Cain at Gettysburg

by Ralph Peters

  Peculiar things struck him: the way the heads of artillery horses kept time with their hooves … or Bettelman’s hand becoming a claw as he tore meat with his fingers. Blades of grass seemed newly distinct, the smoke-rubbed sky immense. Schwertlein had a sense of revelation, but could not say of what. His mastery of words had been his advantage. Now language crumbled. He sensed a new and richer world around him, but could express nothing that mattered.

  The guns firing on the right increased in number, dueling in murdered light. Still, the bend in the line, the cemetery knob with its jutting spur, was spared by the cannonade.

  Too hard to form for an attack in the streets of the town, Schwertlein told himself. They won’t come this way. We’ve done our part.

  He had lain down to rest amid graves the night before, dreading the apparition of Otto Schumann, who had risen from the bloody field to embrace him again and again in the endless evening. But instead of fighting ghosts, he had dreamed of Maria. More real than the facts of day, his dream had been rude and delicious, vicious and raw, leaving him with soiled undergarments, with cum-stiffened drawers and a sense of loss past telling. Nor had embarrassment put an end to his wants: He arose so hungry for woman-flesh that he wasn’t sure any decency remained in him.

  Had other men marked his dreaming? Had he called out? Moved his hips laughably? He chose not to care. He wanted Maria. He wanted a thousand women now. Pure or filthy, he knew what they were and he wanted them. Ruthlessly. His desire felt so blinding he feared madness.

  Otto Schumann had joined the dead and no longer leapt against him with yesterday’s vividness. Lurid dreams had shoved the corpse away. Otto was still there, but on the periphery: Schwertlein could conjure him readily, still feel the blood and meat slop against his cheek. But Schumann was weaker than the beast who had ravished a pliant Maria in the night.

  Schwertlein felt he should use the evening’s doldrums to write to bereaved wives, but made no effort. Hypnotized by death and copulation, he sank into fantasies scarlet and impermissible.

  What was he becoming? What had he become?

  A cynic now, he observed Colonel Krzyzanowski. Kriz limped about, wheezing and wincing, as he inspected, ordered, and rallied his disheartened men. Whenever the Pole’s face grew so glum that the men around him mirrored it, he mustered a smile and joked. The men wanted laughter, they craved it. And the colonel understood. But any fool could see the man was suffering.

  What was there to joke about? Whose wit could help them now? Was Krzyzanowski insane? Why didn’t the damned fool go to the rear and save his life? He had a good excuse. Why didn’t the idiot run to his wife and bury himself in her hips? How could men choose a battlefield over a woman’s flesh? Once the answers had seemed noble and clear. Now they were mockeries.

  Careless of sharpshooters, Kriz paused just beyond his New York regiments, conferring with two generals in the twilight. The officers seemed concerned about the action on the right flank, in the hills to the east of the cemetery.

  The battle on the distant left, the great affair of the day, had sputtered out. A last flush of activity, with regiments pulled from the far side of the cemetery, came to nothing. Night draped the fields and hills. The shooting thinned to gestures of defiance.

  On the right, the guns dueled on. But the cemetery remained a garden of peace.

  For all his new passion for life and its sordid hungers, Schwertlein did not feel a bit afraid. Only sick of all that came with war. He had been reborn as a creature of lust, not fear. If Confederate wraiths emerged from the day’s last glow, he would rise and fight. That was his duty. But he could no longer dress the deed in frills.

  All the philosophy he had read wasn’t worth a dry canteen. Poetry—Goethe, Heine, Hölderlin, Eichendorff—was naught but cakes for children. Only living flesh retained validity. He recalled, with animal hunger, the prostitute in the alley behind the cathedral. He had taken her standing up, in a stable’s archway, his first taste of Eve, in his student days. Drunk when he embraced her, he had spent months dreading the onset of monstrous diseases, but had been spared. He had never again been so rash, but now he viewed his self-restraint as cowardice. He could smell and feel that creature now, exquisite in her squalor, and he wanted her. As he wanted the Maria of his dream, a wanton who took pleasure in his savagery, a squealing, insatiable whore. The battle slew hundreds and thousands, but his mind crowded with orgies, with women named and nameless, real and imagined, all of them naked, hot-fleshed, wet, and shameless.

  Bettelman moaned piteously. He had not been dreaming of women.

  “Leo?” Schwertlein turned to the watchmaker. “Are you all right?”

  “My head’s exploding. This tooth, this tooth … I want to shoot myself.…”

  “The doctors will take care of it. As soon as they’re done with the wounded.”

  Darkness prowled around them, unleashing new stenches.

  “That’ll be months,” Bettelman said.

  Tears glistened on the little man’s face. Schwertlein was seeking helpful words when the sounds of battle shifted. The horrid Confederate shrieking, the screams of damned souls, rose much closer to hand. The wailing swelled just to the right, nearer than the battle had come all day. The Rebel hordes were just beyond the Eleventh Corps’ line, where batteries guarded the spur of the hill past the cemetery gatehouse and the Union line curved like a shepherd’s crook.

  Artillery rounds, shot long, shrilled overhead. All around Schwertlein and Bettelman, soldiers alerted, rustled, grabbed weapons, cursed. The surviving officers herded them into ranks.

  The two comrades found their places.

  Flashes from cannon and rifle fire tore the darkness. The Rebel howling fell, then rose again.

  “Die kommen, die kommen!” a soldier cried. They’re coming.

  “Let them come,” Schwertlein snapped, astonished at the ferocity in his voice. “They need to be killed. Every one of them.”

  He stared up through the hellish light, searching for Krzyzanowski, who had left the anxious generals. Schwertlein understood, of course, why the colonel stayed.

  * * *

  Krzyzanowski did not wait for orders to ready his men. As battle sounds lapped the knob thrusting out from the cemetery, he turned to the fullest of his depleted regiments, the 58th and 119th New York, men he viewed as especially his own, and pulled them back from their places on the line. Forming them up to face toward the tumult beyond the pike, he shouted to be heard above the chaos, calling down his Wisconsin Germans and Pennsylvanians to fill in the gap the New Yorkers had left behind. He knew the latter regiments were too weak to hold, should the Rebs strike here as well. But they’d do for a bluff, and the risk had to be taken.

  Now his New Yorkers stood waiting. But no order came to advance. The streaks of combat in the night made a hell of the knob past the gatehouse. He could not be sure, but feared that the Confederates had already reached the guns of Wiedrich’s battery.

  What were the generals doing? When he had left them, their attention had still been fixed on the fighting on the right. Now the battle had come to them at last. Didn’t Howard see it? Didn’t Schurz?

  “Fix bayonets!” Krzyzanowski barked. Each time he bellowed, his rib case gripped him painfully. Short of breath and aching, he tramped down the line of soldiers, struggling to make out the flow of the fight in the darkness.

  The violence, near and confused, intensified.

  He decided to wait no longer. Someone had to act. Let them court-martial him. Someone had to rescue Wiedrich’s guns.

  Before he could give the command to advance, General Schurz came up on foot, followed by his aide, Captain Szenowski, a fellow Pole.

  “Howard needs you to restore the line,” Schurz called. “Verdammt noch mal, Kriz. Can you see what’s going on?”

  “The guns,” Krzyzanowski shouted above the blasts. “They’ve reached the guns.”

  “For God’s sake, then, go forward!”

  Krzyzanowski turned to
his men. This was no longer a matter for generals or strategy. He drew his sword, clutched it tight, and uncased his pistol.

  “At the double-quick … forward!”

  Ready for revenge, the soldiers howled.

  They had not far to go. Only distance enough for Krzyzanowski to note that Szenowski kept pace with him, leaving his general behind. Krzyzanowski wanted to call out that a Pole just couldn’t resist a desperate battle, but needed all his breath to keep pace with his men.

  His ribs stabbed him.

  “Double-quick!” he shouted again, unnecessarily. “Bayonets! Gib mal Bajonetten!”

  Mary, Mother of God, be with us now.

  They swept across the road past the cemetery, plunging into the melee by the guns. Reality came in cracks and flares of light, revealing Union gunners fighting hand to hand with Confederates in a wild array of uniforms, from a poor-farmer’s tatters to the flamboyant garb of Zouaves. Rebels leapt atop cannon, only to be shot or knocked down again. Wiedrich’s artillerymen fought with pistols, hand-spikes, rammers, sponge-poles, and discarded rifles taken up as clubs. A cannoneer swung a wooden bucket madly.

  The New Yorkers slammed into the brawl, four hundred furious men, determined to avenge themselves for the previous day’s debacle. A Confederate officer climbed up on a gun carriage, waving a flag. He was shot, then shot again, and bayoneted as he fell to earth. Men fired rifles a foot from the chests of their enemies, blowing them backward. The quick glare of muzzle flashes lit faces aghast, amazed, bitter, proud, and unrelenting. Men bared their teeth like dogs brought up to bite. Outnumbered now and too pressed to reload, the Rebels swung rifle butts or thrust bayonets into the enveloping blue swarm.

  With battle swirling about him, Krzyzanowski knew that he had to maintain what control of his men he could. But he, too, wanted to fight in the rawest physical sense. An hour before, a stray Confederate shell had killed his adjutant, Louis Dietrich, the last of the close-knit staff officers the first day’s fighting had left him. He had felt the loss more grievously than a veteran would have expected.

  He fired his pistol into the side of a Rebel struggling, rifle pressed to rifle, with a bearded sergeant from the 58th, then raised his sword as high as his ribs allowed.

  “Don’t stop, don’t stop! Forward, boys! Drive them!”

  Amid grimaces glimpsed during blinks of light, and to the accompaniment of mixed cries of spite and triumph, Krzyzanowski strode forward, drawing his men along by strength of will.

  Moving again, the soldiers found that they wanted to come along, to surge toward the Confederate lines invisible in the dark, to punish a wicked world for all its sins.

  The Rebels who had not fallen and could not escape back down the hill raised their hands in surrender. Angry cannoneers clubbed a few to the ground before their officers put a stop to it. But Krzyzanowski’s soldiers had no interest in captives now. They charged down the hill, hounds pursuing hares, hurrahing and shouting insults at the men they had defeated.

  Soldiers stumbled and tumbled, tripping over each other in their haste.

  “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot … my leg’s broke,” a Southern voice cried out. German curses answered him, but his life was spared. Rifles were as empty as hearts were full.

  Captain Szenowski remained near Krzyzanowski, who told him in Polish, “Go back up the hill. Tell Wiedrich to give them canister over our heads.”

  As they reached the trace of a farm road, he halted his men.

  “Everyone down. To the ground! Now!”

  Unready to be stopped in their rage of triumph, the soldiers had to be cursed down by their officers, who were grudgingly obeyed. Krzyzanowski knelt close to the earth himself, landing between a Confederate sprawled in death and another weeping for his mother and sisters.

  On the height above, guns opened. Blind rounds pursued the vanquished through the darkness.

  Some of the New Yorkers cheered. Hidden by the darkness, Krzyzanowski clutched his side. It hurt so fiercely it squeezed tears from his eyes. General Schurz had pressed him again to spare himself, but Krzyzanowski had refused to go. He would not leave his soldiers in defeat, would not leave his brigade while he could stand upright. Melancholy was in his Polish blood, but quitting wasn’t: He was born to long struggles, to wars that lasted centuries, passed down through generations like jewels or silver. But his heritage couldn’t ease the hurt in his ribs.

  At least he had stopped coughing blood. That was a good sign.

  When the cannon on the hill ceased firing for lack of targets, he ordered his soldiers to form up and retrace their steps. There would be no rest even now. Rolls needed to be called and ranks adjusted, pouches topped with ammunition and the wounded carried off to the too-few ambulance wagons and the overwhelmed field surgeries.

  Tomorrow would be another day of battle. Krzyzanowski knew it in his bones.

  * * *

  A single candle lit the room where Meade’s corps commanders gathered. The shanty stank of sweat and tobacco, of ill-digested meals and burned gunpowder. Every man was exhausted, but the mood was far from despondent. As he stood watching his generals maneuver for position among themselves, Meade believed he knew what each man felt: For all the tribulations of the day, they had stood up to the best that Lee could offer, and if they had not won, they had not lost. If Lee had not been defeated, he had failed in his designs. The Union line had held, if not at Sickles’ madcap forward position, then at the line originally intended. It had been a bloody, knife’s-edge day, but they had endured it, with fight left in their men as night wrapped the field.

  Meade felt starved for sleep, yet mentally sharp, inhabiting a strange mental realm that compressed reality. He ordered himself to stand erectly, letting those who had gotten chairs slump around the table. Latecomer generals leaned on the walls, complaining about inadequate food supplies for hungry soldiers, hinting that Meade had overdone the priority given to ammunition wagons. One-armed Howard bustled in, with the fighting on Cemetery Hill reduced to a flicker. Sprawled on a ragged quilt upon a string bed, Gouverneur Warren had plummeted into sleep. Meade chose not to disturb the engineer. Warren had done good service that afternoon, with a bandaged neck to show for it. Only the corps commanders mattered now, and all were present. Each man had to be harnessed to one purpose.

  George Gordon Meade despised councils of war, but he knew his army. Whatever the morrow might bring, he wanted none of the backbiting that trailed the Army of the Potomac like a stench, arising from accusations by rival generals that their brilliant grasp of the field had gone ignored, resulting in avoidable disasters. Meade was going to give his generals a public audience now, letting each man speak up in front of witnesses. If Robert E. Lee failed to bring him down, Meade would not succumb to army politics.

  Further, he wanted to give each man a personal stake in the army’s success or failure, to make him feel that his advice was valued. Less than a week ago, Meade had been their peer. He had to allow for the vanity that even the friendliest general wore with his shoulder straps. Meade’s preference was to give orders and be done, but he saw that a show of arrogance could be fatal.

  He was learning as much about himself as about Robert E. Lee.

  Above all, Meade sought clarity of intent. These were weary, burdened men, but if he had to keep them until dawn, he meant to see that every corps commander understood the role he was to play, the position he was to occupy, and the boundaries of his freedom. There would be no more shenanigans in the fashion of Daniel Sickles.

  Not that Meade expected any. Each man now in command of a corps had been fitted to the profession and they made up the finest collection of leaders the army had yet fielded. For all their divergence of character and habit, these men were fighters. It was Meade’s task to help them fight effectively.

  Hancock bellowed out a joke, briefly arousing Meade’s envy. Win had the gift of rallying men, of making broken lines whole. His soldiers adored him and even his fellow generals allowed Win a preeminen
ce that strutted beyond his rank. The tallest of them, with fine muscles going to fat, Win outshone other men, as if lit from within. Meade liked him and resented him, wishing he had a touch of that magic himself. Hancock was a prime reason why Meade continued standing, ignoring the chair his chief of staff kept free for him. He needed to tower over Win, who was seated and cursing fantastically to nettle the pure-minded Howard.

  Butterfield chased the last of the aides and hangers-on from the room, and the bantering generals quieted. Looking up at Meade from their chairs, or watching him with hooded eyes as they hunched against the walls, they awaited their orders.

  Meade took up the tin cup by the bucket of drinking water and wet his throat. The water was sour. As if death had infected it. Meade would have liked another gulp of brandy. To follow the glorious swig he had taken from Newton’s flask that evening.

  “All present, General Meade,” Butterfield said. Unnecessarily.

  The chief of staff wanted to get things going, to get through the meeting so he could return to the many labors laid on him. But this was more important than any routine.

  “Returns all in?” Meade asked.

  “Yes, sir. I reckon we have fifty-eight thousand men present and fit for duty. Not counting the artillery and cavalry.”

  Meade almost asked, “So few?”

  Butterfield read his mind. Or perhaps his face.

  “Casualties have been heavy. Both days. And straggling’s a problem.”

  “I want the straggling stopped. With all necessary force.”

  As worn as any of them, Butterfield scribbled a note to himself.

  “All right, then,” Meade said, surveying the room a last time. Men wanted leadership, that was the thing. Even Win Hancock did. Meade hoped he could supply it in adequate quantity. He still had moments when he felt himself an impostor in his position. “Gentlemen, let me begin by thanking each of you for your services this day. We avoided calamity … but more than that, much more. General Lee discovered that he could not break this army. Not this army. But I believe he will try us again tomorrow. So I have three questions for you. General Butterfield?”