Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  The cold truth was that marching toward a battle unsettled Oates. He didn’t mind the fighting itself, which was a lusty matter more often than not. Fear had never been powerful in his makeup. But the getting up to a battle teased out memories. And those memories got all mixed up, good and bad, until the good ones made the bad ones harder to bear. The memories were always of his brother, John, last seen dying on that hillside in Pennsylvania, bleeding and lost amid tumult and disaster, with Oates choosing his duty as commander over his desire to stay with his brother to the end. He had met John’s eyes a last time, and perhaps his brother’s eyes had been past knowing, but they accused him here and now, asking, plaintive as a hant-spooked boy, You just going to leave me here?

  The march to that useless, hopeless fight had been brutal, hotter than this, and made for the most part with empty canteens and bellies flushed by the camp trots. Oates had not learned the name of the nearby town, Gettysburg, until well after the 15th’s fighting was done. It was all a heat-crazed, kill-a-man march, with good men falling away before they saw the first Yankee, a long march made at a brutal pace, with Hood himself riding up and down the column, railing at them to move, move, move, and who’s that coward straggling? That march had been murderous but straight until near the end, when the division had marched and countermarched as Yankee cannon tried the day in the distance, getting ready for them, and there never was a damned explanation of where the devil they were, just “Git on along there! Pick up the step!” followed by a few shreds of formal orders issued on unfamiliar ground, with the brigade and regimental officers unsure of what they were meant to do beyond going forward and let’s just see what comes of it.

  Law had been fuming, burned like a sulfur match, unable to get a fair look at the ground the brigade was to cross, unsure if it could be crossed to good effect, and then, just after Oates had sent a detail to fill the men’s canteens, the division moved forward, and the brigade moved forward, and Oates gave the order to his regiment to move forward, and the unappeased thirst and fiendish heat just made the men grim and mean, ready to kill any living thing that crossed them or just looked at them cockeyed. The Yankee artillery down on that flank had peculiar fields of fire, butchering some regiments while sparing others entirely, and the 15th just passed through most of that fuss at a quickstep amid drifts of smoke as stink-sharp in the nostrils as unwashed quim. Then word came down that Hood was badly wounded and Law had the division. Oates never knew if the next order to his regiment was Hood’s last or one of Law’s first. The courier just pointed in the direction of the two hills off to the right and front, and said, “Colonel Oates, you’re to move off at the oblique and take care of the Yankees on that hill,” and then the man was off, without clarifying which of the two hills he meant.

  The big hill came first, steep and strewn with boulders, but at least there was shade for most of the going up. Exhausted, dead-eyed soldiers grew twitchy as fighting cocks and discovered the down-deep strength to keep pushing on, maybe because stopping would have required a decision they were too dogged out to make, men too weary to fall down and just quit, just doing by rote because that was the easiest thing. Expecting a fight, expecting the Yankees hidden in the trees up there to open up just any old time at all, but there were no Yankees on that higher of the two hills, just rocks and trees and a view that made Oates wished he commanded the entire army for one drop-jawed moment, because he knew just what he’d do with it: He could roll up the goddamned Yankees like a rug when the fiddles came out.

  He held his men there, high up on that precious ground, as the battle raged and hammered and shrieked below, and he sent a runner—just a boy who looked like he might not fall down dead from the day’s gathered heat—to beg for guns to be manhandled up that hill, for cannon and more men, at least a brigade to plunge behind the Yankees and tear the heart out of their blundering, blue-bellied army, but all he got back was word that there were no more troops, that there was no damned time to bring up any artillery—and why hadn’t he obeyed his orders and pitched into the Yankees on that hill?

  Well, at least he knew which hill they meant now, and he ordered his withered regiment forward, northward, down through the boulders that played Hell with their alignment before rupturing it entirely, him yelling in a dry-husk voice, “Keep together, damn you, align on the colors.” And he stumbled and cracked his elbow on a boulder as he almost fell, winning himself a sharp white pain like snakebite, but he refused the pain and the very notion of injury the way you slammed the door in the face of a drummer who knocked while you were addressing a woman. His body was defiant, though, and his left arm did its best to refuse his orders. And that just made his rage worse, rage at everybody and everything, and the regiment arrived at a poison-green saddle between the hills and, Jesus Christ, the Yankees were dead in front of them, up on a lip of ground, and their first volley made the regiment quake like a hurricane wind up from the Gulf had struck it.

  “Charge! Charge! Charge!” was all he could yell, all he cared to yell, all his voice was good for, and he regretted now that he had not taken two minutes, or maybe three, to put his men in some kind of order, but that was not his way, nor theirs, and they plunged toward the Yankees in that terrible green place, a grove sweated sickly cool in the treacherous evening, and the goddamned Yankees just blistered them.

  The first charge failed. But the men didn’t run, they just gathered up back in the rocks, catching their wind, making sure they were still alive, and this time he made their captains and lieutenants give them proper orders, and the sergeants bullied the lines straight, and down the slope they ran again, dodging trees and tripping over the rocks, and the Yankees didn’t wait long to open up this time, but fired the way veterans do, fast and aiming low. Some of his men made it right up to their line, stabbing and clubbing wildly until they were slaughtered, and a passel of the Yankees hollered, “Maine, Maine!” and at first Oates thought they were yelling, “Mean, mean!” and he thought to himself, You want mean, I am going to show you mean, you sonsofbitches.

  They made five charges in all. Later, some men claimed six, and a few said only four, but Oates remembered five. And each time he led those boys from the rough-tempered towns and break-a-man farms he knew all too well, each time he led them back into the fight, they were fewer and fewer. But damn if they didn’t rush up that body-strewn bank another time for him. By the last charge, Oates had been maddened to a rabid state, determined that those Yankees, those bastards, were not going to hold him at bay, and he wished agonized deaths upon them all. He had tried flanking them, tried everything his scorched mind could think up, and nothing worked, and all he could do was hope the Yankees were tired, too, and maybe low on ammunition, or maybe just Yankees, men accustomed to being whipped, so that last time he ordered his men to concentrate on the jut of their line, to punch right through the blue-coated bastards right there and nowhere else, and to shoot their damned officers, starting with that mustached sonofabitch waving his sword.

  And in they went again, with their special Alabama yell, unstoppable and indomitable, but the Yankees must have been reinforced, or hiding part of their strength, and they came sweeping down out of the trees with bayonets fixed, just swinging around like a dead cat tied to a stick, smacking into his enfeebled regiment’s right flank, and that was too damned much, and his fine men broke, and those who didn’t run were shot down, clubbed, bayoneted, or taken with their hands thrust up in immeasurable shame, and when Oates looked about, one of the last to fly, he caught John’s eyes, John down and already more dead than alive, propped against a boulder, and William C. Oates knew only two things, that he was obliged to command what remained of the 15th Alabama, and that no worthless Yankee sonofabitch was going to take him prisoner. So he looked away from John, fired his pistol into an Irish face, and ran, slowing only to shoot a Yankee who somehow had gotten ahead of him. No damned Yankee was going to …

  But they had John. Still alive, most like. Alive for a pinch of time yet. His littl
e brother. Did they rob his pocket watch while he was still breathing but unable to resist them? How much cruelty was in them?

  The last, terrible thing he recalled was the cheering of the Yankees to his rear.

  Now Oates hated marching into battle. Marching gave a man too much time to think. Killing was better.

  Three thirty p.m.

  North Bank of the Rapidan

  With his immediate duties done, Sergeant Brown scooped his tin cup into the bucket of coffee, thanked the boys who’d cooked it up, then joined Bill Wildermuth, the company’s most talkative man, and Henry Hill, the least apt to say a word, under a shade tree whose leaves had been dulled by dust. Out on the road, other regiments marched down the cutaway bank to the crossing site, and every so often Brown heard cannon boom in the distance, faint as thunder across Second Mountain back home. He had no idea why they had been stopped and turned off the road, after which the entire brigade had waited for almost two hours for further orders. It was the sort of doing an old soldier simply accepted.

  “Well, boys…,” Brown said by way of greeting.

  Hill and Wildermuth looked up at him with the same wait-and-see expression. It was a common look among the veterans, a mutually agreed statement about the way of the world that spared them the need for speech.

  “Coffee just gets worse and worse,” Bill Wildermuth said. “A man can’t drink this mule piss.” As soon as he had spoken, he took another swallow. “Sit on down there, Sergeant. Rest those big, old feet.”

  Brown chose a place between two sprawling roots. The coffee was god-awful, Bill was right. But it was better than no coffee.

  He glanced back toward the gathered Eckert clan, making sure that young John Eckert heeded his order not to remove his shoes until the day’s march was well and truly over. The Eckerts were a strange bunch, no way around it. Isaac was already back in the good graces of the others, after what had fallen just short of an outright theft of his cousin’s stockings.

  “You know,” Brown said, “I still can’t figure why Isaac reenlisted. For that matter, I find it hard to say why the man joined up in the first place.”

  “Hah!” Wildermuth said. “You knew his wife, you’d know. Most Eckerts just sort of match themselves up right inside the family, but Isaac, he made the mistake of marrying out. And he got himself one great, big, wicked Dutch gal, mean as stink.” Wildermuth took another swig of coffee and made a jester’s face. “God almighty, this is awful stuff. Isaac’s probably afraid to go home, probably hopes the war’s going to last till doomsday.”

  “That a fact?” Brown said. Just to help the conversation along.

  “A fact indeed. Yes, indeed.” Wildermuth alerted, the way a dog will. “Oh, here we go. Looks like the colonel just got a message from Jesus and his archangels.” He shifted his backside, as if ants had got at him. “Guess we’ll be moving. And I was just getting fond of this place, all nice and far from the battle.”

  Abruptly, Henry Hill said, “Sergeant Brown, I’ve just got this queer feeling.” Even in front of Bill Wildermuth, the oldest of comrades, Hill insisted on using his friend’s new rank.

  “Taking sick, Henry?”

  “No. I didn’t mean that.”

  A bolt of alarm shot through Brown’s chest. He’d known a number of men to have premonitions, and it was uncanny how often they foresaw their deaths.

  “Worried? Anything in particular?” He didn’t know how forthcoming Hill would be in front of the other man. Henry Hill was the most private being Brown had ever known, as solid as an oak tree and about as likely to display his emotions.

  Hill deciphered Brown’s meaning. “Not that. Nothing like that. It’s…” Hill searched for words. “It’s that something’s different now. About the war, I mean. I don’t know.”

  Wildermuth jumped in, as he usually did: “I know just how you feel, Henry. Yes, I do. Oh, there was dying enough before, Lord knows, but right up to Vicksburg and even a while after, it was all kind of a lark, to be plain honest.”

  “I wouldn’t call it ‘a lark,’” Brown said.

  “You know what I mean, though. Then, at Knoxville—”

  Hill cut him off. “I wasn’t talking about Knoxville. Shut up for a minute, Bill. I mean the war. I can’t say exactly, but something just feels different. Like it’s going to get worse, a whole lot worse. I don’t know. It’s all just … so big now. It isn’t man-size anymore.” He shrugged. “I guess that’s fool talk. I can’t explain it right.”

  For Henry Hill, that had been a speech comparable to a sermon for the ages.

  “It’s not fool talk,” Brown said. “I think we all feel something on those lines. Even Bill here. Though he does have a knack for overtalking matters.” He drank the last, cold dregs of coffee, wishing that Wildermuth were not present. He and Henry had things to share that the other man would just cut down to jokes.

  “Captain’s on his feet,” Hill said.

  Brown turned, saw, rose. They would be moving again.

  “I better let some of this coffee back out,” Wildermuth told them, and he turned to face the tree.

  What Brown wanted to say was that, yes, there was a new ugliness in the air, and a sudden decrease in the old fool talk that made light of earnest things. Even Bill had eased up on his mockery. There were no shining daydreams left, no expectations of glory. The world had become a darker place, as if winter lingered on in the hearts of men.

  Brown’s problem wasn’t exactly with the war, it was with himself. Maybe it was the effect of his feelings for Frances, but he asked himself, again, if it were possible to remain a good man through all this. He had done things so shameful that he didn’t know how to measure them. Forgiveness fled his heart and forbearance weakened. He had become a harder man, with a toughness grimly different from that of the lad he had been when he killed the Ranger. He feared he might not be fit for the soft things in life.

  Virtue was something he had not pondered before. He had assumed he was good enough, normal, imperfect, but a worthy companion to others. Now he longed to be virtuous and good. Not in some tent revival way, spouting Bible verses and preening. Damnation in the afterlife didn’t worry him, though he knew it should. He just accepted that, in the wake of this war, the Lord would judge them all as he saw fit. But it had become a matter of grave concern to be a good man on this earth. Not merely a man who would make his Frances proud, if indeed this war let her be his. And not a man drunk with pride at the things he abjured. He wished to live and live well, to love and be loved. But he just wasn’t sure he knew the how of it anymore.

  The kind of goodness fixed in his mind was about far more than the daily care of the men given into his charge, although that was a serious thing. He could not explain his longing, no more than Henry could find words to capture his altered feeling about the war. Brown wanted to be honest inside and out, but it was more than that. When he spoke to himself of goodness, he did not mean meekness or show-off public kindness. Nor could he say he wanted to do no man harm, since he was sworn a soldier and obliged to kill. But in a world that held beings such as Frances, a man had to find a proper way to live. And neither honor nor riches had to do with it. Not fame or glory, either. The riddle was how to stay upright marching through Hell.

  Henry’s cousin, First Sergeant Hill, bellowed for the company to fall in. But even after the lines were dressed and the men had faced right to form a marching column, they were held up to keep the road clear for someone else, a brigade or perhaps a battalion of guns urgently needed ahead. But the road remained empty. The sky even cleared of dust. A few stragglers came up, and that was all.

  It was just another pointless delay that would never be explained or even remembered.

  At last, the order came down from some all-knowing general, passed on by colonels to lieutenant colonels and downward to the captains who led the companies:

  “Forward, march!”

  Four p.m.

  Junction of Brock Road and the Orange Plank Road


  “Getty, don’t be an idiot,” Hancock said.

  Getty stiffened. Hancock might sit upon his stallion in all his majesty, but Getty had been fighting and Hancock had not.

  The division commander resisted the urge to ask the corps commander what had taken him so long to bring up his corps. And Hancock remained unready and disorganized even now, his men still streaming in.

  “I have my orders,” Getty said, “and I always follow my orders.”

  “But … this is folly. Don’t be pigheaded, George. Just hold off until Mott closes up behind Birney and I can support you. You told me yourself you’re already short a brigade. If you advance your division unsupported, you know what will happen.”

  A few hundred yards from the crossroads, skirmishing rattled the woods. Smoke prowled.

  “I have my orders. As you have yours, General Hancock. Meade has directed me to attack ‘immediately.’ I shall do so.”

  “Getty … for Christ’s sake…”

  Bulky and grand, Hancock did indeed resemble the war god praised in all the newspapers. And Getty knew that Hancock was correct, tactically speaking. He would have preferred not to attack without Hancock’s divisions on his flanks, he had made that clear to Meade’s pink-pated errand boy, Lyman, a society creature got up in a tailored uniform. But that had been the extent of Getty’s protest.

  He was an old soldier and, he believed, a good one. Earlier in the day, he had followed his orders to rush his division to this place and hold it, and he had held it. He had cursed Meade, but he had done so to himself, not to other men. And Meade had been right, he had been needed exactly where he was sent and precisely when he got there. For all he knew, Meade would be right again this time.

  But even if George Meade was wrong, the order must be obeyed to its last letter. The greater point was obedience. An army could not function if the orders of its commanders went ignored or were amended to each subordinate’s liking. George Washington Getty had never disobeyed or delayed the execution of an order in his life. He believed his fellow officers respected that.