The Damned of Petersburg

by Ralph Peters

  He had clutched the command, gnawed by the injustice done him, reminded of it each day because Law’s Brigade was held in reserve and his 48th tented right beside the dastardly Lowther and his 15th Alabama. His days were as bitter as wormwood.

  His mother did love that expression: “My days are as bitter as wormwood.” She would shake her head and speak in the glory voice, though not at the volume, of a circuit preacher, the sort who rode a mule, not a horse, and had mastered the cadence of the Holy Bible, of speech impregnable. His mother and her chore-burnished faith in the Lord. On a swept-clean porch, she would mouth those words with a lean sort of affection, as if complaint were a thing to be nursed and cherished.

  Complaint, that ready delight of hard-used folk, song of his blood.

  Oates stood with folded arms, watching the men devour the watermelons, their cheeks shining with drip. His back was to the river in the distance, turned resolutely to the Yankee gunboats, inured to their occasional puffs of devilment, the range too long for the shells to do him one-tenth the evil Lowther had done unto him.

  Washington had encamped on this very spot, so it was said, with his army triumphant. Just after Yorktown. The echo was pleasant, but Oates wasn’t blithe about another such victory, here, with his people pressed against Richmond by the Yankees. Who kept coming on again and again, drab devils.

  Oates didn’t take to feeling cornered.

  Well, you just had to face it one fight at a time. And not overponder.

  Still, it had been a queer sort of relief when, two days before, they had been ordered down the New Market Road, where the Yankees had stirred up a fuss. And then they had marched back again, after the scrap went quits. Nothing to it but the heat and dust.

  He watched, bemused, as a first few men strayed over from the camp of the 15th, slavering, enticed. As if by Eve herself. By watermelons as tempting as Delilah, as plain a come-hither as a lifted skirt. Oates understood desire. And he watched them come, watched them edge their way in, watched them take the offered fruit in hand, intruders teased but tolerated. His men, new and old.

  More of the boys from the 15th brisked their way over, hound dogs on the scent. Just too many, and it would not do. They had to learn that this fruit, this gift, was for his new men now. Let Lowther, the tightfisted bastard, scour his own purse. Let him buy a treat for the men he’d stolen away. Let him burn.

  Oates strode forward, hip not much of a bother this ripe day, maybe heat-soothed, and he said, “You men there. Cates, Jones, Kirby. Rest of you. Those melons are for the Forty-eighth, and they won’t stretch. Y’all get back to your camp.” He could not help but add, “I’m sure Colonel Lowther’s got watermelons coming.”

  “Aw, Colonel. There’s plenty enough.”

  Oates shook his head. “I don’t see it, and don’t you sass me, Farley. You get along now. Take what you have in hand and go your way. Hear?”

  And go they did, in sorrow. Cut down to sulking children. War made a man a creature of dependencies, waiting, helpless, for rations, garments, orders. Independent fellows who would have beaten and perhaps slain the man who took a tone of command with them back in low-country Alabama, his realm, or in the hills that spat out the 48th, these hill men who had brethren of Yankee leanings and no love for the Confederacy, men without niggers who couldn’t see fighting to keep niggers where they belonged, men from hills where only white faces showed themselves and lived, particular people who wished to be left alone, yet here they were, almost three hundred still, now that he had drained the Richmond hospitals.

  He had taken over this rump of a regiment, men who had strayed from discipline, and he had let them know that the days of slumped shoulders were over. He’d drilled them hard, hardest on his captains and lieutenants, and they had not troubled him much, for they knew his reputation for knocking down any man who needed knocking down, and he had led them in battle and well, and for all the groggy, sun-ain’t-up-yet murmurings, the truth was that they wanted a firm hand, desired it as a woman desired things she could not admit.

  He had taken on Richmond, menacing clerks not only with requisition forms, but with generous hints of violence, and he had gotten his new men better rations—such as they were—and new uniforms and even replacement rifles for the worst his inspections discovered. His little regiment was the best-looking outfit in Law’s Brigade these days, and he had done that in a matter of weeks, let Lowther get down on his knees and lick his ass.

  He burned with hellfire each time he saw that man.

  Joe Hardwick, a lieutenant of some grip, stepped up to Oates. He held out a cut of watermelon. “You’ll join the men, sir? Have yourself a piece?”

  Oates remembered Billy Hardwick, young Joe’s elder brother, from the brigade’s old days. Two blinks after his promotion to lieutenant colonel, Billy had been captured by the Yankees and not heard of since.

  Thick-bearded and dark of mien, a purposeful man and let every last soul know it, the new commanding officer of the 48th Alabama, William C. Oates, Colonel, CSA, pending confirmation by the august powers, shook his head as if declining to buy a fine hog cheap.

  “You eat that up,” he told the lieutenant. “Never cared for watermelon myself.” A lie, a gargantuan lie! But the men had to know that the melons were for them, not purchased to satiate a colonel’s craving.

  Oates had satisfied a deeper craving on one foray into Richmond. He had asked after a house where the girls were clean and had taken his chances with pink, quivering flesh, that other rich and immemorial pulp. And he seemed to have come through unscathed. Despite the odds.

  He might have lingered, but he’d been repulsed by the unclean sheets he’d only noticed when done with his doings. Even a whore had no cause to be a slattern.

  Different standard for colored gals, of course, and he’d always been fond of them, of their engulfing scent and merry laughter. But a man didn’t dare touch that sort around here, given all the contagion. He’d lost good men that way. So the best on offer had been that bored, too-costly white woman, a creature of painted nails and dirty toes, a slut who hardly bothered to lace her gown up between callers: a full month’s pay in worthless money for a damned poor ride. Well, that about summed up the entire Confederacy, did it not?

  Things hadn’t worked out quite the way they’d reckoned.

  Oates’ eyes tracked Captain Wiggenton and waved him over through the shimmering air.

  Passing a rind to his left hand, J.W. saluted with his right. “Yes, sir?”

  “You let your brother officers know that I want the entire regiment turned out. Soon as the heat breaks. Get in an hour of drill before dark settles.”

  “Sir, I don’t know as I’d say this heat ever breaks.”

  “Well, then you turn ’em out when you think I think it breaks.” Oates refolded his arms, letting his hard face harden even more. “And don’t you ever back-talk me again, not even a hint. Hear?”

  “Sir, I—”

  “You go on now. Do just what I told you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Before the younger man could flick a salute and move along, the captain’s eyes jumped to another target. Behind Oates.

  Oates turned and found Colonel Lowther striding up, dressed in every last inch of braid a colonel commanding was authorized. Too damned hot for that kind of fuss, but Lowther did enjoy his one-man parades.

  “You go on now,” Oates told the captain. “Git.”

  Lowther drew up a few feet away, as if he preferred not to smell Oates up too close. Or, perhaps, get his jaw broken.

  “Oates, I’m told you’ve been luring my men with watermelons. Without asking my permission. As an officer and a gentleman, I must ask you—”

  “Lowther,” Oates said, “you clear out of my camp. And keep your boys out of my camp. If they’ll listen to you.” He narrowed his eyes. “As for watermelons, you sonofabitch, I look at you and know just where one’d fit.”

  Early evening, July 29

  Union Ninth Corps, Peter
sburg lines

  “Think that mine’ll work?” Sergeant Eckert asked in his don’t-trust-one-thing voice. “Think she’ll go up?”

  “Be quiet, Levi,” Brown said. “Let Sam call the roll.”

  “Nobody’s missing.” Eckert scratched inside his shirt. “’Least, not yet.”

  “Quiet.”

  First Sergeant Losch read the too-brief list of names. Unable to stand in ranks, the men of Company C sat on the firing stoop or squatted along the trench walls, tanned by dust and darkened with sweat but sheltered from the Johnnies a shout away, just up the slope. Johnnies who took a mind to shoot now and then. Levi was right, of course. Brevet Lieutenant Charles Brown knew the whereabouts of every man he led: fifty-four in all. And only that many because of returned convalescents. The only time a man left the baking trench was to lug the slops buckets back through the traverses—a duty some men sought for a break in the boredom—or to fill canteens or bring up hot eats or mail. Or for Brown to report back to regiment that nothing much had changed. Or for orders that only warned of more orders to come.

  Today’s orders had been unwelcome.

  A few months before, men told they’d attack in the morning would have grown agitated, flaring at little things and scribbling letters. Dulled now, like knives used badly, they cleaned their rifles by rote and tried not to think. But men who had once slept soundly would shout in the dark.

  Brown hoped he wasn’t one of those who cried out. If he was, no one ever told him. But his dreams, too, were unsettled.

  He needed to be steady, to remain sound.

  Peering down the trench as the men responded to rasped-out names, Brown knew the faces, the habits, the man-by-man smells, of those left on the roster. Most were friends or acquaintances from home, canal boatmen just as he’d been and hoped to be again. With his own boat, bought clear. A man of property.

  The roll call echoed unspoken names, as well.

  So many, so terribly many, had died, not least his brother Benjamin, dead of a fever at Vicksburg, on the banks of a river grander than the Schuylkill, sweating out his life atop bluffs that belonged to a different world. Since May, though, the pace of the killing had passed all decency. In April, Brown had been a corporal, in May a sergeant and then first sergeant. In June, with the last of the officers dead or wounded, he had been anointed an “acting” lieutenant, waiting for orders to make the rank real and leading the survivors of Company C of the 50th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry. Even the regiment’s former colonel, lifted up to brigade command, had been wounded in one of the useless assaults made after the army snuggled up to Petersburg. The tally of dead, wounded, or missing exceeded the number of voices that answered, “Here!”

  All the dead friends, the comrades. Others suffered captivity, like the Israelites in a sermon. Jake Guertler had died in one of the last assaults, just a month after Jake’s brother Bill had been captured at Spotsylvania. Taken, along with a dozen other men from Company C. Poor Johnny Doudle, who had dreaded becoming a prisoner, had been collared by scarecrow Rebs. As Brown looked on, helpless, across a swale.

  He did hope Doudle was faring all right, that he was still alive.

  And his own best friend, Henry Hill, who had made a madman’s stand back in the Wilderness, had been wounded the day the others had been captured. Henry, at least, would return. To endure an unsought and unwanted promotion to sergeant. Brown missed Henry, couldn’t wait to see him again. Sometimes, Brown feared he missed him more than his brother.

  A terrible time it had been, all senselessness. Hard to say which day had been the worst since they waded the Rapidan, but that charge at Spotsylvania was up for the prize.

  First Sergeant Losch crabbed along the trench, waving off swarming flies. “All men present, Lieutenant. All those fit for duty. In dieser Schweinerei.”

  Lieutenant. The rank still sat uneasily, but the men had taken his promotion well. And that was the hardest thing: These men whose kin he knew by first names all, they trusted him now. Even as Brown had to struggle to trust himself. By the magic of rank alone he’d become their father. But a father destined to kill at least a few of them, Isaacs to his Abraham, with no hope of an angel’s hand to rescue them.

  What would Pastor Colley say to that?

  “The two days’ rations? For the men to carry?”

  “Verdammt noch mal. They’re coming. The boys try, but the commissary comes late.”

  The commissary sergeants were all squeezers, heartless as missies raised up in brick houses. In the army, you were always at the mercy of someone or something. They got fresh rations now, but mess chums couldn’t cook them in the trench line, and the company had to slop its vittles together in the rear. Then the eats had to come up through the traverses. The day past, a boy had been wounded scurrying up and the stew got spilled.

  Of course, there had been times aplenty when they all would have been thrilled by the thought of beef fresh and free of maggots, no matter how late it might have been served or the risk involved in the carrying. But memories never helped an angry belly.

  Losch shook his big Dutch head. “Since I am first sergeant, I think I hate sergeants more.”

  Brown smiled. Losch was the best choice left for his position, since his Dutch-talk helped with the boys who struggled with English. Brown glanced from Losch to Levi Eckert, the latter a sharp-dealing man even with his relatives, a conniver who had once tried to cheat a cousin out of a new-gotten pair of socks. But Levi was a fury in a fight, the men respected that. And his stripes seemed to have changed him, at least tolerably. Levi would never have sewn on those stripes but for the frightful losses, but, Brown knew full well, neither would he have had a flea’s chance of wearing a second lieutenant’s shoulder strap.

  “Anybody sick yet?” Brown asked. “From that pie?”

  “They will be,” Levi put in.

  Losch grunted and said, “I call up more shit pails. Such Dreck a man puts in his mouth.”

  Brown smiled without merriment. “Would’ve gobbled it down our gullets at Knoxville.”

  “This ain’t Knoxville,” Levi said.

  “I don’t know which ist mir lieber,” Losch said. “Here or there.”

  “Take the heat over the cold myself,” Levi told him. “Keeps off the rheumatism.”

  Losch shook his head. “Mag die Hitze nicht.”

  “Sam, the boys got you talking all Dutch again,” Brown teased. Reaching for better spirits.

  The young first sergeant shrugged. “My mother is speaking nothing else, you know. I write to her and confuse myself with words.” Losch smiled, sighed. “Ach, die Mutti.”

  And they pondered the bloody-footed winter past. Then they thought on the molasses pie Jack Fritz’s mother had sent him through the mails, a mad thing to do. The pie had arrived broken into mold-coated crumbs. But Jack—over howls of disgust—had scraped off the filth and shared the remains with his butties.

  Well, if a man didn’t sicken from one thing, he would from another. Hard enough it was, even now, for Brown to drink water all wiggling. Or to squat over a slops bucket teeming with worms.

  Although he’d lived poor as a child and always worked with his hands, Brown was a fastidious man. That was how Frances put it. “Fastidious.” He had needed to figure out what she meant the first time she used the word. But she did claim she liked cleanliness in a caller. And he’d always swabbed down the deck of his boat at day’s end and kept his ropes properly coiled. In another world.

  Frances. His betrothed. He imagined her at her piano, in her mother’s parlor. His Frances, kind-eyed and soft. In his big, bruised hand, her fingers had looked so delicate that he hesitated to grasp them. He was the one who refused to marry until the war was done. Too many widows in Schuylkill Haven already. She deserved more.

  Brown sought to be a good man, to get through the war without turning bad forever, to be deserving of the things he wanted. But there were times when he sensed a beast inside, sharp-clawed, on a chain that might
break at a tug.

  Even in this world of beards and whiskers, Brown shaved close. As if a clean face promised a clean life. He longed to wash himself white again, to scrub off the filth of war, afraid that the dirt had already gone too deep.

  The endless heat. At times, it seemed worst in the evenings. Heavier. Stale. He pushed back his cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead and eyes. Fit to cook a man, it was, even under a strip of canvas.

  Even the longed-for rain days back had seemed to fall at a boil. And the mud that swamped the trenches had tortured them all before turning to dust again.

  Brown wasn’t fond of Virginia. Or of much else, at present.

  He slapped at the flies and Levi aped his gesture. Sam Losch grunted again, too hot to bother.

  “Well?” Levi said. “Seeing as how the company business is done for the next ten minutes, let me ask the opinion of the high-and-mighty Lieutenant Charles Brown. Before old Useless Grant himself sends down for his advice.” Levi fussed at the dirt with a sliver splintered from a crate. “Think those pit-boys from north of the mountain can make their damned mine work? Blow our Confederate brethren to Hell for breakfast?”

  Brown wasn’t minded to think on that too hard, given the prospects. Rumors had blazed down the trenches all day. The 50th and the rest of Willcox’s division—even the reserves held back by the railroad—had received abrupt orders to support an assault planned for the morning. Company C would be relieved just after dark so it could pull back and form with the rest of the regiment. So they could go forward again. After the “secret” mine was blown, the mine that was known to every skulker and sutler.

  And if the mine failed? They’d probably go forward anyway. Once the army started in to doing something, it was hard to stop the doing, even after it stopped making any sense. Until enough blood had been spilled for the generals to show they’d made an effort.