Love and War: The North and South Trilogy (Book Two)

by John Jakes

  “All right, just quit talking and do it.”

  And in that way, in the rain, George’s friendship with Herman Haupt began.

  Haupt was right—the yard office wasn’t much more than a shanty. Water dripped through cracks in the plank roof. Droplets glistened in Haupt’s beard as he poured liquor into two dirty tumblers. Wotherspoon had declined the invitation, wanting to tour the huge military complex before he left.

  “I’m a civil engineer by trade.” Haupt’s statement was modest; he had a reputation as one of the best in the nation. “I’m supposed to maintain the railroads the army appropriated and build new ones. They make it damn hard with all their rules and procedures. What do you do?”

  “I work in Washington.”

  “Wouldn’t wish that on a man I hated. Doing what?”

  “Artillery procurement for the Ordnance Department. If you want a more accurate description, I spend most of my time dealing with fools.”

  “Inventors?”

  “They’re the least offensive.” George drank. “Principally I mean the generals and the politicians.”

  Haupt laughed, then leaned forward. “What’s your opinion of Stanton?”

  “Don’t deal with him much. He’s inflexible politically—a zealot—and some of his methods are suspect. But I think he’s more competent than most.”

  “He learned the lesson of Bull Run more quickly than a lot of them. When this war started, damn few understood that you can move troops faster and easier by rail than by water. Most of the generals are still living in the riverboat age, but old Stanton saw the significance when the rebs brought men from the valley by train and combined two armies to whip McDowell. They did it so fast, McDowell was dizzy.”

  “Celerity,” George said, nodding.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Celerity—it’s one of Dennis Mahan’s pet ideas. More than ten years ago, he was saying that celerity and communication would win the next war. The railroad and the telegraph.”

  “If the generals don’t lose it first. Have another drink.”

  “Thanks, no. I must try to find my younger brother. He’s in the Battalion of Engineers.”

  He rose to leave. Haupt thrust out his hand. “Enjoyed our talk. Aren’t many in this army as smart and forthright as you.” That amused George. He had done little except sit and listen while Haupt expounded—but of course if you did that, a rapid-fire talker always thought you brilliant.

  “I am forced to go to Washington occasionally,” Haupt went on. “I’ll look you up next time.”

  “Wish you would, General.”

  “Herman, Herman,” he said as George went out.

  George checked on the whereabouts of the engineers and early in the afternoon swung aboard an iron-pot coal car, part of the train bound for Falmouth. He tugged his hat down, leaning against the cold metal of the pot and speculating about Haupt. A year ago or so, after the administration had pushed through a bill establishing a military railroad system, Stanton had brought in Daniel McCallum, superintendent of the Erie, to run it. Why McCallum hadn’t been satisfactory, George didn’t know, but Haupt soon replaced him.

  Haupt organized his department into two corps, one to handle operations, the other construction. It was in connection with the latter that Haupt’s legend had spread. He was famous for laying track rapidly, building sturdy bridges virtually overnight—and losing his temper as he did it. At least the man accomplished something, which was more than George could say for Ripley. Or for himself.

  After jumping off the slow-moving car at Brooks Station, he found Billy supervising construction of a stockade to strengthen the station against attack. They stayed at the work site and talked for an hour. George learned that his brother had just finished a week’s leave at Belvedere. Both going home and returning, Billy had passed through Washington in the middle of the night—an inappropriate hour for calling in Georgetown, he explained.

  George grinned. “I can understand your eagerness to see your wife but not your haste to get back to duty.”

  “I want to get this war over with. I’m sick of being separated from Brett. I’m sick of the whole damn thing.”

  That was the tenor of the reunion: little humor and a pervasive melancholy. George could do nothing to cheer his brother. He felt bad about that as he returned to the city.

  To his surprise and delight, before a week went by, Herman Haupt stalked into the Winder Building hunting for him. They went to Willard’s for lager and a huge afternoon meal. Haupt had his temper up; he had come from a meeting at the War Department. George asked what had gone wrong.

  “Never mind. If I talk about it, I’ll just blow up again.”

  “Well, I had another argument with Ripley this morning, so I don’t feel a hell of a lot better. I keep telling my wife that I don’t think I can stay here much longer.”

  Haupt chewed an unlit cigar. “If you decide you must get out, tell me. I’ll put you to work building railroads.”

  “I can manufacture rails, Herman, but I don’t know a blessed thing about laying or maintaining them.”

  “Twenty-four hours in the Construction Corps and you will. I guarantee it.”

  George smiled abruptly; a weight had vanished. “I appreciate the offer. I may take you up on it sooner than you imagine.”

  Raw winds, freezing temperatures, sudden snows continued to torment the armies waiting for spring. Everything, including camp life, was harder because of the weather. Charles managed to ride to Barclay’s Farm for three overnight visits. The first time he brought two carbines and ammunition taken from dead Yankees, turning the lot over to Boz and Washington, an act that would have gotten him flogged in his home state. But he trusted the freedmen, and they had to be armed if the Yankees crossed the river in force when the weather warmed up.

  The second visit almost cost him his life. He came straight from reporting after a two-day ride behind enemy lines with Ab. He was still clad in the uniform he wore for such missions—light blue trousers with broad yellow stripe, confiscated talma of Union blue, kepi with crossed sabers in tarnished metal. It was snowing when he approached the farm. Boz mistook him for the enemy and shot at him. The first round narrowly missed him. By the time Boz fired again, Charles and Sport had taken cover behind a red oak. The bullet hit the tree. Charles yelled to identify himself, and Boz apologized for almost ten minutes.

  Charles couldn’t get enough of the yellow-haired, blue-eyed widow. Not enough of talking to her, sleeping with her, touching her, or just watching her.

  She wanted to know all about his life in the cavalry. Over savory beef soup, from which he plucked the ring bones and sucked the marrow, he told her about the boredom of the winter camps; Jeb Stuart’s, south of Fredericksburg, had been nicknamed Camp No-Camp because of the monotony of life there.

  Then he talked of Confederate cavalrymen gathering legends around their names. Of Turner Ashby, who had flashed like a comet for a year, displaying a suicidal recklessness when he rode his white charger. Some said he was wild to avenge his slain brother Richard. Ashby had been killed in the valley last summer. Of John Mosby, who had scouted for Stuart on the ride around McClellan, now commanding mounted irregulars in Loudoun, Fauquier, and Fairfax counties, an area rapidly becoming known as Mosby’s Confederacy. “The Yanks want to hang him as an outlaw.” Out in Kentucky, there was John Hunt Morgan, called the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy. And they were starting to hear fantastic tales of another horseman in the West, a barely literate planter by the name of Bedford Forrest.

  “Does he have a nickname, too?”

  “The Wizard of the Saddle.”

  “You’ve been left out, Charles.”

  “Oh, no. Ab and the rest of us, we’re called the Iron Scouts.”

  “It sounds like a compliment.”

  He smiled. “I take it as one.”

  “If you’re that special, the Yankees must consider you prime targets.”

  He glanced at her as he raised the soup
bone to his mouth. There was no lightness in the remark or in her expression.

  In the drowsiness after love-making, he liked to share his past with her. He described the way he had been tricked into having half his head shaved the day he arrived at West Point. He told her about the soldiers he had met and admired in the Second Cavalry, among them the Virginian George Thomas, now on the other side. He shared the story of his difficulties with the captain named Bent, who for some reason hated his whole family. And he created pictures of Texas as best he could with inadequate words: the vistas of grass, the blue northers, the pecan trees and post oaks glistening after a rain while larks sang.

  “Parts of that state are the most beautiful places on God’s earth.”

  “Would you like to go back there?”

  “I thought so once.” He took her hand. “Not now.”

  With cornmeal grits steaming on his breakfast plate, he would admire the soft, still-sleepy beauty of her morning face and, when strong coffee had wakened her a little, tell her of some of the rivalries troubling the cavalry. His old friend Fitz Lee, now an important general he seldom saw, didn’t like Hampton because Stuart didn’t, and because Hampton would always rank Fitz by ten days, and nothing could change that.

  At the end of the third visit, Gus kissed him on the mouth four times before whispering, “How soon will you be back?”

  “Don’t know. We’ll be heading for the lower part of the state soon, to hunt for horses. We’ve lost a lot of them.”

  “You tell General Hampton I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “And you tell Boz and Washington to sleep with those carbines—loaded.”

  Back in camp, Ab Woolner surprised and annoyed him by joking bitterly, “Lord God, Charlie—you been here a whole hour and you ain’t talked about nothing but that gal. You used to talk about Sport some and the war now an’ again. You forgotten why we’re all here?”

  Something flip-flopped in Charles’s middle when he heard that and gave him pause.

  He had no reply.

  68

  VIRGILIA HATED TO FORCE the visitor to leave. Odd as he was, the patients liked him and counted on his Sunday visits, though sometimes he didn’t show up because he couldn’t talk his way aboard a military steamer coming down to Aquia Creek Landing.

  Whenever he did, he brought pockets sagging with horehound drops and a haversack of cheap pens and writing paper, cut plug tobacco, little pots of jam, and five- and ten-cent bills he distributed so the wounded could buy the fresh milk sold by vendors who came through.

  Virgilia suspected that the man impoverished himself to buy the things he gave away. His job couldn’t pay much; he was only a copyist in the paymaster general’s office. That and his first name were all she knew about him, except that he seemed to have a need to touch and console the wounded soldiers.

  It was early afternoon. A feeble February sun shone. The Landing, a vast complex of docks, rail spurs, raw pine structures, tents, and drill fields populated by thousands of soldiers, civilians, and black contrabands, was relatively quiet, as it was every Sabbath. Patients in this long and narrow hospital building had been either wounded in skirmishes or felled by sickness on the infamous Mud March.

  Virgilia could detect a better spirit in the army now. In the spring, General Hooker would lead what might be the final phase of the crusade to crush the rebels. She looked forward to tending the Union wounded and sometimes daydreamed of the suffering of boys on the other side. Every scream from a reb was another penny of repayment for Grady and all his people.

  In the reception hall, she heard voices. She approached the Sunday Samaritan, who was seated beside a sleeping soldier, holding the young man’s hand between his two soft and delicate ones. The visitor, in his mid-forties, was bearded and burly as a dock hand. He had mild eyes and a fair complexion. He always wore a decoration, on the lapel of his baggy suit—today, a bedraggled tulip fastened by a pin.

  “Walt, the visitors are here.”

  With slow, bearlike movements, the Sunday man lifted himself from the stool his bulk had completely hidden. The soldier felt the hands leave his, and his eyes flew open. “Don’t go.”

  “I’ll be back again,” Walt said, bending to place a gentle kiss on the boy’s cheek. Some of the nurses called such behavior unnatural, but most of the patients, awaiting the surgeon’s saw or suffering horrible internal pain, welcomed Walt’s handclasps and kisses. It was all the love some of them would know before they died.

  “Next week, Miss Hazard, if I can,” the Sunday man promised, settling the haversack strap on his shoulder. He shambled out the doors at one end of the aisle as the dignitaries came in at the other end. The delegation consisted of two women and four men from the Sanitary Commission, plus a seventh individual, to whom the others seemed to defer. Virgilia was glad she and her ward-masters had scrubbed the floor and walls with disinfectant last night; it muted the odors of wounds and incontinence.

  “—a typical ward, Congressman. Well maintained by the volunteer nursing staff, as you can see.” The speaker, one of the gentlemen from the Commission, beckoned to Virgilia. “Matron? May we have a moment of your time?”

  Touching her hairnet and smoothing her apron, she hurried to the visitors. All were middle-aged except the man addressed as Congressman. He was pale and tall, stooped and unprepossessing. Yet he impressed her as he swept off his tall hat—wavy hair gleamed with too much oil, a common fault with gentlemen—and swiftly inspected her face and figure.

  The white-whiskered scarecrow who had summoned her said, “You are Miss—?”

  “Hazard, Mr. Turner.”

  “Kind of you to remember me. We have a special guest, who wished to inspect several of our facilities. May I present the Honorable Samuel G. Stout, representative from Indiana?”

  “Miss Hazard, is it?” said the congressman, stunning Virgilia. Out of that clerkish body rolled the deepest, most resonant tones she had ever heard—the voice of a born orator or divine, a voice to draw tears and sway mobs. He spoke four words, peering at her with rather small, close-set brown eyes, and sent shivers down her back.

  His gaze made her inordinately nervous. “That’s correct, Congressman. We’re pleased to have you here. A great many dignitaries from Washington pass through Aquia Creek Landing—the President and his party went down to Falmouth on the train recently—but we’ve not been fortunate enough to have any of them visit our ward until now.”

  “Next to serving on the lines,” Stout said, “this is the most important work of all—restoring our lads to fight again. I don’t agree with Mr. Lincoln’s contention that we must treat the traitors gently. I am in Mr. Stevens’s camp, believing we should punish them without pity. You are helping to hasten that task to its conclusion.”

  Sententious murmurs of approval came from the others. One woman, huge as a gas balloon, pressed a glove to her vast front and breathed, “Bravo.” Virgilia recognized that Stout was behaving like a politician, turning a scrap of casual conversation into a platform statement. Yet his sentiments and his voice continued to touch nerves.

  “You are a member of Miss Dix’s corps?” he asked, managing to step closer. She said that was true. She smelled the cinnamon oil on his hair.

  “Perhaps you’ll tell us a little about your charges.” Stout smiled. His teeth were crooked—her first impression was correct; he was unimpressive physically—yet she sensed determination and strength in him. “This young lad, for example.” Directing her to a bed on the left, he contrived to take hold of her elbow. Instantly, she experienced a physical reaction so unexpected she was afraid she might be blushing.

  The boy in bed stared at the visitors with feverish eyes. “Henry was on picket duty on the Rappahannock,” she said. “Rebel scouts crossed near his post. Shots were exchanged.” The boy turned his cheek to the pillow and shut his eyes. Virgilia drew the visitors out of earshot. “I’m afraid his right leg can’t be saved. It’s just a matter of a day or two before the surge
ons take it.”

  “I would take the lives of ten rebels for blighting a young man that way,” Stout said. “I would crucify them if that form of punishment were condoned in our society. It ought to be. Nothing is too cruel for those who precipitated this war of cruelty.”

  One of the Commission members said, “With all due respect, Congressman, don’t you feel that’s a bit severe?”

  “No, sir, I do not. A dear relative of mine, an aide to General Rosecrans, was slain at Murfreesboro not sixty days ago. There were no remains fit to be returned to his wife and little ones. His body was foully mutilated by those who slew him. Certain parts were—”

  He stopped, clearing his throat; he knew he had overstepped.

  But not so far as Virgilia was concerned. The man excited her as few had since her acquaintance with the visionary John Brown. She led the visitors through the ward in a curious light-headed state, her mind functioning well enough for her to describe each case, yet a part of it reserved for exhilarated contemplation of the congressman. Did he possibly find her as attractive as she found him?

  Unwittingly, she lengthened her description of each patient’s diagnosis, until Turner started to tap his foot. When that did no good, he pulled out a large gold watch. “I am afraid we shall have to hurry along, Miss Hazard. We are due to inspect the quartermaster’s stores.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Turner.” She hesitated, then reminded herself that if Stout walked out unaware of her reaction to him, she might never see him again. “I wonder if I first might have a moment to speak privately with the congressman? This hospital has certain urgent needs. Perhaps he could help with them.”

  She knew it was flimsy, but she could think of nothing better. Turner and the balloon-shaped female suspected her game and exchanged sharp looks; propriety was being outraged here. Congressman Stout rolled his hat brim in white fingers, unsmiling except in his dark eyes. He understood, too.

  Virgilia turned and walked away. The visitors moved in the opposite direction, one grumbling. Stout followed her. Feeling that she must be scarlet, she halted between two beds in which the patients were asleep. No one could hear when she turned and whispered to Stout.