The heat was debilitating, even to those veterans inured to months of hard campaigning in the Virginia summer. Their water was all but gone and many of the men had already torn off their wool jackets and cast them aside.
The dead littered the sides of the crater and carpeted the ground around it. The wounded slid down to the bottom, trying to find some semblance of shelter. They crawled into the crevices cut into the raw earth by the explosions, some still venting wisps of smoke after five hours. The men were enveloped by the rotten-egg stench left by four tons of detonated black powder, as well as that from the musketry of the defenders and those encircling them. In many of those crevices, more than one wounded man died, or was trampled and buried by the panicked pushing and shoving of comrades.
Groups of men would cluster along the eastern lip of the crater, closest to the Union lines. Together they would spring to their feet make a break for their own lines, but few made it unscathed.
Garland glared at the knot of men below, gazing up at him with such hatred.
Colonel Russell, hearing their comments, turned toward them.
“Get up here, you damn cowards, and fight!” he cried, but none of them moved.
“I’ll kill the first man who attacks any of my men!”
As they fought to keep back the Rebels along the rim, many soldiers of the Fourth gazed back anxiously; over the years, more than one had heard such talk and knew that at times it had ended with a rope and a tree.
11:45 A.M.
“I said to start digging!” Henry Pleasants screamed, but his words came out as barely a strangled whisper.
His men, soaked with perspiration, some of them down from the heat, dragged back to the covered way, just looked at him, numbed.
He pointed up to the cauldron, the damn crater—the crater he had created.
Another burst of men burst from the crest, some running full out—rifles, cartridge boxes, and jackets cast aside. A few were moving more slowly, dragging along wounded comrades … nearly all were white troops.
In that inferno of noise he could hear whoops from the Rebel line. Shouts rang out that more were breaking, and then men suddenly began to collapse—many caught in full stride, shot from behind or from the side, falling, rolling over; some staggered back up. In some cases the Rebs took pity after winging a man and would let him limp the last few yards to tumble into Pleasants’s section of trench.
But if it was a colored soldier, he would be absolutely riddled. Of the several hundred men of the Fourth who had tried to make a break to the rear, fewer than one in three were making it unscathed.
“We’ve got to dig to them!” Pleasants cried. “Those are your comrades up there!”
“Dig a hundred yards upslope?” one of his men replied wearily, obviously spent.
“Damn it, yes,” Pleasants gasped. “It doesn’t have to be deep, just a few feet across, a foot or two deep, enough to give them some cover. We can cut our way up there in three, four hours.”
He knew he was lying. His regiment was one of the very few out of the entire corps which had been exempt from the charge. After their labors on the tunnel, their job had been to hold the forward line just in case something went wrong with the attack.
Men of the regiment that had been out of the trench in the first minutes watched the effect of what they had labored so hard for. They urged their comrades forward, helped pull them up and out of the forward trench, pushed them up to the attack, and now acted to aid the wounded. No one back at corps had arranged for a cadre of medical orderlies to be waiting in the covered way to help the wounded to the rear. In the grand plan of it all, once Petersburg fell, sections of pontoon bridges would be laid over the trenches to facilitate the moving of artillery, followed by wagons of ammunition and ambulances for evacuating the wounded.
All those ambulances were now parked a thousand yards back behind the lines.
Nearly half of Pleasants’s regiment had by now been detailed off to help drag or carry wounded through the covered way and back to the aid stations behind the main line. More than a few of those men, in spite of the good discipline of his regiment, were not coming back, or were doing so as slowly as possible. All could see the debacle, and as veterans, none would be surprised if the Rebs decided to launch a surprise counterstrike into their trench to ensure complete encirclement of the four divisions, or what was left of them.
Several men, armed with shovels, finally stepped forward, one group led by Sergeant Kochanski. Without a word to their commander, they began to chop away at the forward edge of their trench. They were keeping low, for harassing fire was now beginning to skim the top of their position as well.
“Come on, I need more of you,” Henry pleaded. “I want a half dozen crawlways up that hellhole!”
By twos and threes, his weary men, who had not slept in more than a day, began using short-handled shovels and bayonets—with which they had dug nearly six hundred feet of tunnel—to construct pathways to save their trapped comrades.
And then, to his absolute amazement, Henry saw a knot of several dozen colored soldiers leap out of the crater and set off at a full run. None were armed, most still wore their heavy blue jackets, but what amazed him was that each of the men had eight, ten, a dozen canteens slung over his shoulders or around his neck.
The fire that closed in on them was merciless. Henry wanted to stand up, to scream at the Rebels: “For God’s sake, is it not obvious what these men are doing?”
Many were struck by well-aimed head shots, others wounded and knocked over. As they tried to rise they were hit again and again.
Little more than half of them made it to the lip of Pleasants’s trench, his own men standing up, cheering them on, and pulling them in as they leaped or slid to safety.
Faces sweat soaked, they looked at each other, some with tight-lipped grins, all of them silent until one of them, a sergeant, looked up at Pleasants.
“Boss … I mean, Colonel, sir. Where can we find water?”
Unable to speak, Henry could only point to a fifty-gallon barrel that had been laboriously rolled up through the covered way for the benefit of his men in this blazing heat.
His own men stood silent, then eager hands reached out to these men who had just sprinted from hell and obviously intended to go back into it. And then words of encouragement:
“Here, you rest, I’ll do it”; “Give me them canteens”; “You just sit a spell and get your breath.”
And in the eyes of more than one of his men, Pleasants saw tears of admiration, a sight rare indeed with veterans.
His men, carrying the dozens of canteens, gathered around the barrel, plunging the canteens in to fill them. Others in his command ringed the dozen colored soldiers; squatting down by their sides they took off their hats to fan them. They offered them their own canteens, which they drank from greedily. A few made the ultimate gesture, one comrade to another unknown comrade, offering a pint of whiskey; some of the black men took it gladly, others refused. One of his officers lugged up a bucket and upended a quart or so of water over the head of each man to help him cool off.
The men of the Fourth looked up at them in amazement, for here were white men waiting upon them, eyes filled with admiration and wonder.
Soldiers of the 48th reached into haversacks, pulling out chaws of tobacco, whispering words of esteem and encouragement …
The men who had filled the canteens came back, one by one, and solemnly handed them back to the bearers.
Pleasants tried to control his voice.
“You don’t have to go back,” he finally said, voice choked with emotion.
They looked up at him, breathing hard.
“Sir, we got friends back there. Friends hurt real bad,” one of them replied. “Wounded men crying for water, and they need it now.”
Another sighed, shaking his head.
“I told Bobby I’d bring him back water,” and the sergeant’s voice was choked. “I ain’t gonna let him die a-thirsting for a drink.
Owe him that, don’t we?”
Pleasants, too choked with emotion to speak, could only nod.
“I want covering fire for these men,” he cried out. “For these brave comrades!”
The men around him, who minutes before had been so reluctant to start digging, leaped to pick up their rifles, and climbed up onto the firing line, weapons leveled.
Pleasants looked at the sergeant who was leading the water bearers, his comrades of the Fourth. It was a picture he knew he would carry to his dying day.
It was Pleasants who saluted first. The sergeant looked up at him, shocked by the gesture, and rose to return the salute. Pleasants put a hand on his shoulder, trying to force him to rest for just a few more seconds before confronting his fate.
“Ready, boys?” the sergeant shouted.
No one spoke.
“Go!”
The dozen scrambled up over the side, each of them burdened with a dozen or more loaded canteens; rather than going downhill, they were now going upslope.
As if waiting for them, a scathing volley swept the lip of the trench. One of the men barely cleared the parapet before he fell back in, hit in the chest, gasping out a final breathful of air, blood frothing his lips before he was still.
One of them started up the side of the parapet, then hesitated, and slid half down.
He looked up at Pleasants, not much more than a boy of sixteen or seventeen, shaking like a leaf.
“Stay,” the colonel cried, trying to restrain him. “It is all right. Stay with us. You’ve done enough today.”
The boy gazed at him for a second, then shook his head, squeezing his eyes tight shut.
“No, sir; no, sir. I ain’t no coward,” and pulling away from Henry’s grasp, he scrambled back up the parapet.
The dozen who had started up the slope were within seconds just eight, then six, then five … The sergeant leading them almost reached the lip of the crater, then fell backward, shot in the head.
Pleasants could not contain his rage, half climbing out of the trench.
“For Christ’s sake! They’re a watering party for the wounded!” he screamed. “Show mercy!”
He would have been dead, if not for Kochanski and others of his command who climbed out after him, grabbed him, and physically threw him back into the trench.
Before being pulled back he saw only four make it back into the relative safety of the crater. The frightened boy was not one of them. He lay sprawled in the middle of the field; the shot that killed him had pierced a canteen filled with a precious quart of murky water, which now gurgled out of the shattered tin, mingling with his blood.
“Oh, God,” Pleasants sobbed, sitting in the safety of his trench. “Forgive them, make this stop.”
Around him he barely noticed that his men were now digging with a will, trying to cut a trench to their comrades, 130 yards away.
The pitiless sun glared down upon them.
12:30 P.M.
“General Meade, you know there will have to be a court of inquiry about this disaster.”
Meade displayed not a flicker of emotion. He had learned long ago that Grant was the ultimate poker player when it came to not revealing what he was really thinking.
“I am due for a conference first thing tomorrow, back in Washington with the President. The packet is already late. I leave the field to you.”
The thunder of battle continued to roar little more than a mile away. Meade had ridden over to meet Grant when summoned by one of his aides.
“Make sure good, fair men sit on it. I’d recommend Winfield Hancock for one.”
Meade took that in. There was a degree of enmity between him and Hancock, whom some reporter had tagged with the moniker “Hancock the Superb.” Some had even whispered that at Gettysburg, it should have been Hancock in command rather than Meade; for then surely the battle would have been fought to an end in which Lee, pinned against a flooded Potomac, would have been forced to surrender.
But Hancock was a fair man, who would render a good decision when presented with proper well-organized facts.
“Convene the court as soon as decently possible. I want a full inquiry as to what went wrong and why.”
Grant leaned forward slightly, fixing Meade with his gaze.
“I think that for whatever reason, a fair chance to have ended this war today has been lost. I want to know why.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine, then we understand each other. Good day to you, sir.”
General Ulysses S. Grant turned his mount toward City Point—toward the packet to Washington, toward meetings in Washington that would consume his time for many days to come—leaving General George Meade with the responsibility of sorting out the truth, of what had happened and of what was happening even now.
THE CRATER
1:00 P.M.
The shot had struck Private Jemson in the back; James Reilly could see that clearly enough. Turning, he saw in the mob of men clustered in the bottom of the crater a man glaring at him defiantly, having just murdered the soldier next to James—a black soldier who had been valiantly trying to hold back the Rebels for hours.
“For God’s sake!” James cried, half standing, pointing at the murderer.
The man disappeared into the riotous press of panic-stricken soldiers trapped in the bottom of the crater.
What had only hours before seemed like shelter had instead turned into a spider hole, a death trap, the type he remembered seeing on an assignment out West before the war. The spider would dig a pit rather than a web, conceal itself. An unwary victim would fall into that pit, try to crawl out, and the spider would strike.
To either side of him, colored soldiers of the Fourth held the rim of the crater, freely intermingled with those white soldiers of the other divisions who still had fight in them.
Men shared cartridges when a comrade ran short, offered a sip from a precious canteen, and together cursed the Rebels and the damn generals who had got them into this nightmare. They were comrades, while behind them men filled with terror were now shooting black soldiers in the back out of fear that they might be executed in a final killing frenzy if taken prisoner with them.
When one was wounded or dying his comrade would stop for a moment, cradle a man whose name he might not even know to comfort him, pray with him, and hold his hand until death relaxed the grip, before he picked up a rifle and resumed the fight.
Reilly felt absolutely useless in this inferno. His precious sketchbook, still in his hand, had taken two neat bullet holes. Well, his friend Lincoln might be impressed by that, he thought with a wry smile.
But at least he could watch the backs of his comrades who still held the rim of the crater, beyond which the pressure was building, minute by minute. He was veteran enough to know that the Rebs were nerving themselves up for a final rush, and that, if they gained the rim, it would be an absolute slaughter pen. Passions were out of control on both sides; there would be no prisoners in this fight.
Colonel Russell was a few feet away, and James crawled over to his side.
“Your revolver, sir!” he cried.
“What?”
“Your revolver!”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Because one of your men just got shot in the back by those bastards down there. I’ll cover them!”
Russell looked back at the seething mass, then peeked over the lip of the crater, and ducked back down; only a few seconds later a couple of minié balls impacted where he had just been.
He reached into his belt and pulled out a Remington.
“It was Lieutenant Grant’s,” Russell cried, “I took it from his body after he fell. Didn’t want some Reb to get it. Check the load!”
James held the pistol up, half cocked it, and spun the cylinder. There were four rounds left.
“You know that as a civilian if you are caught with arms you will be executed?” Russell shouted.
“Hell, I’m going to be executed anyhow once they see my ske
tchbook and me alongside your men!” he replied.
Russell patted him on the shoulder and turned back to the fight.
James turned to face down into the crater, held the revolver up so those nearest him could see it, and cocked it, his intent clear. He assumed he might be shot within the next few seconds. Some shouted obscenities at him, but they drew back.
At least his comrades on this small section of the front were safe from being shot from behind.
BLANDFORD CHURCH HILL
HEADQUARTERS, ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA
1:45 P.M.
“Finish it,” Lee said, looking at Mahone. “For heaven’s sake, they are cornered. Bag the lot, and finish it. If we wait until dark they will escape. For that matter, I am stunned they have not yet brought up reserves to strengthen their line and perhaps threaten another section to draw us off. I want it finished now, before they can launch another attack and stretch us too thin to hold.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And General…”
“Sir?”
“Is it true a colored division was in the assault?”
“Yes, sir.”
Lee stepped closer to Mahone and in an uncharacteristic gesture put a fatherly hand on his shoulder.
“I want the full honor of war observed. Those who surrender are to be treated as proper prisoners, with respect, their wounded tended to, their officers shown the respect due their rank.”
Mahone looked at him, as if to reply.
“I know what our President has said, but in this army, sir, my orders on this day carry full weight. We are Christian soldiers, sir. Do you understand me? Passions must not rule, even in the heat of battle. If I hear of any atrocities, I will ensure that those involved shall face court-martial and the full penalty of military law.”
He drew Mahone a bit closer.
“Do we understand each other, sir?”
There was only one answer Mahone could possibly give to such a man.
“Yes, sir.”
THE CRATER
2:00 P.M.
The Battle of the Crater: A Novel Page 28
