North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

A nondescript man stepped away from the side of the building. He offered an apology and brief explanation for the delay. Then, after both checked the surrounding area for possible observers once more and saw none, Cooper removed his hat and passed the folded message to the man, who walked quickly away, and that was all.

  Cooper ran most of the way to the ferry stage but missed the boat by three minutes and had to wait an hour for the next. The terminal smelled of dust and sausages and the odors of a drunk snoring on the floor in a corner. The short trip in the gathering evening was far less sunny than the earlier one. Cooper again leaned on the rail, seeing not the water or the city but the eyes and mustache and chomping teeth of Marcellus Dorking.

  We’ll stop you.

  Into his mind there stole a question that, even a week ago, would have revolted him and brought derisive laughter. But now—

  “Sir?”

  “What’s that?” He started, then showed embarrassment; the person who had stolen up behind him was a crewman.

  “We’ve docked, sir. Everyone else has got off.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  And away he went, frowning in the spring dusk, silently repeating the question that was ludicrous no longer: Should I get a gun?

  53

  “TAKE THE REGIMENT, COLONEL Bent.”

  Over and over, he heard the command in his head. Heard it despite the crashing of artillery in the cool Sunday air. Heard it despite the clatter of guns and limbers wildly wheeling up to defend the line. Heard it despite the hurt or frightened cries of the untrained Ohioans he was to rally and hold in position. Heard it despite all the hell-noise of this April morning.

  “Take the regiment, Colonel Bent.”

  The division commander’s eye had fallen on him at staff headquarters near the little Shiloh Meeting House, an hour after the first faint firing and the return of the first patrols to confirm its dire meaning. Albert Sidney Johnston’s army was out there to the southwest and had caught them by surprise.

  Bent was in this spot because the division commander disliked him. The commander could have ordered a junior officer to lead the Ohio regiment when its colonel, lieutenant colonel, and adjutant were all reported killed. Instead, he sent a staff colonel—one to whom he had been curt and unpleasant since their first meeting.

  Had any officer ever served in worse circumstances? The general was a besotted incompetent, the division commander a little martinet, who last fall had been prostrated by an attack of nerves brought on by fear of Albert Sidney Johnston. Bent was convinced William Tecumseh Sherman was a madman. Vindictive, too. “Take the regiment, Colonel Bent.”

  After that, Sherman said something that made Bent hate him as he had never hated anyone except Orry Main and George Hazard: “And don’t let me hear of you standing behind a tree with your hand out, feeling for a furlough. I know about you and your Washington connections.”

  Those connections had rescued Elkanah Bent. Or so he thought till this Sabbath morning. The day he boarded the westbound train with Elmsdale, he wrote and posted a polite, apologetic letter—a last appeal—to lawyer Dills. When he arrived in Kentucky, he found new orders, reassigning him from line command to staff duty with Anderson.

  Then commands were shuffled, as they were endlessly shuffled. Anderson left, replaced by Sherman, whose brother was an influential Ohio senator. Had the little madman somehow gotten wind of wire-pulling? Bent didn’t know, but he knew the division commander had been waiting for an opportunity to punish him.

  Squinting into the smoke, Bent saw his fears made visible: a new assault wave forming down there in the woods. Hardee’s men, a dirty rabble, many in shabby butternut-dyed uniforms. At the summit of the gentle slope the rebs would climb, Bent’s green Ohioans lay behind trees or clumps of weeds. The Federals had been caught over their breakfast fires, no entrenching done, because General Grant had neglected to order any. Brains Halleck had good reason for distrusting Grant.

  Trembling, Bent saw the rebel charge beginning. “Hold your positions, boys,” he called, forcing himself to step clear of a thick oak and raise his field glasses. He wanted to crouch behind the tree and cover his head.

  The first gray wave commenced firing. Bent winced and jumped back to the protection of the tree. The butternut rabble began to utter wild yells, the yells that had become a staple of Confederate charges, though no one quite knew when or why. To Bent they sounded like the howling of mad dogs.

  He heard balls buzzing all around. To his left, a kneeling soldier stood suddenly, as if lifted under the arms. A slice of his right cheek sailed away behind him, then he toppled backward as the ball entered his brain.

  On they came, up the hill in a wide line, the bank ranks firing when the men in front knelt to load and fire a second time from that position. Then the whole line swept forward again, bayonets fixed, officers screaming as loudly as enlisted men.

  The rebs were within fifty yards, butternut and gray; beards and tatters; huge fierce eyes and huge open mouths. Shell bursts speckled the blue sky; smoke bannered from the treetops; the earth shook, and Bent heard an even louder scream.

  “Oh, no, my God—no.”

  The first rebs reached the Ohioans, who had never fought a battle—seen the elephant—until this morning. Clumsily, they fended off the stabbing bayonets of the attackers. Bent saw one length of steel bury in a blue coat and pierce through the other side, red. The scream sounded again.

  “Oh, God, no!”

  With his saber he beat at the back of an Ohio soldier. He whacked and he flailed, lumbering through long grass, right on the heels of the fleeing private. The rebs were pouring along the hilltop, the Ohioans breaking and scattering, their position overrun. Bent beat at the private’s blue coat until the man stumbled and dropped. Bent sped past, fleet now despite his bulk.

  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 u
p. 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 anyway?”

  “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 gen
erals 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.