Colonel Neale was pleased with us but the high-ups weren’t so pleased with him and he been replaced and Captain Wilson been bumped up to major and we got a new colonel who don’t know us from a hole in the wall. Colonel Neale is now again the major and he has gone back to Fort Laramie and Starling Carlton wanted to go with him but he signed and won’t be released from happy servitude for another month. Colonel said he would be glad to have us again at Laramie so that was very pleasing. John Cole says we could just go pick up Winona when all this was over or our three years was up whichever come sooner and skedaddle over there. Why not? Well, first thing, you and something there don’t agree, I say. Maybe the water. Anyhow what about the dresses? Well, says John Cole, we could go on all the damn way to San Francisco. Find us a theatre there and put riot into the hearts of simple men. Or stay put with Mr Noone, why not? I say. World’s our oyster, says John Cole, looks like. So we making plans like honeymooners. Our service up in four months or thereabouts. No one thinks the war will be over then and some say we will never see the end of it. The Rebs are stronger than they ever were and their cavalry is like a flashing fire of death, they say. They ain’t got proper provisioning, they ain’t hardly got food, their horses are skinny and their eyes are aflame. It’s a mystery. Maybe they all ghosts and don’t need nourishment.
Month’s up and our old pal Starling gets his papers and tucks them into his sack which is just two square feet of gunny cloth. It is a burning hot morning in early fall and his heart suddenly opens as he is going. We have come through a deal of slaughter together and everything we have done adds up to a sum of regard right enough. Starling Carlton is the strangest man I have called friend. The book of Starling Carlton no man can read easily. The letters all cluttered and lots of smudges and blackness. I seen that man kill other men without much regret. Kill or be killed. All the things he says he hates are the things most dear to him and maybe he knows it and maybe he don’t. John Cole gives him a horn-handled Bowie knife as a keepsake and Starling stares at it like it were a bejewelled crown. Thank you, John, he says. Off he goes after his beloved major and maybe that was the measure of the man called Starling Carlton. That in essence he were true.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THOSE OF US STILL indentured to Mr Lincoln are being force-marched into Tennessee but then for many days we can’t even find the enemy. That’s pretty queer since Johnny Reb is told to be everywhere. But not where we looking. We’re knocking round woodland and goddamned sore-looking Tennessee fields and we don’t see no fresh-baked pies now. It’s one thing to go on a forced march but it’s another for the supply wagons to come behind. Walking and walking like goddamned marionettes. Major Wilson is in command of three companies, A, B, and C, but maybe he in command of the whole regiment because all the new colonel does is drink rum. Where the hell he gets his rum is a question. But he gets it and he drinks it. Spends most of his time asleep in the back of the colour party’s cart and it ain’t a pretty sight. Guess Major Wilson can cover it well enough but still. This colonel fella is called Callaghan so that might explain it. Feel like lighting a candle to Major Neale next church I come to.
After many such confounding days cavalry detail rides up and has orders for the colonel so Major Wilson takes them and reads them quick so the irregularity may feel less. All ahead we can see a great pall of smoke rising and we can even hear the clump-clump of shells like giants walking over hard ground. Guess there’s a mighty battle up ahead and now we are to put ourselves in the guise of a relieving corps. We aim to do it. Dan FitzGerald nods to a gaggle of recruits to his side that never seen battle. You all ready? he says. Good lads. Now Dan not even a officer, not by a long gap. Guess they are going pale in the face from wondering what the hell happening now. Scraggly beards like frocken bushes, farmboy faces. You get your muskets loaded now, boys, says Dan, easy like he was their own brother. That’s how the new boys will live through. Someone showing them when to be brave and when in the name of the good Lord to run like thieves.
We got to move up quick because the boys up there been holding a line for three days. Looks like we are the succour long awaited. Dark fields and troubled crops, the big sky growing melancholy with evening. Doubt they’ll light the candles in the small farmhouses tucked into woody corners. Don’t want to be attracting no demons of soldiers along with the big moths of Tennessee. Wake in the morning and your tent be speckled with the beggars. Our few thousands climb the last picket fences and go on up into slowly rising country. You can feel the new effort in your limbs and the faces of the new men look strange and affrighted like they was running against their will. It’s the corporals’ task to make it all seem righteous. Got to put a sense into them that this is manly work. They been trained six weeks in sticking bayonets into sacks and loading on their backs. Digging breastworks. If they run now they will be shot anyhow by the captains coming up behind. Best keep going, boys of Massachusetts. In due course of things we start to meet our bluecoats coming back down. Guess they got the order to fall back now we are racing up. Man they look like weary boys and the wettest soldiers in the history of the world. Rain up here in the hills be like swimming in a creek. Who you boys? one asks as he stumbles down. We the Irish, says one of the recruits, in a squawky henlike voice. Very glad to see you boys coming up, he says. I can see straight off the heart it puts into our new men. John Cole appears at my side and says, who was that man? I don’t know, John, I says. Didn’t you recognise him? says John. No. That was Trooper Watchorn, to the life, he says. Trooper Watchorn dead, I say, we shot him.
On we go. We got many soldiers now coming back. Hot up there, boys, watch youselves, they say. Faugh a ballagh. Men coming back down on the backs of other men, wounds dripping blood on the quiet ground. Soon the sound of gunfire and shellfire is closer. We break from the trees and all before us on a rolling hill without trees we see the front line massed and firing. The Rebs not far off deep in long lines of rifle pits. Much better safe than us. How’d they get their artillery up this far? Must have come by another way. Our bluecoats loading and firing. Now we see we got at least rough breastworks for a shield. That’s something. Our arrival prompts a mass exchange of places. Boys with exhausted and reddened faces or strange whitened faces greet us. Thank God, they say. Their order’s given to fall back through us. As they go on they give a scattered cheer. Thank God, thank God.
The day swaps sight for darkness and now the fierce firing ceases. The Reb lines go quiet and likewise us. Can’t see a blessed thing. The night’s so dark with clouds that even when the moon rises she can’t find a fingerwidth through. It’s like we was all struck blind by sudden catastrophe. Holy Jesus, says Dan FitzGerald. Was ever night so dark? Then we thinking we ain’t eaten nothing all the livelong day and is there any chance that salt pork come up with us? Gotta feed these crouching souls. But looks like not, all told. We set our pickets and our sentries as thick as a fence. Don’t want them snarling yellowlegs creeping up. Their guns still have a distance so they still lobbing shells for a while anyhow. We have batteries right and left it seems, likely on flatter ledges, and for a while also in duet with the Rebs our guns reply. Then in that vast murk of night it all stops as if a performance was now at a close and the players taking off their face-paint to go home. Major Wilson marks the trouble of this place. Worst thing looks like we don’t have no advantage of neither height nor numbers. Horrible stalemate and no doubt the suffering and the casualties have been great these past days. We hear that maybe two hundred been carried down. Dead as rabbits mostly. We taste in our mouths the terror of this place like it were bread of a kind. I sense in my bones we don’t got enough men to hold. It’s a queer instinct comes from long service. Like we was two plates of a scales, the Rebs and the bluecoats. Each man a grain of corn. Seems to be the scales banging down their side. Situation is such you’re not keen for morning because morning will bring back the war. We ain’t sleeping now though we might try a while. You got to stop your hands gripping your musket so tight you strangling it. Try to breathe easy and pray the moon won’t show. All the black night we think our private thoughts and then at dawn light touches everything in its kingdom. Tips against leaves and strokes the faces of men. Who can we blame then when the Rebs come at us from both sides surprising the bejesus out of us? Pour over the verdant hill in front for good measure. Feebly we fire in disarray but it’s as sudden and absolute as a flood. No one knows the numbers of the Rebs. There must be thousands upon thousands. We thinking we looking at two brigades at most but Captain Wilson now opines we gazing upon a corps entire and he gives the order to surrender. Surrender! Tell that to the yellowlegs sticking us with bayonets and busting their muskets into our faces. If they ain’t got time to reload they turn the musket and hammer it onto our heads. We’d fight for two cents but all up the line the majors and captains are concurred in surrender and now we lifting our arms like lonesome fools. Otherwise we going to be no one left. In a half hour of slaughter we lose a thousand anyhow. Ten thousand demons fallen on our bones. God help us but I don’t reckon He does that day.