Chickamauga and Other Civil War Stories

“To give Johnston,” he said. “Confound it, Miss Rosie, can’t you understand either than I’m just a fallible mortal man trying to run a military command according to certain fixed and inviolable rules, no matter how foolish the business looks to superior outside folks?”

  “All right,” Granny said. “You had one. I was looking at it.”

  “So I did,” General Forrest said. “Hah,” he said. “The battle of Sartoris.”

  “No,” Granny said. “Not at my house.”

  “They did all the shooting down at the creek,” I said.

  “What creek?” he said.

  So I told him. It ran through the pasture. Its name was Hurricane Creek but not even the white people called it hurricane except Granny. General Forrest didn’t either when he sat down at the desk and wrote the report to General Johnston at Jackson:

  A unit of my command on detached duty engaged a body of the enemy and drove him from the field and dispersed him this day 28th ult. April 1863 at Harrykin Creek. With loss of one man.

  N. B. Forrest Genl

  I saw that. I watched him write it. Then he got up and folded the sheets into his pocket and was already going toward the table where his hat was.

  “Wait,” Granny said. “Lay out another sheet,” she said. “Come back here.”

  General Forrest stopped and turned. “Another one?”

  “Yes!” Granny said. “A furlough, pass—whatever you busy military establishments call them! So John Sartoris can come home long enough to—” and she said it herself, she looked straight at me and even backed up and said some of it over as though to make sure there wouldn’t be any mistake: “—can come back home and give away that damn bride!”

  4

  And that was all. The day came and Granny waked Ringo and me before sunup and we ate what breakfast we had from two plates on the back steps. And we dug up the trunk and brought it into the house and polished the silver and Ringo and I brought dogwood and red-bud branches from the pasture and Granny cut the flowers, all of them, cutting them herself with Cousin Melisandre and Philadelphia just carrying the baskets; so many of them until the house was so full that Ringo and I would believe we smelled them even across the pasture each time we came up. Though of course we couldn’t—it was just the food—the last ham from the smokehouse and the chickens and the flour which she had been saving along with the bottle of champagne for the day when the North surrendered—which Louvinia had been cooking for two days now, to remind us each time we approached the house of what was going on and that the flowers were there. As if we could have forgotten about the food. And they dressed Cousin Melisandre and, Ringo in his new blue pants and I in my gray ones which were not so new, we stood in the late afternoon on the gallery—Granny and Cousin Melisandre and Louvinia and Philadelphia and Ringo and I—and watched them enter the gate. General Forrest was not one. Ringo and I had thought maybe he might be, if only to bring Cousin Philip. Then we thought that maybe, since Father was coming anyway, General Forrest would let Father bring him, with Cousin Philip maybe handcuffed to Father and the soldier with the bayonet following, or maybe still just handcuffed to the soldier until he and Cousin Melisandre were married and Father unlocked him.

  But General Forrest wasn’t one, and Cousin Philip wasn’t handcuffed to anybody and there was no bayonet and not even a soldier because these were all officers too. And we stood in the parlor while the home-made candles burnt in the last of sunset in the bright candlesticks which Philadelphia and Ringo and I had polished with the rest of the silver because Granny and Louvinia were both busy cooking and even Cousin Melisandre polished a little of it although Louvinia could pick out the ones she polished without hardly looking and hand them to Philadelphia to polish again:—Cousin Melisandre in the dress which hadn’t needed to be altered for her at all because Mother wasn’t much older than Cousin Melisandre even when she died, and which would still button on Granny too just like it did the day she married in it, and the chaplain and Father and Cousin Philip and the four others in their gray and braid and sabres and Cousin Melisandre’s face was all right now and Cousin Philip’s was too because it just had the beautiful-girl look on it and none of us had ever seen him look any other way. Then we ate, and Ringo and I anyway had been waiting on that for three days and then we did it and then it was over too, fading just a little each day until the palate no longer remembered and only our mouths would run a little water as we would name the dishes aloud to one another, until even the water would run less and less and less and it would take something we just hoped to eat some day if they ever got done fighting, to make it run at all.

  And that was all. The last sound of wheel and hoof died away, Philadelphia came in from the parlor carrying the candlesticks and blowing out the candles as she came, and Louvinia set the kitchen clock on the table and gathered the last of soiled silver from supper into the dishpan and it might never have even been. “Well,” Granny said. She didn’t move, leaning her forearms on the table a little and we had never seen that before. She spoke to Ringo without turning her head: “Go call Joby and Lucius.” And even when we brought the trunk in and set it against the wall and opened back the lid, she didn’t move. She didn’t even look at Louvinia either. “Put the clock in too,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll bother to time ourselves tonight.”

  Fish-Hook Gettysburg

  STEPHEN VINCENT BENET

  Two months have passed since Jackson died in the woods

  And they brought his body back to the Richmond State House

  To lie there, heaped with flowers, while the bells tolled,

  Two months of feints and waiting. And now, at length,

  The South goes north again in a second raid,

  In the last cast for fortune. A two-edged chance

  And yet a chance that may burnish a failing star;

  For now, on the wide expanse of the Western board,

  Strong pieces that fought for the South have been swept away

  Or penned up in hollow Vicksburg. One cool Spring night

  Porter’s ironclads run the shore-batteries

  Through a velvet stabbed with hot flashes. Grant lands his men,

  Drives the relieving force of Johnston away

  And sits at last in front of the hollow town

  Like a huge brown bear on its haunches, terribly wai ting.

  His guns begin to peck at the pillared porches,

  The sleepy, sun-spattered streets. His siege has begun.

  Forty-eight days that siege and those guns go on

  Like a slow hand closing around a hungry throat,

  Ever more hungry. The hunger of the hollow towns,

  The hunger of sieges, the hunger of lost hope.

  As day goes by after day and the shells still whine

  Till the town is a great mole-burrow of pits and caves

  Where the thin women hide their children, where the tired men

  Burrow away from the death that falls from the air

  And the common sky turned hostile—and still no hope,

  Still no sight in the sky when the morning breaks

  But the brown bear there on his haunches, steadfastly waiting,

  Waiting like Time for the honey-tree to fall.

  The news creeps back to the watchers oversea.

  They ponder on it, aloof and irresolute.

  The balance they watch is dipping against the South.

  It will take great strokes to redress that balance again.

  There will be one more moment of shaken scales

  When the Laird rams almost alter the scheme of things,

  But it is distant. The watchers stare at the board

  Waiting a surer omen than Chancellorsville

  Or any battle won on a Southern ground.

  Lee sees that dip of the balance and so prepares

  His cast for the surer omen and his last stroke

  At the steel-bossed Northern shield. Once before he tried

  That spear-rush North and was
halted. It was a chance.

  This is a chance. He weighs the chance in his hand

  Like a stone, reflecting. Four years from Harper’s Ferry,

  Two years since the First Manassas—and this last year

  Stroke after stroke successful—but still no end.

  He is a man with a knotty club in his hand

  Beating off bulls from the breaks in the pasture fence

  And he has beaten them back at each fresh assault,

  McClellan—Burnside—Hooker at Chancellorsville—

  Pope at the Second Manassas—Banks in the Valley—

  But the pasture is trampled; his army needs new pas ture.

  An army moves like a locust, eating the grain,

  And this grain is well-nigh eaten. He cannot mend

  The breaks in his fence with famine or starving hands,

  And if he waits the wheel of another year

  The bulls will come back full-fed, shaking sharper horns

  While he faces them empty, armed with a hunger- cracked

  Unmagic stick. There is only this thing to do.

  To strike at the shield with the strength that he still can use

  Hoping to burst it asunder with one stiff blow

  And carry the war up North, to the untouched fields

  Where his tattered men can feed on the bull’s own grain,

  Get shoes and clothes, take Washington if they can,

  Holding the fighting-gauge in any event. He weighs

  The chance in his hand. I think that he weighed it well

  And felt a high-tide risen up in his heart

  And in his men a high tide.

  They were veterans,

  They had never been beaten wholly and blocked but once,

  He had driven four Union armies within a year

  And broken three blue commanders from their com mand.

  Even now they were fresh from triumph. He cast his stone

  Clanging at fortune, and set his fate on the odds.

  2

  Lincoln hears the rumor in Washington.

  They are moving North. The Pennsylvania cities

  Hear it and shake, they are loose, they are moving North.

  Call up your shotgun-militia, bury your silver,

  Shoulder a gun or run away from the State,

  They are loose, they are moving. Fighting Joe Hooker has heard it.

  He swings his army back across the Potomac,

  Rapidly planning, while Lee still visions him South.

  Stuart’s horse should have brought the news of that move

  But Stuart is off on a last and luckless raid

  Far to the East, and the grey host moves without eyes

  Through crucial days. They are in the Cumberland now,

  Taking minor towns, feeding fat for a little while,

  Pressing horses and shoes, paying out Confederate bills

  To slow Dutch storekeepers who groan at the money.

  They are loose, they are in the North, they are here and there.

  Halleck rubs his elbows and wonders where,

  Lincoln is sleepless, the telegraph-sounders click

  In the War Office day and night. There are lies and rumors,

  They are only a mile from Philadelphia now,

  They are burning York:—they are marching on Balti more—

  Meanwhile, Lee rides through the heart of the Cum berland.

  A great hot sunset colors the marching men,

  Colors the horse and the sword and the bearded face

  But cannot change that face from its strong repose.

  And—miles away—Joe Hooker, by telegraph

  Calls for the garrison left at Harper’s Ferry

  To join him. Elbow-rubbing Halleck refuses.

  Hooker resigns command—and fades from the East

  To travel West, fight keenly at Lookout Mountain,

  Follow Sherman’s march as far as Atlanta,

  Be ranked by Howard, and tartly resigns once more

  Before the end and the fame and the Grand Review,

  To die a slow death, in bed, with his fire gone out,

  A campfire quenched and forgotten. He deserved

  A better and brusquer end that marched with his nickname,

  This disappointed, hot-tempered, most human man

  Who had such faith in himself except for once,

  And the once, being Chancellorsville, wiped out the rest.

  He was often touchy and life was touchy with him,

  But the last revenge was a trifle out of proportion.

  Such things will happen—Jackson went in his strength,

  Stuart was riding his horse when the bullet took him,

  And Custer died to the trumpet—Dutch Longstreet lived

  To quarrel and fight dead battles. Lee passed in si lence.

  McClellan talked on forever in word and print.

  Grant lived to be President. Thomas died sick at heart.

  So Hooker goes from our picture—and a spent aide

  Reaches Meade’s hut at three o’clock in the morning

  To wake him with unexpected news of command.

  The thin Pennsylvanian puts on his spectacles

  To read the order. Tall, sad-faced, and austere,

  He has the sharp, long nose of a fighting-bird,

  A prudent mouth and a cool, considering mind.

  An iron-gray man with none of Hooker’s panache,

  But resolute and able, well skilled in war;

  They call him “the damned old goggle-eyed snapping- turtle”

  At times, and he does not call out the idol-shout

  When he rides his lines, but his prudence is a hard prudence,

  And can last out storms that break the men with pa nache,

  Though it summons no counter-storm when the storm is done.

  His sombre schoolmaster-eyes read the order well.

  It is three days before the battle. He thinks at first

  Of a grand review, gives it up, and begins to act.

  That morning a spy brings news to Lee in his tent

  That the Union army has moved and is on the march.

  Lee calls back Ewell and Early from their forays

  And summons his host together by the cross-roads

  Where Getty came with his ox-cart. So now we see

  These two crab-armies fumbling for each other,

  As if through a fog of rumor and false report,

  These last two days of sleepy, hay-harvest June.

  Hot June lying asleep on a shock of wheat

  Where the pollen-wind blows over the burnt-gold stubble

  And the thirsty men march past, stirring thick grey dust

  From the trodden pikes—till at last, the crab-claws touch

  At Getty’s town, and clutch, and the peaches fall

  Cut by the bullets, splashing under the trees.

  That meeting was not willed by a human mind,

  When we come to sift it. You say a fate rode a horse

  Ahead of those lumbering hosts, and in either hand

  He carried a skein of omen. And when, at last,

  He came to a certain umbrella-copse of trees

  That never had heard a cannon or seen dead men,

  He knotted the skeins together and flung them down

  With a sound like metal. Perhaps. It may have been so.

  All that we know is—Meade intended to fight

  Some fifteen miles away on the Pipe Creek Line

  And where Lee meant to fight him, if forced to fight,

  We do not know, but it was not there where they fought.

  Yet the riding fate,

  Blind and deaf and a doom on a lunging horse,

  Threw down his skeins and gathered the battle there.

  3

  Buford came to Gettysburg late that night

  Riding West with his brigades of blue horse,

  While Pettigrew and his North Carolinians

  Wer
e moving East toward the town with a wagon- train,

  Hoping to capture shoes. The two came in touch.

  Pettigrew halted and waited for men and orders.

  Buford threw out his pickets beyond the town.

  The next morning was July first. It was hot and calm.

  On the grey side, Heth’s division was ready to march

  And drive the blue pickets in. There was still no thought

  Of a planned and decisive battle on either side

  Though Buford had seen the strength of those two hill-ridges

  Soon enough to be famous, and marked one down

  As a place to rally if he should be driven back.

  He talks with his staff in front of a tavern now.

  An officer rides up from the near First Corps.

  “What are you doing here, sir?” The officer

  Explains. He, too, has come there to look for shoes.

  —Fabulous shoes of Gettysburg, dead men’s shoes,

  Did anyone ever wear you, when it was done,

  When the men were gone, when the farms were spoiled with the bones,

  What became of your nails and leather? The swords went home,

  The swords went into museums and neat glass cases,

  The swords look well there. They are clean from the war.

  You wouldn’t: put old shoes in a neat glass case,

  Still stuck with the mud of marching.

  And yet, a man

  With a taste for such straws and fables, blown by the wind,

  Might hide a pair in a labelled case sometime

  Just to see how the leather looked, set down by the swords.

  The officer is hardly through with his tale

  When Buford orders him back to his command.

  “Why, what is the matter, general?” As he speaks

  The far-off hollow slam of a single gun

  Breaks the warm stillness. The horses prick up their ears.

  “That’s the matter,” says Buford and gallops away.

  4

  The battle of the first day was a minor battle

  As such are counted. That is, it killed many men.

  Killed more than died at Bull Run, left thousands stricken