Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  If only people understood how little he’d wanted to be a general. Oh, he’d wanted the rank as a reward for his ability, for his striving after merit. But he has never enjoyed generalship. No, he would rather command a flying battery, hurl himself into battle, questing for the particular moment, the particular point, where his beautiful guns would make all the difference. Buena Vista. He could live that day a thousand times, ten thousand, and never grow tired of it.

  But that was another war, another time, when a lowly captain and a single battery could change all. Such things happen rarely, if ever, in this war of great armies bludgeoning each other until both must fall back to rest. In Mexico, there were clear victories, accomplished with style. Not in this war. His critics accuse him of lacking subtlety, of ordering massed attacks with little room for maneuver or the exploitation of a sudden opportunity. But what else can he do with this ill-trained multitude of country boys? Name one time in this war where subtlety has triumphed. Is Lee subtle? Hell, Bob Lee is a pounder, more reckless of his men’s lives than Bragg has ever been. Look at Malvern Hill. My God, Lee had thrown five divisions straight into the teeth of two hundred and fifty Federal guns. And, oh, we may scoff at much about Yankee soldiery, but they understand machines, understand artillery, work their guns with immense skill. Lee’s doomed assaults cost the Army of Northern Virginia five thousand men, yet Lee emerged a hero, a master tactician, while Bragg is called a bumbler after nearly defeating a Yankee army four times his number at Perryville at a cost of only three thousand.

  Beneath him, the black gelding shifts. Bragg pats the big animal’s neck absently. If he had his way, he’d mount his staff now, lead them down into the battle, dash about placing batteries, instructing colonels on tactics, shouting encouragement to the men. And would any of that do any good? Momentarily it might, but in the course of things such a frenzy would disturb the chain of command, confuse the picture until no one understood the whole, even the half of it.

  Elise believes she sees everything entire, badgers him constantly with advice. In grand strategy she is not a bad novice. Really quite good. But strategy is easy, a matter of pointing to a map and announcing an Anaconda Plan or the like. Even tactics, though more difficult, are easy compared to the daily management of an army. In this Bragg excels, is better even than Lee or Joe Johnston. Yet Elise still has her advice on all things connected with the army. He almost smiles. That silly note about not trusting the Tennesseans, about putting the artillery behind them to shoot those who would flee. The Tennesseans are good enough troops, no better and no worse than most, and much preferable to the Kentuckians, who truly are unreliable. But Elise will have her say.

  He loves her with an intensity almost beyond bearing. Shakespeare or Milton might have managed some sense of his love, but no lesser poet. Elise is, he believes, God’s reward for his suffering, his forbearance, his striving after excellence. For her he can go on being a general, though it is using him up, making of him an old man before his time.

  Brent approaches. “General, we have word that Adams’s brigade is across the river.”

  “What’s the time?”

  “Nearly half past one, General.”

  Bragg shakes his head. Three and a half hours for Breckinridge to obey an order. Well, one thing is for certain. No matter how this battle turns out, he shall go straight to the president with the charge that Major General John C. Breckinridge is a traitor.

  Bragg has been trying to get reinforcements across the river since midmorning. Shortly before 10:00 A.M., with the Yankees in flight everywhere to the left of Sheridan’s salient, Hardee appealed to him for a fresh division if possible, two brigades if you can supply no more.

  Whatever his generals may think, Bragg is not absolutely dedicated to the great wheel. He fully recognizes the chance handed him by Hardee’s triumph on the left. If Hardee can get across the Yankee rear to the Nashville Pike, they will have Rosecrans cut off from Nashville and nearly surrounded. He instructs Major Clare, his assistant inspector general: “Go to Breckinridge. Tell him to shift two brigades to this side of the river. They are to march as rapidly as possible to General Hardee’s support.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Clare is back. “General Breckinridge respectfully declines to transfer any troops to this side of the river. He says he’s about to be attacked by a heavy Yankee battle line.”

  Bragg thinks rapidly. How can Rosecrans have found enough men to launch a flanking attack while fighting for his life everywhere else? It seems improbable if not impossible. More likely it is some pathetic feint to hold Breckinridge in place. Still… . “Very well, I withdraw the order. Tell General Breckinridge to attack unless he is certain that the enemy is upon him in force.”

  Clare rides off. A few minutes later, Brent brings a muddy cavalry lieutenant from Brigadier General John Pegram, commander of the small cavalry brigade east of the river. The lieutenant salutes. “General Pegram sends his regards, sir. He would like to know if you have been informed of the Yankee battle line advancing east of the river on General Breckinridge’s position.”

  Bragg is not an intuitive general, but he senses something amiss here. “Yes, I’ve been told of it. But, tell me, Lieutenant, when did General Pegram observe this Yankee battle line?”

  “About eight, General. We let General Breckinridge know and then went on a scout up the Lebanon Road in case the Yanks had a column coming down on his flank.”

  “Then the sighting of the Yankee battle line is more than two hours old?”

  “Well, yes, sir. I mean our first sighting. I got only the one, but I think General Pegram must have left someone to watch the Yanks.”

  Bragg frowns. Pegram is a West Pointer and, though a bit of a dilettante, a soldier of good judgment. All right, there is a Yankee battle line east of the river, but it cannot be in great force with Rosecrans’s need for men to hold off Hardee. Nor can it be advancing vigorously if it has yet to make contact with Breckinridge’s line. The sooner it is broken up, the better. “Colonel,” he says to Brent, “send Major Johnson to repeat my order: Breckinridge is to advance, capturing or destroying all Yankee formations east of the river.”

  Time edges past. Cheatham, Cleburne, and finally Stewart hammer at Sheridan’s salient, finally break it. A message comes from Polk asking for reinforcements. Bragg shakes his head angrily. Do they think I have a pocket full of dragon’s teeth that I can sow every time they need soldiers?

  At 11:45 A.M., Major Clare returns with a message from Breckinridge: I am obeying your order with reluctance since advancing will take me away from the Lebanon Road and expose my right to a heavy force of the enemy advancing from Black’s bridge.

  Bragg is stunned. What heavy force? He has had no report of any force on the Lebanon Road, although he has worried about an attack from that direction for days. He sends the panting Clare back to Breckinridge with an order to halt his advance in place and protect his right. He dispatches a second courier to Pegram with instructions to determine the size and, if possible, the intentions of the force coming down the Lebanon Road. He sends a third officer pelting off to ask Polk if he can send two brigades to reinforce Breckinridge.

  For the better part of an hour, Bragg paces. Finally, the mud-splattered and rather dazed Major Clare returns. He hands Bragg a note from Breckinridge: It is not certain that the enemy is advancing on me.

  Bragg explodes. “Which enemy? From which direction? What does the man mean?” He glares at Clare.

  “I think he means that there is no enemy between his line and the river.”

  “And where is his line?”

  “About a half mile forward of his original position.”

  “And his right? Is it threatened?”

  “Not so far as I know, General. No one seemed concerned about it.”

  “But there was supposed to be a heavy force coming down the Lebanon Road! Breckinridge said so himself.”

  “I didn’t hear of any such, General. All I heard was some speculation t
hat if a force appeared from that direction, it would be behind their right flank.”

  Bragg is astounded. “It was a speculation?”

  “As far as I heard.”

  A rider arrives from Pegram. The colonel has found no force approaching by way of the Lebanon Road. Some Yankee sharpshooters have occupied the east bank of Stones River near McFadden’s Ford, but the remainder of the battle line observed earlier in the day seems to have withdrawn across the river.

  Bragg stares at Pegram’s scrawled report. He should be furious, towering in his wrath, but he is simply too astonished. Pegram is a West Pointer, a professional. Breckinridge held the second highest office in the land prior to the war. How in God’s name could they have made such a botch of things? He sighs, feeling very old, very inadequate. “Colonel Brent, tell General Breckinridge to bring four of his brigades across the river and report to General Polk. Tell him to leave Hanson’s Kentucky Brigade to hold Wayne’s Hill and to protect the flank.”

  He mounts his black gelding, rides to the top of the low rise to see what he can of the battle. Too late to send infantry to Hardee. He will revert to the original plan, put the great wheel in motion again. But first he must smash that miserable grove of trees at the apex of the Yankee line.

  Bragg refuses lunch, munches a cracker instead. Brent brings him reports of the fighting. He acknowledges them with a nod or a few words. Finally Brent brings news that Adams’s brigade is across the river. Good, Bragg thinks. Three more to come over and then we can smash the Yankee salient in those trees, perhaps draw off enough troops from the Yankee right flank for Hardee to break through to the pike. All may work out yet.

  Breckinridge is profoundly humiliated by the morning’s blunders. He can trace exactly how things went wrong. Pegram had come to his tent at first light to share coffee, bacon, and cornbread by the fire. He is an exceptionally handsome young man, intelligent and cultured despite a West Point education, which—from what Breckinridge has observed—does nothing to refine a young man save to give him a passing fluency in French.

  They have shared breakfast on many mornings, talking of literature, history, art, and—most fascinating of all—what manner of civilization the South can build once it is free of Yankee tyranny. They agree that something must be done about slavery, perhaps a gradual emancipation followed by a benign peonage binding the coloreds to the land as an eternally subservient race. Then let the arts, the manners, the culture of the South flourish in a pastorale without end.

  But this morning Pegram was edgy, talked not of the future but of the day. “Rosecrans is their great secret, their best general by far. They’ve brought him along slowly, given him a chance to succeed. Now they’re giving him his first great opportunity.”

  Breckinridge yawned. Though he is a politician—one of the most successful of his generation—he is slightly bored by talk of the plotting in the Federal capital. “By they, I assume you mean Lincoln and Stanton.”

  “And Halleck.”

  “And you contend they have been grooming Rosecrans?”

  “Absolutely. Grant is a nobody. He won’t last the winter. Burnside is as good as gone now. If Rosecrans wins today, they’ll order him east to take command of the Army of the Potomac.”

  “And his present army?”

  “They’ll give it to Thomas, the traitor.”

  Breckinridge nodded, blew on his coffee. “So what’s your point, John?”

  “I’m saying, General, that I don’t think anyone in this army appreciates how subtle, how devious Rosecrans is. I saw it at Rich Mountain, where he got a column over an impossible road into our rear. We barely got out with our lives and would have been destroyed completely if McClellan had attacked from the front at the right time.”

  “Yes, but that was fighting on a rather small scale.”

  “True, but Rosecrans won at Corinth and there wasn’t anything small about that battle. Van Dorn and Price had him outnumbered and he still gave them a thrashing. Now he’s taken Buell’s sorry lot and made them into a first-rate army. He’ll use it well. He’s got something up his sleeve, some stratagem, and I suspect he intends it for us on this end of the line.”

  Pegram had his full attention. “Do have any guess as to the nature of this stratagem?”

  “I think he’s going to loop something wide, something to get into our rear to distract us at the critical moment.”

  “Cavalry?”

  “No, I doubt if he has enough. More likely an infantry division, at least a brigade or two.”

  Breckinridge was skeptical, but then Pegram was the professional. “Well, keep on the lookout and keep me informed. For the time being, it seems that the commanding general has little planned for this flank of the army.”

  Breckinridge does not recall thinking overmuch on this conversation as Hardee opened the battle on the opposite flank. But when Pegram sent him the first reports of Yankee infantry crossing McFadden’s Ford, he somehow fell into assuming that Pegram’s predictions must be right in every detail, including the eventual arrival on the division’s right flank of a Yankee column from the north. He sent word of the crossing to Bragg and braced for the onslaught. For two hours nothing happened, but then this was not an undue amount of time if Rosecrans was bringing two or three divisions across the river. He received no further word from Pegram, but assumed only that the cavalry must be scouting the edges of the Yankee lodgment.

  At 10:00 A.M., Breckinridge was thunderstruck to receive the order from Bragg transferring two brigades to Hardee. My God, Breckinridge himself was about to be struck front and flank! He demurred, sending the dutiful Major Clare back with a polite message to Bragg. Clare returned with orders for Breckinridge to advance against the enemy battle line forming on the east side of the ford. Again, Breckinridge was astonished. A forward movement would leave his right flank open to the Yankee column coming down the Lebanon Road. (That no such column had actually been detected seemed immaterial, what with the accuracy of Pegram’s other prediction.) Again, he demurred, and again Clare galloped off for Bragg’s headquarters.

  Clare returned with a second order to advance, an order which was repeated soon after by Major Johnson. After expressing his concern for his flank in a note to Bragg, Breckinridge advanced a half mile in line of battle. There he halted and sent a pair of staff officers to reconnoiter. The bedraggled Clare returned yet again, this time with an order for Breckinridge to halt in place—an action on which Breckinridge and the commanding general could at last agree.

  An oddly long time passed before the two staff officers returned from their scout. They had found not a single Yankee on this side of the river, no great battle line, not so much as a cavalry patrol. Breckinridge had the sensation of trying to swallow a peach pit, identified it as dread. He sent his chief of staff for a look. The colonel returned shortly. “They must have gone back over, General.”

  “Did you see anything of Colonel Pegram and our cavalry?”

  The chief of staff looked exceedingly unhappy. “No, sir. Perhaps they’ve gone up the Lebanon Road on a scout.”

  “Has anyone heard shooting from that direction? Any indication that the Yankees are up that way in force?” His staff officers shuffled, avoided his eyes. After a pause poignant with collective embarrassment, Breckinridge took a dispatch book, wrote the dispiriting message to Bragg: It is not certain the enemy is advancing on me. He signed it, ashamed for having been misled by his own fears and the fears of a not overly bright young man who once had the stuffing knocked out of him by Rosecrans in western Virginia. He handed the message to Major Clare. “Major, if you would be so kind.”

  Now, with the time approaching 2:00 P.M., Breckinridge has sent Adams’s and Jackson’s brigades across the river, is about to follow with Palmer’s and Preston’s. He will lead his four brigades to the attack himself, win a triumph that will blot out the morning’s farce. That or die in the attempt, for he would rather lay down his life on this field than face Braxton Bragg without first reg
aining some measure of self-respect.

  Brigadier General Milo Hascall continues to engineer the defense of the Round Forest while more senior generals muster artillery and reorganize shattered brigades. He replaces jaded regiments, orders in ammunition and water, evacuates what wounded he can when more important work is done. Wagons cannot get through to Hazen’s line, and soldiers man-handle the heavy cases of cartridges and cannon rounds over the downed trees, shattered artillery carriages, and bodies of the dead. The wounded struggle out of the forest, leaving evidence of their passage in bloody splashes and drips almost as distinct in pattern and volume as the variety of their wounds.

  Hascall picks his way forward. Hazen is using the pause between attacks to build a rough breastwork along his line, his voice cracking as he shouts directions. Hascall dismounts, nods to Bierce, and hands Hazen a canteen. “Keep it, Bill. As soon as we get the ammunition in, I’ll be sending water.”

  “Milo, we have to hold this position.”

  “I know it, Bill. Thomas has fifty guns in place to support you.” He produces a handkerchief. “Wash your face. You look like a coal miner.”

  They talk for ten minutes, though there is surprisingly little to say. Yet it is not time wasted. They are more rivals than friends, but they are both West Pointers, can in that identity share for a few minutes a camaraderie more profound than blood.

  Fighting flares again on the army’s right flank: the Rebels driving in, making their last attempt to breach the Federal line along the Nashville Pike. Hascall looks in that direction. “Rosy is over there. I think Hardee’s the one trying to break through.”

  “And Cleburne,” Hazen says.

  “Yes. He’s apparently quite remarkable. I’d like to meet him.”

  “I’d like to see him dead.”

  Hascall nods. “I suppose that would be better. A pity we don’t have him with us… . Well, I’ll look to the water and the ammunition, then.”

  “Thank you, Milo.”

  Bishop Polk recalls the feeling from adolescence, the stickiness on the belly, in the fine pubic hair of youth, on the thighs and the sweaty sheets. Shocking, embarrassing, for night clothes and bedding must then be washed on a different day than usual. The nigger washerwoman grinned at him, made a pouting of her great lips, darted a tongue like a snake’s head between them. She laughed uproariously at his blush. Ashamed of his own desire, he went to the woods, masturbated, letting his seed fall on the oak leaves. That summer, her daughter went with him to the woods. When he left for West Point a year later, there was a new mulatto baby in the slave quarters. He saw it a time or two, never thought much about it, went on to become a cadet, a convert, a minister, a husband, and a bishop.