Cain at Gettysburg (6 page)

is it not just … today for Poland?

Should Poland not be … theirs, but mine …

a country we have … merely stolen?

Have you forgotten … our own plight …

All you profound … thinkers so hallowed …

Should Poland not … be free by right …

And free of Prussians … with their gallows?

The colonel acknowledged the song with a grin that lifted the wings of his mustache. Riding along, he paid a succession of salutes to the men he soon would lead back into battle. His war was theirs, theirs his, a struggle not only against Confederates or Prussians, but against all the world's princely houses and potentates, Russian, Austrian, Ottoman … Their fight was waged to break the chains that bound men oceans apart. The difference now was that they had a genuine army, not just a rabble with shotguns, scythes, and rusty swords from attics. They had an army, and a free land worth defending.

When the colonel had passed from sight, though, all the high emotions vanished with him. The men went back to the muck and the murderous heat.

“War is shit,” Bettelman said.

*   *   *

He rode into the confusion in a rage. Rain pounded. Headed in conflicting directions, the wagons and their teams blocked all the streets. Officers barked, but the teamsters only shrugged, waiting for someone else to put things right. The guns, the infantry, all the rest of Slocum's Twelfth Corps could not get through the infernal muddle. Everything was falling behind schedule.

“
You,
damn you,” Meade barked at a private hunched on a wagon with the reins slack in his hand. “Who do you belong to?”

The soldier was little impressed with the drenched old man before him. He just shrugged. Meade wanted to have him arrested, but retained the presence of mind to grasp that the teamster's removal would mean an abandoned wagon.

“I asked you which unit you're assigned to, you sonofabitch,” Meade barked.

The boy shrugged a second time, but said, “Third Corps, I guess.”

Sickles. That whoremonger bastard. His trains had no business in Middleburg, or anywhere near it. The last of them should have passed through hours before.

Meade yanked his mount around and worked his way back to the captain in charge of his escort.

“You,”
Meade said. “Have your men open these streets. Whip man and beast, if you have to.”

The captain saluted, but looked dazed by the maelstrom. Everyone in sight appeared half-drowned, and the crawling chaos around them stank of wet wool, wet horses, and waste. The captain went to work, though, waving the leading men of his squadron forward.

Meade rode over to General Hunt, who had sheltered under the wooden awning of a shop to light a cigar. Meade dismounted, tied Old Baldy to the nearest rail, and stormed up the steps, spurs clanking.

“It's Sickles,” he snapped. “Again. The man takes nothing seriously but his debauchery.” He whisked some of the water from his uniform, a useless effort. Too hot for an oilskin, he had made the best of it and now he was soaked.

“Storm's passing,” Hunt said calmly. “That should help.”

“It's not the storm. It's Sickles.” Meade went back into the slackening rain to fetch pencil and paper from a saddlebag. Waving away a cigar, he wrote against the flat of a door frame, giving Sickles the very devil.

Out in the main crossroads of the town, the jumble of wagons had begun to move. But not quickly enough for Meade. The army was a vast animal, hard to manage and always ready to stray. As he moved his headquarters forward, he had ridden along choked roads, often taking to the fields to speed his passage. The journey had led him past countless mired wagons and caissons with broken wheels, past knots of arguing officers and sergeants with their vocabulary ablaze. And, always, the endless columns of regiments came on, men marching in their undergarments in the killing heat, kerchiefs trailing behind their caps, and many of them as barefoot as the Confederates. With his telegraphic communications cut by Stuart's raiders, he had nonetheless tried to get a message through by courier, asking not for reinforcements—he knew there were none—but for a shipment of shoes, if shoes were available.

As for Stuart, Meade refused to take the bait and chase him across Pennsylvania. Let Pleasanton and his cavalrymen fend him off as best they could. The thing now was to concentrate the army, not weaken it. Stuart was, in the end, more nuisance than danger. And Meade wasn't certain he minded having Lee's cavalry separated from the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia. If Stuart was raiding in the east, he wasn't scouting in the west. Meade couldn't understand the logic of what seemed to him a folly, but he meant to take advantage where he could. He had sent Reynolds a message to ensure he was pushing Buford's First Cavalry Division forward as far as Gettysburg.

Lee was at Chambersburg. He knew that now. Rumors put some of his men across South Mountain … although that could have been warmed-over talk from Ewell's passage the week before. Or it might be a token force meant to cover the passes. Or a sign Lee's entire army was on the move again. He needed more information, much more, if he hoped to shape the campaign to his own advantage.

Finished with the note to Sickles, Meade turned to Hunt. “Find Sickles. Give him this. Damn it, I know you're a busy man, Henry, but he won't take anything seriously unless he hears it from the mouth of a fellow general. Give him this note, and tell him I'll be damned if I let him afflict this entire army with his slows. He needs to keep to his march schedule. It's not a damned suggestion.”

Hunt didn't protest at being handed a courier's mission. And Meade didn't worry about diverting the man for a few hours. As chief of artillery, Hunt was thoroughly competent. Meade trusted him to do all that had to be done in his sphere of action.

But just as the artilleryman had flicked the stub of his cigar into the mud and started off, Meade called, “Hunt?”

“General Meade?”

“When you cross Pipe Creek, see what you think of it as a defensive position. For the entire army, I mean. It looks all well and good on the map, and I've got Warren inspecting the length of it, but I'd appreciate your view on the subject. An old gunner's opinion.”

Hunt saluted, a bit carelessly, and moved for his horse. He wasn't careless when he placed his batteries, though. If Hunt blessed a position, it would be a sound one.

The sun tore through. The ill-tempered weather went from bad to worse, humid as a swamp. But the road through the town had opened. Regiments from the Twelfth Corps began to stream past.

The men did not cheer him. He didn't think they even recognized him. Anyway, some would have preferred to have Reynolds, others would have liked McClellan back. Even Hooker still had partisans in the ranks.

Well, they didn't have to love him. They just had to fight.

THREE

June 29, Evening

“Your soldiers certainly do seem full of fight,” Arthur Fremantle, captain and lieutenant colonel of Her Majesty's Coldstream Guards, announced to the gathered officers. Pleased with himself, as always, he nodded under the lantern's light. “Fine chaps, if a bit wild.”

Longstreet understood what the Englishman meant: The men of the Army of Northern Virginia were undisciplined and ragged. Impressive specimens in their way, but not to be measured against Her Majesty's finest. Fremantle didn't understand that there were forms of discipline that had nothing to do with parades.

“They'll fight,” Longstreet agreed. He balanced his plate of stew on one knee to reach into his boot and scratch his leg. He hoped he hadn't picked up poison ivy again. Or the camp itch.

“Yes, sir, fight they will,” Tom Goree put in. “Take a right pleasure in it, some of them. All's we can do to stop them from gutting, cooking, and eating the Yankees they knock down.”

Goree had attached himself to Longstreet during the journey from Texas to Richmond at the outset of the war. He looked like a cleaned-up Comanche. A fine example of a Texas gentleman, Goree was fit to be trusted with a lady's honor, but not with a sharp knife. Give a Texan a knife, Longstreet thought, and he can't help using it on something.

“In all seriousness, Lieutenant Goree, one finds their morale remarkable,” Fremantle continued. “All in all.”

“Haven't et so good in all their lives,” Goree explained. “They weren't so pleased with things last winter. Were they, Moxley?”

“Wasn't all that pleased myself,” Moxley Sorrel said. “Any more of that stew, John?”

“Jupiter's saving a little for our European friends,” Fairfax told him. “If they haven't gotten themselves bushwhacked by some Pennsylvania
Hausfrau
.”

“All right,” Sorrel told him. “I know you'd be mortified, were guests to judge a Fairfax inhospitable. Next time, though, tell that darkey of yours to buy an extra hen wherever he steals them.”

Longstreet focused on his plate. He wasn't in a talking mood, not even with men he liked. Lee was on his mind, not some bothersome Englishman. He had not been able to get the old man to pledge to let the Federals attack. Longstreet knew Lee well enough to sense what he kept inside, and what Lee held back worried him. The old man loved to go right at his enemies, to tear into them and have done with it. The restraint of Fredericksburg had been a fluke, a matter of numbers so lopsided and a defensive position so tactically immaculate—along with a fool for an opponent—that Lee had been obliged to wait for the Federals to come at him. And that had been the right thing to do. It almost always was now. The killing power of massed artillery and rifled weapons was hurrying the age of the bold charge to an end. A fool could see it. And if your enemy would not oblige by attacking you, then you went around him, unhinged his position, and forced his hand. It wasn't an age of war, but one of slaughter.

Longstreet also had begun to see that, for all Lee's protestations to the contrary, the old man really didn't want advice. Not from him. Nor from anyone else. Lee wanted his views confirmed. Unlike Jackson, with his mad eyes and his Bible, the old man was not immune to vanity. Behind that beautiful gentleman's armor, Lee was as human as any man. And very much alone in the midst of his army. He didn't value Longstreet's suggestions about the campaign, but needed someone to talk to, a set of ears.

“Am I mistaken,” Fremantle asked, “or is there rather a divide between this headquarters and General Lee's?”

Longstreet looked up sharply. How had the man sensed that?

Fremantle hadn't sensed anything. He'd just noticed the obvious. “I mean to say,” the Englishman continued, “that it rather strikes one how General Lee surrounds himself with Virginians. While you, General Longstreet, gather in officers from the other states. Cavaliers and Roundheads, would you say?”

“Fairfax over there is a Virginian,” Longstreet said. “And single-handedly responsible for providing proper vittles to this headquarters. We always keep a tame Virginian around to rally our eats.” He wiped his beard. “And to see to our table manners.”

“Even when there's no table,” Sorrel said, joining the merriment. “John's straggling on us, he forgot the napkins again tonight.”

“Colonel Fremantle may have something of a point, though,” Fairfax suggested, “about the Roundhead business.” Fairfax was ever the man to ease another's conversational blunder. “After all, my family aligned with Parliament until the regicide.” He reweighed his proposition, then added, “Of course, I'd tend toward putting the Roundhead label on the Federals, I think. They certainly have the self-righteousness … and the deplorable sobriety. I don't think anyone here's guilty of the latter.” He smiled. Fairfax was a master of smiles. “Anyway, Colonel Fremantle, not all of my fellow Virginians are shining Cavaliers.” His smile turned sly. “Except General Pickett, of course. He's one Cavalier who shines himself three times a day.”

Longstreet guffawed. “Poor George. Best leave him alone, John. Given that he isn't here to defend himself.” He laughed again, though.

Goree looked up, sniffing the air. “He ain't? I swear I can smell his cologne water. Of course, he wears enough so's you'd smell him the other side of the Mississippi.”

Longstreet felt compelled to explain to Fremantle that the joking was in good spirits, that all present had a high opinion—or a tolerably high one—of George Pickett. He didn't want an outsider to misunderstand their ways.

But Fairfax spoke first. “Before we break out the elixir that soothes the soul, Colonel Fremantle, I must assure you that we'd tease George Pickett exactly the same way were he among us. He's a fine soldier, and a brave man. Just a trifle lavish with the pomade.”

The oldest of the circle, Fairfax was more the staff's master of household than a soldier. He, too, had attached himself to Longstreet early on, asking nothing in return. Longstreet enjoyed the man's company, as he did that of all the men he had allowed to remain by his side.

“But don't it seem odd,” Fremantle pressed on, deaf to the subject's sensitivity, “that General Lee, in command of this rather … geographically complex army … surrounds himself exclusively with Virginians?”

“I'm not a Virginian,” Longstreet said.

“Yes!” Fremantle pounced. “Exactly so, sir! And you're over here, while General Lee dines across the road with his staff.” Belatedly, he picked up the undercurrent. “I say, have I raised an indelicate subject?”

He had indeed. There was great resentment in the army about the preferments given to Virginians. Longstreet was the odd man out. But it did not bear talking over with a foreigner.

Horsemen drew up in the shadows. Scheibert, the Prussian observer, and Ross, his Scotland-born Austrian counterpart, made their way through a squadron of moths maddened by the lantern. Lawley, the fellow from
The Times
of London, trailed in after them. Most men had at least one quality to recommend them. The newspaperman didn't.