36 The Price of Shoes

I arose early the next morning and saw the dawn of a close, heavy day, the hot, sticky air oppressing lungs and brain alike. Broad, dark clouds hung over the long line of South Mountain, which shut out the western horizon like a wall. Scattered rays of the rising sun shot through the mists and vapours, and fell in beams of light across the town of Gettysburg and the sombre hills beyond. The walls of the houses shed damp heat.

“Only three days to the Fourth of July,” I said to Shaftoe.

“Yes, Henry,” he replied; “and I wonder how many more Fourths of July this country will have?”

I glanced quickly at him, but Shaftoe changed in a moment to his customary cheerful manner.

“To breakfast!” said he in light tones. “There is one thing that you must learn to do in war: always get your meals—regular if you can, irregular if you must. The same rule holds in peace, so I guess it will stand acknowledged by all men good and true.”

The sun swung slowly up, its rays fighting a way through the resisting clouds which still lent a dark gray tinge to the sky. They hung over South Mountain in close columns, and beneath them the line of the ridge looked sharp and threatening.

The minuteness of preparations begun the day before, and carried on through the night, was continued, the officers permitting no stop or slackening. More cavalry were dismounted and posted along the slopes of the creek called Willoughby Run, some in ambush, Shaftoe and I among them. Others were placed fifty yards behind us in an unfinished railroad cut, and behind these artillery. The four thousand two hundred men of Buford’s command were falling into the places assigned to them by this able and far-seeing leader, who was executing plans thought out the night before, the soldiers themselves knowing nothing, but going to their work with the silent obedience that the war had taught them.

“I didn’t think the Southerners would return,” I said; “those here yesterday were too few to fight us.”

“Maybe one of the rebels has gone back for his brother,” replied Shaftoe.

“Perhaps.”

“I guess he wants a pair of shoes,” said some one, referring to the reported cause of the first Southern visit to Gettysburg.

“Then we’ll try to fit him,” said another, with a laugh.

“It takes a mighty good shoemaker to give the rebel an exact fit,” said Shaftoe, shaking his head.

These men—old soldiers they were now, veterans of thirty battles and a hundred skirmishes, though few were out of their twenties, and some had not yet reached them—were calm and cheerful, not seeking to settle the future before its time. They knew perfectly well that they might not live more than a few hours longer, though the fact was not present to their minds, long knowledge having made it stale, but if they had considered the question it would not have troubled them; it was not important.

“Look at that flash,” said Shaftoe, pointing to the northwest and far out on the Cashtown road, one of the many roads that met or crossed at Gettysburg.

“What seest thou, Sister Anna?” I asked.

“Something much more dangerous than Bluebeard,” said Shaftoe; “that little flash came from a brilliant sunbeam striking on a bayonet. The bayonet belongs to one of a body of marching men, and those marching men are the Southern troops coming to hold a debate with us.”

“We can agree on a topic,” I said.

“But we can’t tell who’ll have the better arguments,” replied Shaftoe.

The flash of steel reappeared, but closer to Gettysburg, and then another, and then a sheaf like the sunlight breaking on distant waves. The flashes doubled and redoubled, passing from bayonet tip to tip, and the men and horses came from the gray wall of the horizon; they advanced and their figures grew more distinct; other lines of men stepped out of the gray wall and followed their leaders with regular tread.

“A heavy column—much heavier than ours,” said Shaftoe.

It seemed that the rebel had in truth gone back for his brother, and that he was one of a large family.

Some of the cavalrymen breathed hard; the horses pulled at their reins; the close, vaporous air infolded us; all talk ceased, and we heard the distant tread of the Southern troops blending with the faint rumble of their artillery. A rifle cracked, and a little puff of smoke, tinted blue in the cloudy air, rose among some trees beside the road.

“A skirmisher! Snaky devils!” said Shaftoe. “Listen; there goes one of ours, too!”

An answering rifle shot came from another wood, and up went the second puff of smoke. The echo sped among the hills.

“Don’t you wish that you could follow all the bullets fired in a big battle, and tell just what each one did?” asked a boy of Shaftoe.

“Nonsense! Why do you ask such fool questions? I’d rather not know; I don’t even want to know about my own,” replied the veteran. “Listen at those skirmishers! There they go again!”

A third and a fourth, and then a dozen rifle shots followed, sounding like the popping of firecrackers, and with nothing to do of my own, I listened for the sounds and looked for the little spurts of flame among the trees or undergrowth, trying, too, to guess where the next would appear.

I watched with interest the play of flame and smoke from the rifle shots, the little stream of red and the puff of white alternating in such picturesque fashion; the crackling of the rifle shots, now increasing fast, was not unpleasant, being rather musical at the distance, and the forms of the skirmishers appeared momentarily, flitting from tree to tree and rock to rock in search of cover as they advanced, and as active as if made of rubber.

The skirmishers hung in clouds on either flank of the advancing column, and in front, covering it on three sides, displaying a pernicious activity, running and creeping among the undergrowth and inequalities of the earth, their brown, fierce faces showing at times, and then gone again like ghosts, their rifles cracking so often that the reports became an incessant tattoo, while the little leaden messengers whistled as they sped through the air on their mission. The great column which they protected, and around which they skirmished with such vigour and activity, advanced steadily and without shouting. I saw it clearly now, a solid body of many thousand men, with formidable artillery, and I looked anxiously at the smaller force that held the Northern lines and awaited the attack. Still, there was no note of battle save the incessant flitting and firing of the skirmishers, who in their activity seemed to be made of flexible steel, and as heartless. But from the main body, advancing in such steady fashion, came no cannon or rifle shot.

The clouds cleared away somewhat; the vapours were sucked up by the sun, and the blue grew in the sky; the smoke of the skirmishers gathered in little white clouds or drifted off in patches toward the horizon.

I was struck by the difference between this day and Shiloh, where the Southern army sprang suddenly out of the woods and darkness, as if summoned up by a magician’s hand, and the battle had begun in the flash of a moment, while here it was a deliberate approach in the open day, with most of the waiting combatants looking on, as if at a spectacle; nor was this difference in manner greater than the difference between the soldiers of Shiloh and Gettysburg—the raw, untrained, and ignorant armies that fought with such courage and endurance on the banks of the Tennessee, and these grim veterans who took their ease and waited until the battle should surge to their feet and draw them into it.

“Those sharpshooters are hot little fellows to-day,” said Shaftoe in a judicial tone; “see how they skip and jump! A sharpshooter is the only man who gets any real fun out of a battle. He’s a hunter after his game, and the smoke of his own gun goes up his nose until it makes him mad for blood. There’s a special hell for sharpshooters, you know.”

The fire of the skirmishers increased; they pressed forward in swarms, the rapid flash of their rifles made a line of flame, and the smoke drifted back over the heads of the creeping marksmen. The massive Confederate column came nearer and nearer, and the drift of idle talk floating in the last minute or two up and down the line of dismounted horsemen with which Shaftoe and I stood, ceased, the men clutching their carbines more tightly and drawing deep breaths, as if they would fill their chests for a supreme effort. We were hidden from the approaching enemy by the nature of the ground, and I saw that it would rest with us to open the real battle, an honour and a danger which we took calmly as became veterans.

Our ambushed cavalry, good marksmen, poured a volley at convenient range into the advancing gray Southern mass, choosing the buttons on their breasts as targets, and firing so close together that there was but one crash.

“Now for work!” exclaimed Shaftoe, reloading his carbine with a swift and practised hand.

The answering report came from the Southern line, descending the slopes of Willoughby Run, and some of our cavalrymen would ride no more; then our carbines were emptied a second time, and in a moment we were in a battle whose two lines of fire steadily swung nearer and nearer, while the men with thinning ranks and sweating hands, clasping hot gun-barrels, reloaded swiftly and discharged with deadly aim. But the Southern line came on, the faces of the men showing through the drifting smoke, and the flame of their volleys going before.

“What are they doing behind us? Why don’t they help?” cried Shaftoe.

“They are helping. Don’t you hear?” I answered.

The mounted horsemen in our rear were firing over our heads into the Southern column, and behind them all the great guns of the battery had begun to speak in tones most welcome to those who stood in the first rank and felt the pressure of the foe.

The Southern lines were rising and falling like irregular waves on the slopes of Willoughby Run, but did not flinch before the fire of the veteran troops who faced them. The combat became murderous to the last degree, and the crash of the rifles and the roar of the guns were unbroken. The Southerners had the advantage of numbers, we of position and the defensive. Buford, our general, watching from a lofty position, saw more long columns of men approaching on the roads from the northwest, and though it was too far to discern either uniform or flag, he knew that these could be only the brigades of the enemy, fresh troops coming to the help of their comrades. Our men refused to give ground, although our ranks were torn by the fire of the artillery and carbines; and the constant closing up of the squares after the passage of bullets and cannon balls through human flesh and bones, like the shutting up of an accordion as the air goes out of it, was fast reducing our army from a fair-sized to a small one.

But help was coming for us too. An officer in the belfry of the seminary beheld a column of dust in the southeast; the heads of men presently emerged from the cloud, and Buford himself climbed into the belfry to see who might come from that friendly quarter. It was Reynolds with his division, and now, by right of seniority, he became commander of the field.

We still held the ground, though at a cost we were not yet able to count, our foes giving no time for enumerations, and we were too tired to cheer the fresh troops which now came in sight, pressed on by messengers from Reynolds to hurry.

“Help at last!” I cried.

“Yes, help at last!” said Shaftoe, “but it only means a bigger battle! Look how the enemy gather! Flies never flew to a lump of sugar faster than they are coming!”

The lines of Southern troops issuing from the western horizon seemed endless. The battle but deepened; it was reaching out, widening its circle, extending long arms and bringing new regiments and brigades within its grasp.

Reynolds was leading a column on the Cashtown road to cut off the enemy when he saw disaster befall our centre and the triumphant Southern troops seize a wood at the end of the slope, from the shelter of which they poured deadly volleys. Always quick to see and equally quick to execute, this general, who had but ten minutes more to live, prepared to make those minutes of the utmost service to his country. Placing himself at the head of a command which had won and deserved the name of the Iron Brigade, he led it against the wood, the men breaking into a run and rushing on with their general. A bullet struck the brave Reynolds in the centre of the forehead and he died without a word, but the Iron Brigade, preserving the fire and dash that had given to it its name, swept into the wood and fell on the Southern troops there, annihilating them.

Three hours from the beginning of the battle Fortune, which was never more fickle than on that day, changed again and chose us as the object of her ardent but temporary worship. Doubleday, a new Northern general, and by right of seniority the third to take command of the whole field, arrived with fresh troops and regained lost ground. Heth, the Confederate leader, hurried forward his men not yet in the battle.

The character of Gettysburg as a magnet, the obscure little place developing so suddenly its hidden power, grew upon it with the day. Noon came, many thousand men had marched into it, and many thousand more were converging upon a town of which the majority had never heard before, brought there without intent, and by the original desire of the Southern troops to obtain some shoes—the modern world’s greatest battle built upon the basis of a pair of cheap shoes!

“They’ve made the fighting as fast as a man can stand it,” I said, when the combat shifted away from us for the moment.

“Yes,” replied Shaftoe, “and while we’ve been busy here the battle’s been growing without us. Look!”

He swept his hand in a circle, and everywhere it pointed to fire and smoke, and from every point came the crash of the combat—the long, steady roll of rifles and artillery, a deep and blended note.

“We are enveloped by the enemy!” I exclaimed.

“And our friends also,” added Shaftoe. “Let ’em fight. Our time will come again soon enough. But for the present I’m going to dine.”

“Dine! What on?”

“Not on cannon balls, my gay cocksparrow. I’ll take a chew of tobacco. Tobacco chewing has been called a filthy habit, and I believe it meets with the disapproval of foreign travellers, who write books about our country and don’t know their own; but as it gives me mental, physical, and moral sustenance—all good things in their way—I’ll indulge, while you, who don’t chew, will have to comfort yourself with air, of which there is a bountiful supply and no charge.”

Having delivered this long speech, he bit a piece of tobacco from a huge twist that he produced from his pocket and chewed in great contentment, meanwhile looking philosophically over the field.

“Battle is going against us,” he said presently.

“Why, I thought that we were winning,” I exclaimed in great surprise.

“I wouldn’t have said it was going against us if you had been a new soldier, but you are an old one now, and the difference between an old and a new one is that an old one can stand truth, when it’s bad, and a new one can’t, always. Look how the rebels charge! See what a spring they have! and see how our men pant! They’ll be shoving us back soon. If the South seceded like a woman, she certainly fights like a man; besides, I think their men are arriving faster than ours. Can’t you see them coming upon those roads out of the west and northwest?”

“There is such a thick cloud of fire and smoke that I can see through it but dimly; yet I can catch now and then the flash of bayonets and a glimpse of marching columns.”

“Yes, they come and never stop coming,” said Shaftoe, more to himself than to me. “Carbines now! Here’s our own corner of the battle booming up again.”

The combat which had sunk at only one or two points, and for but a few moments, embraced us all once more. The Southerners advanced, in force imposing and with a determination yet more imposing, the fire of their own Southern sun shining in their eyes. Heth had gathered his broken brigades and cemented them together with new men; the battle, so strange in its beginning and so remarkable in its steady growth of volume and intensity, was about to assume another and greater phase.

As the Southern troops advanced, both sides opened with all the guns, great and small, that they could bring to bear, and the combat swelled afresh.

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