All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [114]
Gilbert received a commission as colonel in a cavalry regiment. Cass enlisted as a private in the Mississippi Rifles. “You could be a captain,” Gilbert said, “or a major. You’ve got brains enough for that. And,” he added, “damned few of them have.” Cass replied that he preferred to be a private soldier, “marching with other men.” But he could not tell his brother why, or tell his brother that, though he would march with other men and would carry a weapon in his hand, he would never take the life of am enemy. “I must march with these men who march,” he wrote in the journal, “for they are my people and I must partake with them of all bitterness, and that more fully. But I cannot take the life of another man. How can I who have taken the life of my friend, take the life of an enemy, for I have used up my right to blood.” So Cass marched away to war, carrying the musket which was, for him, but a meaningless burden, and wearing on a string, against the flesh of his chest, beneath the fabric of the gray jacket, the ring which had once been Duncan Trice’s wedding ring and which Annabelle Trice, that night in the summerhouse, had slipped into his finger as his hand lay on her bosom.
Cass marched to Shiloh, between the fresh fields, for it was early April, and then into the woods that screened the river. (Dogwood and redbud would have been out then.) He marched into the woods, heard the lead whistle by his head, saw the dead men on the ground, and the next day came out of the woods and moved in the sullen withdrawal toward Corinth. He had been sure that he would not survive the battle. But he had survived, and moved down the crowded road “as in a dream.” And he wrote: “And I felt that henceforward I should live in that dream.” The dream took him into Tennessee again–Chickamauga, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and the nameless skirmishes, and the bullet for which he waited did not find him. At Chickamauga, when his company wavered in the enemy fire and seemed about to break in its attack, he moved steadily up the slope and could not understand his own inviolability. And the men regrouped, and followed. “It seemed strange to me,” he wrote, “that I who in God’s will sought death and could not find it, should in my seeking lead men to it who did not seek.” When Colonel Hickman congratulated him, he could “find no words” for answer.
But if he had put on the gray jacket in anguish of spirit and in hope of expiation, he came to wear it in pride, for it was a jacket like those worn by the men with whom he marched. “I have seen men do brave things,” he wrote, “and they ask for nothing.” And he added, “It is not hard to love men for the things they endure and for the words they do not speak.” More and more, too, there crept in the journal the comments of the professional soldier, between the prayers and scruples–criticism of command (of Bragg after Chickamauga),, satisfaction and an impersonal pride in maneuver or gunnery (“the practice of Marlowe’s battery excellent”), and finally the admiration for the feints and delays executed by Johnston’s virtuosity on the approaches to Atlanta, at Buzzard’s Roost, Snake Creek Gap, New Hope Church, Kenesaw Mountain (“there is always a kind of glory, however stained or obscured, in whatever man’s hand does well, and General Johnston does well”).
Then, outside Atlanta, the bullet found him. He lay in the hospital and totted slowly to death. But even before the infection set in, when the wound in the leg seemed scarcely serious, he knew that he would die.