The Damned of Petersburg

by Ralph Peters

  He fell into someone’s arms. He believed he could see again—light filtered through blood—but he could not focus. Letting himself be all but carried rearward, he tried to speak, to order his men to withdraw, but his jaw wouldn’t help.

  “What’s happening?” he tried to say. And failed.

  Blurred forms manhandled him back into the ditch.

  “What happened?” he struggled to ask. He knew, but he didn’t know. Flashes of memory dizzied him, the blow repeating itself.

  Someone poured water over his face.

  “The men…,” he said.

  “You shush now, Colonel,” a startlingly tender voice told him. “Just shush. You all be fixed right up.”

  He could see. But not well. So many faces. Black giving way to white. The devil’s own bang-up racket. All around him. Inside his head.

  The hurt started up, abrupt and overwhelming.

  He groaned, slipped. Strong arms braced him up.

  Men hoisted him over a parapet. He understood they were taking him back to the Union lines. They were carrying him, strong arms in lieu of a litter. And as they left the trenches he had entered less than half an hour before, a flinty Northern voice remarked, “Well, so much for the coons.”

  Eight thirty a.m.

  Confederate lines below the cemetery

  Billy Mahone was sorry he hadn’t had time for his eggs and milk. Made for an angry belly, burning hot, as if he’d drunk acid. But if his guts were in a temper, he supposed it was fitting enough. The rest of him was in a temper, too.

  Yankees were using nigger troops against white men. Stunned him, when he heard it. The mine was bestial enough, but arming darkies and turning them loose on white men … the swine who would do such a thing would loose them on white women, too.

  Mahone had possessed seven slaves, accidents of inheritance and dowry, and found they were more trouble than they were worth. Didn’t care to have them too near, either, crowding a house. He’d sold off five, including a truculent cook and her brats, and reckoned he was stuck with his wife’s fuss-gal and his body servant, a boy who never failed to find his appetite. Times were when Mahone was uncertain as to who was tending who, given the Negro’s genius for intractability and general not-doing. And when you got to railroad work, fact was that paid men, black or white, worked harder. Better to hire those you needed, cooks or gandy dancers. As long as a fellow wasn’t afraid to sweat, he’d take on a Chinaman.

  He considered himself a practical-minded, modern man, an engineer, a builder of railroads. Privately, he’d long believed that slavery was a rickety undertaking, pitiful for everyone involved. But the men who held his railway bonds didn’t know how to get out from under it. Take his slaves, and the rich man was a bankrupt, cracker-poor.

  And Mahone remembered his father rowing his family out on the river, fleeing Nat Turner’s marauders. The notion that Negroes and whites should commingle in society was as repugnant as it was damn-fool. That was the nut of the problem, and the Yankees just ignored it. Be a different story, though, once free darkies niggered up their cities and pawed their womenfolk.

  Squatting at the drain end of a shallow ravine, Mahone fumed and listened as Lieutenant Colonel McMaster, a South Carolina man who’d been fighting since dawn, sketched a map in the dust and explained the respective positions. McMaster was sound. Unlike old Bushrod Johnson and too many others.

  Mahone had ridden ahead of his troops to gather information, but Johnson’s headquarters had been little help and the general himself had been more concerned with his breakfast—while a line thinned to emaciation held back a feast of Yankees. The most Johnson offered was a lieutenant to guide Mahone up to the lines. Where he and McMaster had found each other, to their mutual relief.

  “See here,” the Carolinian said, “this here’s the ravine and here’s us.” He traced southward. “That’s as far as I took you, up where it shallows out.” The stick moved eastward. “You saw them. Across that open stretch. Say three hundred, maybe three-fifty yards. Plenty of hogs to hunt over in that hollow.”

  “Still can’t believe they used niggers,” Mahone said.

  “Reckon they ran out of white men willing to go. Here now, General. They’ve got the pit and maybe a hundred and fifty yards of our entrenchments to the north. Less to the south, I’d judge. Can’t say to a certainty.”

  Mahone shook his head. Noise, heat, bile. “That’s a bit more than General Johnson claimed.”

  “Haven’t seen him up here,” McMaster noted, not without spleen.

  “How many?”

  McMaster shrugged. “Lord knows. Plenty. Thousands.” Gaze drifting, he calculated. “Maybe five or six thousand. In the fight proper.” He raised an eyebrow, skeptical of his own words. “I could be off a good lick. How many men you have, General?”

  Mahone smiled, not happily. “Two brigades coming up now. Eight hundred Virginians, about six hundred Georgians.”

  Neither man remarked that numbers that low weren’t truly brigades, but regiments with an extra ration of flags.

  “My Alabama boys are set to follow,” Mahone added, hoping it was true. “Be some hours, though. Have to make do, in the meantime.”

  After learning from Beauregard how desperate the crisis had grown, he had dispatched a note to his corps commander, asking that his Alabama Brigade be sent up, too. The detachment left back in the rifle pits would have to make do with bluff and paper dolls.

  A man had to take action and bear the risks. He reckoned A. P. Hill would see that, too.

  Mahone’s aide, Girardey, emerged from the covered way behind the ravine. Mahone had worked him hard and the captain’s uniform was dark as a Yankee’s with sweat.

  “Come on over here, Victor. Show you how I want the brigades set in.”

  Born French and raised Deep South, Girardey squatted down beside the two officers and studied the dirt map. Mahone explained it precisely as McMaster had done.

  “Does seem a challenge, sir,” the captain said. His face sharpened. “Wounded fellow back a ways claimed the Yankees put in their Negroes.”

  “That’s a fact,” McMaster said.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “No,” Mahone told the younger, taller man. “They’ll be damned. You wait.”

  Eight forty-five a.m.

  61st Virginia, Weisiger’s Brigade, Mahone’s Division

  First Lieutenant John T. West led his company out of the covered way. General Mahone stood waiting at the foot of a swale. It sounded as though all the devils in Hell were at work.

  West had pondered Hell. Born into the Methodist Church, he felt that he had only truly become a Methodist the past winter, when Man the Fallen’s eternal prospects had revealed themselves to him at a camp revival. Since then, he had sought to live as properly as a soldier could, preparing himself to face the Judgment Seat.

  First, he had to pass muster with Billy Mahone, a short man with a long beard and a manner that lit men up, parson or profane.

  As the troops passed by, Mahone addressed them in a voice stripped raw: “Remember your homes, men, remember old Norfolk. Our fine city, under the Yankee boot. And you get angry, you get yourselves right angry. Because you’re going to charge when I say ‘Charge,’ and you’re going to whup the goddamned Yankees, and you’re going to do it without stopping to shoot until you get to the trenches they stole this morning. And then you’re going to give them the bayonet, hear?” The little man’s eyes were molten. “One more thing now. Yankees sent in their coons. That’s right, boys, niggers in soldier suits. Schooled to kill the white man.” His voice didn’t rise but tightened until it was narrow as a blade. “Show them no quarter. They raised the black flag and showed your brothers none. I’m not of a mind to bother about prisoners.”

  Mahone paused to let the words strike deep before repeating the speech to the next span of troops. West followed the regimental column up into the swale, where General Weisiger and Captain Girardey guided men into position.

  Two
small mortars had been positioned halfway up the depression, stumpy weapons hurling balls in a high arc, and powder-grimed men sprawled up on the rim of the swale, firing at the Yankees, but the Virginia brigade was ordered to hunker down and keep out of sight.

  The news that Negro troops were in the fight riled up the men. They spoke of it with heathen spite, without the least Christian mercy. Nor did West feel merciful himself. This fight would not be one for gentlemen or for New Testament Christians. The lessons would be culled from Kings and Joshua.

  “Officers of the Sixty-first!” Colonel Stewart called as he prowled their rear. “Company officers, in your turn! You slide on up and take a look at the ground we’re going to cross. Don’t make some damned show of it, stay down. Yankees don’t need to know we’re coming their way. But have yourselves a look, you take it in. Don’t want my officers peeing their drawers when they’re ordered to go forward.”

  Stewart’s officers wouldn’t pee their drawers. The colonel knew that, and so did those he commanded. Still, when West’s turn came, he was appalled. What he could see of the Yankee position crawled like a kicked-up anthill. Rifles blazed forbiddingly from the busted-up ground, and so many flags poked the air he couldn’t count them.

  First Lieutenant John T. West commended his soul to Jesus Christ, his Savior, and regretted failing to bid his brothers farewell. He would’ve liked to see Norfolk County again, but it didn’t seem likely.

  Nine a.m.

  Mahone’s Division

  “General, they’re coming!” Girardey hollered from the top of the bank.

  At first, Mahone assumed his aide had spied his Georgia brigade, which had fallen behind unaccountably. But Girardey’s attention was elsewhere.

  The Yankees were getting ready to charge. Before he could charge them himself.

  Mahone yelled, “Find Weisiger. Tell him to charge. We’ll go it with the old brigade alone.”

  No damned choice.

  Girardey dashed up the ravine, heading toward the shallow end, hunting the brigade’s commander. Three hundred yards off, the Yankees piled out of the captured trenches, forming up where Mahone had meant to strike.

  When he couldn’t spot Weisiger, Girardey ran out in front of the brigade. Drawing his sword, he shouted, “Virginia! Forward!”

  Nine a.m.

  61st Virginia

  As the Virginia brigade rose and burst from the swale, screaming like devils on fire, First Lieutenant West felt he wasn’t so much running as flying toward the Yankees, hurled through the air by invigorating, unchristian, howling, shed-blood hatred.

  The Rebel yell had never had such bite to it, the battle flag had never shone so mean-heart crimson, and it was no time or place for pretty ranks, just every last man aware that the trick was to get across that lonely eternity of open ground and leap in among the Yankees, black or white, just get on into those trenches and get to killing.

  Glancing left and right, reveling in the splendor of the charge for one cut of a second, bedazzled by the martial beauty, West yipped and yelled along with the men beside him, sword in his right hand, pistol in his left, running straight for the blue caps and blue-clad shoulders—grown ever closer—and the orange-flame-spitting muzzles piercing the dust and smoke. They hadn’t even got to the Yankees when they came up on the first stray darkies and, disdaining to waste bullets, clubbed and bayoneted them in passing, the joy of the deed transcendent, almost as rich as congress with a woman.

  A Negro in blue rose up, then dropped to his knees in front of West, calling, “Let me come over, boss. I done, I done.”

  And West, despite himself, waved off a soldier about to kill the pitiful swine masquerading as a human, telling his fellow grayback, “Plenty ahead to shoot. Let that one go.”

  Then they were truly flying, leaping piled dirt and careening into the ditches held by the Yankees. Shrieking with blood-want and rapture, they shot, clubbed, swung, stabbed, punched, and ripped flesh, splashing the blood of white men and colored, daubing the air scarlet, spraying each other, slapped in the face by man-meat torn away, all amid profanity sublime and hate-sweat and guts ripped forth by withdrawn bayonets, man-belly caught on blades and dragged out like sausages.

  Shouting mindless, meaningless orders, West rushed along a traverse. Where it bent back, he found a passel of white Yankees. Two of them lowered their muskets toward his middle.

  Diving across another blue-belly, he leapt atop one rifle and batted the other away, too drunk with fury to marvel at himself. His soldiers were with him again, slaying Yankees mightily, and West beat both the Yankees who’d want to kill him over their heads with his pistol’s butt and the hilt of his sword, Christian faith suspended, bashing them as a wicked child might crush a crippled rabbit with a rock.

  Somebody said General Weisiger was belly-shot, but it meant little, for Colonel Stewart, a closer presence, rampaged wild among them, driving his men forward, an inspiration.

  “West,” Stewart called, “you clean out that next ditch.” Then the colonel told a terrified, cowering Yankee officer, “You want to be spared, you git off to the rear, back thataway. I’m not about to coddle you sonsofbitches.”

  Billy Pate, who’d popped up for a look across the parapet, dropped back down, cackling, gleeful, and said, “Nigs is running like the hounds are on ’em.”

  Stewart, still near, said, “Well, they ain’t all running. Look to it, boys.”

  West led. Men followed. And it was true: Not all of the coloreds had run. They collided with a fierce bunch. Billy Pate shoved his bayonet into a man so deeply that he couldn’t pull it back out and a black soldier slugged him with the stock of his rifle. Pate reeled, but he wouldn’t go down. The Negro hit him again.

  West put his sword through the man’s throat. On his right, Jere Tompkins clashed rifle against rifle with a big Negro, both men baring their teeth like dogs, until a bullet fired from inches away blew the Yankee’s brains out the side of his skull. That just enraged Billy Pate, who screamed, “I got nigger mess all over me, there’s nigger blood all over me.”

  The melee soon turned in favor of West’s kind, with the last blue-clads beaten groundward, the trench a trough of blood and soldiers bashing and stabbing the wounded and dying as if the next step might be to devour their flesh.

  A Reb West didn’t recognize, a man addled in with the 61st in the course of the fighting, bayoneted a Negro over and over, stopped to puke on the man, gasped, wiped his maw, and bayoneted him some more, telling the corpse, “Git up, you nigger sonofabitch, git up.” He was still tormenting the body as West moved on.

  A fellow Johnny waved a captured Union flag and was shot in the back for his troubles. Then West found himself suddenly alone, fending off two taunting blacks with his sword, parrying their bayonets, forced backward until he stumbled over a corpse.

  “We got ’em for you, Lieutenant,” a familiar voice assured him. Prematurely.

  In the ensuing brawl, one of his own men stabbed West in the shoulder.

  It hurt like mortal sin. With an instant, burning hurt. Dropping his empty pistol and clutching the wound, West toppled onto a writhing, blood-bubbling Negro. The darkey tried to bite him, going at his neck right through the collar, and got a bayonet through the eye as his reward.

  West hoped he hadn’t got Negro blood in his wound.

  Nine twenty a.m.

  30th U.S. Colored Troops

  “Rally, rally!” Sergeant Offer cried. Enraged and shamed, he clubbed a fleeing soldier with his rifle, then grabbed a molasses-toned coward by his sleeve. “Washington, turn your behind around, you stand right here and fight.”

  But the lad, who had battled bravely minutes before, had been rendered meek and fearful by the turn of things. When the Rebs descended mercilessly upon them, the best men had fought and fallen, unleashing a panic that ran through the rest like cholera through a plantation.

  When Offer released his grip, the private shriveled like a forgotten apple. Then he skedaddled.

&nbs
p; Not all of the 30th ran, though. Even now, men fought. Offer gave up his attempt at rallying others and, face bleeding and uniform torn, rejoined those with the deep-down strength to fight on. A few of the white officers had run, too, but most had either died or stayed with their charges. They tried to give orders but could do no more than hold some survivors in place, bitter-hearted, disappointed black men firing and reloading and firing again, shooting toward wicked enemies yards away, unwilling to be made less than they had come to believe they deserved to be, their embarrassment as fierce as the mark of Cain.

  Enemies? Despite his share of trials and tribulations over the years, despite a lifetime of seeing in men’s eyes and hearing in their voices how little they valued him, John Offer had never grasped how many lurking enemies he faced. All because of the color of his skin, a curious, incidental, indelible thing. He had known the Rebs for his foe-men, but the shock of his life had come as the 30th first fell back, fighting sharply as it withdrew, only to meet volleys from the rear as men in the same blue uniforms shot down Colored Troops and cursed them, even bayoneted them, driving them off in slack-jawed, wide-eyed mortification and damning them for their nigger-ness.

  Should-have-been comrades had shot them down like dogs. And the Rebs to their front had murdered them like varmints. All a man could do was run or fight.

  Sergeant Offer chose to fight. But the stripes on his sleeves burned his flesh. Confidence gone, he clung to heathen rage.

  The rump of the 30th was pushed from the last trench. The stalwarts broke into two parts. Most of them—Offer among them—withdrew down the slope toward the old lines, attempting to show some last discipline, some ragged display of pride, while the remainder were forced toward the boiling pit, where no man was welcome.

  When Offer reached what passed for safety that day, tears scorched his face. He was embarrassed until he saw his captain, a white man, bawling like a child. The sight dried his tears instantly, enraging him worse than the Reb savagery had done, worse than the treachery of his fellow Yankees.

  He would have liked to slap that boy, to redden his smooth white flesh with a hard hand, to tell him, “You don’t know one thing, not one thing how it’s like, how a man been lifelong kept down, valued less than a rich man’s dog, skills honed high and honest, and still judged less than those of a white-skinned drunkard or a thief, you don’t know what it’s like, no you don’t, ’cause for you this here’s a high and noble cause, way you go talking, but you’re still white, and you’re still the master, but unto y’all comes the day—and maybe soon—when none of us niggers let it be that way, not anymore.”