March Toward the Thunder

by Joseph Bruchac

  There Kirk and Devlin were, a few yards away leaning back to back, too tired to crack a joke or sing a note. Bull lay on his side next to them, worn out past complaining. And there was Corporal Hayes, sitting on a dead tree, staring at his boots. Sergeant Flynn was nowhere in sight. Louis closed his eyes.

  Suddenly Flynn’s voice boomed out near him and he jerked awake.

  “Boys,” Sergeant Flynn said, his voice even more disgusted than usual, “I’m back from getting the lay of the land. And here’s the grand news. We’re no more than an hour’s march from Petersburg. A sergeant friend who’s just come as a courier from near the front with Hancock tells me that our major general has vowed t’ shoot the next mapmaker he sees. The lovely directions we was given had us following roads what don’t exist t’ a destination well within the enemy lines. Our dear little map might have been drawn by General Robert E. Lee himself. By my calculations we just marched thirty-two miles t’ get to a place sixteen miles away and we’re not there yet. The only good news is that the courier knows the way back t’ Petersburg, so we’ll not get lost goin’ there.”

  Flynn paused, but Louis could tell he wasn’t done yet from the look on his face.

  “It gets better, doesn’t it?” Corporal Hayes asked.

  “Ye might say. It seems our Second Corps was expected t’ take part in the assault on the Rebel lines. Unbeknownst to any of us from General Hancock on down! And why did we not know that? Because our beloved Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, bless his heart, never saw fit t’ mention that t’ any of us, from the Snapping Turtle on down to our own General Winfield S. Hancock. In any event, that assault, t’ the surprise of all, actually met with some success. So General Smith decided it would be unfair to the poor dear Rebels to press the advantage by chasing them further.”

  “General Smith stopped the attack when he was winning?” Corporal Hayes said.

  “Bless his heart,” Flynn replied. “Givin’ the Johnnies time to regroup and reinforce. And now we’re t’ take part in a night assault on the great line around the city. No more than ten miles of forts and batteries and breastworks.”

  “Oh Lord!” Hayes said.

  For once there was not the hint of a question in his voice.

  “Indeed,” Sergeant Flynn replied.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS

  Thursday, June 16, 1864

  Just like always, things are not going as planned.

  As soon as they arrived, the Second Corps was sent in to take the place that had been held by Brigadier General Hincks and the USCT of the Eighteenth Corps.

  The USCT. That stood for the United States Colored Troops. The Eighteenth was one of the Union Army’s new regiments of Negro troops, most of whom had been slaves. Some had questioned whether men of color had the intelligence or courage to be good soldiers. But the black men in blue had led the first assault the prior evening with great valor. They’d overwhelmed the Confederate defenses before being ordered to reluctantly fall back and wait for Second Corps to renew the assault.

  But no order to attack was given. The night had passed, and the whole morning of the next day.

  As Louis checked his rifle and counted his cartridges yet again, he saw the shadow of a familiar presence moving up behind him.

  “Yes, sir, sergeant,” he said without looking up.

  “Nolette,” Flynn chuckled. “I’m sending ye off on a difficult and dangerous mission. One of me friends told me the commissary wagon has actually brought up some fresh fruit and vegetables. It’ll be yer job t’ bring back as much as ye kin of them rare delicacies.”

  No attack?

  Louis didn’t ask that question out loud, but Flynn read it from his face.

  “There’ll be a day or more before we take t’ the field again,” Flynn said. “That long march took more of a toll on our good General Hancock than it did on us. The great wound in his thigh he suffered at Gettysburg opened again. The poor man is sloughing out bits of bone. And so, Saints preserve us, the decision t’ attack or not rests alone on the shoulders of Old Baldy.” Flynn snuffed. “Our dear General Smith, who doubts that even the forty thousand good men in blue we’ve now gathered will be enough t’ breach the Rebel works.”

  Bon Dieu help us.

  The commissary wagons were just beyond the bivouac of the Eighteenth Corps. As Louis made his way, two empty sacks over his shoulder, he thought about the formidable fortifications they’d sooner or later be attacking

  The Dimmock Line.

  That was what the great ring of defense erected around the strategic railhead of Petersburg had been named—for the Southern engineer who’d designed it. The walls and trenches that had stopped them at Cold Harbor had been constructed in only a matter of days. The Dimmock Line had been more than two years in the building.

  Louis passed an awed group of Union engineers discussing the palisades, abatis, bombproofs, and redoubts that lay ahead of them.

  “No less than fifty-five separate redans,” an engineer lieutenant with blond muttonchops was saying.

  Redans, that’d be those thick-walled little forts along the length of the line, each one bristling like an angry porcupine with cannons for quills.

  As Louis continued on he realized that he was tapping his fingers on his ammunition pouch, keeping time to a song. It was coming from somewhere nearby—deep, melodic voices accompanied by hand-clapping.

  “Ain’t gonna turn around

  Ain’t gonna turn around

  We gonna take that ground

  We gonna take that ground”

  A group of twenty or more black soldiers making that music were there sitting on the grass. No doubt they’d been among the ones in the thick of battle the day before. Most had bandages wrapped around their limbs or their heads. But they were smiling as they sang.

  “Soldier,” a voice with a heavy Southern accent called to him, “y’all one of us’ns?”

  Louis turned to see not a Confederate, but a man in a uniform bluer and newer than his own. The man’s inquisitive smile shone from a young, friendly face only a shade darker than his own. Seeing how dark his own skin was, even browner now from sunburn and dirt, the man had mistaken Louis for a mulatto.

  “Nope,” Louis said, reaching out to shake the Negro soldier’s hand, “Indian. Louis Nolette, Company E of the Sixty-ninth.”

  “Indian?” the young man said in a delighted voice, pumping Louis’s hand. “A real Indian! My, oh my! My old granny, she is a Indian herself. Has them long braids and high cheekbones. Chickahominy from right roun’ these parts. She still livin’ in Petersburg, y’know. Matter of fact, I thought I’d be payin’ her a call just yesterday. And we would of done so if they hadn’t of called us back. Me and the boys in muh company, we had such a head of steam up that we was on our way to Richmond to tie a knot in old Jeff Davis’s tail. But I am forgettin’ muh manners. Private First Class Thomas Jefferson, of the Virginia Jeffersons and Tenth U.S. Colored of the Eighteenth.”

  “Pleased,” Louis said. He liked the warm, rich voice and the demeanor of Private Thomas Jefferson. Self-confident with a sense of humor. He was as tall and broad-shouldered as Louis. Despite his dark skin, though, the man’s patrician features were more like those of a white man.

  Jefferson? Does that mean . . . ?

  “Now you might be wonderin’,” Private Jefferson continued, guessing the question that was forming in Louis’s mind, “about muh name. I ‘spect you might be thinkin’ I’m fixin’ to claim that one of the Foundin’ Fathers of this fine nation was muh great-grandfather.” Jefferson chuckled. “Well, sir, I am not. Nossir, not at all. Massah Tom’s brother was a little faster getting to the slave quarters that night. So I can only claim President Thomas Jefferson as muh uncle.”

  Louis smiled.

  Private Jefferson had not yet let go of Louis’s hand. “Now, what was it you said your name was, sir?”

  “Louis Nolette, just Louis.”

  “Lou
is, my friends call me just Jeff, seeing as how Mr. President is such a mouthful.”

  Louis’s smile turned into a grin. “Like to walk with me for a spell, Jeff?”

  “Muh pleasure, Louis.”

  As the two young men strolled through the camp, Jeff kept talking. Before long, they joined the long line of soldiers in front of the commissary wagons. As they inched their way forward, Louis’s listening drew out the story of the previous day’s battle and the fortifications that faced them.

  “Now that line of forts there,” Jeff said, one hand on Louis’s shoulder as he pointed toward the west, “you know who did mos’ uh thuh buildin’ of them? Me and about two thousand other men wid skins as black as mine. A year ago, thas where ah was, breakin’ my back wid a pick and shovel. Whilst Captain Dimmock was givin’ high and mighty orders about what to put here and what to move there to make that line of his im-pregnable.”

  Jeff held out his broad right hand palm up and used the index finger of his left to trace a shape. “Fifty-five artillery batteries along a ten-mile stretch. Fum here to here. And ever’ one of um set up like its own little fort with them twenty-four-pounder siege guns. So me and mos’ of thuh other men in muh company, all being fum aroun’ here before we all decided to take French leave and put on this fine blue uniform, we knows jus’ where to go when they sets us to fighting. We knows evah weak spot, evah ditch. Fust thing we does, we takes to this ravine between batteries Seven and Eight.”

  Jeff traced one of the lines in his palm. “And where did that come out? Right behind battery Nine, which we took without hardly a shot.”

  Their two-hour assault had been so fierce that the U.S. Colored Troops of the Eighteenth took no fewer than five of the seven batteries captured that evening by the Union. Despite Jeff’s modest words about how easy it had been, Louis had already heard that the Colored Troops had encountered more than a little resistance. Their own casualties had been over 150 men as they rolled back an entire mile of the Dimmock Line.

  Jeff chuckled. “They was running like chickens fum a fox,” he said. “’N’ well they might. When you’s a boy in gray and you sees a bunch a’ angry black men wid guns and bayonets comin’ at you yellin’ ‘Remember Fort Pillow!’ well, you better take to your heels!”

  Fort Pillow, Tennessee.

  Louis had read the newspaper stories about what happened there just three months ago. Rebel General Nathan Bedford Forrest, said to hate freed Negroes more than any other man in Dixie, had captured that fort along the Mississippi River. Of the 570 troops in the federal garrison, 262 had been Negro soldiers.

  The Union commander of the fort, seeing how outnumbered they were, had surrendered almost at once. But then, either at Forrest’s orders or because he turned a blind eye, the Rebel soldiers had begun shooting down unarmed black men with their hands raised. The final toll at Fort Pillow had been 231 Union dead—most of them black.

  “Before we went into battle,” Jeff said, his voice a reverent whisper now, “we all knelt down and took us a holy vow. Alluhs remembah Fort Pillow.”

  Louis nodded. “I understand.”

  As much as he’d grown to hate this war, Louis found himself remembering again one of the reasons he had been willing to volunteer. The best reason of all.

  No human being should ever own another person.

  Jeff slapped his palms together as if killing a mosquito. “’N’ then, when we had ’em running, they called us off. We could of kep’ goin’ and taken that whole line. Why’d they go and do that? Didn’t they want us black men to win their war for um? We could see those Rebs didn’t have even half what they needed to defend against us. We could see down the line that there was batteries just standin’ empty but they wouldn’t let us take um!”

  He pointed again toward the Dimmock Line. “You know what they’s doin’ now over there? They’s rushin’ in men by that Norfolk and Petersburg rail line, reinforcin’ what was weak. By the next time our generals finally gets up the nerve for anuddah attack, those Rebs is goin’ to be ready. Where that line was made uh sand last night, tomorrow it is goin’ to be iron. I do pity the next soldiers on our side who are goin’ up agin’ that line. They goin’ to be cut to ribbons.”

  And those next soldiers sent against that line, those’ll be us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ATTACK AT ALL HAZARDS

  Saturday, June 18, 1864

  “Men,” Sergeant Flynn said, “Corporal Hayes and I have one command we’d like ye to be listenin’ for. Corporal?”

  “Down!” Hayes yelled.

  Louis and all of the other men of E Company, veterans and new faces alike, dropped as one onto their bellies.

  “Fine,” Flynn said. “Ye can hop back up again, me lovelies. But don’t be getting up till ye hear me or the corporal ask ye to do so. If ye hear the bugle blowin’ the attack, stay where ye are. Even if ye have some fine big officer with all sorts of bars and braids on his clean blue uniform hollerin’ at ye from back behind the parapet, pay the man no heed. And when yer down there don’t be lifting up and looking about. Just roll to yer backs if you need to reload. That way ye might come out of this blessed thing with all the limbs and heads the good Lord saw fit to give us.”

  Two more days had passed without a major federal assault on the Dimmock Line. Now it was the afternoon of June 18.

  The whole of Meade’s mighty Army of the Potomac, 100,000 strong, was just sitting back on its haunches like a balky mule refusing to pull the plow no matter how hard its master whipped it with the reins and hollered giddyup.

  Even a common private like me can see clear as spring water that we’re stalled.

  The federal generals, it seemed, could not get together on anything.

  Burnside and his Ninth Corps wanted to attack one minute and not the next.

  Birney, as the newest commander of all, was waiting for others to decide.

  Hancock was still out of action with his old wound bleeding.

  And the most hesitant of all was Old Baldy Smith. He’d believed for so long the false rumors that large numbers had reinforced the Rebel trenches that by now they were likely true.

  To put it plain, everyone from the top down was remembering just one thing. Cold Harbor.

  No wonder Sergeant Flynn is shaking his head at the foolishness of it. We milled around like a herd of sheep while those Rebels had time to get ready to give us a hot welcome. It’s like waiting all spring and summer to plant a crop and not deciding to put it in till it’s time for first frost.

  Just yesterday, Joker had expressed it well. “You might say that our Grand Army of the Republic appears to of been infected by politeness. You attack first, General Burnside. Oh no, after you, General Smith, I insist. Like a bunch of naughty schoolboys, not wanting to be the first through the schoolhouse door to get paddled.”

  But not today, Louis thought. The Snapping Turtle finally had enough. Meade’s orders left no doubt about what was to be done.

  Flynn had shared the gist of the orders with them.

  “‘Findin’ it impossible to effect cooperation by appointing an hour for attack,’ says the major general’s order, ‘I have sent a message t’ each field commander to attack at all hazards and without reference t’ each other.’”

  Flynn looked at the men in the company. Then lifting his hands up as if holding a piece of paper between them, he mimed the gesture of crumpling that paper between his palms and tossing it over his shoulder.

  “Forward march.”

  With Devlin to his left, Kirk to his right, and Belaney just behind him, Louis started to walk, one of thousands of anxious men.

  I wonder where Artis is. Somewhere off there to the side of us, where the Legion flags are flying? Great Creator, watch over me and my friends.

  As they passed the artillery batteries, a few of the cannoneers shouted “Huzzah!” and took off their hats. Most, though, stood silent or shook their heads at the thought of what lay ahead for the dumb infantrymen.


  “You fixing to charge them works?” a crew member holding a rammer called to them.

  “Nossir,” Joker answered back. “Our plan’s to start at a trot, turn, and head back at full gallop. We had enough of earthworks at the Bloody Angle and Cold Harbor.”

  Joker’s voice was loud enough for their officers to hear, but not a one of them turned a head in his direction or said a word.

  Louis looked up at the clear sky. From where the sun stood it was about four p.m. They were still on the safe side of the federal earthworks. Major General Birney was out in front of them now, telling the officers how to mass the brigade for its attack on the Rebel center.

  We’re too late and we all know it, Louis thought, glancing at the grim faces around him. Three days ago, we might’ve pushed through all the way to Richmond. Now there’s been time for the Confederates to bring up enough men to turn the field ahead into a killing ground.

  Four lines. The first two, where the men of the Irish Brigade were placed, was made up of veteran units. The two behind were the First Maine and the First Massachusetts. Heavy artillery regiments converted into infantry to make up for the immense losses of the past weeks.

  Men who’ve not seen this sort of fighting before.

  “Lads,” Sergeant Flynn growled as he walked backward in front of their line, “soon as yer over the top, ye know what to do. Then wait for my command!” Sergeant Flynn looked over at Corporal Hayes. There was no expression on Hayes’s face, but he nodded quicker than usual in agreement with the sergeant’s words.

  “Over the top, men!”

  Louis wasn’t sure which of the saber-waving officers gave that command, but all of E Company followed it without hesitating. Though when they reached the top of their works they all dove to their stomachs with such speed that they looked more like a great line of swimmers than an attacking army. A few shots popped from the Rebel line. Then it was quiet. No further response from the soldiers in gray a hundred yards away.