Deserter (3 page)

Men drifted away from groups and huddled near campfires or lanterns, scratching out letters to mothers, fathers, and sweethearts. Some knelt, unashamed, heads bowed, lips moving silently in prayer. Others sought the casks of whiskey they'd hidden in the woods, filling their canteens with Pennsylvania's finest, swilling it until they vomited or, preferably, passed out to a dreamless sleep that carried them at least until morning, far from Cemetery Ridge.

“Damn. Lookit that,” Uriah said, nodding toward a wagon creaking by, heading toward the rear lines of the camp. It was pulled by two stout horses, the coats of which gleamed with frothy sweat. The gaits of both animals were unsure, toes of their steel shoes dragging the ground from exhaustion. The driver, in a business suit and wearing leather gloves to handle the reins, looked straight ahead, ignoring the ripple of disgust—of fear—he and his wagon raised in the troops he passed. The wooden sign affixed to the sides of the wagon read:

EMBALMING & SHIPPING
F
AST
—E
CONOMICAL
—S
ANITARY
—O
DORLESS
M
ENDON
H. D
URFEE
, MD
F
AIR
R
ATES

“Sons-a-bitches are like flies buzzin' around a dead dog,” Toole said. “You'd think the army would chase them the hell away.”

“Might be they do some good,” Sinclair said. “I talked to one once, early on after I joined up. What they do is have a big stock of cheap coffins at the nearest railroad depot and haul the corpses they embalm to the coffins and send the dead away to their homes so their families have something to bury.”

“Makes me queasy an' scared, Jake. Like I seen a ghost or somethin'.”

They walked on, watching the back of the embalmer's wagon until it turned off into the deeper woods, the yellowish light from the two lanterns mounted above the driver barely piercing the darkness. “I s'pose he'll do some business tomorrow,” Uriah said.

“I suppose he will.”

“Gonna be bad, ain't it, Jake?”

“Yeah. It's gonna be bad.”

It was as if Toole had to force out his next words. “You ever think of skeedaddlin', Jake? Sayin' the hell with it an' grabbin a horse an' lightin' out? Goin' home or wherever?”

“Think about it? Sure,” Jake answered. “Just like you have, partner, and like all the men in the whole damned army, and in the whole Union army, too. Some—maybe many—have done it. Hell, after a big battle so many men are killed and ripped up that it's impossible to tell who is who. All a man has to do is leave something with his name on it on a body that can't be identified and he's all set. He just chooses a new name and goes off to wherever he decides to go.”

“Well. But he can't go home an' he can't claim what was his before the war. When folks see a deserter comin'back they know he's yellow and that he run off. It's like slappin' President Davis's face. Folks liable to lynch him.”

“There are lots of places to go, a whole lot of land out there. I've heard a man out West doesn't need a last name and doesn't need a history.” Sinclair hesitated. “Thing is, I—we—signed on to defend a way of life we believe in. Neither one of us can walk away from that.” He shook his head slightly, negatively. “Nobody said anything about following orders that're so stupid that a man's pretty much guaranteed not to walk away from a battle, though.”

“Seems like you're saying two things at once, Jake.”

Sinclair sighed. “Maybe I am.”

The night of July 2 and into July 3 passed slowly for the Confederates who sat awake and too quickly for those who slept. A selfish breeze that began an hour before dawn and lasted barely an hour did little beyond disturbing the white ash of dead cook fires, not cooling the men or horses in the least. The heat, even in predawn, was a malignant force, a weighty blanket of stifling, humid air that turned breathing into labor and drew sweat from every pore. Flies plagued the horses and descended in clouds on the latrine ditches. Cooks, dizzy from the combined heat of their fires and the ambient temperature, drew from their rapidly diminishing supplies of biscuits, hardtack, and coffee, cursing at their slow-moving helpers.

Men and horses, drenched with sweat, had been dragging artillery and ammunition into place since the first vestiges of light. The cannons of all the Rebel divisions—every piece that could be moved and that could be coaxed to fire—were needed for the initial barrage. Mounds of canister and ball rounds as tall as a man were fronted by wooden kegs of black gunpowder, tops already wrenched off, awaiting the siege. Movement along the entire length of the Confederate encampment at Seminary Ridge seemed chaotic, frenzied, as if the army was in a race with time. Officers rode in and out of battalions and companies of soldiers; General Pickett and several of his aides rode the length of the camp, waving as cheers and Rebel yells rose at the sight of him. General Lee, seated on his magnificent horse Traveler, observed the preparations, acknowledging the thunderous hurrahs he generated with nods of his head and sweeping waves of his arm.

Pickett's officers, on foot and on horseback, weaved
through the masses gathered to the rear of the forest that fronted Seminary Ridge. Orders were given, repeated, modified, and contradicted. That made little difference: The plan was one of the most basic simplicity. Well over eleven thousand Confederate soldiers would march at double time in ranks as orderly as practicable across a mile of uphill terrain that even this early baked and shimmered under the burgeoning strength of the morning sun.

Uriah Toole worked gun oil into the action of his Henry rifle, a weapon he'd brought to war from his home in Texas but hadn't carried since he began as a sniper's spotter for Sinclair. Now cloth sacks of ammunition sagged from his belt on either side of his body, the left with rifle rounds, the right with .44-caliber cartridges for his Colt revolver. Sinclair, a similar sack bulging with the big .54-caliber cartridges that would feed his Sharps slung across his chest bandolier-style, sipped at acidic, overboiled coffee in a tin cup. There would be no Confederate sniper deployment today; all men able to walk and shoot other than the artillery units would march in the assault on Cemetery Ridge. A buzz of activity and a low hum of conversation was pervasive, but the huge gathering was strangely quiet.

Toole peered around from where they sat in the skimpy shade offered by a young oak. “Damn,” he said almost reverently, “I've never seen so many men in one place in all my life.” Without pausing, he swung to a totally different topic. “Funny how you an'me ended up in Pickett's division, ain't it? With all these Virginia boys, I mean—you bein' from Georgia and me from Texas, an' all.” To someone who didn't know him well, Toole's voice would probably have sounded normal. To Sinclair,
the minute quiver of nervousness and the speed of the flow of words stated that his friend—the man who trusted Robert E. Lee implicitly—was plain scared.

“I guess that's the army for you,” Jake said. “It worked out, though. I never met a man with eyes like yours, Uriah. I swear you could count the hairs on a gnat's balls at a hundred yards—at dusk.”

Toole's smile was both quick and very obviously forced.

“Look, Uriah,” Jake said quietly. “We're both going to walk away from this battle. It'll be a pisser, there's no doubt about that. But like you said, the Yankee round that'll take either of us down hasn't been made yet.” To Sinclair's own ears, his words sounded artificial, spoken for impact rather than credibility. Nevertheless, they seemed to cheer Toole slightly.

Jake fervently wished he believed what he'd just said.

Some of the light came back to Toole's eyes. “Be good to run some cattle 'long with raisin' horses,” he said. “After the war, I mean—after we see our folks an' then meet up again. A man can always turn a dollar if he's got a few head of beef to sell.”

Jake had to force the words at first, but as he spoke—rambled, in a sense—the pretense of normalcy, that this was merely another casual conversation with his best friend—paid the dividend of eliminating the image of the mile of open field leading to Cemetery Ridge. “That's true,” he said. “It takes some time to raise up a horse, break him to saddle, and train him to race. That's better than a two-year process. Even a small herd of hardy stock—longhorns, maybe—would pay the bills while we . . .”

The hours passed as molasses flows in the dead of
winter, slowly, thickly, barely moving. The position of the sun changed as slowly as the minutes and hours passed. The temperature continued its way upward, leaving the nineties of the previous day behind, reaching for the hundred-degree mark. About noon, officers began moving men into the woods, ready to form quickly and efficiently into lines when the order was given. The rare report of a Yankee sniper's rifle was the only sound louder than the shuffling of feet and the quiet conversation of Pickett's troops.

At one o'clock the Confederate artillery fusillade began. It was more than an ungodly racket, more than a wild cacophony of sound. It was a physical force that made the very earth tremble before it, shook the trees, shattered the air, tore the color from the sky, and turned it from deep blue to the hazy darkness of thunderclouds. That such a furor could continue for more than a few moments was impossible. Yet the clamor continued. Blood seeped through the balls of raw cotton stuffed in the artillerymen's ears from ruptured eardrums. Most were deaf within the first minute of the opening volley. But they needed no sense of hearing to obey their order: Fire! Buckets of water were dashed against barrels of cannons and directly down their maws—followed by the next canister and the powder and the torch. Beards, hair, eyebrows smoldered in the heat from the cannons and skin blistered when it inadvertently touched the guns. The thin glass of windows shattered in the Seminary building, not from being struck but from the sheer force of the waves of sound. The Union response to the Rebel enfilade, rolling thunder in itself, was feeble by comparison to the Confederate onslaught.

Two full hours later the cannonade was over. Longstreet, atop a knoll adjacent to the rear cannons, waved an arm to Pickett and then formally saluted him. Pickett returned the salute, spun his horse, and issued the order that started the troops from the woods and onto the grassy, uneven field leading to Cemetery Ridge.

Jake and Uriah stood side by side, watching the soldiers ahead of them move out from the cover of trees into the sunshine. It was an eerily quiet spectacle. There was no Rebel yell, no hollering back and forth between the men. Instead, the steady tramp of boots on soil and grass was the only sound—a steady, rhythmic beat that grew neither louder nor quieter as men poured out and extended the lines.

It took Jake a moment to assimilate what was happening in front of him. He'd never seen his army march like this, with such discipline, in such order. Confederate marching—after more than two years of war—had degenerated to a shuffling walk covering the miles between battlefields, a shambling parody of a military movement of troops.Yet here, the march seemed to be precisely synchronized. A scattered volley of rifle fire from overly enthusiastic Yankees greeted the first Rebel lines out into the field, but the range was such that the Rebs didn't flinch, knowing that the minnie balls and slugs couldn't reach them. Jake tapped his left trigger as his line began forward, keeping his finger outside the guard and away from the second trigger. He glanced for a quick moment to his right. Uriah matched strides with him, the Winchester clutched across his chest, his face a pasty white, in spite of his heavy tan. There were perhaps twenty lines of men
ahead of Sinclair and Toole, spaced twenty-five feet apart. Jake looked to his left and then to his right. The lines appeared to be a good half-mile long.

It seemed like the damage began all at once, like a quick rain shower from a cloudless sky. The man to Jake's left went down making a gurgling sound, blood bubbling from a rend in his throat. The deadly hail of Yankee canisters swept through the advancing army, tearing holes in the lines. Soldiers sidestepped to fill the gaps and kept marching. Yankee riflemen, placed on both flanks of the marching horde, picked off Confederates almost as quickly as they could—fire and duck behind the cover of gullies or slight knolls. Jake stopped, raising his rifle to his shoulder. He fired at a Yankee uphill from him at 150 yards and hurried to catch up with his line as his target was hurled backward by the impact of the slug. Around Jake men were returning fire now, mostly to the flanks, snapping shots, doing little more than keeping some of theYankee's heads down.

The Union cannonade became constant, shells whistling past, canisters exploding with flashes of white light seemingly everywhere in the sky. A half dozen men a few yards ahead and to Sinclair's right went down together, blown to bloody bits of flesh and bone by an exploding round that struck the ground a few feet in front of them. Their screams were swallowed by the blast and by the ongoing roar of the cannons on the far side of Cemetery Ridge.

The weather, too, was a formidable enemy. Men gasped and wheezed as they struggled to maintain the rapid advance, but the uphill angle and the 101-degree temperature sapped their strength and blurred their vision.

Uriah fired steadily at Jake's right, aiming carefully, making his rounds count. His face was no longer pale, Sinclair noticed, and his lips, tense, tight lines, were slightly parted, looking as if he was about to smile.

The front line of the Confederate troops reached the halfway point before the very worst of the slaughter got under way. Jake, aiming, stumbled over a ragged severed leg and fell clumsily onto a pair of downed men who were barely distinguishable as human—who resembled the carcasses of sloppily butchered animals. Sinclair scrambled to his feet, his arms and chest painted with blood, a loop of glistening viscera from one of the fallen soldiers grotesquely hooked around the grip of his bowie knife. Instinctively he swept the length of gut away and as his fingers touched it, the warmly wet and slippery surface filled his mouth with bile and vomit and he staggered, releasing a keening, panicked wail he couldn't hear over the furor of the battle.