by Bob Mayer
Lightning flashed, followed by rumble of thunder, a weak encore to the roar of artillery and musketry which had scythed across this place the previous day. It would be called the Valley of Death by historians looking back at the battle. For the men consigned to die here, now, who’d made that history, it was just a patch of earth for which they’d given their all. The last place they would see, feel, hear, and smell.
The smell. That was the thing one who hasn’t been on a battlefield would never experience or understand. The pungent copper smell of blood, gallons of it. So much so, that at the worst, right after the earlier charge that would get pinned on Pickett, it had flowed into Plum Run, a trickle of water that ran along the lowest part of the valley.
Roland’s nostrils flared. There was the smell of damp dirt from a storm earlier and the odor from the wet wool of the Yankee blue uniforms-- surprisingly there were some of them mixed in among the battlefield debris-- and the more prevalent smell from the lighter cotton of the Confederate gray. Voided bowels. The distinct tinge of gunpowder, despite the downpour earlier, still lay heavy in the low ground. The thick smoke from black powder, which had been a fog bank at the height of the battle, still lingered in tendrils.
Roland lay on his back, staring up at the overcast night sky, watching the flickering lightning in the distance indicating the brewing storm. The sharpshooter’s rifle lay across his chest, reminding him of his mission, which had seemed easy enough during the briefing, but they hadn’t factored in how long it takes a man to die. Men. Men to die.
“Mama. Please come get me, Mama!”
It was a plaintive cry from someone close by. A man, who sounded more like a boy.
“Mother!”
Roland could hear other voices now. Lifting his head slightly, he saw a tree to his left, shot-up, its branches splintered from artillery and grape shot, but still a tree. In the lightning glare, he saw the men gathered underneath. Blue and gray joined together in dying.
“Help me, Lord. Help me, Lord. Please help me, Lord.”
Roland had to tune that chant out. Many of these men would have survived their wounds in his time. Roland thought of pressure bandages, blood clotters, IVs, well-trained Special Forces medics, and, more urgently, morphine.
At the other end of the spectrum, someone else was cursing God in a very even, methodical voice, using terms Roland had never heard before. But no one was screaming, despite how much pain they must be suffering.
There was a quiet bravery in that-- not screaming. There was whimpering. Crying. Praying, cursing, and above all, the cry for Mother. But no incoherent screaming.
Roland closed his eyes, wishing he could turn off his ears. He let Edith’s download intrude, grateful for anything, but it veered toward the hard data to explain this: when the Civil War began, there were 113 surgeons in the entire U.S. Army. Twenty-four of them went to the Confederacy. Both armies, like all armies, were prepared to fight the last war, not the next war. The preparation for recovering and treating battlefield wounded was essentially non-existent at the start of the war.
‘The war will be over by Christmas’ was the refrain of excitement in the Spring of 1861, the same as it was in the first year of every war. That had passed. Then came the battle of Shiloh in April 1862, which stunned the nation with gruesome reality, tallying more casualties in two days than all previous American wars combined. The Union, with greater resources, reacted better, but not adequately, trying to design a system to handle the wounded, but in reality it was less of a priority than bringing ammunition and reinforcements forward.
Gettysburg double-downed on Shiloh, eventually climbing to over to 50,000 total casualties. Of the deaths, 3,155 were Union; 4,708 Confederate.
Roland remembered his medevac flight in Iraq and how quickly he’d been snatched from the battlefield; although he hadn’t been retrieved quickly after being wounded. He had flashes of memories of the modern and well-equipped emergency room in Baghdad where his life had been saved.
A light rain began to fall and the download informed him it would get heavier and heavier lasting all night and into the following day.
It is 1863 A.D. John Tyndall is the first to explain the greenhouse effect; Ground is broken in Sacramento, CA on the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad; the roof of a church in Switzerland collapses, killing forty-seven; two midgets, General Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren get married with PT Barnum charging admission to the wedding; the first meeting of the Red Cross; the Treaty of Hue is signed between the French and the Vietnamese which would lead to a war a century later; in the battle of Camaroon in Mexico, sixty-five French Foreign Legionnaires battle 2,000 Mexicans; the New York City draft riots kill 120; British forces in New Zealand battle the Maori; the Confederate submarine Hunley sinks the first time killing its crew of five; Union forces begin a bombardment of Fort Sumter; President Lincoln proclaims the final Thursday of November to be Thanksgiving; the Coney Island railroad opens; the CSS Hunley sinks a second time, killing its crew of eight, including inventor Horace Hunley; The Geneva Convention is signed; linoleum is patented; Winged Victory is discovered; Henry Ford is born.
President Lincoln makes a very short speech of 272 words at a place called Gettysburg.
Roland wondered how Lincoln would feel if he were here, right now, in the middle of all of this?
Some things change; some don’t.
Roland rolled over, then scooted up, his chest on a dead man’s arm, his chin on the guy’s chest, trying to orient himself. He could see fires in the higher distance, east and west, campfires battling the rain. Checking the terrain against the 3D images of the battlefield in the download, he fixed his position. To the east was Cemetery Ridge, where the Union army was entrenched. To the west, Seminary Ridge, where Lee’s army was encamped. Many Southerners up there were praying to the same Lord as the wounded, but with different intent: that the Union would attack this coming day, so they could litter this same ground with more bodies, except in Yankee blue.
Vengeance. The bitter drink of the veteran.
Roland saw two rock-strewn knobs to the south: Little Round Top and Round Top. Chamberlain, Roland thought. He didn’t need Edith’s download to know about Chamberlain and the 20th Maine saving the Union two days ago on the very left flank of the line by doing the unthinkable: just as they were about to be over-run, they attacked.
The Devil’s Den was in front of him, and to his right rear, the Peach Orchard.
That put him at the southern edge of the large field across which Pickett’s charge had occurred during the previous afternoon, although technically, Pickett was only one of three division commanders, and it was Lee who’d ordered the charge over Corps Commander James Longstreet’s objections. People rarely mentioned the other two division commanders, Pettigrew and Trimble. Pickett commanded only three of the eleven regiments that took part, yet his name was forever linked to it.
History was a bitch.
“Mor. Please, Mor.” A strange accent, Scandinavian, but the Union army was full of immigrants.
Dogs wouldn’t be allowed to suffer like this, Roland thought, anger flashing at the Generals on either side, sitting tight, not sending help to recover the wounded, or end their suffering. This was the part of war no one dared talk about any more.
The dying time.
Roland thought of Cannae, where the Roman wounded were dispatched with a quick thrust of the sword. Their medical capabilities were so much less, yet the issue of the wounded was solved so much more expediently. Neither Union nor Confederate would consider such an action. Things had become more civilized, so leaving men to die slowly in their own piss and shit was considered ethical and moral. The makeshift ethics were ahead of the medical capabilities.
Maybe they should be screaming? All of them screaming, making the men safe on those ridgelines on either side listen to it all night long; the sound of hell on Earth.
There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all
Hell.
Sherman got that one right, Roland thought.
The rain came down harder and Roland checked the piece of oilcloth guarding the rifle’s percussion lock, ensuring it was secure.
The other problem with the rain was it would keep many of these men alive longer. A flash of lightning revealed faces turned upward, mouths open, tongues out, welcoming the water, lapping it. Roland saw a man with his back to the tree, staring where his leg had been. Neatly clipped off just below the knee, probably by a cannonball. He, or someone around him, had had the presence of mind to put a tourniquet on the thigh, a bayonet twisted through a shirt, but blood was seeping out of the severed limb, joining the rain to form a reddish puddle.
The download said that parties would come out later on the Fourth from both sides, recovering dead and wounded, but most of the latter who were here would be the former by daybreak. Without a formal truce, those parties wouldn’t venture too far from their own lines, and it would be the Fifth before anyone got to this area, only after Lee began his withdrawal.
Roland remembered when he was a boy and he’d watched nature documentaries. He’d wondered why someone would film a lion sneaking up on a baby gazelle or a snake slithering toward a nest of eggs. He’d wondered why, if someone saw it, they didn’t stop it? He’d cried, and like these men wished they could do now, he went to his mother and asked her.
Why?
She’d told him it was nature, and the TV crew was recording it and not interfering. That it was God’s will.
He hadn’t really understood it back then, but in retrospect, Roland stopped believing in the certainty of his mother’s God at that moment, before he even got to his first battlefield and saw it first hand. He hadn’t understood it then. He’d known it wasn’t God’s will, if there was a God. But it was nature.
He understood that now.
He also never cried again.
And he still wasn’t sure about God, not like most people thought of it, but he was sure there was something out there, some Higher Power. Traveling in time, seeing the things he’d seen, Roland knew there was something.
But there was also Fate. With a capital F. Scout had seen her. So had Ivar. She was real.
In Roland’s opinion, it appeared Fate was a mean bitch.
The Rebels and the Yankees who’d crawled under trees or over to the creek were just part of nature and doomed by Fate. The natural result of this war and this battle. That was the way it was and he couldn’t interfere. He especially couldn’t interfere because someone was over there on the Yankee side, interfering with the natural history of things and he was here to make sure the Shadow’s attempt to change what shouldn’t be changed was thwarted.
So he rolled over, put his chin on the stock of the Whitworth rifle and waited for daylight and a clear shot, and tried real hard to ignore the voices all around him.
“Mama? Come get me. Please. Mama?”
Vicksburg, Mississippi. 4 July 1863
Ivar wasn’t there, and then he was there, but he’d sort of always been there. It was the best way to explain how he arrived, becoming part of his current time and place without fanfare or excitement among those around him; if there had been anyone around him. He was in the bubble of this day, not before, and hopefully he wouldn’t be here afterward, because it looked like a bad place to be.
He had spent most of his not very long adult life in college laboratories, working alone, often at night so he wouldn’t be bothered by others, but the stillness of Vicksburg in the pre-dawn darkness was eerie even to him. He knew this was a change from the past forty-six nights when Union gunboats fired a total of over 22,000 shells at the town (almost 500 a day, Ivar’s number-oriented brain immediately calculated, although he knew it probably wasn’t evenly spread out over that time period). The shelling explained why there weren’t people about, because no one in the besieged city knew about the pending surrender other than Pemberton and his top officers, but there was nothing else moving. Not one four-legged creature. They’d even eaten the rats.
Siege.
It seemed more a term for a medieval castle than the mid-nineteenth century United States. Except the lack of United had eventually led to this. While others might think a little over a century and a half into the past was a long time, to Ivar, on his third Time Patrol mission, time was a much different variable and he knew it was just a blink in the overall scheme of things, not far removed from his era at all.
He was in a deep, wooded gully and in no rush to climb out of it and face whatever hell awaited in Vicksburg proper. He thought of the Egyptians, who had stayed essentially in stasis for almost three thousand years. Of course, they had viewed time differently than most people in the modern world: it was cyclical to the Egyptians, not linear. Thus three thousand years was a spiral to them, not a line to be advanced upon.
That made him think of the spiral ramp around the outside of the Pit in the Possibility Palace, which shook him out of his lethargy and back into mission. Ivar reluctantly accepted that the clock was ticking and he needed to get moving.
He began climbing out of the ravine. He thought of all the battles, which led to this siege, every detail of which was in his download. Grant had tried to seize Vicksburg fast in May, before the defenses could be set in place.
The terrain, as Ivar was learning, was in favor of the defenders, heavily wooded, with deep ravines that made coordinated assaults almost impossible. The first attack was repulsed with heavy losses. A more coordinated attack followed three days later, down the Graveyard Road (appropriately named), led by a ‘forlorn hope’ (a group of volunteers who lead the way in an assault where 100% casualties was expected) and achieved no success either. One of the officers involved later wrote that it reminded him of one of Dante’s levels of hell, although he didn’t specify which one.
As Ivar grabbed onto a vine, struggling up an almost vertical, muddy incline, Edith’s download continued to entertain him with data. A historian of the Civil War had written that Grant didn’t regret ordering the assaults, only that they failed. Ivar tried to reconcile such actions with the young man painting a landscape in that beautiful garden at West Point. Add to that the concept of waiting and starving people into surrender, which seemed so strange, yet it was the decision Grant had made after his early assaults were repulsed with heavy losses.
Were women and children going hungry the price for not getting soldiers killed?
Ivar knew the Union soldiers were sitting around playing cards (when those on the gunboats weren’t firing at the city) and well-fed, while those inside the ramparts surrounding Vicksburg were down to shoe leather as a delicacy.
Ivar reached for a thick branch, pulled and then fell backward as the rotting arm of the corpse he’d grabbed separated from its body. Ivar tumbled to the bottom of the gulley. The arm came to a halt on top of him. With disgust, he shoved it aside, even as he noted the remnants of Union blue cloth on it. One of Grant’s casualties.
Taking a deep breath, Ivar started upwards once more, careful where he grabbed this time. He’d never had a great sense of smell, an almost non-existent one for some reason, but now that he was aware, he could smell the bodies all around, even if he couldn’t see them. The vegetation was so thick, they were melding into it as they rotted.
Earth to earth.
This added impetus and he made it out of the gulley, onto a ridgeline. He didn’t pause; one never stood silhouetted on a ridgeline. Below, he saw houses, all of them as dark as night and knew he was in Vicksburg proper.
It was as quiet as the gulley. Not a light, not a sound, not a creature stirring—and then to prove him wrong a skinny, shaggy dog ran up to him and began to sniff at his leg. It looked like a chow-shepherd mix that ought to weigh about eighty pounds, but was about half that, its ribs showing. The fact the dog was alive was rather amazing given that the people of Vicksburg were cooking anything they could toss in a pot.
“Buster. Buster.” The whisper was frantic and coming from the r
ight front. A pale boy of about ten ran around the corner of a house then skidded to a halt seeing Ivar.
“Please, mister. He’s my dog.”
Ivar realized the boy thought he was going to take the dog and eat it. “It’s okay,” Ivar said.
The boy walked to the dog, moving in a shoulder-hunched, half-step, shuffling way. Shelling every night for over a month will do that to you, Ivar thought. The download informed him that while the shelling had been intense, less than a dozen civilians were casualties. That didn’t sound like many, versus 22,000 rounds unless, of course, you were one of the dozen.
Plus, the boy didn’t know that. All it took was one. And the boy didn’t know that a truce was in existence. That General John C. Pemberton, West Point class of 1837, had already negotiated the surrender of Vicksburg to General Ulysses S. Grant, West Point class of 1843 for the Fourth of July 1863.
“Thanks, mister.” The boy made to run off but Ivar called out.
“What’s your name?”
The boy turned, Buster at his side. His eyes were wide in the moonlight, as he stared up. “Joey.”
“You’ve done a good job, Joey, keeping Buster around.”
Joey nodded. “Yeah. It’s been hard.”
“Where do you live, Joey?”
The kid gave Ivar an odd look and Ivar knew he’d asked a dumb question. The civilians lived along the reverse slope of a ridgeline between the city and the Confederate lines. The settlement faced away from the gunboats, although now that Grant had emplaced artillery in his entrenchments, the shells had been coming from all directions but with little effect; if sleepless nights and constant fear could be considered ‘little effect’.
“A bombproof,” Joey said, using the term the locals had come up with for their caves. They were fortunate in that the soil around Vicksburg was easy to dig in, but solid enough so that the caves didn’t collapse. “I sneak out sometimes at night to get ol’ man Finster’s ‘tatoes,” Joey explained, taking Ivar’s question the wrong way. His words tumbled over each other as he hurried to clarify. “He sits in that garden all night long with a scattergun to keep the soldiers out, but every now and then he’s got to use the facilities, if you know what I mean. Just a trench, and not far from the garden, but he has to go. That gives me and Buster a chance. Buster can find ‘em and dig ‘em up fast as anything you ever seen.”