University of Virginia Library

1. I.
NOTES OF AN OFFICER OF THE C. S. A.

So June wears on in this good or bad year 1864, and our friend
General Grant is leaving Cold Harbour for a “new base,” I
think.

He has had a hard time of it since he crossed the Rapidan,
and we also; fighting in the Wilderness, (I came near “going
under” there); fighting at Spotsylvania Court-House (our Po
is more famous now than the classic stream of Virgil); fighting
on the North Anna, a maiden who stretched her arms between
the fierce combatants and commanded the peace; fighting on
the slopes of Hanover, when that Indian girl, the Tottapotamoi,
did the same; and then fighting here, how fiercely! on the
famous ground of old Cold Harbour, where the thunder of the
guns has seemed to many like an echo of those guns of
McClellan, which made such a racket hereabouts in June, 1862,
just two years since!

A good many things have happened since that period, but we
remain more faithful to our first loves than the blue people.
Then the Federal commander-in-chief was called McClellan—
now he is called Grant. The leader of the South was then
called Lee, and Lee is his name to-day. But each seems to
have a constant, never-faltering attachment for the “good old
place,” Cold Harbour, just as they appear to have for the blooming
parterres of the beautiful and smiling Manassas! The little
affair near Stone Bridge, in July, 1861, was not sufficient; again

in August, 1862, the blue and gray lovers of the historic locality
must hug each other in the dear old place! “Malbrook s'en
va-t en guerre,” to the old tune on the old ground!

The game is played here for the present, however. Every
assault upon the Confederate lines has been repulsed with heavy
loss, and Grant has evidently abandoned any further attempt
to storm them; he is moving toward James river. The fighting
has been heavy, incessant, deadly. Wind, rain, sunshine,
heat, cold, nothing has stopped it. But the Southern lines have
stood intact; so the war goes elsewhere. It is escorted on its
way, as usual, with a salute.

This morning a decided racket is going on. Boom! boom!
whiz-z-z-z! pow-w-w-w! there is a shell which has burst near
me. Won't our friends across the way permit an inoffensive
Confederate to smoke his pipe in peace, without disturbance
from these disgusting visitors? I have just dined on an infinitesimal
ration, and am smoking peaceably when my reverie
is thus invaded. That shell, which in bursting has raised a
little cloud of dust, might have hurt me; it has interrupted
me. Why do they fire so high, and why at me? I am not
a general. My flag is not up. I am not even fighting to-day.
I am smoking, and indulging no sort of spite against anybody.
I am thinking of some scenes and faces an enormous distance
from this spot, and am, in every sense of the words, “off duty.”
It is pleasure, not duty, which enthralls me. Recreation, not
work, is my programme for the nonce. Respect, my friends,
the rights of a neutral and non-combatant!

The cannonade continues. They are having a hot artillery
skirmish yonder, but I go on smoking without much excitement
thereat, being used to it. The time was when we fought
pitched battles once or twice a year, killed each other all day
long secundem artem, and then relapsed into gentlemanly repose
and amity, undisturbed save by the petite guerre of the
pickets. At that remote period, the present elderly, battered,
and unexcitable warrior, used to rush “to horse” at the first
roar of the cannon; for the roar in question preceded a general
and decisive engagement, in which every man ought to be “on

hand.” Now we have changed all that, or rather the enemy
have. Once, under McClellan, they seemed only bent on fighting
big battles, and making a treaty of peace. Now they seem
determined to drive us to the last ditch, and into it, the mother
earth to be shovelled over us. Virginia is no longer a battle-field,
but a living, shuddering body, upon which is to be inflicted
the immedicabile vulnus of all-destroying war. So be
it; she counted the cost, and is not yet at the last ditch.

All that talk about immedicable wounds and last ditches has
diverted me from the contrast I was drawing between the past
and present. Then, I meant to say, I always started up at the
cannon's roar, expecting a decisive battle; now, so incessant
and so indecisive is the fighting, I lie under my tree and smoke,
and dream of other scenes, scarcely conscious that those guns
are thundering yonder, and that many a brave fellow is uttering
his last groan. Thus we harden. Do I think of “those
blue eyes?” Well, the comrade dying yonder thinks of the
pair he knows. Poor fellow! then I return to my reverie.

The war grows tedious; carnage bores one. “Bores!!!”
This is, I think, about the fortieth day of fighting. We had
the “seven days' battles around Richmond” in 1862. Is this
campaign to be the “seventy days' battles around Virginia?”
The game keeps up with wonderful animation; guns roaring,
shell bursting, and listen! that long, sustained, resolute crash
of the deadly small-arms! Suddenly it stops; but a good many
brave fellows have “gone under” in that five minutes' work.
This takes place at all hours of the day and night. Grant keeps
“pegging away.” To-day he seems to gain something, but
to-morrow Lee stands like a lion in his path, and all the advantage
is lost. We continue to repulse every attack along the
bristling lines, as in 1862. Grant ends where McClellan began;
upon the ground at least. We hold our own. “Lee's army
is an army of veterans,” writes the correspondent of a Northern
journal; “it is an instrument sharpened to a perfect edge.
You turn its flanks; well, its flanks are made to be turned.
This effects little or nothing. All that we can reckon as gained,
therefore, is the loss of life inflicted on the enemy, and of having

reached a point thus near the objective, but no brilliant military
results.” Candid and true. They lose more heavily—the enemy
—than we do, but our precious blood flows daily. Poor Charley—!
A braver soul was never born into this world than
his; and, since something happened to him, he has been quite
reckless. He is dead yonder, on the slopes of Hanover, fighting
his guns to the last. And that greater figure of Stuart; he has
fallen, too! How he would have reigned, the King of Battle,
in this hot campaign, clashing against the hosts of Sheridan in
desperate conflict! What deathless laurels would he have won
for himself in this hurly-burly, when the war grows mad and
reckless! But those laurels are deathless now, and bloom in
perennial splendour! Stuart is dead at the Yellow Tavern
yonder, and sleeps at Hollywood; but as the dying Adams said
of Jefferson, he “still lives”—lives in every heart, the greatest
of the Southern cavaliers! His plume still floats before the
eyes of the gray horsemen, and “history shall never forget him!”

There was Gordon, too—alive but the other day, now dead
and gone whither so many comrades have preceded him. He
fell in that same fierce onslaught on the enemy's cavalry, when
they tried to enter Richmond by the Brook road, in that sudden
attack which saved the capital. “I blamed Stuart once
for his reckless attack with so small a force as he then had on
so large a one as the enemy's,” said a most intelligent gentleman
of the neighbourhood to me not long since; “but now I
know that he proved himself here, as everywhere, the great
soldier, and that he thereby saved Richmond.” And the gallant
Gordon! how well I knew him, and how we all loved him!
Tall, elegant in person, distinguished in address, with a charming
suavity and gaiety, he was a universal favourite. Of
humour how rich! of bearing how frank and cordial! of courage
how stern and obstinate! Under fire, Gordon was a perfect
rock; nothing could move him. In camp, off duty, he
was the soul of good-fellowship. His bow and smile were inimitable,
his voice delightful. He would present a bouquet to a
lady with a little speech which nobody else could approach;
and, at the head of the “Old First” North Carolina cavalry,

he would have charged McClellan's massed artillery at Malvern
Hill. We used to tell him that his rapid rise to the rank of
General was the result of his “personal, political, and pecuniary
position;” but that alliterative accusation was only a jest.
He won his rank by hard fighting and hard work; he gave the
South all he had—his time, his toil, his brain; she demanded
his life, and he gave that, too, without a murmur. Peace to
that brave!

These memories seduce me. I am getting triste—blue. I
do not like blue, having so many disagreeable associations connected
with it; I prefer gray. Blue eyes and blue skies are
exceptions, however. I differ with General Henry A. Wise,
who said to me once, “I like a gray day.” Hurrah for the
sunshine, and up with the flag that has “Vive la joie!” for its
motto. We need all the sunshine and gaiety that is attainable,
for whatever may be thought of our friend General Ulysses
Grant's genius as a soldier, he allows the gray people very
little time for relaxation or amusement. I think McClellan is
the better general, but the present generalissimo does “keep
pegging away” with unusual regularity! There is another roar;
but the artillery fire has slackened. Now the sound is heard
only at intervals. The desultory “wood-chopping” of the sharpshooters
comes from the woods and gradually recedes. Grant
is moving.