by Ralph Peters
Was there a chance that the Rebs had abandoned the line? If so, they’d left a large rear guard: He could see heads bobbing behind the defensive berm. And rifles. Yet, his soldiers were already climbing over the stakes, tugging at them and hammering them down, unmolested by Johnnies ten yards away. The obstacle was no obstacle at all.
Rifles cracked and a few men tumbled. But the firing summed to nothing, when it should have caused sheer butchery.
More Johnnies crowded the line, rushing up, leveling their rifles to no effect.
Barlow began to laugh.
“Their powder,” he said to the staff men at his side. “Their powder’s wet. The sorry bastards. They’re all misfiring, the lot of them.”
His soldiers went over the dirt wall in a blue mass, bayonets thrusting and rifle butts swinging. The report of shots and points of light in the haze announced that his men had kept their powder dry.
The slope was a disordered mass of frenzied men in blue. Shouting. All of them anxious to get in on the kill.
To the right, he could see Birney’s men again. Swarming forward as well. Racing his men into the salient.
“I’ll be damned,” Barlow said.
Four fifty-five a.m.
“Damn them all,” Alleghany Johnson bellowed. “Shoot, goddamn it, fire!” He waved his cane as he walked behind the trenches, uninterested in safety, concerned only with stopping the waves of blue from swamping his line.
How had it happened? He’d sent out circulars, warning his brigades to be prepared.
Now this.
There were no Rebel yells now, only curses.
“Well, shoot ’em, goddamn it!” he ordered a line of his men working their rifles.
“Powder’s wet. Won’t fire.”
“Try new caps, damn it.”
“Done tried.”
Only seconds left to save the position. He could even make out the badges on the attackers’ caps: Hancock’s boys. Win, his old friend. His mortal enemy.
“Fix bayonets!” he shouted, waving his cane at the swelling blue tide, as if he meant to thrash it back across the Rappahannock.
But his men had rushed up to the line, and many had not bothered to grab their bayonets.
Screaming in a fury that chilled even Johnson, the Yankees flowed over the wall of dirt, leaping down into the trench bayonets first. Some of the blue-bellies impaled themselves on Confederate rifle barrels, no need of bayonets, while others landed atop one another. But his men were under them all, literally crushed by the attack’s weight.
His men swung their rifles at heads or pounded the butts into blue-clad chests and bellies, desperate as men attacked by rabid animals. Some Yankees paused at the lip of the trench to fire down into it. A boy in a ragged calico shirt leapt up on the wall, waving the flag of a Virginia regiment. The Yankees skewered him. And took the flag.
The Yankees were all around them now, and some of his men were running. A Yankee came at Johnson, bayonet lowered, demanding that he surrender.
Johnson swept his cane across the man’s face, then seized his rifle and shot the Yankee dead, muzzle to gut. The man’s blouse caught fire where the round went in.
Cane in one hand, rifle in the other, the general fell back. The survivors of his staff had rallied to him now.
Mortified, he saw dozens of his men raise their hands in surrender.
His staff fought through the melee as far as they could, with the general shouting commands and sending runners off with desperate orders, men unlikely to reach their destinations.
A pocket of fog saved him for a time. He saw twinkles of light on every side, and bullets scorched by like wasps from a bothered nest. Phantasms dashed through clouds of mist and gunsmoke.
He turned to his adjutant.
“Bob, you get on back to Ewell. Any way you can, boy. Tell him we need every man this damned army can spare, hear?”
“Yes, sir.”
They parted in the muck of a patch used as a field latrine. Eyes connecting a last time, unwilling for that last second to go their separate ways, the grip of the moment broken only when Johnson tapped the major—a mite hard—with his cane.
“Git!”
Johnson hoped Hunter would live to a ripe old age. But, right now, he wasn’t sure his division would survive. Or the rest of the army.
Blundering out of the curtain of mist, he found himself in the midst of a blue horde. In their thousands, the Yankees were rushing deep into the salient, the only Confederates in evidence a swarm of disarmed men being herded rearward. The firing had all but stopped as resistance collapsed.
“Oh, Hell,” the general said.
Alleghany Johnson raised his cane, ready to lead the remnants of his staff in a final charge, but dozens of Yankees deigned to pause and lower their muzzles and bayonets in the direction of his little band. And they took special note of Johnson.
When he turned, he found Yankees crowding behind him, too.
Nervous as a fifteen-year-old bride, a pimple-plagued lieutenant stepped from the blue ranks. He attempted a strut, but only made a goose of himself.
A goose with a hundred bayonets to back him.
“Sir,” the lieutenant cried in a too-loud, cracking voice, “I am prepared to accept your surrender.”
The boy was so earnest, Johnson almost laughed. Not that there was a great deal else to laugh about.
Instead of laughter, tears betrayed him. Mutinous, uncontrollable, shameful tears.
He lowered his cane.
“Oh, Hell,” he said.
Four fifty-five a.m.
“Stop firing that gun, or we’ll kill every goddamned one of you,” the Yankee sergeant yelled.
Their own infantry had disappeared. Federals were all around them. And streaming past in multitudes.
“Stand down!” Captain Carter shouted. “Get away from the gun!”
The Yankees closed tighter around them, rifles still leveled to fire. Rare was the blue-belly who didn’t wear a murderer’s look.
Carter had gotten his number one piece into action. Just long enough to fire a single round and reload. His other guns were short of their emplacements or mired on the trail. It was the worst day of his life, and he feared it would be his last.
As swiftly as he could, Carter scanned the Yankees for an officer. Settling for the sergeant with blue stripes, he said, “Don’t shoot my men. We surrender. We all surrender.”
“Goddamned right you do,” the sergeant said. He detailed a few soldiers to push his prisoners toward the Yankee lines. First, though, the sergeant helped himself to Carter’s artillery sword and pistol belt, tossing them to a private with the admonition, “You see that these don’t go astray, or I’ll beat you like a whore in the street, Mehaffey.”
Driven over the wall, away from their lost guns, Carter and his men met a spectacle even more humiliating. Between drifts of white mist and gray smoke, many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of disarmed Confederates swarmed northward, cursed to damnation and prodded to run by their captors. So many had been taken prisoner that they disrupted the advancing Union formations.
“I’m just glad Jackson ain’t here to see this day,” a sergeant said.
Five a.m.
Barlow had done his duty by Hancock, sending off a scrawled dispatch so the corps commander could do his duty in turn and send a telegraphic message to the army’s headquarters.
What stunned Barlow most was the swiftness of the action. He had not been able to keep up with his own men and still direct the following brigades to their proper places. The corps had made a brilliant, unexpectedly brilliant, start. But it was only a start, and he worried about preserving cohesion sufficiently well to keep his men driving forward. With the artillery threat behind them, the risk now was a collapse of unit discipline amid the chaos.
He rode through a gap in the abatis and leapt from his horse onto a berm, tossing the reins to an orderly. When he looked down into the trench, he found a snake den of tangled bodies, most of them
gashed bloody, many gut-ripped, and almost all in gray or some rough approximation of a uniform. Trapped under corpses, wounded men struggled to free themselves. The stronger cried for help.
A long, filthy hand clutched the air, searching for a grip.
His staff surrounded Barlow, pistols ready. The ditch was too wide to leap, and he thought it tasteless to scramble over the casualties. He walked the berm until he found a traverse wall, then made his way into the smoke and confusion. He found himself in a queer, twilit world, with the noise of the heaviest fighting hundreds of yards on ahead, but little quarrels of fists or clubbed muskets still erupting in the assault’s rear.
As word spread that he had come forward, soldiers and officers brought him flags, over a dozen in the first few minutes, ready to lay them at his feet, as though he were Caesar himself. He ordered them sent to the rear.
Some of his soldiers had paused to loot the meager Reb possessions, a practice Barlow despised. But he hadn’t time for it now.
His party was nearly trampled by another mass of Confederate prisoners, shock-faced, bitter-eyed, bleeding, gap-toothed men, in wet rags, skeletal, but bearded like the Patriarchs, some weeping, some defiant, their wild pride humbled, even as they sought to hold their heads high. The better of them stared at him as though, left to their own devices, they would tear away his flesh with their bare hands.
He jostled his way through men already separated from their units and pushed through briars and military wreckage, discovering corpses in unexpected places, their bodies contorted, some comically. Wounded men from both sides sat dumbfounded, or staggered, or crawled. One Reb pulled himself along, leaving a trail of intestines behind his bare feet.
As he came up behind the crowded regiments alternately pressing and chasing the Johnnies toward the heart of Lee’s army, Barlow collared every officer he spotted and ordered them to get their men under control and keep them under control, to maintain their organizations and drive on. But he sensed that his inflamed men were growing uncontrollable, that their bloodlust trumped discipline now. He felt it in himself. Men of every rank had the taste of raw flesh in their mouths: This was revenge for the terrible week behind them, and for every humiliation and loss suffered over the past three years. His men would fight on with fury, but responding to orders was another matter.
The fog grew thicker again, while the rain spit on and off. He couldn’t see far enough ahead to give detailed commands, but his division had an intelligence of its own, grinding into the Rebels. His men stormed past a second line of entrenchments, a supporting line that had done the Johnnies no good. More prisoners moped rearward. Just ahead, the noise of the fighting grew uncanny, a summation of rage and terror expressed in voices, with remarkably few shots.
Today, men preferred the bayonet.
He found John Brooke. The brigade commander’s face was streaked with powder, and the eyes of this coolest of officers blazed wildly.
“We’re driving them … damned well crushing them.” The hate released in each word startled even Barlow.
“John, you’ve got to get your men into some order. Lee’s bound to counterattack. Control your men, for Christ’s sake.”
Brooke shook his head. Eyes utterly mad. As if even his commander might be an enemy. “All tangled up. My men, Birney’s. Damned mess. But we’re cutting the bastards to ribbons.”
“Brooke, you must control your men.”
The tone seemed to penetrate. At least partway.
“I’m doing my best, sir. But the men … I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s all I can do to stop them from killing prisoners.”
“Listen to me! Push on. Yes. Drive on. But think, man! Be ready for a counterblow. Lee isn’t going to simply fold up and run.”
“Counterblow,” Brooke said.
He snapped to, suddenly alert, aware. “Yes, sir. Certainly. But I can’t work miracles. Brown’s new to command, he’s got regiments coming in all over the place, crowding my men. It’s not an army up ahead, it’s a bloody mob.”
“It’s your job,” Barlow told him, “to make it an army again.”
Barlow turned away. Just in time to see a not quite familiar regimental flag cutting through the mist.
Gibbon’s men. Committed far too soon. They were only going to worsen the confusion.
There were still more prisoners, though. The advancing, still unbloodied Federals jeered at them.
As he strode through the wreckage, human and matériel, Barlow saw, hardly ten yards off, a kneeling Johnny begging for his life, surrounded by taunting men in blue. The man bent to kiss their boots and they clubbed him to death. Laughing.
He would have had those men court-martialed, lashed, and imprisoned. Any other day but this.
There was no time.
He scrawled another brief note to Hancock and sent it back with a runner. It was difficult to see much of anything, even to keep a proper sense of direction. In the wake of an advancing blue line, he found himself amid a donnybrook of clubbed muskets and angry Rebel resistance. Jim Beaver’s Pennsylvania boys were beating the daylights out of a brave and hopeless bunch of Johnnies.
Beaver tapped him from behind, almost getting a taste of saber.
“Sir, it’s a splendid day! I do like going forward better than playing rear guard.”
“You have your men under control?”
Beaver gestured toward the fray. “It’s a struggle. But yes, I think.”
“Be certain.” There was more firing now and the smoke had grown choking thick. “Lee’s going to counterattack us, as sure as fish drink tea in Boston Harbor. And I don’t want to be rolled up and shoved back to where we started.”
“Sir, we captured General Steuart.” Beaver grinned. “George Steuart. When he introduced himself to surrender, all snoot in the air, I thought he meant Jeb Stuart. I was ready to piss my pants and dance a jig.”
Barlow couldn’t help smiling at the image. Pissed pants, maybe. But he really couldn’t envision the sober Beaver dancing a jig.
“I sent him back to General Hancock, I believe they knew each other.”
“Everybody knew Win Hancock,” Barlow said. “He was probably on a first-name basis with Jesus and the Disciples.”
That went a bit too far for the straitlaced Beaver. His expression made a prune seem like a fresh-faced girl in May.
“Get back to your men, Beaver. And remember what I said. Those buggers will be coming, as quick as they can.”
Five fifteen a.m.
Grant’s headquarters
Grant sat outside the headquarters tent, wrapped in a greatcoat against the rain’s rear guard. Couldn’t hear much. No artillery, that was the likely reason. Sound of guns carried, rifles not so much. Wind wrong, anyway.
He took an easy breakfast, a cucumber split and splashed with a pucker of vinegar. Around him, men drank coffee in the smoke of a poor fire, unwilling to take shelter while the general in chief remained outside. Everyone was impatient for news, skittish. John Rawlins looked starved in body and soul, and his cough was back. Grant had a mind to tell his chief of staff to go on in the tent, but didn’t want to shame him. Anyway, the rain had soaked the canvas to a sagging weight, and there was probably as much risk within as without.
A courier ran up, waving a piece of paper.
“From General Hancock!” he shouted.
Telegraphic message. Rawlins intercepted it. After scanning it quickly, he announced, “Hancock’s men have the works! Hundreds of prisoners…” Rawlins stared at the paper, making out another scrawl. “He’s in their second line of works.”
The staff men cheered, slapped each other’s backs, and spilled a good bit of coffee.
When Rawlins looked over to him, Grant just nodded. And took a bite of cucumber. He didn’t know where Bill got his special vinegar, but it bit all the way down to a man’s knees. Kept his drain open, too.
Another courier arrived.
“Over two thousand prisoners!” Rawlins shouted. He looked a
round the assembly, so excited he appeared downright astonished. “He’s captured two generals.”
“Who?” Grant asked.
“E. Johnson and G. Steuart, it says.”
Grant nodded. Cucumber was all up. He flicked his hand dry.
The dispatches came in an avalanche after that: The Confederates were broken. Barlow and Birney continued to advance. Hancock was sending in Gibbon and Mott to maintain the attack’s momentum.
There was even a message from Cy Comstock, who had been sent over to put some backbone into Burnside. The Ninth Corps, too, was attacking. And almost on time.
A fresh message estimated three thousand prisoners. Dozens of flags had been captured. At least sixteen guns.
Hancock was a quarter mile past Lee’s second line of works.
“By God, they’re done, they’re whipped!” Rawlins hollered. “Hancock’ll drive them to Hell.” His face looked almost mad, his eyes fevered.
Grant let his friend and all the rest take their pleasure in the goings-on. Smoke from the damp firewood was a bother to him. And the rain was picking up again.
Rawlins strutted up and stood before him.
“Well, General! Isn’t this just grand? Over three thousand prisoners. Lee’s done for.”
“Kind of news I like to hear,” Grant said, willing to please his friend. “Hancock’s doing well.” Damned smoke burned his eyes right through. He added, “Ain’t finished, though.”
NINETEEN
May 12, four forty-five a.m.
Gordon’s headquarters, base of the salient, Spotsylvania
Gordon was up and dressed, but still waiting for a cup of the glorious coffee looted in the Wilderness. In all the chronicles of war, not the Sabine women, not Helen herself, had been so cherished a capture as the sacks of beans the Yankees had forsaken. The prisoners he had gathered in meant laurels for the ages, but the value of the coffee beans was immediate.
Light rain spit through the trees.
He turned to Bob Johnston, commander of his North Carolina Brigade, four days back a peer, now his subordinate. The brigadier had left his reserve position in search of news, but Gordon had none to offer. Everyone waited for what the Yankees would do or what Lee would decide to do himself.