by Ralph Peters
“I intend to hold. Every inch I can. But we’ve already been driven back hundreds of yards.”
“Just don’t let them retake the main entrenchments,” the chief of staff said.
“They’d have to kill me,” Barlow said. And he spurred back to his division.
Six a.m.
The Mule Shoe
It was light enough to see more of the fighting between the clots of smoke, and what Gordon saw left him desperate. His men had shoved a body of Federals back to the edge of the salient, where the to-and-fro was merciless. He had long since emptied his revolver, but found no time to reload it. He had to rush from one dissolving regiment to another, appointing replacements on the spot for fallen officers and holding broken companies together by force of will. A man could have leapt from body to body to make his way, and the wounds Gordon saw were ghastly, inflicted by blades and blunt objects. Even the badly injured, heretofore allies in suffering, crawled to kill one another. One dead Yankee’s face looked chewed away.
His men had performed a miracle, but not an eternal one. His bleeding line was all that stood between the Federals and a renewed breakthrough to the army’s heart. He had sent every runner he could spare to beg reinforcements, but had not had a response. And the fighting was so confused, so ruptured, that he could not be sure a single courier had made it to the rear.
Now that there was light enough to spot targets, the Yankee artillery had opened, pounding the salient’s flanks. Hoffman’s men had broken right through the entrenchments and spilled out into the field, only to be driven back by all too accurate shelling. They could advance no additional step, while the Yankees held on a bayonet thrust away.
On foot now, Clem Evans found him. The Georgia Brigade had made Gordon proud, but he knew it was in tatters.
“General Gordon … men … in a bad way…” Clem was out of breath and choking on smoke. “Sixty-first … lost the flag … men captured…”
“Fortunes of war,” Gordon said with pretended confidence. “The remainder of the regiment will hold that line. Even if only a single man remains.” He raised his chin, his sweat-clotted beard. “Horatius on the bridge, Clem. A single man saved Rome.”
“Sir … the brigade’s coming apart.”
“Nonsense,” Gordon assured him. “You’re holding them. The Yankees are already beaten, they just haven’t realized it.”
Lies. War was the realm of lies.
The colonel looked exasperated, unable to understand why Gordon could not see what was all too evident: They’d done their best, but now could do no more.
Gordon grasped the other man’s upper arm. “You’ve done splendidly, Clem. Now it’s time to do a little more.”
“The Sixty-first…”
“They’ll hold,” Gordon said.
“They’re gone, sir.”
“They’ll hold,” Gordon told him. His tone warned there could be no contradiction. “You hold that line, Clem. This is the hour of glory. See to your men.”
Lies …
In an interval between Yankee bombardments, Gordon listened to the combat raging around him. It was unlike any battle noise he had ever heard: This wasn’t the sound of modern armies shooting each other down. It was the sound of medieval warriors hacking each other to death.
It pained him to think of the fate of the 61st Georgia’s men and the shame of the loss of the flag. But he would give every man under his command, every flag and his own life, to hold this muddy prize.
It wasn’t anybody’s hour of glory. That, too, had been a lie. It was the hour of men reduced to beasts.
The Yankee cannon thundered again, evenly sequenced, by section and battery, and explosions gnawed the earth to Gordon’s right. Those gunners had the luxury of good order, of time, of bottomless reserves of ammunition. They lived in an utterly different world a mere thousand yards away. The Federals had superb artillery, a great deal of it. They had a great deal of everything. And he had these men, outnumbered and running out of their soggy cartridges, men who were fighting because nothing else was left to them.
He called through the mist to his aide, hoping the boy remained whole. He wanted to ask him to reload his pistol. Gordon still didn’t feel he dared turn from the fight for the time required to fill the chambers. But he did not intend to meet his foe unarmed, in abject surrender.
It was time to see to Hoffman’s Brigade again. If Hoffman was still there. The fighting snarled with fresh musketry, hard on his flank.
Horatius at the bridge, Leonidas at the pass … what would they say of his division’s stand?
Was Lee withdrawing the army? Leaving him and his men as a rear guard? Had he been forgotten?
Well, he would fight. And Fanny could mourn him.
Jones appeared, miraculously unscathed, though dirtied with smoke and powder. Gordon held out his pistol, not Ulysses, after all, but Hector.
A bleeding courier found him.
“General Gordon, sir! General Ewell says that, if you can hold for fifteen more minutes, you’ll have all the help you need.…”
Eight a.m.
The Harrison house
Lee had looked into the abyss and found only despair. Now there was hope again, if only a sliver of it. And Gordon had delivered it. For all the ineffable bravery Lee had encountered that morning, he owed a debt to Gordon no promotion could repay. According to camp talk, Gordon had saved Ewell’s corps that first day in the Wilderness. Today, he had saved them all.
If saved they were.
Lee had needed to sit down, out of the rain, for a time. To gather himself. He had not behaved at all to his own liking. Unbalanced by events, he had forsaken control of himself and of the army. If not for Gordon …
In the damp, drear room, members of his staff went about things carefully, deflecting trivial queries from Lee’s ears and deciding lesser issues among themselves. They knew him. And he knew that he had frightened them again. With his foolish bravado that morning.
Gordon had put his folly to good use, thanks be to God. But Lee had been as if possessed, for the third time in a week, almost relieved at the prospect of his own death. His selfishness astonished him, the alacrity with which he had been ready to cheapen duty to a gesture.
Outside, some hundreds of yards away, the fighting remained undecided, but unmistakably grim. He had taken every possible measure to hurry reinforcements into the cauldron, committing his army piecemeal because there was no choice. And Gordon had held just long enough for the others to arrive at the double-quick, rushing from every division left to the army. Many, too many, had fallen. But there was hope again, a candle in the dark hallways of nightmare.
Hope, but not of a victory. Merely of the army’s survival this day. He worried that the age of resounding victories might be past, that only this grinding down of lives remained. As gutted regiments gripped those people at the salient’s edges, he had put the men from broken units to work constructing a more defensible line across the base of the salient. But it would take many hours to finish the task. Meanwhile, the Federals had to be held off, no matter the cost.
He felt more alone than ever, bereft not only of friends but of reliable subordinates. For all Gordon’s dash and brilliance, the man was a newly made division commander and could not be advanced without more experience. Of the corps commanders left him, Anderson struggled in place of the wounded Longstreet. Hill remained sick, with Early still untested in his place. And Ewell … that morning, the man had made a spectacle of himself, profane, foolish, and weak, railing at the men instead of leading them. Lee had been forced to admonish him publicly, something he was always loath to do. Richard Ewell had served the Confederacy handsomely, at great sacrifice, even that of a limb, but Lee feared he was unfit to remain in command. Perhaps Ewell needed no more than a respite, but things could not go on as they were now. Lee intended to find an excuse to move Ewell aside that would not shame the man.
If the army still existed at day’s end.
His soldiers
were holding, but holding was not enough. He needed to find an opening for a counterattack, if only a limited one, to relieve the pressure on the salient and muddle the purpose of the men opposing him. It would take some hours to reorganize the remainder of his lines and draw off a few brigades to build an attack force. But he had to stymie those people, to reassert his will and break their hopes.
Burnside? Was he the weak link? Could a few determined brigades cripple his corps? Or at least befuddle the man and leave him useless?
He needed time, it was all a question of time now. But how much remained to this army? To his cause? His life? It embarrassed him anew to recall his loss of self-possession. He had wanted to go forward, to make a swift end of things, to turn his back on the responsibilities that pursued him day and night like very devils.
He must never do that again. Such a death would have bought him cheap renown, but would have been unmanly and indecent. He had learned long ago that dying was not hard. The harder course was to defy the odds, to endure life’s torments stoically. To seek death was a coward’s act, no matter how others perceived it. And he did not mean to end his life as a coward.
Other men might have judged him brave, but the Lord would have known his heart.
He told himself he must grasp control again. To plan a counterblow. To claw his way back to equilibrium with those people. To survive this day and as many more as the Lord allowed.
It was all so difficult now. The put-upon flesh was unwilling, the heart enmeshed in fears that had no words.
Lee rose from his chair at his own command, stiff with the latest visitation of rheumatism. He stepped out onto the porch, which was fouled by tobacco spew and smelled of urine. The rain had shown its temper again and his soldiers shoveled mud, not soil, as they labored in the new trenches. To the north, in the mist, the clash of arms continued unabated.
He had lost an entire division, Johnson’s, including the bulk of the Stonewall Brigade. His miscalculation as to Grant’s intentions had cost the army dearly, and he pledged he would never underestimate the man’s tenacity, his brute confidence, again. Had he only had the sense to leave those batteries in place, had he not succumbed to wishful thinking, imagining that Grant would retreat when he himself would not have considered quitting in Grant’s position …
Grant appeared to be inured to slaughter, a quality Lee had regarded as his own unremarked strength. He had learned a lesson at the cost of many other men’s lives, an obvious lesson to which his pride had blinded him: Grant cared little for casualties, if he believed he could win.
Lee saw that he had to wield his army more guardedly now.
If the army survived this terrible day. The number of killed, wounded, and captured generals and colonels was already so great he could not bear to name them. Short of complete disaster, he did not know how this day could become any worse.
Venable strode up through the mud. A neat man by nature, careful of his dress, he was slopped breast-high with filth. But it was his eyes that troubled Lee.
Bent under the rain, the aide straightened his posture as he neared. He stopped short of the porch and its imperfect shelter, and saluted.
His eyes, his eyes …
“What is it, Colonel Venable?” At least, Lee thought, I am in command of my speech again.
“A courier, sir. From Richmond.”
Venable’s eyes.
Was it his wife? Defeat in the Valley? Bad news from Georgia?
“General Stuart … was wounded. Yesterday. In a cavalry action.”
Not Stuart, too …
“How badly?” Lee asked. Demanding of his voice that it not tremble.
“It’s believed,” Venable said, forcing out the words, “that the wound is mortal.”
Eight thirty a.m.
Headquarters, Army of the Potomac
“Don’t let up,” Grant said. “Keep at them. Dog them.”
He had walked down to Meade’s headquarters in the rain, worried that Meade and his generals would talk themselves into calling off the attack, now that it seemed deadlocked. But the worry had been groundless. Meade’s fire was up, and Humphreys came just short of jumping on a horse himself and charging into the fuss.
There were problems, though.
Humphreys spoke what Meade would not: “General Grant, Burnside has to pull his share. His divisions went in, all right. And came right back out. Hancock and Wright are battling it out, but Burnside…”
Over the past week, Grant had grown well aware of the Ninth Corps commander’s wanting a certain fortitude. The morning’s attack had driven the lesson home again, and he had already decided that the lines of command he had set up just didn’t work. The Ninth Corps would have to be folded into the Army of the Potomac. If Burnside didn’t like it, he could resign.
Wouldn’t do to make such a change with fighting under way, though. And he could hear Washburne’s voice in his head, cautioning him not to humiliate a man who, if not powerful on the battlefield, had powerful friends in Washington. No, placing Burnside under Meade required a calmer moment. And cooler tempers. Mustn’t look like a punishment. Had to be presented as a practical matter.
“I’ll see that Burnside goes in again,” Grant said. “How about Warren? He in? I wanted him in. An hour ago.”
“He’ll go in,” Meade said. “He’s kicking a bit. Doesn’t want to attack those same entrenchments again.” Meade made a face so woefully serious, it tickled Grant. “And, frankly, Sam, I see his point. But he’ll go in.”
“His corps is shot,” Humphreys said. “The men are demoralized. They’ve been going at that ridge for the last four days. Another off-the-cuff assault…”
Grant could not completely suppress his smile. He knew that Humphreys, a good, blunt man, wanted to say, “It’s all because your damned attacks weren’t half as planned as a carouse in a Mexican whorehouse.”
Truth was that Meade and Humphreys had been partly right. The morning’s attack could have used more planning. But that would have given Lee more time to get ready, too. Man just had to take his chances where he thought best. Sometimes the cards ran your way, sometimes they didn’t. But you couldn’t win if you kept backing up from the table.
And he had been right that an attack by a full corps would crack that salient. In his experience, no man had it all figured out. You just had to figure a tad better than your enemy.
As for the august Robert E. Lee, Grant reckoned he had not had his pleasantest morning of the war. His army had suffered a grievous hurt. Pride, too, most likely.
Turning to Meade, Grant said: “I’ll move Burnside. But I want supporting attacks across the front, not just from the Ninth Corps. I expect Warren to attack within the hour, keep Lee from raising the bid against Hancock and Wright.” He thought for a moment, then spoke to Humphreys: “You and Warren go back a time, ain’t that right?”
“We’re old friends,” Humphreys said.
“With General Meade’s permission, maybe you could go on down to the Fifth Corps? See that General Warren gets the gist of things?”
Humphreys appeared surprised, almost taken aback. But not unwilling. Man could smell blood, Grant knew the sort. He’d make it plain to Warren that he could either attack or lose his corps.
“Listen here,” Grant said, speaking now to all the nearby officers. “Fine fighting this morning. Way this army’s meant to fight. Nearly broke Lee. Still might.” He patted his pockets for a cigar and found them empty. “Meantime, this army is not to give back another inch of ground up in that salient.”
Ten a.m.
Laurel Hill
The rain had eased again, but the mire in the trench line rooted the men in place. Sometimes the suck of it threw off a man’s aim, as he wiggled about to get a dead-on shot. And all the while the Yankees just plodded up through the mud and the shattered trees, moving awkwardly, almost as if clowning, as if they downright wanted to get themselves killed.
Oates was out of temper. His men were sick, the food was bad,
what there was of it, and they were all soaked through. The Yankees could have just stayed in their lines and stuffed themselves full of salt pork. But no, they had to come on, blockheaded, goddamned fools, up that same slope, past their own gone-green dead, corpses that, struck by a bullet, flopped about as the gas burst from death-fattened bellies. The Yankees just came on, butt-stupid Fifth Corps boys, and his men shot them down easy as hunting possums. Except that possums took their killing one at a time, and the Yankees came on by the thousands.
He hated the mud, hated the stink, hated the shit water staining his own drawers and the sudden bites in his belly, like a sharp-toothed animal in there, and the dizziness that only made him so angry he could almost kill the man next to him for spitting.
Wasn’t just far from Alabama. He was far from himself. Far from what he once thought he knew of human beings. Dirty-ass animals, every one of them, dirtier than dogs bloated by worms, that was all they were. And the life in which he had reveled, the animal joys that had been his heart’s delight, the cries of women and his own near howls when they brought him out of himself, all of it was drowning in this filth, in this disregard of everything a fool might have called “good.” In this great insult to a God who didn’t have the decency to exist, after all those lies he spawned, in this bottomless human filth worse than any mud, worse even than mud mixed with dripping shit from men too weary, sick, or excited to leave the firing line or who didn’t even know anymore when they soiled themselves.
The Yankees came on, and his men just shot them down. He wanted to reach down and scoop up the vile mud and hurl it at them, to try to shock sense into them. It was an insult to all godless creation, an ingratitude so loathsome it made Oates feel like a madman in need of a locked cell and buckled restraints.
The cheapness with which those blue-bellies squandered their lives riled the deepest parts of him, hidden places that had no decent purpose, that were best left undisturbed from birth to death. He was done damning their generals. Now he damned the men who lacked the sense to just fall down and play dead or find a nice fat body to lie behind, the sense to save the only damned thing they really possessed, their lives.