37 The Bucktails Grow Angry

The renewed attack of the Southern army was made with greatest violence on our right wing, where stood a brigade of remarkable men, Pennsylvanians, who proudly called themselves the “Bucktails”; that was their martial device, an emblem of honour, and the name meant as much to them as any banner or inscription ever carried by a body of troops with a standing of centuries, and a commensurate pride in their ancient honour. The brigade had never existed before these men were born, but they had been fighting all their lives—not in war, but in a calling with almost equal hardships and dangers. They were a regiment of giants, lumbermen from the wild hill and mountain regions of Pennsylvania, tall, far beyond the average of men, huge of chest and limb, with faces seamed by heat and cold, rain and sleet, hawk eyes, great knotted fingers, the strength of a bull and the digestion of a bear, born in the wilderness and living there by choice, sleeping oftener under the sky than a roof—men who would stand for a day to their armpits in icy water, guiding ten-ton logs down a rocky channel, and joke about the incessant risk of being crushed to death. It was men like these who could go into war as a relief from the hard duties of their daily calling, and such were the Bucktails.

It was behind these that a few remnants of the dismounted cavalry, Shaftoe and I among them, who had been defending the railroad cut, took refuge, and sought a little breathing spell before entering the battle anew.

When the Southern wave gathered itself again and came on, its crest a ribbon of steel and fire, the Bucktails rose from the ground where they had been taking a moment’s rest and regarded the enemy with calm and impartial contemplation; they had eaten like giants, and they stood up rows of giants, expanding their chests, stretching their muscles, rejoicing in their strength, and unafraid.

The Bucktails were in a good humour, an exceedingly good humour. They had been camping and marching so long that they had begun to think army life fit only for men of common calibre, men who had plenty of patience and were willing to pass day after day without any event of interest—that is, men who were fond of a quiet life; but it did not suit them; they had expected danger in coming to war, and when it made a wide circuit around them they growled among themselves and said that the whole thing was a sham; it was too dull. What had they enlisted for but to fight? and if they could not fight, they might as well go back to their lumbering among the mountains, where life at least had its variety, and was seasoned with the fine spice of risk.

But now, danger after so many shabby evasions was a present and threatening fact; all these sights and sounds had familiarity in them, and, moreover, they meant something. The roar of the cannon was like the thunder of ten thousand logs leaping down the cataract of a swollen mountain stream; the smell of the battle smoke tickled their nostrils like the ashes of one of their own mountain forests burning in summer, when the dead heat has been hovering for days, and every tree is as dry as a coal; thus they found a double joy: the smell and sound of home, and the break in the monotony of recent life. So the Bucktails were happy, and, seeing the battle roll nearer and yet nearer to them, its front a wall of bayonets and rifles and cannon muzzles, each grasped his own rifle, much as the lumberman seizes the handle of his axe in both hands when preparing for a blow, and stood, feet planted like stout saplings in the earth, and waiting.

The Bucktails smiled; the smile was not one of malice nor derision, merely a smile of content. They had no hatred of the foe, and they did not undervalue him, they never made such a mistake as that; on the contrary, they had the highest respect for him, and that was why they smiled. Here was an enemy entirely worthy of themselves, the Bucktails, sons of the forests and mountains, and they would be lowered in no way by meeting him; anger had no place whatever among their feelings at this moment, and they stood like gentlemen, unexcited and unafraid.

Their commander gave the order to fire. The rifles seemed to leap to their shoulders and the flames to spurt from the muzzles at the same moment. Then nothing was heard among them for a while but the clicking of the gunlocks, the crackle of the volleys, the stifled cry of a man hard hit, the deep breathing of the brigade, and once or twice the quick, snapping order of an officer. The front of the Bucktails was a sheet of fire, and the bullets sang merrily through it and the smoke beyond. By and by they waited a little for the smoke to lift.

There is a jester or a joker, a man of many words, in every regiment or company, and the Bucktails rejoiced in theirs; he was a youngster of six and a half feet, one of the largest of them all, and his name was McConnell, half Irishman half Scotchman by descent, and all American by birth, feeling, and fact. Standing upon a rock, where his six and a half feet became seven and a half feet of rawboned and picturesque humanity, he exercised his gift of irresponsible speech and invited the rebels, in a voice like mountain thunder, to come on and discuss a current topic of importance. But his tones were friendly, like those of one knight to another.

“We are waiting, gentlemen,” he said. “We have heard of Fredericksburg, and Manassas, and Chancellorsville, but we are here; you see that we do not run away. We are ever anxious to meet you, and hospitable though you may be, we shall be equally so! Come on, gentlemen, we beg you, we pray you, we are tired of waiting, we rejoice at the sight of such fine men.”

McConnell’s Irish descent was evident sometimes.

His brother Bucktails looked upon him and smiled an indulgent smile. McConnell was a privileged character, and if he wished to use words that were big and long there was none to oppose him.

The invitation was accepted; the approach of the Southern line did not cease, and its front blazed with flame; the bullets and shells flew in showers.

The Bucktails smiled again, and it was still the gentle, forgiving smile of extreme good nature. The battle was acquiring a pleasant warmth; they foresaw a period of healthful and important activity.

“Now that seems real,” shouted McConnell to the enemy from his rocky perch. “You are all wool, and a yard wide, gentlemen to the bone, and you mean business. That’s what we like to see, but we beg to inform you that the Bucktails are still waiting.”

His tone became one of exaggerated politeness, and had in it a strain of anxiety; he feared that they would not persist in their advance, that they would not come fast enough, that they did not place sufficient reliance on the Bucktails, that they would disappoint the gentlemen who were waiting with such eagerness to keep an important engagement with them. He implored, he begged his Southern friends not to disappoint the Bucktails, and he described the grief of his comrades if they were compelled to go back to their mountain homes among the logging camps without such an interesting meeting.

The smile of the Bucktails deepened and remained. McConnell was a credit to his regiment, and they would not interfere with his flow of speech; the beautiful words were linked so beautifully together; they too felt the exuberance of life and the joy of strong men about to use their strength.

Wishing to encourage the rebels and show that their reception would be as warm as the promise, the Bucktails began to fire anew. Their carbines cooled a little, the smoke floated away, and the whole target was disclosed. They excelled themselves, firing more swiftly than before in their good humour and zeal. The stream of their bullets increased in volume, and they stood in a broad and continuous blaze of light made by the flash of their rifles.

The battle flared along a wide semicircular line and its thunder deepened; the sounds blended, the shouting of the men, the rumble of the cannon wheels, the voice of the cannon itself, and the penetrating crash of the rifles, all confused, intermingling, forming a roar that had a range of many notes, each threatening. Dense columns of smoke arose, shot through with the brown of trampled earth.

The smile of the Bucktails became expansive. They continued to fire into the solid gray mass that came toward them; presently they paused again, and, looking eagerly to see what they had done, were pleased when they noted the new lanes in the Southern line, the cumbering of the earth with the fallen, and the hesitations of their foes. They were sharpshooters who had killed deer and bear, and it pleased them to think that even amid so much smoke and dust they could still look down the sights straight and draw the bead true.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” cried McConnell, in appealing tones, “why do you delay? Don’t you see that we, the Bucktails, are waiting? Virginians, Kentuckians, Tennesseeans, Texans, whoever you are, I wouldn’t have expected this of you! Soldiers with your caps full of victories, are you going to leave the Bucktails, who want your company?”

The Southerners had no notion of disappointing their foes; they were merely reforming their front line, shattered by the rifle fire, and they advanced again with steady step, heads up, eyes bright, ranks even.

The hearts of the Bucktails were full. “We have come to stay, and here we stay,” they said to each other. They noted carefully the ground they stood upon, in order that they might not be pushed back from it and not know it. They fired another volley, and again saw with pleasure its effect. The bullets and the shrapnel were whistling over their heads, but they had heard storms on the mountains make a louder noise. Suddenly the leaden sleet of the rifle balls sank lower, and the Bucktails were in its path; it went on through the regiment like a knife through cheese, and the muster roll of the Bucktails was shorter. But the Bucktails only smiled their habitual smile; they had expected to pay a price; they had been paying a price all their lives; logging and the winter storms always insisted on taking toll, and the loggers had no right to grumble. The dead lay where they fell, the badly wounded struggled to the rear, and the living did the work they were there to do.

MeConnell shouted his defiance; he admitted that the Southerners had done well with the last volley, but he bade them take notice that the Bucktails were still waiting; they had purchased in fee simple the land upon which they stood, and would defend their right against all who came.

The Bucktails smiled and jested with each other. Nothing had occurred to disturb their good humour; the foe was behaving in an admirable manner, he was disappointing no expectation of theirs, and they would disappoint none of his. They reloaded and fired their rifles with all the rapidity of skilled hands, sending the bullets home in a shower that swept level with the ground, and not higher than a man’s head above it.

The blood leaped in McConnell’s veins and his heart pumped it in a great flood to his head; he was breathing the fumes of battle.

“Don’t you hear the song of the bullets?” he cried. “Listen how it calls to you and soothes you! It’s like the buzz of the wind among the trees on the mountain top; it’s like the song of a river flowing down a gorge; it’s like the whistle of the axe as it bites into the tough wood! I love to hear it. It’s music in the air, and makes my muscles strong.”

McConnell was battle-drunk. Moreover, he was feeling the Homeric inflation, tinctured but not qualified by a Celtic infusion. All the Bucktails showed the enthusiasm of their bard. Knowing danger all their lives, they took no extra thought of it now merely because it came in a new form. They shouted their defiances again in the old Homeric fashion, bade the enemy come on, and boasted that they would hold the ground upon which they stood until a region that is warmer than this froze over! Their spirits were effervescent, overflowing. The shells and the bullets flew over their heads and around them, but did not strike them. Some special fortune designed for the Bucktails seemed to protect them, and therefore, as the battle deepened and rolled up toward their line in circular waves, the smile of the Bucktails deepened too, and spread in circular waves across their faces.

Meanwhile the ardour of the Bucktails grew. They had not lost an inch of ground; instead, they pressed forward to meet the enemy, and their ranks were steady and even, flexible like good steel, but as tough. The crash of their firing paused only when their rifles grew too hot, or for the battle smoke to lift, and always the same smile of content was upon their faces.

The flow of McConnell’s eloquence was unchecked, and came in an expanding stream. He made a run on his vocabulary; he used all the long and polite words that he knew, and his manner, always courtly, grew courtlier and more courtly. Then he turned to gibes and jeers, and ridiculed the Southern marksmanship. He told the enemy how his bullets and shells were flying wide, and bade him fire lower.

There was a nasty scream, a long, flying hiss, and a shell aimed with deadly skill burst upon the Bucktails where they stood thickest. The regiment quivered for a few moments like a man who has received a staggering blow. Then the wounded were carried away, and those to whom the combat was nothing now were left alone. But the Bucktails still smiled; this was only an incident of battle, and it was remarkable that it had not happened before. The smile became as hearty as ever when their heavy return fire caused the enemy to stagger and then stop, and McConnell burst into a shout of triumph and defiance, almost unheard now, for the thunder of the battle was roaring in their ears, and the incessant “Wheet-wheet” of the bullets was like the shriek of a storm.

The faces of the Bucktails were red, the hot blood at last showing through the brown skin; their eyes were flashing with determination and pleasure, and their teeth were shut hard. The clouds of smoke which had risen in front when they fired their last volley floated up a little and disclosed again the faces of their enemy as red and determined as their own. Then the sleet of rifle balls which had been whistling over their heads bent lower, like a flight of wild ducks, suddenly sweeping downward, and began to cut a way through the Bucktails.

The range of the Bucktails had been found at last, and the cruel sleet beat continuously upon them, riddling their lines, filling their squares full of holes like a pepper box, and giving them no rest. McConnell felt his blood leap as the fire lashed them through and through. His brain was hot and his eloquence rose to its highest. The Bucktails still smiled as this flight of steel and lead cut through them, and they responded to it with a mountain storm of their own. Yet they could hear around them the pat-pat of bullets striking home, a sound like that of pebbles dropping lightly on the grass, and the low cry of men—not much more than a sigh—as they fell. But they encouraged each other; stood with shoulders touching, and offered a bulwark of broad breasts that did not flinch. They refused to yield. They had bought the ground in fee simple, they repeated, and they would hold it.

The attack decreased in violence presently. The battle lines of the enemy seemed to shift to other points, and the Bucktails ceased for a time to be a centre of attention. The clouds of drifting smoke lifted again, the sunlight reached them, and they saw the cruel rents and seams that had been made in their lines, where the shell and the shrapnel and the bullets had passed. The Bucktails had held their ground, but they had been forced to sow their dead freely upon it to prove that it was theirs.

But McConnell—valiant, sanguine, irrepressible—lifted up his voice and shouted defiance as of old, the Homeric fire still burning in his veins, and the battle smile appeared again upon the faces of the Bucktails.

“They are beaten!” cried McConnell. “They are afraid to attack us again!”

But the column of the Southerners which had parted for a moment in front of them swung back together with a click like a ball going into its socket, and there again were the faces of their enemies showing through the smoke, and coming on. A stream of fire was directed upon the Bucktails, and their first rank crumpled up in the heat. But the second took the place of the first, and, fighting, stood there amid the shells and bullets, McConnell, the self-chosen trumpeter, shouting to his comrades and encouraging them with the cry that at last they were seeing a real battle. But the Bucktails had no thought of yielding. They intended to die to the last man first, and with an incessant closing up of their shattered ranks, and a swift return of the hostile fire, they stood firm until the tempest sank again, and the enemy was forced to fall back before the iron front of the lumbermen.

Then the Bucktails made an accounting of themselves and undertook to see how many lived and how many had died. They looked over the ranks and the little heaps of slain, and at those who still stood, an almost equal division. Then they looked at the faces of each other and noticed the change.

The Bucktails had ceased to smile!

“Courage, boys!” shouted McConnell. “It seems that the enemy is in earnest. I believe that he actually means it to-day!”

“If he isn’t in earnest, he shouldn’t make such a good imitation,” growled a captain of the Bucktails.

The enemy was in earnest—great, deadly earnest. The Bucktails could no longer doubt it. Because he had paused once more was no indication that he meant to quit. He would return again and again, and many times. He would give the Bucktails no rest; he would not only equal the demands of politeness, he would exceed them. The smile reappeared upon the faces of the Bucktails, but it was fitful. Moreover, it was faint as well as fitful. Yet the Bucktails rose to the need and presented the same front of steel to the enemy, who were forming anew before them, with a solemn drum somewhere beating the charge.

The Bucktails, in the earlier phases of the combat, had taken note of the whole battle which swirled over a long semicircle, but by a slow process their attention was concentrated upon their part of it; they were monopolized by their own combat. The foe was too active and dangerous to permit anything else, and now they admitted it.

The fire of artillery reached them, as they awaited the new charge, and burned them. They quivered under it and twisted about, but could make no adequate reply. They did not like this. It seemed to them contrary to the rules of the game, and was an unfair advantage. They were cut up by great guns, while their own covering artillery was directed upon some other point of the Southern line.

The last smile, faint and nickering, left the faces of the Bucktails; their complexions grew redder, and red streaks appeared in their eyes. They began to swear, not mild, liquid oaths that break harmlessly like summer raindrops, but deep, rasping, uncut, many-cornered oaths, that were flung red hot from the throat, and burned like acid.

The Bucktails were growing angry!

And there is something fearful in the anger of a brigade of mountain men all of whom are six feet high, and many much more; men of the open air and swelling muscle who had been good comrades with danger all their lives. McConnell was the angriest of them all. His eyes were inflamed and the cords of his neck stood out. But he lost the power of speech—his surprise and wrath choked him. The rich flow of his eloquence no longer mingled with the shriek of the battle. Yet the Bucktails were prepared to make their greatest effort.

The Southern line was hurled upon them again, crested with bayonets and preceded with showers of bullets. But the Bucktails planted their feet in the ground, and, standing amid their dead and the blaze of their own rapid volleys, received the full weight of the charge which broke against their breasts. The smell of sweat and blood, of clothing and flesh, burned by the flash of gunpowder, filled the air. The smoke and the flame and the shouting mingled in one red whirl, and the reek of battle inclosed them all.

Then the pillar of fire and smoke separated, and the combatants fell apart. The charge, like its predecessors, had shivered itself to pieces on the iron wall of the Bucktails.

But the Bucktails were not exultant. There was not a smiling eye in all their ranks. They looked again over their brigade, and to many minds came the simile of one of their own mountain forests swept by a hurricane. McConnell, now a dumb bard, was unhurt, but, as he stood amid the wreck around him, a single tear ran down his brown face. It gave way to anger when he turned his eyes toward the enemy, and saw that enemy, fierce and indomitable, his forces massing again, rushing forward to a new attack.

Angry, defiant, battle-torn, and with no semblance of a smile, the Bucktails gathered themselves afresh for the defensive, while the battle wheeled and thundered around them.

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