by Ralph Peters
At twenty-four, Brigadier General John Caldwell Calhoun Sanders had seen enough of war to know his chances. And the single chance he saw was for his paltry offering of six hundred men to hit the Yankees so damn hard that they’d swear they’d faced six thousand.
In more of a mood to drink blood than the milk from that cow of his, Billy Mahone had suggested, with an ungentlemanly degree of clarity, that the battle was in Sanders’ hands and his return would be superfluous should he fail.
Sanders looked at his watch again. Five more minutes. Of “rest” for men held under a sun that was downright equatorial. He long had claimed that Virginians didn’t know summer heat from hog meat, that Alabama summers beat them all, but this day was a trial. He’d lost a dozen men on the march, lashed on by frequent messages from Mahone. Now his soldiers crouched in a scorched ravine, man-flesh offered up to the sun like a sacrifice, rifle barrels yet unused and already hot enough to blister calluses.
He liked a good fight, but this looked to be a bad one. Fated, though he never let on that he credited such notions. Put him darkly in mind of that rowdy night with his university brethren, just on the edge of secession, when sodden with drink they’d visited a wisewoman outside town, a creature who let her two daughters do one thing while she did another, gold welcome, silver accepted. Twixt friendly trips to the tumbledown barn, the boys had had their fortunes told for a lark, drawing a string of unlikely promises from the old woman’s lips, though not one word of a coming war and the scythe it would swing among them. Her talk had been of wealth and wondrous brides, of young men’s ambitions cut to fit the company. But when Johnny Sanders’ turn had come, the old witch had stiffened, rejecting his palm and claiming—after a spell of discomfiture—that she’d used herself up and couldn’t see one more thing.
His luck had held, though. With half his friends forced to beg treatment of a doctor renowned for discretion, Sanders had gone unafflicted. Generally, he had done his best to live by his pap’s admonition: Gals, but not too many; drink, but not too much; and leave when the cards come out.
He had liked the university, but he loved the war. And as for the unwelcome memory of that prophesying crone, he reckoned that his wound at Frayser’s Farm had answered her vision.
Anyway, he doubted that any creature up on two legs, even a poor-white sorceress, could have foreseen the desolation of the battlefield spread before him.
Across those few hundred corpse-strewn yards, the penned-in Yankees waited. Niggers armed and uniformed among them. Sanders reckoned his men would just see about that.
One thing he had never done was to lay with a black woman. Couldn’t imagine a gentleman doing such.
He studied his watch again: just under two minutes to one.
Mahone had described the tricks of the ground, pointing to where Sanders’ regiments were to strike the Yankee position. Rags sweated through, the men had panted and listened as the little Virginian explained to all that this was not a day for indifferent measures. And war-roughened men from up and down Alabama, wearied to ruination by that march, turned snake-mean again. In front of a crowd whose members towered over him, Mahone’s effect on men was just uncanny: If witchery there was, he had more of it in him than any red-clay gypsy who whored her daughters.
But Billy Mahone’s gift for mesmerizing soldiers still lacked the magic to transport Sanders’ Alabamians and Carolina strays safely across that deadly space to the blue-rimmed volcano where Yankee bullets served for Pompeii’s lava.
Sanders only hoped that The Last Days of Pompeii, which had enthralled him, wouldn’t give way to the last days of the Confederacy.
He looked at his watch a last time and raised his sword. His men scrambled to their feet.
“Alabama!” Sanders shouted. “Forward!”
And off they went, with orders repeated along the whittled-down lines and last fears smothered by exhilaration.
Mahone had warned Sanders—forcefully—not to veer to the left at the Yankee volleys, as Matt Hall had allowed his Georgians to do. He needed to strike the pit walls smack in the center and on the right, and there would be no excuses. So he kept up a stream of commands—harsher than his habit—as the first Yankee riflery took its toll.
The lines buckled at a volley but rebounded.
The men wanted to charge, to cover that ground, Sanders understood. But he’d be damned if he’d give Mahone the least cause for complaint. His men were going to hit the Yankees where they were meant to hit them. Or leave a trail of bodies in that direction.
More men fell. Yet the volume of fire was less than Sanders expected.
His regiments on the right struck deep traverses and fell behind. The pace of the others quickened, but remained short of a run. As bullet-pierced men flung out their arms, officers corrected the ranks with profanity and swords extended sideward.
Ahead, Sanders saw Yankee rifles hastily laid below bobbing caps, faces pressed against rifle stocks, small bursts of flame, and shoulders turning to disappear again.
The firing bit through the Alabamian ranks. A color-bearer fell, but not the colors.
When Sanders judged that their course was fixed and the Yankees could not deflect them, he shouted:
“Charge! Alabama! Charge!”
Blue-bellies popped from the ground like Lazarus multiplied. Most ran. Others, fear-faced, showed themselves with raised hands. Sanders’ men dropped into traverses too wide to jump, while those still aboveground dashed for the high wall.
But the Yankees outside the pit who hadn’t surrendered were fighting now.
Throughout the war, men had shied from using bayonets. That had changed at the Mule Shoe, Sanders had been a witness. Now his men took the Yankees with cold steel.
No, hot steel. Nothing cold in the whole, wide world this day. Men gasped like beasts and thrust blades into bellies. Cursing and swinging rifles, the toughest Yankees tried to stand their ground. Sanders scrambled over piled dirt and slid into a trench, shooting twice with his pistol before he was again flanked by men in gray.
He had yet to see a black face among the Yankees.
“Push on! Clear ’em out! Close forward!”
Blood burst from a man’s shoulder inches from Sanders. He paused to clear gore from his eyes. A Yankee crawled from a bombproof. Sanders shot him in the face before grasping that the fellow meant to surrender.
Fortunes of war. He pressed on. Thrusting his sword into the back of a bluecoat who’d gotten turned around in a clinch.
His foremost soldiers tried to scale the high wall, to get at the Yankees, only to slip and fall or be shot in their faces.
But the fight had become a challenge for the Yankees. To shoot down at his men, they had to expose their torsos, to lean over their parapets. Soon dead and bleeding Yankees hung over the wall.
Then, as if by mutual agreement, the firing sputtered on both sides. Neither Sanders’ men nor the bluecoats above them could get at each other without dying themselves.
Off to the left, the division’s other brigades were doing their part again, the Virginians and Georgians renewing their assault. He even believed he heard cries that the Yankees were running.
Well, they weren’t running yet from the Alabama brigade.
A delighted soldier scrambled past, crying, “Got me a nigger! I got me a nigger!”
But the fight had all but halted. His men couldn’t get up over the wall and live, while the bluecoats couldn’t lean out to shoot and survive.
Sanders didn’t want to be the one left behind in the victory. They had to break into the pit.
His soldiers began hurling clumps of clay and rocks over the wall. Then a sergeant called, “Pick up the rifles, gather up the rifles! Throw them. Harpoon the damn sumbitches, spear the bastards.”
In moments, abandoned Yankee rifles, bayonets fixed, began sailing over the wall. Howls and curses rose from the other side.
A lieutenant staggered past. He was a good boy from Clinton, the town Sanders claimed as his own
. Now an eyeball lolled down his cheek and his scalp flapped. He made a noise like a cow that needed milking.
Harpoon rifles flew back toward Sanders’ men.
He turned to his adjutant. “George, work over to the right, far as you can. See if there isn’t a spot we can push through over that way.”
The two men dodged a rifle that came down butt first. Soldiers laughed.
“This won’t do,” Sanders said. “Find a way into that pit.”
The captain scurried off.
More hurled rifles. Catcalls. Occasional shots. The atmosphere was as playful as it was murderous, turning into a deadly county fair.
Before he could give orders—angry ones—a division staff man found him.
“General Mahone wants to know why you aren’t in the pit.”
“Yanks aren’t inclined to admit us. You tell me how to get in there, and we’ll go.”
“The general wants your men to jump over the wall. Just jump.”
Sanders stared at the fellow. “You are aware there’s a passel of Yankees in there?”
The battle noise increased. Close by.
“The Federals have been retreating,” the staff major said. “The Virginians could see them running.”
“Then who’s doing all that shooting?”
Freshly smeared with blood and dirt, Sanders’ adjutant returned and ended the argument.
“Good God,” Sanders said. “Are you—”
“We’re inside,” the captain panted. “We’re in the pit.”
One thirty p.m.
The Crater
Brigadier General William Francis Bartlett of Haverhill, Massachusetts, aged twenty-four, son of Charles Leonard Bartlett and Harriet Dorothy Plummer Bartlett, graduate of the Phillips Academy and Harvard (class of ’62), was immeasurably annoyed. Condemned to sit against a stump of clay, cork leg gone and pistol emptied, he watched the brawl he could no longer influence. Bartlett commanded a wealth of obscenities worthy of a divinity faculty, but he no longer commanded any troops.
What he saw before him was mayhem, a small apocalypse.
The noise was infernal, the heat monstrous, the very air bloodstained, and the pit so packed with striving men that he could not even have crawled off, had he wished.
A shock-faced sergeant blundered by, trailing gray intestines. Men screamed, a thing unusual. Flesh separated and flew. Hard men who would have killed for a swig of water sloshed through blood.
More Rebs dropped over the walls, the newcomers screaming their barbarous kee-yip-yee-hee before crashing onto the backs of their fellow Johnnies. Unwitting men stabbed their own kind, while others were packed too close to bring weapons to bear, fighting instead with fists, claws, and teeth.
Men vomited over each other, fainted, were trampled. A Massachusetts soldier Bartlett recognized—despite the grime and gore—fell atop him, thumping an elbow into his ribs. Unaware now that Bartlett even existed, the man rebounded and rejoined the melee.
Wounded on two more occasions after losing his leg at Yorktown—with his last Harvard course work fit to his recuperation—Bartlett had to ask himself whether his last race was run. He found the prospect of death disappointing, although the irony of such an end brought a morbid smile to his lips. Perhaps he should’ve taken religion more seriously.
No gallant ends this day, no answered prayers.
A rifle stock missed his nose by an inch.
Suddenly furious, Bartlett threw his empty pistol toward the nearest Reb. No one paid him attention.
He drew himself up as best he could. To be shot was one thing, stomped to death another.
When the last Reb attack exploded over them, Hartranft had gotten off with as many men as would brave the slope below. Marshall, damn the thick sod, had refused to go and was still somewhere in the mayhem. If still alive. For his part, Bartlett had not been about to leave: He would not order sound men to risk their lives by bearing him away, and he would have found it ignoble, in any case, to abandon the last of his Massachusetts men.
It wasn’t done.
But Marshall should have gone. Really, the man would be worthless in a Reb prison. Better at the head of his broken brigade. And the man had a wife and child, twin plagues that had not yet afflicted Bartlett. And, he judged, likely never would.
He could have wept from outrage and frustration, but that wasn’t done, either.
The Rebs beat back the last good men through raw numbers and viciousness, dragging away prisoners. They were almost atop Bartlett.
And Bartlett saw a thing that appalled him as no other had done. His own men had turned on the Colored Troops mingled with them, shooting, stabbing, and beating them to death.
Other men fought on, though.
Such a waste.
The day’s cause was lost irretrievably, and it had been lost for hours. What remained was pointless savagery. Had Bartlett had two good legs, he would have stood and ordered an end to the slaughter.
Instead, a Reb bellowed, “Why don’t you damned fools surrender?”
And a Northern voice responded, “Why won’t you damned fools let us?”
By mutual, inexplicable understanding, the fighting all but ceased. A few Rebs could not master themselves immediately, nor could a few last Yankees. But it only took moments for the butchery in the main pit to end. Bartlett’s men and the others mixed in with them threw down their arms.
“Oh, hell,” Bartlett muttered.
The fighting on the right, in the smaller pit, dragged on for a few minutes. More Colored Troops over there, Bartlett knew. It was impossible to see what was happening, but the curses and begging hinted at great cruelties.
“Lookee what we got here,” a Reb declared. “Got us a blue-belly general.”
A mocking voice said, “Don’t look like much to me, the hook-faced sumbitch.”
“You git up,” a Confederate sergeant ordered him.
Bartlett glared at him.
“I told you to git up. Boys, git that sumbitch up.”
A pair of Johnnies grabbed him and lifted. Roughly.
Then they eased. Still holding him up.
“Got him but one leg. Yankees are down to using peg-leg generals.”
“Ewell got but one leg.”
“Ought to shoot the sumbitch. Leading nigger troops. He’s got it coming more than those damned coons.”
Bartlett declined to tell them that he did not command Colored Troops. His impulse was quite the opposite.
After a brief staring match, Bartlett said, “Well, gentlemen, shoot me, or let me sit down.”
Three p.m.
Dunn house
“It’s over,” Humphreys said. “Even Burnside admits it.”
The chief of staff wore a look of general disgust on the best of days, but on that afternoon Andrew Atkinson Humphreys’ features were etched in acid.
Meade opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. The worst of his rage had passed, leaving a sorrow best not revealed to any man. It had been Burnside’s failure. But it had been his failure, too. Since the army botched its June arrival at Petersburg, so little had gone right.
In fact, nothing had gone right. Heat, squalor, and failed assaults, with his best subordinates sick and morale far lower than Grant could be brought to admit. The fine army that had crossed the Rapidan the first week in May no longer existed, replaced by a dull, immovable machine.
“Come outside, Humph,” Meade said.
They walked through walls of heat. Without a conscious decision, Meade led his old comrade toward the spot that Grant had chosen earlier. It had not been the right day to press Grant, but Meade had hoped the decision had been made to send him to the Valley to deal with Early. He longed to return to an independent command, even a lesser one, to be his own man again. But Grant had said nothing.
Across the fields, stubborn cannoneers kept at their work. But the attack was over. Finished. For all but the wounded left between the lines.
And the prisoners. It ap
peared that a number—an appalling number—of prisoners had been taken.
In the miserly shade, Meade stopped and said, low-voiced, “I should have known better. Trusting Burnside with a main attack. And a damnably complex one.”
“Burnside couldn’t find a whore’s hole with a lamp,” Humphreys said. His family, like Meade’s, was sufficiently rooted in Old Philadelphia to license speech forbidden to common society. Nor had frontier service restrained his vocabulary.
Meade fingered sweat from his temples. “I blinded myself. I made too much of the Colored Troops business. And lost sight of a fiasco in the making.”
“We’ve all let him go too long,” Humphreys said. “Everybody likes Ambrose, it’s not just the politics. Even I like the worthless sonofabitch. I just don’t want him commanding so much as a company. So there’s your problem.”
Meade recognized a sigh where strangers would have heard a snort.
“But now he’s got to go, George,” Humphreys continued. “That corps needs a firm hand, it’s gone all to seed.”
“There’ll be a board of inquiry. Grant’s for it.”
“Board or not, I think you should put him on leave. And not call him back. Soften the politics of it.”
Meade looked at the chief of staff, who had surprised him. Humphreys was a soldier down to the marrow.
“Unlike you, Humph. To consider politics.”
“Fuck the whole business, as far as I’m concerned. But if Lincoln doesn’t win…”
“As he isn’t like to do.”
Humphreys waved a paw at the day’s debacle. “Then all of this isn’t waste in a cause, to a purpose. It’s just a waste.” This time it was a snort and not a sigh. “Can’t bear the damned thought, I must be going soft.”
A parade of beaten, slump-shouldered soldiers passed rearward.
“Sometimes,” Humphreys went on, “I can’t understand why they don’t turn their rifles on us.”
Three p.m.
Petersburg
Bartlett stumped along, using two rifles as crutches. The path to the rear had been littered with Negro corpses, and beginning with the first houses—Southern and ramshackle—women emerged to deride the captives, often in language he would not have expected from women of the streets. The vigorous among the fairer sex hurled the contents of slops buckets and chamber pots toward them. They found Bartlett and his missing leg a particular source of amusement.