I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (35 page)

I wiped my stinking hands on my trousers, grabbed my belongings and a bedroll from the tent and said a hasty farewell at the fireside. 'Here,' said one of the kindlier of the camp's many kindly ladies, trotting up as I climbed up into Gerry's pick-up. 'You won't eat well in the army.' She handed me a bulging knapsack, smiled bracingly, and watched us barrel off into the night.

Gerry's one weakness was a fondness for enigmatic silence. He kept his peace throughout the dark and bumpy drive, and maintained it when at length we pulled off the track. Our headlights picked out the dull glint of dirty metal; as we clunked open the doors I detected a restless equine whinnying, underpinned by a steady chorus of deeply masculine snores. Silhouetted in the glow of a dying fire a lanky, bow-legged figure shuffled down to meet us. Gerry exchanged whispered greetings with the young Dennis Weaver, conducted swift introductions which revealed that my host actually
was
named Dennis, then departed. 'Rest of the boys are asleep,' murmured Dennis, in a cowboy twang, motioning up at the fire and the tents I could now make out around it. 'Just, ah, make yourself comfortable where you can.' I watched as he crept off into the dark, then laid out my bedroll where I stood. Beside me loomed the vast spoked wheel of a gun carriage; above, framed by black pines, yawned a vast and star-peppered heaven. I shifted about, crushing most of the many boiled eggs in my knapsack, and lay there nurturing an excited thought: whatever greeted me when I awoke would come as a total surprise.

'You ugly
baaasssssstards
!'

The reveille did not disappoint. Two of the nine brown horses tied to a picket line strung out just beyond my feet were engaged in vicious hoof-to-face combat, and Dennis was separating them in kind: I watched in groggy confusion as he leapt clear of the ground and scissor-kicked the nearest participant extremely hard in the bottom. His work done, Dennis exhaled loudly, pulled a dark blue sergeant's jacket off its peg (the end of the cannon barrel), and extracted from this a packet of Marlboro. Having sparked one up with a Zippo lighter, he gave me a wink and said, 'Welcome to the Douglas Texas Battery, Confederate States Army, the only horsedrawn artillery unit west of the Mississippi.' Then, tracking my brow-furrowed gaze to his dark blue jacket and slipping into a disgruntled mumble, he added, 'Now galvanised to the damn Federals.'

I sat up, stuck my hat on and followed Dennis up to the two long, white tents. One was still home to loud snores; the four occupants of the other were trying to get some coffee going on the fire. Dennis began the introductions, but before he'd even got my name out, a portly young man let rip with a fart more compellingly repulsive than any of the several hundred that history had thus far exposed me to. A quavering anal symphony, it rose and fell and rose again, fading only at reluctant length into a drawn-out, buttock-stuttering coda. 'Oooo-eeee!' exclaimed the delighted artiste, slapping his sizeable navy-trousered backside with both hands. 'That's your beans talking, JD!'

My preconceptions of life in the Union artillery were almost entirely dismantled as the morning grew older. Most of the late risers emerged with filter-tipped cigarettes propped in stubbled mouths and partially deflated camping mattresses under their arms; our snack rations – dispensed by a man in Specsavers bifocals – comprised a sizeable Zip-Lock bag stuffed with dried fruit. 'Why ain't you got rubber soles?' called out an impatient young voice when one of our senior members slipped in the dewy grass for the second time. 'I mean, who's going to notice?'

They were nine in all: the youngest a well-fed kid of twelve, here with his well-fed pa – a Supervision Officer in the Smith County Corrections Department – and the eldest a wry and learned fellow called Russ, with something of the Walter Matthau about him, conspicuous in voice and demeanour as the solitary non-Texan. The man they called JD wasn't far behind him: a snow-haired, snow-tached old cowboy, whose enigmatic silence I would soon connect to advanced deafness. All but a couple were either below or well above call-up age; this, and the pervasive sense of spirited aimlessness, made it very hard to banish the spectre of
Dad's Army
.

We drank coffee and Coke and milled around the fire under a strengthening sun. Our cannon was a facsimile of a 2.9" Parrott rifle, one of the Civil War's most popular field pieces: cheap and easy to build, as manoeuvrable as three-quarters of a ton of iron was ever likely to be in the horsedrawn age, and capable of accurately dispatching a 10lb shell the best part of three miles.

Our flatulent maestro, name of Trey, extracted a mobile phone from his cartridge pouch and embarked on an incomprehensibly drawled shit-shooting discourse with a back-home buddy. No one seemed quite sure what was happening. The human casualties meant a rejigged schedule, but the organisers had apparently not accounted for the loss of two of our horses (Gerry's epoxy-hoof repair had yet to cure), or in fact three, now that a hideous and livid crescent-shaped haematoma was emerging from the unfortunate kickee's neck. Our captain – a man called Wayne with a healthy Van Dyck beard – drove away in search of instructions, and his underlings devoted the consequent hiatus to informing, and then severally reminding me, that none of them – with the possible exception of Russ – was fighting for the Union by choice. The Douglas Battery's seven years' experience of such events had been accrued in the Confederate cause; faced with a huge shortfall in Federal volunteers, the BGR organisers had been obliged to 'galvanise' many reluctant Southerners into donning the dark blue.

My, how this had stuck in the artillery crew's collective craw. The Union army was loudly and repeatedly encapsulated to me as 'rapists and pillagers', bent on destroying a proud and honourable way of life (I was regularly told, in contradiction of the academic consensus, that 'slavery weren't even part of the issue'). In consequence, all that fuelled these men was stubborn pride. As the sole artillery unit present at the event, the Douglas boys were all too aware that acquiring their weapon was a primary opposition objective: almost every pronouncement on the Confederacy's moral superiority came appended with the caveat that 'they still ain't getting our damn cannon'.

Presently Captain Wayne returned, a sombre and very different man. 'Right,' he said, climbing out of his pick-up and staring at each of us carefully. 'Is everybody rehydrated?' His subordinates exchanged level glances. 'Anybody need a rest?' Trey scratched an ear, then stooped to raise a wooden toolbox at his feet. Wayne saw him and shrieked. 'Don't lift that alone! And bend your legs, not your back!'

I'd by now deduced that Wayne's debrief had majored on yesterday's medical alarums, and the health-and-safety measures necessary to prevent a recurrence. Almost as an afterthought he added that the war was about to start without us, a couple of miles to the east. Having any hope of getting there before it finished meant loading everything – horses, cannon, us – into their fleet of vast and shiny pick-ups and trailers, very quickly. That this would not occur became obvious well before Wayne wound up his curiously jarring lecture. 'So if anyone's worried about a procedure, don't keep it to yourself. Speak up! Keeping quiet is a dangerous game.'

Navigational uncertainties compounded our predicament, and it was a full ninety minutes – and almost midday – before the distant sound of irregular musket fire drew us off the road. Wayne and Dennis trotted off into the heat-hazed woods towards the unseen battle; the guns fell silent soon after, and they returned downcast.

The next engagement was apparently scheduled for four o'clock, and the Union artillery abruptly worked itself up into a frenzy of determined atonement. After a lot of urgent whispering over maps, our convoy drew up at a roadside clearing: a four-strong reconnaissance party strode purposefully into the muddy, humid forest, and holding on to my hat I jogged off in pursuit.

Only after an hour did someone think to ask where we were going, and it was a great many squelching strides before the painful truth at last emerged: here was a 'but I thought
you
knew' situation, which had resulted in us playing follow-my-leader for several shoe-clogging miles. One damn blunder from beginning to end.

Our very quiet return journey was enlivened near its end by an ambush, which sent the sounds of revolver fire and human panic ricocheting through the trees. Satisfied from a very early point in the proceedings that this was all a friendly-fire nonsense, I barely bothered to take cover. Soon after, our colleagues, who had witnessed the regrettable denouement of this ill-fated mission, and long since established its farcical futility, greeted us with abusive jeers. Russ, a lone voice of muttering dissent throughout the dilatory indecision that had occupied the morning, came up to whisper what would be his catch-all verdict on most unit activities: 'Now, what you saw then was
not good
.' Then Wayne stomped up with a plastic jerrycan and almost forcibly rehydrated the pair of us.

It was gone three now; with an air of frustrated hopelessness we piled into the pick-ups, shot off in a cloud of orange dust and disembarked a couple of miles down the road. At last those seven years of experience manifested themselves. Horses were led briskly out of trailers, and four attached to the limber that bore our cannon. Equipment and supplies were hurled into the back of two wagons, one for each remaining horse, and then with a great purgative yee-hah the Union artillery was rattling off through the Kisatchie Forest. A stirring sight indeed, though for me also a rather disheartening one: by accident, or design, I was obliged to jog after them on foot.

After half an hour, the pops and cracks of nineteenth-century warfare asserted themselves above my ragged exhalations. My unit had long since vacated the undulating horizon ahead; with a lung-torching, waistcoat-ripping last effort I caught up just as they were preparing to push on to the front line. The trail had ended at a hilltop clearing ringed by hefty, venerable oaks: perhaps 200 yards away, and half as many below us, a thin line of men in blue were exchanging rifle volleys with an unseen foe. Between us lay dense pine forest, heavily sprinkled with large rocks and veined with rain-swollen streams. It was hopeless: Wayne issued a thwarted sigh, and lithely dismounted. 'We can still give supporting fire from up here,' he said, and had no sooner done so when Dennis – astride the horse that headed the four hauling our ten-pounder – yanked up his reins and with a rousing bellow thundered suicidally down the hill. Our captain launched into a complicated burst of precautionary instructions that dwindled into Denniscentred profanity; the rest of us stared for a moment, watching the cannon limber bucking off rocks and sideswiping tree after tree, a runaway ton of very loud trouble. Then, as one, we charged off in hazardous pursuit.

Reliving the moment round the campfire that evening, none of us was at all sure how Dennis, four horses and our cannon – how desperately this tale called for a fond epithet, a Barbara or a Catherine, but there was none – had arrived at the front line intact. In the breathless heat of the moment, though, there was no time to appraise this tremendous feat of horsemanship and lunatic bravado. When I scrambled down to the cannon, one shoe in hand, I found Dennis already detaching his steaming horses from the limber, hard up against a dozen weary, war-soiled Union infantrymen, gunpowdered cheeks resting on rifle stocks as – crack, crack-crack – they let off another faltering volley at an uphill enemy I could hear but not see. It was still and sunny, and a fog of gunsmoke hung in the wooded valley; when it thinned, I spotted perhaps eight lines of Federal riflemen in the trees around us, loading and ramming as they prepared to return the latest Confederate fusillade.

The artillery crew were now up to full strength – in essence this comprised our unit's four most senior members, minus JD – and manoeuvring their weapon into position. Only now did I notice the violently detached vegetation lodged plentifully in its trunk-scuffed wheels. There was a lot of shouting, but all of it tightly focused: 'Number Three! Get on the right side, ready to prime!' 'Number Four, ready!' A grandly moustachioed Union commander, majestically costumed but careworn in demeanour, trudged up and distractedly approved our request to open fire. Russ, the Number Four, stretched out an arm towards the little priming lanyard – the only obvious departure from a procedure I'd last enacted nearly 400 years previously – and with a dainty little tug unleashed a thunderous, valley-shattering explosion. The world shimmered, then froze; it was long, long seconds before an enemy rifleman summoned the wherewithal to discharge his feeble and pointless weapon. Swab, ram, prime, boom, repeat . . . I watched as Douglas's Texas Battery burst gloriously to galvanised life.

It was a period rush all right, full strength and class A. And look at me go – an embedded reporter out on the front lines, wafting aside the fog of war with a steady hand, grimly prepared to sacrifice himself on the altar of unvarnished truth. I would tell my readers of peace and beauty reduced to a human hell defined by fear and furious noise, of heroism and salt pork, of unplanted turnips and $100 Mexican brides, of . . . of some old bloke asking if you fancy a go on his cannon, and you pull this little wire loop, and fuck almighty . . .

If Russ hadn't wished me to react to what followed as I did – imagine Thor scoring a decisive last-minute Superbowl touchdown – then he has only himself to blame for failing to explain that the crew had just packed in a double charge. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

Three earth-moving cacophonies later the Union commander waved an arm to silence us; with the big red sun dipping behind a hill, it was time to call it a day. We hitched up the limber and threaded the horses carefully through the trees, crunching across a forest floor scattered with shreds of cartridge paper and – a dark glint in the leaves – Dennis's Colt revolver, thrown from its holster by the rigours of his reckless descent.

Too late now to move on: we pitched camp at the clearing. I dragged bits of dead tree in from the undergrowth and tossed them on JD's fledgling fire, then sat down in a shrinking triangle of sunlight and systematically ingested the entire contents of my emergency-ration knapsack. I'd moved on to air-sealed dried fruit when the prison officer came up, handed me a hefty old revolver and shyly insisted that I follow him.