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PARTISAN REVIEW
aud which Annabelle Trice, that night in the summer house, had
slipped onto his finger as his hand lay on her bosom.
Cass marched to Shiloh, between the fresh fields, for it was early
April, and then into the woods that screened the river. (Dogwood and
redbud would have been out then.) He marched into the woods,
heard the lead whistle by his head, saw the dead men on the ground,
and the next day came out of the woods and moved in the .sullen with–
drawal toward Corinth. He had been sure that he would not survive
the battle. But he had survived, and moved down the crowded road
"as in a dream." And he wrote: "And I felt that henceforward I
should live in that dream." The dream took him into Tennessee again
-Chickamauga, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and the nameless skir–
mishes, and the bullet for which he waited did not find
him.
He be–
came known as a man
of
extreme courage. At Chickamauga, when
his company wavered in the enemy fire and seemed about to break in
its attack, he moved steadily up the slope and could not understand
hi~
own inviolability. And the men regrouped, and followed. "It
seemed strange to me," he wrote, "that I who in God's will sought
death and could not find it, should in my seeking lead men to it who
did not seek." When Colonel Hickman congratulated him, he could
"find no words" for answer.
But if he had put on the gray jacket in anguish of spirit and in
hope of expiation, he came to wear it in pride, for it was a jacket like
those worn by the men with whom he marched. "I have seen men
do brave things," he wrote, "and they ask for nothing." More and
more into the journals crept the comments of the professional soldier,
between the prayers and the scruples-criticism of command (of
Bragg after Chickamauga), satisfaction and an impersonal pride in
manoeuvre or gunnery ("the practice of Marlowe's battery excel–
lent"), and finally the admiration for the feints and delays executed
by Johnston's virtuosity on the approaches to Atlanta, at Buzzard's
Roost, Snake Creek Gap, New Hope Church, Kenesaw Mountain
("there is always a kind of glory, however stained or obscured, in
whatever man's hand does well, and General Johnston does well").
Then, outside Atlanta, the bullet found him. He lay in the hos–
pital and rotted slowly to death. But even before the infection set in,
when the wound in the leg seemed scarcely serious, he knew that he
would die. "I shall die," he wrote in the journal, "and shall be spared
the end and the last bitterness of war. I have lived to do no man good,
and have seen others suffer for my sin. I do not question the Justice
of God, that others have suffered for my sin, for it may be that only
by the suffering of the innocent does God affirm that men are
