Cain at Gettysburg

by Ralph Peters

  “Die Offizieren sind ja alle weg, Herr Hauptmann!” Bettelman explained. The officers are all gone.

  Hopelessly German even now, the men could not imagine fighting without an officer to lead them. They crowded around Winkler’s horse, begging him to take command of the fraction of a company left of their regiment.

  Their pleas caught fire in Winkler.

  “I must ask General Schurz,” he told them. “Give me room … give me room, men!”

  He turned his horse and spurred it back toward the general.

  Schwertlein and Bettelman watched him go, with Josef Heisler standing just behind them. Schwertlein turned to the would-be poet.

  “How goes it, Josef? Alles in Ordnung?”

  Heisler shrugged, but said nothing. His face was blank.

  “You can write a poem about all this, after it’s over,” Schwertlein told him. “Your masterpiece.”

  Bettelman snorted. “Ja, ja … die Kunst ist lang, und kurz ist unser Leben…”

  Heisler nodded and repeated, in English: “Our life is short…”

  “This is no time for Goethe,” Schwertlein snapped at Bettelman. “Dear God in Heaven…”

  “You don’t believe in God, Fritz. So why call on him? Why do I do it myself, I wonder? The old fellow’s insidious, taking advantage of us the way he does.”

  But Schwertlein, throat raw and mouth burning, had no interest in debating theology with the watchmaker. He just wanted to pull Heisler through the day, to save that one life now. To prove that the man’s dark fantasies had been wrong. He worried more deeply about Heisler than he did about himself.

  Captain Winkler trotted back toward them. Wearing a grin. If leaving the general’s staff to take command of thirty or so men was a demotion, he didn’t show it.

  Winkler formed them up, just to the rear of the desperate struggle beyond the orchard. Before they could move, a stray bullet hit a soldier in the arm, splitting the bone. Winkler ordered him to make his way back to the hill beyond the town. Then he led his little band, with its torn colors waving, back to a white cottage where the town began.

  Other elements of the brigade had gathered there.

  “Hurry,” Winkler ordered. “At the double-quick. We’re going to make a stand.”

  The captain knew more of the situation than they did, Schwertlein assumed. But before they could find a place in the ragged line, blue-clad fugitives fled past them again. The new line, the fresh regiments, had not held.

  “Here they come!” someone shouted.

  With an unearthly howl, a Rebel regiment surged toward them from the right. No matter where they tried to make a stand, the Confederates swept in around them, behind them, appearing everywhere.

  “Regiment!” Winkler barked. “Left into line, wheel! Guide on me!”

  His commands were interrupted by a massed volley from the gray line.

  “Retreat!” someone shouted from another unit. Others took up the cry.

  “Who said that? On whose order?” Winkler demanded. None of the men beyond his own small band paid him any attention.

  The captain looked ready to kill any living thing before him, friend, foe, or neutral. His forlorn-hope command had not lasted long.

  He ordered his men back.

  But they had not gone far among the fugitives and wounded before they found a remnant of the 119th New York defending a street a block inside the town. Winkler ordered his soldiers to join them. Schwertlein recognized at least one 75th Pennsylvania man, too. But the 82nd Ohio seemed to have been swallowed whole.

  With a peculiar rage born of weariness and shame, the men fired into the gray attackers funneling into the street. Truthful or not, some men called that they were out of ammunition and made for the rear.

  “Maintain your line,” Winkler called. “Don’t worry about which regiment you’re in. Just keep firing.”

  But the captain’s voice had grown desperate. Anyone could see that the street could not be held.

  From nowhere, a caisson materialized, belatedly fleeing the Rebels, dashing in between their barefoot skirmishers. Despite hunching low, the driver fell to a shot.

  The caisson careened wildly toward the remnant of Krzyzanowski’s brigade, doing what the Confederates could not.

  The team of horses crashed into the rank of blue-coated soldiers, breaking it utterly. Men shoved, tripped, and leapt sideward as they fled from the maddened beasts and the crippling wheels. In the chaos, a soldier from the 119th New York accidentally shot Heisler in the head.

  * * *

  “You must go to the rear!” General Schurz told him. “You can’t even stand up straight.”

  A broken army retreated around them, crowding the street.

  Krzyzanowski looked up at the mounted man and shook his head. “I have to find my brigade.”

  “Don’t be insane, Kriz.”

  Madness had overtaken the town’s center. While struggling to save as much as possible of the corps he’d inherited, Schurz had found Krzyzanowski limping forward, sword in hand.

  “I will not desert my brigade.”

  “You’re wounded. For God’s sake, look at you!”

  “I have to find my brigade.”

  Schurz looked away. “You don’t have a brigade, Kriz. It’s gone.”

  “I’ll find what’s left of it.”

  “Listen to me! Your men gave a good account of themselves, they were heroic. But it didn’t go our way. Now we have to rescue what we can. The survivors of your brigade will need a commander. Back there, on the hill, not here. All you’re going to do is get yourself captured. If not killed.”

  “Maybe killed. Not captured.”

  “Don’t be so damned Polish. This is a time for common sense, not romantic gestures.”

  “Sometimes gestures are more useful than sense.” He winced as his smashed ribs bit into his body again. As General Schurz looked down from the back of his impatient horse, Krzyzanowski spit up more blood.

  “I don’t have any more time,” Schurz told him. “I order you to go back to the cemetery. Take the mount from the first healthy officer you find.”

  “No.”

  “Damn you, Kriz, I’ll have you court-martialed.”

  Krzyzanowski smiled. “I thought I was going to be captured or killed, sir?” And the crippled colonel turned his back on the general to push his way into the wreck of a terrified army.

  He limped. Wheezing. Coughing and suffering lightning bolts of pain. Hatless and missing a shoulder board, he set his face in the fiercest look he could conjure and held his sword ready as he twisted himself forward. The effect was strange and wonderful: Almost biblically, the sea of frightened men parted before him. Everyone feared a madman.

  It couldn’t end like this, that was the thing. Not with this vast giving up, this flight that lacked even the dignity of a surrender. It broke his heart that he’d been carried from the field, only to wake in a genteel parlor with hammer blows inside his head and invisible spikes driven into his left side. He told himself that his ancestors had fought for hours and days in worse condition. But he wondered if that were true.

  A soldier jostled him. The pain-lightning shot through his chest again. The Pole stumbled to the nearest wall to steady himself and coughed up a dark ball of blood. The mortal meat was not having its best day.

  Then he shuffled around a corner and met the most thrilling sight of his life: In the town square, amid tipped wagons, crawling wounded, and scattered corpses, the flag of the 119th New York stood defiantly beside a pair of cannon blasting the Rebels.

  He recognized powder-blackened faces in profile, men from the 119th and his other regiments, fighting on as the rest of the army fled.

  Krzyzanowski attempted to raise his sword, but the daggers where his ribs had been resisted. He called out through bloody phlegm, but could not be heard.

  A big sergeant, wild-eyed and running, knocked him to the ground. Not one of his men, thank the Almighty. Krzyzanowski struggled back to his feet.
In the worst pain of his life.

  As the Pole approached the handful of stubborn warriors, a corporal who had turned to reload called out, “Es ist der Kriz! Der Kriz ist wieder da!”

  Soldiers looked right and left until their bloodshot eyes discovered him. But he saw, too, how their expressions wavered as they watched him struggle forward, a bent-over creature.

  A sergeant with a bloodied scalp saluted.

  Krzyzanowski corrected his posture as best he could to return the salute. And he found his voice again.

  “Dress on the colors, damn you!” he shouted. “This isn’t a Russian whorehouse!”

  And Wlodzimierz Krzyzanowski went back to war.

  * * *

  Schwertlein and Bettelman had become separated from the remains of the regiment. There were no longer explanations for such things: The world just did as it pleased with the day’s survivors. A storm of humanity battered the town, which had seemed so small that morning, but had since become a boundless maze of dead-end streets and alleys blocked by Confederates. There was no sense to the place now: A street remained in Union hands, with clusters of soldiers still fighting, while the next lane, closer to the supposedly safe side of town, was packed with Rebels herding Yankee prisoners.

  They had seen panicked officers ride their own men down, while others gave up their horses to the wounded. They had watched as a soldier was trampled to death by a blue mob, but other soldiers paused to aid wounded men whose names they would never know. Cannon fired down streets. Before one house, a woman shouted imperiously that they should all stop shooting, because they were destroying private property.

  As they reached the end of another useless street, Bettelman said, “Scheisse.”

  Giddy, Schwertlein laughed. “You need to expand your vocabulary, Leo.”

  “What are you laughing about? Good God, Fritz! This isn’t funny.”

  A gang of soldiers had rewarded themselves with liquor as they waited, weapons discarded, for the Rebels to round them up.

  Even then, Schwertlein could hear that there was still fighting in the town’s guts. But he had answered to the last orders to withdraw. Now the events around him seemed a grim comedy.

  In an oddly quiet lane, he and Bettelman shied from a wide-eyed corpse in blue. Someone had already stripped off the boy’s shoes and turned out his pockets.

  They stumbled back into the retreating stream and plodded along in what the mass of men deemed the right direction. All too soon, an eruption of firing on the left led to cries of “We’re surrounded!” and another panic. Made cowards by the day, men ran, heedless of the direction.

  Some men still held their rifles, though. That was something. Schwertlein and Bettelman had theirs.

  The street rose. From a low crest, Schwertlein saw a pulsing blue river ahead. The mood was very different now from the buoyant spirits they’d felt just hours before, when the townspeople cheered them as saviors.

  Artillerymen trying to save their guns lashed out with whips until those on foot threatened to shoot them. Firing broke out directly ahead, followed by the inevitable cries of “The Rebels!”

  “This won’t work,” Schwertlein said. “Come on.”

  “No more alleys. No more streets that end in brick walls.”

  “Come on. I order you.”

  Bettelman shrugged and followed him.

  Schwertlein believed that he had a sense of which way to go now. He thought he had recognized a number of buildings from their triumphant morning passage. Even if he was deluding himself, it gave him a renewed purpose.

  More shooting broke out behind them. They heard the pleas of men trying to surrender. Catcalls and cries of triumph followed in the accents of a different army.

  “You know what I would like now?” Bettelman asked him.

  “To be home with your wife?”

  “That’s asking too much. I’d settle for a glass of Baden wine. And a nice onion tart.”

  “You’re mad.”

  It was Bettelman’s turn to laugh. “We’re all mad today. You, me, everybody. You saw it. What was the sense in all that? Trenk, Heisler, Schumann…”

  “You should have stayed home and fixed watches.”

  “Einverstanden! Agreed! But I was a fool. Like you. Now here we are. Don’t you feel like a fool this lovely afternoon?”

  At the moment, Schwertlein felt nothing but shame and madness. Plus the determination not to be made a prisoner.

  A door opened and a white-haired man leaned out. Except for the woman concerned about her property, he was the first civilian Schwertlein had seen in the course of the retreat. All of the houses, except those requisitioned as hospitals, were shut up tight now.

  “That way…” The man pointed. “Keep going. Down there. Left at that white house. The path leads into the fields.”

  He disappeared again. A lock turned.

  Schwertlein and Bettelman did as the old man bade them. And the fellow had been the best of Good Samaritans. In minutes, they emerged into a meadow ripe with manure. Hard to the left stood a big red barn. Beyond it, the landscape rose sharply.

  On high ground studded with cannon, orderly ranks of blue-uniformed infantry awaited the day’s survivors. Other regiments, unbloodied, hurried up a road that traced the ridge. Guided by the shouts of confident officers and with battle flags flying, columns wheeled into pastures to extend the Union lines.

  “It looks as if we haven’t had enough,” Bettelman said.

  NINE

  July 1, Late Afternoon and Evening

  Blake tried to talk himself into elation, but it just wouldn’t take. He liked to fight, and he liked to win. But this day was a bitter depletion.

  Part of it was just the lack of water, he figured. As he strode back from the chaos of the town beside his comrades, he felt that slow-me-down hint of dizziness that came from neglected thirst on a hot workday. Maybe, once he got his fill of water, his spirits would lift.

  “Soon as we get back in them woods,” Billie Cobb said, “I’m going to take me a shit.”

  Blake pictured Cobb squatting among the corpses, the wounded. Cobb wouldn’t care, either. His was a sensible approach to life for a soldier, but Cobb’s actions were not the deeds that made it into the history books featuring heroes. Blake remembered, back at school in Waterford, reading about George Washington, who clearly had not had to move his bowels a single time in his life.

  Then Blake thought about the knights in armor in a picture book his mother had given him and which he had hidden from her Quaker folks. What the devil had those fellows in iron suits done, when the need came upon them?

  For the first time in hours, Blake smiled. But there was no happiness in it. Just contrariness.

  At the behest of some officer well to the rear, the remnants of the 26th North Carolina had been ordered into Gettysburg on the tail of Pender’s men. Knock Jones, the major who had been only third in command that morning, was now the senior officer in the regiment. A mustached plug of a man, Jones had formed up his weary men in column, then led them into town, where the ruckus sounded like dogs loosed on a prayer meeting. The order to enter the town had been a fool’s doings, since the streets were already crammed with men in gray and the only visible Yankees were prisoners shuffling rearward. Old Knock, who was twenty-two or so, didn’t quite know what to do or to whom he was meant to report. Eventually, he just turned the men around, marched them back to the edge of town, and waited.

  With the afternoon’s heat and smoke congealed on everyone left alive, a rider worked his way along the pike to tell them that General Pettigrew had ordered his division to fall back to the other side of the creek, to the groves and fields they had occupied in the morning. Questioned sharply, the courier said that, yes, what he had said was correct: General Pettigrew had the division now. General Heth had been wounded in the head.

  “Glad he wasn’t hit where it might’ve done him a hurt,” Cobb observed.

  Then Major Jones led them back the way they had c
ome, through fields upon which the density of dead and wounded increased sharply as they climbed back up the ridge their charge had won.

  Surrounded by battle’s leavings, Blake felt bone weariness and a closing of mental shutters. And thirst. Thirst, as if his insides were shriveling.

  They didn’t march, but trudged back to the scene of their triumph like a pack of country folk coming home late from a cockfight a county over. Knock Jones halted them just where their attack had lost its drive. When the major first tried to speak, his voice would not emerge. His throat was dry, too.

  “Y’all listen now,” Jones managed to tell them. “I know you got kin or friends down in those woods. Go find ’em, but don’t dawdle. Take the wounded on back, but there’ll be no burying of the dead right now. That’ll come. You just get our wounded and take them on back. Then the regiment’s going to muster where we lay down this morning, when we were waiting to go. And I don’t want any man disgracing this proud regiment by wandering off. You do what’s right, hear? Now fall out and get to doing.”

  Blake figured Jones himself was anxious to find out if Colonel Burgwyn had been killed or only wounded. The two had been close, David and Jonathan.

  Lugging their rifles and slumping to the last man, the survivors of the 26th descended into the grove where the day’s butchery had been done. It didn’t take long for men to start calling out names or dropping abruptly to their knees. Some men shared what little water remained to them—if any—with Rebel and Yankee wounded alike, but most ignored the cries and pleas of their enemies. It wasn’t viciousness. It was necessity. The way a man saved family before he did strangers.

  Cobb stepped away to have himself a squat between two dead Yankees.

  “I don’t care what the major says,” John Bunyan declared. “I’m going to bury James.” They were the first words the twin had spoken since they had left the ridge.

  “Just hush,” Blake told him. “We’re going to take James with us, like he’s only wounded. And we’ll bury him back yonder, where it’s clean.”

  The twin went down the hillside in long strides, an inner compass guiding him to the spot where his brother had fallen.