Free The March by E.L. Doctorow

pardoned by that general.
    Sure, and you had the papers to prove it. Can you hear me in this rain, God? I am standing with this boy here who thinks an army at war is a reasonable thing. He thinks a soldier is something more than the uniform he is wearing. He thinks we live in a sane life and time, which you know as well as I is not what you designed for us sinners.
    Well, anyways, you said God had his intentions for us, and it don’t seem like this is what they were.
    We are alive, Will my boy. And why? Because we didn’t claim to be but what we appeared to be. We didn’t stretch some dumb Reb captain’s brain all out of shape. We didn’t tell no story to get him so fussed he would shoot us for lyin dogs. We looked like Union, and that’s what he understood. And that’s what we were. And what we ain’t anymore.
    I’ll vouch for that.
    Yes, we are wet and cold and hungry on this dark November night, but alive, which is a sight better than the dead falling to the ground every minute in every state of the Confederacy. And that we are alive by shifting our way about from one side t’other as the situation demands shows we already have something gifted about us. I feel the intention, all right, and I am sorry you don’t. And I will pray He don’t task you for being ungrateful. Or take it out on me.
    THEIR DUTY WAS two on and four off, but with the first paling of the sky they still hadn’t been relieved. The rain let up and the wind blew as if that was what was bringing up the light. Below them the camp appeared, sodden and bare of any vegetation, and with rivulets of swamp water trickling through the stockade walls. Prisoners who had no huts for their shelter stood up from the watery holes in the ground where they had slept. With the first rays of a cold sun, everyone was up and out on the grounds, hunched over shivering, or dancing up and down. The hacks and coughs crackling from this mass of men sounded to Will like rifle fire. Everyone turned toward the kitchen sheds, but there was no smoke from the chimneys.
    Beyond the far walls of the stockade and through the pine trees, he could see the river flowing high and fast from the heavy rains.
    The smell was particularly bad this morning, the open latrines brackish and the burial trench just under their guard post having lost topsoil in the rains. Here and there, a body had emerged. Will turned his back on the sight and tried to draw in some scent of the surrounding pine forest. It was then that he saw the guards running along with their bloodhounds and torches.
    Not long after that, the Union prisoners—wet, bedraggled, skeletal—were being herded down the road through the village of Millen to the railroad yard. There were more than a thousand of them still, and few had the spirit or the strength to question why they were leaving the pens at Millen. Every twenty yards on either side of the prisoner column, guards with rifles at the ready, and some with guard dogs, policed the march. Arly drifted back till he was abreast of Will. We will not be riding any damn railroad, he said. Can you hear me?
    I hear you.
    There’s even less grub where they’re going. Watch me and do what I do, Arly said.
    I should have known, Will said.
    At the depot a long train of boxcars was attached to two engines, smokestacks chuffing black, boilers hissing. As each car was filled, the door was slid shut and bolted. Some of the prisoners, who could no longer walk, were carried on the backs of their companions. Arly, with Will following, walked backward as if to double the guard at each car as it was loaded. Will noticed how conscientious Arly looked, his rifle at the ready, his eyes alert to any escape attempt. In this manner, they reached the last car, and at the moment when nearby officers had dismounted and were conferring over their maps, Arly and Will slipped around the last car and took cover behind the depot.
    Here they had another view of the Ogeechee River. On the far banks a line