A Blaze of Glory by Jeff Shaara Page A

Mexican War, and now Halleck had been put in charge of the entire theater west of the mountains. If Halleck had some nasty little bone to pick with Grant, or took slight at something Grant had done, Sherman had nothing to say about it. He was only a division commander, one of five that had come upriver into southern Tennessee, who had little say in what happened back in St. Louis. At least, he thought, General Halleck had stayed up there. Marching himself into the field seems to be the last thing this commanding general wants to do.
    General Smith, Grant’s replacement, was one of the division commanders, had been chosen to replace Grant by both seniority and respect. He was an older man, had been an instructor and commandant of cadets at West Point, had taught many of the men who even now outranked him, Halleck and Grant included. Sherman held to one piece of optimism, that if Halleck was going to dole out commands to those who least offended him, Smith was at least a good choice for the job. But, to the men marching behind him, Smith was just another one of them . And so they marched through driving rain, across muddy roads, staring into the roaring violence of flooded streams miles from the river, using maps that said nothing of weather.
    What his troops could not know was that Sherman was far more miserable and far more agitated by where they were, and why, than anything to do with the rain. Like much of Kentucky, Tennessee was enemy country, and out there, anywhere, to the flank, to the rear, those other fellows could be moving close, preparing the great assault, the trap. It was an infuriating panic he could not reveal to anyone, and if the staff knew what he was feeling, they dared not reveal that to him. As they rode deeper into the farmlands and dense thickets of black woods, his eyes focused into every opening, every ravine, every mud hole, anyplace someone could be waiting. No matter what the sergeant reported, no matter that the farmers had told them the enemy was miles away, his brain shouted out with perfect certainty that they would come, that his meager column would be swallowed by a screaming wave of enemy troops. He knew they weren’t prepared for it, they had never been prepared, not in Kentucky, not in Virginia, and out here, the weather made them slovenly, slogging their way with minds focused on their own discomfort. It was one more log on the bonfire of his fury, that he couldn’t grab every man, shout it into the faces, be ready! It wasn’t the orders that drove Sherman’s despair, nothing from General Smith. They were attempting to find a route that would take them close to one of the railroad bridges on the great east-west artery that led away from Corinth. So far, the farmers who had offered anything positive had said very little that would help, that the town closest to them, Monterey, was still too far from the railroad, and in fact, might take them right into rebel fortifications that spread out from Corinth. Sherman had let his staff talk to the civilians, the officers surprised that so many were willing to offer any information at all, only a few cursing these boys in blue for defiling their ground. But every moment when the staff and the civilians stood eye to eye, Sherman paid more attention to the land around them, the farmers’ fields where the horsemen might still come.
    I t had begun at Bull Run, a collapse of his own command that had certainly contributed to the collapse of the army. His unit had lost three hundred men, but it was more than the horror of death, of seeing the blood of men who followed you into the fight. For Sherman, that fight held many memories, none of them good, and his own collapse was the worst memory of all. Before the battle, as the army was organized and drilled, there had been all the boasting, the talk of the untested, men who thought of war as something far more fun than what they would find at Bull Run Creek. Along the march into Virginia, they were