March Toward the Thunder

by Joseph Bruchac

  At first, jests were traded back and forth across the no-man’s -land between the Army of the Potomac and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

  “Hey Yank, y’all still as good at runnin’ as you was at Manassas?”

  “Reb, any of you got any shoes left or has you et them all by now?”

  Then, as the mid-summer quiet continued, a few from the two armies began to venture forth to meet in the middle and trade Southern tobacco—the only staple the ragged men in gray ever seemed to have in abundance—for sweets, a little salt pork, or even a few precious sheets of writing paper so that some homesick Carolinian might write a letter to his sweetheart or his mother.

  But in that one little valley, despite the heat, feverish activity had been taking place as Pennsylvania miners, faces streaked with red clay and sweat, labored on their tunnel.

  “We’ll be filling in the tunnel for about forty feet, you know,” Sergeant Reese had explained. “Tamped in tight like a stopper. The only thing that worries us now is whether or not we’ll actually get it to blow when the time comes. Our request for insulated wire and a galvanic battery failed t’ come through, y’know. So what we have is two fifty-foot fuses spliced together.”

  Quiet, but it’s the calm before the thunder.

  Sure enough, after the evening meal, things began to happen.

  “It’s a night march for us, men,” Sergeant Flynn said. “And this time, saints be praised, it’s along a well-marked road and we’ll not get lost.”

  Before night fell, Second Corps was on the move. They struck out to the north, making no effort to hide their movements from the enemy.

  Draw their attention away from the line that’s to be blown up. With all this marching they’re making us do, I just hope it makes something bigger than a woodchuck hole!

  Their march was a long one, all the way up through the small peninsula to the spot on the curving James River where Tenth Corps had thrown a pontoon bridge across. The dawn was breaking as they made their attack on the works at Deep Bottom, the combined Irish Brigade at the front.

  After three weeks of rest, Louis and the other men around him had thrown off the feeling of doom that oppressed them a month ago. The green regimental flag with its Irish harp waved proudly over their heads as they advanced into battle with a great shout.

  They took the enemy so much by surprise that the fight was over almost before it started. In what seemed like the space of only a few heartbeats to Louis they found themselves in control of the first line of earthworks, four twenty-pounder Parrott guns, and two hundred Rebel prisoners. But there they stopped.

  Their movement had been supposed to be little more than a feint to draw a large force up from the Petersburg line. Scouts reported that a large force of Rebel soldiers was being shifted their way to face what the Southern commanders feared was a major attempt to break through to Richmond.

  Sergeant Flynn grinned as he passed on the orders to withdraw. “Sure and we’ve finally done something just as we’d planned,” he said. Even Corporal Hayes had the hint of a smile on his face as they began their withdrawal to a stronger position.

  Louis was assigned with his friends to guard one group of prisoners. As they marched along, some of the men in gray seemed eager to strike up friendly conversations. Most of them seemed relieved to have been captured and taken out of the fight. Also, orders had been given to feed the prisoners, who all were glad to have some food to put into their bellies.

  “The way you Southern boys is chewing on hardtack,” Joker said, “you’d think it was maple sugar.”

  “Never shoulda jined the infantry,” replied a thin, long-haired Southern soldier. The skinny Rebel’s clothes fit him like a scarecrow and his shoes were so worn out that the soles flapped against the ground as he walked. His voice, though, was pleasant and friendly. Everyone within earshot was finding the man’s company amusing.

  “Life in the infantry ain’t worth a goober,” the skinny Rebel explained. “Them cavalry boys has it good. Jest riding about and havin’ a fine time. They never wants for food either. Jest grab up a chicken or a porker as they rides along an’ then gallop away without a howdy-do and leave us to do the fightin’. No suh, if’n you wants to eat and can’t arrange to be in the quartermaster’s department or the commissary, then the cavalry is sure the place to be. And if it wasn’t for the fact that ah just hates them stuck-up cavalrymen, ah would of been one of them. If’n ah could ride a horse, that is.”

  The man paused to lick the last crumbs of his piece of hardtack from his fingers, pushed the hair back from his eyes, and squinted over at Louis and Artis.

  “You two Yanks colored boys?” he asked.

  The man’s tone wasn’t unfriendly.

  “Nope,” Louis replied.

  “Indian,” Artis said.

  “Unh-hunh, so you are. Wouldn’t of mattered, though, if’n you was colored. Ah ain’t got nothin’ agin’ the coloreds. Biggest mistake we ever made was not jest setting them all free onct the war began. Most of us fighting this war, they’s poor folk like me. Never ownt a slave, never wanted one. We jest fightin’ for our rahts since you Yankees invaded us. Them no-account senators we got up in Richmond, Lord, some of them got plantations with hundreds of darkies. They got more slaves than they got sense, if’n you know what ah mean.”

  Songbird had drifted closer as the man delivered his monologue.

  “What do you mean by that?” Songbird asked.

  “Wull,” the talkative Rebel said, “jest that aside from Jeff Davis, who appears to have a head on his shoulders, about all them men supposed to be representin’ us does is argue with each other like mules. Now, ah was a farmer afore all this begun. Worked twenty acres with my ma and my pa and my two brothers. And one thing ever’ soul who works the soil knows is that if’n you got a crop, you needs to sell it if’n you wants the money to live on. That’s jest one thing them mules in fine suits up in Richmond is too dumb to figger out.”

  “What’s your meaning?” Devlin said.

  “Cotton,” the man said. There was a different look about him now. Although the ragged young Southerner had seemed at first like a country bumpkin, Louis saw the intelligence in the man’s eyes.

  “Cotton?”

  “Cotton, the sale of which would’ve paid for uniforms—not like these rags we’re wearing—and food for us to eat. We grows the finest cotton in the world here in the South and the English would have kept on buying it from us, even if they was against slavery—which as ah said we should of just got rid of all on our own at the start of this set-to. So what did those eddicated idjits in Richmond do? They told the British they wouldn’t sell any of our cotton to them unless they declared for our side against the North. But as long as we still got slaves, them English was not about to do that. So where’s all our Southern cotton? Rottin’ in warehouses for the last three years and not bringing in a dime.”

  Soon they reached the James River and crossed. Another company was waiting there to take the captives on to City Point. From there the Rebs would be sent north by ship to a POW camp.

  Off to Elmira. And it’s sad I am to think of you going there.

  “Good luck to you, even if you is Yanks,” the long-haired young Southerner shouted over his shoulder. He waved good-bye with his left hand since his right was clutching the additional pieces of hardtack that the men of E Company had given him.

  “You too, Reb,” Louis called back.

  It was another long march through the dark from Deep Bottom back to Petersburg. A beautiful dawn began to break over the hills. The sky streaked with rose red and burnished gold. Small birds fluttered up in the air to twitter their songs to welcome the new day, seemingly unaware of the war going on between the two-leggeds camped in the woods and fields and crouched in the trenches around them.

  Louis took a deep breath of the sweet morning air. He turned toward Artis and opened his mouth. But whatever words he had planned to say were never spoken. There was a sudden deep crumping soun
d. The two of them felt as much as heard it. The earth under their feet shuddered like a beaten horse.

  Louis squinted his eyes toward the part of the line a mile ahead where the Pennsylvania miners had been laboring for the past month.

  Where . . . ?

  Just time enough to think that word before the answer was made brutally clear.

  A great column of smoke and earth shot up, sudden as a giant’s fist thrust into the air. Even as far away as they were, the massive cloud lifted up and up above them. It was so huge that Louis immediately felt the wrongness of it. It shot out sparks of fire, and flashes of lightning as it rose, formless at first, then taking the shape of a dark arching elm with a trunk made of fire. Two heartbeats later a sound like the roaring of a huge hungry beast struck them, so loud it was deafening.

  Men around Louis and Artis shrank back from what seemed like the end of the world. Some covered their faces or dropped to the ground. But the two young Indian soldiers did not look away. Their keen eyes saw what was falling out of that cloud. Earth, broken timbers, stones—and what looked to be blackened human limbs.

  “Good God!” Artis said.

  Louis shook his head. “Nothing good about this.”

  A thunder crash of cannons came hard on the heels of the blast. One hundred and forty-four field pieces had been lined up for the assault to follow the setting off of the mine. It seemed as if every mortar and siege gun let go at once as shocked artillery men pulled their lanyards. But there was no second round, no answering fire. A brittle silence hung over the lines. Both sides were stunned by the largest explosion ever set off by human hands.

  “What have we gone and done?” Louis said as the men of his company slowly rose to their feet around him and Artis. “What have we gone and done?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE CRATER

  Monday, August 8, 1864

  Louis and Artis kept low as they made their way over to the new camp of the 48th. In the week since the explosion the Pennsylvanians had been moved farther back from the great hole that had once been a section of the Rebel line. The Confederate sharpshooters over there were all as angry as hornets now. Any Union soldier who raised his head was in danger of losing it.

  No more informal truces now between us and the boys in gray.

  Just as he thought that, he heard the sudden whish of air.

  Both Louis and Artis flinched, even though it was already too late to duck.

  Crack! A minié ball buried itself in the log abutment a hand’s breadth above their heads. Some sniper in gray must have climbed to a treetop high enough to get a line of sight over the top of the fortification. The two boys duckwalked the rest of the way along the ditch, then cut downhill.

  “Thank ye both,” Sergeant Reese said as he accepted the small packet of tobacco that Sergeant Flynn had sent over.

  The three of them sat under a wide-trunked Southern oak behind the camp of the 48th. From the leafy branches above them small birds in a hidden nest cheeped, uninterested in the doings of the humans below.

  No wars for them. There’s times I’d like to be a bird.

  Reese’s voice cut into his reverie. “Now, you and your friend would be wanting to hear more of the story, won’t you?”

  “Please, sir,” Artis said. Artis might joke with his friends, but he was always unfailingly polite to anyone older than himself.

  Louis nodded agreement.

  This was the real reason they’d been sent on this errand—to bring back Reese’s side of the story to Flynn. A thousand tales were being told in camp of all that occurred on that dreadful day. Yet awful as the events had been, everyone wanted to hear more—as if hearing it might make another great failure easier to bear. To hear the most, you had to go to those who always know the most—the sergeants.

  “The grand foolishness began the night before,” Reese said, packing his pipe and lighting it. “And the higher they go, the bigger the fools they are, y’ know. General Burnside was happily goin’ about his business, all his plans neatly laid for the morrow, when what should come to him but a courier from army headquarters. ’Twas a message from our grand generals Meade and Grant. Instead of having the assault led by the Colored Troops of the Ninth who’d been rehearsing the plan for days, the attack was now to be spearheaded by one of the white divisions.”

  “Oh my!” Artis said, raising an eyebrow.

  “And well might ye say that,” Reese agreed. He reached down, picked something up, held it before his eyes, and studied it.

  A wood splinter. Even here, half a mile away, bits of debris fell from that godawful blast.

  Reese used the splinter to tamp down the tobacco in his pipe. “And why would the high and mighty of the army be changing the plan at the last moment, y’ might ask? Well, this is an election year, y’know. And there’s been one embarrassment after another for our generals and our president. The Bloody Angle, Cold Harbor, and then this month past there was that hell-be-damned raid of Jubal Early’s.”

  Louis nodded his head.

  He’d read about the daring Southern general’s exploit in a three-week-old New York Herald Bull bought from a sutler. To the shock of the entire Union, General Early had led a hand-picked force of 10,000 Confederate veterans north. With so many federal troops massed around Petersburg, he marched through Maryland with little opposition and crossed the Potomac on July 5.

  Early’s small army came within a mile of capturing Washington. The city militia, the office personnel, and the war invalids were all brought to its defense. The veterans’ hospitals emptied of anyone who could limp to the lines. President Lincoln refused to go into hiding, even though he’d been warned about secessionist plots to assassinate him. Instead, he traveled on horseback from one end of Washington to another during the siege. Lincoln even came under fire himself as he stood on the parapet of Fort Stevens, an inviting target for the Rebel marksmen a thousand yards away. Minié balls began whizzing past the lanky man in black whose unusual height and tall stovepipe hat made him tower two feet above everyone else. When an officer standing next to the president was struck by one of those sniper rounds, someone yelled, “Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!” not knowing he was directing his remarks at the leader of the Union. An amused smile on his face, the Great Emancipator had finally climbed down.

  The arrival of reinforcements had forced General Early to grudgingly withdraw on the twelfth of July. But as he moved back down through Pennsylvania he collected huge sums of gold and greenbacks from the cities he passed by threatening to burn them to the ground if they refused to pay up. The blackened ruins of Chambersburg attested to the seriousness of his threats.

  “So,” Sergeant Reese continued, “if Honest Abe hoped to hang on to his high office and not lose to some ‘Peace-at-all-costs Democrat’ like McClellan, ’twould not have been good for him to have yet another great embarrassment. Such as having his generals shove a corps of poor untested Negroes into battle to be slaughtered. Thus, in their great wisdom, Meade and Grant decided we had to show how much we cared for our Colored Troops by doing the one thing that would get them killed. Hold them back till things got so desperate they had to let them go. Ah, and they got desperate fast enough, y’ know.”

  The sergeant puffed again at his pipe.

  Louis and Artis waited.

  “Now they had to choose which unrehearsed white division would be the lucky one to take the forefront. No one volunteered, so Burnside had his three commanders draw straws. As evil luck would have it, the one who got the short straw was the worst of them all.”

  Reese spat onto the ground. “Brigadier General James H. Ledlie. There’s a man fierce at fighting—a bottle. And where was he during the whole sorry affair? As soon as that explosion went off, he scuttled down to the bombproof with a quart of rum. There he stayed for the whole day, you know. Not only that, General Ferraro, the man supposed to be commanding the Colored Troops, he joined him.”

  Reese puffed out a ring of smoke, then s
hifted to cross his legs. “The fuse was lit at three a.m. Half an hour passed and it still hadn’t gone. So we knew it must have burned out at the splice, just as we’d feared. So it was back into the tunnel for Lieutenant Douty and me. Cut the fuse, relight it, and run like rabbits being chased by a weasel! It went up just as we got out. I was deaf for a whole day after, y’ know. Ach! The hole it made! Sixty feet wide and a hundred feet long! Thirty feet deep with sides of steep clay. Have y’ seen it?”

  “No,” Louis said.

  “Not likely we’d be here if we had,” Artis added.

  Sergeant Reese nodded. “Of course not. Try to take a peek now, y’ll get your head taken off by some Southern sniper. The Johnnies are a wee bit peeved with us for blowing up their fort, y’ know. And along with that fine fort and all its guns, three hundred Rebels or more was blown sky-high as well.”

  Reese puffed out another ring of smoke and watched as it dissipated slowly in the still air around them.

  “Now, blowing all that up was according to plan. ’Twas just, y’ might say, a mite too successful. Everyone was so scared by the great force of it that they ran in the other direction. Not just the graybacks, but our men in blue as well. It took the officers half an hour to get ’em turned around and headed back. And where do y’ think they marched?”

  “Into the crater,” Artis said.

  “Aye. It seems that in the confusion, our side forgot a wee part of the grand plan, which was to move the barricades to either side of the hole. So what did those advancing men see before them? Naught but a ten-foot-wide passway straight down into the crater. Now don’t forget that the only ones who’d been rehearsed was those Colored Troops who’d been sent away to the rear. So where else could those soldiers in Ledlie’s division go without their leader to tell them but down into that bloody hole, y’ know? Leaping in as if it was the world’s biggest trench where they might be safe from the enemy’s guns.”

  Reese cleared his throat and spat. “Once in, of course, with not a ladder among them and those clay sides so slippery and crumbling, they were caught like fish in a barrel. The second division and the third followed right behind, swarming down into that crater for cover. Then the colored boys arrived.”