North and South: The North and South Trilogy (Book One) Page 15

  George and Orry stared at each other. Neither felt the elation they had anticipated for so long.

  Within three days Bent took the Canterberry road.

  Most of the cadets said they were happy he had been dismissed. Orry was, certainly. And George. Yet both of them admitted to some feelings of guilt over the way the Ohioan had been entrapped. Gradually the friends put the guilt out of mind. Orry knew his crisis of conscience was at an end when he began to have sensual dreams about Madeline again.

  At Christmas everyone was still discussing Polk’s victory. Since the President-elect continued to proclaim his intention to annex Texas, Orry wondered whether he would go directly from his graduation, a year from June, to combat against a Mexican army. And would there be a second front in the Northwest as a result of the current dispute with the British over the location of the Oregon border? Thrilling possibilities, but frightening, too.

  On the last Saturday night in December, another hash was in progress in Pickett’s room when there was a furtive knock. Orry opened the door to find Tom Jackson standing there. Jackson had turned into a superior student, largely through determined effort. If he wasn’t exactly likable because of his odd personality, there was yet something about him—a strength, an unspoken ferocity—that inspired respect. He was welcome in the more tolerant cadet groups, such as this one.

  “Greetings, General,” George called out as Jackson shut the door. “Care for a bite?”

  “No, thank you.” Jackson tapped his stomach to indicate his concern with his digestion. The lanky Virginian looked even more serious than usual; positively mournful, in fact.

  “What’s wrong?” Orry asked.

  “I am the bearer of unhappy news. Especially for you two,” Jackson said with glances at Orry and George. “Apparently Cadet Bent’s connections in Washington were not mere products of a boastful imagination. I am reliably informed by the adjutant that Secretary of War Wilkins, as one of his last acts of office, has intervened in the case.”

  George wiped the edge of his index finger across his upper lip. “Intervened how, Tom?”

  “The dismissal was overturned. Mr. Bent will be back among us within a fortnight.”

  The countermanding of dismissals was nothing new at the Academy. Thanks to the political ties of the families of cadets, it happened often enough to be a major cause of the institution’s unpopularity. It was an abuse that even the most conscientious superintendent was powerless to stop, since final authority for West Point rested in Washington.

  It took only six days for Bent to reappear, stripped of his former rank. George and Orry expected that revenge of some kind would be forthcoming, but it was not. The two friends avoided Bent as much as they could, but it was impossible to avoid him entirely. When either of them did encounter the Ohioan, his reaction was the same. His jowly face remained composed, stony. George and Orry might have been utter strangers.

  “That scares me a devil of a lot more than ranting and raving would,” Orry said. “What’s he up to?”

  “I hear he’s boning pretty hard,” George said. “Wasted effort, if you ask me. After what he did, he’ll be lucky to make the infantry, even with top marks.”

  As June drew closer, and Bent continued to keep to himself, the overturned dismissal was discussed less frequently, and finally not at all. There were more important things to talk about; it had been a momentous springtime for the nation.

  On the first of March, three days before Polk’s inauguration, outgoing President Tyler had signed the joint congressional resolution calling for Texas to join the Union as a state. Polk inherited the consequences of that act, the first of them being the reaction of the Mexican government. At the end of the month, the U.S. minister in Mexico City was informed that diplomatic relations were severed.

  War fever gripped some sections of the country, notably the South. Orry broke the wafer on a letter from home and found Cooper complaining about Tillet’s zeal for a military crusade to protect the new slave state if the Texas legislature approved annexation, as it surely would. Northerners were divided on the question of war. Opposition was strongest around Boston, long the seedbed of abolitionist activity.

  Bent and the other first classmen were busy preparing for their final examinations and conferring with the trunk makers and military tailors who always arrived at this time of year. Bent’s class, typical of most, would graduate about half of those who had appeared for the first summer encampment. Each departing cadet would become a brevet second lieutenant in his respective branch. A brevet officer didn’t receive the full pay to which his rank would otherwise entitle him, so it was the goal of most graduates to escape this provisional status and win promotion to full second during the first year of active duty. George’s prediction about Bent came true. The Ohioan was able to do no better than a brevet in the infantry.

  Bent finally spoke to George and Orry after the year’s final parade. It was sunset, a cool June evening. The softly rounded peaks rose half scarlet, half blue above the Plain where many of the new graduates were receiving the congratulations of beaming mothers, quietly proud fathers, exuberant little brothers and sisters, and feminine admirers not connected with the family. George had noticed that Bent was one of the very few with no relatives present.

  The Ohioan looked spruce in the cadet uniform he was wearing for the last time. He had grown generous whiskers, as the first classmen were permitted to do. In an hour or so he would be down on the boat landing, bound for New York and, presumably, the class supper, which was always held in some posh hotel the day after graduation. Leave for Bent and all the other graduates would end on the last day of September.

  Orry was puzzled by Bent’s smile. Then the Ohioan turned slightly, and fading daylight lit his eyes. Orry saw the hatred then.

  “What I have to say to you two gentlemen is brief and to the point.” Bent spoke in short, breathy bursts, as if struggling to contain powerful emotion. “You almost kept me from an Army career. That fact will never be far from the center of my thoughts. I will be highly placed one of these days—very highly placed—mark that and count on it. And I will not forget the names of those who put a permanent stain on my record.”

  He pivoted away so abruptly that George sidestepped, a nervous reaction. Sunset light reddened Bent’s eyes. He lumbered away toward his barracks. His weight made it hard for him to maintain a military bearing.

  George was darting stunned looks at his friend, as if to say he couldn’t believe the melodramatic recitation he had just heard. Orry hoped to God that his friend wouldn’t take it lightly and laugh, because you had to believe the declarations of a madman.

  Believe, and be warned.

  8

  IN SUMMER ENCAMPMENT GEORGE advanced to cadet lieutenant. Among the first classmen, Orry was the only one not given a rank.

  He remained, as an old joke put it, a high private, which was discouraging because it showed how little his superiors thought of him. Oh, they liked him well enough personally. But as for believing he had any military ability, no.

  The first-class courses seemed designed to validate that opinion. While George continued to sail through effortlessly, Orry struggled with the ethics course, which included principles of constitutional law as well as the practice of court-martial. He had an even harder time with the courses in civil and military engineering, which brought him into regular contact with the feared and legendary Professor Mahan.

  In his dark blue dress coat, blue trousers, and buff vest, Mahan looked every inch the Academy professor. When a cadet demonstrated before him, he permitted no variance from what he had taught or the way he had taught it. The foolish cadet who dared to disagree, however timidly, was soon humbled by Mahan’s celebrated sarcasm—and mentally downgraded to boot. Every cadet was ranked in Mahan’s mind. From that judgment, whether it was just or not, there was no appeal.

  Yet the cadets liked, even worshiped Mahan. If that hadn’t been the case, they would have made fun of his slight spe
ech impediment, which made him sound as if he always had a cold. Instead, the cadets affectionately acknowledged the problem with a nickname—Old Cobben Sense; Mahan was constantly lecturing about the virtues of “cobben sense.”

  In addition to engineering, Mahan taught military science. In this course he awed his pupils with predictions of a new, apocalyptic kind of war that would be born of the current industrial age. They would all be called on to command in that new kind of war, he said. And perhaps it would take place sooner than any of them anticipated. In July, General Zachary Taylor and fifteen hundred men had been ordered to the Nueces River, which Mexico still insisted was its northern boundary. At Corpus Christi on the Nueces, Taylor took up a position to guard against a possible Mexican attack.

  By late autumn Taylor’s force had grown to forty-five hundred. On December 29 Texas joined the Union as the twenty-eighth state, still standing by its claim that the peace treaty at the end of its war for independence had established its southern border at the Rio Grande.

  Mexico’s protests grew increasingly belligerent. The treaty was worthless, and the Republic of Texas was a fraud—nonexistent. How could an illegal political entity annex itself to the United States? The answer was obvious. It could not. If it thought otherwise, there would be dire consequences.

  The threatening talk pleased those Americans who believed the nation had an almost divine right to expand its borders. Robert Winthrop, a representative from Massachusetts, encountered a phrase in an obscure journal that seemed to sum up this right in a memorable way. Early in January, Winthrop spoke on the floor of Congress about “manifest destiny,” and America had a new rallying cry.

  During the winter, attempts at peace negotiations conducted by Minister to Mexico John Slidell failed. Under orders from his superiors in Washington, General Taylor again advanced, this time proceeding south, through the sparsely populated wilderness both Mexico and Texas were claiming, all the way to the Rio Grande. People began to talk of war as a real possibility. “Mr. Polk’s war,” the President’s opponents called it.

  In that troubled spring of 1846, George Hazard took a good look around him, blinked, and realized that in four years, while he was busy with cigars, girls, and occasional study, profound changes had taken place. Boys had become young men; young men had become survivors; survivors were about to become brevet officers—in his case, and Orry’s, brevet officers with new growths of whiskers.

  Orry was going to the infantry, so George put in for it too. Some of the professors and tactical officers disapproved. They said George, with his high marks, could get the artillery, perhaps even the topogs. Orry urged his friend to heed that counsel, but George was adamant.

  “I’d rather serve in the infantry with a friend than go flying around on a limber with a lot of strangers. Besides, I still plan to resign at the end of four years. It’s immaterial to me where I spend that time, so long as I don’t get shot at too often.”

  If George was not precisely overjoyed at the idea of going to war, Orry, on the other hand, really wanted to confront danger—see the elephant, as the popular phrase had it—on some distant battlefield in Mexico. Sometimes he felt guilty about that desire, but combat experience would be invaluable to a man planning on a military career. Although Orry’s superiors hadn’t seen fit to promote him, that hadn’t changed his mind about his goal. He would be a soldier no matter what anyone else thought.

  Like Orry, most of the other first classmen were thrilled, although nervously so, over the possibility of seeing action. West Point’s corps of “pampered aristocrats” might at last have a chance to prove its worth. So might the entire Army, for that matter. A great many citizens were contemptuous of the American soldier, saying he had but one skill—he knew how to raise malingering to a high art.

  The question of war was decided before George and Orry graduated. On April 12 the Mexican commander at Matamoros had ordered General Taylor to withdraw. Old Rough and Ready had ignored the warning, and on the last day of the month Mexican soldiers began to cross the Rio Grande. Early in May, at Palo Alto, Taylor’s army repulsed an enemy force three times its size and did so again at Resaca de la Palma a few days later. The ball was open. Congress responded to the invasion of American territory by declaring war on the twelfth of May.

  The war created a windstorm of controversy. George didn’t go so far as some anti-Southern Whigs such as Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, who called the war a trumped-up land grab and warned that a Southern cabal was pushing the nation into a “fathomless abyss of crime and calamity.” George also scoffed at Mexican propaganda about a perverse crusade to expunge Catholicism from North America. After looking forward to four lazy years in the Army, he found the war merely inconvenient and annoying.

  The moment George made the decision about his branch of service, he had written his father and asked him to pull a few wires. Now, at last, his orders arrived, posting him to the Eighth Infantry. Orry announced with astonishment that he had been sent to the same regiment. George pretended to be greatly surprised by the coincidence.

  In the fine June weather, the graduates accepted the good wishes of their professors and marched in their last parade. George and Orry for the first time donned regular Army blue: the dark blue coat, the light blue trousers with the thin white seam stripe of the infantry.

  George’s father and his brother Stanley attended the final parade. None of Orry’s family had been able to make the trip from South Carolina. Immediately after the parade, the Hazards took a boat for Albany, where they had business. George and Orry were ready to leave about an hour later.

  As the steamer pulled away from the dock, Orry stepped to the rail and gazed up at the bluff, visually tracing the path they had climbed for the first time four years ago.

  “I’ll miss the place. You’ll laugh at this, but what I’ll miss most is the drum. It gets into your bones after a while.”

  George didn’t laugh, but he shook his head. “You’ll miss a drum that divided your life into rigid little compartments?”

  “Yes. It lent the days a certain rhythm. A pattern and order you could depend on.”

  “Well, don’t pine away, Mr. Stick. We’ll hear plenty of drums in Mexico.”

  Night was settling as the steamer plowed past Constitution Island. Soon they were moving down the Hudson in darkness. In the city they registered at the American House, and next day saw the sights of New York. On Broadway they happened on a couple of dragoon noncoms and received their first salutes. Orry was excited. “We’re soldiers now. Officially.”

  His friend shrugged, unimpressed. Before George boarded the train for Philadelphia, Orry made him promise to come to Mont Royal toward the end of his leave. They could then travel on to their regiment together. George agreed. In the past four years he had developed a liking for most of the Southerners he had met.

  Besides, he had never forgotten Cooper Main’s comment about the pretty girls down home.

  One of the first things George did when he arrived in Lehigh Station was to unwrap the meteorite he had found in the hills above West Point. In his room he carefully positioned it on a windowsill, where none of the upstairs maids could possibly mistake it for a piece of junk to be thrown out. Then he folded his hands under his chin and contemplated his prize.

  Ten minutes passed. Twenty. In the silence, the rough-surfaced, iron-rich fragment seemed to speak to him with a wordless but mighty voice, telling of its power to alter or destroy anything man could build or invent. When he finally rose to leave, a shiver ran down his spine, even though the house was hot this summer afternoon.

  George took few things seriously, and fewer still touched his emotions in any significant way. That piece of star iron, the stuff at the heart of the Hazard fortune, was a rare exception. He had no intention of meeting a brave and quickly forgotten death in Mexico; he had important work to do in the years ahead. Let Orry spend his life settling border disputes on battlefields. In the iron trade, George would hel
p change the world in many more ways than that.

  He packed and said good-bye to his family in mid-September. Taylor’s Army was advancing on Monterrey, Mexico, during an eight-week armistice. George kept track of the Army’s position because his regiment was part of Taylor’s Second Division, commanded by General Worth. The Eighth had already seen hot fighting and presumably would see more.

  On the long train trip to South Carolina, George tried to organize his ideas about Northerners and Southerners. At West Point cadets from both parts of the country had pretty well agreed that the Yankees were better prepared because the North had better schools. The Southerners haughtily amended their agreement by saying that it didn’t matter much; it was the bold leader, not the smart one, who usually won the battle.

  If quizzed on regional differences, he would have characterized Yankees as practical, restless, curious about the ordinary things of life, and eager to make improvements wherever possible. Southerners, by contrast, struck him as content with life as they knew it. They were, at the same time, given to endless disputation and theorizing, always in the abstract, about such subjects as politics, Negro slavery, and the Constitution, to name just three.

  Of course slavery was always discussed as a positive good. Interestingly, George recalled Orry’s saying that hadn’t always been the case. As a boy he had eavesdropped on the conversation of gentlemen visiting his father. The talk often turned to the peculiar institution, and once he had heard Tillet state that some elements of slavery were abhorrent to God and man. But after the Vesey and Turner rebellions, Orry noted, there was no more of that kind of free discussion at Mont Royal. Tillet said it might tend to encourage another uprising.

  George had no strong views on slavery, pro or con. He decided that he wouldn’t discuss the subject in South Carolina, and he certainly wouldn’t tell the Mains how the other Hazards felt. His mother and father weren’t fanatical abolitionists, but they believed slavery to be totally wrong.