Wilmoth spoke up again. "Mr. DuPont had something interesting there. I spoke to him a few days ago after you told me about the niter supply problem. It's guncotton."
Sharpe threw up his hands. "But I thought the British and Europeans had all given up on it because it was too unstable and dangerous."
"Mr. DuPont said he has heard that the British Army's chief chemist, Sir Frederick Abel, has made a serious advance in making guncotton safe."
McPhail asked, "What the hell is guncotton?"
Wilmoth said, "According to Mr. DuPont, it is a lightweight explosive made by soaking finely washed cotton treated with nitric and sulfuric aci .
"And why is this important?"
"Well, sir, it uses a lot less niter to make the nitric acid used in making guncotton than is used to make gunpowder."
Sharpe stood up suddenly. "You mean that our niter supply can be stretched almost indefinitely by making guncotton instead of gunpowder?"
"I think so, sir, but I'm no expert, and Mr. DuPont says it would take a lot more experimentation to turn it into a useful propellant, if it can be done at all."
"My boy!" Sharpe almost shouted, "We have the ..." He stopped in mid-sentence as he heard his name being shouted in alarm as footsteps ran up the hall. His chief telegrapher threw open the door. "General, New Orleans has fallen!"
HEADQUARTERS, ARMIES OF THE WEST, OUTSIDE CHATTANOOGA, 7:15 PM, OCTOBER 23, 1863
Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant sat on a stump with a cigar clenched in his teeth, reading the same telegraph message that had stunned Sharpe's telegrapher. Taylor had bounced into the city three days ago. The news had run along with the panic by escaping riverboat to Baton Rouge and from there to Port Hudson. The Navy had been able to carry off part of the garrison up river before the city fell.
His staff hung about him silent as the grave. He looked up and muttered to no one in particular, "How the hell did this happen? Where was Banks?" There had been no mention of Banks or his army. Grant was aware that he had marched west to meet the French. Grant had immediately wired him to pull back behind Brashear City and the city's marshy moat and not risk a battle. He did not trust Banks in an open fight with anyone who had his wits about him.
The forces at Grant's command after Vicksburg had been so powerful that the Union had ample freedom of strategic initiative. Now he was desperately short of men. Washington, at the instigation of Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, Lincoln's Army chief of staff, and a military pedant of the first order, had overridden his desires and sent his powerful XIII Corps under command of one of his best generals, Maj. Gen. E. O. C. Ord, off to support Banks in a mission of picking up loose change in western Louisiana and eastern Texas. Then the Copperhead rebellion had diverted Sherman's tough XVII Corps to the recapture of Chicago and the pacification of the Midwest. He had been promised the shrunken XI and XII Corps from the Army of the Potomac, but they had been held back with the British in New York and Maine. All he had been able to bring to the fight was XV Corps, and he had used it to drive a difficult route to the beleaguered garrison over the loop of the Tennessee River at Brown's Ferry. But all he had done was put off the day when the last hardtack was consumed. He had replaced Rosecrans, whose spirit had never recovered from his crushing defeat at Chickamauga, with Maj. Gen. George Thomas, an obdurate man who had fought the rearguard action that had saved the remnant of the army and earned him the epithet "The Rock of Chickamauga." He now vowed to hang on until they starved. Grant knew the last hardtack in Chattanooga would be a distant memory before Thomas asked for terms.
He leaned against a tree, lost in thought, one arm on his hip, his only movement an occasional puff on the cigar. His staff relaxed. Grant had the inexplicable talent to emanate calm force from his nondescript, almost shabby self, in powerful waves. The staff had an unshakable belief in his good judgment and determination. He was relentless in pursuit of success. So indisposed was he to retreat that he would not even backtrack while traveling, preferring to cut a new route even over the most difficult terrain.
Then he walked back to the stump, sat down, and pulled out his dispatch book and a pencil from his pocket. In a precise and calm hand, he began to write. Historians would later marvel at the neat and unhur ried handwriting of his dispatches, written even in the fiercest battles. The man simply could not be rattled. His ability to coldly focus even in the most hellish crisis had become legend. Finished, he gave it to his old friend and chief of staff, Col. John Rawlins. "Get this to Sherman immediately." Rawlins read it as he called for a telegrapher. "Join me with your corps at once. Turn over remaining pacification to state authorities and militia."
Grant got up and took Rawlins by the arm, "Now, John, let's see how we can get General Bragg to help us out."
"HOOKER'S DIVISION," WASHINGTON, D.C.'S RED-LIGHT DISTRICT, 9:33 PM, OCTOBER 23, 1863
No one noticed the little black boy gliding in the shadows between the brightly lit saloons and whorehouses in Washington's red-light district, known as Hooker's Division, a triple play on a nickname for the oldest profession, the bawdy general, and the unsavory reputation of his former headquarters. Jimmy was an expert and determined tracker in the urban jungle that had become wartime Washington. He had never had so much difficulty in tracking a man as the big, bearded man he has seen at Baker's that morning. Big Jim Smoke had a lifetime's experience of thuggery to hone his feral survival instincts. He could just sense his tail. If Jimmy hid in the shadows, Smoke disappeared time and time again in the crowds of soldiers and civilians that crowded the streets and wooden sidewalks or into one or another of the noisy, crowded saloons. But each time he slipped out, the shadow followed.
Jimmy was as relentless as he was careful. Sharpe's instructions had been clear. "Find out where he goes and whom he sees." He had picked up Miller's trail after the man had returned to Baker's office later that day. Now with the gas lamps flickering over the crowded street, he slipped into another shadow to wait the man's exit from Madame LeBlanc's, one of the middling whorehouses. He munched on an apple that Sergeant Wilmoth had given him as he bounded out of the BMI office, intent on Sharpe's instructions. He had the gift of patience and could wait and wait. This time he did not have to wait long. The big man pushed open the double swinging doors and looked about, then quickly strode down the sidewalk. The shadow followed.
The man abruptly turned into a darkened alley. Jimmy waited a moment and went into the darkness after him. His eyes were good in the dark, and his shoes so worn that they made no sound as he picked over the patches of bare ground between piles of garbage.
As good as his eyes were, they could not see around corners. No sooner had he glided around the edge of the building than an iron grip took him by the throat and lifted him into the air. He couldn't breathe. "Not so good, are you, nigger?" Jimmy would have screamed as the knife buried itself to the hilt in his chest and twisted, but the hand had his throat closed. He did not feel pain as the man threw his body against a wall.
AMERICAN ENTRENCHMENTS, PORTLAND, MAINE, 1:55 AM, OCTOBER 24, 1863
The early morning cold of a hard autumn seemed to bite to the bone. The breath of the entire Maine Division rose in vapor wisps as they stood silent in their ranks, broken down into their sequenced assault groups. Almost three thousand veteran men in blue and another two thousand militia, men hardened quickly in the two weeks of siege, waited behind the city's landward defenses. Two days of intensive preparation had readied them for the supreme effort - the sortie to break the siege.
The opportunity for such a desperate measure had leaped almost instantly into Chamberlain's mind when his interrogation of the Canadian lieutenant revealed how weak the force guarding the British fortifications was. He must strike before Doyle returned with his division. With luck, Sedgwick would win, and that would be the end to the threat to Portland. If not, then the sortie must succeed to give the garrison a new lease on life. Chamberlain had walked down the line past each assault group, encouraging the men in his reassuring way. They in t
urn encouraged him by their eagerness to do this thing.
It was time now. He looked at his watch by the light of a hooded lantern behind the earthen walls. He nodded to his regimental commanders who sped off to join their men. They did not have far to go. His ten regiments were now shrunk small and did not take up too much frontage. Besides, he had grouped them into three assault groups with one infantry regiment in reserve and the 1st Maine Cavalry ready to ride through any breach in the enemy's lines.
The front ranks, heavily reinforced with militia, carried fascines - that is, bundles of branches - to fill the ditch in front of the British positions. The militia was not expected to actually help carry the enemy works. They were told they could withdraw after they had thrown their fascines into the ditch. Following them were the dozens of ladder details to cross the filled-in ditches and plant their ladders against the six-foottall earthen wall. Behind them were the special assault teams chosen from the boldest men in each regiment.
Every piece of equipment that could make noise had been left behind or padded. No lights were allowed. It was an overcast and moonless night, pitch black even to men who had been out in it for hours, and a cold mist rose from the ground to further envelop them as they crossed the beaten zone between their own positions and the enemy's. It was a recipe for disaster. Night attacks were rare because the potential for failure was so great. Units would get lost and sent off in the wrong direction or arrive too late. It took the tightest control to even attempt a night attack, and to do so in such darkness would have been folly. To prevent that, the boys in each regiment-the drummers and fifers whose eyes were the sharpest-unrolled white bandages in the direction of the enemy to within yards of the ditch. The men would advance in their ranks, the man behind with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front.'
The mass of men began to move through the sortie breaches in the defenses in a muffled shuffle, the cold morning mist tingling their faces and freezing where it touched the metal of their rifles and fixed bayonets. Chamberlain moved with the center group. All three groups were focused on the enemy line held by the Canadian militia. The batteries of the Royal Artillery were avoided. The Canadians kept poor watch by and large, especially the newly raised battalions. The battalions Doyle had left behind were the most recently raised and had not soldiered long enough to have sink into their bones a great military sin- to fall asleep on guard. Early in the war, President Lincoln had had that problem brought home to him again and again as he had had to review the death sentences of new soldiers for just such failings. To the distress of his generals, he invariably pardoned these boys. The Canadians would have no such benefactor this night. The time of early morning had been chosen not only for the cloak of night, but also to take advantage of the time when the body demands to sleep.
It was a sound assessment, borne out as the first Union men reached the mist-shrouded ditch. The fascine men were brought forward to toss in their bundles and then fall back as the ladder details crossed the now filled-in ditch. But as the ancients liked to say, the gods are perverse. The sergeant of the guard of the 29th "Waterloo" Battalion, raised in Galt, Upper Canada, was no militiaman. Sgt. Henry Mocton had taken his discharge seven years ago from an Imperial battalion, one of the more savage schools of soldiering in the British Army. A struggling farm had improved his memories of "the Armye," and when Galt raised this battalion, he rushed to reenlist and put on the scarlet coat again. As the only veteran in the battalion, he had been much praised and had become even more disliked when these amateurs learned what real soldiering required.
At that moment, the ladder details began to move forward, Mocton's duty round took him to the guard station just above. He found Pvt. Alexander MacCauley sound asleep, huddled below the parapet all in a ball to keep warm. Mocton was about to wake him with a brutal kick when the two arms of a ladder fell upon the edge of the parapet. In moments a face appeared wearing a blue cap. In one fluid, unthinking movement, Mocton drove his bayonet through the man's left eye, twisted it, and withdrew. The body silently fell backwards and landed with a dull thud that brought cries from the men below. Mocton threw the guardpost torch over the side and looked. He could see a mass of moving shadows below and ladders to either side thick with climbing men. He pulled back, turned, cupped his hand to his mouth to shout the alarm-and choked. He looked down to see six inches of a bayonet protruding from below his breast, and then life went dark for him.
Chamberlain dropped over the parapet as the man ahead twisted his bayonet out of Mocton. Men would later say he was reckless beyond all measure for being at the point of the assault, but such a desperate enterprise needed the animating power of the leader at the spear tip to ensure that it continued to he driven home. The men in blue flowed into the advanced positions where the duty sections slept and roused them with rifle butts and the prick of bayonets in their backsides. The first shots rang out, then more, to his left and right down the line in the dark. Other parties had attacked the more alert Royal Artillery batteries from the flanks and found out how well the British gunners took to losing their guns. A gun boomed and then another. Here and there a militiaman had escaped into the dark, fleeing to his encampment in the rear. Chamberlain had drummed it into his regimental commanders that they were not to be delayed inside the enemy positions, but were to press on and overrun their camps where most of the enemy would be. The campfires and torches in the British works cast enough light for the assault groups to he reassembled and thrown forward through the dark to the lights of the Canadian camps.
There the militia had come groggily awake. That rarest thing in war, Napoleon's description of "two o'clock in the morning courage," was nowhere to be found. Panic ran through them as they desperately tried to dress and find their weapons. Ragged lines of half-dressed men began to form, but then when the battle lines of the Maine men emerged from the dark with bayonets leveled, the militia came apart. A few ragged shots got off, but the rest of them turned and ran into the night, the odd man still carrying his rifle. It would have been a presumption against human nature to have expected anything more from men whose military experience was measured in weeks. The same thing had happened to American troops two years ago when both Union and Confederate armies were just as green. The officers ran with the rest.
But a few men who were made of bolder stuff tried to stem the race to the rear. One such field officer yelled at a man who sprinted past him, "Why are you running, soldier?"
The men yelled back over his shoulder as he disappeared into the dark, "Because I can't fly!"2
SAMUDA BROTHERS' POPLAR SHIPYARD, PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND, 2:20 PM, OCTOBER 24, 1863
Lord Clarence Paget was seething behind a placid face. Her Majesty's sudden visit to the yard to inspect the construction of HMS Prince Albert was the last thing he or the Admiralty wanted, especially in company of that simpering courtier, Disraeli. Paget had rushed to Plymouth from London to be in attendance.
Victoria's visit was her first public appearance since the death of Albert, and had aroused the nation's interest in what had broken through her veil of deep mourning. The yard workers had wildly cheered her appearance, buoying her spirits. Disraeli had worked this wonder in persuading her to come, artfully explaining that in this time of national peril, Albert would have wanted her people to see their queen. He went on to say that there would be no better way than to support the project in which Albert had believed so deeply, Captain Coles's turret ironclad. It had taken all of his powers of persuasion to coax her from her shell.
Disraeli murmured to her, "See, mum, how they love their sovereign. They are delighted to see you amongst them again." Now the crowd began to chant, "Albert! Albert! Albert!" A suggestion to the builders from Disraeli had seeded the idea of this greeting as well as the suggestion of a paid holiday. Now Victoria glowed. The tribute to the love of her life brought public tears to her eyes for the first time in her reign of twenty-six years.
She was delighted at the flowers presented by the children of the
yard workers. She had been presented a mountain of flowers in her lifetime, but these seemed most beautiful of all. She was equally delighted to be introduced to Capt. Cowper Coles, the inventor in whom her husband had had such faith. Victoria had become an even greater partisan of this slim, forty-four-year-old naval officer with the long, luxurious blond beard. He escorted her up the Union Jack-draped ramp to the ship's main deck where sat the huge, black, round turret .3
Coles showed her through a hatch into the empty cavernous interior brightly lit with oil lamps. The deck mounts for the guns had been installed, but the guns themselves had not yet arrived. "Your Majesty shall see how easily this turret is rotated." At a signal, eighteen men below strained on a capstan to turn its bulk smoothly 360 degrees on its rollers in a minute.
Victoria was as delighted as a child on a merry-go-round. Without looking at him, she said, "Lord Paget, pray tell me how many such ships we are building."
"Your Majesty, we have almost two dozen ironclads under construction."
"With turrets, Lord Paget?"
"Only one, mum, Royal Sovereign and the former Confederate ship Severyn."
"Why only one?"
Paget was visibly squirming now. On cue, Victoria said, "Mr. Disraeli, what is your opinion?"
Disraeli explained, "Your Majesty, ships that rely on a web of masts and lines for most of their propulsion will find the movement of a turret greatly inhibited."
"Yet, Lord Paget, this 'web of masts and lines' did not serve us as well at Charleston as the American turrets." She was glad of Disraeli's explanation.
Disraeli 's face did not betray his intense amusement at Paget's distress. One tried to evade Victoria's probing questions at his own peril. He was sure to note that the dozen journalists lining the turret walls were taking down every word in shorthand 4
ST. LOUIS CATHEDRAL, NEW ORLEANS, 11:00 AM, OCTOBER 24, 1863
A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History Page 14