The March (31 page)

A regimental probe moved forward to develop the resistance. The men dismounted and spread out wide, slogging through the fields on both sides of the road. The terrain was treacherous, soft and sandy. The fire came from a woods. Lieutenant Oakey, in the lead company, lay on the ground and focused his glass. He saw a well-built works of logs and sand. Concerted volleys of spurting Enfields told him this was no mere cavalry detachment.

The men ran forward in a crouch against the wind, hampered by swampy terrain that grabbed and sucked at their shoes. A cold rain slapped at their faces. The muzzle fire of the enemy seemed to Oakey as sparklers lighting the way. They were all prone on the ground now, firing erratically into the woods. In another moment enemy artillery cut loose, twelve-pounders, with shells that whistled. He held his head and pressed himself into the mud. In the explosions behind him men were screaming. A colonel galloping along the line shouted as his steed buckled and went down. Just in time, he slid himself out of the saddle, the horse having plummeted into a pond of quicksand. He watched helplessly as the struggling animal foundered, sinking slowly, its eyes wide with terror, its poll twitching like a rabbit’s ears. And then it disappeared in a sudden awful
floop
of the gulping muck.

When after twenty minutes the order came to fall back, the men found themselves tumbling over the hurried earthworks Kilpatrick had ordered. The task now was to defend a position, a formal acknowledgment of the size of the enemy force. The cavalry withdrew to a more advantageous terrain, where the orders were given to entrench, and soon hundreds of men were digging in, reinforcing their embankments with logs and brush. There was frantic effort, for soon enough enemy elements rose from their position and came forward. The firing was murderous. Inspired by their desperation, Kilpatrick’s forces held. The Rebs fell back, pickets were set out, and the skirmishing went on.

Kilpatrick had dispatched couriers to Generals Sherman and Slocum. He ventured that he had happened upon one, possibly two divisions of Rebel infantry. They would be Hardee’s forces. Kilpatrick asked for two infantry divisions, if not three, to bolster his lines and provide the manpower for a flanking maneuver. He wanted heavy artillery as well, pieces with greater range than the enemy’s.

On the Rebels’ last charge before darkness fell, the beleaguered cavalry was saved by the arrival of an infantry brigade from Slocum’s Twentieth Corps. With the onset of night, the firing stopped. The two forces now hunkered down, encamped miserably in a cold and wet March night. The Union lit no fires. The men ate their hardtack, cursed the Rebs, the weather, and the war, and curled up in their wet blankets with their hats over their faces to keep the rain out of their mouths as they tried to sleep. Parties were sent out to bring in the dead and wounded, and a mile or two behind the lines the medical wagons came forward and field hospitals were set up in farmhouses taken over for the occasion.

BEFORE DAWN THE
next morning, the Rebs rose up from their lines and sent waves of riflemen on the attack and everything that had gone on the day before seemed like the mildest of jabs. As the sun rose, weak and gray from the fog-ridden swampland, Slocum’s infantry brigade braced for the assault and soon found itself in danger of caving in. The Rebels screamed out their fury. Another division was put in place, the flanks were reinforced, and the troops held on. The battle steadied, with the firing continuous, and then the Union artillery with its range of four hundred yards began to pummel the Rebel lines and the initiative swung to the Union side. Sherman, far back from the battle, sitting by his tent in a pine grove in which odd fragments of grape and canister occasionally dropped, contemplated his tactical options while his staff stood by ready to transmit his orders. He seemed oddly dissociated from the event, and almost lackadaisically supposed that the entire Union line should advance with a right-flanking maneuver to be undertaken by one of Slocum’s infantry brigades. Colonel Teack was quick to translate this thought into an urgent order, and a courier galloped off through the trees.

PRIVATE BOBBY BRASIL,
who had served a short time in the military jail back in Columbia, learned, when he was released, that the 102nd New York had moved on without him. He had thought that unfeeling, given how he exemplified the regiment’s highest standards of drinking and carousing and that his achievements were acknowledged even by that other Papist in the ranks, the staid Stephen Walsh, and he so suffused with Jesuitical proprieties. Brasil’s transfer to a Dutchess County, New York, regiment of dull-witted farm boys seemed especially inappropriate now as he lay among them in the swamp mud of Averasboro awaiting the order to charge that he expected would bounce him up to Heaven, where God would have a few things to say to him before another transfer took place—and that one for eternity.

And then the shout came, and the pistol shot, and up he was and running forward, screaming like the rest, leaping over bodies and keeping a wary eye out for those yellow pools of sand ready to swallow him like the morsel he was. And didn’t that lovely Irish maid in Columbia tell him so, that he was delicious enough to eat? And what would I taste like? he had asked her. A pastry nut cake, she had said, with a heart of sweet cream.

Christ help him if he ever got there, never mind the Reb bullet, his chest would burst from this running, he was pulling the air into his chest in great wheezing gasps, he could feel the rain falling into his mouth and then, glory to God, up in the air he went as the boy in front of him fell dead and he tripped over him, somersaulting over the downed dead boy and smashing into the mud, gasping for air, and the rain pounding him in the face and he staring into the darkness of the day. He could feel the mud seeping onto his back and up his trouser leg and down his collar, he could feel it crawling up the back of his ears—a living, creeping thing. He would lie here like this and catch his breath but for the mud and for the boots pounding by his head, anointing him in spatters and splotches. Judas Priest, to be stomped to death by one of these stupid Dutchess Counties! And up he staggered, spun in the right direction by the men running past him, and ahead was the earthworks, but they were behind it, they had turned it, and here he was suddenly in command, chasing after the fleeing Rebs, some of them going down on their knees with their hands in the air, and he prodding them with his bayonet like a sneering, true killer, except his bayonet accidentally went into one of them: soft it felt, no bone there at all. He would remember the look on the boy’s face, but now with his foot he pushed the poor sod back off the blade and ran on, chasing after the Reb gunners who’d abandoned their pieces and were scampering back into the woods, appearing and disappearing and appearing again between the trees as he pounded after them, a screaming banshee with his wet rifle unfiring, and then his bayonet somehow stabbing into a soft pine tree so that he was trying to yank it out with the smell of resin suddenly filling his nostrils as a great cheer went up and the breastworks was theirs.

BUT THERE WAS
a second line after that, and more fighting as the Rebs regrouped, and as the day darkened and the second entrenchment was taken, they fell back to a third line, this berm solidly implanted with logs and stretching across the small peninsula road to Averasboro with the Cape Fear on one flank and Black Creek on the other. So finally the position was impassable, with the Rebel flanks protected by water and Hampton’s cavalry patrolling.

These people show a little more than I thought possible, Sherman said that evening. He’d studied his maps and, with General Slocum and a humbled Kilpatrick, worked through what intelligence had come in and ascertained that they were confronted with a force of about ten thousand of Hardee’s troops. Sherman wondered if Hardee might not be defending against the feint to Raleigh—for that was what Slocum’s wing had been demonstrating on the road to Averasboro—but simply holding the wing down until General Joe Johnston arrived with the bulk of his army. If Johnston’s marching from Raleigh, he knows I’m really headed for Goldsboro. It’s those damn newspapers, Sherman muttered. Joe Johnston reads ’em, everyone reads ’em, and every move I make, every time I piss against a tree, the news goes ’round the world.

Colonel Teack understood that his General, having underestimated the resistance at Averasboro, was shaken.

In the evening Sherman and his staff rode up to the front. The rain had finally stopped, and in the cooling wet air they could hear the cries of the wounded in the fields. Litter bearers were bringing them back out of the darkness, and the ambulances dispersed them to the farms that had been commandeered for surgeries. Reb soldiers were carried in as well, and Sherman noted how young and poorly clad they were, many of them with no shoes and make-do for uniforms. He toured the farmhouses and spoke consoling words to the men awaiting surgery, and made promises to write home for the boys who knew they were dying. Teack took the names. It was very sad and Sherman was solemn riding back to his camp. In today’s actions he’d sustained nearly eighty dead and four hundred seventy-seven wounded. The Rebs’ third line was still to be taken. This would require a frontal assault, the upshot being more casualties. A tremor of self-doubt went through Sherman at this moment. In the next moment he roused himself: Now, Uncle Billy, what would war be without its ups and downs? Joe Johnston surely won’t make the mistake of attacking you here with the Neuse River at his back. From the looks of those of his boys you’ve seen this evening, his battle flag is sewn from the rag bins of the South. You’ll go on to Goldsboro, and if he turns up that’ll be the end of him.

Sherman was unable to sleep, though. He left his tent and stood on a knoll and looked down the Averasboro road, where Rebel campfires glowed through the trees.

But the secesh had lit their fires and stolen away, and it was only in the morning, when the first skirmishers were sent out and found the breastworks abandoned, that the General allowed himself a thin smile.

MATTIE, HER HAIR
now long and loose down her back, left tending the men on their pallets awaiting treatment outside the doors of the barn and walked off in the cool, damp night to look at the dead. At this farm they were laid out in the front yard of the house, where across the road the men were digging a grave for them. Pearl didn’t go with her anymore when the stepma’m performed this ritual, it was something they’d all come to expect, that whenever the occasion arose Mattie Jameson would walk among the bodies awaiting burial and stop and look at each one to see if it was a son lying there. And then it wouldn’t be, and she’d cry anyway and bite her hand and shake her head, maybe because their mamas were not there to cry for them.

Pearl never thought Mattie would have to see either of the brothers lying dead, because it was such a big war and, if they did get theirselves killed, the chances of her coming upon them were so small. Pearl didn’t mind if the brothers fell, she just didn’t want the stepma’m to find them because she was a poor shaken woman with her brains already addled. And now that this child David was riding with them, Pearl could see how a mother’s love could flow from the time someone needed her who was little.

Pearl knew brother one and brother two as rotten boys, mean to the slaves for no reason, John Junior a bully and the little one, Jamie, a hanger-on and a sniveler, and she had known they spied on the women bathing in the creek and did other bad things, like stealing from the kitchen and blaming black folk. And once when Pap had whipped one of the field hands—it was Ernest Hawkins, the strongest of the men and the proudest—and the whipping was done and Ernest lay on the ground with his hands tied to the fence rail and his back sliced up, it was the boys who come running with the salt to rub into him. They were hated boys all over the plantation. Even Roscoe, so gentle and forbearing, with never a bad word—even he would go off muttering that someday he would take it into his own hands. Pearl had kept the brothers at bay without much trouble, but she remembered now the thought that crossed her mind, that when she grew up and they as well, she didn’t know what she would do, especially if Pap died and the brothers became the owners of her. She had cried at that thought, and Roscoe had said, Miss Porhl, don’t worry your mind, if it ever come to that, Roscoe would kill them before they raised a hand, and he would die a happy man knowin surely he was bound for Heaven.

And now, anyway, there was enough going on, there were three surgeons in the barn, and you didn’t know what to do first. She and Stephen raked the bloody hay into the corners and broke fresh bales to spread round the operating platforms. There was such screaming, such moaning. Once a nurse called her and made her hold the towel with the chloroform over the soldier’s face—she had never been trusted with that before. Every few minutes, when she could, she ran to the barn doors to look up to the house where she’d put that child David in the care of the white folks who lived there because he had found a window where he could look out at what he shouldn’t be seeing and would probably never forget if he lived to be a hundred and ten. For the ambulances were still trotting them in, and the wounded soldiers were everywhere, sprawled on the ground, sitting with their backs against the trees, some of them praying and some of them just lying there quietly, saying nothing while they concentrated on continuing to live. And then the boy would have to see the body waste coming out the door and being thrown into the big pit. She did that along with everything else—in one instance when the man who’d been amputated was a big man and the leg had been removed close to the hip, and it was so heavy that she couldn’t manage it herself and Stephen had to take the upper part while she carried the other end by the big bare foot that was still warm.

But now Pearl and everyone else heard curling out of the night the thin thread of a howl, a cry that stopped the chorus of the moans of the wounded, the bustle of the medical nurses, the gruff commands of the surgeons—all of them shocked silent in deference to a wail so finely drawn and appalling as to resound in every breast as despair of the war in which they lived. No salvo of musketry, no thunderous cannon, could quake the military heart as this sound did. Even Wrede Sartorius for a moment looked up from his bloody labors, and when he turned back to them his own science suddenly seemed futile given the monumentality of human disaster.