The Crescent Spy

by Michael Wallace

  “I’m not brave,” she assured him. “I’m terrified.”

  But when they reached the forts in the morning, the attack had ceased. The Union had crept up to a loose raft in the barrier in the night and set off a submarine charge, which destroyed the raft and opened a gap in the barrier. Confederate steamers had assembled to repair the breach. Other than that, there was little evidence of an attack, only a few gaps in the earthworks where mortars had exploded.

  Major Dunbar was talking to Ludd from the Picayune on the parapet when Josephine found him cheerfully pointing out the Union sloops downriver, out of range of Jackson’s guns.

  When the major spotted Josephine, he excused himself from Ludd, who appeared visibly annoyed at her arrival, and led her along the parapet.

  “There will be more trouble to come,” Dunbar said. “But we’ve weathered the first attack.”

  She glanced to the center of the fort, where Ludd had descended to greet Fein in front of barracks newly bombproofed with sod. The conversation between the two men seemed cordial enough.

  “We heard the enemy fire,” she said. “It sounded like mortars, but I only see cannons, and they’re out of range.”

  Dunbar pointed downstream around the bend, opposite the Union sloops. “There’s a mortar flotilla behind the trees. If you look, you can spot one of the masts poking up. About four thousand yards. We could hit them with our rifled guns if not for the woods.”

  It was exactly the stretch of woods she’d identified earlier, and she thrilled at the thought that her reconnaissance might have made it into Farragut’s plans. He was using the trees perfectly, lobbing mortars over the top while using them to shield his boats.

  “Is the mortar fire accurate?” she asked.

  “Cursedly so,” Dunbar said cheerfully. “But he has fired at least—”

  His voice cut out as a thump sounded from downstream. The shell was moving slowly enough that she could see it rise above the woods, form a large arc, then begin to descend. All of a sudden she remembered reading about a Union soldier who’d watched a cannonball bouncing lazily toward him, thinking he’d had time to move, only to have his legs torn off.

  Dunbar must have thought the same thing, because he threw his arms around her and dragged her to the ground, where he shielded her with his body until the shell hit and detonated somewhere on the opposite side of the fort.

  Josephine rose and dusted herself off. “Was that necessary, sir?”

  “My apologies, but it is better to be safe than . . . Good heavens!”

  She followed his gaze. The mortar had landed on the drawbridge on the far side of the fort and had not only blown a hole in it and made it impassible to horse or cart, but had also snapped off a pole that strung the telegraph line in and out of the fort.

  He raced off to see to repairs. No sooner had he departed than the Union “bummer” crews began launching a barrage of mortars that were soon falling every twenty to thirty seconds. Josephine retreated to one of the sod-covered bombproofs to wait out the attack.

  When the barrage ended, soldiers came into the yard to put out fires.

  That night, she spoke with General Lovell, two colonels, and a captain from the mosquito fleet who came ashore expressly to meet with her.

  “You’ve just come from New Orleans?” the captain asked. “Any news on the ironclads?”

  “Neither can move under her own power. It will be weeks before they can leave the levee.”

  He cursed, then hurried off, muttering something about towing them into place as floating batteries. The next morning, she met two other naval officers, and it was clear that they, too, were more pessimistic about the looming battle than the sanguine men of the forts.

  The mortar fire continued on and off through the night of the sixteenth and into the following day. Commodore Hollins sent a few gunboats beyond the barrier to attack a group of Union surveyors, but two Union ships soon chased them back into the protection of Jackson’s guns.

  The Confederates had by now assembled a large collection of fire rafts above Fort St. Philip of the same kind that had thrown chaos into the Union during the skirmish at Head of Passes last October. Each was the size of a Mississippi flatboat, and stacked high with hundreds of cords of fast-burning pine, together with cotton, tar oil, and other combustibles.

  Not long after the incident with the gunboats and the surveyors, the Confederates lit four fire rafts, opened the barrier, and towed them through. They flamed so high as they passed the fort that Josephine could feel the heat from where she watched on the parapets. Once through the barrier, the rafts drifted lazily downstream toward the Union ships. Three floated harmlessly to one side, but a fourth came straight toward one of the big sloops. Hartford, she thought. Before it got too close, a Union gunboat took it in tow and hauled it away. Shells from the fort splashed short.

  In the early afternoon, Hollins tried again, this time sending three steamers downriver. They took position in the middle of the river and shelled the mortar boats for several minutes before two of the bigger Union warships came upstream. Staying out of range of Jackson’s probing attacks, the Union ships traded blows with the undersized guns of the mosquito fleet. When one shot knocked over a mast of a Confederate steamer, Hollins’s remaining two boats were forced to take it in tow and retreat upriver.

  Josephine watched and noted all of these events from the parapet, her paper on her satchel, where she wrote furiously during lulls in the action. She stuffed cotton into her ears for when shells exploded nearby, or when one of the fort’s big guns let off an exploratory shot, and she flattened on the ground every time a mortar came flying in. Otherwise, she didn’t let the fighting drive her inside. Every hour or so Fein came up to ask how she was faring, then light a cigarette with a shaky hand and let it smolder without smoking before he went below again.

  Mortar fire continued into the night, but it was quiet enough in the small room they’d given her in one of the bombproofs, with only a dull rumble above, that she could almost believe those defenders who were still convinced that the Union action was a feint to draw attention away from the real action upriver.

  So far, both attacks and defensive sallies had seemed probing, almost playful. She’d heard of no deaths, either in the fort or in Hollins’s mosquito fleet, and only a few reports of injuries. The Union could no doubt say the same thing, given the ineffectual Confederate fire.

  Josephine was so tired that she slept soundly. Only direct hits woke her, and then only briefly, as the building shook, and dirt fell through the rafters from the sod above. But as she woke the next morning, she immediately sensed a change in the intensity of Union fire. She climbed the parapet to find Dunbar up top with a spyglass.

  He glanced in her direction. “They’re closer, look.”

  She took the spyglass. The Union bummers had towed their mortar schooners upriver to the places surveyed earlier, where they were still concealed by the trees. Only the forward-most boats lay within range of Jackson’s fire from the casemates, but even then, only partially exposed.

  Thump, thump, thump, thump.

  It sounded like a distant drum, the drumhead in need of tightening. Dunbar grabbed her and dragged her down behind the parapet just as the bombs began to fall. They exploded overhead, and the walls shook. Smoke hung in the air when she lifted her head, and men were running, ducking across the yard below them. The nearest mortar had hit no more than thirty feet away, leaving a blackened crater on the parapet. She climbed back up, shaken, her head ringing.

  Soon enough, she was forced to abandon the wall walk, as the mortar fire intensified, then intensified again. Josephine found relative safety with the men operating one of the eleven-inch cannons firing shells in response. A division of Union gunboats had come within range and now began to shell the fort, and this attracted the fire from the well-protected cannons inside.

  Josephine stuffed more cotton in her ears and put her hands over them as she looked out through the slits at the action
on the river. The fort shuddered with another barrage of mortars, sending dust sifting from the rafters. Moments later, the Union fired another broadside from its sloops. Shells slammed into the wall and threw Josephine and the gunners to the ground. A young soldier lay crying next to her, his wrist badly twisted, probably broken. She volunteered to take him down to the infirmary. The gunnery sergeant nodded, pale-faced, before turning back to order return fire.

  The injured boy was still crying when she got him to the yard, tears cutting streaks in the powder that blackened his face. “Don’t let them do it.”

  “Do what, cut off your hand? Surely it’s not as bad as all that?”

  He bent his wrist. “It’s not broken at all, only sprained. That’s what I mean. They’ll send me back.”

  A shell fell whistling into the yard. It struck the ground a few yards away and sent mud flying. The boy staggered and they grabbed each other for mutual support.

  “Please, help me get out of here,” he said. “I can’t take it anymore.”

  She stared at him. “You mean desert?”

  “No, I would never . . . yes.”

  The boy had seen the elephant. She could see it in the wide-eyed, stunned expression, as if a shell had exploded too near his head and addled his brains. He was shaking so hard that she thought his knees would buckle and he would collapse.

  “If you want to leave,” she said, “there’s a crew outside repairing the telegraph lines. If anyone asks, that’s where you’re going. Then slip into the swamp beyond the water battery. Union pickets lie two miles to the south. Give them information, and they’ll guarantee your safety.”

  Shells fell all day and into the night. The bombardment never ceased. Sometime after midnight, men came pounding on her door and she emerged into the hallway to find it filled with smoke. A shell had penetrated the bombproof and set the wooden support beams on fire.

  She stumbled outside to find half the fort aflame and the night lit up with orange, smoky firelight. Shells came screaming into the yard, where they buried themselves in the wet ground and detonated. Mud spumes spouted into the air. The ground shook so hard it felt as though the fort would soon collapse into rubble.

  In spite of all of this, the fort was still standing. Several men had been killed, and another dozen injured, but casualties were still light. The biggest injury seemed to be morale, and Dunbar reported with disgust that several dozen men had failed to report for duty, presumably deserting. Josephine thought guiltily about the boy she’d encouraged to flee toward Union pickets.

  “I’ve set guards,” he told Josephine and Fein. Ludd had fled upriver the previous night with a signal boat, leaving the two reporters from the Crescent alone to report the battle. “We’ve caught a few deserters, but too many have slipped through. An example must be set. From this point, anyone caught deserting will be shot.”

  “Isn’t that a little harsh?” Fein asked.

  “Every man who leaves his post makes it that much more likely that his fellow soldiers will be killed.”

  When he left, the two reporters stood in the doorway of one of the few bombproofs not on fire, staring up at the sky. The mortars were targeting the water battery outside the walls at the moment, but soon enough the barrage would return, and they wanted to be ready to flee inside.

  Josephine had been thinking about the reporter from the Picayune. “Can you believe that Ludd left already? Did he expect to find a picnic and a fireworks display?”

  Fein cleared his throat nervously. “We should go, too. They say Louisiana left the levee under tow. We could meet them midway up and get a good story there.”

  “You can go, I’m staying.”

  “Then let’s cross to Fort St. Philip at least,” Fein said. “We’ll still see the battle, but away from this confounded bombardment.”

  More bombs came into the yard. One buried itself in the ground some twenty feet away, and soldiers in the fire brigade threw aside their water buckets and leaped to the side. The two reporters ducked inside and cringed, waiting for it to go off. This one failed to detonate.

  “Josephine, for God’s sake,” Fein said. Another shell shook the roof. “We can’t stay here.”

  She hesitated. In spite of her bold words, that last bombardment had left her rattled. But she couldn’t leave. It wasn’t simply a question of watching the battle; she was collecting information for the Union fleet downstream. They must have used hundreds of tons of powder and launched thousands of bombs, shells, and shot, yet so far had not diminished the ability of Fort Jackson to keep fighting back. Few men inside had been killed. If federal troops marched on Jackson, they would be slaughtered. Would she be able to collect this information from the safer side of the river? And could she get this information downriver from either location?

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll move to Fort St. Philip.”

  But this proved easier to plan than to execute. They found Dunbar only to learn that even military traffic across the river had been cut. The Yankees had fired up the docks, he said bitterly, and what’s more, the Confederate fleet was too afraid to venture beyond the barrier except to push down fire rafts when darkness fell.

  The guns from the fort had won at least one hard-earned concession from the enemy. Some of the most accurate mortar boats on the east bank had taken damage, and Farragut had moved them to the opposite side of the river. Here, they were more protected, but more of their shells began to fall astray.

  Even so, Dunbar shared the grim result of two days of full-scale bombardment. The casemates, parapets, and the parade plain had been pounded. Shells had knocked out two thirty-two-pounders in the water battery, and several heavy guns in the fort were either destroyed or disabled.

  “What about Louisiana?” Josephine asked.

  “They brought her in tow. She’s anchored above Fort St. Philip.”

  Fein made encouraging noises at this.

  “But she can’t move under her own power,” Dunbar continued, “and the mechanics are still trying to get her guns properly mounted. I want her towed below the barricade. It would be something at least.”

  “Like a floating battery,” Josephine said. “That makes sense.”

  “Yes, and damn near impregnable.” The major shook his head. “The navy won’t do it. They say they need three days to get her ready for combat.”

  “Three days!” Fein said.

  “Yes, I know,” Dunbar said glumly. “In three days we’ll all be dead.”

  The next night, someone came to shake Josephine from her sleep. She lay wrapped in a blanket, still dressed in the filthy clothes she’d been wearing for days. Soldiers slumbered all around her. They tossed and turned on the hard ground, some moaning in their sleep, others muttering to themselves.

  At first she thought the person trying to wake her was only the ground shaking, the endless rumble and buckle of the bombardment that seemed never to end.

  “Josephine, wake up!”

  She blinked at a lamp held in front of her face. “What is it? Are they here?” There was a dream still lingering on the edge of her memory, something about soldiers storming the gates of the fortress.

  “The boat is ready. We have to go now.” It was Fein peering down at her. One of the lenses in his glasses had cracked.

  Josephine threw off her blanket and grabbed the satchel she’d kept held between her knees while she slept. She stuffed the rest of her few belongings into her carpetbag.

  Outside, there was enough light to see by the remnants of the citadel still burning in the center of the yard. Fein ducked his head and raced across, with Josephine following. Another bomb hit, followed by the roar of two cannons from the casemates. The two reporters left the fort through the open gates, ignored by the soldiers on watch.

  They found a rowboat waiting at a newly reconstructed dock on the upriver side of the fort. Four sailors sat at the oars, and the passengers included a gray-bearded engineer who said he’d come across from St. Philip to check the magazines, a
s well as two of General Lovell’s staff officers. The final passenger was a young soldier with his hands tied in front of him and wearing a blindfold. Some miscreant, she supposed, being hauled across to the other side to face a whipping, or worse. He was trembling so violently that she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.

  The river was a glossy black, reflecting the flashes of light from the Union warships downstream. Behind them, the fort answered fire with fire, while atop the ramparts, the Confederate flag still flapped in the breeze, defiant in the face of all the might the Yankees could throw at them. In spite of the crippled morale inside the forts, it seemed as though the Union was no closer to their objective than when they’d begun.

  “Please,” the young soldier said, flinching at the sound of cannon fire as the rowboat entered the current. “Could you please let me see? I don’t want to die blindfolded.”

  This only brought jeers from the sailors rowing the boat and further disgusted comments from the officers.

  Josephine’s pity only grew. “I don’t see the harm. His hands are tied.”

  “He’s a damned coward,” one of the sailors said. “He don’t deserve nothing from us.”

  “Save your tender feelings,” one of the officers added, a lieutenant. “This man is going to hang for desertion.”

  “All the more reason to show compassion.”

  Josephine made her way to the bench holding the prisoner and pulled off his blindfold. It was the young soldier with the sprained wrist that she’d encouraged to desert. He fixed her with a haunted, desperate look. She stared back in shock and horror.

  “It is true,” he whispered. “There’s no saving me now.”

  “I’ll talk to them. I’ll tell them—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “Please, don’t.” The young man lifted his bound hands and took a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket, which he handed to Josephine. “For my mama. I wrote down her name. She lives in the Third Ward.”

  “This man is a coward and a traitor,” the officer said. His voice was as unforgiving as the shells screaming over their heads to slam into the casemates of the fort. “That’s all his mother needs to know. That he was running to enemy lines, prepared to kiss those Yankees’ boots and thank them kindly for their savagery.”