The March (24 page)

Pryce was flattered by the General’s distrust. He was an adventurous young fellow and got right into the campaign, wandering through the ranks and managing often to find himself on the skirmish line. He lived comfortably in the field, thinking nothing of the hardships. Of course he was no spy. He had dutifully kept his notes until Savannah was taken. There the ban on dispatches was temporarily lifted and he burned up the wires with his stories.

Now, with the army on the march northward, Pryce was reduced once more to jotting his notes and stuffing them in his pockets. Though he looked forward to the next chance to cable his accounts, he was thinking more of the book he would write when he returned home. The fact was that he loved this war in America. These provincials excited him, the sixty thousand of them swinging a thirty-mile-wide scythe of destruction across a once bountiful land. Most of the men he spoke with, even junior officers, were not terribly articulate: the South had to be punished, the niggers had to be freed was the usual level of discourse. And he found them childish in their adoration of their “Uncle Billy.” (God help the poor sod of a yeoman who addressed Cromwell as Uncle Ollie.) But they were intrepid. He had seen them build bridges, dismantle railroad lines, overrun entrenchments, and maintain a pace of ten to fifteen miles a day regardless of the terrain or the weather. As men they were woefully unschooled, but as a military force they transcended their class.

What war was fought more bitterly and with more fervor and intensity than a civil war? No war between nations could match it. The generals of the North and South knew one another—they had been at West Point together or served side by side in the Mexican War. England, of course, had a great and bloody history of civil wars, but they were ancient matters to be studied in public school. This in America was to be seen with one’s own eyes. And as bloody and brutal were the contests of Lancaster and York, they were hand to hand—battle-axes, pikes, maces. These chaps were industrial-age killers: they had repeating rifles that could kill at a thousand yards, grape that could decimate an advancing line, cannon, fieldpieces, munitions that could bring down entire cities. Their war was so impersonally murderous as to make quaint anything that had gone on before.

Yet some of the ancient military culture endured. The brutal romance of war was still possible in the taking of spoils. Each town the army overran was a prize. In this village was an amazing store of wine, in that a granary brimming to the rafters, a herd of beef here, an armory there, homes to loot, slaves to incorporate. There was something undeniably classical about it, for how else did the armies of Greece and Rome supply themselves? How else had Alexander’s soldiers made an empire? The invading army, when it camped, sat on the land as owners, with all the elements of domesticity, including women, enlarging the purely martial function of their social order.

WITH THE VANGUARD
brigades of the Twentieth Corps about to cross into North Carolina, Pryce decided that he had absolutely to ride out with the “bummers,” as the foraging troops so ingloriously called themselves. He had no trouble finding an accommodating party, a detachment of General Kilpatrick’s cavalry. He was a fair-haired, tall, big-boned Englishman with a ruddy open face and a quick smile, and when he identified himself as a reporter, waving his notepad about as if it were the most esoteric professional tool, a soldier was happy to give his name and spell it for him while Pryce scribbled it dutifully, though finding it of no real use.

He could sit a horse, but the mount he was given, with much laughter, was a mule so swaybacked that Pryce’s feet brushed the ground. He accepted this with good humor. The party consisted of twenty or so cavalrymen casually uniformed, in a quite remarkable assemblage of styles. They were led by a sergeant, a middle-aged man with a gray stubble and an eye patch. Two of the army’s ubiquitous white canvased wagons trailed along.

It was not yet dawn, and while the rest of the camp was lighting the breakfast fires the Sergeant led Pryce’s party down a main road and then off through a pinewoods on a lumber trail. Here the bed of brown needles was so thick the animals’ footfalls were hardly heard. Pryce wore long underwear under his thick twill trousers and sweater shirt. His half coat was lined with fleece, and he had his club scarf around his throat. Yet he found himself pounding his arms. The woods gathered the cold, as if the tall trees were a kind of vault. And the sharp redolence of pine seemed to drive the cold up behind one’s eyes.

As best Pryce could determine, the party was riding ahead of the march to the northeast. They rode at the investigative pace of a patrol, with a clear purpose but no fixed destination. After a while the way ahead seemed to lighten and he could congratulate himself that they were indeed headed east, the treetops of the tall pines having turned a fiery gold. Minutes later he could feel the warmth on his thighs as he passed through patches of sunlight. Then, all at once, they were out in the morning.

THEY CAME TO
a halt on the bank of a river. Slightly downstream was a wooden footbridge, and they went across in single file into another pine forest. Here the trees were even taller, and so abundant as to discourage the sun. The animals had to weave among the trees. In these sun-daunting woods Pryce felt in his throat the dangers of the foraging enterprise. They were, after all, a small contingent in Rebel country, with no intelligence of the enemy.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER
they were on a road running alongside fallow acreage ruled off by a low stone wall. A mile or two of this and the wall was deemed an insult. At the Sergeant’s direction the men dismounted and took apart a section of the piled stones wide enough to allow a wagon’s passage, and in short order they were up and riding through the field at a canter, Pryce following at a trot with even the wagons pulling ahead of him. Now he saw their destination, a large white mansion with Grecian pillars for an entrance. They crossed a road onto an expanse of greensward, and then they were on a curving gravel drive that passed through formal gardens of azaleas and rosebushes and sculpted evergreens. Pryce thought he might have been in a Midlands shire.

WHEN HE CAUGHT
up to the others they were deployed in two lines facing the manse. A tall elderly man stood on the porch. He was in a robe and slippers, and his silver hair was uncombed. Cassius! the old man yelled, his voice deep and hoarse. A Negro appeared. Cassius, the old man said, not lowering his voice or looking at the house slave, who stood in obeisance right next to him. Show these Union beggars what they lookin for.

Having been thus defined, the troops did not move. A slave appeared with an armchair. The old man sat. Two white women appeared, one to put a shawl about his shoulders and the other with a blanket robe for his knees. With an imperial calm, he stared at the Union troops. He said something to one of the women, who hurried back inside. He said something to the house slave, who, watching the troops all the while, went down the porch to the side steps and ran off behind the house.

Hugh Pryce could sense of the bummers’ discomfort that they would have been happier to find themselves in a pitched battle. The old planter sat with his arms resting on the arms of his chair, and from under his thick white eyebrows he was making them over into a rabble, a thieving pack of highwaymen. Pryce recognized the old man. The accent might be different, the manners unrefined, but this was a lord of the realm, one of those bred from generations of wealth to be accorded deference from the day he was born. Pryce’s father was such a one. Pryce had made himself a journalist and fled London so as not to become such a one. How many of them did not know how stupid they were beneath the manners of their class.

Shortly there emerged an entire family of women to array themselves behind the old planter, and they were of every age down to three little girls—perhaps his wife among them, but sisters and daughters and nieces, cousins and grandchildren, all of them in familial resemblance with their gaunt faces and high cheekbones and narrow eyes.

Just at the moment when Pryce wondered where the slaves were, for he had never seen a town taken or a plantation passed when scores of Negroes did not come running out to greet their liberators, a few appeared around the corner of the house, and then a few more. In listless procession they came, most of them thinly dressed for the cold, some of them barefoot, the women with their hair in bandannas, the men many of them bent, unshaven, elderly, and children as well, quiet and with bowed heads like the adults, until finally perhaps fifty blacks were gathered before the porch facing the old man. Pryce nudged his mule forward into the ranks. Where some of the slaves’ jackets were rent he glimpsed raised scars on their backs. One man on crutches had no left foot.

All right, the old planter said, his voice deep and hoarse. Y’all see these Yankees come to free you up. Go ahead, turn around an look. There they be.

And some of the slaves did turn and look back dutifully at the troops, who were discomfited by this silent acknowledgment directed by the old planter. It was as if he had made them all, slaves and soldiers, relations of one another. The horses stirred. One of the troopers spit out a stream of tobacco juice. Another raised his rifle and took aim at an upstairs window and said, Powee! Pryce frowned. Was that all? Where was the intemperance he expected from bummers?

You been coddlin such thoughts of them Yankees, the old man said. You think I don’t know that? You think I doan know ever thought goes on in them heads of yorn? I know! I know what you think, Amos, and you Sally, and you Marcus, and Joseph and Silas and Blind Henry and every one of you—yes, down to the weeist pickaninny of your wicked makin. Because, free or not free, you will never be smarter than your massah.

At this the Sergeant awoke from his trance and sent a wagon and half a dozen troops around each side of the house to the outbuildings. The rest stood with him, and at his signal they unsheathed their rifles and held them at the ready.

Well I’m tellin you now, said the planter, you thinkin to go with the Yankees, why just you do that. Out there—he pointed—is a whole army of ’em. And they is all thieves. They is all beggars. You see how these gone sniffin around back now like a pack a hound dogs? They didn’t ride in here because they knowed you was here waitin, nosir, they come for my vittles and my stores, for my stock and my horses and my mules. They come for whatever their thievin souls can lay their hands on. So you go with them, go on, and good riddance if you do, ’cause they doan care one way or t’other. You be on your own and God help you, because I won’t. You won’t have the Massah to take care of you no more. Nor to give you a decent Christian burial when your time comes. Nosir. You’ll be no better than a wanderin Jew with no place in the world to lay his head down ’cept he fall dead in a ditch somewheres for the carrion birds to peck him clean. So you just go ahead and take it, this freedom of yorn, and may the Lord have mercy on your poor nigger souls.

At this the old man rose, the blanket falling from him, and he turned and strode into the house, all his family trailing after.

AN HOUR LATER,
with the sun well up in the sky, the troops were lined up on the gravel road and ready to ride back to the march. The haul was spectacular, the two wagons loaded with sacks of cornmeal and rice and flour and potatoes, turkeys and chickens, hams, sides of beef, great wheeled cheeses, barrels of nuts and dried fruits, and cases of whiskey. A dray had been commandeered to carry pillage they had discovered hidden in a hayloft: rolled Persian rugs, several paintings, cotton bags filled with blankets and pillows, a brace of pistols, an old long-barreled flintlock, and crates of china emblazoned with the planter’s family crest. A string of fine mules stood patiently in tether to one of the wagons. The old man’s two black stallions were harnessed to his carriage. In the carriage, uncomfortably waiting, were five Negroes—three women and two men—the entirety of those who had chosen liberation.

Yet the Sergeant did not give the signal to move out but turned his mount and sat there looking at the house. He reset his hat firmly on his head. He adjusted his eye patch. Something was still to be done, there was unfinished business.

Pryce wondered if the plantation was to be set afire. General Sherman’s standing order was to burn no home where there was no resistance. Certainly there had been none here. The old planter had actually directed a slave to show them to the outbuildings. But there had been provocation in his manner. Was that it? He had refused to speak to the troops directly and had referred to them as beggars and thieves.

To the Sergeant, apparently, this was the problem. To help him think on the problem, the Sergeant now gave the order to break open a case of whiskey.

Pryce did not join the ensuing conference, although he did avail himself of a swig when the bottle came to him. The general feeling seemed to be that no soldier in Sherman’s Army of the West should let a slander go unanswered. That so few of the slaves had elected to leave was another affront. Not that the men were all that anxious to have a bunch of darkies trail along. But the old planter’s awful mental control of his slaves was a de facto insult to the Union liberationists come to free them. Wasn’t that a form of resistance? And if it was, were they not entitled to burn his goddamn plantation?

Pryce was impressed. Feverishly he scribbled his notes. That these ordinary soldiers of a rank no higher than sergeant could, in the midst of their perilous duties, stop to concern themselves with substantive moral issues seemed to him a flash of the quintessential American genius. He could not imagine Her Majesty’s rank and file in such a discussion.

By this time the troops were dismounted and walking about and talking among themselves like a peripatetic school of Aristotelian philosophers. Some of them had stripped to their shirtsleeves as if the sun were actually hot on this late February morning. There arose the question of what would happen to the slaves if the plantation was burned? Would they not bear the brunt? For, whatever the misery of their lives, the plantation was their sustenance, and of course they would suffer even worse hell when the planter turned his wrath on them as the cause of the destruction of his property.