This Hallowed Ground (67 page)

The autumn day ended at last, and the battle ended with it, the shattered Confederate brigades drawing back in defeat. Their losses had been six thousand men killed or wounded, five general officers killed — among them the Pat Cleburne who had mentioned the unmentionable in that officers’ meeting the previous winter — and six more generals wounded, one mortally. Nothing whatever had been gained. Late that night Schofield’s bridge was finished and his army marched off to Nashville, eighteen miles away, saving all of its guns and wagons.

Federal losses had been much smaller, but they had not exactly been trifling; there had been more than two thousand casualties, and the survivors — making their second consecutive all-night march, with a wearing battle sandwiched in between — were at the point of complete exhaustion. Whenever the column came to a momentary halt, men would drop in their tracks and sleep; some men even slept while they marched, stumbling along blindly, helpless automatons. Some of these said afterward that in this marching sleep nightmares came to them, with the sights and sounds of the day’s battle moving through their drugged minds.

They revived when they got to Nashville. The Federal army had held this town for the better part of three years and had surrounded it with powerful fortifications. General Thomas was here with the rest of the army, there were hot coffee and food and good camping ground where tired men could sleep, and there would obviously be no more forced marches in retreat. When Hood’s army came up and ranged itself on the hills facing the Union works, the Federals looked out at them and reflected that it was a fine thing to “occupy the favorable side of the fortifications.”
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Hood came to a standstill here before Nashville. He had already shot his bolt, although he did not seem to realize it. He had started his invasion with approximately forty thousand men, of whom something better than thirty thousand were infantry, he had seen his army badly mauled at Franklin, Thomas outnumbered him by a substantial margin, and there was no longer anything of much consequence that he could do. Lacking a better course, he dug trenches facing the strong Yankee line and put up a hollow pretense of besieging the place.

It worried Pap Thomas very little, but it very seriously worried General Grant. Sherman once said admiringly that Grant never cared in the least what the opposing army might be doing off out of his sight, but Grant was worrying now; for once in his life he had the jitters. From his headquarters hut at Petersburg it looked as if Hood might be making a wild, desperate thrust that could wholly upset all of the Federal war plans. Grant had Lee penned, and Sherman was disemboweling the Confederacy with torch and sword — and now, at the eleventh hour, this Confederate army was on the loose; it might get away from Thomas and go rampaging all the way up through Kentucky, and it was important to destroy it at the earliest moment. And Grant, the imperturbable, grew highly nervous and bombarded Thomas with daily messages demanding that he attack at once.

Thomas replied that it would take a few days to get everything ready and that he would attack as soon as possible; Grant retorted that there must be no more delay, and went so far once as to write out an order relieving Thomas of his command and turning the whole army over to Schofield. The order was not sent, finally, but the fact that it was drafted was significant. Between Grant and Thomas there was some strange misunderstanding — a feeling, perhaps, on Grant’s part that dependable old Thomas could never quite make himself move fast. Thomas sensed what was in the wind, and when Halleck wired that Grant was highly unhappy about his delay he calmly replied that he had done his best and that “if General Grant should order me to be relieved, I will submit without a murmur.” Then, just as he was ready to attack, a great sleet storm came down, fields and roads were coated with an inch of slick
ice, troop movements became utterly impossible, and a cavalry regiment required to travel to an outpost found that its troopers had to dismount and walk, leading their horses.

The ice lasted for four days, during which time both armies were immobilized. Grant fretted and worried and at last he got hold of Blackjack John Logan, who was north at the time, gave him orders relieving Thomas from command, and sent him west to take over.

Logan never quite made it. On December 14 — at last — the weather turned warm. There was a steady rain, mud took the place of ice, and Thomas sent off a wire to Halleck: “The ice having melted away today, the enemy will be attacked tomorrow morning.” Then he called in his corps commanders, gave them written orders for the next day’s attack, went over the orders with them in detail — and finally went to bed in the Nashville hotel room he was occupying, leaving word at the desk for a five o’clock call next morning.
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Morning came, and Thomas packed his bag, checked out, and rode off to field headquarters. There was a fog on the ground, but it drifted away not long after sunrise and the troops were ready to go. Thomas ordered them forward, sending in two brigades of colored troops to hold Hood’s right and attacking at the other end of the line with a solid corps of infantry and all of Wilson’s cavalry, which trotted forward to attack a prepared infantry position quite as if it had never yet been demonstrated that mounted men could not profitably assault men in trenches.

Everything worked. Hood’s line was stretched thin, and although the works his men occupied at the point of attack looked formidable he did not have enough men to hold them. The infantry smashed through, the cavalry curled around behind his left flank, and Hood was driven back for two miles, to take a new, last-hope position on a little chain of hills. He had been badly beaten, and there was nothing he could do now but retreat as fast as the muddy roads might permit, but he was still full of fight, and he hung on for another day of it. His men were full of fight too. A Federal cavalryman who helped escort a bag of prisoners to the rear the next morning noticed that the captured Rebels were still confident: “They say Hood will pay us today for yesterday’s reverses. They all assert he is going to capture Nashville before night.”
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It was not in the cards. Thomas renewed the attack the next morning, and although the Confederates put up a stout fight their case was hopeless. Thomas’s IV Corps swarmed up a hill, crumpling the skirmish line and driving on for the trenches. The officer commanding an Indiana regiment spurred forward to be first man through the line, and as he passed his color-bearer he reached out for the flagstaff, to take the flag in with him. The color-bearer refused to let go of it and ran alongside
the horse, colonel and private both gripping the same staff; and presently the colonel was pulled bodily out of the saddle and took an undignified tumble in the mud. The color-bearer kept the flag, ran up to the Rebel trench, and drove the base of the staff into the soft earth of the parapet, while the rest of the corps charged through and destroyed the Confederate line. Wilson’s cavalry came up on the right, dismounted and acting like infantry — the men had thrown their sabers by the roadside and were working their repeaters like foot soldiers — and finally the whole defensive position caved in and Hood’s army fled, leaving most of its artillery behind, while the Yankee cavalry scurried back to reclaim its horses and set off in pursuit.
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The victory had been complete. Hood’s army was shattered beyond repair, and there was no refuge for it north of Alabama. Young General Wilson drove his cavalry after the retreating army in the pitch-darkness of a windy, rainy night. Forrest was guarding the Confederate rear, and his men fought savage delaying actions in the bewildering dark, crouched behind fence-rail barricades while the Union cavalry charged in across inky-black fields, nothing visible except the sputtering flames from the carbines — and, at intervals, black tree trunks gleaming in the wet, and dark figures moving in and out, when sporadic flashes of lightning lit the night.

It was mean, confused fighting, much of it hand-to-hand. A Union and a Confederate officer came together in the gloom and fought a saber duel on horseback, so close together that they grappled and in some fantastic manner managed to exchange sabers, after which they continued to belabor each other; the duel ended when a stray bullet broke the Confederate’s sword arm and he was compelled to surrender. Forrest’s men were driven off at last, but they had delayed the pursuit just long enough to enable Hood to keep from losing what remained of his army, and after midnight Wilson called a halt and put his troopers into bivouac.

At this point Thomas himself rode up. “Old Slow Trot” was coming in at a gallop tonight, and his customary dignity and self-control were gone. He greeted Wilson with a whoop.

“Dang it to hell, Wilson, didn’t I tell you we could lick ’em?” he demanded. “Didn’t I tell you we could lick ’em?”
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In Louisville, Kentucky, General Logan got news of the victory, put his orders away, and turned around to go back to Washington. And in Washington, General Grant himself got the tidings. He had left Petersburg and was on his way to Nashville to come out and see to things personally, and he was stopping overnight in Willard’s Hotel when the telegram reached him. It told the news of the sweeping victory that removed the last possible doubt that the war would be won on schedule. Grant read the telegram, handed it to an aide with the remark, “Well,
I guess we will not go to Nashville,” and then dictated a wire to Thomas, offering his hearty congratulations.
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Wilson’s cavalry kept up the pursuit for ten days, but with the men who remained to him Hood at last got away to the south side of the Tennessee River, at Muscle Shoals. Of the forty thousand with whom he had set out on his invasion, he had twenty-one thousand left, most of them in a high degree of disorganization. His army had been practically destroyed. Fragments of it would be used in other fields later on, but as an army it had ceased to exist. Pap Thomas had shattered it.

Thomas comes down in history as the Rock of Chickamauga, the great defensive fighter, the man who could never be driven away but who was not much on the offensive. That may be a correct appraisal. Yet it may also be worth making note that just twice in all the war was a major Confederate army driven away from a prepared position in complete rout — at Chattanooga and at Nashville. Each time the blow that routed it was launched by Thomas.

With Hood back in the Deep South, out of Tennessee and out of the war, 1864 came to an end. It had been a long year and a hard year, and it had witnessed two things never seen before in all the history of man’s warring: the soldiers who had the fighting to do had voted for more of it, with themselves to carry the load, and the people back home, who had had three mortal years of it, had held a free election and had given their government a mandate to carry the war on to a finish. Now the year was ending on a note of triumph. A Confederate army still existed west of the Mississippi but it was completely out of the main channel, and what it did could not affect the outcome; there was another, smaller Confederate army scattered about in lower Mississippi and Alabama, but it too was isolated and helpless. Grant remained in front of Richmond, Thomas held Tennessee, and Sherman was in Savannah. The Confederacy now consisted of the Carolinas and southern Virginia — no more than that. Spring was not far away, and spring would inevitably bring the end.

I
T
had been going on for nearly four years, and there would be about four more months of it. It had started at Fort Sumter, with officers on a parapet looking into darkness for the first red flash of the guns; now Fort Sumter was a mass of rubble and broken masonry, pounded to fragments by the hammering of repeated bombardments, but it still flew the Confederate flag, a bright spot of color to take the morning light that came slanting in from the sea — symbolic, a flag flying over wreckage and the collapse of a dream. Elsewhere, in many states, winter lay on the hills and fields that had been unheard of four years earlier but that would live on forever now in tradition and national memory — Shiloh, Antietam, the Wilderness, Chickamauga, and all the rest. Here and there all over the country were the mounded graves of half a million young men who had been alive and unsuspecting when all of this began. There would be more graves to dig, and when there was time there would be thin bugle calls to lie in the still air while a handful of dust drifted down on a blanketed form, but most of this was over. A little more killing, a little more marching and burning and breaking and smashing, and then it would be ended.

Ended; yet, in a haunting way, forever unended. It had laid an infinity of loss and grief on the land; it had created a shadowed purple twilight streaked with undying fire which would live on, deep in the mind and heart of the nation, as long as any memory of the past retained meaning. Whatever the American people might hereafter do would in one way or another take form and color from this experience. Under every dream and under every doubt there would be the tragic knowledge bought by this war, the awareness that triumph and disaster are the two aspects of something lying beyond victory, the remembrance
of heartbreak and suffering, and the moment of vision bought by people who had bargained for no vision but simply wanted to live at peace. A new dimension had been added to the national existence, and the exploration of it would take many generations. The Civil War, with its lights and its shadows, its unendurable pathos and its charred and stained splendor, would be the American people’s permanent possession.

At the time it was possible to see only the approaching end and the hard times that had to be lived through before the end could finally be reached. In the North men nerved themselves for the ruthless blows that must be struck against a dying foe; in the South men nerved themselves to endure the blows; and as the year opened, the blows began to fall.