THE SHADES OF THE WILDERNESS

CONTENTS

I. THE SOUTHERN RETREAT

II. THE NORTHERN SPY

III. THE FLOODED RIVER

IV. A HERALD TO LEE

V. THE DANGEROUS ROAD

VI. TESTS OF COURAGE

VII. IN THE WAGON

VIII. THE CROSSING

IX. IN SOCIETY

X. THE MISSING PAPER

XI. A VAIN PURSUIT

XII. IN WINTER QUARTERS

XIII. THE COMING OF GRANT

XIV. THE GHOSTLY RIDE

XV. THE WILDERNESS

XVI. SPOTTSYLVANIA




THE SHADES OF THE WILDERNESS


CHAPTER I

THE SOUTHERN RETREAT


A train of wagons and men wound slowly over the hills in the darkness and
rain toward the South. In the wagons lay fourteen or fifteen thousand
wounded soldiers, but they made little noise, as the wheels sank suddenly
in the mud or bumped over stones. Although the vast majority of them
were young, boys or not much more, they had learned to be masters of
themselves, and they suffered in silence, save when some one, lost in
fever, uttered a groan.

But the chief sound was a blended note made by the turning of wheels,
and the hoofs of horses sinking in the soft earth. The officers gave
but few orders, and the cavalrymen who rode on either flank looked
solicitously into the wagons now and then to see how their wounded
friends fared, though they seldom spoke. The darkness they did not mind,
because they were used to it, and the rain and the coolness were a relief,
after three days of the fiercest battle the American continent had ever
known, fought in the hottest days that the troops could recall.

Thus Lee's army drew its long length from the fatal field of Gettysburg,
although his valiant brigades did not yet know that the clump of trees
upon Cemetery Hill had marked the high tide of the Confederacy. All that
memorable Fourth of July, following the close of the battle they had lain,
facing Meade and challenging him to come on, confident that while the
invasion of the North was over they could beat back once more the
invasion of the South.