Cain at Gettysburg (14 page)

He was about to order Heisler to help him gather canteens when orders rent the air:
Up. Get up. Stand to.

Corpses rose, groaning, cursing, stretching wretched backs and stiffened limbs.

Sergeant Arnold appeared and called the roll, even as stragglers found their way to the ranks. Astonishingly, only three of the men who had answered up that morning were missing now. A hard man, Arnold announced that those three would be marked as deserters.

Knapsacks were gathered by company, but when the musicians and the last wagons went to the rear, the knapsacks remained on the ground. The officers expected to hold their line.

Schwertlein felt his stiffened garments rub. He needed more water. He needed rest. They all did. The battle
had
to be over. He didn't see how such played-out men could fight. The spirit was willing, willing and more, but the flesh had been blown to Hell by the brutal march.

Dismounted for the present, Lieutenant Colonel Boebel stepped out in front of the regiment. He looked like a pastor about to call down hellfire.

Boebel moved the regiment into the sunlight, leaving the welcome shade to align the 26th with the rest of Krzyzanowski's brigade in a great square of companies. Their footfalls trampled oats and wheat, the sound queerly massive before it came to a halt. Then the entire brigade marched forward to a reserve position at the right-rear of its sister brigade, von Amsberg's. Barlow's division had passed and formed in the open fields on the corps' right flank. Shouted orders, the clank of metal, the rustle of thousands of uniforms, the squeak of leather, and the
plonk
of bouncing canteens summed to a thing strange and mighty.

Exhausted as their bodies were, the visible power of the army, the blue ranks long and deep, with colors held high by the dozen, stirred the men. The cannon fire in the west had slackened, in a sulk. It seemed to them that the day was already theirs.

*   *   *

John Reynolds had told the captain he sent as courier to kill his mount, if necessary, but to lose not a second in reaching Meade. And it was well he had done so.

All morning, the situation had developed swiftly as Meade paced, pondered, and fretted, with Buford reporting Confederates not only to his west, along the Chambersburg Pike, but several miles to the north of Gettysburg as well. Buford had engaged troops from A. P. Hill's corps, forces his cavalrymen could only delay, but he also had reported Reynolds just three miles distant.

The next courier had come from Reynolds himself. A slight officer, little larger than a jockey, delivered a message scrawled in the saddle: “The enemy are in strong force … I will fight them inch by inch, and if driven back into the town, I will barricade the streets and hold them back as long as possible.”

That was Reynolds, through and through. If Gettysburg was a proper place to give battle, John would recognize it and buy the time the army needed to concentrate. If the ground proved unfavorable, he'd cover the army's flank while the right wing withdrew to the Pipe Creek line. Reynolds also had identified high ground near Emmitsburg, where the Confederates could be further delayed, if need be. The man was thorough, a rock for the entire army.

Butterfield, on the other hand, had fallen behind again and been chastised again. The circular with the Pipe Creek plan had gone out only that morning, when it should have been distributed by midnight. Pipe Creek remained Meade's preferred battleground, but he recognized that Lee and the press of events would have their say. He did not intend to blind himself with his own grandiose schemes, as Hooker had done.

Meade believed in engineering. There was beauty in it. Not merely in the finished structures, calculated to their perfect degree as to height, width, weight, and stress, but in the clarity of the process, the sublime predictability. If forced to offer his ideal of beauty, he would have cited not a woman, but the tall and slender lighthouse at Barnegat Bay, his masterpiece.

Yet, he had fought long enough now to recognize that an engineer's training took a commander just so far and no more. The blueprints for battle rarely matched the result. What little he had read of Jomini impressed him not a whit. Interior lines might offer a great advantage to a commander sound in his judgments, but designing campaigns based solely on perpendiculars, obliques, and angles was the labor of an ass. The engineer might pick the ground, choosing it wisely, but then the human beast leapt into the business. In war, clear thinking laid a fine foundation, but battle was captive to the foibles of man.

Still, good ground mattered, of that Meade had no doubt. He only wished he knew more about the terrain at Gettysburg. He still had not a single map that satisfied him. The decision to give battle or not depended on John Reynolds' judgment now.

Meade had sent additional messengers to each of the corps, altering their movements, alerting them that their plans could change again, hurrying Sedgwick, redirecting Slocum, getting Hancock in pocket, always seeking to cover the possibilities of the day. Sickles was moving in the proper direction to support Reynolds' fight, if need be. And Howard would be up right behind John, his lead elements probably on the field by now. So Reynolds would have two corps on hand, with two more corps available by evening.

But was Gettysburg a worthy place for a
defensive
battle? Meade's stomach complained of acid. He had turned down an offered midday meal, unable to eat a bite. And he was tired. He yearned for a night of sleep. Standing with his coat draped open, as was his practice in hot weather, he felt bent, despite his good posture.

If only a portion of Lee's army presented itself, Meade was ready to pitch into it and let the defense be damned—as he had written his wife in a fit of bravado. Otherwise, he wanted Lee to be the attacker. But he did not want Lee deciding where the attack would come.

Had
Lee
chosen Gettysburg?

Meade ached for another message from Reynolds, with more details. Surely, John would have matters in charge by now?

At least the pressure was off of Harrisburg, and it no longer seemed Lee might dash for Philadelphia. Now it was all about choosing a battleground and forcing the other man to slip into error.

Pacing before his headquarters tent, Meade fought the impulse to mount his horse and ride forward, to see the situation at Gettysburg himself. But that would be folly. He was no longer a mere division or even a corps commander. He had to remain where his orders could reach each of his subordinates promptly, and where their reports could find him without delay. He burned to be at the front, but had to keep to his place at the army's center.

It was all a damned bit harder than it looked.

Turning back to the tent, he thrust in his head and snapped at Butterfield, “Has my report to Halleck gone off, or not?”

Butterfield had taken his blows already and declined to be further annoyed. “It's gone,” he said.

“The order to Sedgwick to close on the army?”

“Hours ago. We spoke of it, General Meade.”

“Hancock?”

Butterfield looked suitably put-upon at last. “You spoke to him yourself. Not an hour ago. Was there something else?”

“Has his corps closed in its entirety?”

Butterfield drew out his watch. “Perhaps not fully.”

“Find out,” Meade snapped.

Hancock's visit had buoyed him for a time, although the doubts of the day soon set back in. Win Hancock would have liked to be forward in Reynolds' place, Meade knew. The man loved a fight. Meade would not have trusted Hancock to plan a grand campaign, but there was no one better on a battlefield.

Well, Hancock would get his chance, whether at Pipe Creek or at Gettysburg. Or somewhere in between. Meanwhile, Hancock had placed his headquarters a few minutes' ride away, on the other side of Taneytown. With a short rest, his Second Corps could be on the march again, if needed. Meade applauded himself for the manner in which he had drawn the army together. Only Sedgwick remained worrisomely far from the likely battlegrounds.

Despite himself, Meade smiled. Thinking of Win Hancock. The way the man left every button of his tunic undone but the top one, since, fighter or not, his belly had pushed aggressively to his own personal front. He looked a grand man in the saddle, though. Inspiring. Meade knew that, in a matter of hours, Hancock would come to him with some excuse to ride forward, to get into the scrap at Gettysburg, with or without his corps. And Meade, like a parent, would have to tell him no. He could picture the scene as almost a comical one, as if Hancock truly were no more than a child. “You must stay with your corps, Winfield!” “But … but I don't
want
to.…”

“No more messages from Reynolds?” Meade asked Butterfield. It was a foolish question and both men knew it.

Butterfield shrugged, no longer concealing his exasperation. “You would've seen the man before I did. I haven't left this tent.”

Frustrated that he had no further excuse for anger, Meade stepped back into the sunlight. It was beastly hot with the rain blown off. “Damn it,” he said to no one in particular, “where's young George gotten to?” Then he raised his voice: “Where's Captain Meade?”

No one replied. All in the vicinity did their best to evade the general's eyes and scurry along. Yes, they knew damned well he was in a mood. But what had Frederick the Great said? That soldiers should be more afraid of their officers than of the enemy? The staff of the Army of the Bloody Blue Potomac needed a touch more of that. Hooker's damnable legacy of slovenliness. No engineer would have tolerated it.

Old Frederick knew a damned sight more about war than that bugger Jomini, so adored by Little Mac.

Even as he thought these things, Meade knew he was being unfair. The staff was doing all it could. It was too small. As if they were still fighting in Mexico, puny army against puny army. So much needed to be changed. If he survived in command, he would build the army a proper staff at last. If …

Why didn't Reynolds send more details of the fighting, damn him? Meade needed facts. He had an army to move, and the move had to be in the proper damned direction. He could not afford to confuse his corps commanders with an endless succession of countermanded orders, making a worse muddle than that idiot Burnside.

With a start, Meade wondered if, before long, another general would be damning him for an idiot.

With Gettysburg fourteen miles off, he could not even hear the battle's noise. For all he knew, there had only been a skirmish, over now. Or there might be a significant encounter still under way. Buford had made it sound as though there were plenty of Rebels to chew on.

The point was not to be the one who was chewed.

He needed to know, needed to know. It was John's
duty
to send regular reports, damn it all, and not just have a grand lark chasing laurels.

Meade had expected better of Reynolds. He really had.

He spotted his son returning from the grove that masked the latrine. His temper was such that he was prepared to tear into the boy anyway. How could he expect to know what the army was doing, if he didn't even know where his son was? Instead, Meade stuck his head back in the tent.

“Send a message to Pleasanton. Urgently. He needs to keep this headquarters informed, blast him. I need to know if Ewell is headed for Hanover, or if he's descending farther to the west. You saw Buford's report. Tell Pleasanton if he can't do the work, I'll find—”

Meade heard the hoofbeats of a hard-driven horse. He rushed back into the open. It was all he could do not to run to meet the courier. Coming from the direction of Gettysburg.

Surely he would learn now what Reynolds thought of the ground and the force before him. Enough to enable Meade to make the fateful decisions that must rest upon his shoulders. He took the old maxim to heart: It was almost impossible to recover from flawed dispositions at a battle's outset. Whose dispositions would prove flawed, his or Robert E. Lee's?

The horse was spent and the rider looked no better. Meade recognized Major Riddle, one of Reynolds' men.

Foot catching in a stirrup, Riddle almost toppled backward. Meade was about to upbraid the man for his clumsiness. Unbecoming to an officer, even a worn one.

Then Meade saw the man's face.

It can be difficult to tell the difference between tears and sweat on a drained man's features.

Riddle failed to salute. He looked distraught, shocked. Ill. His mouth opened. With difficulty. As if the jaw had been clenched too hard and too long, until the human mortar hardened.

Gathering himself, the major said, “General Reynolds is dead, sir.”

SIX

July 1, Early Afternoon

“Why don't we attack?” James Bunyan asked. Lying amid the ranks that stretched down the field like ready-made corpses, the twin fidgeted, a child afflicted with worms. “How long they going to keep us a-laying here?”

“Long as they want,” Cobb said as he rolled to one side. He had picked open the sore on his nose again. “Got to give the Yankees a fair chance to get themselves fixed up and ready.”

“It just don't make no sense,” the boy said.

“The generals know what they're doing,” Blake told Bunyan, Cobb, and all the men sprawled around him. Although he was not certain of that himself.

“I didn't see that many Yankees when we was up top there,” Peachum put in. “Seems like we ought to get things done with. While there's not so many of them.”

Cobb delivered his customary cackle. “Plenty of them for Archer's boys, seems like.” Flies adored him.

Blake wondered if he should ask the captain for the let to send a detail to fill canteens. Even lying still, a man felt the sun's punch. And there'd been some whiskey early in the morning, although Tam, Hugh, and the others had tried to hide it. What helped at dawn took its revenge at noon. They'd all be raw with thirst.