by Ralph Peters
And when you beat the man, you beat the army.
For all that, their first encounter had not been promising, thanks to Heth’s blunders. While Hill, incommoded, had lingered in the rear. It scorched Lee’s pride to recall how he had indulged them. An excursion for shoes, indeed. A lark and a folly.…
Yet, those fateful shoes had mattered enough to the men who had marched off to get them. What was his merit, finally, as a general at the head of a shoeless army? If he could not clothe these men who did all he bid them? After all, the Duke of Marlborough’s victories had been those of a quartermaster. Still a mere John Churchill, he had seen to it that new shoes awaited his soldiers along his line of march. But Lee had men who had gone without shoes for months. At Chancellorsville, he had hoped for a Blenheim, but ended with a gory Malplaquet.
Each time Lee visited Richmond, he heard the Confederacy creak a bit more loudly. Despite the resolute parties—which he declined to visit, pleading duty—he detected a growing hollowness as well. The mistress of the grandest house no longer served the delicacies that, last year, had been essential, and mourning garments robbed the streets of color. For his part, President Davis grew unreasonable … although Lee would never have breathed it to any man.
And his army walked barefoot.
A mighty victory was needed. Not a mere stab, but a deathblow. Only then would there be hope of English intercession, even were it merely to impose peace. The spirit of the North had to be crushed along with its army. Those people had to be brought, at last, to reason.
One smashing victory now might save it all.
A seasoned battlefield hunter, Lee’s senses quickened. He saw before he saw. Rising in the saddle, he peered northeast. There was value in Rodes’ actions, after all. In the abrupt ways of battle, matters had turned. Lee sensed it as much as observed it. Rodes was properly at them, taking ground. A corner of the blue line was dissolving.
Now. Now was the time to hit them.
Heth had seen it, too. He rode hard toward Lee.
Lee held up his hand: A moment yet.
Hill appeared, as if summoned.
Lee studied the far field a swallow longer, then turned to Powell Hill. Careful of the chain of command, he said, “I believe the time has come for General Heth’s division to go in, if you would order it.”
SEVEN
July 1, Midafternoon
The soldiers of the 26th North Carolina stood at attention in two long ranks behind the crest of the ridge. Blake’s company had been assigned to the second line, right of center, giving the men a splendid view as Pettigrew’s and Brockenbrough’s brigades formed for the attack. No enlisted man spoke now, not even Cobb, and the Union cannon on the far height had gone silent. The stillness was thick as raw cotton.
File closers dressed the lines until they were perfect enough for a parade ground. Lieutenant Colonel Lane waited just behind the regiment’s right wing, where Blake could sense his reassuring presence. Colonel Burgwyn, who had dismounted for the charge, impulsively leapt on his horse again and rode down the line, sash trailing as he called out encouragement to his men.
Blake felt the raw, taut life of the soldiers near him: Cobb plank-thin and small … Peachum short, too, but barrel-chested over his starvation haunches … gaunt Jack Ireton with his corporal’s stripes and gambler’s eyes … and the beef-slab Bunyan twins, a human wall. Plagued with freckles and moles, red-haired Tam McMinn was the tallest among them. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Hugh Gordon, who looked part Cherokee, but insisted he wasn’t. Pike Gray would have preferred to be forward with the skirmishers—he liked the independence of the work—but had accepted his lot, standing straight as a well-made post between Hugh and Methuselah-bearded Ollie Wright. Blake wondered, with a calmness that teased his conscience, who among them would die or fall wounded and maimed.
The sun gilded the stillness. A faint breeze touched the colors, but could not stir them. Their own cannon ceased bombarding the opposite ridge.
Colonel Burgwyn dismounted again and sent his horse to the rear. The boy-colonel looked striking, almost beautiful, as he strode through the regiment’s ranks. His young face was newly shaven, his mustache pomaded. Blake waited for a curse from Cobb, but it did not come this time.
“Colors, forward!” The command rolled down along the line of regiments. The 26th’s color guard stepped out, halting where all the men of the front rank could see it.
“Load!” The order rippled outward from the vicinity of the pike and General Pettigrew, but Burgwyn’s men already had done that.
“Fix bayonets!” Thousands of men in two brigades scraped metal over metal. The sound was of myriad whetstones briefly worked.
“Shoulder … arms!” The second word, bellowed by every officer down to captain, came out “hahhhms.”
Off to the left, in Brockenbrough’s brigade, a drum began beating. The 26th had sent its musicians to the rear.
Two birds rose from a thicket and raced off.
The men waited again, wet of forehead beneath their kepis and brimmed hats. Feeling the uncompromising hardness of rifled muskets against gray wool and flesh, they knew what the next command would be.
“What are they waiting for?” James Bunyan asked, voice barely a murmur.
No one answered him.
The next round of commands came not from their officers, but from the rear, upsetting the order of things. Pender’s men were forming up to follow them. To come forward over their bodies and finish the job.
A fly settled on Blake’s cheek. He tried to shoo it by wincing, but the creature would not leave him. In a black moment, he imagined that it last had rested on a corpse, perhaps down in the streambed. Still he did not raise a hand to swat it.
Worse things waited than flies.
He felt a touch of James Bunyan’s impatience now. Why, indeed, were they waiting? Blake itched to get into the fight, to end this infernal delay and get to where he could become fully himself again, to pass beyond the need for further commands from other men, to thrive, however briefly, in the whirlwind.
The drumming on the left flank ceased. And then the great command came down from some mortal god, echoed by General Pettigrew and his fellow brigadier, then by their regimental colonels and, in turn, by the captains:
“Divi-zhunnn!”
“Bri-gade!”
“Reg-iment!”
“Compan-eee!”
“For’erd!”
“For’rud!”
“For’id!”
“For’ward!”
“March!”
The drumming started up again as the color guards and the two endless ranks stepped toward the crest of the ridge. The skirmishers moved out with their weapons up and ready, but all those behind them marched with their rifles shouldered, as if passing in review. Two long fences of bayonets shone high.
“Close up, close up!” The voice was overeager. The men did not need to be badgered now. That would come later.
The second line followed the first at a hundred paces and Blake’s heart stirred at the spectacle. The first rank passed through a thicket of trees, parted around a battery, then came together again, dressing on the colors. Beyond the flat of the ridgetop, a split-rail fence marked property. The line broke to scramble over it, knocking down rails and re-forming at the quick. Beyond lay a long, declining slope sown with oats. Bayonets flashing above them, the men in the first rank descended toward the creek.
The color bearer of the 26th waved his blood-red flag, then stilled it again. Thousands of footfalls shushed through ripening grain. Swarms of insects rose from the stalks as boots, worn shoes, and bare feet trampled their world. With the sun passed behind him, Blake could see the Yankees even more clearly than in the morning, before Colonel Burgwyn moved the regiment behind the ridgetop. There were plenty of Federals in a high field to the left by a house and barn, but the blue-bellies who awaited the 26th remained partly concealed by the grove that reached down to the thickets and brush of the st
reambed. No great expanse, the field down which the men from North Carolina marched seemed endless.
It surprised Blake that the Yankee artillery didn’t open up. No sooner had the thought reached him than he heard the roar of guns. Blessedly, there were no cannon posted straight ahead of the 26th North Carolina. Their ranks went untouched, even as other regiments growled for revenge as they suffered.
Blake and his men scrambled over the fence’s remains and quickly rejoined their line. Lieutenant Colonel Lane’s booming voice ordered the second rank to resume the advance.
And then, with both lines still descending through the oats, Colonel Burgwyn’s voice passed on a command shouted down from brigade:
“Charge!”
The soldiers let go a piercing Rebel yell, all yips and wailing cries, nightmare voices of banshees keening in Ireland’s hills and misty creatures warning intruders in Scotland’s wildest glens. Wonderful and terrifying, their noise propelled them forward.
No man ran, but the pace quickened sufficiently for calls to ring out: “Close up, close up, dress on your company, dress on the colors, close up!”
Staring down through the regiment’s first rank, Blake fixed on the chest-high growth that blocked the way to the streambed, then barricaded the far bank below the enemy.
That’s where we’ll get it, he thought. They won’t be able to hold off firing before that, but that’s where they’ll really give it to us. While we’re fussing on through those thickets. And down in that creek.
A soldier broke from the front rank, running forward. A Company F man, Blake judged by his position. The soldier stopped amid grain that brushed his crotch, leveled his rifle, and fired toward the Yankees.
The half-hidden Federals ignored him.
Those Black Hats, Blake thought. They’ve been around the courthouse square in a buggy a time or two. They know their business. They’ll wait.
But Blake was at least half-wrong. The front line had taken but another dozen steps when a snake of flame flashed from the woods beyond the stream. The report of the volley followed in a trimmed second.
The range was long, but a few men crumpled along the forward rank. Blake glimpsed a gray-clad corpse in the oats, almost underfoot, a wide-eyed boy killed that morning. Flies rose from his face as the soldiers approached, but one stubborn insect clung to a bloodied ear.
Cobb broke out of the line just long enough to kick the corpse’s head with perfect accuracy, crushing the bug with the rock-hard ball of his foot.
“Do the same for me, I expect,” he said.
“Halt!” Colonel Burgwyn cried. The front rank stopped at a step’s delay. Lieutenant Colonel Lane held up the second line.
“Colors, six steps to the rear! First rank, ready! Aim! Fire!”
The effects of the volley disappeared into the woodline across the creek. Without waiting for the command, the men reloaded.
“Colors, forward!” Burgwyn cried. “Regiment, shoulder arms! Forward at a quickstep!”
A Yankee volley exploded from the cover of the trees. A few more men went down. But the men in gray and blue were not killing close. Yet.
Roughening their alignment as they hastened over the morning’s strew of dead and sun-punished wounded, the men in the front rank neared the streambed thickets.
The Yankees gave them another volley.
This time, the 26th was in range. All along the first line, men contorted, performers at Death’s circus. Some crumpled in upon themselves, clutching lead gifts to their bosoms, while others raised arms heavenward. A few just dropped, sacks of flour kicked from a wagon.
“Close up, close up! Dress on the colors!” The voices calling out grew urgent now.
The men up ahead shoved their way into the thorns and wild shrubs blocking their way. Another volley punched into the first rank as it struggled toward the creek.
The colors fell. A moment later, they rose again. The new bearer waved them with an angry passion. Clustering together, the crush of men in the brambles made perfect targets. Without slowing the second rank to maintain the proper distance, Lieutenant Colonel Lane dashed forward to help Burgwyn and Major Jones put things to right.
As Blake and his men hastened forward, watching the butchery unfold before them, Yankee artillery opened an enfilading fire from the high ground near the pike. It gashed through men caught in the thicket. Bodies tumbled, burst, dissolved. Spraying blood wildly, limbs leapt into the air.
“Close up, close up!”
“Git through there, damn you!”
“Yea, though I walk…”
“Look what they done to me … Lordy, look at my legs!”
“Out of my way, you crawling piece of nigger-shit.”
“Dress on the colors, men, dress on the colors.”
“Oh, my God … oh, my good God…”
The thicket looked like a henhouse after a vixen went through it. Only feathers were lacking.
Beside Blake, the mortified voice of James Bunyan asked, “We got to go through that?”
“Hope you done said your prayers last night,” Cobb told him.
“Shut up, Cobb,” Peachum said. His voice arrived in a shout.
“Just keep moving,” Blake ordered. He needed to hear his own voice, to know it was ready and strong. No one was shirking. Every soldier had ceased to exist for himself alone and belonged to a greater creature that tugged him forward. Even James Bunyan did not falter a step.
The colors dropped again, only to rise like the dead on the Day of Judgment. Closer to hand, Lieutenant Devereaux flashed his sword, imitating the regiment’s captains. To Blake, the boy looked scared somehow, yet he got out in front of the line as if he were downright impatient to get at the Yankees.
The Federal cannon let loose on the second line as it neared the briars. Another volley leapt out of the trees beyond the stream.
Ollie Wright cried out. The shocked sound carried no intelligible words. He dropped his rifle and ran forward, waving an arm to hail an invisible friend. Red wet pulsed through gray cloth below his shoulders. A lot of blood had burst out of him at once, like a strung hog cut open wrong.
Wright collapsed before them. Pike Gray broke ranks to rush toward his friend, but Blake collared him. “Get back in line, Pike. He’s gone.”
“First of many.” Cobb laughed.
The mood hardened. It was one thing when other men died, even those with faces you knew well enough to nod to as you went about your business. But Wright had been one of them.
Ahead, the slaughter in the brush continued as the Yankees fired at will. But Blake saw heads and shoulders disappearing willfully now, as men from the first rank leapt down into the creek’s bed. Going forward, still going forward.
Colonel Burgwyn paused, waving his sword, trying to bring the companies back into line. His mouth moved, but the din was too great for Blake to hear him. Lieutenant Colonel Lane remained upright as well. He was shoving men forward through the underbrush, while barking at others as soldiers fell around him. The regiment was crowding together, converging toward the colors. Blake spotted Major Jones just in time to see him drop backward in a half-somersault. But the major got back on his feet and went stumbling about, patting himself for wounds. He looked whole, but stunned.
All bulk and black fury, Lane ran back toward the second rank, halting just before Blake and his men. Walking backward in front of them, he called, “You git on through them goddamned briars, hear? You just git the Hell on through ’em, and don’t you stop.”
His coat was porcupined with thorns and splashed with other men’s blood.
Then they were in the underbrush amid a madness of bodies. Agonized cries rose from underfoot. Nature’s bayonets, long thorns ripped flesh. Pike Gray paused to fire, taking revenge on all the world.
“Keep on going,” Blake screamed at him. “You can’t hit a thing from here.”
Instead, something hit Pike as he lowered his rifle. A dark comet, a piece of shrapnel or solid shot, streaked past Blake
’s snout so close he felt hot wind. It disintegrated Pike’s head in a cloud of blood. For a moment, the headless body wiggled like a drunk whore dancing. White bone poked the sky between the monstrosity’s shoulders. Then the ruined meat just folded up.
“Keep going,” Blake yelled. Looking around him, he saw that both of the Bunyan twins were with him, stink near. Beyond them, Tam McMinn towered above the shrubbery, but somehow had managed to bloody his face with scratches.
Blake glimpsed Lieutenant Devereaux in the maelstrom, only to see the boy yank himself down in the brush, a child playing hide-and-go-seek. Blake was unmoved, didn’t much care if the officer was just plain quitting or if he’d been hit. He had not expected much beyond tomfoolery from the lieutenant, and the hard thought crossed his mind that things might go better without him.
The colors fell by the streambed. Again, unseen hands raised them.
“Dress on the colors, rally on the colors!” Blake saw Colonel Burgwyn on the far bank, miraculously untouched but for muddied boots, waving men up from the creek. He held his sword in one hand, a pistol in the other.
Slopped and bloodied, men dashed past the colonel, anxious to gain good footing on solid ground. Beside Burgwyn, a soldier clutched his neck and tumbled backward into the water.
Order reemerged before Blake’s eyes, as the remnants of the first rank formed up in the thinned-out brush and saplings across the creek.
But men seemed to fall as fast as they got into line. It was pure murder.
Thorns tore at Blake, but he thrust his body onward. He could not have spent a full minute among the brush and briars, but it seemed to have been hours. All through the trial, he kept watch on the men given into his charge, so much so that he stepped smack into the bowels of a human carcass.
He pulled back his shoe lightning fast, as if he had stepped on a rattler. But the slime of man-guts wet right through to his skin. Looking down, he recognized the dead soldier’s face: one of the color guard.
Then Blake and his men were down in the creekbed, slipping from the muddy bank and splashing into the mild current, struggling to keep their footing on round, wet rocks. Blake welcomed the water as it washed over his ankles and licked his calves, scouring off the grease of another man’s death.