by Ralph Peters
How dare they? How dare Grant? Not twelve hours before, Meade had hoped their relationship, strained though it had become, was on the mend, given Grant’s promise to resubordinate the Ninth Corps. Now this. It was intolerable, insufferable. Obviously, Sherman—rumored to be half-mad, at the very least—had not laid eyes on the army’s casualty rolls: “… if Grant could inspire the Army of the Potomac to do a proper degree of fighting…” What had the Wilderness been? A cotillion? And the nearly two weeks of slaughter at Spotsylvania? Did that count for nothing? While Sherman engaged in faux maneuvers, a mere ballet, with old Joe Johnston? That redheaded ass might as well have drained his kidneys on the graves of the men who had fallen between the Rapidan and the North Anna.
And Sheridan! When young Wadsworth rode in and announced the vile little Irishman’s impending return to the army, after his extended absence on his vainglorious cavalcade, Grant had perked up like a hound at his master’s footsteps. Grant, who rarely engaged in profanity! What did he see in the filth spewed by that beastly little cretin, a man born to dig ditches and strutting about like some saloon Napoleon?
When the newspapers that reached the camp weren’t full of praise for Grant, they printed flamboyant nonsense about Sheridan. It was as if the Army of the Potomac had nothing to its credit worth the ink. Oh, Hancock might get a mention here and there. But everything else was Grant and Sheridan, Sheridan and Grant. The situation was infamous.
If it would not have been unmanly to do so in mid-campaign, he would have offered Grant his resignation. He had wanted to like Grant, done all he could to get along with the fellow. Now he wondered if he should not have resisted more firmly as Grant slaughtered a third of the army in his impulsive assaults. Had he betrayed the men whose command he cherished? Had he allowed himself to become a mere dogsbody?
Grant’s front-porch demeanor masked an astounding capacity for cruelty. Meade had noted—many had—the man’s distaste for the wounded or even for beef left pink by the headquarters cook, but the modest speech and slumping shoulders masked the iron willfulness of a Caesar.
Did Grant recognize its full extent himself? There were times when the man seemed a husk, emptied of substance. Judged plain at a first encounter, he masked wrath in homespun whispers and grew more indecipherable by the day.
And still Meade wished they might forge a cordial partnership. Even be friends.
What could Grant see in a snake like Sheridan?
Trembling with fury and wounded in spirit, even vaguely fearful, Meade paused in a stand of scrub pines that had been abused by passing soldiers. Amid the reeking evidence of man, he stood until he composed himself.
As he walked back toward the church, where shutters laid over pews served as headquarters desks, Humphreys intercepted him.
“George? I thought you might like to know … Hancock still reports nothing but skirmishing parties and stragglers to his front. And Warren’s probing forward. It looks as though we may have got off on the cheap.”
“Burnside?”
Humphreys’ expression grew quizzical. “Can’t make sense of the man. Writes those florid dispatches to Grant, all equivocation and obfuscation. I used to think he was being clever, now I’m convinced he doesn’t know his own mind.” The chief of staff tossed his hands in the air. “I think he’s across the river at Quarles’s Mill. But most of his force seems to be stuck at Ox Ford.”
“I told Grant the site was impossible,” Meade said.
Humphreys paused, then said, “I’m beginning to think you can’t tell Sam Grant anything.”
Still seething, Meade said, “I don’t care if Lee’s halfway to Richmond by now. I still believe we should have crossed the Pamunkey. You’re an engineer, Humph. You know that I was right.”
After delaying his reply by a few breaths, Humphreys said, “George, you’re a better man than any of them. But you have to act like one.”
Two p.m.
Ox Ford
First Sergeant Charles Brown said, “Just keep your heads down, damn it.”
The remnants of the 50th Pennsylvania clung to the earth, doing their best to hide in the island’s foliage. Two men had already been wounded from Company C, and Brown did not intend to lose any others, if he could help it. He only prayed that no idiot with shoulder straps was going to order an assault across the second channel and up those impossible banks.
The men had lain in the mud for over an hour as sharpshooters, perched high above them, aimed at disturbed leaves or moving branches. The only advantage Brown saw in the position was that the Johnnies could not tilt their artillery muzzles low enough to rake the island with canister.
“Now ain’t this one great, big verfluchte Dummheit?” Isaac Eckert asked all within hearing. “I suppose they sent us out here ‘chust for nice.’ Any man can see the sense of it, sag’ mal.”
“Next time you see him, ask General Burnside,” Brown told him.
“I’m growing so minded, First Sergeant. Just give me permission to go on back right now.”
Brown laughed despite himself. He was almost starting to like Isaac, who had slipped into Bill Wildermuth’s old role.
“I’ve noticed,” Brown said, “you get to talking Dutchie when you’re scared.”
Isaac guffawed. “That was true, First Sergeant, you wouldn’t hear anything else but Dutch come out my mouth.”
Somebody crashed through the bushes. Lieutenant Brumm dropped beside him.
“Any news, sir?”
“Nothing. I don’t know if they’ve forgotten us, or if we’re part of some grand scheme I haven’t the sense to figure. All Captain Schwenk knows is that he was ordered to take the regiment out here and wait.”
“Like I been saying,” Isaac put in. The two men ignored him.
Brown lowered his voice so that only Brumm could hear. “Think they’re going to order us up that bluff?”
Brumm, whose face wore an ugly rash, said, “Brownie, I don’t know any more than you do. And poor Schwenk’s still figuring out how to run a regiment. Or what’s left of one. All I can think is we’re here to hold the Rebs’ attention. While a crossing goes on someplace else.”
Isaac Eckert, who had inched closer when the voices dropped, said, “Wouldn’t mind letting somebody else take a turn at holding Lee’s attention. Seems we’ve been doing a fair amount of that.”
A flurry of shots probed the greenery.
“Stay down!” Brown called again. “Piss your pants, but nobody moves an inch.” In a lower tone, he told Brumm, “If they order us forward, let me slip ahead and size things up. You know how rivers cut under the banks at spots like this. Hard to get up, even when no one’s trying his best to kill you.”
Brumm said: “No. I can’t afford to lose you.” Another swarm of shots bit through the leaves above them, around them, behind them. No man cried out, a small blessing.
Close enough for Brown to smell him, Brumm mused, “I do miss Henry. He’s the man I would’ve sent. Not that I would’ve cared to risk him, either. Just always thought he had some kind of magic charm, doing all he did and never getting so much as a nick. That stunt you two pulled back there in the Wilderness.”
Brown said nothing.
Brumm went on: “I suppose you miss him. You seemed close.”
“Yeah.”
“Good man, Hill.”
“I’m glad he’s out of this,” Brown said. “I suppose they’ll send him back, when he’s healed up. But maybe the worst will be over by then.”
“With leg wounds, you never know.”
“He’ll be back. He’s that way.”
“Well, he’ll have a sergeant’s stripes, when he does.”
“He won’t want them.”
“I don’t care. He’ll wear them, because I’ll make him. Just like I made him put on those corporal’s stripes.” Smiling, Brumm patted Brown’s shoulder. “Remember how you didn’t—”
One shot and a small thud. Brumm groaned, rolled sideward.
“Sonofabit
ch,” the lieutenant muttered.
Brown scrambled over the endless inches to where the company commander lay on his back, rolling from side to side and clutching himself near the collarbone.
“Jesus,” Brumm said. “Jesus…”
“Isaac! Pick a man and get the lieutenant out of here.”
“They’ll shoot us down, second we try to move.”
“He’s bleeding a river. Get moving.”
“I’m all right,” Brumm insisted. “I can … get back on my own.” His face wore a constant grimace of pain. There was too much blood.
Brown felt along the pierced wet cloth.
The lieutenant jerked and cried out. Brumm was a hard one, tough as they came, and Brown could only figure the wound hurt like blazes. You just never knew. A man might not feel a blown-off leg, but suffer agony over a grazed elbow.
More bullets punched into their muddy jungle.
Brown and Isaac Eckert tugged the lieutenant forward to a sitting position, then got him to his knees. In a burst of movement, Isaac hauled Brumm to his feet and thrashed off with him, asking no other assistance.
“Don’t count on me rushing back, First Sergeant,” he called over his shoulder.
“The rest of you just stay down!” Brown roared. “It’s not a damned minstrel show.”
He regretted his increasingly frequent use of profanity. Frances didn’t approve of undignified speech.
But Frances wasn’t here, and these men were.
He was going to miss Brumm. He missed so many men now. He wondered how Doudle was doing in captivity, if he really had been sent to Andersonville. But Henry … he missed Henry Hill above all others, hoping, nonetheless, that his wound would be just bad enough to keep him out of the war for the duration. Which rumor held might end in weeks, even days. As bad as things had been, most of the soldiers Brown encountered agreed that the Rebs had gotten the worst of it.
Which was little consolation at the moment. If the regiment was ordered to assault across the second channel and go up that bluff, it was going to be the Wilderness and Spotsylvania both tossed in one sack for the men engaged.
He truly was glad that Henry wasn’t present.
After all the wild ordeals they had gone through together, Henry’s wounding had been empty of drama, almost trivial. Near the end of the last assault at Spotsylvania, the 50th had been ordered forward to make a charge. But before they stepped off for the assault, the order had come to halt in place. The day’s attacks were over. Just then, Henry had staggered, as if he had stumbled over a hidden rock. Jigging a few steps forward from the line, he seemed unable to control one of his legs. He didn’t utter a sound.
In moments, Henry had mastered himself, turned around, and started back, using his rifle as a crutch, with blood shining through the fingers he pressed to his thigh. Brown had rushed forward to help him, but stopped short. Other men, lower in rank, had stepped up to assist Henry to the rear, and Brown had greater duties to perform. They had not had time to exchange a word, and by the time the 50th returned to what passed for a camp, Henry had been taken off in an ambulance wagon. He had just put on his corporal’s chevrons that morning.
Brown hoped, assumed, that his friend would keep his leg. He wanted him out of the war, not destroyed as a man.
Gathering himself, Brown rose to a crouch and dashed along the company line, chased by zipping bullets and the thud of rounds hitting wood. It wasn’t a very long line these days.
He dropped beside Bill Hiney, who had been promoted from sergeant to lieutenant the year before, moved to another company, then come back again.
“Brumm’s been shot,” Brown told him. Anticipating the question in Hiney’s eyes, he added, “Collarbone, I think. Should be all right. Just bleeding like the dickens. Sent him back. With Isaac.”
“If they don’t get shot crossing back over the damned creek,” Hiney said.
“You have the company now, sir.”
“Brownie, can’t you just call me ‘Bill’? At least, when it’s just the two of us?”
“Don’t want to get in the habit.”
Hiney shook his head. “Christ, I didn’t want this.”
“That’s what everybody says,” Brown told him.
Three thirty p.m.
Confederate lines
“Give it to them! Pour it on!” Oates shouted.
And his men surely did. Yankees came on across a bare-ass field, cocksure, maybe even brave enough, overrunning his advanced rifle pits and those to left or right. The blue-bellies were out to do business, but seemed surprised when the 15th Alabama and the regiments to its flanks popped up from their entrenchments, the ditches a tad too much like stretched-long graves for Oates’ predilection but good for keeping a dead-tired man alive when somebody lacking a ditch of his own had a mind to kill him.
Sun was Alabama hot, and they’d been allotted a stretch that lacked a well. Mouths so dry it felt like a man’s whiskers were growing in, not outward.
The Yankees yelled and hollered, angry as chained dogs taunted by boys, cursing proud enough to be heard all the way to Montgomery, but they paused out there, thinking hard on what they’d come up against, firing steadily enough, even as their ranks broke into little groups, some of the men smart enough to kneel to fire, steadying those long, heavy barrels while making themselves as small as they could get.
“You’re shooting like damned girls,” Oates berated his soldiers, angry again for not much of a reason, if any reason at all. He was angry near all the time now. “Load faster, shoot truer. Damn it, Carter, you need me to load that shooting stick for you?”
His men were just worn out. But somehow they had reared up for the fight again. Never ceased to be a source of wonder how a man too tired to eat could rouse himself like a horned devil when the chance for killing came.
Yankees weren’t quitting, but they surely were not getting the best of it, either. Dropping here and there. But they were veterans, those bluecoat sonsofbitches, see that much in how they handled themselves. Kept off at a fair range, not ready to be slaughtered outright, if they could help it. Waiting for some general to decide something or other.
Numbers were a good sight less than even, much in the Southron favor, it seemed to Oates. Yankee officers seemed uncertain, strutting around to confer behind their men, as if they had stumbled on something unexpected and were struggling to figure out whether it was a yellow dog or a rhinoceros. Fool could see that any one of the generals Oates and his fellow colonels answered to, any one of them with gumption, could order a counterattack to sweep from one flank right to the other. Scoop those suckers right up, killed, crippled, or captured, made no never mind.
“Passive.” That was the word. For all the spilled-out bellies and brains, it seemed to Oates that things above the stand-up-and-shoot level had gone passive. As if the gold-braid generals had decided to have them a few rounds of poker and let things hang.
This here was a golden opportunity. And opportunities didn’t last forever.
Oates noted that Major Lowther, who finally had seen fit to return to the regiment, kept himself low, clutching his hat to his head as if he could squeeze himself shorter. Man was worthless as a tramped-on turd, and harder to get rid of than the itch.
Billy Strickland came up on him, speaking a shared thought.
“Sir, why don’t we just go on out there and get them? Bag ’em all, and call it a good day’s hunting?”
“No damned orders,” Oates said.
Five p.m.
Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia
“We must strike them a blow!” Lee cried out. Or believed he did. “Never let them pass us again. Strike them a blow!”
The tent was hot and fetid, the air funereal. The stink was worse than the slave quarters on an ill-managed plantation. What time was it? There was still time. There had to be. He had to rise. Couldn’t. Try again.
He could not even raise his shoulders from the soiled cot.
“Strike them a bl
ow!” he commanded.
Had Marshall come in? Where was Marshall? Taylor? Venable … Venable had made him sick with his attentions … terrible …
When he opened his eyes, they would not focus. When he closed them, the universe swirled, threatening to spin him into oblivion.
His body felt raw, as if scalded. He had begun to vomit, adding to his afflictions.
Doctors. No help. Not one of them.
Had to strike them a blow …
There was still time, he was certain.
If Longstreet …
In a lucid moment, he remembered someone begging him to give the order to attack, telling him those people were in disarray, vulnerable, unsuspecting. But even in his sickness, he had known that he dared not trust his army to Ewell, who was ill himself, or to Anderson, who lacked sufficient experience, or to Hill … who had let those people cross the river.
Only he could lead the army now. No one else. His army …
A face, two faces split from one, hovered over him. He closed his eyes to make them go away. So terrible they were, dreadful, a man split in two.
He knew that face. Did he not? Those faces …
“Did you call out, sir? General Lee, will you order the attack? We’re running out of time, sir.”
Lee tried to understand the words. He had heard them, heard each one distinctly, but they did not fit together.
“We must strike them a blow,” he said. But he could not hear his voice.
Six p.m.
North of Hanover Junction
Barlow scribbled in the saddle:
Major General Hancock,
The enemy is not withdrawing. He has entrenched. Resistance is sturdy. Prisoners report that Ewell’s entire corps waits in our path. I do not think it wise to press the attack, unless to relieve pressure on Gibbon, and prefer to entrench at our forward-most positions.
Your obedient servant,
F. C. Barlow
Brigadier General
“Black, take this to Hancock yourself. Wait for an answer. And I don’t need a written order, if he’s pressed.”
The aide saluted, turned his mount, and applied the spurs.
