by Ralph Peters
“And then the lovely point, sir, would be to keep on a-going,” Smyth said.
“Right. No matter what damage the guns do—and it won’t be pleasant, gentlemen—just keep whipping the men forward. Get over the abatis, get in among the Rebs. It’s the only chance. And once we’re in those trenches, I do expect scalps by the wagonload.”
“Literally?” Brooke said. “We never quite know with you.”
“Corpses and prisoners have to do, I suppose. That’s it, then. Miles, you’re up on the left, followed by Smyth and the Irish Brigade. Brooke’s up on the right, followed by Brown. Ten paces between brigades, five between regiments. No one fires until we reach the entrenchments. No one stops, no one fires. Only bayonets, when we hit their skirmish lines.”
“Their skirmishers will fire. That’ll warn them we’re coming.”
“A few stray shots are one thing, regimental volleys are another. Just don’t let anything stop this attack, or delay it, or break it up in any way. Hit them hard.” He tried to smile. “I do expect an interesting morning. All right, go and explain things to your regimental officers. And be ready to step off precisely at four.”
His subordinates began to break up the party, muttering about the inability to maneuver when packed so tight and the prospects of canister on the prescribed formation. But it didn’t rise above the normal level of complaints; sour remarks were almost a form of prayer for men at war.
“Hold on,” Barlow said. “All of you. Black, don’t douse the lantern yet. Hold it up, so we can see one another’s faces.”
Surprised, the aide did as ordered.
“Gentlemen…,” Barlow began, “if I have offended any man in this command … if I have done so unjustly … you have my apology. You are, each of you, fine officers. I am proud to have commanded this division. There is no better in the army. And…” He strained for words, ever a reluctant public speaker. “And I wish each of you well.”
“Really, sir,” Nellie Miles said, “we’re not dead yet.”
Three forty a.m.
Artillery park, Early’s rear
“Carter, for God’s sake, get up!”
The artilleryman jumped at the hand shaking his shoulder, at the bite in the voice. He had dreamed of being captured in a woodland, and for a moment, it seemed all too real.
Coming partway back to sanity, he reached for the top of his field desk, hand feeling for a box of lucifers.
He struck a match and found General Long standing over him. Long was drenched with rain: He had come out without bothering to put on his uniform blouse or even a shirt.
Carter touched the match to the stump of a candle.
“You have to get those guns back up to the salient,” Long cried, almost childish in his anxiety. “Here. Read this. It’s from Lee. Christ almighty. It sounds like the blue-bellies may be up to something, after all. You’ve got to get those guns back into position.”
The one thing Carter had learned, painfully, was to get something down on paper in a crisis, since recriminations always followed. He checked the time on his pocket watch, then put a pencil to the order and wrote, “Received at twenty minutes to daybreak. Men asleep. Artillery will be in place as soon as possible.”
As he pulled on his boots, he began to shout orders through the tent’s walls.
If the Yankees were coming, they were going to come damned soon.
EIGHTEEN
May 12, three fifty a.m.
Barlow’s division
“General Barlow!” some idiot called out. “Where’s General Barlow?”
Barlow turned to his aide. “Black, shut that fool up. Cut his throat if you have to.”
For all the precautions taken to keep thousands of soldiers quiet, one barking moron could ruin their hope of surprise.
The rain had gentled to a drizzle, hardly more than a mist. Ground fog hugged the landscape. A horse nickered and was instantly quieted. But the blundering ass crashing through the ranks of soldiers kept calling Barlow’s name.
Black collared the noisemaker and dragged him through the darkness.
“Courier, sir,” the aide said. “From General Hancock.”
Calling off the attack? Earlier, Barlow would have welcomed such news. Now, every man was primed to advance and be damned.
“Sir,” the courier began, “urgent message. Urgent, sir. The attack is delayed until four thirty. General Hancock feels it’s still too dark. With the rain and what all.” The man handed Barlow written confirmation, but it wasn’t worth the risk of striking a match. And there was no time.
“Get runners out immediately,” Barlow told his aide. “Attack’s delayed a half hour. Hurry, man!”
Hancock had cut it damned close. If even one man in the corps failed to get the word … and wasn’t this supposed to be a grand attack? Someone had spoken of Burnside bringing in the Ninth Corps on the left. Would that alert the Johnnies in Hancock’s front? And guarantee a slaughter as his men advanced?
The wet on Barlow’s back was sweat, not seeping rain.
With the attack expected to begin in minutes, every heart in the division would be battering at its ribs, a captive shaking the bars of a prison cell. The tension had neared the unbearable, with his officers and men exhausted yet ghastly alert, waiting to plunge forward and take their chances.
Summoned back to the headquarters shack not twenty minutes before, Barlow had argued for a delay himself, certain the darkness would linger past the dawn in the rain and fog. The troops could advance in faint light, but their order would collapse if they couldn’t see anything. Near catatonic with lack of sleep, Hancock had seemed deaf to Barlow’s reasoning, unable to bear the weight of more decisions.
So he had steeled himself to go forward as planned. And he was ready now. It made every kind of sense to delay, but he no longer wanted to wait. The rational man within had been locked away, replaced by a monstrous, impassioned, explosive creature.
He smiled to himself: We rush toward death. It’s certain madness. Exhilarating madness. If Emerson wanted to experience transcendence, this was where the old charlatan needed to be.
He told himself to be glad that Hancock had taken his advice. He could not see beyond the outline of the nearest troops, and to go forward at present begged for a tragedy. But things had gone too far in the soul’s dark places. The mood among the men was such that a snapping twig might have unleashed a riot.
He waited out the minutes, dreading that somewhere along the line a cheer would go up, or guns would open, or Burnside would be punctual for once, or that one of his own units would blunder forward punctually at four.
The drizzle all but stopped, leaving a racket of droplets falling from leaf to leaf in nearby trees. The fog writhed.
Four o’clock came and went, with no hint of battle.
Thirty minutes more. Of waiting. In the loneliest darkness Barlow had ever known.
His feet itched monstrously.
Four twenty a.m.
Base of the Mule Shoe
“Whip them, damn it!” Carter shouted.
“We’ve been whipping them,” his younger brother, Billy, hollered back. “They haven’t got the strength.”
The colonel knew his brother, a captain, was right. The artillery horses had been poorly fed for so long they were merely nags. Now they were expected to pull guns through the bog that passed for a trail to the salient’s tip.
Whip a horse to death so it falls in harness, and that only slows things more, Tom Carter realized. He leapt from his horse, landing with a plop that shot mud up to his crotch, and joined the gunners pushing the limber’s left wheel out of a hole.
He had hurried Page’s battalion forward, with his brother’s battery leading. If any man could get there in time, it was his younger brother. Carter grasped the risks, but saw no choice beyond duty.
Their mother would never forgive him if anything happened to Billy. But, then, he wasn’t sure he’d ever forgive himself.
“Heave!”
> The limber lurched back onto firmer ground. Sodden men jumped out of the path of the gun.
The following caisson got a rushing start and bounded through. Fortunately, without breaking a wheel.
Between teams, soldiers who had rushed up to help tossed sticks and brush into the road’s worst cavities, dozens of men guessing what things needed doing and working by the light of a single lantern.
The guns were rolling, though. Toward their old positions facing the enemy.
Four thirty-five a.m.
Hancock had come forward, gathering his generals near the front of Barlow’s division, to deliver the order to start the assault in person.
And they waited.
The landscape remained shrouded, gripped by fog the color of soiled cotton.
As the generals stood about the corps commander, bearing the unbearable, nearby troops cursed or prayed or emptied their bladders a last time where they stood. But it was all done so quietly you could hear them draw breath by the hundreds.
The faintest possible paleness appeared in the fog. As if someone held a candle behind a drapery.
The India-ink night thinned.
“To your commands,” Hancock said. “Advance immediately. God bless you all.”
Four forty a.m.
Skirmish line, 4th Virginia Infantry
Couldn’t see one damn thing. Fog to the front, stray raindrops still coming down. The morning was ugly as a preacher’s wife.
Ezekial Goodman just wanted to stay awake till he was called back to the line. He was wearier than a farmer rushed at harvest. With his feet deep in slop as miserable as any he’d ever had the pleasure to meet, worse than a pigsty hadn’t been mucked for years. Different country hereabouts. Poor soil, not fit for growing much more than this crop of mud. Far cry from Rockbridge County, where the bottomland was glad to grow just about anything. July corn up taller than a big man. Wheat waving high on the hillside, taunting the scythe, “Come and git me, afore a hard rain comes.” Wild raspberries, late June on, if you knew the good patches. And the pretty-as-your-best-friend’s-wicked-sister mountains to shade the morning and please the eye. When he got home, he wasn’t going anywhere, ’least no farther than Lexington. No need to go back to Pennsylvania, ever. Stonewall Brigade had planted too many men up there. And Maryland? Maybe your’n, but not my Maryland. Keep it for the crows. Even right here in Virginia, east of the Blue Ridge was almost a foreign country. The Valley was a special place, Eden with apples it weren’t a sin to eat. Many a man would never see it again, his mortal remains left to rot somewhere between Beaver Dam Creek and Gettysburg. But Ezekial Goodman was going to make it home. He had a feeling about that.
Somebody had to live on, didn’t they? Not many of the first-joined-up fellows were left to complain about the weather this morning. Hardly more than a handful remembered Jackson now, the meanest man a soldier ever did love.
Weren’t making them like Jackson anymore, not by a mile. Colonel Terry, he was all right, though. Out on picket with his men, not one of your fine-tent officers.
Goodman wrapped the looted canvas more tightly over his shoulders. Wasn’t no ways cold, but he felt a chill. Would’ve given an acre of good land, and maybe two, for a warm, dry place to rest his bones for an hour.
“Zeke?” Cy Benway asked. “You hear something?”
“Been hearing things all night.”
“Something different.”
Goodman listened. He was so tired even listening was an effort.
“Like leaves rustling,” Cyrus added.
“Plenty of trees yonder.”
“But the wind’s down.”
Goodman peered into the mist, which had grown paler by a shade.
“I don’t—”
Then he heard it, too. Sudden, huge, and close. Like the rustling of leaves on every tree in Rockbridge County at once.
He opened his mouth to holler, “They’re coming,” but the sight before him stunned him into silence: Bursting out of the fog, an apple-toss off, the entire Yankee army had appeared.
Just like that.
“They’re coming!” he shouted. Or thought he did, hoped he did. His mouth was dry as ashes.
He raised his rifle as Cyrus raised his own.
“Christ almighty!”
Goodman took quick aim. The Yankees were almost on top of them, bayonets leveled. He pulled the trigger.
The rifle misfired.
In the second it took to decide to run or surrender, the Yankees swept over the rifle pit. With vengeance in their hearts.
Four forty-five a.m.
Captain William Carter led his number one piece forward until entrenchments blocked the horses. Helped by soldiers recently awakened, his boys manhandled the gun toward the nearest emplacement, careful of men asleep in the traverses, while others scrambled to haul up the ammunition chest.
Men slipped and fell. A chest tumbled. The gun’s wheels grew stubborn.
“Keep that swab out of the mud!” the first sergeant called.
A lieutenant yelled that a caisson was stuck and blocking the way for the column.
Leaving the lead section to the first sergeant, Carter remounted to hurry the trailing guns along and direct them into position. Around him, conditions seemed queer as all get-out, with some soldiers up and looking to their breakfasts, while others slept the sleep of the just or the dead. He had to wonder whether the alarm that had called out his battery had been a fuss over nothing. They’d lost their first chance at real sleep in a week.
Here and there, dutiful officers barked orders, but the overall feel was of lethargy and the stone-heavy drowse that had gripped the entire army. Carter felt as though his gunners were the only fully alert men in the works.
Time, they just needed time, another few minutes.…
As he pointed the way forward for his second section of guns, the captain heard shots.
Four forty-five a.m.
Through a pearly haze, Barlow watched his skirmish line sweep over the rifle pits. The discipline of his men regarding noise was remarkable, each man aware that his life truly did depend on it. A few of the Johnnies got off shots, but his men went through them with bayonets and clubbed muskets. Serpents of mist wound over the earth, clinging to it, and watching the brief struggle at the rifle pits was like spying on ghosts at war.
Riding in the interval between his two leading brigades, he saw his ranks growing ragged, with the packed-together men sacrificing order to move more swiftly than a regular quickstep. With their rifles still at right-should-shift, the brigades followed hard on their skirmishers, who had gained a low ridge topped with a fringe of trees. His skirmishers were mere silhouettes in the gray glow.
Some of the men in the front ranks broke into a double-quick. New men, Barlow realized, imagining that the low ridge would be where the Rebels waited. Veterans called them to order, calling as softly as they could, and most of the befuddled soldiers took their places again.
The man-shadows of the skirmish line disappeared down the far slope, eaten by mist.
His soldiers in their thousands made a peculiar rustle, almost like the sea heard from a shuttered room. The first few prisoners, astonished men, passed by, herded to the rear. On the right, more shots snapped off from Birney’s front, but a grove blocked Barlow’s sight of the action. His men hastened up the final steps of the slope, churning a derelict meadow to mud underfoot.
It was just light enough to begin to see the patterns on their flags.
Atop the gentle ridge, the view was horrid. The mist had thinned, and the last true fog had retreated to a ravine to the front. Every man in the first few ranks saw the raw-dirt line of Confederate entrenchments, barely two hundred yards away, glowering above the sinking fog. Abatis bristled and, here and there, the crossed stakes of chevaux-de-frise doubled the obstacles.
In an unspoken compact, his men paused to straighten their ranks, as if good order guaranteed protection. Against the inevitable firestorm about to start.
>
But to Barlow’s astonishment, the Rebel guns didn’t open.
It was sheer folly. The time for the batteries to do their work was now.
Unless they had a surprise waiting.…
He waved his saber and the officers who saw him called, quietly, for the advance to resume. After the shock of seeing the Reb entrenchments, the men quickened their pace again, burgeoning forward, the front ranks dropping toward the fogbound ravine.
Hopefully, it’s not a thousand feet deep, he told himself, still not free of the long night’s doubts and acrimony.
Why didn’t the Johnnies fire? Surely, they must have seen his men by now? You couldn’t mistake the advance of an entire corps.
As his skirmishers emerged from the fog on the far side of the ravine, his lead regiments dipped into the earthbound cloud.
A Confederate gun fired. The ball soared overhead. The cannon had not been properly laid. It made no sense.
Or was it merely a signal? The beginning of the slaughter?
It was certainly a signal to his men. They dropped their rifles from their shoulders to the charge alignment and began to run. Forward.
And they cheered. Barlow had ordered them to wait until they reached the line of works, but it no longer mattered. They were too close for even strong volleys to stop them.
Their ranks disordered, a thick wave of his men rushed up the far slope, howling spooks still gripped by shreds of fog.
Why didn’t the Rebs open up? It was the perfect moment to let go a battalion’s worth of canister.
He kicked his horse forward, feeling his staff close around him.
“Why the Hell aren’t they shooting?” a lieutenant asked. “Are they gone?”
No man had an answer.
Just short of the ravine and barely a hundred yards from the Rebel works, Barlow held up his party. He didn’t want to lose control, had to see how things developed. But he longed to spur right into the fight, to leap the abatis and go in with his saber.
And behave like an ass, he mocked himself.