[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes

by Anthology

  “Where’d you find it?” he demanded.

  “That cider, it was packed in the green trunk, the one that came up with the divisional train.”

  “I instructed you to pack it in the brown trunk.”

  “I know that, Massa Poe. That fact must have slipped my mind, somehow.”

  Poe’s hand clenched the ivory handle of his cane. Renewed anger poured like fire through his veins. “Worthless nigger baboon!” he snapped.

  “Yes, Massa Poe,” Sextus said, nodding, “I is. I must be, the way you keep saying I is.”

  Poe sighed. One really couldn’t expect any more from an African. Changing his name from Sam to Sextus hadn’t given the black any more brains than God had given him in the first place.

  “Well, Sextus,” he said. “Fortuna favet fatuis, you know.” He laughed.

  “Massa always has his jokes in Latin. He always does.”

  Sextus’s tone was sulky. Poe laughed and tried to jolly the slave out of his mood.

  “We must improve your knowledge of the classics. Your litterae humaniores, you understand.”

  The slave was annoyed. “Enough human litter around here as it is.”

  Poe restrained a laugh. “True enough, Sextus.” He smiled indulgently. “You are excused from your lessons.”

  His spirits raised by the banter with his darky, Poe limped to his headquarters tent, marked by the division flags and the two ravens on their perch, and let Sextus serve him his evening meal. The ravens gobbled to each other while Poe ate sparingly, and drank two glasses of the soft cider. Poe hadn’t touched spirits in fifteen years, even though whiskey was a lot easier to find in this army than water.

  Not since that last sick, unholy carouse in Baltimore.

  Where were his orders? he wondered. He’d just been ordered to occupy Ewell’s trenches. Where was the rest of the army? Where was Lee? No one had told him anything.

  After the meal, he’d send couriers to find Lee. Somebody had to know something.

  It was impossible they’d forgotten him.

  Eureka, he called it. His prose poem had defined the universe, explained it all, a consummate theory of matter, energy, gravity, art, mathematics, the mind of God. The universe was expanding, he wrote, had exploded from a single particle in a spray of evolving atoms that moved outward at the speed of divine thought. The universe was still expanding, the forms of its matter growing ever more complex; but the expansion would slow, reverse; matter would coalesce, return to its primordial simplicity; the Divine Soul that resided in every atom would reunite in perfect self-knowledge.

  It was the duty of art, he thought, to reunite human thought with that of the Divine, particled with unparticled matter. In his poetry he had striven for an aesthetic purity of thought and sentiment, a detachment from political, moral, and temporal affairs…. Nothing of Earth shone in his verse, nothing contaminated by matter—he desired harmonies, essences, a striving for Platonic perfection, for the dialogue of one abstract with another. Beyond the fact that he wrote in English, nothing connected the poems with America, the nineteenth century, its life, its movements. He disdained even standard versification—he wrote with unusual scansions, strange metrics—the harmonies of octameter catalectic, being more rarified, seemed to rise to the lofty ear of God more than could humble iambic pentameter, that endless trudge, trudge, trudge across the surface of the terrestrial globe. He wanted nothing to stand between himself and supernal beauty, nothing to prevent the connection of his own mind with that of God.

  He had poured everything into Eureka, all his soul, his hope, his grief over Virginia, his energy. In the end there was the book, but nothing left of the man. He lectured across America, the audiences polite and appreciative, their minds perhaps touched by his own vision of the Divine—but all his own divinity had gone into the book, and in the end Earth reached up to claim him. Entire weeks were spent in delirium, reeling drunk from town to town, audience to audience, woman to woman….

  Ending at last in some Baltimore street, lying across a gutter, his body a dam for a river of half-frozen October sleet.

  After the meal Poe stepped outside for a pipe of tobacco. He could see the soft glow of candlelight from the Starker parlor, and he thought of the girl in her coffin, laid out in her dress of virgin white. How much sadder it would have been had she lived, had she been compelled to grow old in this new, changing world, this sad and deformed Iron Age dedicated to steam and slaughter … better she was dead, her spirit purged of particled matter and risen to contemplation of the self-knowing eternal.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of a man on horseback. Poe recognized Colonel Moxley Sorrel, a handsome Georgian, still in his twenties, who was Longstreet’s chief of staff. He had been promoted recently as a result of leading a flank assault in the Wilderness that had crushed an entire Union corps, though, as always, the triumph had come too late in the day for the attack to be decisive.

  “General.” Sorrel saluted. “I had a devil of a time finding you. Ewell had his command post at Hackett’s place, over yonder.” He pointed at the lights of a plantation house just north of Hanover Junction. “I reckoned you’d be there.”

  “I had no notion of where Ewell was. No one’s told me a thing. This place seemed as likely as any.” Poe looked off toward the lights of Hanover Junction. “At least there’s a good view.”

  Sorrel frowned. He swung out of the saddle, and Sextus came to take the reins from his hand. “Staff work has gone up entirely,” Sorrel said. “There’s been too much chaos at the top for everything to get quite sorted out.”

  “Yes.” Poe looked at him. “And how is General Longstreet?”

  The Georgian’s eyes were serious. “He will recover, praise God. But it will be many months before he can return to duty.”

  Poe looked up at the ravens, half expecting one of them to croak out “Nevermore.” But they’d stuck their heads under their wings and gone to sleep.

  He will recover, Poe thought. That’s what they’d said of Stonewall; and then the crazed Presbyterian had died suddenly.

  just like old Stonewall to do the unexpected.

  The army had been hit hard the last few weeks. First Longstreet wounded in the Wilderness, then Jeb Stuart killed at Yellow Tavern, just a few days ago. They were the two best corps commanders left to Lee, in Poe’s opinion. Longstreet had been replaced by Richard Anderson; but Lee had yet to appoint a new cavalry commander—both, in Poe’s mind, bad decisions. Anderson was too mentally lazy to command a corps—he was barely fit to command his old division—and the cavalry needed a firm hand now, with their guiding genius gone. “Will you come inside, Colonel?” Poe gestured toward the tent flap with his stick.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Share some cider with me? That and some biscuits are all the rafraîchissements I can manage.”

  “You’re very kind.” Sorrel looked at the uncleared table. “I’ve brought your orders from General Anderson.”

  Poe pushed aside his gold-rimmed dinner plate and moved a lantern onto the table. Sorrel pulled a folded map out of his coat and spread it on the pale blue tablecloth. Poe reached for his spectacles and put them on his nose. The map gave him, for the first time, an accurate look at his position.

  This part of the Southern line stretched roughly northwest to southeast, a chord on an arc of the North Anna. The line was more or less straight, though it was cut in half by a swampy tributary of the North Anna, with steep banks on either side, and at that point Poe’s entrenchments bent back a bit. The division occupied the part of the line south of the tributary. In front of him was dense hardwood forest, not very useful for maneuver or attack.

  “We’re going on the offensive tomorrow,” Sorrel said, “thank the lord.” He gave a thin smile. “Grant’s got himself on the horns of a dilemma, sir, and General Lee intends to see he’s gored.”

  Poe’s temper crackled. “No one’s going to get gored if division commanders don’t get their instructions!
” he snapped.

  Sorrel gave him a wary smile. “That’s why I’m here, sir.”

  Poe glared at him, then deliberately reined in his anger. “So you are.” He took a breath. “Pardon my … display.”

  “Staff work, as I say, sir, has been a mite precarious of late. General Lee is ill, and so is General Hill.”

  Poe’s anxiety rose again. “Lee?” he demanded. “Ill?”

  “An intestinal complaint. We would have made this attack yesterday had the general been feeling better.”

  Poe felt his nervousness increase. He was not a member of the Cult of Lee, but he did not trust an army without a capable hand at the top. Too many high-ranking officers were out of action or incompetent. Stuart was dead, Longstreet was wounded, Lee was sick—great heavens, he’d already had a heart attack—Ewell hadn’t been the same since he lost his leg, Powell Hill was ill half the time…. And the young ones, the healthy ones, were as always dying of bullets and shells.

  “Your task, general,” Sorrel said, “is simply to hold. Perhaps to demonstrate against the Yanks, if you feel it possible.”

  “How am I to know if it’s possible?” He was still angry. “I don’t know the ground. I don’t know where the enemy is.”

  Sorrel cocked an eyebrow at him, said, “Ewell didn’t show you anything?” But he didn’t wait for an answer before beginning his exposition.

  The Army of Northern Virginia, he explained, had been continually engaged with Grant’s army for three weeks—first in the Wilderness, then at Spotsylvania, now on the North Anna; there hadn’t been a single day without fighting. Every time one of Grant’s offensives bogged down, he’d slide his whole army to his left and try again. Two days before, on May 24, Grant had gone to the offensive again, crossing the North Anna both upstream and down of Lee’s position.

  Grant had obviously intended to overlap Lee on both flanks and crush him between his two wings; but Lee had anticipated his enemy by drawing his army back into a V shape, with the center on the river, and entrenching heavily. When the Yanks saw the entrenchments they’d come to a stumbling halt, their offensive stopped in its tracks without more than a skirmish on either flank.

  “You’re facing Hancock’s Second Corps, here on our far right flank,” Sorrel said. His manicured finger jabbed at the map. Hancock appeared to be entirely north of the swampy tributary. “Warren and Wright are on our left, facing Powell Hill. Burnside’s Ninth Corps is in the center—he tried to get across Ox Ford on the twenty-fourth, but General Anderson’s guns overlook the ford and Old Burn called off the fight before it got properly started. Too bad—” Grinning. “Could’ve been another Fredericksburg.”

  “We can’t hope for more than one Fredericksburg, alas,” Poe said. “Not even from Burnside.” He looked at the map. “Looks as if the Federals have broken their army into pieces for us.”

  “Yes, sir. We can attack either wing, and Grant can’t reinforce one wing without moving his people across the North Anna twice.”

  General Lee had planned to take advantage of that with an offensive against half Grant’s army. He intended to pull Ewell’s corps off the far right, most of Anderson’s out of the center, and combine them with Hill’s for a strike at Warren and Wright. The attack would have been made the day before if Lee hadn’t fallen ill. In the end he’d postponed the assault by one day.

  The delay, Poe thought, had given the Yanks another twenty-four hours to prepare. Confederates aren’t the only ones who know how to entrench.

  Plans already laid, he thought. Nothing he could do about it.

  He looked at the map. Now that Ewell and most of Anderson’s people had pulled out, he was holding half the Confederate line with his single division.

  “It’ll probably work to the good,” Sorrel said. “Your division came up to hold the right for us, and that will allow us to put more soldiers into the attack. With your division and Bushrod Johnson’s, which came up a few days ago, we’ve managed to replace all the men we’ve lost in this campaign so far.”

  Had the Yankees? Poe wondered.

  “When you hear the battle start,” Sorrel said, “you might consider making a demonstration against Hancock. Keep him interested in what’s happening on his front.”

  Poe looked up sharply. “One division,” he said, “against the Yankee Second Corps? Didn’t we have enough of that at Gettysburg?”

  “A demonstration, general, not a battle.” Politely. “General Anderson has also put under your command the two brigades that are holding the center, should you require them.”

  “Whose?”

  “Gregg’s Brigade, and Law’s Alabamans.”

  Poe’s mind worked through this. “Are Gregg and Law aware they are under my orders?”

  “I presume so.”

  “Presume,” Poe echoed. There was too much presuming in this war. He took off his spectacles and put them in his pocket. “Colonel Sorrel,” he said, “would you do me the inestimable favor of riding to Gregg and Law tonight and telling them of this? I fear the staff work may not have caught up with General Anderson’s good intent.”

  Sorrel paused, then gave a resigned shrug. “Very well, General. If you desire it.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.” His small triumph made Poe genial. “I believe I have been remiss. I remember promising you cider.”

  “Yes. A glass would be delightful, thank you.”

  They sat at the folding table, and Poe called for Sextus to serve. He opened a tin box and offered it to Sorrel. “I have some of Dr. Graham’s dietary biscuits, if you desire.”

  “Thank you, sir. If I may put some in my pockets for later…?”

  “Make free of them, sir.”

  Sorrel, possessing by now an old soldier’s reflexes, loaded his pockets with biscuits and then took a hearty swallow of the cider. Sextus refilled his glass.

  “General Pickett’s campaign south of the James,” Sorrel said, “has been much appreciated here.”

  “The form of appreciation preferable to us would have been reinforcements from General Lee.”

  “We were, ah, tangled up with Grant at the time, sir.”

  “Still, for several days we had two brigades against two entire corps. Two corps, sir!” Indignation flared in Poe. His fists knotted in his lap.

  “The glory of your victory was all the greater.” The Georgian’s tone was cautious, his eyes alert.

  Condescending, Poe thought. A black anger settled on him like a shroud. These southern gentlemen were always condescending. Poe knew what Sorrel was thinking. It’s just Poe, hysterical Code-breaker Poe. Poe always thinks he’s fighting the whole Yankee army by himself. Poe is always sending off messages screaming for help and telling other people what to do. What? Another message from Poe? It’s just the fellow’s nerves again. Ignore it.

  “I’ve always been proved right!” Poe snapped. “I was right during the Seven Days’ when I said Porter was dug in behind Boatswain Swamp! I was right about the Yankee signal codes, I was right about the charge at Gettysburg, and I was right again when I said Butler had come ashore at Bermuda Hundred with two whole Yankee corps! If my superiors would give me a little credit—”

  “Your advice has always been appreciated,” said Sorrel.

  “My God!” Poe said. “Poor General Pickett is broken down because of this! It may be months before his nerves recover! Pickett—if he could stand what Lee did to the Division at Gettysburg, one might think he could stand anything! But this—this broke him! Great heavens, if Butler had committed more than a fraction of the forces available to him, he would have lost Petersburg, and with Petersburg, Richmond!”

  “I do not think this is the place—” Sorrel began.

  Too late. Poe’s mind filled with the memory of the Yankees coming at the Ravens at Port Walthall Junction, four brigades against Pickett’s two, and those four only the advance of Butler’s entire army. He remembered the horror of it, the regimental flags of the Federals breaking out of the cover of the trees, brass
and bayonets shining in the wind; shellfire bursting like obscene overripe blossoms; the whistling noise made by the tumbling bullet that had carried away Poe’s hat; the sight of George Pickett with his face streaked by powder smoke, his long hair wild in the wind, as he realized his flanks were caving in and he was facing another military disaster…

  “Screaming for reinforcements!” Poe shouted. “We were screaming for reinforcements! And what does Richmond send? Harvey Hill! Hah! Major General interfering Harvey Hill!”

  Sorrel looked at him stonily. The old fight between Poe and Hill was ancient history.

  “Hill is a madman, sir!” Poe knew he was talking too much, gushing like a chain pump, but he couldn’t stop himself. Let at least one person know what he thought. “He is a fighter, I will grant him that, but he is quarrelsome, tempestuous—impossible to reason with. He is not a rational man, Colonel. He hasn’t an ounce of rationality or system in him. No more brains than a nigger.”

  Sorrel finished his cider, and raised a hand to let Sextus know not to pour him more. “We may thank God that the movement was made by Butler,” he said.

  Poe looked at him. “The Yankees will not forever give their armies to men like Butler,” he said.

  Sorrel gazed resentfully at the lantern for a long moment. “Grant is no Butler, that is certain. But we will do a Chancellorsville on him I nonetheless.”

  “We may hope so,” said Poe. He had no confidence in this offensive. Lee no longer had the subordinates to carry things out properly, could no longer do anything in the attack but throw his men headlong at Federal entrenchments.

  The young colonel rose. “Thank you for the cider, General. I will visit Generals Law and Gregg on my return journey.”

  Poe rose with him, memory still surging through his mind like the endless waves of Yankee regiments at Port Walthall Junction. He knew he had not made a good impression, that he had confirmed in Sorrel’s mind, and through him the minds of the corps staff, the stories of his instability, his hysteria, and his egotism.