by Norman Lock
The bugle—one day I’ll have its likeness carved on my headstone—tells a story of its own concerning my service with the 13th—days neither thrilling nor glorious: a dent gotten at Bull Run during the Great Skedaddle, our panicked troops snarled in the rout of picnickers who’d driven out from the capital to enjoy a festive day of slaughter; another dent gotten at Yorktown, when I was nearly trampled by a horse; another, at Oak Grove, compliments of a Johnny Reb sharpshooter who must have thought my tunes sour; and still another at Chantilly, where our regimental strength was so bled that the enlisted men among us were incorporated into the 173rd New York Infantry. The 87th Regiment having been disbanded, our officers went home to swagger in their uniforms.
A slightly built thirteen-year-old recruit, I was too weak to handle a musket. By the time I’d grown into one, I was too practiced a bugler to swap it for a firearm. The adjutants often complimented me on the clarity of my renditions of “Assembly,” “Call to Quarters,” “Boots and Saddles,” “Go Forward,” “To the Left,” “To the Right,” “About,” “Rally on the Chief,” “Trot,” “Gallop,” “Rise Up,” “Lay Down,” “Commence Firing,” “Cease Firing,” “Disperse,” and that ever-popular air among soldiers, “Retreat.” Those of the opinion that the worst a bugler had to fear was an angry boot shied at him for crowing reveille at dawn are mistaken. It required an imperturbable disposition to stand and tootle, in a commotion of men and horses, in a confusion of smoke so thick and acrid that it would blind us with tears and choke us with the bitterness of war. But this is not a story about war—not even so grisly and scarifying a one as our own Civil War. Suffice it to say that, during four years of terror and mayhem, I bugled my way, like a worm traversing a dog’s guts, through historic battles (notable for their casualties), whose hallowed grounds one day would be picturesque destinations for tourists armed with Kodaks and charged with the discipline of ice-cream-eating brats. Bull Run, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Seven Pines, Oak Grove, Malvern Hill, Harrison’s Landing, Groveton, Second Bull Run, Chantilly— those “curious panics” that became a national obsession and our common property, whether we’d fought in them or not.
We would stall outside Richmond, and—blow as heroically as I might—I could not persuade General McClellan out of his damned timidity to advance, although Jericho surely put the fear of God into many a Jeff Davis boy, who, like me, were frightened out of their wits. If I’d been armed with something that expended lead rather than breath, I’d have shot our half-pint general gladly. I’ve killed only three men during my fifty-three years aboveground in our beautiful, spacious, and altogether murderous country. I can’t say whether or not they deserved their fates, though I had good reason at the time to pack them off to glory or perdition.
Because the skirmishes and slaughters in which I played a part, however small, appear in my mind to have been all of a piece, I’ll relate the battle in which I gave up my eye for the Union and the slaves—and let it stand for them all. To be truthful, I was in no almighty hurry to benefit the latter, never having known a black man to speak to until, much later, I fell into the Delaware and was fished out by one.
But before I recount the Battle of Five Forks, Virginia, I want to say something about our boat trip from Brooklyn to Washington City. You’d have thought we were on a weekend excursion, the way we carried on. On deck, the regimental band (its members would be sent home to mothers and sweethearts after the rough going on the Peninsula) played “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “John Brown’s Body,” and a number of sweet airs like Stephen Foster’s “The Village Maiden” and “Beautiful Dreamer.” The bugle was considered uncouth, and bugle boys were shunned by the band’s high-toned personnel, outlandishly dressed like French soldiers in North Africa: Zouave jackets, red pants, white leggings, blue sashes tied around their waists—the insanity topped off by white turbans!
While the men swallowed the treacle served up above, Little Will and I sweat over craps with the stokers in the infernal weather of the steamboat’s hold. Craps—a vulgar word whose origin is crapaud, meaning “toad” in French— refers to a crap shooter’s squat, if you’re curious. We must paper ourselves with facts, even if we are mistaken in them. I would not tell you to lie, although it would not behoove you to be overly fastidious concerning the truth. Conjecture and speculation are how the West was won, and much else besides. In any case, craps suited us fine, and I would have lost my bugle to a coal-blackened son of a bitch if a sergeant hadn’t smelled us out and kicked Little Will and me topside with his brand-new boots. They’d look like hell’s own pitch after we landed in Washington City, where the December mud swallowed horses and caissons whole.
All along the East River and through the Narrows, people stood and cheered, waving hats and babies in the air and shouting after us to “hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree.” There is no gaiety to equal that hatched by rancor. Fire company bands blared fighting tunes, and a skiff overloaded with drunks tried to foist a trio of barroom floozies on us. We cheered that, I can tell you! But the sailors, swearing under their breath at the intolerance of authority, were ordered to drive them off with poles.
“It’s a shame to throw a fat fish back into the water,” Little Will said.
I took his meaning, but I supposed we were too green to have gotten much by way of nourishment from a floozy, even if we had been afforded the opportunity.
“I’ve got a firecracker in my pocket,” I said to prove I was a hell-raiser, too.
“Let’s toss it down the Charlie Noble,” he replied, referring to the copper stack venting the galley.
I lit the cracker and dropped it down the stack. To the discerning ears of two hellions, it produced a most agreeable sound, like a pig’s bladder when pent-up air is suddenly let loose. The squib set pots and pans to chiming and roused the cook from his greasy lair, armed with a knife useful in flaying carcasses. Only the boat’s yawing saved us from a terrible end. Little Will and I crawled into a lifeboat and fell asleep while Barbados rum was ladled into tins to revive the courage of men whose hearts, like bobbins, were being emptied with each nautical mile of the mystic thread of affection—their heart’s needle listing to the north. By the time the war was finished, the thread would stretch almost to breaking. On that night aboard the Marion, many knew an ecstasy they would not know again, except for a few of them who would find a transporting madness in murder. Those, I think, were the truly damned among us—lives blasted away from the common thoroughfare.
Unseen by Little Will and me, who were kept a while longer blameless and unharmed in childish sleep, the Marion steamed along the Brooklyn and Long Island coasts and then into the Atlantic. Black smoke pouring from her stacks, she hurried southward—rounding the Delaware peninsula, past Fort Monroe—and entered Chesapeake Bay and on to the Potomac River. Often, during the four years to come, she’d steam north through the Narrows to Vinegar Hill—a likely Calvary—her hold packed with Union soldiers wearing wooden coats. In the days after the Draft Riots, the northbound Marion might have passed corpses of former slaves lynched and butchered by New York’s resentful poor—their bodies dumped into the East River and left for the currents to carry them, resignedly, south into everlasting captivity.
Washington City, December 1861–March 1862
What boy wouldn’t be satisfied with days spent playing soldier? That’s what it was like to be in the Army of the Potomac that first winter in Washington City, when the only hardships were mud, which was of a sovereign quality, in keeping with our nation’s capital; rats that deserted the riverbank to join the Union’s sprawl of tents (the rats, too, were sovereign); and the wringer of the interminable drills McClellan put us through while he sat on his high horse, with a hand—like Bonaparte’s—tucked up inside his coat. We were lucky to have missed the Washingtonian mosquito, said to be reared in the pestilential swamps to possess a sparrow’s heft and the sting of a cottonmouth.
On second thought, our bivouac on the Potomac grew
stale. Even so engrossing a bit of theater as pretending to kill rebel soldiers with musket or bayonet can become tedious. I missed Broadway and the Battery, the Brooklyn saloons where I sold oysters and, too often, coaxed and kicked my old man home (if you could call it that) from his stupefying and inglorious binges. How fondly I remembered hearing in an Ocean Avenue barroom a waltz tune, cheerful among the shiftless—notes falling unheeded, like gobs of spittle on the sawdust-sprinkled floor! I missed Sheepshead Bay and would gladly have stood up to my knees in winter salt water, raking oysters till my arms dropped off, to be back there again.
I became an expert on my instrument, as Little Will did on his drum. We also became veterans of the boudoir, although the girl on whom we practiced lay not in a swank bedroom on tasseled pillows, but in a hut where black-bound testaments and chaplains’ issues of holy gear were stored. We were too young, Little Will and I, to savor the delicious incongruity. I mean, goddamn it, we gave no thought to irony and none at all to love while we strained after the satisfaction said to fill a man lying in a woman’s lap. To me, it felt like riding a lumpy sack of meal. We were also too young to realize that what a woman is willing to sell a man will not slake, for long, the passion in which he boils.
“Did you enjoy yourself any?” I asked Little Will afterward, while we ran combs through our tousled hair.
“I’d rather wrestle an alligator,” he said, and I had to agree.
Having no more to say on the subject, we ran off to play baseball with other soldiers of Company B who were, like us, temporarily at loose ends. We would look back on this time of childish folly and insouciance with fierce longing, as old men will on the perished days of their youth. Soon enough, we’d all be hotfooting it in hell’s vestibule. But we’d have some colorful tales to tell—those of us who didn’t get themselves scorched.
One day, when I will keep the long hours of eternity below my island of grass, I expect to trade stories with dead folk of every kind, color, and previous occupation. In the cemetery, all men and women are contemporaries; all, the comrades and intimates Walt Whitman praised in his Leaves, with a foolish optimism born of an infatuated heart (you can die of such a heart!)—foolish, because only after we’ve passed into glory or oblivion is the perfect comradeship and intimacy he espoused possible. I’ve often thought how splendid it would be if I could talk to Whitman now. I’d ask him if it is really just as lucky to die as it is to be born. But there is a continent flung between us, whose great divide is more obdurate than granite. One day, when day is meaningless and indistinguishable from night, I hope to find answers to the questions that have vexed me—unless oblivion does win out over the Rapture and eternity is as silent as the tomb.
One question concerns me, myself: Why did I often find it necessary to lie?
Take the story of how I came to lose my eye. Between you and me, it wasn’t the fault of a Confederate shell, as I like to let on, but of my ignorance and panic during the charge at Five Forks. A Union rifleman beside me dropped, with a minié ball through his heart. The Johnny Reb who’d fired it stood ten feet away, preparing to do the same to me, regardless of my tender years and noncombatant status as a bugle boy. I picked up the dead man’s Enfield, poured black powder down its throat, chased it with a lead ball, and then— hands shaking—rammed ball and powder home. Next, I set the percussion cap, cocked the hammer, and fired. I made a mess of it, however, and the spark burned my eye. When it became infected, an army surgeon spooned it out. But I’ll tell you this: My manhood hinged on the idea—call it a “fact”—that a rebel howitzer put out my eye. Much of what followed and added up to my life had its origin in the tale I told later on to Whitman. Anyway, it makes a better story— the way I always told it. Don’t you think?
The rebel I had meant to shoot stepped toward me over gray stubble and dead men of both factions, intending to brain me with the butt end of his musket. I still recall how his eyes—they did not shine—looked dead and goggled, like those of a fish at its last gasp. I think he resented me because he was obliged to kill me. I reached toward him with my bayonet, idly, as you might fork up a last morsel of meat, though your appetite was lost; touched the place where his vital spirits congregated; and watched him dangle a moment (long as eternity) and then drop. I had killed my first man. I wonder if I meant to. No, I don’t think will or even wish entered into it. I pierced him as mindlessly as a dead frog will jerk when given a galvanic shock. It was a case of murder by accident.
Five Forks, Virginia, April 1, 1865
I’ll describe, as well as I am able, the Battle of Five Forks and then be done with the war, except for its aftermath. I say “as well as I am able” not to make a show of modesty but, rather, to acknowledge the befuddled senses of a man in battle, where fear, misery, noise, cannon and musket smoke make for each combatant a kind of bell jar. Think of an insect trapped under glass. What must it feel—if so lowly a creature can be said to feel—to find itself all of a sudden cut off from the world it knew? That’s what it’s like for a man in a fight for his life. To be separated profoundly from his intellect; to exist solely in his body; to be preoccupied entirely with the body’s survival. To hell with the mind! Inside the bell jar, a man has no more to do with thoughts, doctrines, a cause célèbre, his previous sentiments and affections than a bug would. Life, its color and complexity, is reduced—like a mess of stew bones boiling in a pot—to an elemental dish whose simple flavors are rue and terror, hatred and self-love.
There are heroes—I would not tell you otherwise. But the dish they eat at what might be the hour of their death is the same. Willingly or reluctantly, we went to be tried; eagerly or tearfully, we marched for union or abolition. But the moment when we stood on the scaffold raised over the abyss, we were deaf to Lincoln’s proclamations and the orders of the generals—hearing only the bestial noise of the shambles or what sound a gigantic maw might make opening wide to receive us. There is no reliable witness to a slaughter, just as none die happily or well who die in war.
I remember smoke—how it lazed above us, like a low-lying cloud or like the bluish gray mist fraying above wan fields after the morning sun has burned off the dew. In the old woods bordering the field, ruts clogged with April mud, torn bandages of smoke clung to the bones of the leafless chestnut trees (a species soon to be no more). The gloomy aisles were treacherous with thickets and downed branches turned gray, like the deer and squirrels, by winter. Dropped leaves left to rot above the thankful grubs were slick with recent rain. Knowing no way to say how war is, the qualities that make it a thing wholly unto itself, I must resort to a literary language that denatures it. What birds and animals claimed Five Forks as their habitat had fled, panicked by the hobnailed armies of Sheridan and Pickett, met in those dun woods and fields—the one to strike the vital Southside Railroad, the other to defend it at all cost for Lee and the Confederacy.
That afternoon, we threaded our way through underbrush that tangled us in thorns and whipcords, as if the vegetation sided with the Army of Northern Virginia against us Yankees. Out of the woods at last, we charged the entrenchments set along White Oak Road, only to find the enemy’s center had moved during our painstaking march through the trees. We shambled in confusion until Warren flung us recklessly against the rebel line—this time from the north— while Sheridan swept Pickett’s left with his cavalry, destroying it. You may have seen the famous lithograph.
As a result of that April day in the year 1865 (I will not call it the Lord’s), Pickett lost a third of his army, Lee lost Petersburg, Jeff Davis lost Richmond, the Confederacy lost the war, and I lost my eye. Before that day, I had not thought blood could be so red! It lay in crimson drops on the palms of dead leaves, like that from Christ’s own wounds; it dripped garnets from the briar thorns; it turned to scarlet the sodden furrows cut in peaceable days by plowshares (abandoned, since, to rust—blood’s other color), as if Aaron had walked among them with his vengeful rod. I tell you the fields were soaked, the stubble blazed with it! I’d
never seen what a garish thing blood is until my eye socket brimmed with it! The Battle of Five Forks halved my sight and did as much as any of that uncivil war’s campaigns to stitch up the Union.
This blab of mine isn’t meant to be a history of the Civil War and what followed it: I mean the wrong turnings made in realizing a destiny consecrated by deception, fraud, murder, and profit. No, I wish only to study the sickness of the degenerate age in which I lie at night, listening to the boasts and grievances of the dead: a faculty forged by blinding headaches that beset me after the death of Crazy Horse. Your headache powders would’ve been useless against them, Jay, and you’d have had to look elsewhere for their cause than a clinch knot in the brain. I doubt your arts take in the supernatural. No, you’re a hardheaded Yankee doc and can’t credit what your science won’t allow— but indulge me awhile. What I have to say makes for one hell of a yarn, if nothing else.
Armory Square Hospital, Washington City, April 13–21, 1865
I could not have known that the train that carried me from Five Forks to the army surgeons in Washington—the first I’d ever ridden—would herald, with a noise of tortured iron and escaping steam, a future delivered up to the railroads. I was too enthralled by the novelties of speed, felt by my muscles and nerves as a reluctance, and motion, seen by my unbandaged eye as a blur of woods and fields, rivers and marshland, to think what this journey might portend. Besides, I was not then gifted with foresight, as I’ll seem to you to be later on when I recount my days in light of time to come. Wreathed funereally by coal smoke, the train arrived in Washington at the Baltimore & Ohio Depot, where, four years earlier, his life threatened by secessionists, Lincoln had slunk, incognito, into the capital to take his oath. From that same station of his cross, he would leave on a funeral train after having departed this life for the next on Saturday, the fifteenth of April.