Cain at Gettysburg (38 page)

As his regiments formed beyond the pausing batteries, he had ridden along his front to show himself, admiring his men's aura of ferocity. Returning to the middle of the formation, he reined in before his beloved 13th Mississippi.

Rising again, he surveyed the men proudly and shouted, “Hellfire, boys! Y'all going to do your duty by the great and glorious state of Mississippi. I know that. Yankees been fouling our soil for many a month now, disgracing our women and children with their barbarities.
You
know that. Time to water their own damned soil with blood—and I don't mean ours.
What says Mississippi?
”

The ranks growled and warpath voices called, “Damned right!” and, “Turn us loose, Billy…”

Then, for one gorgeous moment, by unspoken and common consent, all fell silent along the brigade's dressed ranks. Barksdale savored the splendor of it all, scorning the Yankee guns' lust for Southern flesh to revel in the power and the glory. Aglow with an abundant sense of destiny, lascivious in its richness, he reared up and roared from the depths of his lungs, the volume outstripping his fiery orations in Congress or out on the stump. The noise he made might have been the roar of a creature half-man, half-lion:

“Y'all see those guns? Those Yankee guns been pecking at us? We're going to
take
those guns, boys. And then we'll keep right on a-going until dead, gut-shot, and quittin' Yankees lie so thick neither man nor beast can climb over top of them.” He drew his sword and raised it high. The blade caught the sun as an iron rod catches lightning. “Atten …
shun
! For Mississippi! By battalions,
forward
!”

The regimental commanders repeated his order, only to be overwhelmed, swamped, drowned by the grandest Rebel yell Barksdale had ever heard.

This day was rare, enchanted in a way even he, a master of oratory, lacked words to explain.
Destiny?
Perhaps that. A day of destiny. And an hour of delicious rage and satisfaction so encompassing it put him in mind of the day he had watched Brooks cane Sumner to the Capitol floor.

Instead of taking his place behind the regiments, Barksdale dropped into his saddle—wishing the infernal boils would just burst—and rode farther to their front. His white locks bounced and tickled his neck, and he felt himself part of a reborn, noble chivalry. Plagued buttocks or not, he could only grin at the joy of leading
these
men, of being a part of all this, on this day,
here
.

Ragged and proud, his men crossed the shimmering field, careless of enemy cannon, as if their shells were naught but summer flies. Barefoot or shod, each wellborn boy or can't-read-nor-write scratch farmer took pains to keep in step and maintain straight ranks. Now and again, a voice raised a shout of defiance.

They tore down a fence with hardly a moment's pause and brushed aside a Yankee skirmish line. Next, they erased the companies that had rushed to support the skirmishers. As was their custom, the men fired independently, reloading as they marched. A man would break pace for a step or two to fire at the blue smear ahead, then trot up to mend the line again.

Men fell. It made no difference. Mississippi was unstoppable.

At last, Barksdale let the first rank and the second pass him by, careless of the death on every side, but cognizant of his duty to command.

One rapscallion in a ripped calico shirt called, “Done voted for you twice, Billy, and damned if I won't do it a third time!”

Barksdale tipped his sword toward the man.

As he took his place at the rear of the sweeping advance, Barksdale's pride was mixed with the rage that haunted him ever and always. He hoped the rumors about Vicksburg were true, that the drunkard Grant had been put to flight with all his filthy Vandals. But he couldn't trust the camp talk, no more than he trusted that worthless Pennsylvania Quaker Pemberton, Vicksburg's useless defender. Even if the man now wore a gray coat faced with yellow, he was Yankee-born and suspect.

The forward line slowed, then stopped to exchange volleys with the Yankees defending the road, dropping soldiers along the blue line and gunning down cannoneers as they dragged off their pieces. Barksdale let his boys go at it, confident that minutes would tell the tale.

Smoke rose. And screams.

How dare they, though, those infernal Northern busybodies? That was the damnable question at the heart of this. How dare those self-righteous, ignorant, do-gooder Yankees tell Mississippi to raise the nigger high? Yankees didn't want justice: They wanted to destroy the South. As for the darkies, abolitionists didn't know them, not the real ones—only a few tame coons who had their letters. Northerners had no grasp of the nigger's hopeless inferiority. Every white man from the Delta to the red-dirt hills knew the colored man was a shiftless, carefree child, who lived for little treats and wanted discipline. Left to himself he would decline into indolence and crime, even to outrages. To imagine even a scrubbed, hymn-howling darkey as the white man's bed-and-board equal was a joke—and now a deadly one.

His people back in Tennessee had carved a world from the wilderness, while the Yankees carved out profits from other men's sweat. Still young, he had bound his life to Mississippi, with its river-blessed fields and handsome ways of doing. He found an unmatched goodness in his state, where the cool shade of God's mercy welcomed men as a live oak drew a field hand in high summer. His was a fragrant, ordered, peerless world, where virtue thrived.

Now Northern warmongers wanted to wreck it all, in the name of a perversion of law and religion that would set the black man up on a marble pedestal, higher than a white man's wife and children. Fanatics from the cold vaults of New England, they believed their purpose was worth a sea of blood.

Let the blood be theirs, then.

With a cheer, his men swept through a Yankee line. Barksdale rode on behind them, resolutely overlooking his twisting wounded and the inert dead. A few of the Yankees sent forward still fought on, Zouaves in baggy red pants and filthy turbans. That was fine with Barksdale: If a Yankee wanted to die in coon drawers and a monkey jacket, so be it.

He ignored the disarmed Yankees heading for the treeline his brigade had exited. He felt no empathy, no soldierly brotherhood, with his enemies. Had they all been killed, it would have suited him fine.

From his perch in the saddle, he spotted smoke-wreathed Federal cannoneers hooking lines to a field piece, preparing to drag it off. Spurring forward, he bellowed, “Get those guns! Don't let them take off those guns!”

Whether his men heard him, or took action on their own, was of no matter. They surged forward, heading for the stranded guns and the tumult of Yankee limbers and caissons behind them, where drivers slashed madly at harnesses to cut dead and crippled horses from their teams.

“Shoot the horses!” Barksdale raged. “Shoot the damned horses!”

Defying command protocol, he rode into the midst of the regiment. He was outraged at the thought of the guns escaping. If Northerners wanted a “fiery, swift sword,” he damned well had one for them.

On the flanks, other Yankee batteries issued a constant fire, but their attentions were split in two directions now. Barksdale sensed their chain of command collapsing. Flaunting his sword, he urged his soldiers forward, pressing the compact lines to move as one and cursing any officer pausing to think.

The thinking time was done. It was time for killing.

“For Mississippi! Onward, Mississippi!”

A boy in gray, rifle discarded, stumbled toward the rear. With not a spot of blood on him. Nothing but a flytrap, his mouth hung open as he ambled, arms dangling and twitching. His eyes were those of a blind man, staring eternally.

Barksdale let him feel the flat of a sword across his back. “Damn you for a coward, boy. You get back in the fight!”

But he had no time to waste on shirking wastrels. Not while over a thousand men—
his
men—were killing blue-bellies. Yankees flocked into a farmyard, fighting stubbornly. It wouldn't help them. His boys had the force of God's avenging angels.

Gaining the high ground, Barksdale saw a grand and astounding sight: The Federals were thick enough along the sunken road running north, but to their rear they had nothing for a mile.

Behind this cauldron of fire, smoke, and death, the Yankees had
nothing
.

Up by the orchard, a well-drilled Union regiment stood its ground, protecting the battery that had rolled up to support it. Charging through the fickle smoke, Barksdale leaned down and grasped the shoulder of the first field officer of the 21st Mississippi he could locate.

“Y'all fix those Yankees up proper. Those high-and-mighty sonsofbitches up there. Open a hole for Wofford to go through, he's coming on. I'm taking the other boys leftwards, tell your colonel. Join up later, if you can. If not, just kill whatever gets in your way.”

He kicked his big-boned horse with his spurs, riding tight behind his line, ordering one regiment after another to wheel about and roll up the Yankee defense, to lay into them hard and keep going.

His regiments no longer displayed parade-ground precision, but they held together well enough and turned promptly on his orders, advancing through trampled stalks of grain to get in range of Yankee regiments scrambling to change front.

“Press 'em, don't let them align,” he told the heated faces all around him.

An officer dashed up, causing Barksdale to yank back his reins.

“General? Aren't you too close? Those Yankees are doing their damnedest to put a bullet in you.”

Barksdale snorted. “Best way to stop Yankee bullets is killing Yankees.”

He felt no fear. He was mad as Hell and enjoying it.

In the open fields to his left, between the rattled Yankees and the treeline where other Confederates waited to charge, Southern batteries trotted forward, a spectacle in the gilded dust of evening. Braving desperate volleys to drop their gun trails in the oats and support his attack, they were taking a madcap risk.

How could the South lose, with men as bold as that?

Barksdale watched impatiently as his Mississippians shot it out with yet another regiment of Zouaves—or perhaps a remnant. Mississippi rifles cut the fancy-dress Yankees to pieces, with some of Barksdale's men rushing in for a rifle-butt and bayonet melee.

It was all indescribably beautiful.

Smugly, Barksdale thought of Malvern Hill, where all the valor his men could show had not been enough in the slaughter. No victory since that grisly afternoon had healed the wound that fight left on his soul.

This one might.

“Come on, boys, come on! They're breaking, they can't stand up to you!”

His men did not need encouragement. They burst upon the Yankees like human case-shot.

The thrust of Barksdale's attack had shifted leftward as he rolled up the Union line and Wofford's Georgians came up on his right rear. Wofford could deal with whatever remained past the orchard and back in the woods. Barksdale had his eye on those vacant fields to the rear of the crumbling Yankees.

Turning to take the measure of the Georgian charge, Barksdale saw Longstreet riding amid Wofford's infantry. Even from a distance, the corps commander looked black-miened and determined. But Barksdale could not forgive the man who had held back his troops so long. There would be a reckoning.

He turned his horse back to the fight.

The Union troops resisting his advance crowded around another farmhouse now, gravitating, as men will, toward a hint of shelter, the illusion of safety. The Yankees were fighting staunchly—harder than usual—but their resistance was strained and ready to snap. Wide gaps had opened.

Farther up the road, the next increment of regiments in blue hastened to refuse their flank and save themselves. But it was too late. Barksdale knew down in the core of his being the Yankees were beaten.

Enraptured and careless, he spurred forward again. “Come on, Mississippi! Give 'em lead and steel, boys, lead and steel!”

The fighting in the farmyard collapsed into ugly brawls. Barksdale pressed his men onward, past the outbuildings, toward those sprawling, undefended fields. That house and barn didn't matter now. Nor did the other farmsteads. Once the remaining Yankees grasped that they'd been left behind, they'd give up quick enough. He would not let them slow down his attack.

You had to keep going, just keep going, no matter what it cost you.

The Yankees were different on their home ground, though. They fought like they meant it, Barksdale allowed them that. Even the last shreds of regiments stood tenaciously, or shook their fists as their officers took them rearward. But the brave would soon be dead or lying wounded. There weren't enough of them left to stop his charge. They'd been caught in the wrong damned place, which was their hard luck.

There really was nothing behind them,
nothing
. Not one intact regiment as far as that distant ridge, where a great gap waited. The way was clear for nearly a mile—maybe all the way to the Union rear, if he hit them right.

Barksdale saw a glorious victory waiting.

In that entrancing moment, he felt the air change. As if a spell from a children's book had been cast. The last Union troops fighting on his right withdrew. As they gave up their grip on the ground, their ranks dissolved.

Wofford pursued them, his Georgians cheering and charging.

Let the Georgians sweep them up. Let Wofford have those groves and their hanging smoke. The purpose of Barksdale's existence now was to hasten across those fields. No enemy on earth was going to stop him.

Wounded men, clad in gray and blue, staggered toward his rear. Some prisoners strolled unguarded, relieved to be out of the fight. Mocked by their captors, others wept in shame. A captain looked bewildered and bereft. A lad shrieked madly. The dead of both sides lay thick.