Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  Little groups of kindly intentioned prisoners assembled to do what they could, to offer sips of water, bits of corn pone. This was the most flagrant assault which had ever occurred, and affecting by far the greatest number, and was pursued with swiftness beyond imagination. The bulk of the helpless Yankees appeared stunned by it.

  They were stunned further a moment later at the latest pronouncement of the prison superintendent. Almost simultaneously news was posted at both North and South Gates. A general wail ensued: Wirz said that no rations would be issued that day. He hinted that he might not issue any more rations until the prisoners had seen to it that no such disgraceful episodes would be repeated.

  Puts it up to us with a vengeance, said Seneca.

  Actually, Nathan told him, we would seem to have Wirz on our side.

  Key started toward the deadline but MacBean pulled him back. Key, you got folks to go home to. I have none. Deadline’s an infernal jumpy business, with all these trundle-bed soldiers so nervous on the trigger. He pushed fairly up to the scantling and was greeted by a gun muzzle from Station Number Eight. We need to speak to Captain Wirz, he called to the calico hat behind the gun.

  He ain’t here, Yyyank. Get off’n that deadline!

  I’ll get, but you get Wirz.

  I’ll ask the sergeant when he comes round. Get back, you. Hear me?

  I hear you, but you get Captain Wirz.

  They waited in staring sun for more than twenty minutes, but after a time Nathan believed that he heard the guard talking with someone on the path outside. They hoped for the best, they knew that spies were watching them, they prayed only that raiders, emboldened by their morning’s feat, might not charge in mass attack upon Regulators or suspected Regulators before the ranks were filled. Presently the wicket in the North Gate squealed open and the plump face of Lieutenant Davis appeared.

  Whah-ye!

  We don’t want you, Lieutenant. We want your boss. The three moved toward the wicket.

  What you want to see him about? He’s busy.

  Tis important.

  A matter of life and death, said Nathan Dreyfoos.

  All of that, said Key.

  Davis’s puffy little eyes looked their alarm. I’ll let the three of you into the enclosure here; but you better be sure it’s important or the captain will make you smoke.

  Course, said MacBean, settling his long shape in shade of the palisade— Course we’re correct. Whole prison’s a matter of life and death.

  Death, mainly.

  If we prevail, said Nathan, it will become a matter of life for some who otherwise would have died.

  Blame you for a philosopher, Brother Nathan.

  A very childish one.

  They relaxed in the gift of shade. There was no real shade within the prison except in the best-constructed shebangs. Here, in this cubicle surrounding the North Gate, a fifteen-foot height of logs built a barrier against the scorch and would until the sun reached its zenith; in that same hour the western end of the cubicle would begin to furnish shade. Davis had gone, but he left one armed guard beside the outer gate. Suddenly this guard jumped aside almost guiltily as the outer wicket was jerked open. Henry Wirz tripped across the sill. He wore his calico waist with no collar—there was a naked collar-button showing below his Adam’s apple—and the waist was wet with perspiration, and he bore his arm in its black sling. The three prisoners got up quickly and moved to meet the smaller man. He stood with thin hot face lifted toward them, beard stringy and damp, angry eyes jumping.

  Captain Wirz, sir, said Leroy Key.

  To me you come to beg rations? Nein. I have said it, it will be so: no rations you get today!

  We’re not here to beg for rations.

  You I know not. Him—pointing to Nathan—I know not. You—to MacBean—I know. Speak it out once, you bad sergeant. Was gibt’s? You want you should go in the stocks again?

  Not so’s you could notice it. What we want is clubs.

  For why you should get clubs, God damn?

  To handle those raiders.

  Wirz swore in German, then in English. To the surprise of the others Nathan Dreyfoos began to speak laboriously in German. Almost no words of German had passed his lips in several years; still, there was the similarity to Yiddish, and he was getting on tolerably when Wirz interrupted him with a sharp gesture.

  Parlez-vous français?

  Oui, Monsieur le Capitaine.

  The conversation was continued and concluded in French, at which Nathan was more proficient than Wirz. Still the linguistic barrier fenced them apart from the rest of mankind at this moment; Henry Wirz felt inferior when compelled to speak in English, as he was compelled to speak it through most of his waking hours. His inferiority begat an underlying resentment to sustain the heap of his other resentments. This was sensed by Nathan Dreyfoos, it was the reason he had attempted German.

  Leroy Key, capable commander though he was, might not have obtained the promise of armament. Wirz would have been dyed in suspicion because of the Bloomington printer’s essential American qualities, his essential Yankeeness. Seneca MacBean would not have persuaded Wirz to furnish clubs: already MacBean had tried to escape, he might be planning some new trick when he appeared with an artless request for Rebel coöperation.

  But Dreyfoos was recognizable to the superintendent as a European whatever his nativity. Wirz held the ancient Teutonic-Swiss distrust of Jews; and as they talked he became hurtfully aware of the tall young man’s culture; Nathan’s fund of culture exceeded Wirz’s obviously. Nevertheless this employment of French brought back student days, young days, better days. It suggested old Doctor Cordier and Bucheton and Jacques and Annette and Mimi and Louis Modave (young things, gone, some dead, Bucheton scorned but still representative of youth and freedom) and other boys and girls of the past who danced together and drank together and worked together and made love as in a careless mural depicting some opera. In the long ago, when Henry Wirz spoke chiefly in French, his arm had not pained him, it had not been pierced by hot iron and made into a draining hurt. Fate had not then compelled him to superintend the mess of muck and vagabonds which now he was called to boss. Each flowing nasal phrase, spoken and heard, was redolent of a past superior to this baking hour with sunshine flaring and hordes of human vultures to be detested for their dirtiness as Henry detested slum-dwellers because of their poverty.

  Nathan spoke briefly but impressively of the Regulators. He pointed out that they were mainly non-commissioned officers, men accustomed to discharging responsibility. If given the help of Confederates they might conceivably bring about an orderly regime within the stockade which had not abided before. Prisoners existing in a city ruled by surly barbarians were assuredly less tractable than prisoners existing without the dread of robbery, kicks, strangulation: was that not plain to see? If the raiders were put down a better authority might prevail, and certain worries of Andersonville’s supervisors would be lessened or even vanished. This made sense to Wirz, no matter what fright he had endured throughout the previous night. Promptly Nathan won the promise of clubs.

  He won more than that. There had been fear that clubs might be torn from hands of those who wielded them, as happened so often in brawls. Therefore Nathan asked that each club be provided with a loop of hemp or rawhide, as in a policeman’s billy club. Henry Wirz nodded and believed that he could furnish these thongs.

  Time was of the essence. Wirz said that he would order a company of Reserves to the Yeomans’ sawmill at once. The sawmill, though not now in operation, had spawned a large trash heap. Quantities of seasoned hardwood of odd sizes and lengths could be found there.

  And additional rope, Nathan insisted. With which to tie our prisoners.

  This I give you.

  When it comes to that, said MacBean, where we going to put the bastards on trial?

  Key requested, Might we use
one of these gate cubicles for a place of detention, maybe a court room?

  Was—?

  Nathan explained in French. Again Wirz agreed on grounds of practicality. But he said that they must not take too long about the trial of their prisoners; they must be quick, efficient.

  Got to be quick and efficient about the whole blame business.

  They thanked Wirz for his coöperation and trusted secretly that no vagary would cause him to change his mind. They returned to the stockade to assemble squads of Regulators.

  Had it not been for a broken grindstone, Ira Claffey might not have been forewarned of the encounter which was to take place, he would not have witnessed it.

  It was share and share alike in these times of stringency: the grindstone at the Yeoman place had been broken beyond repair several months earlier, and in this week the big shining Scooper had appeared with a cart, to borrow the Claffey grindstone and sharpen Mrs. Barney Yeoman’s hoes, knives, axes, other implements. Now he came driving to return the stone, and Jonas and Jem lifted it from the cart. In shadows of the implement shed Ira heard the deep-voiced conversation of the slaves, punctuated as always by their falsetto laughter. Scooper was guiding his mule down the lane when Ira walked out to see that the grindstone was undamaged and had been returned to its proper situation under the low roof built to shelter it.

  Big doings, Mastah!

  What say, Jonas?

  With them Yankees. They going fight!

  It came out that a party of soldiers had visited the Yeoman sawmill to seek for hardwood fragments in trash heaps, fragments which, according to information furnished by Scooper, were to be made into bludgeons. Scooper had sworn that this was true: he had seen it with his own eyes. No telling what those Yankees might do next. The soldiers were cutting the cudgels to size, and fastening a loop to each club.

  He say all them Yankees set to kill each other today, Mastah.

  Save us folks the trouble, said Jem with patriotic virtue.

  Ira told the black men, I think Scooper must be mistaken. Do you get on with your rebuilding of that fence. He returned to his work in the shed, cataloguing seeds which had been dried from the choicest of the earlier vegetable crops. But Ira could not rid himself of the bizarre notion which the hands’ conversation had evoked. At last he put his pencil down, locked the shed, and started deliberately toward the stockade. Tension of the night now lay over the sunburnt region as an implacable silence. Ira quickened his pace. When he had passed the star fort and looked back to see cannoneers at their posts he forced himself to go even faster. Sentry shacks loomed: two of the Georgia Reserves instead of one stood on every platform, and Ira identified officers ganged at those stations nearest the gates. At the post by the south corner the fat figure of Lieutenant Davis, wearing his familiar ragged straw hat, went toiling up the ladder. At the next post were two guards. Ira mounted to the platform and looked into the shrunken face of Floral Tebbs. A bearded Reserve with frightened eyes stood behind the boy.

  What’s ado, Flory?

  Them prisoners, Mr. Claffey, sir. Just you look.

  Beyond the marsh, where the slope piled steeply toward the north, the hillside had become a mosaic. This was a mosaic composed of Yankee faces by the thousands. The prisoners congregated, raw shoulder to raw shoulder, thin belly crowded above thin buttocks; if they were toys, and had been placed so by many busy children, they could not have been packed more securely. Above each mat of tangled hair was a portion of another countenance. Some way speedily, without plan or reckoning, those mobs had managed to sort themselves for observation. There was no hill, no bare mud to be seen, no shebangs—nothing but this studding of fierce small faces. Here was their amphitheatre: they had found it, were employing it.

  Denizens of the southern area had drawn back, squeezing perilously near the deadline in a crescent; it was a crescent which lapped from both ends into the battle array of the raiders. Ira had heard of raiders, as who had not, yet he was unable to single the beasts out, designate them as such. He saw only that the core of the throng—massing near the conical tent close to South Street—was composed of men in prime, men of stature, some wearing better garments than Ira wore. He wondered who might dare to come against them. Then, picking their way up the slope from creek and bridge and marsh, he saw a column of men deploying with military precision into a wider rank, becoming a sickle blade as they reached the top of the hill. He thrilled to observe that many of these prisoners were of a stature comparable to the hoodlums at the summit.

  There had been a tactical error on the part of the raiders, in their not pushing ahead to resist volunteers approaching from the north. The cat-walk and its approaches were narrow; they could have been held indefinitely. Forces attempting to move by flanks through the adjacent mire would have been bogged down in the most literal fashion. But the raiders’ supreme self-confidence was born justifiably of a thousand successes speckled with a scant dust of failures. Their assault on the West Virginians that morning had strengthened belief in their own invulnerability.

  Key instructed his lieutenants, Proceed with all caution, approach in silence. Then, at the first stroke of encounter, drive with every ounce you’ve got.

  The raiders were expending precious breath on obscenities and threats. Man for man, no matter how ample their diet of recent months, they were inferior in condition to the Westerners now breathing in their faces— Westerners who came without a word to say. (No orders were cried. Their plan had been dinned into every man’s brain.) The raiders were soaked in pine-top, they’d caroused throughout the night into this day.

  The front rank of the attacking force feinted toward the right, then veered obliquely to the center where the most gigantic of their enemies were grouped, and their supporting flanks veered accordingly.

  Brother Nathan, said Seneca, I’ll think of Clovis Tibbetts on that pony. I’ll make like I was pulling him off of it.

  (So was Michael Hoare now gathering strength to expend against a neighborhood bully who had pounded a beloved younger playmate, while little Mike Hoare sat up in bed, tremulous with scarlet fever, and watched through a window. The bully moved away from town before Mike was grown to a size which might have permitted revenge. The fact that he had not revenged himself was bitterness for years. . . . So was Bill Rowe about to smite an officer who had hounded him when first he joined the cavalry. . . . Dad Sanders told himself that here stood the rich Methodist who had extracted the life’s savings of a gentle relative who sickened and died under the strain. . . . Key himself was lifting a club against a boss who had wounded him particularly. . . . Consciously, or deeply unperceived and yet present, the same notion instilled a flaming fury in the souls of other men, Egypt and Sergeant Goody and Ned Johnson alike. Tom Larkin said that here stood the neighbor who poisoned his dog; A. R. Hill was about to encounter the schoolmaster who had beaten Hill’s tongue-tied chum with a strap. . . . Nathan Dreyfoos saw a squat Spaniard with the face of a Moor, he had watched this man stoning a puppy to death in a slum by the sea when he, Nathan, was too small to do more than scream; so grown with skill and power he could find the Malagüenan again. Ned Carrigan was hitting against death; death itself had been a monster ever since the day he killed unwittingly a grinning rock-faced pugilist with whom he had been drinking jolly beers two nights before. . . . Limber Jim, the sinewy man from the Sixty-seventh Illinois who looked like a Sioux, did not have to tax his imagination; this was well, since he had almost no imagination. He grunted within himself. He picked out the huge gingery shape of Willie Collins. Limber Jim knew that Willie Collins or one of his gang had killed his, Limber Jim’s, brother.)

  They wore the visors of desperation but they were not blinded by the visors. Their desperation rose from the knowledge that this was The Moment, they had primed for it, The Moment would not come again. If they failed in the first onslaught they would fail in the second. If they failed for an instant they would fail for a
ll time. Their line would be broken, individuals would be wrenched from it—as witness, again, the West Virginians of that morning—and individually they would be tackled until they were stamped to ribbons on the ground or gargled their bloody way back down the hill. They thought of weaker comrades who were here now, they thought of the weak and disconsolate to be tossed into this place next month. The same mayhem which had ruled before would terrorize throughout a heartless future. There was only one thing to do; they said it again in their hearts: win quickly, win decisively, crush the head of every constrictor before its coils twisted in the fatal pulling.

  Help one another to win, feel no obligation of pity or quarter. If a comrade staggered an enemy with his blow, and the raider came weaving toward you, and you had the split second to do it, you were to stagger him again. Forget decency and Christianity, because decency and Christianity themselves had absolved you of any necessity to observe them. The bite would be here, the kick in the crotch, the pressing out of the eyeball, the tearing of the nostrils, the champ of your teeth to rip the muscle from an arm before the enemy’s fangs went into your own. Win this first battle, in truth it would be the last.