Confederates (15 page)

They climbed one fence and then another, finding behind it a dead pointer, a fine dog who'd been maybe doing a little rabbiting in his own right and who'd been transfixed through the shoulders by Joe Nunnally's shot.

‘Oh Lordy,' said Joe and began to cry. ‘Oh Lordy I'm shamed before you, Usaph.'

Usaph laughed. A dog was better news than a cavalry man.

‘No, Joe. That's a shot you fired! Holy Betsy, what a shot!'

Joe gathered the dog up closely in his arms, not caring about stains, and Bumpass carried his musket for him. Captain Guess was waiting for them back on the picket line.

‘A dog.
A goddam dog!
Say, there's cavalry over there, boy. They know where we stand now all because you had to shoot a goddam dog!'

Joe Nunnally still had tears on his face. He weighed it a terrible thing to kill a working dog.

‘You take that dog back to camp, boy,' Captain Guess told him, ‘carried in your own goddam arms, and stand beside my tent with it until noonday tomorrow, and then you bury it and when next you see a pay waggon, you pay me three dollars to replace it to its owner.'

Joe started to limp away straight off. Usaph caught him and slung the rifle over his back. ‘Don't weep there, Joe,' Usaph whispered. ‘That was one shot, that was!'

3

As Joe Nunnally carried the dog back to camp, grieving for it in its own right but also because it hung in his arms with the dead weight of an omen, the brandy bottle was being passed at the end of dinner outside Colonel Wheat's tent. Dinner had been cornbread and fried chicken and sweet yams and grits served by Colonel Wheat's orderly. Wheat drank whisky with each mouthful and young Lucius Taber felt bound to do the same. By coffee time Lucius's head reeled and he felt like a happy child on a carousel. But the fireflies off amongst the beech trees seemed to be blurs to him, not points of light, and he should have taken warning from that.

He noticed that Captain Hanks, the middle-aged Valley lawyer, who with Lucius had brought the conscripts to camp, drank pretty carefully. At first, like a true Immutable should, Lucius despised Hanks for this. But after some six or seven ounces of brandy on top of all that whisky, Lucius stopped comparing himself with other officers and began to worry about his own nausea. Soon he began to dream of being sick the way you dream of a sweet release. But he went on trying to listen to each of the colonel's words, for the colonel had called this dinner to inform Hanks and Lucius of certain rules of thumb that apply to military campaigning.

‘… the percentage of hits is always very small,' said the colonel. He dropped his voice. ‘As low as a half of one per cent, the ordnance officers say, though I don't know where they get the figures and I don't want it mentioned to the men. They also say the Yankee figures are even lower. Abe is lucky if one in 400 rounds that his boys fire off strikes flesh. Now the Lord's decreed that here in the South we're short of lead and powder and copper, and so the customary reasoning runs like this. Don't give the men breech-loaders, even if we beg and buy and steal them. If you give the men breech-loaders the waste of lead and powder and copper will be more than our means can tolerate. So goes what passes for the ordinary wisdom!'

And Colonel Wheat took another gulletful of brandy. He looked at the regimental surgeon, Abel Oursley, who was also full up with one of those medical stimulants he often used in amputations, namely whisky. Abel nodded over the table, sometimes waking to say a few words about his profession in a thick voice. The adjutant, Major Dignam, sat straight, tall, round-faced, sipping a glass of lime juice. All at once Lucius envied him that tall Methodist glass of lime juice, wishing he himself wasn't an Immutable and wasn't bound to a career of whisky-and-brandy gobbling.

‘But look at the question from its other side,' said the colonel. ‘The Southern rifleman is likely a farmer or a farm boy. He's been since babyhood shooting squirrels and coons and, in our part of the Confederacy, goddam bears! He's a natural marksman, that is, unlike the low-grade immigrants and slum-boys that oppose our cause.…'

Captain Hanks frowned and put in an objection. ‘But they shoot squirrels and coons and bears in Michigan too. And in Ohio and Minnesota and Wisconsin. And in upstate New York the country's, why, full of marksmen.'

Hanks was clearly a traveller and wanted Wheat to know it. Wheat nodded. It was a brushing-aside nod. ‘But, capt'n, the gift of marksmanship just ain't the rule in the North. Sure as hell it might be the rule in the backwoods, but most of the Yankee rankers ain't from the backwoods. They're goddam Germans straight off the ship. They're goddam Irish. They're slum-boys and degenerates who can use a knife or a brick from behind but have not in their lives before been called on to be marksmen.'

Hanks gave a nod that was halfway a shake of the head and halfway respectful. The colonel sighed and his parroty eyes took in Hanks in a way that said, I hope we won't have any more trouble in mid-argument. ‘What I was reaching for,' he went on, ‘was the proposition that given the Yankees
as a rule
ain't marksmen an' given that our boys are
as a rule
marksmen, wouldn't it be clear enough to a purblind jackass that if our boys were armed at all costs with Spencer breechloaders, the casualties we'd cause would increase by the power of the followin' factors – first, the greater percentage of hits we already enjoy, second, the increased accuracy-cum-muzzle velocity of the breechloaders, an' third, the increased rate of fire. Oh, I can see young Lucius there saying to himself, why we'd use up a few years' supply of lead, powder and copper in the one year. Weren't you jest thinking that, Lucius?'

Lucius nodded and wished he'd brought a notebook for that
first, second, third
of the colonel's. He sat swaying in misery, sure that he'd missed out on vital news.

‘Well, I say one year's supply is all we'd need, Lucius. Northern mothers would end the war. Northern casualty rates, Northern goddam grief. That's the way it seems to this mountain lawyer anyways.'

In the silence the surgeon, Doctor Oursley, raised his head.

‘When I get boys coming to me on the march, why I've got a ball of blue mass in my left pocket and a ball of opium in my right … a ball of blue mass …'

‘Good for you, Abel,' said the colonel, and Abel Oursley went back to sleep.

Wheat went on with his reflections and advice. They should never, he said, fret themselves too much if they saw boys throw their bayonets away. ‘To be of use in battle the bayonet – on the chance of a charge from either side – must be attached to the musket during loading, as any fool knows. That means men are likely to spike their hands while loading, to cut a finger off maybe at the knuckle, or to wound their neighbours as they lift the long apparatus to fire. Believe me, our regiment ran through all its ammunition at Kernstown and the first thing the boys did then – and it was, mark you, instinctual – was grasp their muskets by the barrel and ready them for use as clubs. And I promise you, gentlemen, that the damage done thereby to the first of the Yankee slum-boys who got into our section was as worthy as anything the bayonet could do.'

Hanks felt appalled by this little oration, and his sense of being lost amongst barbarians was made worse as Oursley, the surgeon, raised his turtle-like head again and finished the speech that had defeated him ten minutes before.

‘… blue mass in one pocket and opium in the other,' Oursley persisted. ‘And when they come to me on the march and say, Doc, I'm ailing, I say are your bowels open? If so, I administer a plug of opium; if shut I give a plug of blue mass. On the march you jest have to reduce the practice of medicine to its lowest …'

But his forehead hit the table and soon he fell out of his chair and was left snoozing away on the ground. Lucius Taber thought, even in his whisky daze – what if ever I'm wounded and one day am brought to that drunk lying there?

And that moment a boy passed thirty yards off, carrying a bundle in his arms. The colonel was distracted. ‘What you got there, feller?'

‘It's a dog, sir.'

‘You meaning to devour that dog are you, boy?'

‘Sir, I shot this dog thinking it was the enemy.'

‘You know you got to pay the owner?'

‘I've been told that, Colonel.'

‘That's the way the Confederacy does things. We ain't no race of plunderers. Now bury that dog.'

‘Sir, Captain Guess told me to stand before his tent with it in my arms till noonday afore buryin' it.'

‘Who'm I to contradict the captain. Lucius, give this poor lad a sup of brandy to stand him in his long vigil.'

Lucius got up, urging himself to be steady, and poured the boy some brandy in a tin mug. ‘You teetotal, son?' Major Dignam asked Joe Nunnally just in case, but Joe shook his head, dropped the dog's corpse on the ground and drained the brandy. Then he replaced the mug on the table, bowed to the colonel, lifted the burden again and went off to stand in front of Guess's tent.

Wheat said: ‘Ole Popeye Ewell once said, the road to glory can't be followed with much baggage.' Lucius wasn't sure whether Wheat was speaking of the toting of dogs or excess equipment like cartridge boxes and such. But there wasn't any mistaking what the clicking of the colonel's fingers meant. He wanted the brandy bottle. Taber passed it and, to his horror, got it back after the colonel had used it.

Feeling obliged to pour himself another belt, he did so, looking at it in the mug and saying to it, not with his lips but with his stewed brain, you're the one that's going to kill me.

‘Now one last thing,' said the colonel again. ‘It might be a thing of merit to try to explain the constitutional issue for which we fight to simple farm boys, but there's very little use. I believe there is jest no question that low anger is the finest stimulant and every general, even teetotal Tom Jackson, knows that it outranks whisky itself as the primer of the tired and frightened soldier.'

At the word
whisky
Taber got up, excused himself and walked fast away into the shadows, towards the far cool Blue Ridge, into the forests. He found he wasn't out in some soothing unpopulated darkness, but standing amongst the shapes of sleeping men of the Stonewall Brigade. The gush from his belly fell on the blankets of two Irishmen of the Twenty Seventh Virginia. They woke instantly as veterans have a gift to do, and in his helpless spasms, he could hear them complaining and looking round for the source of this discomfort.

‘Oh Jaysus, Jimmy, thet's him there, the bastard.'

Jimmy got Taber by the collar and Lucius began shaking and was ill again. ‘What in the goddam name of Hell?' Jimmy asked.

But the adjutant had arrived. ‘Let go of him, son,' he instructed. Jimmy obeyed but not without making a speech.

‘But it's hard enough, Yer Honner, sleepin' in shit without havin' that ordure there atop ye.'

Taber retched on in front of them. Oh God, I am so shamed. What sort of Immutable am I now? My colonel has done for me with a brandy bottle.

4

The English correspondent Searcy came up to Gordonsville with some officers of Ambrose Hill's division, arriving the morning after Joe Nunnally shot the dog.

Although he'd thought it was his duty both as journalist and agent to go up to Jackson's headquarters, he hadn't liked leaving Mrs Whipple. He visited Chimborazo two more times after that first meeting. The first of these two occasions he took with him a few diagrams of the way Longstreet's half of the army had placed itself around Richmond. These practically valueless drawings were his excuse for visiting. He sat in her little kitchen and felt his soul expanding under the influence of her liveliness and her good sense and that bunched little smile of hers.

‘Is it a good thing for us to be friends?' she asked when he was going.

He'd look her full in the eyes. ‘Don't even question it, madam.'

Just before he left Richmond – his horse was already loaded aboard a freight train – he'd visited her a last time.

But it hadn't been a very happy visit. Orderlies and nurses kept coming to her door with messages and requests; and twice in the three hours he had spent there she had to leave him to himself – or at least to the company of her black maid – for more than half an hour at a time.

‘Your mistress is kept very busy,' he'd said to the black girl.

‘Yassir, them slack surgeons, they get Mrs Whipple to break the news to boys when they's dyin'.'

Searcy didn't like to think too closely about what
that
must do to the brain behind the small pug face.

Perhaps there were Mrs Whipples all over Virginia who would meet with him and collect whatever he had for them. If there were, he didn't know who they might be or how he would know them. It might end up that he'd have to cross the lines himself with any special knowledge he'd got together. He didn't like that prospect, for pickets on both sides fired with a nervous quickness.

Jackson's headquarters was, predictably, a white frame farmhouse, pleasant, its lawn and rosebeds trampled and grazed out by the horses of visiting officers and couriers.

Searcy was sitting on the stoop of this house one stifling Tuesday morning. He chatted with any officers who came and sat there to mop their faces or fan themselves with their hats. As he sprawled, making what mental note he could of what was said and lazily chewing on a sour cheroot, he saw a sort of mobile haze coming across the meadows towards the house.

It was a cavalry detachment travelling cross-country, and soon it had drawn up at the gate, the troopers swearing and stretching in their saddles and reaching for the corncob pipes in the saddlebags. Their officer got down from his mount and came in through the gate. A typical cavalry colonel of maybe Searcy's age, his uniform part military and part the outfit of an elegant travelling gentleman. Whoever he was, some of the other officers in the garden knew him and called to him.