Confederates (49 page)

Your only chance of something different was to get to town on market day and make an arrangement with one of them fast girls they had in Newmarket or Woodstock or Strasburg. Otherwise you courted nice girls like Emma Groener in front of an audience of her relatives, who weren't the most joyful folk you'd met, and you went home and dreamt of what might have happened if they'd ever left you alone for half an hour in one of them plain, no-nonsense parlours. But there wasn't sense in complaint. That was the way everyone Hans knew up to the summer of '61 had ever courted. And he didn't, up till then, think it such a bad thing to live and die that way.

The coming of war churned him up though. The Strahls owned no slaves. They were gently in favour of the Union, but only in so far as they felt closer to their brethren in Pennsylvania than they did to any big landholder of British descent down in the lowlands. But Hans could tell that this war was his chance to change himself, and to taste a wider life, and to get loose from those aunts and elders, and to speak to women without a crowd of spectators, and to be profane for a while and earthy and, in the end, to have a call on the gratitude of a bigger bunch of people than he would normally get noticed by, on Methodists and Presbyterians and other
englische
people in towns like Newmarket.

So he made an honest soldier. He was happy with what had happened to him. He had stories to tell his grandchildren. He had memories. In Winchester early in the year, when local girls were able to pick with whom they'd walk, an Irish girl called Molly Nagel walked with him and coupled with him away from witness in as wild a way as you could want. He learned to speak profanity too in English, so he would know when he went back to that little clutch of Germans what he was giving up by talking seemly.

He'd always guessed that these kinds of reasons were the reasons half the boys were here, and that there must be Danes or Germans or others over in that Yankee army who were working away for just about the same reasons. Of course he wasn't thinking about any of this today. He was generally aware of being in line in a cause a lot of clever people said was holy, and he had Americans both sides of him. He was not afraid any more and felt just about as good as he had three afternoons back, during the feast at Manassas Junction. He was sure the dysentery, which had plagued him these past three months, wasn't going to trouble him any more.

That afternoon James Longstreet decided it was ‘militarily possible' now to move his infantry in a great crescent-shaped line across the fields either side of the Gainesville turnpike. Jackson's boys were able to leave the cut at last and go ahead. Since the Shenandoah Volunteers were close to the place where Longstreet's line hinged on Jackson's, they found themselves stumbling forward behind a line of Hood's Texans.

All of them, Strahl too, had not untangled the sights and noises of the morning. Their minds were jumbled and dazed. The Texans, however, moved fast; they were a hundred paces ahead. Whenever they got to a fence, they'd dismantle it quickly, as if they didn't want their movements hindered by fences.

They passed a schoolhouse, white, with a little belfry, and its windows locked. Deep in its summer sleep. From here, through open views amongst the trees, you could see lines of Rebel soldiers and battle flags away off to the south in a great sickle. When the Texans saw that they started making their funny noises. Tired and numb as he was, even Strahl felt their excitement and in the midst of that Texas yelling shells began to lob in the neighbourhood or burst in the air. One struck the school bell in a way that caused it to give a
comic
bong.

‘Goddamit!' the Texans were hooting. ‘They's musical bastards, they is.'

The Volunteers crossed the main pike in the wake of the Texans. Though some of them stumbled, they were drawn along by the magnetic drag of the frenzy of these strangers from the Confederacy's furthest corner. Hans Strahl could see a good stone fence ahead and a parsonage beyond it. From behind this fence Yankees rose and shot the Texans fair in the face, but the Texans overran the parsonage yard. Now everyone was running for the cannon, both the Texans and the Yankee fleers. Hans Strahl, stepping amongst the fallen around the parsonage, felt like little more than a witness.

The Yankee gunners were so frightened on their little hill that they had their cannon filled to the lip of the muzzle with those terrible bunches of balls called grape. The Texans who were struck fell down to make a sort of animal hedge in Hans's path.

It was the nature of the battle that though these heaps gave off screams, they meant as little to Hans as would the cries of migrating birds. The voices of those Napoleons and Parrotts on the hills were the only voices of any merit and drew on the Texans the way sirens draw sailors.

Later many boys wouldn't remember approaching the guns. All Usaph, for example, could remember was being amongst them suddenly, a cannon wheel by his shoulders. The cannon fired and the wheel jolted backwards, spinning him with it. The blur of wheel and the shock of the firing dropped him down on the ground with a bleeding nose.

It was poor Hans Strahl, stumbling innocent in blue smoke, who happened to be fair in line with the mouth of one of those cannons just when a charge of grape went off into his chest. The man who had pulled the lanyard was himself already dying, for a Texan had pierced him with a bayonet. As one ball of grape tore Hans's head off, others burst it into fragments and hanks of his dark hair were scattered wide. Both his arms were likewise torn away, ripped up and thrown wide. His entrails were scattered over the hillside, his left leg sundered into small lumps and his right thrown away to one side amongst Texans and strangers. Ash Judd, beside him, did not know where he had gone – to Ash, Hans Strahl's vanishing was as magical as the ole man of widow Lesage. Later Ash would go seeking him in the fields around the parsonage and up forward, as far as Chinn Hill.

Hans felt nothing but a fearful shock bigger than the known world. It is likely that the fact of his death seemed a small thing beside the size of that great tearing he suffered. Indeed, his mother would report seeing him around the farm for some years after that afternoon at Manassas and, being his mother, she could tell he was hanging around bewildered and in need of a simple explanation.

Whereas the Yankee who had pulled the lanyard had a deep and decent sleep.

While Usaph lay in his bloody-nosed swoon, the four-mile sickle of the Confederate army ran on over Chinn and Bald Hill and on to the Henry house and beyond it to the Stone Bridge over Bull Run. Cloud came up in the evening, and with it rain, and the Federal army set nervous pickets along the Centerville Road and kept dragging off north. And all that time Wheat's regiment stayed on their hill, guarding the captured cannon and putting the dead in three pits – one for the Union, one for the Confederacy, and one for corpses that carried no signs other than those of their humanity.

12

Into a plain decorated parlour in the White House in Washington that evening, two Union officers brought a brown despatch case. One carried it, the other served as escort. They stopped in front of a long table topped with morocco leather. Fair under the round bulbs of a gas chandelier and beneath a portrait of Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory – by an irony, the last Southerner to have become President of the Union – sat Abraham Lincoln, looking a little ill and scurfy by gaslight.

This was not his accustomed office, but he'd been working here since a meeting of the cabinet broke up only an hour before. It was after ten o'clock now and, as the President's secretary, young John Hay, knew, the President had not yet eaten dinner.

The officers saluted, and one of them handed the despatch case to John Hay. Hay undid the case, took out the despatches and laid them on the morocco-top table. The President began to read them without any expression. ‘You might wait outside for a while,' he suggested to the officers after a time.

John Hay knew how far down in the glooms his chief could go, but he didn't see anything to worry about in the way Abe got rid of these two clothes-horses from the War Department. When the door was closed behind them though, Abe's head began to loll as if he would be sick any second or just faint away. There was this half-whimper, half-groan from him. ‘Well, John,' he said, ‘it's happened again.'

He said nothing more for a while and John Hay didn't ask.

‘We've bin whipped, I mean. You can read it all.' He let the despatches flutter out of his hands. ‘Johnny Pope says he's licked. He's scuttling back to the old lines round Centerville. Right where we were at the start of last winter, mind you.'

John Hay himself wanted to slump down in a chair. The Union generals had wasted this summer. They had done more than waste it. John Hay had a normal respect for the office of the presidency but he didn't think this was a decent version of it – to sit and work in Washington and hope that the generals out there would show the average enterprise of a hardware store proprietor say. And to be always disappointed.

Abe Lincoln suffered from a strong disadvantage for a man who liked power – he felt, almost as a personal hurt, the length of the casualty lists and the individual agonies and losses that they spoke of. He said, ‘By heaven and earth, John, if I was one of those thousands of boys who went under this summer – by heaven and earth, John! – I'd want to now what for, I would! I'd want to know what
for
!'

The President's head went on lolling. ‘Do you want me to fetch Mr Secretary Stanton, Mr President?' John Hay asked.

‘That I'll think about,' Abe Lincoln told him. Abe lifted another paper, the way a professor lifts an especially bad examination essay. ‘McClellan has diarrhoea, John, and Mr Secretary Chase of the Treasury tells me we can't raise any more money and that he doesn't want to take that easy way out the Rebs took and print the stuff. I tell you, the bottom is out of the tub, John. The bottom is out of the tub.'

He closed his eyes for a while. ‘Fetch General Meigs,' he said in the end.

As John Hay went to find a messenger, he met General Meigs in the waiting room outside and was able to bring him straight in. ‘At least some things get done fast in this Republic,' the President said, seeing the general.

Meigs was the Quartermaster General of the U.S., a sane old professional dedicated to the Union and the constitution. So he was the sort of soldier who – unlike the McClellan bunch – didn't see the military as a holy brotherhood with rights to bully any civilian, even a President.

‘Is it time to pack yet, Montie?' Lincoln asked.

‘Pack, sir?'

‘I mean, is it time to leave Washington? Is it time to choose a new capital? By hokey, the Bostonians would like that. What I'm getting at, Montie, is whether Pope can hold them at Centerville. Do we have to look forward to a siege?'

General Meigs smiled. ‘I don't think we have to pack tonight, anyhow,' he said.

‘What is the cause, Montie? How could anyone fail as thoroughly as Johnny Pope?'

The Quartermaster General shrugged. ‘I hear reliably that his staff work this past three days has been poor. And his intelligence poor. This afternoon of course he was gobbled up on the flank by an immense force that he scarcely knew was there.'

The President nursed his lean jaws. ‘That's just about the same as going to a circus and failing to notice the damn elephant.'

Two hours before the news came in from Manassas the President had talked to his cabinet about a document he and Hay had got together between them. It was the document that had been waiting to be written for months. It was a decree freeing the slaves of the Confederacy. He had already signed an Act ending slavery in the District of Columbia by the device of buying slaves from their owners for no more than $200 each and then freeing them. Already the War Department had revised the regulations compelling army or naval officers to return runaway slaves to their owners. And from Vienna, the U.S. Ambassador, John Motley, was saying that only one of three things would stave off recognition of the Confederacy by the European powers; there had to be a great conclusive win over the Confederacy; or else there had to be the capture of the cotton ports so that cotton could be released to Europe; or else there had to be a clear-cut emancipation of the slaves.

Well, things were a little more complicated than that. Even Secretary Seward, who'd been so keen on abolition all his life, could see that you couldn't have a clear-cut emancipation of slaves unless there was first a great compelling sort of victory. And with Johnny Pope whipped and McClellan in the privy with runny bowels, there was no way you could suddenly declare Confederate slaves free without looking ridiculous.

‘Montie, tell me this,' said the President. ‘No reflection on you – but where do you think generals are manufactured? And how come the Confederacy seems to have cornered the market in them?'

13

There was a stillness in the valley of the Cowpasture, an endless hot day sat over Aunt Sarrie's place and everyone moved slowly at their eternal tasks: Aunt Sarrie upstairs making beds with Bridie, Montie in the river pasture sowing corn for that summer's second crop, Lisa crooning on the stoop and Ephie in the kitchen at the churn. The gurgling and whumping of that churn was just a background rhythm in Lisa's quiet song.

Some counties away Ephie's spouse toted sharp-edged ammunition boxes, but Ephie thought little of him this afternoon; not because she was not beset by him, but because she was fighting away at an urge to retch. She kept her hands firm on the churn handle, for she knew Aunt Sarrie had been looking sidewise at her, looking for signs to back up certain ideas she'd got about Ephie's condition. So Ephie worked the churn hard both to distract Aunt Sarrie from fretting about her and also in the sweating hope that it might just clear her problem. Why, she'd had a cousin who'd lost four of them at an early time and only eventually managed to keep one till term. It had made it seem like the longest child-carrying in history. Other women used to joke with this cousin, ‘What you carrying in there? A brown bear?'