our flight to Washington. We could hear the distant cries and tramplings and the scattering shots of the pursuing army, but we knew the way across the fields and through the woods, and I had no fear. A little farther back we found a cabin inhabited by negroes who were frightened to the verge of death and ready to acknowledge the first man who came as their sovereign lord and master. They screamed with fear at the sight of the dead body, but two ten-dollar gold pieces persuaded them to take it, a trust which they kept faithfully, and the mortal remains of poor Bidwell were buried afterward according to the rites of the Church into which he had been born.

Leaving the body there, we continued our flight, oppressed by grief, shame, and anxiety. No man could tell what would happen to Washington. The victors behind were those veterans of whom the Duke of Wellington, their own commander, wrote to the British ministry: “It is impossible to describe to you the irregularities and outrages committed by the troops.” The men who were with Wellington were the men who were now at Washington.

My first thought was of Marian, and her father told me he would go to her at once in Georgetown. Even as he told me we parted, he to go as he had said he would and take her to safety, and I to go to Washington, where I thought it my duty to be, for even yet I hoped that the army might rally and make some sort of a stand.

I was sore of muscle, wearied by the battle and the flight, the heat and the dust, but I passed on at steady speed, and, entering Washington, saw for the first and last time a city in despair, its people fleeing before a ruthless conqueror, a sight which our country luckily has beheld neither before nor since. My head swam at the confusion and the terror which surged around me. There was not the slightest hope of reforming an army; no army was there, but the air was filled with the screaming of children, the crying of women, the shouting and cursing of men, while the clouds of dust kicked up from the earth half veiled houses and human beings, and the hot glare of the sun beat down on everything. A wounded soldier, a clerk in the Treasury Department whom I had known, sat on the steps of a house tying up his wound with a handkerchief.

“Over the bridge to Virginia, Ten Broeck!” he shouted to me.

He must have recognised me by my size, for my face was encased in dried mud and blood as in a mask. I shook my head, and he said nothing more, but took his own advice and fled toward the bridge, which was crowded with a flying procession in wagons, on horseback, and among them many of the great officials of our nation. The President and his wife had crossed the river in a boat already, Mrs. Madison lingering to the last to save the famous portrait of Washington in the White House.

The wreck swept on, leaving full evidence of its passage. In the streets lay abandoned guns, pieces of furniture, and broken mirrors, and the stray breezes caught up documents which, for all I knew, may have come from the Capitol itself. Over the bridge thundered the crowd, the tail of it a huddle of frightened negroes, who, after the custom of their race, wept at the top of their voices.

I saw a group of twenty or twenty-five men in uniform; soldiers they were not, for when I asked them to stay and help in a defence they hooted at me and followed at a swift pace in the wake of the fleeing crowd. Dusk was coming on; in the east the twilight was appearing. The beat of flying feet had sunk from thunder into a distant rumble. Those who remained had locked themselves in their houses, doors and windows barred, and the fallen city was about to behold a night of defeat.

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