Cain at Gettysburg (11 page)

“How current is the staff's information, sir?” Pettigrew asked.

That annoyed Hill. “Current enough, I expect.”

“I told him it had to be militia,” Heth explained, as if Pettigrew were no longer present. “Just farmers got up to parade around on their mules, then run like Hell.”

“With respect, sir,” Pettigrew said, “the cavalrymen we saw were not about to run away.”

Hill shifted from one leg to the other, as if feeling the need to relieve his body. His tone grew conciliatory, though, indulging a child. “Well, now … we all know it's easy enough to get excited. Everybody's looking forward to a fight, not just you, General Pettigrew. Get excited, your eyes play tricks.”

Suppressing his sense of ill-treatment as best he could, Pettigrew turned and waved to his aide-de-camp, who had kept a respectful distance across the road.

“Captain Young!” he called. “Come here.”

Young had served under Hill during the Seven Days. Hill knew him and liked him. Perhaps the corps commander would listen to Young.

The captain sloshed across the ravaged street, high boots and spurs digging deep. It was hard to move with dignity.

The young man saluted the generals as he approached, tilting his saber out of the mud with his other hand.

“Captain Young, would you please report what you saw on the ridge before Gettysburg today?”

“Yes, sir. Good afternoon, gentlemen. Immediately to the west of Gettysburg, we observed Union cavalry vedettes. They moved in good order and were reinforced with additional elements as we watched.”

“Militia. On mules,” Heth said.

Young's expression instantly grew wary. But he, too, had seen what he'd seen. “I didn't judge them to be militia, sir. They appeared extremely well-drilled.”

Hill nudged a torn-up clot of grass with his toe. “I cannot believe that any portion of the Army of the Potomac is up. A patrol, maybe.…”

“Goddamned militia,” Heth insisted. “Nothing but.”

Hill thought about it. “Most like, Harry, most like.” He inspected the weather, judged the hour. “Find out in good time, I suppose.”

“Well, if there's no objection, then,” Heth said, “I'll take my division tomorrow, go to Gettysburg, and get those shoes.”

Hill pulled at his trousers and shifted his weight again. “No objection,” he said. “None in the world.”

Heth's irritation had not been quelled, though. Rather too loudly, he said, “I'll put Archer's brigade in front this time. He won't shy.” The division commander turned his eyes on Pettigrew. “That will be all, sir.”

Pettigrew saluted and plodded off through the mire, flushed and humiliated. The suggestion that want of valor had deterred him from entering Gettysburg was as unbearable as it was unjust. His orders had been clear: He was not to bring on an engagement. And the Federal cavalry had been right there in front of them, for any man to see.

General Heth would learn who was brave and who was not.

Pettigrew snapped his horse's reins from the orderly sergeant's hand. Leaping into the saddle, he took care, even now, to show a good seat. His aide aped his every gesture.

Pettigrew did not turn his mount eastward to where his brigade had camped, on picket duty for the corps that night. Instead, he rode for General Archer's headquarters. He felt it his duty to pass on to his fellow brigade commander all that he had seen, not only regarding the Union cavalrymen, but the problem of the terrain, the way the ridges running perpendicular to the pike offered a succession of fine defensive positions to a skillful enemy. He would not bear the blame for any blunders tomorrow. And instructing Archer was the honorable thing.

When the two riders had put a safe distance between themselves and their superiors, Captain Young drew his horse close and said, “I'm left in a spirit of unbelief, sir. At the obstinacy of our generals.”

After riding a stretch in silence, Pettigrew told the younger man, “I fear that many beliefs will be changed tomorrow.”

Morgenrot! Morgenrot!

Leuchtest mir … zum frühen Tod …

Schwertlein struggled to ignore the song the regimental
Liederkranz
had begun across the camp. Its sentimental morbidity repelled him:

Crimson dawn! Crimson dawn!

Comes the night … and I'll be gone.

Soon you'll hear the trumpets calling,

Then you'll see the bodies falling,

And my short life … will be done.

The men sang it because the hated Prussian army had forbidden it. They sang it because they liked the yearning melody. And they sang it because they were hopelessly sentimental, even in the depths of war. Sentimentality was a German disease, Schwertlein decided.

He was tempted to clap his hands over his ears. But that would have made it hard to write the letter.

His
words had to be stripped of clumsy sentiment. He did not want sympathy. He wanted far more than that. When the time came.

Footsteps climbed the steps to the porch, but Schwertlein refused to look up. A shadow invaded the cast of lantern light, falling on the page, on his unfinished sentence.

“Another article for the newspaper?” Heisler asked.

“Yes,” Schwertlein lied. He surrendered and raised his eyes. His friend did not look well.

“It's dry here,” Heisler said, glancing around the porch. “I'm surprised the officers haven't taken it.”

Schwertlein shrugged. “They're over at the academy, with the Sisters. So I'm allowed my porch.” He leaned back on the rough-hewn chair, inspecting his comrade while bantering. “The farmer's an old widower. He was surprised I had the manners to ask if I could sit here. He expected us to just take what we want.”

Heisler smiled, if not strongly. “He may find that some of his chickens have joined the regiment.”

“Sit down, Josef,” Schwertlein said. He blotted the paper and folded it over. “Tell me what's wrong.”

“Nothing,” Heisler answered. Too quickly. “Absolutely nothing. I just … I've written a new poem. I thought you might read it and give me your opinion.”

Schwertlein turned an amused expression on his friend. “Always, we go through this … you worship your Heine as the god of poetry, and I hand the laurels to Goethe. Our tastes are as different as wine and beer.”

“Heine's the voice of freedom.”

“Of sentimentality and sensation. Goethe's the better poet. Disciplined, precise…”

“Goethe was a reactionary, a hireling of the
ancien régime
.”

“And a better poet.”

“And I will never be even as good as Heine. I understand. But … will you read this, Fritz?” Heisler drew a paper, folded square, from deep in a pocket.

Schwertlein accepted the poem in the best spirit he could muster. Heisler loved poetry, but poetry did not love Heisler. He had no gift, only an impulse that burst into awkward rhymes.

In the ring of yellow light, to the sound of distant singing and insects in multitudes, Schwertlein read the words entrusted to him. The poem was not as long as most that issued from Heisler's pen. But that was not why Schwertlein looked up so sharply.

He peered into his friend's eyes. “So much darkness? Why?”

Rump perched on the porch rail, Heisler looked off at the campfires protesting the darkness. “I didn't really come about the poem.”

“What then?”

Still searching the darkness, Heisler said, “I'm afraid.”

Schwertlein gave a snort. “We're all afraid.”

His friend shook his head. “It's different this time. I feel something. Always … I've always been able to put these thoughts into this pocket and those thoughts in that pocket. You know what I mean. A man thinks about things. But he doesn't truly think about them. The mind accepts terrible things, because such things are only to happen to other men.” Weeping as gently as a child, he found the wherewithal to meet Schwertlein's eyes again. “I have always known that I would go home one day, that I would return to Marthe.
Und die Kinder.
But now … this time…”

“It's the damned singing. It's morbid.”

“It's not the singing.”

“And there's the rain, the mud, the heat. It would wear down any man.”

Drying his eyes with his fingertips, Heisler shook his head. “Do you know what I'll regret? Apart from never seeing Marthe and the children again?” He raised his chin, showing a good profile and the edge of a bitter smile. “I would have liked to write one truly great poem. To leave one poem behind … that would rival your Goethe. Only one, and I would be content.”

“You'll live to write many more poems.”

“You can't know that.”

“And you can't know that you won't.”

A moth struck the lantern's glass and exploded.

“Sometimes … a man knows a thing,” Heisler said.

“
Quatsch
! Rubbish!”

Heisler only shook his head again.

“If the sun shines tomorrow,” Schwertlein told him, “you'll feel better. Wait and see. And then we can all complain about the heat again.”

“Fritz? I'm not so foolish as you think. I know the poem isn't any good. But I'd like you to keep it. And there's something else. A favor. Please. No matter what happens to me … write and tell Marthe I didn't suffer, that it was all clean and good. Spare her.”

“I can't listen to this. You're talking nonsense.
Reine Scheisse.
”

“But promise me you'll write to her.”

Schwertlein laughed a single, hard syllable. “And what if I'm the one who dies?”

“It won't be you,” Heisler told him. “I can tell.”

“No! You listen to me.” Schwertlein's voice rose. “You
don't
know what tomorrow will bring. None of us knows. Damn it, man … think like that and you
will
get yourself killed. But you don't know a thing about any of this. Nothing. And you're talking absolute nonsense.”

“We'll see, Fritz, we'll see,” his friend said resignedly. “I'll leave you to your article now.”

And Heisler left the porch. In moments, the darkness had swallowed him.

Schwertlein tried to return to his letter. He was writing to Maria Schenk, the woman he had loved for almost a decade, although it was not yet the time to say it aloud. Or write it.

They had met on her wedding day, at the fest following her vows. A torrent of fire had passed between two souls, a sense of mutual shock, of immediate and immeasurable sorrow that things were as they were and irremedial. No poet would ever put that succulent horror into words. As he watched her later that afternoon, across the gay crowd in that hall, he wished he had died at Rastatt rather than live to meet this wife of a minor friend. For her part, Maria fought not to look at him again, but even as a new bride she had failed in her duty.

When they met over the years, on the street or at a charitable affair, they could barely speak complete sentences to one another, settling for a minimum of courtesies. They both
knew
. They had known from that first instant that life had played a terrible trick on them and their fate was cast in iron. There was no recourse for decent people.

Her husband had died in camp, of measles, in February. Cautiously, they had begun a correspondence, dealing, at first, with the mundane matters that followed Heinrich Schenk's death. But when those things were settled, neither had broken off the correspondence. She wrote to tell him the news from home, as a sister might. He answered by describing as much of the war as he thought decent: not least, that the accusations of cowardice lodged against all German soldiers after Chancellorsville had been a calumny.

Now he hoped to nudge their exchanges to a deeper intimacy. No article he had ever written, not even the chapters of his unfinished book, had ever demanded such precision of language, such care. He feared that one wrong word might ravage the future of which he dreamed. And of which, he was convinced, Maria dreamed, too.

Men feared different things. But all men feared. Poor Josef, with his sudden
Werther
morbidity, dreaded the coming battle, although he had always been as brave as any man. Schwertlein's own terror was of a life lived in loneliness, without the only woman he ever would love.

How lives changed, as the fires of youth burned down! He still dreamed of the world revolution, of justice and equality for all. Rastatt would always be there, with its dead. It was a dream no Prussian fusillade could kill. He clung to those youthful visions of a world purged and perfected.

But he worried that, if forced to choose between the revolution and his love now, he'd choose Maria. Whose hand he once brushed lightly in a shop.

Schwertlein could not write. Safe words refused to come. He longed to pour out his heart. But that would never do. Every turn of phrase had to be measured.

In the devious way the mind tricks a man, he thought of his father and mother. What kind of love had they shared behind their propriety? Had he been oblivious to a mighty passion? It was hard to imagine such things, of course. No child credited his elders with such feelings. Yet, now he conjured hints of mutual tenderness out of the sternness with which they had faced the world.

He recalled the parlor,
die beste Stube,
in their home in Mainz, where his father served the archbishopric as an overseer of property accounts. Only to have his treasured son flee the university to join a revolution that called for an end to ecclesiastical property. The room had been savagely cold in the winter, except on Sundays, when the tiled stove was lit and the family gathered together in dreary reverence. At last, the rich smells of dinner would seep in, assaulting the solemnity. He had hated those endless afternoons as a boy, but now they seemed of inestimable value.

Mainz. With its hideous cathedral, its red stone the color of enfeebled blood. The city lived in its alleys, not at the altar. There had been sugared almonds at
Karneval
and sweet wine from the vineyards that stretched from the river into the hills. He recalled the smell of printer's ink and the curses of laborers, market wives all peasant slyness, and priests going round in pairs like God's policemen. He could see the barges on the Rhine and his mother at home with starched lace at her neck, her posture that of a guardsman, her heart that of a saint.