The Bride of Texas (41 page)

“Fire!” the officer shouted. His assistant began turning the crank and, inured though they were to the noise of war, all of them jumped when the machine began exploding like a whole
squad of riflemen, emitting a steady stream of flashes, belching smoke like a chimney, as the artillery officer slowly moved the rudder from one side to the other and the barrels on the opposite slope toppled one by one. The officer barked another order, and his assistant stopped turning the crank.

The officer turned to the general. “General, sir?”

“Hmmm,” said the general. “If every battery had two of these.…” He paused while the sergeant tried to estimate how many men it would take the place of. “Let me try it,” said the general.

The officer stepped away from the rudder, but the general reached for the crank and began to turn it. The officer took the rudder again. Again the machine let off its thrilling staccato racket, while smoke poured out of the muzzle and the reset barrels toppled over again. Then something happened: a part flew off the barrel, the general gasped and let go of the crank, the noise stopped suddenly, and there was General Sherman hopping around the contraption on one leg, filling the air with curses.

For three days after the demonstration the general walked with a bad limp. The contraption did not become part of the armament of Sherman’s great army.

By this time, as a member of his staff, the sergeant was also getting to know the face of war most familiar to the general. By night, civilians would arrive on horseback and slip inside the general’s tent; when the wind blew the tent flaps open, the sergeant sometimes saw the general’s reddish head by the light of a candle, as Sherman watched intently while a civilian’s finger traced a path across a map. Next day the army would make a large detour. There would be a lot of grumbling about how unnecessary it was but the sergeant knew it made sense, even though it often didn’t in the long run. He was gradually learning the art that the general was studying — by a process of trial and error that often had the ambulances filled and dripping
with blood. There was confusion, but now and then the confusion would settle into patterns that could be understood, briefly, before reverting to chaos again. Maps were less than precise; reports from the scouts and spies who came by night were often full of inconsistencies. Cleverness distorted the art, faulty observation distorted intelligence. On one occasion the enemy fortifications seemed to bristle with cannon, but when the frustrated general captured the position in a dangerous attack the cannon turned out to be wooden — yet when Lieutenant Bain delivered an angry kick to one of the harmless muzzles, hornets swarmed out of the hollow interior and stung him so badly that he died a hero’s death. After the battle, they found a prostrate Rebel bass-horn player on the battlefield. He told them how General Beauregard compelled his one band to make exhausting marches up and down the long meandering battlefront, stopping every quarter of a mile to play a different tune, fortissimo, to make General Butler, who was listening closely from the Union palisades, think there were many different regimental bands and hence many different regiments facing his depleted ranks. That night the Union general withdrew his division from the battlefront, defeated by a single weary band.

Kapsa, having retreated to the infirmary with a violent two-week bout of the Kansas quickstep, heard a story from General Rosecrans’s cook, who was recovering from a bayonet wound he’d received at Chickamauga. Rosecrans was another apprentice in this nascent art, and he’d stood restless and impatient listening to a sharp-eared old woman outside a rough-hewn log cabin on a hilltop near Chickamauga. A cannon boomed from the woods in the valley, and the woman said, “That there, that would be from some place near Reed’s Bridge.” General Rosecrans nervously examined his poorly drawn map but couldn’t find Reed’s Bridge. Another cannon sounded from the woods and the old woman said, “Now that there, that could be from
Kelly’s farm.” But the farm wasn’t on the map; instead, the general found Reed’s Bridge where the farm should have been. A third cannon roared. The old woman fingered the warts on her chin and shook her head. “Now that there, I can’t rightly say. Could be Connolly’s Grove — but then again, maybe not.” General Rosecrans found Connolly’s Grove on the map but it was a long way from where the sound of the third cannon had echoed from. Then he remembered that the old woman had admitted having a son with Hook’s division; although she’d sworn her loyalty to the Union cause, she might well be — indeed, everything suggested that she was — deliberately misleading him. So he gave up on her information but not on her method — he simply began listening for himself. The individual cannon blended into a basso profundo, interrupted now and then by the crackle of rifle fire. The old woman scowled at him through the window of the log cabin as he paced back and forth shouting, “That’s Brownlow attacking!” And a while later, “No, Brownlow is just starting his attack now!” And then, “That’s Negley! Running a little late!” In the end, the method proved a complete failure. Ordinary courage and butchery prevented the worst, but the Battle of Chickamauga was won, without much glory, by Braxton Bragg.

And yet the apprentices were gradually becoming journeymen, if not masters, of the art, which was why the sergeant understood his general’s certainty when he reassured General Davis: “There’s no infantry standing in our path, Jeff. All they have is a few squadrons of cavalry. Sweep them aside and you’re fine. We’ll meet tomorrow at Cox’s Bridge.”

Several days earlier, in a house near Cheraw that he had chosen for his quarters that night, Sherman had found evidence that
General Hardee had recently stayed there. The evidence included a New York
Tribune
only a few days old, and the paper made him as angry as he’d been at Vicksburg. “God damn that scoundrel Greeley!” he cursed as he read the editorial. “Journalistic scum!”

Hardee had in fact slept in the little house the night before, and had undoubtedly read the paper as well. By sending Slocum’s battalion towards Raleigh, Sherman had hoped to trick Hardee and Johnston into thinking that he intended to force a battle for the capital of North Carolina. They would then have diverted their weary regiments towards Raleigh, and cleared his way to Goldsboro and the port and Morehead City, where he planned to meet up with a flotilla carrying supplies from Savannah, put his men in new uniforms, and, thus refreshed, strike the decisive blow of the war and smash the Confederacy to a pulp. But the publisher of the Tribune had tried his hand at strategic analysis with unfortunate accuracy: “The next time we hear from Sherman will be from Goldsboro,” Greeley wrote. “We have determined that the supply-vessels from Savannah are to rendezvous with Sherman’s forces in Morehead City.”

The general was all the more furious the next day, when he found indications that Hardee had read and understood the editorial all too well. Six miles south of the village of Averasboro — at a spot where the two rivers on either side of Slocum’s advance, the Cape Fear River and the Black River, were less than four miles apart — Hardee had posted General Taliaferro’s infantry division right in the way of General Kilpatrick’s reconnaissance units, and had forced a battle the general would gladly have avoided.

Damn Greeley!

During the battle, Sherman behaved in a way Kapsa had never seen before. While Kakuska sweated to help put up the
barricades Kil had ordered to halt the advance of Taliaferro’s infantry, and while Shake in the Twentieth Corps sweated with fear because he desperately wanted to live to see the war’s end, which was now indisputably imminent, and while the pandemonium of battle — the first the Twentieth Corps had seen since the battle of Atlanta almost nine months before — continued long into the night and started again early the next morning, Sherman and his staff sat well beyond the range of the guns. The general wore a grim expression and seemed to be in a trance. The sergeant knew why. Thanks to one man’s journalistic ambitions, his work of art was being destroyed in the bottleneck between Cape Fear and the Black, and his soldiers were paying for Greeley’s scoop with their blood.

Indeed, the main reason Hardee engaged Sherman at Averasboro was to find out if Greeley was right in speculating that Sherman’s apparent march towards Raleigh was just a feint. When Hardee ordered a retreat, and when the spies and prisoners began to trickle into the woods where Sherman sat frustrated amid his bewildered staff, the stories they told revealed a surprising fact: Slocum’s successful resistance had convinced Hardee that Greeley had been wrong. Evidently, Hardee had concluded from the encounter that Sherman was not heading for Goldsboro after all, but intended to fight a decisive battle at Raleigh.

They were all still learning the art of war.

At noon on March 17 — St. Patrick’s Day — the general ordered Slocum’s battalion to move north-east, towards Bentonville and Cox’s Bridge, while Hardee and Johnston’s troops — so the general thought — were marching north-west to protect Raleigh. The work of art was salvaged, and the regiments and companies and gun batteries and the column of supply wagons of Sherman’s great army rolled on towards Bentonville in the drenching spring rain.

The rain stopped, the moon appeared and lit the blossoming apple trees, while in the distance in Bentonville a few tiny lights glimmered in the dark, and Shake was telling the others about how his Readers’ Circle scheme had failed
.

He used to lend his five books out, but at that time Latin script was all the rage in Bohemia, and when he finally succeeded, with the help of Molly Kakuska, in assembling a Readers’ Circle, Padecky came to him and said, “Look, man, I can’t read this, it’s impossible!”

“What do you mean?” Shake was offended. “Such a beautiful story, so moving! Weren’t you moved by Viktorka’s fate? What are you, insensitive?”

“Bugger insensitive. I can’t read it!” said Padecky, putting his spectacles on his nose
.

“Maybe you need to clean your specs,” advised Shake, and Padecky lost his temper
.

“Here, dammit, Molly, take a look at this,” he said, shoving the book into the hands of Molly Kakuska, who hadn’t gotten a book since there weren’t enough to go around, even though she was the heart and soul of the Readers’ Circle. She opened the book eagerly, but stared at the pages like the proverbial calf at a new barnyard gate, related Shake at Bentonville
.

“Mr. Schweik,” she said, “it’s not in Czech! It must be German.”

“What do you mean, German?” Shake grabbed the book out of Molly’s hand
.

“Just a minute,” Sergeant Kapsa interrupted Shake’s story. “I thought you weren’t allowed to cross the Kakuskas’ threshold.”

“I wasn’t,” said Shake. “But I didn’t have to. With a single hold, I scared the wits out of her, but I also charmed her, so she used to come to me for advice.”

“What ‘hold’?” asked Houska suspiciously. “You wrestle? You?”

The army coarsens a man, and war even more so
.

This was when the sergeant finally learned why Mother Kakuska had banned Shake from her house
.

The moon had been shining into the Kakuskas’ modest castle while, outside, the Czechs were trying to figure out a way to pry out the nails. Shake already knew what should be done; he just needed to look inside to see if the structure had a floor and any foundations that would complicate his ingenious solution. He walked around the cabin to the door, and entered. In a shaft of moonlight he saw a firm young breast, like alabaster, but when he touched it — how could one resist touching it? — it was warm and resilient. Molly gave a sigh, opened her eyes, and was terrified to see Shake looking at her like an obscene Jesuit. He wasn’t the least bit obscene, just young and horny. She smacked his hand, covered her breast with her nightie, then gave Shake a resounding slap across the face. He ran out of the little house while Molly went to Tereza to complain
.

Shake didn’t appeal to Molly, but it was the first time in her life a man had touched her like that, and something in her was aroused. So when she happened to meet the culprit on the corner of Van Buren and Canal streets, instead of sticking her nose in the air she said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Schweik.” Shake caught fire, and they began to meet. She never let him get anywhere, of course, since by this time Schroeder, the engineer, was expressing serious interest in her too. She merely started to help Shake with the Readers’ Circle, because, when he wanted to, Shake could be extremely persuasive — although in Molly’s case it did him no good. “German, what do you mean, German?” he asked woefully
.

“ ’Cause I can’t read it!”

That was how Shake discovered that his compatriots were literate only in Gothic type. In the meantime, Latin type had come into fashion in Bohemia, from where his sister, patriot that she was, had sent his book
.