The American: A Middle Western Legend (3 page)

But a hundred miles from Washington, the situation changed. They were turned out of the cars into a pouring rain at a little wayside station, and now the non-coms had their revenge, driving them into line, snapping and snarling at them, and there in the rain they stood for two full hours, waiting for the colonel.

The colonel was a small, dry, bearded man, who drove up in a chaise, chewed an unlit cigar, and stared at his regiment long and coldly, stared at the home-guard officers who grinned at him and then suddenly stopped grinning The colonel had been wounded three times, the last time when his battered line of Ohio Abolition Volunteers had been wiped out at Shell Mound. Now he called for Captain Frank, who came on the double and saluted smartly.

“We have twenty-two miles to march before we make camp,” the colonel said.

“But it's getting on to night, sir, and it's raining.”

“I saw that it was raining.”

“But—” Then the captain nodded and turned away. Then he remembered, halted, turned once more, and saluted.

VIII

They marched through Washington, but they were not proud any more. Their uniforms were faded and dusty, and their shoes crunched ankle-deep in the June mud. Two weeks of training had convinced both them and their colonel that they would not be soldiers, yet they had learned how to load their rifles, how to fire in unison in the same general direction, and not to sneer at that legendary figure, Johnny Reb. They had learned too to make camp and break camp, and they were beginning to learn how to march. In Washington, they were just another regiment passing through, and there was an endless stream of such regiments, and in the end they all came back, limping, decimated, on litters and in wagons—or sometimes they did not come back at all and they would be canceled, as it was termed, since you can't reconstitute a regiment out of two or three survivors, not when you're in a hurry, not when the situation is as desperate as it was then, in the summer of 1864, so desperate that this bedraggled line of Ohio farm boys was ordered to the front, as the colonel said, “To murder?”

“To murder, if you think of it that way,” the general answered.

“With two weeks of training? They're not troops, they're nothing.”

“They're men, aren't they?”

“Then it's murder.”

“If you want to call it murder, call it murder,” the general agreed.

Of this, only rumors came to Pete; he knew that they were marching south, and already he had seen more of the world than he had ever dreamed existed. He had seen great cities, and he had seen the nation's capital. And the edge had gone; fear came into his heart and mind, and into his legs too, the whole fabric of him, fear that hung like a pall over the nation, so great was the slaughter, so constant, so fruitless. Yet he was harder than he had any right to be at the age of sixteen, harder than the ten or twelve who had run away already out of homesickness and terror, harder than the one who was caught, brought back, and hanged before parade ranks. Sergeant Jerry O'Day said he had the makings of a soldier, and some of the men shared chewing tobacco and liquor with him, and he was strong as a young horse, used to going barefoot, so that when the paper soles of his shoes wore through, his feet did not bleed, but only became tougher than before. If not for the fear, if not for the sense of disaster which increased constantly as they moved south, translating itself into confusion, hesitation, marching and countermarching, he would have been reasonably happy. He had enough to eat, and marching was not as hard as work. They no longer sang, it was true, but at night, in bivouac under the summer stars, he had men around him who were his comrades; he had never known that before. There was talk, and he loved talk, loved to listen to it, to the sound of words, to the soft, lazy American accents, and to the wonderful commonplace of:

“God, I'm tired.”

“Sonovabitch, I ain't going to have no feet left, just wear them down to the ankles and polish the bones:”

“Tell you something, Jed, you wear them down to the ankles and sure enough they'll send you home.”

“You ain't going home a long time, soldier.”

“Going to write a letter to Johnny Reb.”

“How?”

“Going to pacify us both—just meet and shake hands.”

“Just shake, stranger, huh?”

“That's right.”

“And he puts a lead in your belly, huh?”

“That's right.”

Every night there was such talk, so much of it. Pete didn't want to be shot—be heard terrible tales of men who were shot; but he didn't want to give up this life either.

He was not a demanding person; he complained less than the average soldier, and he was so grateful for small favors that the men in his company came to have a real affection for him; if they wanted something done, the kid would do it. If they put turtle eggs or live frogs into his pack, the kid grinned as if he really enjoyed it. One day, bivouacked outside of a little town, four or five went to see a prostitute, taking Pete with them, he who had never even kissed a girl or spoken to one outside of necessary do or don't words, ouside of his own sisters, and then they laughed at his fright and shame. But the shame passed, and his dreams turned more and more into the three dimensions of life. The force inside of him throbbed so hard and so wildly sometimes that once, when asked what he was going to do after the war, he answered:

“Everything. Everything.”

Speech, which had been such a halting, difficult thing for him, came more readily, and he gained a sense of confidence and power from the black fuzz that began to cover his cheeks, thinking that some day this would be a full fine beard, covering his split lip, covering his large chin. Change fermented in him, and he groped for ideas that would have never started in him only a few months ago. A soldier from Cleveland, who had been a parson before the war, gave him a novel to read,
The Redemption of Blackfist Megee
, and as he struggled through it, only half understanding it yet losing himself in its incredible vulgarity, still another horizon opened. And he sat one night by the fire, listening to a furious argument between an Abolitionist and a blackbaiter, taking from the talk, for the first time, a whole impression of the war in which he was involved as one minute and unimportant unit. Yet from this came the beginning of consciousness concerning many things, four million black slaves, a Union that had grown from the blood and suffering of men, abstract principles of right and wrong, natural rights, and many other half-formed ideas which set his head to spinning and aching, and made him partly crazy at the thought of how full and large and incredible the world was.

IX

Yet fear and confusion predominated, and he could make no real pattern either from the war or his concern with it. A great battle was going on across the James River, and although they approached it for crossing four times, each time they turned back. He heard that an argument was going on between their own officers and headquarters, as to whether they were ready for battle; certainly, the lines of wounded coming back across the river told of the need for them, raw as they were, and the fact that their own officers held them in such contempt didn't add to morale. As a reaction, they took to boasting, and once, when a report came through that they would be sent went into Kentucky to work on a railroad as service troops, the mood of the men turned black and savage, and they spoke of a strike. It was the first time Pete had ever heard the word mentioned, and it was more puzzling to him than the desire of his comrades to see action, for he too felt something of the growing drive that impelled them to fulfill themselves or die.

The nearest they came to battle was when a detachment of Rebel cavalry forded the river one dark night and struck a savage, slashing blow at the reserve's flank. If the blow had been followed in force, the whole of the Ohio and Illinois reserve might have been routed, and temporarily at least the course of the war changed; but the Rebels sent over only a few companies and the raid burned up and died away like a quick brush fire. But the time it lasted was the wildest, strangest few hours in Pete's life—turned out of bed half naked into the night by shots and trumpet call, men fumbling for guns, bayonets, and outside in the moonless camp woeful confusion, random shots, shouting, and then finally panic. It surprised Pete that he was not wholly a part of the panic, that when several hundred men ran helplessly in whatever direction they thought least dangerous, he stayed outside his tent until a bugle called him into ranks, then marched under directions of his sergeant down to the river and kept his station there all night long.

He might have taken great pride in the fact that he was not a worse soldier than most, but the next day he came down with fever, and both pride and confidence disappeared in a malarial oven. For two days he lay in his damp tent, shivering, pleading for blankets to keep himself warm, while his brief glory died away, while his brief manhood changed itself into the adolescent whimpering of a halfgrown boy. During much of that time, the tall parson who had given him the book sat beside him and begged him to prepare himself to leave this world and enter the next; but Pete's good nature had gone, and he snarled back like a cornered animal. The sergeant tried to find a doctor for him, but when two days had passed with no hope of getting a medical man, they gave it up and carried him by litter to the nearest field hospital.

Afterward, there were two reasons for his not remembering the days in the field hospital any too well; for one thing, much of the time he had a raging fever; for another, the things he saw at the field hospital, in between his spells of delirium, were not good to remember. When he was conscious and clearheaded, he saw them bringing in the battle cases from the south, men in blood-soaked bandages, men without hands and without feet, men who screamed with pain, and men who wept. The doctors, in their filthy, blood-stained aprons, reminded him of the farmers at home when hog-killing time came, and once, when the man next to him died of a hemorrhage, blood spilling from his lips all over the sheet and bed, and lay all night beside him, a corpse, the hard thing inside of Pete broke, shattered entirely, and let him weep the way he had never wept before.

His delirium was to be preferred, for then he went back to the forest where all was still, and the boughs overhead a high roof, and the soft south wind humming way up above, and there was not one girl with golden hair but a thousand, and all the mingled images of his dreams came together into splendid structures.

After two weeks, he was pronounced cured and told to go and join his regiment again.

X

For Pete, the war was as permanent a condition of life as any he could imagine. It seemed to him sometimes that there was never a time when there had not been a war, nor did he speculate a great deal on what would become of him when the war was done. He had not written home because there was no one there he desired to hear from, and he had never received a letter from home. Thus, when it came to an end so suddenly, his regiment demobilized and sent home, he could not react the way most of the men did, whooping, shouting, paying fantastic sums for bad liquor. What a war, what a war! No real battles, none of the stuff like Gettysburg or The Wilderness, none of that, but still they were soldiers, and that was something for a man to look back on. It was not something for Pete to look back on. Marching north to Washington, he was silent in the ranks of singing, happy men—“Farewell, mother, you may never press me to your heart again; But oh, you'll not forget me mother, if I'm numbered with the slain”—derisive and contemptuous; but he was silent, facing not the inverted joy of his comrades, but the inverted tragedy of his own rejection from the only good life he had known.

XI

The farm was different, the people different. He had come home, not out of deep desire, but like an animal who knows only one burrow. He had come home in a uniform, and he stood among his family as a stranger, looking at his brothers and sisters as if he had not seen them before, looking at the worn woman who was his mother, at the father. The very phrase and threat and anger of fatherhood was gone; old Altgeld was a man no taller than Pete, no stronger. He watched his son almost with apprehension, and the mother showed plainly how much she wanted to please. She smiled and kissed him; she even cried a little. This son was not to be beaten with a harness strap; he had seen the world and the enemy, and he had made his compact with the mysterious warlords. As peasants, with the peasant tradition of father and grandfather and twenty generations before that, they accepted the separation; actually, they had not expected the son to come back, but he was back now and he was a stranger to them and so was to be suspected and feared, even though tears had flowed. Tears must flow; he was blood of their blood and flesh of their flesh.

To his brothers and sisters, he was also a hero, a man who had been to the great and bloody war and seen the terrible face of Johnny Reb. They were prepared to admire him, to grant him leadership, to listen to his tales of glory, and even to like him—but he threw them off. They remembered that he was sullen once, and he was not too different now. He told no tales. When pressed:

“Did you fight?”

“No.”

“Kill anyone?”

“No.”

“Seen Jeff Davis?”

“No.”

Just that way, and he lost them; having almost had them, he found himself cut off, and after a week or two of farm work, work never so hard as he had done once, he knew that he must go away, and told his father that.

“Where do you go?” the father asked him.

He had worked out a plan. He knew something now; if they thought he was a piece of driftwood only a war could claim, he would show them different. He could read and write English, and he could do sums, simple sums, it is true, but a beginning. He was going to be educated, and some day he would come back here, not as a soldier from the wars, but as a lord and master. He told his father that he was going to the school at Mansfield.