WE were all well used to seeing men shot, but this was different.
It was a soft, warm, mellow autumn morning. It was a day suggestive of all gentleness. A purple, Indian-summer haze enveloped the earthworks and the camps. Nature had issued an invitation to peace and repose. The cannon were not at work. Nobody on either side had been tempted to bombard anybody else. Even the mortars and the sharp-shooters were still.
It was not the kind of morning for the bloody work of war.
Yet a young man was to be killed within the hour. He was to be killed deliberately, in cold blood, by sentence of a court-martial, and with great pomp and ceremony; and nobody, even in his heart, could say nay to the justice of the sentence.
For Youngblood had done an infamous thing.
There were many desertions to the enemy about that time. The war was manifestly drawing to a close, and men who lacked self-sacrificing devotion were getting tired of its hardships and privations. In order to stop these desertions, orders had been issued that any soldier arresting another in the act of going to the enemy should have a thirty days’ furlough.
Youngblood was on picket one day with another man. He proposed to that other man that they both should desert, and they started together toward the enemy’s lines. According to Youngblood’s story, it was his purpose to arrest his comrade, and thus earn a furlough at the expense of the other fellow’s life. Whether this story was true or not doesn’t much matter. The other fellow arrested him.
In any case, he deserved to pay the penalty he did. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced. The sentence was approved by all the authorities, including the war department. This morning it was to be carried out.
It was about ten o’clock, Youngblood’s regiment was formed into three sides of a hollow square. Near the entrance to the square, on the right, rested Youngblood’s coffin. Beside it was Youngblood’s grave.
Presently an ambulance drove up, bearing the prisoner and his attendant guards. As he stepped lightly and lithely from the ambulance, we saw him to be a fine specimen of young manhood. He was twenty-three or twenty-four years of age; tall, well built, and full of elastic vigor. He was handsome, too, and of refined and gentle countenance.
There was no sign of flinching in him: nothing that denoted the coward which his explanation of his crime had shown him to be.
It seemed something more than a pity to put a fellow like that to death.
He took his place in front of the guards and just in rear of the band, and the dead march began.
He walked alone.
Slowly, and with cadenced step, the procession moved around inside the square. And as it passed me, I was curious to observe the condemned man’s behavior. His step was as steady and as firm as that of any man in the guard. I looked at his hands to see if there were any convulsive clutching of the fingers. There was none. I doubt if any man in all that regiment felt so calm in mind or so well poised in nerve as Youngblood looked.
Having completed the seemingly endless march around the three closed sides of the square, the procession turned to the right, and crossed its open end to the point of execution.
There an officer stepped forward and read to Youngblood the findings and sentence of the court which had condemned him, with the formal endorsements approving them and ordering the sentence executed. The guard which had the prisoner in charge divided to the right and left, and Youngblood was left standing alone in front of his coffin, and beside his open grave.
At the word of command he knelt upon the coffin and folded his arms across his chest. Again at the word of command twelve soldiers stepped out in front of him with guns in their hands. Six of these guns carried ball cartridges, and six were blank. No man in the firing squad was permitted to know whether his gun had a bullet in it or not.
The officer in command spoke scarcely above his breath, but so hushed was the time that his words were audible to the three thousand men there assembled, as he said to each alternate man: “Fire at his head,” and to the intervening man: “Fire at his chest.” Then turning his back, which was perhaps not an officer-like thing to do, the lieutenant gave in a husky voice the word of command.
“Ready, aim, fire.”
There was a sharp crack from twelve rifles fired simultaneously. There was a whirr and whistle of six bullets that had passed through the head or chest of the doomed man, and hurtled off into the fields beyond. Army rifles fire with tremendous force.
The dead man’s body rose to its feet and fell limply forward.
Five minutes later all that was left of Youngblood was buried beneath six feet of earth.
There was no merriment in any of the camps that day, or the next, or the next. Even our scant rations were not much relished by those of us who had witnessed this scene.
And yet, as I said at the beginning, we were all well used to seeing men killed.