George Eggleston - Evelyn Byrd

“You’se jes’ anudder sich as Mis’ Dorothy,” she said. “Jes’ case it’s spring yo’ won’t hab no fire to dress by even when it’s a-rainin’. An’ so you’se a-tryin’ to cotch yo death o’ cole, jes’ to spite ole Mammy. No, yo’ ain’t a-gwine to git up yit. Don’t you dar try to. You’se jes’ a-gwine to lay still till dem no-’count niggas in de dinin’-room sen’s you a cup o’ coffee what Mammy’s done tole ’em to bring jes’ as soon as it’s ready. An’ de next time you goes fer to stop de makin’ o’ you dressin’-fire, you’se a-gwine to heah from Mammy, yo’ is. Jes’ you bear dat in mind.”

Evelyn doesn’t quite understand. She says she thought we controlled our servants, while in fact they control us. But she heartily likes Mammy’s coddling tyranny – as what rightly constructed girl could fail to do? Do you know, Arthur, the worst thing about this war is that there’ll never be any more old mammies after it is ended?

I’m teaching Evelyn chemistry, among other things, and she learns with a rapidity that is positively astonishing. She has a perfect passion for precision, which will make her invaluable in the laboratory presently. Her deftness of hand, her accuracy, her conscientious devotion to whatever she does, are qualities that are hard to match. She never makes a false motion, even when doing the most unaccustomed things; and whatever she does, she does conscientiously, as if its doing were the sum of human duty. I am positively fascinated with her. If I were a man, I should fall in love with her in a fashion that would stop not at fire or flood. I ought to add that the girl is a marvel of frankness – as much as any child might be – and that her truthfulness is of the absolute, matter-of-course kind which knows no other way. But these things you will have inferred from what I have written before, if I have succeeded even in a small way in describing Evelyn’s character. I heartily wish I knew her history; not because of feminine curiosity, but because such knowledge might aid me in my effort to guide and educate her aright. However, no such aid is really necessary. With one so perfectly truthful, and so childishly frank, I shall need only to study herself in order to know what to do in her education.

There was a postscript to this letter, of course. In it Dorothy wrote: —

Since this letter was written, Evelyn has revealed a totally unsuspected accomplishment. She has been conversing with me in French, and such French! I never heard anything like it, and neither did you. It is positively barbaric in its utter disregard of grammar, and it includes many word forms that are half Indian, I suspect. It interests me mightily, as an apt illustration of the way in which new languages are formed, little by little, out of old ones.

There was much else in Dorothy’s letter; for she and her husband were accustomed to converse as fully and as freely on paper as they did orally when together. These two were not only one flesh, but one in mind, in spirit, and in all that meant life to them. Theirs was a perfect marriage, an ideal union – a thing very rare in this ill-assorted world of ours.

AT midnight on the 3d of May, 1864, a message came to General Lee’s headquarters. It told him only of an event which he had expected to occur about this time. Grant was crossing the river into the Wilderness, his army moving in two columns by way of the two lower fords.

General Lee’s plans were already formed in anticipation of this or any other movement of the Army of the Potomac. He needed to learn only which line of march of the several that were open to him General Grant would adopt. Now he knew, and instantly his orders were given to carry out plans previously and completely wrought out in his mind. Grant’s movement by the lower fords indicated clearly what his plan of campaign was to be. He had under his orders a veteran army of one hundred and thirty thousand men, of whom rather more than one hundred thousand were ready for actual battle. Lee had a total of a little less than sixty thousand men – forty-five thousand of whom, perhaps, he could put upon the firing-line, with which to oppose the Federal advance.

Grant’s plan was to push forward rapidly through the Wilderness before Lee could strike a blow, turn his adversary’s right, and plant his greatly superior army near Gordonsville, in Lee’s rear, and between him and Richmond. If he could have accomplished that purpose, the surrender or destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia would have been a matter only of a few days, or perhaps a few hours. For if cut off in this fashion from all its sources of supply, and with no other army anywhere to come to its relief, the already half-starving Virginia force would have had no resource except to hurl itself upon Grant’s double numbers and shatter itself to fragments in a vain effort to break through impregnable lines. It would have had no possible route of retreat open to it, no conceivable road of escape, no second line of defence to fall back upon.

But General Grant was dealing with the greatest master of strategy of modern times. Grant’s plan of campaign was flawless, but Robert E. Lee stood in the way.

Lee instantly moved forward to interfere with his adversary’s march toward Gordonsville, by assailing him in flank. At the same time he threatened his advance corps on their front, in such fashion as to compel Grant to recall them and accept battle amid the tangled underbrush of the Wilderness.

This Wilderness is, perhaps, the very wildest tract of land that lies anywhere east of the Mississippi. It skirts the southern bank of the Rapidan for fifteen miles, extending inland from that stream for about ten miles. Originally it was densely timbered, but in colonial days, and a little later, the timber was cut away to supply fuel for the iron-furnaces that once abounded there, but that were afterward abandoned. As the region does not at all tempt to agriculture, the abandonment of the iron mines left it a veritable wilderness. Its surface became covered with densely growing scrub trees, interlaced with a tangle of vines and imbedded, as it were, in an undergrowth of a density inconceivable to men who have not acquainted themselves with the lavish luxuriance of Southern vegetation.

It was in this Wilderness that Lee’s columns struck Grant’s in flank, and for two days a battle raged there, of which, for difficulty of conditions, there is scarcely a parallel in the history of warfare.

The men could not see each other at a distance of more than a few rods. Regiments, struggling through the tangled vines and underbrush, came unexpectedly upon regiments of the enemy and fought desperately for the possession of the ground, neither knowing how much or how little the holding, the conquest, or the loss of the position involved might signify in a military way.

Orderly fighting was utterly out of the question. Not only was it impossible for corps commanders to handle their troops with co-operative intent; even brigades were so broken up, and their several parts so hopelessly separated and lost to each other in the thickets, that their commanders knew neither when nor where nor how to set one regiment to reinforce another at a critical juncture.

It was a veritable Donnybrook Fair on a large scale, where the only strategy consisted in pushing forward, and the only tactics in striking with all possible might at the enemy, wherever he was found.

The fighting was desperate on both sides. It was such fighting as only the most hardened veterans could have been expected to do under circumstances so unfavourable, such fighting as would have been simply impossible at any earlier stage of the war. To valour these two armies had added discipline and long use in war. Their determination was that of veterans, their courage that of matchless heroes, their endurance that of insensate machines. Here for the first time the two greatest armies of modern history had met in their perfection of discipline, of experience in war, and of that high courage which makes no distinction between the facing of death and the confronting of a summer shower. To these war-seasoned men on either side the hum of bullets meant no more than the buzzing of mosquitoes; battle, no more than a breeze.