Cain at Gettysburg (21 page)

To his horror, he saw that von Amsberg's men had been driven back hard on that flank, opening yet another gap in the line. Now it was his own 82nd Ohio that was vulnerable to envelopment.

He cursed Barlow and cursed him. He cursed Howard. Cursed himself. Cursed history and fate, the earth and sky. His own brigade had been thrust into a salient by General Schurz's belated, hopeless order, but without even the benefit of the scrap of high ground that lured Barlow to his fate.

That was the lesson handed down through countless generations: The
husaria
always closed ranks and never opened a gap for the Tartars to wedge in among them. But today his army had opened up one gap after another.

Captain Maluski caught up with him.

“Orders, sir?”

“The Eighty-second Ohio must refuse the brigade's left flank and hold as long as possible.”

Having just returned from that regiment, Maluski looked doubtful.

“I know, Sasha, I know,” the colonel told him. “I see the gap from here. We just have to do what we can. And fight like beasts.”

Krzyzanowski rode back along the rest of his line, shouting praise at his men, assuring them that they were giving the Rebels better than they got. But the sight of men twisting and dropping, and the sound of pain-addled screams, left him doubtful of his claims.

A boy stumbled past him, a hand over each eye, watering the field with blood.

How could there have been such a blunder? Not just Barlow, as bad as that was, but sending a battered corps to hold back what looked like the bulk of the Army of Northern Virginia? Didn't the high generals back in their headquarters know anything? Where was the sense in this?

The Rebels were killing flies mired in honey.

Well, the sense was in the fight itself. Even a hopeless one.

His men howled throatily at the Confederates, as if curses could kill. Their volleys brought the Rebels up short, forcing the gray mass to form a firing line, here fifty, there seventy yards distant. The Confederates seemed unwilling to press any closer, as if surprised at this unexpected resistance after they had collapsed the Union line.

“Give it to them, boys, give it to them!” Krzyzanowski yelled.

The problem was that there were ever more men in gray joining the other firing line. Hordes. Tartar hordes.

Krzyzanowski dug his spurs deep into his horse's belly.
Fear me, darling, not them.
He rode hard for the 26th Wisconsin, a slender belt of blue resisting a vast gray body. Boebel was the key man now.

The Pole looked right. Still no sign of a battery, not a single cannon. While the Rebels seemed to have dozens of guns available to them. Dozens, and then dozens. Shells landed everywhere.

The shortest way to the Wisconsin line led over a lateral fence that had not been dismantled. His horse had jumped higher obstacles.

Galloping madly through the flush of wounded men blundering rearward, he spurred his mount again. It rose and flew over the fence, its rider masterful in the saddle.

But a swarm of bullets stung the white horse in midflight and it landed crazily, rearing again, shrieking, then coming back down on one foreleg that snapped away, tumbling its rider to the rock-hard ground.

The last thing Krzyzanowski felt before losing consciousness was the slam of the horse's skull landing on his ribs.

*   *   *

“Der Kriz ist gefallen!”

“I saw them pick him up. He isn't dead.”

“They always pick up colonels, dead or not.”

“He isn't dead, I tell you.
Gestorben ist er nicht!
”

“Look to the front, damn it,” Corporal Schwertlein ordered, loading his voice with all of the authority he could muster.

“
Doch,
which is back, and which is front now?” Schumann joked ruefully. The Confederates seemed to be everywhere.

The soldiers of the 26th Wisconsin called hot-voiced to one another, firing as they spoke, attempting vainly to open holes in gray ranks close enough for men to read the expressions of the men trying to kill them.

“Mit oder ohne,”
Bettelman said matter-of-factly. “With Kriz or without him, we're in the sewer now.”

Lieutenant Colonel Boebel had been struck down as the regiment moved into action, shot in the leg, then, as he struggled to rise, hit again in the same leg by a piece of shell. The regiment's commander had been dragged off with bone revealed and the useless meat of the leg trailing behind, calling orders until he broke off in midsentence. Then Major Baetz, the next in command, had gone down. Lieutenant Young was killed and Lieutenant Grode toppled over. The Rebels were taking aim at every officer. Yet, the officers of the 26th kept stepping forward.

The Rebel line advanced in a bending wave, its rough-clad soldiers firing as they came on.

“Scheisse, Scheisse, Scheisse,”
Bettelman said. “Shit, shit, shit.” Despite his language, the watchmaker's voice was now the calmest among them, its tone more melancholy than alarmed. Bettelman was an odd one, Schwertlein thought. Judging by his comportment in the rear, you would assume him to be the weakest man in the company on the battlefield. Yet, he always stood firmly in the front line, working his rifle as intently as if repairing the innards of a watch.

War revealed men.

Another Rebel volley flamed and crackled. Lieutenant Steinmeyer dropped face forward in the trampled grain. But Schwertlein's old friend Lieutenant Trenk remained unscathed. He had taken up a fallen soldier's rifle and joined the line.

Men fell, men fell, men fell. Another round of solid shot tore through the ranks, spraying the air crimson. Other men's blood whipped Schwertlein's face. Yet, those to whom his heart was bound had escaped the Rebel fire until now: Leo Bettelman, with his watchmaker's daintiness and a mammoth wife in Milwaukee; Schumann, the master carpenter, just recovered from his wounds; Josef Heisler, a would-be poet and family man meant for peace; and Hannes Trenk, his first friend in America, a fine and honorable man endangered now by the rank upon his shoulders.

It seemed impossible that the Rebels had not surged forward and overrun them. Schwertlein could see the rage on the blackened Secesh faces, smell it in the air as it thickened the gunsmoke. He finished reloading, raised his rifle, took aim, and fired again. The man he had singled out arched backward, mouth opened in a cry that never sounded.

What sort of man had he been?

Mechanically, Schwertlein began to reload. In a fit of insanity, Otto Schumann embraced him, pulling him toward the ground.

“Otto … zum Teufel…”

His friend's dead eyes and drooling mouth fell against him like a lover's.

As Schwertlein fought to stay upright, Schumann's corpse slipped away. A force greater than a rifle ball had torn his chest apart. He struck the earth like a heavy, spineless doll.

Slopped with Schumann's blood, Schwertlein went back to reloading. Screaming as his hands did their duty methodically. His fingers quaked, but he rammed the bullet home.

An eye for an eye,
he thought. He repeated the words inwardly, turning them into a mad child's singsong:
An eye for an eye, an eye for an eye, an eye for an eye …
He raised his rifle and felt its punch-back against a shoulder already bruised.

The Rebels were drawing hopelessly near, lapping around the regiment's flanks like floodwaters.

Captain Fuchs ran along the rear of the rank, in command of the regiment now. “Withdraw while firing … maintain your ranks. Rally beside those buildings. Keep up your fires … steady, boys…”

As the shrinking regiment withdrew, maintaining its order stubbornly, the right flank of the retreating New Yorkers jostled into the Wisconsin left, drawing officers desperate to untangle them. The 75th Pennsylvania either had moved off in another direction, or had disappeared from the face of the earth. The Ohio men might as well have been in Africa.

“Scheisse, Scheisse, Scheisse,”
Bettelman muttered.
Shit, shit, shit.

Lieutenant Trenk laughed wonderfully and called out,
“Nein, nein! Schiesse, schiesse, schiesse, Leo!”

Shoot, shoot, shoot!

“Shooting in the shit,” a neighboring voice replied.

They fought their way backward, leaving ranks of dead and twisting comrades on the worthless ground where they had stood. Still more soldiers dropped as the regiment worked toward the illusory shelter of stout brick buildings, the town's farthest outpost.

The only reprieve they got was from the Rebel guns. The Confederate infantry had come so close that their cannon on the right flank had to shift to targets in the rear. The guns shot their projectiles over the heads of the soldiers of the 26th, separating them from the town that waited beyond another open field.

The New Yorkers had pulled away again, fighting their own battle-within-a-battle. Hoarse now, Captain Fuchs kept shouting orders. A few surviving sergeants did their best to maintain a coherent firing line, but all around them the corps had come apart, its regiments dwindling to companies and dissolving.

All of it infuriated Schwertlein to the brink of tears. Chancellorsville again. Would this, too, all be the fault of the “Flying Dutchmen”? Certainly, native-born Americans, fine men such as General Barlow, would bear no blame.

His rage made him fight all the harder, more careless of death than he had ever been.

Lieutenant Maschauer dropped his sword and pistol, clutching himself and wobbling rearward like a drunken man about to vomit. Captain Fuchs seemed to have vanished into thin air and Captain Domschke took up the task of holding the regiment together.

They stopped to make another stand by the brick buildings, fighting amid the wreckage of other regiments. Some hard men from Barlow's disaster rallied near them. And the 119th New York had reappeared. Schwertlein believed he even saw the colors of a resurrected 75th Pennsylvania, although a mere handful of soldiers stood around them.

The former editor of a rival newspaper to Schwertlein's, Captain Domschke cursed the Rebels with language that would have embarrassed bargemen on the Rhine. He even managed to make the men laugh, a drink of fresh water poured over the mind.

In a milder moment, the captain shouted, “Give it to those slave-fucking shit-boys, drop them like cowshit, like turds in a teapot, and send the rest of those piss-cutters back to the clapped-up whores who dropped them out of their asses like a French fart. Shoot off their cocks and tell their girls it's bratwurst. Then shove it up their assholes for good, old Wisconsin!”

It was as if the captain had unleashed a decade of editorial frustration.

Still wielding a rifle like a private, Lieutenant Trenk, who had shared Schwertlein's hardscrabble early days in America, flung away his weapon and sat down. As if he had decided to pause for a rest. His hat had dropped away, exposing crinkled blond hair. A thin ribbon of blood strained from his mouth.

“Hannes!” Schwertlein cried.
“Hannes!”

His friend did not respond. His eyes were open, but still. Leo Bettelman reached out and moved Trenk's shoulder. It woke the lieutenant, who looked up at them with an eerily peaceful smile.

“You go on. I'm going to rest now.” His voice was hard to hear.

Schwertlein and Bettelman tried, awkwardly, to lift him up. Trenk shook his head. “I want to rest now. They aren't animals. They'll care for me.”

“You've got to get up. Help us, Hannes.”

“Let me go. It hurts.” He smiled faintly, spreading the blood on his chin. “We'll meet when the war is over.”

There was no time, no time.
“Hannes!”

“I'm going to rest now,” the lieutenant told his friends.

Bettelman gave up and went back to firing.

“At least lie down,” Schwertlein cried. “So you won't be hit again. Lie down.”

“
Ja. Ach, ja.
I'll lie down, Fritz.
Danke.
” He slipped into the grass.

Perhaps the wound wasn't a bad one, Schwertlein told himself. Perhaps they would meet again … perhaps …

He reloaded and fired.

A messenger galloped along their mockery of a line, not pausing to risk his life as he shouted the order:
“Retreat! Back to the town! Retreat!”

Still cursing magnificently, Captain Domschke ordered the men to withdraw firing again. An open field stretched between them and the first houses and outbuildings. Its expanse seemed as broad as the fabled prairies of the West, the empty lands that lay open beyond the settled territories. Schwertlein had hoped one day to cross those endless plains. But not this one.

As they began to withdraw, a line of Rebels saw their chance and rushed toward the dying 26th. Sergeant Major Metzel splashed back against Sergeant Arnold, the two of them the last visible remnants of a noncommissioned officer chain of command. The two men fell into a trampled bed of grass. By the time Arnold tried to rise, the Rebels had surrounded him.

Captain Domschke's voice was missing now, replaced by the rasp of Captain Fernekes.

“Rally to the colors!” the captain cried. “Stay with the colors!”

Those colors fell, not for the first time, but were promptly raised again.

“Stay with the colors,” Schwertlein repeated to his own dwindling band. He was unsure of how loud his voice was now. His parched mouth was fouled with the taste of gunpowder, his canteen emptied hours ago. But there was no time to pause for a swallow, anyway.

As they struggled backward across the endless, boundless field, the Confederates swarmed in ever greater numbers, enclosing them on three sides and surging to close off the fourth. The regiment began to break apart. A few men ran, then more. But even in that hellish field, most of those still able to fight balled about the colors, firing in every direction except straight into the rear. Elsewhere on the field, other clots of blue put up futile resistance.