March Toward the Thunder

by Joseph Bruchac

  Hope I don’t dream.

  And in what seemed no more than the time it took to close his eyes, a hand was shaking him. He looked up at Corporal Hayes. One of the corporal’s eyes was closed, the ends of his mustache were singed, and the left side of his face was swollen and scratched.

  That big tree limb that was knocked loose by a shell and fell on him during the retreat.

  Despite the bruises, the impassive look on the corporal’s face was gone.

  “The sergeant wants to have a word with us all,” Hayes said, pulling Louis to his feet. “And thanks again, Chief,” the corporal added in a softer voice, patting him on the shoulder, “for lifting up that heavy tree limb. I would have been caught for sure by those Rebs who were on our tails.”

  “Wasn’t nothing,” Louis said, “sir.”

  “Lads,” Sergeant Flynn said, “I’m glad t’ see ye hale and hearty. But as ye know, the rest of our lads were not so lucky. There’s so few of us left that our three New York Regiments, the Sixty-third, the Sixty-eighth, and our own Fightin’ Sixty-ninth are bein’ consolidated.”

  Flynn paused and as he did so Joker raised a bandaged hand.

  “Sergeant, can you tell me what it means to be consolly-dated? Will it hurt much?”

  It was a weak joke, but a few men still laughed. The laughter, though, quickly died away as the serious look stayed on their master sergeant’s face.

  “T’ be consolidated means that our poor regiments have been so shot into pieces that”—he held up three fingers on his right hand and then grasped them with his left—“we’ll all three be combined into one. Now, that’s not such a bad thing, for our own Captain Richard Moroney of the Sixty-ninth is to be the man in command of the consolidated regiment. But that’s not the whole of it. As you know, we lost Colonel Kelly, our commanding officer of the Second Corps, last Saturday. And we’ll not see his like again for that cool courage and gentle manners and modesty and honesty of his that made us love him.”

  Flynn took off his cap and held it over his heart for a moment of silence. There’d been no irony in his words, even though Louis knew that the sergeant shared their opinions about the foolishness of the orders that had led to the suicidal charge the day before.

  “So,” Flynn said, “to reward us for all our sacrificin’, the army will not be replacing him. Instead, our own dear brigade is itself to be consolidated into the Third Brigade of the Second Division under the command of Colonel Thomas Carroll. ’Tis an ungracious and ungenerous measure, but it’s not for us to decide. The Irish Brigade as it once was is no more, though the name will still be used for our command unit.”

  Flynn’s face looked so dark and dismal that Louis wished he could think of some words to say to encourage him. Seeing their sturdy sergeant so cast down lowered their weary spirits even more.

  Louis began to count them up in his head.

  The Wilderness.

  The Bloody Angle where Possum had died.

  Then Scarecrow and Happy right after.

  That awful fight where Captain Blake had fallen at his feet.

  They’d lost Merry then too. But in a way that brought no hurt to his heart. The little private was safe at home. Louis had read aloud the letter Mary sent to him and the other men in their mess. She missed them and thought them—next to her husband—to be the finest men on all of God’s green earth. She would always regard them as brothers. Her husband, though he’d walk with a cane all his life, had survived in good enough shape. She was nursing him back to health. The door to the O’Shea home would always be open for any and all of them. She’d always keep an extra place set at their table. Even Kirk had grown misty-eyed.

  Then, after Mary left them, had come the crossing of the river.

  Cold Harbor.

  Petersburg. Those Maine innocents marching to their deaths.

  Louis looked down at his boots. And who’ll be next?

  “Excuse me, sir,” a voice said.

  It was Devlin breaking the silence as usual—though with a question and not a song.

  “I heard a rumor that we’ve a colonel or two forwarding the draft back in New York,” Devlin said. “Won’t that swell our ranks back up again?”

  Flynn laughed, but the laugh was a bitter one. “And who do ye think they’ll find to send us?” he said. “The best and the bravest have all volunteered by now and far too many of them are but faces beneath the sod. We’ll be sent a batch of laggards and left-behinds who’ve finally joined up for nothing but the bounty.”

  Louis looked over at Bull Belaney, who raised an eyebrow back at him.

  “Not all of us who signed for the money have turned out that bad,” Louis said, surprising himself and Flynn.

  Flynn took off his cap and dusted it with his meaty hand.

  “Begorrah,” he said in a softer voice as he looked around all that remained of his company, “I’m not meanin’ t’ speak ill of any man here. Ye’ve been fine lads, every one of ye. I know that among ye are men who signed for the bounty and turned out to be tigers. What worries me now is that the ones they’ll be getting through their draft—forced to join up whether they like it or no—will be as green as the grass and just as witless. And when the first shots are fired, where do ye suppose they’ll go?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE MINE

  Thursday, July 28, 1864

  Louis stood ramrod straight as he handed the thick sheaf of papers to the officer.

  Courier duty. A sight better to carry paper than a rifle and a pack. Even if the papers end up weighing more.

  Observing how the rough plank table was piled high with white pages, he had to hold back a smile.

  You could build a barricade five feet high around this camp with all the paper used every week by this Grand Army of the Potomac.

  At least three copies of every order and everything else under the sun put down on paper.

  Muster sheets listing how many men were in each company and regiment.

  Requisition sheets for anything from blankets to ammunition. Quartermaster reports, making careful note of everything in the way of supplies that went in and out, not counting what was stolen or sold on the side.

  Maneuver orders—more hopeful guesses than accurate predictions.

  General reports—what the officers said happened, as opposed to what really took place.

  Promotions and reassignments—some political, some deserved, some too late for men already reassigned to the grave.

  And thinking of paper . . .

  Louis felt his pocket. The latest letter from his mother was still there.

  Come home soon.

  He would write his mother—and, yes, Azonis—later that day. He would tell them that he was healthy and whole. But he would not say anything about being home soon.

  This war is going to last a while. Unless maybe the mine works.

  He took out a kerchief and stopped to wipe his forehead. All around him people were either moving about listlessly or seeking the shade. The only spot where hard work went on without cease was in the little valley below the abandoned railroad cut. That was where Louis was headed.

  Louis squeezed some of the moisture out of his kerchief and watched as the drops of sweat were quickly absorbed into the dry red dirt. Hot as June had been, July was hotter. If Old Jeff Davis was the devil, as his friend Jeff said, then the head of the Rebels had to be pleased as all get out about this summer. All you needed was the smell of brimstone to think you were in that fiery place where Père Andre said the unrepentant sinners ended up. Even at midnight, heat still rose up from the Southern soil. Hot as blazes.

  It wasn’t just this heat that might make the Rebel president and his generals grin like demons. The months just past had been one disaster after another for the Union. Louis wiped his head again with the kerchief and made his way around a line of unhitched wagons. Some of the men from the Ninth were behind the wagons, laughing and joking as they played cards.

  Louis raised his hand
in a friendly wave.

  They smiled and waved back. None of them seemed to be sweating.

  Why is it that those fellows aren’t bothered so much by the heat? Is it because their ancestors came from Africa? Or is it just that they were born down here?

  “Louis,” one of the men yelled, “y’all wanta play?”

  “Maybe later,” Louis called back.

  Since Jeff had introduced Louis to some of his friends in the Ninth Corps, those men knew Louis by sight and always said howdy. Jeff’s own Eighteenth Corps wasn’t part of the big plan, but the black men of the Ninth were mightily involved.

  The Ninth had been drilling, practicing maneuvers they’d soon be called upon to undertake. Pour through the breach blasted in the Rebel lines to take the rail hub of Petersburg in one quick thrust.

  Providing the thing works.

  Louis had his doubts that the explosion would do more than shake the earth under the Southerners’ feet.

  One of the colored soldiers farther back from the card players made eye contact with Louis. He nodded at the skillet he held over a fire and then touched his lips.

  Eat with me?

  Gabriel, one of Jeff’s cousins. They’d belonged to the same white master and worked together building this section of the Dimmock Line. Gabriel’s skin was a lighter brown than Louis’s. He was slightly built and short and looked younger than Louis’s own fifteen years. Louis had asked him how old he was. But Gabriel’s answer had been the one many black soldiers gave to such a question.

  “My ole massah didn’t keep record of such things. Ole nuff t’ work is all.”

  Louis held up his right hand, palm out, pointed with his chin in the direction he was going, then nodded back toward Gabriel.

  Got somewhere to go, maybe later?

  Gabriel’s answering smile and nod showed he understood. Like Indians, former slaves knew how to get things across to each other without using words.

  Louis started down the slope to the hole in the bank out of sight of the Southern fortifications 150 yards uphill. Different today down near the mouth of the mine. Before there’d been two long lines of men at work. One line lugging away buckets of earth or pushing wheelbarrows cobbled together from hardtack boxes. The other line bringing in timbers and planks salvaged from an abandoned sawmill to use for shoring.

  Today, though, there was only one line. Nervous-looking men unloading and carrying in kegs of black powder.

  Oh my!

  Louis sat down under the thin shade of a small scrub pine to watch.

  The rail-thin sergeant standing down by the wagons and supervising had explained the operation to Louis. His name was Harry Reese. Like others of the 48th Pennsylvania he’d been a hard coal miner before the war. Like so many other sergeants in the Union Army, he was a friend of Flynn’s. That was how Louis had come to meet Reese three weeks ago near the start of July, when things had settled in to a blessedly quiet stand-off between the two armies.

  “Louis, m’lad,” Sergeant Flynn had said, “come t’ me here. I’ve a wee errand for ye. Run this pouch of tobaccy over t’ me friend Sergeant Reese in the Forty-eighth. Take yer time. With that inquirin’ mind of yers, ye might find it interestin’ to see what those boys are up to.”

  Interesting hardly describes it.

  The idea had come from the 48th’s regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants. Have his mining lads drive a shaft under the enemy fort up the hill, pack it with powder, and blow a hole in the enemy line.

  The higher-ups had scoffed at first. A tunnel of that length was impossible without air vents, vents that would give them away to the enemy. The earth would cave in on them. Even if they could do it, the enemy would hear their digging and countermine. Plus, it would take months.

  But Pleasants, who’d been a civil engineer, drew up a sketch that caught the fancy of the commander of the Ninth Corps, Major General Ambrose Burnside. Burnside took it to General Meade. Meade’s approval was halfhearted. He never expected it to succeed. But it would be a diversion for men getting bored after days of inaction.

  “The great and good General Meade, he did not give us even a shovel, y’ know,” Sergeant Reese said as he stuffed his pipe with some of the tobacco Louis brought him. “Not a jot or a whittle did he have to spare for us. So we made do with what we had. Our blacksmiths fashioned picks from scrap metal and we made a pipe from wood to bring air in and another to draw it out by means of a fire we kept burning here on the outside. An old trick learnt from our Welsh grandfathers, y’ know.”

  The sergeant nodded as he drew in on his pipe and then let out a contented breath of smoke. “Fine tobacco this, y’ know.”

  That had been two weeks ago. Now, with those powder kegs being taken in, it looked as if the last stage of the plan was being put into motion.

  Sergeant Reese beckoned to him. Louis got up and went down the hill.

  “It’s done?” Louis asked, handing the sergeant another pouch of Flynn’s tobacco.

  “Aye,” Reese said, packing his pipe. “Our hard-working men, happy to dig in earth less unyielding than our hard stone of Pennsylvania, y’know, have done fine work. Look you. There before you is a five-hundred-and-eleven-foot shaft. Five feet high, four feet wide at the bottom and two feet wide at the top, all the way under the Rebel lines. This mornin’ we finished the two lateral tunnels at the end to make a chamber beneath the enemy bastion.”

  “Right under the enemy fort?“

  Reese nodded. “I was just in there an hour ago, y’know. And even through twenty feet of earth, I could still hear the thumping of Rebel soldiers walking above me.”

  “And the Rebel tunnels?”

  Though the Pennsylvanians had kept as strict a silence as possible during the tunneling, the Southerners seemed to have caught on that a tunnel was being dug. Two weeks ago the Union miners had heard the first sounds of digging from the other side—two countermines being driven toward them.

  Reese chuckled. “Through the grace of God or bad engineering, their tunnels missed us clean, y’know. And there’s been no sound of their excavatin’ for three days now. Let’s move a ways up the hill, lad. We’d not be wanting a spark near those ammo wagons, y’ know.”

  Fifty feet from the tunnel mouth and the nearest black powder keg, Reese pulled out a lucifer and struck it on the sole of his boot.

  Reese puffed on his pipe. “Fine tobacco, this,” he said again.

  Louis looked back toward the dark mouth of the tunnel, imagining the closeness of that chamber where tons of explosive powder were being stacked.

  All that powder, they’re for sure going to blow something to Kingdom Come—most likely themselves!

  "Y’ want to go in and take a look, Chief?” Reese said, a wry smile on his face.

  He already knows my answer. No way under heaven am I ever going into that tunnel.

  He shook his head.

  Reese nodded.

  “Late for the Fourth of July, but we’ll be having some fine fireworks soon, y’ know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE FEINT

  Saturday, July 30, 1864

  Louis looked up from his whittling to cast an eye around the mid-afternoon camp. He was up on a little hill with his back against a tree. Below he could see the hundreds of tents in their regimental rows, like neat herds of white sheep. On the hillside next to him, Artis was stretched out with his cap over his eyes.

  Not really sleeping, though.

  Now that he and Artis were spending even more time together, he’d come to realize that his Mohawk friend hardly ever slept. He’d catnap now and then, but if Louis should wake at three in the morning and look out of the tent, like as not there Artis would be stirring the fire with a stick.

  The old warrior way that Papa told me about. That is what Artis follows. A man on the path of war sleeps light or not at all.

  The consolidation of units had resulted in Artis and four other men from his old company being reassigned to E. None of the
m, though, had been Artis’s friend, the good-natured bantering Irish soldier.

  Louis had asked about O’Grady when Artis arrived.

  Artis just shook his head and swung his hand palm downward. Louis understood. Don’t say the names of the dead.

  An already familiar face, Artis fit in easily as E Company settled into a routine like that of the men in all the other regiments dug in around Petersburg—Rebel and Yankee alike.

  Drilling, eating, playing cards, and swapping stories and songs to ease the boredom. So the hot summer days passed. Sometimes they’d get up a game of baseball. Louis had never heard of it before joining the army. But soldiers like Bull, who came from New York City, were crazy for it.

  Just yesterday baseball had been the source of a heated argument between Bull and Joker.

  “Why, in Brooklyn alone,” Belaney said with great fervor, “there’s no fewer than three fine teams—the Stars, the Eckfords, and the Atlantics. And you should see what Candy Cummings of the Stars can do! He can hurl a ball in such a way that it scoots to the right or the left in flight.”

  “A curveball? Hah!” Kirk sniffed. “It’s a myth. A scientific impossibility.”

  “I seed it with me own eyes.”

  “An optical illusion,” Kirk replied. “Or maybe you had so many beers that it blurred your vision.”

  Belaney got so worked up about it that he’d insisted on the two of them taking a ball and going out to a level piece of ground. There Bull had tried for a solid hour without success to make a ball curve sideways through the air the way he swore his man Cummings could.

  Today, though, was too torrid for even a game of pitch and catch. The few clouds in the sky were stuck in place, seemingly as stunned by the heat as the humans moving like tiny ants in the lines of trenches below.

  Even the sharpshooters had been affected by the counterfeit peace between the two great armies. Almost no shots were being fired. In the twilight, informal truces sprang up between companies of young men in blue and gray.