Lincoln Conscript - Free Audiobook

CHAPTER X
FIGHTING FOR THE FLAG

For three days, Robert Barnwell Bannister had been a soldier of the United States. On the evening of the third day he sat at the opening of his tent studying a small volume of infantry tactics which had fallen into his hands. Inside the tent his comrade and tent-mate, a young fellow hardly older and no less patriotic and enthusiastic than himself, just in from two hours of picket-duty, lay resting on a rude board couch, with a block of wood and a coat for a pillow, singing softly to himself a rude bit of doggerel that had recently become popular in camp.

“Mud in the coffee and niggers in the pork,
Lobskous salad to be eaten with a fork,
Hardtack buns—oh, but soldiering is fun;
Never mind the grub, boys, we’ll make the Johnnies run.”

After a moment he called out:—

“Say, Bob, here’s a conundrum. What’s the difference between a bounty-jumper and a—”

“Oh, button up!” replied Bob, who was studying out a peculiarly difficult infantry formation, and did not wish to be interrupted.

“All right! now you’ll never know,” responded his comrade.

For a few moments there was silence, then the voice in the tent was again heard singing rude rhymes of war.

“We are goin’ to drop our thunder,
Johnny Reb, Johnny Reb;
You had better stand from under,
Johnny Reb, Johnny Reb;
You will see the lightnin’ flash,
You will hear the muskets crash,
It will be the Yankees comin’,
Johnny Reb, Johnny Reb;
And we’ll git you while you’re runnin’,
Johnny Reb.”

Above the tent, below it, all about it, from Warrenton to Turkey Run, was encamped Meade’s great army. There were seasoned veterans, raw volunteers, conscript regiments, all accepting and enduring with philosophic fortitude the hardships and vicissitudes of army life. Here and there camp-fires had been lighted, here and there a belated meal was being eaten. It was an hour for rest and relaxation from the stern duties of war, only the picket force being thrown to the front in triplicate lines, to protect the army from surprise.

Bob Bannister looked well in his suit of army blue. He bore himself with soldier-like precision, and a dignity befitting his occupation. Young, enthusiastic, good-natured, intensely patriotic, he had at once become a favorite with the men of his company. His every duty, performed with intelligence and alacrity, marked him in the eyes of the officers as one destined to promotion. As he sat there in the twilight, still studying his book, an orderly approached him and inquired:—

“Are you private Bannister?”

“That is my name.”

“You are wanted at company headquarters.”

Wondering what it could mean, private Bannister laid aside his book and went with the orderly up the company street to the captain’s quarters. Inside the tent a candle was burning on a rude table by which the captain was seated. Standing about, against the inner walls, were a half-dozen men whose faces the boy could not recognize in the semi-darkness.

Bob advanced to within a few paces of the table, saluted, and stood at attention.

“Private Bannister,” said the captain, “I want to know if you recognize this person?”

He nodded, as he spoke, toward a man dressed in civilian costume, standing near the entrance to the tent. Bob turned and peered into the shadows. The man stepped forward.

“Father!”

“Rob!”

And then Bob rushed into his father’s arms.

For a moment no one spoke. But the soldiers who saw the meeting never forgot it.

“Father, what does it mean?”

“FATHER, WHAT DOES IT MEAN?”

Bannister, his voice lost in emotion and his eyes dim with tears, pointed to a paper lying on the captain’s table. He had tried to imagine how Bob would look in uniform, but he had not thought to see quite so straight, manly a figure, clear of eye, handsome of countenance, “every inch a soldier.” And the words of Mary Bannister, when he read Bob’s letter to her, came back into his mind and voiced his sentiment: “I’m proud of him. He’s the bravest boy in the world.”

“Private Bannister,” said the captain, “your father is here in custody of Lieutenant Forsythe of the regular army, who brings with him this letter.”

The captain then read impressively, with a sense of its true importance, the President’s letter to General Meade. When he reached the end and read the name “A. Lincoln,” every man in the tent lifted his cap reverently from his head.

“This communication,” continued the captain, “was delivered to the general commanding, by him endorsed and delivered to the division commander, then to the commander of our brigade, to the colonel of the regiment, and in due course has reached me. It has been endorsed as follows by all the officers through whose hands it has passed: ‘If not prejudicial to the service, let the President’s wish be carried out.’ There is therefore nothing left for me to do except to give the order for your discharge, and the mustering in of your father to take your place. Permit me to add, however, that we shall regret to lose you. During your brief term of service you have been a good soldier, a credit to the company and the army.”

In the silence that followed, the captain half rose from the table as if to close the interview. Then Bob found his voice.

“But, Captain Howarth,” he said, “I don’t want to be discharged. I don’t want to go home. I want to stay. I am old enough. I can march. I can do picket-duty. I can fight. But I can’t go back home now, it’s simply impossible.”

The captain dropped back into his seat, incredulous. Among the men standing against the tent-wall there was a buzz of approving voices. Rhett Bannister put his arm about the boy’s shoulders affectionately.

“You’re right, my son,” he said. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have asked it. I didn’t think. I didn’t realize; but—you’re right.”

Then Lieutenant Forsythe stepped forward.

“Permit me,” he said, “to make a suggestion. I talked much with this man on my way down here. I believe he will make a good and earnest soldier. The son has already proved his ability and patriotism. Why not keep them both? I am sure it will not militate against the spirit of the President’s order.”

“Right you are!” exclaimed Sergeant Anderson, stepping out from the shadow where he had stood dreading lest he should lose his protégé, of whom he had grown wondrously fond.

“Good!” said the other men.

“Let it be done,” responded the captain. And it was done.

In less than two hours Rhett Bannister was also a soldier of the United States. And so he and his son served their country in the ranks. They ate by the same camp-fire, slept in the same rude tent, and marched, shoulder to shoulder, through the autumn mists and the winter slush and mud of old Virginia. At Mine Run, a month after they were sworn in, they had their first baptism of fire, and bore themselves with such coolness and bravery as to elicit compliments for both from Captain Howarth. In winter-quarters, with the monotony of camp-life and the round of daily duties pressing on them, their spirits never flagged. Both by precept and example they radiated courage and cheerfulness to all their company. When, occasionally, a spirit of dissatisfaction showed itself in the ranks, when impatience with those in command became manifest, when poor and scanty fare and wretched clothing were the rule, it was Rhett Bannister, cool and logical, free of speech and earnest in manner, who moved among the men and counseled patience, who pointed out to them their duty and appealed to their patriotism, and never without success. “His influence with the soldiers,” said Captain Howarth, one day, “is worth a thousand courts-martial.”

There was one time in particular when murmurings of discontent broke forth, when the winter rains of Virginia were coldest and most piercing; when food was scarce and foraging forbidden; when Meade, under whom the soldiers had fought at Gettysburg, was discredited and displaced, and Grant, whom they did not know, was given supreme command; when the authorities at Washington seemed stricken with lethargy and blindness, and the anti-war sentiment in the North, increasing with dangerous rapidity, came filtering down to ears and hearts in the ranks not unwilling to receive it. Then it was that Rhett Bannister, the one-time hater of the administration, detractor of the army, denouncer of the war, went out among his comrades, from man to man, from tent to tent, from company to company, urging duty, pleading patriotism, counseling patience.

“You think you have troubles,” he said one night to a group of murmuring men, crowded into a smoky tent, while the cold rain dripped through the tattered canvas, and the wind howled dismally among the pines outside. “You think you have hardships and burdens and afflictions in the service of your country. Let me tell you something. I have seen Abraham Lincoln. I have talked with him face to face. I have read in his sad eyes and hollow cheeks, and the lines creasing his forehead, the story of his suffering. Boys, that man is bearing the burdens of this country and the woes of her people on his heart. Every drop of blood that is shed is as though it came from his body, every groan of a wounded soldier is as though it came from his lips, every tear from the eyes of those left desolate is as though it furrowed his face. You cannot conceive the immensity of the burdens he is bearing, or the weight of suffering he endures. Yet he is patiently, faithfully, earnestly, prayerfully, with tremendous power of will and strength of soul, pressing on toward the hoped-for end, and by God’s grace he is going soon to bring us all back out of the shadows of war into the light of a victorious peace. Boys, when you think you have burdens to bear, remember Abraham Lincoln.”

And they did. No man who heard those impassioned words that night ever again opened his lips in complaint of his commanders.

Letters came from Mount Hermon almost daily, sometimes a half-dozen in a bunch. People up there wanted Rhett Bannister and his son to know that they were appreciated at home. But the letters that came from Mary Bannister, strong, cheerful, splendid letters, were the ones that brought most joy to the hearts of their recipients. At last she felt that the ban had been lifted, and that she was once more a woman among women. She was not insensible, indeed, to the dangers that surrounded her loved ones night and day. She knew well enough that any mail might bring her terrible tidings about one or both of them. But such anxiety was as nothing to the agony of mind she had endured through many weeks before her son and husband went down to the war. And as there drifted up to her ears now and again news of the brave conduct and manly bearing of those so near and dear to her, she went about her household labors, happy in the thought that from this time forth she could look any man or woman in the face and say: “Behold my heroes!”

One day there came down to Rhett Bannister a letter from Sarah Jane Stark. A wise, impetuous, laudatory letter, such as no one on earth could write save Sarah Jane Stark herself. Over the first two pages Bannister laughed like a boy, but when he had finished the last line of the letter, tears were streaming down his face.

“To think,” she wrote, “that the one-time copperhead of Mount Hermon is serving his country in the ranks. I would give Billy my cat to see you in your blue uniform, and you know how much I love Billy. And that dear boy! I never cried about a boy in my life before, you know that; but I cry about that boy of yours every time I hear from him! I’m so proud of him, and so fond of him! Heaven bless both of you!”

And down at the end of the letter a postscript was hidden away. It said:—

“I’ve induced Mary Bannister to come up to town with Louise and live with me this winter. It’ll be pretty lonely down at your place, and I’ve got a big house and plenty of room, and I want company, and I want her. She’s such a dear, brave, patient little woman, and we’ll have a glorious time together.”

So, with no disquietude on account of their loved ones at home on their minds, Rhett Bannister and his son faced the enemy and, with their comrades in arms, fared on.

When Grant, in the spring of ’64, began his arduous and bloody campaign from the Rappahannock to the Rapidan and from the Rapidan to the James, they were in the forefront of the conflict. Yet they seemed to lead charmed lives. Out from the tangled depths and thousand pitfalls of The Wilderness, from the forest scarred and seamed across with fire and shell and bullet, from the ghastly field with its blood-soaked herbage and its piled-up heaps of dead, they came unscathed. At Spottsylvania Court-House and up and down and across the North Anna, through all of May they marched and fought. At Cold Harbor, in the early days of June, they faced, with their comrades, the merciless fire of those Confederate riflemen, until, scorched, winnowed, withered, the Union army, with ten thousand dead and wounded on the field, retired from the hopeless and unequal contest. Yet father and son came out of it without serious injury. Shocked, sickened, exhausted, they were indeed; scratched here and there by hissing bullets, but otherwise unharmed. Again, in the awful fiasco before Petersburg, in the crater left by the exploding mine, hemmed in, helpless, horribly entangled, black soldiers and white falling by hundreds under the pitiless enfilading fire of a thousand down-pointed Confederate guns, even from that pit of death they escaped, wrenched, bruised, battered, buffeted, but whole.

So, through all that summer they fought, in the bloodiest, cruelest campaign recorded in history, shallow trenches filled with dead everywhere proclaiming the awful sacrifice at which Grant was forcing the desperate and depleted armies of the South into their final strongholds.

As his officers had predicted from the beginning, Bob Bannister was rapidly promoted. For meritorious conduct, for brave deeds, to fill vacancies above him as the grim tragedy of war played itself out, he donned his corporal’s stripes, exchanged them for a sergeant’s, added the orderly’s diamond, and finally, in the fall of ’64, his shoulders were decorated with the straps of a first lieutenant. When this happened his company held a jubilee. He was a mere boy, indeed, not long past eighteen, possibly the youngest commissioned officer in the Army of the Potomac; but the men of his command trusted him, believed in him, loved him, and would have followed him wherever he chose to lead, even to the gates of death.

But Rhett Bannister was not promoted. That was not, however, the fault of his officers. Nor was it that his conduct was not splendidly soldier-like and meritorious,—it was simply because he would not have it so. It was after Cold Harbor that Captain Baker called him one night to company headquarters,—Howarth had long ago been invalided home,—and said to him:—

“Bannister, I am going to make a sergeant of you.”

“But, captain—”

“Oh, I know how you feel, but there’s no help for it. Brady’s dead, Holbert’s a prisoner, and Powelton and Gray can’t do the work. You must take it.”

“Captain, I beg of you not to do it. Be good to me. I’ll fight anywhere. I’ll take any mission. I’ll face any danger. But I can’t accept an office in the army of the United States. I told you this when you spoke of making me a corporal. I repeat it now. If I were to accept this honor I never could fight again, I never could look the boys in the face again, I would feel so cowardly and ashamed and dismayed. Don’t do it, captain, I beseech you, don’t do it! Let me fight in the ranks and be contented and happy as I am to-night.”

And the captain gave heed to his protest, knowing that it came from his heart; and so he continued to fight in the ranks, honored, trusted, and loved by all his comrades. In the midst of the political campaign of ’64, when the contest for the office of President of the United States was stirring the North as no political contest had ever stirred it before; when Lincoln’s enemies felt that they had won the victory, and that the battle of the ballots on election day would only ratify it; when Lincoln himself gave up the hope that he would be permitted to lead the nation back to peace and safety; when only the votes of the soldiers in the field could by any possibility save the day, Rhett Bannister turned politician and went out electioneering. From man to man he went, from company to company, from regiment to regiment, earnest, anxious, persuasive, pleading with his whole heart and soul the cause of Abraham Lincoln. And when the November ballots were counted, and the overwhelming majority proved that the people in the North as well as the soldiers in the field had confidence in the great War President, no heart in the Army of the Potomac beat with more exultant pride and unbounded happiness than did the heart of Rhett Bannister, the Lincoln conscript.

In March came the President’s second inaugural address. A newspaper containing a report of it floated early into camp and came into Bannister’s hands. He read the address word by word, sentence by sentence again and again. Then he called together the men who were fond of listening to him and read it to them.

“You will not find,” he said, “in all history, nor in all literature, a clause so sublime in thought, so simple in diction, so sweet with divine charity as this; listen: ‘With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’

“Gentlemen, that is Abraham Lincoln, than whom no man who ever lived in America has had a higher aim, a sweeter spirit, or a more prophetic vision.”

All winter Grant had sat before Petersburg, grim, silent, relentless, pushing here and there ever a little farther to the front, seeking the exhaustion of his enemy, waiting for the auspicious moment to let fall the blow which should lead quickly to the inevitable end. To Lee’s army looking from the heights on the tented foe in front of them by day, on the thousand camp-fires gleaming there at night, it seemed as though a ravenous monster, white-toothed, fiery-eyed, lay crouching before them, stretching out a sharp claw now and then, waiting pitilessly until the exhausted foe, weak and helpless, should fall, an easy prey, into its clutches. Surely no soldier, no army, ever held out more bravely against more fearful odds, in more desperate straits, than did this remnant of Lee’s tattered host, in its final effort to save the Confederate capital from falling into the hands of its enemies. Yet every drum-beat trembling on the soft spring air was but the knell of Richmond’s hope; every passing hour brought nearer and nearer her unavoidable doom.

Late in March Grant threw out a force on his left, under Sheridan, to meet and turn, and crush if possible, Lee’s right flank, and thus precipitate the fall of Petersburg. It was at Five Forks that the two armies met and clashed in the last decisive battle of the war. Overwhelmed in front, cut off from the main column on the left, borne down upon from the rear, fighting twice its numbers on every side, the little army of Confederate veterans, with a thousand of its men already captured, and a thousand lying dead and wounded along the barricades it had so stoutly defended, broke and fled helplessly and hopelessly to the west, only the darkness of night saving it from utter annihilation at the hands of Sheridan’s pursuing cavalry.

But on that field of Five Forks, after the blue-clad hosts had swept over it across the enemy’s redoubts, and only the grim harvest of battle was left, dread rows of fallen men and horses struggling and groaning among the silent dead, Rhett Bannister lay, at the edge of the White Oak road, his shoulder pierced by a minié ball, his dim eyes seeking vainly for the child of his heart. And just beyond lay Bob, stretched on the greensward, his blood-splashed face turned upward to the twilight sky, seeing nothing, knowing nothing of battle or victory, of friend or foe, deaf alike to the dying thunders of the conflict, to the exultant shouts of the victors, to the heart-stirring cry of that father who would joyously have given his own life that his son might live.