Hell or Richmond (74 page)

“You!” Griffin shouted. “Captain! Rally your men in those entrenchments. And hold your ground, or I’ll horsewhip you myself!”

As he watched, a color-bearer was shot through the throat. Blood erupted from his neck and the white bone of his spine showed as he fell. Other hands took up the banner.

First Bartlett, now Ayres. He’d ordered up his reserve, Sweitzer’s brigade, to occupy the old trench on the farm west of the church, warning the colonel to refuse his right. He intended to re-form the division on that line, his last, grim chance.

A slash of rain cut across his face.

Great buggering Jesus! Ayres’ Regulars were streaming back: He knew their flags at a glance, even soaked and drooping. It had been hard enough to see the remains of Bartlett’s toughest regiments, the 83rd Pennsylvania and 20th Maine, fleeing like girls in petticoats chased by a snake. Now this.

Ignoring the bullets flying his way—downright insulted by them—Griffin drove his horse out into the field, cursing like a clapped-up sailor and waving his fist, to Hell with swords and niceties.

“You quim-tickling sonsofbitches, you call yourselves Regulars? You’re not men enough to piss out a lucifer match. The goddamned Rebs are
that
way. Come on, I’ll show you!”

It was an art, Griffin knew. You shamed the Regulars, but encouraged the Volunteers.

“I can do more with two fists than you fucking ladies can do with a goddamned brigade.”

The Regulars, most of them, stopped.

“Form up, goddamn you,” Griffin told them. “If you’ve got a dripping cunt’s worth of pride left in you, form on your flags and follow me.”

The men fell into ranks with remarkable speed. All they damned well needed was clear leadership.

The Rebs were almost on top of them, spit-close. The Regulars bit off cartridges, shielding the powder from the rain.

“Come on, damn it. Those are cartridges, not tits. You don’t have to suck ’em.”

A shot clipped a lock from his horse’s mane.

“Regulars! After me!” Griffin barked. He drew his sword for effect.

A bearded sergeant, farm-boy big and slum-lad mean, stepped from the ranks and raised a broken-nosed face.

“Get out of here, old man. You’re in the way.”

His men cheered the sergeant and called for Griffin to get back to their rear. Another man shouted, “Git yerself kilt, we’ll have nobody fer to learn us our vocabularies.”

The men laughed and cheered and went forward.

It was rain in his eyes, Griffin told himself.

The last time he saw the bearded sergeant, the man was racing ahead and shouting, “Knock the bastards down, then give ’em the bayonet!”

Not enough to stop the onslaught, Griffin knew, but they’d buy time to ready a line. Chased by bullets, he turned his horse to the crisis on the right. Rome Ayres caught up with him.

“You shouldn’t be this far forward. I can lead my own brigade.” Ayres touched the brim of his hat.

“Then fucking well
lead
it, Rome. The Rebs are going through you like cholera shits.”

“I don’t know where they came from. I heard a few shots. Before I knew it, the Zouaves were bolting.”

“Dressing up like a fancy-boy never helped one peckerwood. Form over there, on Sweitzer’s left, and don’t give a goddamned inch.”

Here and there, rump regiments were fighting their way back, not running anymore. Terrified strays still headed rearward, but not so many now.

Thank God or the devil, and take your choice, Griffin thought.

A battery came jouncing and jangling over the fields at last, approaching the new line without slowing down, as if it intended to run over his men. To the front of the guns—well to the front—Griffin recognized Wainwright, a cranky cuss with a mouth on him and his own opinion on everything since Genesis, but, for Griffin’s money, the finest gunner ever to straddle a caisson.

The two men met by the trench line. There were no salutes.

“Wainwright, where’ve you been, you sonofabitch? Pissing in the powder again? Off on the grand tour?”

“Roads were blocked up with infantry, General. Headed in the wrong direction. I’ve seen horse races slower than those girls of yours.”

“Just put your syphilitic sonsofbitches to work, Wainwright.”

“Infantry must’ve got to the whorehouse first. Where do you want my batteries?”

“Put one in that field. The rest wherever you can lay on canister.”

A trace of bullets ripped the air between them. Both men grinned.

“With your permission?” Wainwright tipped his cap and bowed from the saddle, dripping wet.

“Any redleg worth a bucket of turds would’ve opened by now,” Griffin told him.

As he spoke, a covered battery boomed in sequence, sending explosive shells in perfect arcs over his troops toward the Rebs.

Sweet Jesus, Griffin thought, if I loved those redlegs any more than I do right now, I’d have to bend them over a gun carriage and bugger every one of them.

Banishing his smile, he turned to a knot of Michigan Volunteers who had paused to fire back at their tormentors.

“Good boys!” Griffin told them. “Brass balls and iron peckers, every one of you. Pour it into the sorry sonsofbitches.”

A second battery began firing over his withdrawing soldiers. Within the minute, a third roared into action. They had the range of the Rebels from the first shot.

Even before the artillery entered the fight, the attack had become disordered, broken up by its rapid advance, with the Johnnies coming on boldly still, but without the deadly power of men well organized.

“Back to the diggings now,” Griffin told the men fighting around him. “Get back to that trench and we’ll give the bastards the bloody red fucking they’re begging for.”

A frock-coated man raised his hand in remonstrance.

“You, too, Chaplain,” the general called. “Get back behind that goddamned trench and pray like a broke-jawed cocksucker.”

As he spurred his horse toward his stiffening line, Griffin glanced back at the Rebs, who had more spunk than prospects now. Shells exploded in their midst, dismembering those near the impacts. Wounded men jerked like fish tipped into a boat. To the rear of the Johnnies, an officer rode a black stallion, as careless of the rain of shells as he was of the rain from the heavens. His posture was as rigid as a knight in a picture book and everything about him spoke of fearlessness.

But Griffin knew no man was free of fear. They only feared different things.

“Fucked for beans yourself,” Griffin told the horseman.

Six p.m.

Upon finishing a novel by Ann Radcliffe, of whom Gordon did not entirely approve, Fanny had asked him if he would like to be granted immortal life.

“Only if it was shared with you, pet,” he had replied. His response had been immediate and, he thought, artful.

Lovely in the lamplight, Fanny had drawn in her brows. “I don’t know, John. Really, it sounds grand at first, but when you think about it … isn’t it the brevity of our lives … the finite term … that gives them their poetry, their poignancy?” She smiled. “Would you really love me so much, or the same way, if you knew I’d be here forever?”

He had not risked a second clever ploy. When his wife was of a serious mind, she expected earnest answers. And he had not found a good one in the course of an otherwise sweet and peaceful evening.

Four years ago? It seemed at least a lifetime.

He had an answer for her now, at least a part of one. There was no beauty, no “poignancy,” in lives cut short in grim ways once unthinkable. There was no poetry, either. Just this wanton slaughter, this enticing, seductive butchery, irresistible and revolting. He had, again, found himself caught up in the near delirium of a successful attack, experienced enough to keep his wits and give sharp orders, but intoxicated all the same. He had believed, for twenty minutes, almost for a half hour, that he finally had scored the victory he had hoped for since the fighting in the Wilderness. His men had brought in prisoners by the hundreds, had torn through the Yankees like wind through an arrangement of paper dolls. Only to find, once again, a new line behind the broken line, massed cannon, and a supply of human meat greater than the number of bullets his men could bring to bear. The attack had climaxed with the bravest men briefly piercing the new Yankee line, only to disappear, swallowed by a great, blue maw.

Now his blown soldiers manned worthless rifle pits seized from their enemies. And those enemies were still there, merely pushed back some hundreds of yards at a cost of equal hundreds of precious lives.

Had they reached a point, Gordon wondered, at which neither army could defeat the other decisively on a battlefield? A point at which they could only bleed each other white, a stage of the war where even idiocies—such as an unguarded flank—could soon be redeemed by men who had fought so long they would not panic, but simply do what had to be done to restore the equilibrium? If that was so, the South was lost. Because the South would run out of men long before the North felt more than a pinch.

Unless they discovered a way to kill Yankees in masses.

Clem Evans found him in the dark.

“Miss the tall trees of home on a night like this,” he said. “Stay right dry under one of our Georgia pines.”

“I don’t mind the rain,” Gordon told him. “Breaks the heat a touch.”

“That’s a fact.”

“You did good work today, Clem. Everybody did.”

“Tried my damnedest. New men come as a surprise, that Twelfth Georgia. Went at those blue-bellies like bobcats loose in a sheep pen.”

“I saw.”

“Damn it, John … I just don’t know how we could’ve done any more.”

“I know.”

“Makes a man sick sometimes. I mean, how many damned Yankees do we have to kill?”

“A lot.”

“Well, it makes a man sick.”

“The killing? Or the failing?”

Face half-hidden by his rain-drenched hat, Evans told him, “Both, I reckon.”

“Clem, we are damned beyond hope of redemption.”

Gordon shocked himself when he heard his own words. They hung in the air between the two men. He had not meant to say them, had not known that he had even thought them. The words had just appeared. Like the automatic writing Fanny’s cousins practiced.

He tried to make light of it, adding, “Just the doctrine of original sin, Clem. We’re all damned, but for the mercy of Jesus Christ.”

But the words were out there.

Eleven p.m.
Grant’s headquarters

“Meade’s heart isn’t in this attack,” Grant said.

“Is yours?” Rawlins asked him.

Grant shrugged. “Has to be.”

“Why?” Rawlins glanced about, as if he might glimpse eavesdroppers through the canvas. He heard Bill puttering in the rain.

“You read the letter from Washburne. One more reason.”

“Washburne isn’t here. He doesn’t know.”

“He knows. He knows what matters. Lincoln. Baltimore. The convention.”

“It’s five days off. You could bluff that long.”

“Lincoln needs a victory. Clear one.”

“And what are the chances of that, Sam? Even Hancock doesn’t want to attack. Not here. His division commanders are against it. And I wouldn’t class Barlow and Gibbon as tender flowers.”

Grant smiled, but not much. “They’ll do all right. You’re beginning to sound like George Meade.”

Rawlins smiled, too. And not much, either. Then he coughed. Between coughs, he said, “You always wanted me to tell you what I think, Sam.”

“You need to look after yourself. Get some sleep. Maybe go back to Washington for a few weeks.”

“No.”

“I think I can behave myself. If that’s your worry.”

“No. No, it just wouldn’t look right.”

Grant took out a fresh cigar, then returned it to his pocket. Out of concern, Rawlins knew, for his lungs. He didn’t want to be pitied.

“Go ahead, Sam. You think better with a cigar.”

“Don’t care to. Like to be the death of me, anyway.”

“Lee’s had plenty of time to entrench. Every report says his line appears formidable.”

Grant’s voice sharpened. “Broke his line at Spotsylvania. Twice. Almost broke him in the Wilderness. He’s weaker now. Wouldn’t have the push to plug the hole.” He reached for the cigar again, but stopped his hand short. “Must’ve lost half his men. And all the deserters coming over. That army’s ready to break, feel it in my bones. And Lee. You heard Sharpe. Lee’s been sick as a sheep taken with the blight.”

“We’ve had losses, too.”

Grant nodded. “All the more reason to finish this here and now. The attack goes in at four thirty.” He leaned closer. The lamplight showed deepening lines around his eyes, fair skin ravaged. “What can I do, John? Move south again and try to cross the James? With Lee set to pounce when he’s got me halfway over? And go where? Petersburg? Just leave here without a fight, when we’re nearly in sight of Richmond? What would the newspapers say?”

“You never cared about newspapers before.”

“And wouldn’t it boost Confederate morale? If we tried to slink off?”

“What about
this
army’s morale? An attack across the whole front, everybody committed … what if it fails, Sam? What if Meade and Humphreys and Hancock are right? Good Lord, I’m told that soldiers down in the Sixth Corps are sewing their names to the backs of their jackets, so their bodies can be identified. I’ve never seen Meade so dejected, he’s like a sleepwalker.”

“Meade’ll be all right.” Grant breathed deep. Rawlins knew that sound. Somewhere between a sigh and exasperation. “Failed at Vicksburg. More than once. Whipped ’em in the end, though. Do the same here.” Grant looked down at his outstretched fingers. The gesture was pensive, almost delicate. “Stakes are high, John. Couldn’t be higher. Break Lee tomorrow, the war ends. On Richmond’s doorstep. Save more lives in the long run than any attack could cost.”

“I understand that, I see it. But … Sam … I have to ask you something. As a friend. Has all this come down to a personal feud? Between you and Lee? Just two scrapping boys who won’t back down while the other boys are watching?”

Grant took out the cigar.

“That’s what war is,” he said.