Shiloh (5 page)

When I watched him drill the militia at Georgetown after he
finished at the Academy—he graduated far down the list and had almost every
demerit possible marked against his name for deportment—I got the idea he hated
the army. Seeing him stand so straight and severe, maneuvering the troops about
the courthouse square, I thought how different this was from what he would
prefer to be doing. Then the Mexican War broke out, and though he only had some
administrative job down there, we heard that he had distinguished himself under
fire, going after ammunition or something.

Next thing we knew, he had married into a slave-owning
family down Missouri way—which was something of a joke because Old Man Grant
had been one of the original Abolitionists in our county. However much West
Point might have changed him, his method of asking his girl to marry him was
just like the
Ulyss
we had known back home. The way I
heard it, they were crossing a flooded bridge, the buggy jouncing, and the girl
moved over and took his arm and said, "I'm going to cling to you no matter
what happens" (she was a Missouri girl, all right) and when they were safe
on the other side Grant said to her, "How would you like to cling to me
for the rest of your life?"

For five or six years after that we didn’t hear of him at
all. Then one day everybody knew about him. Stationed on the West Coast, away
from his family, he took to brooding and finally drank himself right out of the
army. His father-in-law gave him an
eighty
-acre farm
near St Louis. Grant cleared the land himself, then built a log house there and
named it Hard-scrabble. It was about this time that a man from home went down
to the city on business and came back saying he'd seen Grant on the street,
wearing his old army fatigue clothes and selling kindling by the bundle, trying
to make ends meet. But it was no go. He sold out and went into town, where he
tried to be a real-estate salesman.

Now you’d think if ever a man had a chance to succeed at
anything, it would surely be in real estate in St Louis in the '50s. But that
was no go either. So Grant moved up to Galena, Illinois, where his brothers ran
a leather business, and went to work selling hides for a living, the occupation
he had hated so much twenty years before. Mostly, though, he just sat around
the rear of the store, for he was such a poor salesman that the brothers did
what they could to keep him away from their customers. He had a highborn wife
and four children to support, and at thirty-eight he was a confirmed failure in
every sense of the word.

Then came Sumter. But at first not even the declaration of
war seemed to offer him an opportunity. He served as drill-master of the Galena
volunteers, but when the troops marched away he stayed behind because his
position was not official. Then his real chance came. The governor made him a
colonel in charge of recruit training at a camp near Springfield, and not long
afterwards he picked up a St Louis newspaper and read where he'd been made a
brigadier. This had been at the insistence of an Illinois congressman who
claimed the appointment for Grant as his share of the political spoils. No one
was more surprised than Grant himself.

He was neither pro nor anti on the slavery question, though
his father had been an Abolitionist and his wife had kept her two Negroes with
her all through her marriage. A proclamation he issued in Kentucky—"I have
nothing to do with opinions. I shall deal only with armed rebellion and its
aiders and abettors"— first attracted the attention of the government
which was having its troubles with generals who were also politicians. But it
was not until the Battle of Belmont that they began to see his fighting
qualities. Then the double capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, especially the
unconditional surrender note he sent to his old friend Buckner, made his name
known everywhere.

This coming
great Battle of Corinth will be fought not more than a month from now. The
Rebels are massing & we are massing too — & soon I shall go down &
get our revenge for Bull Run. After that I’m sure to get a furlough & we
shall be together again. It seems so long. Martha, I give you fair warning now
— nothing but Unconditional Surrender, I propose to move immediately upon your
works. (For goodness sake don’t let anybody see this not even a peek.)

It gave us confidence just to see Grant ride among us in his
rumpled private's blouse, looking calm and composed no matter what came up and
always smoking a cigar. (He'd smoked a pipe before. But after Donelson, people
sent him so many boxes of cigars he felt obliged to smoke them.) The soldiers
never put much stock in all the tales about him drinking and carousing, for we
saw him daily in the field. There may have been those little whiskey-lines around
his eyes, but they were there before the war. We knew that he had seen to it
himself that the whiskey would not get him this time, the way it had done eight
years before, and here was how he did it:

He had an officer on his staff named Rawlins, a young hard-faced
man in his late twenties, dark complexioned with stiff black hair to match.
He'd been a lawyer in Galena, handling legal affairs for the Grant brothers'
leather store; that was how Grant met him. As soon as he made brigadier. Grant
sent for Rawlins and put him on his staff. Rawlins had a gruff manner with
everyone, the general included. Other staff officers said he was insubordinate
twenty times a day. That was what Grant wanted: someone to take him in hand if
he ever let up. I saw his bold, hard signature often on papers passing over my
desk—
Jno
A Rawlins —and you could tell, just by the
way he wrote it, he wouldn’t take fooling with. There was a saying in the army:
"If you hit Rawlins on the head, you’ll knock Grant's brains out,"
but that wasn’t true. He was not Grant's brains. He was Grant's conscience, and
he was a rough one.

So that was the way it was. There had been flurries of snow
at first (the sunny South! we cried) but we were too busy clearing our camp
sites to think about marching, anyhow. Soon afterward the weather cleared, half
good days, half bad, and Sherman made a practice of sending us down the road
toward Corinth on conditioning marches with flankers out and a screen of
pickets, just the way it would be when we moved for keeps. It was fine
training. Occasionally there would be run-ins with Rebel cavalry, but they
would never stand and fight. We'd see them for a moment, gray figures on
scampering horses, with maybe a shot or two like hand-claps and a little pearly
gob of smoke coming up; then they would vanish. That was part of our training,
being shot at.

It was during this period that Colonel Appier and I began to
fall out. He had a wild notion that all members of his command, cooks and
clerks and orderlies included, should not only be well-versed in the school of
the soldier, but also should take part in all the various tactical exercises.
That was all right for theory, perhaps, but of course when it came to putting
it into practice it didn’t work. In the first place they made poor soldiers and
in the second place it interfered with their regular duties and in the third
place it wasn’t fair in the first place. All my clerks complained, and some of
them even applied for transfer. One or the other, they said; not both.

So I went to the colonel and put my cards on the table. He
was angry and began to bluster, complaining that he could never get his orders
carried out without a lot of grousing. He said all headquarters personnel were
born lazy—and he looked straight at me as he said it. Finally he began to hint
that maybe I didn’t like being shot at. Well, truth to tell, I had no more
fondness for being shot at than the next man, but I wasn’t going to stand there
and take that kind of talk, even if he was my regimental commander. I saluted
and left. Next morning when I checked the bulletin board I saw that I'd been
put on O D for the night.

If this had been an ordinary, personal sort of feud I would
have been enjoying my revenge already. Colonel Appier had been making a fool of
himself, the laughingstock of the whole army, for the past three days. He was a
highstrung sort of person anyhow, jumpy, given to imagining the whole Rebel
army was right outside his tent-flap. Friday afternoon, April fourth, a
regiment on our left lost a picket guard of seven men and an officer, gobbled
up by the grayback cavalry, and when the colonel advanced a company to develop
the situation they ran into scattered firing, nothing serious, and came back
without recovering the men.

All day Saturday Colonel Appier was on tenterhooks. We felt
really ashamed for him. Other outfits began to call us the Long Roll regiment
because we had sounded the alarm so often. The last straw came that afternoon.
A scouting party ran into the usual Rebel horsemen and the colonel sent me back
with a message to General Sherman that a large force of the enemy was moving
upon us. I was angry anyhow because I had found just that morning that he'd put
me on O D that night, and then after dinner he'd made me accompany him on the
scout so I wouldn’t have time to get properly ready for guard mount. Now he was
adding the crowning indignity by making me carry one of his wild alarms, crying
Wolf again for the God-knows-
whatth
time, back to the
general himself. I knew the reception I'd get at division headquarters,
especially if Sherman turned that redheaded temper on me. My hope was that he
would be away on inspection or something. Then all I would have to put up with
would be the jeers of the adjutant and the clerks.

As luck would have it, I met the general riding down the
road toward our position, accompanied by an aide and an orderly. When I told
him what Colonel Appier had said, he clamped his mouth in a line. I could see
he was angry—he'd received that message from the colonel too many times
already. But he didn’t say anything to me; he clapped the spurs to his horse,
and soon we came to a clearing where Colonel Appier and some of his staff were
standing beside the road with their horses' reins in their hands.

Colonel Appier began to tell Sherman how many Rebs there
were in the woods out front. He was excited; he flung his arms around and
stretched his eyes. Sherman sat there patiently, hearing him through and
looking into the empty woods. When the colonel had finished, Sherman looked
down at him for almost a full minute, saying nothing. Then he jerked the reins,
turning his horse toward camp. As he turned he spoke to Colonel Appier
directly.

"Take your damned regiment back to Ohio," he said,
snapping the words. "Beauregard is not such a fool as to leave his base of
operations and attack us in ours. There is no enemy nearer than Corinth."

And he rode away. It was certainly a rebuke to Colonel
Appier, administered in the presence of his men. I heard at least one of them
snigger.

Charley
Gregg has been promoted First Lieut. in Co G. He bought himself an armored vest
in Saint Louis & clanks when he walks. The man who sold it to him said if
it did not stop
bulLet’s
, bring it back & he would
give him another. Ha
Ha
! You would not catch me
wearing a thing like that — it would be like admitting in public you were
afraid. The men make jokes about getting him out with tin snips but Charley
likes it & wears it all the time clanking.

Dawn had come while I was writing my letter. It was cool and
clear, the Lord's day and a fine one. Somewhere out front, over toward the
right, the pickets already were stirring. There was a rattle of firing from
that direction—two groups of soldiers, grayback horsemen and a bunch of our
boys, earning a living—but that meant nothing more than that there were some
nervous pickets on the line for the first time, itching to bum a little powder
and throw a little lead the way they always did, shooting at shadows for the
sake of something to write home about. It died away and the birds began to
sing.

The guard tent, facing northwest so that the sun came up in
the rear, was out in an open field a few hundred yards short of a swale which
crossed the center of the clearing. In the swale there was a small stream with
a thin screen of willows and water oaks along its banks. The willows were green
already but the oaks had just begun to bud. I could see through the fringe of
trees the field continuing for a few more hundred yards to where it ended
abruptly against a line of heavy woods at its far margin. Sherman's
headquarters tent had been pitched directly in rear of the guard tent, out of
sight across the road. Shiloh Chapel was to the right rear, visible through the
trees which were
tinted
blood-red now, the color
moving down as the sun rose higher.

Near at hand but out of sight, between the guard tent and
division headquarters, the cooks were up. I could hear two of them talking
above the rattle of pots and pans. I could even recognize their voices. One was
Lou Treadway; he was from Georgetown. Back home he always had his pockets full
of tracts and was ever ready to talk salvation to anyone who would listen—or to
anyone who wouldn’t, for that matter. He knew his Bible, cover to cover, and at
the drop of a hat he'd expound on a text, usually an obscure one that gave him
plenty of room to move around in. He was a little wrong in the head, but a good
cook.

"Take that chapel yonder," he was saying.
"It's called Shiloh. You know what that means, brother?"

"Can’t say I do," the other cook said. By the
sound of his voice, he was plenty weary of Lou's eternal preaching. But this
was Sunday and Lou was all wound up. There was no way of stopping him.