Cain at Gettysburg (19 page)

He fell. Lane knelt beside him.

And Blake heard Cobb's laughter.

“Move fast, Quaker, if you want them boots.”

Turning to knock Cobb down, Blake saw Jack Ireton seated on the ground, playing with the red, white, and gray spewings of his belly the way a child plays with a wonderful new toy.

Perhaps it was the sight of the colonel falling. Or maybe it was his recognition of the hard death awaiting Jack Ireton. But Blake felt a new fury. And Cobb wasn't target enough for it. Bloody-faced and merry as a farm boy at the fair, Cobb was fighting the war by his own rules. Blake decided to let the devil be.

“Come on,” Blake called to the two men who remained by him. And they went forward again, Blake, black Cobb, and empty-faced John Bunyan.

The old verse, queerly applicable, leapt to his mind, a substitute for thought: “Surely, I come quickly…”

That's right, Billy Yank. I'm coming for you. Quickly.

Lieutenant Colonel Lane stormed by, his anger borrowed from Kings or perhaps Joshua, nothing New Testament about it. “We're going to give them sonsofbitches the bayonet,” he shouted. “Shoot 'em in their bastard guts and give 'em the damned bayonet.”

The tattered clans of the regiment's companies began to howl. The shredded line straightened remarkably, the men wild as pent-up hounds about to be loosed on their quarry.

Sharp to the left, two lieutenants, Cureton and Blair, were practically wrestling over who would bear the flag next. In charge of the regiment now, Lieutenant Colonel Lane descended upon them.

He tore the flag from Blair's grip, speaking words no one but the two lieutenants could hear. And Lane dashed forward himself, flaunting the short-staved banner.

For an unearthly moment, Blake saw Lane rimmed by sunlight, as if he had been chosen for a miracle. The smoke had concealed how near they had come to the far edge of the wood, to the top of the ridge, to what must pass for victory. They were almost there.

Waving the broken flagstaff, Lane bellowed:

“Twenty-sixth! Follow me!”

Fewer than a hundred men remained to drive home the attack. But hundreds more, ghosts now, filled out their ranks. A last, triumphant Rebel yell soared above torn treetops.

The Yankees were pulling back again, abandoning the grove. This time, their order was broken. They stumbled rearward in huddled groups, pausing to fire, outraged at being bested. But others in blue just ran now—not many, but enough to distract their remaining officers from the fight. Sergeants shouted, mouths wide, but their voices could not compete with the tumult of war.

Blake rushed forward, bayonet ready for man-flesh. Cobb kept up to his left, John Bunyan to his right. The three of them, and dozens more, surged toward the crest of the ridge, howling like demons.

Surely, I come quickly …
The words became a chant inside Blake's head, inextinguishable, resounding.
Quickly … I come quickly … new heavens, and a new earth … quickly … I come … quickly …

They have no place in me,
Blake told himself, attempting to resist.
These words are not my own. Mine own. Thou, thee. Quaker talk.

Surely, I come quickly …

You are your father's son. Reciting scripture blasphemously in your drunkenness. But you are drunk on blood …

Led by Lieutenant Colonel Lane, they burst from the trees into the dirty sunlight of the battlefield. Even now, not all of the Yankees were ready to quit, but anyone could see that their defense was finished. Now it was just about stubbornness and spite.

Lane turned to his ruined regiment, shouting, “Come on, boys! Come on!”

A Yankee bullet caught him in the mouth.

Blake's heart plummeted, even as hatred quickened him body and soul, lawless, delicious.

“Sumbitch,” Cobb cried, “those sumbitches.” It was as much emotion as he had ever shown.

Captain Brewer of Company E, one of the last officers still on his feet, took up the bloodied banner.

He did not have to shout to rally the men. They rushed after him screaming and howling. They were attacking the Yankee army with fewer men than the regiment's smallest company had counted an hour before.

Still beside him, John Bunyan seemed unaware that a bullet or sliver of shrapnel had scraped his scalp, painting the left side of his head and neck crimson.

Flesh wound,
Blake decided.
Or the boy wouldn't be standing
.
Head wounds are always bloody. Means nothing, most like.

Blake needed someone other than Cobb to survive with him.

He fired his rifle into the chest of a Yankee who had appeared not five feet in front of him. Too late, Blake realized that the man wanted to surrender.

Didn't matter, anyway. Didn't matter.

Surely, I come quickly …

But then, as at a command, all quickness left him. A collective will pulled up the attack's survivors atop the ridge, stopping them among clots of contorted bodies garbed in blue. The men still alive from the 26th North Carolina were spent and done, there was nothing left in them. If the Yankees had pushed back now, they might have redeemed themselves.

But the Black Hats continued to fall back, small clusters of them, moving down through a swale and carrying off those of their wounded who could limp along or cling to a tent-mate's back. They were drawing off toward a Yankee battery and more troops formed up on a ridge at the edge of the town.

We can't,
Blake thought.
We just can't go over there. Too many of them. We just can't.

A mighty, magnificent cry broke just to his rear. The Rebel yell. For an instant, Blake went chill with the thought that it really was the ghosts of the regiment's fallen.

Instead, it was the men of Pender's division, fresh as daisies, coming up behind them to finish the charge.

Blake sat down on the ground. Only by propping himself up with his rifle could he stop himself from pitching out flat. He did not remember deciding to sit down. He had just done it. Men in gray and various browns swarmed past him.

“God awmighty,” a fellow sergeant told him as he passed by, “you boys
done
something. God awmighty, you sure done something.…”

Then the first line of Pender's men went down into the swale. Soon, the second line passed. The men cheered the milling survivors of the 26th and their ruined flag.

Somewhere up ahead, cannon opened again. But it no longer mattered.

Blake sat. Smeared with blood and pus, Cobb had taken a place beside him. Befuddled and gory, John Bunyan got as far as his knees and stayed that way, kneeling the way an ox would. They were surrounded by dead and terrified wounded men. All in blue uniforms. One man seemed to be trying to speak to Blake, to ask something of him, but Blake could not understand. The fellow might as well have been a Chinaman.

… and a new earth … a new earth …

The last firing moved off toward the town, leaving the moans of gut-torn men, of men bleeding to death from limb stumps, of men whose lungs had been gashed, or whose spines had been cracked without enough force to kill them then and there.

The field stank.

Slowly, Blake looked around for an officer. He saw none.

Using his rifle as a crutch, he rose. Amazed that he could stand, that he was whole.

“Come on,” he told Cobb and John Bunyan. “Gather up ammunition from the dead. This isn't over.”

“Sumbitch,” Cobb whispered.

EIGHT

July 1, Midafternoon

“Get those fences down!” Colonel Krzyzanowski ordered, gesturing toward the broad fields stretching across his brigade's front and on the right flank.

Colonel Robinson and Lieutenant Colonel Boebel saluted and rode back to their regiments, leaving Krzyzanowski in midfield with his two aides. Hastily formed work parties rushed forward as the uproar of combat intensified. General Barlow had gotten himself into a deadly pinch. Krzyzanowski could not make out all of the details, but the volume of fire was alarming. The terrain beyond Barlow's awkward line obscured the Rebel positions and the size of their force, but it was clear that the situation was grim.

A dog straining on a leash, the Pole awaited orders to advance the final distance into the fight. He knew those orders would come. But why not now, while there was still a chance to eke things out? If that fool Barlow had to be rescued, the time was now. Krzyzanowski would have preferred an attempt to re-form the corps' defense on the original line near the town, but feared that it already had grown too late.

Abruptly, the Confederate cannon shifted their fire toward Krzyzanowski's lines again. The guns had reappeared in their former positions on the high hill to the left. And there were more of them now. As he turned to gauge the effect on his brigade, a row of men in the 82nd Ohio disappeared in a smear of blood.

The battle noise notched up again.

He considered ordering the men in the ranks to lie down, but decided against it. In the confused combat unfolding on both his flanks, seconds might matter. There were times when men had to die, and he had to make them do it. That, too, was in his blood. But it was bitter.

He put the side of his boot heels to his mount, sparing the creature the bite of his spurs again. At a canter and followed by his aides, he traversed his brigade frontage, the better to see if the skeletal 75th Pennsylvania had finished aiding the effort to block the Rebel probe of the corps' center.

The regiment's commanding officer, Colonel Mahler, had performed heroically. With his horse tumbled atop him and the beast kicking in agony, the injured officer had risen to his feet again, refusing to go to the rear. With the help of one of his staff officers, Mahler had hopped back into the fray like a fellow in a sack race, cheered on by his Pennsylvanians.

Those boys were all too few, but they were fighting on their home ground. Krzyzanowski understood. Their hearts were in it. They'd give a good account of themselves and their company-size regiment.

Yes. Good. Mahler and his men had contained the thrust and were returning to their place in the brigade reserve. Krzyzanowski rode no farther, but turned his horse again. “Come on,” he called to his aides, two enthused young men.

On the right, billows of smoke obscured all beyond the firing line of Barlow's forward positions. That was where Krzyzanowski's worries lay. He pulled up his mount before his 119th New York, trying to hear acutely, to judge the course of the hidden fighting from the intensity and direction of the firing. But there was too much noise, too much confusion. The constant report of the guns, along with the incessant rifle volleys, jumbled the world.

The Eleventh Corps' own batteries dueled with the Rebel artillery on the high hill again. Dilger had repositioned his guns adeptly, the man was brilliant. That much of the fight seemed subject to control, if things did not worsen. The Pole trotted over to his right flank, to his Wisconsin Germans, the Sigel Regiment. Along with his beloved Polish Legion, the 58th New York, they had made a stand at Chancellorsville as heroic as any action he had ever seen. Only to be included in the battle's general shame, in the accusations of cowardice delivered by distant voices. Nor had the failed generals risen to defend the honor of men who had died for their errors.

The 26th Wisconsin would be the first to catch it, if Barlow's front collapsed or his flank was turned. Shrunken though it was, he wished his Polish Legion could be with him today. Every man would count on this field. But his 58th had been ordered to detached duty, leaving only a handful of its men on the field, positioned between the New Yorkers and the Wisconsin
Deutschen
.

Lieutenant Colonel Boebel, an old revolutionary, rode out to meet him. Shells burst near enough to shy their horses, but both men were confident riders. Krzyzanowski's aides moved off to give the commanders privacy.

“Well, Hans,” Krzyzanowski called over the roar, “you'll be in for it soon enough.”

“Too damned soon, I am thinking. Young
Meister
Barlow's made a barnyard slop of it. If the Secessionists don't turn his flank, they have no brains at all.” At the report of a shell, his horse pranced. The German tightened the reins.

Krzyzanowski understood what his subordinate was thinking:
Chancellorsville again. Except this time we made the same mistake in broad daylight, when we had the choice right in front of us.
But the Pole would not, could not, say it. Chancellorsville would not be mentioned, not by him, not today. He had to appear confident, not only willing to fight, but ready to win. The art of command had a great deal to do with convincing lies.

Boebel spoke again. “I think I would as soon shoot this Barlow as any of the Rebels.”

Krzyzanowski smiled bitterly. “Better not, Hans. General Howard adores him. Barlow speaks prettier English than you or me.” The Pole's expression lifted one wing of his mustaches. “The boy even looks like an Englishman. The way he pouts. Even when he isn't pouting.”

That was as far as Krzyzanowski would go to criticize a superior, even the dreadful Oliver O. Howard. He remembered Howard's condescension in the last fateful hours before Jackson struck at Chancellorsville, the obstinate refusal to shield the army's flank, despite mounting indications of an attack and the pleas of his foreign-born subordinates. The Pole remembered all that. And his dead.

Finished with the work of dismantling the fences before them, Boebel's men hurried back to their places in line. Krzyzanowski had wanted the fence-line to their right torn down as well, but the sergeants in charge of the details had left the work incomplete.

Everyone had nerves now. The men were impatient for action, for collective motion, for anything but this awful waiting in the vale of artillery fire. Krzyzanowski understood the soldiers he commanded, sensing each shift in mood, the slightest change in spirit. Nonetheless, any slighted task annoyed him. All of the fencing should have been pulled down.