Hell or Richmond (51 page)

Barlow huddled under the canvas his brigade commanders and aides held over their heads, shielding the lantern’s light from the enemy’s view. On the chance in a thousand it could be seen through the murk. The rain had softened to a light blow and pattered on the cloth, dripping from the edges. Fog rolled over the fields and through the groves as if God were smoking a meerschaum. Beyond the lantern’s cast, the air was Hades black.

Drawing in the mud with a stick, Barlow said, “Make your peace with God, gentlemen. I have a hot place picked out for some of you today.” The attempt at humor fell flat. A pall worse than the weather hung over them all. Barlow ached to display his usual confidence, but every time he spoke a false tone spoiled his voice.

“It isn’t much to go on, but the salient’s here, shaped like this. Pay attention to the tip. We’ll aim to hit just off its center, slightly to the left, just about … here. Of course, there’s no telling where we’ll actually end up … but as soon as you catch a glimpse, the vaguest outline, of the position, that’s where I want you to do your best to hit them. Now … we’re here. When we move out, we’re going straight ahead. Nothing fancy, no nonsense. I’m told this ground is open and what trees there were near the works were cut down for abatis. Be prepared for plenty of abatis.”

“If they used poplar,” Nellie Miles said, “it’ll snap off.”

“Not when it’s wet,” Brooke said.

Paul Frank’s replacement, Hiram Brown, added, “Rain’s been so heavy, the stakes may not have much purchase. Might be able to pull them right out of the ground.”

“Fine, but let’s not count on it,” Barlow told him. “What’s essential is that you all keep your men closed up. Keep them moving fast, as fast as you can without losing all sense of order. If this mist holds, they won’t be able to see us until we’re a hundred yards off, or even closer.”

“They’ll hear us.”

“Can’t aim at a sound with very much confidence,” Brooke observed.

“Exactly,” Barlow said. “They’ll have to hold their fire, until we’re close enough to make a dash for it. Even if they’ve laid guns to rake the fields, they’ll be hesitant to open until they think they’ve spotted something of value. They’ll be worried about the time they need to reload.”

“And then the lovely point, sir, would be to keep on a-going,” Smyth said.

“Right. No matter what damage the guns do—and it won’t be pleasant, gentlemen—just keep whipping the men forward. Get over the abatis, get in among the Rebs. It’s the only chance. And once we’re in those trenches, I do expect scalps by the wagonload.”

“Literally?” Brooke said. “We never quite know with you.”

“Corpses and prisoners have to do, I suppose. That’s it, then. Miles, you’re up on the left, followed by Smyth and the Irish Brigade. Brooke’s up on the right, followed by Brown. Ten paces between brigades, five between regiments. No one fires until we reach the entrenchments. No one stops, no one fires. Only bayonets, when we hit their skirmish lines.”

“Their skirmishers will fire. That’ll warn them we’re coming.”

“A few stray shots are one thing, regimental volleys are another. Just don’t let anything stop this attack, or delay it, or break it up in any way. Hit them hard.” He tried to smile. “I do expect an interesting morning. All right, go and explain things to your regimental officers. And be ready to step off precisely at four.”

His subordinates began to break up the party, muttering about the inability to maneuver when packed so tight and the prospects of canister on the prescribed formation. But it didn’t rise above the normal level of complaints; sour remarks were almost a form of prayer for men at war.

“Hold on,” Barlow said. “All of you. Black, don’t douse the lantern yet. Hold it up, so we can see one another’s faces.”

Surprised, the aide did as ordered.

“Gentlemen…,” Barlow began, “if I have offended any man in this command … if I have done so unjustly … you have my apology. You are, each of you, fine officers. I am proud to have commanded this division. There is no better in the army. And…” He strained for words, ever a reluctant public speaker. “And I wish each of you well.”

“Really, sir,” Nellie Miles said, “we’re not dead yet.”

Three forty a.m.
Artillery park, Early’s rear

“Carter, for God’s sake, get up!”

The artilleryman jumped at the hand shaking his shoulder, at the bite in the voice. He had dreamed of being captured in a woodland, and for a moment, it seemed all too real.

Coming partway back to sanity, he reached for the top of his field desk, hand feeling for a box of lucifers.

He struck a match and found General Long standing over him. Long was drenched with rain: He had come out without bothering to put on his uniform blouse or even a shirt.

Carter touched the match to the stump of a candle.

“You have to get those guns back up to the salient,” Long cried, almost childish in his anxiety. “Here. Read this. It’s from Lee. Christ almighty. It sounds like the blue-bellies may be up to something, after all. You’ve got to get those guns back into position.”

The one thing Carter had learned, painfully, was to get something down on paper in a crisis, since recriminations always followed. He checked the time on his pocket watch, then put a pencil to the order and wrote, “Received at twenty minutes to daybreak. Men asleep. Artillery will be in place as soon as possible.”

As he pulled on his boots, he began to shout orders through the tent’s walls.

If the Yankees were coming, they were going to come damned soon.

EIGHTEEN

May 12, three fifty a.m.
Barlow’s division

“General Barlow!” some idiot called out. “Where’s General Barlow?”

Barlow turned to his aide. “Black, shut that fool up. Cut his throat if you have to.”

For all the precautions taken to keep thousands of soldiers quiet, one barking moron could ruin their hope of surprise.

The rain had gentled to a drizzle, hardly more than a mist. Ground fog hugged the landscape. A horse nickered and was instantly quieted. But the blundering ass crashing through the ranks of soldiers kept calling Barlow’s name.

Black collared the noisemaker and dragged him through the darkness.

“Courier, sir,” the aide said. “From General Hancock.”

Calling off the attack? Earlier, Barlow would have welcomed such news. Now, every man was primed to advance and be damned.

“Sir,” the courier began, “urgent message. Urgent, sir. The attack is delayed until four thirty. General Hancock feels it’s still too dark. With the rain and what all.” The man handed Barlow written confirmation, but it wasn’t worth the risk of striking a match. And there was no time.

“Get runners out immediately,” Barlow told his aide. “Attack’s delayed a half hour. Hurry, man!”

Hancock had cut it damned close. If even one man in the corps failed to get the word … and wasn’t this supposed to be a grand attack? Someone had spoken of Burnside bringing in the Ninth Corps on the left. Would that alert the Johnnies in Hancock’s front? And guarantee a slaughter as his men advanced?

The wet on Barlow’s back was sweat, not seeping rain.

With the attack expected to begin in minutes, every heart in the division would be battering at its ribs, a captive shaking the bars of a prison cell. The tension had neared the unbearable, with his officers and men exhausted yet ghastly alert, waiting to plunge forward and take their chances.

Summoned back to the headquarters shack not twenty minutes before, Barlow had argued for a delay himself, certain the darkness would linger past the dawn in the rain and fog. The troops could advance in faint light, but their order would collapse if they couldn’t see anything. Near catatonic with lack of sleep, Hancock had seemed deaf to Barlow’s reasoning, unable to bear the weight of more decisions.

So he had steeled himself to go forward as planned. And he was ready
now
. It made every kind of sense to delay, but he no longer wanted to wait. The rational man within had been locked away, replaced by a monstrous, impassioned, explosive creature.

He smiled to himself:
We rush toward death. It’s certain madness. Exhilarating madness. If Emerson wanted to experience transcendence, this was where the old charlatan needed to be.

He told himself to be glad that Hancock had taken his advice. He could not see beyond the outline of the nearest troops, and to go forward at present begged for a tragedy. But things had gone too far in the soul’s dark places. The mood among the men was such that a snapping twig might have unleashed a riot.

He waited out the minutes, dreading that somewhere along the line a cheer would go up, or guns would open, or Burnside would be punctual for once, or that one of his own units would blunder forward punctually at four.

The drizzle all but stopped, leaving a racket of droplets falling from leaf to leaf in nearby trees. The fog writhed.

Four o’clock came and went, with no hint of battle.

Thirty minutes more. Of waiting. In the loneliest darkness Barlow had ever known.

His feet itched monstrously.

Four twenty a.m.
Base of the Mule Shoe

“Whip them, damn it!” Carter shouted.

“We’ve
been
whipping them,” his younger brother, Billy, hollered back. “They haven’t got the strength.”

The colonel knew his brother, a captain, was right. The artillery horses had been poorly fed for so long they were merely nags. Now they were expected to pull guns through the bog that passed for a trail to the salient’s tip.

Whip a horse to death so it falls in harness, and that only slows things more, Tom Carter realized. He leapt from his horse, landing with a plop that shot mud up to his crotch, and joined the gunners pushing the limber’s left wheel out of a hole.

He had hurried Page’s battalion forward, with his brother’s battery leading. If any man could get there in time, it was his younger brother. Carter grasped the risks, but saw no choice beyond duty.

Their mother would never forgive him if anything happened to Billy. But, then, he wasn’t sure he’d ever forgive himself.

“Heave!”

The limber lurched back onto firmer ground. Sodden men jumped out of the path of the gun.

The following caisson got a rushing start and bounded through. Fortunately, without breaking a wheel.

Between teams, soldiers who had rushed up to help tossed sticks and brush into the road’s worst cavities, dozens of men guessing what things needed doing and working by the light of a single lantern.

The guns were rolling, though. Toward their old positions facing the enemy.

Four thirty-five a.m.

Hancock had come forward, gathering his generals near the front of Barlow’s division, to deliver the order to start the assault in person.

And they waited.

The landscape remained shrouded, gripped by fog the color of soiled cotton.

As the generals stood about the corps commander, bearing the unbearable, nearby troops cursed or prayed or emptied their bladders a last time where they stood. But it was all done so quietly you could hear them draw breath by the hundreds.

The faintest possible paleness appeared in the fog. As if someone held a candle behind a drapery.

The India-ink night thinned.

“To your commands,” Hancock said. “Advance immediately. God bless you all.”

Four forty a.m.
Skirmish line, 4th Virginia Infantry

Couldn’t see one damn thing. Fog to the front, stray raindrops still coming down. The morning was ugly as a preacher’s wife.

Ezekial Goodman just wanted to stay awake till he was called back to the line. He was wearier than a farmer rushed at harvest. With his feet deep in slop as miserable as any he’d ever had the pleasure to meet, worse than a pigsty hadn’t been mucked for years. Different country hereabouts. Poor soil, not fit for growing much more than this crop of mud. Far cry from Rockbridge County, where the bottomland was glad to grow just about anything. July corn up taller than a big man. Wheat waving high on the hillside, taunting the scythe, “Come and git me, afore a hard rain comes.” Wild raspberries, late June on, if you knew the good patches. And the pretty-as-your-best-friend’s-wicked-sister mountains to shade the morning and please the eye. When he got home, he wasn’t going anywhere, ’least no farther than Lexington. No need to go back to Pennsylvania, ever. Stonewall Brigade had planted too many men up there. And Maryland? Maybe your’n, but not
my
Maryland. Keep it for the crows. Even right here in Virginia, east of the Blue Ridge was almost a foreign country. The Valley was a special place, Eden with apples it weren’t a sin to eat. Many a man would never see it again, his mortal remains left to rot somewhere between Beaver Dam Creek and Gettysburg. But Ezekial Goodman was going to make it home. He had a feeling about that.

Somebody had to live on, didn’t they? Not many of the first-joined-up fellows were left to complain about the weather this morning. Hardly more than a handful remembered Jackson now, the meanest man a soldier ever did love.

Weren’t making them like Jackson anymore, not by a mile. Colonel Terry, he was all right, though. Out on picket with his men, not one of your fine-tent officers.