The Damned of Petersburg

by Ralph Peters

  Be careful, Brown warned himself. He daren’t speak so. Not one word about his doubts, his ugly mistrust of things. The men were discouraged and blue as it was, with little left but a grudging sense of duty.

  “Well?” Levi demanded.

  “Good men in the Forty-eighth,” Brown said. “Miners, most of them. They know what they’re doing.”

  “But does anybody else know what they’re doing? There’s the question.”

  “Pleasants is a good man,” Sam Losch put in. “Ein guter Kerl. Doch wild. Maybe our colonel he should have been, but he takes the Forty-eighth.”

  Pleasants had been a mine engineer back home, with something a touch dark and foreign about him, a fellow with a brain in his head but calluses on his hands. The kind of man you respected before you could say why. Brown had known him, just slightly. Their relationship had been limited to talk about re-siting a coal chute outside Port Carbon, the better to feed the loads into the boats. Brown had been pleased to be asked for his opinion by such a man. Not that his advice had any effect. The coal company did what it wanted, and it had not wanted to pay to move the chute.

  It was said of Pleasants that his wife died young, months after their marriage, and that he chased death but could not get himself killed.

  “If Colonel Pleasants says that mine will work, it’s going to work,” Brown declared.

  “Hark to the voice of Solomon!” Levi flicked an ant from the back of his hand. “Little buggers bite. All right. The mine works. Boom, up she goes. But you heard everything I heard. More, no doubt. Seeing as you’re a high-and-mighty lieutenant.” He scraped the barren earth again. “Them coons was set to go in? Do some fighting for once? All trained up and ready to go? And they call them off when the circus comes to town? You tell me why. You just tell me. Here we are, fighting so Old Abe can free the Children of Ham to take a white man’s job, and he won’t even let them fight. No, sir. Send in more white men to die.”

  When Brown didn’t answer, Levi continued. “And I blame Grant. Old Meade don’t do nothing without his say-so.”

  “That a fact?” Brown said in the sharper voice he was mastering. “I guess when they make you a general, you can fix it.”

  “What’s chapping you?” Levi asked, surprised at Brown’s sudden harshness.

  Down along the trench, the newest men worried their knapsacks and tightened their leathers, as they’d been told. The older hands played cards or picked lice from their garments.

  Brown could hardly say why he’d turned sour. It struck a man like a cramp.

  Corporal Oswald scuttled up the trench, hog-dirty and pleasant-faced.

  “Supper coming up,” he announced. “Fresh beef, all right, and plenty more to carry.”

  The Reb sharpshooters started in. Just like them.

  First Sergeant Losch rose to see to his duties, but Levi Eckert tarried. “You know which division’s set to lead the attack?” he asked, barely whispering.

  Brown nodded. Yes. They’d all heard the rumors haunting the lines since noon.

  “Worst division in the corps,” Levi continued. “Garrison men. Useless.”

  Brown wanted to say, “Just be glad that we won’t be out front,” but officers could not say such things. Officers had to show confidence. Even if they didn’t feel it, not a lick. He felt terribly old at twenty-three.

  “There any point behind your pestering, Levi?”

  The sergeant grew earnest. “Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t mind seeing this fizzle. Right at the start. Can’t go in on the flank, if there ain’t no flank to go in on. And I can’t say I’m much minded to go in, that’s just the truth. It’s been one mess after another since we got here. Before we got here.”

  Brown considered the man in front of him: an unlikely survivor, given the risks he took during a fight. Levi Eckert, for all his faults, had never been one to show fear. And while Brown wasn’t given to profane talk—Frances didn’t like it—he saw Levi as one hard-made sonofabitch. But all of a sudden Levi looked like a ghost of the man he’d been.

  “We’ll go in,” Brown said.

  Eight thirty p.m., July 29

  Mahone’s Division

  Confederate lines, Petersburg

  “Still got your cow, I see,” Doc Brewer said. He set down his cake plate.

  Brigadier General William Mahone nodded mildly, not quite looking at his white-haired visitor. He tilted his chair another few degrees, relishing the risk, the calculation.

  The shack’s porch creaked. Not much of a headquarters, but it served. Beyond a low ridge, heat-whipped pickets annoyed each other. Nothing to that firing, just obligation.

  “Chickens, too,” Mahone replied. His sharp voice of command had soothed to a gentlemanly languor. “Wouldn’t need to fuss so, if you medical fellows paid more attention to what’s inside a man’s carcass than to what’s left in his purse.” He smoothed his billy-goat beard.

  The old man tapped the whiskey bottle he’d brought out from the city. “You won’t join me, then? In a draught of this pleasing elixir? In return for that fine cake?”

  Mahone shook his head. “Blessing in disguise, my dyspepsia. So Otelia tells me. No fear of taking to drink, burn my insides out.”

  The old doctor nodded with seasoned gentility. “Take it over the gout, though. That’s a plague on a man.” He splashed more whiskey into his tin cup, drawing envious looks from lurking staff men. “Mrs. Brewer paid a call. Wife of yours is a firecracker, Billy.”

  Mahone snorted. “Stick of dynamite, more like.”

  Otelia, pure spunk. Mahone enjoyed the pleasant sparring between them, brisk exchanges that never rose to a spat. When he’d completed the Norfolk line, after laying tracks right through that endless swamp and doing what his fellow engineers thought impossible, he and Otelia had delighted in labeling the newly created stations, drawing their names from the novels of Walter Scott. There had been one water stop they could not agree on, though. Until Otelia laughed that you-look-out trill, halfway between a lady and a hoyden, and said, “We’ll call it ‘Disputanta.’” And they did.

  A detail of soldiers, thin as famine, loped toward the rear. Pretty marching wasn’t called for, but Mahone almost rose from his chair: He liked a degree of crispness in a soldier, heat or no heat. Hard times wanted hard men.

  Doc Brewer sipped his whiskey, maybe reading his mind. “Infernal weather. Not sure I’ve seen worse.”

  Hot it was, indeed. But Mahone was a Southside man, born and bred, and the heat was just a bad neighbor a man got used to. Did like the ocean breezes they’d had in Norfolk, though. Hadn’t liked the yellow fever much. Fifty-five, that was. It had seemed a muchness of death back then, but war had taught him a higher mathematics.

  “Never could get too riled,” Mahone said, “over things I couldn’t change.” He gazed into the mellowing light, felt the still-hard air. The passing soldiers had faded to ghosts of dust. Settling his chair’s front legs on the porch, he called, “Hannibal.”

  “Same cow, same nigger,” Doc Brewer mused.

  “Different cow.”

  The servant appeared. “Suh?”

  “Any more buttermilk?”

  “You done drunk it, Marse Billy. Git you the plain ole, though.”

  Mahone turned to his guest. “Glass for you, Doctor? About all I can offer, I’m afraid.”

  The old man held up his whiskey. “Wouldn’t dare start drinking cow’s milk now. After all these years of specimen health.”

  “One glass, Hannibal.”

  “Suh.”

  When the servant had gone, Doc Brewer shook his head. “Billy, what’s to become of those poor people? If the Yankees have their way? They could never take care of themselves.…”

  “They take care of us,” Mahone teased, just to be contrary.

  The old man drank and sighed. “Give a simple man a simple task. Give him time, and he’ll master it. But the notion—”

  “We haven’t lost the war yet,” Mahone said, a tad sharply.


  “No, no. Of course not. I only meant—”

  “You meant ‘What if?’ That’s all right, no offense taken. Many a man must be asking himself that question.” A half-smile lifted one side of his mouth. “Just won’t admit it. That’s all.”

  “And you? What do you foresee? Between old friends.”

  “I’m an engineer. I deal with the problem at hand.”

  Doc Brewer shook his head. “First dishonest thing I’ve heard you say, Billy. You were always a far-thinking man, ’long as I’ve known you. How you made your fortune.” The old man seemed to fade into the shadows. “Saw what this war would bring, better than most folks.”

  “Well, the Yankees have a bloody business ahead before they lick anybody. That’s what I think.”

  Downcast, the old man repeated, “A bloody business.”

  “You know, I’d like to find Otelia better lodgings,” Mahone declared. Eager to change the subject. “Better than that sty she’s boarding in. If you should hear of anything…”

  Doc Brewer nodded. “I’ll ask about.”

  “I’d take that as a kindness.”

  The servant delivered a glass of milk streaked pink. Mahone drank deep. To soothe his belly, his soul.

  His guest leaned closer, seeking intimacy. “Billy, you and I do go back … otherwise, I would not presume to ask…”

  “That’s a worrisome preliminary.”

  “All this business about a mine now. Is there … I mean, people are saying the Yankees are tunneling right under the city.”

  Mahone’s smirk lived and died in a brace of seconds. He shook his head. “Fool nonsense. Far as the city goes. You tell people that. The good citizens of Petersburg need to worry about what’s on top of the ground, not what’s beneath it.” He scratched the side of his neck. Even undone, the collar itched in the heat. Southside man or not. “As for a military mine, that’s another matter. Alexander was convinced a month ago they were at it, tunneling somewhere up around Elliott’s stretch.”

  “And you think…”

  “The Yankees would be damned fools not to try it.” Which was why he had his men waking at two thirty every morning and standing to by three. Their prospects were especially worrisome now, with Lee stripping the lines so thin to shift troops north of the James, responding to more Federal shenanigans.

  “I see. And might they…”

  “Succeed? Devil only knows. But one thing those boys over there do have is anthracite miners, deep miners. And mining engineers. In their position, I’d certainly try it myself.” Cocking one short limb against the banister, he pushed the front legs of his chair off the floor again.

  “And … might we expect this soon? A detonation?”

  “All depends on the engineering difficulties. I’m a railroad man, not a miner. But they’ll have soil issues, ventilation issues. More than that, I can’t say.”

  He almost wanted the Yankees to do it, to get it over with, if they planned such a thing at all. Rumors ran madcap, the men were unsettled. Heat-hammered. Rendered indolent of flesh and mad-dog hot of temper. Waiting.

  And things along the line had gotten a bit too quiet for his taste. The Yankees were up to something, no least doubt.

  Mahone had known his guest for years and liked him mightily. But he wasn’t minded to discuss military matters any further. His old friend seemed to sense it, if belatedly.

  “We’d take Otelia in ourselves, if—”

  “Wouldn’t want that,” Mahone said firmly. “Didn’t mean that at all.” He smiled and added, “You’d live to regret it.”

  Otelia. With her sense of humor that could peel a rattlesnake. His wife was a filly who needed a fair stretch of pasture.

  That sense of humor had only failed as the infants died, one after another.

  Don’t think on that now.

  Having reached the right application of tonic from his bottle, the doctor cast off his last formality. “Speaking of your missus, got to ask you … meant to for a time now…”

  “How I came to be married to so fine a woman, and her the taller of us by a good two inches?” Otelia. No flawless beauty, truth be told, but a rose who wore her thorns proudly. His wife: an ornery comfort, indispensable.

  “About Second Manassas. What she told that courier.”

  Softened by remembrance, Mahone grinned. “You mean when they told her I’d only suffered a flesh wound—”

  “And she said, ‘Then I know it’s serious. For William has no flesh, whatsoever.’” The old doctor cackled.

  “Yes, sir, that’s about right,” Mahone agreed. His soldiers joked that he was every inch a soldier, there just weren’t many inches of him. “Little Billy” Mahone, survivor of Nat Turner’s rebellion as a child and a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, at just shy of five feet five inches tall, had been forced to look up at many a man, but there were a good sight fewer he looked up to.

  “Might want to get back home. Before full dark,” he told his friend from the years of peace and prosperity.

  Doc Brewer nodded. “Leave the whiskey?”

  Mahone shook his head in the gloaming. His long beard dusted his shirt. “Some fool’d just drink it up. You take it along.”

  The old man rose from his chair with a reserve of vigor. “My congratulations, by the way. Hear you’re set to get promoted, soon as President Davis finds his pen.” He slapped off the dust that had settled on his clothing. “Major General Mahone. Won’t that be fine?”

  “Reckon we’ll see,” Mahone told him.

  Eight thirty p.m., July 29

  Dunn house, headquarters, Union Ninth Corps

  Petersburg lines

  Oh, dear, Burnside thought. Dear, dear.

  He feared he had made an error.

  Absently chewing a cuticle, Burnside looked down at Ledlie. Ledlie looked up at him. The corps commander lowered his eyes and began to pace again, still gnawing his finger.

  “Nothing for it,” he said with a sudden shake of his head, as if warding off a chill in the awful heat. “Nothing for it.”

  “What?” Ledlie asked. Burnside feared the fellow smelled of alcohol.

  Nothing for it.

  His other division commanders had left him, Potter in a huff, Willcox uncertain, Ferrero still aggrieved. Only Ledlie remained behind. As if stunned by what had befallen him.

  Staff officers shied away. Busy enough they were, busy enough. So much to do, all the changes to the plan …

  Burnside rued missing his dinner.

  Meade, Meade! Terrible man. How could he, how could he do it? U.S. Colored Troops, all about the Negroes. Ferrero had them prepared, all prepared. Then Meade interfered. Bags under his eyes, the insistent nose. George Meade. Telling him, only the day before, that Ferrero’s U.S. Colored Troops could not lead the assault. Politically dangerous, Lincoln already in trouble. If things went wrong and the Negroes suffered a massacre, all the abolitionists would howl, claiming the darkies were used as cannon fodder. Cannon fodder! Politics! Lincoln! Meade! He had appealed to Grant, but got no relief. Meade was only Grant’s henchman nowadays. And here they were. With the mine set to go up in seven hours. Less.

  Burnside wiped a palm over his bald crown, skimming off sweat. Horrid weather, horrid. And now this … this upheaval. The best-laid plans …

  And he’d made things worse, made them worse himself. Why had he done what he did? Meade had told him to lead with his best division. But that would have been Potter’s. Or Willcox’s, in a pinch. But all of their men were tired, tired. Didn’t have the heart. Straws, he’d had them draw straws. It had seemed the only fair way to go about it, with Ferrero’s darkies held back to go in last.

  If they went in at all.

  It had seemed like a good idea, even gallant. Then Ledlie drew the short straw. Ledlie! Didn’t deserve a division, terrible man. But he couldn’t be relieved. Far too well connected in New York, in Albany. Political man himself. Of sorts, of sorts. And any man who wished to have a future in Rhode
Island politics—as Ambrose Burnside did—couldn’t afford to have enemies in New York.

  Now here they were, here they were! Ledlie to lead the attack. Dear, dear. Ledlie. Of all people. Bad enough behavior on the North Anna.

  Dropping his hand from his mouth, Burnside said, “You must be ready, Ledlie.” He stopped pacing and skimmed away sweat again. “Will your men be ready?”

  “They’ll be ready.”

  “Perhaps … you should see to them?”

  “Have their orders,” Ledlie muttered. Was his voice slurred? Well, he only had to be sober by the morning.

  “You must clear the lanes through the obstacles. You must see to it. After dark, right after dark. Quietly, of course. But no obstacles, no obstacles. Clear the lanes in front of the covered ways. Plenty of lanes, wide lanes.”

  “Thy will be done.”

  “What? What?”

  “Been seen to.”

  “And your officers … they understand? They understand everything?”

  “Everything.”

  A staff major passing between them appeared doubtful.

  “Right out of the covered ways and forward! No hesitation,” Burnside continued. “Every subordinate officer must understand. Speed is everything. Point of detonation isn’t the goal. Only the means, the means. They must get past the mine’s effects, get on to the second ridge, that cemetery. Get to the second ridge … and we have Petersburg, Petersburg shall be ours!”

  “Ours,” Ledlie repeated.

  “One regiment, only one, moves to either flank to provide security. Everyone else goes through the breach and on to the second ridge.”

  “Security,” Ledlie said. He perked up. “I thought Grant’s orders were to forget about flank security, just go head-on. In every attack. Not slow down, just go on.”

  “That’s right, that’s right. Just one regiment, that’s all. Out on either flank. The rest go straight ahead.” Burnside hesitated, then asked, “Really, Ledlie, don’t you think you’re needed at your division?”

  The New Yorker frumped his chin. “Staff can see to everything, what they’re for.” But he rose. Did he smell of alcohol? Burnside couldn’t be sure, couldn’t be sure. Everything else smelled so awfully. But Ledlie’s reputation …