Andersonville (5 page)

His German was profound and scholarly, because he was native to Zurich and educated also in Berlin. His French was fairly secure, accent or no accent, because he had learned the language when very young; but he was twenty-seven years old before he began to speak more than a few words of English, and was handicapped further (as a loyal Confederate he disliked to admit this) because he had spent most of his thirteen or fourteen American years with the soft long drawl of R-slighting of Southerners in his ears.

So perhaps that was the reason his promotion had been passed over repeatedly? They thought that a man who talked like a Tam Tutchman wasn’t worthy of higher grade? What about that Prussian giant—what was his name?—who worked for General Stuart? Wirz had heard him laughing, bellowing delightedly, twisting up his whiskers; he stood close to him once; and Von Borcke was unmistakably of field grade, with his English nothing like so extensive as Henry’s.

You had to know influential people, you had to know them well. You had to know—

Ach, mein lieber Gott im Himmel!
The arm.

He was walking, measured hurtful step by measured hurtful step, on a stone-bordered path in the Luxembourg gardens, where he had strolled so often when he was a youth; and one day he had even helped two little boys with their sailing of boats, and a great breeze blew the fountain spray loose from its jeweled column and spattered them thoroughly, and they all shrieked with laughter and so did young Henry Wirz, and kindly he took off his shoes and stockings and rolled up his dove-colored pantaloons, and he waded in to retrieve the two white sailboats which the wind had tossed upon their beam-ends—

He was walking, grasping that slung arm which bred its torture, he was walking in midnight amid the damp Luxembourg gardens; and it did not seem real—walking in New Orleans would seem more real nowadays, if only he could walk there; and in the Luxembourg gardens all of the Parisians turned out in full force each Sunday, except for the thousands who went gabbling to the
Bois,
and all of them had their dogs along with them. French dogs were a race apart: not like American dogs, not like Southern American dogs, with their long ears and jaunty scratching and their loose addiction to raccoons or brawling, or their fondness for copulation in the open dusty roads. French dogs marched in harness, they took tight little steps, they seemed to sniff in French, they carried the pinned-up ears of one breed, the ruffles of another, the hard-curled tails of still another heritage; they were indubitably French—they gestured with their strange tails as they met and conversed—

The dogs. The Yankees were dogs. Oh, God. My arm—

Wirz walked there, and saw and felt no more than the barest impress of a fading past, hung like bleached wall paper against the facade of the October night. What was more real was blackness of a late May storm—
ja,
the night between May thirtieth and May thirty-first, it was—and Blanchard’s Brigade was moving up through steady pouring rain, and the arm did not hurt at all because there had been no metal entering to mutilate it. Come the next day, and the next . . . all plank highways built up out of the marsh, and trees thick and dripping, and the uncertain scattered fire of skirmishers cutting through the forest where another brigade of Huger’s Division was already making contact with the enemy—

Then came the smash of pain like a fist striking simultaneously his arm, his eyes, his nose, the soft thin hollow of his belly.

Go to the rear.
And look out for those batteries moving up, and go stumbling off the corduroy while the great wheels draped with mud come skating past, and hold your arm and watch the blood run down between your fingers and—
Go to the rear.

And never a moment, from that moment, divorced from the feel of the wickedness. Never a tingling second to escape it, never a long hour of waking to know that the throbbing was subdued. Only in sleep, only in blank blackness, with the bitter small brew of morphia to bring a void before you, and force you over the edge and into it.

Henry Wirz moved across wet and ancient stones. With his left hand he opened the iron gate; he went up to the steps and rang the bell for the
concierge.
A night-walker came past the fence, he heard the light conversation of her heels resounding under barren chestnut trees. She called with low fervor, Oh,
Monsieur,
one moment, please— He coughed and turned his thin face away. The
concierge
came muttering inside with a candle, chains were unfastened, the door swung.

One might then have gone far beyond Henry Wirz, through darkened bricks of the tall old house which once had been occupied by a marshal who died in Egypt, and over the soot and tiles beyond— One could have gone out in thought through the wastes of the
Bois de Meudon
where a suicide and a huddled hare and a softly wailing servant girl (newly and rudely taught a rite supposed to deal with affection) lay nearly in the same thicket— One could have swept on an instant past the spires of Versailles and over secret countryside where the River Eure rose in its initial brimming; and might have passed near Alencon in a twinkling, and given a blessing to old women who spent years with their lace and dangling shuttles; and sped across thrashing coasts of southernmost Brittany where the racket of nighttime winches was forgotten at Lorient and last lanterns were put out by the fog—

Away, away, going in thought or imagination above the long black swells, west and a little south, west and steadily bearing a little to the port dots of the compass, ignoring the marble which emerged from waves and was then sponged into spray by a fresh slapping of salt and was reconstructed into more jet and snowy marble far in the depth, and pushed up and out again to frighten the fishermen in their small plunging boats and to be seen by birds flying at night, except that none was flying—

And on past a Swedish vessel and a blockade runner which bore no lights because Yankees were looking for her, even in these eternal wildernesses of marble and salt which couldn’t be measured easily or plumbed; and on, in the single flaming of a thought, ignoring lonely islands of the Atlantic and into the growing color which suggested a twilight and became finally a sunset and then a remnant of late October afternoon in which coastal cities stood out boldly, and where guards walked above the batteries of some forts which had been attacked and some which would never be hit by any shells—

Above estuaries and over camps the fast wild thought might have gone fleeting, born in a brain which truly had no power to bear it; for this moment became a part of the future where a man can never dwell, and where gods are merely invented, and where the new unseen sun gives off its roaring, and new unseen stars are intact.

The Fifth Maine Battery was bivouacked behind a knotty board fence. When Portland Hyde and his friend Caldwell walked the nearby lane at night they could see cooking fires showing pale red in reflection above the fence, and raw living red through the cracks. Now they moved in dusk, less than two months away from the winter solstice; dusk or not, they did not care, for they carried a duck with a fresh-wrung neck. Got him safe under your coat, Porty? You just bet I have. Don’t want no sentry putting down the law to me about foraging. Yes, and then taking our duck for his own self. How do you say we boil him? Twould be easier. Maybe so; but I just couldn’t stomach boiled duck. No, sir, I’d as lief toast him bit by bit on a ramrod. I wish we had some peas; a pot of peas would go well along with him. Well, why don’t you wish you was to home, and having Betty fetching in beans and biscuits? O laughter. . . .

Companies E and K of the Eleventh Vermont guarded a great pile of earthworks and logworks outside Washington City. Here John Appleby was freshly come on picket duty. He had retreated like a smart soldier below a broken-off sycamore tree where he was cooped safely from any wind or weather, and had a good sight at the road in either direction whenever he felt in his bones that an officer or a provost detail might be approaching. Mainly he thought about his friend Adam Garrett, and how well things must be going with him. Adam was recovered from his Gettysburg wound, which he had received while serving with Stannard’s Brigade. Now that the Sixteenth Vermont was mustered out, Adam had re-enlisted in the Eleventh and was still at West Dummerston enjoying veteran’s furlough.

Where was Adam? Maybe gone to take supper with the Smalls? John groaned to himself, thinking of the Smalls and their big low kitchen; well, yes, he’d liked Hallie Small too, but Adam always shone up to the girls more successfully. Mrs. Small was noted for her fruit pies all over the town of Dummerston, all the way from East Dummerston across the forest through Dummerston Center and down to West Dummerston on the river. (Fact of the matter was, Adam Garrett was gone to a church supper on this evening. Next Tuesday he’d ride with his father to Brattleboro and take the cars, and head for Northern Virginia to join his new regiment and his old friend John Appleby. Time was when Adam never thought he’d get over talking about that piece of rib which was shot out of his side—he was so proud of it, and rejoiced in the realization that he wasn’t actually killed, just hurt a mite. But lately he’d grown weary of telling the same story to the same rural garden-variety of ears. Nobody understood truly what he was talking about. He sat beneath a bower of bunting, and ladies bustled behind him with their big flat blackened pans of chicken pie, and he tried to see Hallie beyond the bunting, and prayed that she wasn’t still mad because of that tiff they’d had when he caught Hepsy Clark and kissed her when they played Ruth and Jacob at the Jennings place— He said to old Deacon Root and young tongue-tied Mr. Willis and of course the minister, beaming gravely beyond— He said, Well, you see our regiment was on the left of those trees. There was a stone wall just ahead of us, but the stones was knocked loose and scattered. The Rebs give us one volley before they moved forward past the barn. I forgot to tell you there was a barn and farmhouse towards the Rebel lines from us—I mean, in between. He kept peering past the bearded listeners, trying to see Hallie. He caught a flurry of her plaid gown—)

Old Tom Gusset, Saddler, Ninth Ohio Cavalry, said to the sutler, That’s a pretty price. Thirty cents currency for that one little tin? Look, old man, them preserves are strawberry and they got a little brandy in them, or so tis said. Would you guarantee that? Not me; I ain’t guaranteeing nothing. How do I know it’s true what it says on the label of the tin? Well, by cracky, if you don’t know, who does? How much is that there tin marked quince and nut? That’s dearer, partner. Thirty-five cents I got to get for that.

In a bleak ravine west of Chattanooga, a private of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin said, Haltoogoesthere? Friends with the countersign. Advance singly and be recognized. Billy stood with his rifle directed on dim shapes moving among the trees, and he resented the added weight of the bayonet. What in the devil—? Oh, yes; the countersign was
Tippecanoe.
Advance singly, Mister. You come one at a time. Advance with the countersign. . . .
Tippecanoe.
Hey, there, Billy—you sounded scared—I didn’t recognize your voice. Gol damn it, I ain’t scared, I’m just sick. Sick of what? Sick of beef dried on the hoof. Well, we may fare better, now that they’ve got rid of old Rosy Rosecrans. Think Pap Thomas will do better by us? I surely do—rumor has it that the first thing old Pap is going to do is open up a cracker line.

In a Richmond bedroom two great sagging wide-fleshed faces met and stared; one was cased in glass backed by crinkled quicksilver, and the quicksilver had flaked away from the mirror’s back to make the imprisoned face more pocked, more scabbed, more seamed than it was in fact. Brigadier-General John Winder put up his pulpy fingers and inspected tenderly the bleeding notch which a razor had made in a ridge of loose skin beside his mouth (his mouth was a thin old scar, wide and long-healed and stitched together by mythical sutures; it was a fierce blue mouth). Amos, you black son of a bitch, what were you trying to do—murder me? A frightened slave in a frayed white jacket hovered behind Winder. Please, General, sir, I don’t know what did happen. That old razor seem like it was nice and sharp when I strop it, but it just didn’t glide tonight, sir, it just didn’t glide. . . . Winder snarled in reply, saying no words, but he was a master of the snarl, his snarls spoke volumes of invective on complicated ugly subjects. Now he must appear at the President’s table with a fresh-cut face. . . . You son of a bitch, go fetch a lump of alum! Don’t stand there like a gawk, God damn it—
fetch
!

Aboard the United States sloop
Sea Sprite,
bumping on patrol beyond Mobile, a shaggy Irishman named Patrick was squatted in the head, doing his business at the same hour he always liked to perform it. On the same deck, at another place, another seaman was soliciting the youth whom Patrick adored.

I’ll give you five dollars, Val, the man muttered—no, I’ll make it six. Just think—six beautiful gold dollars.

I don’t think you got six dollars.

Yes, I got them, right in this here sock. Hear them jingle? Val, if you’ll wait till it’s my watch below and—

I don’t dast. He’d be mad; he’d maybe beat me black and blue.

Val, he won’t know nothing about it, because he’ll be on watch. I’ll never tell, Val boy—you can trust old Sprit.

The boy backed slowly away, his ferret eyes gleaming with cupidity, his ferret head shaking. No, I don’t dast.

Say ten, by God. I’ll raise to ten; hain’t got no more.

Well, for ten—

In the lines near Knoxville a boy from the Thirteenth Kentucky slid his rifle across a rock, elevated the sight slightly, and fired at a dark shape which had been drifting in front of him through the thickening mountain dusk.
Yipe,
and then swifter howls going away. I’ll be blamed. Just one of those damn dogs again. Hey, Charley, what did you pop? Blame dog. Hey, listen, Charley, you got any crackers left? Got three. Give me one? If I crawl over? Thanks kindly.

Near the Rappahannock the woods were witches’ woods where the One Hundred and Forty-eighth Pennsylvania crouched along a side road. Ennis, I noticed something. Well, what? It’s the quartermaster; notice anything odd about it? No. Well, I did. Tonight’s the first night he set up his tent right
in camp—not out with the wagon train.
Now, way it looks to me, we’re stuck here for good. Might as well start work on a shebang tomorrow; I give my oath, I’d bet every shinplaster I got that we’ll go into winter quarters right here. First time we’ve settled down since Bristoe Station. What do you say—about the shebang? There’s whole loads of wood around, and if we get started before the rest pitch into it, we’ll get first pick. By gum, Jake, I think you’re maybe right. Get Balder and Timmelpennick and Douglas and Puffy; let’s get after that wood
tonight.
Shake on it, Ennis, I’m with you.