How Few Remain (37 page)

Seeing that panorama, he understood for the first time why men spoke of the terrible grandeur of war. Barges and boats packed with soldiers raced across the Ohio so the men they carried could close with the foe. Shells from the U.S. guns poured down like rain on the waterfront of Louisville. Each one burst with a flash of sullen red fire and a great uplifting cloud of black smoke. Douglass could not imagine how any Confederate soldiers compelled to endure such a cannonading could hope to survive.

But the enemy not only survived, he fought. Not only did shells burst along the waterfront. They also burst in the Ohio. Looking across the river, Douglass could see flashes from the muzzles of Confederate guns, cannon similar to those the Massachusetts volunteers served. Their thunder reached his ears, too, attenuated by distance but still very real.

Tall plumes of water flew up from the shells that splashed into the Ohio. When Douglass noticed those, the spectacle before him suddenly seemed less grand. His breathing came short. His palms got sweaty. Remembered terror was almost as vivid as the original. He did not need to wonder what the blue-clad men in the invasion boats were feeling. He’d felt it himself, when the Rebel battery shelled the
Queen of the Ohio
.

Those Confederates had been but a handful, with only a single battery of old-fashioned guns to bring to bear on their target. The Rebels here had modern cannon by the score and targets to match. Many of them, too, would be their Regular Army men, the best they had.

Not all their shells, then, burst in the river. Some struck the hurrying boats full of U.S. troops. Douglass groaned when one of those simply broke up and sank, throwing its heavily laden soldiers into the water. Another stricken vessel must have had either its helmsman hit or its rudder jammed, for it slewed sharply to one side and collided with its neighbor. Both boats capsized.

And, as the barges and boats neared the bank the Confederates held, tiny yellow flashes, like far-off fireflies, began appearing in the midst of the shell-bursts from the U.S. guns: Confederate
riflemen got to work. Incredible as it seemed to Frederick Douglass, they had not only lived through the bombardment that still continued, but also retained enough spirit to fight back strongly. Loathe their cause though he most sincerely did, Douglass could not help respecting their courage.

The first boats began to reach the far bank of the river. Tiny as blue ants in the distance, U.S. soldiers swarmed off them, rushing forward to find cover from the galling fire of their foes—and also from the fire of their friends, which had not shifted its targets despite the landings. Artillery put Douglass in mind of some great ponderous stupid beast, liable to step on and crush anyone who came too near it.

He scrawled his impressions of the fight down in a notebook, intending to weave them into a coherent whole back at his tent when he had the leisure. He had, as yet, no idea whether the battle would be won or lost. All he could discern at the moment was that both sides were fighting not only with desperate courage but also with all the resources science and industry could give them.

And then, in the twinkling of an eye, the battle lost its abstract, panoramic quality and the face of war changed for him forever. The C.S. artillery had concentrated on the invasion boats on the Ohio and, to a lesser degree, on the quays where the barges and boats took on their cargo of soldiers. Every so often, though, the Rebs would lob a few shells at the U.S. guns bombarding them, no doubt aiming more to harass than to stop the cannonading.

By the time the sun came up, Frederick Douglass had grown intimately familiar with the astonishing cacophony emanating from an artillery battery working at full throttle. He did not, however, understand what shrill, rising screams in the air meant until three shells burst in swift succession among the Massachusetts volunteers whose deeds he’d intended chronicling.

The ground shook under his feet. Something hissed past his head. Had it flown a few inches to one side of its actual path, any hopes of his chronicling the artillerymen’s adventures would have died in that instant.

More screams, these from the ground, not the air: the sounds of agony. Douglass forgot he was a reporter and remembered he was a man. Stuffing the notebook into a pocket, he ran across the field—even now, under the stink of gunpowder, the grass smelled sweet—to give what aid he could.

“Oh, dear God!” He stopped short with an involuntary exclamation of horror. There lay brave, clever Captain Joseph Little, who had never by word or deed shown he thought Douglass less than himself on account of the color of his skin. Captain Little would never think good or ill of Douglass again, not in this world. One of the Confederate shells had burst quite near him. Now he lay like a broken doll. Broken quite literally: his head had been torn from his body, and lay several feet away from the still-twitching corpse. Half the top of it had been blown off, too; red blood pooled on gray brains. More red soaked the green grass under him. The first flies were already landing.

Captain Little, of course, did not scream. The one virtue of his death was that he could have had no notion of what hit him. One second, he was directing his guns, the next … gone. The fellow down on the ground beside him—no, by some miracle or insanity, sitting up now—wasn’t screaming, either. When the artilleryman sat, his intestines spilled out into his lap. A shell fragment had laid open his belly as neatly as the slave butcher gutted hogs back in Douglass’ plantation days.

The Massachusetts volunteer looked down at himself. “Isn’t that something?” he said, his voice eerily calm. Douglass had heard of men with dreadful injuries who seemed unaware of pain, in stories from railroad accidents and such. He hadn’t believed them, but now he saw they were—or could be—true. The artilleryman’s eyes rolled up in his head. He slumped back to the ground, dead or unconscious. If he was unconscious, Douglass hoped he’d never wake, for he had no hope of surviving, not with that dreadful wound.

By one of the hellish freaks of war, another soldier had had his guts torn out in almost identical fashion. He was not quiet. He was not calm. He rolled and thrashed and shrieked and wailed, spraying blood and fragmented bits of himself in every direction. Douglass heard one of his teeth break as he clenched his jaws against yet another scream. He was perfectly conscious, perfectly rational, and looked likely to stay that way for hours to come.

His eyes, wide and wild and staring, fixed on Douglass and held the Negro’s in an unbreakable grip. “Kill me,” the artilleryman growled, his voice rough and ragged and ready to dissolve into yet another howl of anguish. “For God’s sake, kill me. Don’t make me go through any more of this.”

He wore a revolver on his belt. With what looked like a
supreme effort of will, he jerked one dripping hand away from his belly long enough to get the pistol out and shove it along the ground toward Douglass.

Before Douglass knew what he’d done, he picked up the revolver. It was heavy in his hand. He knew how to use one. He’d carried one in the grim days just after the War of Secession, when whites were liable to blame any Negro they saw for the war and, perhaps, to go from blaming him to hanging him from the nearest lamppost.

He looked around. None of the other artillerymen was paying him the least attention. Some were tending to less dreadfully wounded comrades. Others, farther away, kept on serving their own guns, so as to make sure the Confederates on the other side of the river got their fair share of death and mutilation and horror and torment.

“Shoot me,” the eviscerated soldier groaned. “Don’t stand there with your thumb up your ass, damn you to fucking hell.”

For the first twenty years of his life and more, Douglass had been caught up in the nightmare of slavery. Now he found another nightmare, one that turned men into beasts—into beasts straight from the abattoir—in different, more abrupt fashion. Caught in the toils of this new nightmare, he pointed the revolver at the artilleryman’s forehead and, with a convulsive motion, squeezed the trigger.

The pistol bucked in his hand. A neat, blue-black hole appeared above the wounded soldier’s left eye. The back of his head blew out, splashing hair and shattered bits of skull and brains and blood over the grass. With a cry of disgust and dismay, Douglass set down the pistol and rubbed his blood-smeared palm against a trouser leg again and again, as if by that means he could wipe off the mark of Cain.

Several artillerymen spun toward him at the sound of the shot. Most of them, seeing what he had done, simply went back to what they were doing. One, though, with a sergeant’s three red stripes on his sleeve, walked over toward the distraught Negro. After looking at the dead gunner’s ghastly wound for a few seconds, he put an arm around Douglass’ shoulder. “I want to thank you for what you did, sir,” he said. “Noah was my cousin, and you put him out of his pain. If you hadn’t been there, I believe I’d have had to do the job myself, and that would have been mighty hard, mighty hard indeed.”

“It was—the only thing I could do,” Douglass said slowly. So often, words like that revealed themselves for the shallow self-justification they were. This once, he heard truth in them.

So did the sergeant, Noah’s cousin. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s just exactly right, and don’t you let it trouble your mind again.” He went back to his cannon, leaving Douglass, who was not a Roman Catholic, fully understanding for the first time in his life the power of absolution.

    Alfred von Schlieffen paced along the northern bank of the Ohio, growing more frustrated by the moment. A great battle raged a mile away, and he could not get to it. He could not even do a proper job of observing, not from where he was. Too much smoke hung in the air to let him have more than the vaguest notion of how the fight was going. And the U.S. authorities flatly refused to let him board a boat and cross over to the Kentucky side of the river.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said Second Lieutenant Archibald Creel, who accompanied him today because General Willcox had more urgent things for Oliver Richardson to do. “The general doesn’t want us to have to explain to Berlin how we let their military attaché go and get himself killed.”

A couple of Confederate shells smashed to earth within a hundred yards of Schlieffen. “I am on this side of the river to do that,” he remarked with some asperity. As if to underscore his words, more shells screamed in.

Lieutenant Creel did not look as if he had been out of West Point more than a week. He stood firm, both against the shelling and against the foreign officer he was required to shepherd. “I have my orders, sir,” he said. He might have been quoting Holy Writ. In a soldierly way, he was.

“To the devil with your orders,” Schlieffen muttered, but in German, which the youngster did not speak. He tried again: “I am a military man. I am obliged to take risks for my fatherland.”

“No, sir,” Creel said, and stuck out his chin.

“Donnerwetter,”
Schlieffen said. No doubt about it: he was stuck.

Since he was stuck, he decided to make the most of it. He set off at a brisk walk toward the Jeffersonville wharves, which, as an accomplished map reader, he knew to be closer than those of
Clarksville. Like a dog on a leash—and so he was, a watchdog—Second Lieutenant Creel tagged along.

Men in blue—some in the faded uniforms of the regulars, more wearing the dark and almost spotless clothes the volunteers had recently donned—waited in long, stolid lines to board the barges and steamboats that would ferry them over the river so they could fight. Schlieffen had watched boats get hit in midstream. No doubt the soldiers had, too. They kept moving toward the boats anyhow, exactly as Germans would have done. That took discipline and courage both, the combination being especially remarkable for volunteer troops.

Long trenches paralleled the lines that led down to the waterfront. When the Confederates started sending shells at the men near Schlieffen, they lost their stolidity in a hurry, diving into the trenches to shelter from blast and flying splinters.

Schlieffen stayed upright. So did Lieutenant Creel. It was surely the first time he’d been under fire. He handled himself well. As soon as the shells stopped falling, the U.S. soldiers scrambled out of the trenches and resumed their places in line as if nothing had happened. Stretcher-bearers carried away a couple of groaning wounded men, but only a couple.

“These ditches are a good idea,” Schlieffen said. “They save casualties.”

“That they do.” Archibald Creel sounded as proud as if he’d thought of them himself.

So
, Schlieffen thought, I
have here one small worthwhile thing. Is this enough for sending me so far? Is this enough to have gathered from the greatest battle of the war?
The answer, in both cases, was painfully obvious. With more temper than he usually showed, Schlieffen rounded on Second Lieutenant Creel: “You can tell me for a fact that U.S. troops are at this time fighting in Louisville?”

“Yes, sir, I can tell you that,” Lieutenant Creel said.

“Sehr gut
. You cannot, however, tell me where in Louisville or how in Louisville or how well in Louisville they are fighting,
nicht wahr?”

“I don’t know those things for certain, no, sir,” Creel said. “I wish I did.” He laughed nervously. “The fog of war.” His wave encompassed the very real layer of thick gray smoke that blanketed Louisville, that hung low and close to the Ohio, and that drifted and swirled in eddies on the U.S. side of the river.

“Where will they know—where will they have some idea—how goes the fighting in Louisville?” Schlieffen demanded. “One place is over across the river, sir,” Creel said. “Where I cannot go.”

“Where you can’t go,” the young lieutenant agreed. “The other place would be General Willcox’s headquarters.” He laughed again. “Well, Confederate headquarters, too, I suppose, but you can’t go there, either.”

“No,” Schlieffen wondered if the German military attaché to the Confederate States was over there. He hoped so. Having reports from both sides of the line would be useful back in Berlin—provided he learned enough here to give his report any value. “Be so good, then, as to conduct me back to General Willcox’s tent. To go to the front is for me forbidden, and here in the middle I might as well be in the middle of the sea. Take me back.”