Cain at Gettysburg (52 page)

Smoke thickened over his gun line now, as action by section and battery stiffened the mood. If his guns hit nothing, so be it. The men had to have confidence, that was the thing. Soldiers liked the noise of their own cannon.

Beyond his flank, Newton's guns began firing, too.

Good.

But as Hancock rode through a break in the rising smoke, he saw that not a single gun on the far left flank had opened. Hunt had at least forty guns lined up down there. It was intolerable.

Digging in his spurs so fiercely his horse whinnied and leapt, Hancock was ready to burst like a shell himself. George Meade had made solid work of bringing up the army, Hancock gave him that. But Meade put too much trust in that bugger Hunt, who saw the world through the aperture of a gun-sight. Now it was time for Meade to keep out of the way, and high time for Hunt to get his damned comeuppance.

The shrinking retinue pounded into the low ground. The army's reserve artillery stood at the ready, doing nothing. Down where they couldn't see one Confederate gun and would serve no purpose until the Rebs were on top of them.

Hancock charged toward the first battery commander he could identify.

“Your battery taking a holiday, Captain? What the Hell's going on here?”

“We're delaying our reply,” the captain said with provoking calm. “General Hunt's orders, sir.”

“Hunt's not in command of this goddamned line.
I
am. And I order you to open fire. Immediately. Or I'll have you charged with cowardice, you piss-ant.”

That caught the captain's interest. He glared at Hancock, who remembered that, in fact, he no longer commanded the left wing. But that was a minor detail. George Meade would back him up.

“Give me a written order, General,” the captain said. “And I'll open fire under protest.”

Lieutenant Colonel McGilvery, another insolent sonofabitch and one of Hunt's pet creatures, trotted up.

As if intent on worsening the general insubordination, McGilvery spoke first to the battery commander, rather than to Hancock.

“What's the difficulty, Captain Hart?”

Before the artilleryman could reply, Hancock barked, “Why the Hell aren't these batteries firing, McGilvery? You taking a goddamned Mexican siesta? My men are going through Hell, and you're scratching your balls.…”

“General Hunt has a scheme of fires, sir. The time hasn't arrived for these guns to open. Your own guns are wasting rounds they're going to need.”

“Don't you tell me how to run my guns, McGilvery. Just open fire, damn you. That's an order.”

McGilvery refused to become flustered: “I take my orders from General Hunt, sir.”

Hancock exploded, voice roaring over the racket back on his line. “I outrank Henry Hunt, goddamn it. And every whoreson cocksucker in the artillery. I
order
you to open fire.”

“I must decline to obey the order, sir.”

Hancock fought down an impulse to knock McGilvery out of his saddle.

“Put your guns into action, you sonofabitch.”

An errant shell screamed overhead and disappeared behind them.

“They haven't got the range,” McGilvery said matter-of-factly. “They don't even know these guns are here, sir, don't know what's waiting for them. General Hunt's orders were given to meet this very case, he's doing his best to support you.”

Hancock snorted. “With silent guns. While you let the Reb artillery shit on my men.” He saw that he was not about to change McGilvery's mind, though. The man was a dry-docked sea captain from Maine, stubborn and useless.

There was going to be Hell to pay later, Hancock decided, but now he had to get back to his corps and his men. The Confederate bombardment had intensified, but it wouldn't last forever. Then they'd come on, a great goddamned gray mob. Old Meade had been right about that much. Meanwhile, his men had to see him, mounted and fearless.

“Your guns aren't worth a prayer book in a whorehouse,” Hancock said. He pulled his horse around and rode back to the fight.

*   *   *

As Meade watched from the porch of his headquarters shanty, a dud shell struck a line of horses tied to a nearby rail. The impact gutted the beasts in a burst of gore.

Long bones cracked like rifle shots. Flesh flew.

In an instant, the line of staff mounts became a tangle of writhing meat. With shells screaming overhead, a new man on the staff plunged forward to put the beasts out of their misery. He shot the only unwounded horse in the head.

Explosions furrowed the earth of a nearby field, propelling grit over orderlies pulling down tents. Another shot pulped a line of corpses waiting for a burial detail. The Confederates had mistaken the range and most of their rounds spared the troops up on the line and the Union guns. But the barrage pounded the supply wagons staged in the low ground behind the headquarters, and panicked teamsters fought for a place on the crowded road that offered the only escape. Wagons careened and crashed. Some men just ran. Ammunition wagons stood abandoned, waiting for the shell that would ignite them. Amid spectacular wreckage, an ambulance burned.

A round of solid shot fanned Meade, inches away from killing him, and crashed into the house with a burst of splinters. Poorly fused, another shell pierced the attic. Two staff officers rushed out of the shanty, covered in dust but whole. Others, still inside, coughed and cursed as they gathered up their papers.

Meade had hoped to maintain his headquarters here, just behind the line, but the notion was suicidal. And he still had a day's work to do before he died. After stepping down from the porch with studied calm, he walked past the slaughtered horses toward the road. One beast clung impossibly to life, eye bulging as it spewed blood.

A round shot tore off the front steps where he'd stood.

As the personnel of his headquarters scattered around him, Meade slowed his pace to set them an example. The truth was that he found it all exhilarating: Fear of bodily harm was not one of his weaknesses.

He smiled at what he saw next: A covey of staff men had taken shelter behind the rear wall of the shack. The old planks offered not the least protection and already had been splintered in two places, yet the soldiers and their officers crowded against them. Meade tried to rally their spirits with a tale from the Mexican War, but the effort at humor failed. He rued, again, that he lacked Hancock's way with soldiers.

An explosive shell—no dud this time—struck amid the horses of his bodyguard. The blood and meat splashed all the way to the shanty, slopping over the men who had huddled behind it.

Meade's chief of staff came up beside him, the last man to leave the cabin. Clutching a roll of maps, Butterfield opened his mouth, but Meade spoke first:

“This won't do. We'll try that barn down the way.”

Their horses stood among those that had been spared. Mounting, Butterfield held on to the maps. Those officers and couriers who still had untouched mounts leapt to follow the generals, with the remainder of the staff coming after on foot.

We're hardly an example for the men up on the line, Meade told himself.

Down along the Taneytown road, two wagons warred for precedence, locking wheels, then breaking apart abruptly. One turned over on its side, narrowing the escape corridor.

A caisson waiting with Hunt's reserve exploded, triggering serial detonations. Meade cringed at the loss of ammunition.

Still, the men on the line were being spared, relative to what they might have suffered, had Lee's artillerymen been better shots. That was the thing that mattered in all this, that regiments in blue would be ready to stand and kill the best men Lee could muster.

He paused to order a company left on provost guard to go forward and rejoin their regiment. Delighted to get away from the worst of the shelling, the men went toward the crest at the double-quick.

At the barn, Butterfield spread the best map on the ground. Orderlies rushed to help, but the chief of staff told them to stay out of the way. Hooker man or not, Butterfield was giving all he had to his duties. Despite their personal friction, he wanted to win.

Meade waved up a captain, barking to be heard above the confusion: “Ride to General Slocum. Tell him the attack's coming at the center. He's to send another brigade to back General Hancock. And he's to hurry.”

He could risk thinning the right now. He had already positioned reserves behind Hancock's line, ordering up brigades from various corps, but he wanted real depth. Lee had to meet blue wall after blue wall.

As the staff hurried to reorganize itself, a shell burst in the road. At first, Meade thought the only casualties were horses again. Then he saw Butterfield quivering on the ground, clutching his neck with fingers bright with blood. Another man lay still beside the map.

No place along the road would serve for headquarters work.

His son appeared. “Sir … General Slocum's headquarters is back on that hill there. He's just out of range, and he's got a signal station.”

The boy was clearheaded, the mark of a true soldier. Meade felt a flash of pride.

He knelt to see how serious Butterfield's wound was. The man was conscious and would live, but his role in this battle was over. Meade wished him well, and went back to the war.

Bellowing to his staff to follow, he mounted again and led the way rearward through the rain of shells. He was determined not to lose control of the army as Hooker had at Chancellorsville, or as Burnside had done at Fredericksburg—where Meade's men had been forgotten under fire. Hancock, Newton, and the others would handle the coming charge. His purpose now was to care for everything else, to keep the great beast of the Army of the Potomac properly in harness and pulling obediently.

Spurring his mount, Meade outdistanced the men who served him. He rode past the wreckage of wagons and smashed gun carriages, past the corpses of men who'd imagined they were safely tucked away, past others bloodied and weeping, dazed or waving blankets to put out fires. The plight of the horses was nothing short of a massacre.

When he reached Slocum's hill, he didn't even dismount. He saw at once that the signal station could not reach his flag men back on the ridge, who had gone to ground. Exasperated, infuriated, and sweating like a slave, he cursed and kicked his horse back into a gallop, retracing his path through the torrent of death, mortified at the time he had just squandered.

He cared nothing for the stragglers in his path now, willing to ride down any man to return to a place where he could command his army. Unwilling, after all, to accept that his part was done, that the battle had passed to subordinates, he lashed his horse as if he meant to skin it.

Few wounded men staggered rearward. Initially, the observation pleased Meade, promising that Lee's guns had done little damage up on the line. Only after another minute of pounding toward the ridge amid bursting shells did it strike him that no wounded man would willingly leave the line and risk greater chances of death walking to the rear. The battle had gone topsy-turvy, its dangers upended.

He spotted a blue column on a course parallel to his own, quick-marching from Slocum's flank right through the bombardment. Turning his horse, he rushed toward the officer heading the column. It was General Shaler, bringing up his brigade.

Skipping the courtesies, Meade called, “Take your men over there, to Hancock's left. Head for that orchard.”

As he turned to ride off again, a plump man in civilian clothes materialized, astonishingly careless of the shelling. He grasped Meade's bridle.

“Cheneral, dem solchers … dem solchers uff yours has took
mein
house for the woundit mens und made in
mein Garten
a graveyard. I make a claim on the government!”

Meade barely restrained himself from whipping the man with his reins. “You fool! You don't even know if you'll
have
a government after today. Get out of here, or I'll send you up to fight!”

Followed by his son, his flag, and the motley group of riders who had caught up with him, Meade rode straight for the crest of the ridge that trailed down from the cemetery.

He found himself facing a valley filled with smoke, with his own guns firing into dirty clouds. It surprised him that Hunt would waste so much ammunition.

He watched, appalled, as a section of guns limbered up and rolled to the rear.

“George! Ride over there and find out why those guns are leaving the line.”

Guiding on Meade's flag, a courier found him.

“From General Warren, sir. He says it's urgent.”

“Where's Warren now?”

“The first round hill, sir. He's been trying to signal, but there's too much smoke.”

Meade took the note and unfolded it. Warren's impression merely confirmed his own: The Union gunnery only obscured whatever Lee was doing. Lee could launch an attack behind the smoke.

George returned. He blurted out, “The lieutenant said he's out of ammunition, that's why he pulled back his guns.”

“God
damn
it,” Meade said. “George, I need you to find General Hunt. Send riders to both ends of the line. And to the rear.
Find Hunt.
I want our guns to cease firing, this is pointless.”

“Yes, sir.” His son rode off into the acrid fog.

Meade felt his eyes sting as he watched the boy go, with the smoke only partly to blame.

Distant points of light blinked and disappeared again. Now and then, a shell struck among his waiting regiments, but most still howled overhead. It was all a waste, every bit of it.

He wondered what was happening across those fields.

*   *   *

Wasn't a battle a beautiful thing, as lovely as May in a meadow? Gallagher mocked any nearby man who fidgeted, twitched, or cowered. As for those who fainted in the heat or fell to raving, 'twas weak they were and worthless, undeserving.