Confederates

by Thomas Keneally

Popeye saw the guns of a battery he’d sent for come straining up the Culpeper Road. The horses weren’t so fast but they looked goddam sturdy. Each cannon with its caisson was driven through a hole in a fence a hundred paces ahead of where Dick Ewell stood. The guns were unlimbered in damn quick time, and the battery officers knew Dick Ewell was watching them and approving. The horse teams were taken back to an edge of forest, and there stood the six guns, loading up with solid shot or shrapnel!

  Dick Ewell watched them send off one round, then another. And then another 25 seconds later. Within another 25 seconds there was shot and long-range shell from the other side falling and banging away all round the battery. Dick Ewell saw no one hurt yet, but a maple tree was cut in two near the place where the horses were tethered.

  Surrounded by aides, dictating messages and talking to colonels, he still had time to tease his brain with ideas about the ironies of battle. When young – in the days before his stomach gave way – he had fought in the Mexican war. Up the thorny cliffsides of Churubusco and Chapultepec had gone the young Popeye, blinking at the flash of Mexican cannon like a man mildly and reasonably annoyed. After that he spent years in garrisons from Maine to Florida; and inland, escorting the mails on the great ice-bound plains of Kansas. In other words, he had had time to reflect on those mad Mexican battles, and to reflect also on the way the anatomy of a battle is set by accidents.

  For example, by the accident of whose division took the road first this morning. There’d be mothers’ boys from these regiments passing here in brown bagging coats and torn hats who’d be dead tonight because Jackson trusted one Popeye Ewell more than he trusted Ambrose Hill. But the accidents didn’t stop with that. Popeye Ewell had a brigade commander called Jubal Early, a lawyer, foul of mouth, ambitious by temperament. Just the man to push forward up the little slope ahead and down to Cedar Run. So there’d be mothers’ boys in Early’s brigade who would likewise perish or be maimed because Popeye Ewell liked the style of Jubal Early.

  Now, as Early’s brigade marched by him, some of them on the road, some of them on a cross-country line across the meadows, five regiments, three Virginian, two Georgian, Popeye watched the boys’ faces out of the corners of his eyes to see if their destiny that day was any way marked on them.

  Half an hour later his adjutant came up. All his fifteen regiments, the adjutant said, were lined up like a sickle between the road and the far side of Slaughter’s Mountain.

  He hoped it was the truth. But when you had colonels who were elected by their regiments and learned warfare as they went, you could never be sure they did things properly.

  Bumpass and others, marching blind in the column of dust, heard the Union guns about noon. At their first sound, Cate scooped up the dust from his bottom lip with a harsh tongue, looked quickly at Bumpass two ranks ahead and told himself to flee or pretend to be ill, and did nothing, stayed there locked in place, locked in the marriage of Ephephtha and Usaph Bumpass and so locked in the war.

  At the sound too, a pretty young conscript staggered from the line and slumped on the embankment of the Culpeper Road and sobbed. The Irish fiddler who had befriended him stood by him, trying to wheedle or reason him back into line.

  Joe Murphy, passing, mimicked the two of them. ‘Ah, don’t desert me,’ he yelled in a falsetto voice, ‘and don’t drop dead of the heat, me darling. Oh, what would I ever do without your plump pink cheeks.’

  Murphy could talk and josh because he was a veteran, and could tell the cannon were far up the road and that as yet the risk was akin to the risk of being struck by summer lightning.

  There was a point Usaph got to in the road, trudging along in a mêlée of other boys, which was the same one where Dick Ewell and Tom Jackson had recently been talking, and where Dick Ewell had had his thoughts about chance and the follies of colonels. From this point, in spite of the dust and the distance, you could see the Federal cannon smoke on a far ridge and, some seconds later, you would hear its bang and whistle. Here Usaph and Gus and the others got one of their rare views of a Confederate general. General Winder sat there in a meadow, resting against an artillery caisson. The top buttons of his jacket were opened to help his breathing and he looked grey-faced, as if he needed the rest. He had only just caught up with his division. His adjutant, a genuine tidewater aristocrat, stood by him and instructed the colonels as they drew level with him. Usaph saw him talking to bird-like Colonel Wheat and Colonel Wheat nodding, nodding.

  Railings had been ripped out of a stretch of fence here, so that soldiers could march off leftwards, sideways away from the enemy you could spot way over there on the ridge. The general’s adjutant had come right down to the gap in the fence now and was waving Usaph and the others through and telling them to do it at the run.

  ‘We’re on a flanking move here, Usaph,’ Gus panted. It wasn’t a hard conclusion for any veteran private to come to.

  ‘Goddam,’ yelled Ash Judd gaily, knowing he couldn’t be killed himself, ‘ain’t it exactly the sort of nonsense that jest about got us all killed at Kernstown.’

  Now, as the regiment went over a narrow pasture and in amongst cedar stands, it wasn’t possible any more to keep even the loose ranks they’d kept in column down the avenues of maples and quaking elm all morning. Usaph began to look around to see if Cate had managed to straggle away and hide, but there he was, over to the left. The Shenandoah regiment had lost boys with lameness and dysentery and some had slipped off into woods and hidden, the Irish fiddler and his boy amongst them. But of all those who could have fallen by the way and straggled off, ole Bolly with his parasol in his belt and Cate, the two scourges of poor Usaph, had kept on as if with a purpose – and it seemed to Usaph of course that their demonish purpose was to go on reminding him of his dead uncle and of the portrait and of the manner the letter from Ephie had come to him by.

  ‘That general back there,’ Cate said in his resonant college-boy voice.

  ‘His name’s Charlie Winder,’ said Bolly.

  ‘I don’t think he looks like he’ll last the day.’ Cate sounded like a truly concerned Confederate.

  Usaph remembered seeing some Irishmen who’d been punished by General Winder two weeks back for straggling. Usaph had come across them one day by the side of the road, a stick under their knees and their arms passed under its protruding end and tied with rope in front of their legs. They looked ridiculous. The fiercely tied cords cut into the flesh of their wrists. While men laughed and called jokes at them in passing they cussed back in their black Irish way, and one of them called: ‘Keep an eye on Charlie Winder, you whoresons! Next battle the bastard dies by my goddam bullet.’

  And that was about all Usaph Bumpass knew about General Winder. But he hoped the man would not die of illness or Irishmen during the afternoon, and that his head would stay as clear as ordinary boys had a right for it to be.

  They went loping along in open woods and now came to a cleared and gentle hillside. There were a number of colonels waiting out there on horseback, right in the open, Colonel Wheat amongst them. There was no one but colonels there. Even the man commanding the Stonewall Brigade today was a colonel called Charles Ronald. There was no general available. The thing was A. J. Grigsby, the regular substitute brigade commander since Garnett was dropped, had dysentery today. That was it, you never knew whose orders you might die under. You looked at their faces hard but they were always the faces of strangers.

  First the boys dropped their blankets and haversacks and left them in piles and then formed a firing line, under the direction and the curses of Captain Guess, the dentist who had been changed so much by the conflicts around Richmond. The adjutant – Reverend Major Dignam – and Guess and sober Captain Hanks and young Lucius Taber stood amongst the lupins and daisies, viewing the whole process and with their backs to the North, as if they were supposed to be indifferent to anything Union snipers could send their way.

  ‘Don’t bunch, goddamit!’ Guess snarled in the undergrowth. ‘Two paces apart! Two p
aces apart!’

  If Guess got through the war whole, his old customers would come back to his surgery to get their rotten teeth out. They would remember him as a gentle man. Well, they’d be in for a shaking, shuddering shock once he got his pliers on them next year. ‘Don’t hunch, goddamit!’ he’d scream at them.

  Other regiments were marching across the front of the Volunteers, right across the clearing, calling stupid things Usaph did not even listen to. He noticed now that he had Gus Ramseur on one side of him and Joe Nunnally, the boy who’d shot the dog, on the other. Then – as if Cate had worked at it – goddam Cate. Beyond Cate, Ash Judd and Joe Murphy and ole Bolly yelled insults at the Irishmen of the 5th Virginia who were marching west across the middle of the clearing.

  Everyone in other regiments yelled and hooted when they saw Bolly. Bolly was a favourite with anyone. And he got a sort of animal joy, the old blackguard, out of keeping marching when younger men fell out. He loved to turn up in the battle lines with his dirty yellow parasol hooked into his belt so that men could see him readily and then judge what stuff he was made of. ‘Hey, Bolly, rumoured you was with a plantation lady in Orange!’ they called. ‘Weyhey, Bolly Quintard! There he be, neat as a goddam parson with his ’brella hangin’ from his whatsis.’

  Later, a whole brigade of Winder’s division went the same way, mashing the daisies with their feet. These boys vanished into the woods way ahead. Everyone started to decide that this meant the Shenandoah regiment was in reserve.

  ‘Is it a good thing, this-here reserve?’ Joe Nunnally asked Usaph in a low breathy voice. For all around some were expressing pleasure at the idea and others disappointment.

  ‘I think it may be, Joe,’ said Usaph. ‘Let them goddam Irishmen do the ploughing and we’ll take in the crop. If you take my meaning.’

  In the next hour Usaph heard fresh Confederate cannon opening up to his front. He had no way of knowing that this was the Rockbridge Artillery, way up along the Culpeper pike, lined out in a meadow and answering the cannon of the enemy.

  ‘Orville, what do you say?’ called Patrick Maskill, Puckett’s handsome friend. ‘You’re a goddam philosopher, boy. Do you think they mean to stand or will they probe and run?’

  All around them boys were working; working wasn’t quite the word. No one was bursting his bone cage. There were boys milling round the limber chest, looking in at the shells and charges like they were seeing what mother had packed for the picnic. There were boys swabbing thoroughly, but not too rushed, the black mouths of the cannon. Orville Puckett saw it all as an example of the strange, cool, easy way men often began battles.

  Maskill noticed how Puckett stood a little stooped from the cramps in his belly, reaching out and with his fingers indicating to a young artilleryman the length of match the boy ought to cut. ‘I think, Patrick,’ he said, ‘they’re in big numbers for people who mean to run.’

  ‘That’s what I think too, Orville,’ yawned Patrick Maskill. ‘You got belly-ache, Orville?’

  ‘Some,’ admitted Puckett. He felt they – the six guns of Brynam’s battery – stood a long way up the road and that feeling didn’t help the cramps in his gut. But General Jackson had this habit of pushing his artillery way out to the front, instead of stringing it out in the rear, as generals used to do in far-off 1861.

  Orville bent to the elevator screw of his smooth-bore Napoleon and adjusted it a touch. The effort cramped his belly. Turning his head sideways with the pain he saw Pat whistling.

  He just about hated Maskill for that.

  In a second, Captain Brynam would finish talking with that aide of General Winder’s, who’d been sent up here on a visit from the sickly general. Orville knew what the aide was saying. ‘You’re well forward here but we’ll send infantry to protect you.’

  They always said that and it was only sometimes the truth.

  Anyhow, when the aide had finished whispering these half-verities, Brynam would give the order: ‘Fire at will, two rounds per minute.’ And the boys who were now reading the instructions pasted inside the lid of the limber boxes, all that stuff about how much powder to use with how much shot, and anyone else who was lazing about, maybe leaning against the wheel of a caisson, would come rushing up to serve the guns.

  At last Brynam looked up and called the expected order.

  These Napoleon smooth-bores could fire five rounds in a minute, but they wouldn’t be firing at that rate yet, they were still feeling out that ridge beyond the stream. Puckett’s gun was aimed on a diagonal across the road and into the centre of those far-off flecks of blue. Back in the edges of the woods the six horses of Orville’s gun team snuffled and stayed docile in their harness. There was a boy called Ellis back there, who would talk to them through all the noise.

  Puckett himself was sensitive about horses. He had a feeling for them. He believed the worst things of all he had seen in the war happened in the early days when, in obeying the instructions in military manuals, you took the horses a bare twelve yards back from the place where your gun stood. The slaughter of the horses was then frightful. Orville remembered a beast he saw at Manassas, a good broad-shouldered artillery horse struck in the withers by solid shot. He remembered how it struggled up on its front legs out of a swamp of meat and cartilage. Its screams were as high-pitched and piercing as a child’s. It was Private Orville Puckett’s task, given that his place was with the horses, to cut it out of the traces with his bowie knife, to saw through its leather harness and separate it from the other five mad-eyed, rearing, kicking survivors.

  So the Rockbridge had learned you kept the horses back – even 200 paces wasn’t too far in Orville’s opinion. They could be brought up quick enough if there was need to move the guns. In like manner you kept the limbers back more than the six yards the textbooks had suggested. If a full limber box was hit, it could scythe down its whole gun crew from behind.

  A private taking spherical shot up to the cannon shoved it under Orville’s nose. Orville was supposed to inspect it and give it the nod. It looked all right to Orville, though his sight blurred at these times. This shot was done up in a long linen tube, the shot and powder all in one linen container. There was a fuse screwed into the surface of the shot, a circular fuse of metal with numbers on it, and you could turn a pointer to the right number. The boy back at the limber box had correctly set this fuse at five seconds. This meant that if the powder was of even quality and if the fuse was well made and was not knocked out of its socket by the explosion inside the gun, or did not fall out in flight, then the shot should blow itself into vengeful fragments over there above the ridge and rain its harsh manna down on poor Yankee boys. But you had to have a lot of some sort of faith for that to happen.

  The others seemed to be amused by the uneven quality of Southern powder and the unpredictability of Southern fuses and long-range shells. But when Orville was faced with them he felt a feverish helplessness. He didn’t find it amusing that the missile he inspected now might, in twenty seconds’ time, blow up anywhere between the mouth of his cannon and the distant enemy.

  Orville saw his friend Maskill moisten his lips. ‘Hot work, Orville!’ yelled Maskill in gaps in the noise. To Orville’s stunned ears the words sounded hollow, his head floated with an excess of sunlight.

  As Orville stood, inspecting shot, calling advice and order in what could be called a well-oiled daze, a round of spherical case shot fired from his own cannon exploded at the muzzle. The crack was amazing and stopped Orville’s weak heart. Breathless, he could see fragments of the shell-casing whipping the low vegetation two hundred yards ahead. As the gun whipped back and the smoke cleared he expected one or two of the gun-crew to show wounds. In fact the one injury was far down the line of the battery, a boy working one of the Parrott rifled pieces. He held his hand up tranquilly and three fingers were missing. One of his friends began wrapping the mess in a shirt. The boy just stayed there whey-faced. Orville’s gun-crew took little notice; maybe some of them didn’t know. It was no
use making apologies. The blame was on the gimcrack factories of the South.

  Men from Maskill’s gun started shouting at Orville’s crew. ‘What was that one, eh? Full of sand, was it?’

  ‘Lordy, one or two more like that, boys, and we can go into the lumber business.’

  Orville started to smile, a boy brought another round of spherical case from the limber chest and shoved it into his sight; and all at once, because of the great anger he felt, the smile became a grimace.

  He shoved his right hand into his jacket on account it was jerking. Oh God, but do I need a woman, a wife, someone to soothe me! One of these nice Lexington girls whose fathers are theologians or physicians and you get invited round to their place to eat cake, drink coffee, sing songs, argue politics or God in a mild sort of way on a Saturday evening. One of those girls who could herself sing and sample, play the piano and make jokes in Latin if that was what you needed.

  ‘Shall … shall we try another round, gentlemen,’ he managed to call.

  He saw his friend Sergeant Pat Maskill smiling towards him, carefully sharing the joke, and could tell Pat Maskill knew: that it was a moot point what would happen first with Orville – his mind go or his heart burst.

  Under the grin of Sergeant Maskill, Orville Puckett got some of his health back. ‘Next week,’ he called to Maskill, ‘we’re going to try Christmas puddings. The components, sir, the components are more reliable.’

  Maskill laughed in some sort of relief. Orville remembered a time in Lexington when they’d spent too long in a beer parlour and Maskill began weeping in front of everybody about the death of Shelley. He was sure touched by the circumstances of Shelley’s death – the poet’s corpse being washed ashore on an Italian beach and cremated right there on the sand in the pink dawn by Lord Byron and other great men. When did that happen? Forty years past? Well, the world had lost all its innocence since then, and no Northern boy who was struck by Maskill’s fire, or by his own, by Orville Puckett’s, made any sort of decent corpse, any touching corpse at all. Any boy that was struck by Maskill’s fire or Puckett’s, be he the equal of Shelley or not, turned into a foul thing. His own mother wouldn’t want to look at him. His own mother would swear that that steaming meat there in the meadow was no flesh of hers.