“Get back up here, you fools!” a sergeant yelled. “That’s been shaking that way every time a train passes for five years.”
Five years? Ryan shook his head. The place looks like it’s fifty years old.
“Hey, Ryan! What do you think?”
He turned, blinked, and had to try not to laugh. Matt Bryson had shed the clothes he had been wearing and put on his new “uniform.” He wasn’t alone, either. A lot of soldiers had stripped down to their undergarments and were pulling on the uniforms. Ryan sure hoped the good ladies of Corinth weren’t watching this wretched display.
Colonel Moore had requisitioned gray uniforms, but the trousers and coats being passed out weren’t gray, but white. Matt Bryson looked not only like a ghost, but one of the funniest Ryan could have ever imagined. Maybe, just maybe, the pants would have been long enough for Sam Houston, but on Matt they stretched six inches past his feet, and he needed his belt to keep them from falling down. The coat, on the other hand, had sleeves three inches too short.
Matt laughed, found a spot to squat, pulled up his pant legs, and shoved on his old brogans. “Beats the rags I was wearing,” he said.
Ryan somehow made his way to the end of the porch, where Sergeant Rutherford was barking orders at two privates who were handing out the bundles of white wool uniforms, wrapped in twine, from the back of a covered wagon.
“Here you go, McCalla!” Sergeant Rutherford tossed him a bundle.
Ryan caught it turned around, uncertain.
“What about shoes, Sarge?” someone asked.
“No shoes,” Rutherford snapped. “Wear what brought you here.”
“My feet brought me here. I ain’t had shoes since Alexandria.”
“Then your feet will take you to battle.”
An unfamiliar voice drawled: “Sergeant, shouldn’t we dye these duds gray?”
“No time for that, Warren.”
Although men were peeling out of their filthy clothes all around him, Ryan wasn’t about to undress in the middle of a bustling city. He saw the door to the hotel’s lobby, and maneuvered his way there. The ground floor was full of dirty, stinking men changing out of their old clothes. Behind the counter, a bespectacled man in sleeve garters, book-ended by a bald Negro and a wide-eyed white boy, stared in amazement.
“Best hurry, Ryan,” Little Sam Houston said.
Ryan set his new uniform on the back of a settee. “You, Sam?” He couldn’t believe it. Sam Jr. had taken off the uniform his father had hired a tailor to make.
“We boys of the Second have to stick together,” Little Sam said with a grin. “What do you think?”
Ryan managed to shake his head and smile. At least Sam Jr.’s uniform fit him better than had Matt Bryson’s. Ryan stepped behind a curtain, and, leaning rifle and haversack against the colorful wallpaper, began unbuckling and unbuttoning.
* * * * *
“You look like a horned toad stuffed to the brim,” Little Sam said, looking at Gibb Gideon.
“Yeah,” Gideon said stiffly.
Ryan didn’t see how Gibb could breathe, tight as the coat was. Ryan felt lucky. His uniform fit, more or less. So did Little Sam’s.
“Some of the boys say they’ll gather up some pecan shells,” Matt Bryson said, “crush them, and use that to dye these funeral suits a fitting color after we whip the Yanks.”
“At least we got uniforms.” Gideon took a stick and began rubbing one end against his mud-darkened sock. Like many others in the Second, Gideon no longer had shoes to wear.
No shoes. And little grub. They had exhausted their rations, which had been issued in Houston, somewhere between Memphis and the Mississippi border. Being the last regiment to arrive in Corinth, they had found most of the food the Army of the Mississippi had ordered already gone. Most soldiers had been issued four days’ rations. The commissary had been able to give the men of the Second only two and a half.
Little Sam leaned over the pot that Matt Bryson stirred. “What is that you’re making?”
“Something one of those Alabama boys from the Nineteenth showed me. They call it kush.”
Ryan peered over Little Sam’s shoulder, and frowned. “What is it, exactly?”
Matt didn’t bother to look up. “Cornmeal, bacon, and water. Exactly.”
Gibb Gideon spat out tobacco juice into the flames. “I wouldn’t feed my hogs that.”
“Hogs wouldn’t eat it. Soldiers will.”
Shaking his head, Ryan let out a long breath, and squatted by the fire. At least the coffee smelled good.
“Where’s Baby?” Little Sam suddenly asked.
Matt stopped stirring. Ryan looked across the rows of Sibley tents and campfires, across the ghostlike figures moving about in the mud.
“He was writing a letter by the depot,” Matt said, “last I saw him. Didn’t you see him, Ryan?”
His head shook.
“He’ll turn up.” Gibb Gideon began unbuttoning his coat. “It’s not like he can run off to his mama’s house on Galveston Island.”
* * * * *
Harry Cravey, however, wasn’t there that night, or the next morning. Ryan even checked in at sick call, and was directed to a tent that served as the hospital. The stench of that place made him walk through in a hurry, but he didn’t find Baby Cravey. He even walked along the depot, and went into the lobby of the Tishomingo Hotel.
Harry Cravey, it seemed, wasn’t anywhere in Corinth.
He wasn’t there before dawn on April 3, when the men of the Second Texas fell in, and began marching through ankle-deep mud, following the gray-, brown- and blue-uniformed soldiers of regiments from Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Texas, leading scores of other troops, some in uniforms, some without.
Sidewalks, porches, balconies, and platforms were lined two- to three-deep with the citizens of Corinth. A band played “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” Women sang along. A preacher read from the Gospel of St. Matthew. Men removed their hats.
“Hey, mister, where does this road lead to?” Matt Bryson called out to a man in a brown sack suit.
“Monterey in Tennessee,” he said. “Then all the way to Pittsburg Landin’ on the Tennessee River.”
Chapter Fourteen
April 6, 1862
Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee
At least the rain had stopped. Between the rivers, the steamboat, and what seemed like forty days and forty nights of a constant deluge, Caleb Cole felt so water-logged, he half expected to turn into a tadpole.
He woke that morning not to the sound of rainfall, but of horses’ hoofs plopping through the mud, and the splashing of freshly brewed coffee into a cup just outside the canvas tent. Since he had slept in his socks, trousers, and boiled shirt, he pushed off the blanket, stepped into his brogans, grabbed his blouse and hat, and eased outside.
Smiling, Folker handed him the cup of coffee he had just poured for himself.
The tin cup burned his fingers, so Caleb set it on a stump to cool. He looked up at the dark sky, finding a few twinkling stars. Fewer clouds. Maybe today it would not rain.
“’Morning, General,” Boone Madison said, and waved his hat at a small figure with a scraggly red beard and well-chewed cigar.
Turning quickly, Caleb blinked as he espied General William T. Sherman, who ignored Boone Madison’s greeting, lead a small group of riders down a quagmire some might call a road.
“Morning?” grunted Seb Woolard, squatting by the fire to warm himself. “The sun ain’t even up.”
The sky was turning gray in the east, but the only real light came from lanterns and cook fires that cast an eerie glow on the endless expanse of canvas that stretched out over several acres. A drummer tapped out something over to the east, and the sounds of a military camp—a military city—could be heard: curses and laughter, prayers and c
omplaints, matches striking, bacon sizzling. The aroma of breakfast, of coffee, blended with the moist scent of the water-soaked earth and rotting leaves, of spring in western Tennessee.
Now Boone squatted by a nearby fire, turning a rotisserie crank. Caleb’s mouth watered. Chickens. A dozen chickens being roasted over hot coals. Well, it was Sunday. Nothing like chicken, coffee, and bacon for Sunday breakfast.
Picking up his cup of coffee, Caleb tested the hot liquid and shook his head in wonder. If he lived to be a hundred, he’d never be able to comprehend this army of thousands that had turned a rugged, wet country, full of thickets and fleas, into a city that would have dwarfed Unionville, probably all of Putnam County, and might have even rivaled St. Louis.
Over the past week Caleb had met soldiers from all over—Illinois and Michigan and Wisconsin. He felt so far from northern Missouri, and couldn’t wait to write to Maryanne Corneilison, or his parents, about all he had seen, all he had done. Those nightmares of Platte County, of Parker Pruitt and Colonel Morgan, lay in his past, he hoped never to return. He had just seen William T. Sherman ride so close that he could have swiped the general’s cigar. He had listened to General Ulysses S. Grant, the hero of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, give a speech or two. Neither Grant nor Sherman looked like heroes. Gee willikins, they didn’t even look like soldiers, at least not officers, with mud-splattered boots, rumpled coats, and savage countenances.
By grab, he might even write his sister, let Bessy know everything he had seen since leaving Missouri. She’d likely have a conniption over his brags. Only they wouldn’t be brags, just facts.
He was in Tennessee, the Confederacy, enemy territory. So close to actual war. That proved hard to accept, too. The Rebels, real Rebs, not the slippery bushwhackers he had chased in western Missouri, were massing only twenty miles south.
A muffled crack in that direction caused Caleb to stiffen and Seb Woolard to jump to his feet. “What’s that?”
“Some dumb sentry.” Folker filled a fresh cup of coffee. “That’s probably where old Cump’s heading this early in the morning.” Cump was what a lot of the soldiers called Sherman, though Caleb didn’t know why. “To arrest some fool for shooting off his musket, and have him hanged by his thumbs.”
“He’ll have to arrest more than one,” Seb Woolard said. “Been hearing a lot of shots this morn.”
“I wish it was the Rebs.” Boone shook his head. “Tired of all this prancing around for Colonel Miller.”
“Hold your horses.” Sergeant Masterson had finally stepped out of his tent. “We’ll have our fight soon enough. We’re here, aren’t we?”
* * * * *
Getting here had been a long, roundabout journey. The train they had boarded in St. Joseph had taken them to St. Charles, with a long delay—and quite a bit of excitement in Breckenridge after several cars had derailed. No one was injured, however, and Caleb had wished he had been in one of the cars that had slipped off the tracks. It would have been a good story to tell his folks.
From the Missouri River, they had marched to Benton Barracks, a miserable place in St. Louis that made the dirt redoubt of Fort Morgan in Laclede look like a grand hotel.
While in St. Louis, Colonel Miller had dismissed several other officers of the Eighteenth—those who had been close to Colonel Morgan—but Captain Clark remained in command of Company E. For that, Caleb felt grateful. The colonel’s actions, however, had riled many of the regiment’s enlisted men to threaten desertion, but no one, not even Seb Woolard, had made good on the threat. Maybe because as soon as Colonel Miller had replaced the officers he had kicked out of the service, the Eighteenth was on the move again.
Ordered to join General Grant’s army at the District of West Tennessee, more than eight hundred men had crammed aboard a ship called the Nebraska and steamed to Cairo, Illinois. The Nebraska was as pathetic as Benton Barracks, a wooden vessel that creaked, moaned, and often leaked water. Between the hundred horses and mules in the ship’s hold, the filth on the deck where the men camped out, and the stink of the river, most of the soldiers suffered on the journey. Half the men of the Eighteenth came down with diarrhea, which got so bad that the Nebraska’s crew cut holes in the wheel covers to accommodate the persistent purgings of hundreds of sick, miserable soldiers.
Caleb felt blessed. He had no loose bowels, and he loved the scenery.
Back in Missouri he had traveled by train, and now he was on a steamboat, heading to war with his friends. While more than a few boys hung their heads over the sides of the ship to vomit, Caleb just sat or stood, watching the river, the tree-lined banks, the other ships, boats, barges. There was just so much to see. The world, he decided, was a wonder. When this war was finally over, he wondered how he would be able to return to slopping hogs.
He had marveled over Kansas City and St. Louis. Cairo, Illinois had been equally something to behold. For Caleb, anyway. Chaplain Garner had another view.
“What do you think, Parson?” Caleb had asked when they had stepped onto the levee.
Head shaking, the preacher had replied: “Why, Private Cole, this is a splendid site for a town … if only they had land to build on.”
From Cairo, they had moved down the river, still aboard the Nebraska, on to Columbus, Kentucky, and then down to Island No. 10, where they had gotten their first taste of war.
“An appetizer,” Sergeant Masterson had called it.
Actually all Caleb and the others had done was sit on the Nebraska’s decks, and watch shells from Confederate batteries on the island and Union ironclads in the river light up the night sky. Caleb had often heard about fireworks, had seen an illustration or two in some magazine his father had brought home, but he had never seen even a firecracker. Not on Independence Day. Not on New Year’s Eve. The cannons had sounded like thunder, and the Nebraska had shuddered with the explosion of every shell. It had been something to see—beautiful, awe-inspiring, but hard to believe how deadly it must have been closer to where those shells kept exploding.
“What would happen if one of those bombs hit us, Sergeant?” Seb Woolard had asked.
“You’d never know,” Masterson had answered.
The next morning, the Eighteenth Missouri had learned what war was all about.
They swung axes, picks, shovels. They worked cross-cut saws. They joined engineers and “contraband”—runaway slaves, or slaves who just happened to find themselves surrounded by Federal soldiers. The Eighteenth worked alongside these black men and Union engineers, removing timber and limbs, leaves and mud, driftwood and sandbars. Some fool general had gotten it into his head that trying to run steamboats like the Nebraska past Rebel cannon was too risky. Instead, they would clear these flooded woods northeast of New Madrid, Missouri, and create a fifty-foot channel.
Those soldiers who weren’t still feeling the effects of dysentery had taken to the forest, working even after blisters formed atop blisters, even after their muscles screamed in agony and kept them awake at night. Caleb soon wished he had gotten sick. He often wished he had died. Until he had helped bury two Missouri farm boys who had died.
Then came new orders. Once the Nebraska turned around, the Eighteenth Missouri had climbed back onto those putrid decks, and returned to Cairo, leaving behind the graves of privates John A. Blake and William Pate, and one unfinished canal. “Much work as we did on that,” Rémy had complained, “seems that we could at least stick around and sail down it when it opens!”
That, of course, was not the way this man’s army operated.
Back to Cairo, then up the Ohio River to Paducah, Kentucky, and down the Tennessee River where, finally, they had pulled ashore at Pittsburg Landing.
As soon as they had gotten off the Nebraska—by then, even Caleb had grown sick of river life—they had marched a mile and a half southwest, and set up camp in a grove of hickories and oaks near some pike the locals called the Eastern Corinth
Road.
Colonel Miller had wasted no time. South of the woods lay a farm, and in the clearing the new commander of the Eighteenth had decided it was time to drill.
And drill. And drill.
The problem, of course, was that most of the soldiers—Sergeant Masterson and Rémy Ehrenreich, among them—had not fully recovered from their bouts with diarrhea while on the Nebraska, or from all the back-breaking work on that stupid canal. Others, like Folker, had merely complained that they hadn’t gotten their land legs back.
Colonel Miller had not really cared. He had drilled them anyway, until, at last, on Friday, April 4, he had ordered the regiment for a general review. The colonel had closed the review with one long, flowery, patriotic speech.
Yesterday, they had drilled again.
And today? It was Sunday, so maybe, the good Lord willing, they wouldn’t have to parade or march.
So here he stood on a crisp morning, a private in the Eighteenth Missouri Infantry, part of the Sixth Infantry Division, Army of the Tennessee, Brigadier General Benjamin Prentiss commanding.
* * * * *
Caleb set his cup down long enough to pull up his suspenders, and slip on his blue blouse. Slowly the sun began creeping over the trees. Matt dropped bacon into a skillet, and the sizzle and scent reminded Caleb that he was starving. Another smell caused his stomach to growl, and he looked around until he saw the Dutch oven, its lid covered with coals and ash.
“Folker, are you making biscuits?” He couldn’t remember the last time he had tasted biscuits. Back home on the farm, a lifetime ago? He shook his head.
“Amen, brother. It’ll be a Sunday feast, boys. Even got us butter for the biscuits.”
“When are we going to march to Corinth?” Folker changed the subject. “I’m like Boone, here. Tired of waiting.”
“We march when General Grant says we march,” Masterson said, helping himself to coffee.
There was a pop. Followed by another. This one closer.
“Stupid fools,” Boone Masterson said.
“Wish they’d stop that infernal racket,” Seb Woolard said. “It’s making me all jumpy.”
And There I’ll Be a Soldier Page 12