For the Honor of the Company

THE old man came slowly up the little graveled path which bisected the plot, and painfully bent himself to one of the ornate iron settees facing the monument. Everything about him, the faded blue suit, the brass-buttoned coat with the tiny flag pinned on its breast, the old army hat, all bespoke the veteran. He wore, also, a look of unwonted tidiness which sat stiffly on his shambling figure. The frayed edges of his clean linen had been clipped, and his thin gray hair neatly brushed. His whole aspect told of a conscientious concession to the solemn rites of Decoration Day.

The bench already held one occupant, small and withered in person, with soft white hair showing beneath a rusty, old-fashioned bonnet. An observer would have pronounced her a contemporary of the newcomer. But it is harder to tell a woman’s age than a man’s; the way of her life marks her face more than do the years. In this case her deep corrugations bore witness to stress, but behind the furrows lay something which hinted that the owner had overlived the storms, and that the end was peace.

The little green park which they had chosen for their resting-place was a fitting spot for old people, for it, too, spoke of battles past and victories won. The monument was one of those misguided efforts by which a grateful community is wont to show its appreciation of heroic service. It rose from the surrounding sward with a dignity of purpose and a pathos of intention quite worthy of better expression. The scrap of ground around it had been promoted from unkempt waste, trampled by children and the occasional cow, to a proud position of national use. On this particular day it fulfilled its duties with an air of special integrity, while the monument fluttered with decorous gayety in a loyal drapery of red, white, and blue.

The Memorial Day sun was warmly manifesting its patriotism, and the veteran sank into the shaded seat with a sigh of tired content. He took off his hat and mopped his forehead. His part in the programme was over, and he had earned his rest. The celebration had been a success; not a threatening cloud had distracted the attention of the audience from the orator of the day. The procession had made an impressive progress to the cemetery, and one more chaplet had been laid upon the grave of the Civil War.

When he had restored his hat to his grizzled head, the veteran straightened up and regarded his seat-mate. He was a social soul, and the little cough he gave found no excuse in his bronchial regions; it was a purely voluntary and tentative approach to conversation. The look the woman vouchsafed him did not discourage his advance.

‘Sightly place?’ he ventured.

‘Yes,’ replied the woman.

‘ That monument now; it’s somethin’ to be proud of, ain’t it?’

‘It’s real handsome.’

‘I ain’t been here since it was set up. I belong over Hilton way, but this year the whole county’s celebratin’ together, you know,an’ I thought I’d like to see the boys’ names cut up there.’

The woman’s gaze followed the veteran’s to the tablet on the side of the shaft.

‘They look good, don’t they?’ she said softly. ‘I brought Danny to see them. His gran’father was my husband, an’ I give him to his country.’

The veteran put his hand to his hat in an awkward gesture of sympathy.

‘Well, ma’am,’ he said, ‘I often wonder why I warn’t taken instead of some better man. I fought right through an’ got nothin’ but a flesh wound. Lord! but it was the women that suffered; they’re the ones that ought to get pensions. I sense as if it was yesterday the mornin’ I said good-bye to my sweetheart.’

For a moment the only sound was that of the breeze gently stirring the fresh young maple leaves overhead. Then the woman spoke.

‘It seems queer, don’t it, for us to be settin’ here, an’ them never knowin’ that we’re proud of ’em, an’ that the country they died for is doin’ ’em honor all over its length an’ breadth? If they could come back an’ join in the procession it would make a long line, but, my! would n’t we make of ’em! I can’t help thinkin’ how much more they did than just fight.’

‘That’s so,’ responded the veteran. ‘There’s somebody that says that when you pass out, what you’ve done don’t die, but goes livin’ on after you, an’ I guess he’s right. If we sensed that all the time we’d be more careful, mebbe.’

‘It has lived after them,’ approved the woman. ‘ I feel just that way when I’m thinkin’ about my husband. He helped break the chains of the slave, but that warn’t all or even most of what he done. I guess the war would n’t have been lost if he had n’t been in it, but he gave the folks that knew him an example of what bein’ a hero is, an’ you can’t calculate what that’s meant.’

The veteran nodded.

‘I never thought of it just that way before, but I guess you ’re right, ma’am.’

‘You take Danny, now; he’s the only gran’child I’ve got, an’ we set store by him. Well, he’s lame, an’ the doctor says he won’t ever be better. Seems as if it would fair kill his father when he heard that; men take such things hard, you know, and Danny was his eye’s apple. But I guess he had some of the fightin’ blood in him, for he marched straight up to the sorrer an’ looked it square in the face. “ My father faced the music, an’ I guess I won’t shame him, though it’s a different kind of a bullet that’s struck me; one you’ve got to live with instead of die of,” he told Hatty Anne; she’s his wife, an’ she told me. As for Danny, well, when he was a little mite with a backache a good deal bigger’n he was, he would n’t cry out because his gran’father was a soldier. We talk to him a lot about it, an’ I guess it’s given him courage to live.’

‘Perhaps the little feller’ll get over it,’ said the veteran sympathetically. ‘Doctors don’t know everything.’

The woman shook her head.

‘There ain’t any perhaps about a spine as crooked as Danny’s. But he’s real sunny dispositioned an’ he’s got lots of grit. He’s just set on playin’ soldier, an’ it would make you cry to see him drillin’, brave as the best, with his poor little back, an’ his pipe-stem legs. He’s over there now, waiting for the band to come back; he’s just crazy over bands, Danny is.’

The veteran strained his dim eyes in the direction of the little figure sitting, crutches by his side, on the broad curb which swept about the curve of the grass-plot.

‘My husband did n’t leave much in the way of worldly goods,’ continued the woman, ‘but I guess the legacy he did leave has gone further an’ done more’n dollars would have done.’

‘That’s so! That’s so!’ affirmed the veteran; and again on the two old people fell silence. It was the veteran who broke it.

‘I’m thinkin’, as I set here, how the real heroes, an’ them that ain’t heroes, are all mixed up in a war, an’ both get equal credit. Here’s your husband, now, a brave man who died for his country, an’ then again I could tell you a story — but there! my son’s wife says my tongue’s longer ’n the moral law. I guess when I get goin’ I don’t know when to stop.’

The woman’s face expanded in interest as she edged nearer her seatmate.

’I’ll be real pleased to hear it,”she said.

The veteran painfully crossed his stiff legs, took off his hat and put it on his knee, while with one wrinkled hand he nervously fingered the brim.

‘It seems good to be talkin’ of old times.’ The veteran’s voice took on an apologetic note. ‘Young folks don’t always know what that means to the old, an’ sometimes they get a bit impatient. You can’t blame ’em. But this thing I’ve mentioned I never told but just to one, an’ that was my wife; she’s dead, now, this twenty year. It ain’t a pretty story to tell, or for a woman to hear, but somehow I kind o’ feel as if you’d understand. I’ve never been quite sure I done right; my wife, she thought I did, but you know wives have a way of favorin’ what their men do. Perhaps you’ll judge different.’

The veteran’s eyes were fixed on the monument. The woman adjusted herself in an attitude of attention. Now and then there floated over to them the broken sounds of a happy little tune Danny was singing to himself.

‘It happened at Gettysburg,’ said the veteran, ‘on the second day of the fight. You can’t know just how a soldier feels when a battle is in the air. War brings out all that’s good in a man, an’ right along beside it all that’s bad. The thought of the cause you’re fightin’ for, an’ the music, an’ the marchin’, an’ the colors flyin’, an’ the officers cheerin’ the men, all gets hold of somethin’ inside of you, an’ you could give up everythin’ for your country. It’s grand, but, Lord! it’s no use talkin’ about it! You can’t put it into words. Queer, ain’t it, how many things words can spoil?’

The veteran paused as the woman gave the expected note of assent.

‘ As for the other side — well, when you’re really on the fightin’ ground with the bullets flyin’ ail about you, an’ you see the men you’ve marched with, shoulder to shoulder, shot down, an’ you know it’s goin’ to keep on till one side has to cry quit, then the beast that’s in you gets up an’ roars, an’ you want to kill an’ kill; sometimes you turn sick an’ want to run — but you don’t; no, ma’am! runnin’ ’s the last thing you do. It takes all kind of feelin’s to make a battle. It’s a queer sort of a way to settle troubles, now, ain’t it? Seems kind o’ heathenish, don’t it?’

The woman shook her head.

‘I take it we ain’t to criticize what the Lord’s sanctioned,’ she said. ‘The God of Battles is one of his names.’

‘Oh, when it comes to the Lord, I ain’t takin’ exceptions, of course,’ responded the veteran with a slightly embarrassed air. ‘I would n’t set myself up to judgin’ his doin’s, but I should n’t have thought of introducin’ war as a pacifier of nations, myself, or of fightin’ as a way to brotherly love. But then I ain’t pious. There’s a pretty side to war, but it warn’t showin’ itself that day at Gettysburg.

‘It was a gloomy mornin’, with a mist like a steam bath, dreary an’ drippin’. We could n’t get a sight of anything, an’ the fog got into the men’s hearts an’ wilted them down, like it does starch out of a collar-band. There were other reasons for feel in’ low. Things looked pretty bad for our side, an’ every one of us knew it. Our little cap’n danced about for all the world like a war-horse; just a bundle of nerves. He said a little speech to us — said! it shot right out of him. It hit, too, for the whole company straightened up as if it had got a backbone. “You do your damnedest!” he yelled, “or by George, I’ll shoot every man of you!” You’ll have to excuse me, ma’am; I had to repeat it just as he said it, or you would n’t have understood how wrought up he was; an’ “By George” ain’t, exactly the words, either.’

The woman nodded indulgently. Her interest outran the amenities.

‘Time dragged that mornin’,’ the veteran went on. ‘After a while the sun burned off the fog, an’ everythin’ lay as bright as if there was goin’ to be a strawberry festival instead of a bloody battle. The fields was as green as grass an’ crops could make ’em, an’ the cattle grazed as peaceful as lambs on a May mornin’. One herd of them cows got a taste of what war was before the day was over. It was brought home to them personal, you might say.

‘You could hear the cocks crowin’ first in one barnyard an’ then in another, an’ birds was singin’ everywheres. Little puffs of far-off smoke was all that told of battle in the air. The mornin’ wore on, an’ still we waited; there ain’t anythin’ more wearin’ to a soldier’s nerves than waitin’. I’d rather fight a dozen battles than spend another mornin’ like that.

‘It was well on to the middle of the afternoon when the orders was given. There was a racket then, all right! The pretty, peaceful farmyard scene was broke up, an’ instead, there was a hell of roarin’ guns an’ screamin’ shells an’ blindin’ smoke. Talk about slaughter! You ’ve heard of the Devil’s Den, I’m thinkin’.’

The woman shook her head.

‘It got pretty famous that day. It was a heap of rocks, full of little caves, an’ every one of the holes held a Johnny with a sharpshooter. Our men got picked off as fast as they come up. A little ravine ran right by the place, an’ the herd of cows I mentioned got penned up right in the range of the crossfirin’. Them animals would have learned a lesson that day, if there’d been anything left of them to remember it with. That’s generally the way with life, most of us get our experience too late.

‘There was a hill called Little Round Top, an’ General Warren see right off that was the key to the situation. There did n’t seem to be anybody occupyin’ it, but it was such a good point, right on the face of it, that he kep’ a sharp eye on it. All of a sudden there came a bright flash from near the top, a blindin’ flash that made us sit up an’ take notice. The truth of it was a company of Rebs were in ambush, an’ the sun struck on to their bayonets an’ gave them away complete. It’s funny how weather steps in sometimes an’ balks things. Seems as if it had more to do with winnin’ the battle than the whole army did.’

‘The ways the Lord takes are beyond the understandin’ of man,’said the woman. ‘His arm is ever with the righteous.’

The veteran meditatively rubbed his rough hand over his shabbily-clad knee, as he remarked, —

‘ Mabbe I don’t give the Lord credit where it’s due. It seems to me we’re mighty apt to call it the Lord’s arm when it’s on our side. I notice them that lose ain’t apt to regard it in that light. However, whoever had the managin’ of it, that flash saved the day. Our company was one of those sent up to take the hill. In all the war there warn’t a finer charge. I don’t see how we ever done it with them guns. It was a steep slope, rocky, and rough with tangled undergrowth. We never could have got up in cold blood. We were facin’ a hot fire, but our only thought was to get to the top. There warn’t a man in the company but would rather have been shot than face our little cap’n after havin’ played the coward. I say there warn’t a man, — there was one, as I found out, but then, Lord! I don’t call that thing a man.

‘Well, up we went, rattlety-bang, yankin’ them guns over the rocks, stumblin’, scramblin’, tearin’ our faces an’ hands an’ barkin’ our shins, but keepin’ right on. An’ that ain’t mentionin’ the bullets whizzin’ all about us.’

‘It must have been awful,’ interrupted the woman. ‘It takes a lot of prayin’ to keep up courage in the face of danger like that.’

‘Prayin’!' ejaculated the veteran. ‘If you call it prayin’ to be bound to keep on if you had to kill every allfired Reb in the Confederate Army to do it, an’ to make a road of their dead bodies, then we was all prayin’. I guess men do things different from women. It don’t make any odds what we thought; we did, and that was more to the point.

‘About halfway up the hill, one of the guns got stuck some way, an’ I had to stop an’ help free it, so I fell behind a bit. As I was hurryin’ to ketch up I stumbled on somethin’ soft and yieldin’. It was a man, an’ he was wearin’ the blue. It took me some seconds to sense what it meant, an’ then I realized I had run down a skulker, hidin’ in the rocks. I just reached out an’ hauled him up by the collar of his coat, an’ says I, “What you doin’ here?” He was a man from my own company, worse luck. He was tremblin’, an’ his face was white. I shook him just as I would a rat. “ Lemme alone!” he whimpered. “I was just gettin’ my breath!” “Gettin’ your breath! ” I yelled. “ You march up that hill as fast as you can go, or you’ll get what mean little breath you’ve got knocked clean out of you, an’ it won’t be the Rebs that does it either!” With that I give him a kick that sent him flyin’ in the right direction. You see, ma’am, I was hot at havin’ our company shamed by a thing like that.

‘Everybody knows what we did on that hill, an’ how our charge saved the day. The names of the officers we lost on Little Round Top are writ up high in the records of the war; an’ the men who fought for ’em an’ fell with ’em are n’t any less heroes, though they may not be in such big print. You can read all about it in any of the histories, but there’s just one little story of that day that never got into a book. Nobody knows it but me, an’ I saved our company from shame, an’ a dead man’s name from bein’ a by-word an’ a reproach.

‘That evenin’, when the firin’ had stopped, I was prowlin’ round the hillside, lookin’ after the wounded and such. I got off the main track of the charge an’ blundered about a bit, tryin’ to find my way back. I was gettin’ a little impatient to know my course, when I saw somethin’ black, lyin’ on the ground behind a tree. I halted an’ got my gun ready: you see, I thought it was a Johnny, skulkin’ round to rob the dead. I crept up softly toward the figure. It did n’t move. When I got near I see it was a dead body. It was lyin’ on its face, an’ its heels pointed up hill. Worse’n that, it was wearin’ the blue. With my gun as a lever I turned the body over an’ looked at the face. It was more because I did n’t want to accuse any one in my thoughts than because I wanted to see who the scamp was, that I turned him over.

“I bent over him to get a good look, an’ there, with his white face starin’ up at me, lay the man I had kicked up hill that afternoon. He had been shot as he was runnin’ away again, shot in the back. That’s the biggest disgrace a soldier can earn, I take it. Not an hour before, I ’d been braggin’ loud about our company, an’ there was a man I’d messed with, an’marched with, givin’ me the lie as he lay there, the marks of his guilt hittin’ me in the face, as it were. It seemed to me as I stood there in the dusk an’ stared down at his, as if he was a big, black blot on our fair record, an’ as if he marred the glory of the company that had fought so brave. We was the heroes of the day, an’our deed would be in the mouth of every one the country over, an’ that rascal spoilt it all. “Not a man but has done his duty,” our cap’n had said. Oh, well, it ain’t any use talkin’, but I was mad clean through.

' As I told you, it ain’t a pretty thing for you to hear, but I just took aim at that feller’s forehead. It’s bad enough to shoot a live man, but to send a bullet into a dead face turned up helpless to you—well — it’s just plain butchery! But I done it. My shot hit him fair between the eyes. Then I left him.’

The veteran paused. The woman’s face was turned toward his; both were lost in the interest of the story. The music of the returning band and Danny’s shrill little cheers were unheeded. The streamers on the monument fluttered softly, and the shadow of the shaft, lengthening as the sun traveled to the west, fell upon the two old people. Finally the woman spoke.

‘ It was an awful thing to do. It makes me think of Indians maulin’ the bodies they’ve killed. But I don’t know but you was right. It would have been worse for them that loved him to bear a coward’s shame. I guess you was right.'

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ returned the veteran. ' That’s the way my wife took it. I’m glad if you can see it in that light. But you must n’t make a mistake about one thing. I warn’t thinkin’ about that skulker, or them that loved him, when I done what I did. It was for the company I put that bullet into his dead skull, an’ I’d do it for the company’s sake forty times over — nasty job as it was.

‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘I’m glad if his family got any comfort out of the thought that he was hit in the front. I never heard anything about himmore, I never even heard if he was found, till I just see his name up there, writ in endurin’ stone, along with brave men and heroes. Then the whole thing came back to me as plain as day, an’ I felt the goose-flesh run over me, as I did when I shot into that coward’s forehead. Yes, when I see that name, carved deep, Dan’el P. Ol——’

‘Stop!’

The cry cut the name short, as clean as a shot. The veteran started in amazement. His companion had wheeled about on the bench, and was facing him. Her old eyes were blazing. Her withered cheeks flushed dark red; then the color went out and left the white of ashes.

‘Why, ma’am!’ stammered the old man. ‘Why, ma’am! I guess you ain’t feelin’ well. I ought n’t to have told you such a story. ’T ain’t fit for ladies to hear. I guess you ’ll have to excuse me. You see, that name brought it back so vivid.

‘Oh, stop!’ again cried the woman. Her hands were working nervously and she was trembling from head to foot.

A slow conviction dawned upon the veteran’s bewildered brain.

‘Why, ma’am!’ he exclaimed once more. ‘I’m right sorry if it was any one you happened to know. I’d never —’

‘Hush ! For God’s sake, hush ! ’ The woman was panting and breathless. ‘Don’t you see the child is comin’ ? ’

The band had vanished and Danny; who had watched the last back around the corner, was hastening to his grandmother as fast as his crutches would allow. His eager little face was shining with its past delight. The woman rose quickly, clutching the back of the settee for support. The veteran struggled to his feet.

‘ The child!’ he repeated in confusion. Then a light broke on him. He took a step forward, but the woman put out her poor quavering hands as if to push him away.

There they stood, those two old people, and stared dumbly into each other’s eyes. The woman read in the man’s face the horror of his deed, but she saw nothing to help her misery. The veteran’s face was as gray and drawn as that of his companion. His act was beyond recall. What he had smitten was more than life.

Then, as Danny came up and clutched his grandmother’s gown, gazing half shyly, half admiringly at the old man in his uniform, the veteran straightened with a martial air. It was as if a call to battle had put new life into long unused muscles. He stretched out a tremulous hand and laid it on the crooked little shoulder. The rapture of being touched by a real soldier overcame the lad’s bashfulness, and he smiled up at the old face above him.

‘My grandfather fought in the war,’ he said.

The veteran’s voice was grave and steady as he answered, —

‘Danny,’ he said, ‘always be proud of that. When things go hard you just shut your eyes an’ think that you’re a soldier’s boy, an’ that your name’s his name, an’ that he died in battle. Don’t ever go back on that, Danny. There ain’t any braver thing than a soldier, an’ he died in battle.’

‘He was shot in the forehead. He was the bravest of the brave,’ said Danny.