Truce

Henry Ashton. Arlington Heights, in the United Kingdom of America. Tuesday, 2 September 1862.

The rebel armies were commanded by Thomas J. Jackson, who was the best soldier the rebellion had and was not enough.

The Universal Register: The American Civil War

They stayed in the woods in front of us for four days after the Thursday, and the dead stayed in the fields.

I will not describe the fields. It was the end of August in Virginia, and there had been no rain, and the wind was from the north-west, which is to say that it blew from the fields across the works and down the heights to the river and over it into the city, so that by the Sunday there were ladies on the Axis holding handkerchiefs to their faces who had never been nearer to the battle than the hospital doors. In the fort we did not speak of it. We could see the woods from the parapet, and the smoke of the rebel fires in the woods, and sometimes a man walking among the trees; and between the woods and the abatis there were the fields, and the ditch, and what was in them, and nobody on either side could go out to them, because the first man who showed himself in the open from either side would have been shot by the other.

On the Sunday afternoon a flag came out of the woods.

It came from the rebel general commanding the troops in front of the northern works, and not from Jackson, and it asked for a truce of a day to bury the dead. The answer went back the same evening from the general commanding on our bank, and not from the Colonel, and it granted a truce from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon of the Tuesday, the second of September. I learned that from the general’s aide, who told me as a piece of news. I have wondered since whether that was arranged as well: whether the two of them, who had served together in Mexico, and had known each other for fifteen years, and had not exchanged a word since the spring of 1861, had each of them stood a little to one side so that the other would not have to put his name to a paper that the other would read. I do not know. I know that it was done that way, and that nobody remarked on it, and that it seemed to me, even then, exactly like both of them.

The Colonel sent me out with the flag, because I knew the ground in front of the fort better than anybody living, having drawn it, and because somebody had to stake the line between the burial parties so that neither side’s men would go farther towards the other’s works than the truce allowed.

We went out at eight, from the gorge of the fort, a lieutenant with the flag and a sergeant and four men with stakes and a maul, and myself, and walked out across the causeway over the ditch and through the gap in the abatis that the rebels had shelled open on the Thursday, into the fields.

Their party came out of the woods at the same time, with their own flag, and we met about halfway, at a rail fence that had been knocked flat on the Tuesday. Their engineer was a captain of about my age, a Virginian by his voice, with a sunburned face and a notebook; and he saluted me, and I saluted him, and we stood at the fence for a moment, each of us looking past the other at the works behind him, and then he said, “Well, Captain. Shall we lay it out?” and we laid it out. We walked the line together for three hours, from the river road on the left to the woods on the right, and put in a stake every fifty yards with a strip of white cloth on it, and argued civilly about two of them, and split the difference. He knew his trade. He asked me, at the end, whether I had built the fort, and I said that I had drawn it, and he said that he had thought so, from the trace of the ditch, which was in the Colonel’s manner. He had been at the Point three years after me.

Then the burial parties came out, theirs from the woods and ours from the works, and the day’s work began.

I am not going to tell Your Majesty very much about it. Our men carried the dead out of the ditch and from in front of the abatis, on stretchers and on blankets and on doors, and laid them in rows at the stakes; and the rebel parties took them from the stakes and carried them back towards the woods, where they had dug long trenches along the edge of the trees, and laid them in the trenches side by side, in their jackets, and covered them. Some of them were known, and the men who knew them stood by the trench for a moment when they went in; most of them were not known by anybody on that field, or could not be. A chaplain on their side read the service over each trench as it was filled, and a chaplain on ours, a Methodist from Ohio, walked over to the woods in the afternoon and stood beside him for the last two, and nobody objected. Their men and ours did not speak much while they were carrying. When they rested they spoke a good deal, across the line of stakes, and traded: our coffee for their tobacco, and newspapers for newspapers, and once a pocket knife for a pair of spurs. They asked one another where they were from. A good many of them found that they had cousins in the same county, or had worked on the same railway, or had been at the same camp meeting by the same river, before.

The new regiment, which had carried our powder up through the battle, was kept back behind the works all that day by order. The officer who had brought the rebel flag on the Sunday had asked, I was told, that no Black soldier should be sent out under it, and that if one were, the truce would end; and the general commanding on our bank had agreed, for the sake of the dead. I was not asked. I did not object. I set it down.

In the middle of the morning I went with the bag.

The provost marshal’s people had made up a bag of letters from the prisoners in the capital to their families, as was the custom under a flag, and they sent it out by me, because I was going to the line in any case, and I carried it to the stakes and handed it to the rebel captain, who gave me a receipt for it in his notebook. I knew what was in it. I had put one of the letters into it myself, on the Saturday night, in my own hand, addressed to a house on the Rappahannock in King George County; and I stood at the stakes and watched him give the bag to an orderly, and the orderly carry it away into the woods, and I thought that it would very likely go by Fredericksburg, along the road I had driven down with my brother in the gig, and be at Marlfield within the week. I did not know whether she would open it. I still do not know.

A corporal of the county company was on their burial party, a man named Tom Sisson whose father had been the overseer at Woodlawn, our neighbours’; I had known him since he was a boy. He came to the stakes in the afternoon, when the parties rested, and stood on his side of them and looked at me for some time before he spoke. Then he asked me whether the captain was alive. I told him that he was wounded and a prisoner in the capital, and would keep his arm. He took that in. He said that the county would want to know, and that he would tell them. Then he looked at my coat, and at my face, and said nothing at all, and went back to his trench, and I understood that he would tell them that too.

Jackson came along the line a little before three.

I did not know him at first. There was a group of horsemen at the edge of the woods, to the right of the trenches, and one of them came out from the others and rode slowly along the rebel side of the stakes, alone, at a walk, looking at the work; a tall man in a faded coat, very plain, with a cap pulled down over his eyes and a brown beard, on a small horse that was much too small for him, so that his feet hung down below its belly and he sat leaning forward over its neck, as though he were riding into a wind. The burial parties on his side stopped work as he passed, and stood, and took off their hats, and he raised his hand to them a little without looking at them. He was eating something as he rode. It was some time before I saw that it was half a lemon.

He stopped at the stake where I was standing, and looked down at me, and then past me at the works, for a long time. He had pale eyes, very pale, and they did not move about the way most men’s eyes move; they went to a thing and stayed on it. Then he looked back at me, and asked me my name.

I did not know what to call him. I called him General, because his own men did, and he did not seem to notice what I had called him.

I told him my name. He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I had a cadet named Ashton. At Lexington. From King George County.”

I said that he was my brother.

He asked me whether he was among those in the ditch. I said that he had been, and that he had been taken out of it alive, wounded, and was a prisoner in the capital, and would keep his arm. He took that in as he had taken in the works, without moving.

Then he said, “He drilled well. He did not always understand why a thing was to be done. But he did it.”

I said that this was so.

He looked at the fort again, at the parapet and the ditch in front of it, and the abatis with its gap. Then he said, “That is a good ditch, Captain.”

I said that my brother had said the same, on the floor of the hospital.

He thought about that for a moment, and then he said, “Then I taught him something,” and it was not a joke; I do not believe that he ever made one. He said that I was to tell my brother that he prayed for him, and for all the men of the company, by name, every night. I said that I would tell him.

Then I waited.

I want Your Majesty to understand why I waited, because I think it is the whole of what I have to tell about him. He knew who I was. He had looked at the works, which everybody on both sides of that line knew to be the Colonel’s, and he had heard my name and placed it, and he knew, I am certain, that I served under the Colonel, because there was no other reason for an engineer of my rank to be standing at that stake. He had known the Colonel in Mexico. They had served in the same army for fifteen years. And he had just sent a message, by me, to a captain of his own who was a prisoner, about his prayers. I stood by the stake and waited for him to send another. I think he knew that I was waiting.

He did not send one. He looked at me a moment longer with his pale eyes, and then he said, “Good day, Captain,” and turned his little horse and rode back along the line to the horsemen at the edge of the woods, at a walk, eating his lemon, and the burial parties on his side stood and took off their hats as he went by, and he raised his hand to them a little without looking at them, as before.

The truce ended at four. The flags went back. The last of the trenches was filled at the edge of the woods, and the rebel captain and I took up our stakes and shook hands at the fence, and he said that he hoped we should not meet again in the same way, and I said that I hoped so too. That night the rebel fires were burning in the woods as before. In the morning they were still burning, and there was nobody at them.

I reported to the Colonel that evening, at the farmhouse.

I told him how the line had been laid, and how many trenches had been dug and how long they were, and how the parties had behaved, and about the bag. He listened as he always listened, without moving, and asked two questions about the ground, and wrote something in his book. Then I told him that Jackson had come along the line in the afternoon, and had stopped, and had spoken to me about my brother, who had been his cadet.

The Colonel said, “I am glad he remembered him.”

He did not ask me whether Jackson had said anything else. I did not tell him that he had not. I think that each of us knew what the other knew, and that it would have been a kind of discourtesy, to both of them, to say it aloud. He closed his book. He said that he thought the traverse on the left of the northern fort would want rebuilding before the winter, and that I should see to it, and I said that I would.

I have thought since that a man who would send his prayers to a cadet’s company, by name, through an officer of the other side, would have sent a word to an old comrade by the same officer if he had had one to send; and that he did not have one, or would not send it, and that the absence was the word. The Colonel never sent one either. They never exchanged another, in the whole of the war, and now they never will. Jackson is dead. He was killed the next year, and I shall come to that in its place.

He was the best soldier the rebellion had. I have no doubt of that, and I have met nobody who served against him who doubts it. He moved armies faster than anybody believed they could be moved, and he did more with fewer men than anybody on our side ever did, and he was not afraid of anything that I could discover, including God, whom he appeared to regard as a superior officer whose orders were perfectly clear. And on the Thursday he had put the best men in his army at a ditch that he could see, as plainly as I could, that they would never cross; and on the Tuesday he had ridden along the trenches where they were being buried, and looked at them, and eaten his lemon, and praised the ditch. I have never known what to make of that, and I do not ask Your Majesty to make anything of it. I give it as it was.

They went north.

The fires in the woods had been left burning to cover the going, and by the time our cavalry pushed out to them on the Wednesday morning the whole of Jackson’s army was on the roads to the west, going up the river, away from the capital, as fast as it had come. It crossed into Maryland by the fords a long way above us, and went north through the valleys on the other side of the mountains, towards Pennsylvania; and the army that had come back from the Rappahannock went after it, with most of the regiments from the works that could be spared, and some that could not. The Colonel did not go. His charge was the capital, and the capital was not threatened, and he stayed on the heights and rode his lines every day as before, as though nothing were happening anywhere else in the world.

I stayed with him. I rebuilt the traverse on the left of the northern fort, and the parapet that had been knocked about on the Thursday, and I drew a new line of rifle pits on the low ground where the second assault had come in, which the Colonel moved twenty yards forward, and was right. That is what I did in September of 1862, while the war went north into Maryland without me.

There was a battle at the passes of South Mountain on Sunday the fourteenth. I was not there. I heard of it on the Monday from the telegraph office in the capital, and read of it on the Tuesday in the newspapers, and on the Wednesday the lists began to come in, by name, by regiment, and were posted on the boards outside the newspaper offices and the provost marshal’s, with crowds in front of them reading for names they hoped not to find. I remember only one name from those lists, and for no better reason than that it was the first I read, on the first board I came to: a lieutenant-colonel of an Ohio regiment named Hayes, severely wounded in the arm while leading his men. He sits in the Commons now. I have never met him.

I do not know who won the battle at South Mountain, in the sense the newspapers meant. Both sides’ papers said that they had. There was more fighting in Maryland that month, after it, which I was not at and will not describe, because I have read accounts of it that do not agree with one another about anything except that a great many men were killed; and then the rebels went back across the river into Virginia, and Jackson went back into the valleys, and no rebel army came near the capital again for the rest of the war. That much I know, because I was on the heights the whole time, and I watched for them, and they did not come.

My brother went north before the end of the month.

The wounded officers among the prisoners were sent away to the prisons in the north as soon as the surgeons would let them travel, and Edmund’s surgeon let him go on the twenty-sixth. I went to the wharf in the morning to see him onto the steamer. He was thin, and his arm was in a sling, and he was in his green jacket still, because he had no other, with the shoulder of it cut away; and he stood at the rail among the other prisoners and their guards and looked at the city, at Charter Hill and the Axis and the hospitals and the heights across the river with the works along them, as though he were memorising it.

I told him what Jackson had said, at the stake: that he had drilled well, and had not always understood why a thing was to be done, but had done it; and that Jackson prayed for him, and for the men of the company, by name, every night.

He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “He would.” He said it in a voice I had not heard him use since we were boys, and turned his face away towards the river, and I did not look at him again until he had got it back.

When the steamer was ready to go he put out his left hand, because the right was in its sling, and I took it with my left, which is an awkward thing for two men to do; and he said, “Look after yourself, Harry,” and I said that I would, and that he was to do the same. He did not say anything about the letter to our mother, or whether he thought she would read it, and I did not ask. Then the guards took the prisoners below, and the steamer went off down the river towards the bay, and I stood on the wharf and watched it until it was round the point.

I did not see him again for two years.