North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  Things settled down to an occasional shout or bang of a musket. In the small hours of the night it started to drizzle. When daylight broke, the hell began.

  Seventeenth of September. The blue waves appeared early, rolling from those suspicious woods Charles had spied. Shoulder weapons showing in the gray mist, banners unfurling, they trotted forward, double line of skirmishers first, then the main force, firing and loading, firing and loading—coming on. A Southern soldier cried, “Joe Hooker!”

  Joe Hooker, handsome and a hell of a fighter, raised a hammer of two Union corps and let it fall on the Confederate left flank. Charles was dispatched up through Hood’s position, west of the pike in some trees around a small white Dunker church, carrying instructions for the Nicodemus Hill gunners. The Union troops coming out of the woods opened fire on Hood, and Yankee artillery out of sight beyond those same woods let loose, shot coming in, and shell, and the Yankee foot pushed through the corn with heads down or turned aside as if to avoid a rain shower.

  The fighting began at six, and by nine the sides had thrown each other back and forth across the cornfield several times. The waving cross of St. Andrew, the South’s battle ensign, had gone down in the noise and smoke and been raised several times. The battle was so huge and swiftly shifting that Charles saw only threads, never the pattern.

  Coming back from Nicodemus Hill, head down, revolver in hand, he was caught in a driving charge of federals against Old Jack’s men, who lay waiting amid trees on rocky ridges. A colonel who had lost several officers ordered Charles off Sport at gunpoint and screamed, “Hold this position at all hazards.”

  So he fought in the woods with two squads of the foot cavalry for fifteen incredible minutes, shooting at Yankees who came running over the pike, bayonets gleaming steadily brighter as the sun burned off the mist and hot, cheerful light broke over the battle.

  In the midst of Old Jack’s men, Charles fired, reloaded, shouted, encouraged—helped repulse the charge that cost the Yankees almost five thousand men in under half an hour. When the jubilant foot cavalry went hollering and countercharging toward the cornfield, Charles, feeling that his duty to the anonymous colonel had been discharged, ran back, untied Sport, and went on his way, shaking from nerves and excitement.

  As he rode out from the rocks behind the Dunker Church, a bloodied figure in blue rose up and rammed a bayonet at Sport. Charles shot the soldier—in the face, as it happened; he had been aiming lower. He saw beardless flesh and red tissue and an eye fly away as the boy went down. The sight did something to Charles’s sensibilities, set some unwholesome process in motion.

  Shells burst; the ground trembled. He shook himself like a wet dog and pressed on, fearing Sport wouldn’t survive the morning.

  Along about eleven, the cockpit of the battle had shifted to a sunken road east and slightly south of the cornfield, which Charles passed through about this time. In the last three hours at least a dozen charges had gone screaming and lurching and shooting back and forth where the stalks could no longer be seen. Head high yesterday, they were gone, beaten and stamped and crushed down by living men, and dead.

  He sensed he was staring into some demonic kaleidoscope, each gory scene a new variation in horror. Seeing them, Charles felt his self-control slipping. He gripped the rein more and more tightly. While turtle’s instinct brought his head down beneath another billowy burst in the sky, he thought of a face. A name. Anchored himself to both.

  He had an impulse to dismount and hide. It passed, and he kept going in the direction of the sunken road, where Old Bob’s officers and men were not just scrapping to save the army now but maybe the whole Confederacy, too.

  Charles forced Sport ahead. He was a man adrift on a vast, destructive sea. No cause could save his life; no slogan. Just scraps of memory.

  Name.

  Face—

  Her.

  Near the sunken road, he was among madmen—soldiers in gray seeing the elephant for the first time and berserk with fear. He watched one throw his canteen away; another pound one, two, three, four balls down his rifle muzzle without counting, without noticing; a third standing with clenched fists, squalling like an abandoned child. A sky-borne chunk of exploded iron cut off his left leg and his yell in one neat slice. Blood pattered the ground like the earlier drizzle.

  “Get up, get up, damn you!”

  Charles saw the shouter, a red-faced, red-bearded lieutenant booting a fallen horse. The lieutenant’s men crouched around a three-inch Blakely gun foundered in a rut. The lieutenant kept kicking the horse. Charles bent low as another shell burst, then slid from the saddle, found a rock, put it on the loose end of the rein. He ran forward at a crouch and pushed the hysterical officer with both hands.

  “Get away. That horse can’t pull anything. That leg’s broken.”

  “But—but—this gun’s needed up by the road. I was ordered to move it to the road.” The lieutenant wept now.

  “Stand aside. You men”—Charles pointed—“cut the traces. We’ll pick it up by the trail handle and pull it. Some of you push each wheel. One of you watch my horse.”

  Through Minié balls thick as bee swarms, shell bursts scattering shrapnel, they hauled the little rifled field gun, cursing like dock hands, sweating ferociously, pulling it forward yard by yard till they found a major, who flourished his saber to salute them. “Good for you, boys! Wheel her right up there.”

  “The captain done it,” said one of the horse artillerymen pushing a wheel. “Our lieutenant couldn’t. He’s scairt out of his pants.”

  “Who are you, Captain?” the major asked.

  “Charles Main, sir. Scout for Hampton’s Brigade.”

  “I’ll write up a commendation for this if any of us survive the day.”

  Charles turned and ran doubled over back through the field to the soldier guarding Sport. The bearded lieutenant sat on the ground beside the lamed horse. Charles put a bullet into the animal to end its suffering. The lieutenant stared at him with wet eyes, as if he wished for the same mercy.

  “Come on, Sport,” Charles whispered in a raw voice. He must get back to headquarters.

  Going was hard. The federal artillery cannonaded from behind a smoke wall on the heights above the creek. Charles never saw the man who shot him. Something struck his chest, and he jerked sideways, nearly falling from the saddle.

  Bewildered, he looked down and found a round hole to the left of a shirt button. He opened his shirt and lifted the leather bag. It too had a hole, though not on the reverse side. A ball, maybe partly spent when it struck him but deadly anyway, had been stopped by the book.

  He got snarled in Anderson’s Brigade, which was being rushed to the sunken road in an attempt to save the position. They made slow progress, and so did he against their flow. What began to effect some permanent change in him wasn’t death, which he had seen before, but the staggering multiplication of it. Bodies propped one another up. One, the spattered jacket gray, had no head; green flies crawled on the meaty stump. Bodies hung belly down over farm fences. Bodies of enemies lay twined in accidental embrace.

  An artillery piece and its limber were being raced along the Hagerstown Pike for some unknown purpose, and Charles was near it on the lower perimeter of the cornfield, where bodies in blue and gray and butternut had fallen so closely there was hardly any ground visible. Sport had to slip and pick through a terrain of dead backs, lifeless heads cocked at strange angles, groping hands wet with the flow from mortal wounds, mouths that howled for succor, water, God to stop the pain.

  He tried to cross the pike in front of the racing artillerymen, wasn’t fast enough, reined to the side. He heard the shell coming in, saw the horses hit and blown apart.

  Smoke shrouded him. Sport reared, whinnying for the first time all morning. Horse bone, horse flesh, horse entrails, horse blood rained down on Charles in a quarter-minute of baptism. He yelled in rage, saw a wounded Yankee, unarmed, rise to his feet a yard away, started to shoot him, and instead leaned to
the right and threw up.

  Next thing he remembered, he was again riding toward the northern edge of Sharpsburg. Suddenly, in the reddened grass to the right, he spied a fallen man whose form seemed familiar. The man was prone, and by some happenstance his face had landed or been forced into the inverted crown of his wide-brimmed hat.

  Shaky, Charles climbed down. “Doan?”

  The scout didn’t stir. There were bodies strewn along both sides of the road, but Doan’s horse was nowhere visible. “Doan?” This time he said it softly, as if in recognition of what he knew he would find when he rolled the scout over.

  It was worse than he expected. A ball had entered Doan’s left cheek, in and out, and there had been plenty of bleeding. Doan’s whole face dripped when Charles lifted the head. Blood ran off his eyeballs and out his nostrils and over his tongue and lower teeth. His hat was full. Doan had drowned in it.

  Eighteenth of September. In the dark of the night, Bob Lee’s army went back over the Potomac to Virginia.

  Twenty-three thousand had fallen in the battle that had lasted till nightfall on the seventeenth, rolling east across Antietam Creek. Little Mac’s plan had lacked a vision of what might be accomplished that day. Attacks had been piecemeal, savage but seemingly unconnected. As a direct consequence, Lee had been unable to seize the initiative, was forced instead to rush masses of men from danger point to danger point, all over the field. He had in effect conducted a series of hasty and relatively disorganized rescue operations, rather than an offensive based on a grand strategic design. The desperate defense efforts had been carried out at enormous cost; a massed frontal assault on Union positions could hardly have been less bloody.

  There were moments when everything looked lost. In the afternoon, the Yankees had been within half a mile of Sharpsburg, half a mile from swinging around and cutting Lee’s escape route. There were moments to be proud of—as when A. P. Hill’s gray-clad Light Division arrived late that same afternoon, Hill having been busy with details of the Harpers Ferry surrender until he found himself urgently needed up where the corn and the boys from both sides lay together in a red harvesting. So Hill came up; forced march—an incredible, legendary seventeen miles in seven hours.

  Politicians who had never led troops or even tasted combat often carped because generals slacked off a fight late in the day and failed to pursue an advantage all night long. The carpers were men who did not understand and could not imagine the awesome burden of battle. It was not only mortally frightening but cursedly hard work. It left the combatant drained—starved, thirsty, ready to lie down anywhere there wasn’t a corpse.

  So the battle day had ended with both sides exhausted but still facing the long, dreadful night of screams and moans and searching for survivors. Candles moved across the fields and through the woods, like the last of summer’s fireflies. Pickets held their fire; both sides were searching.

  That night Charles saw the ambulances roll with their wailing cargoes. He saw the improvised pavilions where surgeons pushed up their sleeves, took out their saws, and amputated mangled arms and legs by the hundreds. He saw corpses growing huge, ripening with the gasses of death. Near dawn, he saw one explode.

  Next day, the eighteenth, assessments began to emerge.

  McClellan had assumed a defensive posture, or he might have buried the Confederacy forever. Presented with an opportunity to destroy Lee’s army, he merely stopped the invasion. Lee hadn’t been whipped, but neither had he won. He had simply rushed his defensive units from one place to another, repelling in succession five apocalyptic attacks between daybreak and dark: at the west woods and cornfield three times; at the sunken road, leaving a lane of the dead six, seven, eight deep in one thousand-yard stretch; and, lastly, at the lower bridge on Antietam Creek.

  Reinforced during the early hours of the eighteenth, McClellan chose to stand fast. The Confederate high command chose to withdraw. By now Charles had only fragmentary recollections of the day before. He couldn’t remember all the places he had been sent or how many men he had shot at. Several times he had been on his own an hour or more, isolated from his objective or any familiar faces—a not uncommon happening in a battle that slid from here to there like mercury. He knew he would forever carry memories of his constant fear for Sport and his feeling that the September afternoon was eternal, the sun nailed to the sky, never to fall and force an end.

  On the retreat, more segments of the tapestry—one an afternoon incident whose site he could not recall, though the images were burned into his mind. Three men in gray, one very young, with drool in the corners of his cracked lips, moved across Charles’s line of vision thrusting their bayonets deep into the bodies of dead Union soldiers.

  A wisp of a lieutenant colonel, perhaps a schoolmaster or attorney once but now a blood-covered casualty, managed to lift himself in the sunshine and indicate by raising a hand that he was pleading for—anticipating—mercy. The split-lipped boy was the first to stab him, through the bowels. The others stabbed his upper chest, then all lurched on, the smile of a pleased drunkard on each face.

  That single memory planted a new conviction in Charles’s heart and mind. It would be a longer war than anyone had dreamed and henceforward would be fought without the punctilio of that remote day when Union riders pursued Gus, and the Yankee lieutenant, Prevo, accepted his word as an officer and West Point graduate that she wasn’t in the farmhouse. Gentlemanly conduct had disappeared along with the black horses and the brave, shouting lads he had led in that springtime he wanted to remember but could not because of the slain animals, the butchered or bloating bodies, the gray trio with their bayonets and grins.

  Who had won, who had lost—who gave a damn? he thought in the strange, light-headed mood that came over him as he and Ab, reunited, rode toward the Potomac in the long procession that stretched away and away, forward and behind, over the hills of Maryland. They were about a mile to the rear of the troopers of the Second South Carolina, who were relatively fresh because they had been held in reserve on the extreme left during the entire battle.

  In moonlight, near the river, they passed some infantrymen who had fallen out to rest. One, bitterly jocular, called to them, “Bet you two boys didn’t see the scrap, bein’ in the critter cavalry.”

  “That’s right,” said another, “bein’ in the critter cavalry is jes’ like havin’ an insurance policy nobody will ever cash in.”

  Ab looked bleak and feverish. He pulled his side arm and cocked and aimed it at the last speaker, who yelped, “Hey, now,” and jumped up to run. Charles grabbed Ab’s arm and pulled it slowly, steadily, down. He felt Ab’s trembling.

  The next day, Charles became like many of those who went into a great battle and came out again. He didn’t smile; he hardly spoke. He felt his soul clasped by a deepening depression. He could function, obey orders, but that was about all. And when someone asked Ab Woolner why his friend had such a remote look in his eyes, Ab explained.

  “We was at Sharpsburg. Charlie still is.”

  58

  OF THE BATTLE HIS army called Antietam, Billy wrote but one line in his journal:

  Horror beyond believing.

  A sense of it began to infect him on the advance to what became the battlefield. The engineers found it hard to march on the Maryland roads because those roads were jammed with ambulances. From the ambulances came sounds Billy had heard before, though he could never grow accustomed to them.

  He saw the smoke and heard the firing from South Mountain but didn’t reach the summit of Turner’s Gap until after dark on the fifteenth. Reveille roused the battalion at four, and when the light broke they found they had bivouacked among fallen dead from both sides. Even men with strong stomachs lost everything they had eaten for breakfast.

  From Keedysville, late in the afternoon, the battalion was rushed to the front. By five Billy and Lije were organizing detachments to search the surrounding farmland for every available stone. Other men carried these to Antietam Creek. Shirtless, Bil
ly worked till the sun sank, seeing to the paving of soft spots in the creek bottom, creating a ford where the artillery could cross. A similar one was prepared for the infantry.

  When the tool wagons arrived—late—grading of the approaches commenced. At half past ten the work was finished. Though Billy was yawning and ready to drop, nervousness kept him awake most of the night. Tomorrow there would be a battle. Would Bison be in it? He had thought of Charles frequently in the last few days. Was he still alive?

  As was customary, the engineers were issued ammunition—forty rounds for the cartridge box, twenty for the pockets—and rations, but they were withheld from the actual fighting. Billy and Lije and the others sat out the bloody day on a ridge overlooking the fords constructed the night before. In view of what he saw, Billy wished he had been elsewhere. The sight of the dead and wounded induced a disloyal reaction in him for a time; how could any cause be worth so many human lives?

  Rushed forward next day, the engineers acted as infantry support for a battery near the center of the line. Sporadic Confederate sniping harassed them, but caused no casualties. The day after that, the battalion withdrew toward Sharpsburg across the lower creek bridge, already being called Burnside’s in honor of the general who had stormed it during the battle’s final phase.

  The federal pontoon bridge at Harpers Ferry had been wrecked by the rebels, so the engineers marched there, and late on the twenty-first fell to rebuilding it. Billy found the work restorative; with hands and backs and minds and a lot of sweat, the battalion created things instead of destroying them. He built a mental barrier and behind it hid the purpose of those creations.

  From the shallows they dragged pontoon boats that could be salvaged and repaired them with wood from boxes in which rations of crackers were shipped. By now Billy’s beard was two inches long. He existed in a perpetual bleary state and sometimes fell asleep on his feet for five or ten seconds. He longed for Brett.