So why didn’t I cry and start trembling like this in the Crimea? Well, I’m older now. And this is … yes, it is, Searcy old boy … this is a holier war.
Searcy wandered on across the slope. He was still working as a journalist. He knew the various badges Union soldiers wore on their sleeves. Some of the dead down near the cut displayed the oval insignia of Sigel’s German Corps – they had been killed early this morning. The men who had fallen in the past few minutes and were just getting accustomed to their wounds and wondering if the pain and terror could be managed, they wore the diamond badge of General Jesse L. Reno’s IX Corps. Hill’s division had by some means held out two corps. It was axiomatic that that sort of thing couldn’t keep on happening. Someone ought to go and state the axiom to Tom Jackson.
Searcy did not do so straight away. He spent some time on the slope, letting his rage against Tom Jackson build. From his tin canteen coated with the fur of arctic seal – an explorer’s special from the Army and Navy Stores – he fed water to those who cried for it, even to boys with belly wounds and a bloody froth already on their lips. He pushed the water fatally and unwisely down their throats, as if it were the only gift he was capable of, and he’d be damned if he didn’t give it.
About a mile south of where he’d spent that early part of the morning, Searcy found Tom Jackson in a clearing in the forest. Searcy had intended to come rushing up and start straight off raging at the madman, but it could not happen that way.
Tom Jackson was at the time sitting on a caisson behind some of Andie Lawton’s Georgia batteries. He had a pad on his knee and was writing a despatch. Sandie Pendleton and Kyd, and some others Searcy didn’t know, stood around the caisson like a protective wall.
‘General!’ Searcy called, dismounting in a flurry. Sandie put a hand up to halt the journalist. ‘Shh!’ Kyd said, hardly turning towards Searcy.
A shell hit the forest floor on the far side of Tom Jackson’s party. It was maybe the length of a small church-aisle away and Tom Jackson’s shoulders and the page he was writing were showered with grit and pieces of leaf. It didn’t surprise Searcy that the General just shook the page off.
‘Searcy,’ said a large cavalry officer, stepping from the group around the General. The way the man said his name, it came out Zeerzy.
Searcy flinched and inspected the officer. It was von Borcke all right. ‘Ve git drunk, der last time ve zee each der odder. Dat vas in Milano in ’59, ain’t it so?’
‘Yes,’ said Searcy. Why did I ever drink with you? ‘I’d heard you’d come to this war.’
‘I am wit Jeb Stuart. I turn up in Richmond wit der letter der introduction from Cheneral von Montauffel und here I am, ridink wit Stuart.’
Von Borcke wore a big grey hat with a plume in it and a grey jacket of ornate and non-Confederate design from one of the many armies he’d belonged to. Searcy wanted to say: ‘When I got drunk with you, you Prussian bastard, I didn’t know what a foul thing a mercenary is.’
And then he thought, aren’t you a sort of mercenary, Searcy old chap? Oh yes, you don’t do it for pay, you do it for the moral thrill of being in a great war of liberation.
The air von Borcke likes is air laced with the stink of powder, the presence of dead young boys and open wounds. What sort of air do you like, Searcy old chap?
At heart von Borcke was a European though and would understand better than Americans that Jackson was breaking the rules.
‘He has to give it up, Heros,’ said Searcy in a voice that was louder than he wanted it to be. ‘He has to give it up, for pity’s sake.’
Some of Jackson’s staff turned and began looking at him. Good! thought Searcy.
‘There’ve been two corps beating up against your left flank,’ Searcy found he was yelling directly at Jackson. ‘They have Kearny’s and Heintzelman’s in reserve and God knows what else.… Ambrose Hill’s men, Heros, are depending on the dead for ammunition. I saw, sir … with my own eyes … I saw a major gathering pebbles of a calibre suitable for muskets. It’s not even noon. For God’s sake, this line can’t … simply can’t be held.’
There was a sort of hush, even though artillery was banging away all around. Tom Jackson himself got up from the caisson and, still holding the despatch pad in his left hand, came up to Searcy. He reached out his free hand and put it on Searcy’s wrist. My God, Searcy saw with surprise, my damned hands are trembling. There was a frightful kindliness in Jackson’s eyes.
‘I’m touched by your distress, Mr Searcy, but you mustn’t fret.’ And then a slow country smile rose from beneath the dark whiskers. ‘Longstreet’s arrived,’ the General whispered. ‘General Hood’s Texans have just turned up down on the Gainesville crossroads. We have the means, dear sir, to hold. The means …’
Patting Searcy’s wrist once, Jackson turned back to his seat on the caisson. Searcy heard him say: ‘Give him some brandy.’
6
Orville Puckett lay on a waterproof blanket that morning, on the shaded side of McFail’s ordnance waggon. Even while he drowsed, his head was full of pain and he kept his eyes shut against the mild sunlight in this clearing. His knees were held up towards his chest to ease his stomach cramps. Already his stomach had rejected the little bowl of corn gruel McFail had fed him for breakfast.
McFail was a Scot. He’d grown up in the Highlands somewhere and had this thick way of talking you could just understand. He was grey and tough and well in his forties. In the poor white section of Wilmington, North Carolina, he’d owned a grocery store, but his wife had sold it some ten months past and gone further south, taking with her McFail’s ten-year-old son and the sale price and a Cherokee lover. McFail was hungry for money to start his life afresh. He’d taken $10 from Patrick Maskill to mind Orville in these last few days and to carry him in his waggon. As well as that, Maskill had said that if Orville was still alive in a week, McFail would get $20.
‘Orville is the sort of boy we need to have alive,’ said Maskill.
McFail had whisky from Manassas in his waggon. He’d been saving it for the time that was bound to come when boys would pay $2 a half cup for it. Why, he’d heard that in the army of the Tennessee they were already parting with $2.50 for a sip of the stuff in a tin can. While waiting for the price to rise, he fed Orville a slug of it three times a day. Not just because he had a fatal kindness, but also because the war might come to its close before the big prices came in, and then boys would be able to buy as much of the stuff as they wanted for $2 a bottle. A prize of $10 in a week’s time just for keeping a gunner alive was worth thinking on.
McFail stood amongst the waggons speaking of fast money this morning as every morning. Every time Orville woke, which was about once every two minutes, there was McFail talking about the way this man or that had been visited by divine wealth.
‘I’m told there was a driver of sixteen years, a mere bairn. He was serving in the army of the Confederacy in Kentucky this past spring, and what does he do but go to a Union general by night and he offers to deliver forty Confederate waggons for money. Well, one night these forty waggons is eking along south of Perryville and this traitorous bairn is driving the lead waggon. And some Union cavalry comes out of the woods and makes captives of the cavalry escort at the front of the column and then leads the whole waggon train in a circle to the North. That boy became the happy possessor of $1200 in U.S. treasury notes jest frae that wee enterprise.’
‘If you mean,’ one of the other drivers said, nodding towards the noise of cannon from the ridge, ‘to go and make deals with General Johnny Pope, the time is now. For there seems to be so much conversation going on atween them and us right now.’
‘Why, there’s more ways of making fortunes than that,’ said McFail. ‘I was reading in a copy of Harper’s that a sergeant of 24 frae Chicago dreamed up a wee false hand a mon could use to do up his buttons and hold his member with while pissing. Why, this war augurs to make so many one-armed people that the baby sergeant will be the richest mon in all the
continent.’
‘Goddamit, McFail,’ someone called. ‘Them Yankee horsemen might come round this morning and deliver you from all your dreams of wealth.’
For there was a sort of anxiety in this clearing amongst the waggon-masters. There were litter-bearers around there too, trying to delay in the shade on the edges of the forest, skulking from their surgeons and their officers. Amongst all of them there was this funny feeling about the battle up there on the ridge that was beyond their influence. And they often spat tobacco juice, the waggon-masters, and said with what sounded almost like real hate that they hoped the goddam infantry was doing its job up there. ‘I hope they can hold that goddam line,’ they’d say occasionally, as if the boys up there would just give it all up if you let them have half a chance of so doing.
Well, Orville understood these feelings in a way. For the soldier, the wondering and the frowning ended once the firing started. Back here you could wonder and frown all day, and nothing happened to ease that tautness of the brain.
A little after nine o’clock by that jangled watch Orville Puckett carried in his trouser pocket, and which he sometimes squinted at when the cramps or the sharp voice of McFail woke him, a whole force of Union cavalry – just about three regiments of it, came riding into that clearing. They were horsemen who’d spent the morning creeping away from Longstreet, and so they’d come over Catharpen Run and by a series of country lanes to the edges of these woods. What they saw before them was a goodly part of the supply and ordnance waggons and the medical side of Jackson’s army. It was said later that they were Germans, for they didn’t hold surgeons sacred. They leaned in the saddle as they galloped into the clearing and shot a Georgia doctor in the face while the man had a bonesaw deep in the marrow of some poor boy’s leg. Loitering litter-bearers were shot by their empty litters. McFail and his friends ran to their waggons. They were not meant to be armed, but they were, better than any infantry man, with breechloaders they’d acquired by what was called alienation of supplies; that is, by bribing officers or cavalry men with whisky. McFail stood by the axle trees of his waggon and fired off one round. Then the rifle seized, and he was working its lever when he was shot through the chest.
The clearing was now full of blue cavalry men. Orville thought, I can clear the mechanism of one of those. He rose from the blanket and the cramps kept him bent. But he took the rifle from McFail’s side and, working the lever, got rid of a stuck round and then shot a young horseman clean out of his saddle.
Now no one except cavalry officers kept sabres, and even then few officers carried them in battle. But all at once there was an officer coming at Orville and gesturing with a sabre. He was about the same age as the boy Orville had just killed and he was coming to punish Orville for that death. Even without his cramps, Orville couldn’t run, being backed up against the axle tree like that. Orville thought how he didn’t want to kill his young subaltern, but he could see the horseman’s mouth set like an old wound. And the idea came that if only he and the cavalry officer could go aside from all that heat and fire and speak with each other they might find they were both Americans and mutually forgiveable. The other consideration was that the Spencer had seized up once more. No wonder someone had sold it to goddam McFail – it choked on every second round. I am defenceless, O God, thought Orville, backed up against enough ammunition to keep a brigade in the line for a week or so.
The boy officer came on very savage. Orville was frightened by the hate that was there. He worked the lever but then it got properly stuck. The boy struck Orville at the side of the neck at the moment Orville was thinking of saying something to conciliate and soothe him. Orville felt the deep bite of the metal. Deep enough! he wanted to say. And his breath went out of him along with his first blood. The blade was halted at the front by his collar-bone and, amazed, he felt it grate against the bone atop his spine at the back. Dear Christ, I’m halfway beheaded. By this old-fashioned device.
He couldn’t remember the blade coming out, but Orville noticed the boy had gone away; and you could see the bloody steel raised high.
He sat down and drowsed off again before he knew he had done it. His well-stored blood spilled out by the split in the collar of his artillery jacket. But the deepest blood, the blood that shouldn’t be poured away, went on its easy way in Orville’s jugular, which the blade had run beside but not sundered.
A railroad cut has its own specialities. Sometimes it is higher than the surrounding fields and in these parts it is called a fill. Then it slices fair through little hillocks, and there it is called a cut. Ordinary people tend to call the whole thing a cut. This railroad cut – of which Wheat was thinking that it would be very likely the scene of the worst railroad accident in America, with no locomotive even involved – had no tracks laid in it and was all cuts and fills, one after another. Some boys opted to lie atop the high embankments, others behind the tall fills. Fifteen feet high. At their base officers could stand on level ground if they wished, and call up for news.
In the hot noonday along their stretch of railroad cut the Volunteers were left alone and relished it. It was a mysterious mercy and they made use of it, some sleeping, some playing poker down in the bottom of the cut, some talking, some reading bartered and yellowed newspapers.
Usaph and Gus lay with Lafcadio Wheat atop an embankment, on their bellies, their ribs tickled by the spiky grass. Wheat could see blue regiments in the woods off to the north and he lent Usaph and Gus his glasses so they could see them too. Usaph began to think, but it was a fine thing to work with a colonel and discuss probabilities with him and be privy to the mental side of battle.
‘They’re pushing away up there, them Lincoln boys,’ Wheat said, pointing north. ‘You can be sure as a tune on a fiddle they mean to make a push at us down here.’
Yet all day Colonel Wheat’s boys were left untroubled. A Union general called Porter was meant to have fallen on their end of the line with his whole fine and numerous corps. But although Usaph, Gus, Wheat and even Jackson did not know it, Porter had had an argument with Pope that morning and had reached the conclusion Johnny Pope didn’t know for certain where any of his corps were or what they should be doing.
So he did not move. Later he would be court-martialled for his kindnesses to the Confederate lean right flank.
About mid-afternoon, when butterflies hung from the lupins with folded wings and the heat lay on Usaph’s shoulders like a fierce but tolerable garment, Wheat began to talk about his gran’daddy. It amazed Gus and Usaph. They felt exalted and a little uneasy, being let look through Colonel Wheat’s field-glasses. It didn’t seem right to them that now they were being invited into the secrets of the Wheat family. But soon they could sense that in some ways the colonel needed to tell them of the scandalous ways of that first American Wheat, as if the best fate he could envisage for himself was to grow up to become just such an old man.
‘Now my gran’daddy,’ said the colonel, ‘was a wild-haired attorney from Clarksburg, and his name it was Hugo Wheat, and he was such a big man and could nigh-on dig post holes with that there implement of his. Well, there he was, Chairman of the Miners’ Benevolent Fund with powers to dish out the lucre to the families of any poor miners who left various of their extremities down in the pit. There was this rumour that he enjoyed many a fine mine-widder, but I doubt that’s true, he wasn’t the sort to dance on any man’s grave. Though you know when that-there Sam Peeps was Secretary of the Navy to the old British tyrant Charles II he used to get his way with many a sea captain’s bride who called there at the Navy office in old London town to fetch her absent husband’s pay. And ole Hugo was of a literary turn and had read Peeps’ book setting down all these particulars, so if he did get his corner into a nice mine wife then he was but following the dictates of literature.’
Usaph saw Gus hunching down on his side and glancing at the brassy sky with this wide childlike grin on his face. So, Usaph thought, why should I spoil things by scowling at this story? But the questi
on of what ole Hugo Wheat did to miners’ widders raised the question of what men might one day do to his widder.
‘Well, sometime on about twenty years ago,’ Wheat pressed on, ‘my gran’daddy discovered that another member of the committee was using the funds to issue personal cheques for his own purposes. With one of the cheques, this feller had bought a racehorse, and with another a new kiln from Chicago for his china works, which were called the Monongahela Pottery Company. So we’ll call him Mr China for the purpose of this-here narrative and we’ll call his wife Mrs goddam China. It happened that old Hugo always had a leaning towards Mrs China and that governed Hugo’s actions in all that followed, for Hugo was a victim of the heart as they say in those yeller-back novels. He went to Mr China and told him as a friend that a member of the committee had found the gap in the Society’s books and that the best thing Mr China could do was to clear out to Parkersburg on the Ohio and on to Cincinnati and raise the missing funds from the bankers and the merchants of that city, given that he was known to many Ohio merchants because of the quality of his goddam chinaware. Of course, he could never expect to be taken back into the bosom of that-there committee, but nothing would be said as long the money came back. So Mr China took off on his racehorse at night and left ole Hugo free to stay in Clarksburg, yet riding as sweet a mount, if you can fathom that riddle, gentlemen. For Hugo was left with none other than Mrs China and they took delight in each other in the morning and on them dry mountain afternoons in summer, and they were together according to their will in that first hot flush of night and after the dogs had gone to bed and in the first grey.
‘Well, Mr China was absent a good five weeks and didn’t return till this time of the year, round on about the first rains. He comes riding up to his fine house at Nutter Fort and there’s a horse in the rain there, gran’daddy Hugo’s horse, and there ain’t any niggers about to put it in the stable, because Mrs China’s sent all the house and stable niggers, about five of them, all to town on errands. And Mr China is in the door yelling blood and murder before Mrs China and ole Hugo know anything of him. It’s a situation ole Hugo has been in before this and he has this here facility – a true lawyer’s gift – to make everyone feel goddam at fault, including the goddam judge.
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