An Extremely Uncivil War

By Jerome Levy

"An Extremely Uncivil War" is based loosely on the life of a farmer who lived near Cairo, Indiana, and his life during the three-year period of service in the Civil War. The book is largely fictional, and is a combination of quasi history and a murder mystery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781682229842

Book preview

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE – JOSH’S WAR

Be careful who you trust, as the devil was once an angel.

Unknown Source

The splinters flew in every direction when a Confederate cannon ball pulverized the massive oak tree above the trench in which Joshua Quark was crouching. Initially he did not think that he had been injured, but then he noticed that blood was dripping from his cap onto the ground in front of him. Luckily Josh sustained only some minor cuts to his scalp, but that was scary enough. His throat constricted.

Was today going to be his last day on earth? There was a very good reason for Josh to ponder that question. Worrying would not help him at this particular moment in time. No one in combat could ever know what the next day, hour, minute or even second might bring. His mind raced back to the admonition from the Captain that his troops under his command had to be fearless warriors. That is more easily said than done.

Nothing foretold of the danger that was awaiting him that humid day. Of course, extreme stress is part of every soldier’s life when shells are flying. Josh had never known anything remotely like the constant, fear-driven existence that he presently was leading. Everyone has a breaking point, and he felt that he was coming close to his at that moment. Josh grinned inwardly as he remembered the comment from one of the lieutenants, who said The first requirement for anyone to get to Heaven is to be dead.

The thick cloud of cannon smoke made it almost as dark as night. The sun was nowhere to be seen. Josh had known better days. In fact just about every previous day in his life had been better. There was nothing civil about this civil war. He decided that the situation could not get any worse, then that is exactly what happened.

His always-cheerful friend, Sebastian Smith, was crouched a few feet to Josh’s left. Sebastian often joked that he would live to be a hundred since generation after generation in his family had been blessed with long life. Fate had a different agenda for him that day. As he rose to fire his rifle, he was struck in the forehead by a Rebel bullet. He died on his back facing up towards the branches that he would never see. Mercifully Sebastian’s death was instantaneous. Unless a shot is to the brain or the heart, a seriously wounded man would suffer for hours before the Angel of Death came to claim the soul of that unfortunate soldier.

Looking at the lifeless body of Sebastian lying next to him, Josh became queasy. He had seen a lot of men die during combat, but this time it was one of his closest friends who had died. Josh already knew that it was a bunch of crap when the officers had told the men at the training camp about dying with dignity. Is there anything on the other side of life? What is a soul? Does it disappear at the time of death?

Josh remembered from back home Preacher Douglas saying that the soul transcends the existence of the body. How could he know that to be a fact? He also said during one of his sermons, You get closer to your moment of death every minute that you are alive. You begin to die the moment that you are born. Considering the situation in which he presently found himself, those words were not encouraging to Josh.

A few minutes later another Confederate bullet hit its target. Don Gates was a blacksmith and was known by everyone back home as being the town brawler. The man had a volcanic temper. Gates ducked too slowly and got shot in the right shoulder. Josh ran to him and saw that while the wound was serious, it did not look life-threatening though it might cost him an arm. That Confederate bullet guaranteed that Gates would be discharged and sent home. Josh said to Gates that he should thank God that he was only winged. Having never been a religious man, Gates responded through clenched teeth in obvious pain, This is the first time God ever did anything for me. Gates had always been a real smartass.

Then Gates looked at the blood running down his arm and said, The last time that I had this much fun was when I dropped an anvil on my foot. He was strong and said that he could walk on his own without help, so he retreated behind the line of battle to look for a surgeon. Then what? Can a man with only one arm be a blacksmith?

While looking at Gates walk away, Josh rationalized that if he did not survive this damned war, at least he would not have to worry about the pains of old age, nor about having his children support him when he got so old that he could work. On the other hand, he preferred the idea of continuing to breathe for another few decades. There came to mind that old line that it is better to arrive late at the Pearly Gate than to get to Hell on time.

Far too many times Josh had heard the anguished screams of seriously wounded men lying in no-man’s land in the middle of a battlefield. It was impossible to tell whether it was a Union or a Confederate soldier who had been hit. Pain and suffering are universal. Josh pondered the question of when will this damned war end, or will it be a war without end?

There was no way that a year earlier Josh could not have pictured his life to be the way that it was now. Everyone knew that life can be unfair. Now he had come to the realization that death is equally arbitrary. He had a feeling of repulsion the first time he saw a bullet that he fired hit its targeted, a Confederate soldier, but now he had long since grown insensitive to inflicting injuries on another human being. He was not firing at a fellow American but rather it was a Rebel who represented a foreign nation that sought to retain the institution of slavery, a practice that Josh abhorred.

Granted, he had never met a black man prior to the war, but he knew what the slave practice entailed. Josh saw the Confederates as being an illegitimate rogue nation fighting for an immoral purpose. Josh was doing his patriotic duty to fight to reunite America as a slave-free nation.

Josh drew comfort knowing with total certainty that God was on the side of the Union. Upon further reflecting, he guessed that probably the Confederates thought the same thing. One area of commonality was that both sides believed that the other was the villain.

It is hard to lose a friend, but after having survived months of frequent combat, Josh did not have much emotional energy left to grieve for fallen comrades. In fact he thought back to his first week in uniform when one of the lieutenants told the new troops, I know that none of you are tired of living, but some of you may very possibly perish in combat. That’s going to be rough on the rest of you, but you will need to hold off your grieving until this damned war is ended. Luckily, there’s no chance that this conflict will last more than a few months.

He certainly had to eat those words. The people in both the North and the South were certain when the shooting commenced that the conflict would be short lived. That opinion was proven totally wrong at the battle of Bull Run at Manassas, Virginia. It was a wakeup call for both sides. For the first time it became clear that people had unrealistic expectations. The pageantry ended that day, and since then a great deal of blood had been soaked into the ground. The armies from both sides now limped towards whatever the future had in store for them.

Josh’s worst fear was that of a living Hell, which would be in the form of being maimed but surviving. It is better to get killed outright than to have your brain turned to mush and live for years thereafter as a vegetable. He would prefer death. Josh had heard of stories when for all practical purposes lives were lost. Men survived who were so badly injured ---- either physically or mentally ---- that both they and their families were shattered.

He wondered what was the likelihood that he would survive this war and return home in one piece. He had never expected much from life before enlisting, but now all he wanted was just to survive with his body and his mind intact.

As he looked around him, Josh let out a silent scream. The destruction of men and horses was beyond belief. He stumbled across the mangled, lifeless body of Eric Green, who formerly had been neighboring farmer, and Josh got nauseated and light headed. A few seconds later he stepped on someone’s detached leg. Josh fell to his knees and tried to rise, but his legs refused to cooperate, so in a trance-like condition he aimlessly crawled a few hundred feet.

Suddenly Josh experienced a strange feeling of total calm. He was at peace with himself. He was in no position to argue about his fate. Whatever was going to happen to him next was beyond his control. He had long ago tried to call in every last favor that he had with the Lord.

The day’s combat was a matter of happenstance. The weather hampered everything that both sides tried to do. The Union and the Confederate commanders had tried to deploy their forces as effectively as possible under the adverse circumstances to outmaneuver the other side. However, the variables caused by the heat, the murky weather and the torrential rain rendered neither side able to effectively communicate orders to the scattered infantry, the cavalry or the artillery units. Sometimes Josh felt that the generals did not have a real plan or knew what they were doing, but maybe it was just that they did not want the foot soldiers to know the scary stuff.

Neither side’s commanders had intended to initiate an attack that day at that place, since there was no high ground or strategic value to that flat piece of land. The opposing forces simply had stumbled into one another. Now that fighting had commenced, both sides tried battering the other so as to inflict as much damage as possible.

The battle ebbed and flowed during the course of that afternoon. The sights and sounds of the butchery associated with combat and death encircled Josh. There was a range of outcomes that can happen when a soldier goes into combat, most of them are bad. Cannon balls and rifle shells flew in every direction. The sounds and debris of war were everywhere. The bowels of the deceased open following death, and the stench was nauseating. Making matters even worse were the hundreds of blowflies circled overhead eager to pounce on the bodies of the dead and the dying.

As was the case every time the bullets flew, Josh wondered if he would survive this battle. Certainly what he saw before him now must be a view of what Purgatory is like. Had God been watching over him this day? Was his life a gift from the Almighty or had it been merely a loan? Had he passed the expiration date of his existence? While Josh had always wanted to be close to the Lord, he did not want it to occur too soon.

Above the sounds of battle, he heard the booming, always-irreverent Sergeant Bowen shouting, We are all going to die sometime, so it might as well be today and get it over with. Josh yelled back at Bowen, In that case, can I have the day off? It is ironic how some people can joke when instruments of death are whizzing by in every direction.

The setting sun made it difficult for the Union troops to locate, aim and fire accurately at the Confederates who had the setting sun behind them. The Rebels were firing less often, so they might be running low on gun powder. The carnage slowly came to an end.

It tortured Josh’s soul to hear the screams of the wounded men lying between the combatants’ entrenched lines on the inaccessible battlefield. Frequently these cries were laced with obscenities. Usually the wounded knew that they were dying, and were in such pain that they begged for someone, anyone in fact, to shoot them and put them out of their misery. The battleground looked like the most godforsaken place on earth, as it was covered with misshapen bodies of both men and horses. Josh knew that the horrendous sounds and images of battles would haunt him as long as he lived.

Few people and no newspaper would be interested in that day’s skirmish. Even so, by nightfall more than two hundred Northern and Southern men had been killed or seriously wounded. In the larger scheme of things, the battle was a nonevent, except for those families who lost a husband, a father or a brother. Or to a soldier who lost a limb. Or two.

Josh was both weary and wary of combat. He knew that the Army owned his body and could use it as cannon fodder, but his soul still belonged to him. Or could it be that it really belongs to God and not to either the Army or to him? Josh wondered whether for the first time in his life he had really found God or had God found him. He remembered that on the day he left for the Army when Pastor Douglas told him, Pray to God as though everything depends on Him, but act as though everything depends on you.

On a different Sunday Pastor Douglas said that there is nothing in the Old Testament about life after death. All of the promises in it relate to what will happen on Earth. The remark meant nothing to Josh at the time but now he often found himself mulling the significance of that bit of Biblical insight.

Some of the men who had no faith prior to entering the Army now actually found themselves envying those who did. The other side of that issue was one that Josh found hard to understand. Specifically there was one man in his unit who was deeply religious. Josh found it interesting that the man had no problem shooting to kill the enemy or pushing his bayonet through a Confederate’s gut, but he thought that it was a mortal sin to swear at the Rebels.

Josh had firmly believed at the time he enlisted that he was doing so for the cause of saving the Union. Not any longer. After having experienced so much combat, everything that he was now doing had become a personal mission. Could anyone ever be desensitized to the sights and sound of war?

Now Josh fought with the primary objective of repaying each and every Confederate soldier for all of his friends who had been killed or wounded. He rarely gave any thought to the widows and orphans of the men he had shot, and even when he did he no longer devoted any emotional energy worrying about how they would cope. Not often, but occasionally, he pondered about the fact that this war had desensitized him to the suffering of others. Did the Rebels who were shooting at him ever think about Josh’s wife and children?

To the depth of his soul, Josh believed that the Confederates were in a battle that they could never win. That was one of the many reasons why he had no sympathy for them or for the price that they were paying. He knew in his heart that no Confederate soldier could ever go to Heaven. In fact, Josh wanted to personally give every one of the Rebels a one-way ticket downstairs for take up permanent lodging in Hell. In his eyes, they were like insects who needed to be crushed.

Josh wondered how God could allow so many of his finest creations to kill one another. On second thought, isn’t that what happened with Cain and Abel? This whole issue was far beyond the mental capacity of this farmer from Cairo, Indiana. Maybe someone smarter than him might some day provide an answer.

Prior to enlisting, Josh knew nothing about war. That term only had relevance when someone read about it in a book, assuming that individual could read. Josh was able to read and write, but never enjoyed doing either. He had been a man of the soil and had little use for book learning.

The initial Union objective had been to defeat the Confederate armies but later it became a battle against Southern society’s support of the institution of slavery. That expanded the objective of the war from being a conflict to reestablish the Union to one with an additional goal of ending slavery in a reunited country.

Josh wondered whether this war would ultimately prove anything. What will historians write about this mess? It seemed to Josh that all of the Rebels are warlike, fight-to-the-death fanatics. Someone joked that the definition of a moderate Southern soldier is one who is out of ammo.

Josh had little time to think about larger issues since, understandably enough, his primary focus was on the subject of day-to-day survival. His life was divided into one of two categories: boredom or abject terror. He experienced one dull, routine day of marching after another day of dull routine, but those boring times were followed by seeing the world around him explode.

War must be amoral and it loves death more life. It is a monster that does not care if people perish. War is a beast with an insatiable appetite. Josh remembered sitting in church as a boy scared by the preacher’s discussion of Armageddon. He wondered if he was living in that reality today.

As a child being raised on a farm in rural Indiana, he had wanted some adventure in his life, but this was way too much. Previously the most exciting experiences he ever had was when the circus came to town and the horse races when the county faire was held. Everyone was fascinated by those events. Josh was enthralled by the man who walked on a wire high above the ground without a net beneath him. Now Josh found himself thinking that every day of his life during this war was like that man walking a tight rope.

Several years earlier at the faire one of his brothers challenged Josh to pay fifty cents in order to