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Page 82
I pass over a desperate hour that followed. Ryerson tried to kill himself
and, when I took the weapon from him, he begged me to put an end to his
sufferings. Never until now had I realised how hard is the way of the
transgressor.
I have often wondered how this terrible night would have ended had not
Providence suddenly intervened. The city hall clock had just tolled five
when there came a volley of shots from the direction of Monument Avenue.
"What's that?" cried my poor friend, his haggard face lighting.
We rushed to the window, where the pink and purple lights of dawn were
spreading over the spires and gardens of the sleeping city.
The shots grew in volume and presently we heard the dull boom of a siege
gun, then another and another.
"It's a battle! They're bombarding the city. Look!" He pointed towards
Capitol Square. "They've struck the tower of the city hall. And over
there! The gas works!" He swept his arm towards an angry red glow that
showed where another shell had found its target.
I shall not attempt to describe the burning of Richmond (for the third
time in its history) on this fateful day, January 20th, 1922, nor to
detail the horrors that attended the destruction of the enemy's force of
occupation. Historians are agreed that the Germans must be held blameless
for firing on the city, since they naturally supposed this daybreak
attack upon their own lines to be an effort of the American army and
retaliated, as best they could, with their heavy guns.
It was days before the whole truth was known, although I cabled the
London _Times_ that night, explaining that the American army had nothing
to do with this attack, which was the work of an unorganised and
irresponsible band of ten or twelve thousand mountaineers gathered from
the wilds of Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky and Tennessee.
They were moon-shiners, feudists, hilly-billies, small farmers and
basket-makers, men of lean and saturnine appearance, some of them horse
thieves, pirates of the forest who cared little for the laws of God or
man and fought as naturally as they breathed.
These men came without flags, without officers, without uniforms. They
crawled on their bellies and carried logs as shields. They knew and cared
nothing for military tactics and their strategy was that of the wild
Indian. They fought to kill and they took no prisoners. It seems that a
Virginia mountain girl had been wronged by a German officer and that was
enough.
For weeks the mountaineers had been advancing stealthily through the
wilderness, pushing on by night, hiding in the hills and forests by day;
and they had come the last fifty miles on foot, leaving their horses back
in the hills. They were armed with Winchester rifles, with old-time
squirrel rifles, with muzzle loaders having long octagonal barrels and
fired by cups. Some carried shot guns and cartridges stuffed with
buckshot and some poured in buckshot by the handful. They had no
artillery and they needed none.
The skill in marksmanship of these men is beyond belief, there is nothing
like it in the world. With a rifle they will shoot off a turkey's head at
a hundred yards (this is a common amusement) and as boys, when they go
after squirrels, they are taught to hit the animals' noses only so as not
to spoil the skins. It was such natural fighters as these that George
Washington led against the French and the Indians, when he saved the
wreck of Braddock's army.
The Germans were beaten before they began to fight. They were surrounded
on two sides before they had the least idea that an enemy was near. Their
sentries were shot down before they could give the alarm and the first
warning of danger to the sleeping Teutons was the furious rush of ten
thousand wild men who came on and came on and came on, never asking
quarter and never giving it.
When the Germans tried to charge, the mountaineers threw themselves flat
on the ground and fought with the craft of Indians, dodging from tree to
tree, from rock to rock, but always advancing. When the Germans sent up
two of their scouting aeroplanes to report the number of the enemy's
forces, the enemy picked off the German pilots before the machines were
over the tree tops. Here was a mixture of native savagery and efficiency,
plus the lynching spirit, plus the pre-revolutionary American spirit and
against which, with unequal numbers and complete surprise, no
mathematically trained European force had the slightest chance.
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