The Better Angels of Our Nature (2 page)

“Cut that goddamn hullabaloo!” one of them bellowed as he passed. “Kain’t hear maself think.”

“Damn your eyes!” shouted a second soldier, while a third tossed a brogan that struck the boy squarely in the tin plate hanging from his sack jacket. “Nex’ tayme’ll be a bullet, yer goddamn shit-house rat!”

“Why you dirty bag-a-bones country boy, stop that goddamn noise!” came an order from one of the tents.

“Lord a’mighty, it’s the whole goddamned Reb army!”

“I guess that’s one way a scarin’ Johnny Reb” was a wry comment.

“I reckon they can hear yer all the way to Richmond, boy. Ain’t yer got no place to bed down? Yer lookin’ ter git yerself hog-tied.”

A third man stuck out his leg and this portable cook’s galley went crashing headlong to the ground amid a cacophony of tin cup, plate, and coffee pot.

“Haw, haw, haw!” came the chorus of laughter.

Just when the boy was beginning to think he had lost the commander in the maze of canvas streets, every tent identical, from out of the darkness was heard the hoarse command, “I’m over here, and for pity’s sake, cease your noise, you will rouse the entire camp!”

Over the entrance of the large wall tent, fluttering occasionally in the cold night air, was the headquarters designation flag: Fifth Division, Army of the Tennessee. Beside this tent was another, smaller wall tent, where the commander himself was bivouacked. The headquarters guard, all but asleep on their feet, jumped to attention at Sherman’s approach and the sentinels marching back and forth moved with renewed vigor, stifling a yawn. The youthful lieutenant of the guard merely stared in astonishment.

“Leave your equipment neatly stacked on the ground outside,” Sherman ordered.

“Yes sir—thank you, sir—” The boy-soldier made a groaning sound and finally, gratefully, collapsed under the weight.

Anyone not completely fixated by the sight of the boy upended on his back like a helpless turtle wobbling upon his shell, legs kicking air, might have spotted the momentary smile that lit the commander’s stern features as he rushed to free the trapped boy from the straps of the knapsack that were cutting into his narrow shoulders. When the officer of the guard, blond fuzz on pale cheeks passing for a man’s beard, continued to look on in speechless astonishment, Sherman was fierce.

“Damn you, Lieutenant, don’t just stand there, lend a hand, sir, lend a hand!”

“Yes sir.” The transfixed lieutenant came instantly to life, doing what he could to disentangle boy from blankets, knapsacks, straps, and cartridge boxes. He then watched in curiosity tinged with envy as the young soldier followed the general into his tent.

“Have you had your supper?” Sherman wanted to know.

The young soldier hesitated.

“Well?” said the general sharply. “When was the last time you ate? Was it so long ago you can’t recall?” Sherman puffed at his cigar and laughed. “Well, it’s no wonder you can’t carry an infantryman’s load!”

The young soldier sat on a cracker box before the folding table and ate the chicken and sweet corn that the general had ordered his cook, Horatio, to dig out of the stores. Although prodded into wakefulness from what might have been a sweet dream of freedom, the talkative old Negro, with tufts of white hair on the back of his head like cotton balls, displayed none of the resentment of the quartermaster sergeant, but simply shuffled back to his blanket with the young soldier’s hearty thanks still ringing in his ears. Now the boy tasted the thick dark liquid in the cup and wrinkled up his rather shapeless child’s nose.

“I never imagined it would taste so bitter,” he said.

“
Imagined?
Have you never tasted coffee before?”

“No sir, never—” the boy replied, his mouth full of chicken and sweet corn.

“Well, don’t take too much sugar in your coffee. You’ll get dysentery.”

Sherman was lighting a fresh cigar. Again, his mind was elsewhere. His bony, thickly veined hand had grabbed up a letter from the table and his deep-set, piercing eyes were now traveling wildly across the pages as the nails of his other hand made a scratching sound across his coarse beard. He stood up suddenly and started to march the short distance between table and tent flap and back again, puffing away noisily at his cigar, rubbing his beard the wrong way and murmuring to himself in a manner that made the boy guess that the contents of the letter irritated him. This man was easily irritated, prone to excitations, temper swings, and prompt changes of mood that could raise him as high as the heavens and cast him down to the depths of despair. The boy drew in a deep breath, inhaling cigar smoke and whiskey, the smell of sweat, stale and manly, and the aroma of physical and moral courage that hung in the air and clung to the general’s crumpled uniform.

When the boy opened his eyes, the Ohioan had stopped pacing and was watching
him.

The boy cleared his throat. “Please, sir, may I ask what it is I am eating?”

“Why, it’s chicken! Have you never eaten chicken before either? No coffee
and
no chicken? You haven’t lived.” The Ohioan was laughing at him.

“I think it very fine.”

“I’m sure Horatio would be gratified.”

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

“What? What did you say?” After having briefly resumed his marching, he now stopped again and fixed the boy with those glittering eyes. “
You
know
Hamlet
? Well, knowing it is one thing, understanding it, that, my boy, is another thing.”

“I think I would understand it far more if I saw it performed on a stage.”

Evidently, Sherman approved this reply, since he made a noise that sounded like approval.

“Here, here, how can you hold your knife and fork that way—?” He grabbed up the boy’s hands one after the other and turned back the sleeves with a roughness that belied the compassion behind the gesture.

“Thank you, sir.” The boy looked up at him gratefully.

“Watching you laden down with all that equipment just now reminded me of the recruits I saw in Washington when I was there in June last year. Their uniforms were as various as the states and cities from which they came. Their arms were also of every pattern and caliber and they too were so loaded down with coats, haversacks, knapsacks, tents, baggage, and cooking utensils that it took from twenty-five to fifty wagons to move the camp of a regiment from one place to another.” Sherman puffed and reflected. “Some of the camps had their own bakeries and cooking establishments that would have done credit to Delmonico’s!” He was still laughing that strange hiccupping laughter as he sat on a camp chair on the other side of the small table, his frock coat hanging open by the side of his narrow thighs, cigar ash falling onto his already dusty vest. His old-fashioned “sideboard”-collar shirt was ringed in grime and his dickey bow had gone awry, hanging limply, as though it had given up any effort to look military. “Where do you come from, my boy?”

“Far from here, sir.”

“We all come far from here. Where does your mother live?”

“I have no mother, sir, only a Father in heaven.”

The boy stared at the general and the general, who had lost his own father at nine and his mother when still a young man, thought he understood.

“An orphan. Well, there are worse things.”

“Such as politicians and newspapermen?” the boy suggested, knowing the general’s loathing for both professions.

“Quite so,” the general confirmed, smoking his cigar and laughing again. “Where were you educated?”

“I hope, sir, to learn about soldiering from you.”

“We’ll see, we’ll see.”

“Sir, I am an excellent reader, and can read to you at night when you are too weary even to hold a book. I can read to you from all your favorite writers, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Dickens. I can even read to you from your book of Shakespeare, sir, if you wish it.”

“How do you
know
my favorite writers?” The general looked at his footlocker stacked high with books. “Ah—very observant. A good soldier must be observant.”

“I’ll rise before dawn and bring you coffee. I only want to serve you, sir.”

“You can serve me best by serving your
country.
”

“I want to ride into battle beside you, sir.” For emphasis, as though it were a saber, not a bent eating utensil, the boy waved the fork in the air and a piece of chicken that had been hanging there precariously finally dropped into his lap. The boy retrieved it hastily and returned it to his tin plate.

“To ride into battle beside a general you must first be an officer. Have you ever fired a gun?”

“No sir, but I’m a very fast learner. Anything you teach me I will retain forever.”

“‘An excellent reader’ and a ‘fast learner’ are you? You don’t lack for confidence, that’s a fact.” The commander seemed to make up his mind about something, since he got abruptly to his feet and, calling over his shoulder, “Wait here,” left the tent.

The young soldier looked around the interior, so plain, so practical, the absolute barest of necessities, cot, campstools, small folding table, the battered wooden footlocker with his name stenciled on the lid, and the books. Well-thumbed copies of Robert Burns’s collected poems, Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus
and
Hamlet,
and on the table, Scott’s
Rob Roy,
from which several paper markers protruded. Beside that an inkwell, a pen, and some sheets of paper, covered with his bold, assertive hand, a candleholder with the stub of a candle, the flame fluttering in a draft, by which the young soldier read several lines of the unfinished letter:

Dearest Ellen—Let what occur you may rest assured that the devotion and affection you have exhibited in the past winter has endeared you more than ever, and that if it should so happen that I can regain my position and self respect and should Peace ever be restored I will labor hard for you and our children.

“Now we’ll see just how fast you learn!” Sherman burst in, a musket in one hand, a cartridge box in the other.

“The first question is, do you know which end out of which to shoot?”

The boy grinned, screwed up his freckled nose. “Oh yes, sir.”

“Then we are indeed on the way to making you a soldier. Now listen well, for your very life may depend upon it. This is a Springfield model 1861 rifled and sighted musket, which takes a .58-caliber minié ball. Do you know what a minié ball is? The men call them ‘minnie’ balls. Invented by Claude Minié, a Frenchman, the ball and musket, or shoulder arm, is deadly at any range up to five hundred yards. Are you listening carefully—for there will be no time for revision.”

The boy repeated all he had heard so far, not at all like a parrot, so much so that his excitable, enthusiastic instructor said, “Splendid, splendid,” and clapped him on his narrow back.

Without preliminaries the general swept up papers and pen, threw them onto the cot and laid cartridge, percussion cap, bullet, ramrod, on the table, identifying them one by one, as the young soldier repeated each name. He took the boy through the procedure for loading the musket. He showed him how to tear the cartridge at the corner of his mouth, pour the powder into the barrel, and ram a bullet down on top of it.

“Then,” Sherman gravely instructed, “it is necessary,
absolutely
necessary, to put a percussion cap under the hammer. Unless you do this, you can pull the trigger until kingdom come without discharging your piece.”

As Sherman spoke, the young soldier’s gaze moved back and forth from the gun to the man’s grim features. At forty-two, his dark red hair was already in retreat from the domed brow and his gaunt cheeks bore the early ravages of past failures and present anxieties. It was a face of such strength and character that the boy thought it like a canvas upon which fate would etch every moment of passion and pain that was to come, finally turning it into a flesh-and-blood monument to integrity, courage, and patriotism. The boy thought that into that suffering face every man, woman, and child in America would one day be able to gaze and know the pain of a nation at war with itself.

“At the command ‘load’ you will stand your rifle upright between your feet, the muzzle end in your left hand held eight inches from your body, at the same time moving the right hand to your cartridge box on your belt. There”—he indicated just about where the boy would locate it—“at ‘handle cartridge’ you will bring the paper-wrapped powder and bullet from the box and place the powder into the muzzle, like so, and the minié ball into the bore. Are you following every movement?” he demanded sharply, showing the boy the ball.

The boy said he was, an alert look in his eye confirming that truth.

“Then draw the rammer, which will send the bullet down the bore to sit on the powder charge. Replace the rammer and prime!” The general brought the weapon up and extended it outward from his spare frame with his left hand while with his right he pulled back the hammer to the half-cock position, explaining all as he proceeded. Then he reached into the cap pouch, removed a cap and placed it onto the nipple. “Now comes the moment of truth—
Shoulder!
” he cried loudly, took the appropriate foot stance and brought the rifle up to a vertical position at his right side, his right hand on the lock, his thumb pulling the hammer back to full cock.
“Aim!”
Up went the rifle to his right shoulder, his cheek to the butt so that he could sight between the opened
V
at the rear and over the muzzle. His finger hovered against the trigger and his hoarse voice bellowed “
Fire!
”

It was at this very moment that the tent flap was thrown aside and a well-built individual appeared, brandishing an army Colt .44, followed in close order by as many of the headquarters guard and their muskets that could squeeze into the tent. Bringing up the rear was the bemused Lieutenant Lewis.

“What in blue blazes—Gen’al—?” The tall, imposing-looking man with the pistol halted in his tracks as the commander of the Fifth Division stood there pointing a rifle at him.

Immediately Sherman brought the piece carefully to his side.