A day later the sound of the long roll beat an incessant call suddenly as the morning breakfasts were being consumed and coffee boiled.
“Grab your traps, don your traps, and fall in on the company line!” shouted First Sergeant Fisk.
The company musket stack was at the head of the company street, the streets laid out in parallel lines of tents with a space suitable for company formations. It was here that everyone came rushing to fall into two lines.
“Fall in, fall in quickly!”
The regimental drum corps beat a continuous roll, and men breathlessly scrambled to get sack coats on and struggle with their leather gear.
“We are in for it now,” someone behind Philip muttered.
A faint rumble in the distance added urgency to the call of the drums.
This was it, finally, came the thoughts as the regiment was turned once again upon the Hamburg road, and with the 36th Indiana and Mendenhall’s Battery, marched at the quickstep. This time, the march was accompanied by the sounds of a heavy skirmish in the distance. The old dread hung heavy on every man, the wish for something other than backbreaking labor now answered but fervently wished away. Each man was too filled with excitement and fear to dwell on the inconsistency. It was back down the same road to the same bridge crossing of Seven Mile Creek that the brigade marched, continuing on toward the sounds of fighting. Pope needed help.
Would this be Shiloh all over again? They had been marched to the point of exhaustion that day in April, only to get there too late to do anything. Today the officers kept a fast pace and allowed no breaks to rest, yet the sounds of combat, though faint, did not have the urgency that Shiloh had had. This did not sound like a heavy force or heavy combat. What did it matter? A minié ball would still bring death or disablement if it were fired from a small force rather than a large one.
At the crossing of Seven Mile Creek they were greeted with silence, and even as the regiments were pushed forward with urgency, the silence grew. A halt was called where they’d stood yesterday in support of Mendenhall’s guns, and the regiment waited in battle line.
Muffled curses and epithets at both the Rebels and General Pope were uttered, the men not bothering to whisper or keep quiet in the presence of officers as the wait drew on and nothing was to be seen of either. Relieved that they had once again rushed toward nothing and death was to be given another day’s delay, Philip rejoiced. This time there was no return march, and the regiments were put into picket positions where they remained in line of battle even as darkness descended on another day. By the last light of dusk, a column of infantry approached by the Hamburg road and made camp beside them, the long-awaited connection with Pope’s Army of the Mississippi.
“Pearson!” called First Sergeant Fisk. “Mail.”
Two letters, one from his father and another from the adjutant general of Ohio, were handed him.
“What’d ya get?” Sammy asked, dropping the tent pegs and rushing over.
“You gonna hold the tent or what?” Johnny asked in exasperation from within the Sibley. The canvas cocoon wrapped around him as he waited for Sammy to begin stretching the concave material outward and hammering in the stakes.
“In a minute,” Sammy muttered as he stood over Philip’s shoulder.
“As of this day, the first instance of May, Year of our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Sixty Two, I, as Adjutant General of the State of Ohio, do hereby order Philip Pearson, Private 24th Ohio Volunteer Infantry to report to myself forthwith for commissioning as a Chaplain of Ohio Infantry for assignment.” Philip read it aloud and exhaled loudly, feeling the rush of anxiety released in one great breath. His hands still trembling, Philip read the lines once more.
“What?” Johnny called from within the tent.
Philip handed Sammy the communication as he turned his attention to his father’s letter. Sammy read the lines and looked up, a sad expression in his eyes.
Philip skimmed his father’s letter, hardly taking any of it in; his mind was too distracted by the enormity of the change he’d just accepted. His father was complaining again of Paul’s wanting to volunteer and of his courting of someone’s daughter, someone whom he would let Paul introduce should he choose to, and of church business.
“That’s it, isn’t it? You’re going home,” Sammy said softly.
“Chaplain Pearson!” Johnny added and grabbed Philip’s hand, shaking it vigorously.
Trembling slightly and grinning, Philip looked about him in a daze. “Yes, Chaplain Pearson. I, oh, but that means I’m going to be leaving,” Philip admitted. He was going to be able to fulfill his true role again, and as an officer to boot. He would no longer be ordered about by superiors and have to rush off to a battle line to kill someone or be killed. Soldiers would look to him now to see to their needs while sick or injured or to hold on to when life in the army became onerous. But his pards, his friends, were what had given the toil and danger meaning. They had relied on him as he on they, and he was breaking that bond. He missed the status that the collar had given him, but he would miss the anonymity that being a private gave.
“You don’t have a choice; you’re no longer a private. What do we call you?” Johnny asked.
“Don’t know,” Philip replied. “Chaplains make captains’ money.”
“Pearson!” a voice called out from among the tents.
“Here!” Philip called. It was Lieutenant Willard, acting captain of the company after Bacon had been injured in the bridge calamity.
“Report to Colonel Jones. You’ve got your big ticket, your discharge from the regiment. Collect your traps.” Willard’s voice held little fanfare or sorrow.
“What?” came questions from those nearby who dropped what they were doing to find out what was happening. Johnny wrestled his way out of the canvas and dropped the pole. He stood by Sammy, who handed him the letter from Adjutant General Hill.
Ushered into Jones’s tent, Philip stood before the colonel in a daze. Events were spinning more quickly than he’d imagined.
“Pearson, you’re headed home. There’s a column of ambulances headed for Pittsburg Landing, and you can find some space to ride back. You have these orders to board any transport headed for Cincinnati. Chaplain, huh?”
“Yes, sir. Father is a minister, as was I before the war.”
“Turn in your weapon and leathers to the QM, and God’s speed,” Jones said and held a hand out.
Philip stared at it a moment before reaching a tentative hand out to grasp it. A handshake felt foreign to him after so long in the army where only peers shook hands.
Philip stepped back out of the tent. The crowd from his company was waiting.
“Three cheers and a tiger!” Sammy shouted.
“Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah arrrrrrrrrrrr!” The crowd of thirty or so disheveled and war-weary enlisted men gathered around him with back slaps and manly nudges.
Quickly wiping away a tear, Philip tried to walk with dignity toward his traps, feeling a little lighter than before.
With just the clothes on his back and knapsack, Philip climbed into a waiting ambulance. No wounded were being ferried to the rear, only a civilian and an officer. The civilian, a woman in her forties was a sight incongruent with an army in the field. Philip unloaded his shoulders and took a seat along the sideboards. The woman and her baggage took up the middle where a patient would be. She looked sad but was trying to cover it with a sense of decorum. A lieutenant of infantry sat beside her. He was young, almost too young to be in the army. He regarded Philip with an air of suspicion. The other ambulances in the column were filled with wounded and other passengers.
Seated opposite the woman, the lieutenant took his eyes from Philip and stared off into the distance. The woman nodded to him in a polite, feminine way. Her movements were refined and smooth, as if she’d practiced being in the company of men. The young officer, however, gave Philip a look of disdain and turned back to watching the countryside glide by. The cover to the ambulance was rolled up p
artially to allow air to circulate more freely.
“Mother,” the lieutenant whispered, “you should really not have come. I thought my letter was clear that we had no body.”
“I had to find out what happened,” the woman replied in even tones, unconcerned that Philip could easily hear. “I had to visit where it happened.”
“The general sent his condolences and would have given me leave to come home for a time but for your insistence on coming down.”
“Your father would have done the same if it had been you.”
“I combed the creek bank all the way to the Tennessee; Father was washed into the river.”
“It was good of General Nelson to give you leave to attend to my needs; thank the general for me. Your father spoke with nothing but kindness for him.”
“I hardly saw him; he was too busy with bridge work to visit headquarters much, and I was always in the saddle carrying messages.” The lieutenant’s voice rang with sorrow. He bowed his head in reverence, and his whispers were forgotten.
“He wrote highly of how proud he was that you were on the general’s staff. He knew you would be safe there.”
Unable to keep from interjecting any longer, Philip asked, “Pardon me, ma’am, but what is your surname? I only ask as I was detailed under an engineer for a time a week back, working on some bridges.”
The lieutenant snapped his head up and glared at Philip. “Woolsey, Private, and I’ll ask you to not address us again unless I address you.”
“Rudy, mind your manners. He was addressing me. Do you treat all your soldiers this way? Woolsey was my husband’s name. Was he the man?”
The name didn’t come as a surprise, yet Philip was struck by the incongruity of it. Woolsey had been a far cry from the loving husband and concerned father he was hearing about. “Yes, ma’am, that was he.” Philip bit his lip as he mentally discarded several things he could say about the man, none of which was very flattering.
“You say you were working on the bridges. Are you in the engineers?” she asked.
“No ma’am, we were detailed to help construct a pontoon bridge across Lick Creek. We worked on it several days, and your husband was in charge.”
“Did you know he was missing?”
Philip nodded.
“No one would tell me anything, not even the general himself, as to what happened. Do you know?” Mrs. Woolsey pleaded.
“Mother, that’s why I told you it would be useless to come; there was an accident and he was … was washed out into the Tennessee. General Nelson didn’t have any particulars to give.”
Philip cleared his throat and related how they’d come to try to save the bridges. He glossed over the more unseemly parts of the story about the major of engineers. “Your husband pulled me out of the water before the pontoons broke; I’d heard he was tossed into the water.”
“No one tried to rescue him?” the lieutenant asked.
“I don’t know, I was still clinging to the pontoon as it was swept downstream.”
Memories of the man’s tirades and insults clicked through his mind like stereograph images—a face contorted by epithets and crass words spilling off a vulgar tongue. Even if she knew of this side of her husband, there was little use relaying it. But the son was less resigned to the moment.
“You let a major do all of the work? Father might be alive today if not for such incompetence!” The lieutenant sat upright and tried curling his lip into a snarl, but he was hardly able to pull off indignation.
“The major was doing what he could to save his bridge. Any officer would have done the same.”
Mrs. Woolsey gave as sweet a smile as she could muster under the circumstances. “Thank you for relating what you witnessed. Though still sorrowful, it brings comfort to know my Wooly was doing it for the cause.”
Closure. He was witnessing it. No funeral, with a body to be laid to rest, would be held. No minister to extol Major Woolsey’s virtues as a man in life and his heavenly rest in death, if there would be such a rest. Yet closure was happening here in this wagon, peace and comfort coming to a grieving widow. That was all anyone wanted, to be mollified with some kind words. Exacting revenge on the living for the sins of the deceased would only bring he and everyone else trouble. It felt good to see the comfort his words brought Mrs. Woolsey, even if it meant lying a little.
“You are welcome, ma’am. I’m glad I could assist.”
“Now, why are you heading home?” she asked.
“Yes, Private. Why are you here? You do not appear to be sick or wounded,” the son asked.
“I was discharged. I am on my way back to Ohio to accept my chaplain’s commission.”
“You volunteered to fight?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve served over a year and have seen much of Tennessee and Kentucky.”
“My Wooly would have had some choice words for you. He always liked our priest.”
Choice words indeed, Philip thought. “It never came up, ma’am.”
The trip back to Pittsburg Landing was long in the rickety ambulance, but the arrival on the battlefield hushed the occupants. The Corinth road crossed the same ground Philip had marched over, and the ground still showed the scars. The tent city was gone, but trees still lay where they had been felled after the storms, weakened by shot and shell, and the fields littered with the wrecks of caissons and wagons. The farmers had never returned to reclaim what war had wrested from them, and their houses stood vacant. The smell was still there of rotting horseflesh, as were the mass graves of Confederates.
The landing area by the river was teaming with civilians and soldiers alike, the big hospital still caring for the wounded and sick with many being helped along gangplanks onto waiting riverboats. Philip slipped down from the ambulance and held out his hand to help Mrs. Woolsey down. Smiling sweetly, she gingerly took the rough iron step. Long lines of wagons stood waiting to carry supplies inland toward the army, and long lines of convalescing men waited to board one of the hospital boats waiting its turn to dock.
Philip stayed to help her son unload the baggage; the major’s personal belongings were the only thing she would travel home with. The lieutenant brushed Philip’s hand away and tried to lift a heavy valise down to the ground, but he dropped it clumsily, spilling its contents to the ground. Cursing, the boy scrambled to collect the knickknacks and effects. A worn Testament landed at Philip’s feet, the Vulgate edition containing the Catholic sacred texts. Philip picked it up, always curious about family Bibles, and opened it to the front leaf. It contained a message from the man’s wife. Closing it quickly, Philip handed it to the woman.
“This looks well worn, ma’am. I’m sure it brought him comfort in his separation from you.” It was the most charitable thing he could come up with.
“I pray that it did. I pray you God’s speed as well,” she replied graciously. To her son she said, “Walk me down to the boat?”
Philip shouldered his pack and walked down the slope to an awaiting boat, his passage secured by orders. The army had a way of bringing out the coarseness in a man. Major Woolsey had either been a sinner or a saint. To his wife he was the latter. It didn’t matter what Philip thought about the man, he realized; he hadn’t known him.
Chapter 11
Camp Chase, Columbus, Ohio, August 10, 1862
Stephen Murdoch sat idling the time away on the stoop of the barracks. He whittled away at a stick with a dull eating knife. He was working on a chess set, and the longer the work took, the better. He and his messmates had decided they needed something to pass the time. He didn’t play chess, but it was what everyone was doing.
The high plank walls surrounding the POW stockade blocked out most of what could be seen of Camp Chase, save for the Stars and Stripes, which fluttered just out of reach beyond the wall. The sight reminded him that he was in prison in a foreign land. It reminded him of the flag they used to swear allegiance to. It reminded him that someone else was in charge.
The camp, ro
ws of barrack buildings that did not do well at keeping men warm in the winter or cool in the summer, was home to a thousand Confederate prisoners of war. Many of his new messmates had been captured at Shiloh and before, a veritable log of Union victories and Confederate defeats at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Island No. 10, and a hundred skirmishes too obscure to be given a name. There were men from Kentucky, from Virginia, from Georgia, from Arkansas. There were civilians as well, political prisoners from Kentucky who had been rounded up as Union forces took over parts of the neutral state as Confederate forces retreated. The food was palatable but never enough, and it had the usual lack of army imagination in dietary nuance. Hardtack and salt beef or pork, some vegetables, and watered-down coffee. Stephen was used to the regimen. Despite the portions, they were all growing fat with inactivity.
Sitting under the gathering clouds, Stephen focused on his carving of a knight. Lacking the necessary tools for detail, he was nonetheless working on the mane of the horse’s head. No rider, just a horse’s head. He would do the other three knights in turn. They had the checkerboard already made. The prisoners spent hours playing chess, and chuck-a-luck, and cards whenever someone happened to have a fully intact deck, and they whittled and did more of the same. They wrote letters home. They looked out across the top of the high fence and wondered what was happening to their families at home or to their fellows in their regiments. They waited to be exchanged.
There was a constant coming and going from the camp, as new prisoners would arrive in packs of ten or thirty and others would leave in tens. Some would be transferred to Johnson’s Island; others would just sit and wait as he and his pards were waiting. Prisoner exchange was their only hope of getting out of Camp Chase—that or dying. The hospital was full of disease-ravaged bodies. Diarrhea was the principal complaint, but fevers and malnourishment affected those who had been cooped up the longest.
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