Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  “Not unless it’s a sight better than the spew I get at headquarters.”

  “It’s likely worse.”

  They both smiled.

  Grant said: “Got this great big army, more generals than Napoleon, locomotives, telegraphs … and we still can’t cook up a proper can of coffee.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  “Now, Porter there, he’ll drink any coffee you got. Man would drink pitch or tar, if you served it lukewarm.” Grant turned. “Horace, go test the coffee while General Sedgwick and I do our little war dance.”

  Sedgwick waited. Grant stepped closer.

  “How are the men?” the general in chief asked. His tone required honesty.

  “They’ll be all right. Once they’re rested. It’s been something of a shock, coming right out of winter quarters and into all this. They’re not used to the pace.”

  “Lee’s men are tired, too. Another good push or so and they’re going to break.”

  “Lee’s a stubborn man.”

  “He’ll break. Every man has his breaking point.”

  Sedgwick thought of Tom Neill, of the bright Irish eyes gone mad.

  He gestured toward the front line. “Trying to get up that slope head-on … yesterday was Injun-massacre ugly, and they weren’t half dug in.” He shook his head. “Remember when the Richmond papers mocked Lee, calling him the ‘King of Spades’?”

  “Never heard that.”

  “Back during the Peninsula business, after Joe Johnston caught one. They all made fun of Lee’s taste for the shovel and ax. Nobody’s laughing now.”

  “I mean to flank him. One way, or the other.”

  “Better than sending men back up that ridge.”

  “Might have to do that, too,” Grant said. “Hit him on all sides. So he can’t rob Peter to pay Paul.”

  “He’s got interior lines.”

  “All the more reason to hit him from every side.”

  Sedgwick looked at Grant. And saw a slump-shouldered, nothing-special man, the sort you passed on the street without a thought until, one day, you paused and really looked at him and he scared the devil out of you. His eyes warned of premeditated murder. Grant had not had much of a reputation in the old Army, but Sedgwick figured he just hadn’t found a war big enough, not even in Mexico, for his killing ways.

  “Your troops are all right, though?” Grant asked again.

  “They will be.”

  “By tomorrow?”

  Sedgwick fought down another sigh. “If need be. Although I’d—”

  “Have them ready tomorrow,” Grant said. “You’ll hear from George Meade.” He turned his head. “Horace? Had enough of that swill?”

  Mounted again, Grant said, “Hot day coming on,” and rode off with his staff men and his guards.

  Sedgwick sat down in the shade of a tent fly and let his body sag. One of his staff men, Hyde, brought a cup of iced water.

  “Found an ice cellar back a ways, sir. Thought you might like a drink.”

  “Wouldn’t mind a drink of something stronger,” Sedgwick said. “But she’ll do. Hyde, sit down a minute, tell me about that ride of yours.” As the boy sat, Sedgwick reached out and tugged one of his ears, as he might have done with a child. “I hear you gave the Johnnies some target practice.”

  “Just as soon not repeat the experience, sir.”

  Activity out on the road drew Sedgwick’s attention. “Redlegs are swapping out guns. Who’s that coming up?” He drank. The water tasted clean. The local wells would not stay that way long.

  “Looks like McCartney’s battery, sir.”

  “Well, McCartney can shoot.” He drained the cup. “Guess I’d better go up for another look at things. Before Sam Grant finds something doesn’t suit him.”

  He summoned McMahon and Whittier. They went on foot. Up on the line, all horses did was draw fire and kill men for nothing.

  As usual, there was a problem. War was the oddest business, reducing intelligent men to fools every third day. The New Jersey Brigade’s rifle pits had been dug so close to the Rebel lines that a man couldn’t return fire, leaving them useless. Otherwise, things looked tolerably professional. Even the amateur officers were learning the arts of war. And the soldiers on the line learned even faster.

  A man did what he could. The trick of leading men was to ask a great deal, but not more than they could deliver. Some of his fellow officers thought him too soft on his soldiers, but it was always the officers, not the men, who disappointed him.

  As they came up to the corps’ flank along the Brock Road, he found a regiment poorly positioned and blocking the fires of the battery to their rear.

  “Now that’s just wrong,” he said. “Marty, come with me.”

  “General, I could handle this myself.”

  “Men need to see their generals. So they know we’re not some fairy tale.”

  He was tired, though. Downright weary. When they reached the offending troops, he let McMahon give the orders to set them in motion and clear the battery’s field of fire.

  As the soldiers started rearward, the Rebs opened up. Bullets made the earth cough dust and the withdrawing men broke ranks. Some ran and others dropped flat on the earth. New boys, Sedgwick figured.

  Although it was just nine thirty, the heat was a torment. He hoped there was a bit of that ice left back at the headquarters. Of course, there would be none for these poor devils.

  The scrambling and scattering troops were an embarrassment, though. The Johnnies were only pecking at them. When he saw a sergeant, who should have known better, flop in the dust and crawl, Sedgwick had to act.

  “I’m ashamed of you,” he said. “What are you dodging at?” He nudged the man with the toe of his boot. “They can’t hit an elephant at that distance.”

  Ten thirty a.m.

  Headquarters, Army of the Potomac

  “It’s true,” Lyman told Meade. “I just met McMahon bringing back the body. Sedgwick’s men are crying like babies.”

  Ten thirty a.m.

  Laurel Hill

  Oates felt kin to a cottonmouth, temper ready to strike at the least provocation. His men had drawn a lucky stretch of the line, set deep enough in the trees to give shade and hide them from Yankee sharpshooters. Even so, the heat and the run-to-ground tiredness kept them testy. When he shifted a company of the 48th to better line it up with the 15th, some of the soldiers kicked about digging new rifle pits and he had gone off like a mad dog loose in a dancing class. Nearly struck a corporal, which wouldn’t do. He meant, intended, determined, to carry himself with restraint befitting a colonel. But it was a trial.

  Others had it worse, of course. Earlier on, some of the fellows entrenched on the open ground to the right had gone out to bring in the wounded left overnight, and the Yankees had fired on them. That got things started. Whenever a blue-belly tried to retrieve a comrade, he got the same treatment. And the wounded men of both sides lay in the sun, every so often waving an arm in a fever or giving a cry. It sickened Oates, and he told his men to keep out of it.

  He was a hard man, and took an impure pride in it, but some things left him raw. He was all for killing Yankees, and no remorse ever troubled him on that count. But he never had been one for beating on a man once he went down. Not any man. You fought standing up, and if you stayed up, that sufficed. He told himself he was a fool for looking for fairness or mercy in this world, and he did not mean to put himself in a position where he’d have to ask for either. But he liked a certain justice. And it wasn’t lawyering that had done that to him. Even as a boy, he’d been all fists but mostly fair, and some strange how he’d never been given to taking his born-in rage out on a weak man or stupid animal, although he’d been rough with a woman or two who demanded it. It bewildered him when the fair sex took delight in outright pain, in hard subjugation, and he shunned such creatures, unnerved. He was all for the right kind of roughhousing at the right time, but women who begged to be treated like filth dismayed him. Their unhappiness
seemed a greater sin than loving somebody up could ever be. His tastes ran to a mighty give-and-take, good sweat, and nails that did not go too deep into his back.

  That black-haired, black-eyed girl yesterday. Looked like she’d come at you claws and all, but in a way most satisfactory. Sort of gal who meant to be a match for the men she chose and wouldn’t choose weaklings. Eager as a man, once the shutters closed. She’d been dark enough of complexion to wear some musk on her, too. He always liked a dark skin, his great vice.

  A flurry of shots returned him to the moment. Why didn’t some “gentleman” on one side or the other ask for a truce to bring in the poor, damned wounded? Because the gentlemen were too proud to ask first. They’d even leave their own kind lying out there.

  He took pains never to show he felt such things, but every wounded man was his brother, John.

  Well, every man but Lowther. He hoped his major was having a high time cavorting in Richmond and nursing his stubbed toe. While gut-shot men writhed under a frying-pan sun.

  The war itself had gone drowsy to his front, and it didn’t take religion to count that a blessing. It was a different story to the east, though. Boys a few miles off were having a do.

  Let them take their turn. His men needed rest and he was feeling used up.

  Without rhyme or reason, Yankee cannon let loose on the grove. Guessing the range, they were just passing the time, with shells to waste. Around him, men gripped the earth. Some cursed inordinately, while others prayed. Branches and a few limbs crashed down around them.

  When the shelling let up, with little harm done, his canteen detail returned from the creek in the rear. The water was foul, but he drank it.

  Ten thirty a.m.

  The Ni River northeast of Spotsylvania Court House

  The colonel fell off his horse by the side of the road. For a worrisome moment, he lay still, as good as dead. Then he laughed and sang out, “On to Richmond!”

  The enlisted man who had a good berth as the brigade commander’s servant leapt to help him, propping the old man up. An aide fanned him with his kerchief. “On to Richmond … I’m in command here!” the colonel cried. Chin gleaming with drool, he cackled again.

  “It’s sunstroke!” the aide called to the passing soldiers. “It’s only the sun, men.…”

  The claim drew chuckles and murmurs from the ranks.

  “Sun done him down, but whiskey done him in,” Bill Wildermuth said. “I can smell him from here.”

  The men of Company C, 50th Pennsylvania, had lowered their estimation of their brigade commander a ways back. As they went their way down the road toward another creek that passed as a river hereabouts, Lieutenant Colonel Cutcheon galloped back from the front of the column.

  “Cutcheon’ll take the brigade today,” Wildermuth told the men marching around him. “The old bird picked a good time to go on the bottle, far as I’m concerned.”

  First Sergeant Brown said: “No need to run your mouth, Bill.”

  But he agreed. If they were going into a fight, better to have Cutcheon giving the orders. Colonel Christ had been drinking in the saddle since the brigade was kicked to its feet at two a.m., and he hadn’t even had the sense to hide it. Every man he commanded felt insulted. And powerless.

  Not a week old, the campaign was wearing down everyone. They’d been rousted from a scrap of sleep that left even Brown slow to rise and formed up for what was described as a quick march forward after their stint as the army’s rear guard. But their progress had been anything but swift. Within a half hour, they had been halted to allow a column of horsemen to take precedence. And they stood there for hours as endless fours of cavalrymen clopped southward.

  “Must be a mass desertion,” Wildermuth had declared. But the men were too tired to laugh.

  As dawn neared and a fellow began to see things right, the column still streamed past, flags cased, breathing dust and horseshit, and leaving more of the same. It looked as though the whole cavalry corps were on the road. It was the sort of thing that seemed fine when sketched for the papers, with the clouds of grit removed and the smell left out. But the men of the 50th and their sister regiments had to stand there, sucking in foulness, when they could have backed off a few yards and slept a little. Then, under the sun’s first glare, they had been quick-marched in the cavalry’s wake, hurrying down a road carpeted with horse dung. It had not been their best morning of the war.

  It grew hot enough to make a darkey faint. The colonel had been a fool to drink spirits and then ride out in that sun. A fool or worse. As the column descended toward the creek, with clean dust underfoot at last, Brown looked forward, for once, to getting his shoes wet. He figured that every other man did, too. The regiment smelled like a horse barn. A splash of cool water would be welcome on many a count.

  The first tack-tack of skirmishers sounded ahead, coming from the bald hill across the creek. Brown couldn’t put a name to where they were and doubted many officers could, either. They were all just tired men going where they were told.

  Apart from the heat, the day was lovely, teasing a man with spring as it slapped him with summer.

  At the near edge of the creek, the brigade halted. Some of the 60th Ohio boys had been sent ahead to skirmish with Reb cavalry, and the remainder of the regiment led the column, followed by the 50th, then the rest. Cutcheon had indeed assumed command, to the men’s satisfaction, but he ordered them to deploy in battle order before they crossed the stream, which drew some groans.

  “Could’ve done it on the other side,” Wildermuth said.

  “Shut up, Bill,” Henry Hill told him, getting out the words one second before Brown could speak them himself.

  But Wildermuth was right again. The veterans knew that the road led through a ford, which would be the easiest place to cross and might even have a bed of laid-in stones. But deploying in lines of battle would send men forward through the mud, through sinkholes and ankle snappers.

  They were too tired to complain much. The veterans told the new men to sling their cartridge cases over their rifles and hold them high, in case the creek was deeper than it looked, but the men who had survived previous campaigns also drew the corks or unscrewed the tops of their canteens to scoop up what water they could as they waded forward.

  It made the crossing an awkward, stumbling business. If the purpose of deploying early had been to have them prepared for a Rebel surprise, it had not worked. Brown was glad to see the grayback horsemen turn and fade from the top of the hill.

  The hot days had shallowed the creek, and only the clumsiest soldiers got a dunking. After shambling up the southern bank, the men halted to form again.

  Brown would have liked to strip off his filthy clothes and sit down in the current, letting the water scrape off the crust he wore. Instead, mud replaced the horseshit on his shoes. He chose to view the change as an improvement.

  The skirmishing grew fevered, telling the old soldiers that the Rebs had brought up infantry behind the crest. Orders rolled down the brigade line: Forward! They marched at right-shoulder-shift, up through a field of young rye, and insects leapt into the air at the threat of their footfalls. Sweat flowed down Brown’s temples.

  The lay of the land pulled the brigade leftward, into the open ground and away from a grove. Soon, the 50th was advancing on the right of the road, with the 60th Ohio on the left side and the rest of the brigade stretching off into the fields. Brown heard a distant order and saw the 1st Michigan Sharpshooters double-quick forward, racing for the crest to aid the skirmishers.

  “We’re going to catch it again,” Wildermuth said.

  “Shut up, Bill,” Brown told him.

  “Yes, First Sergeant.”

  Corporal Doudle offered his view of matters: “Bill’s still sore about that Rebel besting him back in them woods. Wasn’t that a howler?”

  “You shut up, too,” Brown said.

  Wildermuth began whistling “Dixie.”

  The men laughed. Plagued by poison ivy as well as
ravaged feet, John Eckert the Shorter moaned, “What are you whistling that for?” Vott are you vissling dat for?

  “Chust for nice,” Wildermuth answered. “Got to be ready to make new friends, in case things turn unpleasant.”

  “I told you to shut up,” Brown snapped. But it was all part of the company’s ritual, the pattern of how they did things when every man had a right to be on edge. His role was just to tell Wildermuth to be quiet, without a deep expectation of being obeyed. “Pay attention now,” he said.

  To Brown’s surprise, it was Henry Hill who spoke next, although his voice was muted. He marched just to the front and right of Brown and spoke largely to him.

  “I don’t like this. One brigade out here like this.”

  Brown didn’t much like it, either. But it was another of those things that just plain was.

  Shortly before they reached the crest, the invisible force on the opposite slope unleashed a Rebel yell.

  There was no more banter.

  Captain Burket repeated the order from on high to move up at the double-quick. The captain then let the two ranks of trotting men pass by and picked up at Brown’s side.

  “Captain Schwenk has the four left companies. Anything happens to me and Brumm, you take orders right from him.”

  “Yes, sir.” That was fine. Schwenk, who had Company A, was as good a man as the regiment had left.

  Burket ran back toward the colors, sword flashing as he pointed it toward a foe who remained unseen. The racket ahead signified a clash beyond skirmishing.

  As the regiment broke the crest, Brown saw a swarm of Johnnies off to the brigade’s left front, someone else’s problem. The first cannon fire sounded from the rear and shells shrieked overhead, dropping behind the Rebs and accomplishing nothing.

  Lieutenant Colonel Cutcheon rode along the brigade front, halting his right-flank regiments at a fence line atop the crest. Unlike the man who lay back by the roadside, Cutcheon appeared fearless. It steadied the men.

  The last skirmishers dashed in. There were still no Confederates in front of the 50th.

  It was a different story on the brigade’s left, though. Another passel of Johnnies leapt out of a fold in the ground, as if some storybook wizard had called up spooks. They hit the 1st Michigan Sharpshooters at an angle, hard as a club.