Unholy Fire

by Robert J. Mrazek

  “We’ll try again in an hour,” he said. An hour later, it stayed down.

  Afterward, I fell into a deep sleep. I found myself dreaming again. This time the dreams were not about Ball’s Bluff or Johnny Harpswell. They were of my island home off the coast of Maine, just as it had been when I was a boy.

  Bathed in a radiant summer sun, I saw our fleet of two-masted schooners swinging gently at anchor in the harbor. There was a fresh catch, and the fishermen were standing in their aprons beside the wood plank tables in the flake yard, gutting and cleaning the cod with razor-sharp knives. The beach was covered in scaly flakes.

  Great flocks of gulls swooped overhead, their shrill cries interrupted by sudden attacks to pounce on the entrails, heads, and tails. I could smell the reek of salted fish curing in the sun.

  Then, suddenly, it was winter, and cold rain was leaking down from the slate shingles under the roof in the attic and soaking my pillow. I opened my eyes to the pressure of a cold wet rag on my forehead.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  The craving was no longer there. I was sure that it had not gone far, but the desperate need to have the opiate inside me was gone. I told him so.

  “You might not believe it yet, but this is the beginning of a new life for you,” he said.

  “How long have we been here?” I asked.

  “Three days and nights.”

  “No … that’s impossible.”

  “It’s true. I secured a week’s leave for you. The next step is to regain your strength. Are you ready to go back?”

  “Yes,” I said weakly, and meant it.

  As we came to the top of the stairs, Val introduced me to the man in the red wig. His name was Crisp, and he was originally from Springfield, having once served as Val’s law clerk. His wounds were suffered during the Seven Days.

  Less than an hour later, we were back at Mrs. Warden’s.

  The following day I began my new life. Upon rising, I took a long hot bath, had breakfast, and then ambled slowly around Lafayette Square, stopping several times to rest along the way. Within a week I was walking all the way to the Capitol, eating my packed lunch in the park beyond it, and walking back without a pause. My appetite was such that Mrs. Warden threatened to charge twice the fee for my weekly board. I cheerfully volunteered to split the new pile of firewood in her yard, and she readily accepted the offer.

  As each day passed, I grew steadier in my resolve that I could tame the beast inside my brain. For that was where it lived and still lurked. I went back to work the following Monday.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Through much of that November I was primarily occupied with desertion cases, although I did handle the court-martial investigation of a soldier who was accused of stealing laudanum from a field hospital. He had become addicted to it after the amputation of his leg following Malvern Hill. I was able to get the charges against him dismissed.

  One morning I arrived at the office to find a large envelope on my desk. It was addressed from the Adjutant General, U.S. Army. Inside was a parchment document that read: “Know ye, that reposing special trust and confidence in the patriotism, fidelity, and abilities of John McKittredge, I have nominated and with the advice and consent of the Senate do appoint him Captain in the army of the United States.”

  It was signed by Abraham Lincoln.

  My first reaction was to send it to my parents because I knew it would make them proud. Upon closer inspection, I saw that my name and new rank were filled in with ink, while the rest was printed on the vellum stock, along with the presidential seal. Although it looked like Lincoln’s signature at the bottom, there were far too many captains in the army for him personally to have signed all our promotion papers.

  My colleague Harold Tubshawe was duly impressed. However, it was obvious from the disgusted look on his face that he had seen nothing in my performance at the Provost Marshal’s Office to warrant a promotion of any kind.

  In mid-November, I became embroiled in the military trial of one Simon Silbernagel. At first the case did not appear at all different from dozens of others I had already handled in my job, although it was on a much bigger scale. Simon Silbernagel was then the largest contractor supplying fresh beef to the army commissariats in Washington and Maryland.

  The charges against him were detailed in a docket folder that landed on my desk one morning along with three others. I noted on the cover page that Tubshawe had been assigned to prosecute the case. The top of the first page read:

  CHARGES: FRAUD AND MURDER

  It is charged that said contractor, Simon Silbernagel, contracted to deliver to the Subsistence Department of the U.S. Army, fresh beef in equal proportion of fore and hindquarters meat (necks, shanks, and kidney tallow to be excluded) from steers of four years of age or older.

  And that said Simon Silbernagel did willfully, corruptly, and knowingly deliver large quantities of beef from bulls and cows, as well as large quantities of diseased, ulcerated, and decaying beef, when he knew the true quality and condition of said meat.

  And that said Simon Silbernagel did therefore willfully cause the death of Pvt. Ratliff Boone, a cook in the Subsistence Department who consumed such meat and thereafter died.

  “This is a murder case,” I said to Harold. “I’m not qualified to look into it.”

  “You would be wasting your time anyway, McKittredge. There is nothing to investigate,” he said. “The man is guilty.”

  I might never have done anything further with it if he had not then added, “Silbernagel is a Jew.”

  “That is not evidence,” I said.

  “They are by nature parasites. Perhaps you read the newspaper of General Grant’s recent order in his own military jurisdiction.”

  “Ulysses Grant?”

  “The same. He has ordered all the Jews out of the Western Theatre of Operations. I only wish President Lincoln would do the same here. Obviously, this man Silbernagel didn’t count on his diseased meat killing someone, but I will make him pay for it.”

  “What penalty will you seek if he is convicted?” I asked.

  “Death by firing squad,” said Harold. “I would prefer to see him drawn and quartered, but shooting him will serve as an example to the rest of the tribe.”

  It seemed to me that if bigotry was the underlying reason Tubshawe had already decided he was guilty, then prejudice might have also factored into the inquiry that led up to Silbernagel’s indictment. That was the sole reason I decided to look into it.

  I spent the next four days interviewing everyone whose name appeared in the docket folder, starting with Mr. Silbernagel. He was about sixty, with dark, liquid eyes and a well-cropped silver beard.

  “I swear to you, Lieutenant,” he said, with great emotion, “I have never sold diseased beef to the army. It’s true I do not always supply steers, but a fat heifer provides better meat than an old steer. Ask anyone in the business.”

  I did ask, and every contractor I spoke to, including several of Mr. Silbernagel’s competitors, took the same position he did.

  “I probably shouldn’t be saying this,” one of them told me, “but he could have gotten a much higher price for his meat from private buyers than from the Subsistence Department. The bid he made to the army was so low there was no way he could make a profit on it. I remember asking him why he would want to lose money, and he told me he did it because he believed in President Lincoln and wanted to do his part to help win the war.”

  After talking to many people Mr. Silbernagel had done business with in the previous year, I became convinced that he was not a fraudulent contractor. Of course, that didn’t mean he wasn’t guilty on this one occasion.

  It was clear from reviewing the army documents that an inspector from the Quartermaster Corps named Major Dana Pease was the pivotal witness in the case. He was in charge of the office responsible for inspecting meat delivered through the Subsistence Department to all the military camps in the district. On the day the ulcerated meat was d
elivered to the camp in question, he happened to be there on an inspection tour. Coincidentally, it was the same day Private Ratliff Boone, an army cook who was apparently fond of eating raw beef, died from food poisoning after consuming a portion of it. Major Pease had personally inspected the remainder of the suspect beef after Private Boone died and declared it to be diseased. He had ordered Silbernagel arrested and placed in confinement, pending the charges that were ultimately brought against him.

  At the War Department on Seventeenth Street, I found a copy of Major Pease’s military records in the Adjutant General’s Office. He was thirty-six years old, and had served in the army less than a year. A letter in his file indicated that a colonel in the Quartermaster General’s Corps had offered him a captain’s commission based on his professional experience as a food wholesaler in Philadelphia. After receiving his commission, Pease had been placed in command of the meat-inspection department of the Quartermaster Corps for the Washington District. His promotion to major was accompanied by a commendation letter from the quartermaster general himself, praising his steadfast devotion to duty.

  As the date of the trial approached, I could find no hard evidence to support my belief that Mr. Silbernagel was innocent. The day before the trial began, however, I did learn one piece of information that possibly suggested a more sinister reason for Private Boone’s death.

  It occurred to me that since Mr. Silbernagel had been confined at Fort Marcy since his arrest four months earlier, someone else was supplying fresh beef to the camps in the district. I found myself wondering who it was. Those records were on file at the Quartermaster General’s Office.

  What I discovered was that a week after Mr. Silbernagel’s imprisonment, his contract had been summarily canceled. A day later, an “emergency” contract was entered into with a company named Consolidated Supply and Manufacturing, which was based in Philadelphia. Under the emergency contract, which had not been competitively bid, the new price for freshly slaughtered beef was more than three times what Mr. Silbernagel had been charging. The signature of Major Pease appeared at the bottom of the new contract.

  I remembered that he had been a food wholesaler in Philadelphia prior to his commissioning. Back at my office, I wired the Provost Marshal General’s Office in Philadelphia to provide me with information about the Consolidated Supply and Manufacturing Company, as well as a list of all the principals in the firm.

  That afternoon I was briefing Val on everything I had learned in the case when an enlisted man burst through the closed door.

  “Sorry to interrupt you, Colonel, but it’s the gun carriages again,” he said, out of breath. “This time at Fort Ward about thirty minutes ago.”

  Val stormed out into the corridor, bellowing for his coach to be brought around to the asylum entrance. A few minutes later, we were tearing across the city at breakneck speed, narrowly averting disaster at several intersections because Val could not refrain from craning his head out the window to yell at the driver to go faster.

  We crossed the Potomac River at the Long Bridge and thundered down the Columbia Turnpike through the city of Alexandria. At Bailey’s Crossroads, we turned east onto the Leesburg Pike and ran on for another mile or so until we reached the southernmost fortifications in the capital’s defense ring.

  At Fort Ward a sentry waved us through the sally port, and we rumbled across a narrow wooden bridge that spanned a moat leading into the interior defenses. There was no evidence that anyone was on high alert. Off to the left, a soldier was hanging laundry on a clothesline he had stretched between two timbers that formed part of the inner revetments of the massive earthen walls. We pulled to a halt at the foot of a path that led up to the outer parapet of the fort.

  An artillery major was waiting for us when we leapt from the coach.

  “It happened again, Colonel Burdette, just as you anticipated,” he said, as we followed him up the corduroyed path. “As soon as I received word of the accident, I sent for you.”

  The earthen-filled fortification wall rose fully twenty-five feet above the plain and was topped with a wide parapet. Beyond the fortress walls, the flat Virginia countryside stretched for miles into the distance. Every fifty feet along the parapet, cannons faced south to thwart any possible enemy attack.

  The two closest gun emplacements looked like they had taken direct hits from enemy artillery. Each had held a twelve-pound bronze Napoleon capable of firing a shell nearly a mile. Both cannons were now lying in the debris of their smashed gun carriages.

  “I ordered the men not to touch anything,” said the artillery major.

  One of the guns lay canted over to one side, parallel to the fortification wall. The other was still in its embrasure, but pointing straight up in the air. The carriages that had supported them had been reduced to shattered timbers. An artillery sergeant who had been conducting the firing exercise stood waiting for us on the wooden platform that extended along the inner span of the parapet.

  “What happened here, Sergeant?” asked Val, without any preliminaries.

  “God help me, Colonel, I didn’t mean to kill those men,” he said, his voice almost breaking. “We had cleared the range of fire for the training exercise, and I …”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Sergeant. Just tell us what happened.”

  “I don’t know, sir. First we had problems with these friction primers,” he said, holding up a thin copper tube no larger than my little finger. “They’re supposed to ignite the powder bag inside the barrel, but there was something wrong with the fulminate of mercury in the ones we were using. None of these are any good.”

  He threw the primer in disgust toward an open wooden crate. Dozens of the copper tubes were scattered on the ground around it.

  “I ordered one of the men to get another crate of them, and those worked all right,” he went on. “That’s when we started the exercise.”

  I walked over to the wooden packing crate that had held the defective friction primers. Bending down to examine them, I was surprised to see that there were no markings on the crate to identify the name of the manufacturer.

  “We had fired four rounds,” the sergeant went on. “There was no warning … both guns were firing fine … but on the fifth salvo, the gun carriages just collapsed … both of them. They just seemed to disintegrate … splinters flying in every direction.”

  His eyes roved back toward the gun emplacement.

  “The barrel of my own piece pitched hard left as the powder charge exploded, and the shell went about 30 degrees off in that direction,” he said, pointing toward a tree-covered knoll several hundred yards beyond the fortifications. The hill was dotted with white Sibley tents. “That’s when it hit those men over there.”

  In the middle of the encampment, one small cluster of tents appeared to have been leveled as if by a windstorm. As we watched, men bearing stretchers were heading down the knoll toward the fort.

  Val walked over to the pile of debris behind the first gun emplacement and began to examine the shattered timbers of the gun carriage. He spent almost thirty minutes combing through the wreckage before conducting a similar examination of the second one. Picking up one of the defective friction primers from the ground, he put it in his pocket, and said, “I can learn nothing more here.”

  Before leaving the fort, we rode over to the encampment where the errant cannon shell had exploded. The bodies of three dead infantrymen lay side by side, covered with blankets. From inside one of the nearby tents, I could hear the same demented moaning that I remembered so well from Harrison’s Island.

  “This is an obscenity,” said Val, staring at the carnage around us.

  Having served in an infantry unit, I was well aware that powder sometimes didn’t explode and that artillery pieces sometimes malfunctioned. But what we saw that day drove home to me just how deadly to an army’s success defective equipment could be.

  The trial of Simon Silbernagel began a few days later. Up to that time, I had never seen a court-martial ca
se take more than three days from opening arguments until a final verdict from the military court. Yet three days into the trial, Harold Tubshawe had not even finished presenting his so-called evidence.

  At one point he spent twenty minutes reading from a breeder’s manual on the genetic differences between a steer and a heifer. Witnessing his methodical attack, I became convinced that there was an underlying motive for his overzealous prosecution of the case. I went home beginning to think that an innocent man might be shot for a crime he almost certainly did not commit.

  That same evening I learned at Mrs. Warden’s dinner table that President Lincoln had chosen General Burnside to replace McClellan as the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, and that General Hooker was now leading two full corps of more than forty thousand men. According to the latest rumors, our army was preparing to launch a new attack from its base near Fredericksburg, Virginia.

  As I listened to the other boarders fatuously offering their opinions of the latest war news, it almost seemed as if my night with General Hooker had been nothing more than the product of one of my fevered dreams. I found myself hoping that he would soon have a chance to add to the success he had earned at Antietam.

  After finishing dinner, I went upstairs to my room, hoping to read a book until sleep finally overtook my agitated mind. Without laudanum, I had found it almost impossible to sleep more than a few hours at a time.

  Lighting the lamp next to my bed, I crawled under the covers with a volume of Dickens, which soon carried me away to a different world. Eventually, rain began spattering the panes of the window, and its rhythmic beat eventually caused me to doze off.

  The book still lay propped open on my chest when I was awakened by the sound of someone persistently knocking on my bedroom door. Picking up my watch, I saw that it was almost midnight. I got up and opened the door to find a soldier standing in the corridor, his India rubber cape dripping water onto the hall carpet.