The crush of men pressed up beside him and Hazner fell in with them. They were almost at the embrasure. He pushed up the last few feet to one side of the gun opening, clawing his way to the top. He caught a glimpse of heads, some wearing blue kepis, most of them hatless, the rammer for the gun withdrawing the staff, screaming for the crew to run the piece back out.
He stood up, aimed at the man less than five feet away, and squeezed. Nothing happened; his rifle was still uncapped.
A gunner, shouting, raised a revolver, and he dropped down atop the crest of the wall, the pistol round cutting a neat hole into the brim of Hazner's hat
He lunged forward, tumbling over the wall and into the fort. All was madness, confusion. Landing on the firing step, a Yankee, standing above him, screamed, using his musket like a club, swung down, trying to crush his skull. Hazner rolled, avoiding the blow. Kicking with his bare feet, he caught the man on the knee; the Yankee, cursing, staggered back. He tried to stand up, but then was knocked down as another man landed on top of him. He caught a glimpse of the inside of the fort, bodies sprawled everywhere, many of them in gray or tattered butternut A line of infantry, bayonets poised, were in the center compound, light field pieces deployed across the small parade ground, aimed straight at the wall.
The man atop him grunted, cried out, then rolled off. He came to his feet, saw the man that had been atop him thrashing, screaming, a bayonet stuck in his back, the Yankee who had caught him fighting to pull the bayonet back out
Holding his musket at the butt, Hazner swung it like a club and brained the man, who collapsed, falling off the firing step into the compound below.
It was now a murder match, men fighting like primal animals, no quarter given or asked. Fumbling, he pulled out a percussion cap, thumbed it on to the nipple, cocked his gun, and swung it around, firing from the waist into the stomach of a man lunging at him.
More men were swarming over the top of the parapet; the few Yankees atop the firing step began to jump off, running. He was about to jump down after them and then saw, to his right that the crew of the thirty-pounder were still at their position, a sergeant slapping a friction primer into the breech, pulling the lanyard taut screaming for the crew to jump back.
Colonel Brown was up into the embrasure, turning, looking back, shouting incoherently. He was so close that Hazner could almost touch him. Lunging out he grabbed Brown by the arm, which was covered with blood, and then fell backward, dragging the colonel with him. Behind Brown the flag bearer was coming through the embrasure, colors still held high.
The gun went off with an earsplitting thunder crack, the flag bearer disappearing, screams echoing up from beyond the wall.
Dropping his grip on Brown, Hazner crouched, animal-like, looking around, taking it all in, his senses suddenly sharp, clear, the world momentarily focused.
Trie infantry in the center of the fort's parade ground were firing away, independent fire, picking their targets as they came up over the wall. One of the field pieces erupted with a sharp kick, leaping backward, canister sweeping the top of the fort to Hazner's left, sweeping down a dozen or more men, some of them Union, on the open parapet.
Yankees deployed along the far side of the wall, facing in toward Washington, were turned, crouching down, firing as well; a light field piece over there was turned, pointing straight at them, ready to sweep any charge that came into the parade ground.
He stood up for a brief instant, looking back over the parapet, back across the ground they had just stormed. It was carpeted with the dead and wounded of two divisions. Scattered groups of men were still pushing forward; down in the moat, hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more, floundered about. Any semblance of command was lost in this nightmare.
Where was the next wave? The mist revealed nothing.
"We're getting out!" Hazner shouted. He stood up, pushing his dazed colonel up on the wall. The gunners, not ten feet away, were furiously reloading their piece. For an instant he thought of taking them, but knew it was useless. Bullets were smacking into the earthen wall to either side, fired from the troops assembled below.
He violently pushed Brown, who was still dazed.
"No!" Brown cried, but Hazner ignored him, leaning down, lifting him up with his blacksmith's strength, slamming him over the parapet.
He leapt up, grabbed Brown, and rolled off the top, skidding halfway down the slope. Brown tried to stand back up.
"Goddamn it, Colonel. Lay down!"
"We can still take it!"
"Not yet, damn it. Wait for the next wave!"
"We can still take it!"
Brown tried to stand up, blood pouring from his wounded arm. Exasperated, Hazner reared back, punched him with a numbing blow on the side of the head, and Brown fell, tumbled into the mud, and was still.
Fumbling into his cartridge box while lying on his back, Hazner reloaded, awkwardly pulling out the ramrod, pushing the charge down while his musket lay on his stomach, then rolled over, capped the nipple, and poised his weapon.
Pressed flat against the slope, he knew that for the moment he was safe, though those on the far side of the moat were trapped in hell. Hundreds of men, thinking as he did, had pressed themselves down into the forward slope of the fort, the ground defilade that could not be hit. The thirty-pounder, only feet away, could sweep the far slope and the fields beyond, but it could not touch him, though the roar of it would leave him deafened. Any infantry that tried to pick him off would have to stand atop the parapet, and several did try in the next few minutes, only to be riddled, as a hundred or more fired on them, offering back some small measure of revenge for the carnage. It was a stalemate.
Hazner looked around, recognizing some faces from his regiment.
"We stay here!" he shouted. "Stay here, don't fall back, or you'll be slaughtered. Stay here till the next wave comes, then we go back in!"
He reached down to his canteen. Uncorking it, Hazner lifted it up. It was light, empty. A bullet had cut it nearly in half.
Cursing, he flung it aside, and then hunkered down to wait for what would come next
He looked back to the east The sun was breaking the horizon, dull red as it shone through the smoke and the fog, which would soon burn away. It was going to be a hot day. It was going to be a very long day.
July 18th 1863
6.30am
The smoke of battle was drifting down Fifth Avenue. A gutted mansion to his right burned fitfully, its brownstone walls scorched black, glass from the broken windows lying scattered along the sidewalk, smoke pulsing out of the empty window frames soaring up in coiling plumes. Two bodies dangled from a lamppost in front of the mansion, hand-lettered signs tied to their feet... REBEL ARSONISTS, the signs twirling slowly as smoke drifted around them.
The artillery fire had stopped just after dawn, only the occasional rifle shot echoing now in the gloom. The haze of smoke hung low on the street, a fitful rain splashing down, the rain thick with soot, ash, the smell of wet wood smoke.
Maj. Gen. Dan Sickles walked purposefully down the middle of the street, his escort, a company of green-clad Berdan's sharpshooters, fanned out around him in a circle, moving like the veterans they were. Instead of stalking through woods and fields they now moved from doorway to doorway, rifles poised, scanning rooftops, open windows, abandoned barricades, racing forward, going down on one knee, then up again. Disdaining such caution, he walked upright, unafraid, setting the example he knew had to be set. Twice assassins almost got him, one of the shots nicking his hat. Of course he made sure that an illustrator from Harper's Weekly knew about that event; with luck it might be on the cover next week, with him standing as a hero in the middle of the street, the skulking coward leaning over from a rooftop. He had made a point of drawing his revolver and firing several shots back—missing, of course, but still it set the right pose. The country needs a hero in a time of crisis, he thought, and I am going to give them one.
A scattering of cheers and applause greeted him as he str
ode down the avenue, frightened civilians peeking out of windows, then coming outside to greet him. A beautiful young girl in a soot-darkened silk dress of bottle green came out from a doorway, carrying a flower. Shyly she curtsied and handed him the blossom.
Smiling, he bowed gallantly, took the flower with one hand, and then, taking the girl's hand, he bent over and kissed it gently.
"Thank you, my dear."
"The honor is mine, General."
She scurried back into her house, several of the veterans accompanying him looking at her, grinning slyly. He turned, handed the flower to one of his adjutants, and smiled at the knot of reporters walking behind him.
"You're a popular man this morning, General," a reporter from the Tribune shouted.
He smiled, thinking the nation needed a modest hero.
"It's the men, my men who deserve the credit," he replied diplomatically, saying it loud enough so his escort could hear it
They crossed Thirty-fourth Street, heading south. The four corners of the intersection were piled high with barricades, torn-up cobblestones, upended wagons, dead horses, a streetcar pushed over on its side... and dozens of bodies, many of them hideously riddled from the blasts of canister and solid shot, which the evening before he had directed into this rebel stronghold.
He paused at the middle of the intersection to watch as a company of infantry, New York State Militia, and several dozen firemen and policemen emerged out of the smoke and passed by, heading west. The lieutenant leading the group saw Sickles, slowed, and saluted.
"Where are you coming from, Lieutenant?" Dan asked.
"Over on the East Side, sir, down by the docks. Hard fighting, I lost half a dozen men, but we routed them into the river."
"Good work, son."
"We've been ordered over to the West Side now."
Dan nodded. There were still a few pockets of resistance down toward the Hudson, and apparently some of the rioters were trying to seize boats to get out of the city now that the insurrection was collapsing.
The lieutenant motioned to the back of his column. Four bedraggled civilians, hands tied, were being prodded along at bayonet point
"We captured these men, sir, in a burning warehouse. They claim they're innocent. I'm not sure, sir, what to do with them."
Dan looked over appraisingly at the four. One was fairly well dressed, broadcloth jacket velvet vest, looked like a clerk or young merchant in his early twenties.
Dan walked up to him, ignoring the other three, who were obviously ruffians, Irish street-sweepings.
"What's your story?"
"I got trapped in the mob, sir," the young man said nervously. "I don't know how I wound up in that warehouse; I was trying to get out but couldn't."
"Why aren't you in the army?" Dan asked pointedly. "Men your age should be up at the front, serving their country."
As he spoke, his gaze shifted to his escorts. They were looking at the young man with cold eyes. It had not been difficult at all to unleash his men, survivors of the Union Mills disaster, on this mob. The resentment that had been building for two years against stay-at-home slackers was already at the boiling point before the riots had even started.
The young man said nothing, eyes a bit unfocused, obviously still drunk.
Dan turned away and looked at the lieutenant.
"If he were an honorable soldier of the South, like those my comrades and I faced openly on the battlefield, I would risk my own life if need be to save him if he were wounded."
He looked at the men of his escort, who were now watching the drama.
"You there, Sergeant," he nodded toward a veteran, beard flecked with gray, an ugly crease across one cheek from a bullet that had almost killed him the night before.
"Should this man be treated the way we treated prisoners after Antietam or the other battles we were in, where we shared our canteens with wounded rebs?"
The sergeant glared at the captured man, chewing meditatively on a wad of tobacco.
The dazed man looked at him hopefully.
"Hang the son of a bitch," the sergeant growled and spat, the juice striking the man's boots.
Sickles turned away with a dramatic flourish.
"Hang them all."
"Sir?"
"You heard me, Lieutenant. They are insurrectionists not in uniform. The rules of war are that they are to be hung."
Without waiting for a reply Dan started to walk away, ignoring the young man who, stirring out of a drunken stupor, began to hysterically scream for mercy.
He did not even bother to look back and, scrambling over the barricade, pressed on south. The Tribune reporter came up to his side.
"Isn't that rather harsh, sir? Resistance is collapsing."
Dan pulled a cigar out of his pocket and offered it to the reporter, who refused. Dan then bit off the end and paused to strike a match against a lamppost.
"Harsh?"
"The rioting is all but finished, sir. Isn't it time now for some mercy?"
"Riot? Sir, this was not a riot, it was an insurrection in support of the Confederacy. I wish you reporters would get it right. The size of it, the sheer destructiveness—no unorganized mob could do what was done here to our city, three hundred miles away from the front lines. You see around you the hand of the Confederate government and their secret agents. New York has become just as much a battlefield as Union Mills or Washington."
The reporter did not reply.
"Write that down if you please, son."
The reporter complied
The screaming of the young man was suddenly cut short, and they looked back up Fifth Avenue. At the corner of Thirty-fourth Street, a body seemed to leap into the air, half a dozen men pulling on the rope, the young man kicking and thrashing. A rifle shot exploded, one of the other three trying to escape, scrambling up over the barricade, collapsing, then half a dozen more shots, the soldiers deciding to dispatch the rest without the ceremony of a hanging.
Dan turned away and continued to walk.
"It doesn't seem to bother you," the reporter said, his features now pale.
Dan took off his hat, which was rain-soaked and covered with greasy soot He looked up at the morning sky, breathing deeply. It did smell like a battlefield; the smoke, the faint whiff of rotten eggs from the volley just fired, a distant thump of a cannon counterpointed by more musketry.
"You ever seen a battle, son?"
"No, sir."
"You should. Young man your age." "Are you going to hang me, sir, because I didn't join the army?"
Dan looked over at him and laughed. "You think that's it? Why I hanged that scoundrel back there?"
"I think it contributed to it."
"At Union Mills I saw the ground carpeted with our dead, and we lost. I saw the same at Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, where the bodies froze into the ground. Dead, wasted dead, and still the war continues."
He fell silent, the memories sharp, crystal clear. The stench of the field at Chancellorsville, bodies bloating in the heat Waste, all of it waste. Back here it was just numbers, names in fine print filling page after page of the papers. He had seen it and felt the anguish as men, his men, died. They were his men being wasted, and if ever there was a chance to change all that, it was now. By God, the republic had to be saved, and the saving of it would start right here, in the streets of New York. Set the example here that traitors stabbing the army in the back will not be tolerated And then let his men who fought here return back to the Army of the Potomac and spread the story of what he accomplished. That will affect the morale of all his men for the better.
"If I had but one day in command," he whispered, "and fifty thousand more men, men even like that slacker back there, who I could have turned into an honorable soldier, the war would be over."
He puffed on his cigar for a moment, still looking at the dark-gray sky.
"These are hard times, son. Hard times. We've lost two hundred thousand men in this war and still it goes on. I want what happ
ened here to be a message to our nation. The times have changed forever, the traitors down South forced that on us, and now I shall finish it"
"You, sir?"
He looked back over at the reporter and smiled.
"After today? I saved this city, son. Saved it from becoming a wasteland."
As he spoke, he gestured up and down Fifth Avenue. The refuse of the riot was everywhere—broken storefronts, gutted buildings, bolts of cloth trampled into the filth, smashed-in barrels, broken bottles, torn-up pavement dead horses, and, from a lamppost at the comer of Thirty-third Street, two more bodies dangling, one with trousers burned off to the knees, the skin blackened.
"If we had lost New York we would have lost the war."
"Isn't it lost already? There's reports that Lee will take Washington today."
Sickles took the cigar out of his mouth and blew a ring in the still air.
"I don't like that kind of talk, son."
"Sir?"
"Just what you said. 'Reports,' you say? Who filed these reports? The government, or some newspaper?" The reporter was silent
Not wanting to antagonize this important mouthpiece to the public, he smiled.
"Son. When we see an official dispatch from the government declaring mat the capital has fallen, then print it, but not before. Such talk might only lend encouragement to the rebels here in this city. That girl who gave me a flower back there. Do you want her to fall into their hands?"
"Of course not"
"Fear is the enemy here this morning. We've got it under control; let's leave Washington out of it for now and wait until there is official word."
The reporter said nothing.
"And if by chance, if by remote chance the capital does fall, I will lead the Army of the Potomac, in its fury, across Maryland and teach Bobbie Lee a lesson he will never forget"
"Sir, what Army of the Potomac?" another reporter interjected, coming up to join the two. Sickles smiled dismissively.
"That, young man, is a military secret Believe me, the Army still exists, I know, for even while here, I am working to rebuild it You will see it crowned with the laurels of victory before all is done."
Grant Comes East - Civil War 02 Page 11
