Cain at Gettysburg (40 page)

“General, we need to re-form. We need to stop and organize our regiments, they're scrambled like Mammy's eggs,” Holder said.

“Half my regiment's down,” Griffin added.

Barksdale valued these men, but not their opinions. Not now.

“Hell, boys. We're not stopping now. We have those sonsofbitches on the run. It's time to crowd them.” He pointed eastward with his saber, toward the far, still grove. Treetops caught the death-throes of the sun. “We'll re-form over there. Keep your boys moving.”

Bodies weary, their ranks dissolved into clans around torn banners, but the Mississippians surged forward again. They ignored stray Yankees seeking to surrender, men who had lost their bearings in the smoke. Nothing short of God's own hand would bring them up short now.

Ahead, the wheat gave way to low ground, a water meadow speckled with brush and briars. Beyond lay the promised land, a glorious emptiness, the end of this battle, perhaps the end of this war.

“Forward, Mississippi, forward!” Barksdale called.

This was the climax of decades of bitter struggle. First, he had tried to defend his world with words, as a newspaperman. Then he had fought for his way of life as a lawyer. When that failed and the Yankees increased their demands, he had done all he could as a politician to preserve his people's rights. But none of the words on paper, no speeches or bills submitted, had been enough. Northerners made continued union impossible. War had been thrust upon a cornered South.

Here, at last, amid the gore of this battlefield, he finally had achieved something that no Yankee could refute.

His boys were worn, he knew, but their hearts were mighty.

Diminished bands of threadbare men plunged into the marshy ground between them and their goal. Afflicted by the earth, by soil wet even in summer, their progress slowed. As if the earth itself begrudged them victory.

“Go on, boys, go on,” Barksdale cried. “Just get on through there.”

The light was failing prematurely, bedeviled by clotted smoke. Hellish flames erupted from obscured guns.

Good men fell. Too many were down, too many.

“Keep on moving, press 'em, push 'em.
Go on!
”

Fickle air gathered smoke from other fields, enclosing them in the marsh. They were fighting earth and sky now. His men charged slowly through a twilit world. Time lost its grip, its order. The last pretense of maintaining ranks faded into random figures in a fog.

Abruptly, the smoke cleared. They had gotten through it, if not through the last thorns and mud.

A long blue line stretched before them, rifles leveled.

They weren't supposed to be there.
It was as if they had risen from the underworld.

The Yankees fired.

Fewer soldiers pushed forward now as more and more men toppled. A red flag flapped earthward, grasped anew before it reached the mud. It fell again. The Rebel yell was reduced to defiant catcalls.

Barksdale guided his horse through the wretched ground, lofting his sword with a tired arm and calling for one last effort.

A hideous mass of men in blue, the Yankees fired at will.

So close, they had come so close.
He could not let those bastards stop him now. Rising in his stirrups, Barksdale roared, furious beyond words, howling in the voice of a primitive warrior, as if his personal rage could turn the tide. He pointed his sword toward the enemy line, ordering his brigade to keep on going.

And then he saw nothing but the sky, with darkness closing in. Thin as lace, smoke drifted across his gaze. A paleness remained in the heavens, but night held the winning hand.

Why was he looking at the sky?
He couldn't understand it. The smoke grew thick as swabs. He had been standing in his stirrups, leading his men. How could he be lying on his back? Wet earth seeped through his garments. Sucking him down.

“I'm all right,” he said. Or thought he said. The world spun. As if he had drained a keg of applejack. “Go on, boys, go on,” he said. “Victory … victory…”

Where were his men?

The pain was there, but it had a flirting, roaming quality, a confusing inexactness. A weight within him pushed him down, cooperating with the greedy earth.

He heard the battle he could no longer see. It seemed to be at a great distance.

“Rally the men,” he cried. “Holder …
rally your men
.”

He could not see his brigade at all. Only purple sky jarred by battle's lightning.

With the greatest effort of his life, he raised himself onto an obedient elbow. A rush of warm wet greased him.

He remembered now. Falling. Faces around him. He had told them to tell his wife and children that he fell doing his duty. Hadn't he? Where were those faces now, where were his boys?

In the gloaming, he saw no upright men. Only bodies, cuddled slugs on the earth.

He was cold. July could not be so cold. Not even here, in hateful Pennsylvania.

Why had his men forsaken him? Surely, only to carry on the attack. He listened for cries of victory, but heard only the guns.

He remembered his boils. They no longer pestered him. He wondered if they had burst in his fall. What a trivial matter that had been. His body felt cold as an ice cellar. There was blood.

A lone figure appeared. Wandering. Unsure of its footing. Barksdale opened his mouth to call out, but could not gather words. He watched the soldier meander. It was a boy, arm in a hasty-made sling.

He wore a gray uniform. Of sorts. Barksdale's movement caught his eye. He plodded over, stumping through the marsh.

“General Barksdale!” the boy exclaimed. His tone revealed innocent fear. The sling was dark with blood.

“Water.”

Obedient, the boy knelt down and opened his canteen. Between them, they shared a total of two good arms. Barksdale struggled to rise far enough to drink.

In velvet light, the boy's eyes flared. Barksdale followed the line of their concern: The water he had swallowed seeped from his chest, along with blood.

“I'm killed, boy. You go on. Tend to that arm.”

The young man seemed to fear him, as if blameworthy. Perhaps he feared Death's approach, the unwanted companion.

When would it come? Before his men returned for him? Or the Yankees found him?

“You go on. I'll be cared for. Go on now.”

Capping his canteen, the boy wobbled to his feet like a newborn fawn. He began to step away.

“Son?” Barksdale called. “Soldier?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Did we lick 'em?”

“No.”

*   *   *

Meade had been fighting two battles throughout the evening. The first was with Lee's army, which had attacked with a fury that shocked even his veterans. The second was a struggle to check his emotions. The only hope he had was to keep his powers of judgment at their sharpest, to view the field with more than mortal clarity. To be decisive, but never rash. He had to maintain control of this unwieldy beast, to give clear orders while others just stared at the slaughter or gave up hope.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done.

Riding from one point of crisis to another, he twice had guided brigades to plug holes in the defense, unable to find the commanders of their divisions. The concentric attacks against his left had constricted Sickles' lines like a noose on the army's neck. Meade had begun by calling up the Fifth Corps, then, as regiments broke, brigades collapsed, and divisions began to dissolve, he had ordered up units from every corps in the army, save the broken Eleventh, thinning his lines elsewhere to the point of grave vulnerability. Chains of command were a shambles and there had been no time for niceties. Minutes had been purchased with hundreds of lives, entire regiments sacrificed to gain a quarter hour. Amid the mounting troubles, he had called on his generals to give up what men they could from their own lines. To their credit, they complied unstintingly. Every man felt the terrible weight of the moment.

Little Round Top appeared safe, although Sickles' forward line had been broken everywhere. The valley below the Round Tops was a butcher's yard, and the rugged ground to the west had all been lost, while a misshapen wheatfield sprouted corpses from a dozen regiments. The fighting continued in thickets and gloom on the left, but it now appeared that those lines, at least, would hold.

Elsewhere, though, the Rebels kept on coming, pouring in fresh troops in what seemed a brilliantly organized oblique attack of the sort taught at West Point in homage to Frederick the Great. None of the cadets had listened, of course, because their wars were all to be frontier scraps.

Now, from where Meade sat upon Old Baldy—who had suffered a few nicks—he saw a vacuum before him. The center of his line had emptied, except for fleeing men unsure of the shortest route to safety. Humphreys' division had collapsed and there had been nothing behind it.

Any moment now, Meade expected to see gray lines emerge from the smoky twilight. And the force remaining by his side consisted of himself, two junior officers, and two orderlies. Every other member of his staff and even his cavalry bodyguard had been dispatched to hurry on reinforcements or to bully fleeing regiments to make a stand.

His final call for help had gone out to Newton, the general he had picked to command the First Corps on losing Reynolds. The corps had been bloodied badly the day before, but Meade had no one left to whom he could turn. Newton would have to pull his men off line, and far more quickly than good practice dictated. If he failed to come up swiftly, the path to the army's rear and its trains lay open. The Confederates could walk there unopposed. And the Army of the Potomac would split in two.

This was the struggle's climax. And all he could do was wait.

It seemed an age ago that he and Newton had stood by the cemetery, surveying the fields and the town. But it had not been twelve hours. The confidence Meade had felt in the morning had shrunk to a nugget of hope.

Face impassive, the general burned within. He had done his best to stage an engineer's defense, to teach Lee's army a lesson, only to find himself betrayed by a politician's ambition.

Now Sickles was somewhere in the rear, under a surgeon's knife. Which just might save the villain from a court-martial. The blessing of getting him off the field was worth it, though: Sickles had lost control of his corps early on, then did little to wrest it back. Upon learning that Sickles had been wounded, Meade had sent Hancock to rally the Third Corps' scraps. Win had done everything that was humanly possible. It had not been enough.

Massive and constant, the din of battle sounded left and right, refusing to break off as night enveloped them. Only to Meade's immediate front did there seem to be a corridor of silence. He peered through the smoke and faint light.

He had done all he could. He did not believe any general could have achieved more, under the circumstances. Drained of his last resources now, he could only pray what was done had been enough.

Then he saw them. Their uniforms showed darker in the gloaming, but the advancing lines were unquestionably Confederate. The flags waved by triumphant bearers confirmed it. Not six hundred yards away, across undefended fields, they marched straight for him.

Those Rebel battle lines were uneven now, marked by hard fighting. Not all of Sickles' men had run away. Men had fought for their homes, for the Union, and for the friends beside them. The Confederates had suffered, too.

There was precious little comfort in the thought. The Rebels were
there,
coming on. And Meade had no one left to whom he could turn.

He swung around in the saddle, scanning the world behind the crest of the ridge. Looking for Newton's men. Or for anyone.

To his rear, he saw only night.

The advancing Rebels may or may not have spotted the cluster of horsemen in their path, but they certainly saw the emptiness around them. They sent up a Rebel yell. It was hoarse and much diminished now, but still bloodcurdling.

Was this how it was to end?

Meade glanced rearward a last, urgent time: Ghosts of smoke, no flesh.

The gray ranks loomed, picking up their pace, souls ablaze with the victory in their grasp.

Perhaps this would be the final battle Lee wanted. Perhaps the war would be decided here. And the South would go its way. Because he, George Meade, had failed.

The thought was wormwood and gall.

No! I will not be beaten.

With the Rebel line spreading out to fill the horizon, Meade straightened in the saddle.

He drew his saber.

Without a word, the four horsemen at his side drew their own swords. They aligned their mounts with his, ready to charge and die beside their chieftain.

As Meade began to extend his saber, ready to spur his horse into the foe, an orderly shouted:

“Here they come, General! Here they come!”

Meade was about to snap that, damn it, he had eyes in his own head and could see the Rebels. But the words were stopped by cheering to his rear.

He turned.

General Newton came galloping toward him with his staff, his lead regiments pouring over the ridge, with their country's flag held high in the pale night.

Tears welled in George Meade's eyes, but he restrained them. It would not do for a Philadelphian to weep.

Doubleday's division was coming on, with Robinson's following. Thousands of hurrying footfalls thickened the dying light with dust.

Newton rode up and reined in beside Meade. In splendid spirits.

“With your permission, General, we'll go right at 'em.”

Meade nodded. And sheathed his sword.

“I was wondering what you were going to do with that butter-knife,” Newton said. Grinning. He waved his men forward, past the relieved horsemen. Newton was a cool fellow, on the whole. But he was enjoying the moment. He drew out a flask and passed it over to Meade.

Meade accepted it. Gratefully. His hand trembled, but he refused to be ashamed. It was enough that the soldiers in blue rushed past him, full of fight.