by Ralph Peters
“Two days. I’ve sent a man to hurry him on.”
“Two days will do well enough.”
“If we have three.”
“Hooker will not take the aggressive,” Lee said. “We’ll have the time. Hooker will be cautious.”
Longstreet almost raised Stuart’s absence again, but saw it was pointless. The old man would hear nothing against his beloved fellow Virginian. Stuart was almost a son to him. And perhaps he was right, Stuart might ride into camp that afternoon.
“Then we should have time to pick our ground,” Longstreet said. “To choose good ground and make Hooker attack us. Outflank him, move between him and Washington. Force his hand.”
Lee did not answer immediately, but said at last, “When the army is gathered in, we’ll take the aggressive. We should find those people still dispersed in Maryland. Should we meet any closer to hand, we’ll defeat them piecemeal. Otherwise, I intend to turn toward Harrisburg again, to make Hooker follow, to give him the chance to worry himself into errors.”
“And we’ll force him to attack on ground we choose,” Longstreet repeated. He wanted to hear the old man say it aloud. “A strategic offensive that ends in a tactical defense.”
Again, Lee weighed his words before responding. Then he spoke as if he had not heard a word Longstreet had offered. “I will not bring on an engagement until this army is concentrated, that much is certain. I will have every man understand that.” He nodded in agreement with himself. “But once we have balled our fist, I intend to wield it.”
The old man’s mood lightened again, but Longstreet could not shake his growing alarm. The old man wanted a fight. Say what he might, he loved it. But they had to fight wisely now, so far from home. The army could not afford another bloodletting like Chancellorsville. Not even one called a victory.
Porter Alexander had come to him that morning not to tell stories of big yellow dogs and amusing little girls, but to express his concern about their stocks of high-explosive shell. “There’s enough for one real battle and to cover a march,” Alexander had told him. “But we won’t have a round to spare.”
“Perhaps you and I are too prone to worry, Pete,” the old man said, reading his mind again. The use of his nickname startled Longstreet. Lee was a formal man on all occasions.
“Here we are,” Lee continued, “worrying ourselves over grand strategy, and you know the last thing I heard from Powell Hill?” He shook his head slowly, as if at a child’s antics. “General Heth asked if he could go fetch some shoes. It seems the men have more immediate concerns than a pair of somber generals do.”
“Well, I’d rather have a thousand new pairs of shoes than a thousand new rifles myself,” Longstreet said, “and that’s the Georgia truth. If Hotspur Harry can bring in a load of shoes, boots, or ladies’ slippers, I’ll tip my hat to him.”
Skirmishing raindrops reached them. They rose together and hastened under the fly before Lee’s tent.
“I told General Hill I had no objection, to act at his discretion,” Lee went on. “As long as no one brings on an engagement, he understands that.”
“Did Hill happen to say where his men intend to go hunting for this treasure?” Longstreet asked. “I have half a mind to force-march Hood over the mountains and beat them to it.”
The volleys of rain grew heavier, thumping the canvas, trying to break through.
“According to General Heth, the shoes are in that crossroads village east of Cashtown.” Lee’s expression tightened in consternation. “I know the name full well, but it eludes me.”
“Gettysburg,” Longstreet said.
* * *
“Ich habe das verdammte Regen zum kotzen satt,” Bettelman cried in a tone of glorious outrage. I’ve had enough damned rain to make me puke.
His nearby comrades laughed, despite the torrent pounding them. Bettelman’s outbursts of indignation at every aspect of army life were so dramatic and sudden that that they enlivened the grimmest march. And this march was wretched.
“An hour since, you complain about the heat,” Heisler reminded him. Shaking the wet from his neck and face, he added, “You want to be cold. You get rain. Now you don’t like the rain.”
“It’s the mud I don’t like,” Bettelman replied. “I am not made for the insane life of a soldier. I’m a watchmaker. I am not made for this.”
But he was made for it. Corporal Friedrich Schwertlein had seen Bettelman stand on the field of Chancellorsville, as steady as the statue of a warrior, face blackened with powder and jaw set, firing calmly into the Rebels as they came on screaming. The regiment had stood its ground, even after Colonel Krzyzanowski ordered them to withdraw. They had stood, and fought, and bled as the army collapsed around them. Only to read in the newspapers that every one of the Germans, “the Flying Dutchmen” of the Eleventh Corps, had run away, a vile disgrace to the Union. But the 26th Wisconsin had not run. Not even when half their number lay dead and bleeding, with fires devouring the brush around them and the Confederates hurling themselves forward through the undergrowth, maddened by the unexpected resistance. Schwertlein himself had stood his ground as well. Telling himself, Rastatt nie wieder! Never again a surrender such as Rastatt.
Rastatt was far away now. Across an ocean. Fourteen years gone. But the fight was the same. Prussian princes then, slavemonger aristocrats now. Another desperate battle to save a republic. Another chapter in the universal struggle for freedom.
Fritz Schwertlein certainly did not consider himself a nationalist. The day would come when nations would disappear in the recognition that all men were brothers. Yet, it burned in him, as it did in every man still marching under the regiment’s colors, to hear all Germans derided as cowards. In the battle each man sensed ahead, it would not be “Rastatt never again!” but “Never another Chancellorsville!” This time, it would be different, their reputation would be redeemed.
The rain halted as suddenly as it had begun, leaving a mire through which the men had to struggle. Some lost their shoes and cursed, while others fell out to remove and save their footwear. More than a few already had collapsed from the heat and strain. The march seemed endless.
“Wie weit noch?” Bettelman whined. How much farther?
Roused by the question, Heisler asked Schwertlein, “Do you think we are in Pennsylvania, Fritz?”
“No,” Schwertlein told him. “Emmitsburg is in Maryland. We have not come to Emmitsburg. After that is Pennsylvania.”
To their rear, a commotion rose. Horses complained and hot voices commanded: “Give way there! Get out of the way!”
Accustomed to their fate, Schwertlein and his fellow Germans stepped to the side of the road, seizing the excuse for a few minutes’ rest. Their clothing steamed.
As the limbers, guns, and caissons neared, the soldiers stepped back deeper into the brush. Even so, great splashes of mud reached them. Low Irish by the look of them, the gunners ignored the foot soldiers as they whipped their horses through the clinging slop.
“If they stick and ask me to help, I don’t help them no more,” Bettelman muttered. Then he reconsidered and added, “Perhaps I am better to be an artilleryman? To ride so? Better than this verschweinte Infanterie.”
The last caisson sloshed by, leaving knee-deep traces and long puddles amid the slime. Some fellow attempted to raise a song, but the mood was too disheartened. With the rain blown off, the heat punched back through the trees that lined their route.
Lieutenant Trenk rode up and dismounted beside them. He always walked with the men, mounting his horse only when he needed to reach regiment or brigade headquarters in a hurry. In the 26th, officers and men saw each other differently. Some had fought with Sigel all the way to Freiburg in ’49, and so many of them had been driven into exile after the failed revolutions in the Germanies that most viewed rank as a necessary evil on the path to a utopia of equals. They were not Prussians, that was the thing, but men from Baden and Hesse, from the Palatinate or the Lower Rhine. They could march as well as
anyone and fight better than most. But they were civilized Germans, not slaves of the Junker tyrants beyond the Elbe.
“Was neues, Herr Leutnant?” Heisler asked. “Any news?”
“It’s true about Meade. He’s in command now.”
“Another Englishman. So I think we lose again,” Bettelman commented.
“Well, don’t say that to Colonel Kriz,” the lieutenant told him. “He doesn’t like talk of losing. And he’ll be riding up the column in a little while. Halt’s Maul, ja?”
“Der Kriz is a good man,” Bettelman said. “I think he is really German, not a Pole.”
“Bettelman thinks every good man has to be German,” Heisler put in.
“The Poles are a mixed-up bunch, though,” the lieutenant observed. “You have their minor noblemen like Kriz, their szlachta. Some of them are educated men. And they’re brave beyond imagining. But the peasants live like animals, and they make no effort to improve themselves.”
“Spoken like a true Hohenzollern,” Schwertlein told him. “I should run up and ask the band to play the ‘Hohenfriedberger.’”
“The Lion of Rastatt roars!” Lieutenant Trenk laughed. “Come on, Fritz. You know what I say is true.”
Schwertlein hid the sudden wound he felt. He had not been a lion at Rastatt. Not at the end, when the garrison surrendered and he hid in a woman’s cupboard while the Prussian officers rounded up the revolutionaries they later would shoot in a ditch below the walls. He had fought until that hour, though, in his angry, amateur’s way. It was only at the end that his nerve had failed him.
Trenk’s mockery was meant in fun, of course. He knew only that Schwertlein had been at Rastatt, nothing more. The two men had befriended one another in their early days of exile in Milwaukee, before either realized that he had become American in his heart. Trenk, an advocate back in Konstanz, had been struggling to read the law in his new home, while Schwertlein, the younger by three years, had not yet found his vocation as a journalist. They had shared their dreams of a free, universal society, as well as the inevitable nostalgia of the immigrant, but not every detail of their pasts had come into the open. In America, you could edit your previous life like a newspaper article.
When the regiment mustered in, the men had voted for Schwertlein as their lieutenant. But before a single shot was fired, he had proven inadequate to the task, an eternal observer of men, not a leader by nature. They had voted for him only because they had known his name from his newspaper columns. Trenk became the lieutenant and he stepped down to corporal, an arrangement better suited to them both. The embarrassment had been fleeting.
“Anyway,” Schwertlein said as they marched along, “what does it matter? German, Pole, American? The only identity that matters is whether a man stands for a better world, or defends the old order. Krzyzanowski fought for a better future in Poland, and he fights for the same thing now.”
“Our corporal’s reading us one of his columns,” Heisler joked.
“Scheisse,” Bettelman called out. “More artillery comes.”
But it wasn’t another column of guns and limbers. It was only their brigade commander, Krzyzanowski, creating the uproar behind them. Lean and almost comically elegant, he sat, straight of spine and smiling, on a white horse that pranced even in the depths of mud.
But Schwertlein remembered Krzyzanowski at Chancellorsville, riding just as erectly amid the madness, wielding his saber to direct men where to aim their fire or halt for another volley, a knight strayed into the wrong century, a hero out of Schiller. Colonel Kriz, too, had felt the sting of injustice, after he and two of his regiments had held the line for the better part of an hour, letting the artillerymen save their guns, as an entire corps collapsed around them.
As the colonel neared, some men in his path took up a song in Krzyzanowski’s honor:
Was gestern recht war … für den Rhein …
ist’s Heute nicht auch … recht für Polen?
Other voices took it up, organizing themselves in song. Despite the slaughter at Chancellorsville, they still had men in the ranks from a number of singing clubs back in Milwaukee. Schwertlein sang, too, in a baritone honed on Schubert’s Lieder in his family’s parlor in Mainz.
What once was justice … for the Rhine …
is it not just … today for Poland?
Should Poland not be … theirs, but mine …
a country we have … merely stolen?
Have you forgotten … our own plight …
All you profound … thinkers so hallowed …
Should Poland not … be free by right …
And free of Prussians … with their gallows?
The colonel acknowledged the song with a grin that lifted the wings of his mustache. Riding along, he paid a succession of salutes to the men he soon would lead back into battle. His war was theirs, theirs his, a struggle not only against Confederates or Prussians, but against all the world’s princely houses and potentates, Russian, Austrian, Ottoman … Their fight was waged to break the chains that bound men oceans apart. The difference now was that they had a genuine army, not just a rabble with shotguns, scythes, and rusty swords from attics. They had an army, and a free land worth defending.
When the colonel had passed from sight, though, all the high emotions vanished with him. The men went back to the muck and the murderous heat.
“War is shit,” Bettelman said.
* * *
He rode into the confusion in a rage. Rain pounded. Headed in conflicting directions, the wagons and their teams blocked all the streets. Officers barked, but the teamsters only shrugged, waiting for someone else to put things right. The guns, the infantry, all the rest of Slocum’s Twelfth Corps could not get through the infernal muddle. Everything was falling behind schedule.
“You, damn you,” Meade barked at a private hunched on a wagon with the reins slack in his hand. “Who do you belong to?”
The soldier was little impressed with the drenched old man before him. He just shrugged. Meade wanted to have him arrested, but retained the presence of mind to grasp that the teamster’s removal would mean an abandoned wagon.
“I asked you which unit you’re assigned to, you sonofabitch,” Meade barked.
The boy shrugged a second time, but said, “Third Corps, I guess.”
Sickles. That whoremonger bastard. His trains had no business in Middleburg, or anywhere near it. The last of them should have passed through hours before.
Meade yanked his mount around and worked his way back to the captain in charge of his escort.
“You,” Meade said. “Have your men open these streets. Whip man and beast, if you have to.”
The captain saluted, but looked dazed by the maelstrom. Everyone in sight appeared half-drowned, and the crawling chaos around them stank of wet wool, wet horses, and waste. The captain went to work, though, waving the leading men of his squadron forward.
Meade rode over to General Hunt, who had sheltered under the wooden awning of a shop to light a cigar. Meade dismounted, tied Old Baldy to the nearest rail, and stormed up the steps, spurs clanking.
“It’s Sickles,” he snapped. “Again. The man takes nothing seriously but his debauchery.” He whisked some of the water from his uniform, a useless effort. Too hot for an oilskin, he had made the best of it and now he was soaked.
“Storm’s passing,” Hunt said calmly. “That should help.”
“It’s not the storm. It’s Sickles.” Meade went back into the slackening rain to fetch pencil and paper from a saddlebag. Waving away a cigar, he wrote against the flat of a door frame, giving Sickles the very devil.
Out in the main crossroads of the town, the jumble of wagons had begun to move. But not quickly enough for Meade. The army was a vast animal, hard to manage and always ready to stray. As he moved his headquarters forward, he had ridden along choked roads, often taking to the fields to speed his passage. The journey had led him past countless mired wagons and caissons with broken wheels, past knots of arguing
officers and sergeants with their vocabulary ablaze. And, always, the endless columns of regiments came on, men marching in their undergarments in the killing heat, kerchiefs trailing behind their caps, and many of them as barefoot as the Confederates. With his telegraphic communications cut by Stuart’s raiders, he had nonetheless tried to get a message through by courier, asking not for reinforcements—he knew there were none—but for a shipment of shoes, if shoes were available.
As for Stuart, Meade refused to take the bait and chase him across Pennsylvania. Let Pleasanton and his cavalrymen fend him off as best they could. The thing now was to concentrate the army, not weaken it. Stuart was, in the end, more nuisance than danger. And Meade wasn’t certain he minded having Lee’s cavalry separated from the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia. If Stuart was raiding in the east, he wasn’t scouting in the west. Meade couldn’t understand the logic of what seemed to him a folly, but he meant to take advantage where he could. He had sent Reynolds a message to ensure he was pushing Buford’s First Cavalry Division forward as far as Gettysburg.
Lee was at Chambersburg. He knew that now. Rumors put some of his men across South Mountain … although that could have been warmed-over talk from Ewell’s passage the week before. Or it might be a token force meant to cover the passes. Or a sign Lee’s entire army was on the move again. He needed more information, much more, if he hoped to shape the campaign to his own advantage.
Finished with the note to Sickles, Meade turned to Hunt. “Find Sickles. Give him this. Damn it, I know you’re a busy man, Henry, but he won’t take anything seriously unless he hears it from the mouth of a fellow general. Give him this note, and tell him I’ll be damned if I let him afflict this entire army with his slows. He needs to keep to his march schedule. It’s not a damned suggestion.”
Hunt didn’t protest at being handed a courier’s mission. And Meade didn’t worry about diverting the man for a few hours. As chief of artillery, Hunt was thoroughly competent. Meade trusted him to do all that had to be done in his sphere of action.