The Damned of Petersburg

by Ralph Peters

  And he turned from them as the nearest Federal band blared out “Rally ’Round the Flag.” He’d often thought it a rousing melody, wishing that it belonged to his side, not theirs. A better tune it was, by far, than “Dixie,” that minstrel ditty he’d always found unworthy. But the men liked “Dixie,” they’d chosen it for their own, and he could not forbid them such a little thing.

  Lee undressed slowly, constrained by his arthritis. He prayed a second time, kneeling on the planks, rug cast aside. And after he thanked the Lord for His mercies and goodness, he sought the refuge of sleep but was denied.

  Instead, he lay awake, raging. He had beaten Grant, again and again. He’d beaten Meade, Hancock, Warren, all of them. He’d taken their men prisoner by the thousands, he’d slain their legions, humiliated them. Yet their grip tightened like an infernal serpent’s. The Weldon line was gone. Wagon trains could bring up the goods from the last safe station, skirting the Union lines, but that would only draw Grant westward again. A season of hunger loomed.

  How could he win again and again, only to be pinned in some great cheat? How could the Lord permit it?

  There were times, horrid times, when he scrutinized his beliefs, his fateful choices. What if his people had been wrong and slavery was a sin? What if the Lord was wreaking His vengeance on Virginia and an ever-bleaker South? What if the Creator had turned away?

  Such questions were, at last, beyond Man’s ken. And the morning would insist on practical matters. With Atlanta gone, he would need to visit President Davis and face another harangue against the world, with the president unwilling to admit that he himself had erred in any way.

  Atlanta …

  He saw Grant’s policy clearly, his brute grip that immobilized the Army of Northern Virginia while his paladins rampaged over the South. He saw it, but he could do nothing about it.

  Nothing except hope that, somehow, Atlanta would make no difference, that a war-weary North would elect McClellan and turn Lincoln out, that there would be peace at last.…

  And if peace did not come … they would have to last out another winter and see if the Lord wrought a miracle in the spring.

  In the meantime, he had to defend his remaining lifelines, one main road and a railroad.

  Beyond the opposing trenches, a band played “Listen to the Mocking Bird.”

  Seven p.m., September 10

  Howard’s Grove, Richmond

  Surgical hospital for Alabama’s wounded

  “Two aces and three tens,” Oates said, slapping down the cards. “Got you beat, don’t I?”

  Captain Billy Strickland laid down his own cards in disgust. “Not sure you’re to be trusted anymore.” He shooed a fly with his remaining hand, his wound mirroring Oates’ loss. Down the ward, a new arrival groaned. “Back in the regiment, I used to believe you were an honest man. I fear I was deceived.”

  “Unlucky at cards, lucky in love,” Oates consoled him. “Way you charm that old biddy.”

  “Ain’t she a fright? Comes through with the whiskey, though.”

  Oates eyed his comrade’s glass. “You paying up?”

  Strickland made a sour face, but his good nature shone through. “Help yourself. To the victor…”

  Oates grinned. “Don’t have the hankering today. I’ll content myself with my own ration.” He picked up his glass. “Take your IOU, though.”

  The whiskey was raw and rewarding.

  “Well, lookee there,” Strickland said, peering through the window. “Off to the races again.”

  “Fancy ball, more like. That’s what I heard. Times I do think I should’ve followed medicine, rather than reading the law.” Oates watched the ambulance, freed of its canvas, pull off toward town with its load of doctors, every one of them in a parade uniform. “Wouldn’t mind spoiling a crinoline myself.” He pondered for a pair of seconds. “Have to learn to dance with one arm first, get my balance back.”

  “Hardly seems right, a ball so soon after Atlanta.”

  “Better Atlanta, Georgia, than Abbeville, Alabama. That’s how I’m coming to look at it. Which one of the butcher’s boys stayed back, any idea?”

  “Mudd, I believe. He was cussing royally earlier.”

  “Lord help us,” Oates said. “Don’t sicken until morning, at the earliest.”

  He reached down to rearrange himself on the bed—and realized, again, that the arm he’d meant to use was no longer there. It was just the queerest thing. There were times when he could still feel a tingling in the fingers, sense a tightening of muscles, even feel cramps. Only the fingers and the rest of that arm were buried on New Market Heights, behind that tree. He’d become part ghost.

  Hard to learn how to do things one-armed, harder than he’d imagined. Even playing poker was a challenge. He and Strickland helped each other, but the frustration was always there.

  Oates did wonder what a vigorous woman would make of his stump. Ugly as Mammy’s behind.

  He’d thought himself well along on his recovery, only to swell up and have the surgeons cut him open again to drain the pus. Doc Gaston had done the work himself, and it did seem better now, though the pain came and went.

  Out of the blue, Strickland said, “Sure could use a woman. Wouldn’t be picky, either.”

  “Tell you the truth, I’ve been uneasy with how you’ve been looking my way.”

  The captain snickered. “Beards never drew me one bit. Truly, though, I’ve got half a mind to walk on into town and inspect the merchandise.”

  “There’s always your belle of the whiskey barrel. Just one building over.”

  “Don’t put me off my vittles.”

  “Well, I reckon we both have a little more healing to do,” Oates said. “Shame, though. I share the hankering. Lay here thinking back on this missy and that.”

  “I do wonder what a fine gal’s going to make of a one-armed man. You ever wonder?”

  Oates paused a moment before answering, “I do.”

  “Have to calculate how many men been killed, of course. That smooths the odds. Then you reckon in the men who lost both arms, now there’s an impediment to the hallowed deed. Not that it wouldn’t be possible.”

  “Surely.” Oates’ thoughts dwelt not on highborn women now, but on a colored gal he’d enjoyed the winter before, thanks to Colonel Toney, when he’d been mending up from the wounds to his hip and leg. Contortions had been required, but they’d managed.

  “Got to stop talking about it,” Strickland said. “Drive myself crazy.”

  He moved awkwardly, toppling the makeshift table between their beds. Cards flew and glasses fell.

  Ever a man of quick reflex, Oates grabbed for his glass. But the arm wasn’t there this time, either.

  The jerking motion did something, though. Something inside that shoulder. He straightened his back, seeking to regain his balance.

  Strickland’s eyes went wide.

  When Oates looked at his bad shoulder, blood squirted from it like a horse pissing red. Suddenly, he felt weak, faint.

  “Doctor!” Strickland screamed. Truly screaming. “Doctor! Get a doctor!”

  His friend and comrade struggled to rise and balance himself, clapping his good hand over Oates’ stump.

  “Lie down, lie down,” the captain insisted. Oates sought to comply and Strickland tried to follow along, to keep the pressure on.

  He lost his balance and tumbled across Oates.

  The other men in the ward who had the strength to call out added their voices, howling like lost and angry souls for a medical redeemer.

  Oates was lying on his back. He felt Strickland’s hand again. The captain’s face and blouse were splashed with blood.

  Not like this, Oates thought. Not after everything. I can’t die like this.

  Doc Mudd came running, followed by a male orderly and a matron with nothing else left of her Saturday nights.

  Mudd said nothing, but Oates saw his alarm. The doctor slipped his hand in where Strickland’s had been, adding more pressu
re, feeling the wound.

  “Ligature slipped. Sloughed off the subclavian artery,” he told Oates. As if the information made the least damned bit of difference.

  “Joe…,” Oates said weakly, “fix me up.”

  Mudd said nothing for a moment. Then he turned his face to the orderly and said, “Send a rider after Doctor Gaston. Tell them he’s needed. Hell, tell them they’re all needed, get all the surgeons back here.”

  Oates wanted to joke that it did sound awfully serious, but found he couldn’t speak.

  The surgeon sat there by him, maintaining the pressure. All he said to Oates was, “Don’t you stir.”

  Time jumbled itself, veering like a drunk between dreams and waking. Oates careened through long-forgotten memories, vivid, canted, wrenching.

  “Can’t die like this,” he muttered, or thought he did.

  Later, during a lucid spell, he heard many voices arguing over his treatment. They all seemed to agree that Doc Gaston should cut into him again and retie the artery.

  He heard Gaston’s reply clearly, as if spoken from a pulpit on a Sunday, august and irrefutable.

  “He’d die. He’s too weak, he’d sink under the weight of an operation.” The doctor paused. “He’s a good young man, fine officer. I want to save him, if possible.”

  “He’s going to die, anyway,” an unwelcome voice said. “Might as well try another ligature.”

  “I’m going to try compression.”

  “The rupture’s too powerful.”

  “Well, if he’s going to die, anyway … as you put it … I might as well try what I think’s for the best.”

  “Compression will never work.”

  For the first time in his life, Oates did not care what other men thought of him. He wanted to blurt out, “I can’t die like this. I can’t.” But his lips had no life left.

  “Mudd, take over the pressure. Until I get my coat off. Ruined the damned thing already.”

  “He’s gone,” somebody said.

  Oates had slipped deep into the realm of dreams, a place of brilliant light and of dark, unending corridors, of fractured memories and unearthly beckoning.

  He woke up the next afternoon, alive and clotted with gore.

  “Don’t you move one muscle,” Doc Gaston warned him. “Any antics from you and I’ll kill you myself.”

  Three thirty p.m., September 20

  Ninth Corps rear, Union lines

  “Ain’t that a pretty sight?” Levi Eckert asked Brown and the others nearby. “Have to wonder what the ladies would make of it.”

  In a little grove of trees well to the rear, the men of Company C stood about, mostly naked, between rows of packs and rifle stacks. Some of them lazed and some engaged in horseplay, like boys let out from school. Others bent over the troughs set up for them to wash themselves—taking a teasing if they bent over too far. A detail tended the cauldrons boiling their uniforms, hoping to cook the creatures in the seams. Another few men spread their uniforms on the grass to dry. They’d been issued new trousers, nothing else, and sorely needed undergarments and stockings.

  Still, Brown felt almost keen again. His splash-up had left him grubby still, but cleaner, almost tolerable. Mild air feathered over his bare skin, soothing the terrible chafing on his thighs.

  Sam Losch answered Levi: “If you are washing more and talking not so much, it’s better, I think.”

  “Soap, Levi.” Smiling, Brown held out a piece. “Try it, it’s a miracle.”

  “I been and washed.”

  “I recommend repetition.”

  “I’m cleaner than any Dutchman ever lived.”

  All were in good spirits, despite the banter, glad of the filthy water in the troughs. Glad to be relieved of duty for this day. And, at least in Brown’s case, glad to be back where a bit of green remained. The leaves in the grove were already browning off and the grass had been trampled, but enough lushness remained to lift his heart. In the three months since they’d arrived in front of Petersburg, the low green hills had been stripped of trees and the earth had been churned to make trenches and traverses, bombproofs and covered ways, until the stretch of land between the lines and for a good mile to the rear was nothing but ruptured dirt and clinging dust. It looked to Brown like Hell in the midst of a drought.

  The barrenness wore on men. On him. He dreamed of the wild-grown banks of the Schuylkill Canal.

  Didn’t help, either, that the stretch of line they’d drawn was one of the mean ones. Here and there, the men on picket duty from both sides agreed to conduct themselves peaceably, trading newspapers, coffee, and tobacco when the officers weren’t about and even warning the other side when trouble was headed their way. “Comity,” that was the word a colonel had used within Brown’s hearing. “We cannot permit such comity with the enemy.”

  If the word meant what Brown thought it might, he was all for it himself. On their stretch, the Reb sharpshooters were merciless. A man had to keep down, passing his days like a rat.

  He stretched his back and considered the oddity of the bodies before him, the flesh grub-white, except where red bites, boils, or carbuncles showed, and hair the more matted for being plied with water. They’d been washing themselves for over an hour, but every man was still foul, just a bit less so, as if they’d taken on dirt that would never come out. And it was strange to see faces, necks, and hands as brown as leather stuck on those pale scarecrows.

  “Well,” the first sergeant said to him, “maybe soon we go to do more fighting. They do this just for nice, letting us wash. And off we go.”

  “I haven’t heard anything.” Brown did wonder, though. It wasn’t like Grant to let the quiet last, they’d all learned that much, and it had been over three weeks since things had been lively. Even the Johnnies had only rustled cattle, if a lot of them. A battle had to be on its way, the weather was just too good for men not to fight. “Take what comes, Sam, all a man can do.”

  “I wash noch einmal. Then I go to see about the mail.”

  “Take your time,” Brown told the first sergeant. “You’ve earned a rest as much as any man. Ruhe dich doch,” he added in his canal Dutch.

  Brown was looking forward to the mail, though. He hadn’t heard from Frances in a week. He thought of her in each spare moment, proud and sorry at once that he had insisted on waiting for the war’s end to marry. He just didn’t want to leave a young widow, there were too many back home wrapped in black already.

  He sometimes feared that she might be too fine to be content as the wife of a boatman. Even one who owned his barge free and clear.

  Lord, he longed for the clean life he had lived, for muscles strained by honest work, not war. Even the memory of that one bad day, of the boy he’d killed when those fools attacked the first boat on which he’d worked, even that was nothing compared to what he’d seen since 1861. A brother dead, friends slaughtered, all the blood.

  Lieutenant George Brown wanted to go home. But he knew he wouldn’t, even given the chance. He would not leave these men until the end. So he did his duty as best he could and plodded through the Bible to please Frances.

  He’d been surprised at the details in the Gospels, finding Jesus a nice, impractical fellow who just didn’t understand the way people were.

  Major Schwenk trotted up on a new bay horse. When he spotted Brown, he steered over. The major looked as happy as if he’d just had a real bath in a tin tub. He wore a new frock coat, too, and appeared fully recovered from his wound.

  Somewhere along the lines, a band struck up. Then another let loose.

  Halting his horse, Schwenk said, “Had trouble making you out. In the guise of Adam.”

  “Ain’t pretty,” Brown allowed. The truth was that his nakedness embarrassed him. He’d always been on the shy side about such matters. The old hands on the canal had deviled him terribly during his learning years.

  “Hate to interrupt this county fair, but there’s news you’ll want to hear, it just came down.”

  Distant
hurrahs rippled. Something big was up.

  “We marching, Major?”

  Schwenk shook his head. His grin revealed the gap where he’d lost a tooth. “Nothing like that. Sheridan beat Jubal Early yesterday. Out in the Valley. Thumped the bejeezus out of him.”

  “Where?”

  “Near Winchester.”

  “Well, that’s good news, sir. That’s really good news.”

  “Not if you’re Robert E. Lee.” The major’s grin just wouldn’t go away. “Got to say, Brownie, I like the look of you better in a uniform. You must scare the devil out of the girls.” He glanced toward the cauldrons steaming under the trees. “Last time I had my own things boiled, it just gave the lice an appetite.”

  Six p.m., September 21

  Field headquarters, Cavalry Corps,

  Army of Northern Virginia

  Wade Hampton took the young man’s salute, then extended his hand.

  “Welcome to the Cavalry Corps, Major Hampton. The adjutant will assign your duties to you.”

  As he gripped the palm of his eldest son, Hampton felt a heady impulse to clutch him to his breast, to enfold this brawny, bearded likeness of himself in his arms as if young Wade were still an adored child. Instead, he released the hand he would gladly have held for an hour.

  Before the adjutant took his son captive, Hampton added, “We acknowledge rank strictly here, Major,” a claim that was not quite true. “Your rank will govern your relations with Lieutenant Hampton, of course.”

  Wade Hampton IV nodded respectfully. What does he feel? Hampton wondered. Again, he felt the urge to enclose his namesake in his arms, to kiss him in welcome and tell him, “Son, I’m proud of you, prouder than I can say.”

  “That will be all, Major,” Hampton told him. And he watched his scion go, revealing the uproar in his heart to no man. Later, when night fell, he would greet the boy warmly, allowing himself that indulgence. But he would not display the least favoritism, the least affection, before men he might order to their deaths.