Cain at Gettysburg

by Ralph Peters

  Perhaps half of his shells had an effect. For an opening salvo, that was splendid.

  The captains and lieutenants, the sergeants and sweat-gilded gun crews, took over now, correcting range and elevation to meet the Confederate advance, moving swiftly and steadily to apply as many shells to the quick gray lines as they could before clouds of smoke left them shooting blind.

  What Osborn saw through the thickening haze was butchery. He had gone from farm boy chores to college in New York, and had read the law on the eve of Southern secession. But Blackstone never addressed this form of murder.

  On the flank closest to the town, a wavering Rebel formation broke for the rear, even before his fires had much effect. The prime brigades continued coming on, though, utterly undeterred and scornful of death. Along the distant treeline, barely visible now, more gray ranks appeared. A battery limbered up and trotted forward beside the infantry. Scattered fugitives plunged toward them, tiny creatures runnng for their lives. The Rebel attack had already gone off-kilter.

  The fleeing men did not break the ranks of the second echelon, but Osborn wondered what grim thoughts arose in the soldiers marching through the runaways.

  His guns pounded the leading brigades. As the salvos took their toll, the efforts of those in gray to restore their ranks with fresh meat began to break down. Lines bent and buckled. But they would not stop.

  As the Rebels neared the road leading south toward Emmitsburg, with their flank almost perpendicular to his guns, they began to bunch and intermingle, inclining toward the Union center, driven hence by his fires. Through his glasses, Osborn watched men bend forward, almost doubling over, as if making their way against high winds and driving rain. But this storm was of iron, steel, and lead.

  Running the trace of his gun line, Osborn shouted, “The road! Concentrate all fires on that road! Hit them when they’re coming over those fences. Hit the road!”

  Some of the officers and crew members heard him. Enough of them. Hands waved an acknowledgment. Exhausted faces flashed their comprehension.

  Struck by a surge of faintness, Osborn paused. Placing his hands on his knees and breathing gunpowder. The heat behind the guns was at least ten degrees higher than the sun had made it. It amazed him that his gunners could keep it up. Some had been firing for over an hour in total. Pieces had to be splashed with precious water, with no more to spare for the men. Stripped to their trousers, many of the gunners were as black as Negroes. Some crews maintained the crispness of their drill, while others just worked the guns as best they could, needing no commands. But all kept firing into the gypsy smoke, seeking targets through its rips and tears.

  Returning to his lookout, Osborn raised his glasses again. Waiting. Scanning. Aching for the smoke to part.

  When it did, he saw a mass of men struggling in the roadbed, caught between two fences, beasts for slaughter.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Cushing clutched his guts and ordered his men to load again. Propping him up, First Sergeant Fueger passed on the command. Fantastic pain competed with excitement for Cushing’s attention, but he remained unwilling to indulge himself.

  He had watched the Confederates approach, guiding his remaining shells into their handsome ranks, admiring them, hating them, hoping to hang on until they were vanquished. His exposed intestines squirmed over his fingers, but he still refused to examine his body’s wreckage. His men, too, averted their eyes.

  He was down to a single gun now. But one gun could do great damage. And Cushing—aware he was dying—intended to do his duty to the end.

  At first, the gray lines had been a blurred mass centered on lofted flags. His gun and others along the line tore passages through their ranks. The Rebels howled. Then, as they approached the road, their lines became a collection of individuals: Bearded men could be distinguished from those who were clean-shaven.

  One shot from his gun struck at the feet of an advancing line, tossing men about as if they were weightless. Cushing took no satisfaction in the cruelty of it, but reveled in his effectiveness. He did not seek vengeance. He wanted victory, and knew it must be his last desire on earth.

  If he had to die, he intended to die well.

  The Rebels on his left made a great, befuddling turn, their ranks dissolving into a mob as they aimed straight at the wall his gun defended. Crossing the road, they rushed at gaps torn in the fences, truly charging now and wailing like demons, ignoring death, heat, thirst, wounds.

  Cushing felt an equal resolve to stop them.

  He ordered his men to load canister.

  The little balls made red clouds out of men.

  “Canister! Load!” he called again. Desperate to get off at least one more volley before the running men could reach his wall. Faithful to the end, his first sergeant repeated his command.

  “Ready!”

  The charging forms acquired faces, mouths, eyes, their expressions sharpened to a peak of intensity more than human and less. They rushed straight for his gun, directly at the muzzle, racing against his last remaining crew’s effort to ram home the charge.

  The Rebels howled their death-rage, and Cushing sang out his:

  “Fire!”

  He had never seen the effects of canister unleashed so close to living men: It was a crimson massacre. Yet, more of them came on. Running toward him. Screaming. Falling. Limping. Crawling. Hellbent on getting over the wall, no matter the cost.

  “Load canister!” he cried a last time, hearing the death in his voice and hanging on to his first sergeant to stay upright. His guts lurched against his paw.

  Some of the Rebels paused to aim their rifles. One of their bullets found Cushing’s mouth and blew out the back of his head.

  * * *

  Glorious it was, as lovely a sight as ever a man did see. With the Rebels running forward from the road, the lot of them all but tripping over themselves, the officers called the sweet 69th to rise from behind its wall and pour it into them.

  The volley dropped a line of Johnnies, as if they’d been commanded to lie down and sleep, and the quivering of their bloody wounded made a fine beginning to the day’s proper work. Gallagher tossed one rifle rearward for reloading and picked up the next from the number he’d amassed. He hadn’t the time to choose only officers now, with the Rebs coming on full flush, so he just gave it to the biggest men he could spot, to take them out of the donnybrook that was coming. By the time he took up rifle number four, he could see the wide, crazed eyes of them, the terror and the madness, and it pleased him so. Some were in a right rage, they were, with others running toward him only because they could no longer think of anything else to do. If heroes they were, they were all of them fools as well.

  To his delight, Gallagher spotted a fancy officer, after all, waving his men onward. He put a stop to the waving soon enough.

  Glancing to the right for a reloaded rifle, he saw the boy artillery lieutenant give up his brains. But his last, lonely gun got off a gorgeous round of canister, chewing a great hole in the Rebel mob.

  The collision came quickly thereafter, with one last shot fired off and the Johnnies over the wall just to the right, knocked back by a volley, only to surge over the stones and guns again.

  Gallagher’s officers screamed to refuse the flank, and two companies on his right drew back in good order. But the arses in Company F blundered about, only to disappear in a swarm of gray.

  They were over the wall, the buggers were, a hundred men or more, wailing like banshees. A dirty pack of them turned to take on Gallagher and his boys, but his lads were all for it. Driven from Galway and Fermanagh, from Cork and Kerry and Wicklow, his men crashed into the gray-clad, slave-fucking bastards for the sport of it, welcoming them with rifle butts and knuckles.

  A soldier in a sorry straw hat came at Gallagher with a bayonet, but he wasn’t a pig for the sticking this fine day. He parried, then smashed his rifle’s stock against the Johnny’s fingers, crushing them on the guard of the man’s musket: When you couldn’t reach
a man’s private parts, there was no better way to cost him his purpose than to take him in the head or on the fingers. In the instant of shock and pain that crippled the Reb, Gallagher brought the heel of his rifle up into his jaw, cracking bone with a sound as sharp as a pistol’s shot. When the Reb went down, Gallagher rammed his empty rifle into his face. The second stab pierced an eye.

  Another Reb, perhaps a friend of the first, came for Gallagher, but Carnahan caught him with a bullet fired so close to the man’s chest that his rags took fire. Serve the shite-arse right, it did.

  Straight on behind the brawling clutter of men, Gallagher spotted a high Rebel officer trying to climb up on the dead boy’s cannon. How he longed for a loaded rifle in his paws, but ’twas not meant to be. The colonel or general or whatever he was got one foot up in the spokes of the carriage wheel, raising a sword with his hat impaled upon it and the noggin cover slipped down to rest on the hilt. Immediately, the sorry bugger buckled and twisted and clutched himself, hit twice and true and merry.

  Well, prizes enough there were. More men of his own pack came swarming in, while some other devils—perhaps the 72nd, those great Ulster-tainted malingerers—let go volley after volley, knocking down the Rebs who had penned themselves on the wrong side of the wall.

  ’Twas a gay day for the Union. Then:

  “Jaysus, they’re shootin’ us!” McGuire shouted hard on Gallagher’s ear.

  “Well, what do you bleedin’ expect?” the sergeant asked.

  “No, no! Our own boys it is, coming through the grove.”

  “To Hell and Derry, then, the best way’s forward.”

  Sure enough, some fools were firing into the melee, as if they were as color-blind as stupid. But at the same time he felt the animal presence of his own side crowding into the fight, men from a muddle of regiments, coming in for the kill.

  Gallagher watched a boy in gray—no more than a lad he was—as he loaded his rifle amid the happy to-do. He bloodied his hand on his own bayonet, but didn’t stop ramming home his powder and ball.

  The instant the boy withdrew the ramrod with his scarlet mitt, Gallagher struck him a blow with his fist and took the weapon from him. Turning from the boy for richer meat, he spied a gray-clad officer, fancy as a Dublin pimp and fine as the squire on Sunday. The man was struggling to fill his revolver’s cylinder.

  Gallagher shot him point-blank in the belly, spoiling the lovely uniform and the bugger’s afternoon. A slow death, that one was going to have, and let him lie in agony.

  He took a wicked blow from behind, hard to the back of the head. But Gallagher had been struck far worse on the docks—if not by his own da—and he turned to find a bayonet lunging at him.

  If any man on the field could dance a jig, ’twas Danny Gallagher. He took him a shallow slicing, the hot biting shock of it skittering along a rib, but it didn’t sum up to the weight of a proper punch, let alone a killing thrust. With his rifle gone missing from his mitts, he punched the Reb on the side of his snout, then hit him again and a third time, before tripping him and elbowing him down.

  He dropped atop the creature in gray, a full-grown man this bucko, with a ginger beard and teeth already out. The devil was a fighter, though, and got in a kick as Gallagher dropped toward him, reeling him back for a plowman’s dance before Gallagher did some kicking of his own, right in the devil’s woman-tickling glories. Then he landed a knee on the bugger’s chest, took up a rock, and beat his skull to a pulp.

  ’Twas growing to be a hard day’s work, if a sweet one.

  The worthless buggers from the 72nd, good soldiers all, came on now, ranks in fair order, countercharging down toward the wall.

  In a moment, the air went out of the Rebels in the killing field. They’d had enough. Weapons dropped, hands went up, and here and there a handkerchief waved at Nellie. Those who fought on were soon put paid and sent to visit their forefathers.

  From up the line, where the volleys continued thick from the boys in blue, cheers went up and then a triumphant chant:

  “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!”

  So quick it all was, in the end. An eternity of instants. A joy too fine for words—and then it was done.

  “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!”

  Men cheered on every side.

  A whore’s miracle, several of the lads from Company F reappeared, as pleased as punch with themselves, leaping back from the other side of the wall.

  When Gallagher got himself up, he registered all the confusions of a retreat, of failure, of humiliation, as the Johnnies with proper legs took themselves off, leaving back the sorriest. Between the wall and the line of the road, dozens and more of the Rebs raised their hands in surrender, or lay on the ground waving rags. Others, mean as landlords, kept firing back through the comrades who had forsaken them, determined to kill a last Union soldier or two.

  “Get on with you, Johnny, get along now. Go on, the lot of you, that’s the way.” It was Walsh’s voice, lording it over a wonderful shame of captured Rebs.

  Some of his own kind advanced beyond the wall, racing toward the road, with the doings-and-done a fire in them now, the scent of the hunt in their nostrils and blood in their hearts. Some fired into the backs of Rebs running away, while others contented themselves with claiming prisoners. The wise lads and the officers gathered flags.

  “Sergeant Danny,” Walsh addressed him, standing there proud as a whore with a ring on her finger, “it’s bleeding ye are, like the blind butcher’s pig in the kitchen.”

  But Gallagher knew he had no serious injuries. Nor pains that couldn’t be mastered.

  Off to the right, bits of skirmishing continued, and the sound of a squabble rose from the guns on the left. But here it was done.

  The Rebel batteries tossed out some rounds to cover their retreating soldiers, and a bit more damage was tallied. But the thing was over. Naught but a memory now, as unforgettable as a man’s first woman.

  The officers, ever busy when all the work was done, cried out for the men to sort themselves out and rejoin their regiments.

  “All in good time,” Gallagher told them all and none of them. For he had a last task to do to finish the victory.

  He traced his way back through the maze of bodies, strewn and piled and twitching, with the wounded clawing the air and calling their mothers, until he found the officer he had shot. Gallagher didn’t want him dying uninstructed.

  Hardly more than a lad he was, with sweat-darkened tawny hair and wisps of beard. A captain, Gallagher decided, and never to be a major. The fellow wore a silk scarf around his neck, of the sort that must have been given him by a ladyfriend.

  Gallagher knelt by the fellow’s side and unknotted the scarf, drawing it away from the pulsing flesh.

  “I suppose ye’d like some water, me lad,” he said.

  The man’s eyes blinked, but his body didn’t move.

  “Well,” Gallagher went on, “there’s none to be had, not a drop. It’s your ill luck.”

  He wiped the blood from his face with the scarf, then thrust it under his blouse to sop up the gore where the blade had scraped his rib. Reassured that the slicing was nothing to interfere with business, he pawed through the wounded man’s pockets and soon came up with the finest watch he had ever held in hand. And ticking it was, like an English heart at the sight of an Irishman’s misery.

  The gut-shot captain, who had suffered additional injuries in the tumult, struggled to raise a hand to stop Gallagher’s theft. But he was too weak.

  The captain was dying. But not yet. His eyes were alive and intelligent, his expression aware of his last bit of God-given life.

  Gallagher scouted the captain’s hands for rings, but found not one.

  With a grin he summoned when beating men on the docks, Gallagher brought his mug close to the boy’s fine features. Close enough to feel the lad’s breath tickle his own whiskers, to smell its dry-mouthed staleness. The man’s eyes flashed no more defiance, only a delicious dread.


  Kissing close to the captain’s ear, Daniel Gallagher whispered, “It’s not just your watch I’m after taking, boyo. After this fine war’s over, I plan to take meself south, if ye didn’t know. And I’m going to fuck your sweetheart and your sisters. And when I’ve had me fill and grown tired of their weeping and begging for mercy, I’m going to pass the lot of them on to your niggers. You think about that now.”

  Gallagher rose, a victor.

  TWENTY-THREE

  July 3, Afternoon

  Brigadier General Dick Garnett had never wanted any of this to happen. As he waved his soldiers—his brave boys—onward toward the stone wall, hoping against collapsing odds that, somehow, the attack might be driven home, he felt their excitement multiplied within him, the peculiar human inability to stop when the stopping was good.

  And now it was too late. Kemper was down, and he had last seen Armistead disappearing into the melee around the guns. The grand charge had become an affair of curses and screams, of rifled muskets swung as clubs, of heaved rocks and cracked skulls, of rage and numbers.

  “Come on, boys! Come on! You’re there, by God, you’re there!”

  He waved his hat at the sweat-streaked, battle-carved faces rushing past him. Their hides spit blood as they fell. Bullets wasped around him, too, biting into the horseflesh bearing his weight, and he knew it was only a matter of minutes until he joined the fallen. But he could not stop any more than those men could. His dizzies surged again, trying to unhorse him, but his sense of duty—what was life’s purpose but duty?—glued him to the saddle amid the slaughter.

  Garnett jerked his stallion about and rode back through the thinned-out mob in gray. The men had lost all military order, their brigades intermingled after that fateful left wheel and the shock of the flanking fire. Now they just plunged forward, leaderless, because going on was the one thing left to do.

  “Over that wall, too!” he cried. “Git on, boys, git among ’em!” He waved his hat toward the scrambled blue line south of the copse. “Turn ’em, boys! Git around ’em! Cut ’em off!”