carpenters, servants, and guns. You are impressed?
I don’t know what to think. I’ve lost everything to this war. And I see steadfastness not in the rooted mansions of a city but in what has no roots, what is itinerant. A floating world.
It dominates, Wrede said.
Yes.
And in its midst you are secure.
Yes, Emily whispered, feeling at this moment that she had revealed something terribly intimate about herself.
But supposing we are more a nonhuman form of life. Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. It sends out as antennae its men on horses. It consumes everything in its path. It is an immense organism, this army, with a small brain. That would be General Sherman, whom I have never seen.
I am not sure the General would be pleased to hear himself described so, Emily said in all solemnity. And then she laughed.
But Wrede clearly liked this train of thought. All the orders for our vast movements issue forth from that brain, he said. They are carried via the generals and colonels and field officers for distribution to the body of us. This is the creature’s nervous system. And any one of the sixty thousand of us has no identity but as a cell in the body of this giant creature’s function, which is to move forward and consume all before it.
Then how do you explain the surgeons, whose job it is to heal and to save lives?
That the creature is self-healing. And where the healing fails, the deaths are of no more consequence than the death of cells in any organism, always to be replaced by new cells.
Again that word cells. She looked over at him, her expression an inquiry.
Wrede guided his mount alongside hers. That is what our bodies are composed of, he said. Cells. They are the elemental composition, to be seen only under a microscope. Different cells with different functions comprise tissues, or organs, or bone, or skin. When one cell dies, a new cell grows in its place. He took her hand in his and studied it. Even the integument of Miss Thompson’s hand has a cellular structure, he said.
He glanced at her with those alarmingly ice-blue eyes, as if to see that she understood. Emily blushed and, after a moment, withdrew her hand.
They rode on. She was extraordinarily happy.
VIII
T HEY STOOD IN THE STOCKADE TOWER, WET AND MIS erable as the cold rain pelted their shoulders and dripped off their caps and down their necks.
Will said, I was ready to tell them who I was.
Yes, Arly said, that we was hiding out in disguise just waitin for ’em. Sure, that would’ve been the thing, all right.
Well, look where you have got us? Can you say we are more better off than these poor Yankees here we are supposed to be guarding? We eat the same slop they get. We stand without a roof over our heads in this damn rain just like them. So where is anything different?
Will, son, you just don’t think.
And then to have a pistol put to my head till I swear an oath of allegiance to my own side! Like I wasn’t who I am! No wonder they couldn’t trust us no more than to send us up here to this miserable duty. What would you do in their place? Because you can’t ever trust no man who swears the oath because you put a pistol to his head.
Well, you are back on your own side even so. That was what you wanted—you never did cotton to the blue coat you was wearing.
Captain, I should have said, I am as much secesh as you. I am Private Will B. Kirkland from the Twenty-ninth Infantry Regiment out of North Carolina. I don’t need no pistol to my head.
And that would have been that.
That’s right. And a grand welcome and good duty.
He wouldn’t have asked any questions such as traced you right into the Milledgeville prison for deserting your Twenty-ninth Regiment. Or that found me for sleeping on guard duty in a combat situation.
We was
I don’t know what to think. I’ve lost everything to this war. And I see steadfastness not in the rooted mansions of a city but in what has no roots, what is itinerant. A floating world.
It dominates, Wrede said.
Yes.
And in its midst you are secure.
Yes, Emily whispered, feeling at this moment that she had revealed something terribly intimate about herself.
But supposing we are more a nonhuman form of life. Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. It sends out as antennae its men on horses. It consumes everything in its path. It is an immense organism, this army, with a small brain. That would be General Sherman, whom I have never seen.
I am not sure the General would be pleased to hear himself described so, Emily said in all solemnity. And then she laughed.
But Wrede clearly liked this train of thought. All the orders for our vast movements issue forth from that brain, he said. They are carried via the generals and colonels and field officers for distribution to the body of us. This is the creature’s nervous system. And any one of the sixty thousand of us has no identity but as a cell in the body of this giant creature’s function, which is to move forward and consume all before it.
Then how do you explain the surgeons, whose job it is to heal and to save lives?
That the creature is self-healing. And where the healing fails, the deaths are of no more consequence than the death of cells in any organism, always to be replaced by new cells.
Again that word cells. She looked over at him, her expression an inquiry.
Wrede guided his mount alongside hers. That is what our bodies are composed of, he said. Cells. They are the elemental composition, to be seen only under a microscope. Different cells with different functions comprise tissues, or organs, or bone, or skin. When one cell dies, a new cell grows in its place. He took her hand in his and studied it. Even the integument of Miss Thompson’s hand has a cellular structure, he said.
He glanced at her with those alarmingly ice-blue eyes, as if to see that she understood. Emily blushed and, after a moment, withdrew her hand.
They rode on. She was extraordinarily happy.
VIII
T HEY STOOD IN THE STOCKADE TOWER, WET AND MIS erable as the cold rain pelted their shoulders and dripped off their caps and down their necks.
Will said, I was ready to tell them who I was.
Yes, Arly said, that we was hiding out in disguise just waitin for ’em. Sure, that would’ve been the thing, all right.
Well, look where you have got us? Can you say we are more better off than these poor Yankees here we are supposed to be guarding? We eat the same slop they get. We stand without a roof over our heads in this damn rain just like them. So where is anything different?
Will, son, you just don’t think.
And then to have a pistol put to my head till I swear an oath of allegiance to my own side! Like I wasn’t who I am! No wonder they couldn’t trust us no more than to send us up here to this miserable duty. What would you do in their place? Because you can’t ever trust no man who swears the oath because you put a pistol to his head.
Well, you are back on your own side even so. That was what you wanted—you never did cotton to the blue coat you was wearing.
Captain, I should have said, I am as much secesh as you. I am Private Will B. Kirkland from the Twenty-ninth Infantry Regiment out of North Carolina. I don’t need no pistol to my head.
And that would have been that.
That’s right. And a grand welcome and good duty.
He wouldn’t have asked any questions such as traced you right into the Milledgeville prison for deserting your Twenty-ninth Regiment. Or that found me for sleeping on guard duty in a combat situation.
We was
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