The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (George Washington Series)

by Newt Gingrich

  “I want this war over just as much as you do. For what it is worth from a newspaperman, you have my oath I’ll not breathe a word of what I’m thinking.”

  Pleasants did not reply.

  “I’ll say no more, sir. My offer stands. Report me if you wish when we get to City Point. I’ll be camped with the men of the Fourth Division if you decide not to, but then change your mind later.”

  Pleasants seemed to hesitate and then finally spoke.

  “What do you think of those colored soldiers?”

  “Sir?”

  “Is this some sort of stunt by the Abolitionists? I’ve heard mixed reports. Everyone knows about the charge of the 54th Massachusetts last year down in front of Charleston. They were courageous in the face of entrenched firepower. It was good press at least, but by God, they got slaughtered for nothing. Then, on the other side you hear reports that they panic easy, that if they don’t have their white officers telling them what to do every step of the way they break down and run. What do you think of them?”

  It was the most Pleasants had said to him on either leg of this journey.

  “I think they’re trying very, very hard to be good soldiers,” James replied, after thinking it over for a moment. “Better than some, not so good as others. None of them have seen the elephant, of course, so they are all fresh fish. But on the whole I’d stack them up alongside any white regiment in this army who were going into their first fight.”

  “Will they charge into Hell, if ordered?” Pleasants asked and then he seemed to draw back slightly, as if knowing he had just said far too much.

  Reilly looked at him closely. The moment was ironic, for the steamer was rounding the great bend of the Potomac past the run-down mansion of General Washington. He was a man who had owned slaves, and yet by the end of the Revolutionary War, had agreed to the enlistment of thousands of colored troops into the ranks.

  “They have something driving them we don’t have,” James finally said.

  “And that is?”

  “They have to prove something.”

  Pleasants did not reply, as if wanting more.

  “Look, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Well maybe for you it isn’t as much, but for me it is.”

  “How is that?”

  “I’m from Ireland,” and he forced a smile. “Accident of birth not of choice, believe me. My parents brought me to these shores when I was fourteen back during the famine. Me ma…”

  He paused, realizing he was drifting into dialect, “My mother died on the passage over. My father remarried and we moved to a godforsaken place called Chicago where he took work on the railroads. There was no place for me with them, so I lit out.”

  He smiled.

  “I found a kindly lawyer who allowed me to sleep in his office in exchange for keeping it clean, plus four bits a week, which was all he could afford back then, and that was where my life started in a way.”

  “Kindly lawyer?” Pleasants laughed and then spat over the railing. “That’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one.”

  James did not know the meaning of the word, but he caught the sense of it and continued to smile.

  “There are a few, a precious few. The point is, we Irish have had to claw every inch of the way for what this country claims is the right of all men, but those rights get forgotten by a lot of people once they get those rights for themselves.”

  Pleasants said nothing, but James could see his words might sound like preaching.

  “All I am saying is, you asked me if they would charge into Hell. And I say, hell yes. The same way the Irish Brigade charged and died at Fredericksburg.”

  “Ghastly fight,” Pleasants sighed. “I was there.”

  “So was I, and I wept at the sight of it, the memory of it.”

  It would haunt him for the rest of his life, the way those men cried, “Erin go bragh,” as they swept up the blood-soaked slopes of Marye’s Heights, died nearly to a man, and gained immortal glory and perhaps, just perhaps, the first step to the realization of many that the Irish were as much Americans as anyone else. He had personally carried the drawings of that charge back to New York, slammed them on his editor’s desk, and was not ashamed of the fact that, in tears, he begged the man to print them, which he did. His everlasting shame in a way was that he had not gone in with his brothers from Erin and instead had fought that battle with just a pencil and a stick of charcoal in his hand.

  “What I’m trying to say”—He realized his voice was slightly choked and was angry that emotion was getting the better of him. “I’m trying to say that the men of the Fourth Division have a fire in them. The first battle will most likely quench it, as it does with most regiments. Oh, they’ll fight after that to be certain, but like all veterans, they will do so as their sworn duty, not with that fire of idealism in them. Those colored soldiers will charge into Hell because by going to Hell, if need be, they will prove they are men and as that Frederick Douglass of theirs said, with rifle in hand they will prove their right of citizenship to the entire world.”

  James fell silent and realized his voice had pitched upward and several others were looking over at him. A couple of them snickered; he heard a whispered laugh of “Damn, stupid darkies will run all right, straight in the opposite direction, to the rear.” He turned but the man who said those words would not identify himself.

  But one did nod and smiled.

  “Bully for you, I’m with you, Irish,” he announced, shook James’s hand, and then after shooting a telling glance at another officer, walked off toward the bow of the ship.

  James looked back at Pleasants.

  The colonel stood silent in the shadows and then finally replied.

  “I pray to God you are right.”

  Without another word to James, he walked, off as did the other officers around him.

  James was tempted to offer a taunt that he had a good quart of store-bought Irish whiskey in his haversack and would drink it with a man who would drink to the Fourth or the Ninth, but he knew better. No point in starting a personal fight on the deck of a boat going back to the war.

  Summer darkness had descended. By dawn, they would be rounding Fortress Monroe and by midday be back at City Point. The quart should last him till then, he thought, and curling up in a corner between two barrels, filled with what he suspected was whiskey bound as priority shipment to some headquarters staff, he uncorked the bottle and rationed out his first long drink.

  It helped to still the memories, and he was soon asleep.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Abraham Lincoln leaned back in his chair, scanning the papers and maps, turning them over one by one and then, at last, placing them back on his desk.

  “Do you honestly think this will work?” he asked.

  General Grant, who had sat while his President evaluated the proposal, was silent for a moment.

  They had gone over why Sherman was stalled in front of Atlanta, the southern campaign wearily dragging into a third month, with no end in sight. The utter fiasco of an entire army venturing up the Red River out in Louisiana and Arkansas, rather than marching east to take Mobile as ordered, had been passed over. It was an embarrassment to Grant that a general in charge of an entire army had claimed to have misread orders and set off 180 degrees opposite from where he was supposed to go. In front of Charleston that pathetic siege continued without any end in sight. That the Rebels were dug in like ticks on a hound was now a well-worn and overused analogy.

  The only hope of a shift of fortunes before the Republican and Democrat conventions, and with that any hope of winning the national election come November, rested on Petersburg, and what Grant had just shown him was the most radical of plans to end it.

  “I will admit, Mr. President, I have not studied it as closely as I could have. I have delegated that to General Meade, who is in direct command of that army. But I think there is at least a chance of success.”

  Lincoln nodded.

  “From some of your questions, sir,�
� Grant ventured, “it seems you have had some foreknowledge of this idea.”

  Lincoln just smiled and said nothing.

  Grant did not probe further, for it was not his place to do so. That was something Lincoln appreciated about him. He knew how to give honest straightforward answers without any “varnish,” but also knew when not to ask or push. Grant was unlike so many of his generals, especially McClellan, whom he would undoubtedly face in the fall election.

  “I feel it is time to make a few things absolutely clear,” Lincoln finally replied. As he spoke, he raised his long legs and put them up on his desk, folded his lanky arms over his stomach and leaned back in his chair, with the forelegs rising off the floor so that he was perfectly balanced. Somehow, however, this casual gesture did not diminish his authority in the slightest.

  “If this fails, it could turn into an absolute slaughter, could it not? The same as happened at Cold Harbor?”

  Grant visibly winced at the mention of that fight.

  “Yes, sir, it could.”

  “The lead division annihilated?”

  Grant did not reply verbally but finally nodded his head.

  “Choose them well then,” Lincoln replied. “Please let General Meade know that the lead division of the assault must be the best possible to assure success. This scheme carries one of two things with it: either the promise of a success that just might end this war before the elections, and thus assure the survival of the Union, or a disaster that will end any chance of this administration continuing into next year. I speak not for myself, General; you should know me well enough now to know how I view myself in relationship to this. It is about saving our Union and that is the task I have entrusted to you because I totally trust you.”

  Grant nodded, saying nothing.

  “And you have delegated the details of this to General Meade?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why so? From the Wilderness on through you have often taken direct command of the Army of the Potomac.”

  “That was in the heat of action, sir, and frankly, at times I could not restrain myself. This, in contrast, is, what they used to call at West Point, a ‘set piece battle,’ one planned weeks in advance, something quite rare in this current war. Meade will have plenty of time to evaluate it, and besides, I cannot predict where I might be needed three weeks from now. I chose to place my headquarters in the field with the Army of the Potomac when the spring campaigns started, but circumstances might require me to decamp and move instead to Atlanta if need be.”

  He fell silent. The implication was clear. Sherman was his closest friend and ally in the field; otherwise Grant would never have entrusted his old command to him when called to Washington to take command of all armies in the field. But, if there should be a reversal there, or lack of a clear indication that progress was being made on that front, Grant might find it necessary to go and take back direct command, thus leaving Meade in complete charge of the events unfolding before Petersburg.

  “Well enough, then.”

  Lincoln took his feet off the desk, picked the plans up, and thumbed through them once more.

  He looked back at Grant.

  “Please, General, no mistakes this time. No politics, jealousies, rivalries, or decisions based on blind prejudice. I know you understand me. Please ensure that General Meade knows it as well.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If we do not win the war with this one, General, I fear the backlash could be such that the country, the American people, might very well give up, and we will then lose the Union.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA

  JULY 7, 1864

  “Are we ready?” Colonel Pleasants whispered.

  His team was gathered around the observation position carefully prepared during the night. He had decided to shoot the angles precisely at dawn. The air was usually still then, and his veterans had pointed out that after midday the angle of the sun was such that light would glint off the lens of the theodolite and he might well be greeted a few seconds later by a .58 minié ball.

  They had measured the first angle fifty yards to the right of the tunnel the morning before without incident. During the day he had made precise measurements down the length of the tunnel, finding that the crude instruments he had used when earlier measuring the angle and climb of the tunnel had deviated nearly three feet, which was being corrected now. This morning he would shoot the next angle fifty yards to the left of the mouth of the tunnel. Both distances had been laid out precisely with measuring rods rather than tape, so he would finally be able to report back to Burnside that they were proceeding with exactitude.

  Captain Hurt would act as spotter a dozen yards to his left, watching for any hint of movement along the Rebel line, warning of any sharpshooter on the other side. With him were three enlisted men, one of them Corporal Stan Kochanski, whom Pleasants had already slated, in the back of his mind, for promotion to second lieutenant. Kochanski was diligent and had an excellent background in trigonometry, took care of the delicate instruments, and would note down his angles as he whispered them out.

  Pleasants took a deep breath.

  “Let’s do it,” he announced.

  He ever so slowly pulled the canvas curtain, coated in red clay, away from the lens of the theodolite. He and Stan had checked and rechecked that it was absolutely level, the plumb line resting directly above the marker stake, laid out the evening before so that they were exactly 163 feet from the center of the entry to the mine, 3 extra feet having been added because of a slight rise in the trench line where a sharpshooter’s position had already been dug in.

  Colonel Pleasants leaned over, sighting through the scope ever so slowly, raising the elevation on the theodolite till he was sighted at the base of the fort. Next, he slowly traversed it to align directly with the center line of Fort Pegram, locked the hold-down screw in place, and then carefully raised the elevation angle a little more than a degree. It was hard to judge—constant artillery fire had rent the grand before the fort—but he felt he had a good shot on actual ground level and not the rising ground of the parapet itself.

  “Mark,” he hissed.

  His assistant, kneeling by his side, noted down traverse and elevation and reconfirmed that the compass was set exactly.

  He spared a look down to make sure the corporal got it right and took one more sighting just in case either of them had brushed against the delicate instrument, mounted on a heavy tripod, and had thrown the observation off.

  He reached over and pulled the curtain shut. He would have preferred to take a second shot after waiting a few minutes, just to be sure, but knew that would indeed be pressing his luck.

  “Captain Hurt, you can step down,” and he turned to look over to the young officer, who was spotting for him against sharpshooters.

  Hurt started to turn his head, smiling with relief, when at that exact instant the side of his head shattered, blood and gray matter spraying against the opposite wall of the trench.

  “Merciful God!” Pleasants cried, ducking down as a bullet pierced the canvas screen, slipping past Pleasants’s face by no more than a few inches. Tripping backward, he nearly knocked over the precious theodolite, but Kochanski reached over the tripod and, cradling it, pulled the instrument away from the canvas screen. Even as he fell, Pleasants noted the boy had made the right move, grabbing the precious instrument rather than trying to block his officer’s fall. The bullet had creased the wood on one side of the tripod, but the brass mounting and the surveying tool itself had not been hit.

  Pleasants scrambled over to Hurt, but knew the man was already dead.

  “You goddamn sons of bitches!” one of the enlisted men, who had been standing back watching their commander at work, screamed. He stepped to the place Hurt had been just seconds before, poked his rifle through, and fired a shot blindly toward the fort.

  He wisely ducked back as several more rounds zipped overhead, one of them striking the dirt where Hu
rt had stood.

  “We warned ya, Yank,” a reply came. “We un’s got orders to shoot. No truce here.” There was a pause for a moment. “Ever since we heard you got darkies with ya now.”

  Pleasants was kneeling by Hurt’s side. He had seen hundreds of men die in battle, but this lad had been close to him. He had been a good adjutant, brave, had survived every action since New Bern without a scratch … and now to die like this?

  Corporal Kochanski was still clutching the theodolite. Thank heavens he grabbed it, Pleasants thought, in spite of his grief. For even though he had finally worked out a proper measurement to the fort, he still needed it to check direction and angle of slope within the tunnel. The boy was pale faced, staring at Hurt and the pool of blood spreading onto the dirt floor of the trench from his shattered skull. He began to sway.

  Pleasants jumped to his side and grabbed the instrument. Kochanski tried to mutter a thanks, then collapsed in a heap, fainting dead away.

  The men around them were silent. The boy was “fresh fish,” and this was the first time he had seen someone take a head shot. All of them, long ago, had been fresh fish as well.

  Pleasants knelt down, unbolting the theodolite from the tripod, carefully putting it into its velvet-lined carrying box, and snapped the lid shut.

  “A couple of you boys keep an eye on our young corporal there; help him back to headquarters when he comes around. Find a stretcher detail for Captain Hurt as well.”

  There were quiet nods of acceptance of his orders. He took the precious notebook, with all the calculations, out of Kochanski’s clammy hands. Crouching low, he headed to the communications trench to the rear, leaving it to others on his staff to take care of the measuring rods, compass case, and tripod.

  He wanted to get the final measurements calculated immediately and then double-check them. And he had yet another letter to write to someone’s parents back home.

  FORT PEGRAM

  A couple of men were still chortling about Allison’s incredible shot, but he said nothing. He had actually focused his Whitworth on the target a dozen feet to the left when the man, who looked to be peering through some sort of strange telescope, had closed the canvas curtain. It had only taken a moment to swing to the second man and finally squeeze off a round after a long twenty-four hours of being told by Captain Sanders to just observe and not shoot.