House Divided (120 page)

Colonel Sellers at that harsh reply wheeled his horse and galloped off; and Longstreet's anger mounted. By God, Hood must attack, whether he thought it wise or not! He too turned, and he lifted his horse to a run and followed Colonel Sellers, taking one fence and then another by the road, and so came down to where Hood was waiting. He saw Sellers speak to Hood as he approached; and then both men turned to face him, and Hood began to speak.

But Longstreet interrupted, in a chiding tone that was almost derisive. “Now, General, you know we must obey the orders of General Lee.”

Hood met his eyes in a long glance; and Longstreet thought, as he had often thought before, that there never was a man in whose eyes such sadness dwelt as in the eyes of Hood. Then Hood turned his horse without a word and cantered forward to ride ahead of his men toward the enemy position.

 

There was a mounting clamor of great guns from the peach orchard half a mile away, shot and shell striking here among Hood's regiments. As they pushed northward along the slope parallel with the road, infantry opened on them from a patch of woods diagonally to their right and ahead. The rising clang of battle steadied Longstreet's pulses. He spurred his horse to come up with Hood. Under that fire from the cover of the trees yonder, the men instinctively changed front a little, quartering down the slope to face the enemy; and Long street swung with them, matching his horse's pace to that of the men on foot. The bursts of shells swept the lines with flying fragments, and he took off his hat to fan the smoke away, shutting his eyes to the sight of hurt men and dead men on the ground. He had no need to look at them to know what he would see: blood trails on the broken grass where a man had dragged himself to the half-shelter of some tree or boulder; helpless men with palms upraised toward the enemy as though to stop the next bullet pelting toward them; men with arms shot away running to the rear, their soundless mouths open so that they seemed to scream even though their screams could not be heard; dead men ... Why did so many men die on their backs, but with a knee pulled up, so that they appeared to lie at ease, their sightless eyes staring at the sky? Why did a man shot through the belly always try to move his bowels? How absurdly symmetrical were the dust puffs thrown up by the hoofs of a riderless horse! Why did a horse with a dead man dragging by one foot from the stirrup always gallop at full speed, like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail? Why were the eyes of a wounded man surrounded by white skin, as though tears of pain had washed the dust and sweaty grime away?

No matter; such thoughts were better not thought, such sights were better not seen. In camp he might consider the health of his men, their comfort, and even their amusement; but not on the battlefield. With that detachment which combat always brought him, he reflected that
the general, like the surgeon, must forget that the instruments he used were flesh and blood. Even civilians armored themselves against this realization. They said that Lee drove McClellan away from Richmond, that Jackson cut Pope's communications at Manassas, that Longstreet smashed Burnside's attack at Fredericksburg; but this was just a protective simplification. It was not Lee who harried McClellan from Mechanicsville to the James. It was sixty or seventy thousand nameless men, hustling into flight a hundred thousand other nameless men; and a good many of them died in the process.

But by thinking of battle in terms of generals, the civilian shut his mind to the agonies of individuals; and as long as he never visited a battlefield, he could continue to do so. Longstreet wondered whether, if politicians were set to the task of cleaning up the debris of battle, hurrying to bury the dead men before maggots and beetles and rats and foxes and hogs devoured them, moving bodies which had swollen and burst after a day in the sun, they would be quite so ready to lead a people to war.

Yet he was as bad as any civilian, shutting his eyes to the sights about him. And like any civilian, he too thought in names; McLaws, Hood, Pickett. But McLaws was not one man. He was four brigades, he was seven thousand men, he was a mass. Hood was a few more bayonets than McLaws; Pickett not so many. As for the brigade commanders, Law, Anderson, Robertson, Benning; each was not a man but a brigade. Kershaw, Semmes, Barksdale, Wofford; they were each a brigade. Each name was a symbol for say fifteen hundred men; each commander multiplied himself fifteen hundred times.

Then there were the regiments, but Longstreet was not concerned with regiments. His weapons were divisions, or sometimes brigades. In his work, regiments were nothing. For that matter, brigades were nothing. This fight just now begun would cost in killed and wounded enough individuals to make up a brigade; yes, perhaps enough to make two brigades, for the position in front of him was a strong one. Yet victory would be well worth that price, if you did not think of brigades as men. You must think of a brigade as a broom with which to sweep the enemy aside. If in the process that broom lost some straws, no matter; the urgent, the necessary thing was to get the job of sweeping done. Just as those surgeons whom he had seen working
on the wounded yesterday must close their ears to cries of agony, so must a commanding officer shut his eyes to death.

 

In this abstracted mood, Longstreet rode forward into the storm of fire, till Fairfax and Moxley Sorrel came up beside him and Fairfax cried: “Go back, General! We'll do this!” So Longstreet checked his horse, remembering that it was not his business to face those guns ahead. He reined in, pausing to survey the ground. Along this slope below the road there was a vista of open fields as far as an orchard, beyond which there seemed to be a fairly deep ravine; beyond that ravine lay the peach orchard that was their goal, wreathed now in smoke from the batteries emplaced among the trees. Down to their right a larger orchard covered the face of that low wooded hill; and by the signs there were Yankee skirmishers in that orchard, and masses of Yankee infantry in the wood on the hill.

Well, Hood must make his own battle. Sorrel said Hood's right was going astray; so Longstreet rode back and up the slope till he could look down to the low ground toward the Round Tops. Hood had made his move with two brigades: Robertson's here on the left guiding by the road, Law on the right; the others in reserve. Sorrel's report was correct. Law's men were pressing into the forest along the foot of the Round Tops; and smoke drifting upward from among the trees said they were meeting brisk contention on those hidden slopes. Well, if the enemy was there he must be fought. Law must clear his flanks before he went ahead. But Law's drift to the right while Robertson pushed straight ahead thinned the center of Hood's line of battle. If it were drawn too thin it would break. That must not happen.

“Fairfax! Sorrel!” Longstreet spoke calmly. “Repair the line there!”

The two staff officers raced away to bring Hood's support brigades to the point of danger. Longstreet stayed where he was, scanning the enemy front now clearly outlined by their fire. Robertson was in that first small orchard now, but he was checked. From the low rocky hill on his right and rear, flanking fire was punishing his men, and the cannonade from the peach orchard was heavier all the time. That peach orchard was the anchor and the angle of Meade's front. Smash in that angle and you would split the enemy line and shatter it; but Hood's
advance was meeting sheets of fire, was held in hard and growing battle. Worse, as Robertson's regiments instinctively swung to face the fire from the wood on their flank, between his left and the road a gap began to open.

McLaws must fill that gap, but McLaws had not yet moved. Goree came to report that Law had cleared the lower slopes of the Round Top; he was pressing across the dip between the two peaks toward the lesser height. In the center, the support brigades were fighting their way into the woods on that low hill which threatened to split the line; so Robertson's flank would presently be clear. Longstreet nodded; he was not needed here. Hood would bring his brigades to effective focus now.

“I'm going to hurry McLaws,” he said. He rode at a canter back across the road and circled to the north. Kershaw was waiting behind Alexander's busy guns. The batteries were under heavy fire from the enemy not half a mile away; and Longstreet saw men down, horses kicking in their death throes, guns dismounted. Lieutenant Wentz, whom Colonel Alexander had brought to Longstreet that morning, had drawn back from his position and was hastily knotting a handkerchief about his forearm. Longstreet pulled up his horse.

“Hurt, Lieutenant?”

“A scratch, nothing.”

“What's between the Round Tops and that rocky little hill on Hood's flank?”

“Low land, a brook. Boggy ground. A lot of big rocks.”

“Whose peach orchard is that, where the guns are?”

“Mr. Sherfy's. That's his house west of the road.” Longstreet saw a two-storied house with a chimney at one end and three large trees shading it at the other. Probably there was a Yankee sharpshooter in every window; and the Yankee batteries in the orchard, screened by the trees and by their own smoke, were being well served. “My father's house is east of the road, just across the lane from the peach orchard,” Lieutenant Wentz explained. “You can see it as the smoke shifts.”

“Your people still there?”

“I expect so. My father's a hard man to move.”

Longstreet chuckled. “We must move him,” he said. Those houses were at the apex of the angle. Well, they would smash that angle, and doubtless the houses too.

 

Longstreet found McLaws and General Barksdale together. Below them in the fringe of trees Barksdale's brigade was waiting. Longstreet had come to order McLaws instantly to advance; but he saw at once that the other had been right not to move. The massed fire of the enemy batteries was too heavy for infantry to face. Alexander's guns were off to the right at longer range; but guns along this front would give converging fire against the Yankees in the orchard. His first word to McLaws was sharp.

“Why haven't you a battery here?”

“It would draw fire on Barksdale's men.”

“Place a battery here,” Longstreet said curtly.

McLaws gave the order, and guns in reserve came quickly into position. Their fire at once drew fire; and solid shot and shell tore through the trees where Barksdale's brigade lay at ease. Barksdale said urgently to McLaws: “Let me go in, General.” McLaws made some answer, and Barksdale appealed to Longstreet. “Let me go, General. I can take those guns in five minutes.”

Longstreet looked at him absently. Barksdale's men were Mississippians; and Longstreet thought it possible that some of his own kinfolk might be here in Barksdale's regiments. Perhaps in a few minutes some of them would die; but not yet! Barksdale must not throw a thousand or fifteen hundred men into that furnace blast of fire.

“Wait,” he said quietly. “We're all going in presently.”

Yet waiting was costly too. As shells rained into the fringe of trees he heard cries of pain; and hurt men stumbled or crawled past them to the rear. Damn those Yankee guns! Were they invulnerable? Off there below the road Hood was fighting himself out, fighting the battle alone; but if McLaws went forward now his men would be slaughtered! The ground over which Barksdale's men here must advance rose a little toward the orchard; and there were fences and stone walls that would delay them and hold them under point-blank fire.

Currain reined up beside him. “I went to find you, sir,” he said, “to say that General McLaws asked your presence here. Now General
Hood is wounded. He has been carried from the field. Sorrel reported to General Law and Law took command, and he asks for help.”

So! Hood gone! What Hood could do with his men Longstreet knew; but could Law do as much with them, or less, or more? Law was young, a South Carolinian, a graduate of the Military Academy in Charleston and in later years a lawyer. He was a lean man with a conspicuous brow and bold yet sombre eyes, who chose to keep a line of whisker that continued the line of his mustache down to the small spade beard under his chin, but left cheeks and chin bare except for a small tuft attached to his lower lip. A man who took such pains with the pattern of his beard confessed a certain vanity, and vanity suggested a lack of self-confidence. It was as though Law sought to persuade himself that he was a better man than he believed himself to be.

But Law had done some fine fighting since that day at Manassas when as lieutenant colonel he took the bullet through the elbow which had made his left arm stiff and awkward ever since. He had lived up to his opportunities and a little more, not only at Boonsboro, but again at Fredericksburg. His recent marriage had not distracted his attention from the business at hand. Longstreet nodded, accepting General Law, reminding himself to bear in mind that Law, who a moment ago had been a brigade of some two thousand men, was now a division of seven thousand muskets, and to be used accordingly.

These reflections had been instantaneous. Before Currain could quiet his panting horse, General Law rode up to them at full gallop.

“General, we're held!” he reported, and he turned to point across the smoke-shrouded field. “Our right is on that lower peak, our left has drifted into those woods beyond the road.” Longstreet nodded, understanding that Law spoke now not of his brigade, but of the division. If Law's left was in the wood, that gap which he himself had seen beginning to open, between Robertson's brigade and the road, was now become dangerously wide. Law added: “I ventured to suggest to General Kershaw that he cross the road and wheel so that his right will touch my left.”

Longstreet nodded again. Law was right; Kershaw's brigade must fill that gap, and at once. No more delay! If those guns yonder in the peach orchard could not be silenced, they must be carried and their fire quenched with blood.

Well, if it must be done, these men could do it. “Tell General Kershaw we will cease fire and then give him three slow guns as a signal to advance. I will allow you time to return to your division. Speak to him on your way.”