The Damned of Petersburg

by Ralph Peters

  “No, that’s true. I would not. Pass me one of those cigars. From the pocket there.”

  “Miss Julia say you not to smoke in bed, that trash behavior.” But he produced a cigar.

  Grant took the Habana but didn’t bite it. “So tell me, General William Barnes … what’s your professional judgment regarding our progress? Against General Lee? Think he’ll hang on much longer?”

  “How you mess these pants so bad, burnt holes in them again? And they new.…” Bill shook his head. “Can’t say how long Bobby Lee go on frustrating all the great, big Union. No way to tell. But see, it like this here: There’s these two dogs. One, he a biting dog, got a fearsome bite, he so proud of his bite, bred high and pretty. Other one, he a gnawing dog, some mix-up hound, just get a holt of a leg and won’t let go, keep chewing and chewing, even if the other dog bite his ear off.”

  “And?”

  “Any man ever had him a dog knows the gnawing dog going to win. ’Long as he don’t mind the biting too much.”

  Grant considered that. “So … you’re calling me a mongrel? I suppose I have fleas, too?”

  “Heap of ’em. Anyway, I done heard you called lots worse.”

  * * *

  After Grant went to bed, Bill sauntered down to the docks, where the unloading of cargoes continued by torchlight. The colored laborers sang slave songs, the sort that charmed white folks and disgusted him.

  When would the day come when he could speak plainly and not resort to minstrel-show banter to live? Even Grant, a good man, expected subservience, took it as his due from the darker-skinned. Would the day come when he could stand upright? Emancipation was only the beginning, little more than a word. It might strike off the shackles on ankles and wrists, but the chains in the hearts of men would remain unbroken.

  By the banks of the muddy James, bloodied waters of Babylon, he sat down on an idle pier, remembering not a Zion he’d never known, not interested in the past at all, but looking ahead into an unbounded darkness.

  How long, Lord? he cried within. How much longer must it be like this?

  There were times when he wished the war would last until every white man lay dead.

  PART

  V

  THE MILL

  THIRTEEN

  Two p.m., September 30, 1864

  Fort Archer, Squirrel Level Road line

  “Well, Major, you’re in command, you’ve got the Third Brigade. Don’t expect congratulations,” Brigadier General Charles Griffin said.

  “No, sir,” Ellis Spear responded. “Unfortunate situation.”

  “One way to put it. Twentieth Maine going to get along without you? I expect so,” Griffin added, answering his own question. “Christ, losing Gwyn and Welch. In one piddling attack.”

  “It was a fine one, though, sir.”

  “Damn Jim Gwyn. Riding his horse up the rampart, idiotic stunt.” Griffin’s sandpaper voice grew somber. “At least he’ll live. Welch wasn’t so lucky.”

  Letting his mount nose the grass, Griffin nodded toward the Ninth Corps troops passing through his division—while his own men worked to reverse the captured entrenchments. Rather than marching boldly into battle, the Ninth Corps soldiers were barely slinking forward, reluctant as schoolgirls asked to pick up snakes. Their lack of rigor offended Griffin, who would have come down hard, had they been his men.

  “Wait a few hours,” Griffin told the major. “We’ll be fucked for beans again today.”

  “We did our part, sir. Gave them a good start.”

  “Isn’t the start that counts with Lee, it’s the finish.”

  “Pleasant fighting weather, at least,” Spear tried again.

  “Going to rain. You wait.”

  The attack had gone well, Griffin had to admit, although it had taken Jim Gwyn too damned long to get his regiments organized. The 118th Pennsylvania and the 16th Michigan had crossed an open field at the double-quick, with the 20th Maine close behind and not one man faltering, all of them forcing their way through the Reb abatis, going at the obstacle with axes, then hurtling over the walls of the fort with snap. In fifteen minutes of fighting, they’d turned the Johnnies out of their fortifications along Squirrel Level Road. It was all about doing things properly, Griffin believed, and no damned nonsense.

  Shame about Norval Welch. The 16th was going to miss him. Hell, they’d all miss him. One more veteran officer gone. But Welch had ended the way a soldier should, topping the enemy’s rampart.

  “Ellis,” Griffin resumed, “the Rebs aren’t going to let those Ninth Corps boys just stroll up to the Plank Road and the South Side. You wait. They pass another farm or two, and they’re going to get hit, front and flank. Rebs do it every time, you’d think we’d be on to the game.” He wiped his thick mustaches. “Not much fight in that corps, by the looks of it.”

  Yes, he was proud of his own men and saw others as inferiors. But it wasn’t pride without justification. As far as Charlie Griffin was concerned, he led the finest division in the Army of the Potomac. Or in the whole damned Union army. And they’d just given the Rebs another taste of it.

  Only dismounted cavalry in that fort, though, strung out thin. No more than a fire bell, set out to warn the rest of Bobby Lee’s army. Truth was that the ball had barely opened.

  “Our plans are just too complicated,” Griffin mused to his new brigade commander. “‘Fifth Corps will seize the Squirrel Level Road line and consolidate. Ninth Corps will pass the Fifth Corps line and continue the advance.’ Buggering Jesus on Christmas morning, we should have just continued our attack, while the Rebs were reeling. The one thing you can never get back in any battle is time. But no … we have to pass the Ninth Corps through and lose a good three hours because Parke’s shit-licking recalcitrants are marching like truants headed back to the schoolhouse. Christ, we all know what Lee can do in three hours.…”

  Ellis Spear almost replied, but Griffin, rarely so talkative, wasn’t finished.

  “This isn’t the Army it was, they have to grasp that. It’s no longer capable of intricate maneuvers. If it ever was. Too many of the best officers and veterans are dead, we can’t execute the fancy plans they send down. Not even this division. This is a bare-knuckles fight now, not a duel with high-flown rules and rapiers.”

  “Yes, sir,” Spear agreed. His tone signaled impatience. Griffin needed to send the younger man off, to let him get a grip on his new duties.

  “Well, just in case I’m right and the high and mighty back in the rear are wrong, you get your boys digging harder. Look at them. Proud as peacocks. After chasing off a handful of underfed jockeys.” Cut boneward by long service in the Southwest, his hard face tightened. “I don’t just want those entrenchments reversed, I want them improved, and mightily. See to it. And strengthen your skirmish line. Before Powell Hill comes down and plucks our feathers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And no damned softness today. Let ’em eat crackers, cooking fires can wait. And straighten the alignment of those rifle stands, this isn’t some Mexican cathouse. Those Ninth Corps boys’ll come skedaddling and we’ll need to patch things up.”

  Giving the Johnnies three hours, even two, to figure things out was about as helpful as giving a band of Comanches a day’s head start.

  Spear’s posture changed, signaling that he was about to ride off and see to his duties, but first the major asked, “Any more word from the Richmond front? Darkies really do it?”

  Griffin cleared his throat and spit. “Seems so. Warren tells me they got farther up the Heights than any white men.” He scowled at nothing, at everything. “No doubt their officers will undo it all. Go on now, Ellis. I’ve already used up this week’s ration of talk. Have your brigade prepared to defend this line or advance at my order. In case we have to go out and save those skulkers.” He turned sharply in the saddle. “You there! You, soldier!” he called to a Ninth Corps straggler. “Catch up to your regiment, or I’ll have you bayoneted.”

  A squad of his own soldi
ers working nearby laughed, and one called out, “He means it, laddiebuck. That’s General Griffin, it is.” The soldiers laughed again. “He’s born of the Great Banshee, he’ll swallow ye whole.”

  Griffin rode over to the work party. Hard-faced.

  The soldiers slew their good humor and bent to their labors.

  Griffin halted his horse. “Did I invite one of you sonsofbitches to volunteer his opinion?”

  The soldiers froze. Only two dared look toward him.

  “He din’t mean nothing bad, sir,” the bravest of them said.

  Griffin snarled, “Stand up straight when I’m talking to you.…”

  The men dropped their tools and jerked to parade-ground postures.

  “If I’m born of the Banshee, what are you lot, goddamned leprechauns?”

  He smiled broadly.

  The soldiers eased and laughed. One said, “Oh, sir … ye had us afeared, ye truly did.”

  With a practiced growl, the general told them, “Damned well better be afraid of me. And nobody else. You get back to work now, the Johnnies aren’t done with us yet.”

  “Ah, but they’ll wish they were,” the bravest man told him. “Look to the boys from Cork, sir, and ye’ll see doings to savor.”

  Griffin rode on. Cursing wondrously at the men he loved.

  Speaking to his comrades as Griffin passed, another Irishman forged by the Famine declared, “If I live to tell me tale, boys, that buggerin’ general’s going to steal half the telling, an’t he the lovely?” Sighing, he added, “Had we had one such in the ’98…”

  To the north, skirmishing crackled.

  Fucked for beans again, Charlie Griffin swore.

  Three p.m.

  Boydton Plank Road

  “It’s a gift,” Wade Hampton said to Harry Heth. “Fifth Corps just stopped. Hardly bloodied, but they stopped to dig in. Now they’re passing the Ninth Corps through to start up again. And no sign of artillery marching with Parke … it makes no sense, pushing for the Plank Road without guns. They have to know they’re going to face a fight.”

  Harry Heth had dismounted to relieve himself. Closing his trousers again, he looked up at Hampton. “Like you said, Wade. A gift. God bless ’em, and thanks a-mighty. Trouble enough up there in front of Richmond, with the niggers. Fort Harrison, too. Hard business. Turn a man sick and vicious all at once.” He swung back into his saddle. “They’re counting on us to keep things right down here. And I reckon we will.”

  Behind them, along the vital road, the vanguard of Heth’s infantry hurried past.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Hampton said. “I’ll give it twenty minutes after you hit them from the front. Then I’ll come in on their left, wheel off that swamp. Go deep behind them.”

  Heth nodded. “Be two hours before my last brigade’s up. Just spread so thin. And then I’ll need to get it in position. Have to do this right, hit them hard as we can, no room for misjudgments.” He glanced skyward. “Beat the rain, if we can. If not, we’ll fight ’em wet.”

  “Wet or dry, no difference,” Hampton commented. Hunting that bear with a knife, in the cold rain. Hadn’t that been a time? Younger then. Foolish. Were any son of his to attempt such a folly, he would have done more than just berate the boy. The bear would’ve wept for the lad.

  His sons. His heart swelled at every glimpse of one or the other.

  Heth’s smile was a stingy ornament, but it passed for its purpose. “Myself, I don’t mind giving them time to extend themselves, not one bit. Get some distance between them and the Fifth Corps, let them think they’ve all but done the trick, get their mouths watering. Then scoop them up.” The Virginian stretched in the saddle, settled, and yawned. “Almost get tired of thrashing them.”

  “Never tire of it myself,” Hampton said.

  Four thirty p.m.

  Boisseau farm

  Shame.

  Brown had never before felt so let down by his own men. The 50th Pennsylvania had never been a quitter regiment, the kind stocked with bounty-jumpers and malingerers. Yet something had happened, something Brown couldn’t quite grip. Too many soldiers had just decided that they’d done their part and had enough. The mood was not of mutiny, but of ill-tempered reluctance and thin excuses.

  It had gotten so bad that, as they’d marched past the Fifth Corps, some general had chastised a soldier from Company F. And the man had deserved it.

  At least, Brown had managed to keep Company C intact, what there was left of it. He’d begun the day’s march with thirty-two men, and with Sam Losch, Levi Eckert, and Henry Hill herding them like sheepdogs, he’d brought all thirty-two to this field. He wasn’t convinced all thirty-two would fight, though. The newest men weren’t worth much.

  Sometimes he wondered if the entire army might not dissolve, if Bobby Lee kept refusing to give up, kept drawing blood. Brown had become a Lincoln man himself, but he had to wonder how the election would go, how others would vote. The draftees and bounty men just wanted to go home.

  Hard times, no question. Their old brigade had been so reduced that the 50th had been folded into General Hartranft’s command. Which was fine, as far as it went. The veterans respected Hartranft, a fellow Pennsylvanian whose rise they’d witnessed up close. But the relationship with their new comrades had yet to smooth out, it was still an untanned hide, with nobody quite sure how much they could trust one another.

  The march hadn’t even been bad, that was another thing. Brown had understood men dropping away in the August heat. But this was about as pleasant a day as old Virginia offered, even had clouds to keep the sun off a man. But men from the division had shirked by the hundreds.

  Pushing through that last stretch of Virginia tangles hadn’t helped any, either. Men had slipped away like water through fingers.

  But he still had his thirty-two. Because he’d become a hard man, all but brutal, in a matter of weeks. The kind of boss he’d cursed in his learning days. He saw no choice, though. The new men, the draftees and substitutes, were the sort who didn’t just steal from the dead but pilfered from each other. He and Sam Losch had applied their fists to break up more than one scuffle.

  Now here they were, on an autumn day in Virginia, lined up facing another worth-nothing field on a run-down farm, with yet another stretch of brush beyond, the brigade hemmed in by a swamp on the left and all Rebeldom on the right, every veteran just waiting for the crack of a nearby sharpshooter’s rifle, the sprinkling fire of pickets, or a sudden bust-out of howling Johnnies coming their way fast. It wasn’t just more of the same, it was too damned much of it.

  To the north, on ground held by other men, skirmishers pestered and pricked.

  As near as Brown could tell, the 50th stood close to the corps’ left flank, which had been refused. Wasn’t a good place to be, nor was it a bad one. It was just where they were. And every man with scratches and scars knew the Johnnies wouldn’t take it lightly, a Yankee corps pressing into Virginia’s flesh again. As the fighting had moved west, it had grown bitter.

  There were times when he wondered how he would feel, if he found himself on the other end of things, facing an invading army surrounding Schuylkill Haven or maybe Pottsville, an enemy that reveled in destruction.

  But he wasn’t in Pennsylvania. He was here, in Virginia, an acting lieutenant with a job to do. And that was that.

  War just left men too much time to think.

  So Brown waited, along with every other man in the regiment. Wondering if they hadn’t received an order to entrench because they were expected to move again, or because some officer failed to pass the word.

  Looked like rain, too. And they’d marched light. Be sleeping wet, that was sure.

  Two men from the skirmish line dragged in a bearded Johnny. The fellow looked as thin as hunger itself, but cocky, undaunted.

  Captain Brumm stepped over. Looking at the passing Reb, he noted, “They’re coming. Bet a gold piece.”

  Wearily, Brown agreed.

  He was as tired of al
l this as any man.

  Five p.m.

  Banks farm, Boydton Plank Road

  “Go in,” Harry Heth said. “Go in and do God’s work. Send those Yankee sonsofbitches to Hell.”

  Five twenty p.m.

  Harman Road

  If there was one man Hampton found more unbearably proud than Rooney Lee, it was his cousin Fitz. Born to pride himself, Hampton sought to wear his sense of worth quietly, as a gentleman should. But the rising generation of Lees was rancorous and haughty, without the restrained dignity of the father and uncle they served. Nor did Hampton believe that Rooney, the youngest major general in the Confederacy, would have gained a division command but for his name. Rooney Lee was a very good cavalryman. But he wasn’t the best cavalryman. He was, however, a Lee.

  Now Fitz Lee lay gravely wounded, a Winchester casualty, and Rooney Lee stood waiting for Hampton’s orders. A few hundred yards to the east, the battle had exploded and it sounded as though Harry Heth was doing handsomely.

  It was time.

  “General Lee, I wish you to go in,” Hampton told his subordinate. “Major Hampton will join you. With your permission.”

  “Glad to have him along. Help with the whipping.” Cocky as ever a man could be, Lee eyed him as if Hampton stood on an auction block. “Anything else, sir?”

  Hampton shook his head. The plan for a dismounted attack had been discussed and decided, along with the ground to be covered and the goals. No need to waste more time repeating things.

  Rooney Lee took off at a merry gallop, followed by his color-bearers and Hampton’s eldest son: a major, not a major general.

  Hamptons earned their way.

  Five forty p.m.

  Pegram farm

  Brown spun the soldier around and punched him between the shoulder blades.

  “Get back in that line, damn you,” he told the shaking boy. “You load and fire.”

  The Rebs had stopped to trade volleys and their line was nearly as ragged as the brigade’s. The Johnnies had gained ground so fast that their regiments spilled together, but they still had the numbers and weight. Hooting and calling out threats, the Rebs reloaded with speed but took time to aim. The best Brown could do with the new men who hadn’t run off was to get them to fire wildly toward the enemy. Some just kept working their ramrods, as if they couldn’t recall what to do next, while others stood frozen, waiting for their mother to wipe their noses. One closed his eyes each time he pulled the trigger.