The March (10 page)

Will, for his part, stood a moment gazing up at Nurse Thompson while Arly, waiting not one moment, took his place on the box and got the mules moving. Will had to hurry forward and leap on at a run. To a chorus of moans and curses and cries, the mules trotted down the road toward the house by the woods. Mounted troops cantered past them in the same direction and Emily saw Wrede, too, riding past.

Each rut or ravel in the road brought forth screams. Up front Will, his shoulders hunched, said, One man’s suffering is pitiable. But when it’s a howling chorus it can only be you’re in Hell.

Why, Will, son, I only got us this amblance duty so as you could moon over that Miz Thompson.

Never mind that. I could never aspire to a woman of her degree.

How can you know a woman’s degree till you put it to the test?

She just don’t see me now that I am a recovered Union on his feet again.

Well, then, think on Savannah. We will have Christmas in Savannah. The ladies there will see you. They will pucker up under the mistletoe. We will have ourselves Christmas goose and figgy puddin. And when we’re through with all that we’ll get back on the march.

I ain’t getting back. This is not me wearing this blue. To where? Will said after a moment.

To all the way to Richmond, maybe, and I wouldn’t mind if to the North Pole. On the march is the new way to live. Well, it ain’t exactly that new. You take what you need from where you happen to be, like a lion on the plains, like a hawk in the mountains, who are also creatures of God’s making, you do remember. We may have dominion over them, but it don’t hurt to pick up a pointer or two. I never was much good for settling down with the same view out the window every morning and the same woman in bed every night. It is only the dead in their graves who should live like that, Arly said to the gasps and urgent prayers and implorings for water rising into the warm December morning.

THE SMALL HOUSE
Wrede had chosen for his field hospital was unoccupied. The front door swung on its hinges. The glass panes were shattered. It was just two rooms on the ground floor, a parlor and a kitchen. The two upstairs bedrooms were small, with little headroom under the slanting roof, and they were baked hot from the sun.

Wrede indicated the parlor for his surgery. His nurses carried the furniture outside and within minutes they had set up the two tables, brought out the sheets, drawn water from the well, opened the medicinal case, and laid out the surgical instruments.

Outside, the ambulances were unburdened of their riders. The wounded were arranged on pallets outside the front door, in the shade of an oak tree. The dozen or so cavalry rode about to check the surroundings, especially the woods behind the house, and set themselves out as pickets.

Emily stayed outside with the wounded, trying to keep them comfortable until they were brought in for surgery. When it was the drummer boy’s turn, she went with him, walking beside the stretcher and holding his hand. It was a soft, small hand. He was quiet enough, though his eyes showed fear, but when he was placed on a table and Wrede’s nurses took a pair of shears to the bottom of his trousers he hollered, struggling to raise himself, squirming and shouting, twisting like a bronco, as one of the men said with a laugh.

Emily at this moment understood the boy’s reaction as the same she would have had under the circumstance. Soldiers about to undergo surgery often struggled, but for some reason it was the fact of the nurses intending to enforce their will that was to her the essential meaning of what was happening here. Was it only a matter of the boy’s age? The nurses were doing their duty, but, without knowing why, she felt that she had to stop them. And then all at once, as she read the look of anguish the child flashed at her, her intuition named itself. No no, wait, stop, she said, and moved to stand between the nurses and the table.

On the other side of the room Wrede, doing a procedure, and his attendants waiting upon him, were in such poses of intense concentration as to release her to her own authority. She had by now a respect from the medical detachment that was only partly due to her serious accommodation to the work. It was Wrede’s attentions to her that gave her the credential she assumed this moment as she ordered the men to carry the patient upstairs. And bring me towels and a basin of water, she said.

Alone with Pearl, Emily Thompson removed her trousers and washed the blood from her leg.

You know what this is?

Yes’m.

Is it the first time?

Uh-huh.

Are you hurting?

Naw.

It’s nothing to be scared of, is it?

Take more’n this put a scare into Pearl.

I do believe that, Emily said, looking into her eyes.

And the two women smiled at each other.

XIII

S
HERMAN’S GLASSES WERE TURNED ON FORT MCALLISTER,
which guarded Savannah from the south, a formidably risen, parapeted earthwork with a ravine before it and obstructions of abatis made of felled oak trees, and chevaux-de-frise whose stripped branches had been honed into sharp spikes. It was late in the afternoon. He stood with Morrison, his signal officer, atop a mill roof on the left bank of the Ogeechee a mile or two distant. Above them on a crow’s nest hurriedly constructed by the engineers was Morrison’s signalman, who was in communication with one of Admiral Dahlgren’s squadron laying at anchor in Ossabaw Sound. So the navy was there with the clothing and shoes, provisions, and mail that the men had been yearning for these many weeks. But it could not come in up the river till the fort was taken.

Entrenched in a great arc of siege in the swampland south and west of the city, Sherman’s Fourteenth, Twentieth, Seventeenth, and Fifteenth Corps were hunkered down in the pooling sumps of canal water and sand. His men were cold and miserable and hungry, having marched through a barren sandy territory that devolved into waterlogged rice plantations where there was no forage to be had. They could not light fires to warm themselves lest they invite grapeshot from the Rebel guns. Miles behind them was the wagon train with its hardtack and coffee and its beef on the hoof, but nothing could move forward into this chilled watery lowland until the city was taken.

Your division will storm Fort McAllister, Sherman had told General Hazen. I won’t fuddle about. I’ve come this far and my army wants its prize. We take Fort McAllister and we’ll have Savannah.

Now, he saw Hazen’s regiments moving into position through a woods and halting at its edge. Signal Admiral Dahlgren the assault is about to begin, Sherman said. Then order Hazen to begin. Yes, let it begin, let it begin, Sherman said.

Within moments the blue lines appeared in parade at the edge of the open land and began their advance—a quick trot, arms at the ready, through the fields in the late-afternoon sun toward the fort some eight hundred yards away. Rebel Napoleons immediately boomed forth their round shot. The lines, he saw now, were converging from three directions—north, south, and along the capital—colors flying. My God, they are magnificent, Sherman cried. Within moments the smoke of the big guns enveloped the scene like fog drift, and the wind brought to Sherman the pungency of blown powder. And now only the caprices of the wind would let him see discrete moments of the action, tantalizing glimpses as if, he thought, the smoke were the diaphanous dance veil of the war goddess. And I’m seduced, Sherman said, aloud, to a startled Morrison.

Yet even from these glimpses Sherman saw things that assured him the assault would succeed. The Rebels had left fallen trees in the field where his men could take cover and return fire. And the big guns were without embrasures: his sharpshooters would kill the artillerists. And as he listened the tempo of shot and shell seemed to slow. The white smoke of the battle began to lift, and now he could see his men clambering up the glacis from the ravine, some of them blown into the air by torpedo mines embanked there. But the blue lines came on, more and more of them, and the parapet was gained. He could see the fighting hand to hand. Sherman had to lower his glass, too overcome to watch. He loved a brave man. Regiments of them brought sobs of joy.

How many minutes later was it when Captain Morrison called out, It’s ours, sir, I see the colors! And it was true. All at once the firing ceased, and they heard a great shout over the field. And through his glass Sherman saw his men waving their fists, and firing their muskets into the sky.

IT WAS DARK
when Sherman arrived at the fort. He made his inspection and complimented the defending commander, a young major who admitted that he had not expected an attack so late in the day.

The moon had risen, throwing a chill white light over the dead, who lay where they had fallen. But among them lay his own sleeping soldiers. Sherman’s men had found foodstuffs and wine in the cellars, and now they slept.

Sitting with crossed legs on a barrel, a cigar in one hand and a cup of wine in the other, Sherman contemplated how matter-of-factly his men accepted the dead that they could lie down, so casually, beside them. All of them asleep, though some forever. He barely noticed the coat thrown around his shoulders by his servant, Moses Brown. His thoughts ran this way: What if the dead man dreams as the sleeper dreams? How do we know there is not a posthumous mind? Or that death is not a dream state from which the dead can’t awaken? And so they are trapped in the hideous universe of such looming terrors as I have known in my nightmares.

The only reason to fear death is that it is not a true, insensible end of consciousness. That is the only reason I fear death. In fact, we don’t know what it is other than a profound humiliation. We are not made to appreciate it. As a general officer I consider the death of one of my soldiers, first and foremost, a numerical disadvantage, an entry in the liability column. That is all my description of it. It is a utilitarian idea of death—that I am reduced by one in my ability to fight a war. When we lost so many men in the first years of the war, the President simply called for the recruitment of three hundred thousand more. So how could he, the President, understand death, truly?

Each man has a life and a spirit and the habits of thought and person that define him, but en masse he is uniformed over. And whatever he may think of himself, I think of him as a weapon. And perhaps we call a private a private, for whatever he is to himself it is private to him and of no use to the General. And so a generalship diminishes the imagination of the General.

But these troops, too, who have battled and eaten and drunk and fallen asleep with some justifiable self-satisfaction: what is their imagination of death who can lie down with it? They are no more appreciative of its meaning than I.

AND SO WHO
is left but the ladies? Perhaps they know. They bring life into being, perhaps they know what it is as afterlife. But often they talk of Heaven or Hell. I take no stock in such ideas as Heaven or Hell. And fate? In war a fate is altogether incidental. In fact, it is nothing as awesome as fate if you happen to raise your head in the path of a cannonball. That nigger who was killed the other day by the railroad track not ten yards from me—I saw the ball coming, a thirty-two-pound round shot, and I shouted, but as he turned it bounced up from the ground and took off his head. That was not fate. There are too many missiles in the air for it to be your fate to be killed by one of them. Just as the number of men set to fighting deem any of their deaths of no great moment.

In this war among the states, why should the reason for the fighting count for anything? For if death doesn’t matter, why should life matter?

But of course I can’t believe this or I will lose my mind. Willie, my son Willie, oh my son, my son, shall I say his life didn’t matter to me? And the thought of his body lying in its grave terrifies me no less to think he is not imprisoned in his dreams as he is in his coffin. It is insupportable, in any event.

It is in fear of my own death, whatever it is, that I would wrest immortality from the killing war I wage. I would live forever down the generations.

And so the world in its beliefs snaps back into place. Yes. There is now Savannah to see to. I will invest it and call for its surrender. I have a cause. I have a command. And what I do I do well. And, God help me, but I am thrilled to be praised by my peers and revered by my countrymen. There are men and nations, there is right and wrong. There is this Union. And it must not fall.

Sherman drank off his wine and flung the cup over the entrenchment. He lurched to his feet and peered every which way in the moonlight. But where is my drummer boy? he said.

XIV

P
EARL’S FIRST CITY SHE HAD EVER SEEN WAS MILLEDGE
ville, but it was not a city so grand as this Savannah, with its little parks everywhere with fountains and iron railings and the big old live oaks dripping with moss, and with the grand courthouse and customshouse and the ships in the harbor. And it’s true that some of the cobblestoned streets had been dug up and the stones piled at the corners for the Confederate soldiers to stand behind, but that didn’t happen. They had fled across the Savannah River to fight another day. Along the waterfront were shops and open warehouses where the Union troops were unloading comestibles. The sun was out, and she was riding in a carriage just like the Jamesons’, with Miz Emily and those two ambulance drivers up front escorting them for their tour. Every day it seemed there was another parade, and now they were held at the corner while one went by. She stood up to see it, and grabbed Miz Emily’s hand till she got to her feet to see it too. What mighty music this was, the drums spattering better than she could ever manage with her one-two thump, and the brass horns shooting out the rays of the sun like to their blare, and flutes and piccolos peeping from the top of the music like birds lighting on it, and the big tubas pumping away under it, and at the very back the two big bass drums announcing the appearance of the blocks of bluecoats in dress parade behind them. And all their Union flags!