The Bride of Texas (9 page)

After that he lost ten pounds. I knew something about how that had happened, but I didn’t tell him; the immediate cause of his weight loss was an inappropriate topic of conversation in mixed company. But among the officers with whom my philosopher husband liked to smoke his pipe, it was an open secret that Ambrose had caught dysentery in the Mexican war, and that its unpleasant consequences continued to torment him. They never returned in the heat of battle; mortal danger wasn’t something that inspired fear in Ambrose. They came back when he was attempting to follow orders that brought him up against his own limitations.

In my company, of course, he spoke only of an undefined ailment that had temporarily struck him down in the Mexican War; had it not been for his orderly, Robert Holloway, who had also been with him in New Mexico on the campaign against the Apaches, he said, heaven knew he might well have succumbed to the — ah — affliction.

Robert Holloway was a Negro, a circumstance that — albeit indirectly — may have played a role in the dramatic events of the spring of 1863 in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois.

Ambrose arrived and, as they say in novels (even in mine, I admit), my heart skipped a beat. Time and suffering had done him no damage. On the contrary, they had only enhanced his masculine charms. True, his forehead now went all the way back to the nape of his neck, but his magnificent chestnut beard was the same as ever and his eyes held a wealth of experience garnered between that hysterical conversation at the Connersville train station and this afternoon in my parlour in
Cincinnati. He had indeed lost weight, a fact that was underlined by the cut of his dark blue uniform, and the gold belt with a pistol slung low on one side and his sword, with a big gold tassel, on the other. He held a Union general’s hat in his hand and his smile seemed to indicate that he was actually pleased, after all those years, to see the cause of the first major disgrace in his life. Time is indeed a sieve; the horrors of that courtship were a thing of the past. He turned his radiant gaze to little Jimmy, who bowed politely, and then to Loretta, who took after me and, despite the frills and bows that made her look like a sugarplum, was turning into a shameless tomboy. Still, she managed a relatively passable curtsy, and Ambrose then turned to me. “You didn’t want to marry, Lorraine, but you couldn’t escape it. With all the consequences.”

To my own surprise, I lost my head again at the sight of him and I felt — though briefly — as I had years ago in front of Mr. Jenkins’s saloon on Main Street. When he sat down in the armchair and crossed his legs in those shiny boots, he was surrounded by that aura of charm so mysteriously irresistible to ladies — and I was now a lady. I exercised self-control, of course. After all, romantic love was the coin I dealt in, and that is a far better protection against losing one’s head entirely than motherhood is. In fact, motherhood, as our daily press constantly confirms, is no protection at all. We began reminiscing — in other words, gossiping — about mutual friends and, as we drifted together down the stream of time, I overcame my momentary weakness and landed back on my feet. “And did you hear that Sarah Withers married and moved to England?” I asked.

“Sarah? Wasn’t she your bridesmaid in …?”

I flushed and said quickly, “Sarah, quiet but deep, and now she’s a countess.”

I told him her story. It sounded as though it might have come from one of my novels, and Ambrose wondered aloud at the paradoxes of marriage-brokering in Liberty, which did not surprise me in the least, and led me to ask, “Do you have any news of Maggie Rogers? I somehow lost track of —”

“She married some officer in St. Louis,” Ambrose said, almost curtly, and my cheeks flushed again. You idiot, I said to myself, and quickly changed the subject to my children. Ambrose sat in the plush armchair, the very picture of a general, but the hypnotic charm was gradually wearing off and a different kind of flame was kindled inside me. It was only later, when he had left to attend to his conflicting responsibilities — those he devoted himself to enthusiastically because he felt at home in them, like organizing units for the coming battle at Vicksburg, and those that tormented him because they were connected with his position as military commander of the civilian department of Iowa, Ohio, and Illinois — that I was able to define the feeling. There was nothing original about it: it was friendship, which is supposed to be impossible between a man and a woman. How did ours come to exist, then? I don’t know. And when he was still sitting there in my parlour, toying with the golden tassel on his sword, I said, “And of course there was the Morton boy, Oliver, who’s now Governor of Indiana.”

He laughed. “Did you know I was once given a hat by the Honourable Governor? Of course, it happened before he was governor. Back in Liberty.”

“I had no idea,” I said. “How did that happen?”

“Because he got a waistcoat from me,” said Ambrose.

“You bought each other Christmas gifts?”

“Not bought,” said Ambrose. “Made. He was apprenticed to a hatter, I to a tailor. And we were friends. And now —”

I tried to imagine Ollie Morton, whom I could no longer picture in anything but tails, in that little wooden town among the fields, and I said, “Now that friendship may stand you in good stead, with him the civilian head and you the military one.”

Ambrose’s sunny mood clouded over. “Yes, we’re still friends. But that’s exactly why —” He was about to continue, then apparently decided it was something he couldn’t discuss. “Lorraine, do you know General Carrington?”

“General Carrington? I know a Colonel Carrington —”

“Wright promoted him yesterday. My predecessor.”

I laughed. “Well, Carrington can’t botch things, not even as a general.” Then I bit my lip. Talking with Ambrose about generals who can’t botch things — but Ambrose said, “Well, Halleck thinks —” and he stopped himself again.

Halleck, Lincoln’s general-in-chief, played a black role in Ambrose’s tragedy. As soon as Ambrose had recovered from the shock of being named Commander of the Army of the Potomac, he declared war on his own sense of inadequacy by mapping out the details of an offensive against Fredericksburg. His plan assumed a rapid march along the northern bank of the Rappahannock to put his army opposite the town before Lee could figure out what Ambrose was up to and order Longstreet — who was then located thirty miles west of the town — to move his troops up to reinforce Fredericksburg. Pontoons would be waiting on the northern bank; Ambrose’s engineers would build a bridge; the army would cross the river and take the town by storm, since it was defended by no more than a few Confederate companies and a single battery of light
artillery. This would open the way to taking Richmond and striking at the heart of the Confederacy.

I had opportunity enough to hear all kinds of strategic plans like this in our parlour, since they fascinated my husband, Humphrey, and the officers he invited over for brandy and cigars. To me these plans always seemed rudimentary and transparent. There was never anything surprising or innovative about them, probably because the so-called art of war is more like a polka than a symphony, though it does sometimes thunder like Beethoven. Flanking manoeuvres from the left, strikes from the right, feints down the centre to trick the enemy into shifting his forces, and then a main offensive to outflank him on the right and strike at his rear — it was all a kind of abracadabra. I could never understand where the brilliance of the individual tactic lay, so Ambrose’s plan, as he described it to me afterwards in my parlour, seemed as clever as if Napoleon himself had come up with it.

At the outset, everything went according to plan. General Sumner’s Grand Division, the vanguard of Ambrose’s army, covered the forty miles from their camp in Warrenton to the little town of Falmouth across the river from Fredericksburg in two and a half days. No general had ever moved so many troops so far in such a short time. Large bodies of troops were expected to cover no more than six miles a day, so Sumner should have taken a week. But —

Either Halleck, or Old Brain, as the generals had nicknamed him, was too important to listen carefully to the likes of Ambrose, or his big brain was too preoccupied with other problems, which the war supplied in ample amounts. Afterwards he told Ambrose that he had understood that Ambrose had agreed to a change of plan: Ambrose’s army would ford the Rappahannock some twenty miles above Fredericksburg, march the rest of the way along the southern bank, and then
simply attack. “He must have been listening with half an ear,” Ambrose told me bitterly later on, “because the refrain of the song I sang was ‘pontoons’. I never changed that refrain. ‘Pontoons’ was the last word I said to him before I launched the campaign. Maybe —” and then he stopped, for there were limits to complaining about superior officers, and he was reluctant to say aloud what I was saying to myself — that maybe Halleck, with his big brain full of other concerns, simply forgot about the pontoons and made up the story about a change in plans. The truth was never determined, nor could it have been, for there were no witnesses to the conversation.

And so, when the great army arrived opposite Fredericksburg on November 17, exactly according to plan, the pontoons were conspicuously absent. It was the same the following day and the day after that. They didn’t arrive until a week later, on November 24, because Halleck hadn’t realized his mistake until November 20. General Woodbury, who was charged with delivering the pontoons, did what he could but, by the time his wagons finally arrived in Falmouth, the astute Lee had long since figured things out. The moment the engineers began assembling the bridges, they were mown down by Longstreet’s artillery.

And that was as far as Ambrose’s art as a commander took him. His estimate of an army’s marching capacity had been unorthodox but correct. His assumption that Lee, used to the snail’s pace of Ambrose’s predecessor, McClellan, wouldn’t grasp what was happening in time, and that Longstreet would be at least two days’ march from Fredericksburg when they were ready to move on the town — all that had been correct. But the pontoons hadn’t arrived.

What Ambrose should have done, I don’t know. Or rather, I do. He should have been given an order. He was better than almost anyone else at carrying out orders. But generals in the field were not given specific orders.

Napoleon might have come up with something brilliant, and Hooker, Ambrose’s successor, would have improvised something and managed to look valiant in the attempt. Less than four months later, Hooker botched everything he could at Chancellorsville, at a cost of four thousand more casualties than there were at Fredericksburg. Two months after that, he was removed and the inconspicuous Meade swung into the commander-in-chief’s saddle, truly a last resort. Such are the paradoxes of war: it was this last resort who finally defeated Lee. A bloody, glorious, and fatal defeat. Gettysburg.

His inability to carry out the plan paralysed Ambrose. It was as if his brain had seized up. Yet he had to come up with an adaptation of the plan, and he did come up with a new idea of sorts. He decided to build three more pontoon bridges about three miles downstream, east of the town, where Stonewall Jackson’s units had taken up position on a rise overlooking the river. The new plan depended on two simultaneous strikes: one against Jackson, led by General Franklin across the additional bridges, which would divert attention from the other, the main strike along the long hillside opposite the fortifications at Marye’s Heights.

The problem was that it was General Longstreet’s army that was now waiting for them, instead of a few frightened companies. They’d had two weeks to dig in and fortify their positions, for it had taken that long to build the new bridges under constant fire from Lee’s artillery.

On paper it still looked possible, though only barely so. When he told the story later in my parlour, beads of perspiration broke out on Ambrose, as if he were still standing on the river bank opposite Fredericksburg, looking through field-glasses in horror at the hillside below Marye’s Heights. Franklin’s strength was almost double that of Jackson, Ambrose explained. He could have taken the heights south of Fredericksburg, and then
attacked Longstreet’s flank while Ambrose concentrated on a frontal assault at Marye’s Heights. But there was a dense fog that morning; Franklin waited under its cover until half past eight and then, of all his massive army, dispatched only Meade’s division against Jackson. Ambrose pulled a blue handkerchief out of his sleeve and wiped his forehead.

“Why in the name of heaven did he do that?”

Ambrose tucked the handkerchief back in his sleeve. “It was my fault, Lorraine. Just imagine, I, who was the first to use the field telegraph in my army, decided that the situation was too grave to entrust my orders to an unreliable mechanical device, so I sent General Hardick with a message to Franklin.” Ambrose shook his head as though he couldn’t believe his own stupidity. “It never occurred to me to send the order by telegraph at the same time. I bypassed the machine entirely, and of course Hardick couldn’t find Franklin and didn’t get to him until around half past eight, and by that time he’d forgotten the exact wording of the order and got everything mixed up —”

Ambrose fell silent. I looked sharply at him. He seemed to be flushed.

“— or perhaps I didn’t make the order clear enough,” he said. “That’s probably it. It was probably my fault too.” He turned his brown-eyed gaze to me. “In all honesty, Lorraine, I didn’t know what to do. On one side there was Lincoln, who needed a victory badly. On the other, there were my own commanding officers.” The blue handkerchief came out again. “I called a council. I’d have welcomed any reasonable advice, but they didn’t know what to do either.”

Instead, they gave voice to his greatest unspoken fears, because the responsibility wasn’t on their shoulders. “An attack on Marye’s Heights will bring about the worst carnage of this war,” said Colonel Hawkins. “The entire Army of the Potomac hasn’t enough troops to force through a single man,” said Colonel
Peters, casting a meaningful glance at the long hillside bristling with Longstreet’s palisades.