House Divided (125 page)

Off to the north the regiments of Pettigrew's division were almost completely hidden by the smoke and dust; but they seemed to be maintaining their advance. Longstreet saw Kemper move up out of that hollow by the Codori house. Garnett was on his left, and in firm formation the brigades marched up the gentle slope toward the clump of trees where they must strike their blow. Armistead hurried to lend his weight to theirs. To reach the road they had advanced through steady punishment by solid shot and by shell; but beyond the road they came within musket range of Meade's line, and Longstreet saw the scythe of grapeshot and canister lay windrows of dead and wounded, as the mower's scythe lays ripe grain along the ground. He could not see clearly because of the smoke, but he could see enough. As Pickett's brigades emerged from the sheltering swale by the Codori house, the enemy cross fire caught them, and a blue column thrust out of some trees on their right to hit their flank; but Colonel Alexander opened on that column and Longstreet saw the Yankees break and scurry back to shelter. Alexander knew how to use those guns of his.

A courier galloped up to the fence where Longstreet sat with a message from Pickett. Pickett promised that the enemy's center would be pierced; but he said his right would need support. Longstreet, without
taking his eyes off that smoking, fire-swept slope where the Virginians marched steadily toward the enemy, asked the messenger: “Where is General Pickett?”

The courier pointed: “At that barn.”

“Tell him support is coming.”

The courier raced away. Pickett was at the Codori barn, not two hundred yards short of the goal; but that last two hundred yards, every foot of it within musket range of the enemy, was a long road to travel. Yet Pickett's men went steadily into the storm of fire.

Longstreet turned to Moxley Sorrel. “Tell Anderson to keep the damned bluebellies off Pickett's flank. Tell him to hurry! Don't go yourself—send.” He saw Sorrel's messenger start, saw the man's horse sheer from a shell burst and almost unseat the rider. Sometimes a courier's death or wounding lost a battle, changed the course of history; and also, Longstreet remembered that when Anderson's brigade commanders yesterday sent to him for help, Anderson had been hard to find. “Better go yourself, Colonel Sorrel,” he decided. “If you don't see Anderson, direct Wilcox and Perry to support that flank.”

When Sorrel was gone, his attention returned to Pickett's brigades. Those regiments, their ranks thrashed and thinned by cross fire, had not yet fired a shot; and Longstreet's heart lifted with pride. It needed brave men to march into the face of intolerable fire and never loose their pieces till the word of command. The slope they were climbing was not severe. From the Codori house up to the enemy position there was a rise of no more than twenty feet. But the men had no protection now, and the Yankee infantry had them in range; yet they went on at a steady pace. The line bent a little but it did not break. Longstreet thought that line of men was like a rug hung in the sun while the dust was beaten out. At every blow it yielded, it bellied backward; but after every blow it made firm front again.

A fierce impatience shook him. It seemed hours since those regiments had formed and begun their advance. Of course it had not been as long as it seemed; to march a mile, unfalteringly as these men had marched, was a matter of half an hour at most. But half an hour was a long time for men marching into death, and unable to strike their enemy a retaliatory blow.

Major Fairfax spoke to him. “General, Pettigrew's left is lagging. I think it's shaken.”

Longstreet, his eyes on Pickett's brigades, had missed this. Smoke clouded the field, and Pettigrew's left was a mile to the north; but at first glance he saw Fairfax was right. “Send someone,” he directed. “Have that corrected. And tell Anderson to move forward and support the assault.”

As the couriers departed, his eyes remained fixed on the wavering left. Even from this distance, through the smoke of shell bursts and the hanging dust of battle, he saw men by ones and twos dropping behind their comrades. Those brigades had been badly hurt day before yesterday, and some of them today were in new hands. It was because he had feared some weakness there that he had sent Major Currain and others of his staff to that quarter of the field. They would do what they could; but Pettigrew's left was under close and heavy fire from batteries in the cemetery. Surely Hill would move help forward; and Anderson could throw some of his weight that way.

Then his attention was drawn back to Pickett's front; for from the ridge, even through the steady roar of battle, he heard the sudden shrill, yipping falsetto yell that had sounded on every field since First Manassas at the high moment when the Southern men drove in for the kill; and he heard a slatting blast of musketry. It was a little muffled. Those guns were pointed toward the enemy. Pickett's men had delivered their first volley.

So the charge had come to hand grips. This was the moment of decision, the climax of the charge, for which all else had been only preparation. His senses sharpened; he weighed every note in the clanging uproar; his eyes strove to pierce the heavy clouds of smoke; he summoned all his faculties to help him see what in fact could not be seen at all. He saw not with his eyes but with a sixth sense. He saw three or four or five thousand men smashing at the Yankee centre, saw as many more coming on to lend mass to that terrific impact.

This was the hour. It was for this moment they had marched the long way from their old lines at Fredericksburg. Now at last the question was put; in a moment more the answer would be given. The violence of that contention yonder could not long be maintained. Presently the scales must tip.

Longstreet could see nothing. All was hidden in that spreading, slowly rising smoke cloud on the ridge. But he could guess what was happening. Meade must have held reserves in hand for this moment. Meade knew tactics as well as any man. To defend against such an attack as this, the rule was standard: Let your guns weaken the attacking column; then at the moment of final impact batter its head with reserves, stab at its flanks, hack at its roots. So Longstreet knew that in this moment Meade would be sending a countercharge from the hill by the cemetery against Pettigrew's wavering left; he would throw a heavy stroke against Pickett's right. A momentary glimpse of a blue column coming down on Pickett was not needed to confirm that certainty.

Listening, watching, testing the pulse of this battle, he felt the issue hang in wavering balance for minutes that might have been seconds, might have been hours. He did not know; time had no meaning. As long as the attacking column moved forward even by inches, success was possible; but once Pickett was surely brought to a stand, his momentum spent, then he must in the end recoil.

When that moment came, when the attack was held, Longstreet knew it beyond any hopeful doubt. So the day was lost; the day that could never have been won was lost. He knew it certainly.

 

Well, they had failed. Now what could be salvaged must be. General Anderson came at a gallop, pulled up his horse, pointed down across the road toward a mass of men moving against the enemy force which threatened Pickett's flank.

“I've sent Lang to help Wilcox, General,” he shouted.

Longstreet looked at him. “Lang? Who's Lang?”

“Colonel Lang's commanding Perry's brigade today.”

Longstreet grunted. Another brigade in strange hands. But no matter now. “Halt them,” he directed. “The assault has failed.” Anderson looked at him in astonishment, for the battle on the ridge seemed at its keenest pitch; and Longstreet spoke in sharpened tones: “It's all over! Recall them! Place your brigades to rally the men.” Anderson exclaimed in protest; but Longstreet pointed. “See for yourself.”

Off to the north, soldiers of Pettigrew's division were streaming
back across the death-strewn fields in confused disorder. Anderson saw. “I'll stop that!” he cried, and wheeled to race that way.

Longstreet glanced at the sun, still high. If Meade pressed them now, the danger would be great; but his jaw set. By God, if Meade tried a stroke, they would teach him a lesson to remember. Yet first Pickett must be extricated. Up on the ridge, the Virginians and some North Carolinians who on Pickett's left had pushed home their charge were trapped. The bluebellies would close in on them from each flank as they had closed in on Wright yesterday. Longstreet sent Sorrel to bid Pickett draw back his left and thus strengthen Pettigrew against a blow from the cemetery; he sent Fairfax to bid McLaws move forward and give Pickett's right what help he could.

The assault was broken; but Pickett's battle, though his flanks were crumbling, incredibly still held to hottest pitch as the men fought off the pressure on front and flank. Longstreet growled a curse. Were those Virginians going to stay there till the last of them died? A high admiration for their stubborn valor ran through him like wine; yet they must yield, they must withdraw while there were still a few of them alive!

Colonel Fremantle, afoot, came running toward him, panting with excitement. “General,” he cried, “I wouldn't have missed this for anything!”

The contrast between the Englishman's words and his own thoughts was so absurd that Longstreet in a grim amusement laughed aloud. “The hell you wouldn't! I'd give a good deal to have missed it!”

The other stared. “Why? What?”

“Look!” Longstreet told him, sternly now. He pointed northward along the line of the road toward where men by twos and threes and half-dozens were trudging wearily to the rear, sullenly retreating.

Fremantle stared in astonishment. “Oh! I couldn't see that from the ridge, back there. What happened?”

“What happened?” Longstreet for a moment let his wrath loose. “Why, we threw fifteen thousand men against a hundred thousand. The God-damned Yankee guns made mincemeat of us, and Pettigrew's left broke, and if Pickett and his men had the brains God gave a rabbit they'd have broken too! But by God they didn't! They drove right into Meade's center and stayed there!” His voice changed, he
spoke low and sadly. “But they're coming now. They're coming now. . . .”

What he said was true. Pickett's shattered regiments were sullenly withdrawing. They were not in flight, nor was there pursuit. It was rather as though two individual combatants, having met breast to breast in a storm and flurry of blows, now parted and stood breathless, with chests heaving and lungs sucking in great drafts of air. Up there two hundred yards from the road, the head of the attacking column had driven deep into the enemy lines; but then from the front and from both flanks men in blue converged, and the head of the column was crushed and obliterated, the supporting masses were pressed backward toward the road. The melee, in which all organization disappeared, rolled half way to the road, at first as a mass, then dissolving into groups. The enemy countercharge spent itself against the stubborn remnants of Pickett's division and of Pettigrew's. Meade's thrust could drive them no farther, but they were too exhausted and too few to attempt again to go ahead.

So on the gentle slope between the road and the stone wall that marked the enemy front, attackers and defenders separated. The men in blue withdrew toward the wall, gathering prisoners as they went; the Virginians and the North Carolinians, walking backward or looking over their shoulders toward the enemy, retreated toward the road. There was for the moment little firing on either side. The guns of the individual soldiers were empty; the men were too near exhaustion to reload. Even the Yankee batteries, until between Northerners and Southerners open ground appeared, were briefly silent; either they had no target where they could be sure not to hit their own men, or their ammunition was exhausted. When they opened fire again, it was to sweep the undulating levels beyond the road, across which by ones and twos and dozens the Confederates drifted toward the shelter of the woods.

Longstreet saw the contesting thousands cease to be one battling mob and separate into exhausted components. His eye swept the field. From the right, a few score men were falling back past Alexander's guns; and for a moment he did not identify them. A larger force was sidling off to the right, retreating toward the peach orchard; and they were commanded by a mounted man wearing a straw hat. That must
be Wilcox! That must be his brigade. Then the torn regiments filtering through Alexander's guns were probably Perry's, led today by Lang. Longstreet had ordered Anderson to halt the supporting columns; but Anderson, intent on placing Ranse Wright to rally the broken left, must have forgotten these two brigades already advancing to guard Pickett's flank. Or perhaps Anderson sent a courier who was shot down before he could deliver the message of recall. So Wilcox and Lang had gone on to futile, costly failure.

That was a mistake, certainly; but if there was blame, it was not all Anderson's. He himself must share it. He should have made sure his orders reached those two brigades.

 

Pickett's men, what was left of them, were reaching the road. Longstreet went to meet them, walking along the road to intercept their heavy-footed withdrawal, heedless of the furious cannonade, ignoring the shell bursts from those unrelenting Yankee guns which took their heavy toll. General Lee was already among the retreating men, steadying them with firm words. Longstreet came to Ranse Wright's brigade, ready where Anderson had halted it. “You had better extend your lines, General,” he suggested. “Give these men a reassuring word. We must rally them.”

He himself went on into the trickling stream. The men were not running. They moved at a walk, ignoring the shells that sprinkled death among them as a man shakes salt on eggs. Some seemed half-asleep, their eyes dulled, their mouths blackened with powder from the cartridges they had ripped open with their teeth when they reloaded. Some weaved and wavered with the drunkenness of fatigue, with weariness more of the spirit than of the flesh. Many, weaponless, hugged blood-stained arms, or pressed their hands against dark spreading blots on their jackets; or their trousers were red streaked where blood had spilled from a wounded leg, or their feet left red prints on the ground. In some, anger found outlet in curses, in backward-shaken fists.