Call to Arms

by Frederick Nolan

Grant smiled his unwilling smile and shook his head. ‘General Halleck has instructed me to entrench, senator,’ he said. ‘I am to avoid battle rather than to fight.’

  ‘Why on earth would he do that?’ Harness asked. He was a tall, stooped man with a great beak of a nose that almost met his chin, and gave him the appearance of an aged Punchinello.

  ‘Reckon he wants all the damned glory himself,’ growled John Rawlins. Grant gave him a sharp look of reprimand but turned the moment with a light phrase.

  ‘No, John,’ he said. ‘We’ll get our glory, never fear.’

  ‘Where is General Johnston’s army?’ Cutler Moore’s wife asked. ‘Is it near here?’

  ‘At Corinth, madam!’ her husband replied, pointing a dramatic hand to the west. ‘Thirty miles away!’

  ‘Corinth is to the south, Mr. Moore,’ Grant said. ‘That way.’ He pointed south.

  ‘Wherever he is, if I were Johnston I would be getting ready to attack you, General,’ Jessica said. ‘Before General Buell arrives to reinforce you.’

  Grant favored her with that contemplative stare of his for a moment. ‘Would you, Miss McCabe?’ he said. ‘We’re all of the opinion here that’s what he won’t do.’

  Andrew watched Jessica struggle with her desire to argue the point. She stared at the tablecloth, two tiny red spots of anger on her high cheekbones. She was wearing a dress of soft blue silk and a black neckband of velvet. Her abundant auburn hair was piled high on her head, and laced with strings of pearls. Long white gloves covered her soft arms. She made the other two women look like dummies in a store window.

  ‘Mind you,’ Grant said with a mischievous smile. ‘We have one officer in the command who agrees with you, Miss McCabe. Colonel Strong also feels that Johnston will attack.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should listen to him, General,’ Senator McCabe said. ‘I have a high opinion of this young man’s abilities.’

  ‘As have I, Senator,’ Grant smiled. ‘Colonel Strong is our logistics wizard. The strength or weakness of an army is in its logistics, you know. If I order up guns, I want them in place at the appointed time, not ten minutes too soon when they may be unable to fire, nor ten minutes too late when their effect may be worthless. If I order up more troops and those troops do not arrive, the pattern of the battle can change, a flank can be turned, a front rolled back. In warfare, logistics is everything, and that is why we are fortunate in having Colonel Strong. Why, just this evening …

  He stopped as the wives of the two Congressmen rose as one and announced that they would withdraw and leave the gentlemen to their cigars. If looks could have killed, Andrew thought, the one that Jessica McCabe directed at them would have stretched them out stone dead on the holystoned deck of the ship faster than you could say their names. However, she had no choice but to leave with them, while Grant resumed his monologue on the subject of logistics.

  After five minutes, Andrew excused himself, ignoring Grant’s glower, and went out on to the deck. It was a balmy evening; a soft breeze came off the river, carrying with it the faint tang of wood smoke from the campfires that flickered up on the bluffs. Fish jumped with a faint plosh. Once in a while a picket sang out his cadences.

  He found her in the bow of the ship, staring upriver. She turned as he drew near, her eyes dark, unreadable pools in the shadows.

  ‘Remember me?’ he said.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ she told him. ‘You seem ... surer.’

  ‘Let me look at you.’ He took both her hands and held them.

  ‘Well?’ she said with a mischievous smile. ‘Do I pass inspection?’ The dimples, he thought. I’d forgotten those.

  ‘You’re lovelier than I remember.’

  Jessica tipped back her head and looked at the stars.

  ‘You told me once … about a girl,’ she said.

  ‘It seems a long time ago,’ Andrew said. ‘But yes. I remember. ‘

  ‘She meant a very great deal to you.’ He nodded abruptly.

  ‘And … she died?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Not quite a year ago. And yet it seems as if it was so long ago, in a distant past life.’

  ‘You still think of her?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That door is closed. Forever.’

  ‘Forever is a long time,’ she said softly. She turned slowly and walked across to the rail and looked down at the dark water purling past the steel walls of the ship. She spoke without looking at him.

  ‘I told you I would forget you,’ she said quietly. ‘And I have done.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

  He went across and took her in his arms and kissed her. She did not respond. After a few moments more he released her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘Why did you?’

  ‘I wanted ... to convince you. That the past is dead.’

  ‘The past is never dead, Andrew,’ she said. ‘Not for you. Not for me.’

  It came to him then and he cursed himself for a fool. ‘How stupid!’ he said. ‘I should have known. There was someone in your life. Someone … special.’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered. She lifted her chin and looked away from him. He laid a hand softly on hers and spoke her name.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jess.’

  She nodded and turned, putting her head against his shoulder and letting the tears come. There were not many; she took a deep breath and straightened her back; in a moment she had regained her composure.

  ‘I told you once,’ she said. ‘That there had been … more than a few men.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was not hard to believe.’

  ‘I told you none of them meant anything to me,’ she said.

  ‘You said they had all lied to you.’

  ‘That was not true,’ she answered quietly. ‘It was I who lied to them, I let them think that – if they really tried – they might perhaps win my affection. Even my love. But I knew in my heart there was never any chance of that.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘John,’ she said. ‘John Hardisty. We grew up together in Chicago. We were going to be married. When I lost John, I knew I would never want any other man. Oh, I pretended. As you once told me, Andrew. I could make every man in a room think that he was the only one for me. And not give a snap of the fingers for any of them.’

  ‘And me?’ Andrew said. ‘What about me, Jess?’

  ‘I couldn’t do that to you,’ she said. ‘You were too … honest. So I’ve told you the truth. That’s more than any man’s ever had from me.’

  ‘It could be a beginning,’ he said.

  ‘No, dear Andrew,’ she said. ‘It cannot be.’

  He walked her back to the cabin door. The general and his staff were saying their good nights. To stay away longer would not only be impolite but unwise. Andrew knew he would have to get back.

  ‘When do you leave?’ he asked her.

  ‘Tomorrow, early,’ she said. ‘We have to be back in Cairo by the seventh of April.’

  ‘I wish I could come and see you off.’

  ‘I think I’m glad you can’t.’

  ‘When will we meet again do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. One day, perhaps. Or never.’

  ‘I won’t believe never.’

  ‘You don’t make it easy to say good-bye.’

  ‘Dammit, Jess,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Another time, Andrew,’ she whispered. ‘Another place. Maybe it’s in our stars, maybe not. But this is not the time. ‘

  ‘All right,’ he said, kissing her hand. ‘Good night, sweet Jessica.’

  ‘Good-bye, dear Andrew.’

  They left while he was working on the gun emplacements on Saturday morning. He heard the hoot of the steamer and thought that he saw her on deck, looking back at the encampment.

  As the bright dawn of the following day, Sunday April 7, 1862, lit the woods and meadows around Shiloh church, forty thousand Confeder
ate soldiers, formed in four parallel lines with a front of three miles and a depth of over a mile, moved silently towards the sleeping Federal camps and fell upon them.

  The bloody battle of Shiloh had begun.

  Fifteen – The Story of Jedediah Strong

  July 1862

  From the crest of a bluff above Orange Court House, Jedediah Strong watched the wagons crossing the Rapidan at Barnett’s Ford. Dust hung high in the still August air in the wake of A. P. Hill’s infantry, glinting in the hot sunlight. Tired as he was, Jed could not help but feel a surge of pride as he watched Stonewall Jackson’s army on the move. A year and more after the battle of Manassas, it had out-marched, out-maneuvered, and out-fought every division of the Federal Army that had been thrown against it.

  An army on the move was an amazing sight, and the thought of the fray ahead was at once both terrifying and exciting, repellent and seductive. It broke some men. Others loved it in a way they could never love a woman. In a year of fighting with Jackson’s army, Jed had learned to love it: he was never more alive than when he was facing death square on. Every muscle, every corpuscle seemed to sing with life. The eye saw every movement in the seething cauldron of smoke, fire, roaring cannon, blazing musketry, screaming horses and shouting men that was a battlefield. The brain emptied of fear, hope, love. It functioned on one plane only, and death was no more real than the furling smoke of the guns.

  He had learned a lot of other things, too.

  That there was nothing you could do about men whose nerve broke as they advanced under fire and who waited, whimpering, for someone to come and kill them. That there was no way you could change the system by which colonels, elected by their men, learned the grim realities of warfare by sending those same men out to be killed. That there was nothing you could do about the terrible roasting stink of amputated limbs on the orderlies’ fires after a battle. That you could not expect always to know under whose orders you might die or which part of the opposing army had killed you.

  He had learned practical things, too. That when you saw rabbits come skittering out of the undergrowth, the enemy’s skirmishers were in there coming at you. That you could tell how far away the Federal cannon were by their very sound. That it took a very long time to starve to death. And most important of all, Jed had learned how to stay alive.

  All the length and breadth of the Shenandoah Valley, and again at Cold Harbor, when Richmond was saved and McLellan’s Federals rolled all the way back to Harrison’s Landing. Death’s dark wings touched him in passing at Gaines’ Mill, as he reeled half-blinded by his own blood, after being struck a glancing blow on the side of the head by a ricocheting Minié ball, and yet again when his horse was shot from under him by a three-inch shell and he lay, half-stunned on the torn ground, watching in horror as the screaming, ghastly thing that was a horse in front, and something from the gutters of an abattoir behind, tried to struggle to its feet.

  He had learned it again and again, so many times that he knew now he had no more learning to do. He had survived where better men had died, learning in the stink of death’s presence that death is nothing to be afraid of. He knew now that death can come in a thousand disguises: a dark cloak or a clown’s hat, dressed as a farm-boy or uniformed as a surgeon. You whimpered in fear of him during the thunder of volleying cannon, and he found you in a latrine: three men died of disease for every one that was felled by a bullet. Poorly trained and badly equipped surgeons butchered thousands more in their desperate haste to do something, anything, for the bleeding wreckage brought to them off the battlefields. Dying, then, was not the worst thing that could happen to you, and knowing that, Jed was fearless, invincible. Time and again he was a rallying point around which his battered company regrouped, a talisman, a light to follow into the darkness. They called him ‘Old Iron Pants’ and they said they would fight alongside him till Hell froze over, then fight again on the ice. And they did: Cross Keys and Port Republic, Gaines’ Mill, Seven Pines and a dozen other battlefields.

  As he watched the troops splashing across the shallow river, pictures from the past flickered through Jed’s mind, a series of moments frozen into the brain like photographs, snatches of life caught in the mind from the swift run of time.

  Memories.

  The way the grapeshot and canister scythed down the wheat at Malvern Hill, neat as any farmer could have sickled it. Lee at Willis’ Church, sitting on a log, talking about picking a rose for each of his daughters from the garden at Arlington, with Tom Jackson standing next to him, head down, listening. The incredible thunderstorm that had fallen on them as they marched by White Oak Bridge, the warring skies making a sound so vast that cannon-fire sounded puny.

  Memories.

  Exhausted soldiers fishing for crab in the James River. The sun catching the glittering steel points of the 6th Pennsylvania’s lances on a June morning. Federal cavalry charging down a hill in glorious array, bugles blaring the charge as they threw themselves in senseless valor against the merciless massed rifles of the astonished Confederate infantry. A young boy from Atlanta, carrying his regiment’s colors, shot once and then again and then a third time, handing the flag to the man next to him saying, apologetically, ‘You see, I can’t stand it anymore,’ as he fell dead. Or Johnnie Lea walking with his pretty bride down Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg, wearing a brand-new, full-dress Confederate officer’s uniform of the finest gray cloth, wildly decorated with gold braid. And alongside him, on parole, and wearing a dark blue Federal uniform equally ornate with gilt, his West Point classmate, friend and official mortal enemy, Captain George Custer of the 5th US Cavalry. A corpse hanging from a tree with a card pinned to the shirt which said: ‘This spy is to hang three days. Any man who cuts him down will hang the remaining time.’

  Memories.

  Jed recalled a July night when the Army of Northern Virginia was falling back to Richmond after Malvern Hill. Jackson was riding ‘Little Sorrel’, the pathetic-looking nag he always rode. Not fourteen hands high, the horse was one of a bunch taken off a train at Harper’s Ferry in 1861 and turned over to the general. Like riding a rat, someone said, but not while Jackson was around: he doted on the animal. This July night, as they rode along the lane Jackson was dozing in the saddle. They passed groups of soldiers in fence corners, roasting green corn over their fires. One soldier, bolder than his fellows, saw the swaying figure and took it for that of a drunken cavalryman. He swung over the fence and into the road, grabbing Little Sorrel’s noseband.

  ‘Hey, there, Johnny!’ he said. ‘Would you have a drop of whiskey to spare for a thirsty lad from Richmond?’ Jackson awoke with a start. ‘What’s that? Eh? Did you speak, Maguire?’

  The soldier recognized him, and his jaw dropped. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘It’s Old Jack!’ He said it the way a priest might say the name of Satan. He turned and ran flat out across the road, cleared the fence in a single bound and disappeared into the night.

  Stonewall Jackson.

  If you took your cue from Old Jack you were either a soldier or a corpse. He’s made a fighting man out of me, Jed thought. He’s made me love the war, love the fighting, every bit of it. He’s taught me to disregard fear, ignore death, forget the future. He smiled at the memory of his early dislike of the man, long since discarded for unqualified admiration. The man was a soldier: tough and uncompromising. He demanded the very best of everyone around him. He expected everyone on his staff, and in his army, to eschew personal safety and to disregard personal comfort as readily as he. Those who could not or would not were soon discarded. A soldier’s task, as Stonewall Jackson saw it, was to fight – and to die, if need be, without complaint.

  He was as unpretentious as any private in his army, his uniform as faded and stained, his boots as muddy. Headquarters was a simple bell tent or a monastic room in the nearest cottage, often without guard or sentry. In bivouac he rolled up in his blankets or beneath a tree and was asleep in an instant. He could sleep anywhere, even on horseba
ck. He ate sparingly, erratically, often disconcerting ladies who had gone to considerable trouble to offer the famous General Jackson some lovingly cooked delicacy by eating nothing but several bowls of raspberries and some bread, ignoring their offerings completely.

  ‘He’s not hard to please,’ Bill Stevenson told him with a grin. ‘All he asks is perfection, one hundred per cent of the time.’

  Memories, memories, memories: enough of them, Jed thought. He leaned forward and pulled his horse’s ear. The horse shook his head and moved off. Down below, Jed could see Hill’s Light Division swarming across the land. ‘Little Powell’ was going home. Although they had been born in the same town, Jed did not know Hill very well. A nervous, handsome man who wore a bright red flannel shirt going into battle, Hill was also moody, short-tempered and quarrelsome. Eight years older than Jed, he came from a wealthy Culpeper family. Bill Stevenson said Ambrose Hill’s dearest wish was to enter smart Richmond society. It seemed like a damned fool ambition.

  Going home, he thought. His chest felt over-expanded. It was a strange feeling of elated anticipation he had come to know well. The first time he had ever felt it was on that long-gone day when he had faced Paul Maxwell in the forest glade at the crossing. He wondered how things were at Washington Farm. In his mind’s eye he saw his father as he had seen him in the spring: drawn, tired and old.

  In a few minutes he caught up with the brigade. The men were cheerful in spite of the shifting dust and the heavy heat. It was as if they were actually looking forward to what lay ahead. Jed touched the hilt of his saber. Strength and pride surged inside him. He felt invincible. Johnny Pope was in Culpeper and Jackson’s army was marching north to meet him, singing.

  Sixteen – The Story of David Strong

  July 1862

  David Strong was not and never had been much of a one for taverns. He found the rank stink of tobacco and the wall of noise that fell on you like a blanket in such places, were reason enough for a sane man to stay out of them. He said as much to Dan Holmes when his neighbor met him on the street in Culpeper and suggested they drop into Fulton’s for a tankard of ale.