Confederates

by Thomas Keneally

The ringing of the bell this morning told Jim the General hadn’t skipped out last night. Jim went in carrying a big pitcher, a basin, a clean laundered towel. While he fetched a clean shirt and drawers from the General’s travelling bag, the General stood by the window, his nightgown dropped to the floor, thoughtfully sponging the upper half of his body. He could see by now some of the tents of his staff in the plantation park and, in a field beyond, a few fires where his headquarters’ regiment cooked its breakfast. The boys over there breakfasted well this morning off Union delicacies taken in the last ten days. There was likely good bacon and ample coffee, and if they were making corn pone, it would be of well-ground Yankee flour and delicious, the sad thing being Confederate cornflour was often riddled with husks. Yet despite what fine breakfasts they might be eating, this place wasn’t a healthy one for those boys down there. All night the mists would be working in through their pores, and now a fiercely humid sun would keep those poisonous vapours simmering in them.

  ‘No good for us, Jim,’ the General muttered. ‘No good for us mountain folks here.’

  Jim, who was getting on so well with the Thomases’ cook, a large homely woman built on the same mould as her masters, just the same knew when to agree. ‘I s’pect that’s right, Gen’ral. I’ve bin shiverin’ and sneezin’ all the night long.’

  G’bye, Missee Cook, he thought. Next week they’d stay at some other gentleman’s house, north, south, east or west – Jim didn’t know, even the General’s generals didn’t know. There he could fall in love with some other grandee’s cook. He fell in love easily but didn’t often do much about it. Women were always saying to him, ‘Lord, Jim, what a talker you is!’

  The mist was lifting quickly now and the General could see young Sandie Pendleton shaving in front of his tent, peering into a mirror held by a servant. He could see too the riflemen of the headquarters’ regiment, lean boys, hanging their damp blankets to dry over Mr Thomas’s rail fences. Not the right place, he thought again, either for health or general strategy.

  ‘Tell Captain Pendleton to come now,’ he ordered Jim. He could see that in any case Sandie was shaving fast, expecting to be called upstairs. He was a very deft boy with a razor. While Jim sped downstairs, Sandie finished the left side of his face, drenched it in water, dried himself, got his grey coat on and buttoned it to the neck. In the same time General Tom Jackson had shirted, underdrawered, trousered and booted himself. In the General’s command only the quick were assured of any standing.

  Sandie was one of the quicker. He came from the town where Jackson had spent all his married life teaching, the town of Lexington. Tom Jackson had therefore known Sandie since Sandie was a child. The boy had shown an early quickness by graduating Bachelor of Arts from Washington College in Lexington at the age of seventeen and by winning the college medal as well. When the war began, he’d been studying for his Master’s at the University of Virginia. It was exactly the sort of background Tom Jackson respected.

  Sandie came through the General’s open bedroom door.

  ‘Where’s Mr Boteler staying?’ the General asked him. Boteler was a Congressman and another of the General’s friends.

  ‘A mile up the road. People called the Morrises.’

  ‘Have you eaten breakfast?’

  ‘I haven’t, sir.’

  ‘So, we’ll both do without it.’

  The General was already loping downstairs. Sandie opened the window, stuck out his head, yelled, ‘Horse!’ in the direction of his tent and followed the General. At the front steps the General’s small dumpy horse Old Sorrel stood being patted by an ostler. Everyone liked Old Sorrel. He wasn’t handsome, his coat was faded chestnut, he lacked style, his eyes were soft as a doe’s. Altogether he looked – had you wanted to ride him to Richmond – as if he would have pegged out about the Charles City crossroads. In fact he never went lame, he had carried the General up and down the Valley at a crazy pace, across and back over the Blue Ridge and on a wild-paced march across Virginia. The General liked him for his easy gait and could sleep by the hour on his back.

  The ostler was English and was telling Old Sorrel, ‘Old Sorrel’s a lively boy, Old Sorrel is.’ By the time he noticed the General, the General was in the saddle, extricating the reins from his hand. Sandie’s horse had also been brought to the steps and Sandie got away a few seconds after his commander.

  Sandie wondered why the General was galloping Old Sorrel on a morning when gallops didn’t seem to be necessary. It must be that Tom Jackson was answering some secret urgency, most likely one of those black crazy urgencies that were more inside his bowels than in the outside world.

  Sandie was a length behind the General when they tore out of the Thomases’ front gate on to the Charles River road to Richmond. This is what it is to live, Sandie thought, with a man who sees his job as being to whip history into shape.

  2

  They tied up their horses in woods three miles south of the Thomases’. There was the General himself and Sandie, and Mr Boteler of the Confederate Congress in Richmond. And as well as these three, a tough, scrawny, crotchety little man called General Popeye Ewell. At the Morris House Tom Jackson and Sandie had found Mr Boteler and Popeye just sitting down to breakfast in the front parlour. Popeye ate only cereal and drank only hot water and talked all the time about his tortured guts, so it wasn’t much of a hardship for him to be snatched away from the table. Mr Boteler liked a Christian breakfast, though – eggs and ham, cakes and gravy. Dragged away from it, he said to Sandie: ‘Those other two don’t have an alimentary canal nor a goddam stomach. They’re monsters.’

  Sandie said, ‘That’s so, Mr Boteler.’

  Ahead of the place they had now left their horses, and right at the edge of the forest, some Alabamans were standing picket duty, facing out across a wide wild field in the distant likelihood of a Union movement. To the left, in a further fringe of oak forest, some Georgians were supposed to be doing the same, though you couldn’t see them for the foliage.

  The Alabamans looked to Sandie as if they were taking their business with proper seriousness, even the ones who were hunkered or brewing coffee. The open ground ahead was a bowl of sunlight now. There were butterflies amongst the lupins out there. But here under the branches there were mosquitoes, and flies as fat as blackberries.

  General Jackson ignored the boys in the picket line. Popeye Ewell, who was the sort of man who always had something to say but pushed it out the corner of his mouth as if it were an imposition, called out: ‘Keep them pupils primed, boys. That meadow you see there is a meadow of Virginia!’

  ‘Wa-ha-ha!’ a few of the Alabamans cried.

  Sandie Pendleton found a child lieutenant standing by a sycamore, field-glasses in his hands. ‘Where are they?’ he asked the boy.

  ‘See that fence across the meadow? Follow it to the right. Then … notice it starts to rise and goes up a hill? Well, there are cottonwoods up there and if you hide among them you can see a line of forest. They’re in that forest, the Union pickets, facing the cottonwoods. You can see the Union camp beyond. And the James.’

  Sandie thanked the boy. Already Tom Jackson and the others were stepping out into the open ground. The meadow was overgrown with blackberry bushes and you could tell which branches the pickets had been harvesting. Maybe these Alabamans would come out of their cover today and crop some blackberries themselves, trading the long chance of a bullet against the assured sugar and succulence of the blackberries. Anyhow, the two generals and Mr Boteler and Sandie made crouching progress amongst the blackberries and across the meadow. It was low, boggy ground, and Sandie, as General Jackson had already done that morning, disliked it and thanked God he was from Lexington. There were likely more copperheads and water-moccasins in these mean few acres than in the whole of Rockbridge County.

  Mr Boteler’s lower left leg slipped from under him and he landed on his knee in bog water. ‘Hell and damn!’ he said, but he looked up smiling at Sandie. He was a tough, genial little man, about
forty-five years, and he was a West Virginian like the General. He was one of the opposition in the Confederate Congress, what they called a Whig Unionist, as Jackson was himself, a moderate, a man who wished this whole mess had never got started. He had a lot of power exactly because he fetched from the same part of the state as the General. It was a wonderful thing for a politician to have a successful general from his own constituency. Boteler, who had once been an operator in the U.S. Congress and was now an operator in the Government in Richmond, knew just how wonderful it was.

  A politician of less flexibility than Mr Boteler might have objected to the price the General was demanding today. How many Congressmen would be willing to creep forward past the pickets and spy on the Yankee hosts from behind fences and cottonwoods? Well, Boteler was willing, and it was just as well. General Jackson thought nothing of bringing any civilian out here to witness the state of the Yankee camp and soul. Jefferson Davis himself better beware – he might find himself out here one morning next week.

  They kept low behind the fence and followed it uphill. Soon they could stand full height amongst the cottonwoods and tall undergrowth. How tall was the summit of the hill? A hundred and fifty feet maybe. Two hundred. But in that flat land it was like a peak in Darien. Boteler and General Ewell put their binoculars to their eyes. Sandie handed General Jackson his.

  Quoting the young Alabaman, Sandie briefed them where to look. There was little need for his instructions, even with the naked eye you could see the Federal camp on the James. Tents and waggons floated in a haze that still clung to the flats round Harrison’s Landing. But with the binoculars you could see more. You could see first the blue-coated pickets in the wood three hundred yards away. If they knew there were two Confederate generals and a Congressman on this knoll they would send out a cavalry squadron to bag them. But they didn’t do much that was adventurous any more, not after last week. Jackson knew exactly the feelings of the boys over there. Brave enough, they wondered if the Rebs weren’t braver still and they began to wonder too about their generals, even about their beloved McClellan. Jackson could read their doubts as he gazed at them through the lenses.

  Beyond the pickets and their line of forest some batteries were placed behind fences and earth embankments, and beyond that stretched the vast Union bivouac itself. The Yankees had been bottled up there for some days now and it looked like a well-arranged encampment. There seemed to be the beginnings of pathways amongst the tents. But not all the Union army enjoyed the luxury of canvas. Along with fifty-two pieces of artillery, thousands of stands of sidearms, much beef, pork, flour, coffee and molasses, the Federals had as well lost a few tents last week.

  Yet it was a town, that camp. As big as Richmond. A hundred thousand men lived there, however uncertainly. You could see somewhere in the centre a great military band playing songs of home, and hymns and tunes to ginger up doubtful souls. You could see ships of the U.S. Navy in the deep-water reaches of the James two miles away.

  The General spoke to Mr Boteler. ‘I’d like you to just take note of the location of the artillery parks, Mr Boteler. Not up forward, as if they ever mean to turn their guns on us. They’re down by the landings. Plain as day, it’s intended they should be ready to be taken on board ship. The great Mac has his bags packed and he’s already decided to leave all defence to those gunboats out there.’

  ‘I believe you’re right,’ said Mr Boteler, letting his binoculars fall and hitching his thumbs, farmer-wise, in their straps.

  The General’s voice became both low and fierce. ‘Well in that case, do you agree we’re losing time here?’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, we happen to be repeating the old mistake we made last year after Manassas. They are being given a free gift, namely, time to recover. And what are we doing here, apart from catching malaria? There are ten thousand of us already sick with pneumonia and dysentery, and the hospitals in Richmond haven’t even got round to treating last week’s wounded yet. There are alternative things to do besides standing in these miasmas getting ill. I wanted to talk to you about it.’

  The General leaned against a tree. He’d always been gangling and a leaner. Popeye Ewell here remembered the day, he himself then a young professor of the Academy, that Tom Jackson had come to West Point, a lean and very handsome boy. Somehow he’d got a place in the Academy even though he hadn’t had good schooling. It was rumoured that he’d got there through political influence, his uncle Cummins Jackson being the drinking crony of a Western Virginia Congressman. Anyhow, Ewell had been attracted to Tom Jackson’s raw talent and helped him with his mathematics. Jackson had been a serious boy who’d had too much death in his family – a mother, a father, his brother. He did everything as if time was limited. Generally he was right on that score.

  ‘I don’t mean to tell you, Boteler, anything a private soldier couldn’t tell you,’ said Tom Jackson. ‘McClellan’s whipped as a cur. He’ll go home. It’ll take him some time to get there. He’ll sulk for reinforcements. It’ll take him time to get them. Even then … well, he’d have to reorganise. And he’s not quick at that sort of job. Richmond is safe now. What we have to do is move north, into Maryland, if possible into Pennsylvania, to outflank Washington. Put Abe Lincoln in a panic.’ He sneezed moistly. ‘I want you to go to Mr Davis and tell him what I’ve told you.’

  ‘You say that as if it were a simple thing.…’

  ‘It’s the only thing,’ said Tom Jackson. ‘A big move north. The final battle. Maybe in Maryland, as I say. Maybe in Pennsylvania. Either will serve.’

  Boteler closed one eye and made a dubious squeaking noise with his lips. ‘What’s the use of me going to Mr Davis? He’d only refer me back to General Lee. Why don’t you talk direct to Lee?’

  ‘I’ve done so.’

  ‘Well …?’

  Tom Jackson chewed at his narrow lips.

  ‘He said nothing. I know he’s got reasons for his silence.’

  Boteler decided to be funny. ‘Well, at least you’re not trying to rebel against your superior general.’

  Jackson didn’t think that was funny. He thought a while. Boteler coughed; the joke had fallen flat.

  The General said: ‘He can’t give me a definite answer because of influences in Richmond. I’m sure the matter’s been mentioned by him there. Now it’s time to add our voice.’

  Boteler spat. ‘It’s clean contrary to current thinking,’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s contrary to ideas of caution.’

  Sandie coughed and General Ewell called, ‘Look at that there!’

  Out of the Federal camp a ball of white and red silk had risen. It yawed a little in the hot air and came straight for them on a light wind off the James. They knew who it was – Professor Thaddeus Lowe, McClellan’s balloonist, flying to observe the Rebels. Very soon the balloon seemed to Boteler to be overhead, and he grinned and pretended to be trying to withdraw his head into his shoulders.

  General Jackson ignored the professor’s exotic craft.

  ‘You have to let him see’, he said, the him being President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America, ‘that Lincoln is more anxious about losing Washington than we are about losing Richmond. And with some reason.’

  ‘Maryland?’ Mr Boteler asked. He laughed. ‘That’s a grand strategy,’ he said.

  Behind them the Alabamans had begun firing at and catcalling the professor.

  ‘We ought to go now,’ said General Ewell, since firing by one set of pickets would set the other side going. He thought how ridiculous it would be if Stonewall Jackson was lost to the Confederacy because a few Alabamans shot at an eccentric Yankee aeronaut.

  But when they were halfway across the field, returning towards their own picket lines, the General was distracted by the plumpness of the blackberries on shoulder-high bushes all round. He was a true country boy. Fruit always attracted him and often he would just sit on a fence sucking a lemon.

  He began to pluck the berries and so did Sandie. Boteler waited, sh
aking his head a little. If he had to ride back to Richmond this afternoon, the last thing he wanted was a bellyful of berries.

  General Jackson ate the fruit heartily, but Ewell, with his weak stomach, picked just a few and ate them slowly. He suffered from ulcers and, as did two-thirds of his command, from camp diarrhoea. To the left the Alabamans were firing at Professor Lowe’s colourful balloon, which was drifting north-west, and to distract them a picket line of Yankees advanced towards the meadow fence and began firing lazy volleys up open corridors amongst the blackberries. Mr Boteler crouched and Ewell gave up the blackberry-culling and mapped out their best path. He saw that up to the right the woods reached a spot almost level with the place where he and Jackson, the aide and Mr Boteler stood. In that wing of woods General Robert Toombs’s Georgians should be. If the firing didn’t get too intense, that was the way to go, into the elbow where the Alabaman and Georgian picket lines met.

  With a mash of berries in his mouth, Stonewall let a sly grin creep over his lean jaws. It broadened when a minie ball slapped a leaf some three feet from his ear.

  ‘Some nervous boy from goddam Massachusetts,’ Ewell swore. But he was worried for the General and also for himself.

  ‘Tell me, Sandie,’ said the General, holding a fat berry between forefinger and thumb, ‘if you knew you were going to be shot and had a choice …’

  It was an eternal question of discussion. Generals and privates thought about it. With some the consideration became morbid. Others suspected that if they talked about the wound they wanted least, it would stay away from them through some sort of sympathetic magic.

  Sandie thought and said: ‘I just don’t want one of those silly wounds, General. You know, the kind that shouldn’t kill a man, but you bleed to death.’

  This wasn’t quite the truth. Such deaths made him angry, but the deaths he really feared were wounds from artillery, and especially to be dismembered.

  ‘If I’m shot,’ Ewell muttered, ‘I want it to be where I’ve been wounded already – in the clothing. Otherwise I don’t want it to be in the face or joints, not with Monsieur Minié’s famous expanding bullet. But I think the face would be the worst.’ He wondered if some Union boy wasn’t at that moment sighting on his head.