Thomas Wolfe, page 357
When these men talked, he saw it all, he felt it all, he breathed and tasted it all—all of the glory, joy, and fragrance of the war—none of its stench and filth and misery. It was not in the boy’s heart to understand the sadness and the sorrow in the talking of the Generals. He never saw the failure and defeat of it, the passionate regret of it, the constant repetition of its bitter and incessant litany of “Why?”
Why, they would earnestly demand, had someone left his right flank unprotected, when he should have had sufficient warning of the pressure of Hancock’s infantry behind the wood? Why had someone mistaken a picket fence for a line of soldiers? Why had there been a mile’s interval between someone’s line and his support? Why had someone waited from eleven-thirty in the morning until two-thirty in the afternoon to follow up his own advance and effect the total rout of an exhausted enemy? Why had someone not instantly taken possession of the hill, when he must have known it was undefended?
Why had Jubal Early, Gordon passionately demanded, not followed up the rout of Cedar Creek with one single, crushing, and conclusive blow? Why, when Hancock’s army was in a state of almost total rout, its divisions scattered and its force demoralized, when only a single corps of the whole army was intact—Why in God’s name had Early failed to give the order for capture and annihilation of that corps, and pounded it to pieces, which a few batteries of artillery could have done? Why, when a glorious victory was ours, had he refrained from making it complete, and allowed a vanquished enemy to gather up its shattered forces, and so had let a glorious victory be turned to terrible defeat?
Embattled “Why?” and wildly-longing “If”—the two great dirges of defeated men! If someone had not acted as he had; If someone had not gone where he had gone, or stayed where he had stayed; If someone had only seen what others saw, believed what others told him, known what others knew; If only someone hadn’t waited, or had done at once what others would have done without delay—“Yes, If,” as Zachariah Joyner said with bitter irony, “If only men were gods instead of children; If they were seers and prophets gifted with prevision and foresight; If battlefields were checkerboards of logic instead of fields of chance; If someone had not been just what he was at the place and moment where he was—in short, If flesh were not flesh, and brain not brain, and man’s nature, feeling, thought, and error not the things they are—then there would never be defeats and victory, there would be faultless logic, but no war!”
As for the boy, he saw the thrill of it, he saw the glory of it; he never saw the defeated hopes and passionate regrets of it, in these earnest conversations of the Generals. For, no matter what their sorrow, how deep and unassuaged their resignation, the Generals were grand men. Inhuman war had fostered in them all a wise and deep humanity; fatherless death upon the battlefield, a kind of deep and powerful paternity; awful responsibility, a calm and unperturbed serenity, a total fearlessness of death or life, a tenderness toward man and child, and to all living. He heard them talk of another’s error, and confess their own. He heard them question another’s judgment, not his courage. He heard them engage in hot debate and open criticism, but there was no recrimination. They were good men, the Generals. They were not jealous, vengeful, petty, mean, and bitter people; theirs was the grief of grief, the sorrow of irrevocable loss; theirs was the sadness for the shattered past, all of the lost joy and the singing—but there was no hate.
And to the boy it seemed a good life that they lived then—sixty years ago. He saw and heard them talk, he listened breathlessly to everything they had to say, he devoured every scrap that they had written—memoirs, reminiscences, autobiographies, personal experiences in the war, as well as complex and highly technical discussions about battles and campaigns, errors in strategy, technical maneuvers. As a result of it, his studies in school suffered disastrously. His grammar was a thing of shreds and patches, his algebra was worse than negligible. To his father’s blunt and frequently outspoken disgust, he was deep in “flanking operations” of all sorts, and a “covering movement” held no terrors for him. He had small Latin, and less Greek, but his knowledge of his rear, his wings, his right, his left, his center, and the position of his supporting columns was encyclopaedic and profound.
He was, as he admitted in his later years, obsessed. He would go for days at a time completely lost to all around him, sunk in a whole dream-world of war, a war in which he played the conspicuous part, a war exclusively concerned with his tactics, his strategies, his battles, his campaigns, his final and decisive victories—for, since he was a warrior of twelve years, his victories were always final and decisive. In all his gory struggles, he never lost a battle, or made a technical mistake.
In his mind’s eye, and in his war-drunk heart and spirit, he composed entire histories, extraordinary documents woven of a dozen different styles, and cunningly combining the most exciting features in the works of all his literary masters—the cold and dry precisions, the technical analysis of the Northern General Doubleday, the flaming and impulsive rhetoric of John B. Gordon. Like Molière and Shakespeare, the boy took what he wanted where he found it, and, like both his illustrious predecessors, he may sometimes have improved upon his theft:
“The scene upon our left was one of indescribable confusion. Early, unaware of Hancock’s movements in the morning, and, through an error of his faulty vision mistakenly assuming that a picket fence somewhat to his right and rear was a supporting column of his own troops, had rashly thrown out his left to the very edges of the wood—when the attack occurred. At this moment, when the Southern line was still resting on its arms, a solid wall of flame and fire burst from the wood. At the same instant, Hancock’s right, under the command of Hays, swept out behind the cover of the wood around the flank of Early’s unsuspecting line. Under the murderous cross fire of this enfilading movement and the solid frontal wall of Hazard’s guns, the whole left crumpled like a piece of paper, and was driven in upon the weakened center. The Union cavalry under Pleasanton now dashed from the woods and drove through the thinned and shattered lines, and the rout was complete.
“It was at just this moment that Lee turned to that young and brilliant officer who, alone of all his Generals, had from the outset of the battle rightly judged the movements through the wood of Hancock’s men.
“‘General Joyner’ he said gravely—for he was speaking to none other than the famous Edward Zebulon Joyner, the youngest general officer in the Confederate Army, the commander of the famous Iron-Wall Brigade, a stripling in years and in appearance, but a scarred veteran of battle despite his youth, and in tactical judgment and strategic skill perhaps the superior of any other officer in the whole Army of Virginia—‘General Joyner,’ said Lee gravely, as he pointed toward the fatal wood, ‘do you think that position there is tenable and may be taken by our men?’
“For a moment the young officer was silent. A look of deep sadness and resignation overspread his handsome countenance, for he, better than all others, knew at what fearful cost of men—the men of his own gallant and beloved command—the operation might succeed. He of all men realized the tragic blunder that had been committed—the tragic consequence of Early’s obstinate refusal to heed the warnings he had given him that morning—but no matter what he felt or thought, he masked his feelings bravely, his hesitation was only momentary. Looking Lee directly in the eyes, he answered firmly:
“‘Yes, General Lee, I think that the position in the wood is tenable and may be held.’
“‘Then, General,’ said Lee quietly, ‘I have just one other question. Do you think that course the only one that is left us?’
“The young hero’s answer came this time without an instant’s hesitation, as clear and ringing as a shot:
“‘Sir, I do!’
“Lee was silent for a moment; when he spoke, his voice was very sad.
“‘Then, Sir,’ he said, ‘you may advance.’
“Without an instant of delay, the young leader gave the order; his veteran troops swept forward, the great attack had begun.”
This was the kind of thing, as Edward Joyner later on confessed, to which his fantasy was susceptible in the eighties. He not only thought and dreamed volumes of it in his mind and heart—he actually wrote whole reams and packets of it out on paper; and one of the most painful experiences of his life occurred when he came home one afternoon and found his father sitting at his roll-top desk reading a great batch of it. The boy had thought his secret safe, but had very imprudently stuffed the manuscript away in an unused drawer, and the Judge had come upon it unexpectedly while going through his desk to find some letters.
He looked up at his son briefly, very grimly, when he entered; then, without a word of greeting, he went back to his interrupted reading of that damning scrawl, that devastating revelation of his miserable soul.
And Edward sat there wretchedly and watched him, as he read page after page. His father sat at the desk, with his broad back turned on the boy, the late light gleaming on the polished surface of his bald head, with only his thick red neck, the angle of his square red jaw, a small portion of his square red face, exposed. Although the boy could not see the expression of that square red face, he did not have to use much of his imagination to vision its grim intensity. And as Edward sat there, staring wretchedly, he could see that red neck turn a redder hue, the red jaw thickening to an angry purple. Near the end of his perusal, which, like everything he did, was most deliberate and thorough—horribly complete, it seemed to the boy, as he watched him read each page slowly and carefully from top to bottom, turning each page face down carefully with a thick and hairy hand when he had finished it—his father began to give utterance of certain harsh, explosive sounds indicative of partial strangulation, and to certain fragmentary expletives which were translatable to his offspring’s tortured ears as follows:
“‘. . . flanking operations!’ . . . Pah!”
And bang! The offending sheet would be thumped down on its miserable face.
“‘. . . murderous enfilading fire which drove his whole left back upon his center—which crumpled like a sheet of tissue paper!’ . . . What damned rubbish is this anyway?”
Bang! And down went this one on its miserable face.
“‘. . . that brilliant and gallant young Commander, the flower of the Confederate cavalry, as he was the pride of their success, whose superb tactical manipulations might alone have served to save the day if only——’”
This, finally, was too much for him! He banged the offending sheet of paper down upon his desk with a tremendous thump, he raised his square red face, and roared out like a bewildered man imploring heaven:
“Great God! Whoever read such Goddamned stuff as this since time began?”
Then he composed himself again, and went back to his reading. Slowly, deliberately, with agonizing thoroughness, he read the whole thing through to the bitter, miserable end. When he had finished, he sat silent for a moment, his thick hands clenched upon the desk, his burly shoulders leaning forward, breathing somewhat slowly and stertorously, like a man trying to think his way through some problem to a laborious conclusion. At last he gathered up the manuscript in his thick fingers, carefully arranged it, put it into the little drawer from which it had come—where the boy had thought it was so safe—and, fumbling in his vest pocket for a small key, locked the drawer. Then he swung around in his old swivel chair, and faced his son grimly and in silence for a moment. And now he took a sheet of paper from his pocket—a sheet which obviously had been crumpled violently in his hand, and at whose telltale and abhorred appearance the boy’s heart stopped beating—and, smoothing it out carefully with his big fingers, he presented it to his son:
“Here’s your report card. It just came today. Among your other academic victories I notice you got forty-two in history.”
Then he got up, still breathing loudly, and limped heavily and slowly from the room.
Edward’s father never spoke to him of this humiliating episode again. One of the greatest elements of that blunt, inarticulate, and desperately shy man was his generosity, the warmth and understanding of his essential humanity. His words could be as direct and brutal as a blow of the fist, but once he had spoken, he was done with it; what was past was past, he didn’t bear grudges, or try to persuade people to his own judgments or beliefs by the ignoble practices of incessant argument, recessive bickerings.
Nevertheless, he was seriously perturbed by the strength and virulence of the boy’s obsession. By the time Edward was fourteen, he was openly and passionately announcing that he was going to West Point if he could get an appointment. Although the father’s usual comment on this was a scornful grunt, or a blunt comment that “You’d better be thinking of some means of earning an honest living and being a useful citizen,” he was deeply and seriously alarmed. The truth was that Judge Joyner would rather have had his son choose any other profession in the world than that of the soldier; every instinct of his nature, every element of his character, abhorred the whole idea and the life of war.
“It’s not a life, anyway,” he said. “It’s death. It’s true the finest men I ever knew, I knew because I went to war. But I went to war because I had to go—and that was the reason that the others went. But the reason that you meet fine men in war is because it is fine men who have to go to war; it is not war that makes them fine. War is the filthiest, rottenest, corruptest, and most damnable disease that man and the devil have invented; and because it is the filthiest, rottenest, corruptest, and most damnable disease, it brings out the most heroic and enobling qualities that men have. But don’t deceive yourself; the reason that war brings out these qualities is not because war is good, but because war is bad. These qualities come out in men who go to war because without these qualities men could not suffer and endure it. Sherman said that war is hell; well, he was wrong. War is not hell, war is worse than hell, war is death!”
He was silent for a moment, his square face reddening as he strove to speak:
“To hell with death!” he grunted.
His son pointed out to him, with all the earnestness and persuasiveness of youth, the advantages of getting “a good education” at West Point free of charge, and added that, even though he went to West Point and got an officer’s commission, “I might not even have to go to war; there might not ever be another war.”
“That would be a fine life, wouldn’t it?” Judge Joyner said. “If that’s all the value you put upon your life, why don’t you just chuck it off the top of Mount Mitchell and be done with it?”
The boy was troubled and bewildered. “Why? How do you mean?”
“I mean you’d be doing something just as useful, for yourself and for your country—and at just a fraction of the expense. No!” he shook his head doggedly. “A peacetime soldier is no good at all. He is a parasite, a fool, and his head is about as useful to him, or to society, as a doorknob. . . . No! You find good men in an army in time of war; in time of peace you find tin soldiers.”
He was very scornful of “tin soldiers.” No man was ever more generous or fair when he spoke of his own comrades in the war, but, like Zachariah, his contempt for the military pretensions of people such as Theodore was frank and pitiless.
Robert Joyner was especially exasperated to see that the terrible experience of the war had taught so many people nothing. His homely character abhorred romantic flummery. He was an intelligent and experienced observer of men and customs, and perfectly aware of a fatal weakness in the Southern temperament—its capacity for romantic self-deception and mythology. The very root and source of his practical and hopeful character was a spirit that would not yield an atom to defeat. He was the type of man who, had his own house burned down, would have begun to build a new one before the smoking embers had grown cold; and, had he needed them, he would have pulled the very nails out of the smoking embers.
At the moment of Lee’s surrender, he undoubtedly had his plans made and knew what work he had to do, and do at once. When he got home, he began immediately to rebuild his life, and from that time on he never faltered at his task—which was, which always was, the task before him, the work at hand.
“If there’s a job to do,” he told his son—“and you will find as you grow older that there always is a job to do—for God’s sake, lay a-hold of it, and shove! Don’t shilly-shally, and don’t mess around! That’s the trouble with so many of us now! It’s always been a trouble in the South. I hoped the war would have knocked some of that foolishness out of us, but you can see yourself what has happened, can’t you? God knows, before the war the thing was bad enough—Sir Walter Scott, fake chivalry, fake lords and ladies, fake ideals of honor, fake wooden columns on the houses—everything fake except the plumbing, which wasn’t fake because it didn’t exist at all. And now, look at the thing that’s happened to us. I hoped the war would have knocked all that rubbish into a cocked hat, that the beating which we had to take would wake us up, and that when we got home, we’d start off with a clean slate, make a fresh start. That’s the thing, Ed!” Robert Joyner cried, and smote his big hand down upon the desk. “Get really started! Don’t you realize that that’s the thing that ails us in the South? It’s not the war. It’s not the war that ruined us. Most of us,” he went on grimly, “were ruined long before the war! It’s all rubbish for most of us to talk of what we lost, because we had nothing to begin with. And the real truth of the matter is that we got off on the wrong foot at the beginning—we made a bad start! Why,” cried Robert Joyner earnestly, and brought his big fist down upon the desk again, “looked at it in one way, that war might have been the best thing that ever happened to us—if we had only seen it in the proper light. It gave us the chance to start off with a clean slate—to wipe out that whole fake and shoddy way of life—and to begin anew!—to get started right! And now just see the thing that’s happened!” In his earnestness, he leaned forward and tapped his son on the knee with one big finger. “For every fake we had before the war we have ten new ones nowadays, and each of them is ten times as bad! Some of the people back before the war did have some basis for their pretensions. If they lived in houses with fake columns, at least some of them did own such houses; and although their niggers ate them out of house and home, at least some of them did own niggers. But look at the kind of people you meet everywhere today. You have people talking of the great estates and houses that they lost who were born in shacks and raised on hog and hominy. You find people—like Old Looky Thar!” cried Robert Joyner scornfully, mentioning a local character to whom Zarachiah had given this strange name for reasons that shall presently appear. “You find people like Old Looky Thar—who calls himself a ‘Major’ now, and never even rose up to a corporal’s chevrons. Yes! and tells you of all the land and property he owned, and all the niggers that he lost! You’ve heard him, haven’t you?”
