March Through Georgia
ExcErr for Robert E. Lee, there were few generals, Union or Confederate, who did not afterwards print their reminiscences of the Civil War. McClellan, Grant, Sheridan, Sherman for the North; Johnston, Hood, Longstr'eet, Beaure- gard (under another man's name) for the South: these and many others had their say, with vary- ing shades of acrimony and vainglory. It is, therefore, at first sight surprising to read the preface to the two-volume edition of Memoirs that Sherman brought out in 1875. He offers a half-apology for writing such a book and so 'departing from the usage of military men, who seldom attempt to publish their own deeds.' Not true then, and certainly not true since.
One explanation is that Sherman made a con- trast in his mind between 'military men' and 'politicians.' Though his own brother was a Republican Senator, Sherman detested the inter- mixture of politics with soldiering, during and after the war. He admits in his autobiography that he mistrusted John A. Logan and Frank P. Blair, two of his commanders, because they were professional politicians. He was irritated when the Secretary of War came to visit him in the midst of his campaign—as irritated as he was by the presence of war correspondents. Dis- gusted by the atmosphere of post-war Washing- ton, when he was General-in-Chief, he moved his headquarters a thousand miles away to St. Louis. Military men could preserve their in- tegrity only if they steered clear of politics. General Grant's career as President offered a melancholy proof of this; and so did the ac- tivities of former subordinates like Logan, who sought revenge on the West Point military by cutting the army appropriations in Congress. The memoirs of military men could be free from such skulduggery.
And, of course, he had much to write about, and a wonderful climax. The whole of his second volume, of which Captain Liddell Hart's edition is a slightly condensed version (with a slightly misleading title) was devoted to the final
year of the Civil War. Behind him lay the ob- scure and unsuccessful pre-war years, the fiascos and despairs of Bull Run and Shiloh. By the spring of 1864 the great year was about to begin. Grant came east to deal with Lee, entrusting command of the Western army to Sherman. 'Everything went right for him. There is little trace here of the worried man whose associates once thought he was going insane, or even of the cynical observer who remarked that glory consisted of dying in battle and having your name spelled wrong in the newspapers. These chapters, for all their occasional asperities and their generally dispassionate prose, are a chronicle of power, independence, vindication, retribution. The first stage, from Chattanooga to Atlanta, was relatively orthodox. The next stage, farther into Georgia from Atlanta to the sea, was a triumph of unorthodoxy. So was the ultimate stage, when Sherman's columns streamed north- ward through the Carolinas and the last Con- federate resistance collapsed. What he had done was to escape the appalling impediments of Civil War campaigning: the clogged lines of supply, the bloody battles ending in stalemate. Sherman cut loose from his supplies, living off the country instead. His men learned the tech- nique as they went along, through a rich and helpless countryside basking in sunlight. They were poacher-avengers, eating fresh beef and water melon, driving confiscated horses and mules before them, ripping up every railway line within reach. As we can see from the photo- graphs and many maps of this handsome book, they were a ragamuffin but highly confident and competent army. The exhilaration of their pro- gress is plainly apparent in Sherman's narrative. Fifteen miles a day. At night, a glass of whisky and a stroll among the camp fires. The know- ledge that the end is in sight, but not until fur- ther punishment has been inflicted. As Captain Liddell Hart insists, this was an early version of the blitzkrieg. To men like him —the few who studied its lessons—it must have seemed as exciting and consoling in the post- war years of the 1920s and 1930s as it did to Sherman in the doldrums of the 1870s, when the confounded politicians were ruining the world. Perhaps the lessons are a little more complicated than Sherman or his editor are ready to admit. He considerably outnumbered the enemy, yet never succeeded in trapping him. His attitude to pillage and destruction seems equivocal: was this a new development in warfare or a reversion to an immemorial one? Guderian or Attila? Whatever we decide, the story is fascinating.
MARCUS CUNLIFFE
'Can't you do anything but snakes?'
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