Hell or Richmond (49 page)

“Just follow your damned orders,” Hancock said. “Order of march for tonight is Barlow, Birney, and Gibbon, nose to asshole.” He gave his generals a drained-to-the-bottom look. “Anything else? Or have you all got your pissant insubordination out of the way?”

“Guns?” Birney asked.

“No guns. Grant wants a surprise attack. No bombardment, no warning.”

“Cannon would just get stuck and hold things up,” Morgan said. “The Sixth Corps artillery will support, as necessary.”

“Grant views this as the most important assault of the campaign,” Hancock summed up.

Barlow let go a startling laugh. “What an absolute, unmitigated delight! I really mean it, it’s fresh cream on a bun. No reconnaissance. No information as to the enemy’s strength. No guns. No clear notion of the objective. Hardly more than a general direction for the attack…” He snorted. “
That,
gentlemen, is your new kind of war.”

“Just have your men on the fucking road at ten,” Hancock told him.

Eight thirty p.m.
The Mule Shoe

“What the devil?” Major General Edward “Alleghany” Johnson said. He waved his cane. “You hold up there. Whoa!”

The leading limber sloshed to a stop. The second team almost crashed into the lead piece in the darkness. Gunners and drivers cursed. Colonel Tom Carter rode up, raising a trail of quicksilver splashes, as if the rain were rising, repelled, from the earth.

“Damn, boy, why’d you hold up?” he demanded of an unseen artilleryman.

When the colonel’s horse stilled, General Johnson stepped back onto the farm trail. “Colonel Carter? That you?”

“Yes, sir. Thought I’d best see to this personally.”

“What the coal black devil’s going on? Where are these guns off to?”

“Orders, sir. From General Long. We’re to withdraw and prepare for movement.”

“Nobody took the damned trouble to tell me.”

General George Steuart, one of Johnson’s brigade commanders, found his way into the huddle. “Ticks me off, too,” he said. “No damned sense to it, drawing off those guns.”

“I should’ve been told,” Johnson muttered.

“Plumb crazy,” Steuart went on. “My line’s exposed enough. But there you go … nobody back in the rear has a lick of sense.”

“Sir,” the artilleryman said, “believe me, the men would rather stay right here. They’ve been building up those emplacements for three days, I judge them impregnable.…”

“Assuming they’re manned,” Johnson said. “Damn it, artillery’s the key to this position. The whole point of exposing my division out here was to give the guns a platform.”

“General Johnson, I have no choice but to obey my orders,” Carter said.

“Oh, I know that, Tom, I know. But it just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Only thing I can figure,” Steuart offered, “is that old Long must intend to replace them with fresh batteries, give these boys a rest up. Only way it plays.…”

Johnson nodded. That made sense. It seemed the only reasonable explanation. But why was it that the infantry never got a rest?

Each of the three officers had wearied of holding still under the downpour. Moving lessened the misery somehow.

“Well, you go on, then,” Johnson told the artillery colonel. “Get your guns along, before you sink on through to China. A man can’t even plant his cane in this damned down-country quicksand. But you tell whoever’s coming up to replace these batteries they mustn’t waste time, hear?”

“Yes, sir. If I see them, I’ll relay the message.” The colonel saluted the men whose outlines he could barely distinguish, then turned to his lead team, shouting to the driver and outrider to haul on through the mire.

Johnson and Steuart stepped back from the slop thrown by the vehicles.

“I don’t like this one little bit,” Alleghany Johnson said.

“Can’t say I like any of it, at the moment,” the brigade commander agreed.

“Long
must
be planning to replace those guns. Folly to leave those positions empty, after what the Yankees pulled last night.” He turned his head, redirecting the water that had found its way to his neck and spine. “George, if fresh guns don’t roll up this way by midnight, you let me know.”

“Yes, sir. I expect they’ll be up, though. Have to be.”

Johnson reset his drenched hat. “Your men all right?”

“Fair to middling. Got us some nice new tent halves off dead Yankees. Boys rig ’em up overhead. Helps a touch.”

Another gun lurched past, splashing the officers despite the distance they had moved from the trail.

“Sonofabitch!” Johnson growled. He thrashed the mud with his cane.

Steuart laughed, a hard man, hard-voiced, softened by his delight in another’s misery. “Not sure I’m any wetter than I was, speaking for myself. Lord, this rain … at least it keeps the Yankees tucked in quiet.”

Ten thirty p.m.

The rain turned the road into such a morass that the horses of Barlow’s party had to struggle. And what was hard for the mounts was worse for the men plodding behind them. Marching to what would be, no doubt, a slaughter.

Barlow felt a level of compassion that had not afflicted him previously. The soldiers he commanded had performed with valor and grit for the past week, despite the grotesque mismanagement of the battles. Those who remained, by and large, were the resolute, and they deserved better than this. He rued the whittling down of his brigades and regiments in one squandered opportunity after another. Lives had to be sacrificed in war, of course, no end of them. But the generals needed to stop acting on mere whims and use their brains. If brains they had.

“So,” he said to Mendell, the engineer dispatched to lead them to their assault position, “you can’t tell me a thing about the ground between our assembly point and the Rebel lines?”

“It’s mostly open, I think,” the lieutenant colonel said. “From what I could see of it.”

“And just how much was that?” Morgan, Hancock’s right-hand man, put in. “Fifteen feet, or twenty?”

“After you leave the trees … I mean, where there are trees … it seems to be open ground for, say, a quarter mile. Some dips and folds. But open, I think.”

“And beyond that?” Barlow asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Speak up, man. I can’t hear you over the rain.”

“I said I don’t know.”

“No, you damned well don’t,” Morgan said. “None of us do. The blind leading the blind. Fuck me to perdition.”

“Sir,” the engineer said, “what do you want me to do? Lie to you? Make something up? I’m no fonder of all this than you are.”

“That may be,” Barlow said, battered by a wind-whipped shift in the rain. “But you won’t have to go forward. My men will.”

“Maybe,” Miles put in from behind, “it’s all meant to be a map-making expedition. A ‘survey in force.’ To unknown lands of military wonder.…”

“Or a grand review in Lee’s honor,” John Brooke mocked. “Fine weather for it.”

“Maybe the provost marshal’s finally found us a decent whorehouse,” Morgan said. “And we’re all going to line up in turn. All twenty thousand of us.”

“Hard on the girls,” Brooke noted.

“Oh, shut up, Charlie!” Miles said. “You’ll get me thinking about women, and that’s all I need. Humping a wet saddle on my way to an early grave.”

“I’ll tell you, boys,” Morgan said, voice theatrically thoughtful, “when I went back to Philadelphia with Hancock the last time, a friend introduced me to Mrs. Adelaide Turner’s noble establishment. It was a revelation, even to my jaded and calloused spirit. My, oh, my … one begins to understand the fascination fallen women hold for a certain detestable class of men.…”

“That why you’ve been so grumpy, Charlie?” Miles asked. “You been clapped up all this time?”

Barlow burst out laughing, but not at the repartee. “Morgan, I’ve given up on any hope of a reasonable picture of the battlefield. But will you at least promise to face us in the right direction in the morning? So we don’t have to march all the way through China and come up in Lee’s rear?”

“Speaking of rears,” Morgan said, “there was this one exquisite creature … a glorious wanton … Boys, I fear that, should I fall”—he intoned his words as if mocking every stage actor who had ever lived—“I do fear that my last thoughts will not be of my pure-hearted beloved waiting chastely by the fireside, but of that delectable— Miles, do you have any idea what some of those women actually
like
to do?”

“If you’re paying them enough,” Nellie Miles said, “I expect they’d like most anything. And I expect you have to pay extra, Charlie.” He laughed. Grimly. “I hope you left them something in your will. Not sure you’ll be visiting after tomorrow.”

“I’d rather pimp a line of China whores than make this attack,” Birney said. “This isn’t soldiering, it’s blood sacrifice.”

The engineer tried to enter the circle of comrades. “I suppose I’m all for audacity in war … but this attack does seem extreme.”

“‘Audacity’?” Morgan said. “Oh, yes.
L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audance
.”

“That’s what Charlie’s Philadelphia trollop kept on telling him,” Miles suggested. “Charlie, she was trying to get you to move your hips a little, it all works better that way. You try it next time.”

“I think the rain’s easing up,” Birney said. “There’s that, at least.”

No sooner had he spoken than a wall of water struck them.

“‘Beautiful dreamer…,’” Miles began to sing.

“Oh, do shut up. All of you,” Barlow said. “If we expect the men to be quiet, we need to at least pretend that we’re adults.”

“Maybe we can just pretend to attack,” Miles said.

“I told you to shut up, Nellie. All of you. Mendell, I thought this march was only three miles?”

“It is. We’re over halfway there, I think.”

“Christ,” Barlow said.

It wasn’t just the mindlessness of it all, or the rough weather. For the first time before a battle, he felt pinches of fear. Despite his wounds, he had always felt that he would not be killed, that he could not be killed, no matter how badly damaged in the flesh. Tonight, he could no longer summon that confidence.

The flashes of doubt that ambushed him had nothing to do with the common dread of pain or even of death itself. Rather, he hated the thought that he might never again see either of the two beings he most loved, Belle and his mother. He regretted that he had not had time to write since the campaign began and that Belle, so close, could not share a last embrace and a few soft words. His wife, for all her gifts, was a tender spirit, as only he knew. They were finely matched, and he felt that by dying he would let her down just awfully. And his mother, for all her failings, remained resolutely admirable and unreservedly loved. He knew, full well, with a man’s nuanced understanding, how much she had risked or outright sacrificed to keep him and his brothers above water. He knew the whispers and blushed at them, but his knowledge ran far deeper than any gossip’s. His mother had clung skillfully to the semblance of respectability, exploiting New England’s web of obligations with a ferocity that presaged his own fierceness on the battlefield.

One of his haunting memories of his mother was a vignette that should have embarrassed him, but, oddly, didn’t. It had occurred in the early, golden days at Brook Farm, when his mother was still queening it over the others. He had slipped away to fish—a skill he never quite mastered—and from a glade he had heard his mother’s voice calling out the strangest pleas. He had thrust forward through the ferns to find John Dwight, the musical fellow, atop the untouchable Almira Penniman Barlow, with his mother’s garments and petticoats in disarray. He had almost plunged forward to rescue her from the assault, when the tone of her begging stopped him. He had never heard such notes—or such language—issue from his mother, a dominating presence. Embarrassed and relieved he had not been observed, he turned away … only to be drawn back to the spectacle of his mother’s weakness. He had realized quickly what the encounter entailed, he’d learned from the farm’s animals and the bragging of other boys, but what struck him and stayed with him all his life was the revelation of his mother’s unexpected frailty.

She had flirted aplenty after his father’s departure—to the consternation of the other Brook Farm women—and her latest social dalliance had been with smelly old Hawthorne, whom Barlow refused to address as “Uncle Nathaniel.” But he had always thought Dwight hardly more than a boy, and a bit silly. Now the fellow had his mother begging for a relief that passed all understanding. Instead of angering Barlow, it had made him feel that, all his days, he must protect his mother and be her defender. That glimpse of her defenselessness had been a revelation, with little or nothing to do with colliding bodies. He had learned that summer afternoon that any human could succumb to weakness.

As for his wife, men had feared her, wary of her intellect, viewing her as impossibly brash and forthright. But Arabella’s enthusiasm spilled from an overflowing mind: He had known many a Harvard man far poorer in his faculties. And behind the occasional awkward display of knowledge over a dinner table, she, too, was racked with doubts and concealed weaknesses, half a Diana, and half a Trojan woman.

He would regret disappointing them with his death.

But he did not intend to shirk his duties one jot. He would fight. And he meant to fight wisely, if such a thing were possible, under the circumstances. He had heard of Upton’s success—with not a little jealousy—and had queried everyone he could find on the details. What he gathered was secondhand at best, but it sounded as though Upton had solved the problem of crossing the killing space that he had pondered for months. Dense columns, rapid movement, no pauses, all violent action delayed until the enemy’s line had been reached. First round fired at point-blank range, then bayonets. Or bayonets, then the first round. He had intuited some of it himself, but had gotten other aspects wrong, fixing on open-order formations when a massive phalanx was what did the trick. He pushed his tired mind to envision the correct formation for a division, the geometry that would deliver a powerful blow without stumbling over itself, the proper spacing … and the absolute need for surprise.…