The Bride of Texas (85 page)

“Wait — it’s Kapsa, right?”

“Yes, general, sir!” replied the sergeant.

Toronto, 1984–1991
DEO GRATIAS

In the Czech archives of the University of Chicago, while doing research for my novel
Dvorak in Love
, I came across 19th century issues of the Czech-American farmers’ almanach
Amerikán
. In them I found stories about the Czech soldiers of the Civil War, and also brief memoirs written by the veterans. Searching on, I discovered other sources:
Josef Cermak
’s invaluable
History of the Civil War with Experiences of Czech Soldiers Attached
(1889) which gives the names of Czech participants in most major battles of the conflict; Rudolf Bubenicek’s
History of the Czechs in Chicago
(1939); Thomas Capek’s
The Czechs (Bohemians) in America
(1920), and other books and articles.

My interest was aroused and I decided that, after I finish my Dvorak book, I’ll try my hand at a novel about the war from an angle which, to my knowledge, had never been attempted. My intentions were patriotic in the old fashioned sense: I would do my best to create a sort of memorial of the men who, far from their native land then under Austrian despotism, fought for the country which, unlike Europe, promised hope for a life worth living.

With the exception of Jan Amos Shake, all other Czech soldiers are real. They fought in various units of the Union Army, some in 26 Wisconsin. For the purpose of my novel I put them all there.

Trying to compute their numbers I failed, as others before me. I went through the card catalogue in the U.S. Army
Military History Institute in Carlisle Barracks, PA, but after examining several hundred cards, I gave up. The trouble was that far too many Czechs have German names, and since army registers almost never gave the ethnicity of the common soldiers it is impossible to decide whether a Konig, a Miller or a Frohlich was Czech, German, Austrian or Jewish. Besides, Czechs in America also anglicized their unpronounceable names, or Army clerks distorted them, so that a Skrzkrk became a Skirk, a Frkac turned into a Fircut, and a Machane, due to Yankee pronunciation, metamorphosed into a Scot, MacHane.

For these reasons it is hardly possible to determine exact numbers. Thomas Capek quips that “the Czechs provided the United States Army with more musicians than generals,” but, except for adding that the number of Czech generals was zero, he does not give any data either for the musicians, or for the common soldiers. He mentions four officers of whom I found only two listed in the
Official Army Register
.

My own, admittedly unreliable, estimate is about 300 combatants. The U.S. Department of Commerce
A Century of Population Growth
(1909) lists 26,061 immigrants from the Austrian countries recorded by the census of 1860, on the eve of the war. Josef Chada in
The Czechs in the United States
(1981) opines that the “largest fraction” of these Austrian immigrants were Czechs but he, too, fails to provide numbers: the census did not take notice of ethnic origins. If I, rather arbitrarily, take 20.000 for the basis of my computation, assuming that more than half of these were women, children and old or infirm men, the percentage of able bodied men who joined the army would be about 3 per cent.

However, those who saw service, judging by their brief memoirs and by the few honorable mentions in unit histories I have read (e.g. Zinkule acknowledged in Captain U.G. Alexander’s
History of the Thirteenth Regiment United States
Infantry
, 1905) acquitted themselves well on the battlefield. Perhaps, even in a huge army, it is quality rather than quantity which counts.

Having lived over one half of my life in a Communist country, I became allergic to Marxist interpretations of the Civil War. They tended — and for what I know, may still tend — to dismiss or, at best, grossly underestimate concepts that see the conflict also — if not mainly — in terms of the liberation of the slaves. The communist historians I read described the war exclusively as a clash between the interests of northern capitalists and southern plantation owners for which, in the North, emancipation only provided a smokescreen and, in the South, the issue of state rights served a similar purpose. This seemed to me like spitting on the graves of the soldiers — an emotional reaction, to be sure. But there is also a rational argument: “Although there were serious differences between the (South and the North), all of them except slavery could have been settled through the democratic process … (Slavery) was not the only cause of the Civil War, but it was unquestionably the one cause without which the war would not have taken place.” (Bruce Catton,
Short History of the Civil War
, 1960).

I resented another popular recent opinion which sees in Sherman the originator of total war. As a youngster, I encountered this killer-warlord image of the general in the Nazi weekly
Signal
. There Sherman’s military strategy was used to mock allied criticism of Goebbel’s notorious
Totalkrieg
speech, and to defend the
Propagandaminister
against allegations of being the one who instigated universal butchery.

I see Sherman differently.

It has never been clear to me how historians can blame Sherman for this kind of warfare. All one needs to know in order to refute the dubious credit is to read the Old Testament,
or be aware of the 15th century Hussite warriors’ battle song “Hit hard, kill, don’t spare anyone”, or remember the war practice of the
condottieri
in Italy, etc. Compared to them, Sherman is a true American innocent who scorched enemy land to shorten the war but never killed civilians on purpose.

The revisionist criticism of the general brought to my mind Graham Greene’s recommendation that writers should focus on characters ripe for universal condemnation rather than on heroes whom everybody likes. I felt I found such a character in the much maligned and ridiculed General Ambrose Burnside, and tried to treat him in the light of my late friend’s and patron’s advice. For this I found support in Craig Davidson Tenney’s dissertation on Burnside.

J.S.

Czech sources are listed in the Czech edition of the novel which, as
Nevesta z
Texasu
, was published by Sixty-Eight Publishers, Corp., Toronto in 1992.