by Ralph Peters
“Yes, sir.”
Gordon saluted and rode out to look at the ground. Stray rounds flirted. From the forest, he heard ragged volleys and unusual, terrified wails, as if the Cyclops had emerged from his cave to eat men alive for his dinner.
Even in those urgent moments, Gordon remained conscious of his appearance, sitting so upright in the saddle that he almost tilted backward.
Breaking out of the undergrowth, two men carried a third who swung from their shoulders. Instead of legs, the wounded man had shreds of blood-soaked trousers and one white thighbone visible, striped like a barber’s pole painted by a drunkard. The soldier’s head lolled every which way, and his youthful face, beyond pain, was golden and beautiful.
“‘Covetous death takes a thousand forms around us,’” Gordon recited, “‘and flight brings no man safety in this hour.’” Homer knew, he knew.
But Gordon didn’t know what the devil was in that tangle of undergrowth and scrub pine. Fighting in there would be little better than brawling on a night without a moon. Some of the gunfire sounded terribly close, the only consolation that the volleys were those of much-diminished companies, not full regiments, of the enemy.
He decided that all he could do would be to put his men shoulder to shoulder in two lines and order them forward.
General Early caught up with him again. “You said ten minutes, Gordon.”
“It hasn’t been ten minutes, sir. What about the other flank? Will it hold?”
Instinctively, Early looked north of the road. But a man could see no more than thirty feet into the brush. If that.
“We’ve got the bastards flanked up there. But they’re not for quitting today. Killing a right good number of them, though.”
General Ewell left his frantic staff and joined his two subordinates.
“Where’s your brigade, Gordon? We need you now, not tomorrow.”
“If, sir, you would kindly turn your eyes…”
On they came, thirsty as out-of-pocket Irishmen, tired as washerwomen on Saturday night, and mean as a wild sow defending her litter. Hurrying forward at the double-quick, they didn’t cheer. They were saving that, Gordon knew, marshaling what voices they had left after eating dust for the last eight hours. They were building up their ability to howl and terrify the way they husbanded ammunition.
“Lord be praised,” Ewell said.
“Get in there, John,” Early told him. “Get in there and tear the guts out of those bastards.”
“As Achilles avenged the death of beloved Patroclus,” Gordon told his superiors. He kicked his horse to meet his rushing men. Some of them raised their rifles from their shoulders, lifting them in one hand in a slapdash salute. For all the rigors of the day and the dangers just ahead, a goodly proportion of his boys were grinning to split their cheeks. It was a grand, inspiring sight, although their smiles could not be described as “ivory.”
And now for the topless towers of Ilium, Gordon thought. Or those goddamned bush pines, anyway.
The 26th led the march. Straightening himself like a Spanish grandee posing for a portrait, Gordon yelled to the regiment’s colonel, “Eddie, plant your left on the side of the road by that broke-down limber. Form two ranks, just shy of a quarter turn to the right.”
“Yes, sir.”
Colonel Evans of the 31st, the next regiment in line, rode up to join them, but Atkinson of the 26th had already turned to his task.
“Clem,” Gordon shouted, “you form to the right of the Twenty-sixth. Two ranks, shoulder to shoulder. Just align on Eddie’s boys. Be quick now.”
Evans saluted and hastened back to lead his men from the roadway into the brush. The men of the 26th streamed around Gordon, water rushing around a rock, and a soldier called, “Genr’l, you’d fright the Yanks just to look at you, I swear.”
Against his will, Gordon lost control of his features. He grinned at the dust-crusted faces hurrying past. “Then I shall be as the Gorgon!” he declaimed. The boys wouldn’t have a scrap of an idea what he was talking about, but he knew that they just liked to hear him talk.
He rode back to give orders to his four following regiments, drawing his sword to point at the spots where he wanted them to go in.
The fighting sounded impossibly close now, a monstrous, invisible beast in the hot, dark labyrinth.
“Thirty-eighth Georgia! Align on the Thirty-first. Get into those woods, boys. Get on into those woods.…”
The crashing and thrashing of his men was complemented by imaginative curses, brief prayers hollered as at a camp meeting, and dry-spit challenges to the unseen enemy.
In a matter of minutes, Gordon had his brigade in a swaybacked line that thrust deep into the brambles. The formation was the best the hour allowed. Forcing his horse through briars and stray wildflowers, he rose in his stirrups and bellowed:
“Georgia! Forward!”
The Rebel yell his men had been saving up tore the air like a volley unleashed by the gods. In response, disorganized but heavy fire erupted from the undergrowth. Rounds ripped leaves and knocked down Gordon’s first casualties. When a clot of men stopped to return fire, he waved his sword toward their enemies.
“Just go at ’em, get on ’em. Wait till you get your muzzles against their bellies.”
But it was the way of soldiers to fire back when fired upon. And the tangled growth was, indeed, a terrible place. As the last wave of Rebel yells faded off and the men got down to killing, Gordon forced his mount back toward the 26th.
“Where’s my bull, my Minotaur?” he called. “Spivey, you answer up! James Ervin Spivey, answer up!”
A wild halloo, a scream like the triumphant cry of Death himself, erupted from the thickets. Spivey’s unearthly howl had become a signature of the brigade.
The Yankees had come damned close. Barely a hundred yards from the road, the blind volleys turned to private tussles with bayonets and rifle butts wielded as clubs. Disregarding the squalls of lead, Gordon rode along his line, if line it could still be called, urging on his officers and men, driving them, adding his strength of will to their animal rage. Off to the left, a stretch of the forest had caught fire, but his men just veered around it.
Gordon’s horse shied mildly at the first Union corpse it met. Thereafter, the number of blue-clad bodies and struggling wounded multiplied. His own men were not unscathed, though. One soldier sat against a tree, clutching the belly of a bloodstained shirt. With more blood greasing his chin, the lad called out, “I’m a-going to catch up with you, Genr’l.” He puked gore. “I’ll be catching on up now.”
“God bless you, son,” Gordon told the boy.
The musketry grew deafening. As one of his men, bloody-shouldered, nudged along a string of captured Federals—threatening them with what Gordon would have bet was an empty rifle—Gordon could only tell an abashed Union captain, “Fortunes of war.…”
His men were a wonder to him, now and always. They kept on going, unwilling, even unable, to stop. Sometimes, he would ride fifty yards and see little but flashes ahead. Then he would come to a scramble of bodies, the living and the dead, intermingled and tangled. Crazed, a man from the 38th bayoneted a Yankee body over and over again, pulping the meat. Gordon knew enough of war to pretend he did not see. When a man was in such a state, you just left him alone.
His men needed no more encouragement, no ringing speeches, now. Victory was more stimulating than the finest store-bought whiskey, a close horse race, and a pliant woman together. His problem would be stopping them, if it came to that.
On their own, his men raised another yell, as if they shared one mind, a great gray beast. The most effective measure Gordon could take was just to ride back and forth behind the advance, showing himself and admonishing men to maintain their ranks where the infernal grove allowed.
Another string of prisoners passed on their way to the rear. A copper-haired Yankee sergeant, red of face, demanded of Gordon, “Where the Hell did you sonsofbitches come from?”
When o
ne of the guards raised a rifle butt to club the insolent man, Gordon waved him off.
“We come, sir, from the verdant fields and sylvan groves of an earthly paradise mortal men call ‘Georgia.’”
“Lord awmighty,” one of the guards said, grinning black-toothed at Gordon. “I don’t know what language you’re talkin’ in, General, but it sounds a heap of pretty.”
A volley from the brush struck the herded prisoners, dropping two. It was impossible to say which side had fired.
“Get them out of here,” Gordon barked. He was all for killing men in arms, but did not wish to injure a captive foe.
He gave his horse both spurs, but it did little good. A horse could not get through where a fawn couldn’t pass. He had to guide the animal around a natural barricade of thorns. Then he came up against a wall of pines and the body of one of his men with its head blown open.
A wave of soldiers appeared from an unexpected direction. They were his men, strayed off. It was impossible to keep one’s bearings in the thickets.
Gordon waved his sword to correct their direction. It struck a tree. After sheathing the blade again, he pointed with a gloved hand and bellowed, “That way. Follow the sound of the guns.”
A few yards on, he found the colonel of the 13th extricating his men as stubborn Yankees fired from an embankment beyond a marsh. Gordon let the colonel do his own work and pushed on to find a way around the obstacle. But his men had solved the problem for themselves, and a wild mob of soldiers in gray—from the 60th, he figured—swept the Yankee line from right to left.
“Keep together now, you men, you keep together!” Gordon shouted. “Close on the center regiments!”
One of his lieutenants lay facedown and unmoving in the muck. Gordon could read the rank, but not see the features. And there was no time for courtesies.
His attack had come so far so fast that he worried it would dissolve from its own success, disintegrating into little bands of soldiers wandering about, as the Yankees who had come the farthest had done. He rode back toward the left, to gather in the 26th and tighten what passed for a line now, but Colonel Atkinson met him on the way.
“General, we’ve got Yankees on our left. We’re in so deep they’re just about behind us.”
“Do they know we’re here? If they’re behind us, we’re behind them, too, Eddie. Leastways, that’s the way I’d prefer to look at it.”
“Well, there’s a plenty of them, either way.”
A welter of musketry rose on the right, a perfect, unwanted bookend to the dilemma.
“I would say,” Gordon told the colonel, “that we have effected a successful penetration of the Army of the Potomac. In fact, we may have been a mite too successful.”
Dirty-faced, Atkinson grinned. “Gave ’em the devil, though. Busted up the nigger lovers good.”
“Eddie, gather your men in. Tell Clem to contract his lines toward the center, too. And get ready.”
“For what?”
“More fighting. You just go on now, I’ll call for you.”
Gordon made his way along the line a last time, spooling in his brigade, careful not to go astray himself. Finally, he summoned all of the regimental commanders to meet behind the 13th. And he called for Private Spivey.
“Gentlemen,” Gordon began amid the revelry of death, “I make out that we still have a few stray Yankees to our front, their famed and feted Iron Brigade on our right, and a moderately worrisome collection of unknown interlocutors to our left. Eddie, you are going to wheel the Twenty-sixth left and charge straight into them. Colonel Berry will lead his Sixtieth in a simultaneous charge to the right, supported by the Thirteenth and Sixty-first attacking on his left and right obliques. We’ll see if we can’t collect a few black hats today.” He turned to the commander of the 31st and said, “Clem, I want you to keep on attacking straight ahead, in case anybody out there’s getting ideas. The Thirty-eighth will remain with me as a reserve.”
“General … sir … you’re attacking in three directions. With one brigade. That does make for interesting odds.”
“Mathematical speculations were never my favorite pastime,” Gordon said. “The signal to attack will be Private Spivey’s basso profundo. Back to your regiments, gentlemen.”
“John Gordon, you are crazy as a loon,” Clem Evans said. “Well, it’s been an honor to serve under you.”
When Gordon’s men renewed the attack, they broke two Union brigades and took three hundred prisoners.
Two forty-five p.m.
Headquarters, Army of the Potomac and the general in chief
Meade faced one disheartening report after another. Warren had been right. The attack had been as ill-conceived as it was ill-prepared. But Grant had left him no choice. And, to be honest, he had wanted to impress Grant with the army’s ferocity. Now he stood in the shade and read the scrawled messages couriers delivered. The attack in the north, along the Turnpike, had failed at every point. It would be up to Hancock, down on the Plank Road, to advance the army’s position. And save its reputation in Grant’s eyes.
John Rawlins strode about, casting blame in the intervals between his coughs and outbursts of obscenity. Grant sat on his stump, from which he had moved only to take a cup of coffee, then, a bit later, to relieve himself of the drink’s consequences. The general in chief whittled one stick after another, making nothing, simply shaving away peels of wood and shredding the knitted gloves he wore. Grant seemed unaware of the condition of the gloves and appeared only mildly interested in the affairs of the army. But Meade was certain the man took everything in.
Grant’s quiet was unsettling.
What slight calm there was amid Rawlins’ eruptions soon came to an end. Charlie Griffin rode up, face smeared and angry, accompanied by a single officer. He leapt to the ground and came on shouting at everybody.
“Goddamn it to Hell, my men just drove Dick Ewell three-quarters of a mile. We broke the goddamned sonofabitch, we goddamned broke them all.” Griffin’s rage was all-encompassing, not aimed particularly at Meade or anyone else. The man was a shotgun blast, not a rifle shot. “Where were those Sixth Corps bastards, tell me that? Goddamned Wright, the worthless sonofabitch. No support from anybody, and damned well not from Robinson’s cunts sitting there doing fuck-all. And my boys are dead and bloodied to Hell and we can’t even get back the wounded, they’re goddamned burning to death.” He rounded on Adam Badeau, blameless in the day’s affairs and guilty only of bearing the same given name as the first man to sin. “Do you know what happens when a wounded man burns to death, sonny? When he can’t crawl away? Or can’t crawl fast enough? It’s not some holy martyrdom like Joan of fucking Arc.” He turned from the mortified staff man and surveyed the collection of men on the little hill, all shocked into silence. Even Rawlins gaped. “You’re worthless as a wet shit,” Griffin concluded. “You killed my boys for nothing.”
And he stalked off, not bothering to mount his horse, just striding back toward his battered division. His mustering officer followed with both mounts.
On a delayed fuse, Rawlins exploded. “That man ought to be court-martialed. He’s a disgrace to the uniform, to the entire army.” He glared and scanned the collection of officers, settling his fevered eyes on Meade. “Goddamned lucky no newspaperman was here, I’ll tell you that. Every word that came out of his mouth was mutinous, downright mutinous. He has to be relieved and placed under arrest. Today. Immediately.”
Grant laid down his whittling knife and rose to his feet.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“General Gregg,” Rawlins answered.
“No,” Meade corrected him, surprised at his own calm tone, “that was General Griffin. His division led the attack today.”
“You ought to arrest him,” Grant said.
Meade shook his head. “It’s only his way of talking.”
To the end of his days, Meade was never clear as to why he did what came next. He walked over to where Grant stood disheveled and doubtful
, and gently buttoned his superior’s tunic. He tugged the garment straight and patted down the lapels as a mother would.
Grant reeked of tobacco and stale breath.
“Griffin’s a fighter,” Meade said. “We’re going to need him.”
SEVEN
Three p.m.
North of the Pamunkey Road
“I’ll tell you where we are, if you want to know,” Oates said. “We’re damned well lost. Longstreet doesn’t know his head from a mule’s behind.”
“Ain’t that the gospel truth,” a fellow regimental commander agreed.
New to command of the Alabama Brigade, but not to the ways of the army, Colonel Perry refused to be baited by his embittered subordinates.
“Orders change,” Perry said. “And when they do, we carry them out. Anything else, gentlemen? If not, get your men turned around.”
“All this ass-over-elbows business,” Oates put in, “we’re just wearing out our boys before a battle.” Oates was prepared to do what had to be done. But there were times when a man just had to say a thing.
“I’m sure your men will be ready for a fight, Bill,” Perry said.
Perry was doing all he could to break through the men’s anger at the arrest and replacement of the brigade’s old commander, Evander Law. Oates understood the fix Perry was in, and Law’s removal had not been Perry’s doing. But a man had to spit out certain things before they ate up his insides. Once he got them out, he’d be all right, though. They’d all fight well for Perry, when the time came. But the man lacked Law’s sense of people. For one thing, nobody called William C. Oates “Bill.” He went by “William,” and didn’t appreciate anybody taking liberties.
The commanders dispersed, barking orders as they went, and soon the brigade snaked onto a rough-made farm track pointed north. It was the second time the entire division had been pulled up and turned back that day. The first instance had occurred when someone figured out that the local guide didn’t know his local business. Now this.