Andersonville, vol 3 | Page 6

"Ready!--FORWARD! CHARGE!'
"We cheered till everything seemed to split, and jumped over the works,
almost every man at the same minute. The Johnnies seemed to have
been puzzled at the stoppage of our fire. When we all came sailing over
the works, with guns brought right, down where they meant business,
they were so astonished for a minute that they stood stock still, not
knowing whether to come for us, or run. We did not allow them long to
debate, but went right towards them on the double quick, with the
bayonets looking awful savage and hungry. It was too much for Mr.
Johnny Reb's nerves. They all seemed to about face' at once, and they
lit out of there as if they had been sent for in a hurry. We chased after
'em as fast as we could, and picked up just lots of 'em. Finally it began
to be real funny. A Johnny's wind would begin to give out he'd fall
behind his comrades; he'd hear us yell and think that we were right
behind him, ready to sink a bayonet through him'; he'd turn around,
throw up his hands, and sing out:
"I surrender, mister! I surrender!' and find that we were a hundred feet
off, and would have to have a bayonet as long as one of McClellan's
general orders to touch him.
"Well, my company was the left of our regiment, and our regiment was

the left of the brigade, and we swung out ahead of all the rest of the
boys. In our excitement of chasing the Johnnies, we didn't see that we
had passed an angle of their works. About thirty of us had become
separated from the company and were chasing a squad of about
seventy-five or one hundred. We had got up so close to them that we
hollered:
"'Halt there, now, or we'll blow your heads off.'
"They turned round with, 'halt yourselves; you ---- Yankee ---- ----'
"We looked around at this, and saw that we were not one hundred feet
away from the angle of the works, which were filled with Rebels
waiting for our fellows to get to where they could have a good flank
fire upon them. There was nothing to do but to throw down our guns
and surrender, and we had hardly gone inside of the works, until the
Johnnies opened on our brigade and drove it back. This ended the battle
at Spottsylvania Court House."
Second Boy (irrelevantly.) "Some day the underpinning will fly out
from under the South, and let it sink right into the middle kittle o' hell."
First Boy (savagely.) "I only wish the whole Southern Confederacy was
hanging over hell by a single string, and I had a knife."

CHAPTER XLIV
.
REBEL MUSIC--SINGULAR LACK OF THE CREATIVE POWER
AMONG THE SOUTHERNERS-- CONTRAST WITH SIMILAR
PEOPLE ELSEWHERE--THEIR FAVORITE MUSIC, AND WHERE
IT WAS BORROWED FROM--A FIFER WITH ONE TUNE.
I have before mentioned as among the things that grew upon one with
increasing acquaintance with the Rebels on their native heath, was
astonishment at their lack of mechanical skill and at their inability to
grapple with numbers and the simpler processes of arithmetic. Another
characteristic of the same nature was their wonderful lack of musical
ability, or of any kind of tuneful creativeness.
Elsewhere, all over the world, people living under similar conditions to
the Southerners are exceedingly musical, and we owe the great majority
of the sweetest compositions which delight the ear and subdue the
senses to unlettered song-makers of the Swiss mountains, the Tyrolese

valleys, the Bavarian Highlands, and the minstrels of Scotland, Ireland
and Wales.
The music of English-speaking people is very largely made up of these
contributions from the folk-songs of dwellers in the wilder and more
mountainous parts of the British Isles. One rarely goes far out of the
way in attributing to this source any air that he may hear that captivates
him with its seductive opulence of harmony. Exquisite melodies,
limpid and unstrained as the carol of a bird in Spring-time, and as
plaintive as the cooing of a turtle-dove seems as natural products of the
Scottish Highlands as the gorse which blazons on their hillsides in
August. Debarred from expressing their aspirations as people of
broader culture do--in painting, in sculpture, in poetry and prose, these
mountaineers make song the flexible and ready instrument for the
communication of every emotion that sweeps across their souls.
Love, hatred, grief, revenge, anger, and especially war seems to tune
their minds to harmony, and awake the voice of song in them hearts.
The battles which the Scotch and Irish fought to replace the luckless
Stuarts upon the British throne--the bloody rebellions of 1715 and 1745,
left a rich legacy of sweet song, the outpouring of