‘You keeping well, Pa?’ Jed asked.
‘Well as can be expected,’ David answered.
‘When did the troops move in?’
‘Three weeks ago, maybe,’ said David, rubbing his forehead and frowning, as though he had difficulty recalling exact days and times. ‘They just rode up to the front door, offered me their compliments and said they were commandeering the house.’
‘And you didn’t argue,’ Jed grinned. ‘Of course.’
‘Told them exactly what I thought of them,’ David said, some of the old snap momentarily back in his voice. ‘Didn’t make a damned bit of difference.’
‘You sold all the horses?’
‘Sold!’ David said. ‘Damned army commandeered them. Damned army commandeers everything. Nathan joined up. All the stable-boys. They all quit!’ He shook his head, like a man bewildered by life.
‘You look tired, Pa,’ Jed said. ‘You should get some rest.’
‘I’ll manage,’ David murmured. No point worrying the boy with his aches and pains. He knew what caused them. He’d talked it all over with Joanna. She understood. Sitting by her grave, he had asked God for the only favor he had ever asked of Him.
‘Just let me live till the end of the war,’ he said. ‘I’ll take whatever You have in mind for me, without complaint. Now, You and I know what it is, so You know that’s considerable of a promise. You know I’ll keep my word. Just let me live till my boys come home.’
He hoped God would understand that he wasn’t doing it for himself. Vis medicatrix naturae wasn’t going to work in his case. It didn’t matter. He would be glad to be with Jo again. But first he wanted to see his sons home safe and the heritage which he had helped to build passed on. ‘Your brother’s joined the Federal Army, Jed,’ he said abruptly. He had been wondering how to break the news. In the event it came out easy. So much for worrying, he thought.
‘Andrew? In the army? I thought he swore—’
David told him about the deaths of Ruth and Eleanor Chalfont in the ‘Black Horse Panic’ after Manassas, or Bull Run, as some were now calling the battle. And how immediate had been Andrew’s reaction.
‘He’s on General Grant’s staff,’ David said. ‘Some place called Cairo. In Illinois, on the Mississippi.’
‘Then he’ll have seen some action,’ Jed said. ‘Grant had a hell of a fight down at Fort Donelson.’ He frowned, getting used to the idea of Andrew as a soldier. ‘He was so sure he’d never fight again,’ he said.
‘Well, all that’s changed,’ David said. ‘He told me all he wants to do is kill as many Confederate soldiers as can be killed and by whatever means he can devise. He says that’s what war is really about: the side that kills the most of the other side’s men will win.’
‘It’s hard to imagine,’ Jed said.
‘Took some believing,’ David admitted. ‘But you know Andrew. Once he gets his thinking done, he makes a decision and then he sticks to it.’
‘And now we are enemies,’ Jed said. It was hard to imagine Andrew having said any of that. They were words filled with cold hatred and Andrew had always been gentle. He tried to imagine firing a gun at his brother. He could not: it was impossible. Yet we could meet, unknowing, on some battlefield, he thought. And I might kill my brother or he might kill me.
‘Does it make you sad, Pa?’ Jed said softly. ‘Does it make you as sad as it makes me?’
‘Jed, boy,’ David said. ‘You’ll never know how sad a man can be till you see your sons ride off to fight in a war.’
They ate Aunt Betty’s skillet bread and eggs in a silence broken only once or twice by conversation, but no less companionable for that. David wished there was some way he could tell his son how lonely he was, how pointless life had become and how all he lived for now was to see him come home safe. But there were no words he could do it with.
‘I’ll have to get back, Pa,’ Jed said, pushing away his plate and standing up. ‘It’s a good hundred miles and I have to be there by tomorrow night.’
‘I wish you could have stayed longer.’
‘Take it up with Stonewall Jackson,’ Jed smiled. ‘See if you can talk him into giving me some leave.’ He winced as he put his weight on the wounded leg and David noticed it immediately.
‘You hurt your leg, boy?’
‘Nearly got ambushed by two deserters,’ Jed said, making it offhand. No point in worrying his father any more than was necessary. He held out his hand and David clasped it.
‘Take care of yourself, son,’ he said. ‘God be with you.’
Jed put his arm around his father’s shoulders, hugging him. David’s body felt thin and fragile. He’s ill, Jed thought, infinitely saddened by the fact that it was so, and the fact that there was’ not a single solitary damned thing he could do about it. He went across and gave Aunt Betty a kiss.
‘You take care, Mahse Jed,’ Moses said. ‘You come home safe, now.’
‘Look after Pa, Moses,’ Jed said. ‘You look after him real good.’
‘We keep an eye on him,’ Aunty Betty said. ‘Doan you worry none, Mahse Jed.’
‘I wish I could stay,’ Jed said again.
‘We all do, Jed,’ his father said. ‘But we all know you can’t. So go and do your blind duty instead.’
Jed turned the big roan’s head towards the pike. As he rode up the hill he looked back. David had come around the house to where he could watch his son ride back to the battles. He raised his hand in farewell. We leave each other so certain of safe return, he thought. Yet so many of us say farewell one casual day and never come back. Nobody ever expects it will happen to them, yet it has to happen to someone. He felt unutterably sad. A thin drizzle began to fall.
Fourteen – The Story of Andrew Strong
April 1862
The Army of the Tennessee was in camp on a pleasant, verdant plateau stretching about four miles along the River Tennessee, hemmed in on two sides by creeks which emptied into the river. It was on the Confederate side of the Tennessee, Sherman said, but so perfect that it would be almost shameful not to use it.
‘We’ve got a lot of green troops to whip into shape, Sam,’ he told Grant. ‘It’s an ideal place.’
‘Anything you say, Billy,’ Grant said.
They were sitting at a table set up under a tree outside Grant’s headquarters in Savannah. Grant, never the most meticulous of dressers, had his uniform coat open and his shirt collar unbuttoned. He was a short man, with black hair cut close to the head, and his beard was brindled with gray. The omnipresent cigar jutted out of his mouth. The small keen gray eyes squinted against the smoke. He was relaxed, for Grant.
‘You’re not worried there might be an attack, general?’ Andrew said. Albert Sidney Johnston’s Confederate Army of the Mississippi lay crouched just thirty miles south of them at Corinth.
‘Hell, no!’ Sherman said, his ruddy face twisting with impatience. He was a tall, gawky man, hot-tempered, excitable. A beautiful piece of machinery with some of the screws loose, Andrew thought. He decided to tell Sherman about Steven Barrow.
Two evenings earlier he had been riding down the East Corinth Road, en route to General Prentiss’ camp, when he heard his name shouted. The shout came from a boy lying on a cot under a tent fly. His gray uniform was stiff with dried blood. He had been shot through the chest and stomach. They’d carried him in and the surgeons had done what they could for him, which was not much. Not much, but better than the treatment many received.
‘You won’t remember me, I shouldn’t wonder,’ the boy said. ‘I’m Steven Barrow. My father is William Barrow. We used to live—’
‘At Orange Court House. I know,’ Andrew said. ‘You moved to Richmond, I remember. Your Daddy bred horses.’
Steven Barrow nodded. His face was ashen and there was scarcely any color in his lips. He made a slight movement with his hand.
‘They tell me I’m going to die,’ he said. ‘I’ll not live to see the battle.’
‘What battle is that,
Steven?’
‘Why, surely you must know!’ the boy said weakly. ‘We’ve an army fifty thousand strong on the march from Corinth! They’ll be upon you at any moment!’
‘You’re sure of this?’
‘Of … course,’ Steven said. Andrew frowned at the faint hesitation; it was almost as if, for a second, the life had left the boy and then returned. ‘I was scouting ahead. The attack.’ Steven looked puzzled, as a man would who cannot understand why he cannot remember something simple. And then the light went out of his eyes the way the light dies when someone turns down a lamp, and he was dead.
‘Colonel, I’ve no doubt you’re telling the truth,’ Sherman said offhandedly at the end of Andrew’s story. ‘But I fear your little Rebel was not!’
‘Why should he have lied to me, sir?’ Andrew said. He was pushing his luck, but he felt strongly about this. ‘He was dying.’
‘Damned Rebels!’ Sherman snapped. ‘He probably died happy, thinking he’d bamboozled you!’
Grant frowned and chewed on his cigar. In the silence Sherman shifted impatiently, sticking his hands into his pockets and taking them out again, shuffling his feet, frowning.
‘You think perhaps we should entrench, Billy?’ Grant asked. ‘Throw up some fortifications?’
‘Fortifications?’ Sherman rasped, in that testy, rapid way of talking he had. ‘Fortifications be damned! Work like that makes men timid, Sam, especially green recruits! We don’t want them to think they’re going to fight behind earthworks, do we? No, when they fight Johnny Reb they can stand up and fight him man-fashion, and them’s my feelings on it!’
Grant grinned. He didn’t much care for breast-beating, but he let Billy Sherman get away with more of it than any other officer in his command.
‘We could send out patrols, general,’ Andrew ventured. ‘A few scouts to—’
‘Scouts, spies, patrols!’ Sherman growled. ‘What’s the matter with you, Colonel? You scared Johnny Reb is going to catch you with your nice new pants down? Don’t you worry. When the time comes, we’ll find him!’
If he doesn’t find you first, Andrew thought, but he did not say it. Staff officers were permitted to make the occasional deferential suggestion, but they did not argue when overruled unless invited to. There was no hint of invitation in Sherman’s brusque dismissals, and Grant did not seem inclined to discuss it further either. The Hell with this, Andrew thought. Steven was telling the truth.
‘With the greatest respect, General,’ he said firmly. ‘I would like to get some artillery lined up on the bluff above Dill’s Branch back there.’ Andrew pointed at the bluff overlooking the curving ravine that emptied into the Tennessee near the Landing. Grant stared at him for a long moment, his gray eyes cold, and in that moment Andrew thought he had overstepped the mark.
‘Why?’ Grant rasped.
‘Suppose it’s true, General,’ Andrew said. ‘Suppose the Rebs are on the march. If they attacked us now, the way our men are spread all over the place, we’d be rolled back like a carpet. A line of guns—’
‘I see what you mean,’ Grant said. ‘A fallback position.’
‘Exactly, sir.’
‘Nonsense!’ Sherman said. ‘Colonel, you’re making work for work’s sake!’
‘With respect, General,’ Andrew said, not giving ground. ‘I’ll be the one doing it.’
Sherman glared at him, then nodded curtly. ‘Please yourself,’ he rasped.
‘General?’ Andrew asked Grant. Grant pursed his lips and then he too nodded his approval. ‘Hell, Billy, it can’t do any harm,’ he said.
‘Won’t do any damned good, either!’ Sherman huffed.
‘Well,’ Grant grinned. ‘Don’t sulk, Billy.’
‘Balls,’ Sherman said inelegantly.
Like Grant he was newly returned to command. Like Grant he had lost the confidence of ‘Old Brains’ Halleck. Now Grant had come down to Savannah to find his army divided, half of it on the eastern bank of the river, and the rest of it eight miles or so downriver, at Pittsburgh Landing. His first priority was to concentrate all the troops into one area, and the one he chose – thanks to Sherman’s enthusiastic advice – was Pittsburgh Landing. Meanwhile, word was received that General Don Carlos Buell was marching south from Nashville with a further forty thousand veterans, sorely needed to shape up this greenhorn army.
‘As soon as Buell gets here, gentlemen, we will take the offensive,’ Grant told his officers, ‘and put Johnston on the run!’
On April 4 Grant’s horse fell on him and his leg was caught beneath the horse. His ankle was so badly swollen that it was necessary to cut off his boot. He was still hobbling around, using a stout stave for support. He would not use crutches.
‘Don’t want the men thinking they’ve got a cripple for a commander,’ he said with that familiar scowl. ‘And I sure don’t want Old Brains to hear about it, or I’ll be back at Cairo shuffling paper again!’
Andrew had met General Halleck, who had become overall commander of the western theater in March. A fussy, pedantic man who never stopped complaining about his hay fever, Halleck had been described by one mordant wit as ‘a large emptiness surrounded by an education’. With his large staring eyes, his bulbous brow, pursed lips and professorial outlook, he was the antithesis of the uncomplicated, unpretentious, and shabby Grant. Halleck reacted by forever seeking to find fault with the man. Grant took it all philosophically, the way a farmer takes rain.
Every day he inspected the camp at Pittsburgh Landing. As Sherman had claimed it was an ideal campsite. Scarred by ravines, the plateau rose sometimes as much as a hundred feet above the river, with abrupt red clay bluffs falling sharply down to the water. Locust, hickory, sycamore and oak trees were in full spring leaf, their bright green foliage flecked with dogwood and redbud blossoms. The creeks were running high. The old log Methodist meeting house on the hill looked down on peach orchards in blossom.
‘What’s the name of the church?’
‘Shiloh, General,’ someone answered Grant’s question.
‘Biblical name?’
‘I believe so, sir,’ Andrew said. ‘The city of Joshua.’ Grant nodded and cantered on. On Ridge Road, green troops of Prentiss’ division were firing off their newly issued rifles, while sweating non-coms roared the rudiments of the loading drill at them. Down at the landing the gunboats Tyler and Lexington were unloading supplies. A calliope on board one of the ships competed with the sound of regimental bands playing in the encampments. Some of the troops were drilling. Most were just lolling around. There was an almost holiday air about the place.
‘General, this rabble isn’t ready to fight, not yet by a long chalk!’ Grant’s chief of staff, John Rawlins said. A grim, hard-jawed man in his early thirties with black hair, swarthy skin and an abrupt manner, he was a former lawyer whom Grant had got to know and trust during his years in Galena, Illinois. Nine years younger than Grant, he was more than the commander’s friend: he was also his conscience. He took no nonsense from anyone, least of all the general. It was common knowledge that Grant had a drink problem. Rawlins was the one who kept him off it. It wasn’t a job Andrew envied him.
‘I don’t see where they’ll have to, for a while,’ Grant said, looking at the sprawling camp with jaundiced eyes. ‘I don’t figure Johnston for an attack. He’s dug in down there to Corinth, waiting for us.’
‘Begging the general’s pardon, but that’s not what the vedettes are saying,’ Andrew said. Grant gave him that cold, level stare again.
‘You’re determined to make me think there’ll be an attack, aren’t you, Colonel?’ he said. ‘Don’t you trust my judgment?’
‘General, you put me in difficulty,’ Andrew said. ‘All I can tell you is that the vedettes report seeing a lot of Reb cavalry.’
‘Skirmishing,’ Grant said. ‘Nothing more to it.’
‘Very well, sir,’ Andrew agreed. He had done all he could. If he pushed this anymore, Grant would erupt. It was easy to see that his ang
er had been aroused. In spite of his victories, he was still insecure, and criticism, real or implied, was a sure way to invite a chewing out.
‘All right,’ Grant said abruptly. ‘Rawlins, let’s get back to the damned paperwork.’
‘No escaping that,’ Rawlins grinned. ‘Nor your dinner this evening, sir.’
‘Dinner? What dinner is that?’
‘You’re dining aboard ship with Senator McCabe of Oregon, general,’ Rawlins said. ‘He’s brought along his daughter too.’
‘Daughter, eh?’ Grant said. ‘What’s she like?’
‘You may remember her as the lady who wrote to the War Department instructing them how to conduct the war,’ Rawlins said. ‘You remember that letter?’
‘Damned right I do,’ Grant said. ‘Old harridan, I’ll be bound!’
‘No, sir,’ Andrew said. ‘She’s very beautiful.’
Grant fixed him with a stare. ‘You know her?’
‘We met in Washington, general, I know the senator as well. ‘
‘Hmm,’ Grant said. ‘You’d better join us, then.’
‘Thank you, general,’ Andrew said. By the time he finished supervising the movement of the cannon to the bluff, it was going to be a damned close run thing to make it to dinner in full-dress uniform, but he knew he was going to do it or break a leg trying.
Jessica McCabe, he thought. After that final meeting in Washington, he had heard nothing more of her. He had not written; neither had she. But he had thought of her, often. He wondered whether she had thought of him. I’ll find out tonight, he promised himself.
Senator McCabe’s party consisted of himself, Jessica, two Congressmen named Cutler Moore and Isaiah Harness and their frowsy, puddeny wives. None the less, it was a jolly enough affair. Grant could sparkle when he wanted to and his staff officers did their best to entertain their visitors well.
‘Well, sir,’ McCabe said to Grant. ‘What news have you of the enemy?’
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