North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  The eight oarsmen struggled to keep the surfboat in its assigned place in the long line of similar craft awaiting the signal to go in. A couple of hours had already been lost because the line was constantly disrupted by the current swirling around Sacrificios. Behind the surfboats lay the troop ships and the rest of the invasion fleet, dozens of vessels of every size from steamers to small gunboats. The yards and tops of the biggest ships were filled with spectators: sailors as well as other soldiers who would go in with later waves. While Navy gunners loaded their cannon with grapeshot, the bands on various vessels competed with one another. Orry could hear “Hail, Columbia” and “Yankee Doodle” above the slap of the waves against the surfboat’s hull and the oaths and complaints of the men.

  He admitted they had plenty to complain about. They groused about everything from their government-issue shoes—cheaply made and designed to fit either right or left foot—to their India-rubber canteens. One private took a drink, grimaced, and spat over the side.

  “No treat to swallow hot water, is it, Novotny?” Sergeant Flicker smirked. “Should have listened to what I told you last week. Rubber heats up. First chance you get, throw that away and fix yourself one of these.” He tapped his own canteen, a gourd carried on a thong.

  The men groused about being sent ashore burdened with haversacks and greatcoats. And they groused about their weapons. A few units had been issued 1841 percussion rifles, but Orry’s men still carried old smoothbores, simply because the high command believed muskets could be more easily maintained by men of limited intelligence. Orry despaired of that kind of thinking. When men knew they were considered worthless, that’s how they acted.

  It was a mild, cloudless afternoon—perfect weather. Northwestward, the domes and rooftops of Vera Cruz were visible. Straight ahead, the spectacular snowcapped peak of Orizaba jutted up through a light haze some distance behind the beach. But Orry was too preoccupied to notice the scenery. He was reflecting that his view of soldiering had changed since his arrival in Mexico. He still wanted an Army career—that was why he was eager to get into combat—but much of the glamour with which he invested the profession was gone.

  First of all, his war duty thus far had not only been frustrating, it had been downright disagreeable. The steamer from Corpus Christi had anchored in the harbor of Brazos Santiago, at the mouth of the Rio Grande. He and George had traveled inland, with other troops, and on the second night Orry had been stricken with dysentery—a standard initiation for newcomers, he was informed. Not even his surroundings—the cool, pleasant uplands of the Sierra Madre—could compensate for his misery.

  The friends reported to their regiment in Saltillo. They were assigned to replace line officers wounded at Monterrey. Orry’s company commander was a lazy complainer named Wilford Place. Captain Place seemed to dislike everyone above or below him, but Orry quickly discovered Place’s attitude was typical rather than unusual. In the United States Army, animosity was a way of life.

  West Point men scorned officers who hadn’t graduated from the Academy. All the regulars hated the undisciplined volunteers, who were prone to burning Mexican houses, stealing Mexican property, and raping Mexican women. Native-born soldiers distrusted the immigrants and vice versa. Even the highest echelons weren’t free of antagonism. Since the start of the war, General Worth had been feuding with General Twiggs over who outranked whom. That ludicrous quarrel had created factions within the Army and finally put an end to the friendship of Worth and Zach Taylor, who had known each other since the War of 1812.

  Far-off Washington joined in the game of mutual distrust. After whipping the enemy at Monterrey, Taylor had given the Mexicans generous terms. Too generous, some complained; as commanding field general, he had let the beaten army slip away past an armistice line. His detractors said he should have ruthlessly destroyed the Mexican forces and ended the war.

  President Polk used this as an excuse to criticize Taylor, whose unpretentious nature and unmistakable courage made him extremely well liked by his men. Taylor’s rising popularity with the kingmakers of the Whig party may also have had something to do with Polk’s enmity. Polk was, after all, a loyal Democrat.

  The President had wanted an independent second front in the south, a direct thrust at the Mexican capital. To achieve this objective, he had no choice but to put a second Whig general in charge—the supreme commander of the Army, Winfield Scott.

  For the proposed amphibious landing, Scott took about nine thousand of Taylor’s regulars, leaving the latter with an army composed mostly of volunteers. With this Taylor was supposed to face a huge Mexican force rumored to be moving to attack him. The Mexicans were under the command of Santa Anna, the self-styled Napoleon of the West. Less reverent admirers called him the Immortal Three-fourths, because of his wooden leg.

  All the strategic maneuvering and professional backbiting had meant but one thing to Orry—no immediate opportunity to go into combat. As part of Worth’s command, he and George had marched all the way back to Santiago in early January, there to languish on the beach while the quartermasters coped with delays in the arrival of everything from casks of water to troop transports. To pass the time, Orry wrote long letters to Madeline. As soon as he finished one, he tore it up and started another.

  Now, here it was the ninth of March, 1847, and he was bobbing in a surfboat, still unblooded, still seeing action only in his imagination. The waiting was surely worse than the fighting would ever be.

  The sudden crumph of a cannon hurled him back to reality. Out in the thicket of masts and spars, a puff of smoke was drifting away from the steamer Massachusetts. Excitement roughened Orry’s voice as he spoke to Sergeant Flicker.

  “That’s the signal.”

  “Yes, sir, so I figured.” Flicker sounded tense for a change. It reassured Orry to know he wasn’t the only one anticipating the prospect of resistance on shore.

  A strange, unfamiliar roar brought puzzled looks to the faces of the men in the boat. Private Novotny was first to offer the explanation. “It’s from the ships. Tattnall’s sailors and cannoneers. They’re cheering us on.”

  The sixty-five surfboats surged toward the beach. Late-afternoon sunshine flashed from the several thousand fixed bayonets. The oarsmen propelled the landing craft between the gunboats of the covering squadron. Caught up in the splendor of the moment, Orry forgot the illness and the boredom, the drudgery and the pettiness of the last few months. This was the high art of war, the glorious side of soldiering.

  A naval gig pulled ahead of the other boats. Its oarsmen rowed frantically, obviously intending that the gig should be first on the beach. Standing in the bow, sword drawn, was a man they all recognized: their handsome, white-haired leader, General Worth.

  Sergeant Flicker tore off his hat, waved it, and cheered the general. Orry joined in, and so did his men. Soon every soldier in the first wave was screaming himself hoarse.

  A half minute before the keel scraped in the sand, Orry unsheathed his own sword. He stood up and was first to leap from the boat, flourishing the sword and shouting, “Here we go, men! All the way to the Halls of Montezuma in Mexico City!”

  For that, they cheered him, too.

  After such a rousing start, the next hour was an anticlimax.

  The regiment formed on the colors, then, with bayonets extended, charged to the top of the first dune. The charge quickly ran out of steam because there were no Mexicans lying in wait, not one enemy foot soldier or dragoon visible anywhere. The only foes the Americans met the rest of the afternoon were sand fleas and the rising wind that flung gritty particles of sand into their eyes, noses, and mouths.

  For the invasion, Scott had reorganized his men into three large forces. After the first two went ashore—Worth’s regulars, then those in General Davey Twiggs’s Second Brigade—the volunteers landed. General Patterson was in overall command of this brigade. Within it were units from South Carolina, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania, led by a man named Gideon Pillow who had but one
qualification for his recent appointment to the rank of general. Before the war he had been Polk’s law partner.

  As night approached, the invading army began to extend its line to the northwest. Worth’s brigade would hold the right, near the landing site, and it was there that Orry and his platoon went to work digging in. Even in perfect weather it would take several days to unload all the men and materiel necessary to complete the eight-mile siege line. Once the line was in place around Vera Cruz, it was expected that the artillery would begin bombardment. But the city might not fall for a long time. It was heavily fortified, defended by nine forts on the land side and the castle of San Juan de Luau in the harbor.

  It was after midnight when Orry tottered into the mess tent. He was sodden with sweat and covered with sand and insect bites. He sank down next to George at a badly stained table, peered at what looked like a gobbet of old meat wedged into one of the cracks.

  He picked at the dried lump with a fingernail. “Lord, this table’s filthy.”

  Captain Place swabbed his cheeks with a bandanna. “It isn’t one of ours. There have been several mix-ups in off-loading equipment. These are surgical tables, last used in Monterrey. Amputations—that sort of thing—”

  Orry gagged and wiped his hand on his trousers. Then he heard the raucous laughter. Even Place, not humorous by nature, roared. It was an old Army joke, Orry learned later. That made him feel better. He was no longer a greenhorn; he had finally been accepted.

  No one knew, that night or ever, why the Mexican commandant at Vera Cruz hadn’t fired so much as one shot at the invaders. But the absence of an enemy made Orry nervous as he went from sentry post to sentry post in his sector about three in the morning. His right hand stayed close to the personal sidearm he had purchased at his own expense, a practice followed by most officers. The gun was a Model 1842, a single-shot percussion smoothbore made by I. N. Johnson and generally considered the best military pistol on the market.

  The night was windy, with not a star showing. Orry was midway between two posts when he heard something on his left, the side away from the shore. He caught the sound of furtive voices and movement. His mouth dry, he drew his pistol.

  “Who goes there?”

  Instantly there was silence except for the wind.

  He repeated his challenge, realizing belatedly that from out in the dark he was a clear target; the lantern-lit regimental staff tent was directly behind him. He started to move on quickly. He had taken only two steps when he again heard voices, loud this time, angrily shouting in Spanish.

  Three shots rang out. He felt a ball flick his trousers. He dropped to one knee, aimed, and fired. A man screamed. Another cursed. Feet scurried away. Sentries at the nearby posts were shouting challenges.

  Pain hit, canceling his brief feeling of triumph. He looked down and to his amazement discovered that a rifle ball had done more than tick against his trousers. It had pierced his calf.

  He pacified the sentries and limped to the medical tent, a good half mile, his shoe filling with blood. The orderly on duty saluted. Before Orry could return it, he fainted.

  The injury wasn’t serious. He was feeling fairly chipper when George visited him late the next day.

  “Your first battle wound.” George grinned. “Congratulations.”

  Orry made a face. “I expected my baptism of fire to be a little grander, thanks. Being shot by a skulking guerrilla isn’t my idea of heroism. I think I got one of them, though.”

  “I know you did. Flicker found the body at sunup.”

  “Soldier or civilian?”

  “Soldier. Dressed like a peasant, but his accouterments were military.”

  Orry looked less displeased. George crouched beside the cot and lowered his voice.

  “Tell me something. When the shooting started, were you scared?” Orry shook his head. “There wasn’t time. But a minute or so afterward, I—” He was silent for a second. “I came to, I guess you could say. I went over every detail I could remember. Then I got scared.”

  The more Orry thought about it, the more convinced he became that he had made an important discovery about the behavior of men at war.

  In his tent a few nights later, George hunched closer to a dim lantern and rolled a pencil stub back and forth in his fingers. He was writing another of his long letters to Constance. He sent one about every three days. He loved her so much, he wanted to share as many of his experiences as propriety allowed.

  He kept some of his deepest feelings out of the letters, though. His longing to be with her had filled him with a powerful hatred of this war, a reaction that went far beyond the resigned acceptance that had been his attitude before Corpus Christi.

  While he was considering what to say next, something tickled the back of his neck. He whipped up his free hand, smacked the tiny insect, grimaced as he wiped his fingers on the edge of the cot. Then he put pencil to paper.

  Unseen snipers usually fire a few rounds every night, but it has been quiet this evening. I am coming to believe that our true enemy is this land. The wind blows like

  He scratched out the letter h; he had started to write hell.

  fury, and as a consequence, the eyes and the skin are constantly savaged by flying sand. Retreating inside a tent minimizes that problem but does not guarantee peace or a good night’s sleep, for we Americans are locked in battle with another army which our superior officers neglected to mention. I refer to the army of fleas and wood ticks which infests this coast.

  Little Mac McClellan, one of my classmates who’s down here with the engineers, has devised a novel defense against the infernal creatures. Each night he swabs himself from head to toe with salt pork and, thus odiously “protected,” crawls into a canvas bag which he then proceeds to close about his neck with a tight drawstring. He says it works splendidly, but I for one am not quite desperate enough to try such an extreme

  George bolted up at the sound of a gunshot. Someone cried out. Men began shouting and running. He dropped the letter, hurried outside, and discovered that a nearby sentry had been felled by a sniper’s bullet.

  The sentry, a private about George’s age, lay on his side with the upper half of his face bathed in lantern light. The one eye George could see was open and glaring. The fatal shot had struck the middle of the sentry’s back.

  A sergeant took charge of disposing of the body. The private had belonged to another company; George didn’t know him. Badly shaken, George returned to the tent and picked up the letter. He would say nothing about the killing. He began to write but had to quit almost at once. The face of the dead private kept intruding in his thoughts, along with memories of Orry’s close call. It was five minutes later before his hands stopped trembling and he was able to pick up the pencil again.

  Gale winds out of the north delayed the unloading of Scott’s artillery, ammunition, and pack animals. Not a round was fired at Vera Cruz until March 22. That evening the guns opened up for the first time. Scott planned to reduce the city by what he called a “slow, scientific process” of shelling.

  Orry was soon back on duty. The Mexicans remained hidden as the bombardment continued. The American soldiers were restless and impatient to engage an enemy. They were beset by the climate all day, and now they were kept awake all night by the return fire of Mexican cannon, which could never reach the American lines but which were hellishly noisy nonetheless. Orry was constantly breaking up fights and disciplining his men.

  Wherever he and George went, they encountered others from the Academy. About five hundred West Point graduates had been serving in the regular Army at the start of the war, and an equal number had been recalled from civilian life to command volunteer units. Tom Jackson, who seemed to grow more dour and indrawn every day, was in the artillery; Pickett and Bee and Sam Grant were in the infantry. Other Academy men the two friends knew slightly, and some just by reputation: Lee and Pierre Beauregard in the engineers; Joe Johnston and George Meade in the topogs; Dick Well and Tom Jackson’s roommate
, Pleasanton, commanded dragoon units. Robert Anderson, Ambrose Burnside, Powell Hill, and a fanatic abolitionist named Banner Doubleday were artillerymen with Tom. The secure feeling generated by the presence of officers with the same background was one of the few good things about this campaign, George thought.

  On March 24, six long-range naval guns supplied by Commodore Matthew Perry joined the siege. That same day, Orry was summoned to brigade headquarters with Captain Place to explain a knifing that had occurred in his platoon. The questioning was perfunctory because everyone at headquarters was in an exultant mood. Scouts kept streaming in to report that the American bombardment was at last inflicting substantial damage on the walls of the city.

  “Commodore Perry’s cannon saved our skins,” Place growled when he and Orry left the tent after the interrogation. “Guess we owe him thanks, even if he did squawk like a mud hen about the Navy’s rights.” Scott had been forced to let naval gunners operate the six long-range pieces. Orry realized the Army had no corner on officers jealous of their—

  “Lieutenant Main. I say—Main!”

  “Yes, sir!” Orry automatically brought his hand up to salute, even as he pivoted in response to the voice he couldn’t quite place. He froze.

  Elkanah Bent returned the salute in a relaxed, almost mocking way. He noted Orry’s fatigue cap with a scornful glance. Bent was wearing the more formal, French-inspired chapeau bras.

  “Thought it was you,” Bent said. “I had a report that you had joined us. Your friend, too. Hazard.”

  Orry took it as a bad sign that the Ohioan remembered George’s name. But of course he had promised to remember. Orry tried to act unconcerned.