“It’s my job to capture those Rebel garrisons at Terre Haute and Urbana,” said Lee. “So this time you’ll have to wait on me. I know I’ll be able to count on you to keep the men and supplies moving forward once we have Terre Haute and Urbana in our possession.”
Lee opened the door and put out his arm, feeling the warm rain falling through the cool air. That meant that a tropical storm coming up from the Gulf of Mexico had wrapped itself around the season’s first gale coming down from the north. The rain was likely to continue for days. Lee walked briskly out of the station and through the open door of his railroad car, dashing through the few feet of open air that seemed to contain a waterfall. As he entered the passenger car he shook the water off his hat and closed the door. The rain pounding on the roof of the car was louder than the roar of the rain falling outside.
Lee turned to his entourage of Braxton Bragg and Richard Taylor.
“From the looks of the storm, your people in Louisiana must have caught a hurricane.” Lee said it loudly, making himself heard over the deluge outside.
“It could have been Louisiana, or maybe Mississippi or Texas that caught the worst of it,” replied Taylor. “Whatever it was, it carried a strong punch, since it knocked down the telegraph lines clear down to the Gulf.”
“I need your Louisiana Tigers to unleash a storm of their own against the Rebels as soon as the weather clears and we can get them up here,” said Lee.
Dour old Bragg chuckled. “Let’s hope they do to the Rebels half of what they’re doing to Memphis.”
“I understand that most of their officers are in jail,” added Lee with just a hint of a smile. “You fellows are supposed to be our chief disciplinarians. Lord knows how that outfit would have turned out if it had been trained by slackers!”
Dick Taylor guffawed loud enough to drown out the pounding rain. Even sourpuss Bragg laughed. He and Bragg were close friends who had trained the Louisiana regiments together. Stoneballs had thrown them against Fremont’s enveloping line at Gettysburg and they had busted it wide open. Lee had hoped to place the Tigers in the line between the weak divisions of Floyd and Pillow, using them as the cudgel to break Grant’s line from the south if the rearward envelopment stalled.
Delays in moving the Louisiana regiments on the overloaded railroads from the Pennsylvania Front to Illinois had stranded them in several towns in the Carolinas and Tennessee, which they had had promptly trashed and looted. They were last reported running amok in Memphis just before the storm took down the telegraph lines. Lee wanted to get them up here before the Governor of Tennessee called out the State Militia to suppress them. That would like as not trigger a small war within a war.
Lee’s thoughts returned to the serious business at hand. This situation is becoming worrisome. I’ve got two hundred thousand men stuck up here on trains that can’t move forward or backward. If Grant were to realize our predicament he could surge forward and capture half the rolling stock in the Confederate Union, and very probably he would capture the men before they were able to detrain and defend themselves. I must resolve this situation before the weather clears enough for Grant to think about taking the offensive against me.
Lee directed Bragg’s and Taylor’s attention to the map spread out over the impromptu desk that had been knocked together over the tops of a couple of passenger seats.
“We have no information on what’s happening at the front. We’ll have to trust to the judgment of Jackson and Kirby Smith and their division commanders to sort things out. In the meantime we can start thinking through the contingencies we’ll be facing when the weather clears. Perhaps we should start by figuring out how to unsnarl the railroads if the Rebels continue to hold out at Urbana and Terre Haute.”
Lee pointed to the section of the map showing the railroads feeding into Terre Haute, including the Terre Haute amp; Alton that he was stuck on now, about seventy miles west of the town.
“Let’s find out if we can forage up enough spare rails and ties for our engineers to lay a bypass route around the west side of Terre Haute on ‘our’ side of the river. We’ll tie it in with the Terre Haute and Vincennes Railroad ten or twelve miles south of town. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just sturdy enough to pass locomotives travelling at a slow speed. If we can do that, we can at least get the trains moving again on a southbound loop. We’ll be able to resupply and re-victual our men at the fronts. Then we can get the follow-on units like the Louisiana men on up here to reinforce them.”
“Will it be possible to lay even a temporary railroad on the waterlogged ground?” objected Taylor. “We have a lot of locomotives and rolling stock to clear south. Is the ground stable enough to bear that load?”
“We can corduroy the roadbed with tree trunks,” answered Bragg. “There’re enough trees along the Wabash for it. We could demolish some barns too, if we have too.” Bragg studied the map. “The bypass route doesn’t have to be long….no longer than fifteen miles as near as I can tell. And the trains don’t have to move fast. We can have our engineers walk ahead of each train and realign the rails as needed. We have a lot of men lollygagging around with nothing to do at the moment. We might as well put them to work.”
“Do any of our engineers have experience building railroad bridges?” asked Taylor. “We’ll have to figure out how to bridge the Wabash after the water goes down. We’ll need to get our hands on some timbers big enough to get locomotives across.”
Lee was startled. He looked again at the map and traced the course of the Wabash with his finger. “Oh, I see, I mistook the Wabash amp; Erie Canal for the river. I must be getting old, not to have seen that right away. The river doglegs west of town. We will have to bridge it.”
“I’ve been down there,” said Taylor. “It’s shallow and full of sandbars. Not a very great distance to bridge, but we will have to figure out how to anchor the timbers in loose sand.”
Lee studied the map in silence as he sought for an alternate solution for rerouting the rail traffic. After several minutes he gave it up. He could see no satisfactory alternative to bypassing Terre Haute and re routing the return traffic through Vincennes.
“We’ll have to bridge the Wabash, sand and all. It’s too far to run a new line down to Vincennes entirely on our side of the river. We’d have bogs to bridge anyway, no matter which way we go. I think it’s better to bypass on the shortest route. We’ll only have to worry about bridging one river crossing that we already know about instead of perhaps discovering several others that don’t show on the map.”
“Then we’d better put our heads together figuring out how to do it,” Bragg said to Taylor. “That’s why we have stars on our uniforms. Let’s round up all the railroad men and construction engineers we get our hands on. We’ll need all the help we can get on this one.”
Lee was pleased that his subordinates were engaging their minds in a constructive project. That spirit would spread down to the men. They’d curse like muleskinners about having to labor in atrocious weather building a railroad on soggy ground and a bridge anchored in sand, but that would be better for their morale than lollygagging around in the rain, becoming physically sick from the dampness and mentally depressed from boredom.
“Very well,” said Lee. “I will leave you two to work out the construction of our railroad bypass around Terre Haute. I have some thinking of my own to do.”