Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 27.djvu/340

 332 Southern Historical Society Papers.

officers. " Hurry up that team; pull their heads out of the water and drive on, blank you." "Blank you back again; but suppose you come and pull them yourself, if you think you can," retorted a sergeant, who was learning how hard and obstinately famished beasts can bury their noses in water, and who would not take cuss words from a staff officer. It was simply and merely running away from an enemy, because of no chance of present defence against him; trying to save those guns and rejoin the main body of the army. As to the expectations of what the morrow's fate might be, no man can now speak with certainty of his hopes or forebodings. Almost certainly, though, nobody anticipated the actual result, ex- cept possibly a few officers, to whom had come rumors of the nego- tiations pending the last two days. Towards morning Lieutenant John Nimmo, in command of the battery, hoarsely whispered to one of the sergeants, under injunction of secrecy, that the army would probably surrender that day.

The slow coming dawn found the company still trudging on the road between Appomattox and somewhere else, probably Lynchburg, and the rising sun has seldom looked down on a group of men and animals more completely wearied out. After sunrise the battery was countermarched on this road, probably on orders to come back and meet the army, should it succeed in forcing its way out, as was at- tempted. The result of that attempt is known to everybody. In the absence of official reports, it is impossible to state exactly the orders received from General Lee. Their effect and the alternative of inability to rejoin the army were disclosed in a scene that ended the company's service a scene that baffles description, but whose memory will ever remain with every man then present.

The catastrophe and the end had come. What that meant we know now better than could be realized under the stunning sensa- tions of such a calamity. So overwhelming were the emotions ex- cited by it, that 'even the weariness and hunger of the last day and week were forgotten, and the exhaustion of physical forces was re- placed by something like the energy of despair, when orders were given to destroy the battery. Moving off into a field, intersected with gullies and ravines, the guns were spiked, dismounted and bur- ied, and the carriages cut to pieces; a piece of work that was thor- oughly and completely done, in soldierly fashion, by the sturdy arms that wielded hammers and axes that morning. Those guns, if found by the enemy, should be useless to them. Limber chests, trails and wheels were chopped and split into small kindling wood, with a