This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  The first thing Doc had done was to look up young James Morton to give him his mother’s and sister’s regards, love, and best wishes. Both the chestnut-haired Morton, and the strapping redheaded Nathanial Nelson served as privates in the Shelby Grays.

  James had greeted Doc with a wild hug, his green eyes alight, and so reminiscent of Ann Marie’s. Compared to so many, at least the young man looked healthy.

  “I tell you,” James insisted, rubbing the sleeves of his new gray uniform, “polar bears ought to live in Kentucky.”

  Doc was attending to his instruments, having just finished extracting a pistol ball from a private’s arm after an accidental discharge. They’d given him a tent to serve as his surgery, along with two “assistant surgeons.”

  Doc raised an eyebrow as the oldest, Augustus Clyde, recently of Tyler, Texas, replied, “Naw, James, they’d freeze this far north. Even a polar bear’d have sense enough to head south … at least as far as Hernando.”

  The town to which he referred was in Mississippi just south of the Tennessee line.

  Clyde was a thick-set and muscular man, just turned twenty-two. A mat of rich black hair crowned his head and contrasted with his almost brilliant blue eyes. His father was a Methodist minister back in Texas, and while Clyde had apprenticed with a surgeon in Tyler, he had no formal medical training. He did, however, have a quick mind, and rarely needed to be told twice.

  James tucked his hands into his sleeves, puffing out breath as he watched the slushy rain fall from the gray sky. Beyond the surgery, the Fourth Tennessee camped in cramped quarters within the Island No. 10 fortifications. Lines of muddy tents sagged wetly, while before them, men clustered around sputtering fires that spewed redolent blue smoke into the air. When the wind changed, not only was the smoke so thick it would choke a man and leave his eyes weeping, but the smell of urine and feces from back in the trees would, as the troops unkindly said, “Gag a maggot.”

  Half of the regiment was down with diarrhea, and, though Doc had mentioned it to Colonel Neely, a proper latrine had to be a priority. Sanitation was simply appalling.

  As miserable as conditions were for the soldiers, Doc’s heart went out to the battalions of slaves who labored building the defenses. Ragged, cold, and shivering, they dug out the dirt, piled it to create ramparts, and hauled timbers to build gun emplacements.

  If they had any brightness in their lives, it was that as valuable “property” they were at least fed and provided shelter. As if, in the grand balance of things, that in any way tempered their endless labor and misery. But at least the effort was made on their behalf. Unlike each time a soldier died of dysentery or pneumonia, when a slave died, it was money out of the Confederacy’s war budget to reimburse the distant owner.

  Doc had never been comfortable with slavery, given his raising and time in Boston. If the Confederacy is to fall, he thought, it will be through divine justice coming home to roost.

  “You have no idea what cold is.” Doc turned his thoughts back to the conversation. “I lived in Boston for three years. My father used to tell me about winter out in the western mountains, how it got down to twenty and thirty below zero. He said the trees would pop as they froze. But something about Boston, the damp cold, the wind blowing across that half-frozen harbor … It slices through a man like a saber.”

  “Don’t suppose I need to give that a try if it’s worse than this,” James said as he wrapped his arms tightly about his chest. In the cold, the freckles dusting the bridge of his nose stood out. “So, you’re really going to be my brother-in-law?”

  “Your sister, having taken leave of her good senses, has agreed. We will set the date as soon as my enlistment is up.” Doc glanced at the young man. “Don’t know where I’ll find a best man.”

  James grinned, looking around. “Well, you sure won’t find one among any of these lazy bastards, if I’m any judge of men.”

  Doc shot him a wink and buckled his surgical chest closed. He turned to the small tin stove he’d been provided with. The embers inside had just about burned out. He’d sent what little wood he had left with his other assistant, John Mays, a lanky nineteen-year-old blond lad from Tupelo, Mississippi. John had been instructed to keep the fire going in the pest tent next door. Each bed was full with the worst cases. Those who were still ambulatory had been sent back to their tents to either recover, or be carried back as they continued to decline.

  “How’d you get here, Doc?” Clyde asked. “We been so busy, I been wondering.”

  “Hell,” James cried, delighted to indulge in profanity now that he was not only a soldier, but far from his mother’s strict censure. “He’s in love, Augustus. With my sister. She’s the one talked him into this madness. Thinks that after the war’s over, he’s going back to Memphis with a pocketful of money to set up his own surgery and marry her.”

  Doc took a deep breath, adding, “I’d be there now if James, here, hadn’t enlisted. It’s his sister’s fault. She said her brother wasn’t capable of taking care of himself, and if I didn’t get him back to her in one piece, she’d marry a Yankee selling tinware before she’d marry me.”

  James grinned self-consciously and hugged himself tighter against the cold. “I think she’s about as smitten as you are, Doc. After Father’s death … shucks, I don’t know what we’d a done without you.” He paused, gaze vacant. “It was like I just stopped. Sort of like I’d been cored out like an old apple.”

  Which was when James had given up on the dream of steamboats. At least for the moment.

  Doc lifted an eyebrow in Clyde’s direction. “I’m here because of freckles.”

  “Freckles?” Clyde shot him a sidelong glance. James was smiling, sharing the joke.

  “She has the cutest freckles on the bridge of her nose and cheeks. So, assuming I can keep James from getting shot up, when my service is completed a year from now, I’m going back to Memphis, establishing my surgery, and I’m going to look at those freckles for the rest of my life.”

  And more, of course, but that wasn’t any of their business.

  That last night in Memphis, Ann Marie had given him a hint and promise of things to come. Betrothed though they might be, she’d somehow managed to remain a lady, and he’d forced himself to be a gentleman. Nevertheless, the desperation in her lips as they’d kissed, and the arching of her body against his, hinted of the magic their wedding night would conjure.

  “Dear God, I love you so much,” she’d whispered as her green eyes had fixed on his, pupils wide with desire and intimacy. Her lips had parted, breasts rising and falling with each panting breath she’d taken.

  A year had suddenly become an unbearable eternity.

  A deep boom carried through the storm, causing the men around the regimental fires to look up, shift, and stare off to the west.

  Artillery. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. Just beyond the tents, earthworks had turned the island into a fortress. If you laid a letter S on its side and turned it upside down, Island No. 10 was situated at the south end of the first bend with shore batteries on either side. Any approach down the river would have to run a gauntlet of cannonfire.

  Doc had only had time for a glimpse, but he wondered how even the supposedly vaunted Federal ironclads could withstand bombardment from the mass of heavy artillery.

  As the boom from the shore battery faded into the gray day, John Mays slopped his way out of the pest tent and shivered as he stepped under the surgery awning. “That’s the last of the wood, Doc. I banked the stove down as far as it would go. Then I checked beds. Private Jenks is still hanging on, but it wouldn’t surprise me if’n he’s dead come morning.”

  Another boom carried on the sodden air.

  “Hope their aim has improved.” James shook his head. “It didn’t do them a hell of a lot of good at Fort Donelson. Can you believe the whole garrison surrendered? Thought one Southerner was supposed to whip ten soft-bellied Yankees.”

  “Thinking like that will lose us this war,” Doc t
old him as he shrugged into his winter coat. “Heard that Johnston is pulling our forces back all along the line. With Donelson and Fort Henry gone, the guns up at Columbus can’t be protected from an army coming from the east.”

  “Wonder where General Johnston is going to make a stand?” James said. “I talked to Nathan last night. The rumor is that Nashville is being abandoned without a fight. That all the supplies are being burned rather than let them fall into Federal hands.”

  “That’s just a rumor,” Mays muttered truculently. “Johnston will hold the line at Nashville. By Hob, it’s the capital of Tennessee. He can’t let that fall. What kind of message would that send to the rest of the state?”

  As if in response, the lilting call of a bugle sounded assembly. Doc was barely familiar with the melody himself. Mays had to say, “That’s your call, James. You’d better be in formation pronto, or you’re going to find out what sergeants and punishment can really be like.”

  James grabbed up his wet slouch hat and charged off into the slushy rain.

  Doc had just turned to make a bed check, when Lieutenant Francis came slopping out of the murk, saluted, and said, “Dr. Hancock? Colonel Neely’s compliments, sir. You are ordered to pack up and be ready to move. General Johnston is relocating the regiment.”

  “Where to?” Doc asked. “My hospital is full of men who can’t be moved.”

  The lieutenant hesitated, glanced uneasily at Mays and Clyde, and said, “Corinth, Mississippi, sir. We’ll see about ambulances and wagons to transport the sick.”

  “You do that, and you’ll kill some of these men.”

  “Then we’ll have to leave them behind to catch as best they can, sir.”

  With that the lieutenant snapped off another salute, spun on his heel, and slogged off through the mud.

  “Just leave them behind?” Doc wondered, stunned.

  “Reckon it’s the army, now, Doc,” Clyde said softly, his eyes on the vanishing lieutenant.

  “War’s different, Doc,” Mays agreed. “It’s devil take the hindmost.”

  With a gnawing unease in his gut, Doc took a deep breath and headed for his hospital. It was the army, damn it. Of course they couldn’t wait for the sick to heal before moving out.

  13

  February 22, 1862

  The sleet, snow, and freezing rain during the tactical withdrawal from positions along the Green River toward Bowling Green, Kentucky, left Butler feeling colder than he’d ever been. And, miserable though it was for him, he suffered nothing in comparison to what the rank and file of the Second Arkansas endured as they muscled wagons and artillery down boglike, half-frozen roads.

  Tasked with covering the Army of Central Kentucky’s retreat, they had no sooner occupied positions around Bowling Green, than the companies were ordered to move out. Hindman’s men set fire to the commissary and quartermaster stores and any supplies they couldn’t carry. Next they put the torch to bridges, the railroad depot, and any structures the Federals might consider of military value.

  Either some of Bowling Green’s panicked citizens—already on the verge of hysteria—caught the fever, or arsonists with an agenda of their own began setting fires in the town.

  On General Hindman’s orders, his troops had spent the night battling the blaze in freezing temperatures, only to evacuate the town the next morning as Federal shells announced the arrival of Buell’s forces.

  “Lieutenant,” Hindman had told Butler as he reached from his saddle and handed over a leather bag, “I need these dispatches delivered, with my compliments, to General Johnston in Nashville. You will await the general’s response and rejoin us in Murfreesboro. We will be encamped there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Butler had replied, glancing back at the plumes of black smoke rising from Bowling Green. The boom of Federal artillery carried on the cold morning air. Flakes of snow drifted down, indistinguishable from the falling ash that melted and ran in black streamers down his coat.

  “Ride safely, Lieutenant,” Hindman had told him grimly. “You shouldn’t have too much trouble finding our new headquarters when you reach Murfreesboro. We’ll be crowded around the biggest bonfire in the area, staying warm!”

  “I would have thought you’d had enough of big fires last night, sir,” Butler told him with a grin. “Go with God, General.”

  Then he had wheeled his sorrel mare and pounded off along the treacherous and frozen road toward Nashville some sixty-five miles to the southeast. The way was not hard to follow, given the abandoned equipment, scattered personal items, broken wagons, and dead horses along the way. And then there were the stragglers, looking miserable as they stumbled their way toward Nashville in ever greater numbers as Butler overtook them.

  As a staff officer on horseback, he shivered, and his teeth chattered. The poor infantry slogged through the snow and half-frozen mud, thinly clad, many suffering from frostbite; each morning men were found dead and partially frozen in their blankets.

  Along with them went the fleeing civilians, most improperly dressed, carrying their most cherished valuables. The most miserable of all, however, were the lines of slaves. In long lines they plodded, barefoot, in the half-frozen mud, worn blankets over their heads and shoulders. Shivering, starved, often roped together and huddling, they were the living reminder of the root of secession. Property—planters’ wealth—being herded south out of reach of Yankee confiscation and the lure of freedom.

  It brought a crawling sensation to Butler’s gut, an unsettling reminder—like a slap in the face—that the glorious cause of secession meant the continued abuse of an entire class of human beings.

  God forgive us for inflicting such misery.

  While Butler might question the ethics of such humanity, behind the grimace on his cold lips and chattering teeth, he was more proud than he’d ever been in his life. The organization behind Hindman’s clockwork retreat was his: a model of efficiency that even General Hardee praised.

  Catching up with Hardee’s brigade as it entered Nashville, Butler might have marched headlong into chaos. The streets of the panicked city were full of desperate people, many of them wheeling their personal property out in wagons, carriages, on wheelbarrows, packed on horseback, or even in valises held over their heads against the cruel freezing rain.

  Governor Harris and the state government had already fled to Memphis, adding to the sense of despair.

  Here and there, structures burned. Sparks and smoke shot into the sky. Furtive groups of skulkers looted stores and residences. Women shrieked and pleaded, some groveling before drunken men who carried off household furnishings.

  On a street corner, a lunatic laughed maniacally, a whiskey bottle dangling from his hand, his face reflecting a crazy relief at the sight of troops.

  The arrival of Hardee’s half-frozen, sick, and dispirited men only added to the insanity of defeat. At the sight of them, even more people picked up and joined the columns of refugees that clogged the roads out of town. But most striking—the image Butler would carry away—was the terror in the children’s eyes. Their pale faces tear-streaked, gaping mouths like black holes.

  This was the stuff of nightmares, the literature of disaster come to life. Like Euripides would have penned in Trojan Women. The sack of Rome. The razing of Carthage. Napoleon at Moscow.

  In a daze he rode through the streets, his pistol in his hand for protection. He kept asking himself: Am I really seeing this!

  If there were any joy to be found in the city’s misery, it was that after delivering his dispatches, and for the first time in a fortnight, Butler had enjoyed a full night’s sleep in a warm bed. Had had his uniform cleaned, and paid to have a seamstress add gold piping to his sleeves to augment his promotion to first lieutenant.

  In too short a time, General Johnston’s replies were prepared.

  Partially recuperated and refreshed, Butler rode south on the Murfreesboro Pike. He tried not to think of the cries and dismay expressed by the remaining terror-crazed citizens of Tennessee’
s onetime capital on the Cumberland.

  What was war, anyway? He wanted to cry for the poor people, broken, terrified, fleeing into the cold, rain, and mud, as the Yankee hordes swept down from the north. It was the children, the women, the frightened families, many of them without the comfort of men, that speared his heart with pain.

  Nor did it let up.

  Wagons clogged the road. Loaded as they were with the treasures of a lifetime, they still couldn’t come close to evacuating the tens of tons of provisions left behind for Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry to burn or destroy before the pursuing Federals could seize them.

  Had Butler not been there to see for himself as Confederate troops fought with lawless civilians, he would never have believed such madness could be occurring in an American city.

  And then had come the final look over his shoulder as Hardee’s small army marched south on the Murfreesboro Pike. Columns of smoke rose into the sullen sky as warehouses were set fire; steamboats, still under construction, were immolated in their docks; and military stores were put to the torch to deny their use to Buell’s pursuing Federals.

  This part of war, Butler hadn’t imagined.

  “Your thoughts, Lieutenant?” Colonel Daniel Govan asked. Govan had raised a company of Phillips County men from around Helena, and been promoted to regimental command in the wake of Hindman’s promotion to brigadier general. In the reorganization and integration into the Army of Central Kentucky, the Second Arkansas had been placed in Liddel’s Brigade, Third Division, Hardee’s Corps.

  “I was thinking I can’t have seen the things I’ve seen. Was that really Nashville? I mean, that might have been Moscow on the eve of Napoleon’s advance, or perhaps Rome as the barbarian vanguard approached. Not our Nashville.”

  He glanced at the line of chained slaves who rested at the side of the road. If the price of secession is the abolition of slavery, let them go. Each and every last one.