Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 36.djvu/219

Rh Curiously enough, on the lawn was also a man named Hawkins, who lived in the house across the road. Hawkins had carried some mail that morning over in the direction of the Rappahannock, and had been warned that the Union army was in the neighborhood. In trying to get back home he was captured and made a prisoner in his house, where there were about twenty-five women and children who had fled there for shelter. His home was General Carl Schurz's headquarters. "One of Schurz's staff officers," said Hawkins, as he placed a chew of tobacco in between his grizzled beard, "came in the house, and, throwing down his sword, said he would go out and see the fun. He had heard some firing, and thought it was a skirmish. He never thought to get his sword. I had been in the Confederate army, had been discharged, but as I stood in the door of my house, my old company came rushing right across my garden. This was too much for me, and, picking up a gun, I went off with them down the road, yelling with the rest of them'. I heard all the officers as they talked during the day, and not one of them knew that they were going to be attacked."

A few miles beyond Talley's house the party entered the Wilderness. Never did name seem more misfitted. The valley of Wilderness Run is beautiful. The fields stretch away to the forests on every side and are as green as a well-watered, fertile soil can make them, Instead of wilderness the country seems a paradise. It was only when, a few miles farther on, after the Lacy house had been left in the distance and Palmer's field, which was once covered with dead bodies, had been passed, that the procession of carriages, turning into the woods, encountered a real wilderness. In the midst of an indescribable tangle of trees and undergrowth, the old trenches could still be seen, although how men fought under such circumstances was then and is still a wonder. In the clearing was the house of a man named Hall, an old farmer, with a typical long, white beard, who had his story to tell of escaping from Union Cavalry while he was trying to carry his family and his household goods into the forest