Cain at Gettysburg

by Ralph Peters

  “Reckon he wasn’t,” Charley Campbell agreed, just to pass the time. “Likely right smart.”

  But Cobb wasn’t finished. “Matthew 8:22. ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ Show you why he might’ve been minded that way.” He tromped on a blue-clad corpse’s belly. The Yankee farted monstrously.

  “God awmighty, don’t do that,” Corny yelled. “The stink’s high enough.”

  “Prettiest gal you know, she’d let go the same perfume,” Cobb said. “Let her lie dead in the sun, she’d stink right up. Lace dress, ribbons, and all.” He tapped the Yankee with his toes, playful, threatening. “That there’s just the incense leaving the temple of the flesh.”

  “Well, let that temple be,” Corny told him.

  Cobb returned to Blake’s unbroken stare. “Don’t it strike you funny, Sergeant Blake? I mean, it’s downright unfair. How one dead man just looks like he’s having a sleep under a shade tree, while the next feller’s all bloat and stink and rot and maggots, after a single night. The good Lord does play favorites. Don’t he?”

  “Dead is dead,” Blake said. He bent again to his labor, yanking the belt and cartridge box free. The corpse had stiffened. Empty hands clawed the air.

  “Sure now … you don’t believe that,” Cobb said, winking as if they shared a mighty secret. “Some of these boys must be up there on clouds of cotton, singing out to harps and heavenly trumpets, with niggers washing their feet and serving them beefsteaks. Ain’t that how it is, how it’s supposed to be?”

  Blake considered the profile of the next corpse up the slope. The side of the Yankee’s skull had burst outward, leaving an eyeless gash. If Blake had any faith left, it was dying. As surely as the bodies on that hillside were quit of life.

  It was so strange: Other men found God in war’s commotion. Sunday meetings weren’t enough for them. They sang hymns in the middle of the week, in camp or on the march, and scoured their Bibles by firelight for comfort. Men hid in different ways, it seemed to Blake.

  He wondered about Cobb now. Since the burying of James Bunyan the evening before, curiosity had begun to nibble at him. There had to be more to the man in that foul carcass, its stench worse than a number of the dead. Blake didn’t believe that God had made Cobb what he was. There had to be flesh and blood in his ruination, some earthly tale.

  A detail of soldiers came along for another load of corpses. One man had found a wheelbarrow, but most lugged soiled litters. They did not have to bear their burdens far. The low ground behind the creek, with its softer earth, sufficed for the ditches filling with gray-clad bodies. Yankees were left to themselves and the raccoons.

  Up on the ridge, where McLaws’ men—Barksdale’s brigade—had come up and were having a rest, the 26th North Carolina’s band began to play. “Camptown Races” fought the rattle of skirmishing in the distance, then the musicians blared out “Bonnie Blue Flag.”

  “Ain’t that a comfort?” Cobb snickered. “Takes a feller’s mind right off of everything.”

  Ever the good-tempered barkeep, Charley Campbell said, “I don’t mind it.”

  “Queer, though,” Corny put in. He raised his snout, as if catching a higher scent. “Thought sure they’d be fighting proper by now. All that marching going on. But it don’t sound like much of anything to me.”

  “Takes time for all those generals to figure out how to kill them the most men,” Cobb explained, “Yankees and our’n alike. Glory runs neck and neck with the casualty lists, if you ain’t noticed. They’ll want to outdo whoever went at it yesterday.” He looked around at the human wreckage, the pants shit through in death and the dried blood-gravy. “Show what fine, brave gentlemen they are.”

  “We won yesterday,” Corny said. His voice was sullen. He’d clearly had enough of Cobb and his teasing.

  “Now, that’s a plain fact,” Cobb agreed. “We just whupped the piss and pride right out of the Yankees, and that’s a God-honest fact no man can dispute.” He grinned. “Why don’t you ask that dead boy you’re fiddling with how he feels about it?”

  “That’s enough now,” Blake said. His tone made it clear that Cobb had reached a limit.

  Yet, Blake could not but feel the rightness in what Cobb said. He had waited for the customary elation victory had delivered in the past, but the joy had been unwilling to appear. The one brief rise in spirits Blake had known had come that morning, when a Moravian from the band mentioned seeing Hugh Gordon the afternoon before, bloody down one side but alive, walking back up the road over which they had marched. Blake would have liked to search the field hospitals for him, but orders had come down to tend to their dead. So the regiment’s survivors gleaned the fields, leaving back ashen officers and Colonel Burgwyn’s nigger. The darkey wept inconsolably.

  Blake tossed his harvest of belts and leather boxes atop a fresh pile the others had begun. Just up the slope, a dead man in blue still wore a good pair of shoes. It seemed a wonder they had not already been taken. The brogues looked about Blake’s size, and he was tempted. His left sole was worn beyond fixing, and the right had a hole down front. But he could not make himself do it, could not take from the dead. He asked himself if he was just embarrassed at the prospect of being seen, and smiled grimly. Cobb would never let him forget it, if he took those shoes. That much was certain.

  But there was more to it. The thought of slipping on a dead man’s shoes chilled him unreasonably.

  Blake moved along.

  The dead came in all God’s varieties, favored and shunned. Cobb had that much right. A few had bloated already: the carefree who went into battle with full bellies. Others remained lean, as in life, but their limbs skewed like the branches of stunted trees. Some intact faces were boyish, angelic. Others had glimpsed an eternity of torment. Then there were men with no faces at all, their features shot away or already gnawed by dark-time animals.

  “I hate this,” John Bunyan said. Loudly. It was the first time he had spoken since breakfast, and his remarks back then had been limited to his needs. Thinking about his dead twin brother. And God knew what else. The boy worked steadily, but his spirit was truant.

  “None of us likes it,” Blake told him.

  Back on the ridge, the band played “Rock of Ages.” Then they livened things up again with a polka.

  * * *

  Longstreet sat on the fallen tree, eating hot biscuits with farm butter and waiting for Lee’s return. General Hood squatted beside him in the Indian fashion, discussing the day’s prospects.

  “General Lee’s a little nervous this morning,” Longstreet said, careful of his language but unable to fully resist the need to complain. “He wishes me to attack.” Longstreet shook his head with stiff-necked slowness. “I do not wish to do so without Pickett. I never like to go into battle with one boot off.”

  Hood spit, then said, “Well, get me Law, at least. If we’re to go in with only two divisions, I’m going to need those Alabama boys.”

  Longstreet nodded. “When do you expect Brother Law?”

  Hood drew out his watch and found it had stopped. “Damn it.”

  “Quarter after ten,” Longstreet told him.

  The Kentuckian shook his watch hard, then set to winding it. “Damn timepiece is mulish as a Mexican. Couple of hours. By one, surely. Maybe before. Law’s a hard marcher.” Hood thought about it. “His boys’ll be tired, but game.”

  “I believe that General Lee will listen to reason,” Longstreet said. “Regarding Law, at least. But the truth is I don’t wish to make this attack.” He bit into a last biscuit and talked through the chewing. “If we’re to attack … if we have to do it … I’d prefer to hit them with everything at once. Get it over. Finish it. I don’t like piecemeal fights.”

  Hood refused to share Longstreet’s despondency. “Once we get at ’em, I reckon we’ll do well enough. Hit them hard on the flank, they’ll fold. Always do.”

  Relieving Longstreet of the need to reply, the foreign observers decided the time had come to ambush the two genera
ls.

  “But this is splendid!” Fremantle declared. “What a marvelous thing it is to see both armies in full battle array! One does expect a good show.”

  “There’ll be a show, all right,” Longstreet said.

  Oblivious as ever, the Englishman plunged onward. “Oh, no doubt, no doubt. Really, General, it’s everything one hears, and more besides. Even the weather … the sunrise this morning put me in mind of Austerlitz. The ‘sun of Austerlitz,’ you know. I mean, I thought it rather a good sign, didn’t you?” He glanced from general to general, sparkling with delight at himself and the adventure of the day. “I say, what do you think of these rumors about Vicksburg? They say this fellow Grant’s been crushed to bits, that he turned tail.”

  Longstreet snorted. “Sam Grant might be crushed. But he wouldn’t turn tail.”

  “They say he’s nothing but a common drunkard.”

  Longstreet thought of his last glimpse of his friend in that hotel lobby. With Grant’s face earnest as a saint’s as he insisted Longstreet accept the gold piece he clearly could not afford to give up.

  “He’s emptied a bottle now and then,” Longstreet said. “We all have. But I never knew the man to be a drunk. Nor common.”

  “But everyone’s saying that Vicksburg’s been redeemed. That it’s a great victory for your cause, that the tide has turned decisively.”

  “I’d be glad to hear it. But I haven’t heard it from anybody with a mite of knowledge on the subject.”

  He thought again of Grant. Born with a whipped face and a mighty heart, red hair flying as he jumped a horse higher than any man in the history of West Point. And Grant chafing at his quartermaster’s duties in Mexico, finding every excuse to get into the fighting. A man who had never uttered a dishonest word, who could not. Longstreet had sensed an untapped strength in his fellow cadet. Back when “Uncle Sam Grant” had been the quietest man in the barracks.

  “Near as I can tell,” Hood announced, “the trouble with Grant is that he don’t know when he’s licked.” He laughed, but harshly. “Take Shiloh. Sidney Johnston beat him fair and square. And look what happened. No, sir, if that stubborn sonofabitch ran off from Vicksburg, I expect he was running toward poor Joe Johnston. With a mind to whup him. If I’m wrong, I’ll eat my boot and call it a pork chop.”

  Disappointed by the generals’ attitudes, Fremantle changed the subject. “There’s a Union signal outpost on the nearer of those hills, you know.”

  “Saw it,” Longstreet said. “’Long as they don’t haul up a battery and a good brigade, it’ll be all right.”

  “Hard to believe they haven’t,” Hood remarked. “That’s one mistake George Meade’s going to find costly.”

  With Fremantle momentarily silenced, Scheibert, the Prussian, thrust in. As the sun browned his face, his dueling scars—livid white—had become more prominent.

  “General Longstreet, I must tell you a thing,” he announced. “I have spoken with Unionist prisoners, men who are from Germany in their origins. They are disreputable people. Before they fled wie Ratten from their homelands, they have rebelled against their sovereigns, against their governments. They are traitors, these men.”

  Hood looked at Longstreet with a smile that spread his beard around his mouth. They had shared a realization.

  Inflamed by his own speech, the Prussian added, “They deserve to be shot.”

  Longstreet aped deep thought. And tried not to laugh. At last, he said, “Well, now, that isn’t quite the way we do things, Colonel Scheibert. Much as a man might like to from time to time. And I’m embarrassed to point out that General Hood and I are in pretty much the same boat as those Dutchmen. General Lee, too. All of us. We’re guilty of the sin of rebellion ourselves.”

  Taken aback, the Prussian stammered on: “But … this is different. Die Lage ist ganz anders. You … are making a fight to keep things as they are, is that not so? The Unionists are those who wish to change all things, to upset society and the proper relations of superior and inferior. For my example, I take the situation of the Negro, who they would raise from the position the Herrgott has given him. This cannot be, there must be proper order. Am I not correct?”

  Longstreet thought of the pistol-whipped darkey in the chain of prisoners he’d met west of the mountain.

  Before he could speak, Hood tore into the Prussian: “It ain’t just about niggers. Damn it, man. It’s about the freedom of God-fearing men to say, ‘This here’s mine, and it ain’t yours, so keep your dirty hands off it.’ It’s about states’ rights, and damned Yankee bankers worse than Jews. And a Congress that sees more good in a factory than a cotton field. It’s about the proper respect due to a man, it’s about our freedom.” Out of words, he grunted. “You go on over and talk to General Barksdale with McLaws’ bunch. He can put it a sight better than me.”

  “I have not wished to give offense,” the Prussian pleaded.

  “None taken, Colonel,” Longstreet assured him. “General Hood here’s just itching for a fight, and he’s a fellow takes on all comers. We value your presence … and your sovereign’s goodwill.”

  “The Unionists must not be allowed to overturn your society,” Scheibert grumbled. “We must defend the proper order of things. That is all I have wished to say.”

  “And it was well said, sir,” Longstreet told him. He just wished the pack of them would disappear. He lacked Lee’s faith in the efficacy of foreign opinion. And he didn’t care for a one of them, save Ross, the not-exactly-Austrian, who could be merry and had an eye for a dainty ankle. Ross would have fit right in on a fine plantation, raising Hell and taking things as they came. Scheibert would have had a slave uprising on his hands.

  Lee returned at eleven. His retinue consisted of more staff officers than had ridden off with him earlier. When the old man dismounted, Longstreet noted that he didn’t rush to relieve his afflicted bowels. He looked more vigorous.

  Posture perfect and uniform only mildly offended by dust, Lee approached them. Longstreet and Hood rose. The foreign contingent nodded and stepped back a pace or two. Scheibert cracked to attention and saluted.

  “You will pardon us,” Lee told the observers and lurking newspapermen. They faded away. No man questioned Lee.

  That was a significant piece of the problem, Longstreet believed. The old man wasn’t used to having his judgment challenged anymore. He’d been winning too long, making it all look easy. While the butcher’s bills swelled.

  One of Lee’s staff men, Venable, spread the headquarters’ map over the ground again. Longstreet spotted Porter Alexander, who would command the artillery for the attack, and waved him over. McLaws had returned to his division, as ordered. Muttering. And justifiably, Longstreet felt bound to admit. He had been as unfair to McLaws as Lee had been to him.

  Lee began with Longstreet: “Have your divisions marched for their attack positions, General?”

  Longstreet felt hit from the rear. Clearly, he and the old man had misunderstood each other. “No, sir. I thought I was to await your final plan.”

  Lee’s face pinked, but the old man mastered himself.

  Might as well get it over with, Longstreet decided. “And I’d prefer to wait on Law’s brigade, General. Since I won’t have Pickett.”

  Lee appeared impatient, but asked, “When is General Law expected on the field?”

  “Noon hour,” Hood answered. “Thereabouts.”

  The old man nodded. “We can wait no longer than that.” He glanced toward the Union lines, but did not really look at them. “We have lost much of the day and will need to move boldly.” He knelt to the map.

  Instantly, the other officers got to their knees around him. As if it were a prayer meeting, Longstreet thought.

  Lee traced his index finger over the heavy paper. It showed roads in some detail, but only the most important landscape features—and those poorly. “General Longstreet, your divisions will attack abreast. Here. As we decided earlier. They will advance up this road and strike those peo
ple on the flank. You will have the element of surprise to add to the force of your blow.”

  “If we’re not seen,” Longstreet said. “Meade has a signal station on the lower hill now. They might spot us marching up.”

  Lee dismissed the concern. “Captain Johnston has been over the ground. He assures me you won’t be detected. He will guide your corps himself.”

  Rifle fire erupted to the south, farther down the ridge on which they had gathered.

  Longstreet tensed. “That’s more than skirmishing.”

  Lee remained unperturbed. “General Hill is moving General Anderson into position. They doubtless have surprised a forward party.”

  “Pretty far forward,” Hood said.

  Lee gave the division commander a sharp look. It quieted him.

  “I mentioned General Anderson and his division,” Lee said. “You do not have Pickett, General Longstreet, but Anderson will cooperate with you. When you have advanced successfully on the Union’s left flank, here and here, he will strike their left-center. It will have the effect of an oblique attack.”

  “What’s Ewell supposed to do?” Longstreet asked. “With his corps?”

  Again, Lee was annoyed. “General Ewell will make a simultaneous demonstration. He will bid for General Meade’s attention and render him unsure as to where to commit his reserves.”

  “What triggers Ewell’s ‘demonstration’?” Longstreet asked.

  “He will move at the sound of your guns.” Lee scanned the second rank of kneeling officers and stopped at Porter Alexander. “I anticipate, Colonel Alexander, that your gunnery will be loud enough to be heard?”

  From Lee, that passed as a joke. His subordinates murmured appreciatively.

  “Yes, sir,” Alexander replied. “They’ll be loud enough.”

  The old man looked around the assembly of officers, awaiting questions, but not really inviting them.

  “We understand each other, gentlemen? As to what is expected?”

  No man denied it.

  “Then it’s time to look to our duties,” Lee concluded. “We must strike swiftly now. General Longstreet, you will set your divisions in motion.” He surveyed the earnest faces a last time and swept a hand toward the Union lines. “If God wills it, we will meet again on the other side of those fields.”