The Seekers

by F. M. Parker

  His view moved over the swamp and the blood spreading in ever widening, crimson circles from the scores of places where men had fallen and died. How many men had he shot with his fine new Spencer? Forty? Fifty? He looked down at the empty cartridges scattered about on the ground. Each one of the shiny metal cylinders marked a dead man. There must be nearly a hundred empties. Horrible. Murderous.

  He did not want to be alone with the dead. He cocked his ears to hear the others of his platoon of sharpshooters. There was no sound to indicate anyone was alive in the swamp except him. Was everyone silent because they too were overwhelmed by the slaughter?

  Levi would leave this place of killing. He grabbed his rifle and started up the bank that lay to his rear. Then he halted and looked back at Jimmy lying across the log barricade. “Damn you, Jimmy Hathaway, why’d you get yourself killed?”

  He shook his head. Jimmy had given his life to hold this little piece of muddy ground against the enemy. Levi could not give it up and run. He crept back and began to reload the cartridge tubes of the Spencers. He spoke sadly in a whisper. “Jimmy, we could’ve left this place. We could’ve gone home.”

  The wild, crazy Rebel yell came tearing across the swamp again. Levi lifted the deadly Spencer. Didn’t these men in gray fear death as other earthly men did?

  Levi shot, and shot, and shot. The body of running men melted into the dirty water.

  Never afterwards could Levi remember the number of charges the Rebels made across the swamp. As the hours passed, his head rang from the great number of shots he fired, and had been fired at him. He became deaf. But his eyes functioned, watching an insane world of men running at him, running into the muzzle of his rifle. He saw the plumes of dirty gray gunsmoke lancing out at him from the exploding rifles of his enemies. After that first nick, every bullet had missed him. How strange it was that the enemy could not hit him.

  Levi came to sanity again, holding his hot rifle. The swamp was empty of foes. The water lay quiet, placid, but bloody in almost every square foot. All the Rebel soldiers were dead and hidden, unseen and unseeing in their watery graves. He did not understand why he was still alive, for by all odds he should be dead.

  He felt a weary sadness at what had happened this day, at what he had done. He laid his head down on the top of his little fortress. He cried for Jimmy. He cried for the dead Rebel soldiers because all his enmity for those brave, fierce warriors was forever gone.

  “Anybody alive down there?”

  Above the boom of the artillery banging away, Levi heard a voice call from the top of the bank behind him. He turned lethargically to look. There was no reason to hurry. He did not speak to the Union sergeant staring at him.

  The sergeant came hurriedly down the bank. “How bad are you hurt?” he asked. He looked into Levi’s face covered with burnt gunpowder, dirt, blood. He saw where tears had washed furrows through the grime. He glanced at the litter of spent shells on the ground, and briefly at the corpse hanging on the barricade.

  “The Rebs killed my friend Jimmy,” Levi said, his voice breaking. “And I shot them. I don’t know how many. They are all out there under the water. But, Sergeant, this is all wrong.”

  “You only did your duty, soldier,” the sergeant said.

  “Duty? No man should kill like I did. They just ran straight into my gun like crazy men.”

  “It was still your duty. Now we gotta move fast. The Rebs have broke through on the north. They’ll sweep south and trap us if we don’t get the hell out of here damn quick. Bring your gun and shells and get your ass back across the Chickahominy.”

  “We just fought to hold this place. Now I must give it up and run?”

  “Yes, damnit. Hurry up now.”

  “What about Jimmy?”

  “He’s dead, ain’t he?”

  “What the hell do you mean, is he dead?” Levi’s voice rose to a screech. “Can’t you see they’ve blowed half his head away?”

  “Leave him,” growled the sergeant. He hastened back up the bank and into the woods.

  Levi scooped up the last of the cartridges and carrying his rifle, climbed the bank. He did not see the sergeant. But that was all right. He didn’t feel the urgency that the sergeant had, only a numbing sadness. The roaring cannon was an unimportant echo on the edge of his awareness. He walked off among the trees.

  He had not gone far when he saw a pool of water surrounded by large oak trees. His throat was parched with a great thirst. He crept to the water and knelt to drink. As he lowered his head, he heard the tinkling splash as a trickle of water fell. He hastily jerked up his head and looked across the pool.

  A Confederate private, a middle-aged man, was on hands and knees at the base of one of the oaks on the far side of the pool. Water still dripped from his shaggy beard. Levi had not seen the man in the shadow of the tree.

  The Rebel was watching Levi, and his hand was reaching for the rifle lying on the ground beside his leg.

  Chapter 2

  Levi’s eyes locked with those of the Rebel soldier kneeling beside the pool of water. Should he try to grab his gun up and shoot the man? Could he do it more quickly than the other man could lift his weapon and fire.

  “Young fellow, let’s drink of this bloody water and then go on our way,” the Rebel said, seeming to read Levi’s thoughts. “Fighting can wait until another time.”

  “That’s fair by me for I’ve killed enough men today,” Levi said.

  “So have I. Most of us who are alive, have killed to stay that way.”

  “Why do you call this bloody water?”

  “Look over there,” the man said and inclined his head toward the far side of the pool.

  A corpse in blue uniform lay face down and nearly submerged in the water. A cloud of red water surrounded the body.

  “These are damn mean times,” said the Rebel.

  “Yes,” agreed Levi.

  The Rebel watched Levi for a moment longer, his eyes prying into Levi’s. Then he lowered his head and began to drink.

  Levi remained on his knees, his sight shifting between the dead Union soldier and the Confederate bent down with his bearded face in the water. He could not bring himself to drink— with the body in the water.

  The Confederate raised his head every couple of seconds to check Levi, then lowered it to drink some more. The ripples made in the water by the man drinking radiated outward ever widening, sweeping across the pool to lap against the body of the dead soldier. The corpse moved slightly to undulations of the water.

  The Rebel finished slaking his thirst. He picked up his rifle and started to rise.

  Levi rose as the man did, gripping his rifle and primed to react to any threatening move from the man.

  The Rebel spoke. “I have a son about your age out there someplace. I hope you don’t kill him.”

  “I hope so too. And that he doesn’t kill me.”

  The Rebel nodded. Keenly watching Levi, he backed away a few steps. Then he whirled and with his back to Levi, went with long, swift strides into the woods.

  Levi, quickly putting the trunks of trees between the pool and himself, hastened away in the opposite direction.

  He went east through the woods in the direction of the Union Army beyond the Chickahominy River. He had gone but a quarter mile or so when a cannonball loaded with grape shot hit the ground off on his right and exploded, flinging iron fragments and lead balls in a thousand directions. More cannon-balls, mortar shells and canisters from howitzers landed in the woods around Levi, and burst, whipping the trees into shattered stems. Levi began to run.

  The bombardment came from the Union batteries to the east. General Porter’s artillerymen must think all their soldiers had withdrawn back across the Chickahominy and had lowered the aim of their big guns to strike east of Boatswains Swamp. The Confederate artillery was responding with an increased barrage.

  Levi ran hard, weaving a crooked course over the land, seeking the most dense woods so that he would have some protection from
the shells exploding in hundreds of places. He raced up and over and down a low hill. He came to a stream, hesitated, briefly casting quick looks around, and then splashed across.

  He raced on. The woods thinned around him and the sun became visible, a large red disk hanging in the cloud of gun-smoke that blanketed the land. He saw a hill that seemed aflame with dozens of cannon entrenched and firing. At the top of the hill, one lone cannon and its gunners were sharply etched, pinned against the sun’s red sphere. The gunners were firing to the east so they were the enemy.

  A Rebel squad of six men broke from a cove of trees on Levi’s left and closed on him. He sprang ahead, his legs driving, running at the limit of his strength. The Rebels knelt to shoot.

  A mortar shell containing an explosive charge with a lighted fuse, and seventy-eight musket balls packed inside in sulphur arced down out of the gray sky. The fire of the lighted fuse reached into the shell. It burst with a brilliant orange flash two hundred feet above the trees between Levi and the Rebels. Musket balls, shrapnel and burning sulphur lashed down at the earth.

  Levi’s eyes registered the flash. His ears seemed ruptured by the explosion. A flying musket ball struck him a hard, glancing blow on the forehead. Blackness caught Levi like a thunderclap.

  * * *

  Levi fought up from the dark pit of unconsciousness to half life. A great sense of urgency drove him because danger threatened him, he somehow knew it. As the light seeped into his brain, a throbbing pain came to life and beat against his temples.

  He laboriously pulled himself to a sitting position. He twisted his aching head and looked around in the growing gloom of night and tried to orient himself to what had happened. Then it all came back to him, the squad of Rebels and the mortar shell.

  He threw a look in the direction of the Rebels. The shell had exploded closer to those men than to Levi, and they lay sprawled in crumpled forms on the ground. Not one moved or made a sound.

  Levi rested and waited for his strength to return. He caught his head in his hands and squeezed his temples hoping that would lessen the hammering pain. As the minutes passed, the fire of the Union artillery became sporadic, slowed even more, then ceased firing altogether. The guns of the Confederates trailed off to silence. The musketry of the foot soldiers of both sides faded away quickly as if they had only been waiting for a signal, any signal, to disengage from the fierce fighting.

  Gradually hundreds of bivouac fires of the Union and Confederate soldiers began to flame up across a wide section of forest. As Levi watched the lights appear they reminded him of the time he had been on a dark hill above Cincinnati and watched that town light its night lamps. From the pattern of the fires of the soldiers, a distinct black strip separated them, Levi knew he was in the territory of the Rebels.

  He tried to rise but his legs refused to support him. The pain in his battered head rose to a hammering crescendo. He sank back to lie on the ground. His thirst was awful. Dead soldier or not, he should have drunk at the bloody pool. He would rest a little while and then try to make it through the Rebel lines to his own outfit.

  The night deepened. Overhead the cold, uncaring stars came out and shined like pin pricks in the black dome of the sky. A single rifle shot sounded far off. No more followed. He could imagine the relief of the soldiers that no battle was beginning.

  An ambulance wagon, its path lit by the frail yellow light of a lantern, came through the trees. He heard the driver and the two men walking beside the vehicle talking as they passed by. He hoped they found all the wounded.

  Levi made no sound, for the men would be Rebels. He closed his eyes.

  * * *

  Levi came awake to the sound of a bugle. He opened his eyes to find the dusk of early morning filling the woods. With his body exhausted and wounded, he had slept the night away.

  Cautiously he sat up. Hardly more than a hundred yards distant, a company of Rebel soldiers were rising up from the ground and forming into ranks. They must have arrived during the night while he slept. Levi heard not one sound from the men as they took their positions. They could have been dead Rebels rising up from where they had fallen to go forward, to fight and to die again. He feared that yesterday’s terrible battle had been a prelude to another struggle more ferocious and bloody today.

  He watched with a bleak heart as the Rebels marched off to the east toward the Yankees beyond the Chickahominy River. He was sick to death at the uselessness of the fighting. The reason for the war had seemed so clear when he had enlisted in the Union Army in Cincinnati six months before. He had felt lighthearted when he said good-bye to his parents and younger brother and two small sisters. He had laughed and joked with the other new soldiers as they journeyed south. He had met Jimmy during the march. They had talked about the magnificent adventure that lay ahead of them as they fought to preserve the Union.

  How wrong they were, for the war was not magnificent. It was an ugly, deadly thing. The two armies were locked in a battle that was self-perpetuating, an all-destroying ritual. A horrible game played between Generals Lee and McClellan. Maybe they got some thrill out of the contest between the two armies. If they did while killing thousands of men, then Goddamn them both to hell.

  The preservation of the Union had no meaning to Levi if he had to kill again as he had killed yesterday. Never again did he want to see a man fall, the ranks to thin around him. The sight of his friend Jimmy lying dead across their little log fortress would forever be burned in his memory.

  Levi nodded to himself. For him the battle was over. Never again would he raise his gun against another man.

  He crept through the trees to the dead Rebels. Two were approximately his size, one wounded in the chest and the other in the stomach. He took the trousers from the first and the shirt from the second, and put them on as his uniform.

  Moving swiftly and carrying his Spencer rifle and ammunition, he struck out to the west. Holding in deep woods, he began to work through the Confederate lines. With luck, he just might make it from the battle zone. He had no destination in mind except to go to some faraway place where there was no killing.

  Levi forded the water of Boatswains Swamp at a location different from where he had fought and entered the bordering woods. A quarter hour later he broke out of the woods and Malvern Hill rose up before him. The open, grassy hillside was strewn with thousands of bodies, living and dead, Union and Confederate alike, like a ragged, gray and blue carpet covering the ground.

  Most of the men were unconscious or dead, but enough moved to give the hill a crawling effect. A grievous, mind-bending sound struck Levi. The fallen boys had been left lying unattended all night and were moaning and crying for water and for someone to help them with their wounds. The sound had a palpable force that pressed against Levi.

  Two ambulance wagons hurried past Levi with loads of wounded. Two vehicles were woefully inadequate for the task of carrying the multitude of wounded to the field hospitals, fifty wagons were needed, a hundred. A dead wagon hauling a bed full of corpses moved toward a long, open trench.

  It would have been nearly impossible to cross the hillside without stepping on the dead or wounded so Levi veered away. He dropped down to the valley bottom and moved along the creek flowing there.

  “Soldier, where’re you going?” called a lieutenant marching with his platoon of soldiers along the edge of the hillside.

  “Where’s the field hospital?” Levi called back. “I’ve been hit.” He pointed to his bloody head.

  “Follow the ambulance wagon,” the lieutenant said. He led his men on.

  Levi trailed after the ambulance wagon. Traveling in that direction would get him farther away from the battlefront. Soon he should be entirely clear of both armies.

  He crossed a narrow finger of woods and came out in a grassy park of a quarter acre or so. Near the center he saw where a skirmish had been fought. He counted fourteen corpses of Rebels and Yankees lying together, literally in a heap. A young Union lieutenant had fallen while tryi
ng to rally his men. His hand was still firmly grasping his sword, and determination was visible in every line of his face.

  A Confederate soldier, a mere boy, lay nearby. He had died while in the process of loading his rifle. The weapon with breech open, was clutched in his left hand, and the paper- wrapped cartridge was between thumb and forefinger of the right, and the end of the cartridge bitten and the paper still in his teeth. Then a bullet had pierced his heart and the machinery of life, all the muscles and nerves, had come to a standstill.

  Levi hastened from the lieutenant and the boy, and all the other dead soldiers.

  He found the Confederate hospital consisting of three long tents in a broad meadow. Hundreds of wounded lay in rows awaiting their turn at the surgeons’ table. Hospital stewards had a squad of men spreading straw on the ground for the wounded to rest upon. Meager comfort, thought Levi as he studied their faces, thin and worn from marching and scant fare, and now pinched with pain from their injuries.

  The sides of the tents were rolled up and tied, exposing wooden tables extending the full length of the interior. The surgeons worked bare-armed and fearfully splattered with blood. Muscular orderlies held the wounded soldiers down on the bloody, slippery operating tables as the surgeons wielded their saws and scalpels. Levi shuddered at the sight of the large mounds of severed arms and legs at every tent. A skilled surgeon could amputate an arm or a leg in ten seconds. The more quickly the operation could be performed the better for the patient for there was no anesthetic and the human body could endure the pain just so long before it died.

  Levi ran a finger over his injury. The bleeding had stopped and had crusted into a scab. The pain had lessened. The wound would heal by itself. Besides it would be hours before the surgeons could be free to treat such a comparatively minor injury. He hurried past the hospital tents and entered the woods beyond.

  Levi raised his pace to a trot. Frequently he saw bodies, swollen corpses darkened by the sun and giving off a frightful stench. They were the dead of the first fighting days earlier.