AN INCIDENT NEAR SAVANNAH

AN INCIDENT NEAR SAVANNAH.

             Word Count-1,111

U.S. HISTORY-CIVIL WAR. 

Fiction.

Geo Lev.

320 Laurel Ave.

DesPlaines. IL 60016.

773-218-1902.

normandy6844@yahoo.com.

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

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

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

     Preston applied for 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. 

       To his amazement, he ran into Wheeler’s cavalry divisions moving toward Savannah. A nasty surprise. He cursed New York’s 1st Cavalry supposed to patrol all the way back north to Milledgeville, and quickly turned his horse around. Wheeler’s men shot it out from under him and now searched frantically. Wheeler did not want him to 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 Sharps carbine, but intended giving Wheeler a bloody nose and a black eye if cornered. 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 finally spotted some buildings in his front.  

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

      This seemed 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 tramping through Georgia made him realize the Union was a mistake to begin with.

      The British should have won at Yorktown in 1781 and hung the slaveholders who destroyed a republic to save a plantation. If so, what is he fighting for? What nation is there left to preserve? None. President Lincoln presides over a corpse. It is now his private war, and his only,  this 25^thday of December 1864, somewhere near Savannah, Georgia.                                                                                                                           He checked his navy revolver and headed for the barn, watching the house closely. Suddenly, a thin elderly man about eighty-five years old in ragged coveralls came screaming out.     

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

     He came near 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."         

       Preston smiled at what he found, a beautiful brown mare about five year’s old slick as a newborn baby, and showing loving care. 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 cannot live without her!”

     “Look, old man, I got four months pay in my haversack, seventy six 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.”  

       “I can’t believe we’re arguing over this when the war is about over.”

       “The war will never be over, you damn fool. The niggers are going to die for the next hundred years, along with any white man who helps them. The bitterness and hatred toward the Yankees will never end in Georgia.”  

        Preston saw this bent over old wreck stood ready to die for the horse. He could not stomach the idea of beating him, and his hand tightened on the .36 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 eyes belonging to a skinny teenager he sabered off his horse at Gettysburg, and how they became sightless as he looked down on him. He wondered who sent children to die like this.

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

 “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 again. Preston had suffered them from time to time during the war. 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 mother’s loving smile father’s warm embrace an old teacher who opened up the world for him.

       “Now! Shoot the old bastard!” someone shouted. “Now! Shoot the son of a bitch and be on your way!” 

      Sergeant Samuel   Preston, age twenty-two, 7th Pennsylvania Cavalry, veteran of every battle in the Army of the Potomac and through the Atlanta campaign, wounded twice, up for promotion to captain, recommended for the new Medal of Honor Congress is awarding “meritorious enlisted men,” raises his pistol and thumbs back the hammer. The cylinder rotates and clicks into firing position. Meanwhile, ominous shadows cross the horizon and blot out the sky from corner to corner. It is darkness at noon.  Preston slowly lowers his weapon and eases down the hammer.         

  “Have any tobacco?”

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