Chapter XXXII: Hunter’s Raid

Virginia Military Institute cadets were younger than they used to be.
To suit the times the age of admittance had been dropped. Even so,
steadily from the beginning there was a road of travel from the V.M.I.
to the battle-fields. Out upon it went many a cadet in his trig white
and grey, never to return. In May, 1864, the entire two hundred and
fifty had travelled it, travelled down the Valley to New Market to
help Breckinridge fight and win that battle. In dead and wounded,
V.M.I. lost sixty boys. Now after a time of wild and blissful
excitement the lessened corps was back in Lexington, back at the
V.M.I., back to the old barracks, the old parade ground, the old
studying. To the cadets it seemed hard lines.

Hunter and his eighteen thousand came up the pike from Staunton,
thirty-five miles away. McCausland and a cavalry brigade, drawn across
his front at Midway, did all that could be done in the way of
skirmishes for delay. Breckinridge was guarding Lynchburg, an
important centre of communications, a place of military stores and
hospitals, and filled with refugees. Early and the Second Corps were
yet in Tidewater Virginia. There was no help anywhere. V.M.I. received
orders to withdraw from Lexington.

McCausland had the bridge across North River lined with hay, saturated
with turpentine. An alley through was left for his men when, at the
last, they must fall back before the blue advance. The night of the
eleventh passed, the people of Lexington sleeping little, the cadets
under arms all night. Dawn came up in rose and silver. House Mountain
had a roof of mist; all the lovely Rockbridge country was as fresh and
sweet as any Eden. Out the Staunton road came a burst of firing; then
with a clattering of hoofs, with shouts, with turning in saddles and
emptying of pistols and carbines, McCausland and his troopers
appeared, pressed back upon the bridge. They crossed, horsemen and a
section of artillery, then struck a torch into the turpentine-soaked
hay. Up roared a pillar of flame, reddening the water. With a great
burst of noise Hunter’s vanguard appeared. They galloped up and down
the north bank of the river shouting and firing. McCausland answered
from the hills across. The bridge burned with a roaring noise and a
great cloud of smoke. A Federal battery coming up got into position on
a great rise of ground commanding the town, and from it began to shell
the most apparent mass of buildings. This was the Virginia Military
Institute.

The grey and white cadets were drawn up on the parade ground. They
stood there with their colours, with their tense young faces. The
first shell struck the hall of the Society of Cadets, struck and
exploded, working ruin. After this there began a bombardment of the
corner towers, and a heavy rain upon the parade ground.

“_Attention! Right face! Forward! March!_”

Drum and fife played “Dixie.” Away from the old V.M.I., coming down in
ruin about them, marched the cadets. They marched to a fierce bright
music, but their faces were flushed and quivering. It needed all their
boy pride to keep the tears away. Lexington, anxious-hearted, saw them
go. Behind them the batteries were thundering, and Hunter’s thousands
were gathering like locusts. Colonel Shipp and the cadets took the
Balcony Falls road—Balcony Falls first and then Lynchburg, and active
service somewhere if not at Lexington....

They came to a high hill, several miles south of the town. “_Halt!_”
and the two hundred and fifty halted, and resting on their pieces
looked back. The Virginia Military Institute was on fire. Tower and
turret, arsenal, mess hall, barracks, houses of the professors, all
were burning down.

Hunter made no long tarrying in Lexington. He waited but to burn the
house of the Governor of Virginia and swept on toward the pass in the
Blue Ridge he had in mind. His line of march brought him and his
thousands into a country as yet uncharred by war.

At Three Oaks there was a wounded soldier—a kinsman of Margaret
Cleave’s, wounded in a skirmish in southwest Virginia and brought in
an ambulance by his servant back to his native county. Here he found
his own home closed; his mother gone to Richmond to nurse another son,
his sister in Lynchburg with her husband. The ambulance took him on to
Three Oaks, and here he had been for some days. Exposure and travel
had not been good for him, and though his wound was healing, he lay in
a low fever. He lay in Richard’s room, nursed by Margaret and an old,
wrinkled, coloured woman.

Tullius was at Three Oaks. Cleave had sent him back, months before, to
be a stay to the place. Now Margaret, coming through the hall, found
him on the back porch, standing on the step between the pillars like a
grave old Rameses. It was a hot June day, with clouds that promised a
storm.

“What is it, Tullius?” asked Margaret. She took an old cane-seat chair
and faced him. There were threads of grey in her hair. The old man
noticed them this morning.

“Miss Miriam ain’ nowhere ’roun’, is she?”

“No. She is out with her book under the oaks. What is it?”

“They’ve flowed over Buchanan, Miss Margaret. I done took the horse
an’ went down as far as Mount Joy. I met a man an’ he say they tried
to cross by the bridge, but General McCausland done burn the bridge.
Hit didn’t stop ’em. They marched up the river to the ford an’
crossed, an’ come hollerin’ an’ firin’ down on the town. An’ a house
by the mouth of the bridge caught an’ a heap of houses were burnin’,
he say, when he left. An’ he say that some of the Yankees were those
foreigners that can’t understand a word you say, an’ a lot of them
were drunk. I saw the smoke an’ fire an’ heard the shoutin’. An’ then
I come right home.”

“Do you think that they will march this way?”

“There ain’t any tellin’, Miss Margaret. They’ve got bands out,
’flictin’ the country.”

Margaret rested her forehead upon her hands. “Captain Yeardley—it will
put his life in danger to move him ... and then, move him where?
Where, Tullius, where?”

“Miss Margaret, I don’ know. Less’n ’twas somewhere in the woods or up
on the mountain-side.”

Margaret rose. “Get the wagon, then. We’ll make a bed for him, and do
all we can, and then pray to God.... You’d better go by the old
Thunder Run road and turn off up one of the ravines.”

“Miss Margaret, Jim’s got a good head, an’ he kin tek the Captain away
an’ tek care of him. I’se gwine stay at Three Oaks. I’se gwine stay
with you an’ Miss Miriam.”

Miriam’s startled voice came through the hall from the front porch.
“Mother! mother, come here! Here’s a boy who says the Yankees are
burning Mount Joy!”

She did not wait for her mother, but came down the hall, at her heels
a white-lipped, wild-eyed youngster of twelve. News came from him in
gulps, like water from a bottle. He had been taking his father’s horse
to be shod, and down near Mount Joy he had seen the Yankees coming up
the road in time to get out of their way. He had gone through a gate
into an orchard and had got down and hidden with the horse below a
bank with elder growing over it. From there he had seen how the
Yankees came through the big gate and over the garden and to the
house.... After a while, when it was all on fire and there was a lot
of noise and he couldn’t see much for the smoke, a little coloured
girl had come creeping through the orchard grass. She told him the
Yankees said they were going to burn every house in the country they
could get at. And she said he had a horse, and why didn’t he go and
tell people, so’s they could get their things out—and he thought he’d
better, and so he had been telling them—

How long since he had left the orchard?

He didn’t know—he thought about three hours.

Mahalah came running in. “O my Lawd, Miss Margaret! O my Lawd, de
Yankees comin’ up de big road lak er swarm o’ bees! O my Lawd, dey
kills an’ eats you!”

“Nonsense, Mahalah! Be quiet! Tullius, go upstairs to the east room
window and see how near they are.”

Tullius returned. “They’ve got a mile an’ a half yit, Miss Margaret,
an’ they ain’t marchin’ fast. Just kind o’ strollin’.”

“How many?”

“Hundred or two.”

“Get the wagon as quickly as you can. If Jim can get down the farm
road to the woods without their seeing him, the rest may be done. Tell
Jim to hurry. Then you and he come and lift Captain Yeardley.”

She turned and went upstairs toward Richard’s room. Going, she spoke
over her shoulder to her daughter. “Miriam, get everybody together and
make them take it quietly. Tell them no one’s going to harm them!”

“Everybody” was not hard to get together. Counting out Tullius and
Jim, there were only Aunt Ailsey and Mahalah, old Peggy, Martha and
young Martha, William and Mat and Rose’s Husband. They were already
out of cabin and kitchen and in from the home fields. Miriam gathered
them on the side porch. They all adored her and she handled them with
genius. Her thin cheeks had in each a splash of carmine, her eyes were
unearthly large, dark and liquid. All that she said to them was that
it was good manners to do so and so—or not to do so and so—in a
contingency like the present. Ladies and gentlemen keep very quiet and
dignified—and we are ladies and gentlemen—and that is all there is
about it. “And here is the wagon, and now we’ll see Captain Yeardley
off, and wish him a good journey, and then _we’ll forget that he has
ever been here_. That’s manners that every one of us must show!”

Tullius and Jim brought the wounded officer downstairs on his mattress
and laid him in the wagon. Old Patsy followed to nurse him, and they
placed beside him, too, his uniform and hat and sword. He was flushed
with fever and light-headed.

“This is no way to do it!” he insisted. “Inconsiderate brutes to take
advantage!—Ladies, too! Must stay and protect.—Lovely day for a drive!
See the country at its best!—New fashion, driving lying down! driving
in bed!—Time for new fashions, had old fashions long enough!—Bring the
ladies home something pretty—scarf or feather!—saw a man once show the
white feather—it wasn’t pretty.—Pretty, pretty—

‘_Pretty Polly Watkins_—,’”

Jim drove him away, trying to sing. It was not far to where the farm
road dipped into a heavy woodland. The rumble of the wagon died from
the air.

Mother and daughter turned and looked at each other. Margaret spoke.
“The hair trunk with Will’s things in it, and the portraits and silver
and your great-grandfather’s books and letters—we might hide them in
the hollow behind the ice-house. No one can see it for the
honeysuckle.”

“Very well. I’ll get the books and papers.”

Tullius and Mat carried out the small hair trunk and took down the two
or three oil portraits and the Saint Memin. Miriam, with Peggy to
help, laid a sheet on the floor and heaped into it a treasured shelf
of English poetry, essay, philosophy, and drama, old and mellow of
binding, with quaint prints, and all annotated in her
great-grandfather’s clear, firm writing. To them she added a box
filled with old family, Revolutionary, and Colonial letters. William
and Rose’s Husband took up the bundle, Martha and young Martha and
Mahalah filled their aprons with the silver. All hurried through the
flower garden, between the sweet william and canterbury bell and
hermosa roses, to the mossy-roofed ice-house and a cavity, scooped by
nature in the bank behind and veiled by a mass of vines. Will and
Miriam had always used it when they played Swiss Family Robinson. Now
they leaned the portraits against its damp walls and set the hair
trunk and the silver and the books and papers on the earth that
glistened where snails had traversed it. The honeysuckle did not hide
the place perfectly, but it would take a deliberate search and sharp
eyes to discover it, and beggars must not be choosers. The movements
of all had been swift; they were back through the flower garden to the
house in the shortest of times. As mother and daughter reëntered the
hall they heard through the open front door a hum of voices and a
sound of oncoming feet.

“We had best meet them here,” said Margaret.

“I am going upstairs to get my amethysts,” said Miriam. “I am going to
put them around my neck, inside my dress.”

Three Oaks was burned. Porch and pillars, doors and windows, hall and
chambers, walls and chimneys submitted, since they could not help it,
to a shroud of fire, and crumbled within it. The family was allowed to
take nothing out. Matters that they prized were taken out, indeed, but
not by them nor for them. At the eleventh hour soldiers, searching the
garden, found the little cavern and its contents. The silver was
reserved, but the hair trunk, the portraits, books and papers were
thrown into the flames.

Margaret Cleave and her daughter and the coloured people watched
destruction from the knoll beneath the three oaks. It was home that
was burning—home that had been long lived in, long loved. The outdoor
kitchen and the cabins also caught—all Three Oaks was burning down. In
the glare moved the band of the foe sent out to do the work. The sun
had set and the night was at hand—at hand with storm. Already the
lightnings were playing, the thunder pealing. Three soldiers came up
to the cluster beneath the oaks. They rolled in their gait like
sailors.

“Look here! Rebel women ain’t got any need of watches and rings! If
you’ve got any on, hand them over!”

“Miss Margaret,” demanded Tullius, “what’ll I do?”

Margaret looked at him with her beautiful, friendly eyes. “Nothing in
the world, Tullius. Stay perfectly still!”—She explained to the
soldiers. “I gave my watch and some rings that I had to the
Confederacy long ago. My daughter has neither.”

“She’s got a chain around her neck this minute. If you don’t want—”

“Exactly. Give the gentleman the necklace, Miriam.”

Miriam unclasped and gave it. The three looked at Mahalah’s hoop
earrings, but at that moment an officer came up and they perforce fell
back. “The men are—er—exhilarated, and not well in hand,” he said. “I
would advise you ladies to leave the place.”

They went, Margaret and Miriam leading, Tullius and the others
pressing behind them. Save for the lightnings it was dark when they
passed through the big gate out upon the open road. Behind them the
three oaks stood up like giant sea fans in an ocean of fire. A moment
later the storm broke in a wild clamour of wind and rain.