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.
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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.
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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 lost of ours. General Bragg did not serve his boys well, I am afraid. Some of them surely were from my home county in Virginia, just as some of ours were surely from Albany and your hometown. I prepare them to the best of my ability. I go out and watch my men bury their own and I no longer know what victory is. Is it measured by how many men are buried each time? Is it enough to measure it by who has moved a half mile toward the enemy’s lines from the night before?
When I went to West Point, I assumed that becoming an officer at our nation’s military college would give me a purpose and clarity. When events confronted me with a choice between serving the North or Virginia, that choice was clear. And I do not regret my decision. But now all I care about is planning a battle, any battle, to win with the fewest casualties. I will not let them say of me that, coming from the South, I made less than a total effort for the Union.
My hope is that some day my family will understand and forgive me. I miss you terribly, my dear Frances. Your support and affection are what sustains me.
Your loving George
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It was nine months before we fought another big battle, at Chickamauga. The routine of camp life was relieved by a skirmish now and then, but very little was happening. Desertion was rampant, and generals’ wives practically lived with their husbands. But General Thomas never took a leave during this time, and his wife never came from the East to pretend with him that there was not a war going on.
You would think that nine months would be enough time to devise a strategy to defeat the Rebels. We won a victory of sorts at Stone River and caused the Confederates to give up their first push to the Ohio River. And Grant had Vicksburg bottled up for months.
Winning the war was the issue. But the plan seemed to be nothing more than waiting and moving and hoping. This was what finally ended Rosecrans’ career in the West. He seemed to think that we could invade the South and win just by attrition, by one small battle after another. He could not grasp the fact that the Rebel cavalry alone, with countless quick strikes, would ruin that plan by frustrating our army enough to make the public in the North too impatient with the war.
General Thomas had a different idea of winning: you had to crush the Confederate army in the West with a major victory, one so large that they would give up and go home. He did not believe, like Grant, that having more soldiers in the field would be enough; that you could wear the South down through numbers. Our men would have to be better prepared, better equipped, and better supplied as well. And the weakest part of our army—the cavalry—had to be brought up to a level with the infantry and artillery. As long as Rosecrans was in charge, Thomas could prepare the army—and