March (8 page)

 

How often it is that an idea that seems bright bossed and gleaming in its clarity when examined in a church, or argued over with a friend in a frosty garden, becomes clouded and murk-stained when dragged out into the field of actual endeavor.

If war can ever be said to be just, then this war is so; it is action for a moral cause, with the most rigorous of intellectual underpinnings. And yet everywhere I turn, I see injustice done in the waging of it. And every day, as I turn to what should be the happy obligation of opening my mind to my wife, I grope in vain for words with which to convey to her even a part of what I have witnessed, what I have felt. As for what I have done, and the consequences of my actions, these I do not even attempt to convey.

Many ill things happened in those weeks of waiting, encamped on the outskirts of Harper’s Ferry. Our side made several small harassing actions. Townsfolk loyal to the North crossed the river to come to us, and spies and scouts from our side ventured into the town. When one of ours, a man widely liked, was killed in an exchange of fire, the major ordered a retaliation which, in my view, went too far. He ordered a party to burn down all the town buildings that stood between the armory and the railroad bridge. Most of these were civilians’ homes or businesses, and since their charred ruins made excellent cover for the Confederates’ sharpshooters, I cannot see that any military purpose was served by their destruction. When I expressed that to him, he turned livid and refused thereafter to attend my services, or even exchange a greeting with me. Later, I learned that this very major, Hector Tyndale, had been detailed to escort Mrs. Brown, two years earlier, when she brought her executed husband’s body home from Virginia to New York. Brown had prophesied that Harper’s Ferry would be destroyed, and now much of it had been. A part of me wondered if the Old Man’s spirit hadn’t somehow possessed Hector Tyndale and caused him to act so. Who knew better than I the power of that man to possess? For him, I had been a tool, to be used with no more thought than a blacksmith gives to a pair of tongs when he thrusts it in the fire. It was a source of equal parts pride and mortification that Brown had used me, as he used every man that came to his hand, to rid our land of its abomination.

When we finally occupied the town toward the end of February, it was a scene of utmost desolation. Many of the inhabitants had fled. Those who stayed had done so only in the hope of securing their property, a hope that in many cases proved vain.

As soon as we took the town, I resolved to make a small pilgrimage to the Engine House where Captain Brown’s attempt to capture the federal armory and incite a slave rebellion had ended in bloody failure. Finding myself at last with an hour’s leisure, I made my way down to that haunted little building. I stood before it, my feelings on a seesaw between repulsion and admiration. Was ever a course of action more reckless and savage? Was ever one so justifiable, so self-sacrificing? My mind was as confounded as it had been the day I heard the news. I had been with Beth and Amy about an afternoon’s chestnut gathering in the autumn woods. Tom Higginson, another who had welcomed Brown as a guest in Concord, came up to us, all grave looks, with the news of Brown’s attempted insurrection, and his capture. He wrung his hands as he described Brown’s saber wounds and the young followers shot dead. I told Higginson then and there that I thought the deed would give impulse to freedom, no matter what became of its instigator and no matter how the states howled over it. But I hurried my youngest ones home, with my heart pounding, and made a fire in my study grate. I fed to it all the papers that documented my dealings with Brown, even though most of them had only to do with land surveys.

Some weeks later, on a mild winter’s day, it seemed that all Concord came out to mark the hour of Brown’s execution. There were no bells, no speeches; only readings. Emerson read, as did Thoreau. Sanborn, the schoolmaster, had composed a dirge and the assembled sang it. I read from the Song of Solomon, and a passage from Plato. And now? What would Brown say now, I wondered, of this
guilty
land and the purge of blood he had so accurately predicted?

My reflections were disturbed by the uncouth behavior of some of our enlisted around the tiny building, which was, it seemed, being used as a holding cell. How distasteful, I thought, to use as a prison a place that should better be respected as a shrine. It appeared that there were some three or four rebels detained therein, and our men were taking it by turns to climb upon barrels and peer down through the high windows, offering coarse taunts to the unhappy souls within. I had a few words with the men about their conduct, but found them sullen and unreceptive.

I was making my way back up the steep streets, reviewing the painful history of my acquaintance with Brown. My melancholy thoughts were interrupted once again; this time, by the loud cry of a woman coming from within a fine house just a little up the hill beyond me. Of course, I hastened to see if I could be of assistance. The door was ajar and so I entered, just in time to be almost crushed by the sound board of a pianoforte as it came tumbling end over end down the stairs. Fortunately for my skull’s sake, the heavier part listed leftward, proved too massive for the banister, and plowed through it, landing with a crashing discord atop what had been, until that moment, the dining-room table. From above came the sound of shattering glass, and as I turned back toward the street I saw the remains of the upper windows falling in a glittering shower.

At that point the woman cried out again and I bounded up the stairs two and three at a time, tripping over broken piano legs as I went. The scene that greeted me on my arrival at the top beggars description. There were three soldiers, two of whom I recognized from my unit, the other either a new recruit or a transfer, and all of them from the very patrol that was meant to forestall disturbances of the peace. They were flushed and laughing, as a woman and a girl of about thirteen years, whom I took to be mother and daughter, cowered, their faces tear-streaked and terrified. The men were playing catch across the ruins of the room with a Chinese vase of some apparent antiquity. The woman was crying out that it was all she had left to her of her grandmother’s possessions, and begging them to stop. The girl ran between them, trying to grasp the vase in midair. The third soldier grabbed her around the waist and pulled her away. When I saw him place his hand most lewdly between her thighs, my thoughts flew to my own daughters, and the bellow of rage that escaped me was a ferocious thing, so loud as to freeze the actions of everyone in that room.

“Who is in command here?”

Five faces-the soldiers’, florid, slack-jawed with surprise; the womens’, pale and blotched with emotion—turned suddenly toward me.

I lowered my voice and repeated my question: “Who is in command?”

“I am, sir,” said the corporal, wiping the sweat off his brow.

“Then kindly explain this outrage.”

“Why, sir, we was just raising a little hell with the secesh. Don’t the Bible say Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed because they was wicked? Why not this rebel nest?”

“Corporal, your orders were to take anything of which the men have actual need. You were expressly forbidden from acts of theft or wanton destruction. What you have done here is contemptible.”

The corporal gave me a dark look, then hawked and spat right on the Turkey carpet. “’Bout as contemptible as shooting all those good men in cold blood under the bluff, would you say, chaplain, sir?” I felt the blood draining from my face under the force of his insolent stare. “The men ain’t forgot it, even if you has.”

“A gentleman—no, say, rather, a
man
-would take his just anger to the field of battle,” I replied coldly. “You may not visit it on innocent civilian women. Kindly clean up as much of this mess as you can and accompany me to the colonel.” I turned to the woman and her daughter. She had drawn the girl close, and was smoothing her hair with a tenderness of gesture that brought my Marmee and little Beth before me. “Madam,” I said gently. “You have my most profound apologies. These men do not represent the army of the Union, and do no credit to our cause.”

She drew herself up, cowering no longer. Her gray eyes were lit with rage. “Your men, sir, are scum. As is your ‘cause.’”

I heard the corporal give a snort, whose meaning was clearly “I told you so.” I turned and glared at him, and he went about a perfunctory cleanup, which consisted merely in kicking some splintered pieces of furniture toward the fire grate. I was anxious to be gone from that house, so I did not trouble to exhort him to more particular efforts, and very soon we were marching in a cold silence to the house where the colonel had set up his command post.

When we arrived he was taking a conference in regard to the pontoon bridge, and so we were obliged to wait above an hour for an audience, and when we were admitted he was still poring over engineer’s drawings and seemed to listen to my complaint with only half an ear.

“Very well,” he said when I had concluded. He turned to the offending soldiers. “The chaplain is quite right. I won’t have civilian women molested, even if they are the wives and spawn of rebels, I understand why you felt driven to do it, but don’t be doing it again. Dismissed.”

The soldiers left, their relief propelling them swiftly from the room. Only the corporal paused, to give me a swift grin of contempt. The colonel had taken up a compass and commenced measuring distances on the engineer’s drawings.

“Sir—” I began, but he cut me off.

“March, I think you should reconsider your place with this regiment.”

“Sir?”

“You can’t seem to get on with anyone. You’ve irritated the other officers ... Even Tyndale can’t abide you—and he’s as much of an abolitionist as you are. Surgeon McKillop ruins my mess more often than not, ranting about your latest outrage. The night before last you’d put him beside himself with some preachment you gave that a Christian needn’t worship Christ as God. I’ve got him in one ear complaining that you don’t preach against sin, and yet here you are sowing discord in the ranks by seeing a great sin in harmless soldierly pranks ...”

“Sir, such wanton destruction is hardly-”

“Keep your peace, would you, March, for once in your life?” He jabbed the compass so hard that it passed right through the chart and lodged in the fine mahogany of the desk beneath. He came around the desk then and laid a hand on my arm. “I like you all right; I know you mean well, but the thing of it is, you’re too radical for these mill-town lads. I knew your views when my old friend Day recommended you to this service, and personally I have no love for slavery. But most of these boys aren’t down here fighting for the nig- for the slaves. You
must
see it, man. Be frank with yourself for once. Why, there’re about as many genuine abolitionists in Lincoln’s army as there are in Jeff Davis’s. When the boys in this unit listen to you preach emancipation, all they hear is that a pack of ragged baboons is going to be heading north to take their jobs away ...”

“Sir! I hardly think...”

He shot me a hard look. I held my tongue, with the greatest difficulty, and wondered again how a man like this ever came to be counted a friend by Daniel Day. He went on, as if speaking to himself “Why do we have chaplains? The book of army regulations has little to say on the matter. Odd, isn’t it? In that one institution where order is everything, where every man has a place and a duty, the chaplain alone has no defined place and no prescribed duty. Well, in my view your duty is to bring the men comfort.” Then he glared at me and raised his voice. “That’s your role, March, damn it. And yet all you seem to do is make people
un
comfortable” He plucked the compass out of the desk and rapped it impatiently against the chair back. When he resumed speaking, it was in a more civil tone. “Don’t you think you’d do better with the big thinkers in the Harvard unit?”

“Sir, the Harvard unit has famous ministers even in its rank and file—men from its own divinity school. They hardly need ...”

He raised his big, meaty hand, as if conceding my point, and, turning away from me, waved it in a vaguely southern direction. “Well, then, since you like the Negroes so very much, have you thought about assisting the army with the problem of the contraband? The need is plain. Ever since Butler opened the gates at Fortress Monroe to these people, we’ve had hundreds streaming into our lines, and more still falling under our care on the liberated plantations. Someone has to make dispositions for them. The labor of the men is useful enough-better they be employed building our breast-works than the enemy’s—but they
will
come trailing their bedmates and their brats. They are upon our hands by the fortunes of war, and yet, with war to wage, officers can’t be playing wet nurse. If something is not done, why, the army will be drowned in a black tide ...”

“But, Colonel,” I interrupted, taking a pace forward and putting myself back in his line of sight. “I know the men in this regiment. I was with them at the camp of instruction; we drilled together. I prayed with them when we got the news of the defeat at Bull Run and when we traveled south in the rush to the front lines that followed it ...”

“Good God, man, I don’t need to hear a recitation of your entire service ...”

I kept talking, right over the top of him. I was beside myself with the need to make my case: I did not see that I was vexing him beyond measure. “I’ve been through defeat with these men, I’ve been covered in their blood. No other chaplain—”

“Silence!” he shouted. He walked over to the window, which opened onto a remarkable prospect of faceted cliffs falling sharply to the crotch of the merging rivers. The light was failing and a red glow burnished the surface of the water. He spoke with his face turned toward the view so that he wouldn’t have to look at me.

“March, I tried to put this kindly, but if you insist on the blunt truth, then you shall have it. I have to tell you that McKillop is lodging a complaint against you, and some of what he plans to put in it is rather ... indelicate. I’m not about to pry into your personal affairs. You may be chaplain, but you’re, a soldier at war, and a man, and these things happen...”