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The Burial of the Guns by Thomas Nelson Page
page 27 of 170 (15%)



Lee surrendered the remnant of his army at Appomattox, April 9, 1865,
and yet a couple of days later the old Colonel's battery lay intrenched
right in the mountain-pass where it had halted three days before.
Two weeks previously it had been detailed with a light division
sent to meet and repel a force which it was understood was coming in
by way of the southwest valley to strike Lee in the rear of his long line
from Richmond to Petersburg. It had done its work. The mountain-pass
had been seized and held, and the Federal force had not gotten by that road
within the blue rampart which guarded on that side the heart of Virginia.
This pass, which was the key to the main line of passage over the mountains,
had been assigned by the commander of the division to the old Colonel
and his old battery, and they had held it. The position taken by the battery
had been chosen with a soldier's eye. A better place could not
have been selected to hold the pass. It was its highest point,
just where the road crawled over the shoulder of the mountain
along the limestone cliff, a hundred feet sheer above the deep river,
where its waters had cut their way in ages past, and now lay deep and silent,
as if resting after their arduous toil before they began to boil over
the great bowlders which filled the bed a hundred or more yards below.

The little plateau at the top guarded the descending road on either side
for nearly a mile, and the mountain on the other side of the river
was the centre of a clump of rocky, heavily timbered spurs, so inaccessible
that no feet but those of wild animals or of the hardiest hunter
had ever climbed it. On the side of the river on which the road lay,
the only path out over the mountain except the road itself
was a charcoal-burner's track, dwindling at times to a footway
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