Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  At McCook’s headquarters on Overall Creek, Colonel Lewis Zahm slumps exhausted into a camp chair at McCook’s invitation. “I’m sorry, General, we haven’t found Negley’s right yet. It’s darker than the Pit out there and the Reb cavalry knows the ground better than we do. We’ll keep trying, but… .”

  McCook moistens his lips, recalling Yankee boys killing Yankee boys in the fog north of Triune. “No matter, Colonel. Get your men some food and rest. We’ll connect with Negley in the morning.”

  Brigadier General John Wharton, commanding a brigade of Joe Wheeler’s cavalry, watches McCook’s camp until the fires are burning high against the night chill and he is sure that the Yankees are not going to move again before morning. They have blundered. He is sure of it. There is a mile and a half gap between McCook on Overall Creek and the flank of the blue line halted short of Stones River. Wharton is a Brazoria lawyer turned Texas Ranger and soldier. He claims no command of grand strategy, yet he senses an opportunity, a chance for something stupendous. He rides to find Wheeler.

  Braxton Bragg takes the report of the successful defense of Wayne’s Hill without comment. Breckinridge did well to send Kentucky Brigade forward to defend the hill, but he does not bother to send congratulations. A subordinate’s successful exercise of initiative needs no praise, should be reward enough in itself. Besides, he has more important matters to attend to.

  He scowls at the map for the hundredth time that day. The dispositions are good, the complaint about splitting his army on either side of the river picayune. He has strengthened the line at all points and extended it to the south of the Franklin Pike with McCown’s reserve division of three brigades from Hardee’s corps. Come the morrow, if Rosecrans is fool enough to attack, Bragg will be ready.

  He knew Rosecrans only slightly in the Old Army, does not know Crittenden or McCook at all. He knew Thomas very well, of course—once liked him. But all the memories of that time have grown hazy in his recollection. I am getting old, he thinks, and well before my time. I imagine this war will kill me, but I should like to see my wife one more time before I die.

  Wharton is almost to Murfreesboro when he is intercepted by Wheeler in person: “General Wharton, I have the commanding general’s permission to go raiding. The roads are filled with Yankee trains. I’ll sweep up through Jefferson and then cut back to the Nashville Pike. We are going reap the devil’s own harvest. That’s what I told him. The devil’s harvest!”

  Wharton is nonplussed, for Wheeler is not usually given to metaphor. “General, there is a gap in the Yankee line. I think we have a chance to—”

  “I’ve already told General Bragg the Yankee dispositions, and he agreed that now’s the time to cut up the Yankee trains, force Rosecrans to fight hungry and short of ammunition. Cover our left flank while I’m gone, John. Pegram has the right.” He starts off, remembers his manners. “The next time, it’ll be your turn, John. I promise.”

  Two and a half miles up the Nashville Pike from Murfreesboro, Rosecrans’s staff is ensconced in a dilapidated log cabin. Rosecrans reads the message from Negley, balls it in a fist, and hurls it at a wall. The paper lacks the weight to reach its target and the act does little to alleviate the general’s anger. He vents his frustration in half a dozen pungent curses. Garesché winces. Father Treacy makes the sign of the cross and stares heavenward before smiling and winking at Garesché. Rosecrans stands for a moment, hands on hips. He turns to Treacy. “I’m sorry, Father.”

  “You don’t offend me, William. However, you might concern yourself—”

  Rosecrans brushes this away. “I’ll confess it tomorrow, Father. Or the next day. Whenever there is time, but I don’t have any now. Garesché, get an escort together. It seems we have to go see McCook.”

  “No, General. You belong here. I will go. Or better, summon him here.”

  Rosecrans glares at Garesché, who does not quail. Rosecrans laughs. “All right. All right. I have a father here and it appears a mother, too. Send for McCook. In the meantime, tell Negley to step his right back to guard his flank. I hate to move men this late at night, but we’ve got to be careful. Bragg always thinks first of the open flank.”

  As any good general does, Garesché thinks.

  “Just like any decent general,” Rosecrans says. “Now what are you smiling at, Garesché?”

  The night deepens as a cold north wind shrouds the stars with clouds. Standing picket on the lower slope of Wayne’s Hill, Corporal Johnny Green and Private Everett Parker of the 9th Kentucky hear the muffled withdrawal of Harker’s regiments across McFadden’s Ford. Christ, it’s cold. They huddle together. When the rain begins, Parker whimpers. Green puts an arm around him, and Parker buries his face in Green’s shoulder. “Hush,” Green croons. “We’ll be all right.”

  Atop the hill, General Hanson refuses permission to build a fire. No, the Yankee guns would find it too tempting a target.

  Elsewhere along the Union and Confederate lines, few officers even attempt such discipline. The men prowl through the woods and fields, gathering brush, cedar boughs, and fence rails. Great bonfires leap up. By unspoken consent, neither army opens with its guns. The green cedar boughs produce immense gouts of crackling sparks. Green can see the silhouettes of Yankee soldiers against the firelight. He tries to concoct a suitable simile of demons around a forge of hellfire. But the boys across the river are just boys: cold, shivering, miserable, and very afraid of dying.

  CHAPTER 7

  Tuesday

  December 30, 1862

  Murfreesboro, Tennessee

  Crittenden’s corps and Negley’s division of Thomas’s corps hold a strong line from McFadden’s Ford on Stones River to the Wilkinson Pike. But McCook’s corps is still some two miles to the west, leaving Negley’s right flank dangerously exposed. Preparing to meet the Federal advance, Bragg has positioned Breckinridge’s and Cleburne’s divisions of Hardee’s corps on the east side of the river; Polk’s corps (Cheatham’s and Wither’s divisions) west of the river. McCown’s division of Hardee’s corps protects the Confederate left flank—an awkward command arrangement, leaving Hardee with divisions on either end of the line.

  WHEELER’S COLUMN OF two thousand troopers stretches more than a mile along the Lebanon Pike running north toward the junction at Waterhill with the road west to Jefferson, Lavergne, and the rear of the Yankee army. Beyond the glow of the campfires, darkness envelops the column utterly. The men are helpless, the horses keeping pace by the sound and mostly the smell of the horses ahead. They plunge on through the dark, following the age-old edict of equine domestication to serve, to serve, to die if asked, but always to serve the master of stirrup, crop, and bit. The ground falls away beneath, heart-stopping, then hooves strike water, splash through the ford across Sinking Creek, and climb the opposite bank spattering mud, all the time the rain falling.

  Even the mud, rain, and cedar cannot entirely cloak the sound of hoofbeats. In the Union camp on the far side of Stones River, men pause to listen to a percussive shuffling like distant thunder in the night. Recruits stand puzzled. Knowing veterans exchange glances, knock out pipes, settle themselves by the fires. Better save your hardtack, boys. The Johnnies have gone raidin’ and that means lean rations tomorrow.

  West of Waterhill, Wheeler’s horsemen cross the east fork of Stones River. They have ridden hard since midnight and Wheeler halts the men to rest while his scouts probe toward Jefferson at the confluence of the east and west forks of the river. He is mildly surprised to have encountered no outposts, flushed no Yankee vedettes in all the ride. If the Yankees are at Jefferson in force, they are well drawn in—overconfident, lazy, or stupid.

  Creeping through the outskirts of the silent hamlet, the scouts watch campfires rekindled with the first predawn stirrings in the Yankee camp south of the pike—enough fires to indicate at least a full brigade of infantry, maybe more.

  Wheeler receives the report in a dripping copse of trees, the staff gathered around him in the dim light of a pair of
cloaked lanterns. “We’ll swing to the right, ford downstream, and keep going,” he tells them. “We’re interested in their trains, not a fight with infantry.”

  “General,” quavers a voice from the back of the little crowd. “Beg pardon, General. But I’ve got a report.” The circle opens, lets through a dripping boy, face sallow even in the dim light. He coughs, hacks, breath fetid. “Sorry, General.”

  Wheeler tries not to show his distaste. “What’s your report, trooper?”

  “A couple of the boys went down to the river to look for an easy place to cross, and they came back sayin’ they heard a wagon train comin’ on toward the bridge from the west. Must be a big one too, because it were makin’ a parful lot of noise. Captain Beeson said to tell you right quick.”

  A buzz ripples through the staff. Fighting Joe Wheeler thinks fast. He wants the train but not the fight with the infantry. He will send Colonel William Allen’s 1st Alabama and two batteries of horse artillery around to the camp’s south side to give it a glancing blow: Good morning, you abolitionist pig-fuckers. Then, while the Yankees are distracted, Wheeler will send the rest of his brigade down the pike to sweep up the wagon train before it crosses the bridge. Without preamble, he starts dictating the orders, forcing his adjutant to fumble quickly for a dispatch book.

  Six miles to the south, patchy fog drifts over the fields along Overall Creek. It is not much fog but enough to make Alex McCook hesitate. Rosecrans has ordered him to send Sheridan’s infantry forward as soon as they can see their feet, but doesn’t common sense dictate that he wait? Surely an hour or two will make little difference. “We’ll wait until the fog thins and then send out Zahm,” he says.

  “General, the Rebs can’t see any better than we can—” Sheridan begins.

  McCook shakes his head vehemently. “No, we wait!”

  Sheridan watches McCook striding toward his tent. The man is afraid, Sheridan thinks. And though almost nothing frightens Little Phil Sheridan— and how he hates the sobriquet—this realization does.

  Outside the cabin that is headquarters to the Army of the Cumberland, Julius Garesché swallows from the scalding cup, then closes his eyes, waiting for the coffee to jolt him into wakefulness.

  Beside him, Rosecrans puffs on a cigar. “Not much fog this morning. McCook should be well underway by—”

  The screech of plunging cannonballs drowns him out. The first ball plows into the soaked earth a dozen yards short of the cabin, the second decapitates an orderly, the third howls overhead to thud into the detritus-littered mud beside the turnpike. Garesché’s brain locks images: the young orderly rising from beside the fire, cup of coffee in hand, his mouth oh’d in wonder at the sound of iron splitting air, and then the sudden explosion of blood as the cannonball tears through his thorax, severing head from torso. The boy’s head whirls into the air above the cabin—rather like a ball kicked in a front yard by a departing schoolboy who has found it abandoned from Sunday’s play. It strikes the uneven cedar shingles, rebounds to a surprising height, and sails beyond the sagging roof line. This happens far too fast for the eye to focus on details. Yet for Garesché, the head seems to pause a moment just above the roof peak, the boy’s face exhibiting yet a terrified consciousness, as if he would speak some reproach or utter at least some surprise in farewell. And for a moment it is Garesché who sees through the boy’s eyes the small crowd in the yard below—soldiers who in another age might have stood beneath the crosses on Golgotha—and in that moment of floating above them, Garesché knows that he is supposed to tell them something. But he cannot summon cogent thought, can only stare in horrified amazement at what has happened to grant him flight.

  “They’ve got the range and the right idea, Garesché,” Rosecrans says, voice even though tightened at the edges. “Get the maps. We’ll need them today. Quickly, we must be away from here.”

  The staff is already scrambling, and Garesché is ashamed of his momentary immobility. Has anyone noticed besides Rosecrans? He doubts it. But it cannot happen again. He is a soldier and can spare no time for shock or visions.

  More cannonballs scream down on them from the Rebel battery on the low hill beyond the northern loop of the river. Harker’s hill, Garesché thinks. What is its actual name? He cannot for the moment recall as he jams unfinished reports into a satchel. Magee, the headquarters orderly, yells at him “Colonel, I’ll get that! Here’s your horse. Come on, for Chrissake!”

  Garesché takes the reins, smiles at the boy. “Don’t use any language that your mother would find offensive, son.”

  “You don’t know Ma, Colonel. Now go!”

  From Wayne’s Hill, Brigadier General Roger Hanson can make out the distant blue figures streaming away from the cabin to climb the rise behind. Captain Cobb, Kentucky Brigade’s artillery chief, calls, “That’s about it, General. Can’t reach ’em now.” Hanson lowers his field glasses and waves a hand. Cobb signals the guns to cease fire.

  Cobb ambles over, a loose-jointed young man who reminds Hanson of a good-natured coon hound. Hell of an artilleryman, though. “So, who do you suppose we woke up?” Cobb asks.

  Hanson shrugs. “Might have been old Rosy himself for all I know.”

  “There were a pile of ’em. Didn’t think that old shack could hold so many. Wonder if we killed any of ’em.”

  Hanson grunts, uninterested.

  Cobb, who is a talker, goes on. “Should be getting some counter-battery by now. Not like the Yanks to waste a chance.”

  A moment later, guns flash along a brigade front on the far side of the river. “Ask and ye shall receive,” Hanson growls as the first shells freighttrain overhead.

  Military plans, even those as simple as Wheeler’s this winter morning, are subject to variables limitless in number and absurdity. Wheeler’s plan goes awry because of the eternal perversity of army mules. The lead hitch of the lead wagon of the Yankee train plodding toward Jefferson is made up of a pair of young and alert mules who have not eaten since the middle of the previous afternoon. On the morning breeze, itself a perversity for eddying briefly out of the east, they smell campfire smoke: a smell they accurately identify with rest and fodder. Lifting their heads and hooves, they break into a trot, bringing the rest of the team out of its somnambulant plodding and nearly knocking the dozing driver off his seat. He regains his perch and hauls back on the reins, but the team is now united in its gait and ignores him. The driver, who is Irish and hence rather more in sympathy with his thick-headed charges than many of his colleagues, eases off. Well, why not? He could use a cup of coffee and an early breakfast.

  He looks behind him, sees the next three or four teams beginning to toss and strain. He whistles to his team, snaps the whip for good measure. “Go, ye flop-eared bastards,” he yells. The drivers behind are cursing, squawking, and then giving in as they begin to understand that this is no runaway, but a more sedate demonstration of muleful independence. A jogaway, that’s what we’ve got, the Irish driver concludes. “You, lads!” he shouts to the cavalry escort ahead. “Best bestir yourselves a mite. We’re acomin’ through, and the rest ain’t far behind.”

  As a result of the jogaway, nearly the entire train is across the bridge and moving briskly toward breakfast when the Rebel horse artillery opens fire on the camp’s south side, setting Wheeler’s plan in motion. The encamped Union infantry is a brigade of four regiments of Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Wisconsin veterans under the command of Colonel John Starkweather. A Milwaukee lawyer in civilian life, Starkweather is accustomed to mendacity, and Wheeler’s misdirection fools him not a bit. “Look to the train,” he shouts.

  While Starkweather marshals an Illinois regiment to protect the train, the soldiers of the 1st Wisconsin, many of them swearing in German at being disturbed at an hour when every man should be given an opportunity to drink his coffee, chew his breakfast, and move his bowels, form line of battle to repel the attack on the south side of the camp.

  By the time the rest of Wheeler’s brigade comes b
owling down the pike a few minutes later, fully half of the train is under cover of the camp. The sight of sixteen hundred gray cavalry whooping and firing at the gallop is more than most of the remaining teamsters can view with equanimity. They either flog their teams into a frenzy or leap from their seats and bolt for the trees. Wagons collide, creating an instant chaos of rearing teams and splintering order, which—oddly—also brings an end to most of the shooting.

  More accustomed to calming animals than trying to kill their fellow men, farmboys on both sides wade into the confusion to untangle teams and wagons. Left to themselves, the privates might have forgotten the war altogether to make common cause in restoring order. But this is, of course, impossible with so many officers shrieking instructions. The Yankees manage to drag a few wagons into camp while the Rebels give up trying to save anything and fire the remaining twenty or so with coal oil. With more jeers than shots, the two forces disengage.

  Across the river and pushing west, Wheeler’s officers count casualties. As usual in affairs like this, there aren’t many: a handful of wounded, a few missing who will probably show up soon, no dead.

  Union losses are heavier. Nearly a hundred troopers in the train escort have been cut off and captured by Wheeler’s troopers, while the attack on the south side of the camp has inflicted a score of Federal wounded. Still, there are no deaths except for a pair of German brothers killed by one of the artillery shells. In the old country they had both received something of a musical education and sang beautiful duets at the campfire. They will be mourned longer than is customary among veterans.