The Battle of the Crater: A Novel

by Gingrich, Newt

  “May I ask why? At Fredericksburg I delegated operational command on the wings to subcommanders.”

  “And look what it got you,” Meade said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I am commander of this army and I will decide when to commit our reserves, if at all, not you.”

  “So that’s it,” Burnside finally replied after a very long minute of silence.

  Meade simply nodded, inhaled, and blew out a wreath of smoke.

  “I have sent up to General Grant all your various requests, which you demanded be expressed to him. I will tell you, Burnside, I did not give them my endorsement, but acting upon his orders I shall see this operation through. Tonight and tomorrow Grant will have his troops near Richmond as if preparing for an attack, in order to draw Lee’s reserves northward from here. I thought that news would at least please you.”

  Burnside realized that all the hangers-on of the headquarters were watching the two of them.

  “So nothing changes,” Burnside said.

  Meade simply nodded and did not reply.

  Burnside, rage barely suppressed, saluted, turned, and walked off. Meade stood, hands in pockets, and watched him leave.

  Meade went back down into his bunker, ignoring the shouted questions of the correspondents. One of his telegraphers was standing there, holding out a sheet of paper.

  “Sir, from General Grant.”

  He nodded, took the sheet, and retired back into his small room, carved deep into the earth. It was stuffy, but the earthen walls still held a touch of coolness when compared to the heat outside.

  He scanned the single sheet, smiled at first, but then wondered what the real meaning was.

  Grant was informing him that the diversionary operation to draw off Lee’s reserves was even now being launched, in spite of the defeat of Hancock’s Second Corps in the tangled ground of Deep Bottom on the far side of the river over the last two days. The crucial line of the message, though, was that rather than checking all orders, Grant was delegating to him all decisions of a tactical nature for the forthcoming battle to be initiated by the detonation of “Burnside’s Mine.”

  THE TUNNEL

  5:00 P.M.

  “That’s the last of the powder,” Colonel Pleasants whispered.

  The entire work crew let out an audible sigh of relief. To a man, all of them were miners and every last one of them had lost many a friend or relative in a mine they had been assured was safe, confident that the blasters knew their jobs and nothing could go wrong.

  The 320 barrels, equally divided between the two side galleries, had been carefully stacked in near pitch blackness, the men working by feel. As each barrel was positioned, a hole was cut into each barrel with a bronze awl to allow the blast from the initial detonation instant access to the powder within.

  Now came the frightful part, with Pleasants announcing he would do the task himself. He did it with a single miner’s lamp placed at the T intersection of the tunnel, and therefore was working in deep shadows. The wooden barrels, with a thin coating of nonconductive lead to keep out moisture, were stacked from floor to ceiling, lined nearly twenty feet deep. Unscrewing the cap of one of the barrels, he felt the wooden plug grabbing against the lead and, even though he knew it was safe, it still set him on edge. He laid the barrel on its side, making sure that it was wedged in tight against the other barrels behind it and to either side. On a heavy wooden plank he had laid out a piece of canvas covered in wax and, tipping the barrel slightly, he let a pound or so of powder spill out on to the cloth, banking the powder with his hand up to the open cap. Reaching back, he took the coil of fuse, careful not to pull too hard. The men had been working all day on the damn splices, making sure they were well woven and then carefully covered with a dripping of hot wax.

  He laid the fuse into the banked powder and then carefully slipped a foot-long section of it into the open barrel. Then he draped another sheet of wax-impregnated canvas over the top of that, in case any moisture might drip down from the ceiling of the tunnel. A wooden stake had been driven deep into the ground and he made sure the fuse was coiled around that stake, so that, if any back pressure was accidentally applied while stacking up sandbags or splicing the main fuse in place, it would not be pulled free from its final destination.

  Ever so carefully, he crawled backward out of the tunnel. This would be the part covered over with sandbags and the section he was most worried about. The fragile fuse, rather than a sturdy insulated copper wire, could easily be dislodged. Along this section, the fuse was raised off the floor of the tunnel. One of his scroungers had come back triumphant after prowling around the waterfront at City Point for several hours, having stolen a couple of hundred feet of canvas hose from one of the firefighting units positioned along the dock to protect the vast warehouses. The hose had been cut into two lengths to protect the fuse as it snaked through a carefully made opening, set into the mounds of the sandbags, leading to either wing of the tunnel.

  He now replicated the same task in the other gallery. Yet even as he worked, every minute or so he would hear something, close on, just to his left. He paused in his work, put his hand on the wall, and after about thirty seconds felt the vibration. He put his ear to the wall, waited, but heard nothing distinguishable. Nevertheless, it sent a chill through him. They were close, maybe twenty or fifteen feet away. It was only a matter of time before this tunnel was found.

  He carefully played out the fuse, making sure it was staked in place every three feet, as he crawled backward to the main tunnel leading back to the Union lines. He didn’t speak, merely gesturing toward the sandbags that were already lining up opposite the wall along which the fuse would be laid. His men quietly got to work forming a relay, his most experienced men—Kochanski, O’Shay, Lubbeck, and half a dozen others working closest to the powder—building up a layer of sandbags from floor to ceiling. The only opening was just a few inches across, for the canvas hose containing the fuse. First layer firmly set, they slipped back a foot and started on the next layer, working in darkness. His greatest anxiety was that the fuses would somehow be dislodged, or far worse, in the final feet to detonation, the splicing would be pulled apart. For want of six hundred feet of copper wire, or just six-hundred-foot lengths of fast fuse, he was now laboring with this anxiety. He silently cursed whoever it was who had either misplaced, delayed, deliberately derailed, or just through sheer incompetence had failed to meet his specific request.

  His only consolation was that, if at least one charge blew, while it would not all go up at once; hopefully at least some of the flame would blow through the opening left for the fuse and a second or so later strike the other gallery and set it off as well, even though the combined effect would be lost.

  Like Burnside, he would have far preferred ten tons; he dug the length of the gallery out with that in mind. But it was too late now to change; he would have to replace that missing powder with yet more sandbags to tamp the charge in place. With that would come all the additional risks of dislodging the fuses or alerting the Rebs.

  Pleasants ever so carefully turned around, knowing the job was in the good hands of his experienced miners, and crawled the 511 feet back out of the tunnel. Once the sandbags were in place, and only then, would he connect the rest of the fuse.

  He reached the woodstove. Once all was in place, and before the fuse was laid, it would be damped out. Left in place, it would be buried with the rest of the tunnel. Perhaps someday an historian might dig it out, and he tried to smile at the thought.

  He opened the airlock door and crawled out. Work details were hunched down, lined up back through the covered way leading to the rear. Men were bringing up more sandbags. Now that the charges had been set, it was their nerve-racking task to form a relay and carefully pass nearly two thousand sandbags, each weighing over forty pounds, up the length of the tunnel to the crews sealing off the four tons of explosives. A single mistake—a man dropping a bag so that it fell against an upright shoring, knocking it out of place—coul
d trigger a disaster. Men could be buried alive, or it could make so much noise that the Rebels would locate the tunnel and finally be able to bore through the last few feet and discover their secret.

  Henry was surprised to see General Burnside at the entrance into the covered way. As was custom on the front line, he did not salute, but did stiffen and offer a nod.

  “The powder is set?” Burnside asked.

  “Yes, sir. And I personally laid the fuse.”

  “That fuse, that damn fuse. Are you certain it will carry the flame?”

  Pleasants was a bit surprised by Burnside’s question and obviously nervous attitude. Enlisted men by the dozen were gathered around, bent over or squatting on the ground, some beginning to file into the tunnel to establish the relay, each of them hauling a sandbag of dirt and sand as they ducked low and went into the tunnel.

  All of them could hear every word Burnside was saying and within minutes the rumors would start again that the general himself was now worried.

  “I am confident, sir, the fuses will work. I supervised all splices connecting the two galleries to the main fuse into the tunnel.”

  Though he didn’t fully believe his own words, he felt he had to say them in front of the men. Confidence had been sky high last night, and then collapsed this morning with the arrival of the powder and fuses. He could not help but hear the muttering that, yet again, the Army of the Potomac was preparing for defeat.

  “It will work, sir,” Pleasants repeated.

  “Good, good,” Burnside muttered even as he shook his head.

  Pleasants finally had to motion him to step away from where the men were working and go back up the length of the covered way. Both remained silent as they passed the men of his regiment, laboring with the sandbags.

  “I had to beg, borrow, and steal just to get those,” Burnside announced, pointing at the bags. “Supply said there was a shortage. There’s always a shortage.”

  “At least you got the sandbags for us, sir. As for the rest, there’s nothing to be done about it now,” Pleasants replied, feeling strange that, as a regimental commander, he was reassuring his corps commander. “Even if by some miracle additional powder and electric detonating equipment appeared, it is too late to set it in. We’re already packing off the tunnels.”

  He did not restate his anxiety that the Rebel counterminers might be drawing closer. With all the work that had to be done in the tunnel over the next day, it would be a miracle if they didn’t hear and bore straight in on them. If additional powder did materialize now, he would advise against setting it. It would only be a matter of days, perhaps hours, before they were discovered.

  “I wish we had one of Professor Lowe’s balloons right now,” Burnside sighed.

  “Sir?”

  “I actually suggested it when all this started, but Meade dismissed it out of hand,” Burnside said hurriedly. “Professor Lowe’s balloons; one anchored behind our lines could easily tell us if the Rebels are digging reserve lines behind the fort or on Blandford Church Hill.

  “He actually laughed and then just dismissed it.”

  Burnside turned away from Henry to look back at the men who were now relaying the sandbags into the tunnel.

  “It will work,” Pleasants said. “Sir, it will work.”

  Burnside looked back at him, his features drawn.

  “It has to work,” Burnside said softly.

  TRAINING CAMP

  11 P.M.

  Camp had at last settled down. The quiet whispering after the playing of “Taps” had died down and all was silent. Garland White, with James Reilly by his side, walked through the encampment area, neither saying much.

  There had been excitement, to be certain, in the camp tonight, men singing the song about being men of war, which had sprung to the other regiments so that it echoed and reechoed across the encampment area of Fourth Division. But there had been an increasing sense of somberness as well.

  Officers had gone from group to group, urging the men to turn in promptly and get a good night’s sleep. In the morning they would be allowed to sleep in until eight, an unheard of luxury in this army. The noonday meal would be fresh beef and the first of summer corn rather than the usual rations. But tomorrow evening they were to settle down at dusk, to be awakened at midnight and then move up to their positions for the attack.

  Tomorrow was to be spent cleaning weapons, stacking packs and all unnecessary equipment into a common depot, and drawing eighty fresh rounds of ammunition and three days of marching rations. The men were to drink as much water as they could hold, then top off their canteens, which were not to be touched once darkness settled. A full canteen was silent, a half empty or, worse yet, an empty tin canteen would bang and rattle.

  James had stood silent, deeply moved by the number of men who had come to Garland during the evening to ask if he would pray with them for a moment, or if he could find the time to pencil a few lines to a wife or parents saying that they would meet in Heaven and not to mourn, for death had came honorably.

  James had tried to sketch one such moment, a drummer boy and a young soldier who might have been his older brother, asking for help with a note back to a Quaker school mistress in Indianapolis, thanking her for her kindness to them.

  Then he felt he was invading something sacred and poignant, and he gave up and turned away.

  The scenes had, as well, reminded him far too much of Cold Harbor, but at least these men, not yet veterans, had yet to learn to pin the notes to their backs.

  All was quiet now. A few who could not find sleep and did not wish to disturb their tent mates sat silent in front of smoldering fires. A small group was gathered around a lantern, a gray-bearded soldier whispering a verse from the Bible: “Though a thousand fall by thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, it shall not come nigh unto thee…” Another sat sideways by a fire, using the flickering light to write a letter, which was already several pages long.

  Garland did not admonish any of them to turn in. He would simply nod, put a finger to his lips to indicate silence, and would walk on, hands again clasped behind his back.

  “Do you think it will work?” Garland finally asked, breaking the long minutes of silence.

  James did not reply. How could he? How many nights had he spent like this? He could not even count them anymore, so many nights before battle. Once they had been filled with anticipation and hope, but then merely resolve, and finally, in this last campaign, only a tragic resignation. These men believed; they wanted to believe. How could he answer honestly?

  “If anyone has a chance at it, you do,” he finally said.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  James forced a smile.

  “Why don’t you get some sleep, Garland?”

  The preacher-turned-sergeant shook his head and smiled.

  “When the last of my flock are asleep, maybe then—maybe then.”

  James felt that to stay longer was to intrude. The man wished to be alone with his thoughts, his prayers. He took his hand, grasped it firmly.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow night before you go in.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “It’s James, remember?” and he smiled.

  JULY 28

  FORT PEGRAM

  11:50 P.M.

  “The sound is different,” Captain Sanders whispered, looking over at Sergeant Allison.

  “They’ve stopped digging, but they are still down there,” Allison replied nervously.

  “Exactly.”

  Sanders sat back on his haunches, looking at Allison.

  “It’s when we don’t hear anything that we should start to worry.”

  “They won’t withdraw us out of the fort?”

  “At least our regiment isn’t inside the fort,” Allison whispered. “Thank God we switched places with these poor South Carolina boys … God help them.”

  Sanders shook his head.

  “Ransom thinks there might be a tunnel, but we can’t abandon
the line,” and he nodded back toward the Jerusalem Plank Road. This night, like every night, the Yankee heavy mortars were lobbing shells at random back onto it, hoping to hit the supply wagons that could only move at night.

  “We lose that, we lose Petersburg, so we stay here.”

  “And get our asses blown off?” Allison retorted.

  Sanders could only smile, pat Allison on the shoulder, and stand up.

  “I’m gonna try and sleep. Give me a holler if the noise stops.”

  “Oh, I’ll holler all right,” Allison sighed. “And you can holler right along with me, as we either get blown to heaven or hell.”

  JULY 29, 1864

  HEADQUARTERS, ARMY OF THE POTOMAC

  1:00 A.M.

  George Meade, hands in his pocket while chewing on an unlit cigar, stood looking out across the valley to the Rebel lines beyond. There was a flash of light, followed long seconds later by a hollow thump. The nightly bombardment of the Jerusalem Plank Road. Rarely did it hit anything, but at least it kept the bastards on their toes and let them know we were watching.

  Far beyond, to the west and north, the skyline flared, settled, and then flared again, a distant storm marching down, perhaps to arrive here in a few hours. If so, it would be a cool comforting relief after the days of such intense heat. Once this war was over he never wanted to see the South again. Before the war he had worked along the New Jersey shore, supervising lighthouse construction. Perhaps he would return there to settle down after all this was over.

  Even a fool could realize how things would fall out once this was done. Grant would aggrandize himself with the glory of victory and pull his trusted companions from the West—Sherman and Sheridan—along with him. When the war ended and the army demobilized there would be no room for him. The mistakes that had been made, the butchery of the Army of the Potomac from the Wilderness to this godforsaken place, would be laid to him. He was pragmatic enough to know that if victory was ever won, the Westerners would get the credit, and he would get carping about how he had not pursued Lee after Gettysburg.