Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  Rosecrans, who can and has been swearing like a trooper all morning, says mildly: “Mind your language, General. The next bullet may send you to eternity.”

  Sheridan looks away. “I can’t help it,” he says gruffly. “Unless I swear like hell, the men won’t take me seriously.”

  Watching Sheridan blink back tears, Garesché suddenly understands this man who has always been a puzzle to him. My God, he thinks, Sheridan loves those men, swears so terribly because he can barely stand to see them suffer.

  Private Sam Watkins of the 1st Tennessee is a veteran of Shiloh, Corinth, Perryville, and a dozen smaller fights. But he has never seen anything like the carnage in the cedars. The Yankee dead lie on all sides, strewn across the rocks and lying in heaps on the forest floor. He cannot even begin to count them, counts instead the dead battery horses. At eighty, he quits, starts for the rear to have his arm tended.

  He passes the body of a dead Yankee colonel, shot several times in the chest. He is a large, handsome man with a curly black beard and the finest uniform Watkins has ever seen. The boots attract Watkins in particular— knee-high black boots, polished to a mirror finish. They would not, Watkins supposes, be very good for marching in, but he can certainly trade them for something better than his own sad brogans. He kneels, lifts one of the colonel’s feet and tries to work the boot free with his uninjured arm. He feels an odd tickling at the nape of his neck, turns quickly, and then jumps back with a cry. The colonel is staring at him, blue eyes hard. And dead. Watkins nudges the body. “Colonel?” No, the man is dead, unbreathing. Still, Watkins edges backward a dozen paces before turning away from the body of Colonel George Roberts.

  Private Joe Zein of the 1st Louisiana Regulars has fought all morning, first with one regiment and then with another. He needs no orders, simply goes where the fighting is hottest and kills every Yankee he can find. He cannot recall ever having a grander day: a day filled with everything a man could want. Or nearly.

  When he returns to his company, he has half a dozen Yankee haversacks thrown over a shoulder. He swings them off, tosses them in a mound in the middle of his friends. And aren’t they his friends? Why, certainly.

  He opens one of the haversacks, digs about in it, pulls out a handful of hardtack. He likes hardtack, has strong teeth to crush the iron-hard crackers. He notes that several of them are stained with Yankee blood. Other men have found the same. But they are desperately hungry, break off the soiled pieces and chew the rest. Zein grins, bites off a soaked, red corner, chews with utter satisfaction. Other men see, protest. Zein goes on chewing, showing for everyone his strong, white teeth turning the hardtack to a blood-tinged paste.

  Private Dickie Krall is urinating into a clump of brown ferns when he feels strong arms go around him from behind. A foot trips him and he sprawls in the ferns. Zein is laughing quietly, mouth next to Dickie’s ear. He grabs the waist of Dickie’s trousers, pulls them down, tears away the frayed, threadbare underdrawers. Dickie tries to pull free, to run on all fours, but Zein is on top of him, and suddenly there is a pain like nothing he can imagine. He tries to buck away from it, but Zein is expecting this, thrusts to meet him, drives his engorged member deep into Dickie’s rectum so that the boy screams, would collapse except that Zein grips his thighs, lunges into him hard over and over, whooping and laughing until he climaxes with a howl of utter pleasure. Now the day has all that a man could want.

  Zein comes back into the clearing where his messmates are making coffee. He squats by one of the fires, helps himself to a cup. Sergeant Simon Buck makes the connection that both Zein and Krall have been gone at the same time. He curses silently. “Did you hurt that boy, Joe?”

  Zein looks up with an expression of innocence, cannot hold it, laughs, shakes his head at the humor of the question. Buck gestures to Corporal Tom Binder and they go to look for Dickie Krall. They find him curled up, sobbing, pants drawn up but the blood soaking through the seat. “You stay with him,” Buck says to Binder and starts back for the clearing, then changes his mind. “No, we’ll bring him. He should be there.” Together, they lift Dickie between them, help him stumble through the brush.

  At the edge of the clearing, they pause. Everyone watches them. Zein turns from his squat beside the fire, smiles with his white teeth, eyes dancing merrily beneath black curls. Sergeant Simon Buck lets Dickie Krall’s arm fall from his shoulder, walks deliberately to Zein and bayonets him, high up, between the heart and the clavicle. He holds Zein down, pinning him to the ground. The other men rise, come one at a time with their bayoneted Enfields. Zein laughs at them. They cannot kill him; his ma said he would come home safe.

  After Binder has used his bayonet, Buck hands a musket to Dickie Krall. “You got to do it, Dickie. We’re all in this together. They don’t hang one unless they hang us all.”

  Sam Watkins falls in beside a wounded lieutenant with a dispatch rider’s pouch flapping against his side. The lieutenant is young, more boy than man, with a mustache so blond and sparse to be all but invisible against his pale skin. Watkins, tired from fighting and the seepage of blood from the wounds in his arm, does not at first scrutinize the lieutenant. But when he turns to say something neighborly, he sucks in his breath. The lieutenant’s left arm is entirely gone, the frayed sleeve seemingly sucked into the wound. Through shattered ribs, Watkins can see the boy’s exposed heart beating. “My God, Lieutenant!” Watkins manages. The boy does not turn his head, but walks another dozen paces before falling dead without a word or a groan.

  CHAPTER 5

  Wednesday, 10:30 A.M.–Noon

  December 31, 1862

  The Confederate Left

  North of the Wilkinson Turnpike

  With Sheridan forced back from the cedars north of the Wilkinson Pike, Major General Lovell Rousseau’s division fights a holding action. Meanwhile, Hardee regroups his forces for the push that will break through to the Nashville Pike, effectively surrounding Rosecrans’s army.

  LIEUTENANT GENERAL BILL HARDEE feels the great chance coming. For the last hour, while Pat Cleburne has been smashing in the right side of Sheridan’s stronghold, Hardee has been pulling McCown’s division together for a drive on the Nashville Pike. If he only had three fresh brigades—even one or two—he could be certain of success. But Bragg has refused to see the grand opportunity of enveloping the Yankee right, insists on blindly following the original plan of the giant wheel. Yet with Sheridan in retreat at last and Cleburne sidestepping to join his left to McCown’s right, Bill Hardee has a rush of optimism. Even without reinforcements, he may do it, may break through to the pike and confound Rosecrans and Bragg both. He sends an outline of his plan to Cleburne: The moment of glory is upon us, Patrick.

  With Sheridan pulling back on his left, Major General Lovell Rousseau is planning his withdrawal to the Nashville Pike. He does this with surprising coolness for a political general of little experience. Another Kentucky lawyer-politician promoted by the Lincoln administration in hopes of keeping the wavering state in the Union, Rousseau has taken to the job as if born to wear a general’s stars.

  He is a big man, well over six feet, with a rugged, pockmarked face. Comparisons to Lincoln are inevitable, for Rousseau, too, is rough-hewn, self-educated, humorous, and wily. Even George Thomas, who has little patience for political generals, likes Rousseau. They are nearly the same age and—off the political platform—Rousseau has an easy, mildly sardonic way about him. With the congenial Negley, the three generals make a comfortable trio of large, assured men: a solid center for the army.

  When Bill Hardee crushes the Union right at first light, Rousseau’s three brigades are camped in reserve beside the Nashville Pike near Rosecrans’s headquarters, some two miles from Carlin’s brigade at the center of McCook’s line. Listening to the sound of heavy fighting to the south, Thomas orders Rousseau to prepare to reinforce the right. Shortly after 8:00 A.M., a courier from Rosecrans brings a message confirming Thomas’s expectation.

  Thomas reads the order, h
ands it to Rousseau, gives him a moment to absorb it. “Is it clear to you, General?”

  “Yes, sir. I am to support Sheridan’s right, refusing my right flank as necessary.”

  “It will be. My guess is that you won’t find much of Johnson’s division, or Davis’s either, out beyond Sheridan.”

  “It’s a debacle, General.”

  “No, not yet. But it may fall to you to see that it doesn’t become one. How do you intend to deploy your brigades?”

  “I thought Jack Beatty behind and to the right of Sheridan’s right flank. Shepherd’s regulars next to him, and Scribner in support.”

  “Is that the best marching order?”

  “Yes, otherwise I would put the regulars in reserve.”

  Thomas nods. “So would I. Carry on, then.”

  Rousseau tosses a salute and rides off. Thomas stretches his spine, settles back in the saddle. He thinks of Mexico, of Bragg, Hardee, Cheatham, and the others. I know these men, can predict them, he thinks. I wish I knew Cleburne, who’s a lethal pup from all I hear. Not that it makes that much difference; I know who commands him.

  Thomas has never liked Bill Hardee. Most Academy graduates drop at least some of their strut as junior officers. But Hardee was a popinjay throughout his time in the Old Army. Hardee with his imperial, his French tastes, his enthusiasm for lancers and élan. Thomas considers it all a lot of nonsense for making comely females swoon into the arms of bedecked, courtly, randy Bill Hardee.

  Rousseau’s three brigades plow through the torrent of refugees from McCook’s rout. Rousseau orders his line into the cedars to Sheridan’s right and then rides forward for his brief interview with Sheridan and his even briefer encounter with McCook. Returning, he posts Beatty’s brigade in a thick brake with open woods to the front. He places a broad hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “John, Sheridan’s fighting like the devil and we’ll need to do the same. I want you to hold this position until hell freezes over.”

  Beatty, a thirty-four-year-old banker who writes fiction in his spare time, cannot help wondering why so talented an orator as Rousseau cannot produce in this moment of desperate drama a more original figure of speech. “We’ll do our best, General.”

  “I know you will. I’m off to see Shepherd.”

  Beatty turns to the task of getting his regiments into line. The drizzle continues to fall, gray and icy, the men chattering as the sweat of the hard march freezes beneath their wool tunics. Now just what, Beatty wonders, will constitute frozen hell? I think I might actually prefer it to this damned rain.

  If there is a man in the Army of the Cumberland molded on the archetype of a regular-army colonel, it is Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. Shepherd. A classmate of Thomas, McCown, and Bushrod Johnson, Shepherd was dour and inflexible even as a youth. Twenty years of regular service have encrusted his reputation until he is a legend even among his contemporaries. Offered a general’s commission in the volunteer army, he refuses, growling that his only ambition is to become a full colonel of regulars. His friends are relieved.

  Thanks to the newspapers, many civilians hold a romantic view of the regulars, imagining that every private could assume the stripes of a first sergeant in a volunteer regiment and every junior officer the epaulets of a colonel. But the common opinion among the volunteers is that the regulars are a coarse lot, mostly Irish, who have joined the army one step ahead of the law or starvation. The truth is only a little more complicated: Many of the regulars are actually recent recruits with nothing except unit tradition to link them to the Old Army. But like the true old soldiers, they are in the main tough, unlettered, unmarried, and disproportionately Irish. They are also believers: not in grand causes, but in their units. They stand together, do not shirk, do not flinch, do not straggle, and never run. Fuck the sneering dandies and mama’s boys of volunteer regiments; the regulars need only their self-respect. They don’t have to like their officers, don’t like Shepherd, who is a mean son of a bitch if there ever was one. But they will follow him, go where he says to go, not for him or cause or country, but because they are regulars and will hold to that pride unto death.

  When Rousseau finds Shepherd, the five battalions of regulars are advancing into the cedars to the right of Beatty’s line. Here the forest is more open, and the sixteen hundred regulars manage a compact line, their distinctive field blouses and crossbelts still looking dressy despite the rain and the hard marching of the last few days. Rousseau pulls alongside Shepherd and, though he is rarely intimidated by any man, feels a quiver in his stomach when Shepherd turns his lowering gaze on him. “General Rousseau.”

  “Good morning, Colonel. Your men look well.”

  Shepherd turns to look at the ranks. “Yes, well enough. Do you have additional orders, General?”

  “No, push forward until your skirmishers make contact and then hold your position. When it becomes untenable, fall back on the pike. I will send word when I’m ready to receive you.”

  Shepherd stares at him, as if waiting for something inside his massive head to grind the word “untenable” into manageable syllables. “Then I am not to hold position at all hazards.” It is a statement, not a question.

  “No, Colonel. Sheridan is taking a pounding and he’ll have to fall back. We’ll cover his retreat and then fall back alongside Negley’s division to the Nashville Pike. Under no circumstances can we allow ourselves to be enveloped.”

  Shepherd nods. “Yes, General. If that’s all, I need to position my guns.”

  “By all means.”

  Rousseau watches him go, feels the discomfort he always feels on meeting men of inflexibility. Shepherd is certainly to be trusted, but trusted only to be what he is and nothing more.

  George Thomas is little given to metaphor, yet it seems to him that he has been asked to play the role of Helios astride the harbor at Rhodes: colossal, cast of a defeated foe’s engines of war, but unable to move, unable to strike. And he would strike, drive a great bronze fist into the onrushing Rebels, but he cannot, must instead stand and let them break upon him.

  Thomas trots his big, smooth-gaited mare along the Nashville Pike, checking and adjusting the posting of his artillery. If the guns do serious execution among the Rebels, the infantry will see and hold. Of this he is sure, for above all else Thomas is an artilleryman of unequaled skill. To judge from the poor performance of the Rebel guns so far this morning, Bragg has lost some of what once made him a premier artilleryman, but Thomas has never been more certain in his trade.

  Lieutenant Jack Dulin of the 6th–7th Arkansas has hemorrhoids so swollen that riding the jouncing seat of the ordnance wagon is a nearly intolerable agony. Worse, he is lost. Brigadier General St. John Liddell has personally dispatched him to bring up two wagon loads of cartridges, but now Dulin cannot find the brigade. He needs a horse, damn it! With a horse he could ride ahead, stand in the stirrups, spot the brigade, and save his ass both literally and figuratively.

  South of the Wilkinson Pike, Yankee prisoners and stragglers wander across the fields, waiting to be told which direction to go or where to muster. Many of them are still armed, their rifle-muskets reversed in sign of submission. But their mood could change, and Dulin rides with a cocked pistol in his lap. The teamster glances over. “I wish you’d let down the hammer on that Colt, Lootenant. We hit a bump and you might shoot yourself, me, or one of my mules.”

  “It’s not a Colt, it’s a Rigdon,” Dulin grits. “And I’d happily shoot you or one of your damned mules if I didn’t have to get this ammunition to General Liddell.”

  The teamster shrugs, decides not to press his point. At the edge of a cornfield, Dulin spots a lone rider coming toward them. “Stop,” he snaps. “I’m getting that horse.” The teamster complies, and Dulin hops down onto the soggy ground and runs, pistol drawn and piles stinging, toward the rider. “Get down from there, soldier. I’m taking that mount.”

  The man stops, abashed. He is dressed in butternut, the chevrons of a corporal stitched to one sleeve.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I can’t—”

  “Are you a courier?”

  “No, sir. But—”

  “Then get the hell off that horse or I’ll shoot you off it!”

  The corporal stares at Dulin’s leveled pistol, then slides off the far side.

  Dulin leads the nag roughly toward the wagon. He is a short, very round man, barely five feet tall but weighing close to two hundred pounds, and he finds it necessary to use whatever step he can find to get aboard a horse. A humiliation.

  “Uh, Lootenant,” the teamster says.

  “What?” Dulin clambers onto the wagon step and prepares to mount the horse.

  “That man.” The teamster points.

  Dulin looks, sees for the first time that the corporal has lost his left leg ten inches below the knee, the bloody stump already blackening under the pressure of a tourniquet. The soldier stands balanced on his one foot, staring in perplexity at the wound. “General Liddell needs this ammunition and I need this horse,” Dulin snaps, though he feels he might vomit. “There are discarded muskets aplenty around here. He can use one as a crutch. Now go!”

  The teamster snaps his whip and they roll on, the second wagon following, a rear wheel splashing mud on the shoe of the one-legged corporal. He looks up, mournful, as if expecting further insult.

  A mile away, Private Ezra Brown supposes he has been dealt a mortal wound when the impact of a bullet spins him out of the saddle and stretches him amid the thundering hooves of Company G, 3rd Indiana Cavalry, in headlong retreat. He waits for death, too stunned to review his life, sins, or now unattainable dreams. The 14th Alabama Battalion of Wharton’s brigade comes instead of death, thundering over Brown in wild pursuit of the Hoosiers. A mare named Netty steps firmly on Ezra’s midriff, squashing the wind out of him and leaving behind a livid hoof print whose trace he will carry the rest of his life.