Unholy Fire (15 page)

At around two in the morning, it began snowing so hard that Captain De Vries decided to anchor until daylight. For the remainder of that night, we were no more than twenty feet from the Rebel shoreline, and I didn't sleep well at the thought that we might be boarded in that lonely roadstead and taken prisoner.

It was still snowing as we continued the journey the next morning. When we arrived at Aquia Creek, it was to a sight that filled me with astonishment. Next to the newly constructed wharf, which was fully one hundred yards long, we cruised past more than twenty large transport vessels, all waiting in the channel for a place to unload their cargoes. Captain De Vries joined me at the rail as I gazed at a scene of total pandemonium on the wharf.

There were six large steamers already tied to the pilings, and hundreds of stevedores were surging in and out of them in a steady stream. A line of empty wagons stretched off to the left, their teamsters slowly inching toward the wharf as space became available. Another long line of wagons, already loaded, was winding its way toward a phalanx of newly built warehouses that covered the high ground above the wharf as far as I could see. From a cleared space off to the right, a mountain of forage rose forty feet into the air.

“We have already shipped fifty thousand horses and mules down here,” said the young captain, as I shook my head in wonder.

A hard-faced corporal from the Provost Marshal's Office met me at the wharf. The snow was showing no sign of waning, and I was glad to see he had commandeered a coach rather than an open wagon.

We waited more than fifteen minutes to enter the stream of transport vehicles heading down to Falmouth. There was a long train of artillery units, with siege guns, cannons, and wagons full of gunpowder and shells. Behind them came freight schooners, their massive wheels sunk almost a foot into the road mire, carrying barrels of flour, crates of hardtack, and other necessary staples.

When an opening finally appeared in the line of traffic, we started south. Along both sides of the road for the first mile were successions of open horse pens, each holding hundreds of animals. Then came fields dotted with crude log huts that had been dug into the ground and covered with canvas sheets.

“Those are for the teamsters. They have it good compared to us,” said the corporal disgustedly. “If we don't break through at Fredericksburg, the army will probably be here all winter.”

We passed into open country. It was mostly flat, with low melancholy hills in the distance. The landscape had been stripped of trees, fences, even saplings and brush. It reminded me of mange on a dog's back.

The road stretched ahead of us across the plain as straight as a spear. We passed men unstringing telegraph wire from huge wooden spools, and up ahead of them, a team of laborers who were erecting the poles to carry the wire. The corporal pointed across the road to where other laborers were laying track for a new railroad line that was being constructed to expedite the movement of supplies down to Falmouth.

Perhaps it was the rawness of the day, or more likely the fact that my brain was still craving its merciless mistress, but I began shivering against my will. The tremors continued for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, the shaking and quivering ended, leaving me feeling weak and defeated.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the corporal staring at me before he turned away. I knew the look on his face without actually seeing it. I had seen it often enough in the hospital, the look that said I was already used up at the age of twenty-one.

As we continued south, the terrain became even more desolate. In the distance I could see a stately mansion house on the brow of a hill. When we came closer, I saw that it was merely a shell, a burned-out ruin. One of the gigantic chimneys stood in solitary splendor, but it was no longer connected to anything. Two enterprising soldiers had built a fire in the open hearth and were sitting on a sprung couch in front of it, frying their salt pork at the end of long sticks under a canvas shelter.

“That was Senator Randolph's home,” said the corporal, with a satisfied smile.

It was after four by then, and the light was already fading in the west when we finally arrived at the military camps near Falmouth.

“You'll be seeing our boys now, Captain,” said the corporal, “a hundred and thirty thousand strong.”

As he spoke, the first bivouacs of the Army of the Potomac came into view ahead of us. They filled the snowy plain in every direction, a seemingly endless landscape filled with Sibley tents, artillery parks, army wagons, cavalry units, log huts, ammunition piles, and thousands of cook fires. A thick smoke haze hung everywhere low to the ground, and soldiers would suddenly materialize out of the vaporous fog only to disappear again like ghostly spirits.

The regimental camps went on for mile after mile, instilling me with a level of confidence that an army of this strength and magnitude was unstoppable. But then I remembered feeling similar thoughts before Ball's Bluff.

The rattle of the coach wheels subsided as we entered the broad gravel drive of a country estate. It wound its way through a park of sycamore trees. Soldiers' tents were pitched right up to the edge of formal gardens. On the crest of a rise stood an impressive redbrick manor house built in the colonial style, with tall, white-trimmed windows and black shutters.

Officers and couriers were streaming in and out of the entrance as we came to a stop. Off to the right, I spied a line of thunderboxes that had been erected over a latrine pit. I told the corporal that I needed to avail myself and headed over to them. As I grasped the handle of the last one in the row, it turned in my hand, and a young man stepped out of the foul chamber in front of me.

He had flaming red hair and bright blue eyes. I knew his broad fleshy face instantly. It was Philip Larrabee, one of my classmates from Cambridge. I had not seen him in two years.

“Kit,” he said, in an excited voice, “what are you doing here? Are you in a field command?”

“Just a policeman,” I said.

“Hardly,” he came back. “The
Harvard Crimson
had a whole page on your exploits at Ball's Bluff: ‘the young lion of Troy.'”

“That was from war dispatches. They are always embroidered to the hilt. What about you, Phil?”

“I'm writing war dispatches,” he said, with a grin. “And the Boston
Examiner
sent me down to do some portraits of the Massachusetts boys at the front.”

I remembered then his skill as an artist. He showed me a tablet that contained some of his latest studies of men in camp. They were dead-on accurate.

“The rumor is that we are going to drive the Rebels off those heights within the next few days and then push on to take Richmond.”

“I wouldn't know,” I said. “Really, I'm just a policeman.”

“Yes,” he said, with obvious disappointment. “Well … see you then.”

“See you,” I responded.

After successfully moving my bowels, I rejoined the dour corporal, and he showed me to the tent that had been assigned to me within the grouping allotted to the Provost Marshal's Department. I left my satchel bag under the cot and followed him to the front entrance of the mansion. Inside, a wide oak-floored hallway ran the whole length of the house. We followed it to a room near the far end. Next to the open door was a hand-lettered sign that read:
GENERAL HATHAWAY, PROVOST MARSHAL'S DEPARTMENT
.

It had once been the family library, but the dark cherry bookcases were now bare. Inside the room I could see the colossal bulk of Val Burdette ensconced in a large leather chair in front of a snapping fire. There were two others with him. One was sitting down and facing Val next to the fire. He wore no insignia of rank, and the collar of his tunic was unbuttoned.

The other man wore sergeant's stripes on his immaculate uniform and was standing behind him. As I crossed the room, I realized that the man closest to Val was actually seated in a wooden wheelchair. He was holding a sheaf of papers in his right hand. A red woolen blanket covered his legs.

“Captain McKittredge, I don't believe you have met Brigadier Hathaway,” said Val, without getting up.

“No, sir,” I said.

“Please call me Sam,” said the general, extending his hand. “And you go by?”

“Kit,” I responded.

It was hard for me to believe he was really a general. Although his tousled black hair was going gray, he could not have been more than thirty-five years old. With his thin, youthful face and the rimless spectacles that were dangling from the end of his nose, he looked more like a young professor than a brigadier general. Above the glasses, though, his eyes were steely and uncompromising.

“This is my aide, Billy Osceola,” he said. Short and wiry, the sergeant was about my age, with a rugged bronzed face and deep-set black eyes. When he shook my hand, I saw that two of the fingers on his right hand were missing.

“I'm sorry to have ordered you to come down here so precipitously, Kit,” said Val, “but we have a major problem on our hands. Burnside's attack against Lee is no more than a few days away, and we are no closer to determining which gun carriages are defective. Thankfully, Sam and a young officer in the Ordnance Bureau solved the riddle of the friction primers. They came up with a simple test to gauge the efficacy of the fulminate of mercury in each tube. It means checking every one of them, but that process is already underway. As far as the gun carriages, though, there is still no foolproof way to determine which ones are suspect.”

Sam Hathaway took off his glasses and placed them in his breast pocket. He suddenly looked more like a general.

“We need to secure the cooperation of at least one of the federal inspectors who were bribed to approve the defective carriages in the first place,” he said. “If we can get one to talk, we'll hopefully learn which manufacturers are involved and which carriages have to be replaced.”

“Two of the inspectors slipped through our grasp last night and are presumably on their way back to Washington,” said Val. “The other one, a Major Duval, is still here, although he is being carefully safeguarded by his superiors. They are almost certainly aware of his perfidy and very likely complicit.”

General Hathaway wheeled himself away from the fire.

“You've come a long way, Kit,” he said. “You could probably use some coffee.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, as he poured me a cup and refilled his own from a pot on the desk. Standing close by him, I saw there was an unhealthy pallor to his skin, as if he had recently been sick.

“Sam has been leading a one-man crusade against corruption down here,” said Val.

“A thousand men wouldn't be enough,” said the general, with bitterness in his voice.

A courier entered the room, went straight to the wheelchair, and handed him a dispatch. General Hathaway glanced at it for several seconds, initialed the document, and handed it back.

“Why does President Lincoln keep making these decisions, Val?” he asked, as soon as the courier was out the door. “Appointing corrupt men, incompetent men, one after another, to positions of the highest responsibility just because they have the right political connections. Cameron was the worst, but there are so many others. These bloody gun carriages are just one example of the iniquities they are responsible for.”

I wondered then whether Val had confided in him about his relationship with the president.

“At first I thought he was simply misled,” went on General Hathaway, “but it is endemic, Val, and it goes beyond corrupt profiteers. How could he commission someone with no military experience, like Congressman Banks, to be a major general and then allow him to be put in command of thousands of men? Do you know how many boys died because of his incompetence at Winchester? It was criminal.”

Banks had been speaker of the House of Representatives prior to the war. At Winchester, he had suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of Stonewall Jackson.

I waited for Val to come to President Lincoln's defense, but he remained silent.

“And Edward Baker at Ball's Bluff,” he said, the passion rising in his voice. “The man had no idea what he was doing. Like Banks, another vainglorious fool.… His dead were floating up like cordwood to the docks of Georgetown for two weeks after that slaughter.”

I found myself nodding in agreement with him.

“You left out Pope,” said Val, finally.

“Yes,” he said, staring down at his ruined legs, “Pope.”

General Hathaway slowly wheeled his chair back to the desk.

“And now he gives us Burnside,” he said, wearily shaking his head. “Almost three weeks ago, Joe Hooker got here with forty thousand men. He could have waded his boys across the Rappahannock and pushed straight on toward Richmond if Burnside had just allowed him to cross. Now we have a hundred and thirty thousand, and I fear it won't be enough.”

He pointed to a pair of binoculars on the desk and said, “Just take those glasses, Kit, and see for yourself.”

I picked them up and walked over to the window.

“You can see them digging in across the river on the heights above Fredericksburg,” he said. “Lee must have fifty thousand men waiting for us already, and the number is growing every day. Every Rebel in Virginia old enough to aim a rifle will be over there waiting for us.”

The house we were in sat on a bluff above the northern bank of the Rappahannock. The southern bank swept up toward an ancient town of narrow cobbled streets. With the naked eye, I could see a mass of brick homes, church spires, and commercial buildings. Beyond the town, an open plain rose up a long wide hill. I put the binoculars to my eyes and focused them on the heights above it.

In the waning light, I could see the Confederate battle flag flying from a mansion on the crest. As I watched through the glasses, a battery of guns was wheeled along the ridgeline and moved into position facing down the slope. I couldn't imagine ever seeing better defensive ground.