A Blaze of Glory (10 page)

Johnston felt his own breathing in hard short bursts.

“It is one more gift. General Grant has placed his camps with his
back
to the river. Bishop Polk, is this not a message from God? An opportunity?” He didn’t wait for Polk’s response, the flow of words pouring through him. “We will make use of what God has provided us. Before General Buell can march his army to join General Grant, we will
join
him first. We will strike the enemy where he waits, where the
opportunity
waits. We shall mobilize this army as rapidly as is possible, and we shall march to Pittsburg Landing. We shall attack General Grant, and we shall destroy him.” He looked at Polk, saw a reassuring nod. “God shall have mercy on them, Bishop. But we shall have none.”

SHERMAN

NEAR MONTEREY, TENNESSEE MARCH 16, 1862

T
he rain seemed to come from the sky in great rivers, pouring over every surface with a rush of sound that reminded him of Florida. But the farther they moved from the river, the less he felt anything of the glorious days he had spent in the place where sunshine could cure the rainfall at a moment’s notice. As they moved south upriver, the rain had been steady and driving, nothing to inspire the awe and wonder of a Florida thunderstorm. Those storms lasted mere minutes, blown past by their own violence, replaced by the blinding sun and crisp blue sky. Tennessee was nothing like Florida.

They had left the transports and one gunboat on the river, and Sherman led a column of infantry and horsemen inland, a probe several miles deep into the thickets and mud-coated roadways, places where even the rebels didn’t want to be. There had been one sighting of gray cavalry, an encampment of men who were as surprised as the troops who stumbled upon them, and Sherman had given the sharp order for the men to get ready for a fight. But the rebels had scampered away, clambering aboard their mounts in a rapid retreat. The Federal skirmishers out front had reported back quickly that it was just a small cavalry detachment, and when the rest of Sherman’s column eased forward to examine what had been the horsemen’s camp, the Federal officers could see that all that was left behind were a few shelter halves, tin plates, a few bales of hay, and horse manure. The talk began, low chuckles from men who had nothing else to laugh about, that the rebels had been sent out here for punishment, some indiscretion that had earned them a campsite in the worst place on earth. Even Sherman allowed himself a brief laugh, had agreed that there was no other reason to put men so far away from any kind of comfort at all, camped in a sea of mud under ragged tents where no fire would burn, their horses tied to fence posts. The rebels had left one horse behind, a sickly sack of bones with an injured leg. Sherman had avoided studying the horse’s misery and ordered it destroyed, a single bullet to the head, the only humane thing to do. To Sherman, the animals deserved more consideration than the rebels who rode them.

And yet the brief uneventful encounter had punished Sherman, the burst of fear he could not avoid. When the skirmishers reported the cavalry’s hasty exit, Sherman had felt the familiar relief, that there had been no fight after all. But still the fear nagged at him, and he ordered the skirmishers to keep a sharp eye, that there might still be a mass of support waiting in ambush, the cavalry just a ruse. But they had seen no one else, and it infuriated him, drove him into a dark and brooding silence, a struggle against what felt like a quivering knife blade inside of him. In every ride into any place the enemy could be, the knife seemed to rise up and whirl through his brain, his own private torture. The cigars usually came then, giving him something to do with his hands, but out here, that wasn’t even a possibility, the rain too engulfing. He gripped the reins hard with one hand, felt his fingernails digging into his palm, the other hand inside his raincoat, his fingers nervously twirling the brass buttons on his coat. The cigars were there, a bulge in his pocket, and he was tempted to try, but the rain was blowing straight into his face now, and he gave up the idea, took several deep breaths, saw the sergeant of the skirmish line again, another report, nothing out there, just mud and trees and the occasional farmhouse. And still, Sherman’s fingers pulled at the buttons, couldn’t avoid the hard relentless pounding in his chest.

“Sergeant!”

The man jumped toward Sherman’s words, another quick salute.

“Sir!”

“Keep the men no more than a hundred yards to the front. You aren’t doing us any good if you wander off. I want to know your men are doing their job, and that’s your responsibility. Now move it! Keep them sharp. This is enemy country, and we know damn well we’re being watched! I want no surprises!”

It was not the first angry burst the sergeant had heard, and Sherman regretted it, knew the man was a veteran, knew how to do his job. He wanted to apologize, held it in, not appropriate. The sergeant seemed reassuring, as though reading Sherman’s odd fear.

“We’re close up front, sir! They’re good men! We’ll be watching! With your permission …”

“Go on! Move!”

The sergeant scampered forward, his boots kicking up showers of mud. Close behind him, Sherman’s staff officers said nothing. Like the sergeant, they had heard this before.

T
o the men who marched behind him, this mission was nothing more than an exercise in misery, ordered by some other general
back there
, whose boots were no doubt warmed by a delicious fire, a man whose primary duty was putting pen to paper, sending men out into some godforsaken place to make a glorious thrust into the enemy’s land as though nothing bad might happen. But to Sherman, it was all bad. He followed the orders, of course, respected the man who issued them. General Charles Ferguson Smith now commanded this army, had been assigned to take over during the absurd melodrama that swirled around General Halleck’s headquarters in St. Louis. After Grant’s victory at Fort Donelson, what should have been a celebration had turned ugly. Instead of gratitude from his grateful commander, Grant had been relieved. Sherman only knew what floated through the army’s headquarters, that Grant had been guilty of some indiscretion that possibly had its roots only in Halleck’s mind, some fungus-like eruption of outrage that Halleck tossed toward his commanders for no reason anyone could explain. Sherman knew Halleck well, had known him since they were both green lieutenants fresh out of West Point. But that was too many years ago, even before the Mexican War, and now Halleck had been put in charge of the entire theater west of the mountains. If Halleck had some nasty little bone to pick with Grant, or took slight at something Grant had done, Sherman had nothing to say about it. He was only a division commander, one of five that had come upriver into southern Tennessee, who had little say in what happened back in St. Louis. At least, he thought, General Halleck had stayed up there. Marching himself into the field seems to be the last thing
this
commanding general wants to do.

General Smith, Grant’s replacement, was one of the division commanders, had been chosen to replace Grant by both seniority and respect. He was an older man, had been an instructor and commandant of cadets at West Point, had taught many of the men who even now outranked him, Halleck and Grant included. Sherman held to one piece of optimism, that if Halleck was going to dole out commands to those who least offended him, Smith was at least a good choice for the job. But, to the men marching behind him, Smith was just another one of
them
. And so they marched through driving rain, across muddy roads, staring into the roaring violence of flooded streams miles from the river, using maps that said nothing of weather.

What his troops could not know was that Sherman was far more miserable and far more agitated by where they were, and why, than anything to do with the rain. Like much of Kentucky, Tennessee was enemy country, and out there, anywhere, to the flank, to the rear, those
other fellows
could be moving close, preparing the great assault, the trap. It was an infuriating panic he could not reveal to anyone, and if the staff knew what he was feeling, they dared not reveal that to him. As they rode deeper into the farmlands and dense thickets of black woods, his eyes focused into every opening, every ravine, every mud hole, anyplace someone could be waiting. No matter what the sergeant reported, no matter that the farmers had told them the enemy was miles away, his brain shouted out with perfect certainty that they would come, that his meager column would be swallowed by a screaming wave of enemy troops. He knew they weren’t prepared for it, they had never been prepared, not in Kentucky, not in Virginia, and out here, the weather made them slovenly, slogging their way with minds focused on their own discomfort. It was one more log on the bonfire of his fury, that he couldn’t grab every man, shout it into the faces, be ready! It wasn’t the orders that drove Sherman’s despair, nothing from General Smith. They were attempting to find a route that would take them close to one of the railroad bridges on the great east-west artery that led away from Corinth. So far, the farmers who had offered anything positive had said very little that would help, that the town closest to them, Monterey, was still too far from the railroad, and in fact, might take them right into rebel fortifications that spread out from Corinth. Sherman had let his staff talk to the civilians, the officers surprised that so many were willing to offer any information at all, only a few cursing these boys in blue for defiling their ground. But every moment when the staff and the civilians stood eye to eye, Sherman paid more attention to the land around them, the farmers’ fields where the horsemen might still come.

I
t had begun at Bull Run, a collapse of his own command that had certainly contributed to the collapse of the army. His unit had lost three hundred men, but it was more than the horror of death, of seeing the blood of men who followed you into the fight. For Sherman, that fight held many memories, none of them good, and his own collapse was the worst memory of all. Before the battle, as the army was organized and drilled, there had been all the boasting, the talk of the untested, men who thought of war as something far more fun than what they would find at Bull Run Creek. Along the march into Virginia, they were bolstered by the celebratory gathering of civilians, a vast parade of carriages, gaily dressed sightseers of grand old Washington, picnics and parasols and brass bands.

And then, they met the enemy.

On both sides there had been an utter lack of what General Smith would call
sophistication, disorder of the highest order
. There was very little to make a West Pointer proud, nothing that resembled the well-ordered display of soldiers, of
army
. To most of the generals, the battle had been fought by two great rabbles, driving into each other like hordes of savages. When the smoke and the noise began, the amazing eruption of artillery and musket fire, a great many of those men in blue who had marched to the battle with the proud air of soldiers had done what Sherman himself had done. There had been a fight, no doubt, but there had also been a collapse into panic and desperation.

It was the sounds that came first, and the smell of smoke, the sudden bursts of fire that ripped the air around them. And then came the worst surprise of all. The men who had been oh so proud of their uniforms were suddenly washed by the horror of splashing blood, the guts and brains of a friend, screams and dismembered corpses. As the battle joined in earnest, the horrors only grew worse, and those who found the will to fight stepped through smoke and stink and pieces of men, only to find that the men in the glorious blue uniforms had been driven away by the screaming hordes of rebels.

Sherman had been in command of a brigade, hundreds of men, but he could not lead them, had succumbed to the same panic and revulsion as the men who looked to him for … what? Rescue? Salvation? He carried that with him long after the fight, that when the enemy is there, death follows, and it is not clean. That horror had followed him to his command in Kentucky, when he replaced the hero of Fort Sumter, if anyone could deserve that title. But Robert Anderson had held out against Beauregard’s artillery for three days, and so honor had been served, even if the fort was lost, the first great casualty of the war. But Anderson had lost some piece of himself in the effort, had become an aging shell of a man, and though he was assigned to command the increasingly dangerous theater west of the mountains, to Anderson’s credit he knew he required the assistance of the younger, more able rising stars. Sherman’s collapse at Bull Run was one of many collapses, and though Sherman condemned himself for his failures, the army, and Anderson, felt otherwise. Sherman was asked to join Anderson as his second in command, with headquarters in Louisville. But three months after Bull Run, Sherman’s demons returned, and he began to believe that the rebel presence in Kentucky was a far greater threat than anyone above him could comprehend.