Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  Fifteen minutes later, General Tom Wood rides onto the bridge. Wood, who is not easily surprised, who has trained himself to react logically to the wild vagaries of his profession, is amazed. Bragg’s army has ceded the best defensive ground west of Stones River with hardly a fight. He pauses at midstream, smoothes his mustache absently, wonders what Braxton Bragg has in mind.

  Hascall rides onto the bridge from the far side. He shakes a fist in the air, ecstatic. “It’s a splendid bridge, General. Every bit as fine as the one our Pioneers could build if we ever found the lazy bastards again.”

  Wood grins, which—like surprise—is a rarity for him. “Well done, Milo. You’re right; it is a splendid bridge. Now if General Crittenden will give us permission, we’ll go see what’s over in that next line of trees.”

  North of Triune, the rain finally washes away the fog in the early afternoon. McCook gives the order to advance and the skirmishers go forward again. But just as they are pushing Cleburne’s rear guard across Nelson’s Creek, a freezing wind shrieks out of the west, turning the rain to sleet. Visibility drops to a few feet in a matter of moments. Under the cover of the storm, the remaining Confederate infantry and artillery withdraw south. About 4:00 P.M., the wind and sleet abate enough for the blue skirmishers to resume the advance. The Reb cavalry fires a few shots, makes a mock dash at them, and then retreats. The day is gone, and McCook orders the corps into camp. It is very cold.

  Rosecrans glares at the dark line of trees overlooking the fields on the far side of Stewart’s Creek. “My God, Crittenden! Why didn’t you get a brigade into those woods? We could have developed the Reb position, but you’ve squandered the light! Tomorrow it may take two divisions to cross that field. Daylight is precious, sir, as precious as blood! I told you that we must press them and press them and press them! And you have not. Learn to be a general, sir, because there can be no place for missed opportunities in this campaign or in this army.”

  Crittenden stares up at Rosecrans, mouth open in shock and hurt. “I’m sorry, General. I thought we’d done well and accomplished all that you assigned.”

  “Your men did superbly. You, sir, did not. Now they may pay with their blood for your failure. See that you make no error tomorrow! Garesché will send you orders.” He spins his horse, dragging so hard on the reins that his gelding snorts with pain.

  Crittenden watches him go, then walks, head down, to his mount. His staff looks away, embarrassed, for Tom Crittenden is liked if not respected.

  Braxton Bragg climbs to the widow’s walk two floors above his office to watch the columns marching into Murfreesboro through the winter dusk. Bragg should like to feel pride, perhaps even love for these cold, muddy, exhausted thousands. But he cannot, dare not, for only discipline keeps this army from becoming a mob. So he steels himself, watches critically. When a particularly bedraggled regiment passes, he orders his adjutant to send a sharp note to its colonel.

  Of all the troops that pass, Cleburne’s men hold ranks best, seem in the best spirits. Bragg does not entirely trust Cleburne. Oh, he is a good soldier, utterly reliable, but he is Hardee’s creature. He should separate the two. After this battle is won, he will be able to do many things. Free himself of Hardee and Polk, at least. Breckinridge he will keep, discipline, force to submit.

  He climbs down and returns to his office. Another courier from Wheeler waits. The Yankees have carried the bridges over Stewart’s Creek. Bragg scowls. Once again Wheeler has let them win through too easily. Forrest, goddamn him, would have made the Yankees pay. Well, no great matter. Bragg’s infantry has moved quickly, leaving him plenty of time to deploy. He reaches for a sheet of paper, dips pen in ink, and begins:

  Memoranda for General and Staff officers:

  1st. The line of battle will be in front of Murfreesboro, left wing, in front of Stones River, right wing in rear of the river.

  2d. Polk’s corps will form left wing, Hardee’s corps, right wing.

  3d. Withers’s division will form first line in Polk’s corps, Cheatham’s the second… .

  He writes on, his hand fluid, a picture of the dispositions clear in his mind. His guts gurgle steadily. He eructs, farts, plans death.

  Headquarters of the Army of the Cumberland has shifted again, this time to one of the few houses still standing in Lavergne.

  Lieutenant Colonel Julius Garesché pushes his spectacles up on his forehead, then takes them off and folds them carefully, remembering his wife’s admonition to treat them gently. They are bottle-thick, so strong that at first they made him queasy, but Mariquitta has insisted that he must use them to save his sight. Garesché sighs. He has yet to write to her this week. And he must write, for she will know from the newspapers that the army is on the move. He must reassure her that chiefs of staff seldom see the enemy and are even more rarely in danger from them. Thirteen years an army wife and still a girl in so many ways. God, how he loves her, loves her with an intensity that still shakes him, for he had always thought himself meant to love only God.

  “Colonel, would you like some coffee?”

  Garesché looks up at the hovering orderly. “Thank you, Magee.” He accepts the mug, gauges the amount of paperwork remaining, and decides he can afford a minute to rest. He leans back, closes his eyes, and sips from the hot mug.

  To love only God. Had the family not fallen on hard times, he would have become a Jesuit. But the family already had one priest and could not afford two. So Julius Garesché went to West Point to become a soldier. He relished the spartan life at the Point, felt his spirit expand as his body hardened to the discipline. For a time, he was the only Catholic in the school. Yet he never pitied himself for the bigotry of his classmates, but welcomed it as a mortification granted by God for the good of his soul.

  He graduated in 1842, receiving orders to the 4th Artillery at Sacket’s Harbor on Lake Ontario. There he was visited by another recent graduate of West Point, First Lieutenant William S. Rosecrans. After some fumbling, the normally self-assured Rosecrans said, “Look, Garesché, I wanted to talk to you about your church.”

  Garesché felt his heart sink. To think that he’d supposed friendship when Rosecrans—obviously a new convert to some militant Protestantism— came only to try to turn him from the Faith. He sighed. “I am at peace with my course. I have no desire to attempt justifying—”

  “No, no! I’m not trying to talk you out of anything. I’m thinking of … well, converting. It’s going to play hell with my family back in Ohio, but I’ve been studying. Back at the Point, I always admired how you seemed so … well, so certain.”

  Forgive me, Father, Garesché prayed. I had forgotten how wonderful is Your grace. He smiled at Rosecrans. “I know very little, but you are welcome to whatever I can tell you.”

  Rosecrans was baptized in the Faith, and they began to correspond, eventually forming the Association in Honor of the Devotion to the Sacred Heart among the Catholic officers of the army. When Rosecrans resigned from the army in 1854, they lost contact for a few years but not for want of affection.

  From his first posting, Garesché was drawn by temperament and skill into staff work. He longed to test himself in action, but the closest he came to war was the dismal supply depot at Point Isabel, Texas, in the waning days of the war with Mexico. Home in St. Louis on leave in 1848, he considered resigning to enter the Church. Instead, at his mother’s urging, he agreed to marry. The marriage was arranged according to the custom of French émigré families. Garesché again took leave and, feeling old at twenty-eight, returned to St. Louis to undertake the burdens of married life. To his surprise, he was enthralled by the teenage beauty his mother had found for him. And Mariquitta de Coudroy de Lauréal was equally taken with him.

  The wedding was a blur, the wedding night a terror. In the bridal chamber, he stood hands behind his back, starched in his dress uniform, and confessed to a complete absence of experience and knowledge of the ways of married men and women. He had to this point in his life devoted himself
to a quest for purity in soul and—

  Standing near the bed, Mariquitta was seized by a paroxysm of laughter. He was concerned, then frightened as she sank to the floor, leaning back against the coverlet, clutching her stomach, hoop skirts ballooning about her. He knelt next to her, tried to calm her hysteria with apologies for his bluntness. She seized one of his hands, shook her head, finally managed to choke out that her sisters had prepared her in such exhaustive detail that she had been left more confused than ever by the entire subject. She has counted on him in his goodness, his gentleness, his wisdom. And now to find that he knows nothing? Oh, God, it is too ridiculous. They will have to call in her sisters, his brothers. Perhaps visit the stables to observe the animals.

  They sat side by side, laughing until the tears came. Later, after a bottle of wine and much giggling over the advice received before the wedding, Julius and Mariquitta made love. And though they lacked the experience, they lacked nothing of the verve accorded begrudgingly by all the world to the French.

  Mariquitta found army life hard. Point Isabel was desolate, the other army wives well-meaning but not of her breeding. Her first pregnancy threatened her physical and emotional stability. Reluctantly, Garesché sent her back to St. Louis. In 1850 she gave birth to their son, Julio, at her mother’s house. When Garesché received news that both his wife and child were recovered and strong, he begged Mariquitta to join him at his new posting in Brownsville on the Rio Grande. She consented, but the child became ill on the journey and died within weeks of her arrival. Garesché blamed himself and, despite the counsel of the priest and the comforting of his wife, searched his soul for the sin for which God had exacted such terrible retribution.

  As the years passed, Mariquitta spent more and more time at her mother’s home, usually expecting another child. In all, they have four sons and four daughters. Three of the daughters live past infancy, only one of the sons. Garesché, although formally posted to Texas, served mostly on temporary duty in Washington. He wrote long, tender letters to Mariquitta, translated military texts from the French, wrote religious meditations, and took daily cold baths. During the long illness of his daughter Marie, he made a religious vow to read a chapter a day from St. Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ.

  Finally, in 1855, he received a permanent transfer to Washington, where he was assigned to the assistant adjutant general’s office. He brought Mariquitta and the children east and they settled into a blissful family life. Among the wives of staff officers, Mariquitta found convivial friends. Garesché rapidly became an all-but-indispensable part of the adjutant general’s staff—so much so that when war came in 1861, his superiors would not hear of his transfer to the field. Garesché’s workload doubled and then doubled again until he was weighed down to the point of collapse. The vow to read daily from The Imitation of Christ became a terrible burden. The print was minuscule and his eyesight failing. Yet he never missed a day. Rather, he drove himself even harder in matters of religious devotion. He skipped meals to attend mass, rose in the night to pray, visited the military hospitals nearly every evening, often staying until dawn to comfort a dying man. Mariquitta and the children do what they can for him, but Papa is a saint and, hence, beyond real comfort in his anguish.

  Late one afternoon, beneath the sunlit window of a café near the War Department, he confessed to his brother Frederick, the priest, his presentiments of death.

  Father Frederick smiled. “That hardly seems odd for a soldier. Why, I should think—”

  “I am very serious, Frederick. Last week, when I was kneeling in St. Catherine’s, a very old woman sat down in the pew behind me and spoke to me of death. I have seen her often at St. Catherine’s and several other churches as well.”

  “Many of the old and destitute spend their days in our churches. It is a very hot summer and the stone churches are cool. The reverse happens in the first cold days of autumn when the stones are yet warm from the summer.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. But I don’t think she comes for physical comfort. I think she is a very holy person.”

  “Well, I have no doubt seen her, too. Describe her.”

  “She has a short leg and a heavy shoe. She is always in black with a floriated crucifix pinned over her heart.”

  “Ah, yes. Rosamunde, we call her, although I’m not sure that is anything like her real name. She may be holy, but she is also more than a little simple.”

  Garesché studied the flute of red his nearly untouched wine glass cast on the white tablecloth between them. “But are not the simple more often than not chosen by God to speak for Him?”

  “Julius—”

  “She whispered: ‘Beautiful soldier, you will die in your first battle. But fear not. You are but the lamb destined all your life for this.’”

  Father Frederick blanched at Garesché’s words. “Julius! Beware the sin of pride for your soul’s sake! The Lamb of God is one and one only. Many men may be called on to sacrifice their lives in a great struggle such as this, but we dare not compare our paltry sacrifices to our Lord’s.”

  “I make no comparisons, Frederick. I only repeat what she said. But if I am destined to die in this war, if that is God’s will, am I not cheating God by remaining here in safety?”

  “We all owe God a death, Julius. But if God means to have your life in this war, the time and the manner should be, must be, His. It is wrong for you to attempt to predict or to arrange or even to wonder on the circumstances. For He may choose not to take you in this war.”

  “But if—”

  “No, Julius. Listen. It is prideful for you to interpret the superstitious babblings of a half-crazed old woman as the revealed word of God. You have been working very hard and perhaps you dozed for a moment and only imagined her words. It may be that all your so-called presentiments are but the imaginings of a fatigued mind, mere fumes of an overwrought fancy. Now finish your wine and then go home to Mariquitta and the children without stopping at St. Catherine’s or at any of the hospitals. I want you to eat well, to spend a little time appreciating the many blessings God has given you in your home, and then I want you to go to bed for a full night’s sleep. Tomorrow, if you care to, you can come by and we will talk further of presentiments, but no more today. I order you to do this both as your older brother and as your priest.”

  Garesché did not reply but sat staring at the reflection of the wine on the white tablecloth, the flute of red turned to an amorphous splash by some trick of the late afternoon light.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sunday

  December 28, 1862

  Nolensville, Tennessee

  Rosecrans decides against sending Crittenden across Stewart’s Creek in force until the army has had a day to rest. McCook has orders to send a brigade to determine Hardee’s location. Otherwise, the Army of the Cumberland will on the Sabbath. At Murfreesboro, Bragg continues to draw his army together, posting its elements along Stones River northwest of town.

  GEORGE THOMAS SOMETIMES wonders if he is fated to forever follow roads broken and rutted by other men. For two days, his corps has struggled south and then east along roads ground to a clinging paste by the passage of McCook’s corps. The mud has mired cannons and wagons to their hubs and killed many a good army mule with exhaustion. Yet the men have managed. Negley’s division has reached Stewartsboro behind Crittenden’s right flank, while Rousseau’s division has labored into Nolensville behind McCook’s left.

  He would not have hesitated to advance on the Sabbath. But Rosecrans commands, and Thomas will not gainsay him. In the fierce competition among generals, Thomas is one of the few who will not conspire against his superiors, manipulate congressmen, or spread rumors in the press. Not that he is without ambition. He was bitterly disappointed not to receive command of the army when Buell was dismissed. But at least the job went to Rosecrans, whom he likes and respects.

  Thomas remembers Rosecrans from West Point: an ebullient, confident boy with an easy charm and a casual irreverence toward t
he protocol of the institution. Thomas, older by several years than most of the cadets, felt no particular reverence for protocol either, and was frequently the confidant and advisor of younger boys. (It was they who gave him the nickname “Pap.”) Yet he was taken aback on first overhearing Rosecrans call him “General Washington.” He called Rosecrans into the hall.

  Rosecrans, still a plebe, came to an easy attention. “Yes, sir?”

  “Am I mistaken, Mr. Rosecrans, or did I hear you call me ‘General Washington’?”

  “No, sir. You were not mistaken.”

  Thomas ponders. “Why, may I ask?”

  “It is your dignity, sir. Your gravitas.”

  “Ah. You find me ponderous.”

  “Not at all, sir. I spoke in respect.”

  Thomas studied Rosecrans. “Very well, then. I acknowledge the compliment, however undeserved. I would suggest, though, that other upperclassmen might take less kindly to nicknames.”

  “I understand, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Thomas kept an amused eye on Rosecrans in the next year, grew to like him when he saw that Rosecrans, though sometimes thoughtless, was never malicious. They became friendly, even friends, though Thomas permitted few of these in his life. In the spring of 1840, Thomas’s last year, Rosecrans and three other cadets came to the door of the cramped private room granted to Thomas as a cadet officer. Thomas looked up from the artillery text he was reading. “Pap,” Rosecrans said, “we want to know the story.”