I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (36 page)

'I just can't stop thinking about what you said this morning,' he mumbled, referring to a debate on comparative gun laws that had revealed my lifelong unfamiliarity with any weapon more powerful than an air rifle but less so than a cannon. We stopped a fair distance away from the tents. 'Just don't seem right,' he said, shaking his head, then motioning at the revolver. Despite myself, I found I was touched by this fondly paternal effort to plug a shameful hole in my manliness: I raised the gun, closed one eye and let the twilight have it, five times.

Those who had room sat round the fire and filled it with chicken tortillas and JD's famously eruptive beans; Russ proposed a visit to the infantry camp down by the front line, and I accepted. From a distance, through the forest gloaming, it looked beckoningly evocative: bearded figures, perhaps a hundred in all, clustered tightly around tiny fires, the occasional glint of pebble specs or an officer's sword. Some squatted over pots and pans, others wiped war off their rifle barrels.

As we started to thread our way through these groups a very different picture came dully into focus. Few soldiers could summon the energy to turn their heads at the sound of our approach, and those who did surveyed us with dead-eyed, blank-faced incuriosity. At the time, I'd ascribed the almost truculent indifference that greeted the artillery's arrival at the front to irritation at our earlier no-show. Now I wasn't sure. The default expression visible between astounding whiskers and flat-topped, half-squashed cap was one of grubby, vacant resignation – the look of men who knew they might well die tomorrow, and didn't even care. It was Russ who drew my attention to the silence: no singing, tin whistles, banter, not the tiniest expression of camaraderie. And certainly no Zip-Lock bags of mango slices, if the grimly charred shreds of animal being poked about most skillets were anything to go by. Was all this a brilliantly realised evocation of war's dehumanising effects, or just a load of flaccid idlers failing to cope with a few days of burger-free hard work?

A small brook was the decreed front line, and we arrived there in the middle of a prisoner exchange. Senior officers in long coats milled about on either bank, swords by their sides, looking sombre and important; one of the dark-blue lot took a suspicious dislike to me, and after a gruff interrogation by one of his subordinates ('What is your business here,
sir
?') I was ordered away. In consequence, I reported on the lantern-lit proceedings from behind a distant tree, restraining the powerful urge to loudly explain that this was only a bloody game, and how Robert E. Lee and Abe Lincoln were bum-chums.

Happily, my vantage point afforded an excellent view of the POWs' march of shame. Amongst the handful of Confederates being roughly escorted to the exchange point I spotted one of the Lazy Jacks, a whey-faced young Brummie I'd met on the first day, his grimy features etched with defeat, fear and dazed disbelief: precisely the expression I recalled seeing on the RAF pilots shot down and captured during the first Gulf War. I half expected to hear him robotically repeat a prepared statement apologising for his involvement in an unjust war against a peace-loving nation. Then the distant roar of a Rebel singa-long carried down to us through the cold night air: I cocked an ear, traced it to the Union artillery and set off back to camp.

My, those boys were quite the campfire choristers. Without any alcoholic encouragement – to my substantial disappointment, their solitary nod to catering authenticity – they bellowed away for long hours, tirelessly and lustily besmirching the colours they so reluctantly wore.

Three hundred thousand Yankees laid stiff in southern dust, We got 300,000 before they conquered us, They died of southern fever and southern steel & shot, I wish it were three million instead of what we got!

That was the least inflammatory number – identifying some of the others from half-remembered snatches meant visits to some very alarming websites. I wrapped my blanket around me, chewed a lint-coated strip of jerky, and rehearsed the journalistic-immunity speech I'd deliver when the outraged Union hate-mob stomped out of the blackness.

'Think of it this way,' said Wayne, detecting my fire-lit unease between verses. 'How would you feel if you were made to fight for Nazi Germany?' It seemed an ambitious parallel, even before the post-choral paeans to 'bad-assed' Nathan Forrest, a Confederate general best known for his association with the fledgling Ku Klux Klan. That was Russ's cue to turn in and mine to feign sleep: I lay there surrounded by unsavoury chortlings that effectively answered my great unasked question – What If The South Had Won?

Waking up because you're cold ranks high amongst timelessly unpalatable human experiences. Through one eye and a thickening fog I saw that the fire had all but gone out; though it was still pitch black I accepted sleep was at an end. I shuddered off into the mist in search of fuel, and when I shuddered back, trailing a nine-foot branch past the unfortunate horses, restlessly stamping for warmth, my fellow firesider Trey was sitting hunched up in a blanket and wanly poking the embers. For half an hour we exchanged unhappy grunts. Then the tent flaps rustled and Wayne emerged: the Federals were scheduled to pull back at dawn, he croaked, and we had been ordered to cover their retreat. Trey pulled his mobile out to check the time: under an hour to pack up, saddle up, prepare the cannon and be off.

With a little artificial assistance – my job was to illuminate any scene of complex tackle-attachment by holding Trey's phone screen very close to it – we managed it with ten minutes to spare. I'd gathered from their anecdotes – and uncanny farmyard impersonations – that most of the artillery boys had spent at least part of their lives waking up in the dark and tending to animals; it seemed that Dennis, Trey and his younger brother were part-time cowboys. At any rate, the men of Douglas's Texas Battery rose to the challenge quite magnificently. They geed and hawed and buckled and heaved and farted and swore, and after the crippling awkwardness of The Fireside Bigotry it was a profound pleasure to watch and hear them do so.

A lone bugle called mournfully out from the valley, and presently a shredded and soiled Stars and Stripes battle standard took shape through the foggy half-light, followed by a long and silent column of dusty and dispirited infantrymen. When the two mule-drawn carts bringing up the rear were behind us we let rip with a thumping double charge, and another. So traumatically potent was the third that my brain seemed to shift in my skull: one of the cogitations thus dislodged reminded me that this day was the last. Abruptly confronted by the shamefully narrow scope of my war reporting to date, but too cold and tired to tackle this situation rationally, I snatched up my possessions and ran after the retreating Yankees. Not a moment too soon, as I later learned: when the artillery departed shortly after, a Confederate snatch-squad ran out of the mist and grabbed JD, the unit's arthritic straggler. (Once in POW custody, he put his head between his legs until his face went purple, then made a successful run for it when his alarmed guards went off to summon medical assistance.)

I lost the Federals in the fog, then spent a long hour patrolling the forest-highway tarmac, watching the air clear. When a column did march out of the woods I could see at once they were the wrong colour: despite all that Johnny Rebel carousing, it was genuinely frightening to be confronted by men I'd come to think of as a hated enemy. Then a rusty pick-up shot past, leaking horn noise and jeering taunts, and remembering that this wasn't 1864 I trotted up and introduced myself to a young Confederate major in a filthy ten-gallon hat.

'We're driving those Yankees out of here, Mr Moore, keeping 'em out of Texas.' The major's forthright manner suggested his boys were fighting a very different war to the one I'd just experienced, and their condition confirmed it. These men had been living off nothing but corn bread and salt pork – period rations, in period quantity – yet as they marched grimly past I saw fire in their sunken eyes. Most compelling was the barefoot, pallid and painfully emaciated young soldier who strode by with a vigour entirely at odds with his appearance; take away the muddy clay pipe sticking out of his unkempt chest-length beard, and he could have recently emerged from a long spell in a medieval dungeon. Only later did I notice that the filth slathering his shoeless feet was generously blended with fresh blood.

Soon we were deep in the black-stumped forest of death that Gerry and I had walked past on day one. Everything seemed instantly more dramatic. A low boom signalled the Union artillery's distant presence: 'Here we go,' muttered a voice from behind, and when I looked back everyone was biting open paper cartridges and emptying the contents down their rifle barrels. 'I want to see a tight,
tight
skirmish line!' hissed the major, as his men fanned out across the burnt desolation. A cry, a stutter of echoing cracks and battle was joined. Everyone around set off through the smoke and shouts and charcoal spikes in a sort of crouching run, and with my heartbeat noisily filling my head I followed. We crossed a forest trail, a slash of orange through the blackness, and there at the roadside sat a group of huge-skirted ladies, surrounded by upended baskets and willow-pattern crockery. 'They took our food!' wailed one. 'They even took my bible!' I looked across at her as I scuttled past, and saw tears streaming down red cheeks.

Soon after, the skirmish settled into a stand-off; everyone took cover behind sooty tree-stumps. I found myself sharing mine with a Prussian-moustached Frenchman: one of four, he told me, who'd come all this way to fight for the South. 'For me this is nothing about politics or society,' he said, sliding easily into the declamatory philosophising that had been such a feature of my time with his Roman countrymen. 'I have a romantic sympathy for – what you say? – the hopeless cause.' His small blue eyes gleamed out of that miner's face. 'In these woods I truly feel as if I am doing something I have done before.' Then a volley of musket shots crashed out, the major barked an order and soon I was hot, tired and alone.

'What the hell is that damn newspaper man doing?'

Fearless professional curiosity had propelled me deep into no man's land, or so I'd like to claim: in truth my journey into the crossfire was entirely attributable to fatigued confusion. A Confederate sergeant-major crunched across the barbecued woodland, grabbed my arm and half-dragged me back to his front line. The major was deeply unimpressed. 'Have that man placed under arrest with the rear guard,' he muttered coldly, before striding off towards the enemy with his revolver raised.

It wasn't so bad back there. My guard was a paunchy, sallow and painstakingly lugubrious Midlander, another Lazy Jack: he'd suffered three heart attacks and was taking it easy to avoid a fourth. For a couple of hours we trudged up and down the hot and sooty dale in companionable silence, joined along the way by a handful of downcast Union POWs, who through blisters, exhaustion or disintegrating footwear had been unable to keep pace with their retreating colleagues. Then scorched earth gave way to leaves and pinecones and a familiar row of canvas peaks appeared before us. How telling of the sensory and experiential overload endured in the previous forty-ish hours that my time at the refugee camp now seemed a distant memory, and how revealing of my own feeble milksoppery that I greeted those dear civilians with almost tearful fondness.

This was their big set-piece occasion, and how they were enjoying it. Certainly more so than the demoralised Federals, who I learned had let themselves down with some very halfhearted march-by pillaging moments earlier. Still, their loss was our gain: the pebble-spectacled ladies bustled about us, proffering baskets of apples, cookies and bread. With this sort of fare on offer, and the sun now merciless, it was difficult for even the most undernourished Confederate to get too excited about the bubbling, slurried vat of hominy grits that was the pièce de résistance. One who did, though, presented the event with an iconic highlight that featured prominently in every after-action report I would read on the internet in the months ahead: 'I shall not forget the soldier hungry enough for hot food, and bereft enough of something to take it in, that he held out his hat as a bowl, and ate hominy from it with his hands.'

I missed that memorable scene, but I think we can be fairly certain that it starred our barefoot beardie: if re-enactors were awarded medals, that simple act would have bagged him one the size of the skillet dangling from his bedroll. A mention in dispatches for the soldier who scooped up one of those sweet little white hens as we tramped out of the camp, planted his boot on its head and decapitated the animal with a hearty tug. A colleague lashed the twitching corpse to his pack; I followed the trail of blood for an hour.

I gathered things were building to some sort of climax when we found the cannon crew draped across their weapon in dramatic interpretations of death. 'Hi, Tim!' hissed a couple of corpses as I trotted by with my guard. That would be the last I saw of them, and though I didn't then know it, I found myself appraising my time with the galvanised artillery. Much as I disagreed with many of their opinions – in all probability with huge swathes of everything they held dear – at the end of two long and hugely exhilarating days, these were men who had welcomed a foreign stranger into their ranks without question or hesitation, then through good old Southern hospitality let him share all they had: their food, their blankets, their high-calibre weaponry.

We pursued the Federals up a steep and messy ridge, and as must be common in war, discipline and unity steadily petered out in weary confusion. I arrived at the bald brow of the hill without my guard, and found a few Confederates slumped against a hedge, awaiting officers and orders. When a tubby young soldier staggered out of the trees and collapsed theatrically at our feet, clutching his stomach, I stifled a bored groan; many others didn't. After a minute or so of rasping death-rattles, someone wandered over and wearily bent down by his head. Then very swiftly jumped back upright, wearing a very different expression. 'OK! Guys! Cut the shit a minute – this guy's in serious trouble.'