Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

Schuyler looks about the circle of boys, sees eagerness on every face. “Sure, we can have an ambush, but first we got to find the enemy, scout his strength, and make a plan.”

  “The enemy’s right over there on the pike, asshole,” Riggins says.

  “But they’re all stragglers, Rigs. No point in shootin’ a bunch of men who are already running away.”

  Riggins, who would like to do exactly that, shrugs morosely.

  “But a couple of the boys said they heard wagons, too,” Titsworth offers.

  Schuyler resists the inclination to shorten Titsworth’s name to Tits. “Yes, but they’re likely only ambulances. We can’t shoot at ambulances.”

  “Well, what the hell can we do?” Riggins demands.

  “Go scouting. Like I said.”

  Brigadier General Tom Wood would prefer to ride alongside the wagons, but the shrapnel wounds in his legs force him to sit beside an exceedingly odoriferous teamster on the swaying seat of an ammunition wagon. At least the man is not loquacious, which allows Wood time to brood on his humiliation by Rosecrans. Goddamn the ill luck that cost the army Julius Garesché! He would have stepped in, cooled Rosecrans’s temper, won for Wood the right to stay with his division.

  Wood shifts on the hard seat, notes sourly that the teamster has padded his ample buttocks with a folded blanket. Should he ask the man if there is another blanket? Or perhaps he should set aside his pride and lie down in the wagon box. His legs burn with his wounds. His staff surgeon had spent an hour probing for iron splinters that afternoon, and Wood suspects that the doctors in Nashville will need several times as long to finish the job. Damn the luck.

  The Seed Corn Contingent has watched the Yankee wagon train passing for half an hour when Tim Schuyler orders a withdrawal. “Why don’t we ambush ’em?” Riggins hisses.

  “Rigs, don’t be a fool. There’s hundreds of bluebellies over there. How many are there of us?”

  “You’re the damned captain. You ought to know.”

  “Well, last time I counted, there was eighteen and a few of them looked plenty scared. You like the odds?”

  “Screw the odds! We bushwhack a few Yankees and then run like hell. Down the road a mile we do it again. Two or three times and they’ll stampede sure.”

  Lieutenant Titsworth, conciliator and politician, decides to side with Schuyler and sweet reason. “Come on, Rigs. Let’s go find a better spot for an ambush. Maybe wait till first light when we can see better.”

  The contingent starts pulling back, Schuyler, Titsworth, and Riggins bringing up the rear. It is then that Riggins decides to satisfy honor and bloodlust. He aims his revolver in the general direction of the Yankee guard and empties all six cylinders as fast as he can cock and fire.

  The response surpasses in alacrity and ferocity anything the boys can imagine. The road blazes with return fire, the Yankee infantry outlined in the continuous muzzle flashes. An incredible swarm of minié balls buzz through the woods, whining off rocks and trees. The boys run, some screaming, some sobbing, most just running.

  About half the contingent rallies in the clearing. Titsworth notes that all the guards and prisoners have departed. Riggins doesn’t seem to notice. “Where the hell is Schuyler?”

  “He got hit,” one of the other boys says. “I saw him go down.”

  They sit in the dark beside the embers of the fire. “Well,” Titsworth says cautiously, “I suppose one of us has to take command.”

  Riggins ignores him. “Goddamn it, where is he?”

  “Right here. I’m right here.”

  Tim Schuyler, captain, Tennessee irregulars, stumbles out of the woods, the left side of his shirt soaked with blood. He slumps beside them, tries to laugh. “All these years I wished I didn’t have it. Now I ain’t, and I want it back more’n anything.” He puts his head between his knees, sobs.

  Wood has to go among the men, clubbing a few with his crutch before they will cease firing. He orders half a dozen bull’s eye lanterns lit and sends a company forward to probe the woods. He clumps along behind on a crutch. They haven’t gone thirty paces when one of the men jumps back with a yelp. Wood pushes through to his side. A severed arm lies in the brush, so small that its owner must have been no more than four or five.

  A sergeant steps forward, picks up the arm, turns it over in the light of a lantern. “This ain’t no kid’s arm. Look at the hair. It’s a cripple’s.”

  Another soldier holds up an oddly designed revolver. “Looka here. Never seen anything like it.”

  Wood takes the Savage, recalls hearing something of the design. He hefts it, isn’t impressed. He turns to the company captain. “Take your men back to the road. We need to catch up with the train.” He glares at the sergeant holding the dwarfed arm. “Bury that monstrosity!”

  Brigadier General Joe Wheeler is waiting to spring his own ambush when he is startled by the eruption of firing down the road. He curses. “Withdraw the men!” he snaps. “Send someone to find out who’s responsible for that blunder.”

  Twenty minutes later, a staff sergeant and a pair of privates discover the boys of the Seed Corn Contingent. “You cause that ruckus yonder?” the sergeant growls.

  Presented at last with an opportunity for exercising command, Acting Captain Ben Titsworth stands to attention. “Yes, sir. We ambushed the Yankee train.”

  “Who the hell are ‘we’?”

  “We’re the Seed Corn Contingent, Tennessee irregulars.”

  The sergeant snorts. “Get your ass up behind that man. The general wants to talk to you.”

  With Titsworth holding on for dear life to the waist of one of the troopers, the sergeant leads the way back along the path. They find Wheeler and his staff mounted. The private lets Titsworth down. “That one’s the general,” the sergeant says. “Tell him how you fucked up our ambush.”

  Titsworth manages a salute. “Captain Benjamin Titsworth, commanding the Seed Corn—”

  “What did you say your name was?” Wheeler asks.

  “Titsworth, sir. I command—”

  “That is, I assume, an alias?”

  “No, sir. It’s my real—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Fighting Joe Wheeler mutters. “Major, get Captain Titsworth’s report. Tell me later.” He rides off. Titsworth! About all the goddamn night’s been worth.

  About 2:00 A.M., Bragg reads Wheeler’s report from north of Stewart’s Creek. As he suspected all along, the Yankees are withdrawing, their wagon trains already moving up the Nashville Pike under heavy guard. Yet Bragg feels no satisfaction in being right. A pursuit will mean giving even greater latitude to the Professor and the Bishop. (And Wheeler, of course; but at least he is loyal, will not try to claim undue credit.) He leans back, feeling an odd lethargy. Perhaps it is simply exhaustion, the cry of an aging body for a few hours sleep. Best to wait until dawn to issue orders. The men need their rest, and the Yankee retreat will be slow, hampered by the wounded and Wheeler’s sniping. Besides, Rosecrans is still dangerous, yet capable of devising some trap along the road. Yes, best to wait until daylight. Wheeler’s message slips from his fingers, floats on the warm current of air from the fire on the hearth, settles to the floor feather-soft, nearly weightless.

  The temperature plummets with the clearing skies. Litter-bearers find many of the wounded frozen to the ground in pools of their own blood. Despite orders to stay in camp, many soldiers go forward to look for wounded and dead comrades. Half a dozen men of Company C, 16th Tennessee Confederate Infantry, creep up the railroad embankment toward the Round Forest to recover the body of Captain Drury Spurlock. Even in the dark, they can sense the emptiness of the woods ahead. An infantry brigade, no matter how quiet, has a definite mass, alters the air about it as certainly as a ship displaces water. Leaving the others to carry the captain back, a sergeant crawls forward to the woods, finds it empty except for the dead.

  Passed up the chain of command to army headquarters, the report of the evacuation of the Round Forest seems to confirm Br
agg’s earlier judgment that the Yankees are in retreat. He waves away Colonel Brent’s query about orders for Hardee and Polk. “Has it stopped raining?” Bragg asks.

  “Yes, sir. The skies are clear and the thermometer’s down eight degrees since midnight.”

  “Excellent. We’ll have good marching weather. Wake me at first light.”

  In some Federal regiments, discomfort overwhelms caution, and the men build up the fires until sparks flutter among the cedars. Two dozen men of the 21st Ohio, Miller’s Brigade, are startled by the sudden appearance of a horseman at their fire. Rosecrans clears his throat, speaks hoarsely. “You are my men and I don’t like to see any of you hurt. Where the enemy see a fire like this, they know twenty-five or thirty men are gathered about it and they are sure to shoot at it. I advise you to put it out.”

  As if by the virtue of some power invested only in generals, a shell shrieks overhead exactly on cue, exploding in the cedars beyond. The Buckeyes start feverishly extinguishing their fire. Rosecrans wishes them good night, rides on.

  He has determined by this time that there is no significant Rebel force beyond his right flank. Thomas’s scouts have reported only Union cavalry searching by torchlight for wounded and setting fires for freezing men. The report lifts Rosecrans’s spirits, lets him concentrate on what he knows for certain of the Rebels’ dispositions. Bragg will attack in the morning, but where? He has failed against the right, failed against the center. Does it then follow that he will try the left? Above all things, Bragg is an artilleryman, an advocate of force over maneuver. He will fight closed up, eschewing any looping swings at flank or rear. That is why he failed today. If he’d doubled his cavalry or sent one or two brigades of infantry wide… .

  Rosecrans checks this line of speculation. Later he can reconstruct the battle, analyze how it might have been fought differently on both sides. But for now it is a pointless exercise, as wasteful of time as mourning for poor Garesché and all the thousands dead. Now he must concentrate, make ready to fight Braxton Bragg in the morning. He is beginning to feel how it will be. Bragg will feint against a flank, probably the left, and then come in hard, like the body puncher he is, against the army’s center and Thomas’s guns. Rosecrans feels a sudden, triumphant confidence. Let him come.

  The night crawls on. In the hospital tent of the 19th Ohio, Private Eben Hannaford feels his lungs filling with blood. He cannot breathe except sitting up and then only in thick irregular gasps. I’m dying with the old year, he thinks, won’t see the first dawn of the new. Earlier in the day, before all his struggle to stay alive, it might have seemed a poetic thought. Now it is maddening. He leans forward, rolling his shoulders inward, trying to get another breath. He feels an overwhelming sense of suffocation, loses consciousness to a darkness so sudden and complete that he has no time for panic.

  At the Confederate hospital in Murfreesboro, Private James Ellis, 4th Arkansas Infantry, has pilfered several rolls of gauze. He makes a tight cylinder of one, stuffs it in the hole in his left biceps. He wraps two rolls around the wound, tucking in the torn flesh as he goes. He takes a deep breath, for the pain will come now, worse than ever, and loosens the tourniquet. The wounded soldier to his left watches. “What you about, coz? Leave that cord in place and it’ll make the doc’s cutting that much easier on you. That arm must be half dead already.”

  “I’m keepin’ this arm,” Ellis grits as the blood and pain pulse down his arm.

  “The hell you are. They’ll have it off before you can open your mouth.”

  “I ain’t letting ’em. It’s my arm and I’m keepin’ it.”

  The other soldier snorts. “What makes you think you’re so different? You think those boys screamin’ their heads off tonight wanted to lose an arm or a leg? They all said the same thing: ‘Save my arm, doc. Save my leg. Don’t send me home a cripple.’ Lot of goddamn good it did them.”

  “So I suppose you’re gonna let ’em take your leg without a whimper?”

  The soldier shrugs. “I expect I might do a little bellyachin’, but it’s not like I expect it to do any good. I don’t figure I got much choice in the matter.”

  “Well, I figure I do. We’ll be seein’ you.”

  The soldier raises his eyebrows. “You’re headin’ out?”

  “Headin’ out and headin’ south. Gonna go home and get fixed up. Enough war for me.”

  “Well, good luck, coz. I’d go with you if I could walk. But mind those sentries. Ain’t nobody supposed to be wandering around without a pass.”

  Returning from the midnight conference at Rosecrans’s headquarters, Major General Tom Crittenden drinks off two-thirds of a bottle of brandy before falling face down on what may be the only field cot available in the entire Army of the Cumberland. About 3:00 A.M., his bladder rouses him. He stumbles out the tent door and starts unsteadily toward the brush. A blow to the forehead knocks him flat on his backside. He tries to rise, only to flop on his back, the sky whirling. In what seems only a moment but is actually several, a young captain is leaning over him, a shielded lantern in hand. “General, are you all right?”

  Crittenden struggles to a sitting position, glares at the man. “Officer of the guard!” he shouts. “Arrest this man for assault!”

  “Uh, pardon, General, but I am the officer of the guard and you walked into a tree.”

  “Sergeant of the guard!” Crittenden shouts.

  “Here, sir.”

  “Arrest this man! He’s going to be court-martialed and shot for striking a senior officer. Well, go ahead, man. Arrest him!”

  The sergeant looks at the captain, the captain at the sergeant. Several enlisted men of the guard take wary steps backward, sensing the seriously fucked up. Fortunately, the sergeant is a man of uncommon good sense. “Yes, sir, General. But we need to look to that head of yours, too. I think there’s some whiskey in the medical chest we can use to clean it up.”

  “Waste decent whiskey on cleaning a wound? Nonsense, man! Help me up and we’ll have a drink together. Captain, consider yourself under arrest. You men, see he doesn’t sneak off.”

  Halfway to the tent, Crittenden folds up like a jointed doll. The sergeant catches him, hoists him over a shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “Come along, General,” he mutters.

  One of the braver privates looks at the captain. “Captain, do you want us to go ahead and shoot you now? I hear them court-martials are a powerful lot of trouble.”

  “We’ll see what the general determines in the morning,” the captain says sourly.

  The soldiers laugh, return to their posts.

  Bierce wanders through the Union camp. He is bemused by his exchange with the litter-bearers, amazed by his callow citing of decency in the midst of hideous carnage. If he is to understand war, he must reassert rationalism in its brutal simplicity. Yet this is difficult for one who feels his viscera charged with fire, lightning crawling beneath his very skin.

  He walks rearward through Thomas’s silent guns supporting the Federal center, descends an abrupt and unexpected slope into a wooded hollow. The Yankee batteries have taken advantage of the cover to make a park for caissons and auxiliary wagons. Coal fires burn in several forge wagons, the ring of hammers on iron reverberating through the hollow. He goes to the closest one to get warm.

  The blacksmith is an immense man, his face ruddy with the fire, his beard singed to the skin in several places. He is shirtless, a leather apron protecting his chest. Scars pepper his arms, some white with age, others livid and oozing. He turns over a long bar hooked at either end, studies it a moment, and then goes back to hammering, all the while muttering in a low, angry argot that Bierce cannot identify.

  Though the man is of terrifying appearance, something in his tone amuses Bierce. “What are you swearing at? The metal or the hour?” he asks.

  The smith looks up, neither surprised nor resentful. “No, not at the metal; it does what I want it to do. And I like the night. The fire is calmer at night.”

  “What makes
you so angry, then?”

  The smith studies the hooked bar again, shoves an end into the fire, banks coals over it. Bierce hears a sibilant muttering, sees the bellows inflate, worked by some unseen hand. He looks about.

  “He’s under the cart. He likes it there.”

  “Your apprentice?”

  The smith frowns. “No, I wouldn’t call him that. A gilley, perhaps, imp, acolythist, something of the sort.”

  Bierce is trying to place the smith’s accent, which is distinct, yet somehow indefinite. “What were you speaking?”

  The man shrugs. “A little Italian, a few words of French, a little German. I was Swiss once, speak them all. Romansch, Polish, and some Slav, too. I find them all more expressive than English.”

  “You are no longer Swiss?”

  “I am no longer anything. I curse all nations.”

  “You are an anarchist then?”

  “No, I am nothing.”

  The sibilant chatter beneath the wagon increases, almost resolves itself into words. Bierce takes a step back. “What is he?”

  The smith raps on the side of the wagon. “Show yourself, Singe. Officer, here.”

  A tiny Negro pokes his head from beneath the wagon. He grins horribly at Bierce, the glow of the forge gleaming on his bald scalp, his narrow, simian torso. “Kil-dem-al,” he hisses.

  “I call him ‘monkey,’” the smith says. “He doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “Who’s he want to kill?”

  “Ask him. He isn’t deaf or stupid.”

  The little man chortles. “Kil all de white folk. Kil dem all.”

  “Why do you let him say that?”

  “Why not? He’s just cheering the abattoir we’ve arranged here. Besides, I happen to agree with him. The white race is a curse and a plague on this poor world. We should be exterminated.” He shrugs. “And he says I can be the last one to die.”

  Bierce feels a tug on his trouser leg, looks down. Singe leers, eyes wide as half dollars. “You wan’ be second last? We kil you easy quick.”

  Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk rests against a tree trunk, sheltered by an awning, a small fire at his feet. As always, his aides fuss about his health and comfort. Different members of the staff approach him, suggest that he ride back to town where he can get a decent supper and dry clothes. But Polk intones: “No. My men, dead and alive, sleep on this field, and I shall, too.” Eventually they desist.