Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  Once on duty at this stockade you come, you dumb sentry you, God damn you are my boss! I mean—son of a bitch—I am boss! It is under my orders you come!

  (Ach, why could he not speak the English better? It baffled him. Elizabeth had tried to teach, even the little girls had tried to teach. He knew that he was yelling like an idiot, and the recognition of this fact made him but more enraged and yelling the louder. Lack of facility at English had held up his promotion, lack of English—)

  By God, I make you smell hell oder you let me in!

  A coughing and apologetic Captain Hamrick was drawn to the scene by Wirz’s fuming; he identified the new superintendent of the prison, the sentry accepted a furious tongue-lashing from Wirz which seemed to draw no blood—perhaps the creature was deaf as well as illiterate. Wirz passed through the enclosure, halting to survey it critically although there was really nothing to see except log walls, a broken wagon wheel leaning against the logs, and a bedraggled slave stretched at full length in the sun which by this time was high enough to find the interior of the box: the black was either sick or asleep or both. Well! In time there should be built a complete second stockade rather than this mere border around each gate. What was to prevent devilish Yankees from digging tunnels underneath a single stockade? Then might they come squeezing through like fast-bred rodents, emerging into freedom, ready to pillage the countryside—burn houses and stores, corrupt the crops, ravish the women, seize guns, shoot, shoot—ready to constitute a threat behind the Confederate lines more appalling than that faced at the front. Certainly. A second stockade should be constructed as soon as Wirz could wheedle such security from the Winders.

  He paused at the interior gate, quickly putting himself to rights for the prisoners’ eyes. His revolver hanging at his left side, ready for his left hand . . . yes, fully capped, ready to spit. He made his heavy gold watch chain hang true, and felt the forepiece of his cap, and drew the cap jauntily to one side.

  Going inside, sir? A pimply child at the inner gate put the nasal question.

  I am Captain Henry Wirz, commanding now this prison!

  Just a second till I lift the bar, Captain, sir. The boy exerted skinny arms under the wooden bar. Wirz helped him with his hand, together they worried the bar aloft and the wicket door scraped open. Wirz stepped over the sill, wrinkling his sharp nose as an odor swept to possess him. It smelled like an alley in one of those Parisian slums where he had walked gingerly, not pitying the poor, but scorning them for their filth, thinking that they should know better.

  Wry-necked Smith was calling the roll. That was his regular task. He was a Rebel sergeant on whom devolved many duties not too complex but savoring of any ceremony which exemplified discipline. He was a middle-aged man with a squeezed face, sandy mustache and goatee, and a perpetual frown of concentration. In Taliaferro County he had sought public office assiduously and was bound to be disappointed always on election day, but the next election found him undiscouraged. Smith was barely literate. He pronounced many names so remarkably that it was difficult for their owners to recognize them. Years before, on the way to a gin, driving a cart with his own bale of cotton atop, Smith had managed to upset the vehicle and was pinned beneath the load. His recovery amazed the Taliaferro County medical profession; but after that time his head was riveted around to the right; he could not turn it. When he wished to look in another direction he had to turn his whole body. At this late date the wastage of war had raked even this misshapen relic into the army, and soldiers of his company said that Wry-necked Smith was frozen permanently at Eyes Right: an officer had called the order, Smith had obeyed, and then the officer had forgotten to give the order of Front. Northern prisoners, as soldiers also, had come naturally to the same conclusion.

  Wirz had never seen this sergeant before, and now regarded him with disfavor. His darting examination told him immediately that the prisoners were playing roots with the non-commissioned officer. It was an old trick; Wirz had seen them attempting it during his brief service in an Alabama prison and even at Richmond. They tried the trick but did not perform it successfully when Henry Wirz held the roll! It consisted, mainly, of making eighty-seven men, perhaps, seem to count as a hundred. Smith edged warily in front of the formation, moving a few steps at a time, moving to the right where his congealed gaze led him. Yankees responded to their names at one end of the rank, then ducked behind the bodies of their fellows and reappeared in line farther along, squeezing in, answering to the name of Johnson or Langley later as boldly as they had responded to Adams or Atherton earlier. One hundred rations were more to be desired by eighty-seven men than eighty-seven rations. And the game of roots could be played in divers other ways also: it was an aggravation to authorities, a positive swindle to the unalert.

  By God, Sergeant!

  Wry-necked Smith stepped promptly around to look at Henry Wirz.

  These God damn Yankees, you watch them better!

  Smith shifted his tobacco quid. Who’re you?

  Sergeant, it is now I command this stockade. Better you better watch all these damn Yankees. You watch them close! They come around behind, beating you every times!

  A few prisoners hooted in the ranks, the rest watched apathetically, the rest were too tired to do more than that. For the most part only the young lean whipper-snappers in their teens had this dance and energy left to them. Ragged slouching ranks were of a sameness; there was such variety to torn attire or lack of it, such infinite variety in people’s shapes and sizes that they seemed starved down into common face and form. Who had answered to the name of Lewis when previously he had answered to Gilmore? Wirz might not know; their uniformly tarred faces baffled him whether they wore hair or whether they didn’t, whether they were scurvy-ridden and bent between sticks or whether they stood erect, whether they were well-fed raiders or waifs preyed upon by the raiders. Not knowing, feeling his way to absolute authority with caution, Henry Wirz let his patent-leather boots take him away.

  He moved along Main Street toward the center of the stockade, holding his left hand upon the flap of his holster. His right forearm began to knock like the pulse of an aching tooth. Proximity to these devils had done that, ja, ja. The arm responded; the arm said, So these are the people who tore me, these are the inventors of my misery? Throb, throb—let me out, I am cased here in agony. Let me out! Throb, let me out, throb, throb! said the reeking suffering spirit fastened inside the arm, let me see the Yankees.

  Wirz traveled almost blindly, moisture on his forehead, cold moisture on his stringy neck. He looked down: one boot-toe was befouled by excrement, fresh soft yellow human excrement; it had to be human, there were no dogs in the place. He said aloud, God damn shit, Yankees are shit— He kept walking.

  A string of monsters great and small began to attach to him. They followed calculatingly, trying to evaluate this slight grizzled man, many recognizing immediately the power which he would hold over them, and wondering in the same breath how they might profit from it or avoid its impact. Since Wirz announced himself to Wry-necked Smith the word had gone coursing through mildewed formations and on and on . . . a limp word was spoken, a head was turned . . . group to group among the shebangs. Him? Yup, him. There he goes. What? Who? New commander. Where? Over there. Hey, leave us have a look . . . shoed feet, shoeless feet pattering in muck behind the solitary visitor in gray uniform trousers, the armed man in the calico waist. What is he, an errant boy for Persons? Hey, bubby, does your Ma know where you’re at? Bet you a red cent he’s got some sugarplums in that there pocket of his. Who? That’s him . . . word was ahead of Henry Wirz now, people of the stockade were following in a drove, the news had spread faster than Wirz walked.

  A dozen voices were blatting, their owners concealed behind huts or taking refuge back of their mates.

  Hi, Mister, where in tunket did you get that great big awful pistol?

  Will it shoot?

  Beardy, don’t sho
ot me!

  Who’s that specimen, anyways?

  Wirz stood his ground, face twisted partly by pain and partly by desperate assertion. You hear to me, Yankees, you dumb damn prisoners! I am Captain Wirz. Now this stockade I command! You watch, you know what is good for you!

  They seemed to have their faces corked like actors, they were hooligans from some weird treacherous minstrel troupe. Yah, sneered evil boys hiding behind other evil boys. Older ones or the more sickly (and all the sickly ones looked older than they were; so they were sick, they were fundamentally as vicious as the rest, but too weak to manifest their viciousness!) clung closer to Wirz. Some had actually the effrontery to touch the sleeve of his waist, and he drew back offended.

  Captain. Please, Cap’n Wirz. . . .

  You know anything about exchange?

  Heard anything about exchange?

  We’re bound to get exchanged soon, aren’t we, Captain?

  They can’t keep us here forever, can they?

  We’ll get exchanged, won’t we, huh, Captain, please?

  Ja, said Henry, who knew nothing whatsoever about the exchange or its stoppage—because he had been in Europe when that occurred—and who might not divine the resumption of exchange, because he owned no crystal ball nor knew how to use one. Ja. You all get exchanged pretty quick I guess.

  He thought that he was being kind no matter how cruel he was in fact. These prisoners who clustered close were behaving like good children for the most part, and good children should be given peppermint sticks, horehound, barley sugar. This was barley sugar which he offered cheerfully, though it would turn to wormwood later. Bad children should be punished. That also would he do.

  Several times during his march through this populated mire and during his businesslike return, he halted to examine the stockade from the prisoners’ vantage. His glance bounded about like a mouse fallen into a slop-jar. Ha: one stockade only. So they could dig tunnels. Ha: Yankees swarmed tightly against the fence, some of them had even attached their jungly huts to the tall logs, seeking shelter from wind or sun. The most innocent shebang might mask fiendish preparations: elaborate ladders to be raised in the dead of night, a concerted rushing of the gate when ration carts entered or when a fresh draft of prisoners arrived or when— A deadline! There must be a deadline. And tomorrow—at once on paper, tomorrow in the fact—the personnel within the pen should be squadded over. The Thousands and Hundreds should disappear forever, supplanted by Detachments and Nineties.

  With sycophants trailing Wirz returned to the North Gate. One fellow begged to go out to cut wood, another had written a letter which he wished mailed, another insisted that he was an officer—by rights a captain like Henry Wirz—and should no longer be confined here. Henry accepted the letter (which he neglected to mail for the petitioner, and which got mixed in with some old newspapers later on, and so was thrown out, and the prisoner’s wife never heard from him again; never did she know that he died in Andersonville on June twenty-third, 1864, and was taken to the deadhouse without his name tied to his rags; so he became one of the Unknowns; but his wife and sons always thought that he had died gloriously if anonymously in the battle of Olustee). Henry said that there would be no wood-cutting at this time—later on, perhaps, and under heavy guard; he told the pretending officer to be off, to try no funny monkey business with him. He went to his new office, a rough plank shanty on the slope opposite the roadway below the large southwest fort. There, with considerable labor and recourse to the dictionary taken from his saddle bag, Wirz inscribed an advertisement to be tacked on the inside of the North Gate. He desired two prisoners, bilingual as to German and English preferably, with experience in the routine of military offices. Such men must give their paroles and could dwell outside the stockade. They would receive double rations; other emoluments were hinted at but not specifically promised. . . . Promptly there were five applicants for this seeming sinecure, and Wirz had them fetched outside later on. He interviewed them with increasing disappointment and finally made himself select his two. Neither of them did he consider to be of even average intelligence. (One was named Charles, the other Viggo—he was truly a Dane but he spoke German with a Schleswig accent. Charles was sickly, fated to die of a phagedenic ulcer within a few weeks. Viggo stole things to sell to the guards; Wirz caught him stealing soft soap, and had him turned back into the stockade.) They were but the forerunners of a host who would serve Wirz in his office or at and around his quarters, and some would serve efficiently. How many there would be Wirz himself could not guess, any more than he could have guessed how many prisoners would be confined there eventually.

  That same day a guarded herd of Negroes found themselves sinking posts inside the stockade. Wirz’s instructions to the youth in command were to drive small posts into the ground firmly so that some three or four feet of their length remained exposed; upon these posts would be nailed scantling strips to mark the deadline. Twenty feet inside the stockade, said Wirz, but the lieutenant was no surveyor and had not a good eye for measurements. At some points the deadline was established not more than sixteen feet from the fence, at others perhaps twenty-two. A howl arose from scores of unfortunates thus dispossessed. They had labored like insects to achieve their shelter; now treasured stakes were pulled out, pine lattice tossed aside; the men were told to take their blankets and coats and move. Furthermore the habitable area within the pen stood reduced by perhaps three acres. Indignation meetings were held, fists were waved, a few stones were thrown at guards.

  Just let that Dutch son of a bitch show his face in here!

  Deadline, hell. A Wisconsin man stepped angrily past the new posts and jeered up at the parapet, spreading his arms as he hallooed. Promptly several of the nearer guards began to aim their guns at him, and friends dragged the foolhardy man to safety. There was some doubt about whether Wirz meant business, whether the guards would really shoot. This doubt was dispelled quickly the next morning. Ironically the first victim was a German; the prisoners called him Sigel in derogatory reference to his crescent badge of the ill-fated Eleventh Corps. Exposure and illness had sent Sigel into the nodding ranks of the lunatics. Men called him the Old Clothes Man because he went jerking about in a kind of St. Vitus’ dance, searching for stray rags or socks in the mud. Sigel observed a checkered scrap of cloth dropped probably by one of the blacks who had driven posts into place. Scantlings had been nailed already at this point, but a scantling meant nothing to the deranged wanderer, and he went pawing under the little barricade, white crescent corps badge and all. He was killed almost instantly by a handful of buckshot smashing through his chest. Prisoners screamed their hatred of the young guard who had fired, they drove him from his perch with mud and billets before he could reload. Another guard took his place. Later Wirz himself crept aloft to survey the situation . . . missiles flew again, obscenities smoked, the hatred was given freely and accepted just as willingly. The construction detail ran out of scantling before they had marked the entire deadline, and there would be dangerous gaps for a long time to come; wiser people tied cords at night, with tufts of rag to wave in warning, but always these cords were being stolen by other people.

  The squadding over which began on the day of the death of Crazy Sigel was attended by a protracted insurrection. Henry Wirz was a fanatical believer in the Oriental philosophy of Go Thyself. If he depended on some other person’s count, how could he establish the correctness of it? Imagine Wry-necked Smith charged with this task! Wirz was certain that half the private soldiers available to his purposes could not count to twenty without a mistake; he detected signs of unruliness among sergeants and the handful of commissioned officers subordinate to his command. Lieutenant-Colonel Persons himself had introduced the familiar system of Thousands and Hundreds. Through a smoked-up tent fly Wirz heard Alexander Persons denounce the projected Detachments and Nineties as purest fertilizer. Ach, was ever a prison superintendent so put upon, was ever a prison super
intendent less coöperated with? So must he parade the prisoners and count them himself.

  It took him hours to achieve the count, manifold order book in hand. By the time he had completed checking the Seventh Thousand, prisoners of the first detachments were out of formation and wandering all over the place. Bad children—they should be punished (what did he do to Cora when she was naughty? Send her to bed without her supper! So should he do with these!)—he was the man for the job, God damn.

  Today for your badness no rations will come!

  The howl which answered this announcement made Claffey slaves rise in alarm from their planting of a distant field, it brought men running out of Uncle Arch Yeoman’s store.

  This incident was unfortunate, but if it served to teach the prisoners to stay in line when they were ordered to, it should have served its purpose. One could not line up Thousands and tell them off into fresh Detachments unless orders were obeyed. In a melancholy drizzle next morning bayonets were fixed, the gate was swung, guards marched in with Wirz trotting in their midst as if he also were a prisoner.

  Maybe you Yankees stay until dismissed, this day? he asked witheringly. . . . Once more he proceeded with his labored count, once more the sickly tired resentful beggarmen said, Oh, cowshit, and skulked from the ranks. Here was Henry Wirz, counting the new Detachment Twenty-three; and beyond him those vagabonds in the as-yet-uncounted Detachment Twenty-six were strolling down to the marsh because they claimed they had to do their business. Never could two hundred and seventy men need to do their business at once! Did they take him for a fool? They would learn the temper of the officer with whom they trifled!