Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  It takes Ezra the better part of an hour to decide he isn’t going to die. He stumbles up and makes his way to the Gresham house, where a field hospital is operating in the wake of McCook’s rout. He slumps down in the long line of wounded to wait his turn. He has always supposed that a field hospital would be somehow exempt from the tumult of battle: a place of muffled sounds, of suffering and tragedy, but also of dignity and calm. But except for the suffering, Gresham house resembles nothing in his imagining. The noise from the fight on all sides is beyond tumult, belongs to that order of pandemonium shared only by deluge, earthquake, volcanic eruption, and hell. Nor are the house and yard immune to the missiles of the combat. Ezra watches a howitzer shell fall into the shallow declivity of an old cellar, missing by incredible luck every appendage of the five stragglers crowded within before burying itself two feet into the soft earth beneath their feet. There is a pause—no more than three or four heartbeats—then a soggy foomp and a brief spout of mud and body parts. After a few minutes, a hospital orderly scuttles to the side of the hole, stares in, and comes back, face pale though he has already seen much of horror this morning.

  An orderly sergeant squats before Ezra. “Show me your wound, trooper.” Ezra pushes the blouse off his shoulder, revealing a ridge of purple flesh across his left breast above the nipple. The sergeant pokes at the lump at the terminal end. “Pistol ball. Want it out of there?”

  “Well, yes. I guess.”

  “Come on. We’ll get it out and then put you to work.” He leads Ezra to the end of the porch. “Sit down. Pug, give me a hand.” He starts digging into a wooden box of dressings.

  Another orderly pushes in beside the sergeant, pulls Ezra’s blouse off his shoulder and swabs the blood away with a wet, grimy rag. The sergeant leans in over Ezra’s chest, scalpel in hand. “But don’t I get to see a surgeon?” Ezra asks.

  “You don’t need one. Besides, you’re safer with us,” the sergeant says. He makes a quick cut, pinches, and drops a ball of lead into Ezra’s palm. “Souvenir. Thirty-six caliber. Must have been nearly spent when it hit you.”

  “You’re a lucky son of a bitch,” Pug growls. “Sit up.” He expertly wraps a broad bandage around Ezra’s chest, knotting it in the back.

  “Now make yourself useful,” the sergeant says. “Go tear down some of that fence over yonder and make a fire for the boys. Them that can’t move are going to freeze to death unless we get them a fire.”

  Lieutenant Jack Dulin has still not found Liddell’s brigade when he reaches the Wilkinson Pike. He hesitates, doubting if the brigade has come so far so fast. But where else to look? The wagons bump up and over the shoulder of the turnpike, the teamsters flailing at the mules. Riding alongside, Dulin feels himself focused in clear silhouette against the gray skyline and shivers with the sense of Yankee rifles coming to bear on his chest. Then the wagons are across, off the pike, and bumping across the furrows of another cornfield. Dulin lets out his breath. Now where the hell is the bri—

  Suddenly, Yankees are everywhere, an entire line up and running across the field ahead of the wagons. The teamster of the lead wagon hauls back on the reins, shouts, “I think we come too far, Lootenant!”

  Dulin watches the running Yankees with bug-eyed astonishment. Christ, there must be two hundred of them! “Turn around,” he yells. “We’ve gone too far.”

  I just told you that, you dumb son of a bitch, the teamster thinks. He hauls the mules around in a slewing turn, follows Dulin back toward the pike.

  Brigadier General St. John Liddell rides into the yard of the Gresham house past a slightly wounded Yankee private prying boards from a fence. Liddell surveys the yard, picking out the skulkers hiding among the Yankee wounded. If I live, I will come back tonight and take one of them, he thinks. I’ll take him out into the fields and strangle him with my bare hands. Then I will come back for another and another, until my hands are too tired to grasp another Yankee throat, to twist another Yankee neck. Then I will weep.

  Lieutenant Willie Liddell, only sixteen and the darling of his father’s staff, is dead. Bullock, one of the staff sergeants, has seen his body crumpled in a field beside the Gresham Road, goes to find his commander, weeping as he goes, for Willie in life had shone upon them all: blond, laughing; oblivious to danger, death, or the cares that weigh down any man much beyond the age of sixteen.

  Surgeon John Doolittle looks up from the operating table to see a hardfaced general in gray step through the door. He turns back to his work, ripping a capital saw through a femur and then slicing through the muscles and fat on the other side with an eight-inch amputating knife. The patient, only lightly anaesthetized to save on chloroform, gives a shudder, tries to kick the leg that an orderly has just tossed through an open window onto a heap of severed limbs. “Sew him up,” Doolittle tells his assistant, wipes his hands on his bloody apron, and goes to welcome the general.

  Liddell stares at the lithe, mustachioed man coming toward him, takes a dislike to him before he even hears the man’s flat Ohio accent. “General, I’m glad you’re here,” the doctor begins without preamble. “There are hundreds of wounded along the fences near the pike. Men who can’t get here because of their wounds or for fear of getting shot a second time. With a cease-fire of an hour and your help, I can get them into the yard. We’re already swamped and we won’t be able to save all of them, but we’ll save a damned sight more than we can now. Then if you could tell your gunners—”

  “I would rather die than give you so much as a minute.”

  The doctor’s mouth drops open. He recovers, stammers, “But, General! There are Southern boys out there too. We don’t play favorites here. A wounded man is a wounded man to us.”

  “And aren’t you a pretty little fellow, coming down here to tell us what to do, trying to chain us to your accursed Union. You assault our homes and our women, try to take our niggers, and would weld us in shackles for a thousand years!”

  Doolittle rubs at his mustache, leaving fragments of dried blood amid the carefully trimmed whiskers. “General, this is not the time for politics. I only want a cease-fire for an hour so I can save as many boys as—”

  “It’s all politics, sir! War is political. Death is political! The maiming of every poor stupid farm lad out there is political! And it is your politics that are the cause of all this suffering and death. You ask for a cease-fire? For what? To give your army time to regroup so it can kill and maim more of us? Well, you are not going to get one, sir! Because we are going to cut through your army and kill it like a snake. Hack it into a thousand pieces so that it can never come crawling through this land again!”

  Liddell storms out. Doolittle finds himself pressed back against a wall. “Jesus Christ,” he says. “Who was that?”

  “General St. John Liddell,” a young Rebel officer says. “He just heard that his son is killed.” He touches the doctor kindly on the shoulder, follows his general out the door.

  Liddell finds his men filling their cartridge boxes from two muddy ordnance wagons. He looks at the short, fat lieutenant officiously supervising. Dooley. Dulin. Something like that. “Good job, Lieutenant.”

  The man beams, salutes. “Thank you, General.”

  By the time Liddell’s brigade has crossed the Wilkinson Pike and disappeared from sight, Private Ezra Brown has a good pile of boards torn from the old fence. He carries an armload, his chest hurting ferociously, to a spot near a long line of the severely wounded. By propping a board at an angle on several others and jumping on it, he is able to break up some kindling. He borrows a barlow knife to make some shavings and then stacks a neat teepee of kindling over them. Two lucifers and he has a thin flame in the shavings, and soon a crackle and some sparks from the kindling. He is crouching on hands and knees, blowing gently on the fire, when someone hits him across the backside with a board, throwing him forward, upsetting the teepee and nearly setting his beard on fire. “Hey, goddamn it!” he yells, twisting about and slapping at the sparks on his uniform.
But there is no one behind him and his right leg is a sudden dead weight.

  Ezra is staring dumbly at the bubbling wound in his thigh when the orderly sergeant saunters over. The sergeant shakes his head sadly. “Well, now you do have something to worry about. Now you’ve got to see one of the docs.”

  As much as his hemorrhoids will allow, Jack Dulin is a happy man as Liddell’s brigade advances across the muddy cornfield north of the Wilkinson Pike. Like most lieutenants, he has marched on foot with the men until now. The horse—sorry plug that it is—elevates him above the throng, makes him feel a true officer. Moreover, the general told him that he’d done a good job. If he can manage to come to Liddell’s attention a time or two more, perhaps the general will remember him when the next captaincy opens. Jim Slusser, who was a lieutenant only a month ago and is now a captain, points to the skid marks made an hour before by Dulin’s slewing ordnance wagons. “Looks like those boys decided to change directions in a hell of a hurry. Must’ve decided they were going the wrong way.”

  Dulin, who is a young man almost completely without a sense of humor, laughs out loud, wonders if Slusser or anyone would believe him if he told them how he’d routed half a Yankee regiment with a pair of ordnance wagons.

  For all his desire to kill Yankees in Willie’s memory, St. John Liddell is too good a commander to push too far beyond support. North of the pike, he finds himself alone with his brigade in thick woods. He halts, sends an aide back to find Cleburne or Hardee to ask for orders.

  He sits on a log, closes his eyes, tries to ease the thudding pain in his temples. “General, he’s not dead!”

  Liddell opens his eyes, stares at his aide-de-camp, Captain June Bostick. “Who’s not dead?”

  “Willie, sir. Weren’t you told that he was dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he’s not, sir. I put him in an ambulance myself. He got knocked off his horse by a shell burst and stunned. One of the gunners found him and called me. I imagine he’ll be back with us tonight or tomorrow.”

  Liddell stares at Bostick for a long moment. “My son is alive?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s going to be fine.”

  Liddell runs his tongue over his lips, frowns, can hardly think of anything to say or feel. Willie not dead. Amazing. I had already buried my boy and set about plotting to avenge him. “Thank you, Bostick. I am greatly relieved.”

  At twenty-nine, Brigadier General James Earl Rains is the youngest general in the Army of Tennessee, Joe Wheeler excepted. He is tall and slender, with striking gray eyes and a clump of thick chinwhiskers that only accentuate his youth. A Yale-educated attorney and editor in Nashville before the war, he is neither a romantic nor a gloryhunter. Still, he has the sense this morning of not contributing his share to the Confederate triumph. True, his brigade helped rout Willich’s at the far end of the Union line in the first attack, but even that had been mostly Matt Ector’s doing. Since then, Rains and Ector have led their brigades north along Overall Creek, collecting Yankee prisoners and mopping up the few scattered spots of resistance bypassed by Wharton’s cavalry.

  Rains is uneasy with their separation from the rest of the division, suggests to Ector that they should oblique to the right. But Ector, who is senior and a decade older, refuses: McCown knows where they are, will redirect them when he thinks best. So they move along at a measured pace, protecting their flanks, eschewing audacity in the absence of orders. Finally, to Rains’s great relief, McCown arrives to lead them back to the rest of the division.

  Hardee is waiting impatiently with McNair’s brigade near the Gresham house when McCown brings Rains’s and Ector’s brigades into view. Hardee is tempted to relieve McCown for the inexcusable tardiness. Instead, he takes him aside, noting the ashen face of his fellow Academy graduate and Old Army friend. “John, are you ill?”

  “No, Bill. I’m—”

  “Because if you are, there’s no disgrace in asking to be relieved. I’ve already sent McNair back and put Harper in command of his brigade.”

  “McNair’s been sick for a month.”

  “I’m aware of that. Now, do you want to go back, or can you carry on?”

  McCown stares for a moment at his trembling hands. How can this have happened, he wonders, this faintness under fire? He’s been a professional soldier for a quarter century. He’d gone to Mexico, winning a brevet at Cerro Gordo. He never thought he’d be a general, but in his secret imaginings he thought he would be a good one: that a general’s stars would bring an apotheosis, make of him the decisive agent of grand designs. But the rank has done none of that, has revealed instead a fear that makes his heart race every time he faces a decision. He lifts his eyes to Hardee’s. “I’m fine, General. A mild indisposition that will pass in a moment.”

  This is plausible enough. Half the army is afflicted with some indisposition or another, most of them dysenteric. The sight of soldiers, from privates to generals, emptying watery bowels along a line of march is so common as to excite no notice at all. So Hardee nods; he will spare McCown the humiliation of being relieved under fire. But when this business is concluded, he will tell him that he should seek a transfer to a quiet post. “All right, John. As soon as the men are resupplied with cartridges, we’re going to make a push for the Nashville Pike. If we succeed, we’ll have won the day. Send Rains forward on your right, Ector in the center, Harper on the left. Cleburne will come in to the right of Rains once you’re engaged.”

  Half an hour later, Rains’s skirmishers advance cautiously into the misty woods northeast of the Wilkinson Pike. They wear the blue overcoats issued them on enlisting in the 3rd Georgia. The blue is not quite Union blue; but soaked by rain it is very close to the same color as the uniforms of the two battalions of Union regulars of Shepherd’s brigade, Rousseau’s division, advancing in the opposite direction. Momentarily confused by the strange cut of the regulars’ blouses, the Georgians fall back, holding their fire. The regulars are not confused but altogether mistaken, pulling in their own skirmishers and following in the certainty that they are now under the cover of another Federal formation.

  Major Adam J. Slemmer, commanding 1st Battalion, 16th U.S. Infantry, rides behind his ranks, ducking to keep branches from plucking the spectacles from his face. Slemmer is an awesomely talented soldier. At the Academy, his classmates assumed that he would rise to the top echelons of the army staff. Yet Slemmer refused a staff commission, chose the artillery instead, for staff officers are rarely made generals and Slemmer intends to be a general. He could, like his contemporaries Sheridan, McCook, Stanley, and Sill, be one already. But a volunteer commission, even with stars attached, does not suit his purposes. Not yet.

  Of those four, only Sill and possibly Stanley have ever heard of Machiavelli, but Slemmer can recite long passages from The Prince. He does so only to himself, reveals nothing to others. He is thinking beyond this war to the great conquest that will add Mexico, Cuba, Central America, and perhaps even Canada to the American empire. He has analyzed his probable rivals for command in that war, and only John Schofield, Jim McPherson, and now—surprisingly—Phil Sheridan concern him. But he has formulated a careful plan, expects that it will best McPherson, who is too nice by half, and Schofield, who is too abrasive by an even larger margin. Sheridan? Well, the man is a ditch-digger’s son, cannot survive both that and this war.

  In accordance with his timetable, Slemmer is already well on his way to a solid combat reputation. By spring, he will be able to afford a transfer to the staff. He expects Garesché will ask for a field command, and no one will be better qualified to take his place than Adam Slemmer. Then to play politics for a year: make Rosecrans his patron and, through him, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase. By a year from this spring, Slemmer will have reputation, powerful connections, a general’s stars, and a division. Perhaps an independent command. (He would love the chance to go raiding like Forrest, or to hunt down the man himself.) Then, when the press and public tire of all the old, battle-worn generals
, they will find a new hero in Adam Slemmer.

  As the regulars push ahead into open forest, Slemmer glances to his right, makes out the line of 1st Battalion, 15th U.S. Infantry, commanded by Major John H. King, a regular almost as crusty as Shepherd. But King is smart, despite his lack of education: a good ally to have among the regulars. Slemmer ducks to avoid another limb, guides his horse between a pair of trees, and stares out from the vantage of height at a long butternut line of infantry, Enfields at the ready, while a skirmish line in blue overcoats, but with butternut pants showing below, scuttles out of the way. Slemmer has a quick, decisive mind, but even he does not fully comprehend the ambush before the Rebel volley explodes into his ranks. Slemmer feels a blow to his left shoulder, reels in the saddle, hears vertebrae pop as he tries to recover his balance. Another ball cuts through a stirrup strap, shatters his right ankle. Half a dozen bullets strike his horse in the chest and neck. The beast stumbles backward, pitching Slemmer onto the stony ground.

  King is also down, his battalion falling back, firing by the rear rank. Captain Robert Crofton takes command of Slemmer’s battalion, orders it into the cover of a limestone outcropping. For fifteen minutes, Slemmer’s men deliver a cool, disciplined fire against the 29th North Carolina. Half a dozen of the blue-clad Georgia skirmishers have been caught between the lines and taken prisoner. They huddle under cover not far from Slemmer. One offers to tend Slemmer’s wounds, receives a glare in reply.

  Slemmer knows that he will lose the arm and probably the foot. Alone, the foot would not be so bad. An officer less a foot can still command an army. But Congress does not make one-armed officers commanding generals. It goes against the sense that even generals must be able to personally throttle their opponents. Even gouty old Scott possessed a great, imperturbable might, gave the impression that, if he chose, he could rise and advance, wheezing and grunting like an ancient grizzly, to crush any opponent of the Republic. No, Adam Slemmer will never be commanding general now. Not even a hero. If he lives at all beyond this day, it will be to die obscure.