by Ralph Peters
The barkeep did as bidden, promptly, moving as fast as a man tired to failing could make himself go, heading across a half-mile of fields.
They all need to belong, Blake thought, heaving up another shovel load. Even Cobb, in his way. Why don’t I feel it? Under all the yes-sir-no-sir, why don’t I feel that need?
Pausing to rest his weight on the shovel, Blake asked, “Deep enough?”
Tight beside him, John Bunyan stopped digging. Blake had grasped that, if he didn’t put a stop to things, the boy would burrow right on through to China.
The twin peered over the lip of the grave and beyond the cluster of trees. To the west, shadows deepened on the mountain the army had crossed to come to this place. Then the boy looked at his worn shoes and Blake’s.
“I reckon.”
“Dog nor man won’t get him down that deep,” Corny assured him.
“Anyway,” Cobb added, “dogs’ll have easier pickings after today.”
“He’ll still be here, you ever want to bring family back,” Blake said.
For a long moment, they listened to the slackened gunnery in the east, beyond the corpse-laden ridges and the town.
Another chill thought pierced Blake.
“The Yankees aren’t leaving,” he said.
“How’s that?” Corny asked. Every man among them had believed this battle won and done.
“They aren’t leaving. Just listen. Listen to how quiet it’s gotten.”
“It ain’t quiet,” Cobb said. And he was right. Desultory firing continued. With the shovel-blade-on-stones digging done, the shrieks from the field hospital back along the pike carried over, too.
“Not quiet. Just quieter.”
He saw the realization dawn on Cobb. But the little man’s ravaged face went blank again.
“If the Yankees were running, we’d be on them,” Blake explained. “There’s light left. We’d be after them like hounds on a three-legged fox. And we’d hear it.”
“After we whipped them like that?” John Bunyan asked. His voice was near despair. “We’re going to have to fight them again? Here?”
Blake shrugged. “Somebody will. Maybe not us.” Through a fine field of oats, Charley Campbell strode toward them. Laden with their canteens. Blake promised himself, swore to himself, that they would be full of cool well water. “All right. We need to bury James and get on back.”
So they laid him gently in his grave in a Pennsylvania field, and they shoveled in the dirt again as the living brother watched. Used to makeshift, backcountry doings, Cobb fashioned a cross by deep-notching a fallen branch and forcing a stick down into it horizontally.
He held it out to John Bunyan. “Put this in the ground there, boy.”
The cross got the twin thinking. “We need to say some words. Some scripture.”
Blake could have done so. He could have spewed out chapter and verse until morning. But he did not want to do it. Not that. He feared the words would come fouled from his mouth. The dead boy deserved a sincere voice at the last.
“My Bible’s in my knapsack,” Corny said. “Wherever that happens to be.”
Charley came up with the canteens. Blake heard water sloshing. Charley grinned, let the canteens settle to the ground, and drew a roll of pressed meat and a loaf from under his jacket.
“They would’ve give me the parlor furniture and at least one of the children, they’re so scared.”
Take. Eat. Drink. This is my body, and this is my blood …
“Know any Bible words by heart, Charley?” Blake asked. Offering the man a chance to come another step closer to his new family.
Charley thought it over, then said, “Not the right ones, I reckon.”
Let down at the last, John Bunyan looked like a beat-on pup. Resigning himself, Blake took a long swallow of the finest water he had ever tasted and prepared to speak the words that had to be said.
Before Blake finished drinking, though, Cobb stepped up to the head of the grave and straightened himself behind the cross he had fashioned.
The foul little man spoke in beauteous mimic of a preacher for whom the Word itself was wine:
And when all the children of Israel saw how the fire came down, and the glory of the LORD upon the house, they bowed themselves with their faces to the ground upon the pavement, and worshipped, and praised the LORD, saying, For he is good; for his mercy endureth forever.… Then the king and all the people offered sacrifices to the LORD.
Cobb poured a brief stream of water onto the grave, then continued, “Lord … we commend unto you your poor servant, this fine boy, young James Bunyan, who never hurt nothing or no one he wasn’t made to by the ways of this world, who strayed not into temptation, but done his duty to God and man, and loved his kinfolk. We ask, Lord, that you take James to your bosom, where he will shine as true as he done upon this earth. And we ask your mercy, Lord, on those James left down here amid trial and tribulation, when his enemies and thine slew him. Their wickedness has lifted him on high, above this vale of sorrow and into your grace. Amen.
“Them words do?” he asked John Bunyan.
The twin nodded his contentment.
And they went back across the ridges and through the swale, past the calling of the men on the surgeons’ tables, and they returned their borrowed tools to the artillerymen.
“Huh,” a black-eyed sergeant said. “Never thought I’d see you boys again.”
“Thank you,” Blake told him. It seemed a time for civilities.
They ate as they walked, selfish, knowing that to share further would break this bond of complicity and help no one. By the time they reached the spotty grove and backslope where the 26th North Carolina mourned, they had almost missed the muster.
The regiment had gone into the attack with 800 men that morning. Just 212 answered when the roll was called. Blake’s company had begun the day with 89 men. Only 19 remained alive and whole. Nor had their supply wagons appeared. So the rest of the men had not even the small, wonderful portions Blake and his soldiers had enjoyed as a funeral feast.
Up the ridge a throw, by the tavern pump, men lined up for water.
“I can go this time,” Corny said. “I don’t mind standing a wait.”
“Later,” Blake told him. “And we’ll draw straws.” It was his way of welcoming the two other men closer. Close enough to have something a man might depend on.
Campfires came alight in the gloaming. There was as yet no food for the regiment to cook, nor even coffee, but the fires had another purpose, intended to fend off the spirits that had followed the ancestors of these men from moors and fens, from brutally enclosed pastures and wild, bare mountains, following them across the great water and into new moors and glens, then following them here, to this place of death, relentless and mocking.
A captain none of them recognized came by. His uniform had not been disturbed by the day’s events. The sword he wore looked sure to have been the gift of a wealthy father.
The officer stopped before them, a wonderfully self-confident young man. Handsome enough to trouble a rival beau.
“Come now, boys … not enough strength left to build yourselves a fire?”
“Ain’t no food to cook,” Cobb told him.
“Too damn hot,” Charley Campbell said.
The officer was nonplussed. After regrouping, he attacked from another angle.
“Well,” he said, “I can understand that … if you’re weary, I suppose.” He tried for a jocular tone. “We’re all pretty tuckered out, indeed we are. It’s been quite a day. Your regiment did magnificent service, though, simply magnificent. And it did not go unnoticed. Do you know what the message said that General Pettigrew sent to Colonel Burgwyn?”
“Before he died?” Blake asked. “Or after?”
“Before,” the captain said hastily. “I’m sure it was before. I understand that your colonel didn’t … that he didn’t perish immediately. But don’t you want to know what General Pettigrew said? About all of you?”
Charley Campbell, whose tavern work had taught him to deal with a great assortment of men, said, “Be good to hear it, sir. Why don’t you tell us?”
Cobb guffawed.
In a voice clipped back, the officer told them, “General Pettigrew said—and these are his exact words, mind you—that your ‘regiment has covered itself with glory today.’”
“That’s right nice,” Cobb said. “Got any tobacco?”
* * *
When Longstreet rode up, the old man was engaged with correcting and signing orders. Surrounded by Taylor and his other staff men, Lee stood behind a table that had been dragged outside and placed under a tree. He nodded toward Longstreet and briefly raised a hand, a gesture at once of greeting and a signal to be patient.
Tired and stiff, Longstreet swung out of the saddle, landing so flat-footed that it jarred his spine. He had spent the day hurrying McLaws and Hood through the mountains toward the gun-thunder. Pickett still trailed the army, ostentatiously enthused about battle and full of excuses why he didn’t move faster. When Longstreet had seen that he could do no more in the rear, and after a tease from Hood about trying to outshine Jackson, he had ridden on to Gettysburg. His own staff followed after, dogged by the English varmint, Lieutenant Colonel Fremantle.
What Longstreet saw along the way and heard at brief stops on the pike had troubled him. He had never encountered such a mix of the triumphant spirit of victory and the desolation of commanders who had lost much of their commands. One of Heth’s staff officers had confessed to casualties of 75 percent in some regiments, with entire brigades broken. Those were numbers the South could not replace. Heth himself had been wounded, his division passing to Pettigrew. Longstreet thought of Pettigrew as the “Dancing Master,” but he was fair-minded enough to recognize that the man displayed more sense than Harry Heth.
Yet, if some officers appeared stunned by the day’s costs, others were jubilant, yapping about destroying a Yankee corps in “the most gallant charges ever a man did see.” And for all the wounded streaming rearward or laid out in the fields by the surgeons’ butcher shops, it did seem that the Federals had suffered a far worse day than the Army of Northern Virginia.
Done was done. Longstreet worried about what would come next.
His staff men had a good sense of when to leave him alone and they held back now, tethering their horses in the shade of a proud-got-up building that clearly belonged to some form of institution. Longstreet patted Hero’s wet neck, getting the horse-smell the way you never quite did in the saddle, then took a long swig from his flask. The horse shook his head, sneezing, and clopped a half-step backward. Longstreet steadied the creature and drew out his field glasses. At a nod, Tom Goree came up to lead off the mount. Fremantle had to be restrained from leaping forward with more of his pestering questions.
Longstreet walked a dozen paces beyond the cluster of buildings on the ridge and out on a rough-kept lawn. He didn’t use the glasses at first, but took in the entire sweep of the landscape. The town filled the left side of his span of vision, but on the right a shallow cradle of fields separated him from the Federals, who were gradually filling in lines along a low ridge a mile away. But the feature that seized his attention rose behind the town.
He raised the glasses. The hill was a graveyard domain, crowded now with living men in blue. As he watched, Union soldiers filtered back from the town, singly, in pairs, or in clusters, few of them running and some pausing to fire rearward, no longer under concerted pressure from his own kind. Their destination was a low stone wall lined with their fellows.
That wall should have been taken. Longstreet could not understand why the assault had stopped short, why Hill had not pushed right through the town to the high ground, once he was well at it. Hill, with his ruined loins and fevered eyes. Lee, too, had been present. Why hadn’t he insisted on driving the Federals hard, when Hill wavered? That was, after all, the old man’s fashion in a fight, that excited and merciless appetite of his for the kill at the end of the hunt. What had happened?
Longstreet understood the many ways in which attacks just come to a stop all on their own, running out of go. But this case looked to him like inattention.
With every passing hour, that Federal position was only going to strengthen. Already, the hill wore a fiery tiara of cannon. It was the finest position the Army of the Potomac had occupied since Malvern Hill.
Was that all for the better, though? Would the inherent superiority of Meade’s position deter the old man from fighting on the aggressive? Would he see the light at last?
Steadying the glasses, Longstreet scanned the emerging Union line from the gun-encrusted skull on the left, down along the declining ridge, past the last infantry regiment to arrive, and on to where cavalry pickets had pushed out into the fields and meadows. Beyond them, the landscape sank obscurely, only to cast up a pair of smooth-top hills. The hill farther to the south was notably higher, but more thickly wooded and less useful to artillery. The low hill was key.
If Meade had the men present and the common sense to occupy those hills by the next morning, his line would not be turned upon that flank and on this field. In that case, the old man would have to listen to reason and agree, at last, to slip deep behind the Union left, settle on good ground between Meade and Washington, and force the Union commander to do the attacking.
Longstreet surveyed the ridge again, guiding the tunnel of sight past galloping couriers and fresh regiments arriving, drawn back to that gun-clad cemetery. He watched as caissons delivered more ammunition. Small blue figures stocked shot near the guns. Other artillerymen, stripped to the waist, dug out sheltered positions for their cannon. Below them, foot soldiers in blue urgently added height to stone walls and built up fence-lines with planks and dirt. On a promontory below a brick gatehouse, a battery line flamed and recoiled, firing northward. Toward Ewell’s men, that would be, had to be.
Why hadn’t Dick Ewell run right over that hill, before the Yankees had a chance to fortify it? The man had Tom Jackson’s men under his command, for God’s sake. They would’ve done it on a dare.
It sank in that, if everyone present had lacked the sense to take that position today, it would not be taken. The only possibility was to go around Meade.
Finished with the pen-and-ink work of command, the old man joined him on the lawn.
“I wonder, is General Meade on the field today?” Lee said.
Longstreet saw an opening. “Must be. That’s a position an engineer would choose. You would, sir.”
Lee didn’t take the bait.
“Well, George Meade’s trapped himself good and proper,” Longstreet went on. “You can see he’s concentrating as fast as he can. No, sir, we could not call the enemy to a position better suited to our plans. All we have to do is file around his left and secure good ground between him and his capital.”
The old man’s complexion pinked and he reared back his head as a horse will. Pointing toward the Federal position, he said, “If the enemy is still there tomorrow, we must attack him.”
The old man’s blood was up, it was all too plain.
“Well, if he is still there,” Longstreet said, “it’ll be because he’s anxious that we should attack him … a good reason, in my judgment, for not doing so.”
Lee stared across the fields. Shadows lengthened toward the Union lines.
“It would be folly to assault that cemetery, the way they’re building up,” Longstreet said. “Just look at it. If it was to be done, why wasn’t it done today? Before they all piled in. Count the guns up there.”
“I have given General Ewell,” Lee began, “permission to outflank that position this evening, if practicable.”
“Ewell’s not Jackson,” Longstreet said.
Go ahead, Longstreet thought. Say it. Tell me that I’m not Tom Jackson, either.
“He will do his duty.”
Like Stuart? Longstreet almost said. The gay cavalier was still absent, perhaps in Maine by now. “Sir, you sai
d you didn’t want a battle … not one like this … where Meade has such an advantage, where you don’t have proper information…”
In the town, sporadic shots crackled, but there was no meaningful action.
“General Meade,” Lee said, “has tolerably good ground. We have this army. And it cannot be defeated.”
Longstreet turned sharply, as if assailed by a madman. He was about to speak, to protest, when Lee’s unexpected paleness stopped him cold. The old man’s face was greased with sudden sweat.
“If you will excuse me, General Longstreet?” Unsteady, his eyes were already fleeing, before his feet could act.
The old man hurried off, moving much more rapidly and with far less grace than was his habit. Longstreet understood. Lee’s guts were in rebellion again, a situation that always unsettled and angered the old man, part embarrassment at the human condition and part outrage that his own body would be disobedient.
It was not a good situation. The day’s win, costly though it had been, had gotten the old man’s blood up. Now he was going to be sick-cranky and stubborn as a mule, too.
It cannot be defeated. Longstreet felt stricken by the remark, as if hit by a spent ball. The army had never taken the field that could not be defeated. Especially if its generals believed it could not be defeated. Look at Xerxes … the French knights at Agincourt … Charles XII … Napoleon …
Longstreet raised the glasses to his eyes again. If Ewell was going to outflank anybody, he had damned well better do it soon. As Longstreet watched, another Federal regiment crested the ridge in the distance, coming on in columns of companies to extend the line behind still more stone walls.
Madness.
Or was it, Longstreet wondered, just plain pride? The sort of I-won’t-give-one-inch-damn-you pride that had led South Carolina out, followed by the rest of them. To what extent had Lee succumbed to the siren song of glory? Seduced by the mighty victories to his credit? To what degree had all of them succumbed? Had they been numbed by their triumphs?
Pride comes before a fall. There never was an army that could not be defeated. Never. Longstreet could not recall hearing Lee or any other man utter such dreadful words until this hour. It put fear in him.