Edward held out his hand—in it an envelope. “This fell from his coat, sir. The bullet went through it—” The movement brought hand and letter into the ruddy light. Involuntarily he uttered an exclamation. “It is addressed to me!”
The major rose from his knees. “Quite dead.... And you would have called him Fortune’s favorite. It is Louis Gaillard from down the river—Cape Jessamine.”
CHAPTER V
FORT PEMBERTON
Van Dorn’s raid and the battle of Chickasaw Bayou made of naught the December ’62—January ’63 push against Vicksburg. Grant fell back to Memphis. McClernand, Sherman’s superior, withdrew the thirty thousand column from before the Walnut Hills, to the Yazoo and down it, into the Mississippi and up that vast and turbid stream. His forces reunited, Grant, a stubborn, good soldier, studied in his quiet fashion, a cigar between his teeth, the map of the region. His instinct was always to strike out straight before him. The river, for all its windings, was the directest road to Vicksburg. Late in January he brought a great army down the Mississippi and landed it on the Louisiana side, some miles above the town that must be taken. Here, too, above the line of danger from the grey river batteries, he anchored his ships-of-war.
During the past summer the Federal General Williams had conceived the project of canalling the tongue of land opposite Vicksburg, the almost islanded sliver of Louisiana soil. Cut through this thumblike projection, fill your great ditch from the river, let your fleet enter at Tuscumbia Bend, and hey, presto! emerge again upon the bosom of the Mississippi below Vicksburg, the grey river batteries sweetly ignored; in a word all the grey defences of the Mississippi above Grand Gulf circumvented! The canal seemed worth digging, and so, in the summer, the blue had digged. But the summer was dry and the river low; it refused to enter the prepared by-path, and after a series of disappointments the digging had been discontinued. Now the season was wet, and the river brimming. With a large force of engineers and sappers, Grant began again upon the canal. But now there was too much moisture as before there had been too little. The water was so high that it ran into a hundred paths beside the one which the blue were digging. It turned the flat Louisiana shore into lake and quagmire. Impossible to trench with the semi-liquid stuff flowing in as fast as it was thrown out!—impossible to keep an army encamped in a morass! Again there was a withdrawal.
From higher ground and reaches of the river far above Vicksburg, Grant, the cigar between his teeth, parallel lines showing across his forehead, studied flank movements.... The Yazoo again!—though it seemed a stream of ill omen. Not that Grant thought of omens. He was not superstitious. A plain, straightforward, not over-imaginative, introspective, or sophisticated person, he did not so much plan great campaigns as take, unswervingly, the next common-sense step. His merit was that, in the all-pervading fog of war, it was usually upon firm ground that he set his step. Not always, but usually. The Yazoo.... It flowed southward from the Tennessee line. There it was called the Coldwater. Farther down, in northern Mississippi it became the Tallahatchie, into which flowed the Yallabusha. Lower yet it was named the Yazoo, and so flowed into the Mississippi. Throughout its course it drained a vast, flat, egg-shaped lowland, overshot by innumerable lesser streams, lakes, and bayous, rising into ridge and bluff at the southern end of the egg. Named the Valley of the Yazoo, it was reported to be enormously fertile and a storehouse from which Vicksburg and all the exaggerated grey armies in Tennessee and Mississippi were fed. Moreover, at Yazoo City, where the three-named stream became finally the Yazoo, there existed, said Secret Service, a big Confederate navy yard where gunboats were rapidly hatching. To get into that valley from the northern end, come down those rivers, surprise Yazoo City and spoil the nest of gunboats, then on like a swooping hawk and take Vicksburg in the rear!... Grant put out his hand for another cigar. But the Valley of the Yazoo was said to be in effect roadless, and though the Yazoo from Yazoo City downwards was navigable, the Tallahatchie and the Coldwater were not. Then came in Admiral Porter with a well-considered plan, though an audacious one and ticklishly dependent upon a thousand circumstances.
Some distance below Memphis there was a point where the Mississippi and the Coldwater came within calling distance of each other. Between was only the Yazoo Pass—and Yazoo Pass was a bayou which anciently had connected the two. Anciently, not now; for years before a levee had been built, shutting off bayou from river, and preventing untoward floods in the upper Yazoo Valley. Assemble a fleet over against Yazoo Pass, cut the levee, and so lift the water in the Coldwater and the Tallahatchie, then proceed down those streams with the vessels-of-war and as many transports as needed, take Yazoo City, enter the Yazoo, and so on triumphantly! Grant chewed the end of his cigar, then nodded acquiescence.
On the third of February, after much time spent in digging, they laid and exploded a mine. The levee broke in rout and ruin. Like a tiger from the jungle out leaped the Mississippi, roaring down to the bayou. Yazoo Pass became a furious yellow torrent, here spume and eddy, here torn arms of trees, an abatis in motion. The Coldwater received the flood and bore it on to the Tallahatchie. But so angry were the churning waters by the gate in the levee that days passed before the ironclads DeKalb and Chillicothe, the rams Fulton and Lioness, the tinclads Forest Rose, Marmora, Rattler, Romeo, Petrel, and Signal, and all the transports in the rear could attempt that new-made passage. At last they did enter the Yazoo Pass and made slow way to the Coldwater, only presently to find that the grey troops had felled the tall, tall trees on either bank and thrown them into the stream. There, arms interlocked, they made for miles an effective barrier, removed only after slow days and days of effort. The stream wound like a tortured serpent. There presented themselves strange currents, pits, and shoals. The bed was unknown, save that it possessed a huge variety of snag, bar, and obstacle. The flood was narrow, and the thick overhanging forest obscured and fretted. Every turn presented a fresh difficulty. The fleet made three miles a day. Behind it crept, crept the transports, forty-five hundred men under Generals Ross and Quinby. There was much sickness and the fret, fret of utter delay. It was late February before the expedition entered the Coldwater, early March before it approached the Tallahatchie. Here it encountered afresh felled trees like endless bundles of jackstraws, thrown vigorously, crossed under water at every imaginable angle. A little later the blue scouts brought news of Fort Pemberton.
The Southern spring was at hand, a mist of young leaf and bloom, a sound of birds, a sapphire sky, a vapour, a warmth, a rhythm. Edward Cary loved it, and said that he did so, lying after supper, on the bank of the Tallahatchie, under the cotton-bale rampart of the cotton-bale fort that was to keep the enemy out of the Yazoo. The rest of the mess agreed—lovely spring, lovely evening! They lit corn-cob pipes and clay pipes and fig-stem pipes, and stretched themselves on a meagre bit of dry earth, beside a clump of Spanish bayonet. The sun dipped behind the woods across the river, leaving air and water an exquisite coral. There were seven men—five privates, a corporal, and a sergeant-major. All were tall and all were lean and none was over thirty. One bore an old Huguenot name and the forbear of one was a Highland chief. The others were mainly of English stock, names of Devon, Surrey, and Sussex. Two were university men, sons of great planters, born into a sunny and settled world that after their majority overclouded. Three had less of that kind of fortune and had left for the war a lawyer’s office, a tobacco warehouse, and an experiment in mining. The sergeant-major was of the yeoman type, a quiet man with little book learning and a name in the regiment for courage and resource. The seventh man, very young, a grown-up-anyhow bit of mortality, who until he came to handle steel had worked in iron, stood next, perhaps, to Edward Cary in the affections of the mess. Dreadful as was this war, it had as a by-product the lessening of caste. Men came together and worked together as men, not as conventions.
“Yes, it is lovely,” said the warehouse man. “I used to think a deal about beauty.”