by Ralph Peters
“A fellow tells me something, I take him at his word,” Grant said calmly. “Until he shows me that his word’s no good.” Cigar still unlit, he canted his head, looking at Meade the way he might have looked at a horse he still wasn’t quite sure of. “I want you to get everybody tied in proper. Figure out where it’s best to hold up Hancock’s advance tomorrow, then have him reach back and tie in to Warren’s left. And Warren should reach for Hancock, as soon as he makes Parker’s Store. Sedgwick’s corps can link into Warren’s right, when he comes up. I want an unbroken front, if Lee comes on. Or if we have to go for him.”
“Lee won’t just let us arrange ourselves. He’s not like that,” Meade warned. “He’ll start in skirmishing to throw us off balance. He’ll probe for a weak spot and try to delay us, buy himself time. He’ll test you. Based on my own not altogether pleasant experience, I’m convinced he’ll want to draw us toward Mine Run. The place is a fortress for him and a waiting slaughter pen for us. And all the while his cavalry will be out, looking for a way into our trains and stirring confusion.” Meade grunted. “Stuart loves to read about himself in the Richmond papers.”
Grant’s voice remained quiet, but his cigar stabbed the air. “If Lee wants a fight, he’ll get one. If he comes up, you’re to pitch into him. Wherever he may be. Attack him. Before he attacks you. Get your teeth in his leg and chew.”
Meade felt queasy: Grant didn’t understand this battlefield. Or Lee. He saw the plan, their fine plan, collapsing around them.
“Yes, sir,” he said. But his voice was empty.
“As for cavalry”—Grant eased his tone back toward friendliness—“you’ve got Sheridan angrier than a stepped-on cottonmouth. He thinks it’s a mistake to detail two of his cavalry divisions to guard the rear, with only Wilson to cover the army’s front.” The unexpected mirth of Grant’s expression threatened to explode into a laugh. “Of course, I’m cleaning up his vocabulary considerably.”
“If General Sheridan has a complaint, let him bring it to me.”
Grant chuckled, fighting back the insistent laugh. “Oh, he will, he will. Have no doubt of that. Phil’s got him a temper shorter than the man himself. His last dispatch burned my fingers. I had to pass it off to young Badeau.”
“General Sheridan will always get a fair hearing from me,” Meade said stiffly. “But I think I know how to handle my own cavalry. Stuart’s not to be trifled with, Sam. Sheridan’s about to find that out.”
“Bedford Forrest wasn’t to be trifled with, either,” Grant told him.
An aide approached and offered them fresh coffee. Meade declined, but Grant accepted. And he finally lit the cigar.
Meade had grown more than unsettled. The heat of the fire had begun to make him dizzy. It was a hot night, more July than early May, and bad for the troops, who would discard even more of their blankets.
Grant seemed unaffected. He even had his tunic fully buttoned, which wasn’t his habit.
“How long will Lee wait?” the general in chief asked. “Before he moves? I don’t mean just skirmishers.”
Meade looked into the firelight, as if it held the answers. He did not want to reply lightly and pay for it later.
“I’d say … we have a day. Or the better part of one. Longstreet’s corps was in bivouac between Gordonsville and Mechanicsville. He’ll have to march forty miles, if not more. He won’t reach Lee before tomorrow night. If he moved promptly today. And given the numbers against him, Lee will want to have Longstreet up before he risks a general attack.”
“You think it’s going to take Pete that long? After all I’ve heard about Jackson’s Foot Cavalry?”
“Jackson’s dead.”
Grant let out a mouthful of smoke. “And Longstreet isn’t his equal?”
Meade warned himself to step carefully: Grant and Longstreet were known to be old friends.
“Longstreet moves … with more precision,” Meade said. “Anyway, I don’t believe he can reach Lee before tomorrow night, not in any effective condition. And Lee won’t want to get into a major fight without Longstreet’s corps on hand. He learned that lesson at Gettysburg, I think.”
Grant drew heavily on his cigar, as if smoking it were a pleasure and burden at once. Exhaling, he smiled that troubling, close-lipped smile again.
“That so? And what did you learn at Gettysburg, George?”
“I learned,” Meade told him, “that Lee never has to be taught a lesson twice.”
PART
II
WILDERNESS OF BLOOD
FOUR
May 5, dawn
Kelly’s Ford
“Where you going, Private?” Sergeant Brown demanded. He had spotted the boy slipping off in the mist that rose from the river. If the shorter of the company’s two John Eckerts meant to empty his bowels, he was headed in the wrong direction. And if he didn’t intend to have a squat, he had no excuse to go anywhere. “And where’s your cap?”
Rumpling pale hair with an awkward paw, the private said, “I was just going down for to wash my feet. I think I don’t need no cap, Sergeant Brown.” The boy pronounced the rank and name as “Sarchint Brawn,” his Dutchie accent thick as mashed-up beans.
“You wear your cap everywhere, Private. And what did I say about washing your feet? Stand up proper when you talk to me.”
Hunched by early labors with pick and shovel, the private straightened his back as best he could. “You said … you told us we got to keep our feet real clean.”
“I told you to wash your feet with cold water. At the end of the day’s march. I told you never to wash your feet before a march or in the middle of one.”
“But they hurt me.”
Brown took a deep breath. It was like trying to explain mathematics to a mule. “They’re going to hurt worse. You’ll get used to it.” He looked the boy up and down. Five foot two, with some stretch put in. But the lad had shoulders broad enough to carry the weight of the world. If he didn’t get killed in his first fight, he’d do all right. “Didn’t you wash your feet last night?”
“No.”
“That’s ‘No, Sergeant.’”
“No, Sergeant.”
“Why not?”
“I was every ways tired.”
“Well, you’re going to feel worse tonight. Just buck up.” He considered the bovine stupidity that infected new recruits, leaving them stubbornly helpless. “You eat your breakfast? Or are you waiting to be told that, too?”
“I et some.”
The private looked as though he expected a beating. Justice took a practical course back home on Eckert Hill.
“All right. Just go back and put on clean stockings, get yourself ready to march. You can wash those feet tonight.”
Around them, the rough encampment had come to life. At any moment, the bugles would be unleashed, to the groans of the men from companies less alert. The hapless would hurry to do the things left undone the night before, and the laziest men would attempt to cajole hot coffee from their betters. Brown liked his own men up early and properly fed. You could get a Dutchman to do most anything if you kept his belly full.
“I can’t,” the private said. As if the words cost pain.
A shaft from the rising sun reached the boy. For an uncanny moment, John N. Eckert, private, Company C, 50th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry, wore a golden halo.
A horse whinnied. The regimental officers were up and interfering.
“Why can’t you?”
“Because I only got the one pair of stockings now.”
Brown was bewildered. Dealing with the Eckert boys wasn’t like schooling a mule. It was worse. “When I turned out your rucksack in Warrenton, you had two pair. What happened?”
The boy shuffled his body without quite moving his feet. “Isaac said we have too much we are carrying, we must throw away unneeded things that make heavy the pack.”
“Damn it, stockings don’t weigh a thing.”
The boy squirmed again. “But Isaac said�
�”
“I don’t give a damn what Isaac says. He may be your cousin, but I’m your sergeant. Sergeants outrank cousins. You listen to what I say, understand? Versteh’ mal?”
Down by the ford, a battery began to cross the Rappahannock on a pontoon bridge. The procession was barely visible through the mist that clung to the river, but the sounds confirmed its identity. Dangling their chains, the gun carriages, limbers, and caissons creaked slowly over the span and dozens of hooves clopped on the shifting planks. Engineer sergeants tending the site cursed the gunners on principle, their language riper than any heard on the Philadelphia docks. Brown considered himself a war-toughened man, but their vivid descriptions of men and women, of mothers and sons, and of various nationalities made him feel like a spinster who blushed at the word begat in the preacher’s Bible.
“Do you understand me?” Brown demanded.
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Where are those stockings now? Where did you leave them? Back in Warrenton?”
“No, Sergeant. I give them to Isaac. He said it makes him no difference to carry them, he knows to march the right way.”
“You gave Isaac Eckert your stockings?”
The boy shrugged. “He gives me Reb tobacco for them. He wishes to be fair, since I am verwandt, the same in the blood.”
“Come on,” Brown ordered. “You come with me.”
As the two of them marched across the raw encampment, Bill Wildermuth attached himself to the party.
“What do you want?” Brown snapped.
“Just limbering up my legs, Sergeant Brown. I been watching Isaac watching you two parley, and I figure there might be a skunk under the porch. Thought I might help you catch him.”
“I’m not in joking spirits today,” Brown warned him.
Isaac Eckert stood waiting for them, face stripped of emotion. He held a tin cup in one hand, a bit-off cake in the other.
“Give him his stockings,” Brown said.
Eckert nodded, but the gesture had no agreement in it. “We made a trade.”
“Give him the stockings. For Christ’s sake, Isaac. His feet aren’t toughened up. And he’s your relation.”
Isaac charged himself with a swig of coffee. “Fair’s fair, Sergeant. Me and him made a trade. Them down-the-hill, dumb-Dutch Eckerts don’t count as close blood, anyway. I mean, look at him. That hair. True Eckerts are dark-favored.”
“I don’t care if he’s a total stranger. Just give him the stockings. So the boy at least has time to put them on. It’s going to be a hard day, and you know it.”
“Yes, sir!” Bill Wildermuth put in. “Going to be some hard marching today, the boys’ll be dropping like flies. They won’t stop us at the Rapidan, neither.” He turned to the younger Eckert. “Son, the generals play with their peckers and forget what time it is. Then they remember there’s things they got to get done, and we have to run like the cholera to catch up.”
“Shut up, Bill,” Brown said. He turned back to Isaac. “I gave you an order. Give the kid his stockings.”
“That’s not no legal order, I know my rights!” Isaac cried. He splashed the dregs of his coffee on the ground. “We made an honest trade! I want a hearing from Captain Burket, he’ll say what’s fair and what ain’t.”
“Captain Burket will listen to First Sergeant Hill. And the first sergeant will back me up. And if you think you’re testing these stripes on my arm, you think again. Or we can discuss what I caught you doing at Knoxville, you shit-dripper. And that talk won’t be with Captain Burket, but with Colonel Christ.”
Brown was furious. He wanted to knock Isaac Eckert to the ground, but preferred not to lose the stripes he had just sewn on.
The first bugle call beat the others by a few seconds. In moments, the world seemed a madhouse of blaring trumpets and barked orders.
Henry Hill, the first sergeant’s cousin, emerged from the patch of brush that had been given over to personal business. Whether or not he had heard one word of the exchange over the stockings, he seemed to sense the way the matter stood. His somber face was set.
Hill walked up to Isaac Eckert and punched him in the stomach. The blow had such force it dropped Isaac to the ground, where he groaned like a gut-shot dog.
Hill stood over him.
“You do what Sergeant Brown says.”
And Hill walked away.
“I was you,” Bill Wildermuth told the crumpled private, “I’d listen.”
“Bill,” Brown said, “you get the stockings off him. I’ve got things to tend to.” He raised his voice. “Formation in five minutes, everybody.” Turning, he saw that John Eckert had retreated a few steps. “You. Come with me. And you listen here. We go into battle, you don’t step back from a fight, you jump right into it. Unless you want to be stupid and dead together.”
The boy’s reaction to the trivial violence worried him far more than the stockings fuss.
Private Eckert obeyed and followed after him. With time running out, Brown headed for the spot where he had slept out the short night. His well-trimmed rucksack and haversack leaned against a tree, watched over by Sammy Martz, the Pottsville blacksmith who clung to the canal men.
“I was going to bring your things to you, Sergeant,” Martz told Brown.
Brown nodded and knelt down to unbuckle his pack. The one indulgence he allowed himself was a small hoard of clean stockings. Irate at God and Man for making him disorder his possessions and cheating him out of time for a last dose of coffee, he pulled out the first pair of stockings he could find. Frances had made them herself and had given them to him before the end of the company’s leave back home.
“Get those shoes off quick,” he told the Eckert boy. “And put these on. And if you so much as fall one step behind today, I’m going to take a stick to you. You understand me? And you’re going to wash these good and give them back.”
He lingered just long enough to glimpse the boy’s bare feet. They were already blistered and bleeding, Private Eckert’s first taste of war’s reality.
There would be more to come, and it would come soon. For the first time, the weight of his sergeant’s stripes struck him fully: He was responsible for so many lives now, for men and boys with whom he had labored on the canal, whose meals and bedding he had shared even before they went off to war. His soldiers had wives and children, sweethearts and families, back home, and he knew them all, man, woman, and child, by name, knew their kinships, legitimate and shaming, acknowledged and not, and the family secrets that never stayed kept in a small town. If they died because of his errors, how would he ever face the people back home? Would he have to wander the earth like the soul of Judas? How would he face Frances? Or live with himself?
He had weighed these matters in his mind, but now they pierced his heart.
Even as a corporal, he had done his best to prepare the new recruits, to convince them that it wasn’t all a grand lark. At the end of their leave, the company had gone to Camp Curtin in Harrisburg to rejoin the regiment. Then the regiment was ordered to Annapolis to join its brigade and division. The new recruits had been full of brag and bull, ready to show the reenlisted veterans how to win the war without even sweating. So Brown had taken his charges for a walk, leading them past the grounds of the vast convalescent hospital, where thousands of men in bits and pieces of uniforms were learning to live without arms or legs or eyes. Boys imagined fine, brave deaths as a storybook romance, but never thought of the forms survival took. The spectacle of cripples loitering in the hundreds had sobered the new recruits, if only briefly.
From Annapolis, they had gone south to Warrenton, moving by a series of trains, still protected from war’s temper. The forced march the day before had been the new men’s welcome to a soldier’s life.
Brown shouldered his rucksack, looped his haversack over his head, and stepped off to take up his rifle. He considered sending the Eckert boy back to ride on the company wagon, given the condition of his feet.
But softness killed.
And no matter how bad the boy’s feet became, he’d forget the misery as soon as they went into battle. The flesh had a remarkable gift for sensing what really mattered.
Brown heard First Sergeant Hill’s familiar bellow, calling a company formation. Corporal Doudle rushed past him, chiding Privates Sharon and Hoffman to tighten their leathers and straighten their packs and hurry the Hell up. Doudle was clearly enjoying his new corporalcy. As he himself enjoyed being a sergeant, Brown had to admit.
“Come on, come on,” he shouted to the laggards he passed on the double-quick. “Bobby Lee’s waiting. Being late’s bad manners.”
Dawn
Orange Turnpike
Brigadier General John Brown Gordon was as pleased as a sow in a mud pit. He loved his Georgia boys, and they were fond of him and his ways, and there was nothing like a well-turned speech delivered on horseback on a fine May morning.
Straight as a mast, he rose in his stirrups, pulled off his hat, and gazed beyond the assembled ranks of his infantry, staring through the sun-gilt mists that ghosted over the fields, staring into battles immortal and glorious fame eternal. He said:
“Damnation, you boys look ready for a fight! Georgia! Are you ready?”
His soldiers roared. Surely, Gordon thought, surely this multitude must be heard where the Federals held Virginia’s soil in thrall, these voices must be heard and set men trembling.
“Boys, you know me. And I know you. You know I don’t believe, never have believed, in showing the enemy my back. My motto is ‘Forward!’ But, Lord bless me, since I took command of this fine, this brave, this impeccable brigade … boys, I have been shamed. Yes, shamed! And shamed again. You heard me right, just still those murmurs right now. You hold your tongues and listen. You’ve shamed your commanding officer, a man who always led the way in the face of the enemy, and do you know why?”
