by Moore, Tim
Morning, as ever in the olden days, came early. A few short hours before, a kindly lantern-carrying wife had led me out past the officers and gentlemen, across the sodden blackness and into my sleeping quarters. Frail with the nervous exhaustion of making my own fun I was asleep almost before we got there; only now, peering weakly about in the grey dawn light, did I appreciate the efforts made on my behalf. This was the storage tent, but bar a few barrels and sacks stacked at my feet the provisions and implements I'd seen piled up in it before had been cleared away, and in their place a bed laid out, with a huge and potently aromatic buffalo skin as the mattress. On a low side-table beside me lay a winsome still-life: a tin jug of water, a linen handtowel, a candle in an earthenware holder and the means to light it (courtesy of Gustaf Erik Pasch, who had patented the safety match twenty years previously). Still the rain thrummed its staccato beat on the canvas, and I thought of the 250 soldiers Gerry had estimated were out in the woods, sleeping rough and uncovered. Twenty-four hours on, might I hear the whine of a distant shirker?
When the rain moved on I got dressed – shoes, hat, done – and ducked out through the flap. A damp mist swirled through the thin pines, the chickens were out and about, and outside a distant tent a man in a blue flannel shirt and braces was stretching a welcome to the new day. It was all very becoming; not quite a period rush, but a stirring sense that living history was so much more than unshaven men with bad breath hitting each other.
A mood of happy fulfilment saw me through contact with the anachronisms that daylight revealed to my now practised eye – the chainsaw hidden under the logpile, the CHINA stamp on the back of the iron range – and even the most harrowing breakfast I had yet endured: cold grits topped with a dollop of unidentifiable grey purée. One by one the refugee families turned up to eat, tin utensils in sooty hands; afterwards, under a clearing sky, we sat around a small campfire, drinking coffee and shooting the old-time breeze.
Jesse, one of two strapping brothers, said he'd heard that Yankees were within five miles, with horses and cannon. 'Gentlemen,' said his wife, hands clasped primly in her ample grey lap, 'I believe I would give the last of my bread to feed our fighting men.' A short plump man they called Doc reminisced about the Mexican War of '46, and how a friend had just picked himself up a real pretty Mexican bride for $100. Feeling obliged to make some sort of contribution, I announced that the first underwater telegraph cable had been laid under the Atlantic in 1857. 'You know – seven years ago.'
A morning school had been set up in the main tent's parlour, and as I washed grey matter off my plate I looked up to see a child reading aloud from a black-bound period primer, The Eclectic First Reader: 'Bad boys lie, and swear, and steal,' he announced, steadily. 'The old man is a beggar. We do not give him money. We may give him old shoes.' Then a vibrant young woman marched up to me with an axe, handed it brusquely over and said: 'Running short of firewood. Logs are there.' Gone now, the 'sir' stuff – this was my effective inauguration into their community, one that would be marked later with a very modest blaze assembled from misshapen splinters.
I spent the rest of the morning harvesting broom grass – grass to make brooms – from the trailside verges. A friendly chap with Shaggy stubble and a hat like my 1775 number showed me the ropes, and when he glanced around and quietly told me his name was Roger I sensed we were in for a twenty-first-century chat. Having outed himself as a Bush-loathing exair force policeman – 'I guess this gives me a fix of that discipline and responsibility' – Roger described the extraordinary scale of the Civil War re-enactment scene; he'd been at that full-size rerun of Gettysburg, and still endured flashbacks of noise and panic.
For a serious re-enactor, the problem with such a popular period was having to share it with what Roger called 'the guys in Wal-Mart shirts' – the 'casuals', whose cringeworthy outfits and blaring historical ignorance reduced most events to fancy-dress embarrassments, and thus obliged the hardcore obsessives to organise strictly ring-fenced private events such as this. By the same token, the existence of these obsessives meant that his wife was now able to make a living by selling period shirts for $125. He fingered his own with a wink, then peered dubiously at my fistful of brown stalks. 'Uh, let me look after those for you,' he said, with a diplomatic smile.
For a couple of hours we all pottered about in twos and threes. One by one the real-life shutters went up: the associated conversations, as so often throughout my time travels, were a curious mix of the breezy and the brutal. Over a fireside coffee Doc revealed himself as another Vietnam vet – a medic – and described at length the mine explosion that had left him half-blind and obliged to treat the mutilated survivors by feel. A splendid young man whose sunny nature had earned him the name Happy told me how he'd got into 'all this' after finding his great-grandfather's axe in the garage at home – 800 miles away in Ohio. 'Got it right here with me now,' he said, smiling towards his canvas quarters. Many of his older fellow refugees, he told me, had been raised, like Butch, in homes without electricity; one or two had drawn their water from a well. If none of this seemed extreme to them, it was because they were simply re-enacting their own childhoods, not that of their distant forebears.
The sun came out through the lanky trees; I slapped at bits of wood with an axe and suppressed the gnawing realisation that I wasn't doing very much war reporting. At what felt about four o'clock the two brothers suggested a fishing trip, and soon a dozen of us were bumping down the hot trail in a big red pick-up, bamboo canes under our arms, feet dangling off the tailgate like hillbillies. After a few miles, smoke and the strains of a tin whistle wafted out of the trees: I turned just in time to see a few flashes of muddy dark blue, a chestnut flank or two and the barrel of a great big cannon. 'Union artillery,' called out Happy.
Distracted by this encounter, and the anti-bear bins and alligator warnings punctuating our way from the car park to the sandy banks of Kisatchie Bayou, I found it hard to apply myself to the fruitless rod-based entertainment that followed. For much of the time I just watched the five children who'd come along with us, marvelling at the blend of obedience and independence that underpinned their spirited but squabble-free conduct. 'No smiling!' called out a boy of nine when his father pulled out his digital camera, stuck it on sepia, and lined us all up for a group shot. If it sounded a little rehearsed when he later described re-enacting as 'way cooler than video games', his younger sister's delight in telling me how she'd won over her sniggering schoolmates was entirely genuine: 'I just wore my costume into school one day and showed everyone my layers.'
Gerry and his boys were back at our camp when we returned, sandy and fishless. Home as it was to Doc and a trio of former and current nurses, the refugee camp was the BGR M.A.S.H.; Gerry had come to request a medical visit for a Confederate infantryman who had 'bust up his knee'. One of our ladies drove away into the twilight as directed, and over fireside plates of salt pork and pickles Gerry detailed the day's rival casualties. 'Sorted the wheat from the chaff today,' he smiled ruefully, revealing that five soldiers had already been hospitalised – three with heatstroke, one with worryingly elevated blood pressure and the last, dumbfoundingly, airlifted out of the forest following a suspected heart attack. 'And all that in a five-mile march.' I listened in shocked silence, but the faces around me betrayed no more than careworn regret. 'A lot of these guys sit behind a desk all day drinking pop,' said Happy, flatly, 'and then wonder why they can't deal with this.' (Later I'd learn that the average American downs a gallon of sweetened soft drinks every week.)
An advert I'd seen on The Gentleman's Emporium, an online nineteenth-century costumier, spooled through my mind. 'How many years, beers, and nachos does a fellow need before the old tux won't button? Not to worry – we have solutions! There's Rhett, an elegant brocade vest hiding a fully boned corset, and Beau, a less duplicitous boned cummerbund.' It was certainly tempting to interpret the casualties as a parable for the state of modern America – a nation idling along in its bloated comfort z
one, the lean and hungry pioneer spirit now distilled down to an overproof obsession with high-calibre self-defence. The get-up-and-go had got up and gone: if there was dirty work to do, you paid an immigrant to do it. You could turn up here with the most authentic, most expensive kit, and strap your gut in with a Gentleman's Emporium 'solution', but if anyone thought you could actually carry yourself and a reproduction muzzle-loading Springfield up and down a few hills they were whistling Dixie.
To avoid further medevac airlifts, the entire schedule had now been reworked: the forty-mile route was cut in half, and many set-piece events cancelled or rescheduled. I learned now that all the food Gerry and I had delivered the day before, and many other camp supplies, were here purely to be looted by passing armies. A refugee wife recapped for the late arrivals to the fireside: 'The Confederates are now taking our chickens tomorrow afternoon, and the morning after the Federals are coming by for the rice.'
The pastor drove up and summoned Gerry away to effect epoxy-hoof repairs on a lame horse, and for a long while after I sat in the kitchen with the brothers and their wives, stripping the veins off prawn necks in preparation for a late-evening gumbo feast. Having never encountered this dish outside the lyrics to the Carpenters' 'Jambalaya on the Bayou' this was a gastronomic encounter I was looking forward to. And still am: with the prawn-skillet already sizzling on the range, Gerry returned in almost breathless haste. 'You're missing the war,' he said, simply. 'Let's go.'
I wiped my stinking hands on my trousers, grabbed my belongings and a bedroll from the tent and said a hasty farewell at the fireside. 'Here,' said one of the kindlier of the camp's many kindly ladies, trotting up as I climbed up into Gerry's pick-up. 'You won't eat well in the army.' She handed me a bulging knapsack, smiled bracingly, and watched us barrel off into the night.
Gerry's one weakness was a fondness for enigmatic silence. He kept his peace throughout the dark and bumpy drive, and maintained it when at length we pulled off the track. Our headlights picked out the dull glint of dirty metal; as we clunked open the doors I detected a restless equine whinnying, underpinned by a steady chorus of deeply masculine snores. Silhouetted in the glow of a dying fire a lanky, bow-legged figure shuffled down to meet us. Gerry exchanged whispered greetings with the young Dennis Weaver, conducted swift introductions which revealed that my host actually was named Dennis, then departed. 'Rest of the boys are asleep,' murmured Dennis, in a cowboy twang, motioning up at the fire and the tents I could now make out around it. 'Just, ah, make yourself comfortable where you can.' I watched as he crept off into the dark, then laid out my bedroll where I stood. Beside me loomed the vast spoked wheel of a gun carriage; above, framed by black pines, yawned a vast and star-peppered heaven. I shifted about, crushing most of the many boiled eggs in my knapsack, and lay there nurturing an excited thought: whatever greeted me when I awoke would come as a total surprise.
'You ugly baaasssssstards!'
The reveille did not disappoint. Two of the nine brown horses tied to a picket line strung out just beyond my feet were engaged in vicious hoof-to-face combat, and Dennis was separating them in kind: I watched in groggy confusion as he leapt clear of the ground and scissor-kicked the nearest participant extremely hard in the bottom. His work done, Dennis exhaled loudly, pulled a dark blue sergeant's jacket off its peg (the end of the cannon barrel), and extracted from this a packet of Marlboro. Having sparked one up with a Zippo lighter, he gave me a wink and said, 'Welcome to the Douglas Texas Battery, Confederate States Army, the only horsedrawn artillery unit west of the Mississippi.' Then, tracking my brow-furrowed gaze to his dark blue jacket and slipping into a disgruntled mumble, he added, 'Now galvanised to the damn Federals.'
I sat up, stuck my hat on and followed Dennis up to the two long, white tents. One was still home to loud snores; the four occupants of the other were trying to get some coffee going on the fire. Dennis began the introductions, but before he'd even got my name out, a portly young man let rip with a fart more compellingly repulsive than any of the several hundred that history had thus far exposed me to. A quavering anal symphony, it rose and fell and rose again, fading only at reluctant length into a drawn-out, buttock-stuttering coda. 'Oooo-eeee!' exclaimed the delighted artiste, slapping his sizeable navy-trousered backside with both hands. 'That's your beans talking, JD!'
My preconceptions of life in the Union artillery were almost entirely dismantled as the morning grew older. Most of the late risers emerged with filter-tipped cigarettes propped in stubbled mouths and partially deflated camping mattresses under their arms; our snack rations – dispensed by a man in Specsavers bifocals – comprised a sizeable Zip-Lock bag stuffed with dried fruit. 'Why ain't you got rubber soles?' called out an impatient young voice when one of our senior members slipped in the dewy grass for the second time. 'I mean, who's going to notice?'
They were nine in all: the youngest a well-fed kid of twelve, here with his well-fed pa – a Supervision Officer in the Smith County Corrections Department – and the eldest a wry and learned fellow called Russ, with something of the Walter Matthau about him, conspicuous in voice and demeanour as the solitary non-Texan. The man they called JD wasn't far behind him: a snow-haired, snow-tached old cowboy, whose enigmatic silence I would soon connect to advanced deafness. All but a couple were either below or well above call-up age; this, and the pervasive sense of spirited aimlessness, made it very hard to banish the spectre of Dad's Army.
We drank coffee and Coke and milled around the fire under a strengthening sun. Our cannon was a facsimile of a 2.9" Parrott rifle, one of the Civil War's most popular field pieces: cheap and easy to build, as manoeuvrable as three-quarters of a ton of iron was ever likely to be in the horsedrawn age, and capable of accurately dispatching a 10lb shell the best part of three miles.
Our flatulent maestro, name of Trey, extracted a mobile phone from his cartridge pouch and embarked on an incomprehensibly drawled shit-shooting discourse with a back-home buddy. No one seemed quite sure what was happening. The human casualties meant a rejigged schedule, but the organisers had apparently not accounted for the loss of two of our horses (Gerry's epoxy-hoof repair had yet to cure), or in fact three, now that a hideous and livid crescent-shaped haematoma was emerging from the unfortunate kickee's neck. Our captain – a man called Wayne with a healthy Van Dyck beard – drove away in search of instructions, and his underlings devoted the consequent hiatus to informing, and then severally reminding me, that none of them – with the possible exception of Russ – was fighting for the Union by choice. The Douglas Battery's seven years' experience of such events had been accrued in the Confederate cause; faced with a huge shortfall in Federal volunteers, the BGR organisers had been obliged to 'galvanise' many reluctant Southerners into donning the dark blue.
My, how this had stuck in the artillery crew's collective craw. The Union army was loudly and repeatedly encapsulated to me as 'rapists and pillagers', bent on destroying a proud and honourable way of life (I was regularly told, in contradiction of the academic consensus, that 'slavery weren't even part of the issue'). In consequence, all that fuelled these men was stubborn pride. As the sole artillery unit present at the event, the Douglas boys were all too aware that acquiring their weapon was a primary opposition objective: almost every pronouncement on the Confederacy's moral superiority came appended with the caveat that 'they still ain't getting our damn cannon'.
Presently Captain Wayne returned, a sombre and very different man. 'Right,' he said, climbing out of his pick-up and staring at each of us carefully. 'Is everybody rehydrated?' His subordinates exchanged level glances. 'Anybody need a rest?' Trey scratched an ear, then stooped to raise a wooden toolbox at his feet. Wayne saw him and shrieked. 'Don't lift that alone! And bend your legs, not your back!'
I'd by now deduced that Wayne's debrief had majored on yesterday's medical alarums, and the health-and-safety measures necessary to prevent a recurrence. Almost as an afterthought he added that the war was about to start without us, a coupl
e of miles to the east. Having any hope of getting there before it finished meant loading everything – horses, cannon, us – into their fleet of vast and shiny pick-ups and trailers, very quickly. That this would not occur became obvious well before Wayne wound up his curiously jarring lecture. 'So if anyone's worried about a procedure, don't keep it to yourself. Speak up! Keeping quiet is a dangerous game.'
Navigational uncertainties compounded our predicament, and it was a full ninety minutes – and almost midday – before the distant sound of irregular musket fire drew us off the road. Wayne and Dennis trotted off into the heat-hazed woods towards the unseen battle; the guns fell silent soon after, and they returned downcast.
The next engagement was apparently scheduled for four o'clock, and the Union artillery abruptly worked itself up into a frenzy of determined atonement. After a lot of urgent whispering over maps, our convoy drew up at a roadside clearing: a four-strong reconnaissance party strode purposefully into the muddy, humid forest, and holding on to my hat I jogged off in pursuit.
Only after an hour did someone think to ask where we were going, and it was a great many squelching strides before the painful truth at last emerged: here was a 'but I thought you knew' situation, which had resulted in us playing follow-my-leader for several shoe-clogging miles. One damn blunder from beginning to end.
Our very quiet return journey was enlivened near its end by an ambush, which sent the sounds of revolver fire and human panic ricocheting through the trees. Satisfied from a very early point in the proceedings that this was all a friendly-fire nonsense, I barely bothered to take cover. Soon after, our colleagues, who had witnessed the regrettable denouement of this ill-fated mission, and long since established its farcical futility, greeted us with abusive jeers. Russ, a lone voice of muttering dissent throughout the dilatory indecision that had occupied the morning, came up to whisper what would be his catch-all verdict on most unit activities: 'Now, what you saw then was not good.' Then Wayne stomped up with a plastic jerrycan and almost forcibly rehydrated the pair of us.
