The Damned of Petersburg

by Ralph Peters

  “He looked like a corpse just now.”

  “He’ll be lucky if he isn’t a corpse.” Morgan reached out his hand to retrieve the paper. “I’ll have to send it after the lunatic bastard. Like some coffee? It’s wretched, but it’s hot.”

  Miles waved it off. “I have to get back, straighten things out again.” But he paused. “Does Hancock realize how worn out my men are? Seriously, Charlie…”

  “Gibbon’s janissaries are no better off. Maybe worse. Lucky Mott, back in the ditches.” The chief of staff made a thoughtful face—by the measure of Charlie Morgan. “Do what you can today. I’ll see that your men get a proper rest tomorrow. Gibbon’s lot should be up to scratch by then, they can rip up the next stretch.”

  “Meanwhile, we’re out here, splintered off from the rest of the army, with two gutted divisions and half our guns.”

  “Less than half, actually,” Morgan said. “Hancock understands, of course. But what can the old bugger do?” In a moment of candor, he added, “He’s beaten down himself, he’s nearly as bad as Barlow.”

  As Miles turned to go, Morgan added, “And do what you can to divert the contrabands, would you? Point them somewhere else. I can’t have them clogging the roads. And I damned well can’t feed them.”

  “Like me to shoot them, Charlie?”

  Miles went out into the steaming air. How could it rain so much and not cool down? He cursed Frank Barlow again, damning him beyond reason, beyond all justice. But as he passed through the clangor of Gibbon’s division settling in, he had to admit he was awed by Barlow’s will.

  He wondered if he had such strength himself.

  Five p.m., August 24

  Reams Station

  Henry Roback had stuffed his haversack full of ears of corn. The other members of the detail were equally laden and thus in tolerable spirits, despite tired arms and shoulders and backs, and feet that would be weary for days to come. They’d had to go deeper into the cornfield than anyone had liked, given the flurries of shots off in the distance. No one wanted to be scooped up by the Rebs. But the risk had been worth it, anything to get away from army rations. It was like folks back in Washington had made up a special office, with big desks and leather chairs, where they schemed to render vittles as awful as possible. Wilmer Dorrance called it a Rebel plot.

  Uniforms steaming from an earlier downpour, the men passed a burned-out shanty with a charred loading platform where rails used to run. A water tank had been pulled down and lay smashed like Humpty-Dumpty in a storybook. A Negro family with bundles on their backs paused along the tree line, watching the soldiers go by, wary, the way deer stood stock-still before they bolted.

  “Guess that’s the station everyone’s talking about,” Elias McCammon said. “Can’t say it looks worth the bother.”

  “Like everything else in this godforsaken place,” Wilmer spit. “Them coons, too.”

  “What’s got them frighted?” Roback wondered aloud. Negroes mystified him—he couldn’t understand a word they said.

  “Probably think you got romance in mind, Hank.”

  “First Division boys found chickens yesterday,” Pete Buck said, thinking on more important matters. “So I heard tell.”

  “Won’t be none for us,” McCammon told him. He pulled out his pipe. “Count on it. Lucky they left us a cob or two.”

  The sound of halfhearted skirmishing just reached them. Roback hoped his teeth were up to the corn. They’d been a tad wobbly.

  “Would be nice to have a pot of butter,” he said. “I always was partial to butter on my corn.”

  “Rich man’s habits,” Wilmer warned, “never did a working man no good.”

  “We always had buttered corn,” Elias McCammon put in, “and we weren’t rich. I’m with Hank.”

  “Well, you come of farm people. Have all the butter you want. The rest of us have to pay for it. Salt’s good enough for me.”

  “Just be happy we got all this corn,” Sergeant Wetherall told them, closing the topic. Eyeing the entrenchments up ahead, he added, “Smarten up now. Don’t want the officers thinking we’re having a high time. Rifles up proper, boys.”

  “I was a kid,” McCammon said, “we built us snow forts better than those lines. Looks to me like blind men and drunkards built them.”

  They passed soldiers stripped of half their garments, working with picks and shovels, if without a great deal of enthusiasm.

  “Hurry up now,” Buck teased the laboring men. “Rebs a-coming. We stole all their corn.”

  “I know where you can stick a cob,” a brawny fellow with a pickax said.

  “You boys happy now you joined the Army? Enjoying the easy life, all milk and honey?”

  “Make that two cobs.”

  Entering through a gap where the rail line ran, Sergeant Wetherall commented, “Northern return isn’t bad, but that’s about it. Don’t like that opening for the road, that’s just where the Rebs ought to come. And why’d they put that wall other side of the rail bed, not this side? How’re they going to get ammunition up for those guns?”

  “Same way they got the guns up,” McCammon told him, just being contrary.

  Annoyed to have his soldierly judgment challenged, the sergeant said, “No room on that side for limbers or caissons. Care to carry powder over that berm? When the Johnnies start firing? Can’t say I like this position at all, not one bit.”

  “Any luck, we won’t be here that long,” Roback suggested. He was never one for discord. “First Division already moved on.”

  “They’re just ripping up track,” Wilmer speculated. “They’ll be back come nightfall, bet you a dollar.”

  Lord, it was stink-hot. All the heat crowded up late afternoons.

  Roback felt the nip of a louse in his armpit. Hard to remember the last time he’d had a dousing that passed for a bath. Rain didn’t count, just left a man feeling worse. Back on the North Anna? That long? Just scrubbing himself with water from a bucket since—when was it?—May. Old sweat clung.

  “Smarten up. I mean it,” Sergeant Wetherall told them. “There’s Captain Burt and the adjutant. Don’t go looking like the Oswego militia.”

  George Crimmons, who had been silent all day, laughed. “We are the Oswego militia. ’Least, I am.”

  “Lieutenant Quaiffe’s all right, he don’t mind so.”

  “Captain Burt’s fair, too,” Roback said, eager, as he always was, to see goodness. “He knows we been pressed.”

  “We’ll see how long those two last,” McCammon said, with months of weariness souring his voice. The 152nd New York had lost so many officers that it was now commanded by the captain. On the other hand, the regiment was barely the size of a company, with fewer than a hundred men present for duty. In a way, it balanced out, Roback supposed.

  “Bad luck, talking so,” Pete Buck told McCammon.

  Seven p.m., August 24

  Monk’s Neck Bridge

  Billy Mahone rode into Hampton’s camp beside A. P. Hill. Had no real business being there, but he’d felt like coming out. Rambunctious. A man could only sit still for so long when things were doing.

  He saw a quizzical look pass over Hampton’s slab of face. Just made him smile inside. Hampton was a man who couldn’t bear not knowing what was what and who was who. No sense of humor, either. Big as the South Carolinian was, Otelia would’ve devoured him.

  The party dismounted. Mahone followed Hill. Hampton’s staff stood waiting. Every man present seemed dwarfed by the cavalry general.

  Salutes rendered, Hampton held out his hand to Hill, then to Mahone. It was a quirk of Wade Hampton’s that he always shook hands on meeting, unless in the midst of violence. Hampton’s voice was soft and his handshake mild, as if that big paw whispered, “I don’t need to impress you.”

  “Didn’t know you were joining us tomorrow,” Hampton told Mahone.

  “Ain’t. Just thought I’d take some air, come out and see how y’all plan to use my boys. While I’m back in the ditches playing soli
taire.”

  Hampton nodded.

  Hill put in: “Harry will be along. He’s moving up his men.”

  “And holding up my two brigades behind,” Mahone said, smiling. “With me left like a bridegroom at the altar.”

  “We’ll have a potent force,” Hill added. “Lee’s all for it now, he wants Hancock crushed.”

  Hampton smiled down at the corps commander, then waved up a lieutenant, who approached with a hint of timidity. Mahone recognized the cavalryman’s son, or believed he did. Didn’t look much like him, though. Probably took after the mother.

  “Your pardon, General Hill … General Mahone, I don’t think you’ve met my son.…”

  “Not formally. Know him to see.”

  “Then may I present Lieutenant Preston Hampton?”

  The boy bent his shoulders forward an inch. He had fine, womanly eyes. “An honor, sir.”

  “I’m sure the honor’s mine,” Mahone said, thrusting out his hand. “Son of General Hampton’s…”

  The boy made a youthful effort to impress him with his grip. Mahone responded by clamping the offending paw hard enough to hurt, just short of cracking bone. Let the young buck learn that a small man wasn’t necessarily a little man.

  “Mighty fine handshake you got there, Lieutenant,” Mahone said as he let go.

  Boy would turn out fine, no doubt. If he didn’t get himself killed, trying to live up to some notion of chivalry drawn out of a book. Mahone and his wife enjoyed the novels of Walter Scott no end, but never confused them with reality: Folks weren’t really like that.

  “My eldest son will be joining my staff, too. Young Wade.” The cavalryman beamed out pride as he spoke, a rare display of emotion. “He’s been serving with Joe Johnston.”

  “Army’s bound to be better for it, gaining another Hampton,” Mahone said. “I look forward to shaking his hand.”

  Turning, Hampton told his fellow generals, “I cannot offer a grand repast, but we did impound some splendid Yankee coffee.…”

  A young man who knew his place, the lieutenant sauntered off. The ranking officers headed for the cooking fire.

  Hampton was big, all right, but his gestures had an odd streak of the feminine. Passed for grace in Charleston, Mahone supposed. Yet Wade Hampton was said to have killed a bear—some claimed two—with just a hunting knife. And witnesses attested that he’d cloven at least one Yankee horseman from shoulder to waist with his saber.

  It was also reputed that Hampton had been set against secession, that he’d predicted a war would be a disaster. Yet every day of that man’s life, every privilege and every source of pride, had made this war inevitable. And he couldn’t see it, none of them could. Mahone had read Carlyle at Otelia’s prodding and could smell the ancien régime from a distance. Hampton seemed one of those doomed aristocrats, the kind who tried vainly to come to terms with a changing world and failed. Maybe more Dickens than Carlyle, from the book with that knitting harpy.

  Tale of Two Cities. Could as well have been Washington and Richmond. And Hampton might be a brilliant cavalry officer, but he was a man of the past, no way around it.

  Mahone didn’t dote on such matters overly much. Didn’t feel strongly, one way or the other. Just looked at things as they were, one more engineering problem. The stresses were such and such, the bridge bore so great a load and not an ounce more. No matter how the war ended, Billy Mahone believed that the bridge to the past that Hampton and his kind fought to preserve would collapse anyway.

  The future belonged to the railroads, to steam, to gas lights and telegraphs, not to plantations built on nigger sweat.

  Lee was that way, too, of course. Even Powell Hill was, if on a humbler scale. Beauregard might figure it out, but few of the others would. Aristocrats in a dying order never believed it was dying, couldn’t imagine it. Wasted half their time squabbling amongst themselves, clinging to small advantages and exaggerating slights. Unable to see beyond their little fiefs.

  Mahone was a proud Virginian, but not to the point of folly. He was well aware of Lee’s mistreatment of Hampton the winter before, when Lee released his nephew’s division and the other Virginians from line duty, sending them to unspoiled pastures to fatten up their horses, while Hampton’s nags were ridden to death on outpost work along the Rapidan. Enchanted by his own name and all things Virginian, Lee had been unjust. All had seen it, none had said it. But, then, woe unto the Georgian who tried to enter an Alabamian hospital. Or to the starving Mississippian who tried to draw on North Carolina rations.…

  There were times when the particularism and jealousies grew so hot that Mahone all but expected that, once they won the war, states would soon be seceding from the Confederacy.

  A railroad man had to see past boundaries, though. However the war ended, railroads would have to be rebuilt, and to turn a fair dollar they’d have to cross state lines, perhaps borders between nations, spanning a continent. The country may have broken apart and it might well stay divided, but empires waited for bold men to construct them.

  Hampton and his kind relied on Negroes. Billy Mahone preferred surveying tools.

  He wasn’t fighting to preserve the past. Good riddance. He was fighting because that was what a man did. And because he didn’t like being told off by Yankees any more than he bent a knee to the syphilitic sons of plantation masters. Or to their haughty daughters, who couldn’t squat over a piss pot without a mammy’s help.

  Drinking his coffee and listening to Hampton and Hill patter on about horses, Mahone smiled to think of Otelia, who had more sense than any of them. When the war had begun and he’d moved to do his duty and place their little wealth in Confederate bonds, Otelia had put her foot down, telling him, “You and the other children can go play war, but you won’t leave me poor, William Mahone. You can lay out this much, but not a cent more, and I’ll hear no dispute. You’re putting the rest in gold and you’re going to hand it over to me to lay it by, not some hollowed-out bank. And when this war ends, whatever may come, you’ll thank me. If you don’t get your fool head shot off.”

  No, he wasn’t rich the way rumors had it. But he wouldn’t die poor. Hampton and his kind might prove bankrupts, though. Even if the South won, who’d cover their notes? The mills of England had already turned to India and Egypt for cotton. What did Hampton’s puffed-up gentry offer a changing world?

  With Billy Sherman clawing at Atlanta, things weren’t looking happy for the old ways.

  As for Mahone, he didn’t hate Yankees particularly. Just found them obnoxious, self-righteous as driven-off preachers. The South knew how to live but couldn’t afford it, while the North was rich but didn’t know how to live. No, he didn’t hate Yankees. But he didn’t mind killing them, either. Or the coloreds they had no business stirring up. It was just in the nature of things. His nature, anyway.

  He did enjoy the fighting, that he did. Be sorry when it ended. Finest thrill a man could have short of one other delight, and that act couldn’t be performed in public. Sorry he wasn’t included in this cotillion. But Hill wanted him in command of the lines because he trusted him to perform marvels, should the Yankees attack.

  Still …

  Otelia had foreseen so much, reminding him just the past winter, “Billy, it won’t suffice for you to be the best railroad builder this side of the moon. Not if you don’t have money enough to put up a front, so thank me. Comes time to rebuild, trick’s going to be to get all the money other folks hid away to back your endeavors. And the best way to do that’s going to be to put up just enough show to make them think you don’t need them, that you’re doing them a favor letting them in. There’s nothing a rich man loves more than loaning money to a man who doesn’t need it.”

  “Thought I married my little Otelia,” he’d told her. “Here I find I’m wed to Becky Sharp.”

  “Sharper than you know, and you be glad of it, William Mahone. And don’t you ‘little’ me till you’ve grown six inches.”

  As night wrapped around Ham
pton’s camp and the talk eased to gossip, Mahone excused himself.

  “Guess I’d better get on back. In case we got this whole thing upside down.” He turned to Hampton. “Pleasure visiting.”

  “Always welcome, General,” Hampton said.

  “Y’all do good tomorrow,” Mahone told them.

  One a.m., August 25

  Headquarters, Army of the Potomac

  Another late night. Humphreys grimaced. Why bother to sleep at all?

  Meade was still awake, too. He looked like an old hound past his last hunt.

  Humphreys said, “Message went off to Hancock, all his questions answered. I’d feel better if he showed a touch more concern, though. Warren’s convinced those Rebs are bound for Reams Station.”

  “We’ll see,” Meade said. His cold still clung to his voice. “Could be another go at Warren’s position. Can’t rule it out, not yet.”

  The chief of staff shook his head. “Doubt it. One thing you have to give G.K., he knows how to fortify. Lee would be mad to go at him now. Even I was impressed, when I went over there.” He almost smiled, but didn’t quite indulge. “Even old Dennis ‘Heartless’ Mahan would approve.”

  “Still … he’s been wrong of late. And slow to correct himself. Size of his losses in the tavern fight, for one example. Grant first learned it from the Richmond papers. And he didn’t like it.”

  “I didn’t, either. But you know Warren, almost as well as I do. Damned good engineer, slow but thorough. If anything, he sees spooks, Confederates everywhere.” Humphreys surprised himself with a yawn. “I expected a plea for reinforcements, but he’s confident his position is secure. So Win needs to look out, I’ve tried to tell him. Those Johnnies are headed his way, I’d bet two squaws and a pony.”

  Meade caught the yawning contagion. “How many did Fisher count?”