The Killer Angels: The Classic Novel of the Civil War

by Michael Shaara

  After a moment Lee nodded, as if it were not really important. He said, “Perhaps.”

  “I don’t think—” Longstreet raised his hands “—I don’t know if I can go on leading them. To die. For nothing.”

  Lee nodded. He sat for a long while with his hands folded in his lap, staring at the fire, and the firelight on his face was soft and warm. Then he said slowly, “They do not die for us. Not for us. That at least is a blessing.” He spoke staring at the fire. “Each man has his own reason to die. But if they go on, I will go on.” He paused. “It is only another defeat.” He looked up at Longstreet, lifted his hands, palms out, folded them softly, slowly. “If the war goes on—and it will, it will—what else can we do but go on? It is the same question forever, what else can we do? If they fight, we will fight with them. And does it matter after all who wins? Was that ever really the question? Will God ask that question, in the end?” He put his hands on his thighs, started painfully to rise.

  He got to his feet, laboring. Longstreet reached forward instinctively to help him. Lee said, embarrassed, “Thank you,” and then where Longstreet held his arm he reached up and covered Longstreet’s hand. He looked into Longstreet’s eyes. Then he said, “You were right. And I was wrong. And now you must help me see what must be done. Help us to see. I become … very tired.”

  “Yes,” Longstreet said.

  They stood a moment longer in the growing dark. The first wind of the coming storm had begun to break over the hills and the trees, cold and heavy and smelling of rain. Lee said, “I lectured you yesterday, on war.”

  Longstreet nodded. His mind was too full to think.

  “I was trying to warn you. But … you have no Cause. You and I, we have no Cause. We have only the army. But if a soldier fights only for soldiers, he cannot ever win. It is only the soldiers who die.”

  Lee mounted the gray horse. Longstreet watched the old man clear his face and stiffen his back and place the hat carefully, formally on his head. Then he rode off into the dark. Longstreet stood watching him out of sight. Then he turned and went out into the field to say goodbye, and when that was done he gave the order to retreat.

  6.

  CHAMBERLAIN

  In the evening he left the regiment and went off by himself to be alone while the night came over the field. He moved out across the blasted stone wall and down the long littered slope until he found a bare rock where he could sit and look out across the battlefield at dusk. It was like the gray floor of hell. Parties moved with yellow lights through blowing smoke under a low gray sky, moving from black lump to black lump while papers fluttered and blew and fragments of cloth and cartridge and canteen tumbled and floated across the gray and steaming ground. He remembered with awe the clean green fields of morning, the splendid yellow wheat. This was another world. His own mind was blasted and clean, windblown; he was still slightly in shock from the bombardment and he sat not thinking of anything but watching the last light of the enormous day, treasuring the last gray moment. He knew he had been present at one of the great moments in history. He had seen them come out of the trees and begin the march up the slope and when he closed his eyes he could still see them coming. It was a sight few men were privileged to see and many who had seen it best had not lived through it. He knew that he would carry it with him as long as he lived, and he could see himself as an old man trying to describe it to his grandchildren, the way the men had looked as they came out into the open and formed for the assault, the way they stood there shining and immobile, all the flags high and tilting and glittering in the sun, and then the way they all kicked to motion, suddenly, all beginning to move at once, too far away for the separate feet to be visible so that there seemed to be a silvery rippling all down the line, and that was the moment when he first felt the real fear of them coming: when he saw them begin to move.

  Chamberlain closed his eyes and saw it again. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. No book or music would have that beauty. He did not understand it: a mile of men flowing slowly, steadily, inevitably up the long green ground, dying all the while, coming to kill you, and the shell bursts appearing above them like instant white flowers, and the flags all tipping and fluttering, and dimly you could hear the music and the drums, and then you could hear the officers screaming, and yet even above your own fear came the sensation of unspeakable beauty. He shook his head, opened his eyes. Professor’s mind. But he thought of Aristotle: pity and terror. So this is tragedy. Yes. He nodded. In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.

  It was dark around him. There was one small gray area of the sky still aglow in the west; the rest was blackness, and flashes of lightning. At that moment a fine rain began to fall and he heard it come toward him, seeking him in a light patter up the slope. He had dust all over him, a fine pulverized powder from the shelling, dust in his hair and eyes and dust gritty in his teeth, and now he lifted his face to the rain and licked his lips and could taste the dirt on his face and knew that he would remember that too, the last moment at Gettysburg, the taste of raw earth in the cold and blowing dark, the touch of cold rain, the blaze of lightning.

  After a while brother Tom found him, sitting in the rain, and sat with him and shared the darkness and the rain. Chamberlain remembered using the boy to plug a hole in the line, stopping the hole with his own brother’s body like a warm bloody cork, and Chamberlain looked at himself. It was so natural and clear, the right thing to do: fill the gap with the body of my brother. Therefore Tom would have to go, and Chamberlain told himself: Run the boy away from you, because if he stays with you he’ll die. He stared at the boy in the darkness, felt an incredible love, reached out to touch him, stopped himself.

  Tom was saying, “I guess you got to hand it to them, the way they came up that hill.”

  Chamberlain nodded. He was beginning to feel very strange, stuffed and strange.

  “But we stood up to them. They couldn’t break us,” Tom said.

  “No.”

  “Well, nobody ever said they wasn’t good soldiers. Well, they’re Americans anyway, even if they are Rebs.”

  “Yes,” Chamberlain said.

  “Thing I cannot understand. Thing I never will understand. How can they fight so hard, them Johnnies, and all for slavery?”

  Chamberlain raised his head. He had forgotten the Cause. When the guns began firing he had forgotten it completely. It seemed very strange now to think of morality, or that minister long ago, or the poor runaway black. He looked out across the dark field, could see nothing but the yellow lights and outlines of black bodies stark in the lightning.

  Tom said, “When you ask them prisoners, they never talk about slavery. But, Lawrence, how do you explain that? What else is the war about?”

  Chamberlain shook his head.

  “If it weren’t for the slaves, there’d never have been no war, now would there?”

  “No,” Chamberlain said.

  “Well then, I don’t care how much political fast-talking you hear, that’s what it’s all about and that’s what them fellers died for, and I tell you, Lawrence, I don’t understand it at all.”

  “No,” Chamberlain said. He was thinking of Kilrain: no divine spark. Animal meat: the Killer Angels.

  Out in the field nearby they were laying out bodies, row after row, the feet all even and the toes pointing upward like rows of black leaves on the border of a garden. He saw again the bitter face of Kilrain, but Chamberlain did not hate the gentlemen, could not think of them as gentlemen. He felt instead an extraordinary admiration. It was as if they were his own men who had come up the hill and he had been with them as they came, and he had made it across the stone wall to victory, but they had died. He felt a violent pity. He said slowly, in memory of Kilrain, “Well, they’re all equal now.”

  “In the sig
ht of God, anyways.”

  “Yes,” Chamberlain said. “In the sight of God.”

  Tom stood up. “Better get moving, Lawrence, there’s a big rain coming.”

  Chamberlain rose, but he was not yet ready to go.

  Tom said, “Do you think they’ll attack again?”

  Chamberlain nodded. They were not yet done. He felt an appalling thrill. They would fight again, and when they came he would be behind another stone wall waiting for them, and he would stay there until he died or until it ended, and he was looking forward to it with an incredible eagerness, as you wait for the great music to begin again after the silence. He shook his head, amazed at himself. He thought: Have to come back to this place when the war is over. Maybe then I’ll understand it.

  The rain was much heavier now. He put on the stolen cavalry hat and blinked upward into the black sky. He thought: It was my privilege to be here today. He thanked God for the honor. Then he went back to his men.

  The light rain went on falling on the hills above Gettysburg, but it was only the overture to the great storm to come. Out of the black night it came at last, cold and wild and flooded with lightning. The true rain came in a monster wind, and the storm broke in blackness over the hills and the bloody valley; the sky opened along the ridge and the vast water thundered down, drowning the fires, flooding the red creeks, washing the rocks and the grass and the white bones of the dead, cleansing the earth and soaking it thick and rich with water and wet again with clean cold rainwater, driving the blood deep into the earth, to grow again with the roots toward Heaven.

  It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.

  “Thus ended the great American Civil War, which must upon the whole be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.”

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL,

  A History of the English-

  Speaking Peoples

  AFTERWORD

  ROBERT EDWARD LEE

  In August he asks to be relieved of command. Of the battle he says:

  No blame can be attached to the army for its failure to accomplish what was projected by me.… I alone am to blame, in perhaps expecting too much of its prowess and valor … could I have forseen that the attack on the last day would fail, I should certainly have tried some other course … but I do not know what better course I could have pursued.

  His request is not accepted, although he cites his poor health, and he serves until the end of the war. He never again attempts a Napoleonic assault. When the war is over, he believes that the issue has been settled by combat, that God has passed judgment. He lays down arms, asks his men to do the same. His great prestige brings a peace which might not otherwise have been possible. He asks Congress for pardon; it is never given. Dies of heart disease in 1870, perhaps the most beloved general in the history of American war.

  JAMES LONGSTREET

  That winter he requests relief from command, on the ground that he no longer believes the South can win the war. Lee prevails upon him to stay. He is wounded severely in the Wilderness, 1864, but returns to be Lee’s most dependable soldier, his right hand until the end at Appomattox.

  After the war he makes two great mistakes. First, he becomes a Republican, attempts to join with old comrade Grant in rebuilding the South. For this he is branded a turncoat, within two years of the end of the war is being referred to by Southern newspapers as “the most hated man in the South.”

  Second, as time passes and it becomes slowly apparent that the war was lost at Gettysburg, Longstreet gives as his opinion what he believes to be true: that the battle was lost by Robert E. Lee. This occurs long after Lee’s death, when Lee has become the symbol of all that is fine and noble in the Southern cause. The South does not forgive Longstreet the insult to Lee’s name. At the great reunion, years later, of the Army of Northern Virginia, Longstreet is not even invited, but he comes anyway, stubborn to the end, walks down the aisle in his old gray uniform, stars of a general on his collar, and is received by an enormous ovation by the men, with tears and an embrace from Jefferson Davis.

  His theories on defensive warfare are generations ahead of his time. The generals of Europe are still ordering massed assaults against fortified positions long years after his death, in 1904, at the age of eighty-three.

  RICHARD EWELL

  Serves with courage until the end, but as a corps commander he is fated never to achieve distinction. Of the Battle of Gettysburg he is later to remark: “It took a great many mistakes to lose that battle. And I myself made most of them.”

  AMBROSE POWELL HILL

  Never to take his place in the Richmond society he so dearly loved, so richly deserved. Five days before Appomattox, at the Battle of Five Forks, he is killed by a sniper’s bullet.

  JOHN BELL HOOD

  Loses not the arm but the use of it; it remains withered within his pinned sleeve for the rest of his days. Complains bitterly about the handling of the army at Gettysburg, is later given a command of his own: the Army of Tennessee. Defeated in Atlanta by Sherman, he spends much of the rest of his life justifying his actions in the field.

  DORSEY PENDER

  His wound grows steadily worse. An operation is performed within the month, at Staunton, but he begins to hemorrhage. The leg is amputated. He dies within the month. His wife attributes his death to the judgment of God.

  ISAAC TRIMBLE

  Wounded, is left behind to be captured by the enemy. Loses his leg, survives the war. Of the charge at Gettysburg he says: “If the men I had the honor to command that day could not take that position, all Hell couldn’t take it.”

  JOHNSTON PETTIGREW

  Survives the charge at Gettysburg with only a minor wound in the hand. Is shot to death ten days later in a delaying action guarding the retreat across the Potomac.

  GEORGE PICKETT

  His division is virtually destroyed. No field officer is unhurt. Of the thirteen colonels in his command that day seven are dead, six are wounded. His casualties exceed 60 percent. The famous Charge of the Light Brigade, in comparison, suffered casualties of approximately 40 percent. Pickett survives to great glory, but he broods on the loss. When the war is over he happens one day on John Singleton Mosby, on the way to see Robert Lee, and together they visit the old man. The meeting is, in Mosby’s words, “singularly cold.” After it is over, Pickett comes outside and says bitterly, “That man destroyed my division.”

  JUBAL EARLY

  Serves until near the end of the war, when Lee finds it necessary to relieve him because of complaints against him by citizens he has offended. His conduct after the war is notable for two episodes: He becomes the Southern officer most involved in trying to prove that Longstreet was responsible for the loss at Gettysburg, and he becomes the central figure in the infamous Louisiana lottery, which cost thousands of Southerners thousands of dollars.

  ARTHUR FREMANTLE

  Returns to England after three months in the Confederacy and writes a book on his experience, which is published in the South three months before the end of the war. It is a very readable and entertaining book, which predicts a certain Southern victory.

  HARRISON

  He vanishes from Longstreet’s records. Years after the war Moxley Sorrel attends a play, notices something vaguely familiar about one of the actors, recognizes Harrison. He goes backstage for a moment, they speak for a moment, but Sorrel is a gentleman and Harrison is a player, and there is no further connection. Nothing else of Harrison is known.

  JOHN BUFORD

  Never to receive recognition for his part in choosing the ground and holding it, and in so doing saving not only the battle but perhaps the war, he survives the summer but is weakened by wounds. In December of that year he goes down with pneumonia, and dies of it.

  WINFIELD SCOTT HANCOCK

  Survives the wound at Gettysburg. When the war ends it is found that his Second Corps captured more prisoners, more colors, and su
ffered more casualties than the entire rest of the Army of the Potomac. An enormously popular man all his life, in 1880 he runs for the Presidency on the Democratic ticket, against Garfield, but the country has had two terms of Grant and is weary of generals in high office, and so he is defeated, retires from public life. The package Lew Armistead sent Almira Hancock was Armistead’s personal Bible.

  JOSHUA LAWRENCE CHAMBERLAIN

  In August he is given a brigade. Shortly thereafter he is so badly wounded, shot through both hips, that he is not expected to live. But he returns to become one of the most remarkable soldiers in American history. Wounded six times. Cited for bravery in action four times. Promoted to brigadier general by special order of Ulysses Grant for heroism at Petersburg. Breveted major general for heroism at Five Forks. He is the officer chosen by Grant from all other Northern officers to have the honor of receiving the Southern surrender at Appomattox, where he startles the world by calling his troops to attention to salute the defeated South. He is given first place in the last Grand Review in Washington. For his day at Little Round Top he is to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  In Maine he is elected Governor by the largest majority in the history of the state and returned to office three times, where he alienates political friends by refusing to agree to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.

  In 1876, elected President of Bowdoin University, where he attempts to modernize the school, introducing courses in science, de-emphasizing religion, and becomes involved in student demonstrations over the question of ROTC. Receives medal of honor from France for distinguished efforts in international education. When he retires from Bowdoin he has taught every subject in the curriculum except mathematics.