by Ralph Peters
He had learned war—or thought he had—fighting the Seminoles and cornering Mormons, and in the minor Indian spats that briefly broke the boredom of Ft. Laramie. He had missed active service in Mexico, to his shame, but had done his best to comprehend its lessons. He had never imagined this, though: the magnitude, the bravery, the waste …
It was a bewildering thing, how a man could hope to win when he knew he couldn’t. He rode amid his men and hoped. For their sake, if not his own. Striving with all the will remaining to him to crack that dark blue line, to force a miracle.
Yet, even now … here … in this final place, he sensed that all of it was a great wrong, that firebrands South and North had wrought this day from vainglory and spleen. It was not the end he had wanted for his service. But duty lay where the soldier found himself.
Garnett had been a Union man at heart, against secession. But when the parting of the people came, he felt compelled to go with his state, Virginia. So many years after leaving Rose Hill for West Point, his heart could not break its tether. He had murdered his ideals for blood and soil.
Now this: Smoke and madness. Raw screams far more blasphemous than curses. Southern voices, Irish voices, flat-voweled Yankees, shrieks past all allegiance. Rifles fired point-blank. His own revolver empty.
“Go on, go on!” he called to a wavering soldier. But the man only stood stock-still, planted in the middle of the battlefield, suddenly used up.
They were so few now, so few.
He strained to see through the haze. More Yankees coming up, entire tribes of them. Sweeping in, disorderly but enthused. Shouting unintelligible war cries.
So many, so many.
And so few with him now. He had expected to see supporting brigades appear through the earthbound clouds, to hear Rebel yells of reassurance nearing. But all he had was a bleeding horse, an empty revolver, and the remnants of three stricken brigades cast into this devil’s cauldron, cheap as beans.
He could not bear to think it was all for nothing. Even now. Aware of the odds growing each moment more impossible, he could not give up. It could not be for nothing.…
Could it?
His horse was struck again, but would no more quit than Garnett would quit himself.
At his stirrup, the beard and jaw tore off a startled face. Blood splashed Garnett’s boots. Aware and unaware, the shot man staggered on toward the Yankees.
Armistead had taken his boys over the stretch of wall left of the copse. Then Lo had disappeared into the tangle.
They had to punch through on the right of those trees as well. To have any hope of making the lodgment stick. They had to widen the break, to complete it, to outflank the battle-crazed men in blue—Irish as porridge and poteen, by the looks of them.
“Come on, lads!”
So close.
But as his men approached the wall, fresh-laid rifles knocked them down by the dozen. Union cannon began to bark again.
Where in the devil was Pickett? Where were the supports? They were so close.…
Broken-hearted and raging, dizzy and shamed, Garnett steered his horse directly for the wall. He waved his hat at his soldiers one last time.
* * *
The long line staggered. More shells struck. Reduced to bags of blood, men splashed their comrades. The flag of the 26th went down, but fresh hands took it up. Exploded dirt hit Blake in the face like buckshot.
“Dress your ranks!” Knock Jones called from their rear, while other voices cried, “Guide right, guide to the right!”
The men recovered from the first shock of the perfectly ranged Yankee guns, correcting their buckled line as they surged ahead, passing the hot ruins of the farmstead on their left and quick-marching down an incline toward a ditch that jagged across the fields.
A round of solid shot tore a bloody trail through the ranks to Blake’s left.
“Get across that damn thing, get across any old way.”
The ditch contained no more than a hint of wetness, but lay just deep and wide enough to trouble them. The line bristled in both directions as some men leapt the obstacle or clambered down into it, while others hesitated, hunting urgently for a better spot to jump or stepping back to get a running start.
Blake leapt. A small man, Cobb had to fuss his way down into the trough and back up again. Charley Campbell paused, then mimicked Cobb. Blake reached down to give him a hand up.
A shell-burst tumbled him into the ditch. He just missed Charley’s bayonet. After the shock, they sorted out arms and limbs, their rifles and fallen caps. Blake wore blood now, but nothing much seemed awry. Charley got up cursing.
Beyond the ditch, the line paused to re-form, punished all the while by the Yankee batteries. The hill that held the deadliest guns grew cotton bolls of smoke. As the soldiers of the 26th marched forward again, the distant goal of their charge grew indistinct. Hiding from them. Or hiding a surprise.
“Guide to the right, guide right!” a young voice called again. That damned gap yonder. Between them and whoever was on their flank.
Angry now, they knocked down another fence, leaving a trail of their dead and dying behind them.
A wheatfield stretched ahead—infinitely, terrifyingly wide—and ended at stout fencing that marked a road. Beyond, obscured by smoke, their enemies waited.
Crowding away from the deadly flank and the batteries on the hill, soldiers bunched together, offering denser targets to Yankee gunners. As officers struggled to keep control, the ranks drifted rightward toward the Yankee center. As if there were in fact a guiding hand—perhaps that of a God overcome with pity—the brigades advancing to their right made an abrupt leftward wheel. The movement was huge and clumsy, but angled their thousands toward a meeting point with Pettigrew’s men, just where the Union line stuck out its jaw.
They would hit the Yankees together, after all.
Stride by stride, the line of the 26th formed a shallow wedge. A shell exploded at the toes of soldiers who had strutted beyond the flag, tossing them into the air. One man did a perfect skyward somersault, dying a clown’s death. A second explosion followed, fired by the second gun of a section, and butchered the men who had rushed to close the gap.
Still others came forward, lest the Yankees think them weak. Pride trumped life. Dry-throated men howled a painful cheer. But its force was less than it would have been minutes before.
The fence. Just get to that damned fence, Blake told himself. Eat the bear one little bite at a time. Cobb and Charley Campbell were still with him, and the new lieutenant more or less kept up. The boy looked determined and terrified.
The Yankee fire grew still more intense, more accurate, despite the wreath of smoke around their batteries.
Hard to miss, Blake figured. What the hell had all that noise been about in the hour before, if the cannonade had not even dented the might of the Yankee guns?
Cries of agony trailed them through the wheat.
Crossing that field took hours, days, weeks, months. Blake felt the urge to run forward, to get somewhere, anywhere. But he stayed in the rank to which he had committed himself.
“Close up!”
Blake did not know the brittle-as-flint voice. Looking around to put a name to it, he saw the flash of a shell-burst and Colonel Marshall tumbling from his horse.
The young man sprang back up, though. Fending off helping hands, he shook himself and straightened his fine, new uniform, then remounted. An aide turned the colonel’s horse in the proper direction.
Get down, you fool, and walk, Blake thought. You won’t be worth a shit to us if you’re dead. He had to fight an urge to pull the boy down again.
He marched on. They all did. But the damned fence would not come closer. Blake could see it clearly, though: They weren’t going to knock this one down, it was thick-made. A few more steps, crushing wheat underfoot, and he realized there were two fences, not just one.
A penned-in road to get across, and close enough to the Yankees for their infantry to fire down into
them.
Goddamn it to Hell.
Torn by ever more gaps, the line broke from its quick-march rhythm as men rushed for the first fence. Lung-biting smoke had drifted across their path and they plunged into a midafternoon twilight. As if God had darkened the sun. As if the Lord did not want to see any more. Or Hell was fuming.
God or Satan, it was hard to say who was busier.
Before a single man laid hand on the fence to hurl himself over it, the Yankee batteries switched their loads to canister. It tore the attack apart.
Stunned men left on their feet meandered or stood. Gaping. A few shot their rifles into the smoke in fury, needing to do something, anything, to try to hurt their tormentors in return.
“Over the fence! Get over the damned fence!” That was Knock, hoarse and unmistakable. The major still had his head about him.
Others took up the cry. Up the line, men rallied to fire a volley, perhaps at an order that never reached Blake’s ears.
“Come on!” Blake yelled. He launched himself at the first fence. Along with dozens, hundreds, of other soldiers. “Come on! Run! Get past the fence!”
Cobb was with him. Cobb was always with him.
Blake vaulted the slats, surprising himself with the ease of it, and turned to help any others who needed aid. At his fingertips, a barefoot man just topping the fence fell backward, chest punched bloody. Behind the mass of men clambering over the obstacle, Colonel Marshall waved his sword, encouraging them with words Blake could not hear.
A bullet struck the colonel in the forehead.
Blake pulled Charley Campbell into the lane. A few men leapt over the second fence and went on, but most knelt or flattened themselves along the road. Dead, wounded, whole … it was hard to sort the bodies at a glance.
Voices cried that the Yankees had outflanked them. One man knelt in midroad and prayed wildly, shouting to God, as if at a revival meeting.
The Yankee gunners up on the hill kept blasting them with canister. Some of their muzzles aimed right down the road.
It was nothing but a slaughter pen for pigs. And Blake did not intend to die like a pig.
Knock Jones ran along the road, bellowing, “Get up, damn it, y’all get up and get over that goddamned fence. We’re almost there, the Yanks can’t stop us now.”
Blake heard his own voice repeating the commands. He dragged Charley Campbell to his feet. Cobb didn’t need any tugging. Evil-eyed, he was ready. Other men rose up, too.
The lieutenant had gone missing.
It was all a matter of seconds, then, after the eternity in the fields. A last mass of men began to climb the far fence, determined to get at the Yankees and do some killing, to have their revenge at last.
“Come on, come on!”
As they topped the fence, a Yankee regiment poured a volley into them.
Charley Campbell plunged into the field. His head struck the earth and twisted away from his shoulders.
But the flag went forward. Their flag.
Of one will, the men in Blake’s stretch of the line—a ghost of a line—paused to fire into the blur of men up in the haze. The Yankees were lined up behind a fence of their own, pouring out an impossible volume of fire.
Men began edging forward again, reloading as they advanced. A few went back over the fence, leaving the hard souls alone to finish the work.
The regiment’s flag fell.
It rose again.
And fell again.
A boy grabbed it and ran headlong for the Yankees, a friend keeping pace beside him.
Brave souls tried to follow, bending their torsos forward, fighting a headwind only they could feel, planting one foot in front of the other, undaunted.
To the right, where a strip of the line had appeared undefended, a fresh Yankee regiment rose up from the earth, leveled their muskets, and fired.
It was the end.
“Buck and ball!” an outraged voice cried. “The bastards…”
The Yankees began to cheer and chant. At first, Blake’s ears could not find the word they repeated.
Then it rang clear: “Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg!”
Through a mist that would have suited a mountain hollow, Blake saw a herd of Yankees surround the boy with the flag and his companion. Their rifles were leveled. Blake waited for them to fire, dreading the moment.
Instead, the Yankees grabbed the two boys—and the flag—and dragged them back over the fence, as if they were truants.
Blake wouldn’t have it. Not that flag, not now.
He ran toward them, thirty yards away.
“No!” Cobb screamed.
Blake could not comprehend what his antagonist sought to deny him. He raced for the spot where he had last seen that flag. Nothing else mattered anymore, not on this earth.
Stumbling over a body, he quickly righted himself and looked up. Straight into the Yankee line.
A bareheaded boy in a gunner’s trim held a lanyard in his hand. The muzzle of the cannon aimed at Blake.
The boy hesitated.
A sergeant descended on him. Shouting.
The boy yanked the lanyard.
The last thing Blake saw and heard on this earth was Cobb, kneeling over him and grasping his rags, crying, “Don’t die, damn you, Tom Blake, you can’t die…”
* * *
Lieutenant Colonel McGilvery was astonished. He had been certain that the attack was over. His guns had been firing at distant clots of men retreating over the fields they had recently crossed with flags and heads held high. The great din from the center of the line had grown less insistent. He heard cheers.
Then they came on again. Two last brigades of them. Or, perhaps, a brigade and a stray regiment, judging by the size of the formations. Whoever had ordered them forward had to be mad. Their numbers were far too few to make a difference, and even their line of advance made no damned sense. As if they had set out only to offer themselves as targets for his guns.
“What the Hell?” a sergeant asked the sun, the moon, and the stars. The man doffed his cap, wiped his sweat, and shook his head.
“Load spherical case,” McGilvery called. His throat was raw, but they heard him well enough. “Crews without spherical case, load solid shot. Prepare to switch to canister.”
The advancing Confederates might as well have been stranded on rafts at sea, so isolated and hopeless did they appear. Yet, they came waving banners, that cross of washed-out blue on faded red, marching proudly through the thinning haze, their spirits as indomitable as their bodies were doomed.
The senselessness of their effort repulsed McGilvery. He understood desperation. But not stupidity.
His gun crews bustled about in the smoke-queered light. Some men still had their bloodlust up, but others moved with the dreaminess of exhaustion. They, too, had assumed that their work was done, or nearly so, and those not maddened by the additional labor now required were dully resigned.
The Rebs just came parading on, dressed so neatly into ranks they might have been marching through Richmond behind a brass band. But the only music sounded from distant guns—Osborn’s, he figured.
Horses began to neigh behind the gun line, unsettled by the change they sensed in the air.
McGilvery raised his glasses for another look. The Confederates were so perfectly in range he could tell when a man changed his stride to avoid a body.
Soon there would be more bodies in that field. He had a strong stomach and plenty of leftover anger, yet, somehow, the thought of knocking down these men fouled up his guts. This wasn’t a battle anymore. It was set to be a massacre.
Officers and men looked toward him. Waiting for his command.
He let the Confederates cross the ridge upon which he’d slain their predecessors. Then he let them come on a little more. Secretly hoping some officer would recognize their folly and turn them around. Knots of retreating men passed them, the refuse of the grand attack, headed for the rear and a chance to live. The forlorn-hope brigades did not break step.
Disgusted, McGilvery lifted his right hand. Raising it high for every man to see. And he paused. Giving his enemies one last chance, a few last seconds to come back to their senses.
Rage filled him. Rage at anyone, in any army, who would commit such a criminal blunder.
“Commence firing!” he shouted. “Fire at will!” He dropped his hand for the benefit of the more distant gun crews.
Nearly forty cannon spit flame and recoiled in quick succession. The sound briefly deafened every man, but the resumption of battle made sense to the horses, who calmed.
He didn’t need his field glasses to see the gashes torn in the Rebel ranks. The range and trajectory made it hard to miss.
The gray lines quivered, but came on. These men didn’t turn as the others had, but senselessly plunged ahead, aiming at a worthless stretch of ground that led to nothing but another trap.
His batteries fired with malice and fresh energy.
The Rebel discipline held for a clutch of minutes, but once they got down in the swale where the creek meandered, where his guns could sweep them with loads of doubled canister, they began to run: A few dashed back toward the Confederate lines, but most charged straight ahead like blinkered horses, racing deeper into killing range, heading for the false protection of the rocks and scrub trees just beyond the low ground.
McGilvery raised his glasses again. In time to see men ripped apart amid their terrified comrades, set upon by devils disguised as artillery. Their last order disintegrated, becoming the strangest rout he had ever seen, in which men ran toward their enemies and threw themselves on the earth.
His gun crews hardly bothered to aim. Their discipline was breaking, too, but in an ugly, bloody, vengeful way.
McGilvery watched men claw the earth and cower behind trees too thin to protect them. Men clutched each other like lovers or crawled behind corpses to hide.
His batteries had never done such slaughter.
The Rebels were broken. Few of them tried to fire and none were sure of targets. They had come to a place as hopeless as it was worthless.
White rags waved, only to be shredded by double canister.