The Smoke at Dawn: A Novel of the Civil War (48 page)

“The same. You’ve made his acquaintance, I believe.”

“Baldy Smith says the major’s men know how to row a boat. That makes him the right man for the task at hand.”

“Helps that he’s from Ohio.”

Sherman ignored the joke, was consumed by the tension now. The soldiers began to move forward, and Sherman walked closer to the boat, out in the open, the rain soaking his face, dripping from his hat. He called out in a harsh whisper, “Easy, men. Quiet. Plenty of room for all of you. Boat holds thirty.”

He stopped himself, his voice slicing through the cold darkness. The men moved past, and an officer stepped out of the boat, moved close.

“Who might you be, then?”

“Name’s Sherman. You Major Hipp?”

“That I am, sir. We’ll be on the water in a quick minute. Unless you have other orders, sir.”

“No changes, Major. They’re all yours.”

The men boarded the boat, low talk, some of it aimed toward Sherman. He felt his hands shaking, the cold and the nervousness, felt it rolling all through him. He ached for a cigar, his fists clenching, unclenching, turmoil in his stomach. He wanted to push them into place himself, hurry them along, but the men had been trained well, knew what they were supposed to do. In no more than a minute, the thirty men were settled into the bottom of the boat, the order whispered to the men waiting onshore. They moved together, pushed the boat out into the creek, and Sherman heard the whispered order, the major from Ohio. The rain coated the creek with a rippling hiss, and Sherman pulled his fists in tight to his stomach, watched as the oars made low splashes through the black water, the boat slipping silently away.

They made the four-mile journey in less than two hours, the boat pulled by the oars and the current, the first boat turning to slip up inside South Chickamauga Creek. The purpose
was simple: Disgorge the men where they would likely be behind any rebel skirmishers eyeing the big river. From all the men could tell, the rebel skirmishers had heard nothing of the landing, no lookouts sounding a warning, no sounds at all. When the thirty men slipped inland, easing toward the enemy outpost at the river’s edge, the first of the rebels who heard them coming called out to them, had assumed that the Federal troops were in fact their replacements. In a matter of seconds, the surprised rebels were staring into the muzzles of thirty muskets, were gathered up and paraded back to the boat, soon to be hauled away by Major Hipp and a small group of guards. The Federal troops couldn’t be completely certain they had captured the entire squad of pickets at the landing point, the nervous talk growing that a single rebel had slipped past them, escaping into the darkness. But so far, the east side of the river stayed quiet, no sign of any rebels in force, of any alarm spreading anywhere along the enemy’s side of the river. Sherman’s campaign had begun in silence, a perfect piece of maneuver, Major Hipp’s boat crossing back to the west side of the river with the stunned cargo of rebels. It was two thirty in the morning.

Fifteen minutes behind the first launch, the other boats had slipped out down the creek, making their way to the river. Sherman paced nervously along the muddy bank of the creek as the boats made their move, four oarsmen each pulling the craft away from the bank until they too caught the flow of the current. With as little fanfare as Major Hipp’s single craft, the first two regiments began their journey, men from Illinois and Missouri. Some of those boats made their landing on the north side of South Chickamauga Creek, the majority slipping down below, where the first thirty offered them the signal that all was clear. With no angry reception from any rebels, the men began a different kind of labor, moving inland, shovels in hand, digging in, piling logs and earth, creating a defensive line.

To the cheering delight of Sherman, and the utter surprise of his engineers, the brigade’s crossing had been made without any opposition at all, as though no one on the far side of the river was even awake. As the first thousand of Sherman’s men completed the work on their defensive position, more men came forward from their camps, lining up along the west side of the river. Quickly the boats
were ferried back and forth, each one carrying another load of troops to strengthen their hold on the rebel side. With so little attention from the rebels, Baldy Smith made a daring move, ordering a Federal steamboat, the
Dunbar
, to steam upriver from Chattanooga and pass directly through that part of the river the Federal troops had now secured. The
Dunbar
added its decks to the effort, hundreds of men hauled across the waterway in short minutes. By daybreak, several thousand of Sherman’s men had floated across, creating a stout defensive position nearly a mile wide. Following along on a flatboat, even before the first hint of daylight, came their commander.

He watched the engineers as they shifted and paddled the pontoon boats into position. The bridge had reached the near shore, stretching completely across the quarter-mile span, anchored against the current by the
Dunbar
. Already, men and their equipment were making the march across the river, adding to the thousands of men already there.

He kept to the horse now, scanned the waterfront, supplies piling high, stacked muskets, the soldiers who would carry them still doing more work with the shovel. With the first hint of daylight, he had moved out through the laboring men, past the cut logs and dugout trenches. He stared up to the wooded hills, a hazy fog blocking most of the view. All he knew of the ground beyond the dark hilly woods was what Baldy Smith had told him, and the maps he had now in his pocket. He yelled silently toward the sun, urging it upward, hoping the dense gray of the clouds would finally thin.

Far up the hill, the scouts had gone out, perching into good hiding places, awaiting the sunlight with one precise mission: Find the rebels. As the army around him continued to swell, the mystery of the peaceful landing confounded him. He stared up toward the shadowy blackness, the tree-lined hills closest to his front, thought, Is no one watching us? No cavalry scout, no skirmish line? Is there no artillery anywhere close enough to disrupt our labor?

So far, the only answer seemed to be that this part of the riverfront held no rebels at all. The few dozen men they had captured had been hauled back to the far side of the river, men who told no tales of vast
rebel armies perched up in these hills. That was unexpected, a contradiction to what Sherman had heard in nearly every fight. Rebel prisoners always seemed eager to tell their stories, how the bluebellies would be trampled beneath the magnificent stampede of a glorious rebel army. He had yet to experience anything so dramatic, and his officers had learned how to play on rebel boastfulness to gain useful information. But here, the men Major Hipp had transported back to the west side of the river had nothing to give, no hints that any real force was on the hillsides, hiding in thick woods, no hoards of artillery hidden away, waiting for the signal to hammer the men in blue. Instead the dawn came with an eerie silence, the only sounds the light rain on the dark river, punctuated by the shovels and axes of his men.

He rode closer to the trees above him, saw a line of his skirmishers moving farther up, climbing into thickets, pushing to the crest of the hill. He expected musket fire, waited for it, felt the nervous itch, raised the field glasses, nothing to see, his view blinded by fog and watery lenses.

He turned abruptly, spurred the horse back toward the river, past the men who knew not to cheer. His staff was waiting, a limp flag held high by his color bearer. McCoy was there, seemed anxious, the others just as nervous.

“Sir, anything up there? Haven’t heard anything here. The pontoon bridge over the South Chickamauga is completed, just like this one. We’re in contact with the regiments in position north of the creek. No sign of the enemy there, either. What do you make of it, sir?”

McCoy’s jabbering betrayed his fears, and Sherman fought that himself, the same struggle before every fight. He turned to the misty hill again, had no answers for McCoy.

Another of his officers spoke up now, Dayton, the same high-pitched nervousness.

“Sir, are we certain this is the correct landing area?”

Sherman snapped his head around, pointed out to the north, upriver.

“You see that stream over there? It’s the South Chickamauga. If I thought Baldy Smith would send us to some godforsaken mud hole by mistake, I’d tell Grant to shoot him.” He knew he was talking nonsense,
the tension in his voice betraying the anxiousness he could not show his staff. “Never mind that. We’re in the correct location, Colonel. That big damn hill out there is the north end of the Mission Ridge. Bragg’s whole damn army is up there somewhere, and it’s our job to find them.” He paused, shook his head. “I would have thought … they’d be waiting for us. Somebody. A single battery, a heavy skirmish line. Maybe … with all this maneuvering Grant’s been doing, the demonstrations, hell, maybe it’s worked better than we ever thought possible. Maybe Bragg’s pulled his whole army down to the south; maybe he’s really convinced we’re gonna hit him in the center. That ought to make Grant happy.”

“Yes, sir. That’s a good turn of events, surely.”

McCoy’s voice held a shiver, and Sherman fought that himself, the cold of the rain only making it worse. He looked again to the misty hill, said, “What time is it?”

“Six, sir. Just shy. Never thought it would be this easy, sir.”

Sherman kept his stare on the wooded hills. “It never is, Colonel. It never is. But I’m not satisfied by any of this. We’re supposed to be leading the way, jamming a bayonet into Bragg’s guts. By God, if he’s pulled his people away from here …”

“Maybe they’ve withdrawn, sir? Maybe we scared him out of here completely.”

Sherman looked toward the voice, Dayton, a cold stare that quieted the man.

“That’s about the worst thought imaginable, Colonel. We went to all this trouble so we can whip Bragg, not chase him all over Creation. As soon as all three divisions are across that river, I’m ordering the advance. I didn’t come all this way just to build bridges. Our job is to sweep Bragg off that big damn ridge.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but where in blazes are they?”

“Only one way to know that, Colonel. Let’s climb that big damn hill.”

They had moved out to the right flank of the great advance the day before, no one really knowing just what enemy they might confront. The fight had been mostly on their left, the round knobs that protruded from the thick woods, but that fight had been brief, several volleys of musket fire punctuated by their own artillery that burst out back near Chattanooga, what they knew as Fort Wood. For Bauer, the first contact with the enemy had been the sudden emergence of the rebel picket line, half a hundred men responding to the massive parade of Federal troops by firing a brief volley of their own, then scrambling away through the vast fields of tall grass and low brush. The skirmishers had been little more than a brief distraction. What had grabbed Bauer’s attention, and that of the men in line around him, was the immense formations of their own troops, long and heavy lines of blue, advancing across the wide-open plain. He had seen massive assaults before, what seemed to be the entire army rolling forward at Vicksburg. But that was a very bad day, the men in blue smacking hard into rebel earthworks, where a well-protected enemy poured out a vicious fire that had punched bloody holes in the Federal advance. This time, there were no earthworks,
and no volleys of any significance coming toward them. The only artillery the rebels offered came from the wooded ground near the two bald hills. But even that was brief and ineffective, what seemed to be no more than a single battery, facing off against what Bauer assumed to be four or five divisions. Bauer hadn’t even fired his musket.

Bauer awoke before the bugle, his habit now, jarred alert by the cold, a sharp breeze that brought the misty rain straight into the tent. He was shivering, pulled hard at the thin blanket, felt wetness everywhere he touched. His knees were up tight against his chest, but there was little room for movement, one knee thumping into the back of his tent mate, the ever angry Corporal Owens.

“Huh? What the hell you want?” Owens sat up abruptly, his head brushing the top of the small tent. “Jesus, it’s cold. Rained, too. Dammit anyway. Left my brogans outside.”

Bauer had his shoes on still, had heard the rain through much of the night, was surprised Owens hadn’t. He looked out across the open ground, the mist visible in the faint gray light, saw men moving past, could see the hats, officers. The bugle blew now, the first call for the battalion to rise, and Owens crawled outside, wrestled with his shoes, low cursing that still impressed Bauer. It was the constant entertainment from Owens, who seemed to create swear words for any occasion, some so profane that Bauer feared the man might be struck down by the hand of God. But Owens continued to blow out his amazing profanity, and Bauer began to wonder if God Himself wasn’t impressed by the man’s utter originality.