CHAPTER 10
PICTURE OF WAR

"Pack a picnic lunch," Mathew Brady told his assistants, Alex and Tim,
quickly amending his directive to "pack enough food for two of us for two
days. Nothing that will spoil."
"Who are you taking with?" Alexander Gardner asked.
"Tim." Brady had decided that the day before. He judged Alex to be more
adept at developing and printing, always difficult in the field, but considered
Tim O'Sullivan to have the edge in preparing the wet plates quickly. Besides,
Tim was physically stronger than Alex, which would be important on a
battlefield, handling the mules drawing the photographic wagon-darkroom
and lugging the heavy glass plates in and out of the wagon. "You're my
second-in-command, Alex, your job is here in the gallery. The customers
know you." What he meant was that Gardner had a sharp Scotsman's eye for
money, a talent that neither Brady nor O'Sullivan shared; it was for the
studio manager to remain behind.
"We are going on an historic mission," Brady felt called upon to say to his
men. He was not one inclined toward dramatic statements, nor did he permit
his photographic subjects to assume flamboyant or romantic poses, but surely
the mission he had planned was historic.
"How many plates?" Gardner asked dryly.
"This will be the first time that a photograph will be taken of a battle in
progress," Brady continued, gripped by a sense of the occasion.
"Twenty plates," Gardner decided. "The subjects are likely to move, and
you could spoil half the plates right there." Brady nodded agreement. "You
want to take both cameras?"
"We'll just take the big one," Brady replied, putting his hand on the An-
thony & Company camera. One camera would do, even for making history;
the stereoscope was too expensive to risk out of doors, and taking it would
strip the studio naked of cameras. The stereoscopic slides were all the rage in
Washington and New York, surpassing in sales even the cartes de visite, his
illustrated calling cards.
"If anything happens to the big camera," O'Sullivan put in, "there goes the
history. We may never get another battle in this war, at least not near here."
"Timmy's right, Mr. Brady," said Gardner. "Everybody's saying, 'On to
Richmond!' which is where the next fight is likely to be. That's a long way in
a bouncy wagon for the glass plates."
Brady tugged his goatee in thought and then acceded to their wishes. The
risk was not so much to the cameras, it was to the history of his infant
profession if one camera failed and the battle went unrecorded on colloidal
plate. He did not try to conceal his excitement from his operators on this
Sunday morning; the light was excellent, the tension of battle was in the air,
the city was alive with spectators preparing to rush to the front to witness the
decisive blow for the Union.
"You're sure they won't stop you at the battlefield?" Gardner worried.
Brady, looking closely in the long mirror to see if his top hat was on
properly and his doeskin pants were neatly pressed, smiled as he took a letter
from his jacket pocket. Three days before, as soon as he heard that the Union
troops were on the move toward Manassas, he had obtained a pass signed by
General McDowell from the only officer who was his superior. Gardner read
it quicklylucky fellow, he did not have to squint through thick spectacles to
make out the words, as Brady didand wondered how his employer had
managed it.
Brady smiled. "The naked general remembered his friend." Only a week
before, the aging, ponderous General Winfield Scott"Old Fuss and Feath-
ers"had been in the Brady studio. A sculptor had been commissioned to
produce a statue of the General-in-Chief to be placed in Scott Square, and the
artist needed a photograph of his subject stripped to the waist. While Scott
was posing with his shirt off, an English actress entered for her photographic
appointment and Brady had quickly stepped in front of the general, saving
the day by preserving his modesty. When Brady called on him to present his
photograph, at no cost, the general could not turn down his request to photo-
graph the battlefield.
"Winfield Scott is a grand old man," Brady pronounced, although the hero
of the Mexican War was hardly the man for these times. That marvelously
wrinkled old face would probably be replaced soon by lrvin McDowell, after
the victory, or if the victor at Manassas suffered too many casualties, by
George McClellan, who had gained recognition after several skirmishes in the
West. Brady made a mental note to be sure to approach both generals for a
sitting; a tidy profit was to be made out of selling pictures of heroes. "Mc-
Dowell had said he did not want photographers and spectators cluttering up
his field," Brady told his assistants, "but Scott told him that photography
might become useful for military topography."
The provisioning of the wagon was complete in an hour. The assistants
carried the 16x20 Anthony camera out of the studio and into the mobile
laboratory, with Brady carrying the 4 X 4 stereo camera. Gardner remem-
bered the oats for Guerro, the mule, which Brady had forgotten.
"I feel like Euphorion," the photographer remarked as he climbed onto the
front of the wagon, letting O'Sullivan take the reins. "Destiny guides my
feet."
"Who's going to pay for these pictures?" Gardner was moved to ask, Brady
thought with typical lack of imagination.
"Destiny," Brady replied, nudging O'Sullivan to start. Guerroa name
Brady had chosen this week as appropriate to the first combat photographer's
mulelurched forward and the adventure was begun.
In the end, Brady mused as they rolled down rutted Pennsylvania Avenue,
Posterity would pay. The War Department would need official records of the
battle that smashed the slavocracy, and there was good reason to suggest that
photographs could be part of the official record. Brady would have to induce
Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, to visit the gallery; it was said that he was
a man always ready to do business. A series of portraits of Cameron and his
family might do the trick.
The wagon left the two-story house on the corner of Seventh Street and
Pennsylvania Avenue, passed the fashionable National Hotel, where the pho-
tographer was staying while he debated whether to make his personal head-
quarters in New York or Washington. The gallery here was in good hands
with Gardner, and the emporium in New York did not have a capable man-
ager he could trust: good business sense suggested that Brady keep his eye on
the store in New York. Yet Washington, despite the stench from the sewer in
the summer, was sure to be the center of the war, the place where most of the
history was to be made, or at least observed from. The art and science of
photography could best be advanced from here for the next few months at
least.
Traffic on the avenue this Sunday morning reminded him more of the
congestion of New York's narrow streets than the usual freedom of the
capital's wide boulevards. Carriages containing just about every Congressman,
reporter, and social butterfly jammed the streets, crawling toward the bridge
leading to the battlefield. A troop of cavalry, single file, pranced past the
carriages and men on mules and horses. As his wagon passed the President's
house, Brady saw for the first time a platoon of rebel prisoners, looking
properly dispirited, coming back from the Virginia front. No time to stop for
a picture; after the main battle, there would be plenty of time for shots of
captured rebels.
Nearing Long Bridge, O'Sullivan and Brady were forced to wait in a half-
mile line behind what seemed to be every hack, gig, and wagon available in
Washington. In one elegant carriage directly in front of them, its fine horse
ridden by a negro boy, was a passenger Brady recognized as William Howard
Russell of the London Times. The famous reporter, whose writings were
notably hostile to the North, as suited British officialdom, was dressed for
India.
"Brady!" he called over his shoulder. "Are you going to get the two armies
to hold still for a picture?"
Brady, who secretly wished that such a moment could be arranged, merely
shrugged. As an Irishman and a staunch Union man, he instinctively disliked
the British Southern sympathizer. It made the photographer feel good to be
on the way to record the end of the insurrection.
"Tell me, Brady, they've been skirmishing for two daysdo you know if
they've chosen the spot for the grand battle?"
"Follow the traffic to Manassas," Brady told him, feeling it no breach of
trust to repeat the directions Scott had given him, since the crowd seemed to
know the way, "about two hours' drive. Look for the signs to Centreville, it
overlooks Bull Run." He could hear the rumble of artillery in the distance,
across the Potomac. "And follow the sound of the guns." He felt like an old
soldier giving advice to a recruit.
Twenty miles into Virginia, the cannon thunder lost its rolling character
and became sharper and, to Brady, more menacing. Yet the festive air pre-
vailed on the roadway, the Congressmen and other civilians hailing each other
on the way to catch a safe whiff of war. A military man rode up behind with
whiskers Brady found familiar. Colonel Ambrose Burnside's beard ran down
his cheeks but instead of continuing to the chin swept up into his mustache,
which was a variation on the fashion in facial hair. He had been in for a
photograph a few days before. Brady hailed him, and the colonel slowed his
black horse to a walk beside the wagon.
"You'll have a problem with the smoke," Bumside advised, "if you try to
take pictures out there. I was at Bull Run yesterday, when the artillery
opened fire, and by afternoon it gets hard to see the movement of troops."
"Are we winning?" O'Sullivan inquired. Brady wished his assistant would
not ask stupid questions about the battle but would direct his concern to the
problems of light and position.
"Of course," Bumside replied. "McDowell has only sixteen hundred regu-
lar army troops to season all his recruits, but Beauregard's men are green,
too, and he can't have half as many." The colonel looked northwestward,
striking what seemed to Brady a most impressive pose. "Another rebel force,
under Joe Johnston, is about a day's march away in Winchester, but they
can't make it to the battle because we have them tied down defending the
valley."
That was fortunate, Brady thought; by outnumbering the rebels two to one,
the Union Army should have little trouble scoring a decisive victory. He
wondered aloud at the appearance of a column of Union soldiers, dark blue
uniforms relatively clean and muskets slung casually across their backs, com-
ing back from the front.
"That's a sight to make any patriot furious," said Bumside. "Damned
ninety-day men."
The sergeant on a mule alongside the column pulled up to throw a desul-
tory salute at Bumside. The colonel scorned the mockery of discipline and
asked, "Couldn't stand the noise?"
The sergeant shrugged. "These men signed up for ninety days. Enlistment
ran out yesterday, and we're going back to Pennsylvania. We enlisted early
about half the army has another week to go."
"You mean," asked Brady, "you're going to miss the victory? What will
you tell people when you get home?"
"We'll tell 'em we stood on our rights. If you like being a sorefoot soldier,
mister, you join the army."
"If you can remember back to your military life," Burnside said acidly,
"what did the battle look like in the position you left just now?"
"Couple of our divisions crossed Bull Run Creek, flanked the rebs," the
retiring sergeant reported. "Planning to make a charge at Colonel Jackson's
Virginians at the stone house. We seem disorganized as hell, though."
"Why so?"
"Been a long march out here, most of the men ate their rations early. When
our boys hear the damn cannon, they forget how to load their muskets. And
that secesh cavalry scares hell out of our gunners."
"You recognize the danger, and in the face of the enemy, you and your men
are going home," said Burnside. "No shame at all?"
"You're talking to a civilian, soldier-boy," said the former sergeant. "Now
why don't you get your fat ass up to the front and fight like we hire you to
do!"
Burnside cursed and spurred his horse, kicking up dust as he passed the
column of smiling men. The photographer assumed they would go back and
call themselves veterans of the campaign that won the war and saved the
Union.
"I suppose that was the main reason Lincoln pushed his generals into
fighting this soon," Brady observed to O'Sullivan; "most of the army will fade
away in a few weeks as the enlistments run out."
"Should we get them to pose along the roadside?" his assistant asked.
"Let's get on to the battle," Brady decided, "before the war's over."
The photographer's wagon reached Centreville in a half hour. It squeezed
through the bottleneck of Cub Run Bridge, past the carriages of spectators,
wagons loaded with food and ammunition, stray soldiers on foot and a few on
mounts.
"Make for the high ground," Brady ordered, uncertain of their position in
relation to the battle line. The smoke was worse than Burnside had predicted,
stinging Brady's weak eyes and irritating his throat. He worried that the
smoke would befog the lenses. The noise of the crowds on the roads mingled
with the cannonading and Brady felt a frisson of fear. He stole a look at
Timmy O'Sullivan, who had his hands full with the frightened mule. Brady
pointed to a side road and O'Sullivan headed the mule in that direction up a
hill, through a stand of trees.
That was when Brady saw his first dead body. The crumpled form of what
had been a human in gray uniform lay face up alongside the narrow path. No
time to stopthe photographer wanted to find a place that would give him a
panoramic view of the battlefieldbut he made a mental note to come back
for a picture of that body if possible.
Guerro picked his way up the hill, through the brambles that grew across
the path, and out of the woods onto a rising slope. The mule stopped and
refused to move ahead. O'Sullivan scrambled down to get him a bucket of
water.
They were in the open. Below, the wooded countryside was dotted with
cleared fields and patches of green. A line of purple ridges led up the far hills
into what he assumed were the Blue Ridge Mountains. The battle smoke
swept in on them in great black clouds and Brady succumbed to a fit of
coughing. He heard the shouts of soldiers, the pops of musketry amid the
booming cannon. He put his handkerchief over his nose and mouth and
stopped coughing. The voices shouting sounded unlike the cadences of men
from New York. He squinted to see the soldiers in gray uniforms racing
across the hilltop, setting up a battery of artillery.
He was seized with the terrible realization that he was on the wrong side of
the battlefield. The men nearest him were fighting for the Confederacy, deter-
mined to kill as many bluecoats as they could. His dismay at being behind
enemy lines grew when he remembered that the great Union attack would
soon be aimed at these men in this position, which meant at him and his
assistant and his mule and his cameras and darkroom-wagon. The thought
entered his mind for the first time that it was entirely possible to be killed in
this engagement. He would be remembered in history only as the first man to
be shot dead while trying to photograph a war. It would be not only a
personal disaster, but also a setback for the science.
"Turn around and get out of here," he told O'Sullivan.
"You want to take a picture first?"
If his young assistant was going to make a test of bravery out of it, Brady
would not be found lacking in courage. The thought occurred also that it
might be less dangerous to get busy, and look busy, than to appear to the
soldiers in gray all around to be running away, perhaps as Union spies. The
photographer climbed out of the wagon and ordered O'Sullivan to tie up the
mule to a tree stump and set up the large camera.
A Confederate officer on horseback, in the gray and blue uniform that
Brady took to mark him as a general, waved his sword to rally his men, not
thirty yards away. The men were wandering about, or running back and
forth, in a most unmilitary way and to no seeming purpose. The ofiicer
shouted at the men to reform their lines and charged at a group of laggards.
All this was moving too fast for a picture, and Brady could not very well ask
them to stop and hold still for a minute under these circumstances. The rebels
milled about, looking for some place to form a line.
The mounted officer wheeled his horse toward Brady's wagon, shot a puz-
zled look in the photographer's direction at the two men working on their
contraption in front of the mule, then wheeled again toward his men.
"Alabamans!" he called out, pointing to a ridge that seemed to offer a shelter
from the intense firing. "There stands Jackson like a stone wallrally round
the Virginians!"
Their patch of open land was soon deserted as the Alabama regiment ran
to the high ridge.
Brady pointed the camera toward the field of battle. He did not much care
if the brave Southerner was complaining about a man named Jackson for not
moving forward in support or was praising him for holding his own position.
He ducked his head down under the shadowing fabric and tried to look
through the lens.
Nothing. He could not see clear objects well under good conditions, and in
all the smoke, he could see nothing at all. No massed armies, as he had long
envisioned, in grand array, bayonets at the ready, with generals at the head of
the columns, swords raised, standing still; instead, blurs and smoke and con-
fusion. Maybe his eyes had completely failed; he told O'Sullivan to take a
look. The assistant did, and came up saying he would not waste a plate on
that.
The sound of the cannon from the ridge where Jackson was standing like a
stone wall was giving him a headache, especially now that it was mixed with
the screams of soldiers in blue coming under the withering fire from that hill.
He could make out the general in the distance, pressing his stragglers forward
to the new position on the ridge, and saw him lurch forward suddenly and
slide off his horse.
"We need a better position," he told O'Sullivan, who was ready to leave
also, and carried the camera back to the wagon instantly. They guided
Guerro down the hill into the woods, past the familiar dead bodyno time
for a pictureall the way back to the Centreville Road.
Only an hour before, the traffic had all been one-way toward the bat-
tiefront; now it was two-way. As O'Sullivan maneuvered the wagon into a left
turn, toward the front but this time behind the Union lines, frightened men
came past them, suggesting to Brady that all was not well up ahead. The
returning ambulances were to be expected, sure sign of battle, but too many
soldiers were coming back without muskets, leaderless; others trudged back
with their coats hung over their firelocks, with a look of men who had some-
thing important to do elsewhere. The road was littered with evidence of
lightened packs: canteens, knapsacks, cartridge boxes, and blankets lay in the
dirt.
Russell of the Times drew up, on his way to the rear. "Have you seen what
it's like, Brady? Can you believe the ineptitude?"
"We've been lost," O'Sullivan started to say and Brady shot an elbow to his
arm.
"We've been at the center of the battle," Brady said, "saw Jackson standing
like a stone wall, as they said. What news have you?"
"It's a disaster for the Union," the Englishman called out, not in appropri-
ate distress, "the Federal army isn't an army at all, rather a mass of men
milling aimlessly, not knowing how to fight or where to go. McDowell must
be an idiot, going into battle so unprepared."
"You're leaving? Is the battle over?"
"I can tell which way it's going," the portly correspondent snapped, as if
Brady had questioned his courage, which in a way he had. "Your artillery
batteries were moved forward without infantry cover, and the Confederates
captured them. Fear of the cavalry is rampantI've heard prodigious non-
sense, describing batteries tier over tier, and ambuscades, and blood running
knee-deep. This road will be under fire in a very short time. Move aside!"
O'Sullivan let the man from the Times pass. Russell was quickly followed
by a group of picnickers in three carriages who had lost their taste for the
afternoon outing. The road was becoming more congested than at any place
since Long Bridge. An ammunition cart came past them, loaded with explo-
sives. It occurred to Brady that a full load should be headed in the opposite
direction. A red-faced officer on the cart, with an empty scabbard dangling
from his side, said, "Turn back! We are whipped."
"I don't like this," O'Sullivan said. "You can smell the panic."
"Think about capturing it on a wet plate," Brady replied. Even if this
turned out to be a standoff, or at worst a defeat, the War Department would
want pictures. He had not been able to find a photographable scene.
By midaftemoon of a day with hot sun burning through the haze of smoke
and choking 'dust, no observer, military or amateur, could doubt that a rout
was under way. Men in blue uniforms were running down the main road to
Centreville, throwing their muskets by the roadside, desperate to get away
from the sound of the guns. Occasionally a lone officer would shout at them
to stop, and Brady saw a senator he knew, Ben Wade, a pistol in each hand,
threatening to shoot deserters but being ignored in the general exodus from a
scene of confusion and destruction. As far as the photographer could learn,
no order of retreat had been given by General McDowell. His army had
simply decided to go home.
They unloaded the camera at a vantage point below the smoke, close
enough to a stream for washing, facing up a hill looking toward a stone
house. Brady could hardly believe his dim eyes: there must have been four
hundred dead bodies lying up the long slope. With the sound of bullets whin-
ing and smacking nearby, O'Sullivan began the process of sensitizing the
plates. In this heat, the coating, exposing, and developing would have to be
completed within ten minutes.
Brady looked nervously up the hill as his assistant washed the plate in the
collodion solution, a mixture of guncotton and sulfuric ether and alcohol.
When the plate flowed with collodion, O'Sullivan laid on the chemical exci-
tantsbromide and iodide of potassiumand, when that turned properly
tacky, lifted it into a tub containing nitrate of silver and iodized water. It
remained in the darkness inside the wagon for four minutes. Sullivan then
lifted it out, drained the plate, placed it in the lightproof holder, and carried
it, dripping, to the camera.
Brady ducked his head under and looked; he could make out forms on the
ground, little else. He walked forward to make certain they were rebel dead;
at least the body in the foreground was, and the others could be called that as
well. The Northern public, he was sure, was not ready for pictures of Union
dead.
O'Sullivan had the camera loaded. He focused it, as the nearsighted Brady
could not, moved it slightly to get the form in the foreground in focus, and
grunted. Brady lifted the lens cap, counted to thirty, and ended the exposure.
O'Sullivan pulled out the holder, raced back into the wagon and began the
delicate business of dipping it into the developer of acids and soda. In two
minutes, he ran out to the stream and held the plate under water. Brady
prayed there would be no mud to stick to the still-gummy surface.
An image appeared. The dead rebel in the foreground would be frozen in
history as he was frozen in death. Brady could feel his heart pounding as the
science so few now appreciated passed a milestone. "Photograph by Brady"
of a nation at war. He told O'Sullivan to take the plate inside the wagon
quickly and to bring out the stereo camera. The assistant hefted the plate
gleefully, saw his employer's warning frown, and carried his developed image
inside. Brady was glad he had chosen O'Sullivan, who followed orders and
never so much as breathed on the sensitive plates.
The young Irishman was taking the next Brady photograph of the dead
bodies when he suddenly let out a cry and dropped the little camera. Brady
rushed over and picked up the instrument, which fortunately had landed on a
cast-off blanket; aside from the smearing of blood over one of the lenses, it
appeared to be unbroken.
O'Sullivan was staring at his left hand, which was dripping blood. Both of
them were apparently in the line of enemy musket fire. They ran into the
wagon, which offered little cover, and Brady took the reins while O'Sullivan
fashioned a makeshift tourniquet out of a lenscloth. In moments, Guerro had
them on the road back toward Centreville.
Almost all the traffic was headed away from the front by this time, but one
rider that Brady recognized was making his way forward. It was Breckin-
ridge, the Kentucky senator who had steadily ignored Brady's letters of invi-
tation to be photographed.
"Great day for Southern sympathizers," the photographer said coldly.
The rider shook his head in what struck Brady as genuine sadness. "A
terrible day for all of us." He seemed the only calm presence in the spreading
panic.
"McDowell's fault?" Brady wanted to get home in a hurry, and did not
want O'Sullivan fainting from loss of blood, but he remembered that Breckin-
ridge had once been a military man and probably had some idea of what was
going on. Brady was amazed that he could be at the very vortex of a battle
and not have the foggiest notion about the movement of the troops, although
anybody could tell that the side that was running away was losing.
"Lincoln's fault," the senator answered, "but the general will get the
blame. Lincoln wanted this fight, here and now, before his ninety-day men
had the chance to go home. McDowell had thousands of soldiers, but no
army. Look over there."
Brady looked over his shoulder and shuddered at the sight of a force of
rebel cavalry sweeping down a far hill, hacking at running blue infantry. All
too fast in motion, no chance for a picture.
"Those are Joe Johnston's men," the Kentuckian explained, moving his
horse out of the way of an ambulance wagon. "They must have come down
from Winchester on the Manassas Gap railway and joined Beauregard's
army. That's what the Federals thought could never happen." He spotted a
fellow senator, whose name slipped Brady's mind, who was urging his car-
riage away from the firing. "Ah, Henry, what does it look like?"
His Senate colleague struggled by in his gig, not speaking. Wilson of Mas-
sachusetts, Brady remembered, the Military Committee. Good that he was
getting a firsthand look, because some great changes would have to be made
immediately.
They left the Kentuckian surveying the road and the field. Although the
Centreville Road had become a slow river of vehicles and stumbling men and
crying women sightseers, it was the only way back. And as Russell of the
Times had warned, the jammed road was coming under fire from Confederate
artillery.
Nearing the stone bridge at Cub Run, Brady saw his first big explosion: a
shell hit the bridge ahead of them; he could hear the whoosh of fire, then the
blast, and the bridge had disappeared. A score of people crammed on the
bridge were obliterated. Amid the screaming and whinnying, with the line
that had been waiting to get on the bridge now spreading out along the
stream preparing to swim, wade, or float across, Brady felt a wave of resigna-
tion come over him.
"We will stop here," he told O'Sullivan, "and take a photograph of the
place where the bridge used to be. Are you up to it?"
O'Sullivan held up his bandaged fist and grinned. Brady turned the wagon
off the road and stopped. He unloaded the big camera and watched O'Sul-
livan, one-handed, apply the colloidal wash and prepare the plate. He helped
his assistant carry the heavy plateholder to the camera and told him to aim at
the scene of the devastated bridge. He took off the lens cap, waited, put it
back. O'Sullivan went through the developing process, washing the plate in
the creek that they had just photographed.
"That should come out," Brady announced. "Good light, not much smoke.
Not exactly two armies clashing in vast array, but at least we can prove we
were here."
He took the two exposed and developed glass plates in his arms. O'Sullivan
picked up both cameras and carried them high on his back. Together, they
kicked and shouted at Guerro, who finally got the idea he was to drag the
emptied wagon though the water. The two men, and the mule with the
wagon, made it across the stream, with the water never higher than Brady's
knees.
The thumping of the cannons sounded louder as they neared the Union
long-range artillery hurling shells at the pursuing rebels. Then the sound was
pierced by a bloodcurdling scream that Brady knew he would remember in
his nightmaresthe rebel yell, the battle cry of the cavalry swooping down
on batteries and fleeing bystanders. The yell achieved the desired effect, send-
ing terror through the routed ranks, with the gunners abandoning their field-
pieces, every man for himself.
Brady knew he could not leave his equipment behind without leaving his
whole life's meaning with it. At the same time, he was aware that he was
profoundly afraid. He tried to speak several times and finally was able to
choke out instructions to Timmy O'Sullivan to be calm. The young man was
loading the cameras on the wagon and reached down for the plates in Brady's
arms. The photographer gave up his burden, adjusted his top hat, and
climbed up.
A man whose gray uniform was bloodstained across the neck and shoulder
called up to him. He was propped against a tree by the side of the road, face
white, unable to move. Here was the victor, the photographer thought grimly,
Johnny Reb on his day of triumph over an overconfident Union Army. He
considered whether to tell O'Sullivan to set up the equipment again to take a
picture or just to take the wounded man along.
Timmy must have read his thoughts because the young man jumped off the
wagon and lifted the wounded rebel, carrying him into the rear of the wagon.
Brady did not argue. The man was more of a sorry object than a good subject,
but might do them some good if the rebel army in pursuit caught up with
them. He hoped that would not happen. He hoped their generals would not
learn of the extent of the rout until too late and would not carry their triumph
at Manassas into an undefended Washington.