shovels. The men dig trenches for many bodies at once, most of which are stiff not from the cold but from rigor mortis. The only sound beside the shovels cracking the frozen dirt is the sobs from the volunteers, as they deposit their comrades in mass graves. The lines of General Wolfe at Quebec recur to me:
No useless coffin enclosed his breast;
Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him,
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,
With his martial cloak around him.
Slowly and sadly we laid him down
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, we raised not a stone,
But left him alone with his glory.
As we are finishing, General Thomas rides into the middle of the field and stops. He looks at every soldier digging and, it seems, at every soldier being lowered in the ground. This time I am fifty yards away and cannot see his expression.
He does not move for ten minutes. Then he looks straight at me, salutes, and carefully, slowly, rides away.
◊◊◊
Twelve hours later he led his thirty thousand remaining soldiers into Murfreesboro. His commander, General Rosecrans, rode next to him, but we all knew that Thomas was the reason we had taken the town. He was the backbone that refused to break, that gave us the courage we had needed. As he approached the city limits, he passed a little tumbled-down frame schoolhouse. Over the door, in large letters, were the words CENTRAL ACADEMY. I heard that Thomas said, “If this is called an academy, what sort of things must their common schoolhouses be? Tennessee is a beautiful state. All it lacks is free schools and free men.”
The Negroes in the town may not have been free, but they poured out to greet us in great numbers, some of them in holiday attire. The women had flounces and the men had canes. One excited colored man told the truth about the two armies that had just tried to devastate each other: “You look like solgers. No wonder dat you wip de white trash ob de Southern army. Dey ced dey could wip two ob you, but I guess one ob you could wip two ob dem.”
The six thousand white residents were nearly gone. The public square was deserted except for a few businesses that the quartermaster had commandeered. The wide, rutted streets were quiet.
◊◊◊
A week after we had settled into the town on every square of grass and in every abandoned and stately home, I rode back over the battlefield. Trees were peppered with buckshot, and some even cut down at the trunk. Unexploded shells threatened to trip me, and haversacks, hats, shoes, and broken caissons littered the fields. The grass in town was filled with moving, human life; but the grass at the river was filled with stillness and silent objects of all kinds. On the mounds of mass graves like the ones my men had made, wooden sticks, a foot apart, stood for each body beneath. The mounds and sticks were everywhere: in the woods, meadows, cornfield, cotton fields.
I even stumbled over a mound and its handful of sticks in the deepest cedar thicket, where I had retreated to get away from the sight of the mounds in the open. On one of the sticks hung an old hat, still trying to protect the head of the soldier beneath. When spring comes the sticks will be gone and weeds will be up; by summer it will be impossible to find the shallower graves altogether.
3
After two weeks in Murfreesboro, always with the aroma of the corpses of horses from the battlefield in the air, we moved out, south toward Chattanooga. But it was slow going every day; neither Rosecrans nor Thomas seemed to want to chase the Rebels down, and boredom and desertion set in. When they drum a deserter out of the army, he is marched the length of the brigade to marshal music at the point of a bayonet. His head is shaved and sometimes a letter “D” is branded on his cheek. After all these changes, you would not have known that the momentum in the West was with us.
The Tennessee backcountry was exceedingly dusty and the only water was in the ponds. But in all of these the Confederates had dumped dead horses, mules, and dogs, to ruin the water for our use. We used the water anyway for our coffee, which had a strange soupy taste. Not surprisingly, our appetites suffered.
Almost every house along the road was deserted by men and occupied by either white women or Negro slaves. The few Union men who still remained in southern Tennessee had, for weeks past, been hiding away in the hills, and since Stone River the secessionists were up there, too. We found a man on our fifth day out of Murfreesboro with his head cut off and his entrails ripped out, probably a Union man who had been hounded down by southern sympathizers who were being hounded themselves. “It was him or us,” they’d say.
Daily routines never changed now. There was no sign of a coming battle, in which one army might finally crush the other. But Thomas would push us, demanding again and again that we do it right in drill so we could do it right in battle. Reveille at five in the morning, breakfast at six, surgeon’s call at seven, drill, eight, recall, eleven, dinner, twelve, drill again at four, recall, five, guard mounting, five-thirty, first call for dress parade, six, second call, six-thirty, tattoo, nine, taps, nine-thirty. Every day like the last, even when we moved a few miles closer to Chattanooga.
Just now, one of my men lifts up his voice: “Someone is weeping for gallant Andy Gay, Who in death lies sleeping on the field of Monterey.” Oblivious to the rain and the mud and the monotony of camp life, my thoughts drift to other scenes, when all I wanted was to be as safe as the farm families working the land back in Vernon.
The night sky clears and fills with stars and a rising moon. A thousand white tents dotting the roadside, the shadowy forms of soldiers. Another song: “The noise of the battle is over; the bugle no more calls to arms; a soldier no more, but a lover, I kneel to the power of thy charms. Sweet lady, dear lady, I’m thine.”
I cannot help but think of Neala.
◊◊◊
After that first big battle, all I could be sure about General Thomas was that he was a quiet but steady commander. He noticed everything and planned for anything. When he gathered his troops together on the first day at Stone River, and my men helped them stop the stampede of infantry to the Nashville Pike and Chattanooga railway, they instantly believed in him, or at least in his ability to hold the line against bad odds.
My own cavalry, when he did not send them forward on that second day of fighting, were begging me to go to him and plead their case. They wanted to be trusted by him, too. I did not go. I did not know him well enough. But I could see even in my own men the effect he was beginning to have on the whole army. It was a feeling of being able to handle whatever came to them.
Not of winning always—no soldier by then thought that. Not even of not losing, though they would rely on him for that again and again.
It was a feeling of being ready.
His wife, Frances, gave me a letter years later that he wrote to her after Stone River. “Being ready” to him meant something beside winning.
My dear Frances,
We have had our first great engagement, and I will never know if it was worth it. You have read already, I am sure, about the battle near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, that the soldiers call “Stone River.” I am alive, as are most of my men; as far as I can tell, the South lost more of its boys than we
