Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  It was blundering idiocy now. Just standing there, saying, “Shoot me.”

  But they all stood there.

  The Rebs had to be low on ammunition and getting jumpy. The 50th could charge them, Brown was certain. More lives would be saved than lost.

  But he had no say in it. All he could do was to steady his men and encourage them to be good targets for their enemies.

  Another order came down the line. Not to charge, but to take what cover they could and keep up the fire. Instead of welcoming the order, most of the veterans cursed. They all sensed what they could do, given the command.

  Once they dropped down, the Johnnies behind the barricades slackened their fire. Yes, Brown thought, they’re happy as drunks in a brewery. We could have had them. And we stopped like fools.

  He picked out a target, a Johnny’s head crowned by a misshapen hat, but he missed.

  More smoke rolled in, thick as river fog.

  Crouching, Brown worked along the line, telling the men to fire only if sure of a target. He didn’t want them wasting their cartridges and ending up in the same state as the Johnnies. You could win a fight or stay alive because you had one round left when a Reb had none.

  He could tell from behind that one of the new recruits had pissed his pants. Well, men had done worse.

  They were tired from their trot through the woodlands and their angry charge, from their earlier fight and their night march, from the weight of their dead and the terrible load of their thoughts, more tired lying on the ground than they would have been standing and charging. Weariness was a bushwhacker, waiting for a chance to strike from behind.

  The firing on both sides dwindled to odd shots, then to almost none.

  “You men drink water,” Brown told the recruits. “But don’t lift up to do it, you stay down. And don’t drink all of it. We’re not done.”

  The line grew almost silent. Men heard chiming in their ears and the thunderous breathing of others. You could almost hear the smoke drift by.

  A Southern voice rang out: “Hey, Yanks! Who you boys with?”

  Proud, angry, and stupid, one of the new men answered: “Fiftieth Pennsylvania.”

  “Never heard of y’all.”

  “Who’re you, then?”

  “Fifteenth Alabama. Got some ’baccy, if you want to come over and get it.”

  Brown scrambled over to the new man and yanked his sleeve. “Shut up, boy.”

  But Bill Wildermuth took a turn, unable to resist: “Trade you some cartridges for it, Johnny. I figure you boys are out.”

  “Go to Hell, you Yankee sonofabitch.”

  “Go to Hell yourself, Johnny.”

  “Already been. Place was full of Yankees, so I left.”

  Several men in Company C laughed out loud despite themselves. Any Reb who could best Bill Wildermuth in a war of words was a worthy enemy.

  Brown looked around for Captain Burket. And saw him a stretch back, kneeling low with Lieutenant Colonel Overton and a gaggle of other officers.

  Maybe, Brown thought, just maybe they’ve figured it out.

  Somebody had. The officers crabbed back to their companies and passed the word: “Get ready. We’re going to rush them. Don’t stop to fire until you’re over their barricades.”

  Brown felt the soldiers, new and old, tense up.

  Rustling and rattling swelled to the rear and he turned his head to look. A fresh regiment was advancing to support them. The Johnnies had to see it, but held their fire. That convinced Brown beyond any doubt that the Rebs were either out of ammunition or low enough to give them cause to bolt.

  “Pennsylvania! Charge!”

  Brown leapt to his feet and gave in to the thrall of the wild rush. As if he were a corporal, or even a private, again. He didn’t bother with malingerers, but raced ahead with his rifle leveled, howling like an animal.

  “Pennsylvania! Pennsylvania!” men screamed.

  The Rebs broke. They got off a few last shots and just plain ran. Brown saw a big, black-bearded officer, a chesty bear of a man, standing and waving his men back, encouraging them to run, to save what was left of their regiment.

  With his men under way, tearing off like rabbits-in-arms, the big officer finally loped after them, moving as if slightly hobbled. Then he, too, sped up to an outright run.

  Brown stopped, aimed his rifle … then didn’t fire, after all.

  There’d been killing enough.

  The regiment halted just beyond the barricades. Soldiers cheered.

  “Pennsylvania … Pensylvania…”

  Instead of pushing through to pursue the Rebs, the fresh regiment behind them stopped as well. Brown figured there’d been an order he hadn’t heard.

  Captain Burket said, “Organize your men, First Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir. Are you—”

  “Scratched rib. Maybe cracked. No real damage. See to the men.”

  The veterans had begun to pick through the meager possessions on Rebel corpses. As Brown summoned them to re-form for whatever the officers had in mind next, Bill Wildermuth passed him.

  “Jokers didn’t leave any tobacco, after all,” he said.

  * * *

  Oates ran. He was in a fury, but refused to be ashamed. His men had done all they could, and he wasn’t about to see them slaughtered or captured to no purpose. He had ordered them to run like the dickens and forget about keeping order. And they did.

  His rage deadened the pain that haunted his hip. The Alabama Brigade had never broken, not once in three years of war. But they’d been left hanging out like bait forgotten by the fisherman, just begging to be swallowed by a blue whale.

  He ran as madly as he had run as a boy, when he and John raced, or when he went after somebody who wanted a thumping. The difference now was that he had a man’s deep anger, not a boy’s blow-over heat. He cursed in words his mother forbade within a mile of her door. Then he progressed to language even his father had likely not known, wicked epithets gathered in his itinerant days.

  No, he was not a gentleman.

  Sergeant Ball lay dead, shot thrice in a moment.

  No gentleman.

  He and his soldiers scurried, crashed, and man-galloped through the brush for a good four hundred yards, until they broke into a field and saw gray lines ahead.

  Instantly, they slowed to a walk and were hallooed in by their comrades.

  Colonel Perry was still fighting somewhere, but General Perry, the self-declared Floridian, appeared with his shrunken staff. Oates was ready to tear the bastard’s head off. Then he saw the blood and bandages, the ruined uniform, and the man’s struggle to stay upright in the saddle.

  The general broke protocol to salute first.

  “Colonel Oates,” he rasped, “you were correct … I was in error. I … thank your brave men for doing … all that mortal men could do.” He slumped and Oates feared he would fall off of his horse. But the brigadier clung to the saddle. An aide rushed up and whispered words close to Perry’s ear. The Floridian straightened again.

  “Yes…,” he resumed. “I forget my duty, Colonel. Form to the rear, at the far edge of the field.” He thought for another moment, loss-of-blood dizzy, struggling. Then the general added, “God bless Alabama.”

  * * *

  Brown was angry. Shortly after dispatching details to gather up their wounded, the 50th Pennsylvania had been ordered to fall back a quarter mile. The regiments stacked behind them fell back, too, along with all the forces on their flanks. The ground for which they had fought and bled was worthless.

  They had to consolidate their lines, officers explained. Old soldiers understood that “consolidate the lines” was a secret code among generals for “We’re not sure what to do next.”

  Brown was angry, but not disheartened. He had accepted long before that war was a contest of idiocies, and the least idiotic behavior won by a hair. Slumping rearward, the company paused to take up its knapsacks again. Corporal Oswald apologized: Several had been grabbed by skeda
ddlers he couldn’t catch. Soon after, the company took its place in what passed for a line in the undergrowth.

  Step by step, the bitterness passed and memories of their success crowded out the frustration. Brown heard a new man tell a comrade, “I got one of their officers. I really did. I saw him go down.”

  “Amazing shooting, son,” a veteran said.

  The boy brightened.

  “Amazing,” the veteran continued, “since I saw you close your eyes every time you fired.”

  “Dass war alles nur Quatsch und Dummheit,” one of the Dutchmen remarked to no one in particular.

  All nonsense and stupidity. Brown understood that much Pennsy-German.

  And yet … there was more to it: That intoxicating thrill, born of mortal terror. The way a man became part of something greater than himself, part of a mighty creature made up of many men, a company’s worth, a regiment’s, a division’s. The way you soared to a place no one could name and you didn’t know you were there until you weren’t there anymore and you were dazed by the hollowness afterward. When you warmed all the way back to life and sense again, you sought out friends who also had survived and who would be friends for a lifetime if they lived through the fights to come, and you made little jokes that avoided the unspeakable. You mourned together, you mourned alone. Then you got up and marched somewhere else, and you dreaded and hungered for what was coming toward you, what you knew was coming sooner or later, until, at last, your feet just ached and your belly was empty and your throat had gone dry as dust, and that was what you thought about, if you had the strength left to think any thoughts at all, and the part of you that craved being so alive again went numb while you sat down to a feed of beans.

  There were no beans this night. Not even coffee, since fires had been forbidden. Men shared what rations they had left in their haversacks. The ammunition would come, all right, but they would not see cooked food until God knew when.

  Brown called the roll, wincing each time no one answered, and reorganized the company around the surviving sergeants and corporals. He sent a detail loaded with canteens in search of water and did not ask its source when they returned. After selecting men to rotate on guard duty, he kicked recruits awake to clean their rifles. Even the veterans were too weary to search each other for ticks.

  And what would Brown remember of that day? Later on, in the dark, as men tried to sleep against the cries of the wounded burning alive out in the undergrowth, listening to their garbled pleas and the pop-pop-pop as cartridge pouches exploded in the flames to gut men dead and alive, listening to all that and to the barking snores of his own soldiers, Brown sat up pondering, wondering, empty of answers to any question that mattered.

  A shriek of horror rose from the midst of the sleeping men.

  Instantly alert and fully awake, Brown rushed toward the cry.

  Wails and weeping trailed the shriek, the uncommon sound—rare even in war—of a grown man crying piteously.

  Men cursed the noise that woke them.

  In the starlight that pierced the undergrowth and smoke, Brown found John Eckert, the boy who had his stockings. He was all but naked and crying to beat the band.

  Brown tried to think what the problem might be. He’d seen soldiers old and new fight like lions, then go to bits when things were quiet and safe. Like ropes and cables on the canal back home, men had different strengths.

  The boy howled again. Someone snapped, “Shut the Hell up.” Others shared the sentiment in rougher language.

  Brown said, “If you’re worried about your cousin, his wound isn’t bad.”

  “It isn’t that, it ain’t that,” the boy cried.

  “You wounded?” Some men failed to realize for hours that they’d been shot.

  The boy shook his head, pale in the gloom, and howled again.

  “What’s wrong, for God’s sake?” Brown demanded. His temper, too, had grown frail. “You’ll wake the whole damned army.”

  John Eckert raised his face to Brown. Even in the dark, his anguish was frightful.

  “I got the poison ivy,” the boy said.

  TWELVE

  May 6, five thirty p.m.

  Tapp Field

  Lee rode north. Hoping that something might be done on that flank. A last attack on the Plank Road had failed, after exciting false sentiments of triumph. As the men stormed forward, wind-whipped flames had driven Hancock’s soldiers from their earthworks. Remembering their fallen general, the furious soldiers of Jenkins’ Brigade had plunged through the inferno’s gaps to plant their battle flags along the Brock Road. Only to be shot down, captured, or thrust back. Too few had reached the Union line, and their lodgment had been fragile: bravery practiced uselessly against numbers. The southern flank was played out and Lee had no gambit left him but a last, bold move by Ewell.

  As Lee and his small cavalcade passed them on a farm trail, the men of Ramseur’s Brigade raised their hats and cheered. Lee saluted with a hand raised barely to shoulder level. He could not see a reason for their high spirits. Taylor, who had an eye for such things, believed the army’s casualties for the two days of fighting might reach ten thousand men. Listening with a guarded expression, Marshall had removed his spectacles and looked away, feigning other concerns. Lee understood that his military secretary feared their losses would be even higher.

  The dozen horsemen narrowed their column to a single file to pass through the next stretch of woodland, a clean space untouched by battle. Peeved at Taylor and Marshall—their calculations came too near his own—Lee had brought along only Venable and a few guardian horsemen. As if attempting to ride away from his thoughts.

  Ten thousand men. Or more. Lost to no advantage. The army could not afford to bleed so wantonly. Worse, the loss of Longstreet was disastrous. Even if his Old War Horse lived, the man’s abilities would be denied to the army indefinitely. And Hill … after fighting brilliantly the previous day, then desperately that morning, ready to die beside him in a simple gunner’s role, Hill had gone brittle again, ghost pale, succumbing to his old sickness, that shameful business. Lee didn’t know if the man would be well enough to remain in command of his corps.

  Who would be left him? Ewell? An irascible, awkward man, though one of experience.

  Jenkins dead. Jones gone. Benning badly wounded. A half-dozen other generals bleeding from wounds, struggling to remain with their battered brigades …

  When Lee’s party reached Rodes’ Division, those men cheered him, too. That morning, the soldiers’ cries had been sweet music. Now they stung his ears.

  He had to bring off something to humble Grant. Ten thousand casualties or more … and those people still held the crossroads in the south and their advanced position in the north. His own men were back on the lines they had taken up as the battle began. It didn’t matter whether the Federals had suffered markedly higher casualties, as Taylor insisted and Lee preferred to believe. The Union had men enough, men and all else. What mattered was the need to savage Grant in this first encounter, to sweep away his aura as a victor. The Army of Northern Virginia had little beyond rags and reputation. It could not afford to sacrifice the latter.

  And courage. His men had that, too. Despite the morning’s near collapse, the soldiers’ fortitude was undeniable.

  Rodes cantered up and joined Lee, guiding him to Ewell’s headquarters in the trees beyond the Turnpike. Except for the usual serenade of skirmishing, the Second Corps’ front was quiet, almost restful. Lee regretted his inattention to his left wing that day. Had opportunities been missed? Ewell had said nothing, had not requested permission to attack since a brief fight that morning. Had Dick Ewell grown too cautious? Had he lost more than a leg over the war years? Lee had pondered the matter ever since Gettysburg, but always returned to the fact that he had no one fit to take over the corps.

  The visit surprised Ewell, who greeted Lee bareheaded, tin cup in hand. Had the man expected him to be off in Richmond? And Early, a shadow to his corps commander, surely should have
been with his division?

  Lee cautioned himself to be civil. When he felt worn, his stomach filled with bile and his temper with acid. Self-control had cost him as much effort as anything in the war, but he prided himself on how seldom he’d been ungentlemanly.

  He reminded himself of Ewell’s superb performance the day before. And if Ewell had shown no initiative today, neither had Lee pressed him to renew the battle.

  Dismounting, Lee took special care, worried his bowels might betray him. Dignity was essential.

  “It’s good to see you, General,” Ewell said. “Coffee?”

  Lee shook his head. “Thank you, no.” He looked at Ewell as if really seeing him only now: an eager man, often cranky, balding, swinging about on his wooden leg with the gait of a music hall sailor. Lee’s heart bade him say, “Richard, you and I are too old for this young man’s sport.” But he did not, would not, say such a thing. Nor would he call the man “Richard.” Such intimacies only made command more difficult.

  “Hard fight down there,” Ewell said. “Sorry to hear about Longstreet. Terrible thing.”

  At Ewell’s shoulder, Early nodded along.

  The gathered heat pressed down on Lee. “Might we sit, General Ewell? The day has been long, and not without tribulation.”

  “Of course, sir. Come in the shade. Right over here.” The lieutenant general waved a hand at his bevy of aides. It was a nervous gesture, almost feminine.

  Men scrambled to accommodate the men who wore the stars.

  “General Rodes, General Early, please join us,” Lee said.

  “Shall I roust up Johnson?” Ewell asked.

  “Let us talk for a moment. Gentlemen, there is nothing more to be done this day on the right.” He looked at Ewell, introducing a measure of coldness to his expression. “Might nothing be done on this flank? To discomfit those people? I am loath to leave them the field.”

  Ewell twitched. “Way I see it, General Lee, they’re not any more in command of the field than we are. We can’t go that way, they can’t come this way.” The corps commander inspected Lee’s face for a reaction, but Lee revealed nothing. Ewell decided to talk on and said, “Given the disparity in numbers, I’d say we haven’t done less than fairly, all in all.”