A WALK IN THE SUN.

Topic: A soldier seeks to escape his fate.        

     Word Count-1,016 excluding title.

         Sergeant Preston did not feel optimistic. He fought Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart all the way to Gettysburg last year, boxed him in, and smashed him up. Then, General Meade transferred his veteran cavalry regiment to Sherman’s Army of Tennessee in the Atlanta campaign. Now, he struggled out here with General Joe Wheeler looking for him.

        Trouble started when he rode out of Atlanta on 15 November 1864 with the city in flames and led by a half-crazed general lighting his way to the sea. Guerillas hung on the army’s coattails, killing any man that fell out, while General Sherman made war on civilians, including women and children, and turned the state into a wasteland.

      This proved a dirty business, with Sherman’s bummers, criminals really, plundering the state. Truly, they had been recruited from gutters, saloons, and low dives of New York City. Worse his colonel often assigned him to escort duty, protecting them against guerrillas or outraged farmers. 

         Preston applied for a transfer to General Grant’s army in Virginia. Denied. He was out there by himself today because his colonel sent him to look over a plantation near Savannah and put Negroes to work for the U.S. They were Sherman's slaves, now. Then, some fifteen miles outside Union lines, he ran into a Division of Confederate cavalry moving toward Savannah. A nasty surprise. He cursed New York’s 1st Cavalry supposed to patrol all the way back north to Milledgeville. He quickly turned his horse around, but General Joe Wheeler’s men shot it out from under him and now searched frantically. Wheeler did not want him to escape and warn Sherman.

      Capture meant death, as Wheeler took no prisoners. Romantic notions of chivalry died early in this filthy war. No one could have been crueler to Americans than Americans themselves, he believed.       

       He should like to abandon his carbine but intended to give Joe Wheeler a bloody nose and a black eye. He did hide his heavy wool jacket before moving rapidly through some woods headed south and keeping his eyes on open land to the north.  He spotted some buildings in his front and needed a horse.       

       Preston raised his binoculars and looked down on a farmhouse and barn. Brown and flattened fields stretched all around. He saw many farms like this in the south.  He thanked God his family farm in Pennsylvania was safe, its green fields filled with corn and cows mooing their way to a freshwater stream.

       This was a foreign land down here whose people were no more his fellow citizens than Cossacks from the plains of Russia. Sixty-eight thousand blue coats rampaging through Georgia made him believe the Union was a mistake, to begin with, and the wrong side won at Yorktown eighty-three years ago. If so, what is he fighting for? What nation is left to preserve? Well, too late. It is now his private war, this 25^th day of December 1864, somewhere near Savannah, Georgia.                                                                                                                           He checked his revolver and headed for the barn, watching the house closely. Suddenly, a thin elderly man about eighty years old in ragged coveralls came screaming out.

      "She is all I got left! She is all I got left damn you!”

       He approached with face quivering like straw in a wind. Preston saw faded blue eyes in a faded face atop a faded body.

    "Don't make me hurt you old man. I need to see what you have in the barn."  

       He smiled at what he found, a mare about five years old slick as a newborn baby. She can easily outrun Wheeler's tired cavalry; only the old man threw himself in front of her stall.

     "You will have to kill me! You have taken everything from me! She

      is  all I have left in my life. I can’t live without her!”

        “Look, old man, I got four months pay, seventy five dollars in gold.

           Just take it and I will be gone."

       "Don't you understand you damn Yankee? Gold is no good, in hell.   

          Georgia is dead. Hope is dead.”

       Preston saw the old man stood ready to die for this horse. He could not stomach the idea of beating him down, and his hand tightened on the .52 caliber revolver. The old man's faded blue eyes searched for him in the darkened barn, and Preston realized they were failing, and will soon be sightless. He remembered another pair of blue eyes belonging to a skinny teenager he sabered off his horse at Gettysburg, and how they, too, became sightless as he looked down on him. Who sent children to die like this? he had wondered.        

          However, he never killed an unarmed man. General Sherman is about to make a murderer of him. Did it matter in the human course of events in Georgia, 900 miles from home?

       “Move! Get out of the way!”  

       “I won’t, goddamn you!”

           He will blow this frantic bag of bones to hell, his head split into jagged pieces like a rotten watermelon! He knew the damage his pistol could do. Suddenly, without warning, memories came flooding back. Preston did not know where they came from. He did not want them or need them. The girls he loved snuggled down deep in a hay wagon breath to breath and soul to soul, his good old dog that slept with him through the years, his mother’s loving smile, his father’s warm embrace, an old teacher who opened up the world for him. Now! Shoot the bastard, now! And be on your way!

         Sergeant Samuel Preston, age twenty-two,  7th Pennsylvania Cavalry, a veteran of every battle fought by the Army of the Potomac and the Atlanta campaign, wounded twice, up for promotion to captain of his own company, recommended for the new medal Congress is awarding “meritorious enlisted men,” raises his pistol, aims at the old man’s head, and thumbs back the hammer. Meanwhile, ominous shadows blot out the horizon from corner to corner. It is darkness at noon. Finally, Sergeant Preston slowly lowers his weapon and eases down the hammer.

        “Have any tobacco?”

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