The Bride of Texas, page 29
“You’re quite right,” said Shake. “I’ve gone to pot mentally since I joined the army. Sometimes working with your mind can be honest, yes — and you can make more that way than working with your hands.”
“Making shady deals isn’t working with your mind,” said Paidr.
“What is, then?”
“Teaching, maybe,” said Paidr. “Or preaching. Priests work with their minds.”
“What makes you think priests are honest?”
“Watch what you say!” the devout Houska broke in, brandishing his large farmer’s fist an inch from Shake’s nose.
The sergeant intervened again. “So why didn’t Salek quit Lincoln’s Rifles when the shooting started? You say he was richer than Kabrna or that butcher.”
“That’s what surprised everyone,” said Shake. “It’s like the Copperheads used to say: rich men wage wars, poor men fight them.”
“Not always,” Zinkule chimed in. “Especially the ones who inherit their money. Look at General Millgate — he put up a whole regiment out of his own pocket, never took pay, and to top it all, he lost a leg at Shiloh. The real weasels are the ones who never made a cent till the war started. But worst of all are the substitutes. They get paid to take someone’s place, get whatever bonus they can for it, then desert and sign up all over again. Some of them have done it ten times over, I’ve heard.”
“You’re right,” said Shake. “The rich-by-inheritance have military honour in their blood. But the ones who’ve earned their money by mental work or by being smart appreciate it more, and they try to stay alive to enjoy it.”
“You think poor men don’t want to stay alive?” grumbled Houska.
“Wealthy men have more to lose,” said Shake. “All the poor man has is his life, and that’s not something you can bargain with. That’s why poor men are so eager to join the army. Their lives are worth something for a change.”
“Poor men are stupid,” declared Zinkule.
“Are you saying I’m stupid?” Houska turned to him angrily.
“You’re an exception,” Shake said hurriedly. “Like Salek was. But why?” He looked at his stupid companions, and the sergeant was compelled to wonder just what America would be like without their kind of stupidity. “Did you know that Salek was the very first American Czech to divorce his wife?” asked Shake.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” said Houska.
“Not in the church you can’t. He got a civil divorce. It just goes to show you that, for all he’s a Christian, Salek had grounds for divorce that were stronger than his fear of burning in hell.”
“He sure did,” said Kakuska. “She screwed every Czech in Chicago.”
“She wasn’t that patriotic,” said Shake. “She put out for Polacks too, and even for married men without a single drop of Slavic blood.”
The sergeant said nothing. He knew more about it than Kakuska.
And he knew why the general was so quick to dismiss the likelihood that Slocum’s battalion would encounter Johnston’s infantry at Bentonville, instead of just a few squadrons of Wheeler’s cavalry. Less than a year after the general had chosen him to join his staff, the sergeant had come to understand the two faces of war. In his first fifteen years of soldiering — first under Windischgraetz and his beadle, von Hanzlitschek, and then in tiny outposts of the small regular army of the United States — he had been exposed to only one of them: the face seen by the foot-soldier and the noncom. He brought one thing from the Royal Imperial Austrian Army that served him well in America: drill. All he had to do was replace von Hanzlitschek’s brutal and punitive style with straightforward discipline — though the bellow remained. He soon became a drill sergeant. When the war started, he mastered the art of transforming rural romantics and urban adventurers into soldiers, men who no longer saw military orders as an imposition on their personal liberty as Americans, and who came (kicking and screaming) to the conclusion that courage would lead to victory far more quickly if it was shaped by some good old-fashioned Austrian-style authority.
The face of war that the foot-soldier and the noncom saw was the face of confusion, marches here and there for no apparent purpose, building fortifications, tearing them down, skirmishing, confusion in which death was imminent and victory remote, and it all seemed like pricking an elephant with a hatpin. The sergeant knew this face of war all too well, but in this new American war not everything he had learned from von Hanzlitschek still applied. Rifles had a greater range and accuracy than they had had at the barricades in Prague, and they could be reloaded faster. In Europe the slow advance against a kneeling enemy (though here the enemy didn’t kneel but lay flat on his belly, in a rifle pit or behind a palisade) became, at the range of a hundred yards, an awkward charge with ranks closed tight together, crouching elbow to elbow. Here —
In the American war, new weapons were constantly appearing on the battlefields. Once, at the Yazoo River, they brought something to Sherman’s tent that seemed at first like an expensive joke. The muzzle of an ordinary breech-loader was mounted on a two-wheeled gun-carriage. Attached to the weapon at the breech was a tin funnel topped with a rectangular box. It looked like an oversized coffee-grinder, with a crank handle on one side and a rudder-like device protruding from the hind end. The artillery officer who had come to demonstrate the weapon took it down into a narrow valley that formed a natural shooting-range, and had a row of empty biscuit barrels placed on the opposite slope; then he stood behind the device. He grasped the rudder while an artillery sergeant took hold of the crank. The general’s staff formed a semicircle around them and the general positioned himself beside the man with the crank. He nodded for them to begin.
“Fire!” the officer shouted. His assistant began turning the crank and, inured though they were to the noise of war, all of them jumped when the machine began exploding like a whole squad of riflemen, emitting a steady stream of flashes, belching smoke like a chimney, as the artillery officer slowly moved the rudder from one side to the other and the barrels on the opposite slope toppled one by one. The officer barked another order, and his assistant stopped turning the crank.
The officer turned to the general. “General, sir?”
“Hmmm,” said the general. “If every battery had two of these.…” He paused while the sergeant tried to estimate how many men it would take the place of. “Let me try it,” said the general.
The officer stepped away from the rudder, but the general reached for the crank and began to turn it. The officer took the rudder again. Again the machine let off its thrilling staccato racket, while smoke poured out of the muzzle and the reset barrels toppled over again. Then something happened: a part flew off the barrel, the general gasped and let go of the crank, the noise stopped suddenly, and there was General Sherman hopping around the contraption on one leg, filling the air with curses.
For three days after the demonstration the general walked with a bad limp. The contraption did not become part of the armament of Sherman’s great army.
By this time, as a member of his staff, the sergeant was also getting to know the face of war most familiar to the general. By night, civilians would arrive on horseback and slip inside the general’s tent; when the wind blew the tent flaps open, the sergeant sometimes saw the general’s reddish head by the light of a candle, as Sherman watched intently while a civilian’s finger traced a path across a map. Next day the army would make a large detour. There would be a lot of grumbling about how unnecessary it was but the sergeant knew it made sense, even though it often didn’t in the long run. He was gradually learning the art that the general was studying — by a process of trial and error that often had the ambulances filled and dripping with blood. There was confusion, but now and then the confusion would settle into patterns that could be understood, briefly, before reverting to chaos again. Maps were less than precise; reports from the scouts and spies who came by night were often full of inconsistencies. Cleverness distorted the art, faulty observation distorted intelligence. On one occasion the enemy fortifications seemed to bristle with cannon, but when the frustrated general captured the position in a dangerous attack the cannon turned out to be wooden — yet when Lieutenant Bain delivered an angry kick to one of the harmless muzzles, hornets swarmed out of the hollow interior and stung him so badly that he died a hero’s death. After the battle, they found a prostrate Rebel bass-horn player on the battlefield. He told them how General Beauregard compelled his one band to make exhausting marches up and down the long meandering battlefront, stopping every quarter of a mile to play a different tune, fortissimo, to make General Butler, who was listening closely from the Union palisades, think there were many different regimental bands and hence many different regiments facing his depleted ranks. That night the Union general withdrew his division from the battlefront, defeated by a single weary band.
Kapsa, having retreated to the infirmary with a violent two-week bout of the Kansas quickstep, heard a story from General Rosecrans’s cook, who was recovering from a bayonet wound he’d received at Chickamauga. Rosecrans was another apprentice in this nascent art, and he’d stood restless and impatient listening to a sharp-eared old woman outside a rough-hewn log cabin on a hilltop near Chickamauga. A cannon boomed from the woods in the valley, and the woman said, “That there, that would be from some place near Reed’s Bridge.” General Rosecrans nervously examined his poorly drawn map but couldn’t find Reed’s Bridge. Another cannon sounded from the woods and the old woman said, “Now that there, that could be from Kelly’s farm.” But the farm wasn’t on the map; instead, the general found Reed’s Bridge where the farm should have been. A third cannon roared. The old woman fingered the warts on her chin and shook her head. “Now that there, I can’t rightly say. Could be Connolly’s Grove — but then again, maybe not.” General Rosecrans found Connolly’s Grove on the map but it was a long way from where the sound of the third cannon had echoed from. Then he remembered that the old woman had admitted having a son with Hook’s division; although she’d sworn her loyalty to the Union cause, she might well be — indeed, everything suggested that she was — deliberately misleading him. So he gave up on her information but not on her method — he simply began listening for himself. The individual cannon blended into a basso profundo, interrupted now and then by the crackle of rifle fire. The old woman scowled at him through the window of the log cabin as he paced back and forth shouting, “That’s Brownlow attacking!” And a while later, “No, Brownlow is just starting his attack now!” And then, “That’s Negley! Running a little late!” In the end, the method proved a complete failure. Ordinary courage and butchery prevented the worst, but the Battle of Chickamauga was won, without much glory, by Braxton Bragg.
And yet the apprentices were gradually becoming journeymen, if not masters, of the art, which was why the sergeant understood his general’s certainty when he reassured General Davis: “There’s no infantry standing in our path, Jeff. All they have is a few squadrons of cavalry. Sweep them aside and you’re fine. We’ll meet tomorrow at Cox’s Bridge.”
Several days earlier, in a house near Cheraw that he had chosen for his quarters that night, Sherman had found evidence that General Hardee had recently stayed there. The evidence included a New York Tribune only a few days old, and the paper made him as angry as he’d been at Vicksburg. “God damn that scoundrel Greeley!” he cursed as he read the editorial. “Journalistic scum!”
Hardee had in fact slept in the little house the night before, and had undoubtedly read the paper as well. By sending Slocum’s battalion towards Raleigh, Sherman had hoped to trick Hardee and Johnston into thinking that he intended to force a battle for the capital of North Carolina. They would then have diverted their weary regiments towards Raleigh, and cleared his way to Goldsboro and the port and Morehead City, where he planned to meet up with a flotilla carrying supplies from Savannah, put his men in new uniforms, and, thus refreshed, strike the decisive blow of the war and smash the Confederacy to a pulp. But the publisher of the Tribune had tried his hand at strategic analysis with unfortunate accuracy: “The next time we hear from Sherman will be from Goldsboro,” Greeley wrote. “We have determined that the supply-vessels from Savannah are to rendezvous with Sherman’s forces in Morehead City.”
The general was all the more furious the next day, when he found indications that Hardee had read and understood the editorial all too well. Six miles south of the village of Averasboro — at a spot where the two rivers on either side of Slocum’s advance, the Cape Fear River and the Black River, were less than four miles apart — Hardee had posted General Taliaferro’s infantry division right in the way of General Kilpatrick’s reconnaissance units, and had forced a battle the general would gladly have avoided.
Damn Greeley!
During the battle, Sherman behaved in a way Kapsa had never seen before. While Kakuska sweated to help put up the barricades Kil had ordered to halt the advance of Taliaferro’s infantry, and while Shake in the Twentieth Corps sweated with fear because he desperately wanted to live to see the war’s end, which was now indisputably imminent, and while the pandemonium of battle — the first the Twentieth Corps had seen since the battle of Atlanta almost nine months before — continued long into the night and started again early the next morning, Sherman and his staff sat well beyond the range of the guns. The general wore a grim expression and seemed to be in a trance. The sergeant knew why. Thanks to one man’s journalistic ambitions, his work of art was being destroyed in the bottleneck between Cape Fear and the Black, and his soldiers were paying for Greeley’s scoop with their blood.
Indeed, the main reason Hardee engaged Sherman at Averasboro was to find out if Greeley was right in speculating that Sherman’s apparent march towards Raleigh was just a feint. When Hardee ordered a retreat, and when the spies and prisoners began to trickle into the woods where Sherman sat frustrated amid his bewildered staff, the stories they told revealed a surprising fact: Slocum’s successful resistance had convinced Hardee that Greeley had been wrong. Evidently, Hardee had concluded from the encounter that Sherman was not heading for Goldsboro after all, but intended to fight a decisive battle at Raleigh.
They were all still learning the art of war.
At noon on March 17 — St. Patrick’s Day — the general ordered Slocum’s battalion to move north-east, towards Bentonville and Cox’s Bridge, while Hardee and Johnston’s troops — so the general thought — were marching north-west to protect Raleigh. The work of art was salvaged, and the regiments and companies and gun batteries and the column of supply wagons of Sherman’s great army rolled on towards Bentonville in the drenching spring rain.
The rain stopped, the moon appeared and lit the blossoming apple trees, while in the distance in Bentonville a few tiny lights glimmered in the dark, and Shake was telling the others about how his Readers’ Circle scheme had failed.
He used to lend his five books out, but at that time Latin script was all the rage in Bohemia, and when he finally succeeded, with the help of Molly Kakuska, in assembling a Readers’ Circle, Padecky came to him and said, “Look, man, I can’t read this, it’s impossible!”
“What do you mean?” Shake was offended. “Such a beautiful story, so moving! Weren’t you moved by Viktorka’s fate? What are you, insensitive?”
“Bugger insensitive. I can’t read it!” said Padecky, putting his spectacles on his nose.
“Maybe you need to clean your specs,” advised Shake, and Padecky lost his temper.
“Here, dammit, Molly, take a look at this,” he said, shoving the book into the hands of Molly Kakuska, who hadn’t gotten a book since there weren’t enough to go around, even though she was the heart and soul of the Readers’ Circle. She opened the book eagerly, but stared at the pages like the proverbial calf at a new barnyard gate, related Shake at Bentonville.
“Mr. Schweik,” she said, “it’s not in Czech! It must be German.”
“What do you mean, German?” Shake grabbed the book out of Molly’s hand.
“Just a minute,” Sergeant Kapsa interrupted Shake’s story. “I thought you weren’t allowed to cross the Kakuskas’ threshold.”
“I wasn’t,” said Shake. “But I didn’t have to. With a single hold, I scared the wits out of her, but I also charmed her, so she used to come to me for advice.”
“What ‘hold’?” asked Houska suspiciously. “You wrestle? You?”
The army coarsens a man, and war even more so.
This was when the sergeant finally learned why Mother Kakuska had banned Shake from her house.
The moon had been shining into the Kakuskas’ modest castle while, outside, the Czechs were trying to figure out a way to pry out the nails. Shake already knew what should be done; he just needed to look inside to see if the structure had a floor and any foundations that would complicate his ingenious solution. He walked around the cabin to the door, and entered. In a shaft of moonlight he saw a firm young breast, like alabaster, but when he touched it — how could one resist touching it? — it was warm and resilient. Molly gave a sigh, opened her eyes, and was terrified to see Shake looking at her like an obscene Jesuit. He wasn’t the least bit obscene, just young and horny. She smacked his hand, covered her breast with her nightie, then gave Shake a resounding slap across the face. He ran out of the little house while Molly went to Tereza to complain.
Shake didn’t appeal to Molly, but it was the first time in her life a man had touched her like that, and something in her was aroused. So when she happened to meet the culprit on the corner of Van Buren and Canal streets, instead of sticking her nose in the air she said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Schweik.” Shake caught fire, and they began to meet. She never let him get anywhere, of course, since by this time Schroeder, the engineer, was expressing serious interest in her too. She merely started to help Shake with the Readers’ Circle, because, when he wanted to, Shake could be extremely persuasive — although in Molly’s case it did him no good. “German, what do you mean, German?” he asked woefully.
