Seen through the field glasses, those near enough for Bridger to make out clearly were individual soldiers—some solemn, some distracted, some pale with fear. Others, though, were laughing and joking with each other as they worked, like guests at a lawn party, the newest recruits, then, with little or no experience of actual warfare.
Bridger felt a pang of sympathy for them, enemies though they were, as much as he felt for his own men. A lot of them were mere boys who could have no way of knowing, outside of the stories they must have heard, what it was to undergo that first hellish baptism of fire and blood. To come to that initial, utterly horrific realization that war was no schoolyard game of king-of-the-hill, as they had probably imagined.
There would be no going home to supper at day’s end, to chores and lamplight and kinfolk, no falling into a familiar bed to dream the innocent dreams of boyhood.
“Sir?” Reed said, interrupting Bridger’s glum reflections.
Bridger lowered the field glasses again and turned to the other man. “What is it, Lieutenant?”
Reed reached into his dusty tunic, with its sweat-stained underarms, pulled out a thick packet, extended it with a hand that trembled slightly. “With the Yanks putting on a show like they are,” he said, with a barely perceptible quaver, “I near forgot about this here letter. A few mail bags came through on a supply wagon a little while ago, and I was around for the sorting out. Saw your name and said I’d bring this to you personally.”
“Thanks.” Bridger accepted the battered envelope, examined it briefly, distractedly. He noted the familiar Winslow crest embossed in the upper left corner, the smudged but elegant sweep of his younger sister’s handwriting.
Amalie. Always the diligent but sometimes deceptive correspondent.
Bridger loved his sister, and looked forward to her letters, although reading them was often an emotional expenditure he could not afford. She usually included uplifting quotes, mostly from her favorite poets, humorous anecdotes about people they knew, the best and worst aspects of a recent sermon and accounts of increasingly rare social events.
The reality of his sister’s life, he knew, was usually hidden somewhere between the lines, and he sensed that she didn’t want to distract him with worries. But she also found a careful way to keep him abreast of what was happening at home and in the fighting close by.
She filled him in on the state of the house, how their father and the few slaves still at Fairhaven were managing. How the water supply was holding up and whether it had been contaminated. Which friends and cousins were listed as missing, captured or dead in the local newspaper or on the bills posted regularly at the railroad station.
Amalie wasn’t his only source of information, of course. He knew that because of the Northern blockades, most necessities and nearly all once-common luxuries, such as coffee, books, fine writing paper and sweets, were sold at black-market prices, when they could be found at all.
Amalie, just shy of eighteen, pretty and unspoiled and primed since infancy for a spectacular social debut, with all the requisite beaus, ball gowns, cotillions, garden picnics and house parties, had to be profoundly disappointed. The world she’d known all her short life had vanished, leaving her unprepared for hardship.
Although Bridger privately considered the tradition of dressing young women up in silks and satins and herding them into the marriage market to be worse than backward, he ached for Amalie. He could do nothing about her circumstances, but he did send her money whenever he was paid—since the plantation’s income had declined. And he reminded her often that this war, with all its devastation and privations, would end at some point.
At least, it would end for some. Bridger wasn’t counting on a future of his own, not with all those Yankees in plain view, any one of whom would be happy to put a bullet in his head or a bayonet through his heart. He watched, grimly fascinated, as Meade’s advance forces made themselves at home in the distance.
“I sure would like me a pair of them good Yankee boots,” Reed observed, reminding Bridger of his presence—and the thwarted but not entirely abandoned plans of a good many Confederate soldiers to scavenge Gettysburg for badly needed shoes before the battle commenced, which would likely be the next morning.
Bridger indulged in a brief, bitter smile, thinking that if there was one thing he wanted from those Yanks, it was a halfway decent cup of coffee, hot and rich and laced with sugar. Maybe it was his imagination, since the smells of wood and tobacco smoke, human sweat and horse manure were all-pervasive, but he thought he caught the pleasant aroma of the stuff, just the same, already brewing over the freshly laid campfires below.
On the Confederate side, even the most basic rations were in short supply, if there were rations at all. He knew the rank and file foraged for much of what they ate, and what the army called coffee tasted more like last night’s dishwater than the rich, chicory-tinged cup the more prosperous Southerners had come to favor.
“You reckon General Lee will want to engage?” Reed asked. “Some of the men say Longstreet will be against the idea. And Longstreet ain’t the only one with objections, the way I hear it.”
Because of his family’s elevated social position, Bridger was acquainted with both Lee and Longstreet, and numerous other high-ranking officers. Longstreet was anything but a coward. Like General Lee, he was a prudent man and a master strategist. The difference was that Lee hated to pass up an opportunity, any opportunity, however risky it might be, and he seldom did, even when counseled to do otherwise.
Already a legend, grudgingly admired even by some in the North, all but worshipped by his troops and the folks back home, Robert E. Lee was a man of dignity, intelligence, honor and restraint. If there was, in Bridger’s mind, a trace of arrogance in him, he hid it well. He lacked the eccentricities of some of his best officers, such as the late Thomas Jackson, whom he had addressed fondly as “Tom” in relative private and “General Jackson” in public. He might spare a wistful smile when he heard the man referred to as “Stonewall,” but he never used the moniker himself.
Lee was the classic Southern gentleman, well-spoken and erudite. He was married to one of George Washington’s stepchildren, and was the son of the legendary Light-Horse Harry Lee, later disgraced but still revered as one of the greatest soldiers America had ever produced. Along with the graces of his mother’s illustrious family, Lee had inherited a considerable portion of old Harry’s fearless audacity. When there was the slightest chance of furthering his military agenda, Lee could be utterly ruthless, driving his men, half-starved, barefoot and battle weary, far beyond the limits of their considerable endurance.
Nine times out of ten, he got results.
“Yes,” Bridger said, replying to Reed’s question at long last, “I believe General Lee will choose to fight.”
Reed seemed to deflate a little at this, but he recovered quickly enough. He was a good soldier, with plenty of courage, and Bridger liked him, although he knew little of the man’s history, and that was fine, because it was plenty difficult to see a comrade struck down in battle. Seeing a friend killed was far worse.
Even if that friend happened to be a Yankee, like his old military prep school friend, the now Captain Rogan McBride.
Bridger didn’t believe he could end McBride’s life, should they find themselves confronting each other on the field; the bond between them, formed in their teens at boarding school and during visits back South at his family home, ran deep.
Then again, it was easy to make such an assumption at a distance, not yet embroiled in the fierce atmosphere of combat. He hadn’t seen Rogan in several years, but wondered before each battle if this would be the one where they’d be forced to fight each other. Perhaps his friend had changed and become embittered by the inevitable losses and sorrows of war.
Was Rogan down there someplace, thinking similar thoughts?
Remembering better times?
Bridger and Rogan, sharing a room at St. Luke’s, the military prep school on the outskirts of Boston, had formed an uneasy alliance in the early days of their acquaintance, coming from markedly different backgrounds as they had. Both had been forced to attend the school, and both had felt aggrieved about being sent away.
Bridger had essentially been exiled to his mother’s people, Northerners all, a few months after her death from pneumonia, when his natural wild streak had, in his father’s opinion, rendered him incorrigible.
Rogan, too, had been banished from New York City, where he’d been born to an Irish housemaid, out of wedlock, and raised to stay out of everyone’s sight, including his mother’s. He’d never met or seen his father, a stable hand—or so he’d been told—at another wealthy home. When Rogan was seven, Rosie McBride had apparently exhausted whatever maternal instinct she’d possessed in the first place, marched him to the nearest Catholic church and left him there, seated in a back pew, with a heel of bread and three copper pennies to sustain him.
By his own account, shared only after six months or so, when he and Bridger had finally put their initial wariness behind them, the young Rogan had sat for hours, waiting for his mother to come back for him, the way she always had before. Rosie would be in a temper for a while, he’d reasoned, but when she calmed down, she would show up, tearful and apologetic. She’d wrap him tightly in her arms, call him her darling boy, and then take him home to their attic room in her employer’s enormous brick house. There, she would fuss over him, offering him sweets, no doubt purloined from the pantry, making promises and pleading for his forgiveness.
This time, however, she did not return.
The next morning, Father Hennessey, who looked too young to be a priest, in Rogan’s opinion, had found the boy asleep on a pew and promptly delivered him to the nuns, who had surrounded him like a flock of peevish crows, pecking at him with their questions. What was his name? How old was he? Who were his parents? Where did he live? How long had he been left alone?
Bewildered, he’d accepted a hot meal and then been placed in a room full of other children, some older and some younger, where he was handed a slate and a piece of chalk. In the meantime, Father Hennessey had gone in search of Rogan’s mother, only to return the following day, shoulders stooped, face glum. Miss McBride, he’d told the nuns, while Rogan listened outside his office door, had relinquished all claim to her son. She’d finally found a husband, she’d explained, and her betrothed was not inclined to take on another man’s brat. This, Rosie had told the priest, was her chance at a fresh start, and she wasn’t about to let past mistakes stand in her way.
And that was that.
Rogan stayed on with the nuns and Father Hennessey and the other children, mostly orphans, a few crippled in body or mind, others simply unwanted, as he was. At first, he’d missed his mother and continued to hope for her return, but that soon passed. At the master’s house, he’d had to stay in the attic most of the time, hidden away like the shameful secret he was, but at St. Swithin’s Home for Children, his view of the world expanded considerably. He’d learned to read and write and cipher and, after class and on Saturdays, he spent hours outdoors, running and climbing and playing games with the others. He’d had enough to eat for the first time in his life, slept in a bed all his own, and even though his clothes were secondhand, they fit him. He had shoes that didn’t pinch and a warm coat and mittens for winter.
He was happy enough, insofar as he knew what happiness entailed.
He’d excelled in his studies at St. Swithin’s and behaved himself—until he turned ten and, suddenly restless, ran away for the first time.
That was the beginning of a cycle. Periodically, the cops rounded him up, along with the other street rats, slapped him around a little and hauled him back to St. Swithin’s, where the nuns renewed their efforts to put the fear of God into him and Father Hennessey shook his head sadly and told him he must learn to resist temptation in all its forms.
Finally, when Rogan was fourteen, and neither boy nor man, he’d reached the far borders of even Father Hennessey’s remarkable patience. By then an accomplished thief, Rogan had been arrested after smashing a shop window and helping himself to items within.
This time, he received more than a boxing of his ears and a series of lectures on the wages of sin and the horrors of Purgatory. He was brought before a judge and given a choice between jail and military school. Luckily the good Father had somehow finagled a place at St. Luke’s Military Preparation Institute in Boston and a scholarship for him.
He chose St. Luke’s, albeit reluctantly, for the school, as he’d suspected, was strict, a repository for the unmanageable and recalcitrant sons of wealthy families. While he didn’t have a family, wealthy or otherwise, Rogan certainly met and exceeded the other two criteria.
There was something comforting to Bridger in remembering his friend Rogan. It was a way, he reckoned, of verifying that even if death came for him, in an hour or a day, he had lived something of a life.
And Rogan McBride had been part of it. On some school vacations, Rogan had even come home with him to Savannah and visited with Bridger’s father and sister. Then, after four years at the Preparatory Institute, they had gone their separate ways, Rogan back to New York to study law, Bridger home to Savannah, to the Winslow plantation, where he raced horses, engaged in drunken brawls, fought duels, chased women and rapidly earned himself a just reputation as a wastrel and general no-account.
He was the despair of his father, the classic second son, the born rebel bent on scandal and ultimate destruction.
As such, Bridger was well suited for war, if not exactly for the Southern cause. When the conflict finally erupted in April of 1861, he had been among the first to enlist in the ragtag Army of Northern Virginia—after he’d seriously considered taking up with the North, instead.
Growing up with slaves, he had come to hate slavery, euphemistically referred to as “the peculiar institution” by most Southerners, and he hated it still. He was not fighting to uphold the practice, he was fighting to defend the ground in which his mother and elder brother and all his Winslow ancestors were buried.
Now, here he was, about to join a battle he sensed would be pivotal, fiercer and bloodier than any he’d fought in before. A certain amount of introspection seemed in order.
He might never marry, or sire children. Never again raise hell in a brothel, play chess with a skilled opponent, enjoy a rich meal or ride one of his fast horses for the sheer joy of it.
Whatever his destiny, he would meet it bravely, and with honor, at Gettysburg.
If he perished in Pennsylvania farm country, so be it. He was, after all, a soldier.
Should he survive the encounter he knew was coming, he would be grateful for the sweet privilege of drawing breath beneath the bright blue arch of the sky, sleeping under a blanket of stars and awakening to the first light of morning.
Time would tell.
In the meanwhile, Lee was on his way, with Longstreet and others, dogged in his intention to press his hard-won advantage and drive deep into Northern territory, determined to take Philadelphia and Baltimore and, ultimately, the capital. In Lee’s view, once they fell, Lincoln would be compelled to recognize the Confederate States of America as a free and sovereign nation.
Bridger, who had seen something of the North, with its great, densely populated cities, its sprawling farms and busy factories, its vast networks of railroads and telegraph lines, was not as optimistic as his fabled commander.
Lee had firsthand knowledge of Northern resources himself, having studied and eventually taught at West Point, with a great many other accomplishments following. Lee’s military record was, in fact, so impressive that Abraham Lincoln had originally offered him full command of the Union army.
He had refused that honor, with dignity and probably a degree of regret, explaining to the President that he c
ould not raise his hand against his home state of Virginia. Subsequently, at the request of Jefferson Davis, Lee had taken charge of Confederate forces and, despite smaller numbers, untrained troops, scarce and crumbling railroads, inadequate bridges and poor supply lines, resulting in an almost constant lack of food, medicine, weaponry and ammunition, he’d claimed victory after victory.
The general was undeniably a brilliant strategist; his training as an engineer, as well as a military leader, served him well. Lee was fiercely intelligent, but it was his boldness Bridger admired most, his mastery of the surprise attack. When he struck, he did so with the deadly stealth and swiftness of a copperhead.
For all that, Lee had been extraordinarily lucky, too.
And Bridger Winslow, an experienced gambler, knew just how fickle fortune could be. Every winning streak came to an end, sooner or later.
Before turning away to attend to his responsibilities—seeing to the care, comfort and instruction of his company—he took one last look at the ominous pageantry playing out in and around Gettysburg.
Was his friend there somewhere in the midst of the blue-coated horde, preparing for battle? There was no way of knowing, of course, and even if Rogan was present, the odds against their meeting in the chaos of combat were minimal, given the size of both armies.
And what of the sudden prickle at Bridger’s nape, the rise of the small hairs on his forearms?
No believer in signs and portents, he dismissed the sensations as fear, a sensible emotion in the circumstances and, less admirably, a certain sense of anticipation.
After all, he’d always relished a good fight.
8
Seminary Ridge, near Gettysburg,
June 30, 1863, 9:00 p.m.
Rogan
Campfires flickered in the night like fallen stars as Captain Rogan McBride and his small Yankee detachment reached the outskirts of Gettysburg. They were bone-tired to a man, their bellies so empty they ached, their tongues dry with dust, their horses faring no better.
The Yankee Widow Page 11