Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 2.djvu/135

Rh whole party. So Baker kept tip a brisk skirmish, and Johnson moved up a side road to the right. He had not gone a mile when he met Baker's pickets coming back with the Federals at their heels, pressing so close that Johnson hardly had time to leave the narrow road and deploy in an open field before the enemy was on him. They killed Colonel Johnson's horse and shot his saber clean from his side. By the time he got out into the field a column of blue cavalry was going by his left flank and into his rear. So he attempted to withdraw decently and in order. But this was impossible. The Marylanders made repeated charges to get relief, to be as frequently driven back, until at last the only order of going was "sauve qui peut." Out of two hundred and fifty men carried in they left seventy killed, wounded or missing. There was a larger percentage of killed than is usual in battle, for the fighting, as Jackson said about the Bucktail fight, "was close and bloody." Some of the finest young men of the Maryland Line lost their lives that day. Alexander Young, private in Company D, son of a former comptroller of the treasury of the United States under Buchanan's administration, was a model of manly beauty, of chivalry and grace, of courage and accomplishment. Beautiful as he was brave, refined as highly educated; intellectually, physically and morally he was a pattern gentleman. He died in his tracks, dismounted on the skirmish line, holding his place against a charge of mounted cavalry. This was known in the traditions of the Maryland Line as the fight at Pollard's Farm on May 27, 1864.

On the 1st of June following a force of Federal cavalry drove the First Maryland out of Hanover Court House over the Richmond & Fredericksburg railroad at Wickham's Crossing, back to the Virginia Central railroad not far north of Ashland. The bridges of the first road had ceased to be important, for Lee had fallen back between them and Richmond, but the Virginia Central