Hell or Richmond (45 page)

Others leapt over the abatis, or squeezed between the stakes. Some hammered down the sharpened limbs with their rifle butts.

Seconds. Thin-shaved bits of seconds. The world slowed and sped by at the same time.

They hit the Rebel line. His men roared. Leaping over the parapet, thrusting with bayonets.
Now
they fired, muzzles hardly a foot from gray-clad flesh. The cries from both sides were primitive, shocking, profane.

A young Reb leapt up from a trench, waving a flag. Instead of shooting him down, a half-dozen soldiers stabbed him with their bayonets, forking him to the earth.

“Company I! Wheel right!”

Was that his voice? A Reb came for him, bayonet thirsty. Kidder began to raise his sword, then realized his folly and shot the man with his pistol. He shot another Reb, who had been about to club the company’s first sergeant.

For the first time in the war, he pierced human flesh with his saber: a Confederate private, a scrawny, thin-bearded creature that passed for a man. Kidder’s blade thrust through his belly and burst from his back. The look of shock on the soldier’s face asked,
How could this thing happen?

He would never forget the bewildered eyes in that dirty face. In what he later explained to himself as pity, he shot the man in the forehead, sparing him a slow and agonized death. But he never was sure his motive had not been worse.

Struggling to extract his sword, he nearly fell atop the collapsing Reb, whose carcass pulled the blade along.

Then his sword was free, christened with blood.

“Company I! Right! To the right! Forward!”

How many things could happen in mere seconds? Revolver extended, he charged a Rebel gun crew struggling to swing their Napoleon around to fire upon the soldiers still crossing the field.

“Their guns!” Kidder shouted. “Get the cannon!”

In an instant’s decision, dozens of Rebels thrust their arms in the air.

Let other men see to them.

Enough of his men kept up with him to draw along soldiers from the follow-on regiments. Instead of standing to fight or raising their hands, the last Reb gunners ran. Kidder realized they were taking away their swabs and ramrods, so the guns could not be turned on their own kind.

“Shoot the gunners!” Kidder yelled. But the melee had grown so wild, few could hear him.

The masses of surrendering Johnnies threatened to clog the attack.

“You!” Kidder called to a stunned Rebel lieutenant. “Run back across that field. Take your men with you. Or I’ll kill you right here.”

When he turned to look moments later, he saw hundreds of disarmed Confederates funneling out of the works, a herd of terrified gray cattle that impeded the advance of the last Union regiments.

His own men were beyond the battery now. How long had it been since they had breached the line? Three minutes? Five?

He had never seen such sustained, intimate brawling, with men delighted to bash each other’s brains out, or to gut a man and grin as he clutched his intestines.

Smoke darkened the setting sun.

His revolver clicked empty, but there was no time to reload. They had to press on, to break this enemy apart and finish him off.

A thoughtful man, made for enterprise, not war, he did not think of his wife or home any longer. He was transformed. Transfigured. As were the vengeful soldiers howling around him. They lusted for Reb blood.

Kidder felt he could eat human flesh.

*   *   *

What happened? Lee could not understand it. The day had been going handsomely, with Grant and Meade hurling their men into one slaughter after another, losing all, gaining nothing. And suddenly his own men were streaming rearward and those people were running amok within his lines. How had this happened?

He had never liked the salient, but understood the ground could not be abandoned. Now this. The shots and cries unnerved him.

Stray bullets hissed past.

He would not allow it. He must not allow it. He nudged Traveller forward, toward the fight. He would not let those people drive him from the field.

Venable ran up and seized his bridle.

“You
cannot
go forward, sir.”

With burning eyes, Lee looked down on the man.

“Don’t tell me to let go, because I won’t,” Venable went on. “General Ewell’s bringing up more men. It’ll be all right.”

Would it? He believed he could see Federals in the trees in the failing light.
Those people. Inside his lines.
The shame was worse than the danger. Surely, they would bring up more troops to press their advantage. They would support this success. And his army would split in two.

He glared down at Venable, who glared back. Venable had spirit.

Marshall and Taylor came up on horseback to support their comrade.

“We won’t let you go forward, General,” Marshall said. In his haste, he had not removed his spectacles as he took to the saddle. They hung awry.

Lee mastered himself. “Then … you must see to it that the ground is recovered.”

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir, that’s a promise.”

The two of them galloped off, willing to ride down quitters who got in their way.

The sound of the fighting was terrible: The hymn of victory had become the cacophony of defeat.

And Venable still had not released the bridle.

“You
must
go back,” the colonel said.

Lee shook his head. Looking into the smoke and confusion, he said, “I will not. I agreed not to go forward, but the men must not see me turn toward the rear. They must never see that.”

Johnston’s Tarheel Brigade came up at the double-quick. A
fast
double-quick. Men from Gordon’s Division. Lord bless him. Gordon had sent him this brigade and surely had gone for another.

General Ewell, who seemed in fine command of himself this day, spurred toward the column, waving at Johnston to hurry his men along. Bullets thickened the humid evening air.

“Charge ’em, General,” Ewell shouted to Johnston in his mad squeak of a voice. “Damn ’em, charge ’em.”

Lee suspended his distaste for profanity and allowed himself a faint smile. Yes indeed. Damn them and charge them.

From the right front, deep in the grove that backed his broken defenses, he heard a reassuring Rebel yell. His men were coming back to themselves, unwilling to be defeated.

But surely … those people would follow up with an even fiercer blow? Could his men withstand that, too?

*   *   *

Upton was maddened. Where was Mott? Where was the promised support? His men had broken through three lines of defenses before being halted by multiple counterattacks. Now they were being driven slowly back.

Still they hung on, unwilling to be beaten so near to a triumph.

His last reserves were in. Seaver’s Vermonters had become so enthused by the success of the first echelons that they had charged on their own, ignoring their officers. Few men were free of the lust for vengeance this day. And the Vermonters had carried the attack deep into the salient.

But his regiments were intermingled and difficult to command. The Rebels were being granted time to reorganize and bring up still more forces. When their destruction had been at hand, as surely as that of Sodom and Gomorrah.

He could not believe his army would throw away this chance, the opportunity the generals had longed for.

With men firing into each other’s faces and beating each other to death in the rancid twilight, he galloped back across the field to the farm trail from which his regiments had debouched. The grazing wound along his ribs bled warmth.

He worried that he would end by losing twelve exemplary regiments, a victory transformed into a debacle. And all the blame would be his, not Mott’s or that of the generals slurping their coffee.

He wanted a star. He wanted it as badly as he ever had wanted anything on this earth. But he did not want it badly enough to see the finest soldiers he knew be slaughtered to no purpose.

“Where’s General Russell?” he shouted to the first officers he found in the safety of the trees. They’d been watching the fight, with evident amusement.

“Just there, Upton,” a staff man said, gesturing over his shoulder with a thumb. “Good effort, quite a good effort.”

With sweat and blood sealing his uniform to his body, Upton rode up to his division commander.

“Where’s Mott?” he demanded.

“Upton, are you wounded?”

He waved off the concern. “Sir … we must be reinforced. Immediately. We drove them, we’re three lines in. But we need fresh supports.”

“General Wright sent in the Sixty-fifth New York,” Russell said. “There’s no one else.”

Upton had not even seen the 65th, one paltry regiment. Of a sudden, he felt faint. This was not his place. His place was with those men, with the soldiers who had trusted him.

“Listen, Upton,” Russell said, “you’ve done admirably. Everything you said you’d do. You proved your point. I believe you sent back at least five hundred prisoners. But General Wright thinks it’s too dark and too late to call up anyone, and nobody’s ready.” Russell exhaled a deep and troubled breath. He did not look much happier than Upton felt. “The truth is no one expected you to succeed.”

Upton ignored the praise and the insult. “Sir, my men can’t hold, unless they’re reinforced.”

“I just told you, there are no troops.”

Upton thought of the thousands of men who had massed to assault Laurel Hill for the last three days, a hopeless endeavor fools had thought might succeed. Those men were needed here and now. Instead, they’d been frittered away on tactics that hadn’t changed in a hundred years.

He had pursued a star, and lost. Now he had to do what his conscience demanded.

“General Russell”—his chest was heaving and hurting, and breathing had become difficult—“I request permission to withdraw my men.”

The division commander didn’t hesitate. “Permission granted.”

Upton turned his horse about and galloped back to organize a withdrawal.

He did all he could, and the regiments—what was left of them—were saved. But many a man did not want to retreat: They had paid too high a price and had gone too far. The soldiers felt robbed, and shamelessly.

The Vermonters were the worst. At first, they bluntly refused to pull out of the salient, determined to go on killing until they were killed. It took a scribbled order from General Wright to get them to quit, with Colonel Seaver bellowing at them to do as their corps commander ordered or answer to him in the morning, as if that fate would be worse than death or dismemberment.

Among the last to withdraw, Upton had the satisfaction of hearing Rebel officers order their men to charge in pursuit, only to be flatly disobeyed: The men in gray had had fighting enough.

More men died needlessly, uselessly, as they recrossed the open field in the purple dusk. The Vermonters came back with tears rolling down their cheeks.

May 11, eight a.m.
Sixth Corps rear

Upton lay on his cot, unwilling, for the first time in the war, to rise and do his duty. He had lost a thousand men and achieved nothing. And he knew that the best, not the worst, of the men had fallen. Such veterans could not be replaced by draftees and hirelings. His assault had made his point, oh, yes. Only to weaken the army.

The sin of pride, the sin of pride …

He closed his eyes, letting the heat engulf him. The air was sour with the tent’s flaps down, but that was as close as he could come to brimstone. He could not even steel himself to pray.

He had gambled with men’s lives, as surely as the sinful gambled with money. Or the legionnaires on Golgotha had diced for the Savior’s garments. He had gambled, and now he was called to account before God. It was no longer enough to reason that such was war. He had thought to perform a miracle on earth, and his pride had been humbled.

And yet … he had come so close. It might have been a victory to speed the end of the war.
Might
have been.…

The most satisfying thing in his life was his wound, minor but painful. He relished the burning hurt as a small justice, imagining that the bullet had been a nail fit for a cross.

He looked down and saw that the bandage needed replacement, but even that could not resurrect his will.

“Emory?” a voice called. Clint Beckwith, fellow colonel, friend. A good, Christian man. Poking his head and shoulders inside the tent.

Upton could not muster the will to answer.

Beckwith stepped inside and stared down at his friend, clucking his tongue. Then he grinned and dropped a pair of shoulder straps on Upton’s belly.

Each strap bore a star.

SIXTEEN

May 11, eight a.m.
Grant’s headquarters

“Talk to you, Sam?” Washburne asked.

Cradling a tin cup of coffee in his hands, Grant looked up from the looted chair his servant had set out for him.

“Thought you were already gone,” he said. “Pull up a stump.”

“Maybe someplace more private?”

Grant nodded. “Tent’ll have to do, then.” He splashed the remains of the coffee on the ground. “Looks like rain, you’ll want to get along.”

“I’d welcome a little rain,” the congressman said. “This heat.”

“See how you feel after you’re wet through.” Grant held the tent flap open.

Washburne sat down on the cot, leaving the camp chair by the desk for Grant. “Looked like you were a mile deep in thought.”

“Way that colonel broke their line. Something to it.” Grant stood in the center of the tent. Waiting. He was short enough not to stoop under the canvas.

Washburne braced his hands upon his knees. “It occurred to me … that I ought to take back more than just a verbal report for the president. Could I prevail upon you to write something? Just some words to keep Lincoln in our buggy, something he can use?”

Grant pondered the matter before speaking. “Wouldn’t know what to say just now. Our doings have been mostly favorable. But I don’t want to hold out false hopes.”

“You were plenty hopeful a week ago.”

“That was a week ago.”

“Sam, I believe you owe the president words on paper. He’s been behind you, solid as a rock. But he needs something he can wave at the newspapermen. Dispel the myth of Lee’s invincibility, make a show of confidence. That sort of thing.”