Alternate Heroes

by Gregory Benford

  Moses’s eyes widened. “My God,” he said.

  “Take that cap to General Anderson with my compliments! Tell him I will need his support!”

  Moses picked up the cap. “Yes, sir.”

  Poe lunged among the prisoners, snatching off caps, throwing them to his aides. “Take that to General Lee! And that to Ewell! And that to A. P. Hill! Say I must have their support! Say that Wright is here!”

  As Moses and Poe’s aides galloped away, the firing died down to almost nothing. One side or another had given way.

  Poe returned to his seat and waited to see which side it had been.

  It was Poe’s division had pressed back in the woods, but not by much. Messengers panting back from his brigades reported that they’d pushed the Yanks as far as possible, then fallen back when they could push no more. The various units were trying to reestablish contact with one another in the woods and form a line. They knew the Yankee assault was coming.

  Pull them back? Poe wondered. He’d made his case to his superiors —maybe he’d better get his men back into their trenches before the Yanks got organized and smashed them.

  Action, he thought, and reaction. The two fundamental principles of the operating Universe, as he had demonstrated in Eureka. His attack had been an action; the Yankee reaction had yet to come.

  He tapped gloved fingers on the arm of his chair while he made careful calculations. The Yankees had been struck in the right flank as they were marching south along narrow forest roads. Due to surprise and their tactical disadvantage, they had been driven in, then, as the rebel attack dissipated its force, turned and fought. This reaction, then, had been instinctive—they had not fought as units, which must have been shattered, but as uncoordinated masses of individuals. The heavy forest had broken up the rebel formation in much the same manner, contributing to their loss of momentum.

  The Yankees would react, but in order to do so in any coordinated way they would have to reassemble their units, get them in line of battle, and push them forward through trees that would tend to disperse their cohesion. Wright had three divisions; normally it would take a division about an hour, maybe more, to deploy to the right from column of march. The woods would delay any action. The blue-coats’ own confusion would worsen things even more. Say two hours, then.

  Any attack made before then would be uncoordinated, just local commanders pushing people forward to the point of contact. Poe’s men could handle that. But in two hours a coordinated attack would come, and Poe’s division would be swamped by odds of at least three to one, probably more.

  Poe looked at his watch. He would keep his men in the woods another ninety minutes, then draw them back. Their presence in the woods might serve to make the Yanks cautious, when what Grant really wanted to do was drive straight forward with everything he had.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a message from Evander Law on his left flank. He and Gregg had about completed their preparations to advance, the messenger reported, when they discovered that Hancock’s men across the woods were leaving their trenches and preparing to attack them. Gregg and Law had therefore returned to their trenches to ready themselves for the attack.

  Poe bit back on his temper. It might be true. He would have to see in person. He told one of his aides to remain there and direct any messages to the left of the line, then told Sextus to ready his buggy.

  Sextus looked at him in a sullen, provoking way. He was cradling the arm Poe had struck with his cane. “You’ll have to drive yourself, massa,” he said. “You broke my arm with that stick.”

  Annoyance warmed Poe’s nerves. “Don’t be ridiculous! I did not hit you with sufficient force. Any schoolboy—”

  “I’m sorry, massa. It’s broke. I broke an arm before, I know what it’s like.”

  Poe was tempted to hit Sextus again and break the arm for certain; but instead he lurched for his buggy, hopped inside, and took the reins. He didn’t have the time to reason with the darky now. Sextus heaved himself up into the seat beside Poe, and Poe snapped the reins. His staff, on horseback, followed.

  The battle broke on the left as he drove, a searing, ripping sound bounding up from the damp, dead ground. Poe seized the whip and labored his horse; the light buggy bounded ovei the turf, threatened to turn over, righted itself.

  The first attack was over by the time Poe’s buggy rolled behind Law’s entrenchments, and the wall of sound had died down to the lively crackle of sharpshooters’ rifles and the continual boom of smoothbore artillery. It took Poe a while to find Law—he was in the first line of works—and by the time Poe found him, the second Yankee attack was beginning, a constant hammering roar spreading across the field.

  Law stood in the trench, gnawing his lip, his field glasses in his hand. There was a streak of powder residue across his forehead and great patches of sweat under the arms of his fine gray jacket. Law jumped up on the firing step, jostling his riflemen who were constantly popping up with newly loaded muskets, and pointed. “Gibbon’s men, sir! The Black Hats! Look!”

  Poe swung himself up behind the brigadier, peered out beneath the head log, and saw, through rolling walls of gunsmoke and the tangle of abatis, lines of blue figures rolling toward him. He heard the low moaning sound made by Northern men in attack, like a choir of advancing bears…. The ones coming for him were wearing black felt hats instead of their usual forage caps, which marked them as the Iron Brigade of Gibbon’s division, the most hard-hitting unit of the hardest-hitting corps in the Yankee army. We’ve got two brigades here, Poe thought frantically, and we’ve got an entire corps coming at us.

  A Yankee Minié whacked solidly into the head log above him. Poe jerked his head back and turned to Law. The smell of powder was sharp in his nostrils. The air filled with the whistling sound of cannon firing canister at close range.

  “You must hold, sir! No going back!”

  Law grinned. “Do you think the Yankees’ll let us go back?”

  “Hold to the last! I will bring up support!”

  Law only looked at him as if he were mad. And then the Yankees were there, their presence at first marked by a swarm of soldiers surging back from the firing step, almost knocking Poe from his feet as he was carried to the muddy back of the trench, the soldiers pointing their muskets upward, groping in their belts for bayonets…

  Poe reached automatically for one of his Le Mat revolvers and then realized he’d left them in his headquarters tent—they were just too heavy to carry all the time. His only weapon was his stick. He stiffened and took a firmer grip on the ivory handle. His mind reeled at the suddenness of it all.

  The sky darkened as bluecoats swarmed up on the head log, rifles trained on the packed Confederates. The Stars and Stripes, heavy with battle honors, rose above the parapet, waved by an energetic sergeant with a bushy red beard and a tattered black hat. Musketry crackled along the trench as men fired into one another’s faces. “Look at ‘em all!” Law screamed. “Look at ‘em all!” He shoved a big Joslyn revolver toward the Yankees and pulled the trigger repeatedly. People were falling all over. Screams and roars of defiance and outrage echoed in Poe’s ears.

  He stood, the sound battering at his nerves. All he could do here, he thought bitterly, was get shot. He was amazed at his own perfect objectivity and calm.

  And then the Union standard-bearer was alone, and grayback infantry were pointing their rifles at him. “Come to the side of the Lord!” Evander Law shouted; and the red beard looked around him in some surprise, then shrugged, jumped into the ditch, and handed over the flag of the Twenty-fourth Michigan.

  The soldiers declined to shoot him, Poe thought, as a compliment to his bravery. Never let it be said we are not gallant.

  Poe jumped for the firing step, and saw the blue lines in retreat. Dead men were sprawled over the abatis, their black hats tumbled on the ground. The ground was carpeted with wounded Yanks trying to find little defilades where they would be sheltered from the bullets that whimpered above their heads. They lo
oked like blue maggots fallen from the torn belly of something dead, Poe thought, and then shuddered. Where was the poetry in this? Here even death was unhallowed.

  Soldiers jostled Poe off the firing step and chased off the bluecoats with Minié balls. Confederate officers were using swords and knives to cut up the Yankee flag for souvenirs. Poe stepped up to Law.

  “They’ll be back,” Law said, mumbling around a silver powder flask in his teeth. He was working the lever of his Joslyn revolver, tamping a bullet down on top of the black powder charge.

  “I will bring men to your relief.”

  “Bring them soon, sir.”

  “I will find them somewhere.”

  Law rotated the cylinder and poured another measured round of fine black powder. “Soon, sir. I beg you.”

  Poe turned to one of his aides. “Find General Gregg on the left. Give him my compliments, and tell him what I have told General Law. He must hold till relieved. After that, ride to General Anderson and persuade him to release the rest of Field’s division to come to the aide of their comrades.”

  Wounded men groaned in the trenches and on the firing step, cursing, trying to stop their bleeding. Yankee blood dripped down the clay trench wall. Cannon still thundered, flailing at the bluecoats. Southern sharpshooters banged away with Armstrong rifles equipped with telescopic sights almost as long as the gun, aiming at any officers. Poe found himself astounded that he could have an intelligible conversation in this raucous, unending hell.

  He limped away down a communications trench and found Sextus in the rear, holding his buggy amid a group of waiting artillery limbers. Poe got into the buggy without a word and whipped up the horses.

  Behind him, as he rode, the thunder of war rose in volume as Hancock pitched into another attack. This time the sound didn’t die down.

  On the way back to his tent Poe encountered a courier from Fitz Lee. His men had moved forward dismounted, run into some startled bluecoats from Burnside’s Ninth Corps, and after a short scrap had pulled back into their entrenchments.

  Burnside. That meant three Yankee corps were facing two southern divisions, one of them cavalry.

  Burnside was supposed to be slow, and everyone knew he was not the most intelligent of Yankees—anyone who conducted a battle like Fredericksburg had to be criminally stupid. Poe could only hope he would be stupid today.

  Back at his tent, he discovered Walter Taylor, one of Robert Lee’s aides, a young, arrogant man Poe had never liked. Poe found himself growing angry just looking at him.

  “Burnside, sir!” he snapped, pulling the buggy to a halt. “Burnside, Wright, and Hancock, and they’re all on my front!”

  Taylor knit his brows. “Are you certain about Burnside, sir?” he asked.

  “Fitzhugh Lee confirms it! That’s three fourths of Grant’s army!”

  Taylor managed to absorb this with perfect composure. “General Lee would like to know if you have any indication of the location of Warren’s Fifth Corps.”

  Poe’s vitals burned with anger. “I don’t!” he roared. “But I have no doubt they’ll soon be heading this way!”

  Poe lurched out of his buggy and headed for his tent and the Le Mat revolvers waiting in his trunk. Judging by the sound, Gregg and Law were putting up a furious fight behind him. There was more fighting going on, though much less intense, on his own front.

  Poe flung open the green trunk, found the revolvers, and buckled on the holsters. He hesitated for a moment when he saw the saber, then decided against it and dropped the trunk lid. Chances were he’d just trip on the thing. Lord knew the revolvers were heavy enough.

  Taylor waited outside the tent, bent over to brush road dirt from his fine gray trousers. He straightened as Poe hobbled out. “I will inform General Lee you are engaged,” he said.

  Poe opened his mouth to scream at the imbecile, but took a breath instead, tried to calm his rage. With the high command, he thought, always patience. “My left needs help,” Poe said. “Hancock’s attacking two brigades with his entire corps. I’m facing Wright on my front with four brigades, and Fitz Lee’s facing Burnside with two on the right.”

  “I will inform General Lee.”

  “Tell him we are in direst extremity. Tell him that we cannot hold onto Hanover Junction unless substantially reinforced. Tell him my exact words.”

  “I will, sir.” Taylor nodded, saluted, mounted his horse, rode away. Poe stared after him and wondered if the message was going to get through it all, or if the legend of Poe’s alarmism and hysteria were going to filter it—alter it—make it as nothing.

  More fighting burst out to his front. Poe cupped his ears and swiveled his head, trying to discover direction. The war on his left seemed to have died away. Poe returned to his chair and sat heavily. His pistols were already weighing him down.

  Through messengers he discovered what had happened. On his third attack, Hancock had succeeded in getting a lodgement in the Confederate trenches between Gregg and Law. They had been ejected only by the hardest, by an attack at bayonet point. Evander Law had been killed in the fighting; his place had been taken by Colonel Bowles of the 4th Alabama. Bowles requested orders. Poe had no hope to give him.

  “Tell Colonel Bowles he must hold until relieved.”

  There was still firing to his front. His brigadiers in the woods were being pressed, but the Yankees as yet had made no concerted assault. Poe told them to hold on for the present. It would be another forty-five minutes, he calculated, before the Yanks could launch a coordinated assault.

  Comparative silence fell on the battlefield. Poe felt his nerves gnawing at him, the suspense spreading through him like poison. After forty-five minutes, he gave his brigades in the woods permission to fall back to their entrenchments.

  As he saw clumps of men in scarecrow gray emerging from the woods, he knew he could not tell them what he feared, that Robert Lee was going to destroy their division. Again.

  After the Seven Days’ Battle, Lee had chosen to lose the paperwork of Poe’s impending court-martial. Poe, his brigade lost, his duel unfought, was assigned to help construct the military defenses of Wilmington.

  Later, Poe would be proven right about Harvey Hill. Lee eventually shuffled him west to Bragg’s army, but Bragg couldn’t get along with him either and soon Hill found himself unemployed.

  Poe took small comfort in Hill’s peregrinations as he languished on the Carolina coast while Lee’s army thrashed one Yankee commander after another. He wrote long letters to any officials likely to get him meaningful employment, and short, petulant articles for Confederate newspapers: Why wasn’t the South building submarine rams? Why did they not take advantage, like the North, of observation from balloons? Why not untie the forces of Bragg and Johnston, make a dash for the Ohio, and reclaim Kentucky?

  There were also, in Wilmington, women. Widows, many of them, or wives whose men were at war. Their very existence unstrung his nerves, made him frantic; he wrote them tempestuous letters and demanded their love in terms alternately peremptory and desperate. Sometimes, possibly because it seemed to mean so much to him, they surrendered. None of them seemed to mind that he snuffed all the candles, drew all the drapes. He told them he was concerned for their reputation, but he wanted darkness for his own purposes.

  He was remaining faithful to Virginia.

  Perhaps the letter-writing campaign did some good; perhaps it was just the constant attrition of experienced officers that mandated his reemployment. His hopes, at any rate, were justified. A brigade was free under George Pickett, and furthermore it was a lucky brigade, one that all three Confederate corps commanders had led at one time or another. Perhaps, Poe thought, that was an omen.

  Poe was exultant. Lee was going north after whipping Hooker at Chancellorsville. Poe thought again of liberating Maryland, of riding on his thoroughbred charger to Shepherd’s Rest, galloping to the heart of the place, to the white arabesque castle that gazed in perfect isolate splendor over the fabulous creation of his s
oul, his own water paradise. Once he fought for it, Shepherd’s Rest would be his; he could dispossess the restless spirits that had made him so uneasy the last few years.

  Determination entered his soul. He would be the perfect soldier. He would never complain, he would moderate his temper, he would offer his advice with diffidence. He had a reputation to disprove. The army, to his relief, welcomed him with open arms. Hugin and Munin appeared, delivered by grinning staff men who wore black feathers in their hats and chanted “Nevermore.” His immediate superior, the perfumed cavalier George Pickett, was not a genius; but unlike many such he knew it, and happily accepted counsel from wiser heads. Longstreet, Poe’s corps commander, was absolutely solid, completely reliable, the most un-Byronic officer imaginable but one that excited Poe’s admiration. Poe enjoyed the society of his fellow brigadiers, white-haired Lo Armistead and melancholy Dick Garnett. The Southern officer corps was young, bright, and very well educated—riding north they traded Latin epigrams, quotations from Lady of the Lake or The Corsair, and made new rhymes based on those of their own literary celebrity, whose works had been read to many in childhood. Of the rapture that runs, quoth Lo Armistead, To the banging and the clanging of the guns, guns, guns. Of the guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns—To the roaring and the soaring of the guns!

  It was perfect. During the long summer marches into the heart of the North, Poe daydreamed of battle, of the wise gray father Lee hurling his stalwarts against the Yankees, breaking them forever, routing them from Washington, Baltimore, Shepherd’s Rest. Lee was inspired, and so was his army. Invincible.

  Poe could feel History looking over his shoulder. The world was holding its breath. This could be the last fight of the war. If he could participate in this, he thought, all the frustrating months in North Carolina, all the battles missed, would be as nothing.

  Pickett’s division, the army’s rear guard, missed the first two days of the battle centered around the small crossroads town in Pennsylvania. Arriving that night, they made camp behind a sheltering ridge and were told that they would attack the next day in the assault that would shatter the Yankees for good and all. Pickett, who had been assigned elsewhere during Lee’s last two victories, was delighted. At last he would have his opportunity for glory.