Confederates (28 page)

There was a long silence while the cripple considered this. The mother said, like someone asking permission: ‘For God's sake, Arlan, he's but a boy.'

‘You'll sleep in the goddam barn,' the cripple told him.

‘That's still heaven by me, sir.'

‘What did you call yourself, boy?'

‘Joe,' Joe called gaily.

‘I thought you called yourself Asa or some goddam thing,' Arlan barked out.

‘So I do,' said Joe, face burning. ‘But you see, my friends all call me Joe.'

‘Come on in then, Joe,' Arlan said, and he watched the boy come forward wary as a young animal. That boy's such a poor liar, Arlan thought. For Arlan knew that there were no more one-year boys, that the Confederate Congress had done away with one-year boys, transmuting them all into three-year boys. You just had to go to market in Stevensburg, as Arlan did, and ask this or that merchant when his boy was coming home to be told that much.

So Arlan let him stay a day and a half, till he'd chopped up a useful cordage of wood. And on the third day, he rode off early, leaving the boy whitewashing the back of the house, and he went down through the forest to the Gordonsville-Culpeper road. As he expected to, he met up with a Confederate cavalry vedette down there by the side of the road, watching out for Pope to cross the Rapidan. And part of their duty as well was to give stragglers a kick along and to bring in deserters. He said there was a deserter over to his place. Name of Bumpass.

16

All Monday morning Major Dignam, Methodist preacher and adjutant of the Shenandoah Volunteers, watched from beneath an oak in front of General Tom Jackson's tent near Clark's Mountain. He didn't feel comfortable here, he tensed inside his grey jacket whenever some passing staff officer glanced at him. He'd been feeling awkward since seeing Jackson and Lee and Longstreet come riding down from the top of the mountain two hours back, all looking thunderous as if they'd been handed the Tables of the Law up there and were under strict orders from God to force their scriptures on a stiff-necked people. Dignam had seen them all dismount, three tall and sombre men, and go into Jackson's tent to have some refreshment or other. The Reverend Dignam had never seen Lee before and had only read of Longstreet. He'd watched Jackson pass a couple of times. It was a shock to find that these great icons of the cause really lived and drew breath from the very air in that very tent there, the air he was presuming to breathe himself as soon as he could get in there.

At last Longstreet and Lee had come out and ridden off south, and Dignam had started buttoning his collar. He wore a long frock-coat his congregation had given him fifteen months ago. It was better than butternut – you could at least say that. Now he watched Sandie Pendleton and Kyd Douglas and the mapmaker Hotchkiss and Major Harman the profane quartermaster dash in and out of the tent, and hoped and feared he would soon be called in himself.

Well, that hope and fear got quashed. A general, one star, but a general none the less, rode up on a good bay and handed the reins to a guard. Then he barged into Jackson's tent. From his place under the oak the Reverend Dignam couldn't hear the details of the interview that was proceeding in there. He could hear enough, however, to know it wasn't a happy one. It wouldn't go any distance towards improving the General's temper.

At last the brigadier broke out of the tent, mounted his horse savagely, as if it were partly to blame, and gave it a swat with his reins. He left Jackson's headquarters at a gallop.

In the clearing, Kyd approached Dignam under his oak. The General had some time to talk to him now, Kyd said. He led Dignam to the tent and held back the flap for him.

When Major Dignam passed through into the tent the first thing he saw was the General's back. Jackson was sitting on a camp-table, not putting all his weight on it, for it wouldn't have taken it. The table was piled with sheets of paper. Dignam looked at them with a little reverence. They were likely letters from Jefferson Davis, and Judah Benjamin's office, and suchlike.

The General stood, sort of turned and discovered him there. He nodded curtly to Dignam and sat at the desk, but his eyes weren't on his visitor. Lord God, now give your humble servant guidance! prayed the major. The silence went on for a good half-minute before Dignam got the idea that he was the one supposed to talk.

‘Sir,' he stated, ‘I'm adjutant of the Shenandoah Volunteers of your old brigade. In my private life I am a Methodist preacher from Augusta County.'

There was no flicker from the General's eyes. Dignam thought, God help me, the man isn't even blinking, his eyelids are locked open.

‘On that account, sir, I am concerned for the soul of a particular man …'

‘We are all concerned for souls, Major …'

‘Dignam, sir.'

‘Major Dignam, we are all concerned for souls.'

‘This man is one of the three condemned to death for desertion.'

‘Oh.' The General found and picked up the appropriate piece of paper. ‘Which of the three. I suppose it's this Joe …'

‘Nunnally, sir. Yes.'

‘Nunnally is a conscript.'

‘Yessir. Very young. Very simple-minded. You know these mountain people.'

Dignam went red, remembering that the General himself liked to be thought of as a mountain man. ‘I mean, sir, the folks from way up and deep in the mountains.'

‘Nunnally is also a substitute, it says here. The prosecution laid it down straight to the court-martial that Nunnally intended to go somewhere fresh and sell himself all over again as a substitute.'

‘Sir, he got $60 for acting as substitute for some rich man's son. $60, General Jackson, isn't the sort of amount a cunning boy would be likely to take. If Joe Nunnally was worldly enough he would have known he could have got $200 at least in any big town.'

‘You make the whole trade sound honourable, Major. How much did you take when you substituted for someone?'

‘Nothing, General. I'm a volunteer, you know that.'

‘That's my exact point, Major Dignam. This whole money-for-substitution business is deep immoral.'

‘But that's not Joe Nunnally's fault, sir. It's the fault of …'

‘Yes, of the Confederate Congress, you might just as well say so, Major. But this Nunnally … you say he's not cunning.… When the cavalry fetched him in he was using another man's name. The name of a volunteer called …' Stonewall consulted the page ‘… Bumpass. A veteran of Romney and Kernstown and Port Republic, of the Seven Days in front of Richmond and of this last battle at Cedar Run. Now if he's cunning enough to foul a good man's name, you can be rocksure, Major Dignam, he's cunning enough to sell himself again, and this time for whatever price those rich skulkers see fit to pay.'

‘Sir,' said Dignam in a small voice, ‘he told me something in making his peace this morning. He said he deserted on account he felt that if he killed any more of his fellow men he would be cursed by God.'

The General's voice came out small too but Dignam felt it was sort of dangerous to be near it. ‘These people rile me. Could I ask you, is General Lee the accursed of God? Is Jefferson Davis? Is Bishop Leonidas Polk, who holds a general's commission in the Confederate army? Is the Reverend Moses D. Hoge the accursed of God? In the view of all these righteous men this war is pleasing in the nostrils of a just God. And then is a simple boy to come down off his mountain and tell us it isn't?'

The Reverend Dignam with his Methodist background, was used to the claims of a man's individual conscience. The General's idea that a man had no right to one, that only Jefferson Davis, Bishop Leonidas Polk and the Reverend Hoge had a right to one, seemed almost papist; and if General Jackson hadn't been General Jackson, then Major Dignam might just have found the authority or the courage to tell him that.

‘In that case,' said Dignam, and he didn't know
where
he got the courage for saying this, ‘consider your responsibility, General, before the Lord. You are sending this boy's soul to hell.'

As he'd feared it might, a terrible silence settled in on the tent then, one of those electric silences you get in woods in midsummer that beg to be broken by lightning. The General reached out and took him by the shoulders, and there was all at once great sideways pressure on the top of Dignam's body, and Dignam, a tall strong man himself, was amazed at the force Tom Jackson had in his wrists.

‘That is my business, sir. In a second you will go and do yours, for the sure-fire reason that you're about to be pushed out of this tent. My courts are too lenient. For once they've done the right thing and you ask me to sidewhack their decision. It's been suggested that only one man be shot, chosen by lot, but that suggestion seems to me to be nothing but a foul extension of this army's general weakness for gambling. Let me tell you this. You say you serve in a division that used to be mine. Well, in that division, during the recent engagement on Cedar Run, there were 1200 absentees through straggling, through feigned illness, through absence without leave. In Ewell's division there were 1600 absentees. These are losses inflicted on us by ourselves, major. So please do not pursue the matter of the sentence that has fallen on this boy. It has fallen with cause. It has also been upheld by General Lee and by the Secretary of War. Do you understand.'

Dignam was speechless. He was angry in the way that he wanted to hit the General, but he was awestruck too. At last he felt the pressure on his upper arms loosen off and the General looked at him with something close to friendship. ‘Now git!' he said. And Dignam, not knowing what else he could do, obeyed. Outside, he staggered up the road some few hundred yards, hid behind a tree and wept, biting his hands to stop the sound of his grief being too clear to anyone who happened to be on the road.

In his tent, Tom Jackson reflected that he'd been more talkative to Toombs and to this Methodist minister than he'd been to anyone, stranger or friend, on any day in the past six months. And he knew the reason. It was because he knew the army would go out after Pope now and chew him up in detail. His own three divisions, though thinner in numbers than he'd have liked, were in good heart as far as anyone could tell. The invasion of the North was inherent in what God had done to Pope at Cedar Run, and even in Pope's withdrawal from the river, the withdrawal from which Toombs would be punished. The invasion of the North lay coiled like an epiphany in his bowels and in Lee's, waiting to unravel. Under the canvas of his tent, General Tom Jackson raised a hand and touched the fabric of the ceiling. It was like he was welcoming the God of Battles.

17

Mrs Whipple arrived at the Orange depot late on a Tuesday night. She managed to hire one of the few carriages that had been waiting there for the much-delayed train, and so rode the short distance to the square brick seminary building across town.

It was a hot night and the front door of the building stood open. In the stonework above the door was chiselled ‘The Orange Lutheran Seminary for Young Ladies'. But all the girls had gone off to relatives in North Carolina or Richmond, and a drowsy buzz of male voices seemed to waft down from the upper floors. Mrs Whipple left the carriage and walked inside. Just beyond the front door stood a little glassed office, and in it sat a young surgeon, reading.

She knocked on the glass.

‘Ma'am?' he said.

‘I am the matron. Mrs Whipple is my name.'

‘Much pleased, ma'am. Curtis, ma'am, head surgeon on this side of the street. We have rooms ready for you, ma'am.'

Curtis showed her through the place, through the well-ordered and well-scrubbed dormitories and, at the end of each floor, a surgeon actually on duty! At night! ‘How many do you have here?'

‘I have 250 of our boys on this side of the road, and on the top floor some sixty Yankees.'

‘There's a warehouse too,' she said.

‘Across the road, ma'am. It … well, ma'am, it doesn't have the human advantages of this fine building.'

But she could tell that what he was trying to say was, it is not nearly as good a hospital.

‘I'd like to see it.'

‘Now?'

‘Yes.' She smiled. ‘I can see you know that sick men can suffer crises at night. I would be interested to see if the warehouse surgeon has the same ideas as you.'

Young Curtis coughed. ‘I think I'll go with you, if you don't mind, ma'am. The surgeon … Jimmy Canty … he's a harmless enough fellow but a little suspicious.'

So, in spite of the late hour, they left the seminary and crossed the street. From the far pavement, Mrs Whipple could smell the warehouse, that unwashed stink, that reek of urine and slack sanitary arrangements. Curtis knocked on the door for some three minutes before an orderly answered.

‘I'm the new matron,' Mrs Whipple said. ‘I would like to inspect these wards.'

‘You better come back in the morning, ma'am.'

‘What's your name, orderly? I should like to report to the Surgeon-General that you denied me entry to my own hospital …'

‘Oh goddam! Hoity-toit,' said the orderly, and swung the door wide.

‘Tell Surgeon Canty we're here,' Surgeon Curtis said, as he and Mrs Whipple came in. They began walking then through the wards, amongst all the sounds of pain and fevered sleep. ‘You see, ma'am,' Curtis said, being loyal to Canty. ‘There aren't the windows we have. Ventilation counts for a lot, ma'am.' In every ward they found boys with diarrhoea, some of them excreting in corners because ward-buckets had overflowed. At the approach of Mrs Whipple, these boys would stand up shamefaced and clutch their britches round their waist. Mrs Whipple blinked with the stench.

She and Curtis were on the steps to the second floor when a tall man of about forty came prancing down them. He looked sort of florid, and as soon as he started to talk, you could tell he'd been taking liquor.