Hell or Richmond (57 page)

“Guess you weren’t ready for them, though,” a Pennsylvanian answered.

“Watch what’s in front of you,”
Brown snapped.

Bullets tore at the fog. But he had yet to see a man from the company fall.

“Come on!” Brumm shouted, determined to give the slowing attack fresh life. “Charge! Company C! Charge!”

The bushy pines had disordered the entire regiment, but the men remained game and responded to the command by rushing ahead.

Then the Rebs were right there, in front of them, their entrenchments tracing a jagged course through the trees. Blue-clad bodies decorated the raw dirt to their front.

Brown’s men howled. The regiment howled. The Johnnies let go a volley and a shriek.

Then it happened. Before they could close on the parapet. A Rebel yell and firing exploded to their left rear. It all went so fast that Brown couldn’t give an order, not at first. Rebs came swarming through them from somewhere deep in their flank, shooting on the run, clubbing men with muskets, and calling for them to surrender.

Brown turned in time to see Levi Eckert fall, clutching his leg. Frank Sharon took a bayonet through the neck. Brown parried a tall, red-bearded Reb, and John Eckert the Shorter shot the man in the spine from five feet away.

Brown nodded to the boy. He’d earned the pair of stockings.

Lieutenant Brumm shouted for his men to rally, and Brown repeated the call. But the Rebs were just everywhere.

Captain Schwenk reappeared, leading his company in a charge back down through the tumult, shocking the Rebs in turn. Men went at each other close as stink, sparks from their muzzles setting the garments of gut-shot soldiers afire. Isaac Eckert and Henry Hill were fighting back-to-back. Brown moved to join them, calling for other men to rally to them. As Brown neared his comrades, he shouted to get the attention of a Reb who was troubling Isaac. For one fatal instant, the Johnny glanced toward him. Isaac swept his rifle’s stock up into the man’s jaw, a perfect motion that snapped the Rebel’s neck. One thing no man could take away from Isaac: He fought mean.

The three of them did the best they could to grab other soldiers and put up a fight, but below and behind them, surrounded men of the 50th began to drop their rifles and surrender. Cornered by half a dozen Rebs, Corporal Doudle raised his hands.

“I ain’t giving up to no damned Johnny,” Isaac declared.

Bill Guertler and Dave Raudenbush raised their hands, too.

“Rally to Brumm,” Brown ordered.

“Where the Hell is he?”

“Over there,” Henry Hill said.

Brumm and Sergeant Levan were wrestling a brace of Johnnies for the regiment’s flag. Down the slope, Captain Schwenk was struggling to form a firing line, and failing.

Brown saw a gang of Rebels push John Eckert the Shorter into captivity, too distant for a rescue attempt to make sense.

The men who hadn’t surrendered were falling back. Some began to run. Then more of them ran.

“Come on,” Brown said to Henry, Isaac, and the handful of others they had gathered in. “We’re going straight down this hill, and straight through anything that gets in our way.”

As they charged back toward their own too-distant lines, more soldiers joined them. Some fell to Reb bullets, but most pressed on. From all sides, Reb voices called on them to surrender.

Their course intersected that of Lieutenant Brumm. He had the regiment’s flag, with Jim Levan swinging his rifle to clear a path. Brown dashed toward them and the other men followed, just because they wanted to be led: Somewhere. Anywhere. Away from the Rebs.

They had a last brawl with a pack of Johnnies who had strayed from their regiment. After a go-to with rifle butts and bayonets—and some fists—they were able to take two prisoners of their own along. But it didn’t make up, couldn’t make up, for the dozens of men from back home forced to surrender.

“Run, damn you,” Brown told the two sorry Rebs they herded along. Thin as famine itself, one of the men wore torn Union pantaloons, while the other Johnny was barefoot.

A few shots trailed them into the trampled rye field.

Out of breath, the men wheezed as they trotted up toward their busy guns, slowing as the slope punished them and the Rebel fire slackened. To their bewilderment, dead and wounded Rebels littered the ground where the 50th had waited to attack just minutes before.

“What the devil happened?” somebody asked.

The shoeless Reb said: “We done just crossed each other up, that’s what. Wasn’t after you-all, but them guns yonder. Couldn’t get ’em, and met y’all coming back, and howdy-do.”

“Who you with, Johnny?”

“Reckon I’m with you-all now, ’less I have a choice.” He spit out an object that might have been a tooth. “Marched with the Thirty-third North Carolina nigh on three years, though.”

“Just keep moving, everybody,” Brown said. “Form up, once we get behind the guns.”

“Sergeants,” the Johnny said in disgust. “I reckon they’re just the same old yard dogs ever’where.”

Bill Wildermuth appeared, pale but unharmed. Brown felt the joy of a child.

The men teased Wildermuth. Lovingly.

“They got Doudle,” Wildermuth told them. “And John Eckert. Heimie…”

“Saw that,” Isaac Eckert said. “Made a man sick.” They funneled through the space between two batteries and a sequence of fires interrupted Isaac’s speech. In the ringing quiet that followed, he added, “Old Doudle always did have a dread of Andersonville.”

The two Rebs remained quiet after that.

Lieutenant Brumm stabbed the regiment’s flag into the earth and ordered a private to hold it upright. “Company C,” he called. “To me! Fiftieth Pennsylvania!”

Captain Schwenk showed up, too. He seemed to be the senior officer left. Many, many men were missing now. For a time, they waited, hoping that more survivors would make their way back across the field, and a trickle did come in. Then it stopped. Brown guessed the regiment had lost at least a hundred men. A good sight more, if you counted the wounded still on their feet but who would be leaving the ranks. He dreaded calling the roll.

They had accomplished just plain nothing. Again.

It began to rain.

Eleven p.m.
Grant’s tent

Bill said: “If’n you ain’t going nowheres no more, them boots wants oiling up.”

At the end of a rough-hewn day, Grant slumped and told his servant, “I suspect there’s a general or two wouldn’t mind seeing me confined to quarters about now.” He nodded toward the boots, which Bill had just helped him remove. “Smell like week-old fish, too.”

“Nothing I can do ’bout that, Genr’l. You gots the feet the Lord give you.”

The rain hit the canvas hard, but could not drown the sounds of combat from the distant salient. It was a soldiers’ fight now, relentless, and had been that way since the morning. The men had struggled at close quarters for over eighteen hours, with no hint of an end to the intimate killing. Grant tried not to think about it. He had no more wish to see it in his mind than he did in the flesh. After evading a close look at the savagery all that day, he hoped to avoid dragging it with him into sleep. It did no good to dwell on the horrors, when horrors had to be. A man did what was necessary, after which you had to let things run. The battle belonged to the men out in the rain now. Tomorrow was his affair. If the rain eased, he meant to attack.

The day had started grandly, but Lee had spunk. Give him that. And his scarecrow soldiers had heart. What had surprised Grant was the determination of his own men to stick to it, going at it hand to hand in the mud. The Army of the Potomac had more grit than folks credited.

The generals were another matter. Burnside had pissed in his hat again. And Warren’s men had achieved just about nothing. Wright needed time. Hancock puzzled him. Win seemed not to have bothered thinking beyond his first jump at checkers. As if he had lacked faith in his own success. He was still the best of the corps commanders, especially now that Sedgwick was gone, but Win seemed burdened by common things he would have carried lightly in the old days.

They were tired. Grant understood that. But Lee’s men were worn down, too. And the first side to give up would lose, no fact shone with greater clarity. The past week had taught Grant that the Army of the Potomac could fight. Now he wasn’t sure that it could think. For all his temper, Meade was steady enough. A thorough soldier, he did what he was told. But George Meade thought things through too finely, until the dangers got to him. Like too many generals, he saw spooks. And some of those spooks were real, but others weren’t. As Meade’s chief of staff, Humphreys was four aces. But even he wanted to see everybody else’s hand before he bet.

Well, a man had to play the cards he drew. And the hand he held would serve. Game might run on for a time, though.

Bill had the mud-crusted boots in hand, but dawdled. Fussing. Which meant he had something itching him.

“Know what I’d like?” Grant asked. His expression was pure mischief. “Any idea what I’d appreciate right about now? What would truly do me good?”

Bill applied a grave expression to his blue black face. “Ain’t going to be none of that, Genr’l. Mr. Rawlins, he’d chop me up and feed me to the hogs.”

“Now, Bill … John Rawlins is the gentlest creature to walk on God’s green earth.”

“That some other Rawlins, maybe, not the one I’m fearing. He love you like a dog, but he guard you like a wolf.”

True enough. If ere a man had befriended him sincerely in this life, it was John Rawlins. With Pete Longstreet next in line. Pete had been wounded in the Wilderness. Badly, if the reports were true. Grant worried over him. As he did over Rawlins’ cough.

He had been teasing Bill, nothing more. He understood that indulgences of any sort did not lie in his near future. But it was one of his few allowable pleasures to see Bill flustered.

“Well, then,” Grant said, “I suppose I’ll have to settle for hearing what’s on your mind. And don’t tell me there’s nothing. You’re just about spilling over.”

Bill inspected the seams of the battered boots. “Oh, just got to thinking as how it’s a shame those U.S. Colored Troops ain’t in all that fighting. Now it’s dark and all.”

“You want them to do their part? That it? For the ‘dignity of the Negro’? And everything else I keep reading about in newspapers that want me to turn left today and right tomorrow, then go forward and back at once?”

“Wasn’t thinking nothing so high up, now. Not my place. Just chewing on how the Rebs couldn’t even see them boys for all the dark and rain. Be just about invisible. Not like all those poor white fellers. No, suh, the U.S. Colored Troops would be behind those Rebels even before they was in front of them. Scare the drawers off ’em, too.”

Grant considered the man before him. “Really troubles you? That I haven’t sent them in? Somebody has to guard the trains, that’s honest work.”

Bill frumped his chin. “Not my place to be troubled. Just thinking about those bone-weary white men up there, all moony-pale and shiny, getting theyselves killed…”

“Not sure they’re all that shiny at the moment.” Grant sighed. Picturing things he did not want to imagine. “Bill, it’s politics. War is nothing but politics played for keeps. The abolitionists up north, they want the Negro in uniform. And I have no objection to that. But while those high-and-mighty thinkers and editors and ‘consciences of the nation’ are willing to accept any number of white corpses and cripples, they’d howl if General Ferrero’s division suffered the kind of casualties, say, Barlow’s or Griffin’s have. In the South, the Negro’s a slave. In New England, he’s a pet.”

“Wasn’t pettin’ going on last summer in that New York City.”

“That was the Irish. The only power they have is in their fists.”

“Power ’nough.”

“To Boston society, you’re a cause. To the Irish, you’re competition.”

“Don’t mind my astin’ it, Genr’l, you afraid coloreds can’t be got to fight?”

Grant weighed his answer. “They’re still green. One step at a time, Bill. Let them get a sense of things.”

“Maybe they got them a sense of things already. Maybe they got them a powerful sense of things. ’Course, it’s none of old Bill’s business, but I ’spect they didn’t volunteer to be no house niggers on display for high-toned visitors. They might not fight like the veteran man, but you give those black boys a chance…”

Fort Pillow,
Grant thought.
Fort Wagner. The hatred.

“Bill, I’m not sure white men want black men fighting beside them.”

“Then maybe things ain’t got bad enough.”

Grant’s lips twisted until they settled between a smile and a grimace. “Oh, they’re bad enough. Marse Robert’s a tough nut.” His eyes met those of his servant. “What do you think of Lee, Bill? And don’t give me any of that ‘not my place to say’ nonsense. Tell me what you make of Robert E. Lee. That’s an order.”

Bill let profound thought—largely feigned, Grant suspected—play over his face for a carefully judged period. Then he said, “Well, now … that man … he tougher than a one-eyed, grizzly old tomcat, and just as mean.”

Grant laughed. “I suspect he’d be complimented by that. Although it may not be precisely the image he has of himself.” His expression tightened slightly. “If he’s a one-eyed old tomcat, what am I?”

Again, Bill displayed a counterfeit of thought. Grant knew the man had anticipated the second question before answering the first and had the answer ready. But Bill was a proud thespian by nature and needed to act his play at his own pace.

“Well, now … I s’pose you’re a one-
eared
old tom. That’s what I s’pose.”

Grant thought about that for a time, then laughed out loud. “Meaning that I might see more than Lee, but don’t hear so well. Or”—Grant smiled—“that I don’t always listen.”

“Oh, now,” Bill told him, “that was just my way of saying. Old Bill just meant as you got two good eyes in your head. And Mr. Lee, he can’t see what’s looking him straight in the face.”

Midnight
Spotsylvania Court House

It wasn’t so bad. Corporal John Doudle had dreaded capture above all things. The whispered name “Andersonville” had made him shake like a child affrighted by spooks. And now, sitting in the mud, surrounded by those captured at his side, hungry, robbed, and pelted by more rain, he almost felt relieved that the wait was over. A man was an awfully funny thing, he decided.