The March (35 page)

Oh she never sings her coo coo
.
.
.

Till the fourth day a July, David reminded him.

Till the fourth day of July, Albion said. Are you a good boy?

Yassuh.

Are you a good boy?

Yassuh.

Are you—

I done tole you I is.

What is that in the window?

That not a window, that the sun comin in the wagon.

The sun?

Yassuh.

It’s always there.

Not in the night, not if it rainin, David said.

It’s always there. See? It’s there now, and it’s always now. Are you a good boy?

Yassuh.

What did I just say?

Am you a good boy.

Yes. And what do you answer?

Yassuh. Why your hands tied to this bar here?

Are they tied? Untie them.

But they tied.

Yes, untie them. Aren’t you a big boy?

Yassuh.

I don’t like my hands tied. I am in misery. What did I say I am?

You in misery.

I am. Yes. David, what is your name?

You done said it, the boy giggled.

What?

David.

Is that your name?

You done said it yousel’!

Are my hands untied yet?

Naw. This a big knot goes round an over an under.

Around and around?

Yassuh.

Oh, the coo coo is a pretty bird . . . I’ll show you a trick. What will I show you?

A trick. There, that your right hand now. What kind of trick?

Watch, Albion Simms said, smiling. And raising his free hand he touched with his forefinger the spike embedded in his skull. What’s this?

It the iron stuck in your haid. Do it hurt?

No. Watch this, Albion said, and lightly tapped the spike with his index finger.

That no trick, David said.

Roll the drums, Albion said. Slowly he extended his arm. Are you watching?

I is.

With the heel of his hand Albion drove the spike into his brain.

THREE DAYS AFTER
the battle at Bentonville the sun was shining and Sherman’s troops were encamped and recovering in the hills and pine groves around Goldsboro. The junction had been made with Schofield’s thirty-thousand-man army, as planned, and with uniforms and supplies and mail due imminently from the coast by railroad, and the entire Georgia and Carolinas campaigns having gone just as Sherman had designed them, he should have been somewhat satisfied with his situation. But he couldn’t get it out of his mind that the Reb General Joe Johnston had caught him by surprise. Yes, in the face of the numerically overwhelming force finally deployed against him Johnston had retired from the field, and, yes, the books would record Bentonville a Union victory. But Sherman had let his columns diverge to the extent that Johnston was able to bring his entire army against Slocum’s column, isolated back there, and hard pressed to defend itself. Sherman, encamped a dozen miles away, had to be awakened in the middle of the night to be told what had happened. It had required that backbreaking night march with Howard’s wing to secure the lines and force Johnston to give up the fight. And hundreds of Union men had died and a thousand more were wounded.

Colonel Teack intuited from the General’s moods, by turns brooding or agitated, that it was exactly this line of thought that was eating away at him. Yesterday morning Sherman and his staff had stood on parade in the Goldsboro town square as his bedraggled troops came in from Bentonville. There was no hailing Uncle Billy this time, and the salutes were indifferent at best. The men were hungry and exhausted, and so worn with months of marches and skirmishes and battles that there was nothing left of them but sinew and muscle. They were angry as only exhausted men can be. The clothes on their backs were not to be dignified as rags, and their shoeless feet were bloodied and swollen. There were no drummer boys to keep the pace. There was no pace. Look at them, Sherman said to Teack as they sat their horses in review. Have you ever seen a finer army than this? They have given me everything I’ve asked for and then some. When this damned war is over, I would have them march down Pennsylvania Avenue in just this disreputable state, so that the people can see what it takes to fight a war, how it strips away everything inconsequential from a man and leaves a hardened fighter with guts of iron and the stout heart of a hero.

Teack believed that Sherman had made more than one mistake in the past week. It is not unusual for the loyal adjutant to entertain the thought that his tactical skills are a cut above his superior’s. To the degree that Colonel Teack worshipped his General and stood ready to die for him, he nevertheless knew that he, Teack, would not have pulled General Mower back from that flanking movement in the swamps. Johnston was virtually pinned and about to be deprived of his one avenue of retreat, the bridge at Mill Creek. Instead of ordering Mower’s division to fall back, Sherman should have sent in massive support. Johnston would have lost his army, and that would have been the end of all opposition in the Carolinas.

It was uncanny that almost at the same moment Teack was thinking these thoughts, Sherman began speaking of the matter. They were dining well in the mansion of an obliging tobacco merchant who had retired to a farm he owned, leaving everything under his roof—including his servants and his pantry, cellar, and humidor—for the use of the occupation. What would you have done in my place, Teack? Was I wrong to pull Mower back? Was it a mistake? I thought his position was vulnerable. I suppose I could have backed him up. But in any event it would have been bloody. Johnston would have fought to the last man. He’s the best they have, Joe Johnston. He’s better than Lee. They pulled him off back at Atlanta and gave his command to that stupid Frenchman Beauregard. That was our good fortune, let me tell you. Johnston wouldn’t have defended the cities as Beauregard did. How stupid and ineffective. Augusta, Charleston. And never an army united enough to do anything to stop me. Johnston would have used the land, as a good soldier would. He’d have held us at every river, at every crossing, at every hill and swamp and given ground only for our precious blood in return. We would be where we are now, but with more losses to show for it. By the time Johnston took over again he had only dribs and drabs to work with. But he pulled them together into an army and put them in the right place, and for a moment he had me. So send in Mower? I still say no. I saved lives. What can Johnston do now against this ninety-thousand-man army? I saved lives, and not just our own. Father Abraham wants those Southern boys alive so they can go back to their farms and put some food on their tables. And I? I will simply march on, as I have, with men now so honed to hardship and battle that they are almost superhuman. This war is over, Teack, whatever any miserable little band of skirmishers think they can do about it. We have won, and everyone knows it. The South is mine, and Joe Johnston knew it the day I came marching down the lowlands from Atlanta.

Teack was relieved that he was not required to say anything.

Sherman looked bad—tired, green around the gills. He had a cigar going constantly and drank more than he ate. When he wasn’t running on at the mouth, rehashing the same issues compulsively, or raving about his rank and file, he exhausted himself with details that ordinarily would be left to his subordinates. He dressed down the chief mail agent when the mails did not come up from the coast on time. He examined samples of the new uniforms and shoes ordered for his men, actually feeling the materials and hefting the boots like a customer at the haberdasher’s while the embarrassed Quartermaster General Meigs looked on. He ordered inspections and canceled them, he called for a parade and rescinded the order even as the men were gathering. These men deserve their rest and we’ll give it them, he told Teack. At the same time, he was anxious to get on with it, and the sense of a dissolution of purpose and the loss of his spirit-army that he had felt in every city, with the troops encamped and wandering about drinking more than was good for them, assailed him now. He wanted to be on the march, he wanted the ranks to fall in, he did not like city governance and dealing endlessly with whining civilians, and to simulate the good, hard earth in a tent under a tall pine tree he threw his blankets on the floor of his bedroom and slept by the hearth under a pup tent set up for him by Sergeant Moses Brown.

Teack conferred with Brown. Fatten him up a bit, Sergeant, and get him into a hot bath. He’s overworked and overtired. The stoic Brown nodded. He had also watered the decanters of the General’s wine. He didn’t need to be told what his General needed.

Sherman felt better busying himself with a reorganization of his army. Now that he had Schofield’s troops, he planned a three-column march so that no one column would ever find itself without immediate support. The central column corps would be under Schofield. He had Slocum and Howard, of course, for his flanking-wing commanders. And General Joe Mower, Teack noted, had now been promoted to command of the Twentieth Corps under Slocum. Three columns, Teack, ninety thousand strong. If I were Johnston I would throw down my arms and run like hell. This is a trident I’ve made here, three sharp prongs to draw blood. Teack said, The trident was Poseidon’s weapon, General. The god of the sea. Well, Sherman said, there’s been enough damn rain these last months to turn me into a Poseidon.

The morning he learned that Willie Hardee, the sixteen-year-old son of the Confederate General Hardee, had died fighting at Bentonville, Sherman retired to his rooms and wept. Apparently Willie Hardee had pleaded with his father to join the fray though he was not officially under arms. Sherman sat down to compose a letter to Hardee, whose division, according to the latest intelligence, was encamped at Smithfield with Johnston’s forces. And now, General, he wrote, we have both lost our sons of the same name. Though my Willie was too young to ride, it was the war that killed him just as surely as the war has killed yours. How unnatural is this age when, in violation of God’s grand stratagem, the young are unbodied of their souls before the old. In Ecclesiastes it is said (as I blunder to remember it), “As some leaves fall and others grow in their place, so too with the generations of flesh and blood, one dies and another is born.” I can imagine you wishing in your grief that God had spared your Willie and taken you instead, for that is what I wished—I mean, when I lost my Willie. I curse our inverted time, when so many thousands of us, fathers and mothers, have given our children to this damned war of the insurrection. I look forward to the day this nation is again united and the natural order is restored and our generations die once again appropriate to their God-given ranks. At that time, my dear General, I hope we may meet and commiserate as fellow soldiers and survivors. Desiring that you accept my sincere condolences. I am, sir, your humble obedient servant William Tecumseh Sherman, Major General.

STILL RESTLESS, SHERMAN
decided there was nothing for it but to make a quick trip up to Virginia to meet General Grant. He called his wing and corps commanders together to advise them of this and to propose the order of march when he should return. They were met in a large conference room on the ground floor of the state courthouse. Outside, the trees in the town square were in early leaf. Sherman’s maps were spread out on a walnut table that had been polished to a shine. The sun shone through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the generals, but for Kilpatrick, were cleaned up for the occasion in their midnight-blue dress tunics, the buttons gleaming. It was almost grand. Sherman sighed. He himself, he knew, was no sartorial model, but, really, Kilpatrick was an egregious slob, with his stained jacket, his beard stubble, the dried manure on his boots, and damn it, the man did have a kind of hump, but why couldn’t he stand straighter as befit his rank?

With his pointer, Sherman illustrated his thinking as his generals hovered over the table. Heretofore we have marched into their cities and towns. We have torn up their railroads, destroyed their armories and manufactories, deprived them of their currency, helped ourselves to their cotton. Now the situation is changed. We want just to destroy Joe Johnston’s army. We met him last week on his terms, now we want to meet him on ours. Conceivably Lee can choose to pull out of Virginia and make a junction with Johnston down here. Yes, though he might break his heart by doing so, he could do that by traveling light, divested of wagon trains, coming through here, and here, Sherman said, moving the pointer southwest from Richmond. He should. He commands a tired worn-out army, his desertion rates increasing by the day. Grant will cut the last link to Danville, and what then can Lee do but stand and fight till he dies of attrition? So even with Grant on his tail a march to North Carolina is his best move, and I wish he’d make it, because with my ninety thousand I don’t even need the Army of the Potomac. We can end the war right here, and the honor is all ours.

At this, the generals turned to one another with grins and expressions of approbation. An exultant flush rose upon some faces.

But my guess, Sherman said, is that Lee will do the gallant stupid thing and hold his position. So what does that mean for us? Johnston has, at most, thirty-five thousand troops. If we could handle his and Lee’s combined, what then is so difficult about Joe Johnston alone? Well, I’ll tell you. The man is a master of retreat. You remember how deft he was at Atlanta. He understands retreat as the powerful military move it is. We will hope he defends Raleigh, but if not, if he runs, our task complicates. He runs, turns vindictive, scatters his troops in western North Carolina, Tennessee, he fights a guerrilla war and it can go on for years. Years, gentlemen. Knowing as well as we the art of foraging, and with a civilian population prepared, however secretly, to furnish him with what he needs—no, this is the last thing we want him to do. We’ve got to turn his flanks, box him in, and if he doesn’t surrender grind him to dust.

General Kilpatrick’s attention at this moment was diverted by the two young black women coming into the room with silver platters of cups of coffee and decanters of brandy. They were handsome young things, smiling like the free girls they were—free to smile, free to do anything their hearts pleased.