Excerpts from “Reveille: A story of survival, war, family”

The Beginning

At fifteen Charles Andre didn’t know much for certain.

He knew he was an orphan. He knew he had a stand-by-his-side-no-matter-the-consequences friend named Ian, whom he considered a pure-dee idiot.

He knew he had a friend named Sarie Beth that he wanted to be more than a friend, but they were both too young to do anything about it. And, them being Catholic, even if they were older and if they were so inclined to do something about it, couldn’t do it anyway without something bad happening to them both.

He knew he wanted to grow up quicker than he was doing and make decisions for himself rather than have others make them for him.

And he knew he was better than people thought he was, or thought he could ever be. Someday he would prove those people wrong.

Or die trying.

Summer. New Orleans. 1860.

The city held the stink of old, wet garbage close to it, like a grieving woman clutching her stillborn baby. Rotting fish heads with skin cracking across the bones. Spoiled cabbage. Rancid, maggot-encrusted table scraps. Decaying ooze from dead animals. Metallic stench of dried blood. Thunder mug residue.

Charles Andre wrinkled his nose and shook his head as if to sling the stench away. Then he shook his head again, slowly, sadly, knowing what he was trying to do was impossible. Nearing the alley behind Fettermann’s General Store, the smell intensified, taking on a more ominous interpretation. Charles chanced a look down the alley. Huge bones, including one intact rib cage from a butchered cow carcass were strewn about the alley; a dozen snapping, growling dogs fought over the tendrils of meat hanging from the bones, and slitherings of worm-like tendons and gristle.

It surprised him that he actually stopped to watch the spectacle. It was not a sight he should want to remember. Putting his sensibilities and common sense aside, he focused on four dogs fighting over a denuded hindquarter, the hoof barely attached by a single, sickly white tendon. Charles’ eyes jumped back to the rib cage; curlicues of meat hung from it like wisps of Spanish moss from a flooded cypress. The dogs were oblivious to this unclaimed prize, seemingly content to fight and bite and growl over a single, greenish chunk of decaying meat.

What is ‘bout those dogs that they gather up and focus on that lone hindquarter?

It was a rhetorical mental spasm. The answer was clear. It was the same instinct, same urge, same force, that made him think about fighting on occasion. In his darkest thoughts, he could see himself – lips curled back, neck and chest ligaments taut, hands forming claws – to defend the simplest of principles or possessions, like his open-sided ticking mattress stuffed with dung-strewn straw centered under the huge south bay window at St. Mary’s Orphan Boy’s Asylum.

But, in his simplistic reality, Charles was not a fighter.

What would I fight for? Is there anything? Life and territory! Simple concepts of survival.

If your life was threatened, or you “owned” something or thought you did, you protected it, fought for it, and, if necessary, died for it. Next to breath and food and being loved, owning something, anything, was a driving force of life. His life, for certain. He had breath, enough food to survive (never enough, but . . . enough), and he had his place under the window. In his position, at this time, three out of four was certainly acceptable.

Placing his mattress under the big south-facing window at the overcrowded orphanage was a simple, common sense thing to do. And Charles Andre, by all accounts including his own personal analysis, was a simple boy, blessed with an abundance of common sense . . . and an overwhelming, sharp-edged sense of survival.

The south side of the orphanage caught a night breeze that, sometimes just for a few precious moments, cleansed the air and eradicated the smell of the inner city and the large sleeping room filled with other orphans from his nostrils. Charles lived for that breeze, for those few breaths before the gut-roiling smell beat back the freshness of the ocean’s perfume.

An orphan with lower social status than a shanty house whore, his world encompassed the worst of smells, sights, and sound. His eyes were constantly downcast, limiting his view to legs from the knees down, discarded cigar butts, wet, lumpy chunks of masticated plug tobacco, and feces – always feces, animal and human. He, like the city’s other orphans, homeless vagabonds, and unattached coloreds, walked in the gutter. The street was for the buggies, wagons, and horses carrying passengers participating in acts of commerce or for pleasure; the sidewalk was for the gentry— highbred men and women and those who attended to them. They, he knew, thought they were born to rule; they carried themselves in a manner that left no doubt they were peacock-proud of their position, not ever walking in the gutter. It was not expected – by them or others.

Sometimes, Charles watched them in the reflections of storefront windows: The men with the slick, polished shoes (sometimes tipped with silver, filigreed toe-taps) shiny, striped pants, waistcoats, ruffled shirts, gold and silver watch fobs, and high-top hats with saucy ribbons at the bottom of the crown; the women with the tiny, pointy-toed shoes with bright ribbons for laces, billowing, brocaded dresses with tiny flowers on a field of white lace or heavy, iridescent stripes of contrasting colors . . . purple and yellow, red and blue, green and brown.

He thought it interesting that he confined his clandestine viewings to clothing, not facial features.

Why do I do that?

He did not covet anything the gentry had.

Not a single thing.

He had convinced himself of that personal truism time and again. But he could not understand why, then, he hated them so.

Is it hatred? Or envy? Can’t be envy. I hate envy!

The moneyed gentry (or life-scammers who pretend to be just that) had fine clothes, lived and partied in beautiful homes, owned high-stepping, shiny horses with plaited manes, had enough money to buy a fine meal, and even leave a coin or two for the liveried help.

Rich people expected others to be subservient. Few (only those richer) denied them that fundamental pleasure. They threw money away and never missed it. Most of the boys at the orphanage regularly begged metal crumbs from finely fitted-out ladies and gentlemen. But not Charles. Never Charles.

“I’d rather die than beg,” he once told his best friend, Ian O’Rourke.

“Dah-die, then, you old sah-sot!” Ian stuttered, as he ran off, zeroing in on two young, rich gentlemen, both weaving a bit unsteady as they exited a fashionable saloon and bawdyhouse.

The fact that one of the gents threw a three-cent piece in the gutter and both men laughed as Ian got down on his hands and knees in the natural sluice brimming with vegetable leavings riding on black water didn’t seem to bother Ian a bit. It was all Charles could do to keep from crying.

He didn’t consider himself especially strong-willed, overly righteous, or particularly principled. He also didn’t think himself weak the previous afternoon for taking a hand-out from Ian: The slab-ham sandwich made with meat that was more fat than lean and two tough-as-nails slices of week-old bread offered as a handout from the back door of a fancy restaurant off of Chartres Street.

Je ne prie jamais. Comme Dieu est mon témoin, je fichu sûr ne mendiera jamais.

I didn’t beg. As God is my witness, I damn sure will never beg.

Escaping the Orphanage

Confederate camp outside New Orleans – 1863

“I want to join up and fight Yankees,” Charles said in a measured tone, staring straight at the Confederate soldier.

He felt footsteps behind him and instinctively tucked his neck into his collarless shirt as a protective reflex.

“What’s the problem here, Sergeant?” a rich baritone voice rang out.

Charles glanced over his right shoulder and saw a tall man looking down at him. The man was in a tailored, clean uniform with gold braid, epaulets, and a shiny sword in an ornate scabbard. His hair was long, to his shoulders; a mustache perfectly framed his mouth on three sides.

The sergeant stood quickly and snapped to attention.

“No problem, Major. This here quadroon or octoroon tis tryin’ to jine up is all. I was just sendin’ him on his way.”

The major’s kind eyes stayed on Charles.

“So, boy, are you a nigra like the sergeant says?”

“No, sir, Major-sir. I’s French, me.”

  “How old er ya be, boy?”

“Seventeen, sir,” Charles said, stretching his age more than a year.

“So, you small for yore age, er ya?” the major said, looking sternly.

“All us Andre’s is small, then we shoot up quick-like. My spurt is about due.”

“Sergeant,” the major said, “what makes ya’ll think this young’un’s a nigra?”

“Wah-wah-well, just look at him. He’s a half-breed if I ever saw one. Part Messkin and Chinneyman, I suspect, and looks like he probly got some nigra blood, too. Zits obvious, ain’t it?”

The major turned back to Charles as he spoke to the corporal. “Did you happen to notice his eyes? Did you ever see light brown eyes in a nigra’s head? I did once, but it was only one eye and it was just part of that one eye. No, Sergeant, this lad is no nigra. He may have a little mix in ‘im, but nigra blood, if he got any atall, is a dribblin’. But he’s a bit small to offer up as cannon fodder to the gawddamn Yankees.”

He put his hand on Charles’ shoulder and gently pushed him out of line.

“Go home, boy. Go home and thank God that you was not taken in this army this day. Come back when you are much oldah and much biggah.”

The major turned to leave, but Charles’ voice stopped him: “I’m an orphan. I got no place to go,.”

Without turning around, the major, his chin seemingly resting on his chest, said, “Then go back to the orphanage. Now. Git away from this camp and when you git where you are going, git down on your knees and pray that you never have to fight in a war such as this. This is a bad-feelin’ war, boy. Go away from this camp. En don’t come back.”

Charles watched him march off, back straight, left hand on his sword to minimize the swing.

The officer disappeared in the shadows of the house’s entryway. Charles set his shoulders square and marched after him. He dodged a backhand blow thrown at him by a sentry stuck like a pike by the front door. Charles skidded into the house. The major was halfway up a stairway to the right, just passing a large portrait of a bloated man with billowy white hair. The man in the portrait looked kindly and evil at the same time.

“Whatcha doin’ back, heah, boy?” the sergeant from the courtyard said from a part of the room that direct sunlight could not reach.

Charles stepped two steps forward and snapped to attention: “Charles Andre, sir, at your service, I am.”

The sergeant walked out of the darkness and spat, the glob of dark brown tobacco juice speckling the cypress plank floor just to the right of Charles’ foot. “Go home, boy, go home now. And don’t come back around here no more.”

Charles felt his arm gripped in a death-claw as he was hustled out the front door and shoved toward the street.

He looked around the camp and thought he saw Ian in a long line of disheveled and uncoordinated recruits, marching down the wagon road toward a tent village barely visible in the distance.

Ce qui maintenat?

What now? I can’t go back. I have no place else to go.

The Only Option

June 17, 1863.

Charles was stopped three times as he worked his way toward a tent that had been pointed out as the Union Army regimental command tent. Each time, a young soldier bearing a big gun, held diagonal across this body, braced him. All the soldiers sounded alike, fast-barking their “Halt! What’s your business?” in a high, nasal Irish brogue.

Charles was disappointed in the dress and manner of the soldiers of the unit. In June in the Deep South the high humidity in the swampy land surrounding New Orleans created sweat pools that drenched straight through even the thickest of uniforms.

The soldiers he could see – sentries, soldiers lying in tents with the flaps open, men hunkered over tiny cooking fires – were shabbily dressed, not like other Union soldiers seen marching through the streets of New Orleans, or frequenting Sadie’s Place, or on sentry duty at the docks or at key city government buildings. Some seemingly had no coats, wearing threadbare shirts and ragged pants; many were without shoes, their feet wrapped in pieces of leather (not unlike what Charles wore) tied together with small, loopy strands of hemp twin or thin strips of leather. Holey shirts and pants were commonplace.

The entire scene seemed surreal to Charles. He was used to seeing Confederate soldiers in threadbare clothing. In the South, underclothed and underfed soldiers were commonplace. But to see Union Army soldiers without proper clothing and equipment seemed a sacrilege on a monumental scale. These men looked nothing like the spit-and-polish soldiers seen marching down the streets in New Orleans in a daily show of force.

Finding himself in front of the tent with a huge America flag flapping from a skinned tree trunk, Charles stared at a smaller blue flag with Ninth Conn. Regiment in perfect, cursive embroidery. Another flag, this one blue and yellow, shared the rope at a lower level. He put his mind in overdrive, remembering he had seen the same flags in Jackson Square some months back. He took a step forward, pushing against the urge to run back to the orphanage and Sister Bloody.

The devil I know or the devil I don’t know.

The Smell of Battle    

               September 1863-Shenandoah Valley

By Charles’s third trip back from the battlefield, two legs and two arms (three lefts and a right, he noticed for some strange reason) lay like discarded cordwood under the operating table. The arm and one leg lay flat on the ground; the second arm was propped over the remaining leg, the arm’s bloody stump resting on the bloody grass.

                            It looks like it’s trying to wave.

                            What a strange thought.

Charles put a damper on his thought-images and jogged off toward the sounds of the constantly shifting battlefield.

Somewhere about the tenth trip across the open field to pick up the wounded, Charles was struck by the smell of battle.

                            Battle has a smell?

But there it was, as distinct and overpowering as honeysuckle in early summer. The smell was brassy: sulphur mixed with gunpowder and the underlying hint of hot metal. All mixed together in a swirl, capped off with a pungent, mean odor, the powerful musk of fear-sweat.

It was a smell like no other. And one he would never forget.

Hours later, Charles sat in the coffin of darkness, amid piles of rocks on

the banks of a creek. He never remembered feeling so tired in his life.

Tired doesn’t touch it. Numb. Dead with my eyes open is more like it.

The events of the day ran in slow motion in his mind: Rifle shots, cannon shells bursting, Rebel yells ricocheting off the hills, dead men, body parts, carrying the wounded, dropping twice from exhaustion, then levering himself upright for more runs for more wounded.

How many dead and wounded? Five thousand!  Can’t be that many, can it? Plus what the Rebs lost. Plus what will die from the wounds. It don’t seem possible. It don’t seem right.

        I can’t do this again. Nobody should have to.

Charles stared into the darkness on the other side of the creek. The darkness was complete, no light, no shadows; it was so dark he wasn’t sure his eyes were even open. He blinked a couple of times. Or felt sure he did.

He blinked once more, but it was a half-blink, really. It was only then he realized it was still light, not quite full dusk. He wished for the dark to return.

       “Andre!”

The voice sounded like it was far off, around a bend in a hollow, or shouted from the top of a hill.

        Let me be. Just let me be.

“Got to get up, lad.” This time the voice was clear, close.

Charles strained to open his gritty eyes, blinked as minimal light filtered in. He thought he could make out a hovering shadow.

“What . . . what is it?”

“We’re movin’ out, boy,” Corporal William Parker said. “The sergeant is lookin’ all over camp for you. Thought you mighta hung the big one yestiddy. We’re off on a nice march on this find autumn night. And we can’t go without you leading us, don’t you know.”

Corporal Parker, I just want to . . . Wait! Parker wasn’t a corporal no more. Reduced to ranks in . . . June, wasn’t it? Why’s he here? Why was he reduced in rank?  Don’t care. Don’t matter. Just want to sleep. Please . . . .

Without further urging, Charles pushed himself to his feet and took two lurching steps to the creek. He dropped to his knees and slapped double-handfuls of water into his face. Two more handfuls slicked back his wild hair and using both hands he pushed his kepi on front to back to keep it in place.

Bending down on all fours, he brushed the light green scum from the water’s surface in the short eddy as the pleasant lull of water-and-rocks gurgle filtered into his consciousness. He took two quick gulps of water before Parker said, “I think I’d drink somewhere else if I was you, lad.”

Casting him a queer look, Charles’ eyes followed the man’s finger upstream. Not thirty yards away to the west what looked like a humped rock in the middle of the flowing water. Charles blinked twice. His eyes widened. The body of a Rebel soldier lay facedown in the creek, a hole the size of a grown man’s thumb was barely visible above his left ear,

Charles looked at the body, then down at the water. With little warning, his stomach turned itself inside out and he vomited violently into the creek. Once. Twice more. Six times total.

Panting for breath, Charles tried to stand up. His legs refused the muscle command.

        “Take your time, boy. I’ll go tell the sergeant you’ll be there d’rectly.”

Charles nodded and said, “Might be a good idea to pass the word to the boys not to drink from this stream – downstream for sure – leastways for a while.”

        “I was just goin’ to do just that.”

Left alone, Charles scooted on his backside back to the rocks. He chose a single rock amid the moss-covered boulders – strewn here and there like a giant’s game of jacks – and pressed his forehead against it. The coolness instantly eased his queasy stomach.

        I coulda gone all day ‘thout that, that’s for sure and certain.

The Beginning of the Beginning

Late February, 1870.

It was going on three years as a hired hand when Charles realized he needed to make a move in his life. He aimed to take charge of it and forego riding the comfortable current. Since arriving at the Waddle farm one month shy of three years ago, he had worked alongside Tote, learned new skills, and performed every task assigned to the best of his ability. Without even realizing it, he had become attached to the Waddle family.

Mister Archibald Waddle was stern, but, for the most part, fair, especially if you worked hard and followed orders to the letter, which was never a problem for Charles. Mrs. Waddle was aloof most times as might be expected of women in general, but she never was condescending or mean-spirited. The Waddle boys treated him well, not as a brother, but not exactly as a hired hand either. The Waddles’ youngest daughter Henrietta became Charles’ constant companion whenever her parents allowed. She and Charles shared a commonality of spirit – quiet, introspective, thoughtful. They could spend hours together with few words passing between them: The grown, quiet man . . . the small, quiet girl.

And then there was Nancy Ann.

When Charles came to the Waddle farm in early 1867, he expected to fulfill his obligation to work till late fall. But eight months had turned into a month more, then another month. And twenty more after that.

The reason was Nancy Ann.

She was no longer a round-faced, headstrong, obstinate girl. She was a headstrong woman, not pretty in the traditional sense, but more than pleasant to look at . . . coming or going.

She liked him, he knew this instinctively and by her less-than-subtle on-again, off-again flitations. But, she was now twenty-two and more than a few local hairlegs had “come a-calling,” as she told him more than once.

“John Westmore came a-calling Sunday afternoon. I surmise you saw his buggy at the house.”

And, “Benjamin Craner is a good man. His poppa is a banker in Hope, don’t you know. A little birdie told me he’s going to come callin’ Sunday next.”

Charles knew the drill. He was expected to show anger, to give a visible whit about what Benjamin or John or a chorus of other callers would or would not do. He had figured out Nancy Ann wanted him to do something that was not his nature – display emotion.

It just was not his way. He just sniffed at the baited conversation, and refused to bite.

Nancy Ann did not consider herself a patient person; no one who knew her did. But there was something about Charles that intrigued her, made her think about what could be, what might be.

And, what would be if she had her way. Charles smiled. Most times, she had her way.

The Story of 'Reveille'

Who? Why? How?

        Historical fiction: Truth mixed with assumptions, fleeting mental images, and make-believe. Reveille is an historical fiction novel is about a young man I never knew but to whom I am indebted nonetheless. In dealing with history before the electronically recorded word became the reality-god, there is no such thing as absolute truth. There are recollections, perceptions, first-hand accounts (muddled by time and circumstances), and second- and third-hand stories. There are written records – official and plebian – but “facts” in one document are often changed, diluted or ignored when transferred to another. Seldom when digging into the artifacts of historical events do you find absolute truth. Under that premise, Reveille is as close to truth as I could make it.

        In March of 2006, the Andres clan, descendents of a slight man who lived a majority of his life as Charles Montgomery Andres – just a sad-faced image in need of a shave that was imprinted in old, sepia-toned photos – began planning its first real reunion in more than a decade. Far-flung family members met spur-of-the-moment only on certain occasions . . . usually following the death of a revered aunt or uncle. Pleas were made to gather family stories to create a reunion keepsake. The project, named after the small community in Southwest Arkansas in which the modern Andres family story began, was titled “Memories of Sutton.”

        As the stories rolled in about the Andres clan, only stories by the three remaining Andres children – Betty Ann Andres White, Jack Wayne Andres, and Wanda Ruth Andres Collins – contained any mention of Charles Montgomery Andres and his wife, Nancy Ann Hines Waddle. Except for a handful of hand-me-down family pictures in which he appeared, an old, handmade, long-stemmed pipe, some county land records, and his scrapbooks of newspaper and pamphlet clippings (mainly dealing with religious issues), firm evidence of his existence was slim. Before 1870, there seemed to be no official record of Charles Montgomery Andres. All the family knew were from the stories of his early years that he had told.

His personal imprint is evident in his three remaining grandchildren and the hundred-odd great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, and great-great-great-grandchildren, scattered around the United States.

Who was Charles Montgomery Andres? The family stories about the man known as Grandpa Andres were flimsy and without concrete detail:

1. C. M. Andres was an orphan from New Orleans.
2. His father and mother were from France; his father was a doctor.
3. One story had his entire family being wiped out in a “plague”; another had two brothers being in the orphanage with him, both leaving the institution to join the Confederate Army at the onset of the Civil War. If he ever mentioned the names of his parents or siblings, that information had been lost.
4. To get out of the orphanage, at age thirteen to sixteen (depending on the story), he tried to join the Confederate Army and was rejected because of his age. He hied himself off to join the Union Army. He was a drummer for some Union regiment, stationed somewhere for a couple of years.
5. After the war, he came to Arkansas, stopped to work at the Archibald Waddle “plantation,” married the family’s second oldest daughter, and had six sons and a daughter.
6. He was born June 25, 1847 and died January 18, 1929 – it is so stated on his marble marker in Harmony Cemetery in Nevada County, Arkansas. He is buried in a family plot shared by his wife, several children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.
7. He was hard-working, protective of family and friends, loved to read, embraced simple, no-frills, by-the-Word religion, and was considered something of a “healer” by locals. In his later years, he made patchwork-type scrapbooks out of odds-and-ends articles in newspaper and church bulletin clippings.

That was all. The life of a man was summed up in a few hundred words.

More than eighteen months of research revealed that much of the family “fact” was fiction – contrived or believed, but fiction nonetheless.

The man later known as Charles Montgomery Andres was born July 3, 1846 in New Orleans. He was christened Charles Adrien Jean Baptiste Andree in St. Louis Cathedral.    

His father – Georges Adrien Andree – was a merchant; his mother was Josephine Laumonne (or Laumont, as it was spelled on another document). He had two brothers: Charles Gustave Constant Andree and Georges Hyacinthe Andree. His parents and his brother Charles died of either yellow fever or cholera in late 1849 or early 1850. The entire family was listed in the city’s 1850 Census (counted in October of 1849), but only Georges, his brother, was listed in the 1860 Census. Charles was placed in a New Orleans orphanage in early 1850 and his name was shortened, probably due to mouth-to-pen transfer, to Charles Andre.

He left the orphanage in early June 1863 and apparently tried to join the Confederate Army, although no record of such an attempt could be found. If he did, he was rejected. (It would make sense that he made that attempt. New Orleans was under Union control and life for the regular populous was hard; the life of institution-bound orphans was doubly hard.) If the Confederate Army rejected him, it was not because of age. In the early summer of 1863, the Johnny Rebs was accepting boys as young as twelve in infantry units, as young as ten to serve as musicians. Charles was less than a month shy of sixteen at the time.

Within a few days he made a life-changing decision. He walked about ten miles northeast and joined the Ninth Connecticut Regiment stationed outside New Orleans. He served till the end of the war as a drummer, first for Company H, then, when the entire regiment was reformed, for Company C.

With Reveille, Charles Montgomery Andres finally has a voice. A blank shroud of uncertainty is lifted from his life, even if only in an historical fiction sense. It is the aim of this account to replace that shroud with a literary tableau of colors and identifiable and understandable circumstances that helped define the boy that went to war and shaped the man who emerged at the end of it.

It is a sincere hope that Private Charles Andre, musician, Ninth Connecticut Regiment, would be proud of Reveille. His pride in the end result would not be because of any by-happenstance factual depiction of him, his actions, attitudes, motivations, or attempts to build his life-story. The pride would come from the effort expended to make his life more complete than simple words carved on a tombstone in an isolated country cemetery, or as a dour image in ragged-edged photographs hanging in a hallway or stuck in an envelope.

The hundreds of hours doing research for this book was not a lonely quest; Charles Montgomery Andres, my great-grandfather, walked by my side every step of the way. For any assumptions made about this quiet, unassuming man and his life that are incorrect, I sincerely apologize. He assuredly deserved better than I had to give.