Read Online The Training Ground by Martin Dugard - Free Book Online Page B

result, all that West Point engineering training went by the wayside, and he was assigned to the infantry, which almost guaranteed that promotions would be few and far between.
    Also like Grant, Longstreet fell in love after reporting for duty at the Jefferson Barracks, just outside Saint Louis. The woman in question was Louise Garland, and her father was Lieutenant Colonel John Garland, the regimental commander. Longstreet’s eccentric classmate and fellow infantry officer Lieutenant Richard Ewell (the man who allowed Grant his predeployment leave to see Julia at White Haven) considered Louise to be one of just two attractive women in Missouri — the other being her sister Bessie. “This is the worst country for single ladies I ever saw,” Ewell wrote to his brother. “They are hardly allowed to come of age before they are engaged to be married, however ugly they may be. Except the Miss Garlands, I have not seen a pretty girl or interesting one since I have been here.”
    Louise was seventeen when she first met Longstreet in the spring of 1844, a petite beauty who owed her dark black locks to her Chippewa Indian mother. The attraction between Louise and Pete Longstreet was obvious to both of them early on, and before shipping out for Camp Salubrity, Louisiana, he asked her father for permission to marry her. The request was approved, with the stipulation that the wedding not take place until Louise was a few years older.
    Thus Brevet Second Lieutenants Pete Longstreet and Sam Grant were both engaged men as they settled in at Camp Salubrity. But whereas Grant was heartsick for Julia, writing letters that pleaded for her to reaffirm her love (which she did, though not as often as Grant would have liked), Longstreet had taken the separation from Louise in stride. He had passed the time near Fort Jesup among the rogues and rascals, playing poker, particularly a game called brag. (Longstreet was renowned for his ability to bluff. Grant, on the other hand, was miserable at cards.) A brevet second lieutenant earned less than thirty dollars a month — not quite a dollar a day. “The man who lost seventy-five cents in one day was esteemed a peculiarly unfortunate person,” Longstreet said of Grant, who frequently lost that much before excusing himself from the table.
    Longstreet had been transferred to the Eighth Infantry in March 1845 and reassigned to Fort Marion, Florida. More than two hundred years old, the fortress had a decidedly medieval feel, with moats, a dungeon, and twelve-foot-thick walls facing out at the Atlantic. The Eighth was a battle-hardened outfit, having spent the previous few years waging war against Florida’s Seminole tribe. A far cry from the horse races and poker games of Camp Salubrity, Fort Marion was an appropriately disciplined military garrison for a self-confident young soldier to make the mental transition to his first taste of combat.
    By September 1845, Longstreet and Grant were reunited in Corpus Christi, where they spent that awful winter awaiting the order to march on the Rio Grande. By the time Taylor’s army proceeded south the following March, they had spent two full years living under the shadow of war. It had been a stretch of boredom and inertia, card games and hunting trips and living in tents, their personal lives on hold until politicians in Washington and Mexico City could decide their fate.
    But now all that was past. As Pete Longstreet and Sam Grant faced south on a fine spring morning, looking across the muddy, inconsequential tidal flow of the Rio Colorado, battle was no longer some abstract image but was being vividly brought to life by the horns and lancers they could hear and see on the far bank.
    Longstreet had laid eyes on few, if any, foreign soldiers in his life. The same was true of almost every officer and enlisted man along the river. It was titillating to stare over at the nameless, faceless army on the opposite shore, with their brightly colored uniforms and