Kilgariff, again detached with his two guns, sat upon his horse, looking on at all this and wondering what the result would be. Presently a brigade of North Carolinians moved up into line just in front of him, at the moment when the third of the charging bodies was hurled back, baffled, beaten, and broken into fragments.
Just then the chief of artillery of the corps with which Kilgariff was temporarily serving rode up and said to him: —
“Do you want your opportunity for distinction and a commission?”
“I want all the opportunity I can get to render service,” was Kilgariff’s answer.
“Then take your guns to the crest of that hill and stay there!” fairly shouted the officer.
Kilgariff fully realised the desperate character of the attempt, and the practical certainty that his guns, his men, and his horses would be quickly swept off the face of the earth when he should appear upon that shell-furrowed hilltop. But he had no thought of faltering. On the contrary, just as he gave the order, “Forward,” a whimsical thought occurred to him. “The general need not have been at the trouble to order us to ‘stay there.’ We’ll stay there, whether we wish to or not. The enemy will take care of that.” Then came the more serious thought that unless he could bring his guns into battery almost instantly upon reaching the hilltop, the slaughter of his horses might prevent the proper placing of the pieces. So, at a full run, he carried the guns up the slope, shouting the orders, “Fire to the front! In battery!” at the moment of coming within sight of the Federal guns, less than half a thousand yards away, and already partially protected by a hastily constructed earthwork.
Fortunately, the men of Captain Pollard’s battery were perfect in drill to their very finger tips, and their alert precision brought the guns into position within a second or two, and the twelve-pounders were bellowing before the horses began falling just in the rear.
Kilgariff ordered the horses and caissons to be retired a little way down the hill, for the sake of such protection as the ground afforded, but scarcely one of the animals lived to enjoy such protection even briefly.
Meantime, Kilgariff, dismounted now (for his horse had been the first to fall), stood there working his two utterly unsupported guns under the fiercely destructive fire of a score of pieces on the enemy’s side. His men fell one after another, like autumn leaves in a gale. Within half a minute he had called all the drivers to the guns to take the places of their dead or dying comrades, and still each gun was being operated by a detachment too scant in numbers for effectiveness of fire.
It was obviously impossible that any of them could long survive under a fire so concentrated and so terrific. Kilgariff reckoned upon three minutes as the utmost time that any man there could live; and when one of his guns was dismounted at its fifth discharge, and two of his limber-chests exploded almost at the same moment, he hastily counted the cannoniers left to him and found their number to be just seven, all told.
But he had not been ordered to undertake this desperate enterprise without a purpose. Reckoning upon the almost superstitious reverence that the infantry cherish for cannon, the generals in command had sent Kilgariff’s guns into this caldron of fire as a means of luring the infantry to a desperate attempt to take and hold the little hill. Before Kilgariff had traversed half the distance toward the crest, the commander of that North Carolina brigade had called out a message that was quickly passed from mouth to mouth down his line. The message was: —
“We must save those guns and hold that hill. They call us tar heels. Let us show how tar sticks.”
Instantly, and with a yell that might have come from the throats of so many demons, the brigade of about two thousand men bent their heads forward, rushed up the hill, and swarmed around Kilgariff’s guns. Their deployment into line quickly diverted the enemy’s attention to a larger front. Other guns were hurriedly brought up to the hill, and half an hour later a substantial line of earthworks covered its crest.
The three minutes that Kilgariff had allowed for the complete destruction of his little command were scarcely gone when this relief came. He was ordered to withdraw his remaining gun by hand down the hill – by hand, for the reason that not a horse remained of the thirty odd that had so lately galloped up the steep.
VII
WITH EVELYN AT WYANOKE
AS if bearing a charmed life, Kilgariff had gone through all this without a scratch. He had galloped up that hill in the face of a heavy infantry fire; he had planted his section under the murderous cannonading of twenty well-served guns firing at point-blank range; he had fought his pieces under a bombardment so fierce that within the brief space of three minutes his command was well-nigh destroyed. Yet not a scratch of bullet or shell-fragment had so much as rent his uniform.
By one of those grim jests of which war is full, he fell after all this was over, his neck pierced and torn by a stray bullet that had missed its intended billet in front and sped on in search of some human target in the rear.
He was carried immediately to one of the field-hospitals which Doctor Arthur Brent was hurriedly establishing just in rear of the newly formed line of defence. There he fell into Doctor Brent’s own friendly hands; for that officer, the moment he saw who the patient was, left his work of supervision and himself knelt over the senseless form of the sergeant-major to discover the extent of his injury and to repair it if possible. He found it to be severe, but not necessarily fatal. He proceeded to stop the dangerous hemorrhage, cleansed and dressed the wound, and within half an hour Kilgariff regained consciousness.
A few hours later, finding that the temporary hospital was exposed to both artillery and musketry fire, Doctor Brent ordered the removal of the wounded men to a point a mile or so in the rear; and finding Kilgariff, thanks to his elastic constitution, able to endure a little longer journey, he took him to his own quarters, still farther to the rear.
Here Captain Pollard managed to visit his sergeant-major during the night.
“General Anderson, who is in command of Longstreet’s corps, now that Longstreet is wounded,” he said, during the interview, “has asked for your report of your action on the hill. If you are strong enough to answer a question or two, I’ll make the report in your stead.”
“I think I can write it myself,” answered Kilgariff; “and I had rather do that.”
Paper and a pencil were brought, and, with much difficulty, the wounded man wrote: —
Under orders this day, I took the left section of Captain Pollard’s Virginia Battery to the crest of a hill in front.
After three minutes of firing, infantry having come up, I was ordered to retire, and did so. My losses were eighteen men killed and fifteen wounded, of a total force of thirty-eight men. One of my gun carriages was destroyed by an enemy’s shell, and two limber-chests were blown up. All of the horses having fallen, I brought off the remaining gun and the two caissons by hand, in obedience to orders. I was fortunately able also to bring off all the wounded. Every man under my command behaved to my satisfaction.
All of which is respectfully submitted.
“Is that all you wish to say?” asked Pollard, when he had read the report.
“Quite all.”
“You make no mention of your own wound.”
“That was received later. It has no proper place in this report.”
“True. That is for me to mention in my report for the day.”
But in his indorsement upon the sergeant-major’s report Pollard wrote: —
I cannot too highly commend to the attention of the military authorities the extraordinary courage, devotion, and soldierly skill manifested by Sergeant-major Kilgariff, both in this affair and in the fighting of the last few days in the Wilderness.
In the meantime General Ewell had mentioned in one of his reports the way in which Kilgariff had done