Andersonville (24 page)

Colonel Persons, I’ve had these men in formation for an hour. Do you want me to keep them standing here in the rain?

Well, what’s the difference, Captain? There’s no shelter for them inside the stockade.

But all our boys are soaked, sir, a-guarding them. I just thought if we turned them inside, our sentries wouldn’t have to stand out here and—

What matters it, Captain Hamrick? You’re soaked through. I’m soaked through, everybody’s soaked through; and two more trainloads to come. No, three: another just arrived—and from the south.

From the
south,
sir? Whereabouts?

Here’s the escort officer’s communication. Hold that lantern closer. Whom have we here? Ah, there seem to be above seven hundred . . . portions of the Seventh Connecticut, Forty-eighth New York, Forty-seventh New York, Seventh New Hampshire, One Hundred and Fifteenth New York . . . Sherman’s Regular battery . . . Sherman, indeed! . . . here it says: Olustee, Florida. So that’s where they were taken. But it says also:
colored
troops—from the Eighth United States and the Fifty-fourth New York. Damnation, Captain, we have no facilities for the retention of
colored
troops.
Colored
troops! What do they mean? What can we
do
with them?

Way I see it, Colonel Persons, sir, there’s no such thing as a colored soldier. Now, if I had my way, I’d form my command into a series of firing squads and—

Ah, hush up, Captain Hamrick. We can put them to work. Appears to be some two hundred of them. Yes, yes—we shall put them to work outside, we have need of many hands. They could drive— But we have no teams for them to drive. They could fabricate— But we have no implements. They could build— But no lumber. Was that another train whistle?

Inside the stockade the newly arrived prisoners could not see where to go. They sat down in mud. They sat shivering. It was dark, they could not see. They huddled close together; but even so, the more energetic of the raiders found them in midnight and rain. A lament went up as a man was hit and his overcoat was taken from him, and a worse lament arose as another man felt gripping arms upon him in the streaming darkness, and struggled to resist: and so the rest of his captured company found him motionless in muck when gray light fell upon the place where he had resisted.

Fresh fish: that was the universal appellation for the newly arrived as it had been in some of the other pens. Look at them! Here’s where you get your fresh fish!
Fresh
fish,
fresh
fish:
hooooot,
whistle, whistle; they come so cheap; who wants
fresh
fish? A dime a dozen, lady, a dime a dozen: herring, cod, mackerel and sticklebacks. Who’ll buy, who’ll buy, who’ll buy
freshhhhh fishhhhh
?
 . . .
The Olustee hundreds comprised the first large batch of unskinned victims who might be possessed of more than their usual complement of jewelry, buttons, blankets, shoes, tobacco and other useables or tradeables. Their scales had been scraped by Home Guards along the way but they had not been gutted. There would come more, there would come more.

Despite the withdrawal evinced by Lieutenant-Colonel Persons while he spoke of surface activities and refused to state the length to which he was plagued, Ira Claffey gave ear to the true complaint of the commander. Ira had not served as a soldier for many years, but he brought a quiet understanding to the soldier who stood beside him. Ira was not limited as many men, Ira could sense things beyond his experience. He knew that the entire Confederacy labored now in confusion and dismemberment. It was more than unlikely that the subordinate upon whom fell the responsibility of administering the affairs of a new prison in this remote spot should be given the equipment and personnel to serve his purpose; it was impossible. Engines would not run because irreplaceable parts fell away or because makeshift engineers were incompetent (the competent engineers were occupied with artillery at some crucial point). Fuel and food went astray, tires came off of wagons. Where is the quinine? There is no quinine. These muskets must be altered; we have no locks to fit; where are the locks? Stored in a warehouse? Who has the key, who has the manifest, the bill of lading? Someone knew, someone had these things, someone could tell; but he could not tell—he was dead at South Mountain, he was dead on the Chickahominy, he was dead at Fort Donelson.

...A new superintendent for the stockade, Persons was saying.

When?

This week. He comes directly under General Winder’s office. I am to command the post only.

But is not the stockade a part of the post?

In geography only, not in the echelon of command. I wish, said Alexander Persons, scraping the inner surface of his heart as with a silver spoon, that I was back in the field with my regiment.

The new commander: who is he?

Some captain named Henry Wirz. He’s a German or something of the sort, added Persons with obvious distaste. Mr. Claffey, sir, I’d just as soon not have his job. A goodly number of these prisoners were sick when they came in; many more sickened here; they’re not getting the proper rations; I’d give them proper rations willingly, but I’m not the quartermaster and I haven’t
got
proper rations for them. I don’t consider even that my own men are properly fed! The meal is coarse and mouldy, the bacon’s tainted—
when
we get bacon, and we don’t get nearly enough. You ought to go up on that hill over yonder, past those pines.

Persons’ hand shook as he pointed toward the north, east of the Bile property. His hand shook suddenly as if it had been employed as the instrument for spewing these words, as if he had torn loose the plaint, the volley of resentment and futility, by act of hand rather than by act of speech.

What would we find in the pines up there?

Graves, sir. We’ve carted off over two hundred already. . . . Turn the other way. Look at that dirty stream of water.

Once, said Ira, the stream was clean. I was accustomed to drink from it.

You wouldn’t want to drink from it now. But the Yanks have to, unless they can dig wells deep enough to supply them.

Once there was a spring. Down here, almost directly below us. It was spoilt when they built the stockade.

I don’t know anything about that, Mr. Claffey, sir. I didn’t build the stockade. He added, as in a sudden dream, I have to keep telling myself that I didn’t build it, that Captain Sid Winder did. There is another stream over south of your place—maybe a mile—?

Ira said, Little Sweetwater.

Is that the name? I thought this oozing marsh was Sweetwater. Though the prisoners call it Stockade Creek.

This was a branch.

Just the same, sir, that other creek is four or five times the size of this. It flows now perhaps twelve or fifteen feet wide and more than five feet deep in spots. I’m no engineer; preparing a legal brief is more in my line; but I’d estimate that the velocity of that other stream is possibly a mile an hour. Well, sir! Couldn’t the stockade have been placed to include that stream instead of this one? I mentioned as much to Sid Winder. All other things were about equal: drainage, timberland, amount of clearing to be done—

What was Winder’s response?

Rather vague. He declared that he had absolute authority in the selection of the site. I have understood from other sources that a site near Albany—a place infinitely superior to this—was under consideration also. But he selected this place. Damn it all, sir!

Persons wiped his forehead. I’m talking entirely too much. But, to sum it up, we’ve got prisoners with diarrhoea, prisoners showing signs of scurvy, prisoners dropsical, prisoners gangrenous. What we need here is a first-rate hospital; thus far I haven’t been able to lay hold on any tents, much less lumber. . . . Do you wish to go below, gentlemen? I reckon you’ve seen enough.

Ira said, I saw no fights. The men were merely milling about. Idly, stupidly. . . .

That’s all they have to do—mill about. You were fortunate in not observing any of those roughs pursuing their chosen vocation of robbery and mayhem. It goes on all the time.

Can’t you stop it, Colonel? Ira was regretful that he had stated the question the moment it passed his lips, for Persons froze upon the ladder and looked down at him with scorn, while the sentry stood at a distance, waiting to resume his post.

How, sir? Appeal to their better instincts? Send armed guards among them? The kind of material I’m commanding here and now: old men and little boys, or dullards incapable of serving at the front? Send them inside with weapons and ammunition? It’s bad enough to have to put people like that On Parapet.

Ira said, I’m sorry, Colonel. Then, when Persons stood beside him (the officer was breathing heavily, not because of the exertion of descent) Ira put his hand on his arm. He said, Obviously it’s no fault of yours, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Yes, said Alexander Persons, I might be able to do something about it. If I had the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, the courage of the Lion of Judah. How is that for Scriptural summation, Parson Dillard?

Cato told them, It was prophesied in the Book of Joel.
I will remove far off from you the northern army, and will drive him into a land barren and desolate.

Brother Dillard preaches a very stern war, said Ira. But if he owned a tub of fresh collard greens and pork at this moment, he’d be inside distributing it to the hungry.

Dillard’s face shone. A very fine notion, Brother Ira! Why shouldn’t we do that at the first opportunity?

First off, said Persons, you should have to consult with Captain Wirz, the new commander of the stockade. And I assure you that he appears to be a gentleman of very short temper. He added in a low voice, He’s ill. Suffering from an old wound.

The commander took leave of his guests and went rapidly away toward his headquarters tent where he knew that twenty problems, assorted but equally ugly, would be sitting like patients in a doctor’s parlor; they would be aching, they would be waiting. In thought he saw the thin frantic face of Henry Wirz, and he recoiled from the thought: he had not liked that face in his first glimpse of it. This occurred during one of those hours of duplicated entanglement now traditional with the struggling Department of Georgia. Wirz appeared, bearing an order requiring him to assume command of the stockade. Simultaneously appeared a Major Griswold from some other direction, producing an order almost identical with Wirz’s. Discreetly Lieutenant-Colonel Persons retired from the complication; he said merely, Gentlemen, you’ll have to get your own orders straightened out. The matter’s in abeyance, so far as I’m concerned. Wirz disappeared for ten or fifteen days, Griswold fussed about . . . at last came a telegraphed order which took the major away to some other station. Wirz reappeared, triumphant but more habitually irritable than ever. Alex Persons doubted not that the bearded little fussbudget had been all the way to Richmond to invoke the power of Winder’s office. Strange business, he thought despondently. Who’d want a task like that? Thank the Eternal it’s no chore of mine any longer. . . . Secretly he felt a stirring of pity for the caged scarecrows who had followed him, supplicating, each time he went inside. All he could do for them was to mention the bright probability of exchange, and Persons knew that he lied each time he used the word. So did most of the men; he knew that they spoke disgracefully of him the moment his back was turned. Remotely he forgave them. They reminded him—many of them—of his own Fifty-fifth Georgia boys he’d commanded earlier, and who were captured in the mountains, and must now be penned somewhere at the North. . . . Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander W. Persons discovered that he had a severe headache. The afternoon sun was too bright, it hurt his eyes. He went to his tent and found the row of lame halt problems waiting, just as he had known that they would wait, waiting in their home-cobbled bandages, smelling of their home-applied arnica. Gad.

Ira Claffey saw Cato Dillard set forth upon his way to Americus, provided with a lunch of boiled eggs and fresh lettuce sandwiches, but with no Mrs. Dillard beside him today. Once again she was nursing the sick somewhere. There seemed to be more sick than ever before. Many wounded soldiers were come home, unhappy families had been forced from their homes by Sherman’s advance and now were compelled to hunt shelter with relatives in these out-of-the-way counties. Suppose that Georgia should turn into one vast poorhouse or hospital or similar charitable refuge, thought Ira (as the area termed Camp Sumter was turning into the latrine he had described)? He held a sudden impressive vision of beds, beds, beds, cots, cots, pallets, pallets laid out in rows, as he would arrange patches of vegetables, stretching from Bibb to Chattahoochee and south: Macon, Sumter, Dooly, Lee, Worth, Colquitt, name the counties, minister to burdens in the beds.

He went into the plantation’s seed house and tried to concentrate the energy of his thought upon carrots. Carrot planting had been delayed by this and that. If he wanted a late crop the seeds should be put in before the middle of April; in his opinion they came up badly if you waited for warmer weather. He thought the carrot a remarkable plant, both from the point of food value and medicinally as well. He remembered carrot poultices which his grandmother had applied in those departed frontier days when Indian wars ruled the regions barely west of them, when he was young and saw imaginary Creeks lurking in each tangle of gum shoots, and heard with apprehension the tales of wagoners dragged from their seats and scalped in timberland roads. Carrots revived the thought of his youth; carrots would be a manner of refuge.

In neat rows in small paper bags, his seeds awaited him, ticketed first by year, then subdivided alphabetically. Let me cull out these few packets of ’61 carrots; how did they ever come to be left? They should have been thrown away long ago; the seed will seldom germinate properly if more than two years old. Have we a sufficiency of the ’63’s? More than a sufficiency. Then throw out the ’62’s, all of them, along with the ’61’s; they would be uncertain, they would be a hazard. Thus into the refuse basket go the ’61’s
(who died then?) and the ’62’s (Moses) and we shall plant the 1863’s (Suthy, Badge) and they, the carrots, shall arise from the ground in this holy year of 1864—but not upon the Third Day—and who shall be The Departed in this holy year? Many Secessionists, no doubt; also many Northerners. Many Yanks in the nearby stockade. Colonel Persons said over two hundred were gone to their graves already. Granny, should you have used a carrot poultice for the nursing of these? Suppose you wished to give them butter (ah, who has butter except as a treat?): then you should use the carrots for butter coloring as you did in wild early days. Bend forward seriously in your cap and gray-fringed shawl and say to the servant (with her kinky hair tied with pink yarn to scare witches), as you did in the free remote wild early days: One will be enough, Rhody. We’ll have perhaps eight pounds of butter in this lot and more than a single carrot might spoil the flavor. Grate it fine, grate it into
cold
water, Rhody; mind, I said grated
fine.
And Grandfather declared that one bushel of corn and one of carrots were worth more than two bushels of corn as feed for hogs. . . . But let the hogs run untrammeled for the most part, let them feed on mast, feed on acorns, let them rub snouts into the ground and trench it and roll the turf, hunting for other food they like. . . .