Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0139/01395.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 16KB | 269 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01395}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter XXXV}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{vicksburg
first
cave
shell
river
still
streets
three
time
come}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter XXXV

Vicksburg During The Trouble

     We used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream; but we
cannot do that now.  A cut-off has made a country town of it, like Osceola,
St. Genevieve, and several others.  There is currentless water - also a big
island - in front of Vicksburg now.  You come down the river the other side of
the island, then turn and come up to the town, that is, in high water: in low
water you can't come up, but must land some distance below it.

     Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg's tremendous war
experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by the cannon-balls, cave refuges in
the clay precipices, etc.  The caves did good service during the six weeks'
bombardment of the city - May 18 to July 4, 1863.  They were used by the
non-combatants - mainly by the women and children; not to live in constantly,
but to fly to for safety on occasion.  They were mere holes, tunnels driven
into the perpendicular clay-bank, then branched Y-shape, within the hill.
Life in Vicksburg during the six weeks was perhaps - but wait; here are some
materials out of which to reproduce it:

     Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand non-
combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world - walled solidly in, the
frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries; hence, no buying and
selling with the outside; no passing to and fro; no godspeeding a parting
guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide news to be
read at breakfast, mornings - a tedious dull absence of such matter, instead;
hence, also, no running to see steamboats smoking into view in the distance up
or down, and plowing toward the town - for none came, the river lay vacant and
undisturbed; no rush and turmoil around the railway-station, no struggling
over bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen - all quiet
there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty, corn ten dollars a
bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a hundred dollars a gallon, other
things in proportion; consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages
tearing along the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handful of
non-combatants of exhausted means; at three o'clock in the morning, silence -
silence so dead that the measured tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly
impossible distance; out of hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the
stillness is absolute: all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of
artillery, the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming
from soaring bombshells, and a rain of iron fragments descends upon the city,
descends upon the empty streets - streets which are not empty a moment later,
but mottled with dim figures of frantic women and children scurrying from home
and bed toward the cave dungeons - encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery,
who shout "Rats, to your holes!" and laugh.

     The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron rain
pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops; silence
follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues; by and by a
head projects from a cave here and there and yonder, and reconnoitres
cautiously; the silence still continuing, bodies follow heads, and jaded,
half-smothered creatures group themselves about, stretch their cramped limbs,
draw in deep draughts of the grateful fresh air, gossip with the neighbors
from the next cave; maybe straggle off home presently, or take a lounge
through the town, if the stillness continues; and will scurry to the holes
again, by and by, when the war- tempest breaks forth once more.

     There being but three thousand of these cavedwellers - merely the
population of a village - would they not come to know each other, after a week
or two, and familiarly; insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences
of one would be of interest to all?

     Those are the materials furnished by history.  From them might not almost
anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg? Could you,
who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it to the imagination of
another nonparticipant than could a Vicksburger who did experience it?  It
seems impossible; and yet there are reasons why it might not really be.  When
one makes his first voyage in a ship, it is an experience which
multitudinously bristles with striking novelties; novelties which are in such
sharp contrast with all this person's former experiences that they take a
seemingly deathless grip upon his imagination and memory.  By tongue or pen he
can make a landsman live that strange and stirring voyage over with him; make
him see it all and feel it all.  But if he wait?  If he make ten voyages in
succession - what then?  Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and
has become commonplace.  The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken
a landsman's pulse.

     Years ago I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants - a man
and his wife.  Left to tell their story in their own way, those people told it
without fire, almost without interest.

     A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues
eloquent forever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the
novelty all out; they got used to being bombshelled out of home and into the
ground; the matter became commonplace.  After that, the possibility of their
ever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone.  What the
man said was to this effect:

     It got to be Sunday all the time.  Seven Sundays in the week - to us,
anyway.  We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy.  Seven Sundays, and
all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the night, by a
few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron.  At first we used
to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterward.  The first
time I forgot the children, and Maria fetched them both along.  When she was
all safe in the cave she fainted.  Two or three weeks afterward, when she was
running for the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a big shell burst
near her and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece of iron carried away
her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head.  Well, she stopped to
get that game-bag before she shoved along again!  Was getting used to things
already, you see.  We all got so that we could tell a good deal about shells;
and after that we didn't always go under shelter if it was a light shower. Us
men would loaf around and talk; and a man would say, "There she goes!" and
name the kind of shell it was from the sound of it, and go on talking - if
there wasn't any danger from it.  If a shell was bursting close over us, we
stopped talking and stood still; uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to
move.  When it let go, we went on talking again, if nobody was hurt - maybe
saying "That was a ripper!" or some such commonplace comment before we
resumed; or, maybe, we would see a shell poising itself away high in the air
overhead.  In that case, every fellow just whipped out a sudden "See you
again, gents!" and shoved.  Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading
the streets, looking as cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up
watching the shells; and I've seen them stop still when they were uncertain
about what a shell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that
they sa'ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the verdict.
Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of
one sort or another lying around.  Ours hadn't; they had iron litter.
Sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in
his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument in his front yard - a
ton of it, sometimes.  No glass left; glass couldn't stand such a bombardment;
it was all shivered out.  Windows of the houses vacant - looked like eyeholes
in a skull.  Whole panes were as scarce as news.

     We had church Sundays.  Not many there, along at first; but by and by
pretty good turnouts.  I've seen service stop a minute, and everybody sit
quiet - no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then - and all the more so on
account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead; and pretty
soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again. Organs and church
music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer combination - along at
first.  Coming out of church, one morning, we had an accident - the only one
that happened around me on a Sunday.  I was just having a hearty hand-shake
with a friend I hadn't seen for a while, and saying, "Drop into our cave
to-night, after bombardment; we've got hold of a pint of prime wh - " Whisky,
I was going to say, you know, but a shell interrupted.  A chunk of it cut the
man's arm off, and left it dangling in my hand.  And do you know the thing
that is going to stick the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else,
little and big, I reckon, is the mean thought I had then?  It was, "the whisky
is saved." And yet, don't you know, it was kind of excusable; because it was
as scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little; never had another
taste during the siege.

     Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close.
Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no
turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn't have made a
candle burn in it.  A child was born in one of those caves one night.  Think
of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk.

     Twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times we had a
dozen.  Pretty suffocating in there.  We always had eight; eight belonged
there.  Hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow, and I don't know
what all, got so loaded into them that none of them were ever rightly their
old selves after the siege.  They all died but three of us within a couple of
years.  One night a shell burst in front of the hole and caved it in and
stopped it up.  It was lively times, for a while, digging out.  Some of us
came near smothering.  After that we made two openings - ought to have thought
of it at first.

     Mule meat?  No, we only got down to that the last day or two.  Of course
it was good; anything is good when you are starving.

     This man had kept a diary during - six weeks?  No, only the first six
days.  The first day, eight close pages; the second, five; the third, one -
loosely written; the fourth, three or four lines; a line or two the fifth and
sixth days; seventh day, diary abandoned; life in terrific Vicksburg having
now become commonplace and matter of course.

     The war history of Vicksburg has more about it to interest the general
reader than that of any other of the river towns.  It is full of variety, full
of incident, full of the picturesque.  Vicksburg held out longer than any
other important river town, and saw warfare in all its phases, both land and
water - the siege, the mine, the assault, the repulse, the bombardment,
sickness, captivity, famine.

     The most beautiful of all the national cemeteries is here.  Over the
great gateway is this inscription:

     "Here Rest In Peace 16,600 Who Died For Their Country In The Years 1861
To 1865"

     The grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wide
prospect of land and river.  They are tastefully laid out in broad terraces,
with winding roads and paths; and there is profuse adornment in the way of
semitropical shrubs and flowers; and in one part is a piece of native
wild-wood, left just as it grew, and, therefore, perfect in its charm.
Everything about this cemetery suggests the hand of the national government.
The government's work is always conspicuous for excellence, solidity,
thoroughness, neatness.  The government does its work well in the first place,
and then takes care of it.

     By winding roads - which were often cut to so great a depth between
perpendicular walls that they were mere roofless tunnels - we drove out a mile
or two and visited the monument which stands upon the scene of the surrender
of Vicksburg to General Grant by General Pemberton.  Its metal will preserve
it from the hackings and chippings which so defaced its predecessor, which was
of marble; but the brick foundations are crumbling, and it will tumble down by
and by.  It overlooks a picturesque region of wooded hills and ravines; and is
not unpicturesque itself, being well smothered in flowering weeds.  The
battered remnant of the marble monument has been removed to the National
Cemetery.

     On the road, a quarter of a mile townward, an aged colored man showed us,
with pride, an unexploded bombshell which had lain in his yard since the day
it fell there during the siege.

     "I was a-stannin' heah, an' de dog was a-stannin' heah; de dog he went
for de shell, gwine to pick a fuss wid it; but I didn't; I says, 'Jes' make
youseff at home heah; lay still whah you is, or bust up de place, jes' as
you's a mind to, but I's got business out in de woods, I has!'"

     Vicksburg is a town of substantial business streets and pleasant
residences; it commands the commerce of the Yazoo and Sunflower rivers; is
pushing railways in several directions, through rich agricultural regions, and
has a promising future of prosperity and importance.

     Apparently, nearly all the river towns, big and little, have made up
their minds that they must look mainly to railroads for wealth and upbuilding,
henceforth.  They are acting upon this idea.  The signs are that the next
twenty years will bring about some noteworthy changes in the valley, in the
direction of increased population and wealth, and in the intellectual
advancement and the liberalizing of opinion which go naturally with these.
And yet, if one may judge by the past, the river towns will manage to find and
use a chance, here and there, to cripple and retard their progress.  They kept
themselves back in the days of steamboating supremacy, by a system of wharfage
dues so stupidly graded as to prohibit what may be called small retail traffic
in freights and passengers.  Boats were charged such heavy wharfage that they
could not afford to land for one or two passengers or a light lot of freight.
Instead of encouraging the bringing of trade to their doors, the towns
diligently and effectively discouraged it.  They could have had many boats and
low rates; but their policy rendered few boats and high rates compulsory.  It
was a policy which extended - and extends - from New Orleans to St. Paul.

     We had a strong desire to make a trip up the Yazoo and the Sunflower - an
interesting region at any time, but additionally interesting at this time,
because up there the great inundation was still to be seen in force - but we
were nearly sure to have to wait a day or more for a New Orleans boat on
return; so we were obliged to give up the project.

     Here is a story which I picked up on board the boat that night.  I insert
it in this place merely because it is a good story, not because it belongs
here - for it doesn't.  It was told by a passenger - a college professor - and
was called to the surface in the course of a general conversation which began
with talk about horses, drifted into talk about astronomy, then into talk
about the lynching of the gamblers in Vicksburg half a century ago, then into
talk about dreams and superstitions; and ended, after midnight, in a dispute
over free trade and protection.