Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  Humphreys meant to do his best by all of them. But the prospects were daunting. No one was entirely sure of the point of attack Grant had fixed on: somewhere along the salient’s tip, that was all anybody knew. And how were Hancock’s division and brigade commanders to reconnoiter the ground? You couldn’t see fifty yards in the deluge slapping the canvas, and it would be night before much could be organized. And Hancock’s change of position would require hours of slogging through the mud for his men to reach their line of attack. The soldiers would get little sleep, if any, exposed to the elements. Meade was right: Even a tactical success at the tip of the salient would wind down before it reached the depth of Lee’s army. Any trained engineer grasped that immediately: It was the simplest equation of force, resistance, distance, and inertia. You had to hit a shallow line, not a deep one.

  Grant was thinking like a corps commander. No, like a mere division commander. He wasn’t fit to be general in chief.

  Humphreys was not a defeatist or a naysayer. On the contrary, he was vain of his sense of purpose. But he believed that things should be done properly. He respected the old Philadelphia tradition of “Waste not, want not.” And the wastage thus far in the campaign had been horrendous.

  Oh, Grant’s call for a grand, coordinated attack made perfect sense, if properly done. Even the assault on that salient might play a useful part. But to have any chance of meaningful success, so broad a scheme required a full day’s preparation, at the least. And it wanted a brute with a horsewhip to stand at Burnside’s back and make him go forward on time. Humphreys was every bit as convinced as Meade that the Ninth Corps commander would appear late, if at all.

  This had all the ingredients of a bloody mess.

  Still fuming, Meade said: “I just hope Sheridan gets his damned comeuppance.”

  Four p.m.

  Union left flank on the Fredericksburg Road

  “Swear I just saw Noah and his ark go drifting by,” Bill Wildermuth said. “Man could float a canal boat in this ditch.”

  The mud was already inches deep in the trench they had inherited.

  “You’ve been wetter,” Brown told him. Men who had cursed the blazing heat now damned the chilling downpour. It struck Brown, again, how short memories of suffering and pain could be. Yes, they were drenched. But this was a hayride compared to their march from Knoxville.

  “Oh, I been wetter, all right,” Wildermuth went on. “Many’s the day, back on the old canal. Which is where I wish I was, just at the moment. Back home I always knew there was rum for my coffee at the end of the day, and dry clothes waiting. And a fire that wasn’t made out of wet green sticks.”

  “I could do with a glass of rum,” Corporal Doudle said. Rain dripped from the sharp tip of his nose. “Never took to drinking, but I’d have me some rum right now.”

  Wildermuth hooted, loud even in the rain striking their torn waterproofs or pounding the canvas drawn over head and shoulders. “Well, there ain’t none, not for the likes of you. Want your rum or your whiskey today, you got to be an officer. Lieutenant colonel, or better.” He whistled, a gesture usually followed by a smack of the lips. The rain crushed the sound, if it was there this time. “Wonder what Colonel Christ is imbibing this splendid afternoon?” Wildermuth extended a hand, as if to measure the weight of the thumping rain. “He may be in for another bout of sunstroke.”

  “Shut up, Bill,” Brown said. The colonel’s drinking was a sore point that needed no further discussion. To the men’s astonishment, he had resumed command of the brigade, relieving Cutcheon, who was preferred by all of them. Once liked and respected, Christ was regarded now as less than a dog.

  But a dog who held the power of life and death over them.

  “Should’ve made coffee when I saw those clouds,” Henry Hill said. He had been promoted to corporal that morning, but had not had time to sew on his stripes before the rain burst over them. As for the stripes themselves, Brown had known the promotion was on the way and he had cut the corporal’s chevrons from a dead man’s sleeves, hoping it wouldn’t mean bad luck for Henry. He had gotten himself proper first sergeant’s stripes, too.

  War changed men. And not just those such as Colonel Christ, who had fallen from grace before he fell from his saddle. Even the year before, Brown had been reluctant to bother corpses from either army. Now he scavenged with the best of them—and ordered out details to strip the dead of necessities for the company. He had taken care since his promotion to gather in waterproofs and blankets, even some extra tentage, and stow his prizes in the company wagon for just such a day as this, when the new soldiers who had discarded their equipment on the march would find themselves needy.

  Brown grimaced, feeling the rain seep through the poor seams in his cape. For just such a day as this … but when he had sent back a detail to fetch the treasures from the wagon, and after he had prepared a speech for the new men about the importance of caring for their equipment, Doudle and his men returned empty-handed. All of the wagons had been ordered miles to the rear, and no one knew why.

  So now they huddled in the mud on the same ridge they had fought for two days before, set off a few hundred yards from the well-made entrenchments they had dug and perfected. Hartranft’s boys held that position now, and the 50th had to make do with a belly-high ditch whose parapet was dissolving in the rain. The men weren’t happy about that, or about much of anything else. Over those two days they had gone forward and backward, sideward, backward and forward again, day and night, occasionally skirmishing, but mostly just shuffling about in a manner that seemed mad even to the officers. General Burnside’s reputation, too, was declining daily.

  Men would do no end of unpleasant things, Brown had discovered, if they could be made to see some sense in doing them. Soldiers wanted to know where they were and what they were supposed to accomplish, but rare was the officer who bothered to tell them much. If the officer knew himself.

  Men wanted a clear purpose. They’d die for that. But they didn’t care for the thought of being killed or maimed for nothing but confusion.

  It was like breaking in a new boy on a barge. If you wanted him to coil the ropes a certain way, you could order him to do it, and he might do it well enough. But if you made him see the sense of doing it just so, he’d put his heart in it. A man had a hunger to know things, to understand.

  He had resolved to explain all he could to his men. But he recognized that, so far, he had done but a poor job. He couldn’t well explain what he didn’t know.

  “Know what I’d like about now?” Isaac Eckert said to no one in particular. “A great big beefsteak. With a heap of boiled potatoes slopped over with cream.”

  “You ain’t never et a proper beefsteak in your life,” yet another Eckert, Levon, told him.

  “My wife can fry up a beefsteak with the best of them,” Isaac said, indignant.

  “When she isn’t clopping your head with the frying pan,” Bill Wildermuth noted.

  “You don’t talk about my wife, you—”

  “All of you, just shut up,” Brown snapped. “Rebs would be on top of you before you know it, the ruckus you’re raising.”

  “Nope,” Wildermuth said. “You’re wrong there, First Sergeant. The Rebs are too smart to come at us. Not when we’re obliged to go charging at them like a herd of blind bulls and they can just take their leisure leaning over their works and potting us. No, boys, I don’t expect Mr. Johnny Reb to come calling anytime soon. But I do expect to go calling on him, as part of an organized party of unannounced visitors. And I don’t expect much of a kindly welcome.”

  “I would hate to go to the fighting in such rain,” John Eckert the Shorter announced in his Dutchie mumble. Brown had given up on having the loaned stockings returned: Made with loving hands by Frances or not, he wasn’t sure he wanted them back. Too much Eckert on them by now.

  “You’ll fight where you fight,” Henry Hill said.

  “Now that is a profound observation,” Wildermuth said. “Elevation to the
exalted rank of corporal has done wonders for old Henry. He’s becoming downright loquacious.”

  “Just shut up, Bill,” Doudle said.

  “Yes, sir! I’ll shut up. But Corporal Hill’s on to something, mark my words. All the fighting so far hasn’t been near miserable enough, not for the generals. They got to top themselves. Oh, we’ll be in it, they won’t miss a chance to charge through the mud in an outright biblical deluge. Chance like that doesn’t come around every day.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” Doudle said. “Or the officers would be leaping all over the place.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean right now,” Wildermuth said. “Be too easy, that would. They’ll wait overnight, at least, so things get good and soggy.” He turned to the huddled new recruits, cowering in their soaked uniforms. “Ever hear about the soldier who charged across a muddy field and got tramped so far down nobody ever found him?”

  “Bill, shut up,” Brown said. “This time, it’s an order.”

  Wildermuth grinned through the gray curtain of rain. But he went quiet for a few minutes.

  Brown wondered whether he should send Doudle back in search of the company wagon again. He didn’t need the new men any sicker or more beaten down than they were. Half of them had the trots from drinking bad water, and he was getting tired of telling them to go farther off from the trench line for their business.

  He decided he’d need approval from Lieutenant Brumm, given the likely distance involved. Maybe even a note of permission, in case the provost marshal rounded up Doudle and whoever went along.

  Well, first he’d have to see to provisions. And dry cartridges. In the meantime, let the new men learn their lesson.

  But nature liked to distribute misery fairly. The rain had found its way down his back and cold wet formed a garland around his neck. His whiskers rubbed on wet wool beneath the cape. And he was sweating. Just nothing good about it.

  He gave a thought to the men on the other side. Who would be feeling every bit as miserable. There were times when the war seemed nothing but endless idiocy. Men killing each other over matters most of which weren’t anyone else’s business. Was this mud worth leaving Schuylkill Haven for? Leaving behind kin and sweethearts? Sometimes he felt that if he had not taken responsibility for the men around him, he’d just up and walk away.

  And on other days, he swelled at the sight of a flag.

  As for sweethearts, a letter from Frances had reached him the day before. It was a wonderful letter, if only because there was nothing much in it. He had to puzzle out her penmanship, a parade of great loops with tiny letters between them, but the wonderful thing was that life back home sounded just the same as always, more or less. There was a world back there, untouched by war, where folks still worried about pie bakes and church suppers. That world seemed so immeasurably fine to him now that thoughts of it left him damp-eyed. He resolved that if he returned a whole man and if Frances really would have him, he would never speak of what he had seen here or on other battlefields. He would not soil her world with the horrors that had become commonplace to him and the men around him. He would not dirty her with any of it. And he would try to forget.

  As if he had jinxed himself, Brown recalled Sam Martz’s heart pulsing over the ground.

  He shuddered.

  Anxious to force down the memory, he almost asked John Eckert the Shorter how his poison ivy was coming along, but caught himself. He had given the fool boy so much attention that murmurs had begun to spread about him having a favorite. When the Eckert boy was a burden to equal a hod of bricks.

  He even had to be cautious with his best friend in the company, Henry Hill. Despite Hill’s promotion to corporal, it had become hard to have a private talk without arousing suspicions that Henry would get better treatment than the others. Veteran soldiers could be as jealous as young girls were of hair ribbons. And still be willing to die for each other, too.

  Thunder cracked so loudly that even the veterans jumped.

  “Christ, I nearly shit,” Bill Wildermuth said.

  “Be the first useful thing you done all day,” Isaac Eckert told him.

  “You shut up, too,” Brown said.

  Six thirty p.m.

  Third Corps headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia

  Listening to the banter of Hill’s staff over stew and cornbread, Lee felt like yesterday’s man. Even young gentlemen these days cared nothing for the refinement his generation had deemed essential. Their carefree chatter made his diction seem a relic—even, perhaps, a cause for amusement when he was not present. He had labored as a young man to perfect his public language, determined to master graceful speech to better converse with the ladies—he had valued chaste flirtations all his life—and to speak with firm precision in the company of men. His father had praised the perfection of Washington’s rhetoric and bearing, although he thought Jefferson querulous. His father had spoken finely, far better than he had behaved. The result was that Lee had taught himself to exercise self-control in every utterance, and his grammar was as rigid as his posture. Once, such things had been valued. Now all his attainments did was to put those around him on guard.

  His life seemed entirely of another time, as bygone as the remnants of his society would be, were this army denied victory. Oh, he knew that there were good men in the North. He had served beside them. But the grabbing hands and barking voices of the modern age, the crudity of smokestacks as tall as the Tower of Babel, and the rudeness of men delighted to jostle their betters in the street, all that was anathema. Men spoke, not always honestly, of freedom, but what he valued most in life was grace.

  And dignity. Still little more than a boy, he had armored himself against the world, his careful manners a breastplate, his diction greaves and harness. He had learned to appear at ease in good society, even to be convivial within bounds, and he had friendly relations with excellent men. He knew not a single home where he was unwelcome. And yet, he had never had an intimate friend. He had guarded against that; now it was too late. Certainly, he had acquired an enviable number of sincere and pleasant friendships, but none of the sort that would allow him to confide his fears and sorrows, his doubts and waves of despair. He had never let another man that close, and even his wife was denied any glimpse of weakness.

  He regretted that now. As the rain hammered the shabby roof of another unkempt farmhouse, he wished he could unburden himself, or simply complain as other men might do. He longed for someone who would understand his situation, the vicissitudes of commanding such an army, the need to appear ever-confident, to mask oneself with an unshakeable expression, to appear strong even when one’s own strength was failing.

  And failing his was. The change in the weather had summoned his rheumatism, the one ailment he had thought banished with the winter. He was stiff, and turbulent of bowel, and wary of his heart pains. Yet, he was responsible for the men out there in the premature darkness of a storm that wet them through and doused the meager fires that were their small comfort. Even this dilapidated house would seem a palace to them on such a night. And soon he might needs ask them to rally and march through the tempest to pursue those people and, should God will it, to put an end to things.

  Or, if not to make an end, at least to purchase time, to thrust the war northward one more time, above the Rappahannock, until another year’s harvest could be gotten in from central Virginia and the upper Valley, so his men might eat. With the loss of so much territory in the west and the blockade ever tighter, the South had declined from shortages of manufacturing means to a simple lack of cornmeal. The harvest was every bit as vital as gunpowder.

  Let those people retreat this night, and if the Lord wills it, I will smite them mightily. And my men, my people, will be fed for another year.

  Men who had dreamed of gay victories now longed to capture a commissary wagon.

  The fury of the storm without conjured a stray memory. Once, before her health declined, Mary had lured him to a playhouse across the river in Washingto
n to endure a performance of King Lear. He had no interest in such frivolities, but the play had moved him unexpectedly and he had left the theater unsettled, in a state that alarmed him. He had shunned the theater after that, wary of its tricks. But now, as this night broke over two facing armies, he thought again of that foolish old king, and about the poor, wronged fellow in the storm who had spouted nonsense that had the ring of law. And he thought of his men, with their empty bellies, unsheltered on this night. Perhaps there had been more to the play than he had been willing to see.…

  What else had he been unwilling to see in his life? What did he fail to see now? Was he as stubborn as that addled king? Or, perhaps, as mad?

  He caught Venable watching him. The younger man’s expression was almost motherly. The aide quickly looked away, but Lee knew that those closest to him worried over his health and his meager appetite. Lee valued the lads who devoted themselves to serving him, and his feelings toward his military family went deeper than he permitted himself to reveal. Yet, not one of those men could serve him as confidant. He was alone, and had been so for years.

  Across the table, Powell Hill sat, struggling to appear well. Hill was still too sick to do his duty and he knew it: He had not had the temerity to ask for his corps back. He would have it, of course, in good time, when he was well enough, but Early must do for the present. Hill only wanted to remain close to things, to still feel a part of their brotherly undertaking. Lee had no time for mysticism, but there was a bond between these men no science had explained. Only he was left apart.

  “General Lee,” Hill said to him, “you’ve hardly eaten. You must keep up your strength.”

  Powell Hill, who looked like a skeleton whose bones could be snapped in two with a child’s strength. Who would be left to lead in the hard times ahead? If Grant proved unrelenting? He could not afford the loss of another paladin.