by Ralph Peters
Passing a second flame-licked stretch, he heard more cries for help, and a man couldn’t help but look, bad as he might want to look away. One fellow Johnny, leg-ruined and trapped, too terrified even to scream, swatted the encroaching flames with bare hands, slapping at the fire, and there wasn’t a way to reach him, unless a man plunged into the flames himself. So Pickens turned his eyes away and moved along, past a sooty patch, with bodies part scorched but still human-looking, clothes burned off most, and it startled him when a tar-black body wasn’t dead at all, but weeping and whimpering in some immeasurable anguish as his selfish body took its time to die.
Then the Yankees started shooting at them.
In that unholy instant, Pickens wondered what the world had come to when the lives of white men, the sanctity of their bodies, counted for less than those of the Children of Ham. Where was the fairness in that, when white men burning alive—less than pennies to a wealthy man—didn’t merit saving?
His mother was strict about whippings. Not one of her niggers ever got put to discipline unless he deserved and needed it. Even then the manager took care not to damage the property: A slave was worth gold dollars and just wanted chastisement, not ruination.
How was that fair?
The reflection passed, leaving only rage redoubled. He stood there, careless of life, aiming at the Yankees and pulling the trigger, feeling the buck then lowering the butt and fingering up a fresh cartridge, biting the sour, resistant paper and suddenly tasting the tongue-stinging powder, working the ramrod smoothly, not with the awkward jerks of a new recruit—all done so fast that before he knew it, the rifle was up again, with the butt back against his shoulder, hunting Yankees through the smoke.
They rushed forward again, charging, and the Yankees gave way—except for the fools who had to be beaten down.
“Forward!”
Not a man needed that order now. The company, the regiment, shared one desire, begat by bloodlust luxuriant, inspired by a gorgeous, barbaric longing to deal out pain, to prove the master, to be done with civilization and its fussing.
Previous assaults had beaten paths through the brush, so things went quicker. The Alabamians skirted the burning stretches and stepped over the bodies, and Pickens found himself delighted, captivated, to be part of it, running on past Yankees fallen or surrendered and let be, their bewildered, bearded faces fit for remembrance. One Federal who thought too highly of himself was beaten down by half a dozen men who took exception. Wasn’t getting up again, that fellow.
Onward.
Volleys.
Halt. Re-form the line.
“On my command…”
Just standing there and firing, actions repetitious as a mechanical doll he’d seen one time in a shop window in Montgomery.
Shells screamed overhead, their destination some unlucky place behind the Yankee line. Reb yells swelled like a tide, drowning the fewer and fewer Yankee cheers. The volleys, the lone shots, the cries, the hoarse-throated orders, the smoke … were immeasurably intoxicating, better than smuggled rum.
“Forward!”
They monkey-climbed their way over another Yankee barricade, hooting and bragging to all the world with noises, not words, unstoppable.
A lone Yankee fieldpiece let go a burst of canister. It struck just at the edge of the Greensboro Guards. And someone cried:
“Doc’s hit!”
Pickens could not help himself: He turned from a muddled firing line and scanned the tortured landscape for Doc Cowin.
Got to him just as Bill Lenier did, too.
Doc’s eyes were wondrous and his legs were gone. Bright blood pumped from what remained of a thigh. Leaned against a tree, Doc declared:
“I’m gone, boys, I’m gone. I’m done.”
Then he almost smiled and told them:
“‘Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.’”
“Doc, you got a message for anybody? Anything?” Bill Lenier asked.
They didn’t get an answer. Captain Williams stood over them with his Colt pointed first at Pickens then at Lenier.
“You boys get up and get back in that line.”
Doc seemed to deflate as the blood spurted out of him.
“No need for that,” Bill Lenier told the captain. “We’re going.”
“Now. Or I’ll blow your head off.”
They got up, saying quick goodbyes to Doc, already moving. And Doc, in a ghastly, tormented voice, called after them:
“‘I am dying, Egypt, dying…’”
Bill Lenier just said, “I’ll miss old Doc,” and they went back to killing.
Advancing again, coughing through layers of smoke, they broke into a great open space and saw they were not alone: Other Confederates had reached it even before them, swarming and overrunning everything Yankee. Bricks sizzling, a house burned away. Dead mules and horses dotted the field like boulders defying the plow. At the far edge, by a road off to the right, bands of Yankees fought on, but a fellow sensed that the work was nearly done.
“Come on, men! Forward, Alabama! Ain’t nobody going to claim we lagged behind.…”
Elation! Exaltation! The thrill of winning subdued bad feet and even the body’s hunger to survive. They crossed that field and its wastage at a half-run, weariness forgotten. Nobody would outdistance Alabama.
The paltry resistance the Yankees put up was no more than the nip of a granny’s pet dog. The blue-bellies were finished and Alabama was going to make damned sure of it.
They crashed into more undergrowth, a realm less trampled, without wounded men or corpses: They’d passed beyond the battlefield, plunging like a gray dagger into the heart of the Yankee army. No man paused for even a moment as they crossed a clearing where a Federal commissary wagon had overturned, spilling its treasures.
“Alabama!”
Not so many answering voices now. Pickens looked around. Just a handful of men left, familiar faces that had come this far, Greensboro men. Flag was still with them, though. He met Bill Lenier’s eyes. Didn’t need words, they understood each other’s unspoken question:
We alone out here?
The Yankees answered the question for them. Firing at them from what seemed to be every direction. Men took to their knees and replied, but there wasn’t much to the answer.
“You Johnnies give up,” a voice recommended when the shooting lulled. “Don’t want to kill you boys, if we don’t have to. You give up now, you just gone too far.”
The dozen men left kept to their knees, seething and ready but pondering. One fool fired into the brush. A sight more Yankees fired back.
A Northern voice, the officer sort, called, “Cease firing, men! Cease fire!” Then: “You Rebs are surrounded, have yourselves a look. And be sensible.”
Fellow from another company stripped the regiment’s flag from its pole, balled it, and tossed it deep into the briars. The blue-bellies were going to have to work to get it.
Another Yankee asked, “You Johnnies done your mathematics yet?”
One man after another rose slowly, holding his rifle high in the air, butt heavenward, in a gesture of surrender.
* * *
With a fine horse dead and a nag stuffed under him now, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock steered through the chaos, imperturbable, bracing up his brigades as they held open the gauntlet north of the Chancellor fields. Avoiding another withdrawing regiment, he cantered up to Tommy Meagher, whose Irish Brigade held the most exposed position.
“I see your green rag’s waving,” Hancock said.
“And wave it shall. We’ll not be troubled to lower it.”
“That’s the spirit, Tommy.”
The Reb bombardment shifted again, tormenting their position where it spilled from field to grove. It was the fiercest gunnery work that Hancock had ever endured, slaughtering the already slaughtered and making it impossible to drag the wounded from the burning woods.
“Not the prettiest ball I’ve ever attended,” Meagher noted.
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“Goddamned fucking shambles,” Hancock said.
“A man might put it that way, Win.” Meagher grinned and added, “If he had your poet’s heart.”
Hancock firmed up his jaw again. “Tommy, they’ll come back at you. Soon. They’ve got their piss up.”
“And we’ll knock the last drop out of them.”
A shell’s impact hurled dirt at their faces, their eyes. Hancock forced his expression to remain stoic, but he couldn’t recall being in so grim a position, with his brigades fighting nearly back-to-back, taking fire from three sides and threatened by the mass of Lee’s gathered army, gripping a narrow strip of earth to allow the last of Slocum’s men to escape the trap the Rebs were closing on them.
“You know, Win,” Meagher said, reading his mood, “whenever the doings are fit to discommode me, I tell meself, ‘Oh, ’tisn’t as bad as Fredericksburg.’” The Irishman smiled again, his teeth imperfect. “Although there’s novelty enough, with a burning house to one side and Jesus knows what on the other.”
“Just hold on,” Hancock told him. “Fifteen more minutes, Tommy, then I can pull you back.”
Meagher saluted with a light touch and said, “You know, Win, time’s the queerest thing of all. A Christian man ponders eternity for decades, only to find it’s fifteen minutes long.”
* * *
Funk doubted he’d ever forget the burned men, their limbs curled skyward, as if they’d died fending off a last attacker.
He supposed they had: the flames.
If he had to die, let it not be thus.
The Stonewall Brigade—what remained of it—followed him eagerly now. The change was unaccountable, but welcome. Infused with spirit again, made all but fearless, they ignored their losses as they followed orders barked and bellowed, one tendril of a massive gray leviathan. They had closed with one breaking Yankee line, man to man, and the melee had become a contest of fists and even teeth.
Victors with blood on their faces laughed like madmen.
Funk led them forward again and again, through smoldering tangles and over uprooted trees, with bodies scattered everywhere and the worst of the wounded begging to be shot.
“Virginia! Remember Jackson!”
But war cries weren’t even needed. The men were drunk with bloodlust. In that inexplicable way soldiers grasped the uncanny, they sensed that they were winning and would not be stopped. Exhausted and filthy, canteens empty, bleeding and unaware of it, his men—how easily they had become his men, in the strangeness of war, the grand unfairness—were literally racing with the brigades on their flanks to reach the crossroads. And every Yankee attempt at holding them back seemed frailer and doomed.
They swept over a Federal artillery position already cleared. The Yankees had dragged off their precious guns, but the field was strewn with horrors. Disemboweled horses and caissons blown to pieces thickened the wastage, but here the gun crews had had the worst of the luck. Torsos sprawled fifteen feet from hips, with guts laced in between. Heads had been torn away, leaving spikes of bone with crimson scarves. One man, still bubbling blood, had a beard but no face. His hand jerked and fell, jerked and fell. A sergeant had been cut through from shoulder to belly, the sides of his body opened out like the petals on a flower. Bowels curled on the earth, sausages scorned by the butcher. A boy missing an arm, a leg, and an eye dragged himself along.
But the worst of it remained those burned alive.
The sputtering Yankee artillery found his men, but they kept going.
After thrusting forward nearly a mile, as Funk judged the distance, the bled-thin brigade burst into a broad field, joining a vast confusion of other Confederates pressing forward, converging from multiple sides on a burning house and Yankee scraps.
Bone-weary men ran like boys. Funk had difficulty keeping up.
Thousands of voices cheered. Red flags waved by the dozen.
Lord, Funk thought, if the Yankees had a gun line ready now, wouldn’t we be in for it?
But the Yankees had no batteries up. Old Hooker appeared to have ceded his ground.
Funk shouted himself hoarse, willing his command to reassemble. Short-tempered with his officers, he found it a marvel that men—amid all this—would actually heed him.
Rounded upon by their lieutenants and captains—those officers still on their feet—soldiers returned to their flags, boys summoned by the dinner bell. Others snatched Yankee loot from pack or haversack before rallying.
The re-formed brigade was hardly the size of one regiment, but somehow, in that moment, staring at those blackened faces, admiring the sweat and stink and elation and weariness, it didn’t matter. It only mattered that they had not failed.
Up past the crackling house, a Yankee line emerged from the woods and halted. Funk advanced his men to meet the threat, but the Yankees melted back into the trees.
“Reckon some lieutenant took a wrong turn,” a soldier commented.
“What do we do now, sir?” a major asked.
“Load back up on cartridges.”
* * *
Blasted day. Blasted, blasted, blasted.
As his lips dueled with a tin cup of mud coffee, Sickles hoped the Rebs would attack one more time. Arrayed in its new position, his corps was ready, the entire army was. They had a solid defensive position now, with entrenchments that improved as the minutes passed, and the river shielded both of the army’s flanks. Someone even appeared to have taken charge of the artillery. If they tried just one more rush, the graybacks would not have the advantages—or his boys the disadvantages—of the morning.
True as all that was, it did not help. They had been defeated. Severely. It was just difficult to face it. Whether the Rebs attacked again or not, the campaign was lost, and it didn’t take a West Point man to see it. The question was how long things would drag on.
Damn Joe, though. Damn all his hollow vainglory.
Informed that Joe had taken a knock on the head, Sickles had been too busy fighting, withdrawing, and repositioning his battle-bitten troops to look in on his friend and ally, but he hoped the blow had knocked sense into him.
Joe had made a hash of it. There was no excuse for his cascade of mistakes, although, of course, excuses would be found—Sickles already knew that his outrage would pass. He’d stick up for his friend, should congressional meddlers require testimony. His butter was all on that side of the bread, and he didn’t intend to ever go hungry again.
That part of the business would be all right. An iron law of politics held that someone else could always be given the blame. The Germans would do, for a start, as long as the charges didn’t spread to all foreigners: The Irish were valuable Tammany constituents.
Nonetheless, the campaign had been costly. Victory had been handed to Robert E. Lee. A little shame would touch everyone involved. It was time to stay in the shadows and not play the peacock. Joe had to demonstrate that much common sense.
Filthy mess, all of it. And needless. Sickles felt things he knew he would never say.
He was proud of his soldiers, though. His Third Corps had fought ferociously. As had Slocum’s men, to be fair. Ruger had been astonishing, a lion. And Hancock, Couch’s trump card, had just withdrawn his last brigade in good order.… Win deserved a corps as soon as one opened up.
A grand-looking fellow popular with the troops, Hancock could have a winning future in politics after the war. The party needed men from Pennsylvania, and Win seemed to lean Democrat.…
All that had to be kept mum, of course. Until Lincoln blessed any new appointment and brought along the Stevens Republicans.
And a corps command for Win might appease the army’s Pennsylvania faction. Meade would be out for blood, but Reynolds was circumspect and Gibbon didn’t count, at least not yet. They needed to keep an eye on Andy Humphreys, though: There was nothing more corrosive in politics than a man of integrity.
Army scheming made Tammany seem genteel.
As ambulances and ammunition wagons contested the tr
ail that pioneers had cut, Sickles’ thoughts returned again to his soldiers. He’d never thought he would feel such affection for them—at first, he’d seen the men of his Excelsior Brigade only as postwar votes up on two legs, saloon suckers to be bribed with beer and city jobs for the ward boys. But as he’d risen in command and led men from other states, too, they’d fought so hard and so well, time and again, that he’d come to respect them as men and even as citizens. And today they’d bled severely.…
How could courage be so utterly useless? Wasn’t that a fundamental question? The grating truth was that the sacrifices of the day had not mattered. None of the dying and bleeding had done any good. Joe had been getting things wrong for days, and he wouldn’t listen, and men with unknown names had paid the price, men of flesh and blood, with families, decent men who trusted those above them.…
Don’t be an ass, he warned himself. Sentiment was the enemy of judgment. Always. The dead were dead, and mawkishness helped no one. Save it for campaign speeches.
He held out the tin cup. “More coffee,” he told an aide. “And put something in it.”
In the splendid early days, when the war had been nothing more than a rush to the tailor shop, Sickles had envisioned easy glory. Even now, he expected his service to revive his career in Washington or, at least, in New York. He’d learned a great deal in camps and on the battlefields, not least that heroism was no cure for folly, and a hundred lesser successes could not make up for one crucial mistake.
Of course, life had already instructed him on that last point. He’d just been slow to learn.
Beyond the smoldering trees to Sickles’ front, waves of Rebel cheering rose from the fields his men had lost.
He reached for a cigar but had none left.
* * *
The men cheered him as he had never been cheered before. As Robert E. Lee rode northward, trailed by his staff, his soldiers in their thousands opened a lane for him to pass. Men by the roadside threw their hats in the air or raised them on the muzzles of their rifles, pumping them skyward. The boldest soldiers reached out to touch not Lee but the flank of his horse. Faces grimed with power, men wept ecstatically.
