Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  “Oh, certainly it isn’t as bad as all that. Two thirds of your men are farmers, and you’ve got bright young men like Bierce to engineer your road work.”

  Hazen snorts. “He’s a good map-maker, but I’ve never seen him particularly energetic in anything else except inspecting the dead.”

  Garesché lifts his eyebrows. “Really? An interesting hobby. Do you plan to become a doctor, Lieutenant?”

  “No, Colonel. But I would know war,” Bierce says.

  “Ah. Well, it seems we are all learning something of it these days… . Come, ride with me for a few minutes, Colonel Hazen.”

  Bierce sits his horse, watching as the two colonels ride off a few dozen paces. “Bill,” he hears Garesché begin, “as we have discussed in the past, you must curb your temper. It does you no good. It does the army no good… .” The voices drift off. Bierce looks toward the top of the rise where Rosecrans and Crittenden are talking. He wonders again what manner of men these are. Yes, he would know war and those who make it.

  Brigadier General Joe Wheeler, who abhors surprises, has been surprised. Since early morning his pickets have been forwarding reports of Federal columns on the Nolensville, Franklin, and Wilson pikes to the west. Yet somehow they have failed to get word to him of Crittenden’s advance down the Murfreesboro Pike until the Yankees are within a few miles of his headquarters in Lavergne. How the devil could this happen? He mounts, rides hell for leather to have a look for himself.

  Wheeler is very young for a general, only twenty-six, and would look even younger without his thick, black beard. But no one denies that he is a fighter. In the retreat from Kentucky, Wheeler and his men fought thirty engagements covering the retreat of the infantry across the Cumberlands. But to Wheeler’s frustration, his men seem endemically unsuited to the routine of soldiering. In slack times, they are prodigious sleepers, foragers, rakes, and lollygaggers. Hence the fumbled scouting, the incomplete reports, the unpardonable surprises!

  Wheeler and his staff thunder across the bridge over Hurricane Creek a mile north of Lavergne. His chief of staff shouts something about caution. Wheeler ignores him. Perhaps the report is wrong. Perhaps there is no Federal infantry column, just a little cavalry or nothing at all. He has seen it happen before: entire armies, entire hordes, made corporeal by nothing more than the imaginings of overwrought vedettes. He swings sharply off the road, fights through brush, kicking his mare hard as they emerge and begin climbing a rocky hill. He feels a brush of wind, hears a minié ball buzz, then another. Damn it! His staff dodges behind trees and bushes, opens fire, trying to make the Yankee snipers show themselves or at least duck and shoot high. Powder smoke hangs in puffs in the cedars, the pop and crack of pistols and carbines deadened by the sodden air.

  He is nearly there, spurs digging, quirt flailing. He hears the thwack of a ball striking flesh, feels the shiver of the impact through his thighs as the mare plunges. He pulls her head up hard, slashes at her flanks. The mare leaps forward, rocks clattering under her hooves, and they are suddenly atop the hill, horse shivering as the blood streams down her chest, man cursing in a steady vocative hiss at the sight of the long blue column of infantry on the turnpike.

  Wheeler guesses there are four thousand men within his view and more coming. He steadies the horse with one hand, fumbles field glasses from their case with the other, and focuses on the blue soldiers. More minié balls buzz around him. He ignores them, ignores the shouts of his chief of staff. How much more blue infantry? Another division? A full corps? Damn! Almost halfway to Murfreesboro by the shortest route, and he hasn’t done a thing to slow them. He whirls the mare, sends her careening down the steep slope, blood flying from the pumping chest wound.

  “Get the troops up!” he shouts at his chief of staff. “We’ll hold them behind the creek. Stop ’em for tonight.” They pound onto the road again, picking up the fragments of the staff from behind the bushes and trees. Wheeler’s mare stumbles, and he jerks her head up. An aide presses up close. Wheeler shouts: “Around the next bend. She’ll last that long.”

  They hurtle around the bend. Wheeler’s mare is stumbling every third or fourth stride. He waits, judges the moment, and then jumps free as her legs go rubber. The aide is off his horse, holding out the reins as Wheeler runs up. He grabs them, swings aboard. He kicks the horse savagely, bends low over the neck, catching up to the others. The aide swings up behind another junior staffer. Wheeler passes the mare, who, relieved of her burden, has kept her legs. She stands now, head drooping almost to the ground, confused—as he imagines all things with sudden mortal wounds must be confused—by the rapid imminence of non-being. Damn good horse, he thinks, but without sentiment or gratitude. He has no time for either. Never will.

  Colonel William Hazen’s second brigade, Palmer’s second division, Crittenden’s left wing, is still on the turnpike when Federal artillery opens fire on Wheeler’s troopers on the east bank of Hurricane Creek. Bierce watches Hazen, knows that he wants to order the men forward at the double-quick. But it is late in the day, and the men have marched a long way in the rain carrying heavy packs. Grimly, Hazen lets them continue forward at route step.

  Bierce finds the pack loads of the infantrymen endlessly fascinating: what men imagine needing, will carry, suffer for; what in the first fatigue they will throw away; what they will cling to as long as life. In nothing else except the examination of the dead has he found so much of the character of humanity revealed. Though this is only the first day of the march, a stream of items leaches from the column into the ditches by the road: pistols, bowie knives, canteens, pots, frying pans, packets of letters, books, religious tracts, extra shoes, shirts, pants, and so on. With each day, the army will travel lighter, sorer, angrier, wearier. But first before all the other firsts, seconds, and thirds that will cadence the hardening of the army, there is the skirmish up ahead to fight: the first scraping away of the forgetfulness between campaigns. A reminder of how men die.

  A staff officer gallops down the column, showering the men in the ranks with mud. They curse, shake their fists. A hoof kicks a testament from the ditch, sending pages scattering as if in forlorn reminder of the fragility of the Third Commandment. Bierce laughs, feels the glare of a few men nearby. Officers.

  The staff officer pulls up in front of Hazen. “Colonel, General Palmer directs that you hurry your men forward at the double-quick. You are to form to the right of the pike while General Cruft’s brigade forms to the left. Cruft will advance to turn the Rebels’ right flank while you hold onto their left.”

  “Am I just to hold their flank, or may I cross the creek?”

  “Cross if you can, Colonel, but the major effort will be General Cruft’s downstream.”

  “All right,” Hazen says, turns to shout the order for the double quick.

  After a jog of a quarter mile, Hazen’s brigade dumps packs by the road and forms in a marshy field on the west side. Hazen gives the men a few minutes to catch their breath. “Bierce,” he shouts. “Go see how Cruft is coming along.”

  Bierce gallops up and over the road, passing behind two Napoleons and a howitzer shelling the far side of the creek. Cruft’s brigade is half formed. Palmer and Cruft, both civilian generals but competent and wellliked, sit their horses a few dozen yards to the rear. Bierce turns his horse, trots back to Hazen. “I’d say ten minutes, Colonel.”

  “Good. We’ll push forward to the creek and hope the Rebs mistake us for the main effort.” Joe Wheeler is perched in a tree, trying to make out the Yankee preparations on the north side of Hurricane Creek. He curses the rain, wipes the lenses of his field glasses on a uniform sleeve, and peers again through the gray drizzle. He knows his line is spread thin, its flanks hanging; but if he can guess right, perhaps he can hold the Yankees until dusk. He leans forward, squinting. Yes, here they are at last, coming through the brush west of the pike. A feint? Possibly, but the ranks are heavy—a brigade at least— and the Yankees are rarely subtle.

  He swings down from
the tree, feeling a moment of remembered joy from a boyhood not so long past though it is an eon ago. He lands like a cat, sprints to his horse, already giving orders to pull in the right to reinforce the left.

  The Yankees pause twenty yards from the creek and the two sides blaze away. Powder smoke hangs in the drizzle, thickening until neither side can make out anything but the blurred shapes of swamp oaks and cedar. Wheeler paces, waiting for the assault. An orderly reports to his chief of staff, who turns to Wheeler. “General, the Yanks are coming across downstream. At least two brigades.”

  Wheeler curses. “All right, let’s get the boys out. We’ll fall back on the town and wait for dark.”

  There is no panic in the Rebel skedaddle. The men fall back from the stream in small groups, each pausing to lay down covering fire as the next squad follows. In less than ten minutes, the brigade is mounted and riding hard for Lavergne, where three of Wheeler’s staff are already laying out new lines.

  Bierce walks among the dead. There are not many, perhaps a dozen Confederate, a like number of Federal. As always, he finds a variety of expressions on the faces: the instantly dead seem peaceful, while those who have had a moment or two to recognize death seem startled. The expressions of the lingering dead are more varied, more interesting: agony, horror, disgust; and about the eyes of each, a squint of loneliness, a resentment toward all who have left them behind to die. Or so it seems to Bierce as he inspects the dead in the cold drizzle as dusk falls along Hurricane Creek.

  At the end of the first day’s march, Davis’s division, leading McCook’s corps, camps two miles south of Nolensville at Knob Gap and four miles north of Hardee’s positions at Triune. Sheridan’s and Johnson’s divisions of McCook’s corps and Negley’s division of Thomas’s corps halt at Nolensville. Rousseau’s division of Thomas’s corps bivouacs at Owen’s Store on the Wilson Pike. Leading Crittenden’s corps, Palmer’s division camps astride Hurricane Creek, a mile north of Lavergne and sixteen miles from Murfreesboro.

  Rosecrans’s headquarters is in a large stone building at the tiny hamlet of Hamilton’s Church on the Murfreesboro Pike. The staff processes a steady stream of incoming dispatches and outgoing orders. When a pause finally comes, Garesché leans back in his chair to ease his back and rest his eyes. At the adjoining table, Rosecrans signs a final order with a flourish and bounds to his feet to pace the room. Two newspaper reporters hurry forward to join him. Garesché sighs, wishing his general had the sense to rest now while he has a chance. But no, he must pace, talk, speculate on the battle to come.

  “Bragg will concentrate northwest of Murfreesboro,” Rosecrans tells the scribbling reporters. “He’s an artilleryman and he appreciates ground. He’s too easily flanked where he sits in Murfreesboro, and that’s why he’ll probably fight along Stewart’s Creek. He’ll set up with his forward units west of the creek and try to hit us a quick pop or two before we can come into line of battle. But we’ll come down on Stewart’s Creek well closed up. Crittenden, Thomas, and McCook, left to right. Bragg will probe, find that out, and drop back to fight on the defensive. Artillerymen are always more comfortable on the defensive. That’s why I expect… .” He stops, hesitates, covers the sudden thought by lighting a cigar. “That’s why I expect to give Braxton Bragg a round, good thumping. Thank you, gentlemen. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  When they are gone, Rosecrans says, “I need to talk to McCook. Tomorrow morning, he’s going to run into Hardee at Triune and I want him to be ready. Before, I wasn’t certain, but while I was talking to those reporters I suddenly saw it all clearly. Bragg won’t pull in Hardee until he’s bloodied us once.”

  Garesché sets down his pen carefully. “General McCook has received your instructions, General. I copied them out myself. I think you would do better to stay out of the damp and get some rest. The army will depend on you very heavily over the next few days.”

  Rosecrans glares at him. “Colonel, sometimes I swear you forgot how to be a soldier in all the time you spent in Washington. Well, let me remind you what soldiering is: it’s about besting the other man every chance you get. And that means I’ve got to best Braxton Bragg not tomorrow, not the next day, but right here, right now on this cold, godforsaken, rainy night. Is he going to go see Hardee tonight? I doubt it. But if I go talk to McCook and give him one suggestion that will help him beat Hardee, then it matters not if I sleep a wink!”

  Garesché stands, stiffly formal. “Very good, General. I will assemble a party.”

  It takes fifteen minutes for Garesché to gather staff and escort. He briefs Goddard, who will remain behind to run the headquarters staff. The major shakes his head. “Colonel, I think this is unwise. You could all get snapped up by a Reb patrol, and then where would we be?”

  “I know, Major. I know. But the general has his reasons for taking the risk. If we’re not back by three in the morning, contact General Thomas. Tell him that he is to act in General Rosecrans’s absence.”

  “Yes, sir. And, Colonel, have you recharged your revolver in all this damp weather?”

  Garesché is embarrassed. “No, Major. I’m afraid I neglected that.”

  “Let me do it for you quickly.”

  “Thank you, Major. That is very kind.” Garesché fumbles with his holster, withdraws the unfamiliar Colt.

  Rosecrans comes out the door, pulling on gauntlets and puffing on a fresh cigar. He slaps Garesché on the shoulder. “Don’t mind me, Julius. You’re the best damned chief of staff any general ever had, and I know part of your job is looking after me. But Hardee’s a wily old dog, about as wily as Alex McCook is thick. I don’t want Alex handled too roughly in the morning.”

  “Yes, General, of course.”

  They mount. Goddard hands up the reloaded revolver and two extra cylinders to Garesché. “Be careful, Colonel.”

  Trailing an escort of a dozen cavalry troopers led by a young lieutenant, they trot into the gloom.

  It is preposterous. They are lost somewhere in the rainy dark between Crittenden’s and McCook’s corps with Union and Confederate cavalry creeping about, nervous, fingers on carbine and pistol triggers. Rosecrans has already upbraided the miserable cavalry lieutenant leading the escort and has, over Garesché’s protests, taken it on himself to find their way. He knocks on the door of a cabin, quizzes the woman who comes to the door with four children clutching at her skirt. Rosecrans is courtly, calls her “Madam,” charms her into giving them directions though her husband is probably fighting in Rebel uniform. They continue, stopping at several more cabins, Rosecrans seeming to enjoy the interviews. At last they come out on a hill overlooking Nolensville and see the fires of McCook’s camp spread out below.

  They make their way through the artillery park and the long jumbled lines of supply wagons to where McCook has his headquarters in a pair of roadmaster wagons. McCook is delighted to see Rosecrans and Garesché. He summons his chief of staff, and the four of them sit about on the floor of one of the wagons, peering at maps by the light of a candle burning in a bayonet socket. McCook offers whiskey. Rosecrans accepts, Garesché refuses.

  McCook laughs. “You know, Hardee was commandant when I taught at the Point. We didn’t exactly see eye to eye on some of the details in his precious book of tactics. In fact, we had quite the go-arounds on the subject. I had to give in then, but I’ve got a few of my own ideas to try on him tomorrow.”

  Rosecrans frowns. “Pitch into him, General, but watch your flanks. Hardee is no fool; he’ll bait a trap.”

  “Don’t worry, General. I got jumped that day at Perryville, but this time we’ll be on the offensive. I’ll pay old Bill Hardee back.”

  Rosecrans continues to frown. “Gentlemen, if you would be so kind.”

  Garesché and McCook’s chief of staff exit, stand in the drizzle without speaking. Rosecrans and McCook emerge a few minutes later. McCook is still cheerful but perhaps a shade less ebullient.

  When they have said their goodnights and are riding again, Garesché
asks, “Are you in agreement on tactics?”

  “Yes, I think he’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t give Hardee a chance to turn a flank.”

  Garesché wishes he were as confident in Alex McCook, but says nothing.

  Braxton Bragg glowers at the map tacked to the wall of his office. Fourteen hours since the bedraggled cavalry corporal stood before his desk, and still there is no certainty about Rosecrans’s intentions. His diseased gut tells him that the Yankees are moving in force on Stewart’s Creek, but he must be certain before he concentrates the army. Polk and Hardee will seize any mistake, any sign of panic, as another excuse to assault his reputation. Oh, he knows all they have done, have tried to do. He knows of their secret meetings, of the secret letters they’ve sent Davis. Knows and will someday be revenged. But that is for someday. Now he must know what Rosecrans is doing, must be certain before he acts.

  He glances impatiently at the clock. Where is Wheeler? Two hours since he sent for him and still not here. He feels a momentary thrill of concern for the young man, is surprised by the unaccustomed sentiment. He opens a desk drawer for pen and stationery. He will begin a letter to his wife, use that to pass the time. Patience, he tells himself. Rashness is what kills generals and their armies. Wait for Wheeler and then decide.

  But instead of writing, he stares again at the map and the twisting course of Stewart’s Creek. That would be fine ground to defend, far better than the ground at Murfreesboro. But Rosecrans will have seen that, too, will have devised a way to flank the position. Better to draw him south toward Murfreesboro, stretch his supply lines, tire his army. And while the Yankees march in this wretched weather, Bragg will plan a way to use the ground around Murfreesboro to advantage. A snare baited with the apparent weakness of his position. A trap. Yes.