Hell or Richmond (47 page)

He recalled the hard ride to Chattanooga the autumn before, the icy rain and mud that never quite froze. It had worn his companions to a nub and broken horses, but his only complaint had been a sore behind.

Weather didn’t trouble Grant. Men did.

Three thirty p.m.
Headquarters, Army of the Potomac

Meade was cross as a bear. And Major General Andrew Atkinson Humphreys could not blame him.

“This is an outrage,” Meade declared. “
Another
outrage. Why, there isn’t sufficient time to plan, to reconnoiter. And this weather. Biddle, make yourself useful, or take yourself off.” And to Humphreys again: “We don’t have time to plan, to coordinate. And the corps, what are they supposed to do? Just blunder forward again? Can’t the man see the plain impossibility?”

If you’d leave me alone to work on a proper plan, I might be able to do something for this army, Humphreys thought. He was vexed himself. Meade was tired, but everyone was tired. He had a right to be angry, but bombast was an indulgence they couldn’t afford. Meade needed to simmer down, no matter the wrongs done to him and the army. If Humphreys could buck up at fifty-three years of age, so could the rest of them. Including George Meade.

Meade was right on every point, but that didn’t make a watch tick any slower. And each subordinate element needed time to plan as well. It was essential to send them clear, written orders, as soon as possible.

Humphreys glimpsed Marsena Patrick, the provost marshal and the nastiest creature in the Union army, slipping out of the tent. Even he did not want to risk Meade’s wrath.

“And taking away this army’s cavalry. It’s madness, madness,” Meade went on. “We have no idea where Lee might be shifting his forces, what he’s up to.” Meade folded his arms and tapped his foot, a caricature of impatience. “I don’t care if Sheridan takes Richmond and captures Jefferson Davis, he’s left this army blind.”

Humphreys did his best to write through the tirade. He already had sent a courier to warn Hancock to prepare for a move to the army’s left, to a position between Wright’s Sixth Corps and Burnside’s ever-tardy lot. Even a march of a few miles was going to be wretched in the rain and the dark, and it would have to be full dark before Hancock’s divisions moved, to avoid detection. Hancock’s men were in for a rotten night. And a worse tomorrow.

“A grand attack!” Meade grumped. “Well, I have nothing against a grand attack. I’d love to make one, in fact. Instead of shoveling out this army piecemeal and doing every damned thing in … in petulant haste. But an effort of this scope needs proper planning.” He turned to his son, who sat innocently by, drying off from a recent courier ride. “George, if you haven’t anything to do, I’ll soon find you something.”

It had been a bad few days for Meade, Humphreys knew, and he was glad not to be in the man’s position: Being chief of staff was bad enough. The incident with Sheridan still rankled them all, but this very morning Grant had unthinkingly insulted Meade and the entire chain of command again. Perhaps things were done that way in the western armies, but Grant’s peremptory order to Nelson Miles to send out two regiments to feel the enemy on the right had skipped over Meade, Hancock, and Barlow, leaving them all sour. Grant’s action may have been useful at the moment, but an army could not be run on
ad hoc
lines.

“And Burnside won’t attack at four a.m.,” Meade picked up again. “Not a damned chance, and everybody knows it. He won’t even be awake at four a.m. And Hancock will have to make his assault alone.…”

“Wright and Warren will be prepared to support him,” Humphreys said, without looking up from his field desk.

Momentarily driven beyond words, Meade could only sputter. Fine drops of saliva struck Humphreys’ cheek.

“But that’s not what Grant’s order says!” Meade railed. “Burnside’s supposed to
attack
. To keep Lee’s forces occupied. While Hancock concentrates on that blasted salient.” He bore down on Humphreys. “And even were we to take it, what good would that do?”

“It could,” Humphreys said, still scribbling, “do Lee a good bit of harm.”

Meade was not in a mood to be contradicted. “But how much? Enough to justify a madcap dash at things? Say we bite off his forces in the salient. Splendid! But then what? Surely, Lee recognizes the weakness of that position—he’s a damned fine engineer. He’ll have reserves positioned in depth, as sure as Philadelphia sits on the Delaware. We’ll bloody each other up”—Meade cleared his throat—“and have little more than casualties to show for it, mark my words.” Again, he bore down, leaning so close to his chief of staff that Humphreys could smell sour breath, old coffee, and fatback. “An attack on this scale demands thorough preparation.…”

And I’m doing my best to prepare us, Humphreys thought. Close to losing his own temper at Meade as well as Grant, he knew he could not afford the luxury of it. He was worried about Win Hancock, who had been limping noticeably and seemed weary to the point of absentmindedness. Hancock had seemed back in form the day before, but on a headquarters visit that morning, Win had repeatedly stared into vacant space, with the deadened expression Humphreys had begun to see on too many soldiers.

Humphreys meant to do his best by all of them. But the prospects were daunting. No one was entirely sure of the point of attack Grant had fixed on: somewhere along the salient’s tip, that was all anybody knew. And how were Hancock’s division and brigade commanders to reconnoiter the ground? You couldn’t see fifty yards in the deluge slapping the canvas, and it would be night before much could be organized. And Hancock’s change of position would require hours of slogging through the mud for his men to reach their line of attack. The soldiers would get little sleep, if any, exposed to the elements. Meade was right: Even a tactical success at the tip of the salient would wind down before it reached the depth of Lee’s army. Any trained engineer grasped that immediately: It was the simplest equation of force, resistance, distance, and inertia. You had to hit a shallow line, not a deep one.

Grant was thinking like a corps commander. No, like a mere division commander. He wasn’t fit to be general in chief.

Humphreys was not a defeatist or a naysayer. On the contrary, he was vain of his sense of purpose. But he believed that things should be done properly. He respected the old Philadelphia tradition of “Waste not, want not.” And the wastage thus far in the campaign had been horrendous.

Oh, Grant’s call for a grand, coordinated attack made perfect sense, if properly done. Even the assault on that salient might play a useful part. But to have any chance of meaningful success, so broad a scheme required a full day’s preparation, at the least. And it wanted a brute with a horsewhip to stand at Burnside’s back and make him go forward on time. Humphreys was every bit as convinced as Meade that the Ninth Corps commander would appear late, if at all.

This had all the ingredients of a bloody mess.

Still fuming, Meade said: “I just hope Sheridan gets his damned comeuppance.”

Four p.m.
Union left flank on the Fredericksburg Road

“Swear I just saw Noah and his ark go drifting by,” Bill Wildermuth said. “Man could float a canal boat in this ditch.”

The mud was already inches deep in the trench they had inherited.

“You’ve been wetter,” Brown told him. Men who had cursed the blazing heat now damned the chilling downpour. It struck Brown, again, how short memories of suffering and pain could be. Yes, they were drenched. But this was a hayride compared to their march from Knoxville.

“Oh, I been wetter, all right,” Wildermuth went on. “Many’s the day, back on the old canal. Which is where I wish I was, just at the moment. Back home I always knew there was rum for my coffee at the end of the day, and dry clothes waiting. And a fire that wasn’t made out of wet green sticks.”

“I could do with a glass of rum,” Corporal Doudle said. Rain dripped from the sharp tip of his nose. “Never took to drinking, but I’d have me some rum right now.”

Wildermuth hooted, loud even in the rain striking their torn waterproofs or pounding the canvas drawn over head and shoulders. “Well, there ain’t none, not for the likes of you. Want your rum or your whiskey today, you got to be an officer. Lieutenant colonel, or better.” He whistled, a gesture usually followed by a smack of the lips. The rain crushed the sound, if it was there this time. “Wonder what Colonel Christ is imbibing this splendid afternoon?” Wildermuth extended a hand, as if to measure the weight of the thumping rain. “He may be in for another bout of sunstroke.”

“Shut up, Bill,” Brown said. The colonel’s drinking was a sore point that needed no further discussion. To the men’s astonishment, he had resumed command of the brigade, relieving Cutcheon, who was preferred by all of them. Once liked and respected, Christ was regarded now as less than a dog.

But a dog who held the power of life and death over them.

“Should’ve made coffee when I saw those clouds,” Henry Hill said. He had been promoted to corporal that morning, but had not had time to sew on his stripes before the rain burst over them. As for the stripes themselves, Brown had known the promotion was on the way and he had cut the corporal’s chevrons from a dead man’s sleeves, hoping it wouldn’t mean bad luck for Henry. He had gotten himself proper first sergeant’s stripes, too.

War changed men. And not just those such as Colonel Christ, who had fallen from grace before he fell from his saddle. Even the year before, Brown had been reluctant to bother corpses from either army. Now he scavenged with the best of them—and ordered out details to strip the dead of necessities for the company. He had taken care since his promotion to gather in waterproofs and blankets, even some extra tentage, and stow his prizes in the company wagon for just such a day as this, when the new soldiers who had discarded their equipment on the march would find themselves needy.

Brown grimaced, feeling the rain seep through the poor seams in his cape. For just such a day as this … but when he had sent back a detail to fetch the treasures from the wagon, and after he had prepared a speech for the new men about the importance of caring for their equipment, Doudle and his men returned empty-handed. All of the wagons had been ordered miles to the rear, and no one knew why.

So now they huddled in the mud on the same ridge they had fought for two days before, set off a few hundred yards from the well-made entrenchments they had dug and perfected. Hartranft’s boys held that position now, and the 50th had to make do with a belly-high ditch whose parapet was dissolving in the rain. The men weren’t happy about that, or about much of anything else. Over those two days they had gone forward and backward, sideward, backward and forward again, day and night, occasionally skirmishing, but mostly just shuffling about in a manner that seemed mad even to the officers. General Burnside’s reputation, too, was declining daily.

Men would do no end of unpleasant things, Brown had discovered, if they could be made to see some sense in doing them. Soldiers wanted to know where they were and what they were supposed to accomplish, but rare was the officer who bothered to tell them much. If the officer knew himself.

Men wanted a clear purpose. They’d die for that. But they didn’t care for the thought of being killed or maimed for nothing but confusion.

It was like breaking in a new boy on a barge. If you wanted him to coil the ropes a certain way, you could order him to do it, and he might do it well enough. But if you made him see the sense of doing it just so, he’d put his heart in it. A man had a hunger to know things, to understand.

He had resolved to explain all he could to his men. But he recognized that, so far, he had done but a poor job. He couldn’t well explain what he didn’t know.

“Know what I’d like about now?” Isaac Eckert said to no one in particular. “A great big beefsteak. With a heap of boiled potatoes slopped over with cream.”

“You ain’t never et a proper beefsteak in your life,” yet another Eckert, Levon, told him.

“My wife can fry up a beefsteak with the best of them,” Isaac said, indignant.

“When she isn’t clopping your head with the frying pan,” Bill Wildermuth noted.

“You don’t talk about my wife, you—”

“All of you, just shut up,” Brown snapped. “Rebs would be on top of you before you know it, the ruckus you’re raising.”

“Nope,” Wildermuth said. “You’re wrong there, First Sergeant. The Rebs are too smart to come at us. Not when we’re obliged to go charging at them like a herd of blind bulls and they can just take their leisure leaning over their works and potting us. No, boys, I don’t expect Mr. Johnny Reb to come calling anytime soon. But I
do
expect to go calling on him, as part of an organized party of unannounced visitors. And I don’t expect much of a kindly welcome.”

“I would hate to go to the fighting in such rain,” John Eckert the Shorter announced in his Dutchie mumble. Brown had given up on having the loaned stockings returned: Made with loving hands by Frances or not, he wasn’t sure he wanted them back. Too much Eckert on them by now.

“You’ll fight where you fight,” Henry Hill said.

“Now that is a profound observation,” Wildermuth said. “Elevation to the exalted rank of corporal has done wonders for old Henry. He’s becoming downright loquacious.”

“Just shut up, Bill,” Doudle said.

“Yes, sir! I’ll shut up. But Corporal Hill’s on to something, mark my words. All the fighting so far hasn’t been near miserable enough, not for the generals. They got to top themselves. Oh, we’ll be in it, they won’t miss a chance to charge through the mud in an outright biblical deluge. Chance like that doesn’t come around every day.”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” Doudle said. “Or the officers would be leaping all over the place.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean right now,” Wildermuth said. “Be too easy, that would. They’ll wait overnight, at least, so things get good and soggy.” He turned to the huddled new recruits, cowering in their soaked uniforms. “Ever hear about the soldier who charged across a muddy field and got tramped so far down nobody ever found him?”