Sunlight (The Four Lights Quartet Book 2)

by Fergus O'Connell

  Well, sir, I think you can see – I mean you don’t have to be a military man – to see that that’s nearly a mile of open ground. We had cannon here and on those hills back there. We hit ’em with everything we had – solid shot, case, percussion. When they came within range we gave ’em canister and double canister. We couldn’t help hitting them at every shot. But they just kept on coming.

  Then, when they were within musket range – well, there was a couple of thousand of us with muskets and we just let them have it. I’ve never heard musketry like it, sir. You want pictures of dead men – you’ll find ’em here. Pull your wagon in over there.

  And such a beautiful afternoon. The weather. Such a beautiful day.’

  The major sounded like he was talking to himself.

  Roberto did as he was told. They took the dead lieutenant from the back of the wagon and carried him to where a mound of Confederate corpses had been piled up. They deposited him here. It looked like the tourniquet had come loose and he had bled out.

  ‘Thank you, signore,’ said Roberto to the dead lieutenant, ‘for getting us ’ere.’

  Gilbert gazed down at the man, nodding sadly.

  They returned to the wagon, gave Leonardo some oats and unpacked their equipment. Roberto went into the back of the wagon to prepare the first slide. Gilbert reckoned they probably had about two hours of decent light left. They could get six, maybe eight pictures.

  ‘Hey, look at this,’ he heard a soldier shout.

  At the stone wall, members of a burial party had lifted up the bodies of two soldiers, one Confederate and one Union, into sitting positions. Each of the dead men was clutching his rifle and each man had buried his bayonet into the belly of the other. The men’s faces were black from powder smoke and frozen in ghastly grimaces.

  ‘Quick,’ Gilbert called in to Roberto. ‘I’ve got our first picture.’

  He yelled to the two soldiers holding the two dead men, asking if they could find a way to prop them up. They two soldiers looked at each other, then shrugged and used other bodies to support the two dead soldiers. Gilbert positioned the camera while Roberto arrived with the slide. Gilbert indicated to the two men to step away, then ducked under the black cloth and took the picture. He returned the plate to the light proof box and Roberto hurried it back to the wagon. While he was gone Gilbert looked for his next shot.

  Nearby were two Union cannon. One was pitched on its side because one of its wheels was gone. There was no sign of the wheel and Gilbert was staggered by the violence that could not just tear off a large wooden wheel but cause it to disappear entirely. In front of the second cannon, across the stone wall, a swathe had been cut through a large mass of Confederates. They were no longer recognizable as human beings – just a long V-shape that spread out from the cannon’s mouth that contained shreds of uniform fabric, scattered bits of leather, bent muskets and a sort of ghastly stew of rain-soaked flesh, intestines, grass and mud. Flies had settled on the mess in great numbers. Gilbert lined up the camera. He would photograph the shattered cannon first. Then he would take a picture along the barrel of the cannon with the terrible human carnage beyond it. He wasn’t convinced it would make a good shot since what lay on the ground in front of the cannon’s mouth was too unrecognizable – but it was worth a try. Roberto returned and the second picture was taken, then the third.

  The next picture was of the carpet of men across the stone wall. Soldiers were continuing to separate the entangled bodies. Confederates were dragged to one side and piled in heaps. Union soldiers were lifted almost tenderly, placed on stretchers and carried to the rear. Gilbert photographed Union soldiers standing near a heap of dead Confederates as well as long lines of Union soldiers being laid out in preparation for burial.

  At one stage a wounded man was discovered amongst the dead. Gilbert got a picture of him being helped from a pile of corpses – the soldiers lifting the wounded man obligingly froze while Gilbert exposed the picture. Part of him felt callous beyond belief as he took this picture, but part of him was convinced – just as Roberto had said – that this was the right thing to be doing.

  They worked their way along the wall. It was such a nondescript sort of place, Gilbert thought. A tumbled down stone wall on a low ridge. Some trees that in summer provided welcome shade. It was the kind of place that a ploughman might come to eat his lunch and have a nap before continuing his work. Or a place for lovers to sit on the wall, hold hands and wonder at how beautiful the world was and talk about their future. Anything – anything but this.

  They continued until after four. By then a ceiling of low gray clouds hung over the battlefield and the rain, which had stopped briefly, had resumed. They could have carried on but the pictures would have been lacking in sharp detail and contrast. Gilbert suggested calling it a day and Roberto, looking up at the sky, agreed.

  ‘Maybe the sun will shine tomorrow,’ he said.

  43

  They were too tired to go anywhere else. Instead they unharnessed Leonardo and tied him by a length of rope to the wheel of a caisson. There was grass if he wanted to graze but he didn’t. They gave him oats. The rain continued to fall. Dusk came on but there was no let up in the sporadic musket fire that went on amongst both side’s skirmishers down in the valley and further north towards Gettysburg. It also looked like buildings were ablaze in the town since they could see the yellow reflection of flames dancing on the underside of the clouds and heavy columns of black smoke rising in the distance.

  They had no food but a group of soldiers at a nearby campfire asked them to join them and shared the little food they had. The soldiers told them that they hadn’t eaten in three days but they had received some rations this evening as the supply trains caught up with the fighting men. After the frugal meal they sat around the fire, huddled in their capes as raindrops fell endlessly in the firelight.

  Without exception the men were quiet. There was the odd joke or story told or burst of laughter but mostly they seemed thoughtful, each man drawn in on himself. Roberto seemed entranced to be in the company of the soldiers and Gilbert noticed that he hung on their every word. Gilbert thought how he would have had such a story to tell Sarah had he been able to go home to her from this expedition. His eyes smarted and he felt a tear slide down his face.

  Eventually Gilbert and Roberto turned in, lying wrapped in their capes on the wet ground beneath the wagon. The distant crackling sound of musket fire was the last thing Gilbert heard before he drifted off.

  Sunday 5 July 1863

  44

  Gilbert awoke just past dawn after a fitful night. His hair and clothes were sodden. They had never dried after they had become wet yesterday and rain had seeped into his cape during the night. He crawled out from under the wagon, stood up and stretched his aching limbs. Then he saw that there were soldiers at the stone wall looking across to the Rebel positions through the rain. He walked over to see what the excitement was. Was there another attack beginning?

  The rain was still spitting down but it looked like it was finally easing off. There were breaks in the clouds and there was even a faint patch of blue sky. Gilbert gazed across the valley. The Rebel positions were shrouded in drifting gray smoke and what remained of the rain. An officer beside Gilbert looked at the Rebel lines through binoculars. Then he lowered the glasses, turned to Gilbert and smiled.

  ‘Rebs have gone,’ he said.

  They ate with the soldiers again and this time food seemed to be more plentiful – some bacon and coffee had come up during the night. While they ate, Roberto and Gilbert discussed what their strategy should be for the day.

  ‘Brady – ’e’s a definitely gonna come today,’ said Roberto. ‘So I don’t think we should waste any time traveling to anywhere else. This place is ‘orrible enough. Eez much, much worse than anything Brady photographed at Antietam. So we just take more pictures ’ere.’

  ‘What say we do this?’ said Gilbert. ‘We go across the valley to where the charge began and then make our wa
y up here to the ridge. On the way we’ll photograph anything that catches our eye. It’ll be how the charge would have seemed to the men making it. It will give our exhibition a theme, a sort of flow. We can arrange the pictures in the same sequence as the charge.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Roberto. ‘Very nice, boss.’

  The sun came out as they made their way along the road they had come yesterday and back to the Emmitsburg Road. They would have to move fast because the Union burial parties were now beginning their work down here.

  They pulled the wagon in just off the road. They began in the woods from which the Confederate charge had started. They took a couple of pictures towards the distant Union line, framed by foliage from the trees. Then they began their advance. What had been a wheat field was spattered with bodies, now starting to swell in the warmth of the day. As they approached the ruined fences at the road, the numbers of bodies became greater. They photographed one of the corpses they had seen yesterday draped over a section of fence that was still intact.

  They crossed the road and now the ground was littered with corpses. They took turns at the work involved in taking the photographs. Since the glass plates had to be damp for them to be light sensitive, they had to prepare them one at a time and then rush them to the camera. One would prepare a plate and put it in the lightproof box. Then they would bring it from the wagon to the camera and the other would take the photograph. That person would return to the wagon to develop the picture and come back with a fresh slide.

  It was around noon when they decided they needed to move the wagon closer to the ridge. If they didn’t the collodion on the glass plates would have become too dry by the time they got them to the camera.

  ‘We’re gonna have to move some bodies to get the wagon through here,’ said Roberto.

  The last dead body Gilbert had touched had been Sarah’s. It seemed so right that he should do this now.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said.

  ‘For a while, boss,’ said Roberto. ‘Then I take over.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Gilbert abstractedly.

  They went back to the wagon. Where they had parked it, it was impossible to get it off the road onto the field. The way was blocked by the shattered fence line along which scores of bodies lay like autumn leaves piled up by the wind. Roberto reversed the wagon until they came to a place where there was a gap in the bodies. Gilbert got down and removed the shattered fence rails that blocked the way. Each one had literally hundreds of holes in it from musket balls.

  Gilbert walked in front of the wagon. He decided to take the clump of trees on the ridge as his target and try to steer as straight a line as possible towards that. Carefully, threading a way through the corpses, he walked ahead while Roberto followed with the wagon. However, they only managed to get a couple of hundred yards. After this the number of corpses became so great that they were blocked no matter which way they tried to move.

  Straight ahead, sprawled across their path, a body lay face down, a huge bloody crater in the back of its skull. The hole was alive with flies. Gilbert hesitated, not knowing whether to roll the body over or pull it out of the way. Then he decided that he didn’t want to turn the dead man over. If that was what the back of his head was like, Gilbert didn’t want to know about his face. He caught the man’s ankles – he had no shoes on – and pulled him a few feet across the grass, leaving a long brown-red stain behind. Gilbert took a few steps in the direction of the trees on the ridge line and Roberto got Leonardo to move forward.

  Next came a cluster of men, five of them. Four lay on their backs and one on his side. It looked as though they had all been shot by the one volley and fallen together. One man’s jacket was open and his grimy vest was soaked in blood. Glassy eyes looked up at the sky. One man had a grimace of pain on his face. Again Gilbert caught ankles and pulled bodies aside to make a pathway for the wagon.

  The gray and mustard colored mound that Gilbert came to next was barely recognizable as human. There were certainly human parts – a headless torso lay on top and arms and legs were visible. But it was impossible to tell how many individual bodies there were and there didn’t seem to be enough limbs or heads for all the bodies. A stripe more than a foot wide of blood and entrails had been torn down the centre of the mass of men as though with a ruler. Again, a layer of flies carpeted this mash of flesh and clothing.

  Even if Gilbert had been able to stomach it, he reckoned it would have been impossible to move this heap of humanity. He stepped to one side and cleared some other bodies and Roberto did his best to steer around the compressed mass of men. He didn’t get it quite right however, and the wheel passed over the end of the mound with a squelching and then a crunching sound.

  Gilbert took another bearing on the clump of trees but then he saw that he wouldn’t be able to move the next obstacle. A horse lay on its side with one of its rider’s legs trapped underneath it. Both rider and horse looked as though they had been shot several times. The rider’s upper body was peppered with bullet holes and carpeted with flies. The horse had its mouth open, its eyes closed and one of its front legs hovered in the air about a foot off the ground. It was a bay and looked like it had been a fine animal. The smell was appalling.

  Leonardo must have seen or smelt the horse the same time as Gilbert. Leonardo began to shy and looked like he was trying to go backwards.

  ‘Easy boy,’ said Roberto softly, tightening the reins. ‘Easy. Is okay. Is okay.’

  Gilbert cleared some more bodies and made a pathway to one side of the dead horse. Roberto had to slap Leonardo’s back several times with the reins before the horse reluctantly passed the dead animal.

  Painstakingly slowly, they moved forward. The smell seemed to have become much stronger. Roberto asked Gilbert if he would like to change positions but Gilbert said no. He felt he belonged amongst the dead.

  Gilbert had found several yards of open ground and was walking through it, his eyes fixed on the trees, when suddenly he heard a groan.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he said, turning around to Roberto.

  ‘Nothing, boss. That wasn’t me.’

  Then simultaneously, three things happened. Gilbert heard the groan again; Roberto said, ‘One of those guys is alive’ and it dawned on Gilbert with horror that the groan had come from one of the bodies close by.

  He looked around. Which one was it?

  ‘Hullo,’ he called. ‘Where are you?’

  There was no reply, nothing, only silence.

  He scanned the area around him. All the bodies seemed lifeless.

  ‘Hullo,’ Gilbert called again.

  He looked around at the bodies again but there was no movement. Then the groan came once more and Gilbert thought he saw a hand about ten feet away lift slightly. He ran across, jumping over another body. Gilbert squatted down and touched the man’s face. But he was stone cold. Gilbert remembered the coldness the night he had touched Sarah’s face. He remembered at the time thinking that it was a different type of cold from anything he had ever felt before. It was the coldness of space, of the void, of eternity.

  By now Roberto had stopped the wagon and had joined him. Between them they went to each of the bodies nearby.

  ‘Hullo,’ they shouted, as they squatted down, touching the still forms. ‘Where are you?’

  It was several minutes before they found the man. His face had a faint warmth to it and he lay on his back with a second body thrown across his waist. Hurriedly, Gilbert and Roberto lifted the dead body off the living man. The whole bottom part of the man’s body was soaked in blood. As far as Gilbert could make out, the wound appeared to be just above the man’s groin where there was a hole filled with dried, dark red blood.

  ‘Get some water,’ said Gilbert to Roberto, as he knelt beside the wounded man.

  The man’s eyes flickered open but then closed again as though the effort had been too much. Roberto returned with water and Gilbert lifted the man’s head. He held the canteen to the man’s lips. They wer
e cracked and bloody and his face was deathly pale.

  ‘I get the soldiers,’ said Roberto.

  He ran in the direction of some soldiers.

  ‘Hey,’ Gilbert heard him shout. ‘We gotta live one here.’

  The man’s lips moved slightly and then parted a fraction. Gilbert poured some water in. Most of it dribbled down the man’s face but a little went into his mouth. He coughed and opened his eyes again.

  ‘It’s okay now,’ said Gilbert. ‘We’ll take care of you.’

  He heard a cry of ‘stretcher bearers’ and shortly afterwards Roberto returned with two Union soldiers carrying a rolled up stretcher.

  ‘Belly wound,’ one of them announced.

  Gilbert looked up at their faces.

  He ain’t gonna make it,’ said the other.

  ‘So what – you just going to leave him here?’ said Gilbert.

  ‘Oh no sir,’ said one of the men. ‘Wouldn’t do that. Like to think the Rebs wouldn’t do that to us if the situation was reversed. No – we’ll take him to the hospital wagon alright, but he ain’t gonna make it.’

  Gilbert looked down at the Rebel’s face. He was maybe in his twenties, with hair that was raven black against the deathly white of the face. His uniform was muddy and sodden from the rain and his grimy face and hair were wet. He opened his eyes once more but they seemed to be focused on something a long way off. Gilbert knew he wasn’t going to make it too. Maybe all you had to do was witness one death close up and you became expert in it. He wondered who the man was – about his family. Did he have a wife? Children? What had he been like in life? A drinker? A gambler? A religious man? A good husband and father? A wife beater? Who loved him? When would they hear about him and how would the news arrive? Who would grieve for him? He had been out here since yesterday. What had gone through his mind in the dark hours of the night?