by Ralph Peters
Instantly, the wild confusion of pain.
His horse bolted, crazed. He tried to master the reins. His left arm was useless, utterly disobedient and gripped by phenomenal pain. His right hand, too, refused to follow orders.
Still in the saddle. Barely. Maddened, Little Sorrel careened against the brush along the path.
He had never imagined such pain, had reckoned wounded men weak when they cried out.
A branch lashed his face, sweeping him backward, clawing. He almost tumbled from the horse’s back.
Forcing his wounded right hand to follow his orders, he gripped the reins to the extent he could. Unable to close his fingers into a proper fist.
Why had they fired at him? His men, his men.…
He believed that he pulled up the horse himself, but was unsure. Perhaps others did. It didn’t matter. There were voices. Close. And furious shouts in the distance. Admonitions.
The pain.
“Hold the horse while I see to him.” Was that Wilbourn, the Signal officer?
His left arm felt deadened, yet flesh and bone screamed within. He felt blood wetting his face.
“My own men, my own men,” he muttered. “Why?”
“Are you badly hurt, General?” Wilbourn, indeed. His voice. “Are you hit bad?”
Gasping, Jackson opened his eyes. The moon through the branches shone of bloodstained ivory.
“Where are you hurt, sir?” Another voice. Unknown. Young.
“I … fear my arm is broken. And my hand…”
“Which arm?”
“Left arm … right hand … broken.”
The pain urged Jackson to clutch himself, but he could not.
The Lord had left him helpless. Why?
What sins … what shortcomings in his devotion …
“Try to move your fingers. The right hand.”
“I … cannot.”
“General, what…”
“I wish you … would you … see if I’m bleeding? My arm. I fear I am bleeding very much.”
He could not see clearly. He could only feel the pain, the conquering pain.
A hand explored his left arm. Tenderly. Almost as if the hand belonged to a woman.
His esposa? She … no … impossible …
Abruptly, the hand pulled away.
“Will they fire again?” Jackson asked timidly.
“I … no, I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
“Help me down,” Jackson requested. He could not put strength in his voice.
He felt hands upon him. Another wave of pain, sudden. Tangled bodies, an apology, something about an old wound. He had no old wounds. Take your feet out of the stirrups. A command he could not obey.
Other hands searched for purchase, touching him cautiously. Slowly, strong arms lowered him from the right side of his horse.
That was wrong. You always dismounted on the left. Why …
Pain, too much pain. How could he bear it? Had to bear it.
A voice called: “Hold the horse, grab the reins.”
The sound of galloping, followed by complaint.
He lay on the ground, bewildered.
Wilbourn said, “It’s remarkable, sir, that any of us escaped.”
“Providential,” Jackson told him. “The Lord’s hand.” His mind seemed clearer now. He felt himself being shifted and leaned against a tree.
“You’re bleeding. There’s more blood.”
“Blood.”
“I have to cut away your sleeve, sir. To get at the wound, tie it up. It … may be troublesome.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t have much of a knife.”
“Do … go ahead, go ahead.”
More voices now. Morrison. Brother-in-law. Think of her, his darling. No. Must not. Attack. They must attack.
Was that Hill? Hill had to lead the attack.
“General Jackson … I’m so sorry to see you wounded, so sorry. I hope you’re not hurt much.”
Yes, Hill. It was Hill. His voice was kind and true.
“My arm is broken.”
“Is it painful, sir?”
“Very painful,” Jackson said, before he could stop himself.
“Anywhere else?”
“Right hand. Fingers broken.”
He felt Hill gently removing his riding glove. New pain jolted him. He bit it back.
Wilbourn’s voice again: “I have to cut away the entire sleeve.”
“Cut away everything.”
He clenched his teeth, ground them, fighting to conceal the tyrannical pain from those around him.
It had been the sin of pride, he was sure. The Lord had punished him. The Lord knew best, His ways must not be questioned.
Firm hands tied a knot on his upper arm and drew it tight. Nearby, there was a fuss he did not understand. Someone whispered, “Yankees.” Another voice asked, “Where is he?”
“Dr. Barr is here,” Hill said, hush-voiced. “From Pender’s Brigade.”
Jackson felt a bolt of fear. “Is … is he a skillful surgeon?”
“I don’t know him, not personally. But the soldiers like him.” Then Hill added, “He’s not going to do anything much. Just help you back to the rear, he just needs to look at you. Until we find Dr. McGuire.”
“Good, good.”
The pain made him want to weep like a child, but he would not.
Suddenly, Jackson said, “You must take command, General Hill. It’s yours now, the corps is yours. You must attack.”
“Yes, sir. I’m only sorry that—”
“You must attack.”
“I … I’ll try to keep it from the men. Your wounding.”
“Thank you. But…”
Then Hill was gone. In his place, Morrison’s voice, gone urgent, said, “Yankees are placing a battery in the road. Not a hundred yards off. Ambulance would never make it.”
“I can walk,” Jackson said, unsure whether it was true.
Shells struck nearby, introduced from yet another direction.
“Just get him back behind the lines,” someone said. “And, for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone who it is.”
“Must not … take the Lord’s name…”
The pain … what if a man were condemned to such pain for all eternity? What if that was Hell? What if he had failed the Lord his God, somehow betrayed Him?
Aided by good men, he stumbled along, fighting back the pain, unwilling to show weakness even now.
A voice challenged them. “Who’s going on along there? You speak up.”
“Friend got himself wounded.” Wilbourn’s voice again.
But soldiers crowded up.
“Good God, that’s Old Jack!”
“Hush your mouth and move off. You shut your mouth.”
More soldiers approached. A litter team. They eased him onto the canvas and hoisted the stretcher onto their shoulders.
“Stay on the road, don’t jar him.”
A shell tore the air. It burst nearby.
“Damn the Yankees.”
Another shell screamed in.
“Get off the road,” some shouted. Too late.
A blast. Close. Jackson felt the litter sag.
He fell to the ground.
When he struck the road the pain was of an immensity he never could have imagined. Perhaps this was, indeed, what sinners were destined to endure for eternity.
He groaned.
A Union barrage swept the road and the nearby brush. Men cried out in pain that was all their own.
Jackson felt a body press against him as shells burst on every side. Someone was shielding him, he understood. He feared he was sobbing because of the pain. Whimpering.
When would it stop? All of it.
The Union artillery shifted onto targets in greater depth. Soldiers hurried from ditches, re-forming, moving on.
Someone asked for volunteers to help with the litter.
Soldiers jeered. One said, “Some goddamned fancy boy, that one, I bet. Why don’t
you sissy-boys tell his mama to fetch him.”
“For God’s sake, you have to tell them who he is,” a voice whispered.
“He … we’re not supposed to.”
“You want him to die right here?”
Another voice called, “You men there. Help us. That’s General Jackson lying there.”
In moments, eager hands raised the litter again. Competing to help, the soldiers carried him into the woods, in case the Union artillery dropped its range again.
A soldier tripped and Jackson fell from shoulder height again. He landed squarely on his ruined arm.
He cried out. Helplessly.
Apologies, accusations, embarrassment.
Pain.
For the first time in his life, Jackson begged for whiskey.
There was none to be had.
They bore him back to the road then, deeming it the lesser danger. Hoofbeats approached, several riders.
The litter bearers halted.
A voice. Dorsey Pender. Unmistakable. How odd it seemed of a sudden, this God-given individualization of all men.
“General Jackson, I hope you’re not seriously wounded.”
“General Pender…”
“I have to retire my brigade,” Pender told him. “To re-form them. Yankee artillery busted things up right awful.”
Jackson discovered unexpected strength. “You will not retire an inch, sir! You must hold your ground!”
The effort was too much. He sensed less of the world around him. Drained, swooning. Time grew elastic. Only the pain was constant.
He wondered if he would die.
* * *
Anguished, Jim Lane could not bear to see to his duty. Not yet. He needed to lie to the officers and men of the 18th North Carolina, to console them that their terrible mistake was only that: a mistake that could hardly be helped. It could have been any regiment on the line that fired those volleys. He needed to tell them that, to buck them up and avoid crushing out what still remained of their spirit. But he could not do it, not yet.
He hoped to God that Jackson would be all right. He knew it was selfish, but he, too, did not want the opprobrium, a lifelong reputation as the man whose soldiers had shot, perhaps killed, Stonewall Jackson. Nor could the army afford to lose that man, that unexpected genius of the battlefield.
Unexpected, because he had known Jackson well enough before the war, first as a cadet at VMI, where Jackson had been a hapless, if stern, professor. Later, he had known Tom Jackson as a colleague, during his own stint on the faculty. There had always been something to the man, he thought now, but his peculiarities had obscured it. Only war had brought Jackson to his flowering.
It wasn’t right, this dreadful luck. His brigade was as good as any in the army, and the 18th was made up of stalwart Yankee killers. Now what would men think?
He didn’t imagine for a moment that all this would be forgotten, even if Jackson made a full recovery. It was the sort of thing that stuck to a man.
Brigadier General James Henry Lane was not of great physical stature. All of his life, he’d had to fight to make his way past bigger men. In the war, he’d proven himself on the battlefield, and he’d tithed his own blood to the Confederacy, the dull pain of his wounds a dreary companion that never quit him.
Now this.
Powell Hill was down, too. But the Yankees had done that. In their last cannonade.
Better that the attack had been delayed. He did not know how the men would behave just now. In the morning, though … in the morning they’d be out to prove their mettle, to redeem themselves.
If ever they could be redeemed.
Before he could muster the will to do his duty, to rouse men plunged into the deepest despair, the Yankees attacked on his right flank. It was a relief to rush over and see to it, to have something to distract him. But the Yankees let him down. After a sharp encounter, they reeled back and seemed to be firing into their own ranks, cutting down their comrades in the darkness. Their attack soon petered out.
Warning his adjutant to keep everyone away for a few minutes, Jim Lane sat down on a stump and cried.
* * *
George Meade had no patience with anyone that night. Moving his division from the left flank to the right-center in the moonlight, he tyrannized officers who showed the least bit of slackness and arrested any teamsters or stragglers who dared get in his men’s way.
His language grew indelicate. Margaret would not have approved.
The behavior of Howard’s corps had appalled him, but Hooker’s sheer inattention and belated response infuriated him the more. He even grew short with Charlie Griffin, telling him: “Move those men sharply, Griffin, or I’ll find a man who can.”
The one encouraging aspect of it all was that the morning would find his corps poised to join the fight. After all the marching, delays, and follies, his men would have a chance to show their grit.
If Joe Hooker didn’t fold his hand again.
* * *
He knew what the chills he felt meant: He had lost much blood. Dr. McGuire sat by his bedside, silhouetted by the lantern fixed to the tent pole. Now and again, the surgeon took his pulse. Jackson understood that, too: McGuire needed signs of strength from his damaged body before he could wield knife and saw.
At times the world seemed acutely clear, then he drifted off again. The whiskey-and-morphine tincture he’d been given helped a little. Still, the ambulance ride had been an ordeal. He had learned so much about pain in so little time. The Lord had instructed him in his ignorance, and he felt a novel mildness toward the countless wounded men whose pains he had discounted.
“More,” he said.
“What?”
“The whiskey. Please.”
McGuire and an orderly braced him up and helped him sip.
“I … do not care for the taste,” Jackson told them.
“Lucky for you, General,” the surgeon said. “Many a man’s found the taste a sight too appealing.”
He did not like the taste, but he valued the effect in this hard night. Once and only once, celebrant upon graduating from West Point, he had indulged with comrades in a Washington hotel room. He had enjoyed himself immensely, dancing barefoot until he collapsed, but when next he woke, a crumpled being, he had vowed he would never touch liquor again. And he had kept that promise. Until now.
For a time, he had thought he was dying. The pain had been so immense, his weakness so all-encompassing. But McGuire had assured him that he would survive, it was all but certain. Still, the doctor’s voice was not untroubled.
McGuire had hinted that the left arm might be lost to him. He had expected no less. He only hoped that the Lord would allow him to live. There was so much yet undone.…
He drowsed, but did not sleep. Tides of pain swept over him, though without the fury he had endured earlier. To his shock, he thought of his wife with abrupt carnality. His first wife, dead a decade, not his esposa. And that was wrong.
He asked the Lord’s forgiveness.
He had wet himself. He believed it had happened when he fell from the litter the second time. But he was uncertain. A matter that once would have embarrassed him terribly seemed a small thing now.
If the Lord allowed him to live, he would subdue his pride and learn humility.
McGuire felt his pulse again. Then Jackson sensed him leaving. Had Hill resumed the advance? Hill … had something happened to Hill? Had he heard someone say that Hill had been wounded as well? But Hill had comforted him, it couldn’t be. Hill was attacking. Why couldn’t he hear the guns?
He believed that he smelled cloves.
Pain gripped him anew. He thought to ask for still more of the whiskey, mixed again with morphine, but decided against it. The Lord had sent this suffering unto him, and he must not flee His judgment.
Why had the Lord done this to him? And why now? His pride, yes. But there had to be something more. Had he done wrong, had he somehow warred against the Lord, against the divine will? What was t
he Lord telling him?
Lane needed to go forward. Why wasn’t Lane going forward?
He saw the flash again, felt the awful impacts, recalled the panic and chaos with a start.
He wished to go home. Perhaps he would need to visit Lexington for a time, to convalesce. He would see his esposa and the child, their house a mighty fortress against the world’s cruelties.
The canvas above him swirled.
He sensed men crowding into the tent. McGuire’s voice cut through the veil of dreams:
“General … I’ve brought along Doctors Black, Walls, and Coleman. For their opinions and, if need be, their assistance.”
Jackson felt fingertips upon his wrist.
“Good,” the surgeon told him. “Strong enough for us to have a proper look at that arm, General.” When Jackson didn’t respond, he continued, “We’ll want to put you under chloroform. To subdue the pain.”
Jackson nodded his assent. Or believed he did. His head seemed clear now. Brutally clear.
With reluctance in his voice, McGuire added, “If we all agree … if all our opinions find amputation to be necessary…”
“Do what you think right,” Jackson said.
* * *
The joke ran that John Sedgwick’s New England family had been there before the Indians. They’d been a steady bunch, by and large, his ancestors, though siring a naughty woman every second or third generation. Nothing to prove, with routine ideals of service, perfunctory religion, and, for most, money enough to avoid the old-blood curse of “genteel poverty.” Sedgwick men controlled their tempers in public, and “Uncle John” didn’t have the high mercury in him that George Meade or Andy Humphreys did. Nonetheless, this night was a test of his capacity to resist outrage.
For the first time since one bad morning as a lieutenant, he cursed himself for going to West Point all those years ago. He wished he’d stayed home in the Berkshires and grown apples.
Hooker was unbalanced, he had to be. His expectations were nothing short of mad. Even had all gone perfectly, his Sixth Corps could not have reached Chancellorsville—or Lee’s rear—by dawn. And things had not gone perfectly.
That evening, he’d ridden back to Falmouth himself to straighten things out with Butterfield. The telegraph system continued to deliver messages out of sequence or jumbled up—or failed to transmit them at all. Butterfield had assured him that, yes, Joe wanted him to move on Fredericksburg immediately then march a further ten miles to strike Lee’s rear. Dan had sworn that he had perfect intelligence and the Rebs had abandoned the defenses facing the Sixth Corps. Sedgwick just had to get his troops on the road.