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Evelyn Byrd

9781465682925
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
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Overview
A BATTERY of six twelve-pounder Napoleon guns lay in a little skirt of woodland on the south bank of the Rapidan. It was raining, not violently, but with a soaking persistence that might well have made the artillery-men tired of life and ready to welcome whatever end that day’s skirmishing might bring to the weariness of living. But these men were veteran soldiers, inured to hardship as well as to danger. A saturating rain meant next to nothing to them. A day’s discomfort, more or less, counted not at all in the monotonously uncomfortable routine of their lives. They had been sent into the woodland an hour or two ago, and had done a little desultory firing now and then, merely by way of disturbing the movements of small bodies of the enemy who were being shifted about on the other side of the river. Just now the guns were silent, no enemy being in sight, and Captain Marshall Pollard being disposed to save his ammunition against the time, now obviously near at hand, when the new commander of the Federal forces, General Grant, should push the Army of the Potomac across the river to make a final trial of strength and sagacity with that small but wonderfully fighting Army of Northern Virginia directed by the master mind of Robert E. Lee. But, while no enemy was within sight, there was a hornets’ nest of Federal sharp-shooters concealed in a barn not far beyond the river, and from their secure cover they were very seriously annoying the Confederate lines. The barn lay a little to the left of the battery front, but near enough for the sharp-shooters’ bullets to cut twigs from the tree under which Captain Marshall Pollard sat on horseback with Owen Kilgariff by his side. Still, the fire of the sharp-shooters was not mainly directed upon the woodland-screened battery, but upon the troops in the open field on Pollard’s left.

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