Confederates

by Thomas Keneally

  2

  They sent Usaph and the others down the slope from the woods, and you could see the Yankees were already flinging themselves down on the road and then being urged into an upright position by their officers. The Rockbridge began its firing and Yankee artillery in plain sight answered from meadows beyond the road.

  Then it was all lost from sight to Usaph and the others. A low ridge, the ridge where Tom Jackson had ridden a few minutes ago, put itself between the road and Usaph. In fact, Usaph guessed it ran for more than a thousand yards, and as if guessing that those neat Wisconsin boys might charge it, General Telfer got the Stonewall Brigade to halt there, right in front of it. Any Yankees coming over it would be lit by the evening sun.

  Just the same the idea didn’t suit the boys, you could feel their desire to be let loose. They still suffered from the crazy belief that from now on it would all be like the feast at Manassas.

  Usaph stood by Gus and Gus had his ear lifted to the whine of the shells above his head. Talk started up, but Gus said nothing. Looking down the line, Usaph saw Cate staring at him. God, you might damn well lose those eyes in ten minutes! Usaph thought with a savage lift of his soul. For all the martial demons were on Usaph at times like this, and one thing it did for him was he could see each blade of grass as a separate wonder, even in a little sump like this where the light wasn’t good, and he could see and number each wisp of evening cloud and remember its lines all his days.

  Hans Strahl, who wasn’t so talkative at the best of times, had chosen now to be telling a story to Ash Judd, who listened with a sort of grinning composure for which only he himself knew the reason.

  ‘You know how these-here Springfield muskets are so goddam well made,’ said Hans, studiously sounding like a native-born Valley boy, ‘that an Irishman in the 5th Virginia was able to carry whisky in the barrel of one all the way from Manassas last evening to this very place.…’

  Young Lucius Taber and the fierce dentist, Captain Guess, were going about hissing ‘Silence!’ But no one obeyed, they just chatted a little lower.

  ‘And when he sat down by the road early this morning,’ Hans pursued, ‘to have a draught of it, he had to put the barrel in his mouth. And ain’t it jest what you’d expect that the chaplain of the 5th came along then, and he’d have to be one of them priests of the Irish type, the 5th being all Irish. And he sees this here boy with his gun in his mouth and one hand on the barrel and the other down near the trigger and he yells: “Don’t do it, Paddy. Jaysus’ll see you through!”’

  Usaph noticed that there were boys, as there always were, leafing through the scriptures, but it was too late for him to do that; he’d left his in his blanket roll up the hill. Also he guessed that if he touched a scripture at a time like this he’d lose his call on those war-hungry devils that got into him at times like these. And without those devils, he couldn’t face fire.

  Before there was time for him to raise any sort of envy for those boys who, while cool and scared and reading the Book, still stood waiting to face the enemy, a line of neat boys appeared atop the rise fair ahead. They looked like well-shaped farm boys – and from their corpses it would be found that their origins were in Wisconsin and Indiana, and that they came from no Irish or German sink in Manhattan or Boston.

  They were no more than a hundred steps off. Without waiting from any advice from an officer, Usaph shot the one his eyes fixed on full in the body. He had turned into something like an animal now, though there was a Christian left somewhere inside him to lament that fact at a later time. Why, a friend – even Gus – could be shot between the eyes and it’d be midnight before Usaph was human again and mourned him and the waste of his talents. God, he felt so expert, firing uphill didn’t worry him even a little. He was some marksman and so were all the rest! And the Yankee boys went on presenting themselves over that ridge. Who was their commander and what did he mean by serving them up like this?

  Bumpass, the war animal, fired four rounds before the Union colonels got over their craziness and stopped despatching boys over that small rise. There was a stillness then, apart from the artillery firing which, though loud, somehow wasn’t Usaph’s business. Usaph looked at Gus; Gus smiled. From the rise came thin cries, a true babble you could barely make out the bits of. There was a boy up there, though, calling, ‘By Jesus, Andy, I’m hurt,’ in a straightforward voice like a man commenting on the weather.

  One of those delays set in and what ended it was the order to go forward at a trot, over the ridge. The Yankee boys up there on their backs and bellies, putting their hands out for kindness, meant nothing to frothing and trembling Usaph Bumpass. They had no rights. They’d been swept off the table of contents of this battle.

  Beyond the rise was a long rail fence and the Yankees had pulled the uprights from it. The last Yankee runners who had lived through that advance were being pulled back into the ranks down there by the road, into the warm comfort of the jostling shoulders of their kin. The Stonewall went on walking through another desecrated fence, and stopped just a hundred paces from the road. Later, Usaph could not remember any order to halt given at that stage, but maybe there was. It seemed to him as if a halt came because the brigade had come to some unspoken animal agreement about how close was the right thing.

  In fact, General Telfer thought they’d already gone too far, and the instincts of such colonels as Lafcadio Wheat told them any closer was ridiculous.

  Where Usaph and Gus and the others stood, it was an open field, unploughed, and there was bluegrass up to the calves of tall boys like Usaph himself, and the knees of shorter ones like Danny Blalock.

  Tom Jackson watched from his farmyard at the edge of the forest. He could foresee lots of maimings and deaths in the way the two lines of boys were facing each other off, but he didn’t expect the lines to hold like that too long. He’d send Kyd off to the south to tell a Confederate brigade camped down there by a quiet stream near the Manassas Gap railroad line to hurry round from that direction, cross the road, and roll up the Yankee flank in the normal way.

  Tom Jackson, believing he had God’s firm approval, didn’t think how little this sort of move had worked lately.

  Kyd, riding with the order, found the country very broken down that way. He had to ride through ravines where the suckers and undergrowth were up to his shoulders, and his horse would panic and vines would get him by the throat. Four ticks got down Kyd’s collar during that ride. There were deep woods too that muffled the noise of the crazy actions down by the road, and night had just about arrived.

  The brigade Kyd was trying to find was under the command of General Bill Telfer’s cousin, Alex. It was close on eight p.m. before Kyd, no longer a neat and cool aide, but a sweating, tick-infested, irascible boy, collided with some of cousin Alex’s pickets and got the message delivered. It was willingly obeyed.

  But the same country that had made a fool of Kyd caused this brigade to tangle itself in the ravines and thickets. This company or that kept following the noise of the conflict to the north and stumbled into the meadows behind the Union line, where they could do nothing but snipe.

  So the event as Stonewall could see it at its start wasn’t changed all evening. Two long lines of boys stood up to each other so close that the artillery of either side couldn’t join in any more for fear of striking their brethren.

  The Reverend Dignam coolly perceived what a filthy thing it was for two lines to be placed so close like this. He walked down just behind the long string of riflemen. No one looked back at him. It was crazy. Half these boys might run in circumstances not half so dangerous as these. But even the conscripts were standing here, labouring away like mill hands in the great factory of battle.

  Sometimes the Reverend Dignam, keeping his cool Christian head in the midst of his promenade, would be bumped by a boy reeling back from the line open-mouthed and grabbing with both hands a pulped eye or a punctured skull, or holding a shattered arm out from the body and looking at it with that gaping, protesti
ng mouth the wounded put on. And sometimes boys would kneel down, as he approached, like tired children falling on to their haunches, and then their heads would go right down in an Eastern salaam, and their hindquarters would point to the sky.

  Lafcadio Wheat was standing back some fifteen paces behind Company D. His headquarters was a patch of lupins; the flowers were a nice radiant blue this time of day. He had an orderly with him and Company D’s young captain was sitting by his feet. The boy was staring down at his own hand, which lay in his lap. The boy’s thumb had been shot away and all the pad of the hand too.

  ‘This is madness, Laffie,’ Dignam screamed at Colonel Wheat. The colonel grimaced and lifted his ear, meaning he hadn’t heard … ‘Madness!’ the Reverend Dignam screamed again. ‘We must get them away from here. Back to that rise. Lay them down. Just over the crest. We should …’

  ‘Goddamit, Diggie! If should was could we’d both be …’

  He was about to say we’d both be generals, or some such grand thing. Before he got it out, he saw a private soldier turn away from the firing line ahead. ‘Oh Jesus,’ said Wheat. ‘Oh Jesus, Diggie!’

  The private had taken a ball in the jaw. He would have been better to lie still instead of encouraging by movement the gush of his life’s blood. But with his mouth open and his hands out, he stumbled straight for Colonel Wheat, as if he trusted the colonel to set things right. Wheat’s arms went forward and received the boy.

  ‘Now, now. Jest rest there, feller. Jest you rest.’

  He helped the private down to the ground to sit by the young captain. He looked terrible himself with his coat all fouled and muddy red, and children resting against his knees.

  Colonel Wheat yelled, ‘There must be something coming from the flank.’ It was the only explanation of why he’d been ordered up here along with all the other regiments for such a close look at the enemy. It could only mean that any moment now there would come a wild Confederate attack on the Union flank. For the meantime he supposed his task was to hold the Union line in place by the shoulders, in a firm wrestle-hold so it would get the full shock of that flank blow.

  The Reverend Dignam got a thought too painful to yell out in noise like this. What if there was no flank attack – Tom Jackson wouldn’t tell them one way or another – and what if the Yankees went on standing?

  Dignam knelt down and slid the weight of the boy with the jaw wound off Wheat’s shin-bone. The boy fell on his back amongst the stained lupins. His eyes were open but it was mainly the whites that were showing. So Dignam bent over to do some merciful work on them and to close them up.

  He was just flexing the muscles at the back of his left ankle so that he could rise again when there came a bad jolting impact on the top of his bowed head, right beneath the crown of his hat. Somehow he knew straight away that his hearing would never be any good any more. But he could hear, just the same, above the ringing silence the remote voice of his good, earthy friend Lafcadio Wheat screaming, ‘Diggie, for Jesus’s sake. Diggie!’

  It came to Dignam gently, coming up from his belly, that he had taken a mortal wound. Receive your unworthy servant, he said interiorly.

  It was not the dying that frightened him; he was not at all afraid of something that seemed simple and reasonable the closer you got to it. Besides, he believed in the Resurrection of the Dead as truly as most people believe they’ll be paid on Friday. But the big knot in his brain as he died was this: In Bedford County, where he’d had a good living and a fine church, he’d wanted and had twice got Mrs Alison Kane, wife of the presiding elder of the county, Mr Emery Kane, a dry-goods merchant of Bedford. Alison was a tall woman with a long and subtle mouth and deep eyes. The memory of her face sat in his mind now like a single live and well creature in a doomed house. And he was free to cling onto it all the way down that funnel that opened beneath him and drank him down. Yet even as he fell he accused himself. For soldiering had been vanity and the war had been a gift to him, getting him away from Mrs Dignam, a fine girl he had failed to love through no fault of hers, and away from the sharp thought of Mrs Alison Kane.

  Colonel Wheat began dragging his friend up not two seconds after the bullet went into the crown of Dignam’s head, but from the feel of the preacher’s limbs, he could tell already that one of the best and most sensible of men had perished in an instant of time.

  3

  ‘Oh hell, boys, will y’look at that,’ Dick Ewell said, and sat over slowly on his right hip.

  It was a little after seven that savage night. Popeye Ewell stood by his horse at that fence the Northern boys had taken the rails down from earlier in the evening. With him he had a few young officers. They all felt they were well to the rear of the battle. They were in fact but a short walk from it. Now Tom Jackson was considerably further back, over the ridge and by the railroad cut, and that was sensible of him. Because everyone would be lost if he was hurt, given that he carried the plan round in his head.

  But Popeye Ewell, by his horse, by the fence, didn’t feel he was taking any particular risk being where he was. He knew soldiers tended to overshoot in battle, but he wondered if anyone would overshoot to the extent of shooting him up there on that little rise.

  One of these young officers standing with Popeye was in fact a young general. A general from Georgia called Andie Lawton. Once, an age or a month ago, Lawton had, rather than be judged slow by Tom Jackson, jumped from a window in Gordonsville. Now his brigade was holding the line just across a field or two, just by the road there.

  Before he’d called out, Popeye’d been a little agitated. He kept pulling at the corner of his rich moustache which came down a long way past each corner of his mouth. He kept raising his chin in little jerks, like a man who’s not satisfied he’s tall enough to get a good view of the proceedings. And he felt a little confused.

  That goddam Jackson hadn’t so much as told him any flank attack would come in, though Dick Ewell, just like the deceased Reverend Dignam, believed there must be one coming. In the meantime there were too many boys getting felled. But he knew what a withdrawal meant. If you ordered a retreat you had to tell Bill Telfer who was in charge of all those Stonewall boys. And even if you could make it a good withdrawal, it was an axiom you lost one in ten men as prisoners or maimed or corpses through running. For that was the awkward bit. The boys down by the road were wound up so tight to stand there swapping fire that if you called them back a hundred paces, they’d read it as a threat and start galloping. Dick Ewell knew a lot about how calm standing can give way to flight and rout.

  So, before he cried out, Popeye Ewell couldn’t see much alternative for the moment to what he was doing already. And then the high-pitched minie ball entered his knee. He knew what it was at once. Some goddam Indiana boy must have been aiming at an early goddam star. At the goddam Blue Ridge.

  Handsome Andie Lawton looked down on his general, who’d been standing the last time Andie looked. He looked at Popeye’s baggy grey trousers with the blue stripe down them. They were long on him; Popeye wasn’t much of a dresser. They flopped down well over his dusty boots, even when he was sitting down like that on his hip. The knee of the left side had been punctured and was already running with blood. The wound had done nothing for Popeye’s temper, and he looked up at Andie and grunted. ‘Look to your own goddam command, Andie. It ain’t no goddam circus for a boy like you to go gawping at.’

  Andie didn’t go away. He knelt down beside Ewell. ‘Where is it?’ he asked, though he knew exactly where the ball had gone. One of Popeye’s staff officers called Byron knelt down with a flask of brandy. That really angered Popeye. He roared. ‘You expect me to drink that stuff, boy? That crunchgut? With the stomach I have?’

  The shouting turned his skin grey and his eyes rolled and he fell right over on his side, whimpering.

  Andie Lawton was just thirty and ambitious. But he thought: ‘Oh Lord of Hosts, the whole left of this line is now in my command.’ So it showed you Popeye’s advice about not gawping was not
pure peevishness. Andie Lawton thought he had better go and have a look at his line.

  He turned to Byron and the other boy officer there.

  ‘Back there there’s that railroad cut and you should find Surgeon Maguire somewhere along it. Get Popeye – General Ewell – up there.’

  Byron indicated with a wave of his hand that gushing kneecap. ‘How?’ he asked.

  ‘For God’s sake, there’s only one quick way, you know that. Put him on his horse.’

  In fact he took time off his command and helped them lift the general. Popeye tottered in his saddle and muttered and complained through the half faint he was in. He lay forward against the mane of his horse, and his mouth was crushed sideways by the firm horseflesh. Byron had fetched a spare shirt out of his own saddlebag and tied it tight around the knee, but the linen got scarlet in seconds and began dripping on the horse’s belly.

  Andie thought, he won’t keep that leg. There’d be a hacksaw job and he’d be away from the army for months or years if not for a lifetime. It came to Andie with a fearful glow that he would command that division for a long time. On a long-term basis the idea excited him, but to become a division commander during this particular crazy fight was something he didn’t want.

  ‘You, Byron,’ he said. ‘Take him fast. And you, you come with me. We’re going to visit my colonels.’ My goddam colonels!

  This second officer, maybe twenty-one years old, started to argue. ‘No, General Lawton, you stay here. I’ll find a runner.’

  ‘Why in the name of hell …?’

  ‘Well, they can’t afford another shot commander.’