The Bridge

This is the chapter I have been writing towards, Sir, and the one I have been putting off, and I am going to write it as plainly as I can and as soon as I can, so that it is done.

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I should explain first what a pontoon bridge is, because the gentleman who reads this to you may not know, and because the whole of what I have to tell turns on how quickly one can be taken up.

An army that marches across a country with rivers in it must cross them, and the bridges over them are generally burned before it arrives. So it carries its own. The bridge goes on wagons: flat-bottomed boats, of wood or of canvas over a wooden frame, each on its own wagon; and long timbers called balks, which are laid from boat to boat; and planks called chesses, which are laid across the balks to make the roadway; and anchors and ropes and lashings, and the tools. When the column comes to a river the pontoniers run the boats down into the water one after another and anchor them in a line across the stream, and lay the balks and lash them, and lay the chesses, and in an hour, or two hours, or half a day if the river is wide and the current bad, there is a road across the water that will carry infantry and guns and loaded wagons. And when the column is over, the pontoniers take it up again, in the reverse order, chesses and balks and boats, and load it on the wagons, and bring it on, so that it is there for the next river. A good company can take up in half an hour a bridge that took two hours to lay. Mine was a good company.

The pontoon train of the left wing of the column was mine, from Atlanta to the sea. I had forty boats and the wagons for them, and the company, and a detail of infantry to help with the hauling. We laid the bridge over every river and creek on our road that was too deep to ford, and there were a great many of them, and we took it up behind the column at every one.

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The march began on the fifteenth of July, and it was not like any campaign I had read of or any that the professors at the Point had taught.

We had no line of supply. The general had cut it himself, at Atlanta, and burned the bridges behind us, so that there was nothing behind the column but the country we had come through, and nothing in front of it but the country we were going to, and the column lived on the country in between. Every morning the foraging parties went out ahead and on the flanks, to every farm and plantation within reach of the road, and came back in the evening with what they had found: corn and bacon and sweet potatoes, cattle and pigs and chickens, horses and mules, wagons to carry it in, and whatever else they fancied, which was a good deal. What the column could not eat or carry, it destroyed. The cotton was burned in the gins and the gins with it, and the mills, and the barns that had held the corn, and the railway wherever we crossed it, rails twisted round the trees as at Atlanta. The orders said that the houses of people who did not resist were to be left standing. Mostly they were. What was in them, mostly, was not.

I have read since that the object of the march was not to defeat an army but to show the people of the rebellion that their own state could not protect them. I do not know whether that was the object; nobody told a captain of engineers what the object was. I know that it was the effect. I saw it in the faces of the white people at the doors of the houses we passed, who had been told for two years that the war was a long way off, in Virginia, and that the Crown’s armies could never come so far into Georgia, and who stood on their porches and watched the column go by for a whole day and understood, by the evening, that nobody was coming to help them.

We halted one night at a plantation house east of the Oconee, and I slept on the floor of its parlour with my lieutenant, and its mistress gave us supper, because she had been told that if she did the house would be left standing, and it was. She was a widow of about my mother’s age, very straight, in black, and she sat at the head of her own table and watched us eat her bacon without eating anything herself. Her people had gone that afternoon, all of them, following the column. Her cattle had gone with the foragers in the morning. She asked me, when she heard my voice, whether I was a Southern man, and I said that I was a Virginian. She asked whether I had a mother. I said that I had. She said, “Then I hope somebody does as much for her,” and got up and went upstairs, and I did not see her again. I thought about Marlfield that night on her parlour floor. I thought about my mother at the head of her own table, and whether the Crown’s soldiers had come up the drive, and whether she had given them supper, and I knew that she would rather have burned the house herself.

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And the people came.

I have said that they began to follow us at Atlanta. Once the march began there was no end to them. They came out of every plantation on our road and on both sides of it, as soon as the column came near: men and women, and children, and old people who could hardly walk, and babies carried, with what they had on their backs and sometimes a cart and a mule that had been their masters’. They came out in the night, generally, as the people had come in at Falmouth and on the heights; but sometimes in broad day, in front of the house, with the mistress on the porch watching them go. They followed the column. They walked behind it, a mile behind and then two and then more, and alongside it where the road allowed, in a crowd that grew every day until it was as large, I believe, as the column itself, and perhaps larger, and nobody could have counted it.

There was an order by then under which the people held as slaves in the rebel districts the army passed through were free. I had seen it read. As far as anybody could tell me what it meant, it meant that they were free where the army was, for as long as the army was there; and the people had understood it exactly, without anybody explaining it to them. They did not stay on the plantations to be free there, once the army had passed. They had seen what happened to people who were free where an army had been. They followed the army.

The column could not feed them. That is the plain fact, and I set it down first because it is the one that will be offered in excuse, and it is true. We were living on the country and the country was poor, and there were tens of thousands of us, and the foragers brought in what there was and the column ate it; and the people following ate what the column left, and what they could find in the fields after the foragers had been through them, which was very little. They were fed when there was food. They were not always fed. I saw children by the roadside eating raw corn off the cob, and old men chewing on the leather of their own shoes, and a woman boiling grass in a kettle. Some of the soldiers gave them what they could spare, and some of them gave a good deal more than they could spare, and some of them cursed them for slowing the road and drove them off it into the ditches when the wagons came by.

They slowed the road. That is the other plain fact. The column had to move fast, through rebel country, with rebel cavalry behind it and on its flanks, and the crowd behind it blocked the roads and the fords and the bridges, and straggled for miles, and the generals did not like it. I heard it said every evening at headquarters, and in the officers’ messes, that something must be done about them. I did not hear anybody say what.

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We came to Sandersville on the morning of Monday the third of August, and through it, and in the afternoon the head of the column came to a river.

I will not name it. I have the same reason as for the river in the west, and another reason besides, which is that I do not wish the place to be found by anybody who has not already found it. It was perhaps a hundred and fifty feet wide at the crossing, deep, and running fast and brown after rain, between steep banks, with swamp on both sides of the road for a mile; and there had been a bridge, and it had been burned. We laid ours by four o’clock. The column went over it all the evening, regiment after regiment, and the guns, and the wagons, and the herds of cattle the foragers had brought in, until nearly dark.

The people following had come up behind the rear of the column during the afternoon, and were waiting on the far bank, at the end of the road through the swamp, a great crowd of them, sitting by the road and standing among the trees, as they had waited at every crossing since Atlanta, for the column to be over so that they could follow it across.

A little after six o’clock the general commanding the division at the rear of the column rode down to the bridgehead on the near bank, where I was, with his staff. He asked me how long it would take my company to take up the bridge. I told him half an hour. He said that the last of his regiments would be over in twenty minutes, and that the rebel cavalry were not three miles behind them; and that as soon as the last regiment was over, the bridge was to come up, at once, without waiting for anything.

I asked whether the people on the far bank might not be let over first, since the bridge was there.

He said that they might not. He said that the column could not feed them, and could not protect them, and could not wait for them, and that if they came over they would follow it to the next river and the one after, and that the column must move. He said that I had my order.

I had my order. I want Your Majesty to hear that sentence as I heard it then, in his voice, on the bank of that river, because I have heard it since a great many times, in my own voice, at night. I did not argue with him. I asked him once, and he answered me, and I did not ask again. I have tried to remember whether I thought of asking again and decided not to, or whether it did not occur to me, and I cannot remember, and I think that is because it did not occur to me. I was an officer and he was a general, and he had given me an order that was within his authority, and I had asked my question and been answered. That is how it is done. I had been doing it for nine years.

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The last regiment came over at a quarter to seven. The general watched it over, and then rode away up the road after it with his staff, without looking back. I gave the order to my lieutenant, and my lieutenant gave it to the sergeants, and the company took up the bridge.

They had done it at every river since Atlanta and they did it very well. The chesses came up first, from the far end, the men working back towards our bank, plank after plank, passed from hand to hand and stacked on the near shore; and then the balks, unlashed and drawn back; and then the boats, one after another, the anchors weighed and the boats cut loose from their neighbours and hauled in against the current to our bank. The bridge came back across the river towards us as you might roll up a carpet.

The people on the far bank did not understand at first. They had seen the bridge taken up at every river since Atlanta, but they had seen it taken up after they were over. They stood and watched the first planks come up at the far end, and some of them came down to the water’s edge, and then more of them, and then I think they all understood at once, because the whole crowd came down out of the trees together towards the end of the bridge, which was no longer the end of the bridge but the end of a line of boats with nothing on them, drawing away from the bank.

They called to us. I will not set down what they called. I can hear it now, as I write this, and I do not believe that I could put it into words that the gentleman who reads them could say aloud, or that Your Majesty ought to be asked to hear in any voice but theirs.

Some of them went into the water. They went in after the boats, men first and then women, some with children on their backs or in their arms, and tried to reach the boats that were still out in the stream, or to swim the river beside them; and the river was a hundred and fifty feet of fast brown water between steep banks, and most of them could not swim. Some of them reached the boats and held on to them, and my men, who were in the boats hauling them in, pulled some of them aboard and brought them over. I gave no order for that. I gave no order against it. Some of my men went into the river from our bank, without orders, with ropes, and brought some more out. I did not stop them and I did not tell them to do it, and I stood on the bank and watched the boats come in.

Some of them were drowned. I saw some go under and not come up. I do not know how many. I have heard it put since at a number I will not give, because I do not know it, and the men who give it do not know it either.

The bridge was up by a little after seven. The company loaded the boats on the wagons and the wagons went up the road after the column in the dusk. I stood on the bank a little longer. On the far side the people who had not gone into the water were standing at the edge of it, a great many of them, and looking across at us, and I could see their faces in the last of the light. They were not calling now. They were looking. I had been looked at in that way before, by Daniel in the hall at Marlfield, and by the woman in her field on St Helena, and by an old man on a pallet at Harpers Ferry; and I had thought, each time, that I did not know what the look meant. I knew what this one meant.

After dark the rebel cavalry came up to the far bank. I heard them from the road, a mile on, where I had gone after my wagons: horses, and shouting, and some firing, and then not much.

In the morning there was nobody on the far bank. I do not know what became of them. I have heard it said that most of them were taken back to the plantations they had come from, and that some were not taken back, and I do not know which of those I would rather have heard.

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We brought over, in the boats and with the ropes, sixty-one people. I know the number because my first sergeant counted them, without being asked, and told me that night, and I wrote it down. They followed the column to the sea, and I believe that most of them reached it.

I was told, a week later, that it had been done again, at another river, by another company of my own Corps, on another general’s order. I did not see it, and I give it only as I was told it.

I wrote my report that night, by a candle in my tent, a mile beyond the river. I had written a great many reports by then, and I knew how to write them, and I wrote this one as I had been taught: what was ordered, and by whom, and when, and what was done, and what came of it. I gave the hour and the place and the width of the river and the time it took to take up the bridge. I gave the general’s order in his words, and my question, and his answer. I gave the number my first sergeant had counted. I did not give the other number, because I did not have it. I did not write anything about what I thought, because a report is not a sermon, as I said at the beginning of this account about another paper I had signed; and I have come to believe that this report, which has no sermon in it, is the worst thing I ever put my name to, and the most exact.

I kept a copy, as I always kept a copy. And when we came to the coast, three weeks later, I sent the report itself north by sea, past the fort I had built and breached, not to the department, but to the Colonel, because he had told me to write to him and to tell him exactly.

I have the copy in the box with the bond.