by Ralph Peters
“Drilling,” Miles told him. “Have to put the new men through their paces. Your skirmishing evolutions.”
“Meade sent down a compliment for you. Regarding the review. He thought your brigade looked splendid. Now come into the tent, for God’s sake. I could bear losing you to a bullet, but not to sunburn. What’s on your mind? Drink?”
“Just water. For now, sir.”
As Barlow poured from a pitcher, Miles looked about. “I see the new saber arrived.”
“Here. At least the well water’s decent in this godforsaken place. Nice blade. Good and heavy. Whack a coward with the flat of that one, and he’ll think twice. Sit down, sit down. Hancock was just here. Not sure his leg’s all it should be.”
“Any news?” Miles took the camp chair, weary and forgetful of decorum. Barlow let it go.
“He thinks we’ll get marching orders any day now.”
Miles looked around. As if he could see through the canvas. “Shame to waste this good weather. Rather fight now, before the heat sets in. Listen, Frank”—in private, they were “Frank” and “Nelson” or, when Barlow was in the spirit, “Nellie”—“maybe you should address the men. I know you don’t go in for that sort of thing … but all of the other division commanders are doing it. They’re hollering up a storm fit for shouting Methodists: ‘God bless the sacred Union … our holy cause triumphant … damnation to the Confederacy…’ You know the sort of thing. The men expect it.”
Barlow’s grimace took his jaw a good inch out of alignment. “If I’d wanted to preach from a pulpit, I would have pursued a different vocation.” He thought of Coriolanus, the much maligned. “All the men need to hear from me is ‘Fix bayonets!’ and ‘Charge!’ And, really, only you and the other brigade commanders need to hear that much. The men need clear orders, not rhetoric.”
Barlow abhorred and dreaded public speaking. Even as a lawyer, he had preferred settling things in chambers. Fighting a battle was easy compared to addressing a throng. He had sat through enough pandering lectures in churches, parlors, assembly halls, and classrooms to know exactly what speeches were worth, and what a shabby thing it was to plead for the mob’s approval.
“Frank”—Miles tried again—“you’ve got the old Third Corps men disgruntled that they’ve been resubordinated to Second Corps. And everyone’s grumbling—company commanders included—about your order to strip the men’s packs of everything not on your list. At least show them you’re human.”
“They’ve been loading themselves like donkeys. Lighten the packs, and we’ll have fewer stragglers. I want men on the firing line, not lining the damned roads and playing possum.” He folded his arms. “The Johnnies don’t carry gewgaws into battle. That’s why they move so fast while we bump along.”
“Oh, Christ, Frank! It’s as if you’re determined to make them hate you. And they want to like you, they really do. The veterans understand what you’re after, and they tell the new men what’s what.” Miles leaned toward him. “They do look up to you, you know. But soldiers want to like their commanders, too.”
“I don’t need them to like me,” Barlow said. “I just need them to fight.”
TWO
May 4, late morning
Gordonsville, Virginia
Colonel William C. Oates watched the two sergeants fight. Although he wasn’t a gambling man, he did like a good match. Didn’t mind taking part in one, either. He’d have to rely on brawn, though, if it came to fisticuffs. He wasn’t going to do much dancing around with his shot-through hip. He could move just fine again, no need of crutches, and could even run when the spirit was upon him. But he wasn’t fit for a quickstep anymore, whether with a belle or knuckles up.
As each blow landed, the onlookers yipped and yowled, hollering out encouragement to the sergeant they preferred. It was quite a go-to, scattering sweat and blood. Under a blue sky clean enough for churchgoing. Or for sweet-saying a woman, a matter of fond recall. Here and now, the ladies weren’t for touching. And he wasn’t about to risk what health he had with one of the mammies who came around selling fried chicken. Nothing here to occupy a man but the infernal wait for the Yankees, the wondering over what the next days would deliver. At the hospital pavilions behind the rail stop, idle surgeons lurked like vultures atop a fence: The sick, of which there always was aplenty, weren’t much pleasure for a sawing doc.
They wouldn’t have to wait long to bloody their aprons. Oates felt it. The Federals would come splashing across that river, hell-bent on getting to Richmond this time, and the fighting would be a sight worse than this brawl.
The match had been set up to settle some paltry grievance, with his permission as the regiment’s colonel of some duration, a tenure interrupted only by the annoyance of a wound. Law had sought to make him a brigadier, but Longstreet put Law under arrest—out of shame and malice—so none of Evander Law’s favorites was going to see higher rank for a good, long time. As for Longstreet, Oates had turned against him hard after Tennessee, when he struggled back to the regiment in March and found it run-down as a poor-white’s hogpen, fewer than four hundred men present and a passel of the best left dead at Knoxville. The living had been half-frozen and hungry enough to eat dirt. Old Pete had made a mess of things and, instead of facing his failure like a man, had tried to relieve or arrest his division commanders and any unlucky colonels who caught his eye, shifting the blame like a tramp caught stealing a pie.
Longstreet hated Law’s Alabama Brigade, he’d tried to leave it rotting in Tennessee. But Lee had thought better of things. Longstreet’s revenge, when the Alabamans returned to his command, was to place his own man, Colonel Perry, over the brigade while Law stood aside under charges. Oates’ willingness to serve as his old brigade commander’s attorney, if it came to a trial, had been the worst of treasons in Longstreet’s eyes.
The army was worse than the red-clay politics back in Alabama. He would have liked to have Old Pete right here in this ring of soldiers. Then they’d see which one was the proper man.
The fight turned sluggish and cruel. Both of the Company I sergeants, Jimmy Ball and Clarence Morgan, were wearing down, painted with blood and welts. For years, the two had been the best of friends. But something had happened out there in Tennessee, something neither of them cared to speak to. Now they were fit to kill each other. Oates watched the proceedings with a sharpened eye: He was going to need both men. Hell, he was going to need every man, halt, lame, or blind. The return of wounded veterans had brought the 15th’s roster back above four hundred men, but that wasn’t even half the authorized strength.
If Old Pete were to ride up, Oates knew, he’d lose his command for letting the fight go ahead. But Alabama men had their own way of settling matters, and they didn’t need some jackass fool of a West Point martinet to come around to judge the quick and the dead.
Oates took in the downright glee on the faces of the men watching the fight. For these few carved-out minutes of manly violence, they had forgotten their troubles, their old complaints, and their own long-standing grudges, captivated by bloodshed not their own. Out of all the beasts in the fields and all the birds in the air, a man was the strangest creature: When the fight was done—and he meant to end it soon—these men would be all kindness to victor and vanquished alike.
He wished he had been at Knoxville with them and not a pampered guest in a plantation house. Nothing against Colonel Toney and his family, who had treated him like a son and nursed his wounds. The gentlemanly old fellow had anticipated each of a young man’s needs and had even sent a gal around on the quiet, warm skin shining like saddle leather. But no loin-quickening memory could free him from the ghosts of the men who had died during his absence: Frank Park, John McLeod … so many of the first volunteers from southeast Alabama, men with whom he had shared many a misery. It wasn’t as bad as Gettysburg, where he’d lost his brother John to those Maine sonsofbitches, but it came near.
Ball landed a blow that sent Morgan reeling. Big for his kind, the Welshma
n didn’t go down, but staggered. To the extent he could maintain a direction for his unwilling feet to follow, Morgan aimed back toward Ball. The two sergeants were mean-fighting men, Hell on the Yankees. Oates needed them to save some meanness up.
“That’s enough,” he barked, stepping into the circle of ragged uniforms. “Fight’s over, hear?”
He and Ball made eye contact. Ball had heard him all right. But the sergeant turned back to his opponent, who was struggling to hold up his fists. Ball thrust a straight-armed punch at Morgan’s jaw.
The Welshman went down.
Oates strode up to the sergeant. Just as the victor turned his way again, Oates let go a widow-maker that put Ball down beside the man he’d bested.
“You ever disobey an order of mine again,” he told the unconscious figure, “you’ll get a damn sight worse.”
Big, black-haired, and black of mien, Oates knew his effect on others. He straightened his spine and glared at the crowd of soldiers, every one of them silent now.
“Any other man got his spite up, save it for the Yankees. Going to be plenty of those sonsofbitches coming this way soon.” He growled like a feral hog, as if he might lunge at any man within range. “Now get these two fools out of here, before something makes me madder than I am.”
Men leapt to do his bidding, and a smile threatened his face. The ease with which he put fear into others was a precious thing. Not that he didn’t know what fear was himself: Still a boy, if a big one, he’d run off far and fast, sure the law was coming to Oates’s Corners to fetch and hang him. He’d taken a hoe to a grown man who deserved it and left him lying dead. Or so he’d thought. He slipped on down to Florida, where he hawked cigars, then signed on aboard a schooner. Quick to dislike the sailor’s life and its disrespectful nature, he made his way bleak-bellied from the French stink of New Orleans up to Shreveport, where he dallied a night too long with a slave dealer’s daughter and nearly killed another man before running hard for Texas. There’d been hungry times and worse before his younger brother, John, tracked him down in Henderson and told him he could come home, that the dead man was alive and the law had more than William C. Oates to fuss about.
Running from the law let a man see its uses, though, and he set himself to clerking for an attorney. After passing the bar, he put up a shingle in Abbeville, near enough to home, but not so close he’d have to live with his mother’s ever-angrier love of the Lord. She was a haunted woman who had the sight, but could not see her own way. He always kept his vow to her never to touch alcohol, but as for religion, the war had thrashed it out of him. He went through the motions for the sake of his men, since many a fine soldier had been caught up in the revival over the winter, desperate to believe in a Providence Oates just could not see. The death of his brother up in Pennsylvania had shot his faith through the heart.
His mother had foreseen John’s death, but said nothing of his own fate. Questioned, she just went back to her Bible and silence. On his dark days, he wondered how much she really saw. Mostly, though, he left it. Some things didn’t bear too much thinking over.
He remembered John as a jolly boy, the two of them kicking their way down a dusty trace, eyes peeled for snakes, walking through heat thick as wadding to sit just beyond the circle of whiskey-suckers down at the crossroads store, men of varied provenance, slight ambition, and the occasional suspect hue, a profane congregation met to swap tales of Pike County and the wide world. Even a boy could tell they all were liars, but listening made you dream. And now he dreamed of John, fixing him in childhood for eternity. Ambushed by visions, Oates saw his brother squatting in the dust like a waiting Indian, but sweet-eyed and soft-mouthed, wearing a smile wise beyond his years as he listened to the corn liquor talk through the mouths of men who had become its slaves, niggers to a jug. It still seemed an impossible thing that such a fine, bright soul could be no more, reduced to a rotten corpse in Pennsylvania.
There were some things that could not but be thought over, things a man just could not leave behind. He did not know what he could have done to save his brother on that rocky hillside, but he knew he should have done whatever it was.
John. Sweet, loyal John. Never really meant to be a soldier.
With the fight crowd dissolving, Oates spotted Billy Strickland, newly made a captain.
“Walk with me, Billy,” Oates said.
They strolled beyond the regimental camp, following a farm lane. The fencing was gone, used for firewood by soldiers who had preceded them. Didn’t matter much, since there was no livestock, or none worth the notice. Even the spring greenery seemed poor, as if nature, too, had tightened up on rations. Virginia had been humbled by the war, its grand houses set to mourning. The landscape still had a gentility Alabama never quite reached, not even Montgomery, but it wasn’t like to last if the war chewed south. And that was about what the Yankees had in mind. He was pretty damned sure that he and his men would not see Pennsylvania again. They’d be lucky enough to set eyes on Alabama. Hard times were coming, hard fighting. What pleasure there had been in war was gone, replaced by a muddle of rage and desperation.
“Should I take away Ball’s stripes, sir?” Strickland asked.
Oates shook his head as they walked, feeling that little click in his hip, bad bone. The pain was bearable, local as an itch. But it was there.
“Leave him be,” Oates said. “He just had his blood up.”
Before their boots, flies rose from an ancient cowpat.
“Think the Yanks are ready to come on?” the captain asked, passing the time.
“Just been waiting for the roads to get good and dry. They’ll want to move fast. That polecat Grant. I had enough of that bastard at Chattanooga.”
Between Lookout Mountain and the river, blue uniforms had appeared out of the mist, too damned many for one regiment to manage. He had been hit in the hip and thigh.
“Wish I could’ve been with you boys at Knoxville,” Oates said. He tracked a bird’s flight, as if he meant to shoot it. “Damned shame.”
“Wasn’t much to be done, sir,” Strickland told him. “Just all bad, beginning to end. Not sure any one man would’ve made much difference.”
Oates almost said, “Unless he’d replaced Longstreet.” But that wasn’t the way to talk in front of subordinates.
Instead of ranting, he smiled, spreading his black beard. It was one of his queer smiles, though. “Man can’t help but feel guilty, that’s the thing. Laying up in a fine house like Colonel Toney’s. Laying there in a poster bed, fearing his men aren’t going to be properly handled.”
“They were glad to see you, when you turned up, sir.” The captain paused, choosing his words carefully. “We didn’t know if we’d ever see you again.”
Oates grunted. “I suppose I looked a sight. Back on the river.”
“Yes, sir. Mad-dog angry, too.”
“God almighty. Look at that horse there. Wouldn’t be worth the killing for the meat.”
“That’s how the cavalry mounts all looked at Knoxville,” Strickland told him.
“Just hard to believe,” Oates said, going back to his musing. “There I am, living in luxury and dandling babies, every need provided for. Like there wasn’t a war at all, not anywhere.” He paused. “I wanted the feeling to last, tell you the truth.”
“But you came back, sir.”
Oates nodded, thoughts shifting again. “I grew up hard, Billy. Don’t know if I ever said. So hard. You know what it’s like in the backcountry. Might say it made me what I am, but I’d as lief not go through that ordeal twice. And there I am, lying up in that big, fine house … oh, I wasn’t thinking about the war every single minute. No, sir. Not even thinking about the boys as much as I should have. I was thinking I’d like to have me a house like that.”
He laughed. “Wouldn’t make a plug of difference, I suppose. Even if I struck it rich, or married some high gentleman’s spinster daughter—which I don’t have a mind to do—even with that big house and all, there’s a
kind of fence they put up. They ask you along on a hunt, but it’s really your dogs they want. No, there’s always this fence. And they aren’t going to let you jump it, because folks like you and me aren’t welcome behind it.” He slapped at a greenbottle. “Lawyer? Officer? That’s no mind. Not once this war is over. It’ll all go back to being the way it was. Men like you and me, we’ll never be fine. We might be respected in a middling way. Might even wind up in the legislature. But we won’t be fine.”
“Were they rude, sir? The people who took you in?”
Oates laughed. It was a big sound in the meadows.
“High folks are never rude,” he said. “That’s part of the bundle.” He laughed again. “Where you and I would make a fist, they just lift them an eyebrow. I wasn’t speaking against old Toney, now. I’ll be grateful to that man and his family until the day I die. I’d been robbed of every penny I had down in the train yard, lying there wounded and crazy with fever, and thank you for your service to our great Confederacy.” He swung his head like a bothered horse. “Colonel Toney took me into the bosom of his family. Out of kindness, nothing but. Another man might donate a gold piece or two to some sanitary commission, but isn’t like to open his doors to a wounded man who’s not blood kin. No, sir. Old Toney treated me handsome. I was talking on the principle.” He stopped himself. “But I do talk on. And I still haven’t got ’round to what I had to say to you, Billy.”
“Sir?”
Oates kicked a stone. His boot leather was so thin his toes felt the hardness. In the strange way a man had of doing things, just below the level of true thinking, he had hoped the gesture would lengthen out his bad leg, making the thigh right again.
“Best turn around,” Oates said. “Don’t want to get too far from the regiment.” He twisted up a wormwood smile. “Can’t have Major Lowther overtaxing himself in my absence. Can we now? Listen here, Billy. You’re a captain now. It’s a different job. You know it, but I’m going to tell it to you anyways. Your job is to control your company. And dead men don’t control a pile of shit. Inspiring your men is just fine, all that preaching and praising and getting them riled up before they step off. But your main business is to control them when we go forward. I don’t ever want to see Company I or any damned company in the Fifteenth Alabama go to pieces the way we did at Gettysburg. And I will shoot the man who lets it happen. Hear?”
