Boys of Wartime: Will at the Battle of Gettysburg

by Laurie Calkhoven

  I asked another question. One that had been troubling me ever since I saw the waves of desperate men running through town. “Will the Union retreat again?”

  I felt his back stiffen. “There will be no retreat. We’ll hold this ground or die trying.”

  His answer was meant to reassure me, but it had the opposite effect. What if the rest of us died with them? Did the two armies ever think of that?

  “What does everyone want with Gettysburg?” I asked.

  “It’s not Gettysburg,” the colonel said. “It’s an accident that we ran into each other here. But we can’t let Lee win a battle on our own land. It’s bad enough they’ve been beating us all over Virginia. If the Rebels have control of Harrisburg and Philadelphia, Washington will be totally cut off from the rest of the North.

  “Lee hopes a victory in the North will give the Copperheads the political power to end the war,” he continued.

  The Copperheads were Northerners who wanted peace, even if it meant letting the South secede. Their opponents in Washington named them after the deadly snake because they were poison to the Union.

  “We’ve got some Copperheads in Gettysburg,” I told him. I didn’t say that I was starting to wonder if they were right.

  “They want peace at any cost, but I say letting the South go is too high a price,” the colonel said. He steered the horse around a group of soldiers shuffling down the Taneytown Road. “Don’t you worry,” he told me. “Lee’s not going to win this one.”

  Before I knew it, we were almost at the Weikert farm. I asked the colonel to let me down so I could walk the last bit. I had much to think about, and I needed to settle it in my mind before I saw Grace. I expected a good long r ound of yelling about leaving Mother alone with enemy soldiers, plus about a million questions. I wanted my mind to be clear.

  “I might have need of a messenger,” the colonel said. “Why don’t you stay with me?”

  “Me? A messenger?” I asked. For a moment I was excited. That was even better than a drummer!

  “You’ve been brave,” he told me. “You kept your head when many would have panicked.”

  I thought about having to run through crowds of soldiers with dispatches for the officers. The words “Got ’em” echoed in my head along with the images of all the dead men I had seen. Suddenly, being a messenger was the last thing I wanted if it meant I had to stay in the fighting.

  “Thank you, sir, but I have to take care of my sisters.” I was relieved to have an excuse.

  The colonel nodded.

  I watched him ride off, and then turned into the Weikerts’ front yard. It was all torn up. I saw a light flicker in an upstairs window, and then go out. I decided to make my way to the barn rather than rouse the family. I expected to fall into a pile of hay and sleep there until morning, but that was not to be.

  The screams and the moans reached me first. Then I turned the corner of the house. The barn doors were wide open. Soldiers milled around outside. Inside, the barn was crowded with wounded Union soldiers, and a few Confederates.

  Men lay side by side, moaning and crying. Some pleaded for water. A few called for a doctor. Others begged to be released from life. Nurses moved among them, but there seemed to be little they could do.

  On seeing me standing upright, one of them shoved a crock of beef tea and a tin cup into my hands.

  “Start over there,” he said, pointing to the back of the barn. “Give a swallow to anyone who can manage it.”

  I gripped the crock and stared. I wanted to run away screaming. Instead, I corked up my feelings and stumbled in the direction he pointed.

  I knelt beside a man with blood all over his stomach. He tried to shove an envelope into my hands. “Send this to my wife,” he said.

  I didn’t want his letter. I raised his head and tried to get him to drink, but he wouldn’t.

  “Take it,” he moaned.

  “You can send it yourself,” I told him, “after the battle.”

  He only blinked at me. He was dying. He knew it. I knew it. I took the letter.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  His eyes were already clouding over. I wanted to stay with him, but there were too many others who needed my help.

  The men who were awake wanted someone to talk to. One wanted me to pray with him, and I did. A few asked me to write letters, but I had nothing to write with, nor any paper. They all wanted to tell me where they were from—places like Wisconsin and Maine that I had never seen.

  One of the Rebs was from Tennessee. He wasn’t too badly wounded, but he sure wasn’t looking forward to a Union prison camp.

  “You know a drummer named Abel Hoke?” I asked.

  The man nodded. “We’re in the same company.”

  “I saw him a few hours ago—in Gettysburg. He’s just fine,” I told him.

  He seemed grateful for the news. I wondered if I would see him again after the war, when I went to visit Abel.

  It was still dark when I made my way back to the front of the barn to refill my crock, though it seemed as if I had been in that barn for days.

  A surgeon stood in a corner covered in blood. A lantern swayed above his head. Under it, he was sawing off the arm of a soldier. The surgeon threw the limb into a wheelbarrow that was already heaped high with arms and legs and stitched the man up.

  “Next!” he yelled.

  Two men carried the groaning one-armed man to a spot on the floor and then brought the surgeon another soldier. His leg was mangled by a minié ball. Those bullets, favored by both the North and the South, shattered bones. There was no saving a limb if it got hit by one. I caught a whiff of chloroform, and before the soldier was even asleep, the surgeon started to saw again.

  I gagged and ran out into the yard. I had to hold onto the side of the barn to stay upright. Then I gave up and sank to my knees. I knew I should go back inside, that the wounded needed help, but I could not bring myself to do it. Not right then.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Another Task

  Thursday morning, July 2, 1863

  The next thing I knew, the sun had risen. I had fallen asleep and dreamed of rumbling thunder. It was artillery fire in the distance. The battle must have resumed at first light.

  It was a bright, clear day. I blinked the sleep from my eyes, feeling the sun already hot on my face. On a normal summer’s day, I would be just now finishing my chores and asking Albertus McCreary if he wanted to go fishing. Instead I headed for the house, skirting a pile of arms and legs. I tried not to look at them or think about them, but the stench made me gag.

  Mr. Weikert tended the outdoor oven. Mrs. Weikert, Mrs. Shriver, and others were in the kitchen, baking bread and making more beef tea. I asked after Grace.

  “She’s giving water to the troops out front with Tillie.” Mrs. Shriver barely looked up from her bread dough. “Grab a bucket and fill it at the spring.”

  Sally and Jane Ann were in a corner rolling cloth into bandages under the direction of a soldier with his arm in a sling. It was a game to them. They raced the Shriver children to see who could roll the most.

  I wanted to gather them in my arms, but I was afraid they would ask after Mother, and that would set them to blubbering because she wasn’t here. I grabbed a bucket, filled it at the well, and saw Grace and Tillie on the edge of the road.

  Grace looked fine. Tired and dirty, but fine. She smiled at the soldiers and I saw that she was almost as pretty as Tillie. I was happy to see her—a new and strange feeling for me.

  I ran toward her. “Grace!”

  Grace screamed and dropped her bucket.

  It was only then that I looked down on myself. My shirt and trousers were covered in blood, as were my shoes.

  “What happened?” Grace shrieked. “What happened?”

  She was making such a racket that every soldier’s eye on the Taneytown Road turned to us. She wouldn’t stop shrieking long enough for me to answer.

  “Calm yourself. I’m not hurt. I was helpi
ng the wounded in the barn.”

  Her face crumpled and she pulled me into a hug. She sobbed for a moment and then stepped back and shook herself. “Mustn’t cry.”

  “I know,” I said quietly, blinking away my own tears.

  “Where’s Mother?” she asked.

  I picked up her bucket and put it into her hands. “She’s fine,” I said, hoping that was true. “I’ll tell you everything. But let’s give these men some water first.”

  Regiment after regiment passed us by on the double-quick, heading for the fighting. Too many cannons to count filled the open space to the east of us. Ammunition trains raced by. Their horses strained and sweated against the weight and the heat. One man collapsed from sunstroke and had to be carried into the house.

  The soldiers were in good spirits. Thanking us. Letting us know that they would clear Pennsylvania of the Rebs in no time.

  There were some wooden boxes piled up against the fence. One soldier joked about going home in one.

  “Oh, you mustn’t think that way,” Tillie told him.

  “I’ll consider myself lucky if I get one,” the soldier joked. “I don’t want to share a hole in the ground with any Rebs.”

  He was gone before Tillie could scold him again.

  I told my story in fits and starts. Grace cringed when she heard about the Union soldiers hiding under her bed and the Rebs who found them.

  “Did they touch anything?” she asked.

  “Only the floor,” I told her. “Soldiers don’t want to have anything to do with your petticoats if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  I came to the part about finding Colonel Braxton in the carriage house, my plan, and the last Confederate officer we encountered. The one with his hand on his pistol. I might have embellished my bravery in the adventure.

  “You’re telling tales, William Edmonds.”

  Grace looked as if she had a snoot full of skunk. I was wrong before. She wasn’t pretty at all. “Am not,” I said. “It’s all true. Every last word of it.”

  “You left Mother alone in a town full of Rebs,” she screeched.

  “Mother has three Union soldiers guarding her along with a few wounded Rebs. She’s safe no matter who’s in control. And she told me to help the colonel.”

  With that we stopped speaking. I refilled my bucket at the spring. When I got back, some officers had just ridden up to the house. One of them was my colonel. Somehow, he had gotten his hands on another uniform. He had a saber by his side and a Colt .44 pistol at his waist.

  “Will,” he said, “I see you’re still doing your part.”

  He introduced me to his fellow officers as “the boy who saved my hide.”

  I peeked over at Grace. She stared up at Colonel Braxton openmouthed.

  “This is my sister Grace,” I told him. “She specializes in catching flies.”

  Grace closed her mouth and squawked something or other.

  The colonel tipped his hat. “Pleased to meet you. I hope you know what a fine service your brother has done for the Union.”

  Then the colonel asked me to show them to the farmhouse’s roof so they could see the battlefield.

  I led them through the house and found the trapdoor leading up to the roof. The officers used field glasses to survey the landscape. Then the colonel let me look through them, too. Dust and smoke filled the air, and there seemed to be soldiers everywhere my eye landed. Cannons were being rushed into position. Infantry soldiers were forming lines. Officers galloped back and forth.

  From this distance, it was easy to put aside thoughts of the bloody men in the barn, and the pile of limbs that no one had had time to bury. War was a glorious adventure again, if only for a moment. I slipped into one of my old daydreams. I saw myself galloping across the battlefield, waving the flag to inspire the men. They cheered my bravery as I raced by.

  I lowered the field glasses with a sigh. Had Jacob had the same kind of dreams that I did? I wondered how he had felt when real bullets and shells began to fly.

  The colonel asked me to name the landmarks. The hills—Big Round Top and Little Round Top—were just to our west. The Lutheran Seminary on the other side of town was now in Confederate hands.

  “I watched the battle begin from there,” I told them. Then I pointed east. “That’s Culp’s Hill, and you see Cemetery Hill where we were last night.”

  Colonel Braxton checked what I told him against a map. He and the others tried to figure the number of Rebs and noted their positions. Then he rolled up the map and handed it to me.

  “Now that you know your sister is safe, I have another task for you,” he said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Snapping Turtle

  The colonel pointed to the Leister farmhouse, just a little way up the Taneytown Road, where men in blue milled about. “General Meade has set up his headquarters there,” he said. “Take this to him. Tell him it’s from Colonel Braxton.”

  I didn’t see any shelling in that direction, so I said I would.

  We made our way down into the front yard again, and I watched the colonel mount his horse. “I know I can count on you,” he said. “Give it directly to General Meade, no one else. No telling how long before he’ll see it otherwise.”

  He and the officers set off across the fields, galloping toward the battle.

  I headed straight for General Meade, not stopping to tell Grace. I didn’t want to set her to squawking again. I had to push my way into the river of blue that was marching by. It took me some minutes to work my way through them, and then I set off running alongside the road.

  “What’s your hurry?” some of the soldiers teased.

  “The Rebs will still be there,” another said. “No need to run.”

  I paid them no mind. I got to the house in no time and asked for General Meade. An aide tried to take the map from me.

  “Colonel Braxton told me to put it into his hands myself,” I said. “And no one else.”

  The aide didn’t like it, but he led me into the parlor where General Meade was studying some papers. The aide cleared his throat.

  “Yes, what is it?” the general asked.

  I could see why the men called him the Snapping Turtle. His head was small for his body and he was kind of google-eyed.

  “This boy has something for you, from Colonel Braxton.”

  The general held out his hand and I passed him the map. “Colonel Braxton said to give it to you and no one else,” I said.

  The men around him peered over his shoulder and talked about where to send what regiments. I watched them and wondered what I should do. I had never been near a man of such importance before. Should I stay in case he had another task for me? Should I go?

  The aide cleared his throat again. The general blinked at us, looking more and more like a turtle.

  “I live in town,” I told him. “If you have any questions about the map.”

  He seemed to see me for the first time then. He took in the blood on my shirt. “Are you hurt?”

  “No, sir,” I stammered. “I was helping the wounded up at the Weikert farm. The Jacob Weikert farm—there are at least two other Weikert farms.” I was babbling, but somehow I couldn’t stop. “Lots of Weikerts around Gettysburg. I’m the only Edmonds that I know of.”

  The men around Meade chuckled, but the general eyed me seriously.

  “Thank you for your service,” he said. “The wounded need you more than we do.”

  I nodded and backed out of the room.

  The next thing I knew I was racing along the road again. There were fewer troops marching by. Grace and Tillie were in the house, and I joined them. They were too busy to notice that I had even been gone. The gunfire was constant now, and we did our best to stay away from the windows. I peeked once and saw dead bodies in the grass. It was too dangerous to try to move them out of the sun.

  The constant roar of cannons and rifles forced us to shout, and we all grew hoarse as the afternoon went on. The farmhouse shook. O
ur throats ached. The twins hid in a closet with their hands over their ears.

  In the middle of the afternoon, there was a sudden quiet. We stared at each other, stunned. I wondered if the battle was over and who had won. But the quiet only lasted for a minute or two. Then, suddenly, the cannons on the Round Tops began to roar. I shouted to Grace to take cover, but I couldn’t even hear my own voice.

  Soldiers scrambled. Shells flew overhead. The whole house shook.

  In a lull, a soldier suggested we move to a farmhouse about a half-mile across the fields to the east. Mrs. Shriver and her mother, Mrs. Weikert, were determined to go, and so we set off. Grace had Jane Ann on her back, and I carried Sally on mine.

  We raced across the field, hearing explosions behind us and above us. A shell fell just a half a field away, sending dirt flying. We had only been at the farmhouse for a few minutes when another soldier sent us back where we had come from.

  “You’re in more danger here!” he yelled. “Those shells from the Round Tops will fly right over your house and land here!”

  As if to prove his point, a shell exploded in front of the house, sending dirt and rocks flying into the air. The earth trembled beneath our feet.

  Grace and I pulled the twins onto our backs again while Mrs. Weikert and Mrs. Shriver took charge of her two young ones. I could not tell what the little ones were thinking. The twins suddenly seemed younger than they did two days ago. Sally had taken to sucking her thumb again, a habit Mother broke her of last year, and Jane Ann hadn’t spoken a word since we started out. Nor did she cry.

  On our way back across the field I tried to see Gettysburg. There was a big cloud of smoke above it, and I couldn’t make out any of the buildings. Was the town on fire? Had it been shelled until there was nothing left? Grace and I eyed each other. No doubt we shared the same worry. Had Mother been hurt?

  There was no way to find out. The women went right back to the kitchen when we returned to the Weikert place. We hadn’t even been gone long enough for the bread in the oven to burn. I settled Sally and Jane Ann in a back room, along with the Shriver children. Then I stole to the roof, determined to get a look at Gettysburg.