by Ralph Peters
What if the fuse failed again?
He clicked open the watch, mere seconds after he had last read the time.
Four forty-four a.m.
Beneath him, the earth throbbed, a giant disturbed in his sleep.
Rumbling. Growing louder.
The ridgetop swelled like a sore.
He gripped the parapet.
The crest above him erupted. Slowly, hugely. A great mass of earth rose skyward, propelled by hellfire.
The roar hit his ears with fists.
The great clot of earth rose and rose. Then it stopped, suspended, a hundred feet skyward.
It broke apart.
In those raw seconds, Pleasants saw things infernal in the air: twisted men, torn limbs, flying cannon, splintered logs, and disintegrating crates.
Everything dropped, thumped back down, crashed. Smoke fumed and billowed. The cloud spit dirt and stones in every direction. At the first eye-narrowing sting, instinct yanked Pleasants down into the trench.
He pressed himself against the earthen wall as the heavens fell, with the earth still trembling under him and the first shouts and screams grown audible.
Debris hammered the earth. Blown powder burned his nostrils.
The cannonade began, with dozens of batteries pounding the Rebel lines. As soon as he sensed that the rain of scraps and clay and stone was done, Pleasants leapt back up to watch the attack go forward.
And he saw a thing that he had not expected: men in blue, running. Not toward the enemy, but back toward the ravine, racing back through their own lines, terrified by what Pleasants had wrought.
Four forty-seven a.m.
50th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry
“Jesus Christ almighty,” Levi Eckert said.
Four fifty a.m.
Ninth Corps forward lines
“Goddamn you, get back up that hill!” Colonel Elisha G. Marshall barked.
Around him, staff and line officers collared soldiers or threatened them with revolvers. Dozens, then hundreds, of soldiers from Marshall’s brigade had panicked, fleeing headlong into the ravine, down toward Poor Creek, plunging through troops formed up to their rear, and disordering those formations.
Where the hell’s Ledlie? Marshall wondered. He did not think much of his division commander, but he expected the man to be present, drunk or sober.
Dust obscured the Reb entrenchments above, but Marshall had seen enough to know that the mine had done its job. And more. The explosion had knocked him off his feet, panicking soldiers around him who thought he’d been killed.
With grit annoying his teeth and eyes, Marshall herded his soldiers back up the slope, snapping at them to get into formation, shouting at the officers, “Gentlemen, take command of your lines!”
He could read his men: They were regaining their composure, but needed a firm hand now.
Christ, though, that mine had been something.
Artillery rounds screamed overhead, plunging through the smoke in search of targets.
It took nearly fifteen minutes for Marshall to get his men back in good order and ready to storm the breach on the ridge above them. Given the general skittishness, he decided he would personally lead the 2nd Pennsylvania, heavy artillerymen lately recast as infantry.
“Second Pennsylvania! Rise up! Forward, march! By the right flank, march!”
But much remained a shambles. No one had opened the broad lanes promised through the defensive barriers, leaving only a narrow bridge of sandbags for the brigade. And not one ladder in sight. Sword raised and taking care of his footing, Marshall led the way, shouting, “Forward! Forward!” Leading not a compact assault force, but a double file of human ants streaming uphill through the smoke.
At least the Johnnies, stunned, weren’t shooting yet.
Five ten a.m.
Mahone’s Division, Confederate lines
A little man on a big horse, Mahone ignored the Yankee cannonade and rode up to Brigadier General Weisiger, commanding his Virginians.
“Davey,” Mahone called, “we’re going to be needed, might as well get a start on things. Alabama boys will spread out, cover your line. Pull your men out of the trenches. Do it by ones and twos, you keep ’em quiet. Don’t invite the Yankees to make a fuss. Form up back by that orchard, ready to march.”
“Any news?” Weisiger asked.
Mahone shook his head, imperturbable in the face of shell bursts: The Federal artillery was in a shooting temper, but mostly shooting long. “Reckon the boys up there are a mite too busy to send out circulars. You just get ready. I expect to hear from Hill any moment now. If not from higher powers. Reckon on marching fast, hard fighting after. Full canteens, extra cartridges. Split open some crates and let the men help themselves.”
Jaw tightened, Weisiger saluted. Mahone rode on, heading for his Georgia brigade, calculating that with a good bluff, his Alabama brigade alone could hold his line. The earthquake that had passed underfoot and the tower of smoke three miles or thereabouts distant did suggest a mine hadn’t been just talk. And the Federals would strike where their mine went up, that much was as plain as a chinless schoolmarm.
Nor would the Yankees come lightly.
A man couldn’t be certain, what for the poor light and smoke, but the explosion looked to have come just where Alexander had predicted, up around Pegram’s salient, Elliott’s stretch.
Bad ground, that. On a good day.
And they’d picked a sultry morning for it. Hot work for all concerned. He’d have to march his men roundabout, take the road down along Lieutenant Run, and keep them out of sight. Add at least two miles to the march, so call it five in all.
Davey Weisiger needed to be certain canteens were full.
Things couldn’t happen instantly, Mahone knew. Matters had to be sorted out, decisions taken, and orders issued. But he did itch to get moving. The longer the delay, the higher and hotter the sun. And the more calls there’d be to speed the march along. He wanted his men to arrive in fighting trim, not falling-down heat-sick.
His horse shied from a near shell burst and Mahone brought the beast to order. Sharply.
Bound to be a devil of a business. He’d been about to order his men to stand down from their watch, concluding that another morning would pass unmolested as the dawn pinked up. Then he’d heard that faraway grump and seen the pillar of smoke smear up the sky. And he knew he’d be in the business, given that his division was all that was left to Beauregard and Lee to plug things up, what with most of the army sent north of the river. He’d given orders swiftly and, he hoped, clearly. To get two lean brigades—all the line could spare—ready to march.
He hoped it would be enough.
Mahone ached for news as much as Davey Weisiger did, but he suspected he’d get none for a time. Those close to the mine would be as stunned as a mule hit full face with a plank. Truth was that, for all he knew, the Yankees were already on their way into Petersburg.
Well, if he had to, he’d move without orders and face the consequences. And he meant to lead with his Virginia Brigade, his old command. Its regiments were filled with Southside and Tidewater men, from Petersburg and the down counties, from Norfolk and the land between the swamps. Fighting for their homes, they’d do all right. The Georgia Brigade would follow, and its men were sound enough.
Horse spurred half to death, a rider found him: Captain Starke, a staff man of A. P. Hill’s.
Mahone didn’t wait for the panting captain to speak. He declared, “I’ll have two brigades march-ready in an hour. Just have to thin my lines without telling the Yankees.”
But Starke could not contain himself, crying, “God-awful thing, god-awfullest thing, god-awful. Whole battery lifted up in the air, all gone. Just gone. Hundreds of men, hundreds.…”
“Well,” Mahone said in a voice of rail-yard iron, “we’ll have to see to it.”
Five twenty a.m.
The Crater
A forearm thrust from the earth. The fingers clenched and
unclenched, striving to trap air for a buried mouth. One of many—so many—men buried alive. Legs kicked the air as Johnnies trapped under heavy clay struggled to free themselves, while disembodied heads cried, “Help me, Billy Yank! Help a fellow Christian.…”
And try to help his men did, ignoring orders to continue forward. Marshall pressed them, but only to a point. He felt a touch of bewilderment himself. More than a touch.
What stunned him wasn’t the destruction and death, but that so many Confederates had survived, limbs broken, bodies smashed, but left alive. Some just sat there, mostly whole, coated with dirt and amazed, staring madly and muttering to themselves. Marshall’s brigade had entered the crater at least ten minutes before, but his own men had grown as astonished as the Rebs. Mortified by what the blast had wrought.
If some Rebs survived, it seemed that hundreds of others had been killed. Limbs lay strewn on every side, and intestines draped the pit. A mustachioed, whiskered head lay about like a child’s forgotten ball.
Some Johnnies had begun sniping from a distance. It was already dangerous for a man to raise his head above the high wall of clay at the rear of the hole.
Marshall and his staff attempted to bring the men to order, to detail a few to succor the Reb survivors while re-forming the confused regiments to push out and deepen the breakthrough. But conditions grew worse by the minute, with more troops piling into the hole instead of expanding the flanks and pushing forward.
“I seen it,” a shaking Rebel prisoner cried, eyes flaring, “I done seen the seventh seal broke open, this here’s the end of the world.…”
Crushed men cried for water. In a dawn gun-barrel hot.
The great hole did seem a foretaste of Hell, with all the torn bodies and great logs snapped like twigs, with the dust that refused to settle lit orange by the rising sun. Marshall judged the hole to stretch between one hundred fifty and two hundred feet along the entrenchments, with a width of maybe forty feet and a depth of twenty-five feet at the very bottom. It was two craters, really, one larger than the other. And that ugly, steep back wall of clay made it all but impossible for men to climb out the far side.
Will Bartlett, Marshall’s fellow brigade commander, stomped up on his cork leg. Mad as a stepped-on rattler.
“Bugger the devil,” the brigadier general snapped. He was a blue-blood Harvard sort, the kind who might have been hated had he not been so embarrassingly brave.
“Will, you can’t pile any more men in here. We discussed—”
“That’s shit for the birds now,” Bartlett cut him off. “This hole’s like honey to a swarm of flies. You try to stop them coming in.”
“We’ve got to get the men out of here. You need to push north,” Marshall told the newly minted brigadier, who outranked him now. “Give my men some space. I’ve sent Powell back to Ledlie, to report.” He grimaced. “Not sure we can expect much help, though, if we don’t fix things ourselves.”
A miracle in the chaos, a runner found them. He held out a note, first toward Marshall and then, correcting himself, toward the man with the star on his strap.
“From General Ledlie.”
Shots, groans, curses, the shriek of artillery. Flabbergasting Marshall, some of the soldiers had paused to serve themselves breakfast. As if reaching the crater was all they meant to do.
Bartlett passed the note on to Marshall: an order to press forward.
Marshall nodded. He told the runner, “Tell General Ledlie we’re doing the best we can.”
When the courier had gone, Bartlett grimaced and said, “Ledlie.” He snorted. “Old Ask-and-He-Shall-Deceive ought to come up here himself. But he won’t, that one.” He looked at Marshall. “Did you understand his orders last night? I damned well didn’t.”
Marshall glanced around the pit. On the flank, Charlie Houghton and his defrocked heavy artillerymen had sorted out two Confederate fieldpieces, turning them against their former possessors. That much was encouraging. In the hole, regimental officers were doing all they could to re-form the men, cursing and cajoling them.
Now he had to do his part.
“All right,” Marshall told his fellow brigade commander, “I’m going to push out the Second Pennsylvania, gain some room. And get out of this plague pit.” He waved a hand toward the high rear wall. “See what actually lies beyond. But I need support on the right, sir. Quiet down the Rebs shooting from the traverses.”
“Oh, well. Do what I can,” Bartlett agreed. And he levered himself along on his cork leg.
Marshall shouldered his way through the blue-coated mob to the pit’s edge where the 2nd Pennsylvania, his defrocked cannoneers, waited in a degree of martial order.
The men would have to work their way out from the side of the pit to make the attack. A few sharpshooters had managed to climb the back wall and cling to the parapet thrown up by the blast, but no regiment could advance over it. Too steep, too high. It would take an engineer company hours to make it passable.
The great hole had all the makings of a trap. They had to move forward.
Marshall explained to the regiment’s officers what he wanted done. And the 2nd responded smartly enough to its orders, scuttling out of the crater and into an adjoining trench line, despite harassment from the Rebel marksmen. After sending back orders to the 179th New York and 3rd Maryland to prepare to follow on, Marshall clawed his own way out of the hole, gave the order to charge, and followed the Pennsylvanians at a distance, eager to see for himself what lay ahead.
His men went forward boldly, with a cheer. Then their flag fell. Here and there, the attackers halted abruptly, their advance blocked by unexpected trenches and traverses. The Reb position behind the pit was a crazy rabbit warren, a disorderly mess of bombproofs and ditches from which ragged men popped up to fire before disappearing again.
The delays, all the damned delays.…
Shocked they may have been at first, but the Johnnies were recovering their senses, aiming ragged-but-expert volleys at their approaching enemies. Marshall could see a low white house on the ridge ahead and, to the right, the cemetery Ledlie had mentioned vaguely. Petersburg lay just beyond.
But one regiment wasn’t going to be enough. Repositioned Reb artillery opened on his men, buckling what remained of their lines and splashing the air with blood. Gore speckled Marshall’s face, though he stood well to the rear. Nonetheless, the Pennsylvanians—already on their third color-bearer—pushed on, covering a hundred yards and more, before the attack became so disjointed it lost all its thrust.
Men sought cover in the nearest trench or edged to the rear.
Take at least a division to reach that ridge, Marshall decided, a division in good order. And the real obstacle—which had come as a shock—was the slovenly maze of trenches and ditches and bombproofs that would, by itself, break up advancing formations. There was an open stretch of ground to the north, rising from a swale, but it led nowhere. Every feature of the terrain seemed designed to confound an attacker, an incidental defensive work that would have made Vauban proud.
As his soldiers filtered back, rueful and bloodied, Marshall ordered their officers to put them in the northern end of a cavalier trench that had survived the blast, where his Maryland battalion was hard at work, trading shots with the Johnnies.
And Colonel Elisha G. Marshall, old frontier Regular, stiff and aching from his Fredericksburg wound and haunted by a frail wife and sickly daughter, sidled back into the crater to organize the remainder of his brigade and try to redeem an effort already faltering.
What he found shocked him: Another division—Potter’s—was piling into the overcrowded hole.
Six fifteen a.m.
50th Pennsylvania
Thanks to clots of artillery smoke, Lieutenant Charles Brown could barely make out the heights across the ravine. But what he glimpsed discouraged him. Maybe a dozen Union flags waved in the hole the mine had left, packed too closely to make any sort of sense.
Still, more blue lines plunged forward,
leaving the Union defenses to dash up a hillside raked by a masked battery. The open ground between the forward trenches and the damage the mine had done was dotted with the dead, the wounded, and the cowering.
“Make way, make way!” an officer called as he pushed up the covered way.
“Make way yourself,” a hoarse voice told him.
“Going the wrong way, Cap’n.”
“Where’s your mule, sonny?”
The covered way into which the 50th Pennsylvania had descended admitted, at most, four men to pass abreast. Now those waiting to advance lined the sides of the trench, with wounded men, Reb prisoners, ammunition bearers, and any number of busybodies bumping along in the middle.
“Don’t smell like any great success to me,” Levi Eckert said. “Got the stink of trouble on it already.”
Brown ignored him.
Stretcher bearers jostled a major rearward. A white edge of bone thrust from his blood-caked brow.
“What are we waiting for?” a young voice pleaded, a voice barely short of tears. “Why don’t we go in?”
“Just be glad you’re still waiting,” Levi told him.
The order came down to move forward and form for a charge.
Six thirty a.m.
Fourteen Gun Battery
“Where’s Ledlie?” Burnside cried. “Can’t anyone find Ledlie?”
None of the staff men responded.
Shaking his head, Burnside lurched back to the parapet, buffeted by the concussions off the guns. Earning their keep, he had to give the artillerymen that, they were earning their keep.
Burnside lifted his field glasses, peered through the smoke, saw nothing encouraging, and lowered the glasses again. He turned to Major Van Buren, who had grown ever more deliberate as the morning advanced and hopes retreated.
“Perhaps Ledlie went forward, into the pit?” Burnside said.
The major appeared less than confident of that.
“And Potter? Potter?”
“With his division, sir. In the forward trenches.”
“Up in the pit?”
“No, sir. In the trenches. With the remainder of his division.”