B. K. Benson

“ The report of my desertion will come to Adjutant Haskell and to Dr. Frost, perhaps. Will they tell? I hope not. Will they suspect the truth? I wish it, but I cannot hope it.
Let Berwick Jones be dead and buried and forgotten; let Jones Berwick live from this night as he never lived. The Doctor says men live forever. I believe it. If man can live through the worse than death which I have passed through alive, he is eternal. I shall never die. On through the ages! That bright star--almost the only one left in the graying sky--has but the age of an infant. ”

“ The world-idea forbids killing and forbids submission, and demands life and freedom for all; the spirit of the nation is not so unselfish; the spirit of the nation exalts so-called patriotism; the world-spirit raises high the principle of philanthropy universal. The country has not developed the world-idea, and will not, except feebly; but she will at last, and will be loyal to the spirit of the world. Then, unless I am sustained by a greater power, I cannot go contrary to the spirit of the South. I must kill and must be killed.
But can I stand the day of battle? ”

“ Why not let the South, secede peaceably? What are we doing here?"
"Indeed, Jones, you may well ask such questions. War is always wrong; going to war is necessarily a phase of a shortsighted policy; every wrong act is, of course, an unwise act."
"Even when war is forced upon us?"
"War cannot be forced upon you; it takes two nations to make war; if one refuses, the other cannot make war."
"I have known, for a long time, Doctor, that you are opposed to war on the whole; but what was left for the North to do? Acknowledge the right of secession? ”

“ Since I had left the wagon I had had no time for thought of personal appearance. Now I looked at myself. My hands were scratched with briers; my hat was torn; a great hole was over one knee, which I had used most in crawling. I was muddy to my knees, having been more rapid than cautious in crossing the creek. For more than twenty-four hours my mind had been on too great a strain to think of the body. By the side of me, Jones looked like a glittering general questioning an uncouth rebel prisoner. He smiled, but I did not.
"Now, let us mount and ride," said I; "we can eat as we go. ”

“ Willis! That name has come back.
Who is Willis?
I do not know; only Willis.
It is a mistake to be following up the man. Can I not recall the Doctor without this disturbing shape? I try hard, and the Doctor's face flits by and vanishes before I can even tell its outline.
I forced the Doctor to appear and reappear; but he would remain an instant only and be gone; instead of him, this strange man persisted, and contrary to my will.
My heart misgave me. Had I been following a delusion? Was there no Dr. Khayme, after all, and worse than that, no Lydia? Her face was again before me. ”

“ Now the whole course of events, at least all since Bull Run, seems clear if I can but know--or even believe--that any man has such superhuman power. Can I believe it?
Again it is my time for vedette duty. I relieve Butler. Not long till dawn, I think. Far to my left I hear sounds, as if an army is stirring. My time will be short on post. Where was I? Yes; the supernatural power of the Doctor.
What would the possession of such power imply? To see future events and control them! Divine power? Yes, in degree, at least. But the mind, is it not divine? I have seen the Doctor do marvellous things. ”

“ One is the slaveholding aristocracy and their slaves; the other is the common people. There never was a greater absurdity taught than that which Northern writers and newspapers have spread to the effect that in the South there is no middle class. The middle class is the South. This is the South that is right and wholesome and strong. The North may defeat the aristocracy of the South, and doubtless will defeat it; but never can she defeat the true South, because the principle for which the true South fights is the truth--at least the germ of truth if not the fulness of it. ”

“ Yet I supposed my home was Charleston. My memory now began with that city. There were but two great gaps remaining to be filled: first, my life before I was at school under the Doctor; second, my life at home and in the Confederate army before I pretended to desert to the Federals.
I am Jones Berwick and I am Berwick Jones? What an absurdity! Let reason work; the idea is preposterous! What does it mean? Can it mean any more than that you were known at one time as Jones Berwick and at another time as Berwick Jones? It is insanity to think that you are two persons at once. ”

“ Here and there we see a real battle-flag violently shaking; the thunder of the cannon no more is heard; the smoke recedes, and our men--those that are left, but not the line--still go forward.
Pickett has reached the hostile infantry. On his left and right swarm out against his flanks the army of the enemy, while in his front still stand the stone bulwarks over which but few of his men live to pass.
Yet the fight still rages. The Federal skirmishers everywhere have long ago withdrawn, so that we can stand and move and watch the struggle for the graves. ”

“ The army was lost; it was no longer an army. As soon as the men had run beyond gunshot they began to march, very deliberately, each one for himself, away from the field. Companies, regiments, and brigades were intermingled. If the rebels had been in condition to pursue us, many thousands of our men would have fallen into their hands.
In vain I tried to find some group of Company D. Suddenly I felt exhausted--sick from hunger and fatigue--and was compelled to stop and rest. The line of the enemy did not seem to advance, and firing in our rear had ceased. ”

“ But how can you expect me to kill men when I know nothing of the merits of the cause for which I am told to fight?"
"Jones, so far as I am concerned, and so far as the government is concerned, your question is hardly pertinent. You are already a Confederate soldier by your own free act. Your only chance to keep from serving is to get yourself killed, or at least disabled; I will not suggest desertion. For your sake, however, I am ready to answer any question you may ask about the causes of the war. You ought to have your mind satisfied, if it be possible." ”

“ What a mind that man has! He is to be feared. I wonder if he has had active part in what has befallen me.
I keep a straight north course over hill and hollow, through wood and field, crossing narrow roads that lead nowhere. Farmhouses and fields and groves and streams and roads I pass in haste, knowing or feeling that I shall find no help here. Here I shun nothing; here I seek nothing--beyond this region are the people I want. What can I say? what can I prove? This is the question that troubles me. If I say that I am a Union soldier, I must tell the whole truth, and that I cannot do ”

“ I saw the Doctor and Lydia and Willis and the Man! Always the Man! Lydia, even, could not lay the ghost of the strange Man who sometimes wore blue and sometimes gray.
Night fell. I was posted as a vedette near the river. There was nothing in my front. The stars came out and the moon. I thought of the moon at Chancellorsville, and of the moon at Gettysburg, and of my Captain, lying in a soldier's grave in the far-off land of the enemy. ”

“ You are speaking of crime, not virtue."
"Of course they are both wrong in the acts of which we are speaking; but in regard to the principles upon which they seem to differ, they are right, and these are what I wish to speak of."
"Well, I listen, Doctor."
"Then first let me say that the world is ruled by a higher power than General McClellan or Mr. Jefferson Davis."
"Agreed."
"The world is ruled by a power that has far-reaching, even eternal, purpose, and the power is as great as the purpose; the power is infinite." ”

“ Suddenly from our front came a roar and a crash, and our line staggered to a dead halt, every man firing and loading as fast as he could--firing at a line of smoke ahead of us. Great shouts could be heard in the smoke; occasionally, in some momentary diminution in our own strife, there could be faintly heard the noise of battle to our right, far and near to our right.
Men were falling fast. All at once I heard Willis roar, "Fire to the left, men! fire to the left!" A great turmoil ensued; officers cried, "They are our men!" Willis again, shouted: "Fire on that line, men! They are rebels! ”

“ If the moneyed men, the manufacturers, and the great merchants of the North thought for one moment that they would lose some of their dollars by the war, the war would end. What care they for us? They care only for themselves. They plunge the whole country into mourning simply in order to keep control of the trade of the South."
Up to this time I had known nothing of the creation of West Virginia by the enemy, and I thought it discreet to be silent, mentally vowing that I should at once read the history of events since 1859. ”

“ I would say that a system of rewards should be planned by which a worthy negro, ambitious to become free, could by meritorious conduct achieve his freedom. But this act of Lincoln's is monstrous. It is good for nobody. A race of slaves, suddenly become free, is a race of infants with the physical force of men. What would become of them? Suppose the North should succeed. Suppose the Confederate armies disbanded, and the States back in the Union or held as territories. Has anybody the least idea that the whites of the South would tolerate the new dignity of their former slaves? ”

“ Khayme is fact, and Lydia is fact, and Willis; but as to this Jones, or these Joneses, I doubt. Doubt is not relief. Jones remains. Wherever I turn I find him. He will not down. If he is a fact, he must be the most important person related to my life. More so than Lydia?
What is Jones to me? My mind confesses defeat and struggles none the less. Could he be a brother? Can it be possible, after all, that my name is B. Jones? Anything seems possible. Yet a thought shows me that this supposition is untenable. If I am Berwick Jones, and the spy was my brother, I should have heard of him long ago. ”

“ Yet how can I place a limit to the power of mind? God is mind ... and if there is a man on earth who can do such miracles, that man is Dr. Khayme.
But, another thought--why should the Doctor have been willing for me to suffer so? If he knew that I should be hurt--and that I should endure mortification--and be without friends--and long hopeless of all good--why should he do me such injury? Would it not have been better for me to remain in the Union army? ”

“ The homeliest rebel in the South is not uglier than I am. The strain to which I have been subjected for days and weeks, and especially for the last forty-eight hours, must be telling fearfully upon me. Uncouth, dirty, ragged, starved, weak through fever and strong through unnatural excitement, there can be no wonder that the captain thinks me wild. He may suspect that such a creature is seeking the presence of General Meade in order to assassinate him. ”

“ The world and objects in it divert other men, while your attention is upon your own feelings. Pardon me for saying that you think of little except yourself. This new old experience of battle and peril you apply without dilution to your soul, and you wonder what the effect will be. The other men think of other men, and of home, and of a thousand things. You will be all right in battle. I predict that the excitement of battle will be good for you, sir; it will force you out of yourself. ”

“ To refuse war, to tamely allow the South to withdraw and set up a government of her own, would be but the beginning of the end; at the first grievance California, Massachusetts, any State, could and would become independent. No; war must come; the Union must be preserved; the nation was at the forks of the road; for my part, I could not hesitate; we must take one road or the other; war was forced upon us. But why reason thus, as though we still had choice? War already exists; we must make the best of it; we are down to-day, but Bull Run is not the whole of the war ”

“ Lydia started off down the hill.
"She will find a buggy at our stable-camp," said Dr. Khayme; "it is but a short distance down there."
The Doctor smoked. I thought of many things. His view of war was not new, by any means; of course, in the abstract he was right: war is wrong, and that which is wrong is unwise; but how to prevent war? A nation that will not preserve itself, how can it exist? I could not doubt that secession is destruction. If the Union should now or ever see itself broken up, then farewell to American liberties; farewell to the hopes of peoples against despotism. ”

“ Frost had told me that if ever I got the smallest clew to my past, I must determine then and there to never let it go.
Sometimes instants of seeming recollection would flash by and be gone before I could define them. They left no result but doubt--sometimes fear. Doubts of the righteousness of war beset me--not of this war, but war. I had a vague notion that in some hazy past I had listened to strong reasons against war. Were they from the Captain? No; he had been against war, but he had fought for the South with relish--they did not come from him. ”

“ To be pursued would have been to throw up the game; all then would have been lost. I left the road and hid in the shadowy woods. On came the rider, and as the thundering hoofs hit the road within ten paces of my stand, I saw again the black horse belly to the ground in the moonlight.
Almost at once I started in pursuit. I would keep this man before me; if he should run upon rebels, the alarm would reach me; so long as he should be in my front, safety for me was at the front and danger elsewhere. ”

“ O Lord, our heavenly father, the high and mighty Ruler of the Universe, who dost from Thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth, most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy favour to behold and bless Thy servant the President of the Confederate States, and all others in authority; and so replenish them with the grace of Thy Holy Spirit that they may always incline to Thy will, and walk in Thy way. Endue them plenteously with heavenly gifts, grant them in health, and prosperity long to live ”