Days Without End

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.

Johnny Reb he’s happy then and all the ruckus slowly ceases and then we got the curious pleasure as a man might say lying in his teeth of seeing their faces up close. Well truth to say they don’t look too devilish. Some of them laughing at us, pointing their muskets to round us up. If ever a man felt like a goddamn errant sheep it was then. Flocks of sad-looking bluecoats gathered in. God damn it. We feel shame and hurt much worse we find than bullets. Maybe a tincture of relief that we ain’t been butchered straight. They say Rebs like to kill their prisoners in harsh country but these cold-looking boys don’t do that. We never do hear no good story about the Rebs and we don’t like to be so close. Seems these boys be a division out of Arkansas, some place like that. Speaking like they got acorns in their mouths. God damn it. Dan FitzGerald says something to his captor and he gets a full box in the mush. Dan goes down and then gets up again, keeps silent. One of our companies is a bunch of them coloured boys and these is unpicked from the weave of prisoners. We got guards all thickly about us and looks like we being prepared for a march. Orders are given in their queer Southern voices. To take an order from a Reb. Most holy Jesus. We still have the hearts of free men though now we’re prisoners and those hearts are bursting with a wretched force. The Rebs line up the coloured company, faces to an old field ditch. About a hundred boys. They don’t know what’s happening no more than we do. An order is shouted and fifty Rebs are firing into the blacks and then those not shot start to run and cry out and then fifty other Rebs step forward with loaded guns to finish the task. The soldiers fall into the ragged ditch and then the job is ended with pistols and then the Rebs step away like they been shooting birds. John Cole looking at me with wordless amaze. Maybe here and there a doubtful gaze. But also a grimness here and there and here and there a glaze of satisfaction. Job that needed doing and it done, the Reb faces seem to say. Then the rest of us is told to form ranks and then we are told to move and then we move.

Andersonville. You ever hear tell of that place? Five days it take to march us down and if ever a spot weren’t worth the walk that’s it. All we got for our strength along the way is filthy water and soggy lumps of cornbread as they call it. Neither corn nor bread you ask me. A regiment of yellowlegs to guard us and they don’t have nothing either but the same foul fare. Worst-looking lot of soldiers I ever seen. Some of them got the shakes and some goitres and worse. It’s like being herded by ghouls. Hundreds fall on the trail and those with wounds must seek a surgeon in heaven. Bodies kicked away into ditches like the blacks was. Guess there must be many a poor bluecoat sleeping the eternal sleep in the ditches of Tennessee and Georgia. Feet swole up till you can’t keep your boots on or fear to take them off for never getting them back on. Hunger in your belly like a growing stone. The weight of hunger weighing you down mile by mile. And such a sick heart and a drenching fear. Third day a big thunderstorm and it only a huge song singing of our distress. Hard to get the darkness out of your head. Full ten thousand acres of dark blue and black clouds and lightning flinging its sharp yellow paint across the woods and the violent shout and clamour of the thunder. Then a thick deluge to speak of coming death. Tramping on and on, barefoot or clacking boot. Our faces round and sere and bleached like the seedpods of the flower honesty. If we had hidden knives we would fillet out these Rebels’ hearts. That the first day and the second. Looking about wanting to rend and ruin if we given a chance. John Cole says he keep seeing floating in his mind the drummer boy McCarthy who done his utmost and died. And then he seeing over and over the coloured men dropped foully into the ditch. Keep your thoughts quiet, John Cole, I say. Then the third day in the thunderstorm we suffer a change. The sun of Death burns our innards and the moon of Death pulls at our blood. Our blood slows and youth is cancelled and we feel like aged men full of years. Dejection and despair. Such weariness as was never recorded in the annals of warring men.

Well we come into this wide compound and see a great horde of poor bedraggled men. Union soldiers as once was. We got maybe a thousand tents Sibleys and A-frames. That’s our city. Avenue of dirt between making two halves and fifty paths into these curious residences. Must be three thousand prisoners maybe more. Hard to make out. Forlorn and ragged trees also look like prisoners of something beyond the high log fence. Watchtowers looking down on us. All we Irish troop in. Guards everywhere standing with muskets sloped and Confederate boys sitting by their propped guns maybe waiting for the order to annihilate us. We don’t know. A stench like it were coming from the arse of the devil. Heavy crust and smear of filth everywhere that has killed every growing thing. We can see soldiers taking a shit at the sinks as open as a field. Bony moony arses. Then we sit in thirteen to a tent, me and John and Dan among the rest. Dan keeping close to us because his mind be dark with remembering. He seen all this before, he says, at first I can’t catch what he means. The journey’s not been good to Dan, his feet are leaking yellow water looks like. If there’s a surgeon he must be on furlough, we don’t see them. Goddamn guards puts in two blacks with us, seem to think it’s humorous judging by their grins. One of them got a hand falling off where he took a swipe of a sabre and he’s missing some toes. This boy needs a doctor and he groaning all day and night on the filthy floor. All I can do is watch him. His friend tries to clean him up but everything’s too sore I guess. His friend says his name is Carthage Daly and at first he looks at us to see if we haters. I guess we ain’t because he tells us they been fighting now a year. Seen action in Virginia and also was under the walls of Richmond as the saying goes. Seems like a decent man and he tries and helps his friend who he says is called Bert Calhoun. Young Bert Calhoun needs a damn doctor is my opinion but there ain’t one. The whole prison camp full of this need. The Reb in charge of our little merry lane of tents is First Lieutenant Sprague. Any question you ask him he laughs, as if to say, you filthy bluecoats funny boys. We amuse him greatly. I ask the guard is there something to be done for Bert Calhoun and he laughs too. Guess we must be one of them comedic acts of Mr Noone. Probably could tour the South judging by the laughter. That boy’s hand is hanging by a thread, I say. Can’t you get someone to do for him? Surgeon won’t attend no nigger, says the guard. Private Kidd is his handle. Ain’t you got to tend a man so sick? says John Cole. I don’t know, says Private Kidd. He should a thought of that afore he thought to fight us. Goddamn niggers. There’s another dark-haired boy in the tent with us wants us to stop asking to help Bert Calhoun. Says they shoot anyone that helps the niggers. Says the niggers put in with us to find out where we stand. Says he seen just yesterday a guard shoot a bluecoat sergeant because he asked just the same question John Cole did. I’m looking at John Cole now see how he taking this. John Cole nods like a sage. Guess I understand, he says.

Bert Calhoun dies but he ain’t the only one. The winter drear with her icy soul’s come in now and there ain’t a stick of wood. Half the prisoners don’t got shoes no more and all of us is missing bits of clothes. We ain’t got a coat between us being summer and fall soldiers. That’s the cold then eating your skin like rats. They’ve opened a wide long pit in the east corner and every day the dead are tipped in there. Maybe thirty a night. Maybe more. We ain’t got no goddamned food except that lousy cornbread. We get three fingers of that a day. Swear to the good God no man was ever conceived could live on that. Week after week go by and we praying Mr Lincoln will exchange for us. That’s how it used to be done. But Lieutenant Sprague delights to tell us that Mr Lincoln says he don’t want no skeletons back. That’s us. He don’t want to exchange Reb prisoners all plump with Northern grub for no Union skeletons. No good to him no more, says Homer Sprague. And he laughing again. We such a source of fun. A river-source of fun. We lying there week after week. No point moving about except to drag your sorry backside over for a shit. The sinks. Such a stink you never could imagine. Nothing ever cleared out. I swear you could read the long dread history of cornbread in them sinks. Now the nights drop far below the limit of the gauge. We all sleep like a nest of slugs tucked tight together. We take turns on the outside of the pile. You might die in the night from the frost against your heart and many do. Over to the pit with them. After six months we don’t care as much as we did. We’re trying to live but we have a sneaky care to die. Handsome John Cole, Handsome John Cole. Dan FitzGerald’s a man of bones. John too. Myself too. It’s nearly crazy how thin a man can get and still breathe and move. In the south corner are Reb prisoners in a special hut and these boys are tried and taken out and shot. Their own boys so what chance we got. Mr Lincoln, please send us news. Mr Lincoln, we done beared arms for you. Don’t leave us here. Lieutenant Sprague must of been spawned by the devil because he laughs and laughs. Maybe he laughing because otherwise he would tear out his hair and go mad. I guess maybe so. They got precious little to eat theyselves so it’s skeletons minding skeletons somewhat. They ain’t withholding food, they ain’t got any. I swear I see guards han’t got no shoes either. What crazy war is this? What world we making? We don’t know. I guess whatever world it is is ending. We come to the end time and here it is. Just like the goddamn Bible says, says John Cole. How come we lying here and guarded and inside four walls and the camp lying within this wooded land and the dogs of winter biting and scraping at our limbs? What in tarnation for? John Cole just for eternal badness keeps an eye on Carthage Daly. He don’t speak for him and he don’t speak against him but he inclined to share his cornbread because the guard don’t give Carthage one tiny morsel. Not a crumb. John Cole sharing a moiety of nothing. Tears his cornbread down the middle and when no one seeing passes it to Carthage. I watch this day after day for three four months. Got to say it is a marvel how the mortal bones stand out. I can see his hip bones and his leg bones where they thicken at the knees. His arms just whittled branches from a dried-out tree. Long hours we lie close and John Cole lays his hand on my head and leaves it there. John Cole, my beau.