Love and War

by John Jakes

  He threw away his field glasses and his sword. Hundreds were running through the trees in the direction of Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. Regiment after regiment was crumbling. He had to save himself even if every other soldier in the command perished; he was worth all of them combined.

  Those who had fled ahead of him had already trampled out a path. Following it made Bent’s progress easier until he caught up with someone blocking the path—a tiny soldier, limping and holding tight to the blue-enameled rim of a drum. Bent reached for the narrow shoulders of the drummer boy, caught hold, flung the boy to one side, but not before he saw the glare the youngster gave him, scared and scathing at the same time. The boy lost his balance and pitched to the ground beside the path. Bent ran on.

  His panic grew worse as he plunged through thicker trees and across a creek. He heard a shell whining in. He leaped to a tree, flung his arms around it, closed his eyes, and buried his face. The instant before everything blew up, he realized who had screamed “Oh, God, no” just before the line broke.

  He was the one who had screamed.

  He awoke, pelted with rain. In the first incoherent moments he imagined he was dead. Then he began to hear the cries in the dark. Moans. Sudden shrieks. Snuffling, he groped everywhere from his ankles to his groin to his throat, feeling for injuries. He was soaked, stiff, hideously sore. But whole. Whole. God above. He had survived the day.

  Lightning flashed above budding tree limbs. As the thunder followed, he started to crawl. He bumped his head against a trunk, went around it, then through some vicious briars. The ground in front of him sloped downward. He thought he smelled water. Crawled faster.

  Lightning again; thunder; and with it the constant chorus of the injured. Thousands must be lying in the meadows and woodlands round about Shiloh Meeting House. Who had won the battle? He didn’t know or care.

  His hands sank in mud. He reached out and plunged them into the water. His mouth was parched. He scooped water in both palms, drank, retched, and nearly threw up. What was wrong with the water?

  Lightning glittered. He saw bodies bobbing. Red liquid trickled out of his cupped hands. He doubled over and gagged. Nothing came up. He was confused. I am in Mexico. This is Mexico.

  He staggered up, crossed the little stream, gagging at each gentle bump of the floating dead against his legs. He ran through more trees, tripped over a rock, went down with a gasp. One outflung hand struck something, tightened on it, helped check his fall.

  From the feel, he believed it to be a bayonet socket. Strings of hair in his eyes, he struggled to his knees. Lucky he hadn’t grabbed the bayonet itself.

  White light lit everything. The bayonet had pinned another drummer boy to the earth, through the neck. Bent screamed until he had no more strength.

  He started on. The shocks piled one upon another began to have a reverse effect: mental clarity returned. He didn’t want that. Better to be numb, unaware. It happened anyway, forcing him to examine the realities.

  Though he had behaved exactly like the Ohioans—broken, and fled—his was the greater crime because he was in command. Worse, he had been among the first to bolt. He knew the Ohioans would spread the story. The stigma would ruin him. He couldn’t let that happen.

  Snorting, soaking his trousers with his own urine and not caring, he doubled back in the dark, searching the underbrush. He found the wrong body the first time—put his hand deep into a blown-open chest, a reb’s this time, and shrieked. When he was able, he went on and located the little drummer.

  I can’t, he thought, gazing at the impaled throat in a flicker of lightning.

  There’s no other way to save yourself.

  Sweating and panting, he grasped the bayonet and gently pulled, gently twisted, gently freed it from the boy’s flesh. Then, bracing his back against a tree, he steadied himself and gathered his nerve.

  Once more he turned his head to the side and shut his eyes. By feel, he placed the point of the bayonet against the front of his left thigh.

  Then he pushed.

  Both sides claimed victory at Shiloh. But Grant had conducted the offensive on the second day, and ultimately the Confederate Army retired to Corinth, with one of its great heroes, Albert Sidney Johnston, a fatality of the battle. Those facts said more than the declarations of either side.

  In the hospital, Elkanah Bent learned that the behavior of the Ohioans was not an isolated instance. Thousands had run. Pieces of regiments had been found all along the bank of the Tennessee, lounging in safety and listening to the pound and roar of the Sunday battle that was a defeat until the Union turned it around on Monday and produced a victory.

  None of that alleviated the threat confronting Bent, however. He was soon under investigation for his conduct while in command of the regiment. He grew expert at repeating his story. “I was indeed running, sir. To stop my men. To stop the rout.”

  To the question about the place where he had been found unconscious—a small tributary of Owl Creek, nearly a mile from the regiment’s position—he would reply: “The reb I fought—the one who bayoneted me—caught me right near our original line. I was facing him, not running away. The location of my wound proves that. I have few recollections of what happened after he stabbed me, except that I cut him down, then ran to stop the rout.”

  The inquiry went all the way to Sherman, to whom he said, “I was running to stop my men. To stop the rout.”

  “The allegation of some witnesses,” said the general coldly, “is that you were among the first to break.”

  “I did not break, sir. I was attempting to stop those who did. If you wish to convene a general court-martial, I will repeat those statements to that body—and to any witnesses called to accuse me. Let them step forward. The regiment to which you assigned me consisted of men never before in battle. Like many others at Shiloh, they ran. I ran to stop them. To stop the rout.”

  “God above, will you spare me, Colonel?” Cump Sherman said, and leaned over to spit on the ground beside his camp desk. “I don’t want you in any command of mine.”

  “Does that mean you intend—?”

  “You’ll find out what it means when I’m ready for you to find out. Dismissed.”

  Bent saluted and hobbled out on his padded crutch.

  His nerves hurt worse than his wound. What would the little madman do to punish him?

  On the peninsula southeast of Richmond, McClellan was sparring with Joe Johnston with little result. In the Shenandoah, Stonewall Jackson was maneuvering brilliantly, whipping the Yankees and expunging some of the shame of Shiloh. Down the Mississippi, Admiral Farragut ran past Confederate batteries to New Orleans. Virtually unprotected, the city surrendered to him on April 25. Within a week—almost a month after his thorny meeting with Sherman—Bent was reassigned.

  “Staff duty with the Army of the Gulf?” said Elmsdale when Bent told him the news during a chance meeting. “That’s principally an army of occupation. A safe berth, but it won’t do much for your career.”

  “Neither did this,” Bent growled, pointing at his trouser leg. Some seepage from the dressing stained the fabric.

  Elmsdale shook his hand and wished him well, but Bent saw a smugness in the colonel’s eyes. Elmsdale had taken a shoulder wound at a section of the battlefield christened the Hornet’s Nest; he had received a citation in general orders. Bent had been plunged into new ignominy, for which he held others responsible, everyone from Sherman, the little madman with the scrubby beard, to the drab, drunken architect of the Shiloh victory, Unconditional Surrender Grant.

  Elkanah Bent felt his star was descending, and there was little he could do about it.

  54

  “BRING THOSE WAGONS UP,” Billy yelled. “We need boats!”

  In mud halfway to his boot tops, Lije Farmer bumped the younger man’s arm. “Not so loud, my lad. There may be enemy pickets on the other side.”

  “They can’t see me any better than I can see you. How wide is this benighted stream an
yway?”

  “The high command does not favor us with such information. Nor do they issue topographical maps. Just orders. We are to bridge Black Creek.”

  “Hell of a good name for it,” Billy said, a scowl on his stubbled face.

  The bridging train—pontoon wagons, balk, chess and side-rail wagons, tool wagons, and traveling forge—had labored along gummy roads as rain started at nightfall. It had slacked off a while but was now pouring down again, and the wind had risen. Billy surveyed the unfinished bridge by the light of three lanterns swaying on poles planted in the mud. It was risky to reveal their position that way, but light was necessary; the creek was deep, the water high and swift.

  The bridge extended halfway across the broad creek. Pontoon boats spaced by twenty-seven-foot balks were anchored on the upstream side, and every other one by a second, downstream, anchor. Work parties were running out chesses and laying them on the balks while others placed and lashed the side rails where the cross planks were already down. It was rough work, made more difficult because the whole structure heaved under the push of a wind approaching gale force.

  No one answered Billy’s hail, nor could he see any more boat wagons in the darkness. “I suspect they are mired,” Farmer said. “I suggest you go see. I’ll handle matters here.” He snugged his old musket down in the vee of his left elbow. The infantrymen detailed for this kind of duty were responsible for guarding the construction area. But those in the Battalion of Engineers, Army of the Potomac, had more confidence in themselves than in greenhorns, and they seldom worked without a weapon. Billy’s revolver rode in a holster with the flap tied down.

  Covered with mud and growing numb, he slopped up the bank past a tool wagon. He was not certain of the date; the tenth of April, maybe. General McClellan’s huge army, said to outnumber the combined Confederate forces of Joe Johnston and Prince John Magruder two to one, had come down by water to Fort Monroe at the low-lying tip of the peninsula between the York and James rivers. The embarkation began March 17, six days after Little Mac was stripped of his duties as general-in-chief. To explain the demotion, some cited his refusal to move against Manassas. Others merely mentioned the name Stanton; the generals now reported directly to him.

  Though McClellan’s command had been reduced to the Department and Army of the Potomac, he fought on for what he wanted: more artillery; more ammunition; McDowell’s corps, which was being held to defend Washington. When the administration refused most of the demands, McClellan decided to besiege Magruder instead of attack him, a decision to which some, including Lije Farmer, had objected.

  “What is wrong with him? They say he takes the number of enemy troops supplied by his Pinkerton spies and doubles it—but even then, our forces are superior. Of what is he so afraid?”

  “Losing his reputation? Or the next presidential election maybe?” Billy said, not entirely in jest.

  The campaign against Yorktown began April 4. The tasks of the Battalion of Engineers included corduroying roads and bridging creeks so men and siege artillery could advance toward Magruder’s line, which stretched almost thirteen miles between Yorktown and the Warwick River. Scouts brought back reports of sighting many big guns in the enemy works.

  The peninsula was a maze of unmapped roads and creeks. Movement in the maze became increasingly hard as rainy weather set in. But the engineers were prepared. When Billy left Washington so hastily that winter night, the battalion had been sent up the Potomac to test the training of their seven-week recruits. The successful test, construction of a complete pontoon bridge, had renewed the engineers’ almost arrogant pride. Now Billy felt none of it. Nights sleeping in damp tents and eighteen-to twenty-hour stretches of work in ceaseless rain had beaten it out of him. He merely existed, pushing himself and his men through one minute, then the next, to complete one job in order to move to another.

  He reached the line of pontoon wagons, stalled a good half mile above the bridge. Each wagon carried one long wooden boat and its gear: oars and oarlocks, anchors and boat hooks and line. As they had suspected, the problem was mud; the first wagon sat hub deep in it.

  He surveyed the situation by the light of a teamster’s lantern. He suggested unhitching the oxen, moving them forward, and running lines from their yoke over a thick overhanging limb and down again to the wagon to provide a lifting action. The lines were rigged, and the teamster hit his oxen with his quirt. Instead of pulling straight ahead, they headed away at the right oblique. The limb cracked ominously.

  “Slack off!” Billy shouted, jumping to knock the teamster out of the way moments before the limb broke and dropped onto the prow of the boat, smashing it and snapping the wagon’s front axle with its weight.

  Furious with himself, Billy climbed from the mud. The wrecked wagon would prevent the others from coming up; there was no room to pass on the muddy road. “All right, you drivers—I’ll send you some men, and we’ll carry the boats to the launching site. We’re behind schedule.”

  Away in the dark, some phantom shouted, “Whose fault is that?”

  Billy scowled again. Someone else complained. “Carry them? From the last wagon that could be damn near a mile.”

  “I don’t care if it’s fifty,” Billy said, and stormed back to Lije, full of self-disgust.

  On the unfinished bridge, the weary infantrymen had fallen idle. Nothing more could be done until the next boat was floated down and pushed out twenty feet from the last one placed. “I need men to carry the boats, Lije. I tried to free the wagon that’s stuck and wrecked it instead. No one can pass.”

  Standing with his musket in his arms, Farmer gave a majestic slow nod. “I saw. Don’t take the guilt so deeply into your soul. There is not an engineer breathing who has not miscalculated in his time—and these are not the best of conditions for sharp thinking. Be thankful you lost a wagon and not a life.”

  The younger man stared at the older, thinking that when he and Brett raised children, he hoped they could counsel them as wisely and humanely as Farmer counseled those who served with him.

  A musket flashed in the woods beyond the stream. On the bridge, a soldier yelled and grabbed his leg. He started to topple into the water, but others pulled him back. Simultaneously, Farmer grasped his musket by the barrel and clubbed the nearest lantern from its pole. Billy leaped for another as musketry and gibbering hoots and cries issued from the dark. They put all the lanterns out, retreated up the bank, and returned fire. In fifteen minutes the rebel sniping stopped. Fifteen minutes after that, Billy and Lije relit the lanterns and work resumed.

  By half past two they had launched enough boats and laid enough balks and chesses to reach the opposite bank. Billy wrote a brief dispatch reporting completion of the bridge and sent it back to headquarters with a courier. Lije ordered a rest. The men slept in the open, finding the best available cover for themselves and their gunpowder. Troubling thoughts strayed through Billy’s mind as he lay against a tree trunk, a soggy blanket over his legs. Water dripped on him. He sneezed for the fourth time.

  “Lije? Did you hear what they Said about the Shiloh casualties before we started out tonight?”

  “I did,” came the answer from the far side of the tree. “Each army is said to have lost a quarter of those engaged.”

  “It’s unbelievable. This war’s changing, Lije.”

  “And will continue.”

  “But where’s it going?”

  “To the eventual triumph of the just.”

  I am not too sure all of us will live to see that, Billy thought as he shut his eyes. His teeth chattered, and he started to shake. Somehow, though, he slept, sitting in the rain.

  In the morning the engineers secured the last cables on the bridge, scouted the woods beyond for rebs and found them gone, and settled down to wait. They would be sent somewhere else soon enough.

  Bivouacked one night near Yorktown, Charles said to Abner Woolner, “We’ve ridden together for a few weeks, but I still don’t know much about you.”

 
; “Hardly a thing worth knowin’, Charlie. I don’t read good, I spell worse, and I can’t cipher at all. Ain’t married. Was once. She died. Her and the baby.” The straightforward way he said it, devoid of self-pity, made Charles admire him.

  “I farm up near the North Carolina line,” the scout went on. “Small place. Right near where my grandpa fought the redcoats. King’s Mountain.”

  “What do you think about this war?”

  Ab pushed his tongue back and forth between front teeth and upper lip for a minute. “Might hurt your feelin’s if I told you.”

  Charles laughed. “Why?”

  “’Cause I don’t like you plantation nabobs and your godless high life down on the coast. You dragged us into this muss. There’s a few of you who are all right, but not many.”

  “Do you own slaves, Ab?”

  “No, sir. Never have, never would. I can’t say I ’specially favor the black folk, though if you pressed me, I’d prob’ly say no man ought to be chained up against his will. I know some judge said Dred Scott and the rest of the darkies wasn’t persons, but I know some who are fine persons, so I’m not sure how I feel about the nigra question that’s a part of all this. I do know which folks I like. You. Major Butler. Hampton—I could tell he din’t think I was enough of a gentleman to be in one of his regular troops when I signed up, but he didn’t say that and make me feel bad. He just acted real happy that I’d scout for him. I’ll take him over that flashy Jeb Stuart any day.”

  “So will I. Beauty’s an old West Point classmate of mine, but I don’t have the regard for him that I once did. I share your feelings about Hampton. About most of the planters, too, matter of fact.”

  Ab Woolner smiled. “I knew there was a reason I liked you, Charlie.”

  In his journal, Billy wrote:

  The general is a paradox. He requires us to emplace his siege artillery, all seventy-two pieces, to bombard a position many feel could be taken in a single concerted attack. The derrick and roller system required to unload the guns would take a page to describe. We must fling up ramps to move each gun into place. A layman would be led to believe that here is a siege destined to last a year.