Alternate Heroes

by Gregory Benford

  It had been his dread, these years he’d served the Confederacy, that he would encounter some old soldier who remembered serving alongside the eighteen-year-old Private Edgar A. Perry. His fears had never been realized, fortunately, but he had read everything he could on Byron and the Greek War of Independence in hopes he would not be tripped up by the curious.

  “Ah,” Poe said. He pointed with his stick. “The men are moving.”

  “A brilliant sight, sir.” Moses’s eyes shone.

  Calls were rolling up the line, one after another, from Barton on the left to the Ravens next in line, then to Corse—all Virginia brigades—and then to Clingman’s North Carolinians on the right. Poe could hear the voices distinctly.

  “Attention, battalion of direction! Forward, guide centerrrrmarch!”

  The regiments moved forward, left to right, clumps of skirmishers spreading out ahead. Flags hung listlessly in the damp. Once the order to advance had been given, the soldiers moved in utter silence, in perfect parade-ground formation.

  Just as they had gone for that cemetery, Poe thought. He remembered his great swell of pride at the way the whole division had done a left oblique under enemy fire that day, taking little half-steps to swing the entire line forty-five degrees, and then paused to dress the line before marching onward.

  Sweeping through tendrils of mist that clung to the soldiers’ legs, the division crossed the few hundred yards of ground between the entrenchments and the forest, and disappeared into the darkness and mist.

  Poe wondered desperately if he was doing the right thing.

  “Did you know Byron, sir?” Moses again.

  Poe realized he’d been holding his breath, anticipating the sound of disaster as soon as his men began their attack. He let his breath go, felt relief spreading outward, like rot, from his chest.

  “Byron died,” he said, “some years before I went abroad.”

  Byron had been feeding worms for forty years, Poe thought, but there were Byrons still, hundreds of them, in this army. Once he had been a Byron himself—an American Childe Harold dressed in dramatic black, ready with the power of his mind and talent to defeat the cosmos. Byron had intended to conquer the Mussulman; Poe would do him better, with Eureka, by conquering God.

  Byron had died at Missolonghi, bled to death by his personal physician as endless gray rain fell outside his tent and drowned his little army in the Peloponnesian mud. And nothing had come of Byron in the end, nothing but an example that inspired thousands of other young fools to die in similar pointless ways throughout the world.

  For Poe the war had come at a welcome moment. His literary career had come to a standstill, with nine thousand seven hundred fifty-one copies of the Complete Tales sitting in his lumber room; his mother-in-law had bestirred herself to suggest, in kind but firm fashion, that his literary and landscaping projects were running up too fantastic a debt; and his relations with Evania—on Poe’s part at least —were at best tentative.

  When Virginia seceded and Maryland seemed poised to follow, Poe headed south with Sextus, a pair of fine horses, equipage, a curved Wilkinson light cavalry sword, Hardee’s Tactics, a brace of massive nine-shot Le Mat revolvers, and of course the twelve hundred in gold. He kissed Evania and his beloved Mrs. Forster farewell—within a few months he would return with an army and liberate Shepherd’s Rest and the rest of Maryland. He, as well as Byron, could be martial when the cause of liberty required it. He rode away with a singing heart.

  Before him, as he woke in his bed his first night in Richmond, he saw his vision, the benevolent madonna giving him her benediction. In going south he was being, he thought, faithful to Virginia; and he hoped to find the spirit, as well as the name, of his lost love embodied in the state to which he swore allegiance.

  Jefferson Davis was pleased to give a colonel’s commission to a veteran of the wars of Greek liberation, not to mention a fellow West Pointer—the West Point story, at least, being true, though Poe did not remind the President that, because the horrid Allan refused to support him, Poe had got himself expelled from the academy after six months.

  There was no regiment available for the new colonel, so Poe began his military career on the staff of General Joseph E. Johnston, commanding in the Shenandoah Valley. He occupied himself by creating a cypher for army communications which, so far as he knew, had survived three years unbroken.

  Johnston’s army moved east on the railroad to unite with Beauregard’s at First Manassas, and there Poe saw war for the first time. He had expected violence and death, and steeled himself against it. It gave him no trouble, but what shocked him was the noise. The continual roll of musketry, buzzing bullets, shouted orders, the blast of cannon, and the shriek of shells—all were calculated to unstring the nerves of a man who couldn’t abide even a loud orchestra. Fortunately he was called upon mainly to rally broken troops—it had shocked him that Southern men could run like that—but in the end, after he’d got used to the racket, he had ridden, bullets singing over his head, in the final screaming, exhilarating charge that swept the Yankee army from the field, and he could picture himself riding that way forever, the fulfillment of the Byronic ideal, sunset glowing red on the sword in his hand as he galloped north to Maryland and the liberation of his home…

  Maryland never managed to secede, somehow, and Poe’s Byronic liberation of his home state had to be postponed. Via blockade-runner, Poe exchanged passionate letters with his wife while remaining, in his heart, faithful to Virginia.

  At the horrible, bungled battle of Seven Pines the next year, Major General Daniel Harvey Hill made a properly Byronic, if unsupported, attack against McClellan’s left and lost half his men, as well as one of his brigadiers. Poe was promoted and given the shattered brigade. Joe Johnston, during the same battle, had been severely wounded, and the Army of Northern Virginia now had a new commander, one Robert E. Lee.

  It did not take Poe long to discover that the ferocious, dyspeptic Harvey Hill was both an ignoramus and a lunatic. Before more than a few days had passed, neither spoke to the other: they communicated only in writing. Poe broke the Yanks’ wigwag signal code, which didn’t mean much at the time but was of help later, at Second Manassas.

  But by then Poe was not with the army. Only a few days after taking command, Lee went on the offensive, and Poe, supported by exemplary reasoning and logic, refused point-blank Harvey Hill’s order to take his brigade into Boatswain Swamp.

  Now, after three years of war, almost all the American Byrons were dying or had been shot to pieces. Jeb Stuart, Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, Dick Garnett, Ewell, Hood, now Longstreet—all dead or maimed.

  And Edgar A. Poe, leaning on his stick, a sick ache throbbing in his thigh, knew in his heart that Byron’s death had been more merciful than anyone had known.

  He had written the eulogy himself, never knowing it at the time: But he grew old—/This knight so bold—/And o’re his heart a shadow/Fell as he found/No spot of ground/That looked like Eldorado.

  Byron’s eulogy. Poe’s, too. Stuart’s, everyone’s.

  “Forty years dead,” he said. “We have other poets now.”

  “Yourself, of course,” said Major Moses, “and Tennyson.”

  “Walter Whitman,” said Poe. The name left a savage, evil taste in his mouth.

  “Obscene.” Moses shivered. “Filth.”

  “I agree.”

  “You have denounced him yourself.”

  “Repeatedly.”

  Poe stared at the dark trees that had swallowed up his entire division. How many, he wondered, would come out of those woods nevermore? Sickness welled up inside him. In another minute he might weep. He turned and shouted for Sextus to bring him a chair.

  The first edition of Leaves of Grass had happily escaped his notice. The second edition, with the preface by Emerson, had been sent to him for review at the Southern Gentleman. He had denounced it. Whitman and Emerson replied; Poe printed their replies and returned fire, and the fight went on for ye
ars, a war that prefigured the more deadly one begun in 1861.

  A showdown, he had thought triumphantly. He had long distrusted the New England clique and feared their grip on the North American Review—the fact that they regarded the pedestrian and bourgeoise Longfellow as a genius was reason enough for distrust. But now the south had its own literary magazine; Poe was no longer dependent on the approval of New England literary society for employment and regard.

  Whitman, he wrote, knew nothing of versification. Whitman thought prostitutes and steam engines and common laborers fit subject for verse. Whitman knew nothing of the higher truths, of the sublime. Whitman filled his verses with the commonplace, with references so mundane and contemporary that in a hundred years no one would know what he was talking about. Whitman did not even look like a literary man. In the ambrotype used as a frontispiece, Whitman was dressed only in his shirt, looking like a farmer just come in from the fields, not an elevated, rarified, idealized creature—a poet—who spoke the language of the gods.

  And Whitman was obscene. Grossly so. Clearly he was a degenerate of the worst description. Poe preferred not to imagine what Whitman did with those young men he wrote about in such evocative terms. Emerson might have used every rhetorical trick he knew to disguise the filth, or talk around it, but he never denied it—and this from someone who affected to worship the transcendental, meaning the refined and pure. It was then that Poe knew how bankrupt the North was, how desperate, as compared with his refined, elegant south land.

  “Whitman is the perfect Yankee poet,” Poe said. He drove his stick into the soil as if the earth hid Walter Whitman’s heart. “No sublimity, no beauty, just stacks of prose disguised as poetry—sometimes not even prose, only lists. Lists of ordinary things. Produced so much stanzas an hour, like yards of cloth in a shoddyworks.” He drove the stick again. “Like Yankee soldiers. Not inspired, just numerous.”

  Moses gave a laugh. “I must remember that, sir. For when General Longstreet returns. It will amuse him.”

  Poe stared at the woods, grinding his teeth. He hadn’t meant to be witty; he was trying to make a point.

  There was sudden musketry from the hardwoods, a succession of popping sounds turned hollow by multiple echoes. Then there was silence. Poe listened intently for a moment.

  “Pickets,” Moses said.

  How many Yankees? Poe wondered. He turned back in the direction of his tent. Sextus was nowhere to be seen. “Bring a chair, you blasted orangutan!” he shouted. He had no idea whether or not Sextus heard him.

  More popping sounds came from the woods—individual shots this time. From a different part of the line, Poe thought.

  “Byrons can only die,” he said. Moses looked at him in surprise. “We real poets, we’re all too in love with death. Whitman writes about life, even the obscene parts of it, and that’s why he will win. Why,” he took a breath, trying to make himself clearer, “why the North will win.”

  Moses seemed to be struggling to understand this. “Sir,” he said. “Sir, I don’t understand.”

  More crackling from the woods. Poe’s head moved left and right, trying to find where it was coming from. A savage exultation beat a long tattoo in his heart. He was right, he was right, he was right again. He stepped up to Moses, stared into his eyes at a few inches’ range.

  “Do you hear guns from the east, Major?” he demanded. “Do you hear anything at all from Lee’s offensive?”

  “Why—” Major Moses stopped dead, licked his lips. There was pure bewilderment in his eyes. “Why are you doing this? Why are you fighting for the Cause?”

  “I hate Whitman!” Poe shrieked. “I hate him, and I hate steam engines, I hate ironclad ships and repeating rifles and rifled artillery!”

  “Your chair, Massa Poe,” said Sextus.

  A cacophony of sound was coming from the woods now, regular platoon volleys, one after another. The sound battered Poe’s ears.

  “I fight for the South because we are right, Major Moses!” Poe shouted. “I believe it—I have proved it rationally—we are superior, sir! The South fights for the right of one man to be superior to another, because he is superior, because he knows he is superior.”

  “Here’s your chair, Massa Poe,” said Sextus.

  “Superior in mind, superior in cognitive faculty, superior in erudition! Superior in knowledge, in training, in sagacity! In appreciation of beauty, of form, of moral sense!” Poe pointed his stick at the woods. “Those Yankees—they are democracy, sir! Dragging even poetry into the muck! Walter Whitman addresses his verses to women of the street—that is democracy for you! Those Yankee soldiers, they are Whitmans with bayonets! I fight them because I must, because someone must fight for what is noble and eternal, even if only to die, like Byron, in some pointless—pointless—”

  Pain seized his heart and he doubled over, coughing. He swung toward where Sextus stood with his camp chair, the cane still outstretched, and though he didn’t mean to strike the African he did anyway, a whiplike crack on the upper arm. Sextus dropped the chair and stepped back, surprise on his face. Anger crackled in Poe, fury at the African’s stupidity and inability to get out of the way.

  “Take that, damn you, worthless nigger!” Poe spat. He spun and fell heavily into his chair.

  The battle in the woods had progressed. Now Poe heard only what Great Frederick called bataillenfeuer, battle fire, no longer volleys but simply a continuous din of musketry as the platoon sergeants lost tactical control of their men and the battle dissolved into hundreds of little skirmishes fought simultaneously. Poe heard no guns—no way to get artillery through those woods.

  Moses was looking at Poe with wide, staring eyes. He reached into a pocket and mopped Poe’s spittle from his face. Poe gave him an evil look.

  “Where is Lee’s offensive, sir?” he demanded. “Where is the sound of his fight?”

  Moses seemed confused. “I should get back to General Anderson, sir,” he said. “I—”

  “Stay by me, Major,” Poe said. His voice was calm. An absolute lucidity had descended upon him; perhaps he was the only man within fifty miles who knew precisely what was happening here. “I have not yet shown you what I wish to show you.”

  He listened to the fight roll on. Sometimes it nearly died away, but then there would be another outburst, a furious racket. Lines of gun-smoke rose above the trees. It would be pointless for Poe to venture into the woods himself—he could not control an entire division if he could not see twenty feet beyond his own position.

  A horseman galloped up. “General Gregg’s compliments, sir. He and General Law are ready to advance.”

  Poe felt perfectly sunny. “My compliments to General Gregg. Tell him that Poe’s division is a little ahead of him. I would be obliged if he’d catch up.”

  The man rode away. People were leaking back out of the woods now: wounded men, some crawling; skulkers, stragglers; bandsmen carrying people on stretchers. Here and there were officers running, bearing messages, guards marching back with blue prisoners.

  “Lots of Yankees, sir!” The first messenger, a staff lieutenant of perhaps nineteen, was winded and staggering with the effort it had taken him to run here. “We’ve hit them in flank. They were in column of march, sir. Colonel Terry wishes you to know he’s driving them, but he expects they’ll stiffen.”

  “Good job, boy.” Terry was the man who commanded the Ravens in Poe’s absence. “Give Colonel Terry my thanks.”

  “Sir!” Another messenger. “General Clingman’s compliments. We’ve driven them in and captured a battery of guns.”

  Guns, Poe thought. Useless in the woods. We can’t get them away, and the Yankees’ll have them back in another few minutes.

  The sound of musketry staggered higher, doubled and tripled in fury. The messengers looked at each other, breathing hard, appalled at the noise. The Yanks, Poe concluded, had rallied and were starting to fight back.

  “Tell Colonel Terry and General Clingman to press them as hard as possibl
e. Try to hold them in the woods. When the Yanks press too hard, retire to the trenches.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Prisoners, sir.” Another voice. “General Barton sends them as requested.”

  Stunned-looking Yanks in dew-drenched caped overcoats, all captured in the first rush. None of them looked over twenty. Poe rose from his chair and hobbled toward them. He snatched the cap from the first prisoner and swung toward Major Moses.

  “Major Moses,” he said in triumph, “do you know the motto of the Yankee Second Corps?”

  Moses blinked at him. “No, sir.”

  “‘Clubs are Trumps!’” Poe told him. “Do you know why, sir?”

  Moses shook his head.

  “Because Hancock’s Corps wears a trefoil badge on their forage caps, like a club on a playing card.” He threw the prisoner’s cap down before Moses’s feet. “What do you see on that forage cap, sir?” he asked.

  “A cross,” said Moses.

  “A saltire, sir!” Poe laughed.

  He had to be thorough. The upper echelons were never easily convinced. Two years before, during the Seven Days’, he had demonstrated, with complete and irrefutable logic, that it was suicidal for Harvey Hill’s division to plunge forward into Boatswain Swamp in hopes of contacting Yankees on the other side. When the ignorant madman Hill repeated his order, Poe had stood on his logic and refused—and been removed from command and placed under arrest. He had not been comforted when he had been proven right. His cherished new brigade, along with the rest of D. H. Hill’s division, had been shattered by three lines of Union infantry dug into a hill just behind the swamp, with artillery lined hub-to-hub on the crest. And when, red-faced with anger, he had challenged Hill to a duel, the lunatic had only laughed at him to his face.

  “Specifically,” Poe said pedantically, pointing at the Yankee forage cap, “a white saltire on a blue background! That means these men come from the Second Division of the Sixth Corps—Wright’s Corps, major, not Hancock’s! The same Sixth Corps that Lee was supposed to attack this morning, on the other end of the line! I am facing at least two Yankee corps with one division, and Lee is marching into empty air! Grant has moved his army left again while we slept!”