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The Affair At Coulter's
Ambrose Bierce
"Do you think, colonel, that your brave Coulter would like to put one of his guns in here!"
the general asked.
He was apparently not altogether serious; it certainly did not seem a place where any
artillerist, however brave, would like to put a gun. The colonel thought that possibly his
division commander meant good-humouredly to intimate that Captain Coulter's courage had
been too highly extolled in a recent conversation between them.
"General," he replied warmly, "Coulter would like to put a gun anywhere within reach of
those people," with a motion of his hand in the direction of the enemy.
"It is the only place," said the general. He was serious, then.
The place was a depression, a "notch," in the sharp crest of a hill. It was a pass, and through
it ran a turnpike, which, reaching this highest point in its course by a sinuous ascent through
a thin forest, made a similar, though less steep, descent toward the enemy. For a mile to the
left and a mile to the right the ridge, though occupied by Federal infantry lying close behind
the sharp crest, and appearing as if held in place by atmospheric pressure, was inaccessible
to artillery. There was no place but the bottom of the notch, and that was barely wide
enough for the roadbed. From the Confederate side this point was commanded by two
batteries posted on a slightly lower elevation beyond a creek, and a half-mile away. All the
guns but one were masked by the trees of an orchard; that one--it seemed a bit of
impudence--was directly in front of a rather grandiose building, the planter's dwelling. The
gun was safe enough in its exposure--but only because the Federal infantry had been
forbidden to fire. Coulter's Notch--it came to be called so--was not, that pleasant summer
afternoon, a place where one would "like to put a gun."
Three or four dead horses lay there, sprawling in the road, three or four dead men in a trim
row at one side of it, and a little back, down the hill. All but one were cavalrymen
belonging to the Federal advance. One was a quartermaster. The general commanding the
division and the colonel commanding the brigade, with their staffs and escorts, had ridden
into the notch to have a look at the enemy's guns--which had straightway obscured
themselves in towering clouds of smoke. It was hardly profitable to be curious about guns
which had the trick of the cuttlefish, and the season of observation was brief. At its
conclusion--a short remove backward from where it began--occurred the conversation
already partly reported. "It is the only place," the general repeated thoughtfully, "to get at
them."
The colonel looked at him gravely. "There is room for but one gun, General--one against
twelve."
"That is true--for only one at a time," said the commander with something like, yet not
altogether like, a smile. "But then, your brave Coulter--a whole battery in himself."
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The tone of irony was now unmistakable. It angered the colonel, but he did not know what
to say. The spirit of military subordination is not favourable to retort, nor even deprecation.
At this moment a young officer of artillery came riding slowly up the road attended by his
bugler. It was Captain Coulter. He could not have been more than twenty-three years of age.
He was of medium height, but very slender and lithe, sitting his horse with something of the
air of a civilian. In face he was of a type singularly unlike the men about him; thin, high-
nosed, grey-eyed, with a slight blonde moustache, and long, rather straggling hair of the
same colour. There was an apparent negligence in his attire. His cap was worn with the
visor a trifle askew; his coat was buttoned only at the sword belt, showing a considerable
expanse of white shirt, tolerably clean for that stage of the campaign. But the negligence
was all in his dress and bearing; in his face was a look of intense interest in his
surroundings. His grey eyes, which seemed occasionally to strike right and left across the
landscape, like searchlights, were for the most part fixed upon the sky beyond the Notch;
until he should arrive at the summit of the road, there was nothing else in that direction to
see. As he came opposite his division and brigade commanders at the roadside he saluted
mechanically and was about to pass on. Moved by a sudden impulse, the colonel signed him
to halt.
"Captain Coulter," he said, "the enemy has twelve pieces over there on the next ridge. If I
rightly understand the general, he directs that you bring up a gun and engage them."
There was a blank silence; the general looked stolidly at a distant regiment swarming
slowly up the hill through rough undergrowth, like a torn and draggled cloud of blue
smoke; the captain appeared not to have observed him. Presently the captain spoke, slowly
and with apparent effort:--
"On the next ridge, did you say, sir? Are the guns near the house?"
"Ah, you have been over this road before! Directly at the house."
"And it is--necessary--to engage them? The order is imperative?"
His voice was husky and broken. He was visibly paler. The colonel was astonished and
mortified. He stole a glance at the commander. In that set, immobile face was no sign; it
was as hard as bronze. A moment later the general rode away, followed by his staff and
escort. The colonel, humiliated and indignant, was about to order Captain Coulter into
arrest, when the latter spoke a few words in a low tone to his bugler, saluted, and rode
straight forward into the Notch, where, presently, at the summit of the road, his field-glass
at his eyes, he showed against the sky, he and his horse, sharply defined and motionless as
an equestrian statue. The bugler had dashed down the road in the opposite direction at
headlong speed and disappeared behind a wood. Presently his bugle was heard singing in
the cedars, and in an incredibly short time a single gun with its caisson, each drawn by six
horses and manned by its full complement of gunners, came bounding and banging up the
grade in a storm of dust, unlimbered under cover, and was run forward by hand to the fatal
crest among the dead horses. A gesture of the captain's arm, some strangely agile
movements of the men in loading, and almost before the troops along the way had ceased to
hear the rattle of the wheels, a great white cloud sprang forward down the slope, and with a
deafening report the affair at Coulter's Notch had begun.
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It is not intended to relate in detail the progress and incidents of that ghastly contest--a
contest without vicissitudes, its alternations only different degrees of despair. Almost at the
instant when Captain Coulter's gun blew its challenging cloud twelve answering clouds
rolled upward from among the trees about the plantation house, a deep multiple report
roared back like a broken echo, and thenceforth to the end the Federal cannoneers fought
their hopeless battle in an atmosphere of living iron whose thoughts were lightnings and
whose deeds were death.
Unwilling to see the efforts which he could not aid and the slaughter which he could not
stay, the colonel had ascended the ridge at a point a quarter of a mile to the left, whence the
Notch, itself invisible but pushing up successive masses of smoke, seemed the crater of a
volcano in thundering eruption. With his glass he watched the enemy's guns, noting as he
could the effects of Coulter's fire--if Coulter still lived to direct it. He saw that the Federal
gunners, ignoring the enemy's pieces, whose position could be determined by their smoke
only, gave their whole attention to the one which maintained its place in the open--the lawn
in front of the house, with which it was accurately in line. Over and about that hardy piece
the shells exploded at intervals of a few seconds. Some exploded in the house, as could be
seen by thin ascensions of smoke from the breached roof. Figures of prostrate men and
horses were plainly visible.
"If our fellows are doing such good work with a single gun," said the colonel to an aide who
happened to be nearest, "they must be suffering like the devil from twelve. Go down and
present the commander of that piece with my congratulations on the accuracy of his fire."
Turning to his adjutant-general he said, "Did you observe Coulter's damned reluctance to
obey orders?"
"Yes, sir, I did."
"Well say nothing about it, please. I don't think the general will care to make any
accusations. He will probably have enough to do in explaining his own connection with this
uncommon way of amusing the rearguard of a retreating enemy."
A young officer approached from below, climbing breathless up the acclivity. Almost
before he had saluted he gasped out:--
"Colonel, I am directed by Colonel Harmon to say that the enemy's guns are within easy
reach of our rifles, and most of them visible from various points along the ridge."
The brigade commander looked at him without a trace of interest in his expression. "I know
it," he said quietly.
The young adjutant was visibly embarrassed. "Colonel Harmon would like to have
permission to silence those guns," he stammered.
"So should I," the colonel said in the same tone. "Present my compliments to Colonel
Harmon and say to him that the general's orders not to fire are still in force."
The adjutant saluted and retired. The colonel ground his heel into the earth and turned to
look again at the enemy's guns.
"Colonel," said the adjutant-general, "I don't know that I ought to say anything, but there is
something wrong in all this. Do you happen to know that Captain Coulter is from the
South?"
"No; was he, indeed?"
"I heard that last summer the division which the general then commanded was in the
vicinity of Coulter's home--camped there for weeks, and--"
"Listen!" said the colonel, interrupting with an upward gesture. "Do you hear that?"
"That" was the silence of the Federal gun. The staff, the orderlies, the lines of infantry
behind the crest--all had "heard," and were looking curiously in the direction of the crater,
whence no smoke now ascended except desultory cloudlets from the enemy's shells. Then
came the blare of a bugle, a faint rattle of wheels; a minute later the sharp reports
recommenced with double activity. The demolished gun had been replaced with a sound
one.
"Yes," said the adjutant-general, resuming his narrative, "the general made the acquaintance
of Coulter's family. There was trouble--I don't know the exact nature of it--something about
Coulter's wife. She is a red-hot Secessionist, as they all are, except Coulter himself, but she
is a good wife and high-bred lady. There was a complaint to army headquarters. The general
was transferred to this division. It is odd that Coulter's battery should afterward have been
assigned to it."
The colonel had risen from the rock upon which they had been sitting. His eyes were
blazing with a generous indignation.
"See here, Morrison," said he, looking his gossiping staff officer straight in the face, "did
you get that story from a gentleman or a liar?"
"I don't want to say how I got it, Colonel, unless it is necessary" --he was blushing a trifle--
"but I'll stake my life upon its truth in the main."
The colonel turned toward a small knot of officers some distance away. "Lieutenant
Williams!" he shouted.
One of the officers detached himself from the group, and, coming forward, saluted, saying:
"Pardon me, Colonel, I thought you had been informed. Williams is dead down there by the
gun. What can I do, sir?"
Lieutenant Williams was the aide who had had the pleasure of conveying to the officer in
charge of the gun his brigade commander's congratulations.
"Go," said the colonel, "and direct the withdrawal of that gun instantly. Hold! I'll go
myself."
He strode down the declivity toward the rear of the Notch at a break-neck pace, over rocks
and through brambles, followed by his little retinue in tumultuous disorder. At the foot of
the declivity they mounted their waiting animals and took to the road at a lively trot, round
a bend and into the Notch. The spectacle which they encountered there was appalling.
Within that defile, barely broad enough for a single gun, were piled the wrecks of no fewer
than four. They had noted the silencing of only the last one disabled--there had been a lack
of men to replace it quickly. The debris lay on both sides of the road; the men had managed
to keep an open way between, through which the fifth piece was now firing. The men?--
they looked like demons of the pit! All were hatless, all stripped to the waist, their reeking
skins black with blotches of powder and spattered with gouts of blood. They worked like
madmen, with rammer and cartridge, lever and lanyard. They set their swollen shoulders
and bleeding hands against the wheels at each recoil and heaved the heavy gun back to its
place. There were no commands; in that awful environment of whooping shot, exploding
shells, shrieking fragments of iron, and flying splinters of wood, none could have been
heard.
Officers, if officers there were, were indistinguishable; all worked together--each while he
lasted--governed by the eye. When the gun was sponged, it was loaded; when loaded, aimed
and fired. The colonel observed something new to his military experience-- something
horrible and unnatural: the gun was bleeding at the mouth! In temporary default of water,
the man sponging had dipped his sponge in a pool of his comrades' blood. In all this work
there was no clashing; the duty of the instant was obvious. When one fell, another, looking
a trifle cleaner, seemed to rise from the earth in the dead man's tracks, to fall in his turn.
With the ruined guns lay the ruined men--alongside the wreckage, under it and atop of it;
and back down the road--a ghastly procession!--crept on hands and knees such of the
wounded as were able to move. The colonel--he had compassionately sent his cavalcade to
the right about--had to ride over those who were entirely dead in order not to crush those
who were partly alive. Into that hell he tranquilly held his way, rode up alongside the gun,
and, in the obscurity of the last discharge, tapped upon the cheek the man holding the
rammer, who straightway fell, thinking himself killed. A fiend seven times damned sprang
out of the smoke to take his place, but paused and gazed up at the mounted officer with an
unearthly regard, his teeth flashing between his black lips, his eyes, fierce and expanded,
burning like coals beneath his bloody brow. The colonel made an authoritative gesture and
pointed to the rear. The fiend bowed in token of obedience. It was Captain Coulter.
Simultaneously with the colonel's arresting sign silence fell upon the whole field of action.
The procession of missiles no longer streamed into that defile of death; the enemy also had
ceased firing. His army had been gone for hours, and the commander of his rearguard, who
had held his position perilously long in hope to silence the Federal fire, at that strange
moment had silenced his own. "I was not aware of the breadth of my authority," thought the
colonel facetiously, riding forward to the crest to see what had really happened.
An hour later his brigade was in bivouac on the enemy's ground, and its idlers were
examining, with something of awe, as the faithful inspect a saint's relics, a score of
straddling dead horses and three disabled guns, all spiked. The fallen men had been carried
away; their crushed and broken bodies would have given too great satisfaction.
Naturally, the colonel established himself and his military family in the plantation house. It
was somewhat shattered, but it was better than the open air. The furniture was greatly
deranged and broken. The walls and ceilings were knocked away here and there, and there
was a lingering odour of powder smoke everywhere. The beds, the closets of women's
clothing, the cupboards were not greatly damaged. The new tenants for a night made
themselves comfortable, and the practical effacement of Coulter's battery supplied them
with an interesting topic.
During supper that evening an orderly of the escort showed himself into the dining-room,
and asked permission to speak to the colonel.
"What is it, Barbour?" said that officer pleasantly, having overheard the request.
"Colonel, there is something wrong in the cellar; I don't know what--somebody there. I was
down there rummaging about."
"I will go down and see," said a staff officer, rising.
"So will I," the colonel said; "let the others remain. Lead on orderly."
They took a candle from the table and descended the cellar stairs, the orderly in visible
trepidation. The candle made but a feeble light, but presently, as they advanced, its narrow
circle of illumination revealed a human figure seated on the ground against the black stone
wall which they were skirting, its knees elevated, its head bowed sharply forward. The face,
which should have been seen in profile, was invisible, for the man was bent so far forward
that his long hair concealed it; and, strange to relate, the beard, of a much darker hue, fell in
a great tangled mass and lay along the ground at his feet. They involuntarily paused; then
the colonel, taking the candle from the orderly's shaking hand, approached the man and
attentively considered him. The long dark beard was the hair of a woman--dead. The dead
woman clasped in her arms a dead babe. Both were clasped in the arms of the man, pressed
against his breast, against his lips. There was blood in the hair of the woman; there was
blood in the hair of the man. A yard away lay an infant's foot. It was near an irregular
depression in the beaten earth which formed the cellar's floor--a fresh excavation with a
convex bit of iron, having jagged edges, visible in one of the sides. The colonel held the
light as high as he could. The floor of the room above was broken through, the splinters
pointing at all angles downward. "This casemate is not bomb-proof," said the colonel
gravely; it did not occur to him that his summing up of the matter had any levity in it.
They stood about the group awhile in silence; the staff officer was thinking of his
unfinished supper, the orderly of what might possibly be in one of the casks on the other
side of the cellar. Suddenly the man, whom they had thought dead, raised his head and
gazed tranquilly into their faces. His complexion was coal black; the cheeks were
apparently tattooed in irregular sinuous lines from the eyes downward. The lips, too, were
white, like those of a stage negro. There was blood upon his forehead.
The staff officer drew back a pace, the orderly two paces.
"What are you doing here, my man?" said the colonel, unmoved.
"This house belongs to me, sir," was the reply, civilly delivered.
"To you? Ah, I see! And these?"
"My wife and child. I am Captain Coulter."
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