The Sword of Antietam | Page 9

yet, Mr. Mason, but we've got to fight as we never
fought before."
The Union men, both those who had faced Jackson before and those
who were now meeting him for the first time, fought with unsurpassed

valor, but, unequal in numbers, they saw the victory wrenched from
their grasp. Jackson now had his forces in the hollow of his hand. He
saw everything that was passing, and with the mind of a master he read
the meaning of it. He strengthened his own weak points and increased
the attack upon those of the North.
Dick remained beside the sergeant. He had lost sight of Colonel
Winchester, Warner and Pennington in the smoke and the dreadful
confusion, but he saw well enough that his fears were coming true.
The attack in front increased in violence, and the Northern army was
also attacked with fiery energy on both flanks. The men had the actual
physical feeling that they were enclosed in the jaws of a vise, and,
forced to abandon all hope of victory, they fought now to escape. Two
small squadrons of cavalry, scarce two hundred in number, sent
forward from a wood, charged the whole Southern army under a storm
of cannon and rifle fire. They equalled the ride of the Six Hundred at
Balaklava, but with no poet to celebrate it, it remained like so many
other charges in this war, an obscure and forgotten incident.
Dick saw the charge of the horsemen, and the return of the few. Then
he lost hope. Above the roar of the battle the rebel yell continually
swelled afresh. The setting sun, no longer golden but red, cast a sinister
light over the trampled wheat field, the slopes and the woods torn by
cannon balls. The dead and the wounded lay in thousands, and Banks,
brave and tenacious, but with bitter despair in his heart, was seeking to
drag the remains of his army from that merciless vise which continued
to close down harder and harder.
Dick's excitement and tension seemed to abate. He had been keyed to
so high a pitch that his pulses grew gentler through very lack of force,
and with the relaxation came a clearer view. He saw the sinking red sun
through the banks of smoke, and in fancy he already felt the cool
darkness upon his face after the hot and terrible August day. He knew
that night might save them, and he prayed deeply and fervently for its
swift coming.
He and the sergeant came suddenly to Colonel Winchester, whose hat

had been shot from his head, but who was otherwise unharmed. Warner
and Pennington were near, Warner slightly wounded but apparently
unaware of the fact. The colonel, by shout and by gesture, was
gathering around him the remains of his regiment. Other regiments on
either side were trying to do the same, and eventually they formed a
compact mass which, driving with all its force back toward its old
position, reached the hills and the woods just as the jaws of Stonewall
Jackson's vise shut down, but not upon the main body.
Victory, won for a little while, had been lost. Night protected their
retreat, and they fought with a valor that made Jackson and all his
generals cautious. But this knowledge was little compensation to the
Northern troops. They knew that behind them was a great army, that
Pope might have been present with fifty thousand men, sufficient to
overwhelm Jackson. Instead of the odds being more than two to one in
their favor, they had been two to one against them.
It was a sullen army that lay in the woods in the first hour or two of the
night, gasping for breath. These men had boasted that they were a
match for those of Jackson, and they were, if they could only have
traded generals. Dick and his comrades from the west began to share in
the awe that the name of Stonewall Jackson inspired.
"He comes up to his advertisements. There ain't no doubt of it," said
Sergeant Whitley. "I never saw anybody fight better than our men did,
an' that charge of the little troop of cavalry was never beat anywhere in
the world. But here we are licked, and thirty or forty thousand men of
ours not many miles away!"
He spoke the last words with a bitterness that Dick had never heard in
his voice before.
"It's simple," said Warner, who was binding up his little wound with his
own hand. "It's just a question in mathematics. I see now how
Stonewall Jackson won so many triumphs in the Valley of Virginia.
Give Jackson, say, fifteen thousand men. We have fifty thousand, but
we divide them into five armies of ten thousand apiece. Jackson fights
them in detail, which