Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  “As do you, General.”

  Hardee looks sharply at Cleburne. “Why, I believe you have just chaffed me, Patrick!”

  Cleburne is embarrassed. “I only meant a small joke, General. If I—”

  “No, no, Patrick. You’re right. I love all those things. The difference is that I am a Georgian, not a son of the Old Dominion. We Georgians tend to be a bit less ritualistic in our pleasures. I’ve heard tell of Virginia officers, their nether members engorged to near bursting, pausing to bow and ask ‘May I?’ before mounting a four-bit whore.”

  “I’m shocked, General. From what I’ve heard of Lee and Thomas, I can’t imagine the situation occurring.”

  Hardee snorts. “Pardon me for being cynical on the subject, Patrick. Every man has his needs, though I will grant you that I never witnessed either of them in the company of a strumpet. More’s the pity. A little wanton diversion would have done them both good.” He glances at Cleburne. Nor do I think it would do you any harm, lad.

  Cleburne doesn’t seem disposed to comment and, after a moment, Hardee goes on. “I’ve always thought them lonely men. Lee because I suspect he’s a profound fatalist, that he doubts that men have any control of events. It’s an odd posture for a general, particularly for one as aggressive as Lee, but it’s what I have always sensed in the man.”

  “And Thomas?”

  “With George I don’t think it’s anything philosophical. He is simply a very reticent man. He never permitted himself any closeness to his staff, was never at ease with his messmates. Even when we were young and at the academy together, I never saw him truly enjoy the company of others.”

  “Yet he’s married, I believe.”

  Hardee smiles. “Oh, yes. His courtship was a great surprise to us all. He was teaching artillery tactics at the Academy, thirty-five or thirty-six and still a bachelor, when a visiting widow and her spinster daughter ambushed him. He surrendered without a great fuss and the esteemed Miss Frances Kellogg became Mrs. George H. Thomas. I believe every mess in the army toasted the union for no other reason than its improbability. And I think George has thoroughly enjoyed being married. Frances is of … well, let us say statuesque proportions, within an inch or two of being as tall as he is. But she’s not at all bad to look at and she’s got merry eyes. She’s the only person I’ve ever seen make George laugh.”

  “So there’s hope for me, too?”

  Hardee has forgotten Cleburne’s sensitivity on the issue of marriage, looks at him with sympathy. “Of course, Patrick. What we did here today will make you a hero. The young women will pursue you by the bevy. You may have your pick.”

  “I should be better satisfied with a more restrained onslaught.”

  “I doubt that you’ll have a choice.”

  Cleburne lets this pass, closes off as he always does when the discussion becomes personal. Hardee does not press him, but goes on recollecting. “When we served together in Texas, I think George kept himself busier than any officer in the regiment. He studied the geology and the flora, learned to speak Comanche, and read everything in the post library, even the Walter Scott and the silly romances, though he’s the least romantic soul I know. He likes animals and always had two or three scrawny dogs hanging around his quarters. He’d feed them up, try to make them presentable and obedient. But they were usually beyond reform and would go sneaking about the camp, grabbing and gobbling anything they could find. Buck Van Dorn used to shout, ‘Cry Havoc! and let slip the dogs of George!’

  “I think those dogs produced the only friction I ever had with George. What I’d seen in Mexico made me despise all dogs, convinced me that they were the kin of hyenas and jackals rather than anything noble. After a battle or a skirmish, we’d bury the Mexican dead and the Mexican dogs would dig them up. Them and the hogs, working side by side, as if they had some infernal compact. And all the time the ravens, the cats, and anything else with a taste for human flesh would look on, waiting to join the feast. Christ, it was terrible. I remember marching through a deserted village where the dogs and the pigs had dug up a trench of Mexican dead. Everywhere you looked there were arms, legs, heads, and torsos of human beings, while everything that walked, flew, crawled, or slithered was feeding on them. Did you know that even rabbits will eat human flesh? Well, the Mexican ones did in that season. And after that day, I would never own a dog. I even refused my daughters when they begged me for a spaniel. And I never ate pork again. Not until this war and now only because there is so often nothing else to eat… . Can you guess what we did to that village?”

  “I should imagine you burned it.”

  “Yes. But more than that. First, we put a cordon of men around it with clubs, sticks, shovels, axes, pitchforks, anything we could find. Then we slaughtered everything that fled the flames, right down to the beetles and the scorpions. I had the men throw the carcasses into the crypt of the village church to burn.”

  “You’d burned the church?”

  “It was defiled, Patrick! Everything in that place was desecrated beyond anything you can conceive of. Sometimes I dream that even the horses and the cows were eating the dead, their muzzles red with gore and their eyes all aflame with hatred for us. But that, at least, wasn’t true… . A night or two later, when the shock had begun wearing off, one of my volunteer officers opined that the dead had only been Mexicans, after all. I cursed the man, would have struck him had I not been restrained. I challenged him to meet me at dawn outside the camp where we could settle matters with pistols. But later that night my adjutant assigned him to carry a message to General Scott. We never saw him again. I understand that he was assigned to the general’s staff and killed by a shell at Churubusco.”

  Hardee lapses again into silence, gazing at the fire. When next he starts to say something, he sees that Cleburne has fallen asleep. Hardee watches him, feeling something akin to love. What a clear conscience you must have, lad, he thinks. You are the most thorough killer I have ever known, yet you sleep as if untroubled by any dreams at all.

  When Bierce shifts his position for the third time in five minutes, the captain lying beside him throws an elbow into his ribs. “Bierce, if you can’t lie still, get the hell out of here and let the rest of us sleep.”

  Hazen speaks from the other side of their circle. “Go take the names of the wounded, Lieutenant. I’m unhappy that we don’t have a better count.”

  Bierce leaves willingly. He has never felt more alive, as if any moment he might glow luminous, give off sparks if touched. He goes among the wounded waiting for the ambulances, recording the names of those from the brigade. Many of the men ask him for something that will identify their bodies should they die of their wounds. Bierce writes their names and regiments on corners torn from his dispatch book, leaves the men clutching these shards as if they held some runic power.

  Night, cold, and pain have reduced faith to the primitive: a clutching at talismans in the form of photographs, letters, medallions, crosses, wedding rings, and trinkets of every description. There are those men who find in battle and even in their wounds confirmation of elaborate systems of faith. There are even those—particularly among the politically sophisticated Forty-Eighters—who find in the day’s savagery a larger earthly purpose: another step in the bloody forging of the universal rights of man. But those who perceive either temporal or eternal purpose number very few compared to the multitude who put faith in atavistic charms against evil. For it is a night when anyone might imagine encountering demons, ghouls, or even Old Scratch himself.

  Two litter-bearers lower a gravely wounded man to the ground nearby, take seats on a log to light their pipes. Bierce steps to the litter. The soldier is young and blond, quite beautiful despite the face smeared with blood and powder smoke and the dark sputum trailing from his gasping mouth. “Did anyone ask this man his name and regiment?”

  The litter-bearers look up, surprised. “Well, it ain’t exactly our job, Lieutenant,” the older one says. “We just carry ’em off.”

&nb
sp; “You didn’t do anything else for this man?”

  “What’s to do? He’s shot through the lungs. He weren’t hardly conscious when we found him, and didn’t stay that much for long. He’s gonna die before morning no matter what anybody does for him.”

  “How do you know that? You’re not a surgeon.”

  The litter-bearer sighs. “Lieutenant, two things I can tell you: a deck of cards has just as much chance of stopping a bullet as a Bible, and nobody shot through the lungs survives till morning.”

  The other litter-bearer laughs. “From what we seen, those little books with the dirty pictures got the best chance of stoppin’ a bullet. Some good thick covers on them naughty books.”

  “And you couldn’t find the common decency to ask this man his name?” Bierce asks.

  The older man is suddenly very angry. “Common decency, my ass! There ain’t nothin’ decent about what went on here today. You don’t believe that, you come out with us next time. Come see those boys all shot to hell. And then you tell me about decency!”

  “Now see here—”

  “No, you see here, Lieutenant! Right goddamn here!” The litter-bearer tears the blanket from the wounded man, revealing a sucking chest wound. “You think we had to carry this boy back here? He’s gonna be dead by morning! Probably won’t even wake up again. But we carried him back so he could die among friends. That’s what we did! Now you can shut the hell up about decency or you can take off that pistol so I can kick your ass!”

  The other litter-bearer lays a hand on his arm. “Easy, Rodge.” He looks at Bierce. “Lieutenant, we seen some terrible things. You likely has, too. Maybe it’s best you just leave us alone.”

  In the Smith house behind the Rebel left flank, Surgeon Solon Marks has been operating since the first attack overwhelmed Bandbox Johnson’s line sixteen hours before. The stream of wounded never abates, the endless individuality of their injuries resolving into several fairly distinct categories.

  Severe wounds to the head are simply ignored by the surgeons, who cannot waste time on fatal injuries. Serious wounds to the abdomen or torso are considered nearly as fatal. If the ball or fragment can be removed easily, the surgeon does so before binding the wound and sending the victim out to the yard where he may or may not survive long enough to make the trip to the hospital in Nashville. If he does make it to the hospital, he may recover, although it is more likely that he will simply linger for a few days before dying of suppuration.

  The lightly wounded are dealt with almost as perfunctorily. Simple flesh wounds where the projectile has passed through the offended area without causing hemorrhage are relegated to the orderlies’ ministrations. Grazes are similarly treated, with the surgeon—if he looks at them at all—usually delivering a stern word to the victim about abandoning the fight when other men have continued with far worse. There are a surprising number of simple fractures, mostly caused by falling tree limbs. The doctors set these quickly and ruthlessly, anesthetic withheld in punishment for not being more agile.

  Amputation of arms and legs take up the majority of the surgeons’ time. Some involve completing the work done by grape, canister, shell, or cannonball. In these cases, the limb is simply sliced away, the protuberance trimmed back, and the resulting flap of skin sutured over the wound. Amputation of a limb damaged by a minié ball requires only slightly more skill. A one-ounce minié ball propelled by sixty grains of black powder is a fearsomely effective projectile, shattering bone and so mangling muscles, nerves, tendons, and arteries that most damaged extremities are beyond repair.

  Solon Marks takes his calling with great seriousness, tries to save as many arms, legs, hands, feet, and ears as he can. But the longer he operates, the easier it is for him to give into the probability that he cannot save an appendage devastated by one of Captain Minié’s ingenious slugs. He is acutely conscious that every chance taken, every additional minute spent on a patient, means that another will spend that much longer waiting and bleeding. Yet to know that, if given time, he might do so much more is a sorrow almost beyond the strength of a will sagging under so much fatigue, so much suffering. God forgive us our butchery, he prays. I, for one, cannot, will stand appalled at the memory of this night all the rest of my life.

  Outside in the darkness, some of the Federal wounded cannot bear both their injuries and the thought of remaining prisoners of the Rebels. So far in this war, most of the captured have been paroled within a day or two of battle. But tonight a rumor sweeps the grounds of the Smith house that all paroles have been discontinued. “They’re selling the niggers to the Mexicans for gold. We’re going to take their place.”

  “I didn’t think the Mexicans had slaves.”

  “Well, they do now. People are even sayin’ the Rebs and the Mexicans are gonna unite, make one country and invade the North. Old John Bull’s going to lend his fleet and send an army down from Canada. The Frenchies is gonna help too. All of ’em are comin’ in on the side of the Secesh. And meantime, there ain’t gonna be no more paroles for us.”

  In the cold and the dark, the rumor gains many adherents. An hour after midnight, a hundred ambulatory wounded form and march toward the Federal lines. The Rebel sentries watch uninterested, let them go. Behind a single torch, the Yankees hobble across the open fields east of Overall Creek. They cry out like lepers, like those carrying plague. Watching from horseback in the gloom, St. John Liddell recalls the story of the 14,000 Bulgar prisoners blinded by the Byzantine emperor and sent home across the mountains, a single one-eyed guide for every hundred sightless men. So do these one hundred follow a single eye through the night.

  From the forward slope of Wayne’s Hill, Corporal Johnny Green of the 9th Kentucky watches the winking fires along the Federal line. It is not his turn to stand picket, but he has volunteered rather than sleep through what may be his last night on earth. Alone of all the Confederate infantry formations, Kentucky Brigade has seen no action today. Tomorrow, General Braxton Bragg, who hates all Kentuckians, will no doubt correct this error by sending them into the hottest of the fighting, where they will need to stand to the slaughter for honor, if nothing more.

  On the crest behind Green, Cobb’s battery stands silent, only a single gun lobbing an occasional shell across the river. The Yankee fires are too small to make decent targets, and the purpose is more harassment than destruction anyway. Larger fires burn in the hospital areas beyond Overall Creek, but the Rebel artillerymen have marked these sites for what they are and leave them alone. Green watches a single torch creep across the upper left of his view, curious in its fitful progress. The gunners must find it strange, too, for Green hears low commands and the grating rasp of a shell being rammed. A moment later, the gun fires, the shell’s fuse pinwheeling sparks over the dark field. The shell explodes short of the mark, revealing nothing of the target.

  This first shot sets off a brief cannonade. Half a dozen Confederate guns elsewhere in the line fire in quick succession. The Rebel shells arc, plunge, explode in distant winks of yellow, the sound coming only faintly. The Rebel gunners cease firing, take cover, as the Yankee batteries return fire. Green squints, trying to make out the torch, cannot find it.

  Behind him, a deep voice murmurs, “Are you awake, picket?”

  “Yes, sir, General!” Green looks up at the mountainous bulk of Brigadier General Roger Hanson.

  “Any guesses what that torch was?”

  “None, General.”

  “I came down to let my eyes adjust to the dark but now the damned gunners have made me blind as a bat.”

  After a minute, Green chances a question. “Have you heard plans for tomorrow, General?”

  “Not a one. I’ll let you boys know as soon as I hear anything. Sing out if you see anything I should have a look at.” He lumbers up the hill, the limp from a pre-war dueling wound throwing his gait askew.

  Three miles behind the Rebel lines, lights shine in all the streets of Murfreesboro. Every church and public building, nearly every private
residence, holds at least some wounded. Bob, the Negro groom sent in search of the five Foster boys, pokes in at every one. Several times he is told to do this or that, but he refuses respectfully. “Mah massa’s Mr. James Foster, and ah needs be about what he done told me to do.”

  The hat-in-hand, shuffling-nigger act is, of course, a sheer hoodwink. Bob no more respects these white folk than he does old man Foster, his sons, or the memory of the departed Mrs. Foster. His own long-dead wife told him daily that he ought to be grateful that the Fosters were owners who worked beside their slaves, understood their toil, and expected no more of them than they expected of themselves. But Bob has never given a possum’s balls for the lot of other niggers. As far as he is concerned, it is the Fosters who have enslaved him and it is the Fosters he intends to see brought low, crawling like so many spine-shot curs. If the death of any or all of the Foster boys will hurry this personal Jubilee by so much as a minute, Bob will shed no tears.

  At a brick home on a corner, he sees a tall white woman handing out journey cakes to a crowd of hat-tipping Secesh soldiers. He catches the eye of the black maid at her elbow. The girl makes an almost imperceptible gesture with her chin toward the side alley. He waits there by a low window. A few minutes later, she slides it up, hands him two journey cakes and a thick slice of ham. “Here’s a bottle. Drink your fill and then give it back. They’s more like to miss the bottle than the liquor.”

  Bob takes the decanter, tilts it back, tastes good whiskey. He swallows three times quickly, hands it back. “Girl, ain’t you takin’ an awful chance?”

  “Nah. Secesh officers is in and out. Missus’ll just think one of them drunk it. I gotta get back.”

  “First tell me who won this battle.”

  “Thought it was the Secesh at first. Now I hear them Yankees held their own. Everyone’s mad at Gen’rl Bragg.”

  “Let me have ’nother swallow from that jug if you sure it’s all right.”

  She hands it back, and Bob takes a long, delicious swallow, running his tongue around the lip of the decanter, a kiss for the Rebel officer who pours from it next.