“It’s this-a-way,” he remarked after a silence in which the crickets chirped. “I’ve kind of thought it out. War kills men off right along. When they’re brave they get killed all the quicker, or they just get off by the skin of their teeth like I done. No matter how strong, ’n’ brave, ’n’ enterprising ’n’ volunterin’ they are, they get killed, ’n’ killed. Killed off jest the same’s the bees sting the best fruit. ’N’ then what becomes of the country? It ain’t populated ’less ’n the rest of us—them that got off by the skin of their teeth like I did, ’n’ them that ain’t never gone in like some bomb-proofs I know—’less ’n the rest of us acts our part! That’s what war does. It ’liminates the kind that pushes to the front ’n’ plants flags. ’N’ then—as Living don’t intend to drop off—what’s the rest of us that’s left got to be? We got to be what I heard a preacher call ’seed-corn ’n’ ancestors.’ We got to marry ’n’ people the earth. We ain’t killed.” Steve ceased to nurse his ankle, straightened his lean red body, and widening his lips until his lean red jaws wrinkled, turned to his hostess. “Cyrilla.—That’s a mighty pretty name.... Why shouldn’t you ’n’ me marry? You got a house ’n’ I got a house, over in Blue Ridge on Thunder Run Mountain, ’n’ I got a little real money, too! When the war’s over we can go get it.—What d’ ye say?”
Cyrilla screwed on the top of the snuff-box. “I been right lonesome,” she admitted. “But ef I marry you, you got to promise not to go bushwhackin’! You got to stay safe at home, ’n’ you got to do what I tell you. I ain’t goin’ to have two husbands killed fightin’ Yankees.”
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE ARMY OF TENNESSEE
On August the thirty-first Hood fought and lost the battle of Jonesboro. On September the first he evacuated Atlanta, besieged now for forty days, bombarded and wrecked and ruined. On the second, with hurrahing, with music of bands and waving of flags, Sherman occupied the forlorn and shattered place.
Forty thousand men, Hood and the Army of Tennessee lingered a full month in this region of Georgia, first around Lovejoy’s Station, then at Palmetto. On the first of October they crossed the Chattahoochee. Four days later was fought the engagement of Allatoona. On northward went Hood over the old route that had been travelled—though in an opposite direction—in the spring and the early summer-time. Toward the middle of the month he was at Resaca, and a day or two after he captured a small garrison at Dalton. Behind him came, fast and furious, a blue host. He made a forced march west to Gadsden on the Coosa. He was now in Alabama and presently he marched past Decatur to Florence on the Tennessee. Sherman sent by rail Schofield and two army corps to Nashville, where was already George Thomas and his corps. The blue commanding general had now sixty thousand men in Tennessee, and sixty thousand in Georgia. To oppose these last there was left Wheeler’s cavalry and Cobb’s Georgia State troops. On the last day of October Hood crossed into Tennessee. Before him and his army lay now the thirtieth of November and the fifteenth and sixteenth of December—lay the most disastrous battles of Franklin and Nashville.
About the middle of September Sherman evicted the inhabitants of Atlanta. “I take the ground,” he states upon the occasion, with the frankness that was an engaging trait in his character, “I take the ground that Atlanta is a conquered place, and I propose to use it purely for our own military purposes, which are inconsistent with its inhabitation by the families of a brave people. I am shipping them all, and by next Wednesday the town will be a real military town, with no women boring me every order I give.”
In mid-November, quitting the place, he burned it before he went. “Behind us,” he remarks, “lay Atlanta, smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in air and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.... The men are marching steadily and rapidly with a cheery look and a swinging pace.”
Of his March to the Sea upon which he was now entered, he says, “Had General Grant overwhelmed and scattered Lee’s Army and occupied Richmond he would have come to Atlanta; but as I happened to occupy Atlanta first, and had driven Hood off to a divergent line of operations far to the west, it was good strategy to leave him to a subordinate force and with my main army join Grant at Richmond. The most practicable route to Richmond was nearly a thousand miles in distance, too long for a single march; hence the necessity to reach the seacoast for a new base. Savannah, distant three hundred miles, was the nearest point, and this distance we accomplished from November 12th to December 21st.” And he telegraphs to Grant that he will send back all his wounded and worthless and, with his effective army, “move through Georgia, smashing things to the sea.” He kept his word. They were thoroughly smashed.
The men, marching “with a cheery look and a steady pace” listened to a General Order directing them to “forage liberally on the country,” and “generally to so damage the country as to make it untenable to the enemy.” They obeyed and made it untenable to all, including women and children, the sick and the old. They heard that their commander meant “to make Georgia howl,” and they did what they could to further his wish. He states indeed—in a letter to his wife—that “this universal burning and wanton destruction of private property is not justified in war,” and “I know all the principal officers detest the infamous practice as much as I do,” but the practice went on—and he was commander. He left behind him, from north to south of a great State a swathe of misery, horror, and destruction fifty miles wide. There were good and gallant men in his legions, good and gallant men by the thousand, but “Sherman’s bummers” went unchecked, and so far as is known, unrebuked. The swathe was undeniably there, and the insult and the agony and the horror. Georgia was “made to howl.” “War is Hell,” said Sherman, and is qualified to know whereof he speaks.
In the mean time Hood had crossed the Tennessee in chilly, snowy weather and was moving northward. The snow did not hold. The weather cleared and there came a season as of an autumnal afterglow. The sun shone bright though all the trees were bare. Forrest, recalled in this month from Mississippi, rode ahead of the army, then came the corps of Stephen D. Lee,—Hood’s old corps,—of A.P. Stewart, and of Cheatham. The last was Hardee’s old corps. Hardee himself, irreconcilably opposed to Hood and asking for transferral, had been sent to take command of the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Something more than forty thousand men, cavalry, infantry, and artillery, the Army of Tennessee pursued the late November road. It was a haggard and depleted army, but it could and did fight very grimly.