The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  By God, thought George, but there was a man.

  In the town, they waited another hour, hunkered behind the ruins of bombed-out buildings, sheltered from the rain of Confederate shells. When any man mustered courage to raise his head, he saw the First Brigade being smashed, then the Second. Then came the call: “Third Brigade to the front!”

  Chamberlain would write that his men felt at that moment a “tremulous expectation. Not in fear, for that has little place in manhood when love and duty summon; but in eagerness to do their best and make a finish.”

  For his part, George Amory felt fear, deep and cold. He had no choice but to go up that hill. Coming down was now in God’s hands.

  The brigade went forward to the millrace and moved into attack formation on a field that now resembled a scene from Dante. Across eight hundred yards, there were dead men and wounded men, dead horses and dead riders under them, living horses rearing riderless and terrified before explosions that sent great clots of dirt into the air like exclamation marks, and above it all, the fast-falling dusk, a sky almost as red as the puddles of blood and rivulets of blood and swamps of blood that now covered the field.

  The soldiers of the Twentieth had left their haversacks and heavy cloaks with the quartermaster. The officers had dismounted and drawn their sabers.

  But George had pulled his pistol, a big Navy Colt, heavy as a sash-weight. He was a line-closer. His job was to move back and forth behind his company, and as men fell in the front rank, he would push others forward to fill the spaces. Most line-closers used their sabers—swinging them, or prodding with them, or holding them with both hands and pushing the men from the back. George, however, planned to go in shooting.

  He noticed Colonel Ames say something to Chamberlain. He could not hear above the din of battle, but he was sure that the last words were, “God help us now.”

  Chamberlain moved to the right of the line, while Ames stepped to the front, giving example to officers and men both. The bugle sounded, and Ames shouted, “Forward the Twentieth!” The lieutenants called to the sergeants. The sergeants shouted at their companies. And into the inferno they went.

  George Amory forgot his fear. Bullets were whizzing around him, explosions were bursting in front of him, human debris spread under his feet—blood and blasted flesh and bodies. But he put them from his mind and kept his part of the line advancing in step with the regiment, which linked with the Seventeenth New York on the right and the Eighty-third Michigan on the left.

  Wounded soldiers looked up at them as they came. Some shouted encouragement, waved them on, even cheered. A few cried for them to go back, that the wall could not be taken, that they would all be dead before they reached the top.

  But the men of the Third Brigade ignored them, as they had been trained to do, and as all those men on the ground had done earlier.

  George raced back and forth behind his men, urging the company ahead. “Hold the line, men! Hold the line! Straight and steady!”

  Across rills and streams and dips and defiles they went, tight-disciplined despite the explosions and musket fire tearing gaps in their lines.

  By God but they were all men.

  George saw both of the Hoyt brothers disappear in a flash.

  He ignored the splatter of Hoyt blood and brains that sprayed out over the company and shouted, “Keep on, boys! Keep steady!” Then he pushed Corley and O’Rourke forward to fill the hole where the Hoyts had been.

  “Steady on, boys! Steady on!” cried Sergeant Turlock. “We’ve not far. Not far.”

  “Keep on, lads! Keep on!” shouted George.

  Then Colonel Ames called, “The double quick!” And the regiment began moving faster toward its fate, but never running, for that would have broken the line before the fight began, and never stopping to volley, for that would have been worse than useless until they were in range.

  Then Turlock was down, tearing at his clothes to see where he had been hit.

  And the line moved on as if Turlock had never been with them.

  Down into that last defile they went, protected for a few moments from musket fire, close enough now that they were under the artillery.

  It seemed a miracle to George that so many were still standing. Enough, he thought, to carry the fight. The Twentieth were green and untested, but they were as disciplined as any unit of veterans, and they crested the last rise as if it were no different than any other undulation in the Virginia earth, and not piled high with the bodies of the twelve brigades already shattered against that wall.

  And there, in prime musket range, they answered the orders of their officers, to stop, present, take aim, and … Fire!

  At the same moment, another sheet of flame lashed out from the wall.

  Fifty-caliber plugs of lead whizzed and thumped, shattering bone and spraying blood.

  O’Rourke spun about, hands at his throat, as if trying to hold his voice in place.

  George tried to sidestep him, tripped on a body, slipped on the bloody ground, and fell. He landed on his elbow, and his pistol discharged at the same moment that his right leg flew upward. The bullet took off the tip of his boot and three of his toes. He did not feel the pain, because he was sliding down the blood-slicked defile, landing among a dozen bodies, including Jonathan Corley, who had taken a bullet in the thigh and was cinching his belt above the wound to stop the bleeding.

  George tried to stand and cried out, then dropped to one knee.

  “A bullet in the foot,” Corley said. “A ticket home.”

  “My gun. It … it went off in my hand.”

  And for a second time, George saw the death’s head grin. He did not have time to consider its meaning, because he was standing again, limping back up the little grade.

  He got to the top as the regiment delivered another volley. The flame of their fire ignited the dusk for an instant, before another burst of flame knocked the whole regiment back down the slope, some down to death, some down to safety, all down among the bodies of the dying and dead.

  THEY STAYED THAT night on the cold field.

  Men who had sweated hard during the attack shivered now so miserably that they pulled the bodies of their dead comrades around them to stay warm. And those bodies protected them, too, from the Confederate sharpshooters.

  But nothing could protect them from the sound of thousands of men, wounded and dying, spread across that black plain, a sound as insistent as the wailing of the wind, a deep murmur of pain that from time to time separated itself into its component parts—cries for mother, for water, for doctor, for merciful death.

  Chamberlain would write of his own men, who were noticeably quiet despite their wounds: “That old New England habit, so reluctant of emotional expression, so prompt to speak conviction, so reticent as to the sensibilities—held perhaps as something intimate and sacred—that habit of the blood had its corollary in this reticence of complaint under the fearful suffering and mortal anguish of the battle field.”

  George Amory suffered his own misery with barely a sound. He sliced pieces of wool from the uniforms of the dead men around him and used them to pack the boot and stanch the flow of blood.

  Late in the night, the ambulance wagons rattled up the hill with their lanterns masked. Their drivers moved cautiously, crouching among the dead and the dying, lighting matches to peer into faces, to ask questions, to ascertain chances.

  By then, George was unbearably cold. Though his teeth were chattering, he managed to call to one matchlit shadow.

  “Where are you hurt, Lieutenant?”

  “In the foot,” said George.

  “Minie ball?” asked the driver.

  “No,” came the bitter voice of Jonathan Corley. “His own pistol.”

  And a murmur finally ran through those reticent Mainers.

  “You shot yourself in the foot?” asked one of the faceless forms leaning over him.

  “Not on purpose,” said George.

  “Well how did you come by that wound?” aske
d another.

  “None of that talk,” came a familiar voice from the shadows.

  “Turlock?” said George. “But you were gut shot.”

  “Hit in the hip,” said Turlock. “Dragged myself up. And from what I seen, I say Lieutenant Amory done his duty.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” said George. Then he told the ambulance driver. “See to those who need more help. I can last here.”

  The driver stood with a lit match in his hand, and some sharpshooter fired at him.

  “Keep down!” said Chamberlain from the darkness. “Keep down and take care. There’s brave men to save off this hill. You can’t save them unless you save yourselves.”

  The Twentieth stayed there another day, bleeding, bitter cold, empty-bellied, hunkered behind that barricade of dead bodies, answering fire if they could, ducking it the rest of the time. When they were finally ordered to withdraw, they crawled, their way lit by the rare, bluish glow of the Northern Lights, glimmering above them like a sign from God.

  But what God was saying, no one could tell.

  AFTER THE REMNANTS of the Twentieth returned to their miserable winter quarters, George was summoned to Chamberlain’s tent and presented with resignation papers.

  Chamberlain explained that Colonel Ames had lumped George with several lieutenants whose performance at Fredericksburg had disappointed him. Those men were being discharged, and so was George.

  “The Colonel says that a man who’s blown off his own toes can’t be … can’t be”—Chamberlain looked at the papers, out the open flap of his tent, anywhere but in George’s eye—”such a man can’t be trusted to lead, whether he did it on purpose or not.”

  “Can’t be trusted?” said George.

  “It’s not my opinion. But … well, you can’t walk right, George. You never will.”

  “But—”

  “Ames is West Point,” said Chamberlain. “He thought little enough of us before the fight. He thinks some better now, but he’s making a clean sweep of the junior officers.”

  George pulled himself up straight. “I must protest, sir.”

  “It’s an honorable discharge, George.” Chamberlain held out a pen. “Do it. Do it for the regiment.”

  George Amory felt an anger rising higher than any he had felt for the Confederates. This was simply not fair.

  But Chamberlain had a minister’s skill at putting the best face on something. He said, “Combat makes bad men worse and good men better. I’ll tell any man that George Amory is better for what he’s been through.”

  Later, George wished that Chamberlain had committed those words to writing, because by the time he returned to Portland, the whispering had begun.

  A letter had reached Hannah Corley, wife of a fisherman who lay one-legged and embittered in the military hospital at Annapolis. It described the bravery of the men, the folly of the generals who wasted them, and the actions of the regimental officers, including Reverend Amory’s son, “who went and shot himself in the foot.”

  “FATHER, I’M HOME.“

  Reverend Amory was propped on pillows, coughing. It was winter, when a cold could turn to a grippe, which might become pneumonia, especially in a man past seventy.

  Before looking at his son’s face, the reverend looked at the bandage wrapping his son’s foot. “I knew that war would not be to your liking.”

  “My liking?”

  “You liked it little enough that you shot yourself in the foot.”

  George looked at his mother, who made a small gesture with her hands, saying that he should remain calm.

  So George said to his father. “I did my duty. Ask Colonel Chamberlain.”

  Reverend Amory nodded, as if it was something he would think about. Then his eyes fluttered and closed.

  George’s mother gestured for them to go downstairs.

  To sit again in his mother’s kitchen, while she made tea and busied herself about the woodstove, seemed strangely unreal to him now, something from someone else’s experience. His world was a muddy, cold place where men lived in canvas tents and survived on hardtack and beans.

  “Your father took to his bed as soon as news about Fredericksburg started arriving. He was worried sick.”

  “Worried that I’d shoot myself in the foot?” asked George bitterly.

  “Worried that you’d be killed. He loves you very much.” While the tea steeped, his mother put a hand on his arm. “You should know that there is gossip, George.”

  “Gossip?”

  “Hannah Corley blames you for recruiting her husband. She spreads rumors. And Mrs. Hoyt says her sons would be alive if not for you.”

  George watched his mother pour tea.

  “A congregation is made up of people,” she continued. “Sometimes they are more mean than charitable. Perhaps if you stand before them and—”

  “Grandfather always said never to apologize twice. I won’t apologize once to a congregation of busybodies.”

  “Your grandfather is a wise man.” His mother pulled a letter from the pocket of her apron and handed it to him.

  It was written in a shaky hand, but the ideas were still strong: “Our George put his convictions to the test. He is the best kind of American. I will welcome him like a hero.”

  George had no wish to be called hero and he had never imagined returning to Millbridge, but there was nothing for him in Portland. So he lingered a few weeks at his father’s bedside until the reverend finally faded away.

  By then, the grief of the congregation had spread in ever-widening circles, because each week brought more bad news.

  Jonathan Corley survived an infection and came home on one leg. But many others did not. Nurtured by cold and cramped quarters, the sicknesses of winter grew together into a single scourge called camp fever. By spring, it would kill more men of the Twentieth than all the Confederate rifles at Fredericksburg. And every time one of his recruits passed away, George felt the angry stares of mothers in the street.

  He left on the first of March, a bright blustery day when the air still stung of winter but the angle of the sun filled New Englanders with the sure knowledge of spring’s salvation.

  HE STAYED THAT night at the Parker House in Boston.

  He might have pushed on to Millbridge, but he wanted to attend services at the Park Street Church because the young ladies of Mrs. Finley’s Finishing School worshipped there.

  Being a Unitarian visitor without a regular pew, he sat in the back and waited.

  Soon enough, a group of young ladies came in, their chatter fading as they were embraced by the austere beauty of the building. They took their places, lowered their heads to their books, and that was when she saw him.

  Immediately her eyes went to his foot.

  She knew. He wondered what her father had told her. He wondered all through the service and out onto Tremont Street.

  “George, this is a surprise,” she said, angling her head so that the brim of her bonnet would block the sun.

  “I had to see you.”

  Now, she seemed to make every effort not to look at his foot, as though it were a port-wine birthmark or some other deformity. “I heard that you were wounded. I trust not too painfully.”

  “I lost half my foot, but it’s the damage to my reputation that hurts.”

  “Undeservedly, I’m sure.”

  And relief poured over him for the first time since they saw those northern lights. “Your words are a great comfort.”

  “My young man is with the Twentieth Massachusetts. The Harvard Regiment, they call it. I know how brave you all must be.”

  He knew what she was telling him. He was not even sure that he was disappointed. He simply felt that he had to explain himself to her.

  An omnibus rattled up to the corner. Two snorting draft horses clopped their hooves on the cobblestones.

  “Come along, girls,” said Mrs. Finley.

  “I must go,” Cordelia told him.

  “May I correspond with you?” he asked. “I ha
ve always promised you my sisterly affections, George.”

  He looked down.

  “George, I’m sorry. But someday you’ll do something extraordinary, and some other young woman will notice. And then you’ll forget about me.”

  “I did something extraordinary. I went up the hill at Fredericksburg”—he looked along Tremont Street, at the coaches and horses and ladies hurrying arm-in-arm with their gentlemen—”while all these people were warm by their fires.”

  “Cordelia!” said Mrs. Finley. “It’s not polite for ladies to stand talking in the street.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She met his eyes once more, put a hand on his arm, said, “Do something else extraordinary.”

  “What?”

  “Find your Constitution.” She pulled away and headed for the omnibus. “Make the world a better place.”

  “I’ll make the world a better place,” he said, “by making cotton cloth for Union suits at Millbridge.”

  “Oh, George.” Cordelia turned back to him, a look of concern—sisterly concern—on her face. “But you hate Millbridge.”

  “I hate it. I hated war, too.”

  Her expression softened. He saw real sympathy in her eyes. “Don’t waste your life there, George. Dream your dreams.”

  “Dream them with me,” he blurted.

  For a moment, he thought she might say yes.

  Instead, she pecked him on the cheek.

  The girls on the omnibus gasped. And Mrs. Finley cried, “Cordelia! Unless that young man is your brother or father, it is absolutely improper—”

  She left George standing on Tremont Street, touching his cheek.

  “SO, HOW’S YOUR foot?” asked Grandfather Will.

  “It hurts,” said George.

  By evening, George had settled into his grandfather’s house on the Blackstone and taken a place at the old man’s dinner table.

  The bill of fare: ground beef in gravy, peas with butter, mashed potatoes, prepared by Mrs. Murphy, the burly housekeeper who had come from the mill to make herself an indispensable caregiver to a ninety-three-year-old man. She bustled in from the kitchen, poked her round face over the old man’s shoulder, and inspected his plate. “Make sure you eat them peas. Steer ’em into the potatoes to pick ’em up.”