Will closed the old book and carefully set it down on his desk. He’d meant to just skim through it, but he found that the stories Thaddius Riker told—despite his rather primitive literary skills—were fascinating. Riker had accompanied Major General William Tecumseh Sherman on his long fight to Atlanta, and at this point in the tale, they had moved on after putting that city to the torch, headed for Savannah and the sea. Will knew enough about military history to realize that Sherman’s assault on Atlanta and then Savannah proved more than successful, that it was a turning point in the war, capturing one of the Confederacy’s most vital supply centers and cutting Southern rail links. Additionally, by leaving detachments behind to maintain his own supply lines all the way back up to Nashville, Sherman had cut off the South’s western states from the capital in Richmond. The move had been bold, brilliant, and extraordinarily effective.
Sherman, it was said, had coined the phrase “War is hell,” and Old Iron Boots Riker’s diary seemed to confirm that assessment. An earlier entry, about a friend of Thaddius’s whose arm had been amputated in a field hospital by a drunken surgeon using a dull, rusted bayonet, had been as good a description of hell as any Will ever hoped to read. Will’s ancestor had indeed been through hell, but he had survived it.
Anyway, reading the diary had helped to take Will out of his own life and concerns, which was good because otherwise he’d have been thinking of nothing but Felicia day and night. There was nothing wrong with thinking about Felicia, he resolved, but there had to be limits, even to that. He wasn’t opposed to having a social life, even a romantic one, but he was at the Academy to do a job, to prepare himself for service to Starfleet, and even Felicia Mendoza had to take second place to that.
Will found the diary hard to read: its brittle pages flaked and chipped as he turned them, and Thaddius Riker’s handwriting was cramped and spidery. Sometimes blotches of water, ink, or something that Will thought might be blood obscured words or even whole sections. But even so, no matter where he dipped in, he found himself lost in his ancestor’s exploits, and only occasional mental images of Felicia’s radiant smile or the way her strong body filled out her Academy uniform could haul him back to the twenty-fourth century. For the past couple of days he had been turning to the diary as often as he could make the time, in between classes, other work, and little bits of social time.
William Sherman had been the kind of general Will could appreciate, and there were times, reading about “Uncle Billy,” that he wondered if his own parents had named him for Thaddius’s friend. After taking Atlanta, Sherman had chased General Hood around the South for a while. Tiring of that exercise, he had returned to his original plan for after Atlanta’s defeat—the march to Savannah. He moved in the exact opposite direction from Hood, leading his sixty-two thousand troops toward the sea. He left behind him all sources of supplies and communication—completely on his own, behind enemy lines, but with the intention of routing the enemy and showing them why it was a bad idea to continue fighting. All the way across Georgia they marched, torching fields, killing stock, liberating slaves, and generally making Confederate sympathizers curse Sherman’s name for years to come. The plan was reckless, foolish, utterly wrongheaded, and absolutely the right thing to do.
Thaddius Riker, at the head of the New York 102nd, was with Sherman for the whole thing. They had fought through the hills and forests of northern Georgia together; before and after taking Atlanta they had fought at Kennesaw Mountain and Allatoona and Rome. Thaddius Riker had taken a minié ball in the shoulder at a battle in a place called Pine Mountain, and had fallen, inside Confederate territory. Only the aid of a mysterious stranger helped him get back behind Federal lines, probably saving his life. “I had never seen this fellow before,” Thaddius had written. “But he came along at just the moment when I needed someone. Without him, I would not be here writing these words today. Later I tried to find him agin, to thank him, but he had vanished back into whatever regiment he came from. Whoever he may be, I owe my life to him, and he has my thanks forever.”
But it was near another small town called Garner’s Ridge that Thaddius showed his own strategic thinking.
Cut off from supply lines, Sherman’s men had to live off the land. As Sherman pointed out, if millions of Southerners could do it, his force of several thousand could too. But it meant raiding farmhouses, barnyards, and fields as well as hunting native animals. As an additional benefit, any crops or livestock the Union Army didn’t leave behind was food the Confederate Army couldn’t eat when they came in pursuit.
To further that end, Sherman sent his troops on foraging missions as they cut their swath to the sea. These foragers had express orders not to loot or pillage civilian homes, but to cause as much damage as they could to supply depots or arms warehouses, to put the torch to crops, to free slaves and to supply the Federals whenever possible. According to Thaddius’s diary, these orders were frequently ignored. “I seen three boys come around the bend this morning,” he scrawled at one point. “One wore a long white dress with bows and a bustle, over his uniform, with necklaces that looked like gold tied around his head. The next had outfitted himself with a fine beaver top hat and a gentleman’s coat. The last one was covered in muck, and held a squealing baby pig in his arms.”
Thaddius himself, it seemed, had taken Sherman’s instructions to heart. He kept the New York 102nd in line and under control. Outside the tiny town of Garner’s Ridge, he had led a foraging party of seven, trusted men all. They had come across a large, wealthy plantation, with manicured fields and lawns surrounding an enormous white house. As the men approached the farmhouse, a blonde woman who Old Iron Boots described as “a natural Southern beautey” stepped onto the wide porch with a rifle in her hands, pointing it at the men.
“I reckon you gentlemen are lost,” she said bravely. “Y’all are in the Confederacy now, and those blue coats are not very popular.”
“No, ma’am,” Jim Railsback, a sergeant in Thaddius Riker’s regiment replied. “We ain’t lost at all. It’s just that the Confederacy is shrinking around you.”
“Well, this plantation is still a part of it, and I would appreciate it if you all were on your way.”
“We can’t do that, ma’am,” Thaddius said. “We need to have us a look around, see if you have any provisions here that we can use. General Sherman’s army is a hungry one, ma’am. We won’t come in your house or cause you any grief, we can avoid it, but if you’ve got a smokehouse or anything in your bam we’ll find it and help ourselves. You try to use that rifle you’ll find yourself asking for a lot of trouble you don’t want.”
Thaddius believed she was thinking it over, but then another soldier, called only Frankie in the diary, shouted, “Window, sir!”
Guns were drawn and pointed at a downstairs window, where Thaddius saw only a fluttering of curtain. “Who’s inside, ma’am? Soldiers? Children?”
“My children are soldiers,” the woman said, and now Thaddius could see that she was older than he had thought at first, but still trim and attractive. “Fifteen and nineteen, and if they don’t beat you, their children will.”
“You really think the war’s goin’ to last that long?” Railsback asked.
“Never mind that,” Thaddius Riker snapped. “Who’s inside the house? Speak up or we’ll have to go in and see for ourselves.”
The woman shrugged. “It’s just the darkies,” she said. “They’re hiding from you too. They’ve heard that y’all are tools of the devil, and it’s the gospel truth.”