Hell or Richmond (48 page)

“Bill, shut up,” Brown said. “This time, it’s an order.”

Wildermuth grinned through the gray curtain of rain. But he went quiet for a few minutes.

Brown wondered whether he should send Doudle back in search of the company wagon again. He didn’t need the new men any sicker or more beaten down than they were. Half of them had the trots from drinking bad water, and he was getting tired of telling them to go farther off from the trench line for their business.

He decided he’d need approval from Lieutenant Brumm, given the likely distance involved. Maybe even a note of permission, in case the provost marshal rounded up Doudle and whoever went along.

Well, first he’d have to see to provisions. And dry cartridges. In the meantime, let the new men learn their lesson.

But nature liked to distribute misery fairly. The rain had found its way down his back and cold wet formed a garland around his neck. His whiskers rubbed on wet wool beneath the cape. And he was sweating. Just nothing good about it.

He gave a thought to the men on the other side. Who would be feeling every bit as miserable. There were times when the war seemed nothing but endless idiocy. Men killing each other over matters most of which weren’t anyone else’s business. Was this mud worth leaving Schuylkill Haven for? Leaving behind kin and sweethearts? Sometimes he felt that if he had not taken responsibility for the men around him, he’d just up and walk away.

And on other days, he swelled at the sight of a flag.

As for sweethearts, a letter from Frances had reached him the day before. It was a wonderful letter, if only because there was nothing much in it. He had to puzzle out her penmanship, a parade of great loops with tiny letters between them, but the wonderful thing was that life back home sounded just the same as always, more or less. There was a world back there, untouched by war, where folks still worried about pie bakes and church suppers. That world seemed so immeasurably fine to him now that thoughts of it left him damp-eyed. He resolved that if he returned a whole man and if Frances really would have him, he would never speak of what he had seen here or on other battlefields. He would not soil her world with the horrors that had become commonplace to him and the men around him. He would not dirty her with any of it. And he would try to forget.

As if he had jinxed himself, Brown recalled Sam Martz’s heart pulsing over the ground.

He shuddered.

Anxious to force down the memory, he almost asked John Eckert the Shorter how his poison ivy was coming along, but caught himself. He had given the fool boy so much attention that murmurs had begun to spread about him having a favorite. When the Eckert boy was a burden to equal a hod of bricks.

He even had to be cautious with his best friend in the company, Henry Hill. Despite Hill’s promotion to corporal, it had become hard to have a private talk without arousing suspicions that Henry would get better treatment than the others. Veteran soldiers could be as jealous as young girls were of hair ribbons. And still be willing to die for each other, too.

Thunder cracked so loudly that even the veterans jumped.

“Christ, I nearly shit,” Bill Wildermuth said.

“Be the first useful thing you done all day,” Isaac Eckert told him.

“You shut up, too,” Brown said.

Six thirty p.m.
Third Corps headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia

Listening to the banter of Hill’s staff over stew and cornbread, Lee felt like yesterday’s man. Even young gentlemen these days cared nothing for the refinement his generation had deemed essential. Their carefree chatter made his diction seem a relic—even, perhaps, a cause for amusement when he was not present. He had labored as a young man to perfect his public language, determined to master graceful speech to better converse with the ladies—he had valued chaste flirtations all his life—and to speak with firm precision in the company of men. His father had praised the perfection of Washington’s rhetoric and bearing, although he thought Jefferson querulous. His father had spoken finely, far better than he had behaved. The result was that Lee had taught himself to exercise self-control in every utterance, and his grammar was as rigid as his posture. Once, such things had been valued. Now all his attainments did was to put those around him on guard.

His life seemed entirely of another time, as bygone as the remnants of his society would be, were this army denied victory. Oh, he knew that there were good men in the North. He had served beside them. But the grabbing hands and barking voices of the modern age, the crudity of smokestacks as tall as the Tower of Babel, and the rudeness of men delighted to jostle their betters in the street, all that was anathema. Men spoke, not always honestly, of freedom, but what he valued most in life was grace.

And dignity. Still little more than a boy, he had armored himself against the world, his careful manners a breastplate, his diction greaves and harness. He had learned to appear at ease in good society, even to be convivial within bounds, and he had friendly relations with excellent men. He knew not a single home where he was unwelcome. And yet, he had never had an intimate friend. He had guarded against that; now it was too late. Certainly, he had acquired an enviable number of sincere and pleasant friendships, but none of the sort that would allow him to confide his fears and sorrows, his doubts and waves of despair. He had never let another man that close, and even his wife was denied any glimpse of weakness.

He regretted that now. As the rain hammered the shabby roof of another unkempt farmhouse, he wished he could unburden himself, or simply complain as other men might do. He longed for someone who would understand his situation, the vicissitudes of commanding such an army, the need to appear ever-confident, to mask oneself with an unshakeable expression, to appear strong even when one’s own strength was failing.

And failing his was. The change in the weather had summoned his rheumatism, the one ailment he had thought banished with the winter. He was stiff, and turbulent of bowel, and wary of his heart pains. Yet, he was responsible for the men out there in the premature darkness of a storm that wet them through and doused the meager fires that were their small comfort. Even this dilapidated house would seem a palace to them on such a night. And soon he might needs ask them to rally and march through the tempest to pursue those people and, should God will it, to put an end to things.

Or, if not to make an end, at least to purchase time, to thrust the war northward one more time, above the Rappahannock, until another year’s harvest could be gotten in from central Virginia and the upper Valley, so his men might eat. With the loss of so much territory in the west and the blockade ever tighter, the South had declined from shortages of manufacturing means to a simple lack of cornmeal. The harvest was every bit as vital as gunpowder.

Let those people retreat this night, and if the Lord wills it, I will smite them mightily. And my men, my people, will be fed for another year.

Men who had dreamed of gay victories now longed to capture a commissary wagon.

The fury of the storm without conjured a stray memory. Once, before her health declined, Mary had lured him to a playhouse across the river in Washington to endure a performance of
King Lear
. He had no interest in such frivolities, but the play had moved him unexpectedly and he had left the theater unsettled, in a state that alarmed him. He had shunned the theater after that, wary of its tricks. But now, as this night broke over two facing armies, he thought again of that foolish old king, and about the poor, wronged fellow in the storm who had spouted nonsense that had the ring of law. And he thought of his men, with their empty bellies, unsheltered on this night. Perhaps there had been more to the play than he had been willing to see.…

What else had he been unwilling to see in his life? What did he fail to see now? Was he as stubborn as that addled king? Or, perhaps, as mad?

He caught Venable watching him. The younger man’s expression was almost motherly. The aide quickly looked away, but Lee knew that those closest to him worried over his health and his meager appetite. Lee valued the lads who devoted themselves to serving him, and his feelings toward his military family went deeper than he permitted himself to reveal. Yet, not one of those men could serve him as confidant. He was alone, and had been so for years.

Across the table, Powell Hill sat, struggling to appear well. Hill was still too sick to do his duty and he knew it: He had not had the temerity to ask for his corps back. He would have it, of course, in good time, when he was well enough, but Early must do for the present. Hill only wanted to remain close to things, to still feel a part of their brotherly undertaking. Lee had no time for mysticism, but there was a bond between these men no science had explained. Only he was left apart.

“General Lee,” Hill said to him, “you’ve hardly eaten. You must keep up your strength.”

Powell Hill, who looked like a skeleton whose bones could be snapped in two with a child’s strength. Who would be left to lead in the hard times ahead? If Grant proved unrelenting? He could not afford the loss of another paladin.

“That stew could almost be accused of flavor,” Hill coaxed. His tone suggested the ailing corps commander might next come around the table and seek to feed him.

Lee’s stomach was so torn, he could not digest cornbread.

“I supped early,” he lied.

It was essential not to show weakness.

SEVENTEEN

May 11, seven p.m.
Headquarters, Union Second Corps

“This is idiocy,” Major General David Bell Birney declared. “Has anyone in this room actually
seen
this infamous salient?”

“Morgan did what he could,” Hancock said.

“Couldn’t see a damned thing,” the chief of staff told the assembled division commanders. “Rain, and fog on top of that. I could barely see past our pickets.”

“Idiocy,” Birney repeated.

“That Sixth Corps choirboy cracked the position,” Hancock noted.

“And couldn’t stick it,” Birney snapped. “Bloody mess, from what I hear.”

“Well, it got Grant thinking,” Hancock said.

“I suppose that’s a triumph in itself.” Wet through and at his most irascible, Birney was happy to lead the charge of complaints for his fellow division heads.

Gibbon joined in: “Sir, whatever Saint Emory of Upton or anyone else did yesterday, it’s preposterous to expect us to move to a new position after dark—in this weather—then assault a position we haven’t even seen. And, for what it’s worth, I hear their lines are formidable over there.”

A man of pointed beard and pointed manner, Birney added, “Of course they’re formidable. Lee’s had three days to prepare.” He shook himself like a dog. Vestiges of the rain spattered the assembly. “This is an entirely new kind of war, entirely new. Fit only for brutes. These field fortifications, the way Lee’s army gets them up in minutes … they’ll have parapets, head logs, and rifle ports by now.” Birney made a distinctly ungentlemanly sound. “We’re not fighting an army, it’s a moving fortress.…”

“Actually,” Barlow said, speaking for the first time, “it’s nothing new. It’s what the Romans did at the end of the day’s march. Any schoolboy who’s read his Caesar knows that.”

“Thank you, Frank,” Gibbon said. “We’ll all brush up on our Latin before the next battle.”

“Look,” Barlow said, “we’re all agreed, that’s what matters. The scheme’s asinine.” He looked to Hancock. The weathered flesh around the corps commander’s eyes signaled exhaustion. “Sir, we need at least a hint regarding the defenders’ situation. What’s their position, their strength? Which units are we facing? Above all, what’s the terrain like? I might as well order my brigades to march off a cliff.”

“I’m assured,” Hancock said, “that we’ll be provided with all the information we need when we arrive on the left.” His tone was almost perfunctory. “Now stop whimpering, all of you. Orders are orders, and all of you damned well know it. Barlow, you’ll set off at ten. Morgan here will join you and guide the column. We’ll scare up an engineer or two, Wright’s promised to send me someone who knows the ground. Meanwhile, the plan for the morning assault remains unchanged: Barlow on the left, Birney on the right, advancing simultaneously. Gibbon follows, prepared to reinforce success. Lead brigades step off at four a.m.” With grinding slowness, he looked at the face of each division commander in turn. “Any questions?”

Attacking what, exactly? Barlow wanted to say.

“Mott?” Gibbon asked.

Morgan rolled his eyes.

Hancock said, “Used up. I only intend to use his men, if I have to.”

“But he’s seen the position,” Birney said. “He’s been over there for two days. He should be able to tell us something, give us some sense of the ground.”

“I’ll have him at the point of rendezvous. Another flea-ridden shanty, no doubt. Morgan here knows the way.”

“The men’ll be exhausted,” Barlow said. “We’re asking them to attack without any sleep.”

The chief of staff laughed derisively. “Christ, Barlow! Since when have you given a silver-plated shit about your men getting enough sleep?”

Barlow’s fellow division commanders smirked, every man gone mean against the others. Hancock joined in with a sarcastic grimace.

“Since,” Barlow said, “they haven’t had a proper sleep in seven days. There comes a point…”

“None of us has had a proper sleep,” Hancock said. “Nor have the Rebels.” He grunted. “Grant may not have the brain of a genius, but the man’s got a constitution of cast iron. He’ll wear Lee down, if nothing else. As for you, Barlow, be glad I didn’t reinstate Paul Frank again.”

“Last time I saw that sausage-eater,” Gibbon sneered, “he could barely stand up.”

“It true you went at him with that meat-ax of yours?” Morgan asked Barlow, laughing. “Poor Brown doesn’t know what he’s in for, taking that brigade.”

Birney returned to his rich disgust. “We might as well blindfold ourselves and sing ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’! It’s bad enough storming entrenchments a fellow can see…”