IN THE TRENCHES

OPERATIONS in front of Petersburg had by this time settled down into a sullenly obstinate struggle for mastery between the two finest armies of veterans that ever met each other anywhere in the world. It is no exaggeration to characterise those armies by such superlatives. For in them it was not only organisations—regiments, brigades, and divisions—that were war-seasoned, but the individual men themselves. They had educated themselves by four years of fighting into a personal perfection of soldiership such as has nowhere else been seen among the rank and file of contending armies.

The slender lines of hastily constructed earthworks behind which these two opposing hosts had confronted each other at the beginning of that supreme struggle of the war, had been wrought into other and incalculably stronger forms by work that had never for one moment ceased and would not pause until the end.

The breastworks had been raised, broadened, and strengthened under the direction of skilled engineers. At every salient angle a regular fort of some sort had been constructed and heavily armed for offence and defence.

In rear of these lines every little eminence had been crowned by a frowning fortification, as sullen in appearance and as capable of destructive work as the Redan or the Malakoff at Sebastopol.

At brief intervals along the outer lines traverses had been built at right angles to the works, as a protection against all enfilading fire.

The fields just behind the lines were intricately laced with trenches and protective earthworks of every kind. Without these the men in front would have been completely cut off from communication with the rear, by a resistless, all-consuming fire.

Great covered ways—protected passages—were cut as the only avenues by which men or supplies could be moved even for the shortest distances. Every spring that could yield water with which to quench the thirst of the fighting men was defended by jealous fortifications.

There was no more thought now of enumerating the actions fought, or naming them. There was one continuous battle, ceaseless by day or by night, in which dogged resistance opposed itself daily and hourly to desperate assault, both inspired by a courage that did not so much resemble anything human as it did the struggle of opposing and titanic natural forces. Did the reader ever see the breaking up of the ice in a great river or lake, under the angry impulse of flood and storm? As the great ice floes in that case assailed the rocks with seemingly resistless fury, and as the rocks stood fast in the courage of their immovability, so at Petersburg the opposing forces met, day after day, with the courage and determination of inanimate forces.

Every great gun that either side could bring from any quarter was placed in position, so that the fire, continuous by day and by night, grew steadily greater in volume and more destructive in effect.

In this matter of guns, as well as in numbers of men, the Federals had enormous advantage. They had arsenals and foundries equipped with the most improved machinery to supply them, and they could draw freely upon the armouries of Europe, besides. The Confederates had no such resources. The few and small shops within their command were antiquated in their equipment and very sharply limited in their capacity. But they did their best.

As soon as regular siege operations began, the Federals set to work establishing mortar batteries at every available point. Mortars are very short guns fired at a high “elevation”; that is, pointing upward at an angle of forty-five degrees to the horizon, or more than that, so as to throw shells high in air and let them fall perpendicularly upon an enemy’s works, breaking down defences and reaching points in rear of works to which ordinary cannon fire cannot penetrate.

The lines were so close together—at one point only fifty yards apart—that everything had to be done under cover of some kind, and thus mortars became a vitally necessary arm with which to break down the enemy’s cover. The Confederates had none of these guns at first, but their foundries were at least capable of manufacturing so simple a weapon in a rude but effective fashion, making the mortars of iron instead of brass, and mounting them in oaken blocks heavily banded with wrought iron. In a very brief time the mortars began to arrive, and their numbers rapidly increased, but there were very few of the officers who knew how to handle a weapon so wholly different from ordinary guns both in construction and in methods of use.

This scarcity of mortar-skilled officers in the lower grades gave Owen Kilgariff his opportunity. The thought occurred to him suddenly on the day after his vigil, and he acted upon it at once.

He wrote to Arthur Brent, addressing his letter to Wyanoke, whence it would of course be forwarded should Doctor Brent be at Petersburg still.

Arthur Brent was at Wyanoke when this letter came, but he hastened to Petersburg to execute his friend’s commission. He told more of Kilgariff’s personal history than Kilgariff had suggested. That is to say, he told of his gallantry at Spottsylvania and of its mention in general orders. He had neither to urge nor beseech. No sooner was the chief of artillery made aware of the facts than he answered:—

“I want such a man badly. Orders for his immediate transfer to the lines here shall go to-day.”

So it came about that before the end of that week, Owen Kilgariff stood in a drenching rain-storm and nearly up to his knees in the mud of a mortar pit at Petersburg, bombarding a salient in the enemy’s lines.

The storm of bullets and rifle shells that raged around his pits was as ceaseless as the downpour of rain, but as calmly as a schoolmaster expounding a lesson in algebra, he alternately instructed his men and explained to the half a dozen subaltern officers who had been sent to him to learn. He was teaching them the methods of mortar range-finding, the details of powder-gauging for accuracy, the art of fuse-cutting, and all the rest of it, when out of a badly exposed covered way came Doctor Arthur Brent to greet him.