Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  The pale young man smiled. “Not the most complicated order I’ve received, sir. Straight up this road. Take the junction and hold it. Finish what Billy Mahone and the rest got started. My congratulations, sir.”

  Yes, Longstreet felt, congratulations were in order all around. But he said, “Save those sentiments until we’ve finished with Hancock. We’re only partway there.”

  “From what I hear, it’s a good partway,” Jenkins said.

  Hancock! God, what a fine morning it had been. After two days of wretched roads and trails, of error-riddled maps and incompetent guides, and of constantly changing orders from Lee and his staff … after all of that, he had arrived in the nick of time, able first to blunt Hancock’s grand attack, next to contain it, and then to grind it back. After which Moxley Sorrel, bless him, had brought word of a railroad cut on the right, a perfect thoroughfare to channel a force hard onto the flank of Hancock’s penetration and roll him up. It hadn’t offered a deep envelopment as originally foreseen, the scheme of attack up the Brock Road from Todd’s Tavern. But today, a shallower flank movement had to do.

  And it did do. Guided by Sorrel—who was in his glory—Billy Mahone’s Virginians, with Wofford’s Georgians abreast, had slammed into the left wing of Hancock’s advance, and one Union brigade after another had disintegrated. Then entire divisions began to collapse. Mahone had swept all the way across the front, crossing the Plank Road to the north at last report.

  It was as brilliant a maneuver, Longstreet believed, as Jackson’s flank march at Chancellorsville had been. And the strategic consequences might prove greater. If Hancock’s entire corps could be destroyed …

  Longstreet’s pride had been wounded again and again, first when he was blamed for Lee’s blindness at Gettysburg, then, after a too-brief glow of triumph at Chickamauga, for the defeat at Knoxville. But this … this must lift his reputation high.

  Longstreet refused to dwell on the blow to Grant, his old friend and a man fools underestimated. Nor did Meade leap to mind. His goal was to complete his rout of Hancock, the Army of the Potomac’s battlefield lion. Destroy Hancock’s Second Corps, and the remainder of Meade’s army wouldn’t count for much. There was glory to spare in laying Hancock low.

  Arms of smoke wrapped around the marching column, but the clamor of the fighting ahead had been tamped down by the drubbing the Yankees had taken.

  Long lines of Union prisoners trudged rearward along the roadside. Now and then, one of Jenkins’ soldiers heckled them, but most men let them be.

  Jenkins coughed.

  When Longstreet looked at him a mite too sharply, the brigadier forced a smile and said, “You know, sir, I had been losing faith. In our ultimate victory. I’m not ashamed to admit it. But this”—he gestured toward the stream of prisoners, ignoring the shoals of casualties—“this restores my faith. You have won a great victory, sir.”

  Yes. A great victory. Again, Longstreet said, “You just hold on to those sentiments, General Jenkins. By the grace of God, we’ll have something to toast tonight.”

  As the head of the column entered an acrid cloud, an aide rode up beside Longstreet.

  “Sir … don’t you think you’re a trifle exposed?”

  “That,” Longstreet snapped, “is our business.”

  “Yes, sir.” The aide, Andy Dunn, let his horse slip back among the staffs of the generals. Kershaw, too, had joined the party, telling jokes and laughing at them himself, ecstatic.

  It was a good day when Kershaw laughed. A very good day. Longstreet felt a fresh wave of satisfaction.

  Of course, Dunn had a point. His tone toward the aide had been too harsh. But it would not do to turn around just yet. Nor did he want to. With more officers joining their party every few yards, it had become a triumphal procession. They rode not between prisoners now, but amid the amassed dead and twitching wounded. This was war. And the aim was to ride past the enemy’s dead, not the enemy past yours.

  It had been a brilliant morning. When Longstreet first met him on the field, Lee had been as unsettled as he had ever seen the old man, his voice quaking from a soul on the edge of an abyss. But Lee was himself again now, posing on his horse and enjoying the cheers of any men marching by. Lee might put on a stone face, Longstreet knew, but the old dog loved adulation.

  Well, he would not begrudge Lee that. Or anything else. Today, there was glory to spare.

  The roadside undergrowth smoldered and smoked, adding to the miasma of blown powder.

  “Glad I just have to follow the road,” Jenkins said. “Can’t hardly see a thing.”

  Ahead, some fighting lingered on. But it barely seemed a skirmish compared to the uproar an hour before. An army in collapse made a terrible noise.

  “Be grateful for that smoke,” Longstreet told his companion. “Yankees can’t see a thing either. And they’ve got a sight more to look out for.” He scanned about for landmarks, though, trying to remember how the terrain ran. One stretch of scrub pine and brambles looked much like another. Even the dead and wounded bore a sameness, although far more of them wore blue wool hereabouts.

  “Take that crossroads for me,” Longstreet said, “and you’ll win another star. I want South Carolina men to be the first to cross the Brock Road today.” He chuckled. “Only thing worries me is those new uniforms your boys have. You dye ’em with charcoal? Don’t want the boys confusing you with Yankees.”

  “Sir, we’ll be so far in front of everybody else…”

  Longstreet smiled. “All right. I reckon another hundred yards, and you’d better put your brigade into line of battle. No need to take chances.”

  A volley exploded from the woods on the left. So close it hurt Longstreet’s ears. He yanked the reins, turning his horse, ready to take action. But he could not see who was firing.

  The men of Jenkins’ lead regiment broke ranks and rushed to the roadside, shooting into the smoke and foliage. In moments, the firing on both sides became maddened.

  A voice shouted, “Show your colors!”

  Up ahead, a figure ran into the roadway. The man waved a Confederate battle flag.

  Our own men.

  Kershaw saw the flag, too. He wheeled about and drove his horse into Jenkins’ soldiers, screaming at them to stop firing. “Friends!” he shouted. “Friends!”

  The firing continued.

  Longstreet turned to order Jenkins to control the regiment. Just in time to see a bullet punch a hole where Jenkins’ forehead curved into his temple. The brigadier sprawled backward and fell from the saddle.

  Appalled, Longstreet spurred his horse forward to stop the firing. But something happened that passed his understanding: He felt a blow as if struck with a steel hammer. Felt it, yet didn’t feel it. Of a sudden, he was unsure of the world around him. All things, great and small, slowed and receded. He gasped. There was shouting, screaming, on every side. But it was far away. Far, far away, and yet he knew it was near. He wished to speak, but could not form words. His body began to quiver. He could not control it. Then his flesh bucked like an unbroken horse. Something had splashed him, he was drenched. He fell forward, struggling all the while to keep himself upright.

  His horse rebelled. What was wrong with his horse?

  Hands gripped him. Yankees? No, no. He remembered. His men. His men had been firing at him.

  Chancellorsville. The thought put ice in his bowels. Was this Tom Jackson’s last joke from the grave?

  This could not happen … not today …

  What day was it? Who was speaking? Why couldn’t he move?

  He felt himself falling again. Falling and falling. But no. There were hands upon him. His great weight was falling. Like the Mexican cadets tumbling from the battlements at Chapultepec.…

  He choked. With all the strength he could muster, he managed to raise one hand—only one obeyed him—to clutch his neck.

  Wet pulp. He let the hand fall.

  The firing had stopped. He believed the firing had stopped. Hadn’t it? They ha
d to stop firing. His men were shooting at each other. That red flag …

  Was he dying?

  Men laid him down. The earth was hard.

  “Ride for a surgeon!” someone cried.

  Jenkins didn’t need a surgeon. The man was dead. Shot through the forehead. Didn’t they know?

  Why wasn’t Jenkins attacking? Finish the business. Hancock. “Jenkins!” he tried to call, to order him to attack at once. Jenkins was dead, but he had to attack …

  Strange matter blocked his mouth and strangled his tongue.

  Attack, attack …

  Why wasn’t Jenkins attacking?

  Hancock. Kill him myself. Bare hands.

  Tom Jackson. Laughing.

  The world had lost its color, its shape. Black shadows, gray confusion. Was it night?

  Had to attack immediately …

  “He’s choking on his own blood,” someone said.

  Who? Who was choking? Jenkins? Jenkins was dead, surely.…

  Hands grasped him again, raising him, dragging him. They placed him against something hard. Holding him up in a sitting position.

  He gagged, spewed.

  In an instant, he was lucid again. Remembering all.

  “Can you … hear me?” he said. Bubbles crowded his throat.

  “Yes, sir. But don’t speak, you mustn’t try to speak.”

  “Tell … General Field … he must take command.…”

  “Yes, sir. General Field. Yes, sir, we hear you. We understand.”

  “Press the enemy … tell Lee…” He recognized Moxley Sorrel. “Report to Lee … what accomplished … continue … attack … success…”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll do it all, everything you want. But you need to stop speaking now.”

  Longstreet felt a burst of anger. He was not about to be told what to do. Not now. Not ever.

  He managed to fix his eyes on Sorrel’s. “You … tell Field … attack with everything. Take Brock Road. Break Hancock. Don’t stop.”

  Sorrel tried to clean him with a handkerchief, and Longstreet watched a crimson rag retreat.

  “Victory,” he said.

  TEN

  Nine a.m.

  Wilderness Run

  The new men of Company C ate little during their unexpected pause for breakfast. They had just gotten their first look at a battlefield.

  “You wish for mein Speck, Sergeant?” Private Eckert, the shorter of the two John Eckerts, offered. Since the commotion over the stockings, the boy had attached himself to Brown.

  The bacon drooled fat on a foul tin plate. It was clear why the shriveled meat didn’t tempt the recruits. Marching into the battlefield’s depths, they had passed not only the usual scattered bodies, but corpses blackened and twisted up by fire, creatures from a sermon on damnation. Private Martz had broken ranks to puke, soon followed by others.

  “Force it down, boy,” Brown said. “Could be a while before you get cooked meat again.”

  Eckert shook his head. “I can’t fress nothing.”

  “Then put it in your haversack. You’re going to be hungry.”

  The private looked doubtful.

  Brown, too, had his doubts, but about larger matters. He could not understand what the regiment or, for that matter, the brigade and division were doing. No veteran expected every maneuver to make plain sense, but he couldn’t figure the reason for their dawdling. They should have been in the fight by now.

  The regiment had set off in the dark, marching into the common clutter of war: wagons rolling in contrary directions and batteries waiting for orders, couriers on frothing horses, the straying wounded, and a legion of shirkers. After that, it was stop and start until they reached the rump end of the battlefield, with its clusters of do-nothing officers and sergeants who had figured out the army. A Fifth Corps flag drooped by a hard-used house and war-stained regiments pulled back to reorganize, their bleak-eyed men stunned wordless by their survival. All that was normal as turd piles on a mule path.

  The brigade had been ordered forward, still in column. They followed a farm trail down a field strewn with dead.

  “Looks like we kilt ten Rebs for every one of us,” Sam Martz announced.

  “And pussy grows on trees,” Bill Wildermuth told him. “We gather up our own and leave the Johnnies.”

  The veterans were mostly quiet. Those who had seen the elephant read the noise. Off to the right, the skirmishing was heavy, but still only skirmishing. A mile or so to the left, though, a battle raged. They were thrusting between the skirmishing and the slaughter.

  “Turning a flank, that’s what they got us doing,” Corporal Doudle blurted out. He spoke what the regiment’s old-timers were thinking.

  “We’ll see what Bobby Lee has to say about that,” Wildermuth responded.

  Nobody laughed.

  Stray shots pecked the morning, just enough to make the new men wince. As they entered a woodland, the farm trail narrowed. The burned men waited there, white bones revealed by flesh peeled back and teeth grinning through black lips. The stink was worse than dead snakes.

  The vomiting began. Commands grew harsher.

  Abruptly, the column halted amid scrub pines and shallow rifle pits. Brown expected orders to face left from the trail and form lines of battle, to fix bayonets and advance toward the fighting. They’d feel for a flank, all right. And, most likely, blunder into the Johnnies. He steeled himself for the effort to come, every nerve taut as a tourniquet.

  You got used to some of it. But you never got used to all of it.

  Instead of swinging into the battle, the regiment was ordered to break ranks and cook breakfast. Brown couldn’t make sense of it. Was the fighting going so well that they weren’t needed? It didn’t sound that way.

  He posted his own pickets, pairing a veteran with a new recruit on either side of the trail, and the rest of the men got up cooking fires with a speed that would have amazed them all a few years back. When the officers gave you a chance to eat and cook coffee, you ate and cooked coffee.

  Henry Hill crushed coffee beans using the hilt of a knife. Henry made fine coffee and always had some roasted-up beans in his knapsack. Other than Brown, he was the only man in the company who wouldn’t trade beans for tobacco with the Rebs when things were quiet.

  “Tell you this,” Bill Wildermuth said, “Old Burnside may have his faults, but he knows men have to eat. I’ll take a fat general over a skinny one any day.”

  As the smell of bacon pushed back the stink of war, Private Eckert said, “I don’t like this place.”

  * * *

  Stepping away from his talk with Captain Burket, First Sergeant Hill barked, “Form up, form up! Get those fires out. Let’s go!”

  “You heard the first sergeant,” Brown told his men. “On your feet!”

  The first sergeant formed them in two ranks along the trail. Brown figured the order to advance would come at last. But regiment had decided that the roll had to be called again. The first sergeant backed up against a bush and read:

  “Agley … Baker … Berger … Berger … Bowsman…”

  Midway through the roll call, a black snake reared up in front of the first sergeant. Brown had seen plenty of snakes in his canal days, but never one that rose straight up like that.

  The snake startled the first sergeant and he stopped reading. Brown and Henry Hill stepped forward and beat the snake down with their rifle butts.

  “Guertler … Haines … Harner…”

  The snake reared up again, closer this time. As if about to strike the first sergeant’s loins.

  This time, Brown and Henry Hill beat the snake to death.

  The first sergeant ordered the company to ground its knapsacks and haversacks by the trail. Their quartermaster detail had not caught up and unwatched knapsacks wandered off immediately, so a four-man guard was chosen to stay behind.

  “That Doudle,” Isaac Eckert complained, “he always gets the feather-pillow duty. Me, I never once get picked.”

  “
That’s because you’d steal everything yourself,” Wildermuth told him.

  That drew a laugh from a few men, but it faded fast.

  The battle off to the left flared up again. Everyone tensed. This was it, they’d be going forward now. But another unexpected command caught Brown and the other veterans off guard: The regiment was ordered to face right, to form a column again.

  “Forward, march!” The shouts echoed down the line, setting men in motion. But they went only a few hundred yards before halting, still hemmed in on both sides by the forest. Listening to the voices repeating orders, Brown realized that the brigade was incomplete, that only the 50th and one or two other regiments remained on the trail. Had the others kept going when they stopped for breakfast? Had they already been sent into the fight? Why split them up?

  “Regiment!”

  “Company!”

  “Riiiight … face!”

  The greenery in front of Brown looked thicker than the swamp growth north of Vicksburg.

  “This don’t make no sense,” Bill Wildermuth said.

  “Shut up, Bill,” Brown ordered.

  “Fix … bayonets!”

  Steel left leather, steel met steel.

  “Rifles at the carry … forward … march!”

  They pushed into the undergrowth. The new men shied from a corpse in Confederate rags.

  “Close up,” Brown said. It was hard from the start to maintain orderly ranks.

  The regiment wheeled left—westward, Brown thought—and advanced parallel to the trail along which they had marched.

  All right, Brown decided. Up the trail, that’s where they’ll be. Just waiting. Probably had their scouts out in the brush, watching us all the while we were gorging on fatback.

  There was no line advancing on the 50th’s right flank. You had to hope the colonels and generals knew what they were doing.

  “Close up,” Brown repeated mechanically. “Rub elbows with the next man. Keep it closed up, boys.”

  Shafts of sunlight pierced the trees. The glimpsed sky shone flat blue, hard as cheap paint. Brambles gripped sleeves and trousers. They scraped through a raspberry thicket yet to bud and dropped into a mire. Well, old canal men were used to getting their feet wet.