Chapter V The First Tennessee
I do not know where you are, Eloise. I do not even know that you are alive; but if you are, I have the promise of Aunt Lucretia that this letter shall go to you; and Aunt Lucretia, you know, does not break her promises.
And if you be dead, Dear Heart, as I do deep in my mind fear, for I have not heard from you, nor Aunt Lucretia since that June day was turned into December in a night—that day when I went to the old familiar, sweet places, to find no longer there her who had made them sweet—why, what matters so much? For the passing of the soul of a dear one, when we see that it is passed, is such a natural thing at last, such a little change to make so great a transition! While they lived and life looked full and wholesome, it all seemed so large, their life and ours. But they go in a night, in a breath’s draught. And then we see how small it was: a little finger-width zone across the world of things. A little too much heat, a little too much cold, a tiny vein broken, a severed cord, and it is whiffed out. Even in the fullness of strength and brave life a dash at bars on a great game horse....
Forgive me, dear one, if you be alive to read this; for I would not remind you now of a time you were different. ’Tis God’s way, and since He has kept in my heart my love of you, and through your accident showed me your love for me, have we not His two greatest gifts for our very own?
And as to that other world, do you know what instinct tells me it is? That there we will have a hundred senses where we now have but five; and there we shall see the Thought as well as the Thing: every thought, every dream, every hope, every love, these we know not as words but as beautiful beings whom we shall meet face to face. And its only law is Balance, Compensation, Recompense, Poise; the Equation of the Universe. We wonder here why there should be such things as sin and sorrow and injustice. But there we shall know that sin is not sin, but the prism which shows us goodness, that sorrow is not sorrow but the prism of gladness, and that death, as we now know it, is not a stopping, but the prism through which we see another light. Here, on our little earth, with only our five small senses, we see only the prism. There we shall see the rays. It is the difference between the star and its light.
And if we hold the prism of sorrow here, Dear Heart, as I do now, shall I not hold a handful of the joys which stream through it there? For here ’tis a poem written, but there the meaning of it. Here ’tis the sun rising, there the dawn. Here the giving of alms, there the joy of the giving. Here it is the instrument that makes music, there the music. Here ’tis only a picture, there the soul that made it.
And if you be passed, Eloise, if you be passed, even yet will I keep writing to you. For if letters be written with one’s heart’s blood, I know, in my soul of souls, that our dead will read them. For though I have lived but a little while according to the span of things, and less according to the knowledge of things, yet the little span and the little knowledge have made known to me the greatest of all truths: that I do not know: that even with my little knowing I have seen things come to pass which were more wonderful than those which I thought could ever be; that we live on the borderland of a world wonderful, mysterious; that we are clasping hands with eternity, and need only the language that will yet come to spell out the touch for us. And so I shall write to you even though you are dead, write to you, sweetheart, a love letter for your heaven, knowing that not only will you read it, but that I, in the writing, as in all giving, will at last be the one who will get.
It is selfishness in me at last, Eloise, selfishness that I may hold through life and forever this love of you in my heart, now that it has only memory and not your own sweet self to live on. And no greater love and more constant can there be than that which lives on memory. For the living-love, being flesh, must change with the years. But memory-love, being eternal, can never change.
I am at Iloilo; and the gap is great since that long ago June, that June of Tennessee blue grass and roses, and the old home and you, sweetheart.
There is little to tell of my leaving; of my quick decision to fight for my country and for you, Eloise. For, cast from my father’s house there was nothing left but my country’s, and losing the love of my kindred there was only your own great love left me, yours and my country’s. For these I am fighting. But at the last—I know you will want to hear it all—at the last our old grandsire seemed strangely touched, and the memory of it has burned my heart, once strangely amid flying Filipino bullets on the firing line, and once amid the thunders of the great thirteen-inch guns from the Monadnoc. And right glad I believe he will be when he learns, that though he called me a fool for refusing a soft place as aide to dear old Hawthorne, and a greater fool because I refused a commission which he himself could have got for me for the asking, and took a musket in the ranks instead, that I have risen from a private to the Captaincy of the crack company of the First Tennessee. So say the Regulars of the Bloody Fourth that we backed to a fight to the death against the Filipino trenches. So says old Hawthorne himself—God’s blessing on his old white head!—now commanding our brigade, who led us in with the rebel yell in his throat! And riding Satan, Dear Heart; cannot you see the picture, such a man on such a horse! And you should have seen how Satan loves the firing line and how he hates the smell of a Filipino and his pony!
But this story must be told straight even in a love letter to my unseen love in an unknown land.
When I left home I only took my father’s sword and Satan. I took him because of my love of you, and that old Hawthorne, our General, might have a horse to ride into battle that should be worthy of his rider. For if you have ever thought of it, sweetheart, you will know that no great soldier ever owned a mean horse.
I joined a company of the First Tennessee. In the company next to me was Braxton Bragg, commanding it by the influence of our old grandsire.
My first promotion came in San Francisco, where we camped for a month before sailing for Manila, via Honolulu. Our Captain was a Tennessee lawyer who knew little of the game. It was I who drilled the company, my German work stood me in good stead, and we won on dress parade drill. We were the best drilled company of the First Tennessee. Then our Captain resigned to practice law in San Francisco, and I was made First Lieutenant.
We dropped anchor off the city of Manila, November 28. It was an inspiring sight as we sailed into the Bay, to see the sunken Spanish ships, and Dewey’s flag ship with Old Glory flying, proclaiming Republican Liberty for the first time to the waters of the great Far East.
Our first fight came early in February. We had lain outside of the walled city on the Lunetta Driveway for nearly three months. We knew that Aguinaldo, with eighty thousand men, armed with guns we had given him, and those of the Spanish, was in our front, feeling his way.
It was nine o’clock Saturday night, February 4th, when the attack began. We heard shots from the enemy, then three in rapid succession from our pickets. It meant help. The men, who had been grumbling for three months for fear they would have to go back home without a scrap, sprang like school boys to a playground. Then the front lit up with a crackle of fire. Our rear was another sheet of it from the fleet in the bay, firing over our heads.
It was a hot fighting front, the First Colorado, Tenth Pennsylvania, Thirteenth Minnesota, Fifty-First Iowa, and First North Dakota standing the brunt. We chafed all night, standing in line down by the beach, away in the rear, the very base of our half-circle battle line. All night we stood hoping that we might go into it before it was over, our blood stirred by the battle and roar in front, and the thunder behind.
At breakfast Sunday morning we still stood in line, expectant, keyed to a fiddle’s string, eager. The cook passed our Sunday fare up the line, chicken and hot coffee. How little things stick in excitement! Then we saw a courier come out of the smoke and flame, and old Hawthorne rode Satan to our front.
“Boys,” he said quietly, “they have asked us to take the Filipino trenches, and we are going to take them. Attention, regiment! right shoulder arms, fours right, march!”
A Utah battery and the Nebraska boys supported us as we charged over San Juan bridge under fire and across a rice field.
We kept step to the boom—boom—boom—of the thirteen-inch shells firing over us from the guns of the Monadnoc. Down the bloody lane we charged, the bullets humming like hornets.
“Listen, boys,” said a man in my company, “listen how they hum!”
An old sergeant of the Regulars passed us, going to the rear. He was binding a handkerchief around his arm, from which the blood was squirting. But he laughed and called to us, “Oh, don’t worry about those that you hear humming—them you hear won’t hurt you!”
Then the trenches grinned in our front, spitting fire. We prepared to charge. Behind us were Regulars, and in the crisis of it all I saw Braxton Bragg. I hate to write this of the blood of a Rutherford. My shame, my sorrow was greater than his. His nerve had simply left him. He had got down from the hissing bullets behind a sandhill. He had quit before his own men. They did not shoot him, they did not have time; they charged with me, backing my own company. It was a quick rush and soon over. The Filipinos left their breakfast of rice in the trenches. But we left some of our bravest there, too.
But battered and tired as we were, the real fight was just on. In sweeping the Filipinos out of their trenches we had hurled them to the left on our own water-works that supplied the city and the army. If these were held by the Filipinos and our supply cut off our fight would be in vain. It is said that twenty thousand of them stood between our water and our line. Luck again was with us. The First Tennessee happened to be nearest to them and it was we who cut through, and only four hundred, a battalion, at that. In a quick bloody charge we took the works. Old Hawthorne and Satan led us as if on dress parade, a target for twenty thousand Filipino rifles, and not a bullet touched them. With cheers we followed the white hair of the old Confederate on his black horse with the north star on his head. We were holding a perilous place, for we were in the rear of the Filipino army, with our backs against the water-tanks, and foes in front and rear. But we held it for two days until help came. And the first battalion and third battalion had equally as good a record when the fighting was over.
A week afterwards old Hawthorne came to my tent. He was holding a telegram from the Secretary of War. “Jack,” he said, “I am a Major General, and you are the Captain of Braxton Bragg’s company. The boys of it wired petitions and elected you. They said you led them twice to victory. They want you to lead them always.”
Our hardest fight was at Iloilo last week. We took the city, but once out of the water we had to fight down barricaded walls, hemmed in and shot at from walls and house tops. For two hours we were busier than a bull-terrier in a den of cats. They were the best fighters we struck. They were officered, we learned, by the brave and brainy little Japs.
At the Lapaz sugar mill they tried to cut off some of the Regulars. We were nearest. It was merely our luck. Any other regiment would have cut through the enemy to save their comrades. At Naglocan they made a stand and there we finished them.
That was written a month ago. I will finish and let it all go together, finding you if it can; and if not, well my heart has found yours somewhere, sweetheart; in the writing my thoughts have met, somewhere, yours.
We stay and hold Iloilo, but General Hawthorne with a battalion of our boys went a month ago to Cebu to help out the Twenty-third regiment of Regulars who were hemmed up there in the mountains and fighting for their lives.
Would you like to hear how close I came to death yesterday, and not on the firing line at that? It was a nasty close call I had and the horror of it still twangs on my nerves. It is that, and not knowing what the morrow may bring, that has brought me to the writing of this last love letter should either of us pass into the shadow of things.
On the nearby Island of Mindanao live the savage fanatics, the Moros. These people have been a terror to the Spaniards and are the nightmare of our own men. They are Mohammedans, and the fiercest, most treacherous fighters of all the Philippine Islands. They cannot be civilized, they cannot be conquered, they can only be killed. There is a bloody tradition about them and the Spaniards; how, hemmed up for slaughter, when their warriors have all fallen, the women have been known to rush on the Spanish lines with their babes in their arms, and, as the Spaniards would meet them with their bayonets, hurl their babes onto the steel, blocking both it and the fire behind it, and cut down the soldiers with the deadly borangs of their dead husbands. Then there with their babes on the bayonets they would die.
Of these Moros, there is one the soldier dreads more than the firing line of death, more than the panther that springs at night, or the rattlesnake that strikes in the grass. It is the Juramentado.
When one of the Moros is adjudged guilty of thieving, impurity or half a hundred other crimes and sentenced to death he becomes a Juramentado. Strange, mystic ceremonies are performed over him by the priest in the black wood of the black night. Cruel tortures are inflicted; his head, face, eyebrows, and mustache are shaved clean, his face painted, his body left half naked.
There is but one atonement for him. He must kill as many Christians as he can before dying himself. Dying in the act he is transplanted to Paradise.
They are great sailors and are liable to run amuck and then float out to distant places, to any place where they can find a Christian. Stealthily they creep into a camp, or town, or church, or wherever there is a gathering. Their keen borang is sheathed between two bamboo reeds; its blade is a razor, its weight that of lead. With a blow they have cut heads clean from shoulders, or split a soldier from neck to hip.
At a word they will turn in a crowd and kill all those around them. The Spaniards tell how five of these fanatics slipped up to a company of their men peacefully, and then in sudden frenzy killed nineteen soldiers before they could shoot them down.
Our orders are strict concerning them: a soldier must never be out of lines without his side arms. And so nameless a danger is in their very name that it is the unwritten law of the camp to courtmartial any soldier who cries out for a joke, Juramentado!
I was visiting the camp of the Regulars and as I went through the gate a file passed out for guard mounting. A Juramentado had paddled over from Mindanao, slipped in, and suddenly attacked a soldier of the Eighteenth Regulars, as he was returning on a pony from some duty. The first blow of the borang took off the man’s arm at the shoulder. Clapping spurs to his pony he rushed for the main entrance just as I passed out, with the file of soldiers behind me. In an instant the frenzied, howling, painted thing was on us.
I heard the officer in charge cry “fire,” and a dozen Krags snarled their smokeless call, sending twelve steel-jacketed bullets into the charging demon whose painted face, and sharp black teeth were grinning like a wolf in my very face, and whose borang was at my throat.
The bugler got him with his Colt’s 45. Twelve steel bullets had cut twelve clean pin-point holes through him, and not one had stopped him, not being in the brain.
The Krag is a failure. It shoots too clean and hard to kill quick. That old time Colt 45 saved my life. I saw the dead snarling thing all night. When I waked his black painted teeth grinned in my face. I was never un-nerved before.
And so I am writing you, Dear Heart, for I realize now how near to death I have been, how nearer I may yet be. And maybe another thing makes me write to-night. It is such a story as Clarke, our First Lieutenant, has brought back to me to-night. It has set me to dreaming, and made the camp and men and guns sleeping under the mango trees seem like ghosts from another land. Like ghosts, Dear Heart, for in the dream which is always more real than the real, it is you and Old Tennessee that I see to-night, not slumbering guns under mango trees, nor tropical mountain tops, smoking mistily to the moonlighted skies, nor the palm trees, sentineling the ghostly beach.
Clarke has filled my thoughts to overflowing to-night. So I have left him and the sleeping camp. And I lie alone on the beach looking across the ocean toward home.
He told of a girl in Cebu, where our main hospital is, one of the Red Cross nurses from the States. She came over a month ago. Clarke has talked of her till I can see only you. If I did not know you were ill I’d swear it could be only you, peerless, bravest, gamest, most beautiful woman that ever was. She is a trained nurse, but she rode with old Hawthorne, rode Satan, too, to the relief of the Twenty-third Regulars.
Who could have done what she did but you and Satan, clear a ten-foot fissure of a yawning volcanic abyss, outfooting the Filipino ponies when they thought they had cut her off? And her shooting! Again I saw the brown stubble of Tennessee wheatfields, the blue hills circling the sky line, the flush and whir and the crack of the sweet little twenty gauge! If you are not dead or in the hospital it was you—the only one in all the world—there can be no other!
But I shall not see her, for we leave for the States in the fall. They are sending other boys to relieve us, others who want to serve their country.
I shall go home then to my work. I shall take up the life I left, the life of labor and of love, of love, Dear Heart, love of all loves, love of a Memory. And now good-night and for my pen, good-by, Eloise!...