153 Days to Opening Day 2008

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 153 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s book is Fatal Victories by William Weir. This is a book about battles won, but wars eventually lost.

The excerpt is from page 153 and the end of the story of General Braxton Bragg, the commander of the Confederate forces at Chickamauga in 1863.

No soldiers had fought more valiantly than the riflemen of the Army of Tennessee. But every army’s morale has a breaking point. Bragg’s army reached its at Chickamauga. The victory that should have given a lift to the entire South had crushed the victorious army. Chattanooga merely proclaimed the fact to the world.

Chattanooga finished Bragg, just as Chickamauga finished Rosecrans. Rosecrans, though, was able to go back to his business and even be elected to Congress.

After that insult from the troops he cherished, Bragg was a broken man.

Nevertheless, he did his duty to the end. He served as military advisor to President Davis. Just before the last shot, he was called on for the most hopeless of tasks – to stop Sherman, leading what was probably the finest army ever fielded in North America, with a ragtag corporal’s guard.

He failed, as anyone would have failed. The Confederate States of America disappeared, ad President Davis was imprisoned. To many, the Confederacy was a romantic lost cause, but there was little sympathy for the man who saw the southern dream evaporate before his eyes.

When the war ended, Bragg wandered through the South, lonely and unsuccessful. He tried civil engineering, selling real estate and selling insurance. He failed at everything. When, 17 years after Chickamauga, he fell over dead on a Galveston street, Braxton Bragg possessed little but his flinty integrity.

Put today’s entry into a baseball context.