Cain at Gettysburg (33 page)

And this clerk with two stars on his shoulders had no time for him. After the insulting messages delivered by Meade's son and a relay of adjutants,
this
was his welcome: to be ignored. By a man whose reputation was built on lighthouses.

Straightening the fine uniform he had put on for battle, Sickles pushed his way through the pack of officers, the lot of whom stank like the privy of a tenement. Meade was playing the sage over a map, with Warren, his vulture-faced engineer, as sycophant. Sickles thrust himself in between the two men.

The commanding general straightened up. For an instant, his features took Sickles aback. He had never seen a man so visibly weary. Meade always had basset hound pouches under his eyes, but now the bags sagged halfway to his chin. He didn't look fit to command a foraging party.

For his part, Sickles had slept nicely, if not at his usual length.

“General Meade, we must discuss my position.”

Meade waved him off. “Not now, Dan. In five minutes.”

And that was all. Sickles did not believe that Meade would have been so dismissive of the sorriest West Pointer. That was the problem, of course: this brotherhood of “professional soldiers” who didn't know a damn thing about real war. You learned more from an Irish brawl than anyone did at West Point. Look at the bloody mess they'd made, unable to win one clear victory over Lee, despite the wealth and manpower of the North. Sickles did not doubt but that he could do better.
Much
better. After all,
he
wasn't afraid to fight.

But Meade would always favor his fellow West Pointers. To say nothing of his prissy Philadelphians, with their bird-beak noses thrust into the air. One of his two division commanders, Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, was a very pet of Meade's and—Sickles had no doubt—little more than a spy. Birney, who had the other Third Corps division on the field, wasn't much better, but could be steered.

Sickles brushed and bumped his way over to the corner where Butterfield—boon companion of the Hooker days—labored over papers that likely said nothing. The chief of staff looked nearly as worn as Meade. Added to which, he had a volcanic pimple on his nose. Sickles felt pained just looking at it.

“Dan, I'm busy.” Butterfield sighed.

“With what? A panegyric to West Point? A hymn to old Philadelphia?”

The chief of staff flexed his writing hand. “A plan of retreat, if you have to know.”

“He's planning to run? The old bugger's running away?”

“No,” his friend told him. “He's just a by-the-book bastard. He needs a plan for everything. I'm surprised he can shit in a pot without written orders.”

“He's given me a god-awful position, you know. Terrible ground. No glory, but the chance of a damned bad thrashing.”

Cracking his knuckles, Butterfield said, “Well, maybe you should be back with your corps. Doing what you can.”

Sickles ignored the advice. “I think he's setting me up for a scapegoat, that's the gist of it. He certainly wouldn't give that piece of ground to one of his West Point chums.”

The chief of staff exhaled. Out of patience with everyone. Even with a friend and drinking companion. “Don't be an ass. Someone has to fill in the line down there. Your corps was on hand. If anything, he's tucked you in fairly safely.”

Sickles' hackles rose. “Meaning he don't trust me to put up a fight?”

“Oh, he knows you'll fight. Dan, listen to me. To tell you the truth, Meade isn't doing badly. I can't stand the gilded snot myself, but I'll give him his due for pulling things together. Joe was letting everything run to Hell. We're better off. Although I wouldn't admit it to another living soul besides yourself.” Butterfield popped a last knuckle, then took up his pen again. “The Great Panjandrum's waving you over. Better go.” There was unmistakable relief in Butterfield's voice.

Dan Sickles felt absolutely friendless.

Meade didn't give him a chance to speak, but snapped:

“Is your corps in position at last, General Sickles? And why are you here, when you should be with your men?”

“My situation's unclear, sir. The position I'm to occupy…”

“What's unclear about it, man? It's been laid out for you, time and again, where you're to extend the line. You're to take up the high ground on the far left, where Hancock placed Geary last night. What could be clearer than that?”

“Geary had no position. He just put out his pickets and let his boys sleep.”

Sickles could read men well enough to know that Meade had no patience remaining. But he was not about to be assigned an inferior role in what might be the battle that saved—or destroyed—the Union. Indeed, it could be his last chance to shine as a hero. He needed those laurels for politics after the war.

Meade stepped closer, edging out Warren to make the exchange private. “How plain must I make things, damn it? You are to extend Hancock's line along the lower ridge and place your left firmly on that first round hill.”

“It's bad ground.”

“It's integral to the defense. Someone has to hold it.”

“It's all woods and marshy meadows, all rocks and low ground. My artillery's lines of fire will be restricted. It isn't even any good for infantry.”

“It won't be good for Lee's artillery or infantry, either. If any of the Confederates come your way.”

“They will. I know it.”

“Then you know more than I know,” Meade said. “For God's sake, man … even if they did come at you, we have interior lines.” He turned, almost furiously, to the map on which he'd been working. “Look at this. Our lines form a reversed question mark, with that hill of yours as the dot down at the bottom. I'm positioning reserves to move right or left, as need be. If Lee surprises us all and appears in your front, you'll soon have the Fifth Corps behind you. And the Sixth, when it arrives. And look at this.” He traced a hand over the crude map again. “Those are Lee's lines. Were he to extend them beyond our left—beyond your flank—why, his lines would be over six miles long. And ours less than three. The mathematics aren't difficult.”

“I didn't see many reserves as I rode up.”

“They're not all in yet.”

Sickles looked into the reddened eyes of the tired man before him and saw that he would need to maneuver differently.

“Well,” he said, “there are better artillery positions in the vicinity of my lines.” Raising his voice just enough to be certain that Warren heard him, Sickles asked, “Do I have the discretion to post my men according to my judgment? Within the limits of your general instructions?”

“Certainly. Any ground you choose to occupy within those limits, I leave to you.”

Sickles turned a smile on the chief engineer. “Perhaps General Warren could accompany me on an inspection of my lines? I greatly value his opinion.”

He believed that Warren might be persuaded, even if Meade would not.

“Warren's busy.”

“General Hunt, then? I'd be grateful for his help posting my artillery. The ground really is difficult.”

Meade pondered that for a few seconds, then called out, “General Hunt? I need you.”

Hunt broke away from his tribe of gun monkeys.

“Henry, would you ride down to his position with General Sickles? He needs help placing his guns. Do what you can for him, all right?”

Face as drained of healthy vigor as Meade's, Warren's, and Butterfield's, Hunt scowled. “Let me get my damned hat.”

*   *   *

The trick was to persuade Hunt that Meade had made a mistake. Sickles hoped the terrain would speak for itself, but he mustered his supporting arguments.

Hunt was a ramrod bastard, though. Proud of his record, of his brevets in Mexico and his authorship of the U.S. Army's latest artillery manual. The only serious reverse Lee had met had been in front of Hunt's guns at Malvern Hill. But Sickles suspected the man was all façade. Famously the son and grandson of Regular Army officers, he'd been orphaned and raised on the charity of others until West Point took him in and puffed him up. Such a man would have holes in his confidence … somewhere. His pride could be manipulated. Hunt always seemed the most levelheaded of the army's senior officers, but, in Sickles' experience of men and their vulnerabilities, a guarded temper could hide the worst self-doubt.

Despite Meade and his West Point ilk, Sickles perceived a splendid day for battle, the heat not too bad and the sky a blue silk petticoat. As the two generals rode down the ridgeline with their aides, skirmishers, the army's gnats, nipped at each other between the waiting lines. Excited batteries fired for obscure reasons, then went silent again. The hour was nearly noon and little was doing. If Lee held off a bit longer and then attacked on the left, Sickles believed he could be the army's savior.

He needed at least one staff general to bless what he intended to do with his corps, though. He had to cover not only his military flank from Robert E. Lee, but his political flank from the likes of George Gordon Meade. He needed one of the pompous West Pointers on record as backing the move he intended to make.

The issue that pressed him hardest, of course, wasn't his corps' position, but whether it would be wiser to stand for the Senate right at the war's end or to take a turn in the governor's chair in Albany. Assuming his Tammany friends had no objection. He could count on the votes of the New Yorkers brigaded in his ranks, on their relatives, on the Irish, and on the machine-owned newspapermen, with their taste for liquor, cigars, and self-importance. And after the Senate, the governorship, or both … what might a war hero not achieve, when nostalgic veterans voted?

“You'll see,” he called to Hunt as they cantered along, “it's terrible ground, it ain't fit for a dogfight.”

“I've seen it,” Hunt replied. “It isn't perfect. But someone has to defend it, if the line's to hold.”

They diverted their horses around a tangle of guns going into a battery. The sleek barrels of the Parrotts put Sickles in mind of long, black thighs.

“Anyway,” Hunt continued, “I've never seen a perfect fighting position. The surface of the earth isn't made that way.”

It wasn't the sort of thing Sickles wanted to hear.

When they reached the first regiments of Sickles' Third Corps, Hunt asked, “Why aren't your men throwing up breastworks?”

“It would make no difference,” Sickles said dismissively. “Look at this ground. That's marshland out front. And that grove over there. The Rebs could sneak through those trees. Anyway, the line Meade's assigned me is too long for my corps. It's fifteen hundred yards, if it's an inch, and my corps barely musters ten thousand.”

Hunt didn't reply, so they rode on, with Sickles pointing out every deficiency he had noted in the ground, while constantly discovering new ones. Just short of the round hill that was such an obsession of Meade's, Sickles turned in the saddle, pulling his horse to face westward.

“Just ride up this lane with me. You're known to have the best eye in the army. Let me show you a
real
position, where we could give Bobby Lee a pleasant time of it.”

Spurring his horse across the worthless ground, Sickles led the way past a queer-shaped wheatfield on the left and climbed a low ridge where two groves met, one on each side of the deeply rutted road.

Breaking back into the sunlight on higher ground, Sickles paused for Hunt to come abreast, then pointed forward, toward an orchard that crowned a knoll at canister range. Blue-clad skirmishers dotted the height, but had nothing at which to fire.

“Up there. That peach orchard. That's what I want you to look at. It's Napoleon's own position for massed batteries. A man of your abilities must see it.”

He gave his mount the spurs again. The horse shot forward. Hunt trailed slightly, followed by aides and guards, dozens of hooves drumming on the sun-dried lane.

Sickles did not rein up until he had reached the high point, at the far end of the orchard, on the eastern edge of the road from Emmitsburg. The view to the south was commanding, while the lines of fire to the western woodline were markedly better than those Meade had imposed on him.

“Look at this, General Hunt. Ain't this splendid? If I advanced my corps this far, we could stop the Confederates with artillery fire alone. The way you did yourself at Malvern Hill.”

Hunt didn't rise to the bait, unless he was making a show of things for form's sake. The artilleryman scrutinized the ground, first riding southward a hundred yards along the open skirmish line, then trotting northward toward the nearest farm buildings, always keeping his course beside the road, but not straying onto it. Sickles waited, smoothing his mustache and fanning the lazy air: The flies were up. As Hunt rode along, weightier pests erupted from the fields surrounding the orchard. A cloud of insects trailed his horse's haunches.

The instant Hunt returned to his side, Sickles cried, “What the devil?” He had been so preoccupied with wooing the gunner that he had missed the obvious. “Where's the damned cavalry? I was promised a replacement for Buford. Captain!” he shouted to the nearest dismounted officer. “Have you seen our cavalry pickets? Have they gone farther out?”

The captain looked dumbfounded. Clearly, the answer was “No.”

“Meade ordered Pleasanton to send out a relief,” Hunt said. “I was there, I heard him.”

Sickles decided to turn the matter around. “You see how it is, Henry? Nothing gets done the way it should. Meade's a good enough fellow, but he ain't up to this. And here I am, with no cavalry watching the ground beyond my flank. I could be surprised, if I stayed in that low ground. Up here, at least I could see the enemy coming.”

Hunt shook his head. “I don't see it. Oh, the battery positions are fine, you're right about that. Excellent lines of fire. Although there's a bit of dead ground down on the left. But look here, General Sickles…” Hunt's horse shied at nothing, then settled again. “This position's impossible, under the circumstances. You told me yourself your line's already too long. Were you to advance your corps this far, then stretch back to those hills … why, the length of your line would double. And you'd be out here on a salient, exposed on two sides. You could never defend this ground against a serious attack.”