And then Russell turned to face forward.
“Charge boys, charge!”
All around James, hundreds of men, for a moment transfixed by the sight of their flag-bearer going down, now let loose with a wild roar of rage and swarmed up out of the trench.
James stood, unable to move, though with all his heart and soul he willed himself forward. The agonized cries of the flag-bearer, still impaled on the upright bayonet, tore into his soul. He went up to the impaled soldier, grabbing him around the waist.
“Grab hold of my shoulder with your good arm!” James cried.
As he stood up, he could almost feel the grating of the bayonet as it slid back out from between the man’s ribs. He held the flag-bearer tight, feeling his warm blood pulsing from what was left of his arm.
He saw a canteen on the floor of the trench, beside it a soldier of the 28th, who just started at the two of them as he clutched his side, blood leaking out between his fingers.
“The canteen!” James cried. “Cut the strap!”
The wounded—in fact, dying—man roused himself, picked up the canteen, using the upended bayonet as a blade, and sawed the straps off. James wrapped it around the stump of the flag-bearer’s arm, tying it off the way he had seen it done on so many other stricken fields. Picking up a broken ramrod, he stuck it through the twisted strap, using it to twist the strap tighter and tighter until the pulsing flood of blood was stilled.
“Back to the rear,” James gasped, and somehow he managed to help push the two back over the side of the trench toward the Union lines.
“For God’s sake, don’t stay here. Don’t stop! Get to the rear.”
The two set off, leaning against each other for support.
They disappeared into the smoke, out of which yet more men of the Fourth were advancing.
Reilly looked back to the west, where the men of the 28th had gone. In the smoke and confusion they had disappeared from view, and for that moment he seemed all alone on the battlefield, in a trench filled with horrors.
* * *
Sergeant Major Garland White had heard men describe battle as like being in a nightmare, the type of dream where all seems to move painfully, frightfully slowly, as if struggling to move while waist deep in mud and filth.
The field ahead was not as it had been described to them during their training. There were many bunkers, some shallow trenches, the shattered earth confusing. Every step he took, weaving his way around bunkers and leaping over trenches, seemed to take an eternity.
Garland, at the front of the charge, kept looking back; men were still following, many from the 28th, mixed with troops of other regiments, even a scattering of white soldiers, who, seeing the USCT go forward, had at last ventured out of the shelter of the crater to join in the assault. He caught a glimpse of an officer, standing awkwardly, leaning heavily on a cane, sword in the other hand, pointing forward, and men rising around him to join in the attack.
“We can still do it!” Garland cried, urging all of them on. They were nearly halfway between the crater and the Jerusalem Plank Road.
And then he saw it.
A dark-clad column of men was coming down the Jerusalem Plank Road at the run. Then, like a well-oiled machine, even while running the Rebels swung outward to either side from column to line of battle.
As, charging, they swept toward him like apparitions, men not fifty yards ahead seemed to rise up out of a raw slash of earth cut across the field. They had lain in a shallow trench, not more than knee deep; perhaps it had been cut even as the three divisions that were supposed to charge had remained stalled in the crater.
“Damn! Damn all this!” Garland cried, the first time such a word had escaped his lips in years. He looked back. The men of his regiment and brigade were indeed advancing, joined by a fair number of white troops coming out of the crater, urged on by the crippled General Bartlett. But they were scattered, broken up, across a couple of hundred yards of field.
Russell had taken it in as well, and he turned and reached for the flag-bearer still holding the national colors; the regimental flag had disappeared.
“Form volley line! Form line on me!”
But the men were too spread out, too disjointed. Some of the 28th was most likely still all the way back in the covered way. Men of other regiments who were mixed in were separated from their officers and NCOs in the confusion.
Russell’s voice carried authority and, with back turned to the charging Rebels, Garland looked at him and could only feel awe for such leadership and courage.
He started to turn, to grab men, to create some semblance of a cohesive front to meet this countercharge, when the advancing Rebels suddenly seemed to disappear behind a cloud of dirty, yellow-gray smoke. A split-second later their volley of .58-caliber minié balls slashed across the field at nine hundred feet per second. The minié balls slammed into the men of the USCT and their comrades from the other divisions who had joined them.
Dozens collapsed. The flag-bearer, struck several times, sank to the ground, and Sergeant Felton leaped forward to grab the colors and raise them back up. Garland saw that the drummer boy had kept pace with them, but that one or more rifle balls had pierced his drum, shattering it. The once taut head of the drum was now limp, yet he still continued to beat on it.
“Give it back!” Russell cried. “Independent fire at will. Give it back!”
Those still standing raised rifles, leveled them, and fired, triggering a momentary resurgence of morale. For many of them it was the first time they had actually fired their rifles in action.
They were not much stronger than a skirmish line but more men were coming up every second, falling in on either flank, broadening the line out. Garland took position behind the line, pacing it as he had been trained, giving advice, repeating the litany:
“Load ’em right, boys, and then aim low. That’s it. Aim low, aim low!”
He heard another voice repeating the words and looked down the line to see the barrel-chested Sergeant Malady also pacing the line, grabbing men who were coming up and pushing them into position. Their gazes locked for a second and Malady actually gave him a nod. For Garland it was perhaps the most meaningful salute he had ever received.
Then another volley tore into them, men staggering backward, some collapsing to their knees and pitching forward. The blow was shattering.
“Keep at it, boys!” Russell screamed.
And then they heard it. They had been told often enough of it, their officers trying to describe it, but now they heard it for real—the Rebel yell. It was true; it sounded like wolves baying at the scent of blood and now charging them at the run.
Back on the road Garland saw a battery of Rebel field guns was swinging into position. These were the dreaded Napoleons, which could deal such deadly work at short range. Two of the pieces had already unlimbered and were firing, recoiling as they hurled blasts of canister into the far-left flank of the Union line.
“Charge them!”
It was Russell, stepping forward, pointing toward the wall of smoke, and Garland knew it was the only command left to give. This attack had to be met head on.
“Come on!” Garland pushed the man ahead of him and grabbed another who seemed about to turn and run.
“Stay with me!” Garland cried.
The thin line hesitated for a second and then, as if shocked by an electric current, appeared to leap forward in one last act of desperation.
The range closed within seconds. If they had been the solid block formation as they had once trained, they would have battered through the thin Rebel line with barely a pause. Sheer weight and momentum alone would have carried them through. But now?
A half thousand men, scattered in knots and clusters, a few following a trusted sergeant, others around a flag or trusted officer, surged forward in the confusion. Some were tripping into the dugouts, moats, and bunkers that mazed the field behind the main line. They had almost reached the freshly cut trench, when out of it, troops holding up the flag
s of Virginia arose, joined now by the reinforcements pouring off the road. The Rebels came straight in at them, bayonets leveled.
Both sides were screaming foul oaths of hatred and rage. Centuries of slavery and the cruelty and fear it engendered, combined with three years of bitter war with no end in sight, unleashed a pent-up fury on this day as both sides screamed: “No quarter, no prisoners!”
The thin ragged line of blue collided with the thicker, better organized, and more cohesive tide of butternut and gray.
A Confederate officer, pistol raised, pointed it straight at Garland’s face from ten feet away and squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty chamber and, with musket butt raised, Garland knocked the man over backward with a blow to his face. It landed with such violence he could hear bones crunching.
Garland had struggled long with the question of whether he could ever strike another man to kill him. The question had just been answered. He found himself filled with a wild rage, but also a pain so frightening that he only wanted to scream for all of them to stop.
Even as he struggled with that thought, he dodged to one side as a Rebel lunged at him with a bayonet. One of his men grabbed the weapon by the barrel, pulling the man forward, while another clubbed him down.
More and more Union soldiers swarmed into the melee, but for every Union soldier it seemed that two, three, or more Confederates pushed into the fight. Garland could feel the men around him giving ground, backing up.
He saw Malady, just a dozen feet away, swinging his musket like a club, while several Rebels closed in around him. He tried to push toward the man to help him, screaming his name, ducking a clubbed musket aimed at him as well. Then a Rebel leaned in toward Malady and shot him in the chest at point-blank range. Malady staggered backward, falling into a shallow trench.
The dam now broke, his men falling back, Rebs pushing in, screaming obscenities, a primal rage unleashed that to Garland did not seem to be war at all, but instead a devilish exercise in mass murder.
He jumped down into the ditch where Malady lay gasping, trying to pull him up.
“Get out of here!” Malady cried. “Leave me for Christ’s sake and get out of here!”
“No!”
“Look out!”
With his remaining strength Malady pushed Garland to one side. A Rebel was aiming down at him. If he had squeezed a second earlier, the bullet would have struck Garland in the back. Instead it hit Malady. Garland lashed out with his rifle butt but the Rebel had jumped aside and was gone.
Malady’s eyes unfocused and he looked up at Garland.
“Damn proud of you,” he whispered. “You’re as good as any man of Ireland this day.”
Fighting back tears, Garland squeezed his hand, released it, and climbed out of the trench.
There was no semblance of order left. Some men of the USCT were still trying to come up but the veteran line of Confederates continued to push forward, pausing to reload, fire, then push forward again. He was nearly behind them. He caught sight of the drummer boy, who was helping a wounded soldier limp to the rear, and ran to him. Garland nearly scooped him off the ground, pushing the wounded soldier ahead of him. He started to run, bursting back into the confusion of his comrades, who were falling back but still trying to fight gamely.
Together they tumbled into the rabbit warren of trenches and dugouts just to the west of the crater. There was a moment of near-blind panic when he turned a corner and saw a swarm of Rebels, closing in on their flank, pushing forward.
Turning, he shoved the drummer boy in the opposite direction. The ground ahead was a jumbled mass of earth, in some places piled high, like boulders tossed by a giant. Scattered before it was wreckage, debris, dead men, and parts of dead men. There were many wounded, some trying to crawl toward the Confederate side, others up the sloping lip of torn earth.
He looked back.
The few men still standing against the Rebel charge were going down, shot from front and flank. Up toward the road the full battery of Napoleon field pieces now in play, firing case shot set to burst as the twelve-pound rounds skimmed over the ground.
The field was carpeted with Union and Confederate dead and dying. The only ones now standing and moving forward were Confederates.
“Garland! Get in here, you damn fool!” someone screamed.
He looked up the slope. There was the artist, beckoning to him.
Garland shoved the drummer boy and the wounded soldier he had been clinging to toward James. He scrambled up the hot red clay, following while minié balls smacked the earth to either side of him.
As he reached the crest, James extended a hand to pull up the drummer boy and then Garland.
Sergeant Major Garland White cleared the lip of the crater, and slid down into its relative protection. Gasping for air, he looked down into its depths and then swept his glance over the steep-banked slope. It was nearly a hundred yards wide, fifty across, and thirty or more feet deep.
Within its confines were packed nearly ten thousand men, crowded so tightly they could barely move. Those still with fight in them were manning the lip of the scorched hole, firing at the advancing Rebs, at last breaking their charge. They were tossing empty muskets down to the men behind them, who would pass up loaded replacements. When a shooter was finally hit—usually in the head, throat, or shoulders—and slid back down into the pit, he was replaced by another.
Garland took in a deep breath, gasping for air. It was scorching hot, as if the ground itself was still burning from the explosion; overhead a red-hued sun beat down upon them with a pitiless intensity. Garland reached for his canteen. It was gone, where he did not know, and he was grateful when James offered him a full one.
“We’re trapped in a sunlit picture of hell,” James whispered.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
10:30 A.M.
“Sir, this is from Meade again.”
Ambrose Burnside barely stirred, took the offered telegraph, and scanned it.
In the last half hour Meade had peppered him with repeated queries and then at 9:30 had announced that it was increasingly evident that the attack had failed.
Burnside replied that if only the reserve corps were released and thrown in against either flank, the situation could still be reversed.
And then, fifteen minutes later, came the death blow: an order to withdraw all men currently engaged.
He looked again at the telegram just handed to him and could only shake his head. Now it was another contradictory order, from Meade’s chief of staff, to pass a command to the troops still in the crater to hold and dig in.
“Now what?” Captain Vincent asked, taking the telegram from Burnside’s trembling hands.
He looked up at Vincent, eyes red-rimmed. It was obvious the man was in shock, bitten by what his staff privately called “Burnside’s black dog.”
“Tell Humphries I no longer have any discretion in this matter as per General Meade’s previous orders to withdraw.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me,” Burnside whispered. “First, he tells me to attack whether the mine is detonated or not, this after changing the order of battle. Then he makes it clear that, somehow, I have insulted him, and it is evident he will have to bring me up on charges. He refuses to send in the other two corps and push them to either flank, when we have at least made a lodgment in their center. Then he orders me to withdraw. Now his chief of staff tells me to pass the order for the men to hold on and dig in?
“Tell me, Vincent. Which one of us is insane?”
Vincent stood wooden, unable to reply.
“Do you honestly think you can get a message up to those men now in the crater?”
Burnside knew Vincent to be a brave man.
Vincent hesitated.
“If you order me to do so.”
“Would you order others to try and get up to them, other than in a mass charge?”
Vincent stood silent and then finally shook his head.
“No one can get t
en paces up that slope now, sir.”
Burnside sighed, burying his face in his hands.
“Send back to Humphries what I just stated. I no longer have such discretion, after being ordered but fifteen minutes ago to withdraw. Unless these instructions are countersigned by General Meade himself, his prior order stands.”
He sat in silence, staring off. Through the open door, down from the surface, the sounds of the continued bombardment from the Union lines began to slacken. This was not out of any desire on the part of the gunners, who could see the desperateness of the situation, but from the simple reality that after more than five hours of heavy fire they had depleted their huge reserves. They had been told that they would fire in support for one hour at most—not five.
THE CRATER
11 A.M.
“And I tell you, if they catch us in here with them damn darkies, we’re all dead men!”
Garland and those around him looked back nervously at the troops from Ledlie’s division, who were packed in a vast seething mob at the bottom of the crater, more than thirty feet below them.
The crater was a bedlam, a madhouse. The sun was beating down mercilessly, the sky overhead the color of copper.
Around ten thousand men were packed into the crater, a hundred yards in length, fifty or more yards wide, and thirty feet deep.
It was hard to hear anything because of the din of musketry blazing along the entire rim. Those men still with fight in them, mostly from the Fourth Division, were interspersed with white troops. Artillery shells from the Union side were winging in, close overhead, in a vain attempt at support. Rebel fire was increasing by the minute. After the repulse of the last charge, the Rebs had settled into a semicircle, in some places not more than a few dozen feet away, hidden in adjoining trenches. At least half a dozen of their mortars had found the range—several of them light “Cohorns” that could be manhandled along a trench by several men, and which lobbed twelve- or twenty-four-pound shells. The range was so close that all they needed to do was drop in several ounces of propellant, and the ball would arc upward just fifty feet or so, then tumble down into the crater to detonate with devastating effect.
The Battle of the Crater: A Novel Page 27
