Unholy Fire

by Robert J. Mrazek

  “It is as I feared, Kit,” said Sam, his gaunt, wind-bitten face creased with sorrow. He pointed toward the plain as Billy handed me a pair of binoculars. I pressed them to my eyes.

  I could see it all then, the whole terrible panorama of it.

  A broad plain extended out from the confines of the city. The place that General Burnside had chosen for the attack led up a long, steep slope to where row upon row of Confederate riflemen waited behind a stone wall that ran along the heights as far as I could see. Rebel flags dotted their rifle pits, and a huge red battle flag was flying from a brick mansion that sat near the center of the line.

  Atop the heights was the Confederate artillery. From the constant muzzle flashes, I could see that their batteries ringed the hills from one end of the horizon to the other and were in a position to rake every inch of the ground below. It was maybe four hundred yards from the foot of the plain to the stone wall, and our men were exposed to Confederate fire all the way.

  Under the sodden gray clouds, the color of the plain was a soft, liquid brown. From the base of the slope to within fifty yards of the stone wall, it was already stained blue with our dead and wounded.

  “That was French’s division,” said Sam, pointing toward the crest. “They went up first.”

  A hundred yards below the wall, I could see two of our regimental flags waving from a dip in the ground. Surrounding the flags was a large blotch of solid blue. From there, the blue stain meandered all the way back down to the foot of the plain, all that was left of almost five thousand men.

  As I watched a brigade began forming up at the base of the slope for another attack. They moved slowly onto the plain from the outskirts of the city, a pulsing, arterial flood of blue. Through the binoculars, they looked irresistibly strong.

  “That’s the Irish Brigade going in,” called out Major Donovan, excitedly.

  “Into the mouth of Hell,” added Lieutenant Hanks impassively.

  General Meagher was riding along the line in front of his men on a big bay horse, resplendent in a dark green overcoat. Just beyond the place where they had formed up, a deep ditch ran across the length of the plain. Through the binoculars, I saw that it was a canal full of still black water. There were bodies floating in it. Although the water didn’t look deep, its banks were almost vertical on both sides. There were only two small foot-bridges in place to cross over, and the Irishmen were forced to line up in narrow files to reach the other side to commence their attack. That is where the Confederate batteries began concentrating on them.

  “Didn’t anyone scout this ground?” I asked incredulously, as the shells began to open large pockets between the ranks of the brigade. Almost every shell landed with telling effect.

  On the far side of the ditch, the brigade moved quickly to reform into two long battle lines. With elegant precision, they began heading up the slope, closing ranks as each shell exploded above and around them.

  Lieutenant Hanks turned to Sam and said, “Can’t we suppress those batteries, sir?”

  “They have had weeks to dig in,” said General Hathaway with a grimace. “The only guns that can reach them are up on Stafford Heights, and they are firing in the blind.”

  On the wings of the wind, we heard the Irishmen give out with a rousing cheer, although when it reached our ears, their voices were as thin as bat’s cries. They slowly passed through the wreckage of the four brigades that had preceded them. The remains of men and horses lay in their path like so much bloody spoor across the vast killing ground. Cannon flashes now seemed to come from every foot along the heights above the stone wall.

  “It’s our lucky day,” I remembered one of the Irishmen shouting when he had seen Amelie in her green dress.

  I was shocked to see an officer, still mounted on horseback, at least twenty or thirty yards ahead of the first rank of Irishmen. Through the binoculars, he looked like a toy soldier wearing a gaudy yellow scarf around his neck.

  The mounted officer was definitely within firing range of the Confederate line because I could already see men in the ranks behind him dropping to the ground. There was no way he could have survived unless the Rebels so admired his bravery that they were refusing to fire at him.

  “I trained that regiment,” said Sam, with undeniable pride in his voice.

  At that moment a shaft of weak December sunlight found a crack in the gray clouds and bathed the Irishmen in a golden aureole. It was as if the heavens were somehow protecting them from the hail of lead waiting behind the stone wall. It seemed to follow them up the slope a little way.

  When they were within seventy-five yards of the stone wall, both federal lines stopped long enough to fire thin, ragged volleys at the waiting Rebels. Then I saw the officer on horseback turn in the saddle to wave them forward again.

  As if in response, the Confederate rifle pits erupted in a solid sheet of yellow flame. A plume of silver smoke poured out along the length of the stone wall, and a second later the sound of their volley reached our ears.

  As the smoke drifted away in the frosty air, a riderless horse came galloping back down the slope. It ran hard for almost ten seconds before collapsing to the ground. It didn’t move again. Where the lines of the Irish Brigade had been, a handful of the fifteen hundred men who had started the attack were stumbling back toward the two regimental flags that still waved proudly below the wall.

  For a moment the only sound was the wail of the wind through the clock tower. Then we heard the ragged peal of a bugle from somewhere along the heights. It cut through the noise of the wind with piercing clarity.

  The trumpeter wasn’t issuing a military call to arms. There was nothing military about it at all. The sound rose and fell as the bugler drew breath—an odd, crazy peal of triumph, a rallying cry of savage exultation. As it finally died away, I thought I heard the notes of a musical tune.

  “They’re singing,” said Major Donovan, horror struck. “The bastards are singing.”

  My eyes were drawn back down to the base of the slope, where another brigade was beginning to form up. The ground around them was now thick with blue bodies, and they had to step carefully to avoid them. As they started to file across the black water canal, the Confederate artillerymen began raining shells down over their exposed position, exactly as they had done with the Irish Brigade. Reaching the other side of the ditch, the men began to dress their lines before they started up the slope.

  “Where is General Franklin?” burst out Sam in impotent rage. “He has two corps over on the left to turn their flank. Why doesn’t he attack?”

  “A lot of them still haven’t crossed the river,” I said, remembering the confusion at the crossroads near the party house. “No one seems to know what they are supposed to do.”

  “I cannot believe that Burnside keeps sending them in piecemeal like this,” said Major Donovan. “It is criminal, Sam. Just plain butchery. We need to do something once and for all.”

  “It’s time to act, General,” said Lieutenant Hanks.

  Sam glanced back toward me to see if I had heard their words. I said nothing, putting the binoculars back to my eyes as the Rebel artillery began to tear big holes in the ranks of the attackers. We watched them go slowly up the slope through that killing ground, only to disintegrate like the Irish brigade in front of the stone wall. The raw wind tore through the belfry, bringing with it the faint agonized cries of the men lying wounded along the path they had just taken.

  Together, we witnessed three more attacks, all of which suffered the same fate. By then I could have walked up the entire length of the slope on the backs of the fallen. The afternoon light was fading fast when Sam finally looked up at Billy and said, “Take me back.”

  Billy unstrapped the canvas belt from the bench and gently lifted him up. Sam put his arms around Billy’s shoulders, while the young Seminole gripped his back with one hand and his withered legs in the other. As they descended the staircase, tears began streaming down Sam’s ravaged face.

  “T
hose boys,” he said, his face a mask of misery, “those poor boys.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In the gathering darkness we made our way back across the burning city. Billy was still carrying Sam on his shoulders. He never missed a step as he picked his way through the rubble that littered the pulverized streets. I could not help but again ponder Val’s description of Anya’s killer as a man with an acrobat’s strength.

  At the foot of the swaying pontoon bridge, the survivors of a broken regiment were staggering down the muddy embankment, their hollow-eyed faces streaked with dirt and powder smoke. They were carrying their wounded comrades on makeshift litters. We went across the river among them.

  On the far side of the bridge, a group of mounted officers was shouting encouragement to the returning men as they came off the bridge and headed up the muddy bank.

  “Sam … Sam Hathaway,” one of them called out. Looking up, I saw that it was General Burnside himself. With his ludicrous mutton chop whiskers and beefy face, he looked more like a circus barker than the commander of the army.

  “No man can know what this has cost me, Sam!” he cried out in an anguished voice.

  General Hathaway appeared to take no notice of him. I could see his face clearly over Billy’s shoulder. Like a man enduring a nightmare, his eyes were pressed tightly shut behind the rimless spectacles.

  “We are going to drive them off those heights tomorrow!” shouted General Burnside. “I’m going to lead the boys up myself!”

  My hands were shaking as I struggled to contain my rage at the thought of so many lives being squandered through one man’s stupidity. A crazy idea went through my head of saving the men he planned to kill in tomorrow’s attack by pulling out my revolver and putting a bullet between his cowlike eyes. Instead, I just followed Billy up the hill toward the mansion.

  Flickering lanterns illuminated a scene from Hell as we passed through the terraced gardens. The grounds of the estate were still teeming with men in blue, but they were no longer part of the elite regiments that had assembled there that morning. They weren’t part of anything now except that select band of brothers who had come through the unholy fire and paid a frightful price for it. A thousand or more lay shoulder to shoulder on the ground, most still in shock, but others already writhing and squirming in torment.

  Farther on lay the dead. They were lying in neat rows as far as the light allowed me to see. Billy made his way carefully through the mass of bodies until he reached the front porch of the mansion and headed inside.

  At the door to Sam’s office, two sentries stood at attention, their rifles at port arms. Through the open door, I was relieved to see Val standing with his back to the fire. He was staring down at someone seated in one of the high-backed easy chairs facing the hearth. As we came through the door, the man stood up to face us. It was Laird Hawkinshield.

  “You’re here at last, General Hathaway,” he said, as Billy gently lowered Sam into the seat of his wheelchair and covered his legs with a lap blanket. “Colonel Burdette is apparently suffering from the delusion that I am to be placed under arrest.”

  “You are already under arrest,” said Val.

  “General, I am here on official business for the Committee on the Conduct of the War,” replied Hawkinshield, “of which I am the ranking member. As you know, that places me under full immunity from all civil and military laws. I might add that if this idiocy goes any further I will have to inform the president of these outrageous actions. I’m afraid it would go hard on you, Colonel Burdette.”

  He began shaking his leonine head sadly, as if the idea of Val being punished for detaining him was too terrible to bear.

  “I’ll risk it, Congressman,” said Val.

  Sam was staring into the fire, seemingly oblivious to what was happening around him. I realized that his mind was still with the men lying beneath the stone wall across the river.

  “You have been arrested on evidence provided by two senior officers in the Quartermaster General’s Corps,” said Val. “Both have written and signed confessions admitting their guilt in three separate military procurement schemes orchestrated by you.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” said Hawkinshield, with an insouciant smile. “Honestly.”

  “Honestly,” replied Val, with a harsh laugh.

  “These charges are nothing more than lies spread by my political enemies,” said Hawkinshield.

  “With your cannibalistic approach to the democratic process, I have no doubt you’ve left a legion of political enemies in your wake,” said Val. “In this case, however, we have already seized the records that reflect payments made directly to you by the contractors involved in the procurement frauds. We also have copies of two remarkably incriminating letters from General Nevins, in which he asks for your instructions in how to set up the fraudulent bids.”

  “Good help is hard to find,” said Hawkinshield.

  I was pondering a way to take Val aside long enough to report what Amelie and I had learned at the party house when our long-range siege guns suddenly stopped firing for the first time in almost six hours. Except for the agonized wailing from the hundreds of wounded men lying around the house, it became deathly still in the room.

  From the porch we could hear muffled shouting. A few seconds later, an officer stuck his head into the room and said, “Burnside has ordered a halt to the attacks, Sam. It’s over.”

  With those words Sam seemed to waken from his trancelike state. He rolled his chair over to the windows facing the river and gazed out into the darkness.

  “All those men up there,” he said, his words almost a whisper. “No food or water … and no way to reach them.”

  “It will be a long night for the ones who survive,” I said, remembering my own ordeal on Harrison’s Island.

  The door to the corridor opened, and Lieutenant Hanks and Major Donovan came into the room. As if previously summoned, they moved without a word to take seats in the chairs behind me.

  Hawkinshield removed a thin silver flask from his suit coat. Unscrewing the cap, he took a long swallow and recapped it. Then he sat down again in the high-backed easy chair.

  “May I make a suggestion, General?” he said, waving a long, elegant finger toward the heights across the river. “I would like to share with you an idea that I have already proposed to the Committee on the Conduct of the War. Of course they are not professional military men and did not give it the serious consideration it deserves. Now that we have enjoyed another debacle like this one, however, they might come to agree with me. I would add that a word or two of encouragement from a decorated combat soldier like yourself might hasten its acceptance.”

  Still at the window, Sam turned his chair around to face him. Hawkinshield took it as an invitation to continue.

  “Take no prisoners,” he said.

  Sam’s eyes reflected no immediate reaction.

  “No more code of chivalry … no more surrendering of swords after a valiant charge … no more exchanges of prisoners.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Sam.

  “What I am proposing is simply this,” came back Hawkinshield, warming to the task with another sip of whiskey. “We would set a day certain for announcing the new policy, after which all Confederate prisoners would be executed upon capture or surrender. They would be summarily shot.”

  I wasn’t sure that I had heard him correctly. From the looks on the other men’s faces, it was clear I wasn’t alone.

  “It sounds extreme, but think about how many lives might be saved in the long run. Right now, Southern women are sitting in their parlors all over Dixie watching their niggers toiling in the sun and dreaming of their men coming home after the Yankee invaders have been destroyed. Just imagine the change in their attitude if they knew that their men would never be coming home … that from now on they would be executed without mercy as traitors. Why the war would be over in six months … maybe three.”

  �
�You’re not serious” said Major Donovan from his chair behind me.

  “Hardly,” replied Hawkinshield, looking up at him, “I’m simply being pragmatic. Otherwise we can look back on today’s bloodletting as a small appetizer to the bloody repast that is coming … which incidentally would be good for my business interests, but then I’m first and foremost a patriot.”

  “A man of true democratic principles,” said Val. “However, you weren’t brought here to discuss battlefield etiquette, Congressman. You have been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States government for your own personal financial gain. It would behoove you to cooperate with us by revealing which other high government officials are involved with you.”

  Hawkinshield smiled and shook his head again.

  “How far do you think these charges will carry once I am back in Washington?” he said. “I have four congressional colleagues waiting across the river for me to continue our inspection tour. So if you have no more questions …”

  “I no longer have time for you,” said Sam, rolling his chair back toward his field desk.

  “Finally, a cooler head prevails,” said Hawkinshield.

  Opening the top drawer of his desk, Sam removed his Colt service revolver and placed it on his lap. Val and I had seen him do exactly the same thing before he successfully extracted the confession from Major Duval only a few days earlier. Apparently he was planning to try the same ploy with Hawkinshield.

  As Sam started back toward him, Hawkinshield burst out laughing.

  “I am already familiar with this gambit, General Hathaway,” said Hawkinshield. “Major Duval informed us of just how you convinced him to reveal the whereabouts of those shipping manifests.”

  Sam stopped his chair a foot in front of Hawkinshield. Behind the rimless spectacles, he no longer looked like a college professor; His eyes were as cold as blue-veined ice.

  “You sit here guilty of crimes that would get you hung if you weren’t a powerful member of Congress. In your arrogance, you scoff at the laws you swore to obey. You do not even deny complicity in these crimes … blithely confident that your power and your position will make it impossible for any court to convict you.”