The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (George Washington Series)

by Newt Gingrich

  “It could still be a partial burn,” O’Shay gasped, “part of it could still be burning in there.”

  Both had seen it, or the results of it, before. A fuse appears to have failed, a blaster goes in to find out what went wrong, and the last thing he ever sees is that the fuse is still dangling there, but a “partial” burn is still sputtering along inside of it.

  Kochanski pulled the cover off of the lantern, held it up, and puffed the half-chewed cigar in his mouth to life. Hand trembling, he touched the tip of the cigar to the fuse. God, if it did not sputter then O’Shay was right, there was a partial burn still going on … and they were dead men who were still breathing, at least for a few more seconds.

  The fuse flashed to life.

  “Out!” Kochanski cried. “Run!”

  In his excitement, O’Shay dropped the lantern, with coal oil spilling out as it overturned. Flaring up, the open flame added to their terror.

  Squatting low, the two set off at a run. Kochanski, at one point, banged into a shoring with such force that it dislodged, triggering a partial cave-in, just as O’Shay pushed through behind him.

  Ahead they could see the dim square of the tunnel entrance, illuminated by the rising light of dawn.

  The two burst out, standing up.

  “It’s gonna blow!” O’Shay cried, racing for the safety barrier as Pleasants and others reached out to pull them over.

  FORT PEGRAM

  4:45 A.M.

  “Get Captain Sanders!”

  Sergeant Joshua Allison, twenty feet down into the counter tunnel, was looking up anxiously. After long hours of silence he had heard something: voices and then something falling.

  He turned to press his head back against the wall of the tunnel.

  “Merciful Lord, please watch over me,” he whispered.

  Less than ten feet away, the burning fuse had already reached the split and had raced the final twenty feet up the two chambers. The flame in the southwest chamber reached the open pound of powder carefully laid out by Colonel Pleasants a few seconds before its counterpart in the northeast chamber hit its open charge.

  The pound of powder flashed. No explosion yet, just a lurid blue burst of light igniting with a dull thump rather than a blast, for it was not contained. The flash burst into the open barrel of twenty-four pounds of powder, which ignited a quarter of a second later.

  Sergeant Joshua Allison was the first to hear the beginning of the greatest explosion yet recorded on the American continent. He did not even have time to recognize it for what it was … as he was dead. A merciful Lord had answered his prayer, bringing him a death so quick that it did not allow even a moment for fear.

  HEADQUARTERS NINTH CORPS

  4:45 A.M.

  “Tell General Meade…”

  General Ambrose Burnside was interrupted in mid-sentence.

  “My God, there it goes!” someone cried.

  He pivoted, looked west. The ridge appeared to be rising up, like a distant wave coming into shore, distorting the horizon, rising higher and higher.

  No noise yet. Just the ground rising upward, and then suddenly breaking apart into ten thousand fragments that continued to soar heavenward.

  Still no noise, but all could feel the shock wave racing through the earth, shaking them.

  “Merciful God!” some screamed. “This is it!”

  * * *

  James Reilly stood up, sketchpad in hand, blank page ready to record the moment. Only seconds ago, he had feared that the pages he was about to sketch would be only of confusion and terror. He had been afraid that the Rebels had finally seen the mass of over twelve thousand men deployed and that then all hell would break loose. He had heard Burnside arguing about Meade’s order to charge even without an explosion and had seen the agony Burnside was feeling. To charge without the mine going off would be to create yet another debacle. To charge and have the mine explode while thousands of Union soldiers struggled to surround the fort only yards away would be nothing less than murder.

  But now the earth was lifting up. He knew he would have only seconds to register his impressions, impossible to make any clear sketch as it happened.

  What had been Fort Pegram was now rising heavenward, an explosion at least a hundred yards wide igniting, tearing the Confederate position asunder. It was all darkness for another second or so, and then twin columns of flame rose up out of the earth, combining together a split second later, spreading up and out.

  He tried to keep focused, to soak in every detail. He had been under fire scores of times and had learned to fix attention on a particular detail, imprint it in memory, then draw it later.

  But this?

  It was almost beyond his powers of observation. The first detail to catch his mind and hold for a brief instant was an entire field piece, weighing more than a ton, tumbling end over end as it continued to climb toward the sky.

  The illumination from the flash grew in intensity, for a second or so like that of a rising sun as some of the powder, blown clear out of its place deep beneath the earth, was tossed upward, some of the barrels now bursting apart with brilliant flashes.

  The explosion reached a climax. Around the edges fragments of earth, some half as big as houses, were now tumbling back down. In the center of the explosion, the column of thousands of cubic yards of earth, contained six artillery pieces, the caissons of which were exploding as well. Tentage, rifles, and more than three hundred men were being blown apart.

  * * *

  Captain Sanders barely had enough time to register what was happening to him. There was a brief instant of conscious thought, that he had been right and this now proved it, the beginning of a prayer for the good Lord to watch over his young wife and newborn child and then darkness for him as well, as he slammed into the ground fifty yards away from the fort where he had been standing but five seconds earlier.

  * * *

  Hunkered down behind the sandbag barrier, Pleasants heard the men around him cheering, shouting, even as some of the blast, which had raced down the collapsing tunnel, burst into the trench and was finally stopped only by the safety barriers they were positioned behind.

  The shock wave raced through the earth and was followed less than half a second later by the sound of the explosion. It was not the sharp crack that many expected, some saying it would be like a volcano blowing up, though none had ever experienced such an event. It came more as an over-pressure punching into their lungs, a heavy thump like a giant door being slammed shut with a rush of air ahead of it.

  Pleasants looked straight up, his horizon blocked off by the top of the trench in which they were lying. And then he saw it, a rain of debris climbing upward, reaching apogee, and then starting to come down. He had expected some of the wreckage to wash over their trench. And now it was, as he had expected, coming down upon them.

  * * *

  Garland White just stood silent, the explosion mushrooming outward, and then collapsing back down, the sound of it having washed over the regiment seconds before.

  In spite of orders, every man was on his feet, shouting, cheering. The officers were as amazed as the men. Many of them stood dumbstruck, not shouting orders, for clearly no one could hear them through the noise of the explosion and its aftermath.

  Though eight hundred yards distant, he thought he could actually see men, or what was left of men, tumbling through the air, carried aloft by the blast and now slamming back down into the earth.

  He stood silent and offered a short prayer for God to grant them swift and painless deaths, for surely no man deserved to die in such a manner.

  The rumble of the explosion washed over them. Then the noise just gradually died away. The vast mushroom cloud of dirt was disappearing, small fragments of it still raining down, while a dark cloud of dirty, yellowish-gray smoke, made lurid by the rising light of dawn, climbed a thousand feet or more into the morning air.

  He stood silent, while around him men continued to cheer. He knew he had just watched s
everal hundred lives being snuffed out … it was nothing to cheer about, even if they were the enemy.

  The pillar of smoke appeared to detach from the ground and slowly drifted, a cloudy mist hanging over the Rebel line. But after a minute or so it began to break apart.

  And still no one was moving.

  They had been trained again and again in what they were to do. When finally told what was to happen, that ten tons of powder would detonate under the fort, that it would disappear in a single heartbeat, to be replaced by a crater upward of two hundred yards wide, they had expected to already be moving forward.

  “It will look like you are charging into Hell itself,” Colonel Russell had told them, “but better that than Rebel bullets and canister at point-blank range.

  “The moment the explosion starts, I want every man of you up and racing forward as you have drilled over and over. Every man of you! Do not hold back. Yes, some of you might be injured, even killed by the falling debris, but I want you into the Rebel lines to either side of the crater before the dust even begins to settle and the smoke to clear. They will be running the other way, I promise you, and we must latch onto their coattails and run with them, clear into Petersburg!

  “You must charge, and keep on charging!”

  Instead of charging, the men of Ledlie’s division were on their feet, jumping up and down, gesturing, and to Garland’s utter disbelief, falling back! In the face of the debris raining down, their forward lines were actually pulling back, some of the men turning and running.

  “For God’s sake,” he heard someone scream. He turned and saw that Sergeant Malady, true to his promise, had fallen in with their brigade and was standing at the side of General Thomas.

  “Charge, damn you! Charge!”

  With his cry more and more of the men of the Fourth took notice for the first time that the men of the division which had replaced them, rather than going forward, were recoiling back. A universal shout of rage began to rise up from the ranks. Officers turned, some raising their hands for the men to fall silent, but the sight was so overwhelming to them as well that some of their voices joined in protest.

  Two minutes had passed, then three, and not one man had crossed the forward trench line. By this point the entire 28th would already have been across the Rebel trenches and racing toward the Jerusalem Plank Road.

  And so they stood, and raged, and not a single man advanced.

  4:51 A.M.

  “In the name of God! Get your men moving!”

  In his rage Colonel Pleasants had climbed out of the trench. The air around him was thick with the dust that had slowly boiled down the slope, but which was now beginning to clear.

  He scanned their lines to either flank of the crater, half expecting to be shot as he stood up. There did not seem to be a single man in the trenches for at least a hundred or more yards to either flank of the smoking wreckage of what had been Fort Pegram. As he and Burnside had predicted from the first, the massive explosion had triggered a panic, understandably so.

  Would more such explosions follow all along the Rebel line? Had the Yankees planted infernal devices along the entire front?

  He could see scores of Rebels, out of the trenches, running pell-mell back toward the Jerusalem Plank Road. To either flank, for a mile in either direction, every Union artillery piece available—160 guns—had opened up as well, from the sharp bark of three-inch rifles, up to the deep thunderous cough of the huge fourteen-inch mortars, blanketing the Rebel lines with explosive and solid shot.

  He turned back to face Ledlie’s men. They had fallen back a hundred yards or more in some places, all packed together. Debris from the explosion had fallen nearly as far back—clumps of dirt, equipment, unidentifiable wreckage, and bodies as well. Amazingly, one of the Rebels was still alive, staggering around just in front of his trench; several men climbed out, grabbed him, and then with a show of gentleness actually helped him down to cover. The survivor was an oddity that filled them with curiosity as to why he lived when nearly every other man in the fort was now dead.

  The sight of several of Ledlie’s men who had been hit by the debris falling back when they should already have been over the enemy line filled Pleasants with rage.

  He leaped over his own trench, and with arms flung wide, pointed to the enemy position.

  “Charge, damn you! Charge!”

  Some of his men, those who had labored so long for this moment, came out of the trench as well, pointing up the slope, screaming for their comrades to “Move, damn, it move!”

  And finally, by ones and twos, and then in disorganized clusters the men of the First Division began to come forward. Only then did Henry realize that none of them were carrying footbridges to traverse the Rebel trench, and that none had been brought up during the night, to be thrown across their own trenches in the first seconds after the explosion. And not a single man with Ledlie was carrying an ax to clear away the abatis and chevaux-de-frise that were still intact on either flank of the crater.

  Pleasants ran down the length of his own trench, drawing out his sword, holding it up high, waving it, pointing it toward the Rebel line.

  “Do it! Do it now! Take it!”

  The first of Ledlie’s men reached his trench. Some managed to leap across, while many just lowered themselves down, then scrambled up the other side. Whichever units still had any cohesion now broke apart.

  Raging, Colonel Pleasants found himself literally grabbing men, shoving them forward, leaping back over his trench and then turning to grab hold of men trying to climb up and out, yelling at them to keep moving.

  Several hundred were now out into what would have been a killing ground only fifteen minutes before, walking slowly, cautiously, as if expecting at any second a blazing volley to erupt and give them reason to turn and dive back into the protection of their own trenches.

  Not a single shot greeted them, and now more men, emboldened, began to push forward. But many stopped to gawk, to gather around a three-inch rifle, nearly intact, lying inverted halfway up the slope, others slowing to look at the bodies and parts of bodies of dead Rebels blown out of the fort.

  “Keep moving!”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  He turned and saw a star on an officer’s shoulder, but did not bother to salute.

  “I asked, who the hell are you?”

  Pleasants realized that the explosion must have affected his hearing; it was hard to catch what the man was saying.

  “I’m Colonel Pleasants, 48th Pennsylvania. My men dug the mine. Why in hell are your men not advancing?”

  He looked into the man’s eyes, and saw that, for a general, he was quite young, not more than in his mid-twenties.

  “Because we have no orders, that’s why!”

  “And who the hell are you?” Pleasants cried.

  “General Bartlett, First Brigade of the First Division.”

  Startled, Pleasants could not help himself, and looked down. General William Bartlett was leaning on a cane, the straps of his artificial leg visible beneath his uniform trousers.

  The man was something of a legend with Ninth Corps, and Pleasants realized that he himself must be in shock, otherwise he would have recognized Bartlett immediately.

  Enlisting in the first days of the war as a private with the famed 20th Massachusetts, the same regiment which had produced Robert Gould Shaw, Bartlett had risen to company command by the spring of 1862. A Rebel sharpshooter had nailed him during the opening days of the Peninsula Campaign.

  Losing his leg above the knee, Bartlett had finished his college education at Harvard while recuperating, gone back into the army, this time raising a regiment to go with him, and had then been wounded twice more, nearly losing his other leg, and having a hand permanently crippled after his wrist was shattered. He refused to allow the surgeon to cut it off, saying he had given enough of his body to the damn Rebels already. While Bartlett was recovering from those wounds, Burnside had recruited him to take over a brigade under
Ledlie, and nearly every man of the division had looked forward to the day that Ledlie was finally booted out and a real fighting general like Bartlett took over.

  It was therefore shocking to Pleasants that Bartlett, leaning heavily on his cane, apparently did not know what to do.

  “What do you mean, you have no orders?” Pleasants asked, voice going tight, not believing he was asking such a question of this man.

  It wasn’t just the explosion that was making it difficult for Henry to hear. All along the Union line every gun was firing as rapidly as possible, the cannonade a continual wave of thunder.

  “Just that!” Bartlett shouted. “My orders were to form and then advance after the explosion of some sort of mine; that once formed my men and I would be briefed. I waited all night for further instructions, but there wasn’t a word and then suddenly this!”

  He pointed at the still smoking crater.

  Pleasants reeled with this blow. He could sense this was no coward or fool standing before him. The man was out in the open, confused, but obviously enraged as well.

  “Where is General Ledlie? He was supposed to be leading this!” Pleasants asked.

  “Damn him! You tell me!” Bartlett cried.

  And even as the two stood out in the middle of what had been a no-man’s-land but minutes before, they saw the first of the men reach the crest, look about, and then just disappear, jumping down into the crater.

  “You had no orders to take the road and the hill beyond it?”

  “What road? The Jerusalem Plank? That’s what we’re supposed to do now?”

  “Merciful God,” Pleasants gasped, not even realizing he was clasping Bartlett by the shoulder and nearly knocking him off balance.

  “Once blown, the plan was for the lead brigades to charge around the crater, not into it!” and he pointed to where more and yet more men of Bartlett’s command were doing just that, jumping down into the crater, or still poking around at the wreckage, like boys exploring a shipwreck after a storm.