Gods and Generals - Jeff Shaara [189]
It had been Ames, and Captain Spear, who had recommended Tom for promotion. Chamberlain had stayed out of it, knew better, but it was clear that Tom had done his job well enough to attract the praise of the others. And now there were many vacant positions for officers.
Chamberlain smiled, said, “A uniform does strange things to people. Good things, I suppose. It has meaning . . . we’re trained to accept that. We see that bar on your shoulder . . . the eagle on Ames’s. We don’t even have to see the face, the man. I guess that means we’re soldiers.”
“Lawrence, I was gonna write to Papa today, tell him about the promotion . . . the new uniform. Anything you want me to say?”
Chamberlain watched the line of troops moving past, momentum pushing them into the rhythm of the march. “I suppose . . . tell him we did good. You and me both. We did as good a job as soldiers are supposed to do. He’ll appreciate that. Probably mean as much to him as anything else we could say.”
“All right, I will. They’re proud of both of us, Lawrence, you know that.”
Chamberlain watched the last of the regiment move past, saw new officers, the next unit in line, knew they had better move along, catch up. “Yep, I know that. But please, stop calling me Lawrence.”
Tom smiled, saluted, then turned and ran, falling into line at the rear of his company. Chamberlain climbed carefully up to the road bed, walked with a quick step alongside the lines of troops, thought, We follow symbols, we follow the commands of men who have stars on their uniforms. The man doesn’t matter, the face or the name. Unless . . . he makes some bloody awful mistake, then the stars are given to someone else. He looked at the ground, felt his boots sink slightly into softening dirt, thought of Ames’s words. Of course, Ames understood, it is happening again.
He passed Tom, kept moving forward, moved by the other familiar faces, made his way toward the front of the line. He glanced over to one man, saw Kilrain, who was looking up, and Chamberlain followed the look, a brief glimpse toward a thick gray sky, and then he felt it, hitting his cheek, one cold drop of rain, and he looked back toward Kilrain. The heavy round face was looking at him, the hard look of a man who also understood, who had seen all the stupidity, who knew, after all, that the gold stars were often mindless decoration, that the army was led not by symbols, but by the fallible egos and blind fantasies of men.
IT RAINED all night and all the next day, and still did not stop. On the far side of the river Stuart’s men watched from under the dripping rims of wide hats as Burnside’s new plan, the quick and daring assault, was swallowed by the deep ooze of the Virginia mud. The great lines of wagons pulling the salvaged pontoons, the small field guns and heavier cannon, the tons of food and supplies, sank deeper and deeper, until Burnside had no choice but to halt the march and give the order to return the army back to Falmouth and the winter camps across the river from Fredericksburg.
By the end of January the army had settled into a new sense of gloom, defeated not only by Lee and Jackson, Stuart and Longstreet, or by the forces beyond the control of man, the rain and the cold. They had been defeated by the mind of one man, a kind and affable man who had a disastrous lack of talent for command. And thus Lincoln again made a change. Burnside was removed, as was Franklin, and Sumner was forced to retire. Fighting Joe Hooker was given command of the army. Lincoln’s appointment to the new commander concluded, “Go forward and give us victories.”
40. LEE
February 1863
THE WAR was spread now over most of the South, and there were new threats to the Atlantic coast. Burnside had been given his Ninth Corps again, and had been sent by boat to the southern coast of Virginia, below the James River. This effort could open a new front which would threaten the valuable