The Bride of Texas (31 page)

Back then, she’d been pouring a drink for Ambrose, staring at him as though he were Saint Nicholas, and the brandy overflowed onto his beautiful trousers. “ ‘Therefore I stomp on General Burnside’s orders, I spit on them!’ ” Ambrose was quoting Vallandigham as his spies had reported. “Evidently he wanted to insult me personally,” he said. “He apparently doesn’t know me. I know I have a short fuse. But I am certainly not in the habit of mixing personal matters in with our cause.” He brushed aside Jasmine’s embarrassed apologies with a smile. He wiped the drink from his trousers with a napkin and said, in a voice befitting a general, “We’re waging a civil war here, and we have a crisis on our hands that requires a force that can act more quickly than civilian power can. No one has ever won a war by hesitating to use that kind of force when necessary.”

My heart went out to my general, but my brain, always skeptical and only briefly clouded by emotions, woke me up in the
night. Ambrose — with the unwritten and hence abusable law on his side — was marching straight into another one of his predicaments, this time in conflict with the written law. I couldn’t get back to sleep. Was it really possible that men’s matters, like war and the rules of war, were too much for the female brain? I balked at the thought, bolstered by my long-standing friendship with Margaret Fuller, an utterly unsullied friendship because we had never met. It’s probably just as well. The kind of stories I write would make a travesty of such a friendship. Though I hadn’t intended this to be the case, they are sugary stories, with a drop of arsenic in the sugar — just a drop. Now and then a critic notices that my heroines are always “clever” and the heroes always “handsome”, and that the plots unfold accordingly. But none of them draws any radical conclusions from that. They mention my charming irony and other such qualities. Thanks to some inexplicable talent bestowed on me by the Creator, or by Providence, my little novels are always entertaining, and as a result no one ever takes them seriously, or bothers to analyse them.

Humphrey was sleeping contentedly beside me, but I was wide awake with anxiety, so I got up and went to the dining room, where the carafe holding the lovely liquid stood on the sideboard. I poured some into a snifter and stood where Jasmine had, by the window, staring up at the Cincinnati sky. The starry sky above me — the splendid starry sky over Cincinnati, in my native land. Where had I heard that before? From the lips of the brandy-loving scholar I am married to, quoting some sage from over the sea. I was an American. What is the essence of that condition, if not that the world and life are measured by the world and by life and not by Order Number One, the Constitution, when appealed to by Clement Vallandigham? Even though the order is hallowed by the authority of the glorious and the dead — glorious perhaps because they are dead. Is that
dangerous? Everything is dangerous. There is something in the heart of an American that says: danger cannot be avoided. All those dead soldiers. Danger is not to be sought out, but once it is there you cannot dodge it.

So I stood sipping the lovely liquid and philosophizing, and I thought of Ambrose giving orders and getting into trouble again. He keeps giving them because he is afraid — perhaps wrongly — that this land of ours will wind up in trouble.

Someone upstairs lit a lamp, for a soft glow of light suddenly fell on the spring leaves of the elm tree outside. Jasmine probably couldn’t sleep either.

The starry sky above me.

I went back to bed.

(illustration credit 4.1)

T
HE TURPENTINE FORESTS
were ablaze. The sound was like the roar of a waterfall. The forests lay across North Carolina, in a thick green carpet. The trunks of the pines oozed resin that the bummers, that brazen spearhead of Sherman’s army, had set ablaze. The flaming countryside had a wild beauty about it. The sergeant remembered the huge landscape painting over the dining-room fireplace in the château where he had once helped move a new pianoforte. It had looked as though the painter had observed the scene from a flying balloon. But they hadn’t had balloons in those days; it wasn’t until this war — in which everything was possible — that they had begun to use them. Lieutenant Williams watched the burning forests through his field-glasses. All the way to the horizon, billows of black smoke were bursting out of the dense green canopy. Large black mushrooms of sooty smoke rose above the forest cover, turned grey, and quickly dispersed in the overcast sky.

The sergeant could see the endless blue line of Sherman’s great army snaking through the trees, sometimes obscured by the smoke. It too reminded him of the painting in the château, yet it was so different. In the painting, the sun shining through
broken banks of cloud had made patches of light and dark on the ground, and in these patches soldiers in white had battled soldiers in red. They had covered the land from foreground to horizon, while above it, hidden in the azure sky, God was perhaps looking down, amused. Here there was nothing but smoke, clouds of it near the ground, columns of it reaching miles into the air and touching the leaden clouds like the buttresses of a burning cathedral. The turpentine forests were ablaze.

The standard of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin emerged from the smoke. Through a rift in the smoke the sergeant spied a group of four men marching in long strides and swaying as if to the music of a dance band. Axles on munitions carts creaked, yoked oxen groaned in discomfort. The caravan of wagons wound back to the horizon, and beyond it smouldered what was left of Columbia. North Carolina was ablaze. Lieutenant Williams trained his field-glasses on the edge of the forests. Owls were flying in and out of the smoke, their nocturnal eyes huge as if they were horrified at this vision of Armageddon. And pervading it all was the rhythm of that strange percussion, the clanking of tin cups and canteens. Sherman’s great army was rolling northwards.

“War is beautiful,” said Lieutenant Williams softly, perhaps to himself.

The sergeant overheard him and wondered if he was right. The painting in the château had shown war in its beautiful aspect. So did the view from the hilltop that was his general’s vantage-point. The sergeant remembered a long, lazy afternoon at the edge of a spruce grove above Dvorec, the countryside stretching towards the July horizon. Between two spruce trees a spider had woven a work of art that glistened in the sun like silver. He was just a boy and he lay there waiting as the spider rested in the heart of its magnificent web. At last a fly, green and shiny as brass, landed on the web, and the web enfolded it while it buzzed loudly and in vain. The spider darted over and
solicitously wrapped the fly in a funeral shroud. The beautiful world around them was alive with the drone of bees and bugs and beetles and dragonflies, with birdsong and the rustle of leaves. Vain calls for help. The battle-cry of spiders. If this was beautiful, why not war?

The endless blue line of ragged men marched with a rocking gait. The blue in their tattered uniforms had almost faded to grey, but from up here on the hillside the grey still looked blue; the clanking of the canteens was everywhere. A bayonet flashed silver through the black smoke. A squirrel dropped a pine-cone, which hit Jefferson Davis on the buttock; the young hog snorted as it trotted along beside the blue line. The sergeant heard a song over the fire’s persistent roar:

It is a beautiful war, the sergeant thought. The song came from wagons with groaning axles at the foot of the hill where he stood. These were ambulances carrying soldiers with minor wounds who had refused to stay behind in plantation houses transformed into field hospitals because they wanted to move with their general. They bumped and rattled along in the creaking ambulances, dangling their bandaged legs over the sides, heads wrapped in turbans of bandages and bobbing up and down in rhythm with the wheels. A beautiful war. The soldiers on one of the carts saw the general through the smoke and yelled, “Long live Sherman!” The general’s horse neighed, tossed its head, and a smile flashed through Sherman’s rust-coloured beard. He saluted. A thicket of bandaged hands answered his salute, and —

—
the cart rattled along a narrow street in the Old Town, close to where an embedded cannonball had fallen from the building façade and killed the young priest. They moved forward, stumbling, the little apple insignias on their caps, dragging the muskets they would have to clean and polish that evening, when the battle was over. Hauptmann von Hanzlitschek was at the head of the column. They passed a cart carrying students bloodied from the barricades, maimed or dismembered by Windischgraetz’s artillery. One of them was already dead, his mouth agape, his head lolling backwards over the rungs. Behind him, the grocer was wiping blood from a nasty wound in his skull — the same fellow he would later see being interrogated by von Hanzlitschek. They passed another cart loaded with horrors, two legs dangling over the sides, one shot off at the ankle, the stump wrapped in a shirt, the blood oozing through. With rising tears, he noticed the folk embroidery on the shirt as blood from the stump dripped onto the oval paving-stones — signalling the end of —

— and another wagon appeared, full of wounded who saw the general and cheered. They had heard cheers like this when the war began, but not often afterwards. Not after Shiloh, or Antietam, or Chancellorsville. Not until now, at the very end of a beautiful war. The wounded who refused to be left behind rode towards Bentonville, singing.

Sherman’s great army rolled towards Bentonville. The bummer spearhead set fire to the forest, billows of smoke rose from the blazing resin, pushed through tangled branches and burst
into the air above — great black mushrooming clouds, wide-eyed owls, the jangle of canteens and cups, and in the smoke the band of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. Sherman’s great army was rolling towards Bentonville.