Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  “Hard doings yonder,” he said. “Stuart’s been delaying the varmints all morning. Kershaw’s up with him now, holding a ridge north of town, but Yank cavalry are pawing around the courthouse. Behind our boys.”

  Oates waited for the orders that must follow.

  “You take your men,” Perry continued, “and go fast. There’s a lane to the left a quarter mile on. Get up it as fast as you can and go in where Stuart wants you. I’m going to pay off those blue-bellies at the courthouse.”

  Why, surely, Oates thought. We’ll run us a happy old footrace. Fresh and full of spunk, every last one of us.… But that was just the surly side of his nature, an amusement even to himself, so he saluted and turned a hot face to his nearest officers and the skeletal regiments trailing them.

  “That there firing,” he hollered. “Yankees are overstepping again. Boys up there need help.” He gathered his breath. “At the double-quick … forward!”

  Wondering how many men he’d lose to this Hell-heat before they fired a shot, this infernal, wet, worse-than-Pike-County heat, for his men were tired beyond biblical measure, beyond four score and ten years’ worth of weariness.

  They hadn’t a cheer in them, not yet, not without Yankees plain to their front, but the men growled through mouths full of dust and picked up to a dogtrot, and Oates knew just how much he was asking of them, their canteens doubtless empty or nigh on it, so he steered his horse to the roadside and waved up his nigger, who shambled along as if born for the heat, blood of ape ancestors cooked by the African sun, and Oates dismounted and said, “You take care of this horse now. Lose him, boy, and I’ll whip you from here to Montgomery.”

  “Ain’t never us lost no horse, Marse.”

  But Oates had already turned, pain-bitten by his bad-dog hip, one of the wounds that had shocked him with the knowledge that he was not invulnerable and might not be immortal upon this earth, and that hip hurt infernally, but he marched on afoot, beside his men, every step a small misery and a pride.

  “Colonel, you ought to ride that nag of your’n, that’s what he’s for,” a soldier called. “Leastwise, till the ruckus comes on.”

  “Horse needs a rest, I don’t.”

  He waved to Captain Shaaf, who had not possessed a horse of his own for months. The commander of Company A stepped up and strode next to him.

  “We get to that lane where those limbers sit, and we’re going left and on in. Be ready to move your company out as skirmishers, once we get our bearings.”

  “Would’ve been right disappointed, had you asked somebody else, sir,” the captain told him.

  “See how you feel come nightfall.”

  No sooner had they turned into the lane than they found themselves amid the castoffs of battle, stray wagons, emptied caissons, cavalry mounts husbanded from danger, and officers on horseback humming back and forth like bees ’round a hive, all these things set upon a field bright with wildflowers.

  Pretty as a lady, if a bearded one, General Stuart cantered up. He wore a barn-dance grin and waved his hat. A black plume lofted.

  “Colonel Oates, if I do not misapprehend?”

  Oates stopped. Feeling his hip grind. Saluting after his fashion.

  “In the nick of time,” Stuart said, “indeed, in the nick of time, Colonel.” He pointed into the rising smoke. “That grove of trees, on the left. Yankees mean to flank us. I’d take it as a courtesy if you’d deny them the opportunity.”

  Oates nodded. Stuart smiled again, turned his horse, and rode back to his merriment.

  “Captain Shaaf!” Oates shouted, taking up his trot again. “Skirmishers forward. Get in those trees up there.”

  Shaaf waved an acknowledgment and hurried his men forward. Weary, stumbling, willing men, men whose rifles had grown to be part of their flesh.

  Litter bearers and cowards helped off casualties, some of them men in cut-short cavalry jackets, bloodied now. Oates recalled the old quip, “Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?”

  Up ahead, along a gentle ridge, a few guns in battery supported a busy gray line. The Yankees were out of view, down the far slope. Amid carnage, Stuart pranced. As if no bullet dared touch him and spoil his uniform.

  “Fifteenth, by battalion, to my right!” Oates shouted, and heard the order echoed. “Forty-eighth, left and forward!”

  His hip hurt like plain Hell.

  Sword nothing but a bother, he let the blade rest and drew his pistol as they approached the grove. On the right, men shouted as cannon tore holes in the morning. Just before his soldiers reached the trees, he caught a glimpse—one glimpse—down the far slope of the not-much-to-it ridge. It looked as though the whole Union army were gathering.

  Shots. One, two. A dozen. Dozens. Straight ahead. Shaaf and his men. Yanks had come a good way in. But not far enough.

  “Skirmishers! Recover!” Oates shouted. Determined to be heard. He turned his back to the enemy and, just at the edge of the woodland, slowed his men, letting them firm up their ranks. The moment he wheeled about to face his enemies again, he saw blue forms hasten up between wide-set trees.

  “Halt!” he shouted. “Fire by battalion.” And he let the captains and lieutenants who led his shrunken companies do their work. Ripples of flame and the clap of fires stopped the Yankees short.

  “Bayonets!” Oates barked. He wanted the Yankees to hear him, as well as his own men. When the bayonets came out, the side that was weaker of will tended to give way before any steel met flesh.

  The scrape of the long blades fixing to muzzles called to mind his father grinding a knife to butcher a hog. That sound it was, multiplied by many hundreds.

  “Charge!”

  Now his men cheered. The Alabama banshee call sharpened the edges of the Rebel yell, and down the broken ground they ran, weapons leveled at their waists or held across their chests, exhausted men kept upright and moving by war’s fury alone. The grove was a cleaner, better place than the ground over which they had fought two days before: They could see their opponents clearly, as they themselves could be seen. It only increased their appetite for slaughter.

  The Yankees fired a volley, flame-spit and smoke. Oates saw Jep Brown, a fine soldier, clutch his breast.

  “Kill the sonsofbitches!” Oates howled. “Give ’em the bayonet.”

  That was the playacting part of leading men, the threat of the bayonet more potent to an enemy than the glinting reality. The brief bayonet duels in the Wilderness had been shocking, and Oates knew men well enough to believe that no one wished to repeat those contests. A soldier might stand and fire into an enemy’s belly from three feet away and feel just fine, but ramming home the steel took a special hardness.

  Sure enough, the Yankees drew back, the better men loading and firing as they went. The blue-bellies transited a ravine and crossed a ridge spur deeper into the trees. Oates’ men followed, the ranks breaking down into clusters of soldiers pausing to fire, then pushing on. Men fell on both sides, but the Yankees, despite what looked to Oates like greater numbers, kept pulling back. They moved like damaged creatures.

  For one instant that could not and would not last, Oates felt a flash of sympathy, sensing that those men he meant to kill or wound might have marched even harder than his own boys. He glimpsed their flesh-and-bloodness.

  Then they were just his enemies again.

  Billy Strickland came up. “I think we hit the flank of their attack, sir. There’s nothing out on the left.”

  “Maybe not now, but you watch that flank for me, Billy. I don’t need any surprises.”

  When they had driven the Yankees a good two hundred yards, the trees thinned and the companies on Oates’ right pushed beyond the grove. He dashed over to see what they were up against and got his first full view of the contested slope. The ground out there was speckled with dead and twitching Yankees, some in red Zouave drawers, while ragged formations struggled up the hill toward Stuart’s line. It looked like a fool-crazy, piecemeal attack, the sort for which a general ought to be h
orsewhipped.

  “Sumbitch,” Oates said. He’d spotted Yankee reinforcements headed his way and realized that he and his men were far ahead of and fully detached from the Confederate line. He cursed his taste for brawling, his raw, joyous enthusiasm for a fight, most any fight, telling himself yet again to behave like the commanding officer of two regiments, not an idiot captain out to get himself mentioned in the newspapers.

  The Federals coming on looked tight and determined, a good regiment adding weight to the nothing-much brigade his men had driven.

  “Order your lines!” Oates shouted, running back toward his other flank. “Officers, get your men back in line!” He wanted them under control when the Yankees reached them. “Hold where you are. Halt and hold your ground, align right and hold your ground.…”

  The Yankees came on fiercely, their formation compact and aimed right at the juncture of his two regiments. Oates knew his boys wouldn’t hold.

  Had to give the Yankees a blooding, though.

  Instead of shouting, he hurried along the rear of his roughed-out line, with bullets punching the trees around his head. He told each company commander he meant to give the Yankees two volleys, then pull back to the ridge spur they’d crossed and hold there.

  But the Yankees came on faster and harder than he had anticipated. Before he could organize a crisp withdrawal, the Federals were at them. Not with the bayonet, but willing to trade volleys at rock-throwing distance. And the blue-bellies Oates had embarrassed were rallying now.

  Soon, the men were fighting from tree to tree. His boys were better shots, but they were worn out, even the juice of battle quitting on them. But the Yankees were tired, too, sure enough. Heat-sick, exhausted men stood and killed each other.

  The Yankee numbers told with time. The plan to withdraw in good order had collapsed, yet the spur became a magnet for his men, a natural place to stop running, and his lines coalesced again on their own, the companies intermingled but every man a veteran who knew what to do and did it. And the Yankees had figured out that they weren’t up against a few Chimborazo nurses. They kept a bit more distance now as the two sides exchanged another round of volleys.

  The mad hurrahs of another charge, the affair of other men, sounded off to the right, rising from the open fields that sloped up into the muzzles of Stuart’s artillery and Kershaw’s lean brigades. Heavier guns had joined the line, their belching announced their arrival on the field. The Yankees were in for a hot time of it, surely.

  His men and the Federals had reached a standoff. He’d been driven back to the spur, but it didn’t shame him: Numbers were numbers. He’d held the flank and was holding it still. He’d just got a bit ahead of himself.

  The back-and-forth firing did less and less damage, despite the constant noise. Men were just tuckered out, too weary to steady their rifles as they fired. Waste of ammunition, waste of men. On both sides.

  Colonel Perry found him. The brigade was coming up, the Yankee cavalry had hightailed it from the courthouse. And the rest of Field’s Division was extending the line on the ridge. Oates was to pull back and tie into Henagan’s left flank.

  When the 15th and 48th withdrew this time, the Yankees didn’t follow. They’d had enough.

  But Henagan’s men opened fire through the trees, convinced his boys were Yankees. In a rage, Oates got that straightened out personally, running bad-legged right into the fire, waving his hat, and hollering his head off.

  Back on the ridge, his weary men went right to work on battlements built of tore-down fences and piled-up dirt, clawing the earth with spoons, bayonets, and fingers. Swirl-headed from the heat, Oates undid his blouse, too blown to track down his horse and his canteen. He wanted to lie down, but would not do so. Not while the men were working.

  On the south side of the ridge, men and batteries began to appear in good numbers. A sense prevailed, unspoken, that the worst of the crisis had passed.

  General Stuart rode up again, merry as a drunkard with a fresh jug.

  “Colonel Oates!” he cried. “Well done, Alabama! Ain’t this a grand old time?”

  Oates would have liked to ask the cavalryman for a drink of water. But he was too proud to do it. Nor would he drink while his men’s canteens were empty. But he did say:

  “This here place got a name, sir?”

  “I’m told,” Stuart said, “it’s called Laurel Hill.” The plumed cavalier’s grin widened. “And laurels aplenty there are for our soldiers today.”

  Oates believed he’d prefer a swallow of water.

  Noon

  Piney Branch Church

  The headquarters tents had gone up with noteworthy speed, the one thing properly managed in the past twenty-four hours. Hungry though he was, Meade found the salt pork served by his mess unappetizing. He sat and stared at the dubious meat, picking at the beans piled on its flanks, and let silence reign over his companions. They were good men, culled from his favorites: His son, young George, and Humphreys, hot as a steam engine himself at the abysmally clumsy handling of the march. Jim Biddle sat a few steps off, a man of the finest Philadelphia stock and the sort who knew the proper way to do things. Biddle all but touched knees with Ted Lyman, another fine fellow graced with a sharp eye and wit, a Harvard man trained in science by the famed Agassiz himself. Meade had met Lyman ages before, in Florida, where the young man had come bearing letters permitting him to collect starfish under the military’s guardianship. Lyman was bred of Boston’s best, and the two men had hit it off in the Seminole wilderness, where Meade, an aged lieutenant, had been building lighthouses on the shoals and Theodore Lyman had built a reputation. Rather against the odds, the soldier and the scholar founded a friendship. But, then, Boston or Philadelphia, breeding told. Even now, they had a great deal in common, despite disparities in wealth and temperament: Lyman, quite the bon vivant, seemed as uninterested in the salt pork as Meade.

  It was too damned hot to eat, even under a tent fly, and a misery for the regiments plodding past. But the presence of men he trusted, drawn of those few he could trust, lowered Meade’s temper, if not the temperature. He rather thought Margaret would have been proud of his self-restraint this day.

  Everything had been a wretched mess. He could not help but agree with Humphreys, who was furious at Grant and his bunch for setting madcap goals for the army’s march. Oh, it sounded well and good: “Move fast and leave Lee scrambling to catch up.” But such blustering took no account of specimen physics, as Lyman put it. When Humphreys tried to explain that the roads were not only inadequate to support Grant’s envisioned movement, but the best routes were jammed with ambulances and supply trains, Rawlins had all but called them out as cowards again. So they had marched when evening fell, and within the first few miles, the race had broken down to a crawling nightmare, precisely as poor Humphreys had predicted. And Sheridan, Grant’s little Irish fraud, had badly mishandled the cavalry, so that when Warren’s men finally reached Todd’s Tavern—a disgusting shanty—they had found their route blocked by drowsing horsemen in multitudes, two cavalry divisions loitering without orders. On the way to the tavern, Meade and his staff had been forced to let Grant’s western fellows lead, and they had nearly galloped straight into the Rebels. Then, at the tavern, Grant had gone off to sleep by a pigsty, while he had been left to sort out the errant cavalrymen, who were supposed to be far to the south, clearing the way for the infantry. Nobody knew where Sheridan, the cavalry corps’ new general, could be found, so Meade had issued orders directly to the horsemen to do what they should have done five hours before. Only to have them collide with Stuart’s men, who’d been lurking in the dark, at which point the cavalry accomplished precisely nothing. With dawn upon them and every man not of Grant’s snoring staff exhausted, he had been driven to order up Robinson’s division to brush aside the Confederate horse at last.

  And Lee had won the blasted race again. Wilson’s riders reached the courthouse first, but, alone and unable to hold it, they had withdrawn. Now the Confederates
blocked the road to Richmond.

  And things got worse, with Warren repeating the very blunder he had railed against in the Wilderness, squandering his corps’ strength by committing it in bits of brigades and lone regiments against the Confederates gathering on a ridge. Warren had turned a coup de main into a blood-soaked debacle. And Sedgwick, when he came up, had done nothing at all.

  Everyone, from the generals down to the privates, was worn to the nub. And the day was but half over.

  “Lyman,” Meade called, “after you’ve gotten the savor of your repast, have another look at things. I’ve got to stay near Grant.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course.”

  “Take Duane with you. I need to know if anything can be done. Without adding more wastage to the casualty rolls.”

  “I’d like to go up myself,” Humphreys put in. “Since Grant’s people don’t have much use for proper staff work.”

  “In good time,” Meade told him. “I need you here.” He felt his temper rising again. Not at Humphreys, but at the great, wide world. He had been all for moving to better ground, for drawing Lee out of the Wilderness, but Grant had never moved an army of this size, and the roads were few and wretched. Nonetheless, Grant had deferred to his ever-confident sycophants, who insisted it all could be done at the snap of their fingers. Meade found Grant’s determination refreshing, but the hallmark of a plan had to be realism.

  The sound of horses struck Meade’s ear and motion caught his eye.

  Sheridan. At last. Meade’s nostrils flared.

  He set his plate on the sandy ground and stalked toward the horsemen.

  “General Sheridan!” he snapped. “I’ll have a word with you.”

  Gently, he told himself. Calmly. Sensibly. But it did no good.

  A little man with a cannonball head and a brawler’s chest, Sheridan strode up, tearing off his riding gloves.

  “And I’ve been meaning to have a word with you,” he said.

  “In my tent.”

  “Any damned where you like.”

  As he marched under the canvas, with its illusion of privacy, Meade thought that, if he missed any man nowadays, it was poor John Buford.