The March by E. L. Doctorow

  In the meantime, he considered the possibilities of bedding this or that lady, though with mostly sorrowful judgments that they were an unappetizing lot, dreary and haggard, their faces swollen up from their tears, some of them with snot-nosed little creatures at their sides whining and pulling on their skirts. But still he smiled, turning this way and that as the line moved slowly forward, to see who was behind him as well as in front—maybe to spot one with a little flesh on her like it was nothing to be ashamed of, or a profusion of auburn tresses like that Ruby back in Savannah.

  It was during these ruminations that he spied Emily Thompson. Hey, Will, he muttered. Look there. Is that your Nurse Thompson? Or am I seeing things?

  If it was her, she wasn’t a nurse in blue no more but a lady in black with no coat and her hair parted in the middle and pulled tight down over her ears. She was coming along toward him and towing a child’s play wagon by its rope, leaning into the task because in the wagon, as far as he could see, was a good amount of provender: a sack or two of meal, poultry still in its feathers, foodstuffs put up in jars. When he saw two small boy helpers pushing the wagon along with their outstretched arms, he decided after all it couldn’t be Nurse Thompson. But, not to take any chances, he pressed the derby firmly on his head to hide his red ringlets by which she might remember him, and pulled his coat collar up around his stubble.

  She passed right by him without even a glance, the sun on her face showing how worn she looked with fine crow’s-feet from the corners of her eyes and tear streaks dried black on her cheeks and her lips pressing her mouth into a thin line.

  Arly had two thoughts at this point. The first was that it definitely wasn’t Nurse Thompson. The second was that he never thought she was that pretty anyways.

  He looked at the long line ahead of him, and back again at Emily Thompson as she left the square and crossed the street, and he made a calculation. Moments later he was up beside Calvin on the wagon.

  I don’t see any vittles, Calvin said.

  You will, mister. Just git this dumb-ass mule and go where I tell you.

  Arly had been inspired to satisfy two appetites in one fell swoop. Aloud he said, Being as bodily hungers are no concern to you anymore, you won’t care if I test her out like you should have done when you had the chance.

  Say what?

  I’m not talking to you, Calvin. There she is, around that corner.

  She had turned in to the spacious yard of a manse that had seen some fire. The front was scorched, the roof shingles half torn away, and tree vines out front hanging black and limp like dead snakes.

  Calvin brought the wagon to a stop by the front gate. Emily was at the foot of the porch steps, and Arly was about to leap down and make his approach, thinking it didn’t matter if she recognized him or not, since this wasn’t the army no more and there was nothing she could do about it, when a black woman of some girth opened the door and was followed out by at least a half-dozen children. Then the door swung open again and even more children came out, till there must have been twenty or thirty of them crowding around and gazing at what Emily Thompson had brought from the market.

  That there’s a hell of a lot of children, Arly said. Damn. What am I supposed to do with such a hell of a lot of children?

  He watched as some of them came down the steps, each one taking something—a chicken, a goose, a jar, a sorghum crock—and marching it into the house. The sacks of rice were carried off by the black woman.

  These were awful solemn, strange children. They didn’t make any noise.

  Emily stood with one hand to her forehead and the other at her waist. This seemed to Arly a most attractive gesture, suggesting resignation or despair or submission to what fate had brought her, or was presently to bring her, if he could think of how to go about it. But while he was thus bemused it was Calvin who had got down from the box and dragged the big camera and tripod from the wagon. What was the damned nigger doing?

  Arly watched as Calvin went up to the woman, spoke to her for a minute, and then backed away and set up the camera maybe twenty feet from where she stood. Arly thought it was time to take command. He strode into the yard with the assured gait of a master photographer, the flaps of his Josiah Culp coat floating up behind him.

  What in goddamn hell are you up to, Calvin? he whispered. At the same time, he smiled at Emily Thompson and tipped his hat, though not enough to give her a good look at him.

  I’m doing what I do, which is to see things, Calvin said. I see this woman and these orphan chiddren.

  Is that what she said this is, a damn orphanage?

  What else could it be, if you have the sense to look with your own two eyes?

  You being sassy, Calvin? I won’t even bother burying you like I was kind enough to bury your Mr. Culp.

  You can go ahead and do what you want, Calvin said. But I judge twenty seconds in this light. And he slammed the plate carrier into the camera.

  While Calvin busied himself now, arranging the subjects the way he wanted them, Arly, to maintain his dignity, put his head under the black hood and pretended to be adjusting the lens. But from there in the darkness he could study Emily Thompson in privacy. She was a figure on glass. She was looking straight at him, her arms around the children at her sides. Behind her on the porch steps rose more ranks of orphans, standing stiffly according to Calvin’s instructions. You must stand perfectly still, Calvin said in a loud voice. Like soldiers at attention. And up at the back was the black woman, with one of the meal sacks on her shoulders. That, too, was Calvin’s idea.

  But the sight of Emily was what held Arly’s attention. An unaccountable feeling rose in him that, had he been able to understand it, he would have recognized as compassion. He was disturbed to see, miniaturized on the glass, a woman looking into his eyes so as to negate all his operative calculations of self-interest. She was distraught, and for a moment, before he knew to wipe the image from his mind, she evoked in him a reflection of himself stupidly leering at her from under the black hood.

  All right, Mr. Culp, Calvin called. They are ready for exposure!

  And Arly felt that she was staring back at him as if she knew exactly who he was. Take your photograph, Emily seemed to be saying. Take us as we are. We are looking at you. Take it!

  HAD HE SAID anything but what he said, had I been given the chance to change my mind, had he told me how much I was needed, had he tried to convince me that there was some attestable humanity in all of this, I would have stayed. I would have continued with him. Two A.M.? Not an hour at which calm and rational decisions are likely to be made, he said. His watch in his hand and this—Emily in the doorway and dressed in the black mourning she had worn the night she rode from her home, at her feet her portmanteau—this, like everything else subject to diagnosis. I was overtired, possibly hysterical, and acting rashly. What was to be done? A sedative? Brandy? A caress? The pained, wondering look in those widened exquisitely ice-blue eyes. Had he neglected me? I wanted to touch my hair, arrange my dress. I felt ugly and grown old. On his tunic were the darker stains of Union blood. He’d been making notes. You must not reduce life to its sentiments, Emily. I have just seen a man with a spike protruding from his skull. Imagine! Propelled by a bursting fire of some sort, an explosion, with such force as to drive into the brain. And yet the patient smiles, he converses, he has all his faculties. Except the one. He remembers nothing, not even his name. You must tell me what that means. It means he is fortunate, I said. A smile. No, he is quite unfortunate. It means we know something we didn’t know before. The doctor still teaching. What was the use? Dear Lord, what was the use? Independent of my state of mind, my own brain’s faculty of observation judged the new beard a success: it was a strong black manly beard, very handsome. Yet when he approached me and put his hands on my arms I was repelled. Please, I said as I removed myself from his grasp. Of course, I knew I was going from something to nothing. I knew what comes of principled feeling. It is a cold, dark life, the life of principled feel
ing. It is my brother Foster’s life in the grave. But I wanted to go home, if it was still there, and to walk the rooms and remember what the Thompsons had been, and reread the books and hold again the things I held dear, and live alone and wait there for that army of which this army on the march is just the fanfare. I had not yet seen the orphan asylum. I had not seen the children alone but for the black woman. I wanted to go home and sit and wait. I would say goodbye to dear Pearl. I would admit to Mattie Jameson for the last time that I was indeed Judge Thompson’s daughter from over in Milledgeville. I do not reduce life to its sentiments, Dr. Sartorius. I enlarge life to its sentiments. I cannot stand this march any longer. I cannot forgive what has been done here in the name of warfare. I don’t know how you can abide it, how you can condone it. I do not condone it, he said. Yet you are part of it, you belong to it, and so you are complicit. You are the aspect of them by which they persuade themselves they are civilized. His face flushed with anger. I knew I was saying something terribly unfair. I wanted to destroy my feelings for him. I wanted to destroy any affection or regard he might have for me so that he would not stop me from going. Yet I wanted him to stop me.

  Dear God, please help me, even now, if he were to come back and seek me out, I would run to him. I would.

  I

  WHEN HUGH PRYCE, WHO HAD COME OVER FOR THE London Times, applied for a correspondent’s credentials with the Army of the West, he found himself interviewed by no less a figure than General William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman hated journalists—they had the nasty habit of describing what the army was doing so that anyone, including a secesh general, could read about it in the newspaper. But most of all he hated English journalists. Your damn cotton markets have financed the South, he said to Pryce. If I hadn’t taken Atlanta when I did, Parliament would have come into this thing. Never mind your letter of employment, for all I know you’re a damned spy. You’ll file no dispatches while this army is on the march.

  Pryce was flattered by the General’s distrust. He was an adventurous young fellow and got right into the campaign, wandering through the ranks and managing often to find himself on the skirmish line. He lived comfortably in the field, thinking nothing of the hardships. Of course he was no spy. He had dutifully kept his notes until Savannah was taken. There the ban on dispatches was temporarily lifted and he burned up the wires with his stories.

  Now, with the army on the march northward, Pryce was reduced once more to jotting his notes and stuffing them in his pockets. Though he looked forward to the next chance to cable his accounts, he was thinking more of the book he would write when he returned home. The fact was that he loved this war in America. These provincials excited him, the sixty thousand of them swinging a thirty-mile-wide scythe of destruction across a once bountiful land. Most of the men he spoke with, even junior officers, were not terribly articulate: the South had to be punished, the niggers had to be freed was the usual level of discourse. And he found them childish in their adoration of their “Uncle Billy.” (God help the poor sod of a yeoman who addressed Cromwell as Uncle Ollie.) But they were intrepid. He had seen them build bridges, dismantle railroad lines, overrun entrenchments, and maintain a pace of ten to fifteen miles a day regardless of the terrain or the weather. As men they were woefully unschooled, but as a military force they transcended their class.

  What war was fought more bitterly and with more fervor and intensity than a civil war? No war between nations could match it. The generals of the North and South knew one another—they had been at West Point together or served side by side in the Mexican War. England, of course, had a great and bloody history of civil wars, but they were ancient matters to be studied in public school. This in America was to be seen with one’s own eyes. And as bloody and brutal were the contests of Lancaster and York, they were hand to hand—battle-axes, pikes, maces. These chaps were industrial-age killers: they had repeating rifles that could kill at a thousand yards, grape that could decimate an advancing line, cannon, fieldpieces, munitions that could bring down entire cities. Their war was so impersonally murderous as to make quaint anything that had gone on before.

  Yet some of the ancient military culture endured. The brutal romance of war was still possible in the taking of spoils. Each town the army overran was a prize. In this village was an amazing store of wine, in that a granary brimming to the rafters, a herd of beef here, an armory there, homes to loot, slaves to incorporate. There was something undeniably classical about it, for how else did the armies of Greece and Rome supply themselves? How else had Alexander’s soldiers made an empire? The invading army, when it camped, sat on the land as owners, with all the elements of domesticity, including women, enlarging the purely martial function of their social order.

  WITH THE VANGUARD brigades of the Twentieth Corps about to cross into North Carolina, Pryce decided that he had absolutely to ride out with the “bummers,” as the foraging troops so ingloriously called themselves. He had no trouble finding an accommodating party, a detachment of General Kilpatrick’s cavalry. He was a fair-haired, tall, big-boned Englishman with a ruddy open face and a quick smile, and when he identified himself as a reporter, waving his notepad about as if it were the most esoteric professional tool, a soldier was happy to give his name and spell it for him while Pryce scribbled it dutifully, though finding it of no real use.

  He could sit a horse, but the mount he was given, with much laughter, was a mule so swaybacked that Pryce’s feet brushed the ground. He accepted this with good humor. The party consisted of twenty or so cavalrymen casually uniformed, in a quite remarkable assemblage of styles. They were led by a sergeant, a middle-aged man with a gray stubble and an eye patch. Two of the army’s ubiquitous white canvased wagons trailed along.

  It was not yet dawn, and while the rest of the camp was lighting the breakfast fires the Sergeant led Pryce’s party down a main road and then off through a pinewoods on a lumber trail. Here the bed of brown needles was so thick the animals’ footfalls were hardly heard. Pryce wore long underwear under his thick twill trousers and sweater shirt. His half coat was lined with fleece, and he had his club scarf around his throat. Yet he found himself pounding his arms. The woods gathered the cold, as if the tall trees were a kind of vault. And the sharp redolence of pine seemed to drive the cold up behind one’s eyes.

  As best Pryce could determine, the party was riding ahead of the march to the northeast. They rode at the investigative pace of a patrol, with a clear purpose but no fixed destination. After a while the way ahead seemed to lighten and he could congratulate himself that they were indeed headed east, the treetops of the tall pines having turned a fiery gold. Minutes later he could feel the warmth on his thighs as he passed through patches of sunlight. Then, all at once, they were out in the morning.

  THEY CAME TO a halt on the bank of a river. Slightly downstream was a wooden footbridge, and they went across in single file into another pine forest. Here the trees were even taller, and so abundant as to discourage the sun. The animals had to weave among the trees. In these sun-daunting woods Pryce felt in his throat the dangers of the foraging enterprise. They were, after all, a small contingent in Rebel country, with no intelligence of the enemy.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER they were on a road running alongside fallow acreage ruled off by a low stone wall. A mile or two of this and the wall was deemed an insult. At the Sergeant’s direction the men dismounted and took apart a section of the piled stones wide enough to allow a wagon’s passage, and in short order they were up and riding through the field at a canter, Pryce following at a trot with even the wagons pulling ahead of him. Now he saw their destination, a large white mansion with Grecian pillars for an entrance. They crossed a road onto an expanse of greensward, and then they were on a curving gravel drive that passed through formal gardens of azaleas and rosebushes and sculpted evergreens. Pryce thought he might have been in a Midlands shire.

  WHEN HE CAUGHT up to the others they were deployed in two lines facing the manse. A tall elderly man stood o
n the porch. He was in a robe and slippers, and his silver hair was uncombed. Cassius! the old man yelled, his voice deep and hoarse. A Negro appeared. Cassius, the old man said, not lowering his voice or looking at the house slave, who stood in obeisance right next to him. Show these Union beggars what they lookin for.

  Having been thus defined, the troops did not move. A slave appeared with an armchair. The old man sat. Two white women appeared, one to put a shawl about his shoulders and the other with a blanket robe for his knees. With an imperial calm, he stared at the Union troops. He said something to one of the women, who hurried back inside. He said something to the house slave, who, watching the troops all the while, went down the porch to the side steps and ran off behind the house.

  Hugh Pryce could sense of the bummers’ discomfort that they would have been happier to find themselves in a pitched battle. The old planter sat with his arms resting on the arms of his chair, and from under his thick white eyebrows he was making them over into a rabble, a thieving pack of highwaymen. Pryce recognized the old man. The accent might be different, the manners unrefined, but this was a lord of the realm, one of those bred from generations of wealth to be accorded deference from the day he was born. Pryce’s father was such a one. Pryce had made himself a journalist and fled London so as not to become such a one. How many of them did not know how stupid they were beneath the manners of their class.

  Shortly there emerged an entire family of women to array themselves behind the old planter, and they were of every age down to three little girls—perhaps his wife among them, but sisters and daughters and nieces, cousins and grandchildren, all of them in familial resemblance with their gaunt faces and high cheekbones and narrow eyes.