by Ralph Peters
Sensing, as old soldiers do, that the call to form up was coming, Brown rose and said, “You Eckerts. You there, Martz. Line up, let me have a look at you. I’m not going to have you embarrassing this company.”
The new men fumbled about, but got themselves into what passed for order. Brown was struck, yet again, by how young they appeared. There would be, at most, two or three years’ difference between the survivors of old Company C and the new recruits they’d collected during their reenlistment furlough in February. Yet, the men who had left their barges and mule barns in ’61, who had fought from Port Royal to Knoxville, looked a decade older to Brown’s eyes.
He thought of his elder brother, dead of a simple sickness and buried at Vicksburg, above a river whose breadth stunned men bred on the humble Schuylkill. The regiment had moved from north to south to the west and back again, staking claims to strange earth with its dead. Now its flag drooped on a Virginia field. They had gone in a circle, blindfolded mules in a mill.
Flicking away a blossom that called to mind women and private things, Brown tightened the belt on one of the Eckert boys, asking, “You’re William, right?”
“No, Corporal. I’m Johnny. That’s William.” Dutchie as could be, the new man pronounced the names as “Chonny” and “Villy-yam.” The Eckerts were their own breed. In more than one way, folks said.
Brown grunted. Of the four Eckerts in the company now, the only one he could be sure of naming right was Isaac, who had been with them from the beginning. Standing off to the side, Isaac Eckert did not take a protective or helpful attitude toward his relatives, but let Brown straighten them out.
“I have a thing I must ask you, please, Corporal Brown,” the next Eckert in line said. His accent was thick as lard on farmhouse bread.
“What’s that?”
“Them Rebel girls, the ones in town there?” Dem Reppel kirlz, ta wuns in tawn dare? If Brown sometimes had trouble understanding the speech of Reb prisoners, he was sure the Johnnies wouldn’t know what to make of the Eckert boys or the other Dutchmen in the 50th Pennsylvania.
“What about ’em?”
“They are all so verdammt mean? I try to make polite … but when I lifts my cap, die kleine Hexe looks like I am the snake and she wants for the hatchet.”
“The ladies of Warrenton have seen their fill of Yankees,” Brown told the boy. He thought about the matter for a moment. “You just do like I told you and stay away from those darkey gals who come around of evenings. Or you’ll go home with something you won’t be proud of.”
Henry Hill spoke again. Twice in an afternoon was something of a milestone.
“First sergeant just stepped out of the captain’s tent.”
He spoke to Brown as if no one else were present.
“All right, then,” Brown said to the new men, straining to remember his canal Dutch. “Try to look like soldiers out there. Stramm und still, versteh’? Mach doch keine Schweinerei. And keep a crimp in your knees, the way I told you. Any man passes out in front of Captain Burket, he’ll have guard duty for a month. Let’s go now. Los geht’s.”
Company C of the 50th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry Regiment had not gone in for an excess of pomp of late, but the captain wanted to put martial spirit into the new recruits, to make them feel part of something big and important. So the day’s two promotions, which otherwise would have been handled in five minutes by the first sergeant, would occur in front of a company formation.
Good day for it, anyway, Brown thought. It looked as though they might have a dry stretch. Virginia had put on her best green dress, decorated with pink and purple blossoms, thick with scents that put hopes in a man. This field of tents just north of Warrenton—a hard Rebel town, if ever a hard one there was—had almost a fairground atmosphere, crowded with men as thoughtless as bees in the warmth. Yet, every man who had a campaign behind him sensed that they would march to battle soon, knowing it the way veteran soldiers just knew, sensing that this fellow Grant was out to get an early start on the season, that General Burnside and their Ninth Corps were about to be swept along behind the Army of the Potomac. The veterans knew the awfulness of it, too, the pain and death that waited, yet good sense could not overcome their excitement at the prospect of marching forward, of heading southward one more time, of doing something. If war made men of boys, it could also make boys of men.
Charles Brown had long ago stopped trying to make sense of war. He had listened for years as his fellow soldiers, his fellow canal men, complained endlessly about army life, the folly of generals, the bad food and poor equipment, the marches to nowhere. They claimed, endlessly, that they’d give anything to go home, and to Hell with the war. Nonetheless, the survivors of Company C had reenlisted almost to a man. War was a woman you hated but couldn’t let go.
All of the high-flown purposes were gone now. There was only the rough ache to win that they all shared, and the being together like this, the queer feeling when faced with death that even those who survived would never be so completely alive again. Men learned to treasure the smell of campfire coffee and a shared tobacco pouch. A soldier repaired another fellow’s boot and made a friend who would die for him. If he lived—and Brown hoped to—he knew he would never be able to explain it.
He had not chased promotions and looked down on those who did. Yet, men had always turned to him for orders, back on the canal and then at war. In barely twenty-three years of life, he had been forced to lead in countless ways, starting back when he was just a boy. So he did his part, and a little more, and tried not to lament what he could not change.
Thinking about the great, big things led nowhere. The regiment had been camped right here in 1862, below the defiant town up on the hill. Now they were back again. And what difference had all the bleeding and dying made? The young darkies who had not run off expected less these days, although they still flattered, begged, cajoled, and stole, while the older Negroes just kept at their doings. You saw them leaving their shanties in the dawn, shuffling up to the fine brick houses to start the stoves and fireplaces, just as they had been doing all their lives. As for the white women of the sort who had startled that Eckert boy, their once fine dresses were faded now, but they carried themselves as high and mighty as ever. If anything, they’d grown haughtier. Except for the destruction and the slaughter, Brown was not sure that very much had changed. Or ever would.
It had been jarring to go home for a month. It was good, because it was home, but unsettling because home had changed. After Knoxville, the regiment had endured its worst experience of the war, not a battle but a winter march through the mountains into Kentucky. Knoxville had been a horror of wicked cold and savage fighting with frozen hands and feet, but the worst came afterward, when the regiment, shy of winter garments and shoes, had been issued nothing but uncured hides in which to wrap their feet for a march of two hundred miles. The footwear they stitched and tied together had hardly lasted a day, and the regiment had left bloody tracks on the snow. Had the men of Company C not reenlisted the autumn before, the number who would have signed on again might have been a sight lower after that march.
But ordeals end for the lucky men who survive them. They had been fitted out again, then carried home in railroad cars. After the ravaged Southland, it was a shock to see the prosperity of the North. When their train pulled into Schuylkill Haven, the men were amazed at the furious work behind the Turnverein band and the hollering families. Boats and barges jammed the canal basin, all but blocking the channel, and new construction had risen wherever there was dry land along the river. The rail yards, sprawling over the Flats, seemed greater now than those of a Southern city. In many ways, the war had been good to the town at the bends of the Schuylkill, with the Navy’s hunger for anthracite coal and industries begging for it. Schuylkill Haven was the point where the coal region ended and barges were filled for the trip to Philadelphia. It had always seemed a busy place, but never frenzied like this.
There was money for those who
had not gone to war.
But there was a price, too. There were more rough-mannered Irishmen now, taking over the shacks on the Eck, where Brown had passed a brief and broken childhood. Louts in packs roamed Dock Street in the evenings, and sullen women in shawls cursed at Dutch grocers. The new men on the canal were surly, anticipating accusations that they belonged in uniform themselves. Unasked, they loudly damned the war and the nigger, in brogues as foreign as their red and ready faces, willing to fight in any saloon, but not on a field of battle. It grated on Brown to see the lack of care they took with the boats and their even worse care of the mules. It bothered him more than it had a right to do to see busy towpaths left in disrepair and the brass fittings at the harbormaster’s station left unpolished. When Captain Burket had been harbormaster before the war, each last buckle on a mule’s belly had shone. Now it felt as though nothing mattered but making money today, tomorrow be damned. The town was home, and it wasn’t.
Yet, for all the rawness and brute collisions between the Dutch and Irish, home still had a decency Brown missed in the South. Here, in Virginia, there were great houses and shanties, with little between them. In Schuylkill Haven there wasn’t one building as grand as the plantation house down the field or the mansions behind the courthouse on Warrenton Hill. Back home, men lived in a world more evened out, with due respect given but no sense that one fellow was a king and his neighbors dirt. They were different worlds, North and South, and Brown wondered, as he had often done, if they belonged together.
On the last fair day back home—kind weather for early March—he and Frances had fled her family for the orchard west of the river, seeking an hour of privacy amid trees months shy of flowering, and he had felt they understood each other. He was good enough with words with other men, but women wanted something more, and he was not sure that he possessed that something. Frances didn’t seem to mind. She just smiled. Her presence beside him on that bright day had been thoroughly, wonderfully good. He had wanted, terribly, to ask her to marry him then. But he held back. The war had made widows enough. Nor did he want her to be a cripple’s nurse. He would ask when the war was over, if he returned a whole man. It was the only decent course he saw. And if Charles Brown no longer believed in high and mighty causes, he had come to believe in decency all the more.
For now, he labored over letters to her, conscious of his defective spelling and wishing, for her sake, that he had more education. Most of what he had learned he had taught himself, at the cost of candles sold three for a penny, the sort that smoked and stank. He had been sent out, a small boy, to work in a tobacco factory for twenty-five cents a week, by a miserly father afraid to end up in an almshouse. The Lord’s own joke, his father had died of cholera, without telling even his wife where he hid his money.
Laboring at the stacks and racks had been hateful work, its only lasting effect his dislike for tobacco. He had grown strong early and, at thirteen, went to work on the canal, driving mules and caring for them, doing the chores the regular boatmen avoided. He didn’t mind. The air was fresh, and as for the mules, they were never worse than men and often better.
Hardly had he moved up to a man’s job aboard a coal barge when he did a foolish, foolish thing that the men around him misunderstood as bravery. The doing had been no more than the act of an ignorant boy who might have gotten a bullet or worse for his trouble.
He had been present at the last, feeble gasp of the Schuylkill Rangers, the canal pirates who came down from the mountain hollows to steal for their livelihoods. Everyone had believed them to be finished off years back, part of the local history and no more, but a few broken-toothed young fools had attempted to rob a coal barge Brown was aboard. They were not far from Port Clinton when the fuss began, with a shot fired in the air and cries that this was a robbery. The would-be-brazen voices quivered with fear, though, as if a game had gotten out of hand. The pirates were such novices that they didn’t know that a coal barge headed south to Philadelphia offered nothing practical to steal: The prizes were on the goods boats pulling northward.
The Rangers fired their only gun at the outset, shooting into the air, and the shot failed to frighten the bargemen or even the mule boys. The fighting didn’t last long, but Brown plunged into the brawl with a young man’s fury. The result was that he killed a man—a boy, really—with a shovel blade brought down on the fellow’s skull.
He worried that he might be charged with murder, but the constable and the justice of the peace hailed the deed as a good one. The dead lad was criminal filth, not worth a thought. His accomplices were hardly worth pursuing, although they would be taken in good time. The constable expected that the thieves had learned their lesson, but the law was the law and the county would see to matters. Annoyed at the interruption of his sleep, the frock-coated lawman raised his lantern a last time and shook his head.
Staring down at the corpse stowed on the deck, Evans the justice told the bargemen, “Look you, boys, I’ll not waste public money. Put him in a hole, if so you’re minded, but throw him in the river if you’re not. And be it a warning.”
That was when Brown did the foolish thing.
By first light, he inspected the fellow he’d killed, bewildered by the gash in the skull, the jagged bone, and the drying slop of brains, the blood like set molasses. A dead man was as dead as a dead mule. But there was a difference, too. He saw what he had to do without true thinking.
Everyone knew where the folk who had spawned the Rangers hid. They crawled about the north folds of First Mountain and were said to have bred among themselves at a speed of two generations to one in the valley. An unholy mix of Dutchmen shunned by their brethren and lawless Scotchmen who’d wandered in and stayed, they were hardly considered human by the citizenry. Borrowing a mule, Brown roped up the body and led the beast into the hollows up behind Port Clinton, asking as he went for the dead lad’s family.
No men appeared, but more than one woman warned him to go home and let things be.
It took most of the day to discover the right trail. It led up a steep ravine where the world ran queer. In time, he smelled fires, but not proper cooking smells. Then all grew quiet, as if the birds and animals had run off to join the men fearful of the law.
Materializing from thickets, a pack of slatternly women and girls closed off the path behind him. He had not had the least sense of their presence.
They didn’t say a word, but there was something not right about them. Their faces were numb, their features daubed with soot as if on purpose. More than a few were simple-looking, while others were sharp-boned and spook-eyed, the sort who practiced the rites in the Fifth Book of Moses.
They looked Brown over, then, after shooing the flies, applied their claws to the corpse. Brown had wrapped the dead youth’s wound in rags to keep the brains in. As the women untied the body from the mule’s back, the cloth fell away. Brown gagged at what spilled on the trail.
The women gave no hint of sorrow. There was no weeping or even one cry of grief. They just dragged off the body. As if this were a common task in their world.
A filthy girl big with child turned back to Brown. “Go on with you now,” she said. The hatred in her eyes wasn’t just for him, but for all living things. “I told him he were a fool. Men do na listen.”
She spat a gob and followed the other women.
The men who thought he had done a brave thing did not understand that he had not had a choice. And bravery was about choices.
A fusillade of orders slew his memories. Corporal Brown was about to become Sergeant Charles E. Brown. He had not had a choice in that matter, either.
Stevensburg, Virginia
Francis Channing Barlow threw his saber on his cot. “It’s unspeakable,” he said. “Simply damnable. I don’t see why Gibbon can have a man shot, but I can’t.”
Hancock listened in exasperation. The twenty-nine-year-old brigadier general not only looked like a boy, but sounded like one at the moment. Yet, Barlow was the most aggressive divi
sion commander in Hancock’s corps, a born killer.
“This isn’t the time to be shooting our own men,” Hancock said. “Anyway, the president disapproves. It’s an election year. ‘Clemency’ is the watchword of the day.”
“I shouldn’t think it’s his business,” Barlow pouted. “Rainey’s a repeat deserter, yellow as butter. Condemned by a proper court-martial. This ‘mercy’ is a damned insult to every man who does his duty properly.” He snarled, showing crooked teeth. “How on earth can Lincoln pardon the shirkers? Then send good men to die?”
Hancock raised his hand. It was a warning: Enough is enough.
“Forget the president, then,” he told his subordinate. “I say you’re not going to shoot anybody. Frank, I can’t have you breaking down morale when we’re going to march any day now.”
Barlow perked up. “Heard something, sir?”
Hancock shrugged. The movement awakened the pain in his thigh and he winced. His Gettysburg wound had ambushed him again.
He mastered himself. “Same as you, same as everybody,” he told the brigadier. “Everything and nothing. But Humphreys has the staff working late at night. Weather’s good, roads are dry…”
Barlow sniffed. “Anything’s better than this endless parading.”
Hancock smiled. “I thought you seemed rather proud at the corps review.”
“Proud of my men,” Barlow said quickly.
“The men you want to shoot? Frank, listen to me. Your men respect you. They respect the Hell out of you. They’ll follow you and fight for you and, damn it, they’ll die for you. The veterans who know you think you’re the bravest man on earth. But they don’t like you.”
“I don’t care whether they like me. I want them afraid of me. You know what Frederick the Great said.”
Exasperated anew, Hancock sharpened his tone. “Yes, Barlow, I know what Frederick said. But you’re not Frederick the Great, and this isn’t the Prussian army. They’re volunteers, Frank. Citizens. ‘United States of America.’ Remember?”
