The Storm Before Atlanta (13 page)

“Are they never going to let us into the battle at all?” said Jeremy.

“Oh, shut your bazoo, Little Drummer Boy. Go find some more saws to sharpen.”

“We’re being held in reserve, and we like it like that,” said Nicholas.

“Don’t worry. When the front regiments are all shot to pieces, they’ll call us in.”

Jeremy knew he shouldn’t be eager for the battle if other people had to be shot to pieces first for him to get in. But he
was
. He wanted to get it over with. He wanted to see the elephant and to find out that he wasn’t afraid. He had always been tough. He knew he was brave; he wasn’t scared to walk on roofs or jump off the fifth-highest branch of the tree into the swimming hole back home. But going into battle was different, and deep inside of him was a terror that he might run away, and then have to be shot for desertion.

Finally, in the afternoon, the regiment was ordered to fall in. Jeremy and his messmates climbed out of their rifle
pit and joined the other men of the 107th New York, forming ranks. Jeremy beat his drum, at least to start off with. Then they were moving, up a steep hill and through entangling pine branches. Something like a large bumblebee whizzed past Jeremy, and when it smacked straight into a tree above his head he realized it was a bullet. It gave him a chill, and he reminded himself of what Nicholas had said—not one bullet in a hundred hits a soldier, was that it?

They climbed higher, fighting their way through clinging thickets. They were behind their own cannons now, and Jeremy had a moment of mingled hope and fear that they were leaving the battle altogether. But no, they were moving along behind the line of battle, past one artillery placement after another, and to his right Jeremy kept hearing the FWOOMP of cannonballs leaving the barrel, the smell of gunpowder drifting over a moment later. He tried not to look toward the artillery placements. He had to keep his mind on his part of the battle.

Dulcie walked along the road, in the opposite direction from the marching soldiers.

“Are those our new flags, girlie?”

“What’s the
H
for? ‘Here we are’?”

Dulcie ignored them. She’d already learned that soldiers teased officers’ servants all the time. She stopped and stuck one of the yellow flags into the red clay. Then she
walked on, still ignoring the calls of the soldiers. She stopped and looked back. She had gotten far enough away that the yellow flag was just a dot back in the red dust stirred up by the soldiers marching and the cannon and wagon wheels turning. She stuck another flag in.

Put the flags all the way back to where they were setting up the field hospital, Dr. Flood had told her. She had started at the dressing station that Dr. Flood was setting up near where the battle was about to begin. It had a tent, because dressing stations and hospitals were one of the purposes for which General Sherman had acknowledged that tents might be necessary. When the battle began, wounded soldiers would come or be carried to the dressing station. There, Dr. Flood would try to patch them together. If they could walk, he would give them a pass, to prove that they weren’t deserting, and send them back to the field hospital to have their wounds treated. Dulcie’s flags were important. Without them, the soldiers might get lost, never find the field hospital, and come to harm in the woods.

When she was done with this, she would place more flags between the dressing station and the battle lines, in enough different places that, one way or another, the injured who could move might be able to make it back to the dressing station. Their comrades wouldn’t be allowed to stop and help them.

“That’s …,” Dulcie began, when Dr. Flood explained this to her. Then she stopped. Her opinion was undoubtedly not wanted.

“That’s not very nice?” Dr. Flood asked her. “Well, war’s not very nice, Dulcie. If every soldier stopped to help a wounded one, we’d soon have no one on the field of battle, and the Rebs could overwhelm us and capture our soldiers, our dressing station, you, me, and everything.”

“Yes, sir,” said Dulcie. She knew she didn’t want to be captured by the Secesh. Not now that she was free.

“Now repeat to me again what you’re to do during the battle.”

“Don’t go too close to the enemy lines,” Dulcie quoted. “If I see a soldier coming toward me, I should go out and guide him in if he looks like he needs help. If I see him fall, I should tell the stretcher bearers. Otherwise I should make sure that you always have an open carton of bandages and that the morphine bottle is full.”

“My words exactly!”

Dulcie made a slight curtsy to acknowledge the compliment, and wondered how she would do when the wounded soldiers started pouring in and the smell of blood filled the hot tent. She remembered Anne being brought down by the slave hunters’ dogs, and she shuddered.

TWELVE

T
HE
107TH MOVED FORWARD
,
THROUGH THE TREES
,
ON
a path trampled by soldiers going before. Broken branches and spent shells lay all around them. Once they passed three dead men, neatly lined up side by side.

Then the battle came into view.

A charred, burnt valley spread out below them. On the hills opposite ranged the Confederate barricades, mounds of red clay fronted with logs, and from the barricades gleamed bayonets, rifle barrels, and the mouths of cannons. As Jeremy watched, orange arcs of flame shot out from the cannons and iron missiles sailed across the valley. Bullets whizzed back and forth like mad wasps. Between the two lines lay men, some of them twisted into unnatural positions, not moving.

All the trees in the valley had been cut down, and those that weren’t used in the Confederate barricades had been burned. A bitter smell of charcoal underlay the overwhelming smell of gunpowder. Jeremy never got a clear
view of the Union side, because the regiment was ordered to wheel left and move in behind. Again they halted, still not in the battle, although from here they could see and hear much more than they had been able to before.

The afternoon wore on, and at last the order came to march again. Jeremy beat the drum. The men assembled into ranks. The wild-eyed, fork-bearded General Alpheus Williams rode down along the regiments, sword in hand, exhorting the men. There was something different this time. Jeremy’s heart beat fast. This time they weren’t being maneuvered, weren’t going to be held in reserve somewhere else, but were going to fight.

They were marching, and Jeremy had a better view of the battle than before. It filled the valley below him. Thousands of men, the smoke and din of rifles, men lying on the ground, groaning and writhing or not moving at all. There was a smell Jeremy instantly identified with a slaughterhouse he used to pass on his way to pick up his newspapers in Syracuse. Each roar from the cannons tore a line of death through the oncoming attackers. The sight made Jeremy feel ill, but he fought the feeling—he was a soldier, and this was war.

The front line of the lead brigade of Jeremy’s division fired their rifles, then dropped to the ground to reload so that the rank behind them could fire. It took Jeremy, who was a long way to the rear, a few minutes to figure out what was going on—the cannon battery was a Union one, and the attacking soldiers trying to capture the cannons
were Confederates. He guessed this mostly from the direction they were coming from, out of the woods on the opposite side of the wagon road that ran down the valley. Almost everyone on both sides was wearing some form of Union uniform, or parts of one.

The next line fired and dropped, and the next. The Confederate soldiers turned and fled, running back toward the woods at the other side of the valley. A cheer went up from the men around Jeremy.

“Take that, Johnny Reb!”

“Don’t you wanna stay and play?”

“When you get to Richmond give Jeff Davis a kiss for us!”

Jeremy fought disappointment. “We didn’t even get into the fight,” he said under his breath.

“Who cares?” said the man next to him, a soldier named John Decker. “We saved the battery.”

But Jeremy felt cheated all the same.

Later, after they had dug their trenches and eaten in the dark, he felt better.

“Ain’t no Reb that can stand up to the Twentieth Corps,” he said expansively. “Did you see them run like rabbits?”

“Yeah, and I seen us run like rabbits sometimes too,” said Dave.

Lars scowled. “What’re you taking their side for? LDB is right. They
did
run like rabbits.”

“Stayin’ alive to shoot us next time,” said Dave.

Jeremy thought he could live with being called LDB. It was better than Little Drummer Boy.

There had been no firing for over an hour. A voice called out of the darkness, from the other side of the valley. “Hey! Hey, Yanks! Why don’t you come bring us some of your coffee?”

“Come get it yourself!” Lars called back. “Ain’t you got nothing to eat over there?”

“Send one of your slaves over!” suggested No-Joke angrily.

“Why, you need a new colonel for your regiment?” another voice called back. “Did we shoot yours?”

“No, you didn’t!” said No-Joke. He wasn’t very good at this sort of thing.

“How much are your slaves worth now?” Nicholas called.

“More than any Yank I ever met.”

“How much is your gray-backed money worth now?”

“Hey, are you General Hooker’s men?”

“Yes, we are!” said Dave proudly.

“Don’t tell them that,” No-Joke hissed. “That’s divulging intelligence to the enemy.”

Jeremy remembered how, when he had first met Charlie, he had told him his division, brigade, regiment, and about everything else he could think of. He felt a pang. Well, Charlie was only Charlie, hardly an enemy at all.

The firing began again at dawn. The cannon that the Red Star Division had saved last night boomed above
them, the Confederate cannon boomed in answer, and all down the line, for many miles, cannons and rifles fired. The men in Jeremy’s mess fired their rifles. Jeremy had nothing to fire. No-Joke suggested that he ought to go to the rear, but Dave said sensibly, “If he leaves the trench he might get hit, No-Joke.”

Then in the afternoon the order came to move. They made their way ducking and shoving through the clinging thicket and pine trees, tumbling into ravines and clambering up the other side—it wasn’t marching, it was scrambling. Jeremy slung his drum over his shoulder and wished he didn’t have to drag it along. A cannonball crashed through the trees near him, knocking off several branches, and Jeremy hugged the ground in terror. Then he got up, embarrassed. He had momentarily forgotten his ambition to die nobly in battle. He could tell there were other men in the trees around him, making their way forward, but he could no longer be sure they were the men in his company. He was practically all alone. A bullet smacked into a tree next to him, and Jeremy realized it had come from behind him.

“You’re firing on your own men!” he yelled.

Then an instant later he wasn’t so sure the bullet had come from a Union gun. Could be he’d gotten turned around. Maybe he was facing the Union with the Confederates behind him. He thought of climbing a tree to see better, but there were too many shells and bullets flying around up there. He could see no other soldiers clearly.

Around him he heard men’s shouts; he heard the command “Center on the colors!” But he couldn’t see the colors, his own or any other company’s or the Rebs’. All was chaos, the scream of bullets and shells and the trembling of the woods, and then a sudden groan off to his left, and a man’s voice: “I’m hit!”

He made his way over to this last cry, on his hands and knees. He found a man lying on his stomach on the ground. The man was wearing Union breeches and a Union fatigue blouse—that didn’t prove he was in the Union Army, though. Jeremy had to force himself to creep closer to the man. He didn’t want to, didn’t want to see. He reached his hand out and touched the man. Instantly the man’s hand shot out and gripped Jeremy’s tightly. Jeremy didn’t know what to do. He stayed still, and in a moment the grip slackened. He leaned forward, forced himself to look at the soldier’s face. Union or Confederate—Jeremy still couldn’t tell—the man was dead.