Cain at Gettysburg

by Ralph Peters

  The old man returned to his side, better composed.

  “My apologies, General. An indisposition.” Willing to repair the breach between them, Lee attempted to lighten the exchange. “Speaking of indispositions, I see that our English friend remains attached to you.”

  Longstreet waved his head back and forth like a flag of surrender. “If I hanged Colonel Fremantle from an apple tree, he’d use his dying breath to give me a lecture on pippins.”

  “Well, don’t hang him. That man may prove worth an army and a fleet.”

  Longstreet didn’t believe that, either. The British were not coming in. The more he heard of Fremantle’s blabber, the more he was convinced of it.

  “We won a victory today,” Lee said. “Those people held an initial advantage. But we overcame it. Perhaps if Colonel Fremantle witnessed a still-greater victory?”

  “And we might give him one. If you issue the orders tonight to move around Meade’s flank. George Meade’s got his whole army headed this way now. He’ll have a devil of a time turning it around. We can upset his plans, unbalance him … make him fight to his rear.…”

  “We won a victory today,” Lee repeated. “If Meade is determined to fight here, we shall win a greater victory tomorrow. This army will not fail us.” The old man stepped closer, looking into Longstreet’s face. “I cannot withdraw from a victorious battlefield. The men would not take it well.”

  “The men who wouldn’t take it well are dead, sir. Heth’s division’s gutted.”

  “And those people have lost two corps. They will be demoralized. They will fight less well tomorrow than they did today.”

  Escorted by Taylor, Lee’s ever-alert familiar, a courier approached. The old man faced the intruders.

  “From General Ewell, sir,” Taylor said.

  “Is General Ewell attacking?” Lee asked, before hearing the message. “Has he found an opening on the flank?”

  The courier, a staff officer Longstreet did not know, saluted and said, “General Ewell’s compliments, sir. He asks for support, if he’s to make an assault.”

  Disappointment lowered the old man’s face. Had he been in full health, he would not have let another see such emotion. After a moment’s contemplation, Lee told the staff officer, “General Hill’s corps is in some disarray. His men have had a hard fight. I will look into the matter, but cannot promise General Ewell additional support.” He paused again. “Emphasize my order to your general: He is to attack, if practicable.”

  The courier saluted and strode off. Taylor eyed the two generals, then followed the courier. He had read the atmosphere.

  “Jackson would’ve just done it,” Longstreet said. “He wouldn’t have sent a courier. Ewell’s looking for an excuse not to attack.”

  “General Ewell will do his duty.”

  “That may be, sir. But he isn’t going to attack that hill or anything else tonight. I’d bet my command on it.” Then something snapped inside Longstreet and his voice grew more heated than ever it had in the presence of Robert E. Lee. “If we have to take that … that hill … do it now, sir! Do it now, with every man available! Or set this army on the march around Meade’s flank. Do it now, or the price tomorrow will be higher than this army can afford.”

  Lee let his subordinate calm himself, then said, “You told me yourself that Meade holds a strong position. This is not a time for hasty measures, General Longstreet. We will act tomorrow, when your corps is up and we can execute an attack that will trap those people and destroy them.” The old man’s body quaked again, but Lee, inhumanly disciplined, quelled the tremor. “How far back is General Pickett? Will his division be available?”

  “He won’t arrive until late tomorrow. Too late for the day’s fight. It’s hard to move this army on one road.”

  “Then we shall make do with Generals Hood and McLaws.” The old man considered Longstreet in the slanting, gilded light. Judging. “I know you will not let me down.”

  TEN

  July 1, Evening into Night

  The corpse grabbed him again. Schwertlein froze in midstride. He shut his eyes, then opened them. Odd wisps lingered in the evening air, but Otto Schumann was gone.

  Of course he was gone. He had never been present. Schumann was dead. Lying out there. Amid the rest of them.

  Schwertlein sucked in the gunpowder air. Sweat had burst from his body at the sudden hallucination. He had felt the dead man’s embrace, fresh and immediate. Schumann had clutched him precisely as he had done on the battlefield. No. More intensely than that. The slain man’s arms had wrapped around him more completely and had been unwilling to relinquish their grip, their last clutch at life. Gruesome and terrible, Otto’s face had pressed to his own.

  “Fritz!”

  Bettelman had paused to look back at him. As Schwertlein met the watchmaker’s bewilderment, he watched his friend change into Schumann’s corpse.

  “Fritz? What is it?”

  Then Schumann was gone, completely, and the world appeared as it was supposed to be, as normal as the rattled aftermath of battle would concede. A soldier toting a case of cartridges jostled him: “Would you be getting out of me way then, ye great dumb Dutchman?”

  Between the gravestones, men grunted, complained, worked, laughed, wept, stood to their posts, or, searching, called out the names of comrades the day had devoured. Survivors. Amazed to find themselves so few, astonished to find themselves so many.

  Bettelman stepped back to stand in front of him, eyes shifting from surprise toward alarm. “Are you all right? You’re pale as a corpse.”

  Schwertlein forced a smile. “I’d be in the right place.”

  The watchmaker did not appear convinced that all was well, but shrugged and said, “Come on. They can only say no.”

  The 26th Wisconsin had nothing to eat. Water was to be had from a pump up the hill by the cemetery gatehouse, but the men had lost their knapsacks after grounding them at the orchard, and their commissary wagons had disappeared. Other units that had been in the fight that day were as hard-used as the 26th, but the newly arrived regiments at least had the contents of their packs to sustain them. Still others, fresh from the rear, cooked meals in cauldrons.

  “Come on, Fritz,” Bettelman repeated. “I tell you, I fixed watches for some of them. When we were in winter quarters at Stafford Court House. More than one of them owes me still.”

  Clammy after his explosion of fear-sweat, Schwertlein followed. The distance was not far enough to mark them as absent from their place of duty in the line. Not amid the ongoing confusion. And he was as hungry as Bettelman. He could not recall ever being so hungry.

  Maria. Had it been only the night before when he had sat on a farmer’s porch, agonizing over cautious hints? What could he write to her now? That they had been defeated and humiliated again, but, great good luck, he himself had barely been nicked? Oh, yes, his dearest friends were dead or abandoned to the Rebels. But he was fine, just fine, in excellent health and spirits … his uniform was only a little dirtied …

  Maria. Unreasonably, the image of her left him nauseated, sick at something about himself for which he knew no name. It was as if he had become smaller as she watched, as if she had spurned him harshly from afar, from across a gulf so vast that he could not call out to defend himself, across a chasm so monstrous that he would never reach her again.

  Was he truly alive? How certain could a man be of that, after all? Was all of this a Totentanz, a dance of death, around him?

  Before he indulged himself in a personal missive to Maria Schenk, it would be his duty to write to another Maria: Maria Schumann, the carpenter’s wife, a woman he knew only from the homely musings of her fallen husband. And he would need to write, hardest of all, to Josef Heisler’s Marthe. To beautify Josef’s death, just as requested. To lie. To the wife the teacher and would-be poet had idolized.

  Her name conjured a line from Faust, spoken by Mephistopheles to Marthe, the incidental procuress: “Ihr Mann ist tot und lässt Sie grüss
en.”

  Your husband’s dead and sends you greetings.

  It had always struck Schwertlein as the cruelest of all the cruel lines in the play. Yet, it never failed to draw a laugh from the audience. Especially when the devil was played with skill.

  “Please, Leo. A minute,” Schwertlein said to the watchmaker’s back.

  Bettelman halted again. His eyebrows arched quizzically.

  “I feel dizzy.”

  “You must drink water, Fritz. You’re always telling the rest of us to drink water.”

  “I can’t drink anymore.”

  “You must.”

  Dutifully, he took a swig from his canteen. But water was not the problem now. He sensed Schumann out there in the dying light. Moving parallel to him. Waiting to spring. To clutch him again.

  Schwertlein broke into another sweat. He had imagined the dead man’s face against him, kissing him as a passionate woman would.

  How could it be so real? Otto was dead. He was not here. He was dead. Lying in a field beyond the town.

  Otto scooted off to hide again. It was a child’s game played in Hell.

  Schwertlein knew it was an illusion. But it was the same as being in a dream that he knew to be a dream, yet could not escape.

  “Can we sit for a bit?” His corporal’s rank was meaningless. Little Bettelman led now. Trailing a strange, entranced creature in a soiled blue uniform.

  Schwertlein dropped on his backside, resting against his rifle. Leo took a place nearby, bracing his back with a tombstone. In the half-chaos, no one paid them any attention.

  “It’s Otto,” Schwertlein said. “He keeps coming back. Right in front of me. Grabbing me. The way he did…” He closed his eyes, saw Schumann, and promptly widened them again. “When I see him, his face is right there, his eyes. Right against mine. As if … as if he’s about to kiss me … es ist doch grausam…”

  “You’re dreaming on your feet. It’s been a bad day.”

  “I know I’m dreaming. I mean, I know he isn’t real. Of course he isn’t. But I see him anyway. And when I do, he seems impossibly real.…”

  “It’s odd,” Bettelman said.

  “What?”

  “I thought you’d be mourning our poet friend. Or worrying about Hannes Trenk, whether he’s still alive. And here you are haunted by Schumann. You weren’t even close to Otto.”

  The fresh night swarmed around them. “It’s the way it happened. It was … almost as if his life were trying to enter mine, to take refuge inside me, to hide and go on living. I could feel his fear of dying. I could smell it.”

  “He was already dead. I saw it. It was only the way getting hit turned him around. A freak thing.”

  “I felt what I felt.”

  Bettelman raised his eyes to the thickening sky. “You’re thinking too much, Fritz. Just be glad we’re not prisoners. Or worse. You just need sleep.”

  “Here?” He gestured at the imperfect lines of headstones, some already broken off or toppled by gun carriages.

  “A man can sleep anywhere.”

  “If a man can sleep. You’re right, though. It would make more sense if I thought about Josef or Hannes. Maybe they’re waiting their turns.” He stared at the trampled grass, at a past tableau. “Josef came to me last night. I was writing, I didn’t want to be bothered. But he insisted. You know what he told me?”

  “That he was going to die?”

  “He told you, too?”

  “No. We were close friends, but in a different way. He was depressed, though. Any man could see it. We’ve both seen men like that before. They know.”

  “That’s nonsense. And I told him it was all nonsense.” Schwertlein rested his head against the wood of his rifle. “He asked me to write to his wife. To tell her it was all tidy and clean.”

  “Will you?”

  “Write to her? Of course.”

  “Tell her it was all tidy and clean.”

  “It was his last wish.”

  “She won’t care, you know.”

  Schwertlein woke from his exhausted melancholy. “She’s his wife, Leo.”

  The watchmaker moved his foot out of the path of a trio of soldiers. “You didn’t know Josef Heisler before the war. I did. For you, he was only a wartime friend. I knew him much longer. And I advise you not to mourn him too excessively.” Bettelman paused to select his next words. “The thing is … his death was not so unfortunate. In fact, I think he was lucky. Oh, don’t look so shocked, Fritz.”

  “Josef loved life.”

  Bettelman shrugged. “But life did not love him. It’s as you told me once, when we were joking about him and his mooning about. You said that he loved poetry, but poetry didn’t love him. He was just the kind of poor, kindly fool who isn’t loved back by those he picks to love.” The watchmaker leaned toward him. His face was earnest in the softening light, with no trace of cruelty. “Perhaps this day has spared him much disappointment, a great deal of heartache. He wished to be a great poet, but had no gift—it didn’t take a scholar like you to see it. He read his poems to me, too. He bored everyone with them. He was a man whose dreams soared above his abilities. What good ever comes of that? Do you think he was destined for joy, Fritz? And the poor fellow’s wife took other men into her bed. Not from grand passion. From habit. I never believed that woman had a soul, only her appetites. Josef’s children don’t look a bit like him.”

  Schwertlein would have preferred that all of this had gone untold, that Bettleman had remained the whining clown to whom all were accustomed. The day had stripped away more than the regiment’s knapsacks.

  “None of that makes his death a good thing,” he told the watchmaker.

  “You think not, Fritz? This war solves many, many problems, not just slavery or questions of government. How else explain men’s eagerness”—he swept a hand across the antic scene playing out in the frail light—“for all this?”

  “You really are a cynic,” Schwertlein said. “Only of a higher order than we realized. A cynic’s cynic.”

  “No, I’m a watchmaker. I’m interested in how all the little wheels and cogs and hammers function, individually and together. But I have no time for sloppy rhapsodies and romances about wheels and cogs.” He used his rifle to lever himself to his feet. “We need to get moving, Herr Corporal.”

  Schwertlein rose obediently. They passed through a Walpurgis of campfires and contorted faces, of bedeviled horse teams, whips, and elusive laughter. At last, Schumann said, “Him. Over there, with the blond beard. I fixed his watch and he still owes me for it.”

  The two of them stepped slowly toward the fire. Men with their coats off sat back from the heat, eating stew from tin plates. The scent of coffee spiced the aroma of meat.

  “That smells good,” Bettelman said.

  Fire-licked faces turned toward them.

  “I’m Leo,” Bettelman continued. “Remember me? I fixed watches for some of you. In the winter. I thought, perhaps, my friend and I might get a plate of food? All outstanding debts canceled in full!”

  A slab-faced man addressed himself to Schwertlein’s sleeve stripes, rather than to Bettelman.

  “Germans?”

  “Ja. Twenty-sixth Wisconsin.”

  “Then you just get the Hell out of here. Men that don’t fight don’t eat.”

  * * *

  There was food, after all. Not much, but better than none. When Schwertlein and Bettelman returned to their regiment’s portion of the line—hardly more than a company’s frontage—they found that someone had delivered and cracked open two barrels of hardtack. There was no coffee.

  Rifles laid ready against the stone wall, they sat down on a bump of grass by the road that pierced the line. Schwertlein wished he at least had the tin cup that hung from his knapsack, so he could dip the hardtack in water to soften it. Some Confederate had it now, along with a tattered copy of Phänomenologie des Geistes and one good pair of socks.

  He broke off a piece of cracker, put it in his mouth, then f
illed his mouth with water. A man did the best he could. Beside him, Bettelman simply chomped away.

  From their position, they could look far to the west, over a finger of houses and outbuildings that stretched southward from the town and past the arc of Rebel campfires to the outline of the long mountain. As late as it was, a glow still gripped the ridgetops: The light was reluctant to die. As Schumann had been, in the instant of his death.

  “I should not have spoken as I did about Heisler’s wife,” Bettelman stated abruptly. “That was wrong. It isn’t my affair. This is why I only joke and do not talk seriously. When I talk so, I become wicked. I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t know any of it, Leo, I had no idea. The way he went on about her, she sounded half St. Ursula and half Venus.” He watched two soldiers engaged in horseplay, wondering where they found the strength. “She must be an attractive woman, if not a good one.”

  “She has her appeal. To plenty of men. The appeal of a woman who has two children behind her, but no obstacles in front of her skirts. I don’t know if Josef ever truly saw her as she was, even the way she looked, or if he simply created a Marthe in his mind and took it for the real one. What did he need, really? A dream-woman to whom he could address his poems. That’s all.” Bettelman sighed. “Here I am, speaking ugliness again. It’s just that I always resented her flagrancy. And poor Josef was so unsuspecting, so simple. We belonged to the same Turnverein, although there was always more jabbering than gymnastics. That’s how we met.” Bettelman smiled at a recollection. “Josef was a lovely person, only … inadequate. Not just to Marthe Heisler and her sort, but inadequate to life. The truth is, I pitied him. Like an ailing cat you find at your door.”

  The watchmaker shifted his seat, arching his small spine. “Let me give you my best advice, Fritz, advice from the heart: Marry a big, fat woman who can cook. One who won’t have men knocking at your kitchen door when they think you’re away for an hour. One who feeds you well because she’s grateful. And because she wants to feed herself well, too. That’s been the secret of my happiness.”