Cain at Gettysburg (27 page)

Schwertlein would have preferred that all of this had gone untold, that Bettleman had remained the whining clown to whom all were accustomed. The day had stripped away more than the regiment's knapsacks.

“None of that makes his death a good thing,” he told the watchmaker.

“You think not, Fritz? This war solves many, many problems, not just slavery or questions of government. How else explain men's eagerness”—he swept a hand across the antic scene playing out in the frail light—“for all this?”

“You really are a cynic,” Schwertlein said. “Only of a higher order than we realized. A cynic's cynic.”

“No, I'm a watchmaker. I'm interested in how all the little wheels and cogs and hammers function, individually and together. But I have no time for sloppy rhapsodies and romances about wheels and cogs.” He used his rifle to lever himself to his feet. “We need to get moving,
Herr Corporal
.”

Schwertlein rose obediently. They passed through a Walpurgis of campfires and contorted faces, of bedeviled horse teams, whips, and elusive laughter. At last, Schumann said, “Him. Over there, with the blond beard. I fixed his watch and he still owes me for it.”

The two of them stepped slowly toward the fire. Men with their coats off sat back from the heat, eating stew from tin plates. The scent of coffee spiced the aroma of meat.

“That smells good,” Bettelman said.

Fire-licked faces turned toward them.

“I'm Leo,” Bettelman continued. “Remember me? I fixed watches for some of you. In the winter. I thought, perhaps, my friend and I might get a plate of food? All outstanding debts canceled in full!”

A slab-faced man addressed himself to Schwertlein's sleeve stripes, rather than to Bettelman.

“Germans?”

“
Ja
. Twenty-sixth Wisconsin.”

“Then you just get the Hell out of here. Men that don't fight don't eat.”

*   *   *

There was food, after all. Not much, but better than none. When Schwertlein and Bettelman returned to their regiment's portion of the line—hardly more than a company's frontage—they found that someone had delivered and cracked open two barrels of hardtack. There was no coffee.

Rifles laid ready against the stone wall, they sat down on a bump of grass by the road that pierced the line. Schwertlein wished he at least had the tin cup that hung from his knapsack, so he could dip the hardtack in water to soften it. Some Confederate had it now, along with a tattered copy of
Phänomenologie des Geistes
and one good pair of socks.

He broke off a piece of cracker, put it in his mouth, then filled his mouth with water. A man did the best he could. Beside him, Bettelman simply chomped away.

From their position, they could look far to the west, over a finger of houses and outbuildings that stretched southward from the town and past the arc of Rebel campfires to the outline of the long mountain. As late as it was, a glow still gripped the ridgetops: The light was reluctant to die. As Schumann had been, in the instant of his death.

“I should not have spoken as I did about Heisler's wife,” Bettelman stated abruptly. “That was wrong. It isn't my affair. This is why I only joke and do not talk seriously. When I talk so, I become wicked. I'm sorry.”

“I didn't know any of it, Leo, I had no idea. The way he went on about her, she sounded half St. Ursula and half Venus.” He watched two soldiers engaged in horseplay, wondering where they found the strength. “She must be an attractive woman, if not a good one.”

“She has her appeal. To plenty of men. The appeal of a woman who has two children behind her, but no obstacles in front of her skirts. I don't know if Josef ever truly saw her as she was, even the way she looked, or if he simply created a Marthe in his mind and took it for the real one. What did he need, really? A dream-woman to whom he could address his poems. That's all.” Bettelman sighed. “Here I am, speaking ugliness again. It's just that I always resented her flagrancy. And poor Josef was so unsuspecting, so simple. We belonged to the same
Turnverein,
although there was always more jabbering than gymnastics. That's how we met.” Bettelman smiled at a recollection. “Josef was a lovely person, only … inadequate. Not just to Marthe Heisler and her sort, but inadequate to life. The truth is, I pitied him. Like an ailing cat you find at your door.”

The watchmaker shifted his seat, arching his small spine. “Let me give you my best advice, Fritz, advice from the heart: Marry a big, fat woman who can cook. One who won't have men knocking at your kitchen door when they think you're away for an hour. One who feeds you well because she's grateful. And because she wants to feed herself well, too. That's been the secret of my happiness.”

Bettelman gestured to the left. Schwertlein's eyes followed. Colonel Krzyzanowski was conferring with his surviving officers by a campfire. Normally as straight up and down as a rifle barrel, the Pole was bent at the shoulders, pressing his left side with one hand as if stanching the flow of blood.

“Look at Kriz,” Leo said. “He's in a bad way. But the fool won't take advantage of it. He has a wife and brats, too. And I hear he had a thriving business in Washington, selling crockery and the like. He could go home. He's done his part. He could take advantage of his misfortune and turn it into the best of luck. But he won't. The fool.”

“Would you?” Schwertlein asked.

Behind them, the voice of the eternal sergeant barked at laboring soldiers to deepen a shit trench.

“Yes. Without a second thought. If I had such a wound. When I complain on the march, I'm never joking. I'd go home and count my blessings.”

“What if you could just go home? Without a wound? Just walk away.”

“That's different.”

“Why?”

“Even watchmakers have their pride.”

A cracker fleck had wandered up into his nose and Schwertlein sneezed. Recovering, he said, “I don't think any of us will be allowed much pride after today.”

“Fritz! Forget them, would you? They didn't know, they weren't there. And they need someone to blame. Tonight they have their stew, tomorrow we'll have ours.” He murmured a sound meanly related to laughter. “They couldn't very well blame one of their own kind, after all. That
hochwohlgeborener Arschloch
Barlow, for example.”

“I hate the injustice of it. After how we fought.…”

“And you'll write a proper account of it all for your paper. To set the record straight.”

Schwertlein waved that away. His arm was darker than the gathering night: The summer day continued its rearguard struggle. “It won't matter what I write. It'll reach them too late, after everyone's cast their views in iron. The New York City papers will write that the ‘Dutchmen' ran again. And the Chicago papers will repeat what New York decrees. And the English-language papers in Milwaukee will delight in passing on the word about the husbands and sons of their German neighbors.”

“The truth will come out in time. It always does.”

“That's a lie! Leo, that's as great a falsehood as a man ever uttered. The truth is what the strongest voices say it is.”

To their left, a line of skirmishers bounded over the wall and trotted down the slope to the nearest buildings. Order was returning, measure by measure.

“Tomorrow will be an interesting day,” Bettelman said, changing the subject. Their roles had reversed, with Bettelman now the optimist, while Schwertlein wallowed in doubt. “I hope the damned Rebels will only let us sleep. That's all you need, Fritz.”

Bettelman hadn't felt Schumann's embrace, though. He hadn't known that near-kiss or felt the smear of gore. He had not gotten that last horrid breath in his nostrils.

Schwertlein dreaded sleep. Schumann was lurking out there. Waiting. If he saw and felt the corpse slap against him so vividly while awake, what would it be like when he lacked the defense of light and the armor of reason?

“They didn't know.” On a scraped tongue, Schwertlein tested the words Leo had offered him. “They weren't
there
.”

“At least,” Bettelman said, “the whole army isn't running away this time. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” He broke off another piece of the flinty cracker.

“I've never had the desire to kill men before,” Schwertlein said. He wasn't certain he was speaking to Bettelman any longer.

“But you have it now? A desire to kill?”

Schwertlein didn't answer. He stared at the last hint of light over the mountain. He watched it die. Clouds were pressing in, felt as much as seen.
Your husband's dead and sends you greetings.
He imagined himself touching the breasts of the woman he had loved so long in secret. Pawing her with hands covered in blood.

“Damn it again!”
the watchmaker cried. His trill of pain was so sharp that, for an instant, Schwertlein thought his friend had been hit by a sharpshooter.

“Damned crackers!” Bettelman explained. “I just broke a tooth.”

*   *   *

At noon, he had still hoped to fight at Pipe Creek. By six, he'd decided to move the army to Gettysburg. Now, at ten, he finally felt able to leave for the field himself. As soon as Butterfield finished the last dispatches for him to sign.

It had taken the devil's own determination to remain at his Taneytown headquarters, where he could not even hear the dueling cannon and remained at the mercy of intermittent couriers who often bore contradictory scrawls from generals on different portions of the field. He had wanted to rush off, to see the situation for himself. But he was not going to repeat Hooker's error and let the army commander's purpose go unanswered: He meant to lead all of his army, not merely the portion engaged.

Orders had to go to every corps, some countermanding earlier directives. Command relationships needed to be resolved, priorities assigned, roads allocated. Who should march first along
that
route, the next increment of the artillery reserve or an ammunition train? Or was the road best cleared to hurry on a division? Commissary wagons, ambulance columns, missing signal elements … it wasn't as damnably simple as the stay-at-home politicians and the newspapermen assumed.

Reynolds dead, John Reynolds dead
. That news had been followed by his dispatch of Hancock to take temporary command of the field, but no sooner had Win rolled off in his ambulance than guarded reports that reeked of a bloody mess began filtering in, followed by Buford's chilling note that there “seemed to be no directing presence.” Later, word came that Hancock had propped things up, leading to a brief sense of relief—which ended again when Hancock's less-than-manly assessment of possible courses of action arrived in the evening:

The battle is quiet now. I think we will be all right until night. Then it can be told better what had best be done. I think we can retire; if not, we can fight here, as the ground appears not unfavourable with good troops.

What kind of pussyfooting was that? “… the ground appears not unfavourable…” Meade understood, of course. Hancock was a lion on the battlefield, but he wasn't going to put himself in a position to be blamed for a defeat, if one was coming. All the responsibility would be on Meade.

He was disappointed in Hancock's lack of manliness, though. He already had accepted that defeat, if it came, would belong to him alone. He could see it already: If the army emerged triumphant, the generals and colonels would squabble over whose bold action made the decisive difference. Let things go poorly, and there'd be no chests thumped to claims of “
I
made the fatal mistake.”

“George, see if General Butterfield has those papers ready for me to sign. The man's slower than a Spaniard repaying a debt. And ask if anyone's found my spectacles yet.”

He needed to get to Gettysburg now, to see the ground for himself. If the clouds blew past, there would be a good moon later, enough light to let him judge the terrain's potential. And he wanted to hear from Warren, his fellow engineer, a man who saw the details other men missed.

Out on the road, an endless column creaked by. An army's march was marked by a queer disturbance of the air, something more than a collective breath or the obvious concert of noises. There was a life to it that evoked no comparisons. Even more than battle, the march was the essence of the soldier's world.

He had longed to implement his scheme for the Pipe Creek line, but the day had a will of its own. The army had to go to Gettysburg. That did not mean, even now, that the army would remain there for the campaign's climactic battle, but it had become unthinkable to withdraw his two battered corps, even had Lee been willing to let them retreat without further molestation.

The thing of it was, Meade understood, that the army could not bear another episode of quitting. To flee Gettysburg in the stink of defeat would have broken its last morale. He would have to put up at least enough of a fight to call it a drawn match before he could withdraw to give battle elsewhere. And there still was the possibility that he could concentrate his army more swiftly than Lee, after all. The Confederates now on the field might be overconfident. What if he slammed into them with two corps and staged a double envelopment with the remainder? Would the ground allow him to do that? Yes, the dispatches had informed him that he held the high ground. But how high? How expansive was the position? Could the flanks be anchored securely? If forced to defend, were his lines of fire strong enough to sweep the advancing enemy? He needed to know these things and many more, but still possessed no good map.

“Sir?”

“What is it now, George?”

“General Butterfield's ready for you.”

“Oh, is he? General Butterfield's ready for me? Well, I suppose I'd better snap to. Hadn't I?”