by Ralph Peters
As for his wife, men had feared her, wary of her intellect, viewing her as impossibly brash and forthright. But Arabella’s enthusiasm spilled from an overflowing mind: He had known many a Harvard man far poorer in his faculties. And behind the occasional awkward display of knowledge over a dinner table, she, too, was racked with doubts and concealed weaknesses, half a Diana, and half a Trojan woman.
He would regret disappointing them with his death.
But he did not intend to shirk his duties one jot. He would fight. And he meant to fight wisely, if such a thing were possible, under the circumstances. He had heard of Upton’s success—with not a little jealousy—and had queried everyone he could find on the details. What he gathered was secondhand at best, but it sounded as though Upton had solved the problem of crossing the killing space that he had pondered for months. Dense columns, rapid movement, no pauses, all violent action delayed until the enemy’s line had been reached. First round fired at point-blank range, then bayonets. Or bayonets, then the first round. He had intuited some of it himself, but had gotten other aspects wrong, fixing on open-order formations when a massive phalanx was what did the trick. He pushed his tired mind to envision the correct formation for a division, the geometry that would deliver a powerful blow without stumbling over itself, the proper spacing … and the absolute need for surprise.…
He had met Upton in the war’s first months, when the Regular had been a newly commissioned lieutenant of artillery, fresh from West Point, detailed to drill the 12th New York Volunteers, the regiment Barlow had joined as a private and where he had been appointed a lieutenant. Upton had impressed him with his rigor and demands, although the strictness had not pleased the other recruits, who expected a merry summer encampment full of sporting games. Barlow realized with a minor shock how much he had patterned his own leadership on that of the brusque lieutenant, and he resented the need to copy him yet again. But Upton had solved the problem.
If it had not been a fluke.…
Hard, hit them hard, on a narrow front, with an irresistible mass of veteran regiments. Punch through, and then keep going. Kill them before they had a chance to kill you. Barlow could see it.
The problem would be maintaining order after the collision. Loss of control in battle had become the worst of the army’s bugbears, betraying every success.
He just might pull it off, though.
If there was a chance, the slightest chance, to make a successful attack, he meant to seize it. Dense columns. Rushing across an open field. A devastating impact.
The one thing that could stop such a charge was artillery.
May 12, twelve fifteen a.m.
The Mule Shoe
“Major Hunter!” Alleghany Johnson said, kicking his aide a tad harder than was necessary. “Wake your behind up, boy.”
“Sir … yes, sir.…”
It was so damned dark and miserable that Johnson was almost surprised to have found the right man.
“Awake now, Bob? Enough to listen?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can’t say you sound it. Listen here. There’s trouble. Colonel Terry’s pissing his drawers on the picket line, claims he hears the whole Yankee army rooting around in the canebrake. His men hear it, too.”
“Mightn’t it be the jumps? Men are awful tore down. Or the rain?”
“Fourth Virginia ain’t skittish, Bob. And Terry, he don’t spook. And General Steuart reports no replacement guns came up. The line’s stripped bare of cannon.”
“What time is it, sir?”
“Time for you to get a damned move on. Go on back, find Ewell. Knock him on his bald head if you have to, but you tell him we need those batteries back here.”
“Yes, sir. Just feeling for my boots.”
“Shouldn’t ever take ’em off,” Johnson said.
“Got the foot itch, sir.”
“Show me a man doesn’t. You go on off now. And don’t you let Dick Ewell get to bamboozling, I need those guns.”
When the major had gone, Major General Johnson stepped outside again, defying the elements and his body’s complaints, warring against the force of gravity that tugged a man earthward in the depths of one sleepless night after another.
He went up to the trench line, had a back-and-forth with a sergeant who talked thick Blue Ridge, and reassured a pup of a boy from Winchester. The lad worried about his family, caught in another Yankee visitation.
“You just keep your eyes open, son. Plenty of Yankees to whup right here. Then we’ll go over and flush ’em out of the Valley, mark my words.” He tapped the boy’s leg with his cane. “You stay awake now, until you’re relieved. Hate to have to shoot you.”
After that, he listened through the rain, trying to detect the worrisome sounds Bill Terry had reported. Maybe it was just spooks and hants, after all. Enough tiredness put nerves in the best of men.
Feel better once the guns get back, he figured.
Twelve thirty a.m.
Assault position, south of the Brown house
Barlow couldn’t see a blasted thing. The rain had eased to a drizzle, but the night was as black and foul as a Frenchman’s morals.
“Well, this is it. Your jumping-off line,” Morgan said. “General Barlow, I regret—”
“Regrets won’t buy me a boiled egg,” Barlow said. “How do I even know which way to point my division?”
“I can give you a compass line.”
Barlow threw up his hands, but only got wet forearms for it. “Mendell, how about you? Earn your pay. At least tell me how far my men have to go.”
“Something less than a mile, I should think.”
“Now that … is supremely helpful. ‘Something less than a mile.’ That would fall somewhere between five feet and five thousand.…” Exasperated, he paused to listen to his men sloshing through the meadow, churning it to mud soup. They had been cautioned, harshly, to be as silent as possible, and there was none of the usual clanking of tin cups or other metal bits, nor complaints above a whisper. But thousands of massing men made a certain amount of noise, despite herculean efforts.
He knew he was being juvenile, but sarcasm was irresistible. “Tell me, Morgan,” he began again. “And you feel free to contribute, Mendell, if you have any flashes of genius. Here’s the vital question of the day: Can you even assure me that I won’t have to cross a thousand-foot-deep gulch halfway across?”
Morgan played along. “No, sir. I can’t. How about you, Mendell?”
The engineer remained silent.
“It was the weather,” Morgan explained. “I went out as far as the skirmish line. But I just couldn’t see a thing. You know how it was raining.”
“‘This … is the excellent foppery of the world,’” Barlow said, “‘that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars.…’”
“I’d blame Grant, myself,” Morgan said.
One forty-five a.m.
The Mule Shoe
“That bald-headed bastard,” Alleghany Johnson roared.
“Sir,” Major Hunter explained, “General Ewell said the order to withdraw the guns came straight from General Lee, it wasn’t Long’s doing. General Lee has firm information that Grant’s moving Meade and Burnside to the far right, probably to withdraw up the Fredericksburg Road.”
“Well, I guess half of them got lost,” the general said. “Just had a Louisiana boy up here telling me the entire Union army’s about to land on him. And Colonel Terry, he’s ready to crack the Book with Seven Seals.”
“Should I wake the men, sir?”
Johnson considered it, looked at his watch, regretted its fickleness, and said, “No, not yet. They’re tuckered out. Let them sleep a tad longer. Dick Ewell really told you he wouldn’t send me a single goddamned battery?”
“He didn’t put it quite that way.”
“But that was the gist of it?”
“Yes, sir. That was the sense of things.”
“We’ll damned well see about that. Crawley, get my horse.”
Two thirty a.m.
The Brown house
“Barlow, you’re mad,” Hancock said. “If you do that, the guns in that salient will knock down your men like pins.”
“Really, Frank,” John Gibbon said. “They’d be annihilated by canister, they wouldn’t get halfway across the field.”
“The field nobody’s seen?” Barlow was all the crankier for having had an hour of brute sleep on the floor of the house.
Teddy Lyman came in, cape shiny with rain. Most of the gathered generals ignored Meade’s aide, but Barlow nodded. Lyman had another officer with him whose face Barlow couldn’t quite place. The two kept a respectful distance, huddling by the telegraph men who were setting up a station in the corner. To report back to Meade and Grant on the coming assault.
So damned tired.…
“When you don’t know what’s in front of you,” Hancock said, “it’s all the more reason to stick with the tried and true. Frank, I’ll have to forbid—”
Barlow exploded. “Then relieve me! Right here. On the spot. If I’m to lead this assault, I’m damned well going to do it the way I think best. And I propose to have men enough when I reach their works to charge through Hell itself. As for their artillery, I intend to capture every gun they mass on my front.” He glared at Hancock. “With all respect due to rank, sir, sticking with the ‘tried and true’ is poppycock. The only time this army’s had any success on these fields was Upton’s little adventure. Which I intend to repeat with a full division.”
“The Johnnies will be on to that trick now. Every gun on that ridge will be loaded with canister,” Gibbon said, as surly of voice as any of them that night.
“My division’s out in front, not yours,” Barlow shot back. “Damn it, I’m not going to lead my men like sheep to the slaughter again. They’re going to have a fighting chance.” He looked, murder-eyed, at Gibbon. “And I’ll be at their front, not smoking a pipe in the trains.”
The room was on the verge of erupting in its own civil war.
Hancock shook his head in grand disgust. “All right, Frank. All right, then. But make a wet shit of this, and I’ll have your head. And your division.”
“If I fail, my head won’t be your problem.”
“Sounds rather melodramatic,” Birney observed. “Thought you didn’t go in for that sort of thing.”
“A man adjusts his tenor to his company,” Barlow told him. He quite liked Birney the rest of the time, but hated him at the moment. Just then, he hated everything and everybody.
“All right, then,” Hancock said, straining to conjure his bluff, customary voice. “Jump off at precisely four a.m. Let’s set our watches, gentlemen. I have … two forty-seven.”
“Two forty-seven,” a number of voices confirmed.
“To your commands, then,” Hancock said. “And shove the goddamned graybacks down the shithole.”
As the assembly began to break up, Lyman raised his high-pitched voice.
“General Hancock … Colonel Merriam’s seen the ground to your front, I thought he might describe it.”
Bless old Teddy. Harvard was good for something. And yes, that was Wally Merriam, of the 16th Massachusetts, from Mott’s bunch.
Too tired to recognize a man he’d known for years. And he was about to lead seven thousand men in a blind attack.
“Well,” Hancock said, “what have you got to impart to us, Merriam? These men are in a hurry.”
Merriam was the classic Yankee sort, stingy with words. Instead of beginning with pleasantries or good wishes, he strode over to the fireplace, where damp wood smoked, and picked out a charred stick. He began to sketch on a filthy wall.
It wasn’t a work of art for the ages, but there was enough detail for Barlow and the others to begin to grasp the general situation. The best news was that the salient didn’t have an especially broad tip, so there was a limit to the number of guns that could be massed for converging fires. Still, the corps had to traverse up to three-quarters of a mile of rolling ground, then climb over abatis under fire to reach the Rebel entrenchments. It was a deadly, daunting space, almost as far across as the fields at Gettysburg, and no matter how quiet the men sought to be, the Johnnies were bound to hear them coming too soon. Whatever the number of guns that had been squeezed into the salient’s apex, their double-shotted canister at close range would be simply murderous.
Was he making a terrible mistake?
Bet all, or fold, he told himself.
He felt mildly better for Merriam’s description. If he had to die, he preferred not to die a fool’s death in total ignorance.
“All right, gentlemen,” Hancock said. “I hope to see you all at day’s end, let’s go.”
“I’ll be glad to make it to breakfast,” Birney muttered.
Before returning to his men, Barlow took Lyman aside.
“Good stroke, Lyman,” he said. “You academic sorts aren’t totally useless.”
“I seem to remember a certain valedictorian…”
“We all have our sins to repent.” He worked his wedding band off his finger, drew out his folding wallet, inserted the ring, and handed the packet to Lyman. “And this,” he added, fishing out the carefully wrapped image of Belle he kept in a breast pocket. “Do see that Arabella gets these, if I make a mess of things. I’d like to send her my watch, but seem to have need of it.”
“Barlow, this isn’t like you.”
“Not quite certain what I’m like these days. Now don’t go off whoring with the funds in there.”
Insufferably happy in his marriage to a bride almost as rich as he was himself, Lyman turned a warm and mottled pink.
“Oh, I know, I know,” Barlow said. “I’m socially impossible. Might do for Boston, but not for Beacon Hill. Isn’t that what you said about me?” Barlow smiled, but there was unexpected sweetness, rather than malice, in it. “Only teasing, for Heaven’s sake. But do remember what I told you, I wasn’t joking. Back when you asked about seeking a command. Stick to staff work, Teddy, you were born for it. But you couldn’t get an Irishman to follow you into a bar that was ladling out free whiskey. You tell Belle my last thoughts were of her and that I had no time to write. And good luck with your starfish.”
He slapped on his hat and went into the rain.
Two thirty a.m.
Lee’s headquarters
Roused from his slumbers and already dressed correctly, Lee struggled to make sense of the conflicting reports.
“Look at our dilemma, gentlemen,” he said to his drowsy aides. “Here we have a perfect lesson in how difficult it is to be truly certain of information and determine what course is best. I have here a dispatch from General Early claiming, of a sudden, that those people are moving around our left. And this is from General Johnson, endorsed by General Ewell. He insists that Meade has moved to the right and is massing in his front. He begs that the withdrawn guns be returned to the salient.” Lee’s bowels quaked. “Which of these reports am I to believe?”
Taylor said: “General Johnson does appear convinced, sir.”
“But so does General Early. He’s not a man to see phantoms.”
“General,” Taylor said, “we’ve had no further reports suggesting a Union retreat. Nothing trustworthy. Only word of various movements of unclear purpose. And that was yesterday. The artillery was withdrawn with a pursuit in mind and—”
“And my conclusion may have been premature,” Lee said. He looked around the tent. In the lantern’s light, the faces of Taylor, Venable, and Marshall appeared as grim as a deathwatch. “You all believe the guns should be returned to General Johnson’s portion of the line?”
“Yes, sir,” Venable said. The others nodded.
“So do I,” Lee said. “We must make haste.”
Three fifteen a.m.
Barlow’s division
Barlow huddled under the canvas his brigade commanders and aides held over their
heads, shielding the lantern’s light from the enemy’s view. On the chance in a thousand it could be seen through the murk. The rain had softened to a light blow and pattered on the cloth, dripping from the edges. Fog rolled over the fields and through the groves as if God were smoking a meerschaum. Beyond the lantern’s cast, the air was Hades black.
Drawing in the mud with a stick, Barlow said, “Make your peace with God, gentlemen. I have a hot place picked out for some of you today.” The attempt at humor fell flat. A pall worse than the weather hung over them all. Barlow ached to display his usual confidence, but every time he spoke a false tone spoiled his voice.
“It isn’t much to go on, but the salient’s here, shaped like this. Pay attention to the tip. We’ll aim to hit just off its center, slightly to the left, just about … here. Of course, there’s no telling where we’ll actually end up … but as soon as you catch a glimpse, the vaguest outline, of the position, that’s where I want you to do your best to hit them. Now … we’re here. When we move out, we’re going straight ahead. Nothing fancy, no nonsense. I’m told this ground is open and what trees there were near the works were cut down for abatis. Be prepared for plenty of abatis.”
“If they used poplar,” Nellie Miles said, “it’ll snap off.”
“Not when it’s wet,” Brooke said.
Paul Frank’s replacement, Hiram Brown, added, “Rain’s been so heavy, the stakes may not have much purchase. Might be able to pull them right out of the ground.”
“Fine, but let’s not count on it,” Barlow told him. “What’s essential is that you all keep your men closed up. Keep them moving fast, as fast as you can without losing all sense of order. If this mist holds, they won’t be able to see us until we’re a hundred yards off, or even closer.”
“They’ll hear us.”
“Can’t aim at a sound with very much confidence,” Brooke observed.
“Exactly,” Barlow said. “They’ll have to hold their fire, until we’re close enough to make a dash for it. Even if they’ve laid guns to rake the fields, they’ll be hesitant to open until they think they’ve spotted something of value. They’ll be worried about the time they need to reload.”