Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  The muzzle flashes roll down the gun line, the shells and solid shot arcing briefly from the howitzers and Napoleons, traveling almost flat from the Parrott rifles. Case shot explodes over the Rebel ranks. Flags go down, the line itself beginning to crease and ripple, jagged holes appearing as the batteries in the Round Forest open with canister. Watching from Wagner’s line, the Reverend Whitehead murmurs to no one in particular—perhaps to his God—“The fall of Lucifer in brimstone and hellfire. I understand it now.”

  Colonel Joseph Palmer, a former mayor of Murfreesboro, can see the hopelessness of advancing into the fury of the Federal guns. He breaks off the attack, hurries his brigade into the woods near Alexander Stewart’s line.

  Brigadier General William Preston pushes his brigade into the grounds of the Cowan farm where he, too, is presented with the reality that further advance will lead only to pointless slaughter. He pulls Sergeant David Gallagher, color bearer of the 4th Florida, up behind him, gallops toward the cover of the friendly woods. His men cheer, race after him. Only the 20th Tennessee, separated from the rest amid the burning buildings of the Cowan farm, pushes ahead.

  Bill Hazen lets the Rebels struggle to within a hundred yards of the Round Forest and then orders his men to stand and fire. A single volley tears apart the butternut line with a sound like the ripping of a great banner. The 20th Tennessee fragments, leaving behind half its number dead, dying, or crawling forward under the smoke, begging to surrender.

  Hardee arrives at Alexander Stewart’s position in time to watch Palmer leading his men into the woods. He turns to Stewart. “For God’s sakes, Alex, who ordered this assault?”

  Stewart shrugs helplessly. “I assume the commanding general through his vicar, Bishop Polk.”

  “Well, it’s madness! That position couldn’t be taken by three times the number! My God, George Thomas is over there, and nobody carries a position by frontal assault against him.”

  “I know. That’s why I didn’t take my men across that field.”

  Hardee takes a ragged breath. “Don’t let Palmer go on from here. Tell him it’s an order from the commanding general.” Stewart looks at him gravely. “Well, damn it, Alex! If Bragg won’t come down here and command, I must.”

  Stewart nods, raises his field glasses again to study the field. “Preston’s falling back to the woods. I think he’s carrying the flag himself.”

  “At least he has good sense. I’m going to see the Bishop, stop this disaster here and now.”

  At dusk, Brigadier General Dan Smith Donelson, still raging for Yankee blood, finds Brigadier General William Preston. “Why did you give over the assault, sir?”

  Preston glares at him. “Because, sir, I have the honor to command men of great courage and of great value to their country! I will not squander their lives. As it is, I lost a tenth of my brigade. If I’d hammered away like Adams, I would have lost half.”

  “I, sir, lost more than half!” Donelson snarls.

  “Then, sir, may God have mercy on your soul!”

  Southern manhood is such that this exchange, if taken any further, will inevitably lead to a duel. Staff officers intervene, pry the generals apart.

  No one seems to know the whereabouts of Bishop Polk in the failing light. Bill Hardee gives up trying to find him, rides slowly through the shadows toward Braxton Bragg’s headquarters.

  Milo Hascall rides forward a final time to Hazen’s line. “Orders from the commanding general, Bill. As soon as it’s dark, pull back to Thomas’s guns. We’re going to straighten the line. Tomorrow morning, the Rebs can have this position if they want it.”

  Hazen nods, leans an arm against Hascall’s horse for support. “Yes, that’s a good decision. We held it when we needed to.”

  Hascall hesitates. “Bill, Julius Garesché is dead.”

  Hazen goes rigid, causing Hascall’s horse to shift nervously under his hand. After a long moment, Hazen lets his arm drop. “Poor Julius. He always worried how he would behave in combat.”

  “He behaved well.”

  “Yes, I know. I saw him.”

  Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce stands a little apart, listening, overwhelmed with grief.

  CHAPTER 9

  New Year’s Eve

  Wednesday, December 31, 1862

  Along Stones River, Tennessee

  The repulse of Preston’s and Palmer’s brigades in front of the Round Forest in the hour before dusk ends the day’s fighting. The night is cold, the drizzle occasionally turning to sleet and snow.

  AFTER SIX HOURS waiting for death, Private Eben Hannaford, 6th Ohio Volunteers, is still alive. This is surprising, almost embarrassing. God knows, the wound he’d taken shortly before noon should have killed him. Like all veterans, Hannaford is an expert on wounds, and he has yet to see anyone shot through the neck and shoulder survive more than an hour or two. But here he is, still alive half a day after crawling into some brush to bleed out his life in privacy.

  It takes Hannaford some time to reconcile himself to continued existence among the quick. He has, after all, said his good-byes, shed a few tears, prayed a sincere few minutes, and pretty much resigned himself to eternity. To reverse direction now seems like a hell of a chore, particularly since he is not uncomfortable lying on his belly in the brush. Movement will mean pain, almost certainly a hemorrhage, and probably the death he has so far— somehow—avoided. He should wait for the litter-bearers to find him. Not that they are medical people in any real sense, but they may be able to get him into an ambulance and to a hospital without his wound hemorrhaging.

  There is, however, the problem of the cold. Since Hannaford last opened his eyes, the light and the battle have faded. Meanwhile, the pool of blood beneath his right shoulder has turned slushy, the crystals around the edge freezing like shore ice. Yet he has no sensation of cold, feels surprisingly warm. He closes his eyes again, trying to get his mind around this paradox, dozes, wakes horrified. I’m freezing to death, he thinks.

  He feels beneath himself for his right wrist, grasps it tightly, and tries to roll over. He makes it on the third attempt, the pain so intense that he is afraid for a moment that he will faint. He lies breathing deeply, clutching his wrist to his stomach. The sky is gray, though he has a recollection of brief sunshine two or three hours past. Or perhaps that was only a fever dream. He feels his forehead, is shocked by the coldness of his hand. I must get help, he thinks. He takes the knit cap from his head, waves it feebly. No good. He feels about his left side, finds a stick. He perches the cap atop the stick, waves it overhead. The stick breaks, the cap falling out of reach in the brush. For a few minutes he lies shivering, his earlier warmth fled like sleep and resignation. He must rise now, hope that he does not bleed too awfully.

  Colonel Hans Heg of the 15th Wisconsin supposes that his Norwegians and Swedes should endure the cold better than most men, yet walking among them he finds little evidence that generations of exposure to northern climes have imbued them with any particular hardihood. They look as cold, miserable, and sad as any men might under the circumstances. Yet none ask him if they can break the prohibition against building fires. Heg tastes snow on the air, puts up his collar. By morning it will freeze hard. “All right, boys,” he says quietly. “You can build your fires. But only small ones and well hidden. Boil your coffee and step back. Everyone gets a turn to get warm.”

  Corporal Jeremy Andrews, late of the Queen’s 19th Regiment of Foot and now of McCook’s ammunition train, has the old soldier’s habit of routine whatever the weather. He straightens his kit, passes a packet of coffee to Sergeant Barnes, who is tending their small fire, and then looks to his feet. He cleans them with a dampened rag, scrapes at a corn with his pocketknife, and then pulls on marginally drier socks. Chores done, he accepts coffee and a couple of crackers from Barnes. From his haversack he produces a thick slice of sowbelly. He scrapes away a bit of greenish mold and then saws it into three pieces. As is custom, he takes his choice and passes the other two to Barnes and Capt
ain Thruston. While Barnes and Thruston fry their portions, Andrews chews his raw to make it last longer. Besides, frying wastes valuable fat and who knows when they will get more rations.

  Amid the darkening cedars, the firing has diminished to a spattering of musketry and the occasional boom of a field gun. Yet there is little reassuring about the comparative quiet. The Yanks—and Andrews thinks of Northerners and Southerners alike as Yanks—don’t have the sense of civilized races to give over fighting at a decent hour. Bunch of bloody savages capable of anything, including a night attack.

  Andrews supposes he’s known as much fear as most men who’ve spent their lives soldiering. It’s not something a man gets over, just a reality the professional learns to ignore. But dusk spooks even old soldiers, and Andrews recalls the charm taught him by a Cornish private long ago as they’d lain watching a blue dusk in the Hindu Kush—a land where a man might wake in the night to find his throat cut by one the tribesmen whose forefathers had cut the throats of Alexander’s sleeping men twenty-odd centuries before. Now, in the near darkness a mile northwest of Stones River, Tennessee, Andrews repeats the charm, whispering it once, twice, three times, crossing himself each time as he’d been taught: From ghoulies and ghosties and longleggety beasties, and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us.

  “Barnes tells me you were a soldier of the Queen,” Thruston says.

  Andrews is instantly wary, for he is always on guard with officers, even these democratic Yanks. “Aye, sir. That I was.”

  “For how long?”

  “Nigh twenty years, sir.”

  “So you must have seen a great many battles.”

  “My share, sir.”

  “And how does our fighting compare to what you’ve seen?”

  Andrews hesitates. How can he tell these men? He’d been with Raglan in the Crimea, scaled the heights at Alma to drive the Russians into Sevastopol. And God, what a ghastly business that had been. But this … this tremendous brawl in the cedars overwhelms his understanding. “If you’ll pardon the language, sir, you bleedin’ Yanks don’t know when to quit. Just fuck-all and keep charging. And that’s a barbarous sort of fighting. Wasteful and to little purpose, it seems to me.”

  Andrews is surprised at himself for saying so much, is even more surprised that he has so firm an opinion. That lad this morning, the one crushed in the wagon box when the gun carriage had ridden up over the rear axle. He hadn’t known the boy’s name, and a soldier should know the names of the men he serves beside, the lads he must bury if their luck runs ill. “Begging your pardon, Captain, but it doesn’t seem there’s much plan in this war except to bash the other fellows around until one side or the other quits.”

  “Isn’t that what it comes down to in all wars?”

  Does it? Andrews is not sure. Is that what it’s been about every time, all through the last twenty years? It hadn’t seemed so. He stares again into the dusk creeping on toward darkness. From long-leggety beasties. … “I wouldn’t know, sir. Perhaps it is.”

  Private Dickie Krall, 1st Louisiana Regular Infantry, would sit apart from the others, but they don’t let him, force him to sit close with them around the small fire. A little while ago, Sergeant Simon Buck helped him clean his backside again, tore a piece from his own fresh drawers for a pad to absorb the seeping blood from his anus. Like a woman with her monthly, Dickie thinks, fighting back the shame of it again. But no one speaks of it or treats him any differently. He wonders what they have done with Zein’s body. All the bayonet wounds would be something to attract the notice of an officer, so they must have hidden it somewhere, perhaps even buried it, though everyone is exhausted and the ground is hard.

  Someone has procured a canteen of whiskey and it passes around the fire. Dickie doesn’t take his swallow. “Go on, boy,” Sergeant Buck says.

  “I can’t, Sarge. I told Ma I wouldn’t.”

  No one laughs. “I think she’d understand, son. It’s cold, and it’ll be a lot colder by morning.”

  “I can’t, Sarge.”

  Buck nods, takes his swallow, and passes on the canteen.

  Dickie Krall watches the dusk falling in the cedars. He supposes the boys over there in the Yankee lines are not that much different than he is, but he cannot quite imagine it. They seem a race, almost a species, apart. He recalls the long-unused verse from the Litany that his father so liked to mutter under his breath in the midst of the service: From the scourge of the Northmen, dear Lord, deliver us.

  All day, James Foster has limped up and down the yard of his plantation house, listening to the sound of battle a few miles to the northwest. His five boys, ranging in age from seventeen to twenty-five, are over there, fighting for Tennessee and the Confederacy in that order. Around the house, Bob, the nigger groom, has gone about his work. It was Mrs. Foster, of late and sacred memory, who first called Bob a groom. But he is more the all-purpose factotum of his master: handyman, driver, emissary to the field niggers, frequent drinking companion, and occasional confidant.

  When the firing begins to ebb and dusk comes on, Foster at last halts his pacing. “Bob, hitch a wagon. Go bring home my dead and wounded boys.”

  “Yessir,” Bob drawls.

  Bob is atop the wagon seat behind the two mules when Foster approaches him. “You ain’t gonna run off on me, are you, Bob?”

  Bob spits. “Do you suppose I’d’a waited this long if I’d wanted to go live with Yankees?”

  Foster stares into the lined black face, the expressionless eyes. What are we, after all these years? he wonders. Certainly not friends. Yet I’ve told this man more of my soul than I’ve ever whispered to another living creature. “Because if you want to be free, Bob, do this and I’ll give you your papers.”

  Bob stares away from him into the dusk. “I’d best be goin’.”

  “Do you want your freedom, Bob?”

  Bob looks down at him. “Twenty years ago, I would have taken freedom from you. Now you don’t have it no more to give. You’re old like me. We neither of us got a chance of freedom now… . I’m gonna go get those boys.” He releases the brake, slaps the reins, rolls off into the gloaming behind the two mules.

  Lieutenant General Bill Hardee dismounts in the yard of the modest frame house that Bragg has taken as his field headquarters. He limps toward the door, working his cold, arthritic fingers in their doeskin gloves. God, he feels a thousand years old.

  Bragg looks up from his desk. “General Hardee. Good. I have just this minute finished a wire to the president. Here, sit. Do you want coffee?”

  “If you please, General.”

  An aide gives Hardee a cup of coffee, but rather than warming him, it sets him shivering. He huddles over it, hands shaking, trying not to spill any on his uniform. Bragg is correcting a word or two on the telegram, frowning through the reading glasses perched on his nose beneath the ferocious eyebrows. He sets down his pen. “Here’s what I’ve written: ‘We assailed the enemy at first light and after ten hours hard fighting have driven him from every position except the extreme left. With the exception of this point, we occupy the entire field. At dusk, the enemy began falling back. We will follow. God has granted us a happy New Year.’” Bragg looks up. “Well, Professor, what do you think?”

  Hardee stares dumbfounded at the unwonted satisfaction on Bragg’s face. My sweet Lord, he thinks; he actually believes that rubbish! Hardee looks about for the aide who supplied the coffee. “Lieutenant, if you would be so kind. Thank you.” Having delayed long enough to gather his thoughts, he sips from the fresh cup. “I think, General, that the battle today was a nearer thing than you imply. We did drive the Yankees, but the cost was very heavy; and their latest line, even if awkwardly formed, seems to me one of great strength. I saw no sign that they plan to withdraw from it.”

  Bragg has stiffened. “I am not one to mislead my superiors, sir!”

  “I don’t suggest that you are, General. I simply point out that you are more sanguine in your interpretation of e
vents than—”

  “You dispute that this army fought magnificently today?”

  “Not at all, General. I am exceedingly proud of our men.”

  “And did we not drive the Yankees from every position save their extreme left?”

  “I’ve always considered the ford in front of Breckinridge’s line as the extreme left of their line.”

  Bragg dismisses this with a disgusted wave of his hand. “An outpost not contiguous with the rest of the Yankee line and not among our objectives.”

  “Then your phrase is accurate. Nevertheless, General, I saw no evidence on my way here that the Yankees plan to retreat. As long as George Thomas is among them, I think—”

  “George Thomas is a traitor!”

  “Yes, but he is also a splendid soldier. I know no other I would trust to hold a position with greater determination.”

  “A man who cannot stand firm with his country will not hold his ground with any greater conviction.” Bragg snatches up his pen, begins writing furiously.

  Hardee is not sure if he is dismissed or not. He leans back, remembers his coffee, and drinks. No, it was not George Thomas who failed to stand with his country. We were the ones who abandoned it. And though I believe we were entirely justified, that the election of the Original Gorilla represented an overthrow of the republic established by the Constitution, I cannot call George Thomas a traitor. But whatever he is, he is a soldier. He will not let Rosecrans retreat.

  Bragg slaps his pen down, glares at Hardee. “In the morning, General, we shall pursue the Yankees. I have already sent Wheeler and Wharton to obstruct their withdrawal. We shall catch General Rosecrans’s army on the roads and destroy it utterly. I will send you orders before first light.”

  “Yes, General.”

  “And since you’ve made George Thomas your personal bugbear, I will tell you that I have reports he was killed this afternoon riding beside Rosecrans.”