Leon Uris (5 page)

“We going to reach Lizard’s Gate?”

“Paddy, I argued all morning for scaling ladders. They said there won’t be a Lizard’s Gate left and there will be a dozen breaches in the wall to choose from.”

“Yeah,” Paddy said, “maybe a little too optimistic.”

“Well, before the war is over maybe somebody upstairs will recognize just how difficult and tricky a landing is.”

All the hatches, doors, and portholes had been opened to allow any breezes that might happen by to circulate. From the bowels of the
Tuscarora,
several decks down, came the clear and beautiful voice of Corporal Luigi Pastore.

Just before the battle, Mother,

I am thinking most of YOU,

While upon the field we’re watching,

With the enemy in view . . .

and he was joined:

Comrades brave around me lying,

Filled with thoughts of home and God,

For well they know that on the morrow,

Some will sleep beneath the sod . . .

Farewell, Mother, you may never

Hold me to your heart again,

But oh, you’ll not forget me, Mother,

If I’m numbered with the slain . . .

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Ten brigantines moved into Charleston Bay, followed by a hodgepodge of barks, schooners, sloops, and steam-powered gunboats, until sight of the redoubt came clearly into view. A rocket flared from the command ship, now arrayed with sails clewed up but prepared to get under way.

One girds for battle with fear and fantasy.

The reality of the coming hell split the air with the first salvo. Thunderclaps and lightning flashes rose to a level of unreality. Pain of the crackling concussions mixed the real and the unreal into a quagmire of noise. Recoil of cannon bucked the ship and it rose and dropped on swells. On and on and on and on it belched and powed and snorted until ship and man creaked from the twists, until a numbed dream state took over.

A bosun’s whistle pierced. “Now hear this! Marine Company, man your stations!”

“Okay, rats! Let’s get out of this hole!”

Up the ladder, guns and kits banging bulkheads and Paddy’s whistle pierced.

“Fucking Rebs are catching it tonight!”

“Man the whalers!”

A swell spray at waterline and the
Tuscarora
leaped on the water, popping and jumping and dancing and rising too damned high and tilting too damned low.

“Aweigh all boats!”

Seven boats were lowered from their davits, fourteen to sixteen men to a boat.

A cable popped on number three, hurling the men into the sea, leaving the whaler dangling miserably, helplessly. Men were fished from the water; some were drowned by the weight of their load.

Men in the six remaining boats rowed hard to get around to the safe side of the
Tuscarora
and rendezvous with their steam barge. Working by flashes of cannon light and rockets, one after the other passed and hooked to the barge, but the final boat rode a chop right across the others’ lines.

Ben Boone made an instant decision to untangle. He barked through his megaphone, “Number four, cut your line!”

Number four replied and began to row in behind. The steam launch was like a dog walker holding five leashes.

Shouts of confusion in the water were heard between bursts. Eight steam launches pulling fifty whalers arrayed and chugged slowly toward the shore.

Paddy tapped the lieutenant’s shoulder. “Rocket from the beach! Sergeant Layton has landed with the recon squad!”

As the launches moved in, the bombardment finally quit, but there was too much filth in the air to see.

At break of day, the launches detached and the whalers rowed into a surf turned nasty by the night’s bombardment.

Shit!

The number two boat twisted on a high wave, its bow plunged, and the boat broke. The lieutenant’s boat rode in hard and waggled onto the sand.

Boone and his first sergeant were in knee-deep water. Ben took quick count. “Looks like about half the company got in. Number four is still out there rowing in!”

A company of sailors had no better luck getting their people in. It was chaos in their area, half the sailors stumbling and being washed in afoot.

Ben saw a small inlet, bank and brush to his right. “Paddy! Have four men pull one of these boats over there and secure it, then survey the beach.”

At that moment it all hit Ben Boone in the guts. The sound of his own voice made him realize that Sumter was deadly quiet. What the hell did it mean? Abandoned or laying ambush?

Some fifty yards inland, Ben caught Sergeant Layton signaling him. He crawled up alongside . . . and as an ill wind blew the smoke away, Fort Sumter stood, unbreached. And the massive iron door at Lizard’s Gate was bolted shut.

Behind Layton, the sergeants had assembled what was left of their squads and, with the company of sailors, moved up toward Lizard’s Gate.

In came Paddy O’Hara, carrying Ugly, who had last been seen battling to stay afloat in the surf.

“I told Pastore to leave that animal on the ship!”

“Ugly jumped off the deck of the
Tuscarora
. I’ve got a boat stowed behind the bank. Best I can figure, we’ve got forty of our people in and twenty sailors.”

And Paddy said: “Oh, Jesus! We got no breaches! You told those idiots to give us scaling ladders!”

The invaders froze in their shell holes as Sumter rose up like a wounded carnivorous dinosaur and fired a volley of musket and cannon.

Boone, Paddy, and Sergeant Layton huddled tightly. “We are fucking trapped! The fort has hardly been damaged. Rebel artillery has a clear view to the water! Our people in the landing boats will be slaughtered.”

“Sure looks that way to me, sir,” Layton agreed.

“We’ll never storm through Lizard’s Gate with less than a couple hundred men,” Paddy said. “And we don’t have them.”

“Got a multicolored flare?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fire it toward our ships, high and clear!”

The warning signal arched up and burst. Its message: “All landing boats turn around and go back to your ships.”

There was so much fire from Sumter pounding the water, scoring a hit, and another, that no one needed encouragement to retreat, and those rowing in fled back to their mother ships.

“They’ll attack us from Lizard’s Gate! Layton, move your squad into place to cover a retreat. Paddy!”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m taking a dozen men to help Layton hold a rear guard. You get the rest of the people to the water and back into the whalers and the hell out of here!”

“Sir! You take them back, I’ll stay!”

“Git!” Ben snarled.

As Paddy O’Hara tried to make an orderly retreat, Boone and Layton set up a fifteen-man picket line near Lizard’s Gate.

Most of the Confederate artillery was trained on the retreating whaleboats, but some now switched to the confusion on the beach.

Heads with gray caps popped up on Sumter’s parapets.

“Yowohee . . . Yowhee . . . Yowheeeeee,”
the Rebels yelled. Lizard’s Gate cracked open and out they came.

Ben’s people waited, waited, waited . . .

“Fire!”

A half-dozen Johnny Rebels went down and the rest wheeled back into the fort. With luck, it would give Boone and Layton a few minutes to get down to the beach, and this they did, into a scene of mayhem. Getting the remaining whalers to go back over the surf would be more difficult than riding it in on the landing.

“Over here! Over here!”

Jesus, it was Paddy! He had maneuvered himself and five men back near the tiny inlet. Paddy signaled that the whaler was intact and put some of the wounded in the boat.

Paddy quickly darted out, kneeling, turning over fallen men, found a pair of wounded, threw one over his shoulder, and dragged the other back to the scant cover, then went out and got another wounded, then another.

Ben screamed and was blown down hard. He tried to rise to his knees, but the pain was unbearable.

“Lay still!” Paddy commanded. Ben tried to get up again, but no, no way to make it.

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes!”

“Your shoulder is separated. Your arm is busted and full of grapeshot.” Paddy cut the end of Ben’s belt off and shoved it into his mouth. “Bite down, hard!”

Paddy feverishly applied a tourniquet and, thanks to Jaysus and Mary, stemmed the flow of blood from Ben’s arm, then pulled the jacket off a dead man and used it to wrap the torn shoulder tightly against Ben’s body. Ben Boone willed himself to his senses.

“Stand me on my knees, Paddy!”

Oh Lord, what a mess. Shit! Piss! Corruption! Fuckall! How can anything be salvaged? The water was red with the blood of floating dead. Only the still and the moaning were left on the beach. In a few moments the Rebs would come out again and this time they’d reach the water. A few sailors were behind cover. They’d have to surrender or be slaughtered.

“How many good men do we have?”

“Five are in condition to row.”

The wounded on the beach would be doomed to die in their own pus if the Rebs didn’t bayonet them first. Some would be captured alive. Ben would stay with them.

“Put those wounded lads in the boat and get out of here, I’m staying.”

“Sorry, sir, I have to disobey you,” and with that Paddy opened a vial of ether, sprinkled it on a cloth, and sent Ben Boone to sleep.

Paddy O’Hara crawled out on the beach time and again, dragging back more wounded and ordering the healthy men to throw them into the boat.

And again he went out for wounded, and again . . .

. . . until the Rebels came screaming once more through Lizard’s Gate . . .

He threw an unconscious Ben Boone into the whaler, threw the wounded in one after the other until twenty of them lay in the bottom of the boat quivering like netted fish.

The boat was too heavy to row. Paddy and the rowers sloshed and slipped in the blood and vomit, finding newly dead and heaving them overboard until the whaler lost enough weight to move, then pushed along, tightly hugging the bank for cover.

Sea grass kept them out of the firing line of the Rebs, who were too busy finishing off the wounded and shooting those retreating into the surf to look for fresh targets.

The whaler stayed thus until darkness, the healthy men quieting the wounded and sending dead ones over the side. Four rowers and twelve wounded remained.

The four rowers moved out with a wounded Marine at the rudder and Paddy leaning over the bow to count and measure the severity of the surf.

And good black darkness clamped in.

It took three hours to find a steam launch. Paddy was the last man able to move, near dead from thirst. War makes bad sights, civil war makes worse, but there was never a sight to match the bottom of that whaleboat on that night.

Having saved three men at Bull Run and fourteen survivors at Sumter from massacre or prison, Sergeant O’Hara was well on his way to becoming a legend.

He became the second United States Marine to be awarded the
new Congressional Medal of Honor and was ultimately promoted to sergeant major.

Private Jones wheeled off the highway into the roundabout of Prichard’s Inn. Jones retrieved Major Boone’s carpetbag as Master Gunnery Sergeant Kunkle emerged from the inn and saluted.

“Ah Christ, Gunny, give us a hug!”

They clanked against each other.

“Kunkle! You’re uglier than you were four years ago.”

“Hell,” the Gunny said, “nobody’s that ugly, not even me.”

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