by Ralph Peters
“You’ll live to write many more poems.”
“You can’t know that.”
“And you can’t know that you won’t.”
A moth struck the lantern’s glass and exploded.
“Sometimes … a man knows a thing,” Heisler said.
“Quatsch! Rubbish!”
Heisler only shook his head again.
“If the sun shines tomorrow,” Schwertlein told him, “you’ll feel better. Wait and see. And then we can all complain about the heat again.”
“Fritz? I’m not so foolish as you think. I know the poem isn’t any good. But I’d like you to keep it. And there’s something else. A favor. Please. No matter what happens to me … write and tell Marthe I didn’t suffer, that it was all clean and good. Spare her.”
“I can’t listen to this. You’re talking nonsense. Reine Scheisse.”
“But promise me you’ll write to her.”
Schwertlein laughed a single, hard syllable. “And what if I’m the one who dies?”
“It won’t be you,” Heisler told him. “I can tell.”
“No! You listen to me.” Schwertlein’s voice rose. “You don’t know what tomorrow will bring. None of us knows. Damn it, man … think like that and you will get yourself killed. But you don’t know a thing about any of this. Nothing. And you’re talking absolute nonsense.”
“We’ll see, Fritz, we’ll see,” his friend said resignedly. “I’ll leave you to your article now.”
And Heisler left the porch. In moments, the darkness had swallowed him.
Schwertlein tried to return to his letter. He was writing to Maria Schenk, the woman he had loved for almost a decade, although it was not yet the time to say it aloud. Or write it.
They had met on her wedding day, at the fest following her vows. A torrent of fire had passed between two souls, a sense of mutual shock, of immediate and immeasurable sorrow that things were as they were and irremedial. No poet would ever put that succulent horror into words. As he watched her later that afternoon, across the gay crowd in that hall, he wished he had died at Rastatt rather than live to meet this wife of a minor friend. For her part, Maria fought not to look at him again, but even as a new bride she had failed in her duty.
When they met over the years, on the street or at a charitable affair, they could barely speak complete sentences to one another, settling for a minimum of courtesies. They both knew. They had known from that first instant that life had played a terrible trick on them and their fate was cast in iron. There was no recourse for decent people.
Her husband had died in camp, of measles, in February. Cautiously, they had begun a correspondence, dealing, at first, with the mundane matters that followed Heinrich Schenk’s death. But when those things were settled, neither had broken off the correspondence. She wrote to tell him the news from home, as a sister might. He answered by describing as much of the war as he thought decent: not least, that the accusations of cowardice lodged against all German soldiers after Chancellorsville had been a calumny.
Now he hoped to nudge their exchanges to a deeper intimacy. No article he had ever written, not even the chapters of his unfinished book, had ever demanded such precision of language, such care. He feared that one wrong word might ravage the future of which he dreamed. And of which, he was convinced, Maria dreamed, too.
Men feared different things. But all men feared. Poor Josef, with his sudden Werther morbidity, dreaded the coming battle, although he had always been as brave as any man. Schwertlein’s own terror was of a life lived in loneliness, without the only woman he ever would love.
How lives changed, as the fires of youth burned down! He still dreamed of the world revolution, of justice and equality for all. Rastatt would always be there, with its dead. It was a dream no Prussian fusillade could kill. He clung to those youthful visions of a world purged and perfected.
But he worried that, if forced to choose between the revolution and his love now, he’d choose Maria. Whose hand he once brushed lightly in a shop.
Schwertlein could not write. Safe words refused to come. He longed to pour out his heart. But that would never do. Every turn of phrase had to be measured.
In the devious way the mind tricks a man, he thought of his father and mother. What kind of love had they shared behind their propriety? Had he been oblivious to a mighty passion? It was hard to imagine such things, of course. No child credited his elders with such feelings. Yet, now he conjured hints of mutual tenderness out of the sternness with which they had faced the world.
He recalled the parlor, die beste Stube, in their home in Mainz, where his father served the archbishopric as an overseer of property accounts. Only to have his treasured son flee the university to join a revolution that called for an end to ecclesiastical property. The room had been savagely cold in the winter, except on Sundays, when the tiled stove was lit and the family gathered together in dreary reverence. At last, the rich smells of dinner would seep in, assaulting the solemnity. He had hated those endless afternoons as a boy, but now they seemed of inestimable value.
Mainz. With its hideous cathedral, its red stone the color of enfeebled blood. The city lived in its alleys, not at the altar. There had been sugared almonds at Karneval and sweet wine from the vineyards that stretched from the river into the hills. He recalled the smell of printer’s ink and the curses of laborers, market wives all peasant slyness, and priests going round in pairs like God’s policemen. He could see the barges on the Rhine and his mother at home with starched lace at her neck, her posture that of a guardsman, her heart that of a saint.
All gone now, all gone.
In the distance, the tireless singers, perfect marksmen in their harmonies, told of a lover who promised to return when it snowed red roses and rained cool wine. A forlorn village beauty replied that it never snows roses or rains down wine. She knew that he never would come again.
“Farewell, my treasure!” they sang. “Farewell, my love!”
Schwertlein could not finish the letter. Safe words refused to come and he no longer trusted his pen. With a groan he would have judged sentimental in another man, he folded the paper and pocketed it, rising to seek out his blanket. There were rumors of an early march in the morning.
The letter could wait, he told himself. There would be time tomorrow.
PART
II
THE DAY OF THE SOLDIERS
FIVE
July 1, Morning
The march came to a halt amid a muddle of commands. Overhead, rain clouds threatened, but held their fire. It was not yet nine, but the heat added weight to knapsacks and wet the men’s faces with sweat.
“This is a thing I cannot understand,” Bettelman said. “We march around and around. And why? If we stayed in one place, the Rebels would have to come to us, and we could spare our legs.” Rueful at the world’s resistance to logic, he snorted.
Laughing, Schumann told him, “Maybe the generals think of more important matters than your legs.” A master carpenter back home, Schumann appeared to be in fine spirits, having rejoined the regiment the day before. Luck had spared his life, after his wounding at Chancellorsville. “It’s not so bad, Leo,” he told the watchmaker. “Smell the fresh air! Gulp it, man! In the hospital, I am always thinking I would give my life to breathe clean air again. For just one day.” He splashed through a thickening puddle. “The stink is the worst thing. They scrub and scrub, but you smell the rot always.”
Lieutenant Trenk rode down the column, pausing by Schwertlein. “First Corps’ wagons are blocking the road. Another godless mess. Colonel Boebel’s ridden forward to see what Kriz means to do.”
“And he’ll find that Kriz has gone off to see what Schimmelpfennig and Schurz are going to do,” Bettelman put in. “Your watch keeps better time now, Herr Leutnant?”
Trenk nodded. “Ja, Leo. Danke. Bist ein echter Meister.”
“Somebody in this army has to fix things properly,” Bettelman continued. “Perhaps I should join the
quartermasters and ride always on a wagon and make things go better?”
“I thought you were going to join the artillery?” Heisler said. It was his first comment of the morning and Schwertlein was glad to hear the bantering tone.
Bettelman made a dismissive face. “Ach, the cannons are too loud, I think.”
Orders snapped down the column. Soldiers reordered their ranks. Trenk turned his horse and left them.
A quarter-mile on, the men of the 26th Wisconsin followed the rest of their brigade and turned from the road. Stepping over a knocked-down fence, they trampled a broad wheatfield as mounted officers ranged among the stalks. From a low rise, the blue columns of the Eleventh Corps stretched as far ahead and behind as a man could see.
The clouds opened their barrage while the men were in the open.
“Close up,” Schwertlein ordered, testing his corporal’s authority. “Close up now.” His friends chose to obey him, although there was grumbling enough.
The column found another road, but the deluge had turned it into a trough of mud. Orders came back, barked through hammering rain, to increase the pace to a quickstep. Men stumbled in the mire, then ran crazily to catch their companies. The landscape rose into low hills studded with boulders.
Schwertlein kept an eye on Heisler, who had been so fatalistic the night before. The schoolteacher and would-be poet looked normal, to the extent the downpour allowed a man to judge.
They slogged up another country lane between a gauntlet of drooping trees, then struck open country again. Ahead, they spied sunlight beyond the walls of rain. That, too, spurred them forward.
At a fork in the road, Colonel Krzyzanowski sat astride his white horse. Erect as ever, the little officer smiled and saluted their colors, then waved to Lieutenant Colonel Boebel. With his finely trimmed mustaches and goatee, Kriz seemed wonderfully unperturbed by the rain.
“There go my boys!” he called out in perfect German. “The heroes of Chancellorsville! My own boys!”
Dozens of voices responded with the colonel’s most notorious and frequent command: “You must speak English now!”
Wet as river rats, the soldiers laughed. The colonel grinned and held up a hand, palm out, admitting he’d been caught. The battled-down ranks cheered him as they passed. The downpour stopped abruptly, surrendering to the sun.
But the silence the rain left behind uncovered another sound. In the distance, Schwertlein heard the thump of cannon.
* * *
“Just proud as peacocks, ain’t they?” Cobb said. “Like they’re riding off to the fair.”
Limber and gun after limber and gun, caisson after caisson, Pegram’s artillerymen clattered past the picket line, leading Archer’s brigade toward Gettysburg, the town where the Yankee cavalry had been the day before.
“They’re confident enough, that’s for damned sure,” Corporal Ireton said. “Whoever heard of putting guns out front like they was cavalry?”
“Maybe the Yankees run off? After they seen us yesterday?” James Bunyan said.
“I wouldn’t count no blue-bellied chickens just yet,” Pike Gray told him. “Those Yankees didn’t look in no running mood to me.”
“Maybe they got orders,” James Bunyan said. “Maybe they were ordered back.”
Cobb cackled. “Sounds like old Progress ain’t in a fighting mood today.”
“Man’s got a right to think, ain’t he?” John Bunyan said, defending his twin brother.
Cobb enjoyed the testiness. “We’re all privates here, boy. Except Sergeant Blake there. Wouldn’t want to forget him. And Corporal Ireton. And privates ain’t supposed to go thinking on things. Plays Hell with whatever the officers got in mind. Hell and a spit, boy, they don’t even want sergeants thinking overmuch.” Smirking, he looked at Blake. “Do they now?”
Cobb had picked open one of the pustules on his nose. It had bled onto his cheek and down into his beard. He had not washed his face to cleanse himself. To Blake, the man looked like a leper from the Bible.
“No, sir,” Cobb went on, “all they expect folks like us to do is line up all polite and tip our hats and say, ‘Better take your shot now, Billy Yank, ’cause I’m a-going to shoot you, if’n you don’t.’” He gestured toward the infantrymen following the artillery out on the pike. Then he bore down on the Bunyan twins. “Ain’t no general going to weep over you and there ain’t going to be no fine words in no newspaper. Only folks going to weep over you are your kin. And they’ll get over it.”
“Shut up, Cobb,” Peachum said.
But something had stirred up Billie Cobb more fiercely than usual. He turned on his comrade in arms. “You always tell me to shut up, Artie. Know why that is? Do you, now? You don’t like the truth of this world, that’s all. Tell me one word I spoke is a lie, just one word of it.” He spit yellow filth on the ground.
Hugh Gordon broke the bitter mood. “Looks like those clouds are pulling off south. Going to be a right scorcher.”
On the pike, the long lines in gray flashed bits of color where men had chosen civilian shirts over nakedness. Officers of the waiting 26th North Carolina called in the pickets. Lieutenants gathered companies together as their captains assembled near Colonel Burgwyn and Major Jones. Blake couldn’t see Lieutenant Colonel Lane, the regiment’s second in command. It unsettled him. Lane was the one who had his confidence, a tough weed, not a flower. Blake wanted him present.
Davis’s brigade followed Archer’s down the road. By regiment, the army was turning the mud of the pike back to dust.
“Let’s go now,” Blake called. “Move sharp. Form up. Hugh, you go fetch Tam. He’s over calling on his cousin.”
After a detachment had been culled to guard the wagons and the musicians had been subtracted to serve as stretcher bearers, the regiment mustered eight hundred men to go forward. The knapsacks they had just gotten back from the wagons the evening before were piled up again and ammunition was counted, cartridges checked for moisture. When they moved out by column, bringing up the rear of the brigade, the air was as thick and hot as a low-country swamp. It was just nine o’clock.
They had not marched a half-mile when they heard cannon.
“Guess them Yankees didn’t run off, after all,” Cobb announced. Smiling his blackened smile, he added, “Good thing, too. The killing spirit’s on me, boys, and I’m looking to have my fun.”
From Cobb, it wasn’t a brag. The man meant every word, Blake knew. Cobb took pleasure in hurting all things that lived and thrived, and cared not for the censure of God or man.
The rest of the men remained silent as they marched. The entire column had tensed, merged into a single beast. As the artillery duel continued up ahead, enough guns came into play to announce that this was more than a skirmish.
Playing cards lay strewn along the road now, discarded by men who suddenly feared the Lord. Even Cobb turned silent. The route began a gradual ascent. Feet kicked up dust. Some men drew neck rags up over nose and mouth, but most just sealed their lips against the grit.
They heard small-arms fire, rippling volleys, and the peck of lone shots. The first wounded man staggered rearward, cradling his shredded arm. Ahead of the column, smoke curtained the low horizon.
More wounded men materialized, some helped along by shirkers. Suddenly, there were dozens of them edging both sides of the road. The worst cases came on stretchers. Most of those men were silent or moaning low, but a few screams pierced the thunder of the guns. Two bearers shed their burden in a field, arranging their newly dead comrade as if in sleep, then turned back toward the fight with their bloodied canvas.
As the regiment hurried up the grade at quick time, Blake recognized the ridgetop tavern they’d passed the day before. Colonel Burgwyn waited beside it, watching as his regiment caught up with him. Broad-shouldered and bullish, Lieutenant Colonel Lane sat his horse next to Burgwyn. Blake was glad to see him.
A bearded soldier using his rifle as a crutch limped away from the battle. Powder-blackened, his face
wore a fixed grin. As he passed the men going forward, he called out, “You’re in for it now, fellers, you’re in for the devil. Them Black Hats are out there, mean as cottonmouth snakes.” His laughter was worthy of Cobb.
An artillery shell struck the road in front of the regiment’s colors. Blake could not see if men had fallen, but the banners remained aloft. Colonel Burgwyn rode out to urge the lead company forward.
Atop the ridge, twelve-pounders had been placed in battery on either side of the road. The cannon spit flame and recoiled. Their crews rushed back upon them, some of the men stripped to the waist and gleaming as they swabbed the barrels and loaded the next charges.
Yankee rounds burst in the fields and screamed overhead. Someone ordered the regiment to march to the left, but Colonel Burgwyn spurred his horse into the field in front of the column, pointing rightward with his saber. The colors wheeled and the regiment followed, crossing the road onto the flat of the ridge behind the guns.
“Think any one of these sumbitches knows where we’re going?” Cobb asked after leaping a roadside ditch.
“Straighten your ranks,” Blake ordered. “Maintain your file. Keep moving.”
General Pettigrew galloped up on a handsome dapple gray. His aide, Captain Young, trailed behind him. Pettigrew paused in midfield to speak with Burgwyn and Lieutenant Colonel Lane. The cluster of officers seemed bound to catch the eyes of the Yankee gunners.
Blake wondered if the stream down in the hollow before them was still overflowing. Probably not, he decided. Not much rain in the night. They’d get across that quick enough. Beyond lay the woods through which his skirmishers had moved with ease the afternoon before. Things were different now. Yankees would be in those trees.
General Pettigrew gave a command Blake could not quite hear, but Colonel Burgwyn rode closer to the men and gave it again: “Twenty-sixth Regiment … by the left flank!”
Around them, the entire brigade began to deploy. Burgwyn rode down the length of his regiment and back again, red sash trailing. He had put on a fine uniform for the day.