Chapter XL: On the Battle-Field

’Twas the battle-field, and the starless night
Hung dark o’er the dead and the dying,
And the wind passed by, with a dirge and a moan,
Where the young and the brave were lying.—L. E. L.

It was the night after the terrible battle of Cold Harbor. Both armies had fallen back. The dead and wounded lay where they had dropped. Among the latter was Colonel Rosenthal, who had been struck down while charging in front of his regiment. Young Wing, at the hazard of life and even of dearer honor, went in search of his colonel. Wandering in the darkness over that field of blood, he came suddenly upon a fallen horse and rider, and knew by the instinct of affection that he had found whom he sought.

“Is that you, Wing?” hoarsely whispered a feeble voice, as the young officer threw himself down on the ground.

“Yes, yes, my colonel, it is I,” sobbed Wing.

“How did you find me, my boy, on this chaotic field, under this dark sky?”

“How? Oh, how does the faithful dog find his fallen master amid such confusion? I saw you when you fell. I noticed where you lay. I could not come to you in the hurly-burly of that charge—”

—“Ah! a gallant charge, Wing! a glorious charge! It was fine to fall in such a charge as that!”

“Yes, my Colonel. But I have come to help you now. How can I do so? Where are you hurt?” said Wing, groping about, and feeling man and horse under his hands.

“I do not know where I am hurt, Wing. But the horse has fallen on me, partly,” groaned the colonel.

“Stay! if I can find a musket or a carbine—and there must be many scattered over this field—I can use it as a lever and raise the weight from you, my Colonel,” said Wing, moving about in search of the instruments required.

In his motions he touched with his feet what he supposed to be the dead body of a soldier. And he elicited a deep prolonged groan.

“Ah! I am so sorry! did I hurt you?” tenderly inquired Wing, stooping to address this new claimant of his sympathy.

“Oh, no—only roused me,” moaned the wounded boy.

“Can I do anything for you?” asked Wing.

“Water! water!”

Wing had a canteen filled with water, and he took the stopper off and put it to the mouth of the boy, who drank greedily.

“That was good! Now I can die comfortably. Friend, are you Yank. or Secesh?”

“Yank.,” said Wing.

“Well, never mind. What are we fighting for, I wonder? I’m Secesh. Put your hand—in my bosom, Yank. Take out a powder-flask cover that you will find there. My sister worked it and gave it to me before I left home to join the army. Keep it, Yank.——”

“I will keep it for your sister and send it to her if you will tell me where she lives,” said Wing.

“Her name is Ellen Jenkins. She lives—” And here the speaker’s voice failed.

“She lives—?” said Wing, listening attentively.

—“In Rich—in Rich—” panted the dying boy.

Wing snatched a flask of brandy from his bosom and placed it to the lips of the young soldier.

Too late! There was but the gurgling death rattle in his throat. He could neither swallow nor articulate.

“Do you mean to say that she lives in Richmond?” gently inquired Wing, taking the hand of the boy, who closed his fingers upon the hand of Wing and nodded earnestly.

And the next moment all was over.

Wing sighed and turned the young soldier on his back, and straightened out his limbs and closed his eyes, placing two pennies upon the lids to keep them down.

While performing these last offices he had several times touched a carbine that lay beside the dead boy.

How he took it up and returned to the spot where Justin Rosenthal lay partly under the burden of the horse.

“Oh, my Colonel! I have been away so long! But I found a dying soldier, moaning for water, before I found the carbine. And I had to minister to his wants, and even receive his last breath and close his eyes, before I could come back to you,” said Wing.

“You were right, my boy. But now the wind has risen a little and blown the fog away. Can you see where to place the end of the carbine so as to raise the weight of the horse from my limbs?”

“Yes, my Colonel, I can,” said Wing, poking the end of the weapon under the body of the horse that lay directly across one of Justin’s limbs, and prying it up a little way.

“There—that is already a great relief. A little higher—raise it a little higher, Wing, and I shall be able to draw my limb from under it and crawl away,” said Justin.

And Wing put forth all his strength, and pryed up the weight, and lifted it clear of the crushed limb beneath it, and held it so, until Justin Rosenthal crawled away.

Then Wing let the dead horse drop to the ground, while he rushed to his colonel.

A danger that neither had dreamed of was now threatening the life of Justin Rosenthal.

It appeared that the Minie ball which had killed his horse under him had also passed through his own leg, severing some important vein or artery. The dead weight of the horse falling upon this limb, had closed the orifice, and stopped the bleeding. But now, at the removal of the weight, the wound burst out again, and the life-stream of the man was running fast away. He lay panting, fainting, almost dying, when Wing came up to him.

“My Colonel! oh, what is the matter?” inquired Wing, in a voice vibrating with anxiety.

“I think that I am dying, Wing. But come here, boy. Come close. Stoop down and listen to me.”

“But what is it? oh, my Colonel, what is it? Where is your wound? What can I do for you?” wailed Wing, weeping like a woman and wringing his hands.

“I think that the femoral artery is severed, Wing, and that I am bleeding to death.”

“Oh, no, no, no!” groaned Wing.

“Cease lamenting, dear boy. Mine is but a soldier’s fate. How egotistical to bemoan it. Only remember, Wing, and tell my dear sister that I fell in the glorious charge of Wilson’s cavalry at Cold Harbor.”

“I will tell her! I will tell her! But I cannot give you up! I WILL not give you up! You must not die! You SHALL not die! Where is this severed artery? I will pinch it together with my fingers until I stop the bleeding, and I will hold it so all night and all day, and many nights and days, if necessary, until surgical relief comes to you!” cried Wing.

“Ah, my boy, you must hurry from this spot. Every hour that you stay here is fraught with death. You are actually within the rebel lines, Wing. How you ever succeeded in getting here undetected I cannot imagine, unless both chance and the darkness of the night favored you. But now, my boy, you must receive my last message for one I love, and you must hurry back before daylight betrays you to the enemy and to captivity,” said Colonel Rosenthal, gravely.

“Where is your wound? oh, where? Help me to find it, that I may stanch the blood,” said Wing, feeling blindly about the body of his colonel.

“Well, well, here, if you will have it. Here, in my right leg,” answered Justin, in a voice that was every instant falling fainter.

Wing felt the leg of the trowsers soaked in blood; he snatched his dagger from his belt, and ripped it up, so as to get to the wound. And he took his handkerchief, and bound it around the limb just above the knee, and drew it as tight as possible, and tied it fast, and so he checked the fast flow of blood.

“Thanks, Wing. Thanks, my dear boy. I think you have helped me for the present. Now hear my last message to one I love, and then turn and fly—save yourself,” said Justin, solemnly.

“Tell me, then, your last message. What is it?” inquired Wing.

“Say to my beloved sister that I fell leading on my regiment in Wilson’s glorious charge at Cold Harbor. Say if I could have chosen the manner of my death, I would have chosen this. Bid her bestow my property on the bereaved of this war—the bereaved of both sides. For the widows and orphans and old mothers of the rebel soldiers are as much to be pitied as those of our own. Bid her, when the war is over, to open wide her heart and home for the returning prodigals. Bid her do all she can, in her limited woman’s way, to heal the wounds of the country, to reconcile enemies, and to bring back peace. And give her my love and my blessing. Will you remember to deliver all this message, Wing?”

“Oh, yes! I will! I will! But is this the _only_ message you have to send?” sobbed Wing.

“The only one,” answered Justin.

“And is there _no other_—_no other_ that you remember in this awful hour—none to whom you would wish to send a parting word?” wept Wing.

“None—there is none!” answered Justin solemnly.

“No woman as dear, or dearer than a sister, to whom you would like to send some—some last word of love? oh, speak, if there be, and I will bear your message faithfully, sacredly, silently, until I meet with her for whom it is intended! Oh, think! oh, speak! is there _none_—_none_ but your sister to whom you would send such a message?” pleaded Wing.

“There is none!” answered Justin, solemnly. “Beyond this field of blood, there is none but my sister to whom I care to send a message.”

Wing sat down and wept convulsively.

After a little while Justin put out his hand, and taking that of Wing pressed it, and drew it to his lips and kissed it, and said:

“_Britomarte!_”

With a violent start the hand was snatched away, but almost immediately it was returned and re-clasped.

“Britomarte—now in this supreme hour—now, with my life-blood oozing slowly but surely away—with my hours nay, my very minutes numbered—may I venture to recognize you and call you by your name?—may I venture to confess that I recognized you from the beginning?” he pleaded, still holding and caressing her hand.

“Justin! Justin, my beloved! my beloved!” exclaimed Britomarte, whom we shall no longer call by her assumed name of Wing. And she dropped her head upon his bosom and sobbed aloud. He folded his arms around her, and she sobbed until her passion of grief had exhausted itself. Then she raised her head and wiped her eyes.

“I am dying, Britomarte! that is nothing; a soldier’s fate—no more. But stoop, my darling, and put your lips to mine, and give me the kiss—the kiss that my heart has hungered for through all these weary years!” he pleaded.

She stooped and pressed her lips to his in long, clinging, passionate kisses, murmuring between them:

“If you die, I die with you, Justin! I can not survive you, my beloved! I feel my heart sinking with your ebbing life! But oh! that we had our days to live over again! oh, that we had! I would not then repulse your dear love, Justin; I would not! I would not! Ah! how could I have been so unwomanly, so inhuman, as to repel such a heart as yours. Oh, live, Justin! live, that I may undo the work of years, and make you happy if I can!”

“My dearest! if anything could make me live in this world, it would be your love, that makes me so happy. But if I die here, Britomarte, we shall live in another and a better world, where all mists shall be cleared from our vision—where we shall know each other as we are, and love each other eternally,” he said, gently caressing her.

“Oh, try to live!—to live in _this_ world yet a little while, dear Justin. There is a great deal in trying, you know. Pray to the Lord to help you! Ah, do not cheat yourself out of your beautiful youth-time on this dear earth! The other world may be bright enough, but it is not _this_ sweet, familiar earth! Ah, try to live, dear Justin! let me look at your wound. It has ceased to ooze! it has indeed, dear. The blood is coagulated all around the binding. You WILL live if you only make a strong effort,” urged Britomarte.

Her words were like the elixir of life. They put new strength into the sinking man.

“If it depends upon me, my dearest one, I shall not die! I will try to live, Britomarte, since life holds out the promise of so much happiness in your love!”

“That is right! You WILL live! I know it—I feel it!”

“But, my darling, you must go now. Every minute you remain here is fraught with danger to your honor and your liberty. Go, dear Britomarte, go!”

“No, I will not leave you! I will stay here and watch you. And now I think of it, you must keep your limb perfectly still. The least motion may set it to bleeding again.”

“I will, my dearest, I will. But go now—do go!”

“I said that I would not leave you, and I meant it!”

“But every moment of your stay is replete with peril to you! Squads of rebel soldiers pass every now and then to plunder the dying and the dead. And the fog is blowing away, and it is getting clearer and lighter every minute, and if they come this way and discover you, they will capture you immediately.”

“So they will you, Justin, if they discover your rank. And I am resolved to stay and share your fate,” she firmly replied.

“Oh, Britomarte! Britomarte! think of the horrors of the Libby Prison! How could you—a woman—bear them! Reflect and fly, Britomarte! Fly, and save yourself in time!” he urged.

“If I were able to take you up on my shoulders and bear you off from the battle-field, as Aeneas bore his father from burning Troy, I would do so. But as I am not able so to save you, I will stay and share your fate. ‘Horrors of the Libby Prison?’—Oh, Justin! there is nothing in this world so hard to bear as separation from those we love. Nothing, Justin, nothing! I know it, I feel it. I said so, Justin, when you left me to go into the army; and so I disguised myself and followed you to the field. And I say so now, kneeling by your side in this vale of blood. I am now your promised wife, and nothing on earth shall ever part me from your side unless I should be torn by violence away. If you go to Libby, I go to Libby; happier if I share your fate in that foul prison and pest-house than I could be anywhere else on earth.”

“But, Britomarte, for your own sake—for my sake!”

“Justin, my beloved, I abjured my womanhood, disguised myself and followed you to battle; I have been by your side on twenty well fought fields; I have dared what woman never dared before, that I might be ever with you! Justin, Justin, my true love! my husband for time and eternity! never again ask me to leave you!” she exclaimed, her voice and all her frame trembling with emotion.

“I will not! Before heaven, I promise it! I will never ask you, I will never _consent_ to your leaving me!” fervently, earnestly, solemnly replied Justin, closing his hand upon her.

“That is well! Now let us talk calmly together, while we wait for what may happen. And now tell me, Justin, how it was that you recognized me, as you did, from the beginning? I thought I was well disguised, and I am a good actress; with almost a Protean power of changing my face, and with a ventriloquist’s gift of changing my voice!” she said.

“Yes, you were well disguised! wonderfully well! You had sacrificed your luxuriant and beautiful, dark brown tresses, and had put on a skull-cap wig of short, stiff, bristling flaxen hair, and drawn it tight and low over your forehead, making the latter much narrower than nature had formed it. You had shaved off your arched black eyebrows, giving your face the bald look corresponding to the short, stiff hair, and quite altering the expression of your eyes. You had widened your mouth by two deep hidden lines in the corner. Altogether you had made, as you women say, ‘a figure of yourself,’ which was not Britomarte. You had put yourself in the uniform of a United States soldier. And you always carried four or five pebbles in your mouth, to make you speak thickly like a German,” said Justin.

“And yet you recognized me?”

“Yes; when I saw you in the ranks—flaxen hair, bald face, wide mouth, soldier’s clothes and Dutchman’s voice to the contrary notwithstanding—in the ugly, awkward little raw recruit, to my unbounded amazement I recognized my beautiful Britomarte Conyers,” he answered, smiling.

Many times in her military career had Britomarte’s cheeks crimsoned for her own wounded womanhood; but never so deeply as now.

“Oh, Justin, Justin!” she said, covering her face with her hands, and forgetting that he could not plainly see it in that obscure light—“Oh, Justin, it was for your sake, my dearest, that I transformed and disfigured myself so.”

“I know it, dear Britomarte, I know it.”

“Division from your side was worse than death to me—worse than division of soul from body. I felt that I _must_ be with you, at all costs, but I thought that you would never find me out. I wished to serve you as a faithful little brother, with my identity unsuspected. Oh, Justin, Justin! you never misunderstood or wronged me in your thoughts after you recognized me, I know!” she passionately exclaimed.

“I never did.”

“Had I known that you had discovered me, I would have vanished from your sight!”

“I know it, dear Britomarte, I know it! for I know you. There is not, Britomarte, in the universe a creature who understands and appreciates you and your motives so truly and justly as I can and as I do.”

“I feel sure of that,” murmured Britomarte.

Justin pressed her hand and relapsed into silence. He was really very faint and weak from excessive loss of blood; and the transient strength lent him by excitement was beginning to fail.

Britomarte took from her pocket some pieces of hard biscuit, soaked them in the brandy from her flask and put them bit by bit into his mouth.

When he was sufficiently revived by these refreshments, she inquired:

“Dear Justin, when you recognized me in the ranks, how was it that you did not whisper private information of the fact and get me quietly mustered out?”

“My first impulse was to do just that very thing. But I seldom permit myself to act upon impulse; and so I reflected that I had no right to betray your secret, or to interfere with your plans, or in any way invade your free agency; and I resolved to let you take your own course and to protect you in it as far as in me lay.”

“Oh, Justin, dear Justin! good and true in all things, how much I——” her voice broke down and she wept.

“And now, love, forgive me in what I am about to explain to you—because, if I live, I am to be your husband, am I not?”

“Oh, yes, yes,” she answered, earnestly.

“And if I die, still we are to be one forever?”

“Forever and ever!”

“Why, then, we are bound together as fast as though all the courts in the country had issued our marriage license, and all the churches in Christendom had consecrated our union.”

“We are, my own dear love.”

“Then you will let me speak as plainly to you as to my wife.”

“Just as plainly. Yes.”

“Well, then, the very day on which you were mustered in, when I recognized you, I asked myself with a shudder, Where will she eat? Where will she sleep? With whom will she associate? How will she maintain her sacred womanly reserve in this crowded camp, where four or five soldiers occupy a tent together? And then it was that I felt the strong impulse to give private information of your sex, and have you quietly mustered out; but as I said before, I reflected that I had no right to betray your secret, or restrain your free agency, and I resolved to let you go on your own way, but to protect you in it, and so I immediately selected you as my orderly, and assigned you a nook in my own quarters, where your woman’s holy privacy would be, and ever has been, inviolate.”

“Oh, Justin, dear love, honored husband, a thousand blessings on you for all your tender care,” she said, stooping and pressing her lips to his.

He put his arms around her, and she wept to feel how feeble those strong arms had become, and he fondly returned her caresses.

“Tell me, now, Justin,” she said, “how it happened that you never once betrayed to me your recognition of me?”

“I have great powers of reticence and self-control. I knew that to betray my knowledge of you would be to wound your delicacy and control your actions, and so I constantly guarded—”

“Hark!” exclaimed Britomarte, springing to her feet.

“What is it?” cried Justin.

“The Rebels are upon us.—Justin!”

“Well, dear?”

“If they capture us, do not betray my sex to them, in any hope that they will respect it. Do not, Justin. Do not!”

“Not for a thousand worlds. Your uniform is the best protection your womanhood could have now,” said the wounded man.