Читать книгу A Civil General - David Stinebeck - Страница 6

3

After two weeks in Murfreesboro, always with the aroma of the corpses of horses from the battlefield in the air, we moved out, south toward Chattanooga. But it was slow going every day; neither Rosecrans nor Thomas seemed to want to chase the Rebels down, and boredom and desertion set in. When they drum a deserter out of the army, he is marched the length of the brigade to marshal music at the point of a bayonet. His head is shaved and sometimes a letter “D” is branded on his cheek. After all these changes, you would not have known that the momentum in the West was with us.

The Tennessee backcountry was exceedingly dusty and the only water was in the ponds. But in all of these the Confederates had dumped dead horses, mules, and dogs, to ruin the water for our use. We used the water anyway for our coffee, which had a strange soupy taste. Not surprisingly, our appetites suffered.

Almost every house along the road was deserted by men and occupied by either white women or Negro slaves. The few Union men who still remained in southern Tennessee had, for weeks past, been hiding away in the hills, and since Stone River the secessionists were up there, too. We found a man on our fifth day out of Murfreesboro with his head cut off and his entrails ripped out, probably a Union man who had been hounded down by southern sympathizers who were being hounded themselves. “It was him or us,” they’d say.

Daily routines never changed now. There was no sign of a coming battle, in which one army might finally crush the other. But Thomas would push us, demanding again and again that we do it right in drill so we could do it right in battle. Reveille at five in the morning, breakfast at six, surgeon’s call at seven, drill, eight, recall, eleven, dinner, twelve, drill again at four, recall, five, guard mounting, five-thirty, first call for dress parade, six, second call, six-thirty, tattoo, nine, taps, nine-thirty. Every day like the last, even when we moved a few miles closer to Chattanooga.

Just now, one of my men lifts up his voice: “Someone is weeping for gallant Andy Gay, Who in death lies sleeping on the field of Monterey.” Oblivious to the rain and the mud and the monotony of camp life, my thoughts drift to other scenes, when all I wanted was to be as safe as the farm families working the land back in Vernon.

The night sky clears and fills with stars and a rising moon. A thousand white tents dotting the roadside, the shadowy forms of soldiers. Another song: “The noise of the battle is over; the bugle no more calls to arms; a soldier no more, but a lover, I kneel to the power of thy charms. Sweet lady, dear lady, I’m thine.”

I cannot help but think of Neala.

◊◊◊

After that first big battle, all I could be sure about General Thomas was that he was a quiet but steady commander. He noticed everything and planned for anything. When he gathered his troops together on the first day at Stone River, and my men helped them stop the stampede of infantry to the Nashville Pike and Chattanooga railway, they instantly believed in him, or at least in his ability to hold the line against bad odds.

My own cavalry, when he did not send them forward on that second day of fighting, were begging me to go to him and plead their case. They wanted to be trusted by him, too. I did not go. I did not know him well enough. But I could see even in my own men the effect he was beginning to have on the whole army. It was a feeling of being able to handle whatever came to them.

Not of winning always—no soldier by then thought that. Not even of not losing, though they would rely on him for that again and again.

It was a feeling of being ready.

His wife, Frances, gave me a letter years later that he wrote to her after Stone River. “Being ready” to him meant something beside winning.

My dear Frances,

We have had our first great engagement, and I will never know if it was worth it. You have read already, I am sure, about the battle near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, that the soldiers call “Stone River.” I am alive, as are most of my men; as far as I can tell, the South lost more of its boys than we lost of ours. General Bragg did not serve his boys well, I am afraid. Some of them surely were from my home county in Virginia, just as some of ours were surely from Albany and your hometown. I prepare them to the best of my ability. I go out and watch my men bury their own and I no longer know what victory is. Is it measured by how many men are buried each time? Is it enough to measure it by who has moved a half mile toward the enemy’s lines from the night before?

When I went to West Point, I assumed that becoming an officer at our nation’s military college would give me a purpose and clarity. When events confronted me with a choice between serving the North or Virginia, that choice was clear. And I do not regret my decision. But now all I care about is planning a battle, any battle, to win with the fewest casualties. I will not let them say of me that, coming from the South, I made less than a total effort for the Union.

My hope is that some day my family will understand and forgive me. I miss you terribly, my dear Frances. Your support and affection are what sustains me.

Your loving George

◊◊◊

It was nine months before we fought another big battle, at Chickamauga. The routine of camp life was relieved by a skirmish now and then, but very little was happening. Desertion was rampant, and generals’ wives practically lived with their husbands. But General Thomas never took a leave during this time, and his wife never came from the East to pretend with him that there was not a war going on.

You would think that nine months would be enough time to devise a strategy to defeat the Rebels. We won a victory of sorts at Stone River and caused the Confederates to give up their first push to the Ohio River. And Grant had Vicksburg bottled up for months.

Winning the war was the issue. But the plan seemed to be nothing more than waiting and moving and hoping. This was what finally ended Rosecrans’ career in the West. He seemed to think that we could invade the South and win just by attrition, by one small battle after another. He could not grasp the fact that the Rebel cavalry alone, with countless quick strikes, would ruin that plan by frustrating our army enough to make the public in the North too impatient with the war.

General Thomas had a different idea of winning: you had to crush the Confederate army in the West with a major victory, one so large that they would give up and go home. He did not believe, like Grant, that having more soldiers in the field would be enough; that you could wear the South down through numbers. Our men would have to be better prepared, better equipped, and better supplied as well. And the weakest part of our army—the cavalry—had to be brought up to a level with the infantry and artillery. As long as Rosecrans was in charge, Thomas could prepare the army—and did for those nine months. But he could not pick his battles until he was the commander. At Chickamauga, the most violent two days of the entire war, he would have to make up for not being the commander by saving the army that Rosecrans, by his strategy of attrition, had left completely exposed in the northern Georgia thickets.

From January to September, we sat in camp or moved a few miles, inching our way toward the railroad center of Chattanooga. We guessed that General Bragg, commanding the Rebel forces, would make his stand at that city, with his troops and guns perched on the mountains surrounding Chattanooga, to rake us as we approached. Believing that may have made us more hesitant to proceed: when we all got there, Bragg would have the advantage.

I think the hesitancy that we all felt was what brought me into Thomas’ confidence.

◊◊◊

One night, after a few miles of marching in a steady rain, the boys go into camp hungry, wet, and tired, but soon enough have a hundred fires kindled and are eating their supper. Some fervent spirit, determined that the weather is not going to get him down, strikes up the national anthem:

O! say, can you see by the dawn’s early light,

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.

A hundred voices join in, and the distant mountains seem to resound with their own song:

Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming.

A band far off to the right is mingling its music with the voices, along with the occasional whinny of horses and squawk of mules in camp. I have ridden to Thomas’ tent to deliver a routine report on the position of my troops for the night, and to get from him the orders for the morning.

I must have jumped back when I saw his eyes glistening, out of sight of the singing soldiers a few yards away. He said nothing as long as they continued through song after song, some patriotic, some romantic, some downright rude.

Without saying anything, he motioned for me to close the flap of the tent and sit down on the cot opposite him.

When the sounds diminished, he turned to me and began talking urgently in his Virginia drawl, “We’ve had time on our hands, William. I need to tell you that I have overheard some of our soldiers questioning why I am fighting for the North. As much as I understand their confusion, their words still sting. But when I am with you I feel a kinship, so I suspect I can talk to you, and I need to speak with someone. Can I trust you with my thoughts, Colonel Swain? I cannot trust anyone above me in command, and I would not share my feelings with any of my generals. We all need to appear strong, all of the time.”

“General Thomas, I am honored that you would consider me a trustworthy person, and I can assure you that anything you tell me will remain confidential.”

“Thank you, William…. You know, in the South the army determines public opinion and is unaffected by it. Everyone hopes for their victories and hangs on the latest news. I am a Southerner. I know. But in the North the army has no effect on public sentiment, yet we are slaves to it nevertheless. Our people clamor for action—and force us to move too soon, as at Fredericksburg and Bull Run. They have to be patient; we have to push deliberately, but patiently. We should consolidate regiments, and send home thousands of politically appointed officers who take their pay and give us nothing in return. More will die if we just keep fighting one inconclusive battle after another with no plan on either side.

“General Lee pleaded with me to join him and fight for Virginia before I made my decision.” The General paused. “I had fought with him in Texas, and we were the best of friends then and still were in eighteen sixty-one. He told me that no one in Washington had a right to tell us in Virginia how to live our lives; if we wanted to have slaves, that was our business. We contributed to the economy of the nation. We were not forcing slaves on anyone else. We were the ones who set the highest tone for public service in this country. The great politicians in our history had come from Virginia, not Boston and New York, and many of them, like Jefferson, had slaves. It did not keep them from thinking great thoughts and inspiring the North as well as the South.”

The songs outside had started up again, in the distance. He continued, deliberately and intently, looking right at me.

“But I was not swayed by Lee’s argument—amazingly, I was not. I could not have admired or liked a man more than I admired and liked Robert E. Lee. I think he expected that I would be moved by what he had said. Not only was I not affected by what he said, I came away from his speech believing less in the cause of the South than ever before. I simply said to him, ‘Robert, this is going to be a horrible war. It will not just divide and destroy families. It will threaten the existence of the country itself, not only the government in Washington. When that break up starts it will never stop. The South will not hold together. It will begin to shatter into smaller and smaller units—states, counties, municipalities, towns. All that holds the South together is its rural life and slavery, two things that you cannot build a lasting culture on. Take away the North and you do not even have the cotton mills that process the raw material that slaves pick.

“I told him I had to fight for the North because I could not conceive of what America would look like otherwise. I am not an abolitionist, William, but when I was young I chose to teach slaves on our plantation to read; even if they were not citizens and might never be, I believed they still deserved to read and write. My father, a gracious and dignified man, disagreed but did not interfere with my belief in their right to literacy. He set me on this road of independent thinking.

“I told Robert E. Lee that I would fight for the Union because there was no hope for any country within our borders—nothing that could be called America—if I did not. And if President Lincoln ordered the abolition of slavery, I told him, I would not feel a moment of grief. You talk about what Virginia has given this country. Beside our founding documents, Virginia has given us hundreds of thousands of darkened minds that are beginning to catch glimpses of the sun of a better life now rising before them.

“This time Lee was silent. He walked past me, without expression, and I have not set eyes on him since.”

His speech was guarded and emotional at the same time.

“I lost my great friend that day, William. I lost my family, too. I wired them with my decision from New York City, but they never responded, and I will never talk to them again. People in the South are polite only up to a point; if you threaten what they hold most dear, the system that enables them to live well, you have done something worse than murder. It is an act of disloyalty that is beyond indecency. My parents were already dead, thank goodness, but people I still communicate with in Southampton Country have told me that my sisters have turned all my pictures to the wall and refuse to speak my name….

There was a long pause, a deep breath.

Then, suddenly composed, he took my hand and thanked me.

4

A few minutes later, as I walked unsteadily to my horse in the drizzle that had started up again, all I could think of was an old hymn I learned back home, one the free Negroes of Vernon knew as well as I did and sang just as often:

There is a land of pure delight,

Where saints immortal reign;

Infinite day excludes the night,

And pleasures banish pain.

There everlasting spring abides,

And never withering flowers;

Death, like a narrow sea, divides

This heavenly land from ours.

General Thomas was going to deal out death to get the rest of us, somehow, closer to that land where day excludes the night. I knew at that moment that he himself would have stayed behind in that “narrow sea,” if that is what it took.

By the time I had gotten back to my own men two miles away, I thought I understood a more personal reason that General Thomas chose to fight for the North over the South: he wanted to protect his boys even as he sent them into battle, and in some strange way, like the most responsible parent, the more boys he could watch over—South as well as North—the more lives he could try to salvage, the better he would have done his job.

◊◊◊

Riding back to my men, I could not avoid my own reasons for going to war.

My father hated me and I could never please him. As his only child, I was the target of his drunken rage. My mother died when I was twelve years old, and I have always believed she left this world to escape from him.

Everything I did was ridiculed—from my choice of profession to joining the army. After a year of reporting about the war in my newspaper, I suddenly realized that Confederate troops could march into southern Indiana very easily. One reason was Shiloh, a battle the past spring in Tennessee. Our troops luckily won by reinforcements arriving in time for the second day. Until then, all the major battles had been in the East. People forget that state’s rights cut two ways in the war—the North did not want Southerners on our soil any more than they wanted us on theirs. That was what decided the most famous battle of the war—Gettysburg—it was fought on Northern soil, in Pennsylvania, north of Washington, DC!

“You’re a fool to put your life on the line for a bunch of niggers,” my father shouted at me. “You’ve always been an idealist, and that’s another word for a damned jackass.” His eyes were alive with anger. When I tried to explain my position, he just insulted me further. “And that woman you’re courting is nothing but an Irish whore. I didn’t raise you to fill your house with a bunch of mic kids and that’s what she’ll do.”

Here I was preparing to risk my life for what I believed was a just cause, and his response was to attack me and my beloved Neala. Even then, I could not find the courage to confront him. My mother taught me to be silent in the hope that he would fall into a stupor and sleep it off. Now I did that automatically. I was so ashamed of my cowardice.

The following day I had a final delivery for my father to Neala’s father’s farm before reporting for duty. Helping him with his farm equipment business was my way of pacifying him, and keeping him from pestering me about joining him after the war. He could not wait to add “and Son” to his public notices in the county. It seemed the only way he would acknowledge me, and I wanted no part of it.

The Monaghan horse farm was the talk of Vernon. Liam Monaghan and his three children had arrived from Kentucky in 1861 after his son John had been killed at Manassas fighting for the Rebs. Mr. Monaghan brought his slaves with him and freed them when they arrived. All but one stayed and worked his thoroughbreds for show and sale. “I taught them everything I know,” he said in his lilting brogue.

“John and I had a parting of the ways about slavery. He was a true believer in the Southern way of life, having been born there and all. I hope God will forgive me for using human beings in that way, but I never would have been successful without them. They deserve whatever we can give them after what we put them through.”

His honesty was disarming… ever the critic of my newspaper articles, but praising when he felt it was warranted. A quick wit and fiercely loyal, yet melancholy and blunt as hell. I am told that is an accurate description of the Irish, and I liked and admired him very much.

And then there was Neala. Our first encounter was memorable.

Imagine a small but fierce tornado coming at you, Neala on her thoroughbred—chestnut in color, matching the hair of its rider. It was as if she and that stallion of hers were one, their movement fluid and graceful. I knew from Liam that its foundation was Arabian, and he was a spectacularly handsome and intelligent companion.

Neala and I sparred with each other. It was clear there was an attraction but I feared I was no match for her. She took my breath away.

“So you’re a newspaper man.” Her accent was pure Kentucky. And being the too-serious chap that I was, I responded with “Yes, but I am considering going to war at the moment.” I felt pathetic next to her.

She came right back: “Civil war is anarchy, not civility. Our democracy is in its infancy and it is already challenged. Over what? Profit and gentility? Can you see the hypocrisy, Colonel Swain? Civility hides the real truth: greed.”

I was completely captured.

She must have resembled her mother, who had died several years before, her beauty embodied in this dark creature with her black eyes and full features. I wondered if her mother were as opinionated and forthright as she. Neala had been cherished. She knew who she was.

Much to my surprise, she offered to correspond with me, as she did with others, if I joined this atrocious war. She felt it was her duty as a citizen and a woman who could not fight herself.