Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  “If I could just shoot Rainey, as an example…”

  Hancock rolled his eyes. He yearned to dress down the young brigadier, to pour fire and brimstone into one of Barlow’s ears and watch it flame out the other. But, he reminded himself, it was better to have division commanders who had to be reined in than generals who were afraid to apply the spurs.

  “If you want to shoot some poor bastard for cowardice after the next battle, we’ll see about it then. But right now you’re not shooting anybody who isn’t wearing a gray uniform. For Christ’s sake, man, you’ve got the biggest and best-disciplined division in this army. And the lowest desertion rate. Ease up. There’ll be killing enough, soon enough.”

  Praised, Barlow changed his tone: “Do you believe Grant will fight, sir? Really fight, I mean? After Lee gets a piece of him?”

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  “No, sir. Of course not.” Barlow gestured at the tent’s sole camp chair. “Mother would chastise me for my lack of manners.”

  Hancock lowered himself, carefully, into the seat. The damned leg hurt like Hell. Barlow, too, had been wounded at Gettysburg, even more severely. But the younger man didn’t show it. Frank Barlow had been badly shot up at Antietam as well, after his regiment’s charge saved the day at Bloody Lane. Yet, he couldn’t wait to get back in the thick of it.

  Ah, youth, Hancock thought, feeling the burden of his forty years.

  “I’m told your mother was quite the belle in her day,” the corps commander said. It was a relief to escape the subject of executions.

  Barlow displayed his lopsided, snaggletoothed smile. It made his long face seem longer. “She still is. Mother’s quite fine, you know.”

  “I’ll have to meet her one day.” Hancock cleared his throat. “And the other Mrs. Barlow? I hear she’s a splendid nurse, your wife. I trust she’s well?”

  “She’s fine, thank you, sir. Marvelous, in fact. She’s quite a brave girl.”

  “My regards, when next you write.”

  Mrs. Francis Channing Barlow might, indeed, be brave, Hancock thought, but she was hardly a girl. He had been bewildered upon meeting the woman during one of her camp visits. She had to be a decade Frank Barlow’s senior. Side by side, they looked more like mother and son than husband and wife. Odd match, strange. You’d think a young man, a fighter …

  You never knew about men and women, Hancock warned himself. And probably best not to know. He’d been damned lucky himself. Almira. Born to be a soldier’s wife, that one.

  “But back to Grant,” Barlow said, moving his sword and settling his rump on the cot. For a slender man, the young brigadier was broad-hipped. “He hardly seems the conquering hero sort. At the review, he looked like a vagabond.”

  Hancock eased his posture, wondering if the butchers really had gotten the last metal out of his thigh. At inconvenient moments, pain shot to his skull.

  “Don’t judge Grant by appearances,” Hancock said. “Christ, if people judged generals by appearances, you’d be back in a Harvard dormitory, conjugating Latin and fucking your mattress. Grant will fight.” He grunted to mask another stab of pain. “And I’ll tell you why he’ll fight. He’s the opposite of Georgie McClellan, in all his grandeur. Grant has nothing to lose. He’d already lost all he had before the war … reputation, commission, livelihood … everything but his wife. She sticks to him like a carbuncle. And now he’s playing for once-in-a-lifetime stakes, with other people’s money. Or their blood. And that man loves every minute of it, if I’m any judge.”

  Hancock massaged his thigh, the swollen meat of it. “Grant may look untidy, but he’s a tough sonofabitch. Only knows how to go forward. Because he remembers what’s behind him and doesn’t much like the thought of it catching up. Problem won’t be getting Grant to fight, but getting him to stop when it makes sense to. George Meade’s going to age ten years before the summer’s out.” The corps commander lifted his hand to his face, as if the pain had moved there. Hurting or not, he chuckled. “Maybe we all will. Sam Grant and old Marse Robert are going to come as a shock to one another.”

  Barlow had lowered his gaze, but Hancock could read him: Frank Barlow was thinking about the upcoming fighting the way a glutton pondered a heaping plate. Barlow was an odd bugger: number one in his class at Harvard and pals with all the great brains of New England, a lanky, slump-shouldered gent who appeared eternally bored, with eyes that looked as if he were always drowsy. But let him hear the sound of the guns, and he’d light up like a battery of rockets.

  War drew out unexpected talents in men, or so they said. Hancock suspected it was less a matter of talent than of brilliant, burning insanity. Killing well was the darkest form of genius. And, God help them all, the greatest of earthly thrills.

  He often wondered what he would do when the war was done. Even the Army wouldn’t be the same. And Barlow: Could he go back to the settled life of a fine society lawyer?

  “Well”—Hancock picked up the thread again—“soon enough we’ll be headed to Hell or Richmond.” He grinned. “And Frederick the Great won’t help us, I’m afraid.”

  “No, actually, he won’t,” Barlow sniffed. “It’s been idiocy to resurrect his tactics.” The younger man’s condescending tone made Hancock want to slap him. “His approach to discipline made perfect sense, but consider those famed oblique attacks of his: The way our generals and Lee’s bunch have been struggling with his method is simply ridiculous. It only worked for Frederick because the range of the weapons was minimal. With modern, rifled arms, the oblique attack with infantry in line only begs for slaughter. It’s plain mathematics.” He held up his hands, then slowly brought them together. “It’s all about contracting the deadly space and limiting our exposure.” Clapping his hands shut, Barlow concluded, “You must see that.”

  Hancock told himself that he’d give the notion some thought when he found the time. But the candle had already flared: This blue-blood Harvard shit-ass was dead right. And it grated on a West Point man who’d served a hard apprenticeship. Eventually, Barlow managed to grate on everybody.

  Yet, Hancock could not help himself. He had to show that he, too, had an intellect.

  “Plodding through Carlyle, Frank?” Hancock had never read a page of Carlyle in his life, but had heard that the fellow was publishing volume after tedious volume about Frederick the Great.

  “Oh, no,” Barlow said. “I mean, I had my London bookseller send the available volumes. But Carlyle’s insufferable.”

  Hancock raised his hand again: Stop. “We’ll have to take that up another time. I do have a corps to command.” He hoisted himself—painfully—from the chair. It nearly tipped over. He really did have to take more care of his weight. The flesh and the spirit were constantly at war.

  Barlow leapt to help him. A glare from Hancock put a stop to that.

  “By the way,” the older man said, “General Meade sends his regards. He was quite impressed by your men at the review. Miles’ brigade in particular.”

  Barlow’s expression darkened and Hancock grasped his mistake. By singling out one of Barlow’s brigades for praise, even at a remove, he had just made the next several days pure Hell for Barlow’s other subordinates. Barlow’s interpretation would be that if Miles alone had been complimented, the rest must have been deficient.

  Good Christ, Hancock told himself, going into battle will be a relief for the poor bastards. He took up his hat and riding gloves, anxious to escape. Barlow was best taken in small doses.

  “Oh,” he said, “I almost forgot. George Meade sent his regards to each of your other brigade commanders, as well. He said that Miles set the standard and, by God, the others matched it to a man.”

  Barlow brightened a shade, but suspicion lurked in those hooded eyes of his.

  “Good,” the younger man said. “That’s good. My thanks to the general.”

  Hancock settled his hat on his head and slapped his gloves in his left hand. “I’ll pass that on. Meanwhile, Frank, try not to shoot an
ybody.”

  * * *

  Barlow watched his corps commander walk toward his mount. Hancock tried to hide his limp, but gave himself away at every fourth step. That worried Frank Barlow. He didn’t want his corps commander invalided out. Hancock was the man under whom he meant to serve until the final shot. Or until the stupidity of his peers drove him to resign. Suffering and death were to be expected, but incompetence merited hanging, in Barlow’s view. The general mediocrity appalled him.

  The Freedmen’s Bureau position remained a temptation. “Helping darkies out of the darkness,” as poor Bob Shaw once put it. Arabella didn’t believe he’d quit—she laughed and said he’d miss the war too much—but there were days when he had a mind to surprise her.

  Whatever happened, he was damned well never going to serve under a horse’s ass like Howard again. And God save him from more German troops than his division had at present. Deplorable as soldiers, execrable as men, they were bound to dilute the good native stock of the country.

  The Irish were beastly, too, but the bastards fought.

  Yet, even as he swore to himself, he felt the old twinge return: not pain from his wounds, but the deep, unspoken, unspeakable knowledge that it hadn’t been Howard or the Germans who had blundered that day at Gettysburg, but him.

  Never show doubt, he reminded himself. And never let another man witness your pain. His own wounds ached more often than not, and a lingering toothache pushed him halfway to madness. But nobody knew how bad it was, even Bella.

  He was going to punish the Confederates for what they had done to him at Gettysburg. They were going to pay and pay. He intended to grind their misery into their snouts.

  Barlow watched Hancock’s bulky figure grow smaller: The corps commander rode more carefully now. But if Hancock was in pain, Barlow knew some others who were going to feel pain soon enough. Hancock hadn’t fooled him one least bit. He’d let the cat out of the bag, and it wouldn’t be coaxed back in. Meade obviously had been displeased with the appearance and marching of the brigades of Smyth, Frank, and Brooke. And Frank, a worthless Teuton, had no business leading a brigade in any case. Nor was Smyth all he should be, although he and his Hibernians did show spunk. Even Brooke could stand to improve his performance. If orders to march did not arrive first, the division was going to have an early morning. And the world would see who could march in step and who couldn’t.

  He considered calling for his provost marshal to discuss the disposition of Private Rainey, but stepped back into his tent for a moment alone. Carlyle? He didn’t believe Hancock had ever cut the first pages of one of his books.

  They all made so much of his standing at the top of the Harvard class of ’55, but had no idea how utterly worthless his education had been. Barlow smirked. Nor did they know what jackasses most of his classmates were, destined for safe Unitarian livings or privileged positions amid family fortunes. He had been amazed at the naivety—not just on the part of the students, but the professors as well. He had arrived at Harvard Yard with rather more knowledge of the world than even the two sorry whore-chasers in his class. What were their names? Couldn’t even remember, they were inconsequential men. Probably safe at home after purchasing substitutes, or off on grand tours that would last through the end of the war. Collecting art in Paris and syphilis in Rome.

  He had Brook Farm to thank for his own knowledge, tawdry but useful. The Blithedale Romance did not half capture the farce he’d been subjected to as a boy. All the sententious idealism and the grave communal sanctimony had collapsed into a swamp of petty jealousies and recriminations over who was to do the laundry. And his beautiful mother had been in the thick of it, not for the better. Even a lad still missing teeth could tell the arrangements were cockeyed. And yet … there had been lovely days before the mood turned vicious, and idyllic memories intertwined with embarrassments that came later. Before he was ten, he not only had learned the practical things that eluded his Harvard classmates, but knew how it felt to be expelled from Eden.

  And thanks to his mother’s vapid and wan admirers, he’d had quite enough of “the life of the mind” to last him for eternity. Now he took pains to conceal the extent of his reading from those around him: It had been an indiscretion to blather about Frederick to Hancock, who was just a marvelous blue bull turned loose in the Rebel china shop. Barlow despised men who lived in books, the august figures of his New England childhood, who said much and did so little of any consequence.

  Was there anything more disgusting, more useless, than a man devoted to fondling his own intellect? A man had to act. Even Emerson had become too much to endure, an “uncle” who once had seemed a beacon of brilliance. His self-adoring nonsense struck Barlow as morbid now. Emerson could plead all he wanted, but he would never return to New England. Manhattan might be sordid, but it had life.

  Damn the black-clad gentlemen his mother had needed to please after his father went mad and ran away from his wife and three young boys! The shame of certain things she had done, the beggarly things to which he had seen her stoop, would rankle him until his dying day.

  If Boston’s self-congratulation had become odious, he had not found a home in uniform, either. Having turned his back on those who spoke ad infinitum without acting, he now found himself among active men incapable of speech. He never had a proper conversation. Except with Arabella, when she visited.

  His smirk was his armor; he wore it as his custom. He found the human species absurdly limited. No doubt that rogue of an Englishman was right and they were all descended from apes. Although the proposition seemed hard on the monkeys.

  He sat down in the camp chair Hancock’s bulk had threatened to crumple. About to call for his orderly to help him with his boots, he decided that he preferred to extend his solitude. Carefully, he worked the boots off himself and felt, simultaneously, the relief of cool air on his damp wool stockings and the attack of the infernal itching that wouldn’t leave him.

  Rolling off the stockings, he examined the peeling, flaking skin that led down to his toes. It was a wretched business. He’d seen doctors. Their succession of salves seemed to help for a time, as did the salt baths mixed like alchemist’s potions. But the damnable itch always, always returned. One ass of a doctor in New York had prescribed a summer at Newport, where Barlow could go barefoot and bathe his feet in the sea each morning and evening.

  Barlow did not doubt that his feet would get wet as the weather warmed. But it was going to be from the mud of Virginia’s swamps, not the great salt ocean.

  “Orderly!” he bellowed. “Orderly!”

  The man appeared at the double-quick. He was new at the work, a replacement, and wonderfully terrified.

  “Bring me a bucket of water.”

  “Hot water, sir?”

  “Cold.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The corporal eyed Barlow’s exposed feet, and Barlow caught it.

  “Sir … if you don’t mind my saying…”

  “I do mind, Corporal.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Barlow believed that Hancock had it wrong. Whether or not this was the Prussian army—and it damned well wasn’t, more’s the pity—he believed that Frederick had been absolutely correct that the men should fear their officers more than the enemy. Look at the rabble they were putting in uniform these days. Oh, the old veterans were fine. He still loved to visit the men of the 61st, his first real regiment, down in Miles’ brigade. But the drafted lot, and the Irish, the bounty-jumpers. They hadn’t the mettle. The gaps in his division had been filled with the scum of the earth, he didn’t see how a sane person could deny it, and the only way to get such men to face the bayonets to their front was to place even sharper bayonets at their backs. And the only thing worse than a cowardly soldier was a cowardly officer.

  Barlow had never quite understood the importance men attached to their puny lives. Certainly, he preferred life to death. That was ordained. But evaluated by a man of sense, life wasn’t to be taken all that seriously. As
far as commodities went, human lives sold cheap. The politicians could spout their praises of the common citizen, but many a man wasn’t worth the food he stuffed in his maw at dinner.

  He just could not understand the fear men felt on the verge of battle or in its midst. There was nothing on earth more exhilarating. Certainly, it was an incalculably greater thrill than intimate association with a woman, an enterprise much overpraised by poets. Of the many causes for his appreciation of his wife, not least was Arabella’s sense of proportion.

  The orderly returned, announcing himself before entering the tent. The bucket the man carried was sloshing full.

  “Your pardon, sir, but Colonel Miles is trotting up the way.”

  “Put down the bucket. Outside, put it outside, man. And come back here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sentenced to suffer, Barlow drew on his stockings again.

  The corporal stepped back under the canvas. He looked at Barlow’s now clad feet. Doubtfully.

  “Don’t stare, you ass.” He could hear Miles clopping up. “Help me with my boots.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Move.”

  The man moved. He was deathly afraid. That was good.

  Fully clad below the waist again, Barlow stood and said, “Now get out of here.”

  His feet burned, damn them. He dreaded the coming summer.

  And yet, he relished the suffering, too, and knew he did. He took a fierce pride in treating hardships casually, in living rough, in enduring more than the Irish toughs and the muscle-clad farm-boys still not dead of dysentery. In winter, he wore an overcoat only when the cold became truly unbearable, a rare thing in Virginia. He intended to be more spartan than the Spartans, more stoic than the Stoics. He relished humbling other men with their weaknesses.

  Barlow stepped outside as Miles dismounted. They had served together, on and off, since the Peninsula. If there was any officer Barlow trusted, it was Nelson Miles.

  “Well, Nellie!” he said. “You look like a damned Red Indian. Careful of that Virginia sun, old man.” Feet be damned, he was happy to see Miles. The fellow was not just a fighter, but almost had a brain.