The Deserter

by Jane Langton

  HENRY ROPES

  Class of 1862

  Second Lieutenant, 20th Mass. Vols., 25 Nov., 1861: First Lieutenant, 2 Oct., 1862: killed, at Gettysburg, Penn., 3 July, 1863.

  —Harvard Memorial Biographies

  … a painful accident happened to us this morning: First Lieutenant Henry Ropes (20th Massachusetts in General Gibbon’s division), a most estimable gentleman and officer—intelligent, educated, refined … while lying at his post with his regiment in front of one of the batteries … was instantly killed by a badly made shell, which … fell but a few yards in front of the muzzle of the gun ….

  —LIEUTENANT FRANK HASKELL

  But the monkey show was not over. While Otis slept behind the schoolhouse, the coming afternoon loomed in the heavy air. Across the valley, 170 pieces of artillery were shifting and moving, hauled into place in a line two miles long between a Lutheran seminary to the north and a peach orchard to the south. Yesterday morning the trees of the orchard had been laden with green fruit. Now the peaches lay trampled in the ground.

  Two hundred Federal guns were moving too, drawn by their laboring horses, rattling with their caissons into a line that stretched from the tombstones of a cemetery on the north to a pair of round-topped hills to the south.

  The enlisted men of 633 regiments waited for whatever was fixing to happen, while their generals pondered and stared across the field.

  In blissful ignorance Otis slept through the rest of the morning in the pleasant shade of the schoolhouse. He slept past the hour of noon. He would have dreamed through the rest of the day if a thunderclap of artillery had not jerked him awake.

  It was the first signal shots of the rebel guns. The order for the cannonade had been given at last by Colonel E. Porter Alexander, who was undoubtedly enjoying it, because it was the way he always felt—The very shouts of the gunners ordering … Fire! … in rapid succession thrill one’s very soul.

  The noise was ten times the volume of sound that had exploded from the guns on Power’s and McAllister’s hills last night. Over Otis’s head a tree shattered. Splintered branches crashed down amid a shower of deadly shrapnel. To his horror Otis saw a dark object whirl into the air and come down a mangled mass of flesh and bone, another skulker torn from his hiding place.

  Otis sprang to his feet, snatched up his haversack and took to the road again, running away from the thundering guns, back toward the Baltimore Pike.

  His comfortable skedaddling was over. For the next two hours, Otis encountered one crisis after another, while the guns roared at each other across the valley. The first crisis was a dazzle of sunlight on a hundred bayonets, Yankees in blue coats charging on the run in the direction of the Baltimore Pike. They weren’t charging the enemy, they were charging poor old Otis Pike and his fellow skedaddlers. By order of the high command, no poor private or drummer boy or digger of latrines was to absent himself this day from the field of slaughter.

  But Otis’s high command was not Colonel Silas Colgrove, chief officer of the Third Brigade, nor was it Brigadier General Alpheus Williams, commander of the First Division. It was not even Major General Henry Slocum, in whose charge were both divisions of the Twelfth Corps. And it was certainly not Major General George Gordon Meade, the topmost commander of the entire Army of the Potomac. It was—well, who was it? After God, of course, that amiable major general in the sky.

  Otis struggled to explain to himself the sense of purpose that stiffened his malingering spine. How could it be put into words? Well, it was art, of course, it was high art, no matter how melodramatic the words sounded, nor how foolish. All he needed was the rest of his life.

  But today, as he discovered to his dismay, it was not the lofty commanders who were trying to deprive him of the precious years he needed, nor was it the bayonets of the provost guards. It was his own classmates.

  Instead of fighting the battle, some of the men at Gettysburg could have rented a tent and held a jolly old college reunion, because Harvard men were all over the place, among the rebels as well as the Yankees.

  Most of them, Otis knew, had come into the service as second lieutenants and risen rapidly to a higher rank. At Gettysburg they commanded companies, regiments, brigades, even divisions. Tens of thousands of foot soldiers who had never had the good fortune of strolling across Harvard Yard were obliged to obey their orders.

  Or not obey them, like Otis Pike.

  Otis encountered the first of them on the Taneytown Road. Although it was nearer to the tremendous noise of the bombardment, he reversed course in a hurry and loped that way because the rebel shells were falling thick and fast in his neighborhood. The twelve-pound shells had been aimed so high, they were sailing right over the heads of the fighting regiments along the ridge and smashing down in the rear, and the rear was where Otis just happened to be.

  But on the Taneytown Road he was horrified to find himself just behind the battle line. Far into the distance the regiments lay cowering behind a stone wall while the shells from across the valley hurtled and burst over them, and in thunderous reply the Federal gun crews sponged and loaded and rammed their shot home and leveled and sighted their pieces and shouted in threadlike voices, and then the guns went off in blast after blast of fire and smoke and violently recoiled.

  Otis ran crazily toward the first men he saw, a company ranged along the stone wall, all of them lying flat. Scared out of his wits, ducking and dodging while the air over his head exploded with enemy shells, he told himself wildly that he wasn’t a skulker, he was an orderly carrying an extremely important message, racing from one high-up general to another on a matter of life and death

  “Get down, you fool,” shouted someone, “get down. Oh my God, Pike, is that you?”

  Otis gave a frightened glance at the man who had recognized him, and then instead of shouting in reply he kept on running, flinging one arm forward in the direction of an eminent brigadier general who was impatient for his report.

  But then there was a louder crash, and in spite of himself Otis looked back. He saw something appalling. That popular athlete Henry Ropes—Henry Ropes of the Harvard boat club and the victorious university crew—lay dead, with his blood gushing into the ground.

  Panic-stricken, Otis dodged away, ducking and running past a couple of batteries whose gun crews were sponging and loading and shouting and firing, too busy to notice a pitiful skedaddler. Still pretending to be the bearer of an important dispatch, Otis began to feel safe.

  That is, until he encountered three more of his dear old classmates.

  EUSTIS AND FARRAR

  PROFESSOR HENRY LAWRENCE EUSTIS

  Class of 1838

  Colonel, 10th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

  Beyond Doubleday’s left, [Major General John Newton] found the ground to be “almost denuded of troops.…” Meade suggested that he ask Major General John Sedgwick, Sixth Corps commander, for units to fill the gap.… Eventually, the Sixth Corps brigades of Brigadier General A. T. A. Torbert and Colonel Henry L. Eustis extended the line.…

  —JEFFRY D.WERT

  HENRY WELD FARRAR

  Class of 1861

  Vol. A.D.C., staff of General Sedgwick, March, 1863; Second Lieutenant, 7th Maine Vols., 10 April, 1863.

  As for the Sixth Corps, it had become the manpower pool of the army from which infantry units and artillery batteries were drawn and used to plug gaps or bolster weak places in the main Union line.

  —EDWIN B. CODDINGTON

  Good God, it was Professor Eustis. It couldn’t be Professor Eustis, but it was.

  Otis halted his urgent scramble down the Taneytown Road, unsure what to pretend he was doing.

  Professor Eustis was running directly toward him at the head of a great mass of men, three or four regiments, it looked like a whole brigade. The professor had always had a fierce and accusing eye. Otis blanched and shuddered and stopped breathing as it fell upon him now with a look that pierced him through, just as it had pierced him in the old days when a hor
ribly distinguished trio of professors—James Russell Lowell, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles and Henry Lawrence Eustis—had officially “admonished” poor Otis and nearly thrown him out of school.

  Luckily this was not the moment for another admonishing. Professor Eustis swept past Otis at the head of a column of eight or nine hundred men who were churning up the dust on the road and keeping their heads down, heading for another part of the line.

  Breathing again, Otis kept going, but he was severely shaken. No longer could he persuade himself that he might just possibly have been entrusted with a vitally important dispatch from one commander to another. He was just another cowardly skulker heading south on the Taneytown Road.

  And there was no cover, no handy little woodland to duck into when Henry Farrar appeared out of the smoke.

  Otis had not seen Farrar since the Grand Opening Night of Hasty Pudding in March of 1860, when Otis’s playbill had promised “Talented Company! Gorgeous Scenery!! Magnificent Costumes!!! Utter Recklessness as to Pecuniary Considerations!!!!” and Henry Farrar had appeared in a frolicsome farce as Mr. Snoozle.

  Now the hilarious Mr. Snoozle was in uniform, shouting at a battery commander who was trying to move his pieces from one part of the ridge to another. While Otis stood frozen and staring, a shell struck one of the horses. It staggered and fell, spilling its guts on the road. The other horse reared in its traces and the whole caboodle tipped over and fell in a smash of flailing legs and spinning wheels.

  The captain of the battery seemed dazed. He stood sweating and staring while Farrar threw himself at the dead horse and grasped the harness. The men of the gun crew gaped at Farrar as his fingers struggled with the buckles, then came to their senses and began pulling at the other horse, heaving it up on its legs. At once a crowd of men from another battery massed around the gun and set it upright.

  If Farrar had seen Otis, he was too busy to do anything about him, and now a heavy layer of sulfurous smoke drifted over the road, hiding the guns and the panting men and Second Lieutenant Henry Weld Farrar.

  The blanket of smoke smelled of brimstone, but in the welcome cover Otis scrambled away from the Taneytown Road and dove into the woods. He had no idea where in the hell he was going, and even among the trees there was no safety from the hideous random fall of the rebel shell, but he wouldn’t run into anybody he knew. If he could make his way across lots and find a cozy shebang among the trees until nightfall, then maybe he could get away from this place entirely, without running into a provost guard eager to nab and put to death a habitual deserter like Otis Pike.

  All would have been well—in fact he had just found a handy path through the wilderness—if another familiar face had not suddenly loomed at him out of the wreathing smoke.

  Otis would have laughed if he hadn’t been nearly out of his wits with fright, because it was some kind of joke, the way this battle seemed to be the exclusive property of a bunch of Harvard men.

  This one was staring straight at him only a few feet away. It was his idolized old friend and champion, First Lieutenant Seth Morgan. Seth had wandered away from the costly victory at Culp’s Hill into the solitude of the woods, careless of the fall of shot and shell. He was overcome by grief.

  Otis carried in the pocket of his coat the scrap of paper that had been Seth’s kindly warning, written only a moment before the entire regiment had plunged over the breastworks into the deadly swale below Culp’s Hill—the entire regiment, that is, with the exception of Private Otis Pike.

  Both Seth and Otis knew the penalty for a fourth desertion. He was to be shot on sight.

  OTIS, WHERE

  WERE YOU?

  Corps and other commanders are authorized to order the instant death of any soldier who fails in his duty at this hour.

  —MAJOR GENERAL GEORGE GORDON MEADE

  The battle of Gettysburg has become one of those legendary nodes of history like Salamis, Waterloo and Trafalgar. Rightly or wrongly it is remembered as the greatest battle of the Civil War.

  In Otis Pike’s blundering circuit of the battlefield during the aftermath of the immense bombardment, he’d failed to see what every Union soldier waiting behind the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge was never able to forget, the magnificent advance of forty-two regiments of the Army of Northern Virginia, eleven thousand troops of rebel infantry approaching in parade formation across the shallow valley. He was not there to see them falter, cut down like stands of ripened grain by long-range fire from the hills to north and south and double-shotted canister from batteries closer at hand. He did not witness the murderous rifle fire of Hancock’s Second Corps nor the flank attacks of Hays to the right and Stannard to the left. Nor did he see Gibbon’s triumphant regiments rise from the stone wall to hold aloft their shot-torn flags, nor the retreat of Pickett’s division and Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s shattered brigades, stumbling downhill past their own dead thick on the field.

  For Otis the day would be remembered for his one last fearful encounter during the double bombardment, half a mile away from the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge and a full half hour before the Confederate regiments moved out of the trees to begin their fatal assault.

  “Oh my God, Otis,” shouted Seth, his voice hoarse above the roar of the guns, “it’s not you.”

  Once again Otis felt his knees fail him. A nine-pound ball flew over their heads with a sucking sound and slammed into a tree. The tree exploded in splinters of shredded bark. The noise of the artillery was louder than ever, a perpetual thunder from the pieces massed along the ridge. Otis could not see the guns, but their red flashes colored the smoke like the flames of a burning city, and there was a sharp smell of bursting black powder and the overheated barrels of the cast-iron guns. The entire force of the Federal batteries on Cemetery Ridge was roaring in concert, aiming a heavy fire across the valley, and solid shot kept falling into the trees from the guns on the other side. One shell shattered a rock not far from Otis, and the fragments spattered his face.

  He cried, “No, Seth, no,” and held up beseeching hands.

  But tears were running down Seth’s face as he lifted his rifle. He called out to Otis in anguish, “Charley’s dead. They killed Charley Mudge. Tom Fox was hit. Tom Robeson isn’t going to make it. Where were you, Otis? Where were you when they told us to cross that swale?”

  Seth’s rifle was shaking in his hands, but he was only four feet away and he couldn’t miss.

  Otis had no choice. He pulled out the six-shot Colt revolver he had won in a crap game—it had never before been fired by Otis Pike—and screamed, “Forgive me, Seth,” and shot him dead.

  PART VII

  THE FIELD OF

  BATTLE

  Years hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, these chances,

  Of unsurpass’d heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;)…

  Of those armies so rapid so wondrous what saw you to tell us?

  —WALT WHITMAN

  STRANGELY

  BEAUTIFUL

  The Gettysburg battlefield was lovely and green, the shallow valley between the battle lines pleasantly rolling. A split-rail fence ran down and up again from the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee to the road below Cemetery Ridge nearly a mile away.

  It was a fine day. As they walked across the field Mary wondered if Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s men had been aware of the fragrance of the tall grass as they trudged in parade formation up the hill toward the Union guns, or if they had looked down at the wildflowers blossoming around their marching feet. But of course there was probably some other crop growing on the farmer’s field that day, not blades of grass intermingled with daisies and yarrow and clover. And surely the brimstone smell of the solid shot and exploding shell of the two-hour bombardment would have overwhelmed the scent of whatever it was that some innocent farmer had planted on this sloping ground earlier the same year.

  A five-rail fence ran along each side of the Emmitsburg Road. Homer’s bulk made climbing between the r
ails difficult, and he complained about being under fire at the same time.

  “Well, why don’t you duck?” said Mary, but it wasn’t funny. She shuddered, remembering what she had read aloud to Homer on the long drive south, the whole story of the march across the valley by the rebel army, straight into the massed rifles and artillery fire of the Yankees behind the stone wall and the brutal raking bombardment of the guns on Cemetery Hill and Little Round Top.

  But today there was no gunfire, nothing but the buzz of insects in the grass and the fluting whistle of a bird overhead. The sky was blue and the sun was warm. They climbed over the stone wall and settled down to eat the last of their sandwiches.

  Then for a while they wandered here and there among the monuments. The inscriptions recorded the courageous actions of regiments of the seven corps of the Army of the Potomac on the first, second and third days of July in 1863. Moving from one to another, taking in the immensity of the sacrifice, Mary and Homer could think of nothing to say, until Homer groaned that he was still hungry.

  “There’ll be restaurants in the town,” said Mary. “And bookstores. We could find some more books about the battle.”

  Slowly they walked back across the field. At the rise on the other side they headed for the bronze landmark of Robert E. Lee, still gazing magnificently past them at some vision of his brave regiments moving gloriously up the hill.

  The car was parked along the road, in the shade of the trees. Here behind the stone wall there was another reminder of the battle, an endless line of artillery looking silently away from the road toward the gentle rise of Cemetery Ridge.

  “They’re beautiful,” said Homer.

  “Strangely beautiful, yes,” said Mary. “It’s odd to say so, but it’s true”.

  THE SHOP