The Better Angels of Our Nature (34 page)

Jacob could barely wait until the young man had dismounted before grasping both his hands and shaking them vigorously. “Thank God, you found each other, you found each other,” he said, and the ambiguity of this statement was not lost on the younger man.

“Yes, thank God. We found each other,” he echoed and laughed when the Dutchman embraced him.

“You will stay for tea and cookies?”

“Thank you, Jacob, but I must get back to my regiment.”

“Then I shall make up a little package for you to take with you.”

“He is a mother hen,” Ransom said as the Dutchman hurried off. “I need time to think about all this—”

“To think about what, sir?”

“When Sherman sends you away, how will I know where to find you?”

She stared at him.

“I mean—how will I know where to write to you—if I wish?”

“He won’t send me away, sir. I promise.”

Ransom didn’t look at all convinced, but the Dutchman had returned with a small package, so he let the subject drop.

“Thank you, good, kind Jacob, I shall enjoy these with my coffee in the morning.”

Jacob clasped his hand and wrung it. “God bless you and keep you safe under His wing.”

“And you.” Ransom climbed onto his horse, Jacob’s sister’s cookies in his saddlebag. “Jesse…” he said softly, and could think of nothing more to say.

She saluted smartly. “Please don’t forget our wager, sir.”

The Vermonter looked at Jacob, looked at Jesse, shook his head in abject confusion and rode off.

16

Too many generals

In honor of the Shiloh victory, the president had declared a national day of worship and ordered a hundred-gun salute at the National Armoury in New York. He’d also approved the joint resolution of Congress calling for gradual emancipation of the slaves.

At the beginning of April, General McClellan had been in the process of moving his vast Army of the Potomac to the Peninsula, nearer Richmond. By the fourth, he was slowly approaching Yorktown, but despite vastly superior numbers, he had failed to make a decisive effort to drive the Rebels from Yorktown. Mr. Lincoln had reportedly told McClellan: “
—You must act.
”

Federal mortar boats had bombarded forts along the Mississippi, below New Orleans, and even gone on to capture New Orleans itself. Grant’s men had gained the day at Shiloh, but still Little Mac had not acted.

General Henry Halleck, however, had arrived at Pittsburg Landing from Washington and immediately acted. Although he had never led more than a company in the field, “Old Brains” personally took overall command of the three armies now gathered there. Never a Grant supporter, he declared he could not ignore the stories of Grant’s “intemperance,” or his failure to entrench and protect his army and replaced him with the newly arrived General George H. Thomas, a Virginian who had remained loyal to the Union that had educated and trained him. Sherman was content to serve under his old West Point friend.

Grant on the other hand could not have been more
dis
content, given the meaningless title of “second in command,” he was said to be sitting in his tent playing cards, and drinking heavily.

While Mr. Lincoln waited impatiently for news of McClellan’s siege at Yorktown, Seth Cartwright waited nervously for the arrival of the provost marshal, who would, any day now, march in and march out again with Jesse Davis held firmly in his clutches. But the days passed. McClellan made no move to attack Joe Johnston, commander of the Rebel Army of Northern Virginia, and Sherman’s provost marshal made no attempt to arrest Jesse.

The cots of the “first field hospital in U.S. military history” were all empty and the tents struck. The wounded had all gone North; the dead buried. The hospital wagons had been packed with the surgical instruments, pharmaceutical chests, cots, blankets, bedpans, crutches, and bandages. Litters so stained with blood they’d never be clean were rolled and fastened to the sides of the ambulances. The last hospital transports had steamed away from the Landing with its cargo of human suffering and its decks piled high with pine boxes.

Miss Pinchot and her implacable, bureaucratic companions had departed for fresh fields where their particular brand of stern charity would be applied and appreciated.

On April 25, at two in the morning, in the downstairs front bedroom of the Cherry Mansion, C. F. Smith finally succumbed to the gangrene that had invaded his injured leg and to the dysentery that had hung upon this unfortunate man since Fort Donelson. How strange, said many, that those two exemplary men, Generals Smith and Wallace, who had led the same division, had died in the same house in the same month.

Three days later the Army of the Tennessee began the movement on Corinth, thirty miles away.

When General Sherman’s Fifth Division, his four pre-Shiloh brigades now consolidated into three, joined the columns snaking out of the area, Cartwright caught up to the ambulance where Jesse was seated beside the Dutchman. He glanced up into the clear blue sky and commented, “Nice morning.” He pushed his kepi rakishly low over his brow as if to emphasize the fact and his rare sociable mood. “How yer doin’?” he asked Jesse.

“I’m still here,” she said, smiling at him.

“Yer, I noticed that—” The surgeon allowed himself a grin of satisfaction as he rode alongside the wagon. “I noticed that right off.”

If not for the burial trenches, it would have been difficult to believe that such slaughter had ever raged in this place, along fast-moving creeks and in dense woodlands, in peaceful orchards, from behind fallen tangled timbers, in muddy potholes, scarred and sunken roads, Bloody Ponds and Hornet’s Nests. As for those who marched and rode in these vast columns, they could rejoice in one fact, they had “seen the elephant,” and survived the first big battle in the West.
That
was no mean achievement.

For the entire month of May, marching an average of one mile per day, at a pace that would have shamed a snail, the ponderous legions of the West, artillery, commissary, medical, and headquarters, moved, or rather slithered, toward Corinth.

To a neutral witness it might have appeared that this force was not a force at all, but a sleepy giant lurching harmlessly through the warm spring countryside, stopping to smell the flowers, with no particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there. Some said it was so slow because George Thomas and Henry Halleck were
extra
slow and
extra
cautious and they encouraged each other in their slowness.

Sherman spent most of his time teaching the still raw, though bloodied, members of his division how to survive, not only in battle, but also in the day-to-day routine of camp life. He issued lengthy papers; written “lectures” on the art of marching and drilling, showed them personally where and how to dig their sinks, downwind of the “bad air,” lectured them persistently and severely against the evils of pillaging from the local civilians. “The rules are clear,” ran one particular edict. “You may take fodder, hay, and firewood, but you may not take fence rails to make your fires, unless no other wood is available.” However, it seemed that no other wood was ever available, since where the army marched and camped the fence rails disappeared as though by magic, went up in a puff of smoke, you might say.

One day Jesse was present as Sherman angrily lectured his men, after a group of civilians had been to see him about their behavior. The shame he felt oozed from every sweating pore, as he stood there under the burning sun with nothing more to shield his red balding head than a small kepi.

“—I will personally beat and kick any man out of a yard for merely going inside. To take a hen is as much stealing as though it had been stolen in our own country.”

Very few, if any, knew what in tarnation he was ranting about. They wanted only to get out of the merciless sun into the shade of a tree where they could stretch their aching bodies and imagine themselves somewhere else,
anywhere
else except here in this hostile land with marshes and swamps and about as ornery a bunch of insects as could be found on earth. Goddamn it, these reluctant soldiers did not want to be in this scorching heat, bellowed at by a bony, sweating man with wild eyes and red hair that stood up all over his head like a hedgehog. A crazy man who told them it was wrong to steal one single scrawny chicken from the enemy.
One single scrawny chicken! From the enemy!

Jesse worried, for his men had started to whisper once more about old Billy Sherman’s sanity, or lack of it.

At the end of the long days now as Halleck’s ponderous force moved sluggishly toward the Mississippi railroad junction, Jesse often rode Cartwright’s horse to Sherman’s headquarters and sat at his bivouac fire. At first, Captain Jackson had chased her out of camp like some unwelcome varmint, but when he saw that his commander inexplicably tolerated her presence, he left her alone. Van Allen always had a smile for her, and a kind word. Her visits gradually got longer and more frequent until she could now come and go pretty much as she pleased. Cartwright guessed where she went, but said nothing; as long as Sherman allowed her to remain, he was prepared to share her with the entire Army of the Tennessee, if that’s what it took to keep her here.

Some evenings Cartwright and Jesse would eat supper together and then he would lay out the exquisitely hand-carved pieces on the small folding wooden board and proceed to instruct her on how to play chess. Immediately it was obvious that the girl was not only an excellent student of medicine but, if not checked, she would very shortly excel the teacher at the game he had loved since childhood. Between moves, he never wasted an opportunity to try and pry open the clam. That warm May evening was no exception.

“You don’t talk about yourself much, do you?” The surgeon studied the board and tried to ignore the insects that buzzed around the lantern. “You yammer, all right, but not about yourself.” Only four moves into tonight’s challenge and Jesse had already taken the upper hand. She had just captured his white bishop with her black knight, and in retaliation Cartwright had snatched her bishop with his king’s bishop’s pawn. Jesse had then moved her queen’s knight to bishop three. Cartwright narrowed his eyes, removed his spectacles, and blinked at her myopically. “Are you sure you haven’t played this game before?”

“You ask me that question every time we play.”

“Do
I really—
” he said with an indignant sniff. He put his spectacles on and rubbed his bristly chin. “Well, it just so happens that where I come from it ain’t a hanging offense.” The surgeon lowered his hand to his bishop and moved it to king two. Jesse moved her knight to king’s knight five. The surgeon immediately pushed his pawn to king’s rook three and inquired in a more conversational tone, “Which part of this vast land did you say you came from? Was it Ohio?”

“General Sherman says it doesn’t matter which part of America you come from, every state is beautiful.” The girl studied the surgeon’s last move a moment before suggesting, “Perhaps if you took a little longer to ponder your moves, sir, you’d make fewer mistakes.”

“
Ponder my moves? Ponder my moves?
You’ve got your nerve. I don’t need
you
or anyone else to tell me how to play chess. I’ve been playing this game since I was six. So worry about pondering your own damn moves. Now play or resign.”

Jesse lifted her knight and used it to capture the surgeon’s pawn on king six. She saw his cheeks color and his firm mouth harden, but it had nothing to with her chess game.

“Good evening, Jesse,” said Thomas Ransom, stepping into the firelight, “Doctor. Please forgive my intrusion.”

In a second, Jesse was on her feet. She saluted and said, “Good evening, sir.”

Cartwright shook his head contemptuously. The girl was still playing soldiers and very evidently it made the Vermonter uncomfortable. Tonight Ransom looked as if he’d just been scrubbed. Uniform spotlessly clean, freshly brushed and immaculately pressed, slicked down hair shining, boots shining, smooth skin freshly shaved and shining, sideburns neat, those well-bred New England features softened by a shy smile, hat in hand, the perfect gentleman, come a-calling. Self-consciously the surgeon rubbed a hand over his own stubbled chin. He’d take a shave if Jesse asked him.

“How are the chess lessons coming along?” Ransom asked the girl.

“She’s got a lot to learn,” the surgeon replied.

Ransom gazed down at the board, saw Jesse’s knight threatening the surgeon’s queen and suggested in a friendly way, “You must move your queen to bishop one, Doctor.”

“When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.” Cartwright moved his queen to bishop one and out of immediate danger.

Jesse countered by using her knight to capture the pawn on knight seven, saying briskly, cheerfully, “Check!”

“Thanks for nothing,” Cartwright spat at Ransom.

“You’re two pawns down,” Jesse reminded him.

“I can
count.
” He scooped the pieces into the box, a child taking back his toys because his playmates won’t play according to his rules. “That’s enough for tonight, we don’t want to overdo a good thing, do we?”

“Last night you said you can never get enough of a good thing, but then you were winning, at least when we started.” Jesse’s expression was one of mock innocence.

Cartwright looked briefly at Ransom, whose smile indulged the surgeon’s need to retain a vestige of dignity in the face of certain defeat at the hands of a “novice.”

“It’s an intriguing game,” the Vermonter said, to rescue him. “Jesse told me your father taught you to play. My father loved chess also. Jesse says your father was serving as a military surgeon when he was wounded.”

“Jesse says a lot about me, doesn’t she?” The surgeon folded the board with a thwack.

“It’s true, Doctor, Jesse does talk about you a great deal,” Ransom said with a wry smile, lowering his gaze and then raising it again to meet the surgeon’s resentful gaze directly. Cartwright, if only he knew, had little to resent. On those rare evenings during the slow march to Corinth when Ransom had given himself an hour off duty to visit with Jesse, the main subjects of their conversation seemed to be the doctor and Sherman. In fact, most evenings they were the
only
subjects of conversation. He came very firmly up against the same brick wall as his rival. Try as he might, as many times as he brought the conversation around to Jesse, she managed to redirect it again. He knew as much about her now as he had known the evening they had walked near Jones Field. However, he certainly knew a lot about Cartwright and Sherman.