The Cannibal Queen

by Stephen Coonts

  When we got there the Pickwick had an extra room for me.

  The morning papers were full of the collapse of the attempted coup in the Soviet Union. In a twist straight from a fairy tale, freedom and democracy triumphed over the forces of darkness, forces led by the most inept group of would-be dictators that has ranted and postured on the world stage in many a year.

  Communism is as dead as Vladimir Lenin. Like him, it will probably be mummified and displayed in a Moscow mausoleum as a reminder of the bad old days. Lenin they’ll probably just bury. He richly deserves it.

  So today around the globe people are euphoric. The stock market’s up, nuclear war looks more and more inconceivable, the human race’s chances of surviving on this lonely pebble in space look better and better.

  Of course, the bloom will soon be off the rose as people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union come to realize that democracy is no panacea, that free elections don’t create jobs, food, housing, clothing or meaningful lives. All democracy does is place power in the hands of people who are accountable. Those with power can still misuse it, still make grievous errors. Democracy is a thing worth dying for, but I don’t think that the people of the Soviet Union yet realize it. For them, now, democracy is simply the promise of a better life.

  After reading the paper this morning I rented a car and drove out to the Shiloh National Military Park, which is run by the National Park Service. This was my first visit to Shiloh, long delayed and long anticipated.

  Perhaps I should fill you in on the battle that was fought around the little log Shiloh Church above Pittsburg Landing on April 6 and 7, 1862. Forty thousand Union troops under Major General U. S. Grant had ascended the Tennessee River and disembarked at Pittsburg Landing on the west side of the river. They were awaiting the arrival of an additional 25,000 men under Major General Don Carlos Buell, and when assembled, would march the 24 miles southwest to Corinth, Mississippi, where 44,000 Confederate soldiers under General P. G. T. Beauregard were guarding the railroad junction of the Memphis & Charleston and the Mobile & Ohio. Beauregard knew Grant’s army was coming, so he suggested to his superior officer, Albert Sidney Johnston, that the Confederates march to Pittsburg Landing and smite the Yankees before the entire Federal host assembled.

  General Johnston came to Corinth, looked the situation over, and concluded Beauregard’s advice was sound. Indeed, it was the only course open to the Confederate defenders. Outnumbered and ill-equipped, the Confederates were doomed if they waited for the Federals to assemble and march to Corinth for an assault.

  For the first and only time in his military career, U. S. Grant was caught by a surprise attack. He had underestimated his opponent. That was a mistake he would never repeat.

  After a sloppy march and a two-day delay in front of the Federal army that Beauregard thought must now be on full alert, the Confederates hit the Yankees with a clumsy attack just before dawn on Sunday, April 6. The soldiers on both sides were green as grass, but while they lacked experience they had ardor aplenty. The Confederates hit hard, repeatedly, driven by Johnston, Beauregard and Braxton Bragg, three of the most determined warriors who ever fought on this continent.

  They came oh so close, but in the end they just didn’t have enough to deliver the knockout punch. And the Confederates hadn’t counted on the steel in Ulysses S. Grant. Some of his officers counseled retreat that Sunday night. According to Bruce Catton, Grant snapped, “Retreat? No. I propose to attack at daylight and whip them.”

  Catton added that William T. Sherman found Grant standing under a tree in the rain late that night—his headquarters had been converted into a hospital—and said, “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?”

  “Yes,” Grant said, and puffed on his cigar. “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

  That night the remainder of Buell’s men arrived. Deducting the previous day’s casualties, Grant’s army now numbered 55,000. The next day Grant drove them forward and recaptured the ground he had lost. Fought out, with Albert Sidney Johnston dead and 15,000 other men dead, wounded or missing, the Confederates retreated to Corinth Monday night. Grant tried to follow, but he had no cavalry and his troops were fought out too.

  The Federals had 3,500 men killed and another 6,600 wounded. In addition, the Confederates captured about 2,500 Union soldiers. At the time this was the bloodiest battle ever fought on this continent and the long casualty lists stunned people north and south who had thought this would be a short, easy war.

  Amazingly, the battle was fought by raw troops, some of whom had never even fired their muskets before. Some of the inexperienced volunteers cut and ran at the first volley, but most dug in their heels and fought savagely. A lot of them fought to the death.

  The irony of the battle was the aftermath, which presented the Union with a golden opportunity. With the whipped Confederate Army camped at Corinth, the more numerous Federals could have bagged the whole lot if they had moved fast and decisively. The entire Confederate military situation in the west had come unhinged.

  To his credit, U. S. Grant saw this opportunity and wanted to seize it with both hands. But it was not to be. His superior officer, Major General Henry Wager Halleck, came to Pittsburg Landing on April 11 and took personal command. Halleck frittered away three weeks waiting for reinforcements. When he had gathered his host, 128,000 fighting men, he dug his way to Corinth, entrenching every step of the way. It took him a month to move his army 24 miles. Beauregard burned the military supplies he couldn’t carry and marched away before Halleck arrived, seven weeks after the Battle of Shiloh.

  Yet the opportunity still existed! With this vast army the Federals could have marched anywhere on the continent and the Confederates could have done nothing about it. The Union Army could have smashed New Orleans, sacked Mobile, burned Vicksburg. Even better, they could have chased and cornered and gutted Beauregard’s army, the only Confederate army west of the Alleghenies. But Halleck wanted territory. This military genius divided up his forces and garrisoned every hamlet on the railroad, which gave the Confederates invaluable time and allowed the Civil War to drag on for three more years, consuming half a million lives. The obscene, bloody infernos of Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Stone’s River, Chickamauga, and the Wilderness all lay in the future.

  Frustrated, Grant almost quit the Army. Fortunately William T. Sherman talked him out of it.

  We today are lucky that the war didn’t end in the summer of 1862. In the furnace of war Abraham Lincoln converted a war to suppress a rebellion into a social revolution, freed the slaves, and forced the nation onto the road that would lead, in the fullness of time, to a multiracial society with the rights of every citizen guaranteed by a supreme federal government. It took years of gunfire and rivers of blood to accomplish those miracles.

  The Shiloh battlefield today is a park full of stately oaks and well-paved drives, with little monuments and markers and old cannons scattered everywhere. Armed with a map of the battlefield you drive around and stop at each numbered marker where a recorded message or a park ranger will tell you all about it.

  I took in the park ranger’s short guided walk at the Sunken Road and the Hornet’s Nest, the site of the stand that the Union soldiers made from 10:30 A.M. until almost 5 P.M. that fateful Sunday that gave Grant time to prepare his defensive line close to Pittsburg Landing, the time that Grant absolutely had to have to prevent a rout.

  The Johnny Rebs assaulted the Sunken Road and Hornet’s Nest position eleven times without success. One survivor wrote that all he could see in the thick pall of gunsmoke were the continuous sheets of fire from muzzle blasts. The rebels finally blasted the Federals out of this position with a two-hour barrage from 62 cannons.

  Of course today no traces of the battle remain. The gore and body parts and shattered trees are all gone. The men who fought here—those who died, those who were maimed, those who survived—all of them are now dead and well on their way to becoming dust. And this was a gorgeous summer
morning. The early morning fog had burned off and it was cool for August, only in the mideighties. The sunlight filtering through the trees and illuminating fields where once bodies laid in windrows gave the place the atmosphere of a cathedral. Other people felt it too. Everyone talked in low, respectful tones.

  There weren’t many people there. I had most of the tour stops all to myself. Just me, a gentle breeze and the cicadas in the trees singing to the spirits of thousands of dead soldiers.

  I could almost hear the muskets and cannons roar, hear the shouting men and feel the adrenaline surge. Shoulder to shoulder in the dense smoke as bullets came like leaden hail and men fell left and right, most of these men stood their ground and fought to the bitter end. Amid the screams. Amid the stench. Fought here on the doorstep of hell.

  I was deeply moved.

  I stopped at each of the other tour stops and looked around, but Ulysses S. Grant was on my mind. He’s one of my heroes. An Ohio boy who hated West Point but stuck to graduate, he served in the Mexican War, as did Robert E. Lee. But Lee was a gallant staff officer and Grant was a quartermaster. Grant resigned from the Army at the age of thirty to avoid a court-martial for drunkenness. He failed at farming and was clerking in his father’s leather-goods store in Galena, Illinois, when the war broke out. Three years later, at the age of forty-two, he was commander of all the nation’s armies.

  Grant was a small, disheveled man who couldn’t look neat or play a role if his life depended upon it. But he had common sense and never panicked, and he may well have been the best soldier this nation ever produced. Sending men forward into the inferno wasn’t easy for him—he could not eat meat unless it was burned black.

  Here at Shiloh Grant saw the true face of war for the first time—unspeakable violence, carnage, courage, terror, selflessness and selfishness, all the best and all the worst in man.

  And he endured. We’ll lick ’em tomorrow.

  Before I left the park I went into the national cemetery on the knoll just up from the landing. Union soldiers killed at Shiloh are buried here. Over 3,500 of them. Other U.S. soldiers from other wars have also been interred here. The Confederate soldiers who died at Shiloh still lie in four mass graves.

  The graves of the Shiloh dead in the national cemetery are obvious. These men were originally buried right where they had fallen. When moved here the majority of the bodies could not be identified. Now those graves are marked with a small square post that has a number on it. Nothing else. Some of the graves are marked with stones that bear the name and state of the decedent. A few conventional slabs bear the inscription, “Unknown U.S. Soldier.” And a few, the most eloquent of all, simply state, “U.S. Soldier.”

  I got a can of soda pop from a machine in the bookstore and sat on the porch drinking it. The quintessential American tourist and his spouse and sister-in-law came out of the visitors’ center and got into their car for the tour. Everyone fastened seatbelts and kept the windows up. Air conditioning. And off they went, driving slowly, just as I had done.

  The greatest risk to life and limb that most people face today is riding in a car without their seatbelt fastened. They put it on before the car is moved from the driveway. Which is as it should be.

  But these belted, air-conditioned people—these are the descendants of the soldiers in this cemetery and their comrades, men who felt so deeply about the fate of our republic that they were willing to fight, willing to kill and willing to die. They were willing to lie in a soldier’s grave.

  Antiwar activists like to tell us that there is nothing left worth fighting for. Pacifists tell us that there is nothing worth killing for. Draft evaders tell us there is nothing worth dying for.

  Let them come and preach amid these tombstones. On a Sunday morning in April or on a sunny August day. They freely exercise their freedom of speech in this constitutional democracy these men gave their lives to preserve. Let them preach here.

  27

  SATURDAY MORNING I’M FLYING AGAIN. BY THE TIME I GET THE car returned to the agency in Savannah and get the plane loaded and fueled, it’s 9:45. The sun came up red this morning and faded from time to time—some clouds and lots of haze.

  I find out how much haze when I lift off. I can see three, maybe four miles. Yuck! But the sky is clear above.

  I fly west to Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee and take a look at the national cemetery and the park. The only way one can distinguish the landing now is because there is a parking area between the trees on the bank. There wasn’t much there in 1862 either.

  The Tennessee River will lead me north. It will meander a bit on its way to the Ohio, but I’m in no hurry. Sooner or later I’d like to get to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, yet the Oshkosh airport will be there whenever I arrive.

  This kind of leisure is foreign to me. Like everyone else I arrange my life to meet deadlines and commitments. Since I began flying civilian planes I have used them mostly for transportation. “I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon about three. Meet me at the airport.” That type of thing. So this summer trip is a vacation. In a week or two I’ll be back in the office using my watch to regulate my life. Perhaps that’s for the best. Still, I don’t know that I would turn down an offer from Donald Trump if he wanted to adopt me. If he offered a good allowance and picked up my American Express bill every month, I’d be tempted.

  The Tennessee River is a bit unique in that it doesn’t flow through a single city or town of any size.between Savannah, 15 miles north of the Mississippi state line, and the Ohio River, 100 nautical miles north. Small towns lie several miles away from the river on either side, but the river is a scenic boater’s paradise.

  A fellow could put a boat into the water at Nashville and descend the Cumberland all the way to the dams just south of the Ohio, cross to the Tennessee through a channel, then go up the Tennessee to the Pickwick Dam, just above Savannah. No doubt a lot of people do that for a summer vacation.

  The river and land are gorgeous from a thousand feet overhead. The winding river and the farms and wooded areas, it looks very peaceful.

  The visibility has increased to about seven miles by the time I reach Paducah, Kentucky, on the Ohio. The airport ATIS says the temperature is 84 degrees, but the humidity makes it seem boiling hot.

  The FBO’s line boy at Paducah’s Barkley Regional at first denies that his employers own a five-gallon bucket, so I’ll have to go on up the road to change the oil in the Queen. Then he decides maybe they do and produces one, plus four gallons of the right weight of new oil.

  Two hours later I have the job done and the Queen buttoned up. I’m sweating like a tent-meeting evangelist wrestling with the Lord on a hot summer night. I gulp down a soda pop and stand in front of the FBO’s air conditioner, but the perspiration doesn’t slow down for almost 15 minutes. I’m hot, sweaty and filthy. Too bad the Queen doesn’t appreciate the lengths I go to to preserve her engine.

  Flying north over Illinois I latch onto an interstate and sit thinking about tent meetings. They had one in Savannah last night. I drove by and looked through the rolled-up tent flaps at the rapt crowd and the preacher with his shirtsleeves up and tie pulled down. I’ve never been to a tent revival, although they’re popular and common throughout the South and I spent some time there when I was in the Navy. I guess I never thought my faith needed reviving. And I have trouble visualizing myself swaying and singing and shouting Amens as some inspired Elmer Gantry works himself into a lather for my benefit.

  Sweaty public religion is a part of the rural South. Except when it turns into TV preachers bilking the gullible, I don’t suppose it does anyone any harm and it undeniably makes a lot of people feel good.

  Savannah had a lot more going on besides a tent meeting that Friday night as the moon rose all orange and swollen. In the motel parking lots people were checking the boats on their trailers. A group of young people were working out at the karate academy in a Main Street storefront across from the courthouse. McDonald’s was serving burgers and fries and teenage
rs were cruising. In the modest blue-collar homes of eastern Savannah young men were drinking beer around pickups parked in front yards while old men sat rocking on their porches.

  All these people doing precisely what they wanted to do on a Friday night in August; somehow it’s all very normal and, in a way, comforting. Life goes on.

  At Salem, Illinois, my highway zags off to the northeast, so I drop to 500 feet and latch onto a powerline running the 50 miles north to Pana.

  The visibility has improved to about twelve miles and I’m in the mood for a powerline. I really don’t need it, of course, since Pana is due north and the section lines would take me there even if I didn’t have a compass. Powerlines are difficult to follow because they are hard to see from the air and you have to get low to do it. And not all the powerlines are on the sectional charts.

  But the prospect of zipping along at a couple hundred feet above ripe farmland is enticing. I keep my eye peeled for birds. They’re there. At my low speed—84 knots—I just have time to see and avoid them. At twice this speed I wouldn’t.

  Cows lying down chewing their cud look up as I pass overhead but don’t get up. Cattle are used to engine noise, which is a man noise. Sailplanes and balloons frighten them. They’re too much like big, silent birds that might be hungry enough to strap on a calf.

  Two or three hundred feet above a fertile prairie is precisely where a Stearman should be. Here her pace seems fast, here the scale is right.

  I sing. The snoring of the engine is the perfect accompaniment for my fractured baritone and butchered lyrics. This is much better than a shower. “O-oh dar-ling, a love like this is hard to find. Don’t make me wait for luvvvvv. …”

  I stopped for fuel at Decatur. I was sitting on the bench outside having an antisocial smoke when a Piper Colt shut down on the mat and the pilot came over carrying his logbook.

  “You on a solo cross-country?” I asked.

  “Yep. Looking for someone to sign my book.”