| TRAVELOGUE, PT.4: TUESDAY (Tupelo, Mississippi to West Point): After spending the night at Bo's childhood home in West Point, Bo and I enjoined his old man Russell Florreich (aka "Flushright" -- Russell is the town plumber, now semi-retired) and his girlfriend Catherine to drop us off at Bryce's Crossroads (the site of Nathan Bedford Forrest's most inspired military triumphs) and we'd ride back to West Point via the Trace, about 50 miles away... So the four of us took in the sights of the battlefield and had a tasty, sodium-laced catfish and fried chicken lunch in Saltillo, before making our way south on the bikes... Like Jackson, the vehicular traffic on the Trace in Tupelo was completely nutty and only slighter tamer than, say, the first lap of the Indy 500 or something... WEDNESDAY (Bryce's Crossroads redux): En route to Shiloh, Bo and I cycled around Bryce's Crossroads a second day... near the graveyard for the confederate dead we ran into some Civil War zealot/nut who proffered a roll of 35mm film and said: "I have the micro-film for Rommel." I asked him what he meant and he said that it was common knowledge that Rommel based the blitzkrieg on Nathan Bedford Forrest's pincer attack that enabled his 5000 troops and cavalry to destroy and seize Northern General Sturgis's superior force of 8000 men. In his official battle report, Sturgis has estimated Forrest's force at 20,000 men, a testament to how overwhelmed he was by the ferocity of Forrest's attack. It was suggested that Sturgis was drunk during the Battle of Brice's Crossroads, as no sober man could have a suffered such an ass-whuppin' of the magnitude that Forrest delivered to Sturgis. As a footnote, Sturgis' military career was ended after Bryce's Crossroads. His command was taken away, and he finished his duty as paper-pusher... |