“Major, you’ve soldiers all about you. Go find a brigade near your assigned creek crossings and get some able-bodied men from them.” Winters fixed Woolsey with an expression of annoyance, quickly taking another drag on his cigarette and exhaling through the corner of his mouth.
Volunteers! He wants me to get volunteers, Woolsey thought. “Sir, I need experienced … “
Colonel Winters snuffed out the stub of his cigarette and stood up from his cot. He’d been sleeping when the major burst into his tent. Collecting his uniform coat, he said “Major, you have your assigned bridges that need repair and roads that need to be corduroyed.” Giving a pause, then buttoning his coat, he added, “I suggest you go and solve your manpower problems and leave my tent.”
Major Woolsey exited the tent and fumed. He had the authority to requisition manpower from any regiment that was handy, but the thought of dealing with amateurs and men playing officer turned his stomach. A row of wall tents near Winters’s drew his attention. Perhaps his son was about.
“Lieutenant Woolsey about?”
“Sir, no; he’s with the general,” came the crisp reply of a young man standing at attention.
“Tell him I came to see him,” Woolsey said and returned the salute. That was the proper way to behave. General Nelson had West Pointers on his staff, and right proper they were—save for Colonel Winters, he groused to himself as he made his way back to the horse picket to retrieve his mount.
****
May 3 dawned warm, and the real work began as the division was assigned to heavy fatigue details and sent to repair the damage done to the corduroy roads by yet another day of use. Philip and his mess were rousted early and put into march column for a trek up the Hamburg road to a creek.
“Bacon, is it?” Major Woolsey addressed Captain Bacon. Bacon was a diminutive man, who save for the sash and sword, symbols of an officer of the line, and his shoulder straps, was otherwise carelessly dressed in a private’s sack coat and wearing a sad-looking slouch hat. The captain of volunteers failed to snap his salute crisply enough for Woolsey’s taste. The man had also failed to groom himself as properly befit an officer, allowing several days’ worth of stubble to adorn his cheeks.
“Sir, yes it is; Captain Bacon.” The man took an impudent stance, hands on his hips and right leg cocked in relaxed fashion.
“Of volunteers … that don’t make you a real captain.” Woolsey snapped, then added, “I won’t tolerate you treating your enlisted men like they are still neighbors.”
“Sir? My commission is as real as your own in this army,” Bacon replied, straightening to his full five foot seven and tilting his hat to the side.
“No, Captain, you didn’t earn your commission but was probably voted it.” Woolsey straightened out his shell jacket with a quick jerk of the ends and sniffed irritably. “But never mind that. You will oversee the assignments I give your men to carry out, and I want to see some real work from your volunteers.” He glared at the man and waited for a rebuttal.
“Sir, my men will carry the work,” Bacon replied, his voice tense with irritation.
“See that they do, Captain, and I don’t want to find them miscarrying the work. I expect your officers to be busy overseeing them.”
“Yes, sir; these Ohio men are all from farm country and know hard work.”
“Dismissed, Captain. Oh, and I expect to see some discipline out of your officers for anyone shirking.”
“Sir? These men all … “
Woolsey waved the man silent and then tweaked his mustache, a delicate affair that he grew down his jowls in neat, straight lines that ended in a thin goatee. His hazel eyes were hard and bloodshot. He swung a rolled map around like a riding crop as he pointed toward the guard tent. “I expect to see the guard tent full of malcontents and some real punishment meted out. These volunteers will know the lash if any decide to do as they please.”
“Sir, you know flogging has been prohibited in the army. I’ll do no such thing to my men.” Bacon neglected to salute but turned on his heels and stomped away, slapping his gauntlets against his right thigh in anger.
As the work commenced, Major Woolsey flitted about like a nervous hen, pecking at everyone no matter how they were carrying out their work.
“Damnit! Sergeant! You were to hew these logs in six-foot lengths, not four!” Woolsey shouted at one of the 24th Ohio noncommissioned officers. “Captain Bacon! You are the most worthless officer I’ve ever met!”
“You!” Woolsey pointed a finger at Philip, who was wrestling with one of the pontoons before sliding it into the water. “Who told you to move that to the bank?”
“No one, sir. It seemed it was time,” Philip replied without saluting. He was a veteran, but he felt at this moment like he was just off the train at Camp Chase for instruction and muster.
“Sergeant Chambers! Take charge of the pontoons and see that they are laid properly!”
Philip and Mule backed away; the sergeant and a few of the privates from the engineering company took charge of the pontoon section and shrugged.
Captain Bacon could only look on sympathetically and go back to watching his company go about their work.
Gangs of soldiers were chopping down trees, others stripping the branches with hatchets, and others dragging the prepared logs over to the corduroy road being laid in the muddy ground that dipped toward the creek where the pontoons were to be anchored in the water.
“What was that all about?” Johnny asked, dropping the rope he was using to drag the prepared log over to the road.
“Uptight officer,” Philip mumbled.
Johnny and the other man pulling the log behind them returned to their labor. The logs were not large, as they needed to be small enough to sit easily in the mud and not cause too uneven a surface for the wheeled traffic that would rely on the improvised surface leading to the pontoons crossing the creek. Johnny dragged the log to its spot next to the one that had already been placed, but it was too crooked to lay flat. The man working on digging the logs into the mud tried to make it work anyway.
Then it was Johnny’s turn to draw the major’s ire. “God damnit! You sorry sonsabitches!” the major yelled.
“Major!” Captain Bacon called and strode angrily toward the man, whipping his gauntlets hard against his thigh. “Sir, your behavior is deplorable! Where is your honor, sir!”
“Captain, you will return to your duty! Do not speak to me of honor, sir!”
Mosquitoes, damp, and the tyrannical major were just the irritants of the day. Philip and his pards found something else that needed doing and returned that evening wet and exhausted.
Albert Sidney Johnston, the architect of the near-disaster at Pittsburg Landing, might be dead, but the generals were not taking any chances this time. The Confederates would not sally forth once more to cause mischief if they could possibly be prevented. The days wore on under darkening skies; the soldiers dug and chopped until their arms felt heavy with exhaustion. Any sense of accomplishment was lost on the soldiery, for every few hours the roads would be a jumbled mess once more. Details were marched out early in the morning and marched back after dark.
The next day as a light drizzle fell, the pontoons were being lashed together, bridging the creek at a low point along the bank. Running as a spur from the Hamburg and Purdy roads leading to a wood bridge some fifty feet down the creek, the pontoons afforded another way across the creek to relieve the congestion across the bridge. Parties of soldiers were in the water, lashing the three pontoon sections together with rope. Wood planking hadn’t yet been laid across the pontoon sections to make it passable for feet and hooves. Major Woolsey was on one bank calling out orders in his colorful manner when several men balancing on the top of one of the pontoons toppled it over.
With a splash and curses, Philip and Sammy were dumped into the muddy water along with everyone who happened to be on one of the pontoon sections. Spitting out brown, gritty water, Philip rose to a kneeling position soaked thro
ugh, the water riding waist deep but up to his chin as he tried to find a foothold to stand.
“Here, Padre,” said one of the men of Philip’s company, holding his hand out to give him a lift up out of the water.
“Captain Bacon, get your worthless volunteers off my pontoons! Who’s the sorry sonofabitch preacher on my pontoons? Can you call down some common sense from heaven? What are you doing in the army, worthless malcontent preacher on my pontoons doing things all wrong! Get out of the water, you men there! Assign someone else to lashing those pontoons together, Bacon! I want those men out of the water and away from my bridge! Especially that worthless man there!” Woolsey leveled a finger at Philip.
Philip was used to a little good-natured abuse, and even to impassioned anger directed not at him personally but at God or religion in general. But now, as Philip and the others stood in awe and shock at the tirade leveled mostly at him by the major, all work ceased. Even the engineers were embarrassed.
When the pontoon was righted once more and the work begun again, the major commenced to belittle anything and everything Philip did.
“Call on your God to fix the pontoons.” Woolsey called from the far bank, his face lit with flushed cheeks and furrowed brow. “Bacon, detail that man to digging out our sinks.”
“We’re not holding a prayer meeting here, Parson. Put your back into those logs.”
The other soldiers tried to ignore the man’s rantings, but it was getting harder to ignore as the day wore on. There was a perverse pleasure on the major’s face whenever he found himself near whatever Philip was laying his hands to, and though the work did not require skill, there was always fault to be found. As darkness approached and the close of another day, the company looked forward to their return to the camp.
The overhead skies darkened further, bringing a portent of the coming rain. Then the skies broke.
The rain fell upon them even before they finished the detail, and they marched back to camp in a downpour. Eating a cold dinner, Philip and his pards lounged in the darkness of the tent, listening to the rain. The pounding upon the canvas continued through the next day, and but for morning roll call and fatigue duty, anyone who could make himself scarce stayed under canvas. All talk, damped by the rain and the lack of anything to do, had been sucked out of the tents, replaced by the constant drumming of drops on the soaked canvas. The only thing that could be said about the confinement was that they were not back at the bridge laboring in the downpour—under the watch of the major of engineers.
“Even the other officers are appalled,” Johnny said and curled up into a ball under his blanket.
“The man’s a West Point man; must have been top of his class to get an engineer’s post—it’s the bottom of the class that ends up in the infantry,” Sammy related. “Captain Bacon’s already appealed to Colonel Rogers about assigning some other company or rotating us to another detail.”
“I don’t know that there’s much to be done about it anyhow,” Philip replied. “We won’t be working on that bridge much longer, and we’ll move soon enough.”
“Hope not in this rain,” Mule replied and ran his finger down the soggy canvas, watching the small rivulet trickle down the inside of the tent wall.
“I not seen anyone carry on like that before, least not an officer. The man is mad. Lord help those he commands,” Johnny said.
“He must be a good engineer, or maybe connected,” Philip offered.
“No sense in it; no sense at all in it,” Sammy said.
Philip had not suffered this much abuse even when Lee Harper was doing all he could to make Philip’s life miserable. Even though half the regiment had known of the incident in Germantown with Harper’s brother, the feud had been focused between the two men. An enlisted man had to keep his mouth around an officer but could speak more freely to a noncommissioned officer, and Harper and Philip had spoken freely to one another even though Harper had the power to make Philip’s life miserable through detail assignments. This major was just an anomaly.
“It’ll all go away when we move,” Philip replied hopefully. The confines of the tent made moving about difficult. Philip lay back and watched the canvas above him vibrate with each impact.
“It ain’t right,” Mule said. “No one should talk to a man of the cloth like that, no one.”
“He ain’t a priest, my papal friend. Preachers no different than anyone else. He took no vows, an’ he no different before his God,” Sammy replied.
“Still, no one should talk to anyone like that, especially a preacher,” Mule said and warmed his hands against the stove. Built like a teepee, the Sibley came equipped with a heat stove that stood in the middle.
“Mule, I’m not even that anymore.”
“You want to be though, right? You want to be.”
“A chaplain, priest, or a preacher; still just a man. Nothing special,” Philip said. For Mule the priest was the third person in line before the cardinal and the pope to God himself. But Philip knew being a minister was every bit as special as any calling, even that of a major of engineers. He could deny it to Mule, but he wanted to be seen as special once again. Otherwise he could go on ministering to men in hospitals as a private of infantry. One was imminently more dangerous.
“You must forgive our resident papist, for he thinks a priest is the second highest order of life here on earth, second only to the pope,” Sammy said.
“Shut up, Sam!” Mule snapped. “A priest takes vows an’ is close to God; any man who takes up the cloth is to be respected.”
“Fall in! Light marching order! Fall in!” Sergeant Fisk yelled, his face pressed between the two tent flaps long enough to let the words fall heavily about the soggy room before vanishing once more. The twelve men in the Sibley looked at one another in a mix of shock and disbelief. No sounds of fighting were heard, so why be rousted out in such a storm? Why fall in with all of their equipment if no fighting? Why get out into the rain at all?
A moment more of indecision passed before all quickly gathered their leathers and ponchos and tumbled out of the tent to join their equally miserable-looking comrades on the company line. The rain was falling in torrents, and everything was a morass. First Sergeant Fisk eyed his company warily before calling roll, and each response was given unenthusiastically.
Captain Bacon took over from the first sergeant and marched the company to join the three other companies from the 24th Ohio and down the Pittsburg road where other regiments were also marching toward the creek fords they’d so laboriously worked on the last several days. Not a word was said, though all looked about them as if something was missing—a reason for getting them out in the wet. After several miles of sloshing through the roads, the sounds of a torrent, a mighty rushing of water, became apparent even with the drubbing of rain against their vulcanized canvas ponchos and upon their hat brims. In moments they saw it: the Seven Mile Creek had turned into a small river and washed its banks. Men were already in the water, desperately trying to salvage and strengthen the pontoon crossing. The corduroy roads leading to and from the sloping banks had already been washed away, and the engineer-repaired bridge leading across was also in danger of being smashed to bits.
“Captain! Get men down in the water! Officers too!” Major Woolsey shouted. He was unrecognizable in his shirt sleeves and no headgear, though he might have berated even a private for daring to be out of uniform. Now he was on all hands and knees on the pontoon bridge, shouting directions to several of his men who were trying unsuccessfully to tighten ropes around the pontoon sections to keep them together.
“Must be serious if the imperious major is on his hands and knees workin’,” shouted Sammy above the roar.
Men were trying to lead ropes over the pontoons and lash the structure down, and a little downstream, the newly repaired Seven Mile bridge was swaying to and fro as the rising water eroded the banks that anchored it to either shore. Though the creeks in this area were deeply set, with high banks the flow of water was normall
y barely knee-deep. The creeks could also be narrow and deep, then open into shallow lands that spilled out into the surrounding marshes, making wide swaths of land impassable.
The whole regiment had been turned out, minus companies on other details, and like blue ants they swarmed over the bridges to do what the water would allow them. Where the engineers had laid out the pontoon section over Seven Mile Creek, the banks were shallow and the corduroy roads branched off to run parallel from the south Corinth road, augmenting traffic along the one solid bridge. The creek was twice its normal width as the water coursed down the high banks and path that would take it into the Tennessee. Supply wagons waited on the Pittsburg Landing side of the creek bank, waiting to cross.
Captain Bacon brought his company to front and commanded them to stack arms. Without a word, everyone stripped down to undershirts and trousers and waited to be given something to do.
“Get men into the water, Captain! Current is fierce; form a human chain,” Woolsey shouted over the rushing water. He was clinging to the side of one of the pontoon sections. Preoccupied with securing the bridge, he was too busy to berate anyone.
With nothing to anchor its middle, the pontoon bridge was probably going to be lost, but it was to this bridge that Philip’s company was directed. With the extra water, the bridge was now no longer connecting both sides of the creek, and the pontoons were in danger of ripping from their moorings. Several engineering officers were on the banks shouting orders and swearing a blue streak at man and nature, and new bodies were thrown into the water to help extend the effort to run ropes under the pontoon sections to give them extra holding power. The creek was now chest deep and the water level rising.
The soldiers awash in muddy water and dripping with rain, their effort to save the pontoons carried on though the current was getting stronger as the water level rose.
Locking elbows, Philip, Mule, Sammy, Johnny and others of their company entered the water. Keeping a foothold was more a problem in the current than water depth, but the effort to lash the pontoons was exhausting. Those in the water took turns trying to do the work, but each time a large tree trunk came hurtling down the waterway, it would smash into both men and pontoon and destroy anything the men might have gained. Everyone strained to keep footing and keep arms interlocked, but many were becoming too tired to hold up. This bridge was supposed to be three pontoon sections in length, but today twice that were needed, and the engineers were insistent that the bridge be strengthened before all of it was swept down to the Tennessee.
The Shiloh Series: Books 1-3 Page 43