Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [71]
Anyway, reading the diary had helped to take Will out of his own life and concerns, which was good because otherwise he’d have been thinking of nothing but Felicia day and night. There was nothing wrong with thinking about Felicia, he resolved, but there had to be limits, even to that. He wasn’t opposed to having a social life, even a romantic one, but he was at the Academy to do a job, to prepare himself for service to Starfleet, and even Felicia Mendoza had to take second place to that.
Will found the diary hard to read: its brittle pages flaked and chipped as he turned them, and Thaddius Riker’s handwriting was cramped and spidery. Sometimes blotches of water, ink, or something that Will thought might be blood obscured words or even whole sections. But even so, no matter where he dipped in, he found himself lost in his ancestor’s exploits, and only occasional mental images of Felicia’s radiant smile or the way her strong body filled out her Academy uniform could haul him back to the twenty-fourth century. For the past couple of days he had been turning to the diary as often as he could make the time, in between classes, other work, and little bits of social time.
William Sherman had been the kind of general Will could appreciate, and there were times, reading about “Uncle Billy,” that he wondered if his own parents had named him for Thaddius’s friend. After taking Atlanta, Sherman had chased General Hood around the South for a while. Tiring of that exercise, he had returned to his original plan for after Atlanta’s defeat-the march to Savannah. He moved in the exact opposite direction from Hood, leading his sixty-two thousand troops toward the sea. He left behind him all sources of supplies and communication-completely on his own, behind enemy lines, but with the intention of routing the enemy and showing them why it was a bad idea to continue fighting. All the way across Georgia they marched, torching fields, killing stock, liberating slaves, and generally making Confederate sympathizers curse Sherman’s name for years to come. The plan was reckless, foolish, utterly wrongheaded, and absolutely the right thing to do.
Thaddius Riker, at the head of the New York 102
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, was with Sherman for the whole thing. They had fought through the hills and forests of northern Georgia together; before and after taking Atlanta they had fought at Kennesaw Mountain and Allatoona and Rome. Thaddius Riker had taken a minié ball in the shoulder at a battle in a place called Pine Mountain, and had fallen, inside Confederate territory. Only the aid of a mysterious stranger helped him get back behind Federal lines, probably saving his life. “I had never seen this fellow before,” Thaddius had written. “But he came along at just the moment when I needed someone. Without him, I would not be here writing these words today. Later I tried to find him agin, to thank him, but he had vanished back into whatever regiment he came from. Whoever he may be, I owe my life to him, and he has my thanks forever.”
But it was near another small town called Garner’s Ridge that Thaddius showed his own strategic thinking.
Cut off from supply lines, Sherman’s men had to live off the land. As Sherman pointed out, if millions of Southerners could do it, his force of several thousand could too. But it meant raiding farmhouses, barnyards, and fields as well as hunting native animals. As an additional benefit, any crops or livestock the Union Army didn’t leave behind was food the Confederate Army couldn’t eat when they came in pursuit.
To further that end, Sherman sent his troops on foraging missions as they cut their swath to the sea. These foragers had express orders not to loot or pillage civilian homes, but to cause as much damage as they could to supply depots or arms warehouses, to put the torch to crops, to free slaves and to supply the Federals whenever possible. According to Thaddius’s diary, these