Book Three: The Honest Silence Part Three: The Works Characters
Chapter Eleven
Unconditional
Henry Ashton. New Westminster, in the United Kingdom of America. Monday, 3 February 1862.
He was a mediocre peacetime officer and an indifferent civilian because both required qualities he did not possess. He was an exceptional wartime commander because that required qualities almost nobody possessed: an unbreakable stomach for the arithmetic of loss, a quartermaster's grip on what an army could actually do, and a complete absence of interest in how any of it looked.
There was no winter that year.
I mean that in the military sense, which is the only sense a soldier is entitled to, since the snow fell on the capital as it falls every year and the river froze along its edges and the men on the works cursed the cold as men have always cursed it. But in every war I had ever read of, and every war the professors at the Point had ever taught us, the armies went into quarters when the roads went to mud, and sat by their fires, and drilled, and waited for the spring; and in the winter of 1861 the armies of the Crown did not. The orders came down from the new commander in the first week of January, and they were the shortest orders I had ever read. The campaign would continue. That was the substance of them, and very nearly the whole of the text.
I had heard his name for the first time in April, in the Chief Engineer’s office, written in the Colonel’s draft in the Colonel’s hand, and I had asked who he was. By Christmas he commanded every army the Crown had in America, and the newspapers had begun to print his name in the same type as the Prime Minister’s, and nobody in the capital had seen him. He was in the west. He had been in the west since the summer, with a volunteer regiment at first and then a brigade and then a great deal more, fighting along the rivers of the interior where nobody in New Westminster was looking; and he wrote to the Colonel, I was told, every week, and the Colonel wrote to him; and the letters went by the post, or by the telegraph when they were short, and nobody thought anything of them.
On the morning of Monday the third of February, 1862, the Colonel sent for me to the farmhouse on the crest, and gave me a packet sealed with his own seal, and told me that I was to carry it to General Grant myself.
He said, “It is not that I distrust the post, Mr Ashton. It is that I wish him to have it from somebody who can answer his questions about the works, and who will bring me back his answer, and an account of him.” He looked at me in his way. “I have not seen him for some years. I should like to know what he is like now.”
I said that I would tell him.
He said, “Tell me exactly,” and gave me the packet, and that was all.
I am not going to give Your Majesty the whole of that journey, because it was a long one and most of it was railway, and railway in winter in a war is the same everywhere, which is to say cold and slow and full of soldiers asleep on one another. I went by Baltimore and over the mountains to the Ohio, and down the Ohio by the cars to Louisville, in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, which had stayed with the Union by a margin that its own people still argued about in the hotel bars; and from there by another railway south into Tennessee, which had stayed too, and was full of the Crown’s soldiers going south and of wagons and mules and coffee and mud. I had not known that there was so much mud in America. I had thought I knew mud, from the Northern Neck. The mud of the interior in February is a different substance from the mud of Virginia, deeper and redder and more patient, and it seemed to me, by the third day, that it had taken the side of the rebellion and was holding up the whole army by itself.
The last of the way was by river, on a steamer full of ammunition, up a river I will not name, because I have found that naming it starts arguments among men who were there that I do not wish to start. The army was on it, a great many miles up, where the river crossed out of the loyal country into the rebel; and the rebels had built two forts to close it, one on either side of a bend, a few miles apart, with batteries on the water and earthworks behind; and the army had come up to the forts in the first days of February, with gunboats on the river, and had begun to take them.
I came up on the evening of the ninth. The first fort had fallen the week before. The army was round the second, in the snow, in the woods, with its fires going in every hollow as far as I could see along the ridges, and the gunboats lying in the river below with steam up, and every now and again a gun from the fort, or from the boats, making a noise in the dark like a door slammed in a large empty house. I asked the officer who met the boat where I should find General Grant. He said, “Ask anybody,” and pointed up the hill.
I found him in a farmhouse kitchen, at a table, writing.
I am going to describe him as exactly as I can, Sir, because the Colonel asked me to, and because I have found since that almost nobody describes him accurately, the newspapers least of all. He was small. That was the first thing, and it surprised me, because I had imagined, I think, somebody built on the Colonel’s scale; he was perhaps five feet eight, and slight, and stooped a little over the table. He was thirty-nine. He had a short brown beard, cut close, and brown hair that needed cutting, and he was wearing a private soldier’s blouse with a general’s straps sewn on the shoulders, somewhat crooked, and trousers tucked into muddy boots, and there was a cigar in his mouth that had gone out. He did not look up when I came in. He finished the line he was writing, and then the sentence, and then he looked up, and I saw his eyes, which were grey and very steady, and which told me nothing whatever.
I gave him my name and my errand and the packet. He said, “Thank you, Captain. Sit down,” and pointed with his pen at a chair, and broke the seal and read the letters.
He read them twice. I watched him do it, since there was nothing else to do in that kitchen, and I learned nothing, because his face did not move, any more than the Colonel’s moved when he was listening. I have since seen him read despatches announcing victories and despatches announcing disasters, and the casualty returns of battles in which a great many men had died on his orders, and I have never once been able to tell from his face which kind of paper he had in his hand. When he had finished he folded the letters and put them in the breast of his blouse, and relit his cigar, and asked me how the works were getting on.
I told him. He asked questions, and they were the right questions, the questions a quartermaster would ask rather than a general: how many men the works took to man, how many guns, how much powder the magazines held and how long it would last at a given rate of fire, how the guns were supplied when the river was frozen, and what the works would need in the spring that they did not have now. He did not ask what the works looked like or how strong they were or whether the Colonel thought they would hold. He wanted to know what they cost to keep and what they could do. When I had told him everything I knew he said, “Good,” and wrote something down, three or four words, on a scrap of paper, and put it in his pocket with the Colonel’s letters.
Then he said that I had better stay until the fort was settled, since I would want to carry back the news with his answer, and that I should find a bed with his engineer, and called out of the door for him. And the man who came in was Captain Parker.
I must tell Your Majesty about Ely Parker, because I owe him a great deal and because I shall have occasion to speak of him again.
He was a Seneca. He was a sachem of his nation, one of the chiefs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, and he had a name in his own language that he told me once and that I will not try to spell; and he was also a civil engineer, a better one than I was, who had built canals and lighthouses and customs houses before the war and had come into the army with Grant, whom he had known for years. He was a big man, broad and heavy and very quiet, with a deep voice and beautiful handwriting, and he was the only officer on that staff who could have told you, at any hour of the day or night, where every regiment in the army was and how many men it had and what it had eaten that morning. He did not say much. He did not need to. I shared his tent for nine days, and in nine days I learned more about how an army in the field is actually kept alive than I had learned in eleven years in the department.
He told me, on the first night, as we lay in our blankets, that I should not expect the General to talk. He said that the General talked to perhaps three people in the world and that he was not one of them, and that he had served with him for years. He said that the General wrote everything, and wrote it in the fewest words that would carry it, and that I should read everything the General wrote, if I had the chance, because it was the only way of knowing what he thought. He said, “He puts the thing he wants first. Always first. And then he stops.” I asked him whether the General was a hard man. Parker thought about it for a long time, in the dark, and then said that the General was not hard; that he simply did not stop. He said, “He does not like it, Captain. Any of it. He will not let a man swear in his presence, and he will not eat meat that has any blood in it, and he sits up at night over the returns. But he does not stop.”
The fort fell on the Sunday, the sixteenth.
It had been battered by the gunboats and invested by the army for four days, in the snow, and on the Saturday the garrison had tried to break out and had been driven back, and that night the officer commanding sent out a flag across the lines with a letter, asking for an armistice and the appointment of commissioners to settle terms of capitulation. The letter came to the farmhouse a little before dawn. I was there; Parker had brought me, because he said that I would wish to see how it was done, and he was right.
The General read it at the kitchen table, in his blouse, by a candle, with his staff standing round him. He read it once. Then he took a sheet of paper and wrote his answer, without stopping and without crossing anything out, in perhaps five minutes, and gave it to Parker to copy fair. I stood at Parker’s elbow while he copied it, as I had stood at the Colonel’s elbow at Harpers Ferry, and so I can tell Your Majesty what it said.
It said that no terms except immediate and unconditional surrender would be considered, and that the General proposed to move immediately upon the fort’s works.
And then it said, in the same despatch, in the next sentence, without any change of tone, that the officers of the garrison would be permitted to keep their side-arms and their horses.
I read it over Parker’s shoulder twice, because I did not believe I had read it right. I had expected the first sentence; everybody in the army knew by then what sort of general we had. I had not expected the second. It seemed to me a contradiction: that a man who would accept no terms at all should, in the same breath, give terms. I said something of the kind to Parker, under my breath. He finished the line he was copying, as the General finished his lines, and then said, without looking up, “It is not a term. It is a courtesy. He knows the man.” He blotted the sheet. “They were at the Point together. He lent the General money once, when the General had none.”
I have thought about that despatch a great deal, Sir, more than about anything else I saw in the west, because it seemed to me afterwards to contain the whole of the man, and very nearly the whole of the war. There would be no terms. The thing would be ended entirely or it would not be ended, and he would go on until it was. And within that, inside the iron of it, there would be whatever decency could be afforded without cost to the end, given without being asked, to men he had known as boys, so that they could walk out of their fort as officers and not as felons. He did not explain either sentence. He did not, so far as I ever saw, think either needed explaining.
The fort surrendered at daylight. I watched the garrison come out, a long dark column in the snow, without music, between two lines of our men, and lay down their muskets in heaps in front of the works, and stand about in the cold waiting to be told where to go; and the officers came last, with their swords at their sides and their horses led behind them, and there was a sort of silence over the whole thing that I did not expect, as though nobody on either side knew quite what face to wear. I saw the General ride down to the fort in the middle of the morning, alone except for an orderly, on a big bay horse that he rode better than any man I have ever seen ride, and meet the officer who had commanded it, at the gate, and shake his hand. I was too far off to hear what they said. Parker told me afterwards that the General had asked him whether he needed any money.
The despatch was in the newspapers within the week.
I do not know who gave it to them; I suspect that the General did not care, and that somebody on his staff did. But it went out over the wires from the nearest telegraph office on the Monday, and by the end of the week it had been printed in every newspaper in every loyal polity in America, the first sentence of it, the one about no terms but unconditional surrender; and some clever man in a newspaper office noticed that the General’s initials were U. S., and that those were the initials of the phrase, and printed that too, and by the time I got back to the capital it was a joke and a slogan and a song, and the man who had written it was the most famous soldier in America. It was the first plain victory the Union had had in the whole of the war. The early advances in Virginia had been turned back twice; the Colonel’s works were works and not victories; and here was a general in the west who had taken a river and two forts and a whole garrison, in the snow, in February, when every other army in history would have been in its quarters, and had said so in a sentence that a child could repeat.
The second sentence was not printed. I looked for it in every newspaper I could find on the way home, and it was not there. I have looked for it since, in the histories, and it is in some of them and not in others. I mention it because I was there when it was written, and because I think that the people who have made the General into a butcher, as some of them have since, should know that he wrote it, in the same five minutes, at the same table, by the same candle, without being asked.
He gave me his answer to the Colonel on the morning I left, in a sealed packet, at the same kitchen table.
I asked him then, because I had been carrying the question since April and I thought I might never have another chance, how the Colonel had known of him. I told him about the letter, and how I had made the fair copy, and how I had asked the Colonel who Ulysses Grant was, and how the Colonel had said that I would hear of him. He listened to all of it with his cigar in his mouth and no expression whatever. When I had finished he took the cigar out and looked at it and said, “I have no idea, Captain. I have always meant to ask him.”
I said that the Colonel must have known him in Mexico.
He said that they had met in Mexico, once or twice, when he was a quartermaster of infantry and the Colonel was on the general’s staff, and that he did not suppose the Colonel would remember it. He said it without any resentment that I could hear, as a man states the distance between two towns. Then he put the cigar back in his mouth and said, “Tell him the river is open to the south. Tell him I shall not stop,” and gave me his hand, which was small and dry and very hard, and turned back to his papers before I was out of the door.
I came back to the capital on the twenty-fourth, and found it in mourning.
The Prime Minister’s son William, a boy of eleven, had died at Charter House on the Thursday, of a fever that had gone through the town that winter, as fevers did every winter in the low streets by the river; and the house on Charter Road had black crape on its door, and the flag on Parliament House was at half-staff, and in the camps on the works the men who had been singing about John Brown all winter had stopped singing for a week. I was told that Mr Lincoln had gone back to the Commons two days after the funeral and answered questions about the river forts. I was told that his voice had not changed. I did not see it. I believe it.
I went across the river to the farmhouse on the crest and gave the Colonel the General’s packet, and he broke the seal and read it, standing, as the General had read his. Then he asked me what the General was like now.
I told him exactly, as he had asked. I told him about the blouse and the crooked straps and the cigar that had gone out, and the questions about powder and frozen rivers, and the despatch, both sentences, and the officer at the gate and the money; and I told him what Parker had said, that the General did not stop. And I told him, last, what the General had said about Mexico, that he did not suppose the Colonel would remember it.
The Colonel was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “No. I do not remember it.” He folded the General’s letter and put it in his coat. “That is rather the point, Mr Ashton,” he said. And he went out to look at the river, and I have never known what he meant by that either, though I have come to think that I know very nearly.