The Bride of Texas, page 59
“I’m Andy Cup now,” said Salek, “and I have the papers to prove it. American papers. So I was in the artillery — I was young and foolish. Besides, that was a long time ago.”
They were sitting in Slavik’s Tavern, and they were older now, the farmer and the wholesaler.
“Aren’t you too old for Jirinka?”
“I’m an American,” Cup said proudly. “I served honourably in the great war for liberty!”
The sergeant looked around. “Not that her restaurant is such a bad place,” said Mr. Ohrenzug, getting himself in deeper and deeper. “It’s just in a bad neighbourhood.”
“Funny I don’t know it,” said Shake. “I associate exclusively with poor people.”
“Where did you say it was?” asked Houska.
“Somewhere between Dearborn and Clark,” said Mr. Ohrenzug.
“Isn’t that Little Cheyenne?” said Houska, then stopped.
Ruzena asked, “What’s Little Cheyenne, Houska?”
“But that was before we got married,” said Houska.
“Ah,” said Shake.
“You know that part of town, Mr. Shake?” asked Ruzena.
“That was before you two got married,” said Shake.
“Married or not,” Houska’s wife retorted, “we were engaged, Vojtech and me, during the war.”
“But then you married Freddy!” Houska protested.
“But I divorced him because of you!” snapped the angry Mrs. Houska. “And now he’s a candidate for the Sixth District in Berwyn!”
Bozenka, who had been listening closely, said, “Well, I don’t think she’s going to be the Carolina Bride after all. This doesn’t sound like the kind of story Mrs. Lee writes.”
The famous author sat at the head table in the dining room with her head in her hands. But then she stood up and tossed her head abruptly, setting the red curls in motion. The man with the weather-beaten face rose as well, and bowed. The author took his arm and they walked onto the dance floor and began dancing a jig to the music of Mates’s band.
Those strange paths across the mountains.
“There was that one letter,” said Lida. “Somebody was supposed to have seen her in Jamaica.”
“So the blacksmith’s wife —”
“I don’t know,” said Lida. “A drowning man will grasp at straws.”
Some proverbs prove true, some don’t.
The sergeant rose.
“And then nothing? No news from Jamaica?”
“Nothing,” said Lida. “It’s been three years now. Poor Cyril. Strange stars we had in our sky, didn’t we, sergeant?” She stood there in her green hat on the corner of Randolph and Green, Cup’s brightly coloured oranges like burning torches behind her, the cornflower eyes from that distant land, the turpentine forests, here now for ever.
“Not necessarily,” Mr. Ohrenzug consoled the sergeant’s wife. “It’s a fine place, otherwise. They have a salon band from New Orleans. Imported —”
“Have you been there, Mr. Ohrenzug?” Bozenka asked him.
“Strictly out of professional curiosity,” said Mr. Ohrenzug. “You can go there just for a drink. A glass of wine, I mean. Some of the ladies even speak French. It’s just that patois of theirs, but still —”
“There’s one thing I still don’t understand,” Shake said. “Where did she get the money?”
Mr. Ohrenzug flinched. “The capital came from Dr. Walenta,” he replied hastily. “I suppose he got the idea when he was stitching up her ear.”
“So she certainly isn’t the Carolina Bride,” said Bozenka flatly.
The sergeant began walking over to the VIP table, then hesitated. The famous author was returning from the dance floor and he heard her tell the man with the weather-beaten face, “I don’t know if I’ll ever write anything again, general. I had apparently written everything I knew how to write. Then I tried something … I tried hard. But what I wanted doesn’t count. What counts is what I accomplished.”
The farmhouse door was opened by the rosy-cheeked woman in the picture, the one with the miniature portrait of her husband in the background, painted by the jack-of-all-trades from Wilber. He knew then that his footsteps hadn’t been guided here merely by the people who gave him directions at forks in the road. She wept wretchedly, inconsolably. Finally, however, she allowed herself to be consoled.
His wife.
“No, general,” the famous author was saying. “Burnside should not have let them draw lots. He should have picked the most experienced commander for the attack, and Ledlie was certainly not the right one. He just drew the short straw. But why did he fail so miserably?”
“Why indeed?” said the man with the weather-beaten face. “Burnside was a capital fellow. But he bit off more than he could chew.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the famous author. “I only know how important it was to him that this battle create not only a breakthrough in the Rebel line at Petersburg, but also a breakthrough in the technology of warfare —” He saw him on his huge horse, Sam, his staff closing the gap and falling behind like a pendulum in the burning snow. “And that the battle at The Crater be associated for ever with his Negro division. He was genuinely proud of them. He respected them. It’s a story that goes way back, back to the Mexican War, even further, in fact. And you gentlemen did not permit it.”
The sergeant plucked up his courage.
“That was why there was the foolishness of drawing lots,” said the famous author.
“Meade was afraid,” said his general. “If there had been a massacre, the reporters would have accused Grant of sending the coloureds to certain death to spare the whites.”
“So at the last minute you changed Burnside’s orders, and now the reporters are accusing you of regarding the coloured soldiers as trash,” said the author. “You were afraid to trust them with an untried task.”
“You can’t win,” said the general, scowling. To General Logan he had said, “We don’t need to win battles any more.” Then Terry’s Negro Second Division had been marching past in their new blue uniforms and Lida had said, “What can you know, Cyril?” What could he know? The sergeant stepped over to the booth, and out of the corner of his eye he noticed the rapid approach of Mr. Ohrenzug, who had put on his spectacles and had finally noticed the presence of the man with the weather-beaten face. The sergeant snapped to attention. “General, sir!” he said hoarsely. The weather-beaten face turned to him and he knew the general was searching his memory. Lida in her hat with the black mourning band and, marching past the reviewing stand, Sherman’s army. The general looked into his eyes.
“Wait — it’s Kapsa, right?”
“Yes, general, sir!” replied the sergeant.
Toronto, 1984–1991
DEO GRATIAS
Postscript
In the Czech archives of the University of Chicago, while doing research for my novel Dvorak in Love, I came across 19th century issues of the Czech-American farmers’ almanach Amerikán. In them I found stories about the Czech soldiers of the Civil War, and also brief memoirs written by the veterans. Searching on, I discovered other sources: Josef Cermak’s invaluable History of the Civil War with Experiences of Czech Soldiers Attached (1889) which gives the names of Czech participants in most major battles of the conflict; Rudolf Bubenicek’s History of the Czechs in Chicago (1939); Thomas Capek’s The Czechs (Bohemians) in America (1920), and other books and articles.
My interest was aroused and I decided that, after I finish my Dvorak book, I’ll try my hand at a novel about the war from an angle which, to my knowledge, had never been attempted. My intentions were patriotic in the old fashioned sense: I would do my best to create a sort of memorial of the men who, far from their native land then under Austrian despotism, fought for the country which, unlike Europe, promised hope for a life worth living.
With the exception of Jan Amos Shake, all other Czech soldiers are real. They fought in various units of the Union Army, some in 26 Wisconsin. For the purpose of my novel I put them all there.
Trying to compute their numbers I failed, as others before me. I went through the card catalogue in the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle Barracks, PA, but after examining several hundred cards, I gave up. The trouble was that far too many Czechs have German names, and since army registers almost never gave the ethnicity of the common soldiers it is impossible to decide whether a Konig, a Miller or a Frohlich was Czech, German, Austrian or Jewish. Besides, Czechs in America also anglicized their unpronounceable names, or Army clerks distorted them, so that a Skrzkrk became a Skirk, a Frkac turned into a Fircut, and a Machane, due to Yankee pronunciation, metamorphosed into a Scot, MacHane.
For these reasons it is hardly possible to determine exact numbers. Thomas Capek quips that “the Czechs provided the United States Army with more musicians than generals,” but, except for adding that the number of Czech generals was zero, he does not give any data either for the musicians, or for the common soldiers. He mentions four officers of whom I found only two listed in the Official Army Register.
My own, admittedly unreliable, estimate is about 300 combatants. The U.S. Department of Commerce A Century of Population Growth (1909) lists 26,061 immigrants from the Austrian countries recorded by the census of 1860, on the eve of the war. Josef Chada in The Czechs in the United States (1981) opines that the “largest fraction” of these Austrian immigrants were Czechs but he, too, fails to provide numbers: the census did not take notice of ethnic origins. If I, rather arbitrarily, take 20.000 for the basis of my computation, assuming that more than half of these were women, children and old or infirm men, the percentage of able bodied men who joined the army would be about 3 per cent.
However, those who saw service, judging by their brief memoirs and by the few honorable mentions in unit histories I have read (e.g. Zinkule acknowledged in Captain U.G. Alexander’s History of the Thirteenth Regiment United States Infantry, 1905) acquitted themselves well on the battlefield. Perhaps, even in a huge army, it is quality rather than quantity which counts.
Having lived over one half of my life in a Communist country, I became allergic to Marxist interpretations of the Civil War. They tended — and for what I know, may still tend — to dismiss or, at best, grossly underestimate concepts that see the conflict also — if not mainly — in terms of the liberation of the slaves. The communist historians I read described the war exclusively as a clash between the interests of northern capitalists and southern plantation owners for which, in the North, emancipation only provided a smokescreen and, in the South, the issue of state rights served a similar purpose. This seemed to me like spitting on the graves of the soldiers — an emotional reaction, to be sure. But there is also a rational argument: “Although there were serious differences between the (South and the North), all of them except slavery could have been settled through the democratic process … (Slavery) was not the only cause of the Civil War, but it was unquestionably the one cause without which the war would not have taken place.” (Bruce Catton, Short History of the Civil War, 1960).
I resented another popular recent opinion which sees in Sherman the originator of total war. As a youngster, I encountered this killer-warlord image of the general in the Nazi weekly Signal. There Sherman’s military strategy was used to mock allied criticism of Goebbel’s notorious Totalkrieg speech, and to defend the Propagandaminister against allegations of being the one who instigated universal butchery.
I see Sherman differently.
It has never been clear to me how historians can blame Sherman for this kind of warfare. All one needs to know in order to refute the dubious credit is to read the Old Testament, or be aware of the 15th century Hussite warriors’ battle song “Hit hard, kill, don’t spare anyone”, or remember the war practice of the condottieri in Italy, etc. Compared to them, Sherman is a true American innocent who scorched enemy land to shorten the war but never killed civilians on purpose.
The revisionist criticism of the general brought to my mind Graham Greene’s recommendation that writers should focus on characters ripe for universal condemnation rather than on heroes whom everybody likes. I felt I found such a character in the much maligned and ridiculed General Ambrose Burnside, and tried to treat him in the light of my late friend’s and patron’s advice. For this I found support in Craig Davidson Tenney’s dissertation on Burnside.
J.S.
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Illustration Credits
frw.1 Ward, Geoffrey C. et al. The Civil War: An Illustrated History (New York: Knopf, 1990), 320. Courtesy of the National Archives.
