Call to Arms by Frederick Nolan

Author:Frederick Nolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: american civil war, gettysburg, patriots, historical saga, piccadilly publishing, frederick h christian, strong family, shiloh us, call to arms saga
Publisher: Piccadilly

Fourteen – The Story of Andrew Strong

April 1862

The Army of the Tennessee was in camp on a pleasant, verdant plateau stretching about four miles along the River Tennessee, hemmed in on two sides by creeks which emptied into the river. It was on the Confederate side of the Tennessee, Sherman said, but so perfect that it would be almost shameful not to use it.

‘We’ve got a lot of green troops to whip into shape, Sam,’ he told Grant. ‘It’s an ideal place.’

‘Anything you say, Billy,’ Grant said.

They were sitting at a table set up under a tree outside Grant’s headquarters in Savannah. Grant, never the most meticulous of dressers, had his uniform coat open and his shirt collar unbuttoned. He was a short man, with black hair cut close to the head, and his beard was brindled with gray. The omnipresent cigar jutted out of his mouth. The small keen gray eyes squinted against the smoke. He was relaxed, for Grant.

‘You’re not worried there might be an attack, general?’ Andrew said. Albert Sidney Johnston’s Confederate Army of the Mississippi lay crouched just thirty miles south of them at Corinth.

‘Hell, no!’ Sherman said, his ruddy face twisting with impatience. He was a tall, gawky man, hot-tempered, excitable. A beautiful piece of machinery with some of the screws loose, Andrew thought. He decided to tell Sherman about Steven Barrow.

Two evenings earlier he had been riding down the East Corinth Road, en route to General Prentiss’ camp, when he heard his name shouted. The shout came from a boy lying on a cot under a tent fly. His gray uniform was stiff with dried blood. He had been shot through the chest and stomach. They’d carried him in and the surgeons had done what they could for him, which was not much. Not much, but better than the treatment many received.

‘You won’t remember me, I shouldn’t wonder,’ the boy said. ‘I’m Steven Barrow. My father is William Barrow. We used to live—’

‘At Orange Court House. I know,’ Andrew said. ‘You moved to Richmond, I remember. Your Daddy bred horses.’

Steven Barrow nodded. His face was ashen and there was scarcely any color in his lips. He made a slight movement with his hand.

‘They tell me I’m going to die,’ he said. ‘I’ll not live to see the battle.’

‘What battle is that, Steven?’

‘Why, surely you must know!’ the boy said weakly. ‘We’ve an army fifty thousand strong on the march from Corinth! They’ll be upon you at any moment!’

‘You’re sure of this?’

‘Of … course,’ Steven said. Andrew frowned at the faint hesitation; it was almost as if, for a second, the life had left the boy and then returned. ‘I was scouting ahead. The attack.’ Steven looked puzzled, as a man would who cannot understand why he cannot remember something simple. And then the light went out of his eyes the way the light dies when someone turns down a lamp, and he was dead.

‘Colonel, I’ve no doubt you’re telling the truth,’ Sherman said offhandedly at the end of Andrew’s story.

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