I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History

by Moore, Tim

  It was gone three now; with an air of frustrated hopelessness we piled into the pick-ups, shot off in a cloud of orange dust and disembarked a couple of miles down the road. At last those seven years of experience manifested themselves. Horses were led briskly out of trailers, and four attached to the limber that bore our cannon. Equipment and supplies were hurled into the back of two wagons, one for each remaining horse, and then with a great purgative yee-hah the Union artillery was rattling off through the Kisatchie Forest. A stirring sight indeed, though for me also a rather disheartening one: by accident, or design, I was obliged to jog after them on foot.

  After half an hour, the pops and cracks of nineteenth-century warfare asserted themselves above my ragged exhalations. My unit had long since vacated the undulating horizon ahead; with a lung-torching, waistcoat-ripping last effort I caught up just as they were preparing to push on to the front line. The trail had ended at a hilltop clearing ringed by hefty, venerable oaks: perhaps 200 yards away, and half as many below us, a thin line of men in blue were exchanging rifle volleys with an unseen foe. Between us lay dense pine forest, heavily sprinkled with large rocks and veined with rain-swollen streams. It was hopeless: Wayne issued a thwarted sigh, and lithely dismounted. 'We can still give supporting fire from up here,' he said, and had no sooner done so when Dennis – astride the horse that headed the four hauling our ten-pounder – yanked up his reins and with a rousing bellow thundered suicidally down the hill. Our captain launched into a complicated burst of precautionary instructions that dwindled into Denniscentred profanity; the rest of us stared for a moment, watching the cannon limber bucking off rocks and sideswiping tree after tree, a runaway ton of very loud trouble. Then, as one, we charged off in hazardous pursuit.

  Reliving the moment round the campfire that evening, none of us was at all sure how Dennis, four horses and our cannon – how desperately this tale called for a fond epithet, a Barbara or a Catherine, but there was none – had arrived at the front line intact. In the breathless heat of the moment, though, there was no time to appraise this tremendous feat of horsemanship and lunatic bravado. When I scrambled down to the cannon, one shoe in hand, I found Dennis already detaching his steaming horses from the limber, hard up against a dozen weary, war-soiled Union infantrymen, gunpowdered cheeks resting on rifle stocks as – crack, crack-crack – they let off another faltering volley at an uphill enemy I could hear but not see. It was still and sunny, and a fog of gunsmoke hung in the wooded valley; when it thinned, I spotted perhaps eight lines of Federal riflemen in the trees around us, loading and ramming as they prepared to return the latest Confederate fusillade.

  The artillery crew were now up to full strength – in essence this comprised our unit's four most senior members, minus JD – and manoeuvring their weapon into position. Only now did I notice the violently detached vegetation lodged plentifully in its trunk-scuffed wheels. There was a lot of shouting, but all of it tightly focused: 'Number Three! Get on the right side, ready to prime!' 'Number Four, ready!' A grandly moustachioed Union commander, majestically costumed but careworn in demeanour, trudged up and distractedly approved our request to open fire. Russ, the Number Four, stretched out an arm towards the little priming lanyard – the only obvious departure from a procedure I'd last enacted nearly 400 years previously – and with a dainty little tug unleashed a thunderous, valley-shattering explosion. The world shimmered, then froze; it was long, long seconds before an enemy rifleman summoned the wherewithal to discharge his feeble and pointless weapon. Swab, ram, prime, boom, repeat . . . I watched as Douglas's Texas Battery burst gloriously to galvanised life.

  It was a period rush all right, full strength and class A. And look at me go – an embedded reporter out on the front lines, wafting aside the fog of war with a steady hand, grimly prepared to sacrifice himself on the altar of unvarnished truth. I would tell my readers of peace and beauty reduced to a human hell defined by fear and furious noise, of heroism and salt pork, of unplanted turnips and $100 Mexican brides, of . . . of some old bloke asking if you fancy a go on his cannon, and you pull this little wire loop, and fuck almighty . . .

  If Russ hadn't wished me to react to what followed as I did – imagine Thor scoring a decisive last-minute Superbowl touchdown – then he has only himself to blame for failing to explain that the crew had just packed in a double charge. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

  Three earth-moving cacophonies later the Union commander waved an arm to silence us; with the big red sun dipping behind a hill, it was time to call it a day. We hitched up the limber and threaded the horses carefully through the trees, crunching across a forest floor scattered with shreds of cartridge paper and – a dark glint in the leaves – Dennis's Colt revolver, thrown from its holster by the rigours of his reckless descent.

  Too late now to move on: we pitched camp at the clearing. I dragged bits of dead tree in from the undergrowth and tossed them on JD's fledgling fire, then sat down in a shrinking triangle of sunlight and systematically ingested the entire contents of my emergency-ration knapsack. I'd moved on to air-sealed dried fruit when the prison officer came up, handed me a hefty old revolver and shyly insisted that I follow him.

  'I just can't stop thinking about what you said this morning,' he mumbled, referring to a debate on comparative gun laws that had revealed my lifelong unfamiliarity with any weapon more powerful than an air rifle but less so than a cannon. We stopped a fair distance away from the tents. 'Just don't seem right,' he said, shaking his head, then motioning at the revolver. Despite myself, I found I was touched by this fondly paternal effort to plug a shameful hole in my manliness: I raised the gun, closed one eye and let the twilight have it, five times.

  Those who had room sat round the fire and filled it with chicken tortillas and JD's famously eruptive beans; Russ proposed a visit to the infantry camp down by the front line, and I accepted. From a distance, through the forest gloaming, it looked beckoningly evocative: bearded figures, perhaps a hundred in all, clustered tightly around tiny fires, the occasional glint of pebble specs or an officer's sword. Some squatted over pots and pans, others wiped war off their rifle barrels.

  As we started to thread our way through these groups a very different picture came dully into focus. Few soldiers could summon the energy to turn their heads at the sound of our approach, and those who did surveyed us with dead-eyed, blank-faced incuriosity. At the time, I'd ascribed the almost truculent indifference that greeted the artillery's arrival at the front to irritation at our earlier no-show. Now I wasn't sure. The default expression visible between astounding whiskers and flat-topped, half-squashed cap was one of grubby, vacant resignation – the look of men who knew they might well die tomorrow, and didn't even care. It was Russ who drew my attention to the silence: no singing, tin whistles, banter, not the tiniest expression of camaraderie. And certainly no Zip-Lock bags of mango slices, if the grimly charred shreds of animal being poked about most skillets were anything to go by. Was all this a brilliantly realised evocation of war's dehumanising effects, or just a load of flaccid idlers failing to cope with a few days of burger-free hard work?

  A small brook was the decreed front line, and we arrived there in the middle of a prisoner exchange. Senior officers in long coats milled about on either bank, swords by their sides, looking sombre and important; one of the dark-blue lot took a suspicious dislike to me, and after a gruff interrogation by one of his subordinates ('What is your business here, sir?') I was ordered away. In consequence, I reported on the lantern-lit proceedings from behind a distant tree, restraining the powerful urge to loudly explain that this was only a bloody game, and how Robert E. Lee and Abe Lincoln were bum-chums.

  Happily, my vantage point afforded an excellent view of the POWs' march of shame. Amongst the handful of Confederates being roughly escorted to the exchange point I spotted one of the Lazy Jacks, a whey-faced young Brummie I'd met on the first day, his grimy features etched with defeat, fear and dazed disbelief: precisely the exp
ression I recalled seeing on the RAF pilots shot down and captured during the first Gulf War. I half expected to hear him robotically repeat a prepared statement apologising for his involvement in an unjust war against a peace-loving nation. Then the distant roar of a Rebel singa-long carried down to us through the cold night air: I cocked an ear, traced it to the Union artillery and set off back to camp.

  My, those boys were quite the campfire choristers. Without any alcoholic encouragement – to my substantial disappointment, their solitary nod to catering authenticity – they bellowed away for long hours, tirelessly and lustily besmirching the colours they so reluctantly wore.

  Three hundred thousand Yankees laid stiff in southern dust, We got 300,000 before they conquered us, They died of southern fever and southern steel & shot, I wish it were three million instead of what we got!

  That was the least inflammatory number – identifying some of the others from half-remembered snatches meant visits to some very alarming websites. I wrapped my blanket around me, chewed a lint-coated strip of jerky, and rehearsed the journalistic-immunity speech I'd deliver when the outraged Union hate-mob stomped out of the blackness.

  'Think of it this way,' said Wayne, detecting my fire-lit unease between verses. 'How would you feel if you were made to fight for Nazi Germany?' It seemed an ambitious parallel, even before the post-choral paeans to 'bad-assed' Nathan Forrest, a Confederate general best known for his association with the fledgling Ku Klux Klan. That was Russ's cue to turn in and mine to feign sleep: I lay there surrounded by unsavoury chortlings that effectively answered my great unasked question – What If The South Had Won?

  Waking up because you're cold ranks high amongst timelessly unpalatable human experiences. Through one eye and a thickening fog I saw that the fire had all but gone out; though it was still pitch black I accepted sleep was at an end. I shuddered off into the mist in search of fuel, and when I shuddered back, trailing a nine-foot branch past the unfortunate horses, restlessly stamping for warmth, my fellow firesider Trey was sitting hunched up in a blanket and wanly poking the embers. For half an hour we exchanged unhappy grunts. Then the tent flaps rustled and Wayne emerged: the Federals were scheduled to pull back at dawn, he croaked, and we had been ordered to cover their retreat. Trey pulled his mobile out to check the time: under an hour to pack up, saddle up, prepare the cannon and be off.

  With a little artificial assistance – my job was to illuminate any scene of complex tackle-attachment by holding Trey's phone screen very close to it – we managed it with ten minutes to spare. I'd gathered from their anecdotes – and uncanny farmyard impersonations – that most of the artillery boys had spent at least part of their lives waking up in the dark and tending to animals; it seemed that Dennis, Trey and his younger brother were part-time cowboys. At any rate, the men of Douglas's Texas Battery rose to the challenge quite magnificently. They geed and hawed and buckled and heaved and farted and swore, and after the crippling awkwardness of The Fireside Bigotry it was a profound pleasure to watch and hear them do so.

  A lone bugle called mournfully out from the valley, and presently a shredded and soiled Stars and Stripes battle standard took shape through the foggy half-light, followed by a long and silent column of dusty and dispirited infantrymen. When the two mule-drawn carts bringing up the rear were behind us we let rip with a thumping double charge, and another. So traumatically potent was the third that my brain seemed to shift in my skull: one of the cogitations thus dislodged reminded me that this day was the last. Abruptly confronted by the shamefully narrow scope of my war reporting to date, but too cold and tired to tackle this situation rationally, I snatched up my possessions and ran after the retreating Yankees. Not a moment too soon, as I later learned: when the artillery departed shortly after, a Confederate snatch-squad ran out of the mist and grabbed JD, the unit's arthritic straggler. (Once in POW custody, he put his head between his legs until his face went purple, then made a successful run for it when his alarmed guards went off to summon medical assistance.)

  I lost the Federals in the fog, then spent a long hour patrolling the forest-highway tarmac, watching the air clear. When a column did march out of the woods I could see at once they were the wrong colour: despite all that Johnny Rebel carousing, it was genuinely frightening to be confronted by men I'd come to think of as a hated enemy. Then a rusty pick-up shot past, leaking horn noise and jeering taunts, and remembering that this wasn't 1864 I trotted up and introduced myself to a young Confederate major in a filthy ten-gallon hat.

  'We're driving those Yankees out of here, Mr Moore, keeping 'em out of Texas.' The major's forthright manner suggested his boys were fighting a very different war to the one I'd just experienced, and their condition confirmed it. These men had been living off nothing but corn bread and salt pork – period rations, in period quantity – yet as they marched grimly past I saw fire in their sunken eyes. Most compelling was the barefoot, pallid and painfully emaciated young soldier who strode by with a vigour entirely at odds with his appearance; take away the muddy clay pipe sticking out of his unkempt chest-length beard, and he could have recently emerged from a long spell in a medieval dungeon. Only later did I notice that the filth slathering his shoeless feet was generously blended with fresh blood.

  Soon we were deep in the black-stumped forest of death that Gerry and I had walked past on day one. Everything seemed instantly more dramatic. A low boom signalled the Union artillery's distant presence: 'Here we go,' muttered a voice from behind, and when I looked back everyone was biting open paper cartridges and emptying the contents down their rifle barrels. 'I want to see a tight, tight skirmish line!' hissed the major, as his men fanned out across the burnt desolation. A cry, a stutter of echoing cracks and battle was joined. Everyone around set off through the smoke and shouts and charcoal spikes in a sort of crouching run, and with my heartbeat noisily filling my head I followed. We crossed a forest trail, a slash of orange through the blackness, and there at the roadside sat a group of huge-skirted ladies, surrounded by upended baskets and willow-pattern crockery. 'They took our food!' wailed one. 'They even took my bible!' I looked across at her as I scuttled past, and saw tears streaming down red cheeks.

  Soon after, the skirmish settled into a stand-off; everyone took cover behind sooty tree-stumps. I found myself sharing mine with a Prussian-moustached Frenchman: one of four, he told me, who'd come all this way to fight for the South. 'For me this is nothing about politics or society,' he said, sliding easily into the declamatory philosophising that had been such a feature of my time with his Roman countrymen. 'I have a romantic sympathy for – what you say? – the hopeless cause.' His small blue eyes gleamed out of that miner's face. 'In these woods I truly feel as if I am doing something I have done before.' Then a volley of musket shots crashed out, the major barked an order and soon I was hot, tired and alone.

  'What the hell is that damn newspaper man doing?'

  Fearless professional curiosity had propelled me deep into no man's land, or so I'd like to claim: in truth my journey into the crossfire was entirely attributable to fatigued confusion. A Confederate sergeant-major crunched across the barbecued woodland, grabbed my arm and half-dragged me back to his front line. The major was deeply unimpressed. 'Have that man placed under arrest with the rear guard,' he muttered coldly, before striding off towards the enemy with his revolver raised.

  It wasn't so bad back there. My guard was a paunchy, sallow and painstakingly lugubrious Midlander, another Lazy Jack: he'd suffered three heart attacks and was taking it easy to avoid a fourth. For a couple of hours we trudged up and down the hot and sooty dale in companionable silence, joined along the way by a handful of downcast Union POWs, who through blisters, exhaustion or disintegrating footwear had been unable to keep pace with their retreating colleagues. Then scorched earth gave way to leaves and pinecones and a familiar row of canvas peaks appeared before us. How telling of the sensory and experiential overload endured in the previous forty-ish hours that my time at the ref
ugee camp now seemed a distant memory, and how revealing of my own feeble milksoppery that I greeted those dear civilians with almost tearful fondness.

  This was their big set-piece occasion, and how they were enjoying it. Certainly more so than the demoralised Federals, who I learned had let themselves down with some very halfhearted march-by pillaging moments earlier. Still, their loss was our gain: the pebble-spectacled ladies bustled about us, proffering baskets of apples, cookies and bread. With this sort of fare on offer, and the sun now merciless, it was difficult for even the most undernourished Confederate to get too excited about the bubbling, slurried vat of hominy grits that was the pièce de résistance. One who did, though, presented the event with an iconic highlight that featured prominently in every after-action report I would read on the internet in the months ahead: 'I shall not forget the soldier hungry enough for hot food, and bereft enough of something to take it in, that he held out his hat as a bowl, and ate hominy from it with his hands.'

  I missed that memorable scene, but I think we can be fairly certain that it starred our barefoot beardie: if re-enactors were awarded medals, that simple act would have bagged him one the size of the skillet dangling from his bedroll. A mention in dispatches for the soldier who scooped up one of those sweet little white hens as we tramped out of the camp, planted his boot on its head and decapitated the animal with a hearty tug. A colleague lashed the twitching corpse to his pack; I followed the trail of blood for an hour.