Faded Coat of Blue Read online

  FADED COAT OF BLUE

  By Owen Perry

  AVON BOOKS

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To the Welsh, Scots, and Irish

  who built America while the English weren’t looking.

  * * *

  In Adam’s Fall

  We sinned all.

  THE NEW ENGLAND PRIMER,

  Seventeenth Century

  Chapter 1

  A sentry with troubled bowels discovered the body. A shock it must have been for the boy. He fired off his rifle and the Good Lord knows what else, then ran up through the mud and fog to his camp. I do not fault the lad, you understand. A soldier may be brave easily enough with his comrades all about him. But a boy new to service, touched with sickness and with the autumn chill upon him, such a one might be forgiven a wallop of fear when he tumbles over a dead officer in the pursuit of a winkle of privacy.

  He should not have left his post, of course. That he should not have done. But they were all the greenest of soldiers in those days. As green as Gwent. Their days were full of drill and boasting, but well I know the nights of a soldier’s doubt. So I understand what the lad felt, when he found the fairest of young men bedded down in the morning dark with a bullet through his heart.

  The rest arrived at a ran, slopping down through the mire the storm had left, and a dangerous pack they were. Lads in their unmentionables, with cartridge boxes flapping and rifles poorly handled. Sergeants bellowed. Company officers stumbled as they tried to run and draw on their boots at the same time, tripping over swords they had not mastered. Wet and weary they were. And some fool blasted a bugle.

  I was not there. I am reconstructing events. But I have known many a camp surprised by a creeping enemy or a stray cow, and there was always a terrible confusion at the first. So I see them flushing out of their tents at the sound of their sentinel’s shot, eyes hungry for more light and hearts in an uproar. I hear the voices of the weaker souls, crying out that the Rebels were upon them, and aimless shots.

  When no one fired back, they settled a bit, and the light rose. Young Private Haney—for that was his name—blundered in leading a party down to his discovery. They slipped in the muck of the hillside, where the men had torn away each last twig for their camp-fires, and cursed relentlessly, though profanity helps no man. At last, they reached the body, down in the ravine, lying a pistol shot from the military road. They told me the dead man looked like an angel fallen to earth, but some of them were Irish and given to adorning language.

  Later, they would all learn a muchness of death. More than any man should know. But let that bide. Their regiment was too new to have been at Bull Run, and the corpse was the first most of the men had seen. I do not count those taken by typhoid and the like, for that is a natural thing. This death was unnatural, and they knew it in their souls. The newspapermen wrote that the dead officer possessed the countenance and voice of a sweet, blessed saint. They had written that even before his death, after which no commentary might be trusted. The young man was known, and beloved, and should have lived long.

  The soldiers who stood over his body were rugged lads from the highlands of New York, hill farmers. They were not great readers of the newspapers, and they certainly would not have left their fields for a lecture on the evils of slavery. They were men who worked hard, tillers with settled eyes and small expectations even in their youth, and their shoulders were oxen. They admired the officer in hie death, but could not fix him with a name, and only stood about, uncertain what to do, looking down on his beauty. He was not of their regiment, and not of their world. Not even a sergeant dared touch his fine blue coat.

  It took the officers to recognize him. Officers are terrible ones for spotting the bad in a situation, and not a few soon make it worse. I spoke with them later, in the course of my inquiry, and they told me how it was. At first, they, too, caught the fear of an attack and went about rallying the men—valiantly, to hear them tell it—but with the climbing of the light Captain Steele made his way down to the party gathered over the corpse. He thought he knew the face that lay before him, but he had been a lawyer before he took up arms and went cautiously about things. He waited until Major Campbell, the adjutant, joined him.

  Now Campbell was a great Scotsman, and they are devils in the morning, see. He come down barking and settling his belt, sword in his hand. He had been a politician in his county, and that sort is ever more given to speech than to thought, although base calculation is not beyond them. The men moved aside for their major, and he saw the still, white face with its frame of golden hair, and brayed for all the world.

  “Well, I’ll be damned and resurrected,” he said, and I am certain he was half correct. “That’s Anthony Fowler.”

  It was a death that changed my life.

  I was not there, for my regimental days were behind me. I had failed my new country at Bull Run, but a Welshman is a tenacious thing when you spin him up and I was a clerking officer now. I missed my Mary Myfanwy and longed to return to her, but duty is not a thing that will let go of a man if he holds the least worth. When the call sounded through the ward for men who could figure accounts, I stood to it. That I still could do for our Union. My leg pained me, I will not lie to you, but I would have walked through serpents like a Hindoo holy man to leave the stench of that hospital behind. Twas the smell of bad butchering.

  So I was not in that encampment south of the Potomac on the second of November, in the Year of Our Lord 1861. Nor was I in any camp or fort of the hundreds ringing our capital. Nor was I in my bed at Mrs. Schutzengel’s boardinghouse, though as a middle-aged man of thirty-three I was ever glad of its warmth. No, ladies and gentlemen, that morning I was down at the depot below our unfinished Capitol, waiting for a trainload of trousers.

  Twas but four in the morning, with the world black and shivering. There had been a great rain and blow in the night, and a window-rattling as if death himself had gone walking. It had barely stopped when I left my bed. The cold was enough to make a man want shelter, but the depot hall was locked to keep out the drunkards lamming from the provost marshal. Carters bunched in the streets, their horses slithering wet and wagons creaking.

  There were always loaded wagons about the depot. The war was a great benefit for tradesmen, a matter I was studying in my new position, and space for goods on the trains was a precious thing. Men fought with their fists and their dollars for right of place. The Marylander bridges were not in steady repair, and even when they were up the government seemed to favor Mr. Cameron’s Harrisburg line, which took the long way about, over the short route to Philadelphia. It made for a great wanting of trains. There was always more cargo than capacity. It was a new world of steel rails and high business, and we were learning it in the midst of a war, and there was more than a whisper of dishonesty in these matters. A man would have expected all of the cargoes to come into Washington to support our army, with little returning to the north. But all around me wagons rich with cotton and tobacco wedged toward the rails, and I did not think all was of legitimate provenance. But let that bide.

  I stood under a gaslight, doing figures. The rain was not above a tardy splash, but no time is to be wasted, as my Mary Myfanwy would have said. There was cold, but a man must learn to appreciate his advantages. With the heat behind us for the year, Washington did not stink so badly, and that was a blessing. Now I am an old bayonet and a veteran of John Company’s fusses, and my nose has not been stuffed with violets from the cradle up. But I te
ll you I have never smelled a great stink like that of Washington in the summer. It filled me with wonder, when first I met it face to face. Neither your Seekh nor your wild Afghanee would have lived amid such a terrible odor, but would have run screaming. A wild, dirty, unfinished little place it was in those days, our Washington. To a man who had seen London, Delhi, and Lahore, it was not much at all. Pardon me the sin of pride.

  As I stood under that gaslight, with just a little stink rising from the canal and the leavings of the market, a wonder appeared before my eyes. A great carriage come up, with a pair of outriders in uniform and a brace of other carriages following. A trooper leapt out of his saddle and banged on the station door. He went at it with great whacks, while his comrades flustered about the big carriage, pulling on a pair of arms as if the occupant was unwilling to emerge.

  Twas General Scott.

  History stepped down before me, ladies and gentlemen. Six-foot-five and many a pound of it. General Scott come squeezing out the door of that carriage, fair blooming out of it, his cloak heavy with braid and his feathered hat before him. He was a great massive man, a good doer at table, and you could see what a specimen he had been in his prime. But he groaned and grunted now, and could not manage the carriage steps without the aid of a little army of staff officers.

  His going had been rumored, his resignation expected, but we lessers had no facts to hand. Of course, we all wanted to see him go, in our heartlessness and our folly. He was too old, too fat, too tired for us. With the years behind me, I see his greatness now. But the country felt only impatience with him that autumn, and I longed to be one with my new country. Bull Run be jiggered—if you will excuse my ferocity—the Union wanted to march on Richmond. I knew better, of course, but what is knowledge compared to emotion?

  We thought we had our man in General McClellan. But I must not go too swiftly.

  Lights rose in the hall, and General Scott plumped for the doors, an old bear on parade. You could hear his limbs weep. A teamster hollered, “You’re a-going the wrong way, gen’rul. Rebs is yonder.” But none of his fellows took up the mockery. The carriages in trail produced faces half-familiar, politicians who perched at the bar in Mr. Willard’s hotel, and ladies made fine, the sort who stuck to the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue on their promenades. Old Scott was going, but he would not go alone. His companions were making a social affair of it.

  There is sadness in such doings.

  The general did not see me. I am not great of stature, nor a commanding sort. Nor was I a man of any importance. But I saw the old man’s face. Twas the composition of sorrow.

  Just as he was set to enter the station, we heard an uproar come on at a gallop, the shot crack of horseshoes on wet paving, then the muffling as they turned into the mud of the station yard. Accouterments jangled, and troopers riding in advance shouted a path through the wagons and carts and stray women of the sort who have lost their direction in life.

  I am a man blessed with an instinct for where to look, and it has often been in the direction opposite from the public’s attention. With the cavalcade just upon us, I turned toward General Scott. What I saw was far sadder than the loneliness of retirement. I saw hope. I understood him, you see, as one soldier understands another. I saw the quick, bright glow of hope that his President had changed his mind, refusing to accept his resignation and recalling him to his generalcy over the new multitudes in blue.

  He was disappointed. General McClellan, our champion and as young as Scott was old, pranced up on his stallion. Even in the dark, the man shone, and his India-rubber cape looked like a lord’s hunting kit. We all knew him by sight, great galloper that he was. McClellan was ever underway, racing over the long bridge to inspect the fortifications on the Virginia side, dashing up to the heights to welcome a newly arrived regiment, always on his infernal monster of a horse. Little Mac was the most visible man in the Union, a fellow who might have made a great career in the theater, had he not been fitted to the military. I had a fondness for him because he was a great man but not a big one, barely taller than myself. I thought him set to convince the world at last of the spark in the man of compact physique. And he was another Pennsylvania man.

  McClellan made a perfect stop on his horse, gallant and just broadside to the old general, then he threw back his wet cape. The two men shared a taste for fine uniforms, and even this early in the morning they were resplendent. No Worth gown will match the magnificence of a general with an indulgent tailor.

  Another man might have found humor in the contrast between the mountainous old soldier and the young rooster set to replace him. In truth, McClellan did not come up to Scott’s shoulders. Not even with his French cap on. But Mac had zest, and old Scott did not. The young man carried it off with a fine salute. I was proud of him.

  It seemed generous to me that McClellan should rise so early to bid a last farewell to an old soldier, but perhaps it was simply clever. No matter. I believed in its decency at the time. And once his face settled, General Scott appeared pleased, accepting the visit as a mark of respect from the boy who booted him, unwilling to think further on it.

  I heard nothing of their conversation beyond the greeting, for admirers surrounded them, and the sound of an incoming train called me to duty. I had received a telegraphic message promising that a much-delayed shipment of trousers would arrive with certainty this time. We had soldiers standing guard in their drawers and sharing blankets under tentage that would not keep out a spit of tobacco. A week back, General Meigs, who was a hard and honest fellow, had condemned twenty-five thousand army overcoats that had been delivered shoddy. Think of the cost of such like. Our government bled money to buy the things the soldiers needed, but the relationship between payment and delivery seemed to have broken down. There was not an excess of honesty among the manufacturers, if I may be pardoned the frankness, and not a few seemed to regard the war first and foremost as a splendid opportunity to bolster their fortunes. Nor was our government composed entirely of innocents.

  In the camps, sickness whittled at our regiments while the officers quibbled. My new duty was to clothe them, yet I could not do even that. It was a dark time, that first autumn of the war. We had no victories, and few heroes. The country was impatient with Mr. Lincoln. It seemed we could not bear another blow. But let that bide.

  The trousers did not arrive. There was a shipment of cannon of a mark later found to explode upon repeated firings, and a company of zouaves sang a vulgar tune off pitch as they staggered from the train. But the cargo master had nothing for me.

  General Scott boarded a fine private car behind his own locomotive, set to pull away ahead of the six o’clock train. McClellan bid him a handsome farewell, then strutted off, pausing only to inspect a driving wheel, for he had become a big railroad man before the war. Mr. Cameron, our Secretary of War and himself a railroad fellow, come hurrying to join old Scott, but he and Little Mac went out of each other’s way like cholera shunning the plague. Only the barest of formal greetings passed between them, though they were both Pennsylvania men.

  Now I worked on loan to Mr. Cameron’s department under a queer arrangement with the Quartermaster General, and I would have liked to believe in the man. But I could not mistake that he had great acquaintance among those manufacturers least respondent to payment. I had twice been warned not to bother mill owners for due delivery. And Mr. Cameron had great interests in ore and iron and steel, as well. He would have been right at home in Merthyr’s mill offices, or up in Crawshay’s Castle. White-haired and weak of chin, Mr. Cameron had a narrow face and the eyes of a barracks lender. I marked it to Little Mac’s credit that there was no great love between them. But let that bide. The depot was a blustering place, what with the loading and the workmen shouting and the parlor laughter of the ladies attending the general. Bales tumbled from wagons and raindrops skirmished. Newspapermen, hardly creatures of the dawn, accumulated beside Scott’s railway coach, weaving and pitching questions. Cars shifted, brakes shrieke
d, and steam rose. A courier boy ran up to one of the scribblers, and the man left quickly, as though the general’s interest to the public had vanished in an instant, but I thought nothing of it at the time.

  Nor did I think on the trouserless infantry, if I am to be honest. My thoughts were fixed on myself, and they were sour. I had been made a fool again, see. I had presumed to lead a company of men into battle, but I could not even secure a shipment of woolens. Perhaps I should have gone back to Pottsville and my Mary Myfanwy, for all the good I was to the Union.

  I marched off in vexation. Along the first blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue, I had to keep to the high sidewalk, for the street was under water from the storm. A dead cat floated by and the slop water come right up to the base of the elms. Twas Saturday, and early still, yet farmers creaked in to market atop weathered carts, the rough wheels churning through the flood. Wet through, their wives shielded pies to hawk to the soldiers. Wagons of firewood, down from the counties, rolled behind nags too broken to sell to army purchasing agents. Drovers chased muddy beeves along the great avenue, a day’s feed for the army, and language that was not Christian followed them. A boy sold chestnuts from a brazier for a workingman’s breakfast. The fragrance took me in its thrall till I was tempted to buy, but we must be modest and firm in our expenditures.

  The sky cracked above the Island. Light seeped over the roofs, fighting through the veil of chimney smoke. Bugles sounded in the distance, first one, then dozens, taking up the call one from the other like jackals. Our camps were everywhere, in the squares and on the great lawns, on the heights above the city and beyond the river. The army was growing like a great blue muscle, and the city swelled with it.