by Ralph Peters
There was going to be Hell to pay later, Hancock decided, but now he had to get back to his corps and his men. The Confederate bombardment had intensified, but it wouldn’t last forever. Then they’d come on, a great goddamned gray mob. Old Meade had been right about that much. Meanwhile, his men had to see him, mounted and fearless.
“Your guns aren’t worth a prayer book in a whorehouse,” Hancock said. He pulled his horse around and rode back to the fight.
* * *
As Meade watched from the porch of his headquarters shanty, a dud shell struck a line of horses tied to a nearby rail. The impact gutted the beasts in a burst of gore.
Long bones cracked like rifle shots. Flesh flew.
In an instant, the line of staff mounts became a tangle of writhing meat. With shells screaming overhead, a new man on the staff plunged forward to put the beasts out of their misery. He shot the only unwounded horse in the head.
Explosions furrowed the earth of a nearby field, propelling grit over orderlies pulling down tents. Another shot pulped a line of corpses waiting for a burial detail. The Confederates had mistaken the range and most of their rounds spared the troops up on the line and the Union guns. But the barrage pounded the supply wagons staged in the low ground behind the headquarters, and panicked teamsters fought for a place on the crowded road that offered the only escape. Wagons careened and crashed. Some men just ran. Ammunition wagons stood abandoned, waiting for the shell that would ignite them. Amid spectacular wreckage, an ambulance burned.
A round of solid shot fanned Meade, inches away from killing him, and crashed into the house with a burst of splinters. Poorly fused, another shell pierced the attic. Two staff officers rushed out of the shanty, covered in dust but whole. Others, still inside, coughed and cursed as they gathered up their papers.
Meade had hoped to maintain his headquarters here, just behind the line, but the notion was suicidal. And he still had a day’s work to do before he died. After stepping down from the porch with studied calm, he walked past the slaughtered horses toward the road. One beast clung impossibly to life, eye bulging as it spewed blood.
A round shot tore off the front steps where he’d stood.
As the personnel of his headquarters scattered around him, Meade slowed his pace to set them an example. The truth was that he found it all exhilarating: Fear of bodily harm was not one of his weaknesses.
He smiled at what he saw next: A covey of staff men had taken shelter behind the rear wall of the shack. The old planks offered not the least protection and already had been splintered in two places, yet the soldiers and their officers crowded against them. Meade tried to rally their spirits with a tale from the Mexican War, but the effort at humor failed. He rued, again, that he lacked Hancock’s way with soldiers.
An explosive shell—no dud this time—struck amid the horses of his bodyguard. The blood and meat splashed all the way to the shanty, slopping over the men who had huddled behind it.
Meade’s chief of staff came up beside him, the last man to leave the cabin. Clutching a roll of maps, Butterfield opened his mouth, but Meade spoke first:
“This won’t do. We’ll try that barn down the way.”
Their horses stood among those that had been spared. Mounting, Butterfield held on to the maps. Those officers and couriers who still had untouched mounts leapt to follow the generals, with the remainder of the staff coming after on foot.
We’re hardly an example for the men up on the line, Meade told himself.
Down along the Taneytown road, two wagons warred for precedence, locking wheels, then breaking apart abruptly. One turned over on its side, narrowing the escape corridor.
A caisson waiting with Hunt’s reserve exploded, triggering serial detonations. Meade cringed at the loss of ammunition.
Still, the men on the line were being spared, relative to what they might have suffered, had Lee’s artillerymen been better shots. That was the thing that mattered in all this, that regiments in blue would be ready to stand and kill the best men Lee could muster.
He paused to order a company left on provost guard to go forward and rejoin their regiment. Delighted to get away from the worst of the shelling, the men went toward the crest at the double-quick.
At the barn, Butterfield spread the best map on the ground. Orderlies rushed to help, but the chief of staff told them to stay out of the way. Hooker man or not, Butterfield was giving all he had to his duties. Despite their personal friction, he wanted to win.
Meade waved up a captain, barking to be heard above the confusion: “Ride to General Slocum. Tell him the attack’s coming at the center. He’s to send another brigade to back General Hancock. And he’s to hurry.”
He could risk thinning the right now. He had already positioned reserves behind Hancock’s line, ordering up brigades from various corps, but he wanted real depth. Lee had to meet blue wall after blue wall.
As the staff hurried to reorganize itself, a shell burst in the road. At first, Meade thought the only casualties were horses again. Then he saw Butterfield quivering on the ground, clutching his neck with fingers bright with blood. Another man lay still beside the map.
No place along the road would serve for headquarters work.
His son appeared. “Sir … General Slocum’s headquarters is back on that hill there. He’s just out of range, and he’s got a signal station.”
The boy was clearheaded, the mark of a true soldier. Meade felt a flash of pride.
He knelt to see how serious Butterfield’s wound was. The man was conscious and would live, but his role in this battle was over. Meade wished him well, and went back to the war.
Bellowing to his staff to follow, he mounted again and led the way rearward through the rain of shells. He was determined not to lose control of the army as Hooker had at Chancellorsville, or as Burnside had done at Fredericksburg—where Meade’s men had been forgotten under fire. Hancock, Newton, and the others would handle the coming charge. His purpose now was to care for everything else, to keep the great beast of the Army of the Potomac properly in harness and pulling obediently.
Spurring his mount, Meade outdistanced the men who served him. He rode past the wreckage of wagons and smashed gun carriages, past the corpses of men who’d imagined they were safely tucked away, past others bloodied and weeping, dazed or waving blankets to put out fires. The plight of the horses was nothing short of a massacre.
When he reached Slocum’s hill, he didn’t even dismount. He saw at once that the signal station could not reach his flag men back on the ridge, who had gone to ground. Exasperated, infuriated, and sweating like a slave, he cursed and kicked his horse back into a gallop, retracing his path through the torrent of death, mortified at the time he had just squandered.
He cared nothing for the stragglers in his path now, willing to ride down any man to return to a place where he could command his army. Unwilling, after all, to accept that his part was done, that the battle had passed to subordinates, he lashed his horse as if he meant to skin it.
Few wounded men staggered rearward. Initially, the observation pleased Meade, promising that Lee’s guns had done little damage up on the line. Only after another minute of pounding toward the ridge amid bursting shells did it strike him that no wounded man would willingly leave the line and risk greater chances of death walking to the rear. The battle had gone topsy-turvy, its dangers upended.
He spotted a blue column on a course parallel to his own, quick-marching from Slocum’s flank right through the bombardment. Turning his horse, he rushed toward the officer heading the column. It was General Shaler, bringing up his brigade.
Skipping the courtesies, Meade called, “Take your men over there, to Hancock’s left. Head for that orchard.”
As he turned to ride off again, a plump man in civilian clothes materialized, astonishingly careless of the shelling. He grasped Meade’s bridle.
“Cheneral, dem solchers … dem solchers uff yours has took mein house for the woundit mens un
d made in mein Garten a graveyard. I make a claim on the government!”
Meade barely restrained himself from whipping the man with his reins. “You fool! You don’t even know if you’ll have a government after today. Get out of here, or I’ll send you up to fight!”
Followed by his son, his flag, and the motley group of riders who had caught up with him, Meade rode straight for the crest of the ridge that trailed down from the cemetery.
He found himself facing a valley filled with smoke, with his own guns firing into dirty clouds. It surprised him that Hunt would waste so much ammunition.
He watched, appalled, as a section of guns limbered up and rolled to the rear.
“George! Ride over there and find out why those guns are leaving the line.”
Guiding on Meade’s flag, a courier found him.
“From General Warren, sir. He says it’s urgent.”
“Where’s Warren now?”
“The first round hill, sir. He’s been trying to signal, but there’s too much smoke.”
Meade took the note and unfolded it. Warren’s impression merely confirmed his own: The Union gunnery only obscured whatever Lee was doing. Lee could launch an attack behind the smoke.
George returned. He blurted out, “The lieutenant said he’s out of ammunition, that’s why he pulled back his guns.”
“Goddamn it,” Meade said. “George, I need you to find General Hunt. Send riders to both ends of the line. And to the rear. Find Hunt. I want our guns to cease firing, this is pointless.”
“Yes, sir.” His son rode off into the acrid fog.
Meade felt his eyes sting as he watched the boy go, with the smoke only partly to blame.
Distant points of light blinked and disappeared again. Now and then, a shell struck among his waiting regiments, but most still howled overhead. It was all a waste, every bit of it.
He wondered what was happening across those fields.
* * *
Wasn’t a battle a beautiful thing, as lovely as May in a meadow? Gallagher mocked any nearby man who fidgeted, twitched, or cowered. As for those who fainted in the heat or fell to raving, ’twas weak they were and worthless, undeserving.
“Just lie steady, dearies, and take in the pretty show they’ve all got up for yiz.” He laughed like the devil over a priest gone bad. “Ye may never see another such day, if ye live to see any at all.”
“Jaysus, Sergeant Gallagher,” Walsh complained, “an’t it noisy enough without your catterwawling?”
“Walsh, me dearie, ye’re needin’ to put them ladylike nerves back under their darling skin.” He laughed, then called, “Can’t anyone give us a song? For I’m weary o’ the tune the Rebs are playing.”
“He’s crazy as English George,” Lonergan declared. “Nothing to eat for two damn days, the world’s coming to an end on every side of us, and the man wants a minstrel show. He’s crazy, he’s mad…”
“That’s why the great, high powers made me a sergeant,” Gallagher said. “Because only the devil himself could master the likes o’ ye. Reilly, give us a song, then, for the day’s gone drab and dreary, for all the racket.”
A simple lad with a succulent voice, Reilly dutifully tried to lift a tune. Naught but a croak emerged. Canteens were as empty as their bellies, and every man’s throat was scorched with the taste of powder.
Gallagher gave them a bit of the quiet then, if quiet there could be amid the goings-on. He marveled over the foolishness of the colonel and the major, prancing about on their hind legs to show they weren’t fearful, behaving like idiot Englishmen. Gallagher saw no point in risking death without a fair chance of killing the other man first. But officers had their own queer notions about what inspired the lads, all high thoughts and nobility, when Gallagher knew damned well and enough that nothing roused the boys like drawing blood. Give them some lovely killing to do, and a fair enough chance to do it, and every lad among them would stand proper.
Raising himself to see what he could see, he found precious little on view to the regiment’s front, naught but smoke fit for smuggling contraband and flashes bright and gone again, quick as a sleeve-slithered ace in shebeen poker. He turned then to see what was on beyond his own lot, and spied the boy-lieutenant still by his guns, blood-smeared and clasping a rag against his shoulder. The lad’s face was foul as a navvy’s with burnt-up powder, but pretty enough even now to come to grief, if ever he took himself for a dockside stroll. The lad called out adjustments to elevation in a voice that struggled to sound like a grown man.
Gallagher knew the type, he did, for he had slain such a lad all those years ago, a sweet young man who was not meant for this world. So unsuspecting they were, all doomed by virtue.
Gallagher only hoped the lieutenant would last until his guns were truly needed, for he did like to watch the application of canister.
* * *
Hunt wished Meade were present in the cemetery. Hancock had made a mess of things, bullying his batteries to open early and blast away. The Rebels were firing at a breathless rate, excited Union gunners responded in kind, and the duel had already lasted a good half hour. Lee’s ammunition stocks would be running down, but so were his own. And Hunt knew his guns were vital to the defense. It was all so … so damned amateurish.
“This is idiocy,” Hunt declared. “I’d fail any gunnery student who made such a shambles.”
Just below the vantage point where he stood beside Ollie Howard, guns fired by section, spitting flame and recoiling between the headstones. The noise was numbing, even to an artilleryman.
Empty sleeve dangling, General Howard shook his head and asked, “What do you make of it, Osborn?”
The Eleventh Corps artillery chief peered through the man-made fog, reading the twinkle of Confederate muzzle blasts. “I agree with General Hunt, sir. Either they think their fires are doing a lot more damage than they are … or they’re keeping it up just to drain off our ammunition.”
“Of course, they want to exhaust our ammunition,” Hunt said. “It’s common practice before a charge. I taught the fools that much, at least.”
“Not proud of your former students today, Henry?” General Howard asked.
Hunt didn’t respond, but stared into the smoke.
“I wonder,” Major Osborn said, “if we mightn’t put one over on them?”
Hunt turned.
“Suppose we just stopped firing?” Osborn continued. “By the time word passed down our lines to cease fire, they’d assume we were running out of ammunition. Or that they’d silenced our guns.”
Hunt lifted an eyebrow as he looked at Howard. He often wondered what old Ollie would do if he lost the other arm. Grim thought.
“Could work, you know,” Howard offered.
Yes, it could. Trailing off your fires was an age-old trick. Hunt was miffed that it hadn’t occurred to him first. He’d just been so damned furious at Hancock.
“How much ammunition do you have left, Tom?” Hunt asked. “Right here. In those battery caissons.”
Osborn took Hunt’s point and said, “Plenty left to tear a charge to bits. If we stop firing soon.”
“And your men won’t quit their posts?” Hunt asked cautiously. “If Lee’s fire keeps up after ours has stopped?”
Howard’s expression showed that he felt the slight on his corps’ reputation. The tee-totaling abolitionist let it pass.
Osborn shook his head. Decisively. “I’ll let them rest by their guns. They won’t run. I guarantee it.”
“Then stop,” Hunt said. “Immediately. Have your batteries cease firing.” He looked at the Eleventh Corps commander. “If General Howard approves, of course.”
“We could all do with less noise,” Howard said.
Osborn took off at a run, nearly knocking over Howard’s Polish colonel, who limped along like a cripple and looked ghastly.
Howard confided, “I’ve told Kriz he looks like a beggar sent out from the Court of Miracles. He didn’t understand the reference, I fear.”
Hunt made no sense of it, either. But it made sense to stop firing, then see what Lee’s boys made of it. He’d have to ride down along the line and give the order himself to make it stick, though.
He believed Meade would approve. If he didn’t, Hunt was willing to take full responsibility and bear the consequences. Winning the battle was all that mattered now.
* * *
First Lieutenant Alonzo Cushing, commanding Battery A, Fourth U.S. Artillery, felt blood slime under his uniform. The fragment had torn through his shoulder. The pain made him want to cry out, but bearing it was the manly thing to do. Many a man around him endured a worse wound.
And then there were the dead sprawled by his guns.
He raised his telescope again, one-handed, peering into a thick gray sea in the hope of following the trail of his next shot.
“Number two gun! Fire!” he shouted from a parched throat.
As its muzzle flared, the cannon bucked, then settled. Devoured by the smoke, the round’s impact escaped him.
“Lieutenant … you have to go to the rear,” First Sergeant Fueger told him.
“I’m fine. Just see that the volunteers are swabbing properly.”
Ever obedient, Fueger turned back to his gun crews, their depleted ranks filled out with men culled from nearby regiments—many of them Irish, moon-faced, short, and brawny. Most had served around cannon long enough to grasp the drills. And they were brave, willing to stand in the fury while others cowered.
Cushing had done as Hancock ordered, opening counter-battery fire on the Rebels. But he did not fire madly. Instead, he tried to see that each round had a target, at least an approximate one. But as things worsened, with one gun out of action and ever more gunners maimed or lying dead, it was a struggle to keep men from yanking the lanyards before their guns were ready.
Blood coursed down his chest. Earlier, he had envied the enlisted men their freedom to strip off tunics and undergarments. Now he was glad he could not see his wound.
A Rebel shell fell short, exploding in the field beyond the wall. Fine specks of dirt reached Cushing, despite the distance.