Legends

by Robert Littell

  “Shoddy?”

  “What we called shoddy was woolen yarn made from old clothing and then turned into material for uniforms that disintegrated under your fingers in a matter of weeks.”

  “What was your rank?”

  Lincoln turned back to focus on Dr. Treffler. “I wasn’t in the army.”

  “If you weren’t in the army, what were you doing at Fredericksburg?”

  “Fact is, I’d been working for Alan Pinkerton in Chicago. You ever heared of Pinkerton’s detective agency?” When Dr. Treffler nodded, he said, “Thought you might have. Alan was employed by his friend Colonel McClellan to eliminate banditry from the railroads out west. When old Abe appointed the colonel to head the Army of the Potomac, McClellan brought along his friend Alan Pinkerton, who was using the pseudonym E.J. Allen at the time, if I remember right. And Alan brought along some of his operatives, me among them, to organize an intelligence service. Then came what the Federals called the battle of Antietam, after the stream, and the Confederates called the battle of Sharpsville, after the village. With the help of General Joe Hooker—who tore himself away from his camp followers, what we jokingly called Hooker’s girls or just plain hookers, long enough to lead the attack on the right—McClellan won the day and Bobby Lee was obliged to pull his force, what was left of it, back into Virginia. Antietam was the first time I saw the elephant—”

  “Saw the elephant?”

  “That’s how we described experiencing combat—you say you saw the elephant. After the battle, Alan sent several of us riding south to discern the Confederate order of battle, but that old snake in the grass Lee bamboozled us—he must have figured we could estimate his troop strength by counting the rations he issued, ‘cause he doubled the rations and we doubled the size of his army and McClellan got cold feet and stayed put, which is when old Abe decided McClellan had got the slows and sent him packing back to Chicago. Alan Pinkerton went along with him but I stayed on to work for Lafayette Baker, who was setting up a Federal intelligence service in Washington. Which brings me to McClellan’s successor, Ambrose Burnside, and Fredericksburg.” Leaning forward, Lincoln picked up the small microphone and spoke into it. “A woman, a dog, a walnut tree, the more you beat ’em, the better they be. Hey, doc, what about you and me having dinner together when we’re finished here?”

  Bernice Treffler kept her face a blank and her voice neutral. “You’ll understand that this is simply not possible. A psychiatrist cannot have a relationship with a client outside of working hours and still hope to maintain the distance she needs to evaluate the client.”

  “Where is it written there has to be a distance between you and the client? Some psychiatrists sleep with their patients in order to bridge this distance.”

  “That’s not the way I function, Lincoln.” She tried to make a joke out of it. “Maybe you need another psychiatrist—”

  “You’ll do fine.”

  “Why don’t you go on with your story.”

  “My story! You think it’s a story!” He set the microphone back on the table. “You still don’t see that what I’m telling you really happened. To me. At Fredericksburg.”

  “Lincoln Dittmann taught history at a junior college,” Dr. Treffler said patiently. “He turned his college thesis on the battle of Fredericksburg into a book and printed it himself, under the title Cannon Fodder, when he couldn’t find an editor willing to publish the manuscript.”

  “There are things that happened at Fredericksburg you can’t find in any history book, or Cannon Fodder, for that matter.”

  “Such as?”

  Lincoln was angry now. “Alright. Burnside force-marched the Union Army down the Rapahannock, but wound up bivouacking across the river from Fredericksburg for ten long days waiting for the damn pontoon bridges to catch up with him. Lafayette Baker’d posted me to Burnside’s staff—I was supposed to figure out the Confederate order of battle so Burnside could reckon on what was waiting for him once he got across the river. Armed with an English spyglass, I spent the better part of the first nine days aloft freezing my ass off in a hot-air balloon, but the mustard-thick haze hanging over the river never burned off and I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on up on the ridgeline behind Fredericksburg. Which is why I decided to infiltrate the Confederate lines. I found a sunken fisherman’s dingy and raised it with the help of some skirmishers and greased the oarlocks and set off before sunrise to cross the river, which was in flood, creating a margin of shallow marshes on either side. When my dingy couldn’t make it as far as the shore, I pulled off my boots and socks and rolled up my trousers and climbed out and waded through the slime until I reached solid ground. I found myself on the slope below the lunatic asylum. The doctors and nurses had fled inland when Burnside’s army appeared on the other side of the river, leaving the demented women to fend for themselves. They were leaning out of windows, some of them clothed, some buff naked, mesmerized by the sight of the Federal soldiers urinating into the river, also by the occasional mortar shot Yankee gunners lobbed across the Rapahannock and the ensuing explosions on the heights behind Fredericksburg; the demented women were sure something dreadful was about to happen, sure, too, that they were meant to witness it and spread the story, so one young lady with tufts of matted hair hanging over her bare breasts screeched to me from a window when I made my way up the hill past the asylum.”

  The memory of the poor lunatics trapped between the lines in their asylum set Lincoln to breathing hard through his nostrils. Dr. Treffler said, very quietly, “Want to take a break, Lincoln?”

  He shook his head roughly. “I purloined an orderly’s smock from the laundry shed behind the asylum and put it on and walked through Fredericksburg in the direction of Marye’s Hill. The city was deserted except for sentinels who, seeing the white smock, took me for someone employed at the asylum. I made a mental note of everything I saw. Fredericksburg itself was obviously not going to be defended, despite the occasional Mississippi sharpshooter firing across the river from buildings along the waterfront. I made my way out of the city, past buildings with greased paper serving as windows, past an emporium with boards nailed over the doors and windows (as if this would stop looters), and headed across the plain. I could see that no effort had been made to dig trenches or pits, and I began to wonder if there was to be a battle after all. Then I came to the sunken road under Marye’s Hill, with a stone wall running the length of it, and I knew there would be a battle and that it would go against the Federals, for the sunken road was acrawl with Confederates—there were sharpshooters polishing the brass scopes of their Whitworths and setting out the paper cartridges on top of the stone wall; there were short-muzzled cannon with grape charges piled next to their wheels; there were officers afoot with swords and long-muzzled pistols directing newly arrived troops into the line; there were Confederate flags and unit flags furled and leaning against trees so the Federals, when they finally appeared, would not know what they were up against until it was too late to turn back. The single unfurled flag visible to the naked eye belonged to the 24th Georgians, known to be hard customers and surpassing marksmen when sober. No way around the sunken road and its stone wall presented itself—to the right it was too swampy for a flanking movement, to the left the road and wall went on forever. I was challenged by pickets several times but, making laughing reference to the lunatics, talked my way past and continued up the hill. And back from the crest, out of sight of Pinkerton men peering through spyglasses from balloons, was the largest army I ever set eyes on. There were more cannon than a body could count. Soldiers were watering down the road to suppress the dust as teams of horses positioned the cannon behind freshly dug earthenworks. A Confederate band belted out waltzes for the southern gentlemen and ladies who had come down from Richmond to see the battle. My footpath took me past a large gray tent set next to a copse of stunted apple trees and I saw three generals poring over maps stretched open on a trestle table. One, in a white uniform, I took for Bobby Lee himse
lf; the second, in homespun gray with plumes fluttering from his hat, I took for George Pickett (which meant that Pickett’s division had come up earlier than anticipated and was taking its place in the line); the third, with a woman’s woolen shawl draped over his shoulders, I took to be Old Pete Longstreet. I was sorely tempted to try for a closer look at the generals and acted upon this desire, which proved to be my undoing. A young officer wearing a brand new uniform with a sash to hold his sword accosted me. My story about being the last orderly to abandon the lunatics to their asylum did not appear to persuade him and he set me to walking toward the divisional tent on the far side of Marye’s Hill, him following close on my heels. As much as I ached to, I could not run for it—all he had to do was raise the alarum and a thousand rebels would have been upon me. Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”

  “No problem.” Dr. Treffler walked over to a sideboard and filled a glass from a plastic bottle and carried it back, aware that Lincoln’s eyes never left her. Was he thinking of the young lunatic, leaning out the window with the matted hair covering her breasts? Was he regretting he didn’t have a shrink who slept with her patients?

  Lincoln drank off the glass of water in one long swallow and then ran his finger around the rim as he picked up the thread of his tale. “I was closely questioned by a stubby, hunch-shouldered officer with a shock of hair turned silver from age and battle fatigue, so I supposed because he walked with the aid of two wooden crutches. And when he didn’t esteem my answers—I admitted to having been born and raised in Pennsylvania but claimed I’d gone south to defend state’s rights and slavery, for who in his right mind wanted millions of freed slaves invading the north to take away our jobs—he had me stripped to the skin and began examining each item of clothing. Which is how he came across the watch fob decorated with the symbol of Alan Pinkerton’s detective agency—an unblinking eye—that Alan himself had given me back in the days when we were chasing train robbers and cattle thieves. The old officer recognized it immediately and my efforts to make out that I had got it off one of the crazed women in the asylum fell short of convincing him. You are a Federal spy, he said, caught behind our lines. Make your peace with your Maker for you will be executed at dawn.”

  Lincoln, reliving the episode, wiped perspiration from his forehead with the back of a wrist. “I was allowed to dress, after which they tied my ankles loosely so I could walk but not run and took me to a circle of hospital wagons and sat me down at a wooden crate inside one of them to write my last testament and any letters that I deemed necessary to deliver to friends or family. Night fell quickly at this time of the year. The aurora borealis, a rare sight in these latitudes, flickered like soundless cannon fire in the north; it didn’t take much imagination to suppose a great war was being fought beyond the horizon. I was brought an oil lamp and a tin plate of hard crackers and water, but try as I might I was unable to swallow even the spittle in my mouth, the lump in my throat, which I identified as fear, being too big. I attempted to write my mother and father, and a girl I had been sweet on back in Pennsylvania, I wanted to tell them what had befallen me and so began: I take the present opportunity of penning you a few lines, my health is good but it will not be so for long I was obliged to discontinue the letter because my brain, befuddled with chemicals released by fear, could not locate the words to describe my condition. I became convinced that it was all a terrible dream, that any moment I would become too frightened to continue dreaming; that I would force myself through the membrane that separated sleep from wakefulness and wipe the sweat from my brow and, still under the spell of the nightmare, have trouble falling back to sleep. But the wooden crate felt damp and cold under my palm and a whiff of sulfurous air—in the next wagon the surgeons, amputating the leg of a boy who had been pinned under an overturned cannon, were dousing the stump with sulfur—stung my lungs and the pain brought home to me that what had happened, and what was about to happen, were no dream.”

  Dr. Treffler, caught in the web of Lincoln’s tale, leaned toward him when he stopped talking. “Admit it,” he said with a sneer, “it’s beginning to dawn on you that I am recounting the truth.” When she nodded carefully, he went on. “I was expecting execution by hanging but the old officer with the silver hair and crutches had something more dreadful in store. At first light my wrists and elbows were bound behind my back with a length of telegraph wire. I was taken from the hospital wagon by two men wearing the striped shirts of penitentiary guards and paraded to the other side of Marye’s Hill and the turnpike known as Plank Road, called so because the craters gouged by several dozen exploding Federal mortar rounds had been too deep to fill with earth and had been covered over with planking to make the road passable. Standing at the lip of one such crater, which was roughly the size of a large wagon wheel, with the planks intended to patch it stacked at the side of the turnpike, it struck me what my interrogator intended when he spoke of execution. One of the penitentiary guards produced a square of strawboard with the words “The spy Dittmann” lettered on it in India ink and attached the sign with cotter pins to the back of my shoddy jacket. I divined who the author of my unusual execution was when I caught sight of Stonewall Jackson, known to be a religious fanatic, sitting his horse on a rise above me, a look of unadulterated malevolence on his face. He removed the cigar from his mouth and studied me for a long while, as if he were committing me and the moment to memory. He angrily flicked cigar ashes as he issued instructions to an aide. I was too far away to make out more than a few words. Buried, that’s what I want, but alive … Hundreds of Confederates on the side of the hill had stopped what they were doing to watch the execution. My interrogator plucked a cigarette from the mouth of one of the penitentiary guards and, making his way to me on his crutches, wedged it between my parched lips. It is a matter of tradition, he said. A man condemned to death is entitled to a last cigarette. Trembling, I puffed on the cigarette. The act of smoking, and the smoke cauterizing my throat, distracted me. My interrogator stared at the ash, waiting for it to buckle under its own weight and fall so they could get on with the execution. Sucking on the cigarette, I became aware of the ash, too. Life itself seemed to ride on it. Defying gravity, defying sense, it grew longer than the unsmoked part of the cigarette.”

  “And then?”

  “And then a whisper of wind coming off the river brought with it the distant sound of a brass band playing Yankee Doodle. Under cover of darkness the Federals had finally thrown their pontoon bridges across the river and were starting to come over in force. There were scattered shots from Fredericksburg as the Confederate rear guard pretended to put up a fight to suck the Federals into the trap that awaited them once they captured Fredericksburg and started across the plain Richmond-bound. The notes of Yankee Doodle and the hollow reports of muskets set everyone to peering toward the river. Bobby Lee reined up next to Jackson, who touched his hat in salute. They talked for a moment, Lee pointing out the Chatham Mansion, which served as Burnside’s command post, within eyeshot on the other side of the river. And then Lee happened to glance in my direction. His eyes fixed on me and he called, What the blazes is going on down there? My interrogator called up that I was a Federal spy caught behind the Confederate lines the previous evening; that they were about to bury me alive as a warning to others. Lee remarked something to Jackson, then stood in his stirrups and, removing his white hat, shouted down, There will be enough killing on these fields today to last a man a lifetime. Tie him to a tree and let him watch the battle, and set him free when it is over. Which is how I came to see the elephant again—to witness the carnage that unfolded below Marye’s Hill that terrible December day. Burnside’s army burst out of Fredericksburg onto the plain and formed up. The 114th Pennsylvania Zouaves with their white headbands were the first to charge the stone wall along the sunken road—they came on with pennants flying while a drummer boy set the cadence for the attack until his head was severed from his body by a cannon ball. It was a massacre from start to finish. Through the a
fternoon wave upon wave of Federals charged the sunken road, only to be cut down by a hail of minié balls. I counted fourteen assaults in all, but not a one of them made it as far as the wall. The cause was so hapless, the Confederates looking down from the hill took to cheering the courage of the Federals. I could see the Rebel sharpshooters dipping their hands in buckets of water so they could load their Whitworths, scalding hot from being shot so much, without blistering their skin. At one point in the afternoon I could make out groups of Federals trying to take cover behind some brick houses on the plain but the Yankee cavalry, using the flats of sabres, forced them back to the battle. It was a Godawful thing to behold—there have been days since when I wished they’d gone ahead and buried me alive so that the sight and sound of battle would not be graven on my brain.”

  “And they let you cross the battlefield to your lines when it was over?”

  “As for the field of battle, the less said about it the better. The temperature that night dipped below freezing and my breath came out from between my chattering teeth in great white plumes as I negotiated its pitfalls. I ripped the square of strawboard off my back and started toward the flames I could see burning in Fredericksburg, tripping over the bloated bodies of horses and men, stumbling onto limbless corpses entangled at the bottom of shell craters. Even in the cold of winter there were horseflies drawn to the blood oozing from wounds. The maimed Federals who were still alive dragged the dead into heaps and burrowed under the corpses to keep warm. To my everlasting regret I could do nothing for them. I stopped to cradle a dying soldier who had a slip of paper with his name and address pinned to the back of his blouse. He shivered and murmured Sarah, dearest and expired in my arms. I took the paper, meaning to send it to his next of kin but somehow lost it in the confusion of the night. Riderless horses pawed at the frozen ground looking for fodder, but the only fodder at Fredericksburg on 13 December 1862 was cannon fodder.”