Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  Hardee starts. “How definite are the reports?”

  “Not certain, but I have them from two sources.”

  George dead, Hardee thinks in wonder. He’d never particularly liked the man, found him rigid, uncommunicative, and suspected that he was secretly censorious of those of a more social disposition, particularly regarding the ladies. Yet he supposes that Thomas was ultimately his friend, must have been, for he feels his eyes stinging. He clears his throat, rises, straightening his tunic in the unconscious habit of decades. “I will await your orders. Good evening, General.”

  Hunger comes with the dark and the cold. For all his failings, Bragg is a good quartermaster, and most of the Confederate regiments receive rations. Several colonels in the Confederate lines order whiskey barrels opened for their men. Leaning in to fill canteens, men become drunk on the fumes alone, stagger back to their comrades, giggling with the absurdity of inhaled inebriation.

  On the Union side, the situation is considerably grimmer. (Joe Wheeler has seen to that.) In the Federal rear, some of McCook’s re-formed regiments plunder the remaining supply wagons. On the front lines, few of the soldiers have anything to eat. They paw through the haversacks of the dead, check their own pockets a hundred times for overlooked crumbs of hardtack or shreds of sowbelly. Enough dead horses and mules lie about to give every man in the army a decent steak; but the American taboo against the eating of equine flesh persists, and only a few take advantage of this abundance. One Ohio battery almost comes to blows with a company of Indiana infantry desecrating the battery’s fallen horses for a meal.

  Perhaps no other beast in the army is more coveted than George Thomas’s waddling, arrogant, ill-tempered goose. But Thomas is very much among the living, and no one is foolish enough to risk his wrath in the assassination of the fowl.

  Private Eben Hannaford stumbles across corn and cottonfields, clutching his right arm to his stomach. He ignores the pleas of wounded men for aid, though the cries twist his heart. There are arguments aplenty for lying down among them: the torment of his wound, the fear of sharpshooters, the instant death embodied in the occasional artillery shell screaming across the field. Most of all there is the loneliness of being upright and walking—no matter how clumsily—among the dead and maimed. It seems somehow traitorous, an abandonment of comrades, a running away.

  At roughly the same time as Hannaford spots a low log building with red rags hanging from its eaves to denote a field hospital, Private James Ellis of the 4th Arkansas, McNair’s Brigade, manages to reach a hospital in a cotton warehouse on the outskirts of Murfreesboro. A minié ball has gone through Ellis’s left arm just above the elbow, shattering the humerus. A bad wound but survivable, particularly since he has lost less blood than he might have if not for the prompt application of a tourniquet.

  He pauses inside the door, trying to perceive some order in the seeming chaos. A boy lying on a table nearby catches at his sleeve. “Oh, sir, if you have a sharp knife, please cut this ball out of my hand. It’s nearly killing me, and the surgeon says there ain’t nothing there. Please, sir, if you love your mother, please.” The boy starts crying.

  Ellis, only twenty-two and unaccustomed to being called “sir,” is touched by the plea. He feels the boy’s hand, can at first detect nothing. “Press down, right there,” the boy begs.

  Ellis presses, feels the ball—a small one, perhaps a piece of buckshot or a bullet from a small-caliber revolver. “I feel it. But I don’t have a knife and I only got one good arm, coz.” The boy starts sobbing, and Ellis looks about desperately. Nearby, a civilian is looking after several wounded, gently giving them sips of water and wiping their faces. “Sir, could you do something for this man?”

  The civilian comes over, a bald cadaverous man but kindly, though he looks like Death itself. He feels the hand as instructed. “I’m no doctor, but I can find one.”

  Ellis stays with the boy until the civilian returns with a doctor, also a civilian and, from the evidence of his thick spectacles, all but blind. But he is expert, cuts the ball out of the boy’s hand with a quick stroke and a pinch. The boy gasps, lies still on the table, tears running down his cheeks. Ellis is about to show the doctor his arm when there is a sudden commotion in a corner, a desperately wounded soldier thrashing about, tearing at his bandages. The kindly civilian and the doctor hurry away.

  An orderly intercepts Ellis’s wandering. “Sit over here by this colonel, coz. He ain’t gonna live till morning and could use some company.”

  “But I need a surgeon to look at my arm.”

  “You ain’t bleeding bad. I’ll come get you when one of the surgeons has time to look at it.”

  Ellis looks uncertainly at the mortally wounded colonel. “Who is he?”

  “Colonel Bratton of the 24th Tennessee. A cannonball took off his right leg, went clean through his horse, and smashed up his left leg so bad that the surgeons took it off to make him more comfortable. Come on, now. He’s a good man and sitting with him will take your mind off that arm… . Colonel, here’s a man to sit with you. He’s got a pretty nasty wound in one arm but the other’s all right. He can get you anything you need.” The orderly bustles off.

  Ellis sits beside the colonel. His own pain is terrible, but he can hardly imagine the agony of losing both legs. Yet Bratton lies unmoving and uncomplaining, staring at the slow drip from a crack in the roof high above. “Is there anything I can do for you, Colonel?” Ellis asks.

  The colonel turns his head slowly, inspects Ellis. “No, but thank you, son. The orderly took a note to my wife and there’s nothing more to do but wait.” He returns his gaze to the ceiling.

  Ellis feels that he should offer comfort. “You have been a brave man, Colonel. I’m sure your men will miss you.”

  “Yes, I suppose they will. Those who have survived me.”

  “And our cause is just, Colonel. I truly believe that.”

  Bratton smiles slightly. “As just as any, I suppose. God knows, many better men than I have died for it.” He turns again to Ellis. “You should have that arm looked to.”

  “The orderly told me to wait with you. He said he’d come get me when a surgeon had time to look at it.”

  “What’s your regiment?”

  “Fourth Arkansas, McNair’s brigade. We were off on the left.”

  “Yes. You did well, I’m told.”

  “We drove ’em, Colonel. Drove ’em across one pike and all the way to the next. Couldn’t take it any farther, though. We were powerful tired and beat up by that time.”

  “Yes, even brave men get tired.” The colonel is again staring at the ceiling and the drip that appears, drop by slow drop, out of the shadows among the beams. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” he murmurs.

  “Colonel?”

  “It’s a French phrase I have been trying to recall. ‘We must cultivate our garden.’ Lying here, it seems very sound advice.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve been meditating on bravery, and it occurs to me that it is not so much the meek who inherit the earth as the sensible, the ones who repudiate bravery as civilization’s posturing and remain at home. Yesterday I would have called such men cowardly, now I see them as sensible. If we were all like them and had stayed home cultivating our own gardens, none of this slaughter would have happened.”

  “But, Colonel, the Yankees—”

  “I am assuming a like good sense among the Yankees. Let everyone stay home and tend their own fields.” Suddenly the colonel’s face contorts and he chokes back a sob. After a moment, he regains his composure. “I’m sorry. I forget myself.”

  “It’s all right, Colonel.”

  “I was thinking of my rose garden. I will miss my flowers.”

  For several minutes, they do not speak. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can get for you, Colonel?” Ellis asks.

  The colonel sighs. “Nothing. I asked them to put me outside so that someone with a chance to live could have my place. But they said th
ere was room enough for me yet. Still, I would like to see the stars a final time.”

  “It’s still raining, Colonel. There are no stars.”

  “I know, but I had hope.”

  The orderly is suddenly beside Ellis. “Your turn, coz. Come along quick. The surgeons are busy and kinda touchy.”

  Ellis follows the orderly to the far end of the warehouse where several surgeons are operating on rough tables made from sawhorses and doors. One of them finishes amputating a leg, tosses his saw and knife into a bloody basin. “Let me see what you’ve got,” he snaps at the orderly.

  The orderly pushes Ellis forward. The doctor tears away the dressing, peers at the wound. “He won’t die tonight. Don’t fool with him now and we’ll take that arm off in the morning.”

  The orderly leads Ellis to the end of a rank of men slumped against the wall, quickly rebandages the arm. “It don’t look that bad to me,” Ellis pleads, although in truth the wound is gruesome. “And I can’t farm with one arm.”

  “Gonna have to figure out a way, coz. They don’t change their minds. Try to rest.” He hurries off.

  Ellis waits in the line of wounded men, listening to the groans, the low swearing around him, the shrieks from the end of the room where the surgeons are probing for bullets and sawing off limbs. He could go sit by the colonel again, but though he plans to protest the loss of his arm to the last, he is afraid of losing his place in line.

  Private Eben Hannaford is waiting by a smoky fire for his turn in the low log building with the red rags hanging from the eaves. A familiar voice says, “Eben?”

  He turns to find John Marsh, a former member of his company, assigned now to the Pioneer Brigade. “John! Are you wounded?”

  “No. A couple of us are fixing ambulance axles.” Marsh squats by him, peers at the wound through Hannaford’s neck and shoulder, whistles. He’s immediately all business. “Here, let me get you a place closer to the fire. You men, give this fellow a little room.” Men clear a space closer to the fire. Marsh strips off his overcoat, drapes it around Hannaford’s shoulders.

  “John, you shouldn’t.”

  “Ah, no matter. Workin’ keeps me warm. Let me go find you a place in an ambulance. You don’t want the quacks here carvin’ on you.”

  Hannaford dozes despite his pain. Then Marsh is again at his side. “Come on. I got you a place.” He helps Hannaford to his feet, gets an arm around him. The ambulance is one of the antiquated two-wheeled models with a leaky canvas top and no springs. Half a dozen men are jammed inside, the floor slick with blood. Marsh helps Hannaford in.

  “Jesus Christ,” one of the men mutters. “There’s no fucking room.” Nevertheless, he makes enough space for Hannaford to sit.

  Marsh pushes his overcoat into Hannaford’s lap. “Here, stay warm.”

  “No, John. You need it.”

  “Not as much as you’re likely to. I’ll come see you. You can give it back to me then.”

  Rosecrans has again taken headquarters in the exposed cabin close by the Nashville Pike. George Thomas tosses his cigar into some weeds before going inside. Three orderlies scramble for the butt. Tobacco, like food and optimism, has grown scarce in the army.

  Rosecrans sits in his shirtsleeves on a low stool before the fire, feet bare, his uniform coat drying over the back of a chair. He seems unaware of Thomas until the other has dropped into a chair and removed his hat. “Garesché was killed this afternoon,” Rosecrans says, his attention fixed on the socks he is holding to the fire.

  “Yes, I heard,” Thomas says. “A good man.”

  “Brave men must die in battle, but that doesn’t make their loss the easier on their friends.”

  Thomas does not respond, for there is no point in agreeing with the obvious, though he might point out in the interests of logic that not only the brave but the cowardly, the inconstant, and the merely ordinary also die in battle, if in somewhat lower ratios than the brave.

  Rosecrans sighs. “When the others get here, we’ll decide what to do about tomorrow.”

  Thomas does not respond to this either, for that, too, is obvious. He lets his chin drop to his chest, dozes while Rosecrans dries his socks.

  Hazen and Bierce take a small squad of men in search of Garesché’s body. Litter-bearers are bringing the wounded to a clearing in rear of the Round Forest and loading them into ambulances for the trip back along the pike to the hospitals. Bierce and the squad sergeant question several of the bearers until one leads them a little way off to the body of a headless colonel. Hazen kneels by the corpse, shines his lantern on it. Only a piece of the lower jaw and the chin whiskers of a thick brown beard remain of the head. Yet it is definitely Garesché, the uniform somehow a little crisper, a little more stylish than the ordinary, even soaked as it is with blood and rain. Hazen reaches out, lifts the right hand. A tremor passes through the arm and the hand clutches at Hazen’s.

  “God Jesus,” the sergeant breathes, crossing himself, as the other enlisted men step back. Bierce, the most rational of young men, holds his ground, for he—unlike most of these men—does not believe in ghosts or the other manifestations of the unquiet dead.

  “It is only the rigor,” Hazen says calmly. He works the West Point ring off Garesché’s hand. He lays the hand gently on the ground, reaches for the other and removes the wedding band. He puts these, clinking faintly, into the watch pocket of his vest. He stands, looks about. “Over there, a little out of the way. That will do for now.”

  The men start digging a grave. Beside Bierce, Hazen is shivering. My God, Bierce thinks, I didn’t know he was human enough to feel the cold. A Rebel prisoner with a leg wound limps toward a waiting ambulance. He stops by Hazen, holds out a blanket. “Take my blanket, Colonel. It’s soiled some but not too bad. I ain’t bled as much as I might’ve.”

  Hazen inclines his head. “Thank you, soldier. I’m grateful.”

  “My pleasure, Colonel. I’m grieved for your friend.”

  “Thank you.”

  Despite the Rebel’s assurance to the contrary, the blanket is stiff with dried blood and dirt. Hazen pulls it around his shoulders, continues to shiver. At length, he says, “It seems that you will have the last sally in your battle of quotations, Bierce. I assume you have the appropriate words for the occasion.”

  “I had not thought on it, Colonel.”

  “Well, be about it, man. I don’t know poetry, the Bible, or the Catholic burial service, so I must depend on you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bierce says, tries to think. “I know something from Pilgrim’s Progress.”

  “Is it appropriate?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, keep it handy then.”

  The digging is hard in the rocky earth, and Hazen calls a halt when the men have a hole waist deep. They clamber out. Hazen hands the bloodstained blanket to the sergeant. “Wrap him in this. It’s a gift from one of our foemen. I think Colonel Garesché might find that appropriate.”

  The sergeant and two of the other men wrap the body in the blanket, lower it as gently as possible into the grave. “Well, Lieutenant?” Hazen says.

  Bierce has to clear his throat of an unexpected aching. “‘My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me, that I have fought His battles who now will be my rewarder.’” Again he has to clear his throat. “‘So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.’”

  “Amen,” says the sergeant, and the other enlisted men chorus agreement.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Hazen says. “Go ahead, Sergeant. Fill it in.”

  Bill Hardee prowls his line, trailed by a small staff. Twice his adjutant cautions him about the danger from pickets, blue and gray alike, who may be quick to shoot at any horseman. Hardee is too angry to heed, and the adjutant drops back.

  Brigadier General St. John Liddell, peacetime planter and sometimes confidant of Bragg
, greets Hardee near the far left end of the Rebel line. “I hope you’ve come to order a night attack, General.”

  Hardee dismounts, pats Liddell on the shoulder in passing, and squats by the small fire to take a cup of coffee. “We have a little brandy, General,” Liddell’s adjutant offers.

  “Thank you, please,” Hardee answers, holding out his cup. Returning to Liddell, he sips at the cup, still making no reply.

  “So, General, are we going to attack or not?”

  “Why would you attack, John?”

  “Well, hell’s bells, Bill! The pike and the railroad are right over there. Reach out and take them! Then we’ll have Rosy Rosecrans and his whole damned army bagged!”

  “Night attacks are always costly. Too many men get shot by their fellows.”

  “But the Yankees will entrench tonight, and we’ll take twice as many casualties in the morning.”

  “True. So with what do you intend to make this assault?”

  For the first time Liddell is caught without a ready answer. “Well, with my brigade.”

  “And that alone?”

  “No. I assumed that the whole division would be used. And McCown’s too.”

  “With no reinforcements?”

  Liddell is becoming heated with Hardee’s seeming obtuseness. “With reinforcements if they are at hand. Otherwise, we’ll do the job ourselves.”

  “If that is your plan, then I suggest you take it to the commanding general.”

  Liddell gapes. “Good Christ! Then you’re not here to order a night attack?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it is unnecessary. The commanding general has declared victory.”

  “What?”

  “Victory. We have won, John. The Yankees are withdrawing. We will catch them on the roads and destroy them tomorrow.”

  “Like hell they’re withdrawing! I’ve been here since dusk, and there’s no traffic on the pike except some ambulances. More likely they will be reinforced.”

  “No, they’ll withdraw. If not now, soon.”

  “You don’t believe that.”