Cain at Gettysburg (36 page)

Longstreet didn't like the look of it. If all was in order, Fairfax wouldn't whip his horse like that: He was a gentle man with animals.

The Virginia grandee didn't leave the saddle, but rode right up to Longstreet, pausing only to glance upward as a shell on a low trajectory screamed past.

“Sir, General Hood asks that he be allowed to march on the enemy's rear. He's had scouts out and there's nobody on those two hills. Nothing behind them, either. He believes he could sweep right over them.”

Longstreet felt a brief rush of enthusiasm. It was what he had wanted to do all along. But that feeling collapsed promptly into anger. At Hood, at Lee, at himself.

It was too late.
He couldn't let a lone division peel off by itself. It was just too goddamned late. The battle was on and the afternoon was dying. It was too late for anything but a mutual pounding.

“Goddamn it, John. You ride back and tell Hood I said he's to attack immediately. And to go in the way he's been told. No more delays. I want to see his lead brigades crossing those fields before you can ride back here.
Go!
”

But Fairfax wasn't gone five minutes before Major Sellers of Hood's staff galloped up, interrupting Longstreet and Sorrel.

“General Hood's compliments, sir. He asks your permission to move by the right flank, to envelop that knob hill.”

Longstreet liked Sellers. He understood that Hood had selected the man as an emissary because of it.

He fought down the worst of his anger again. “You go back and tell General Hood he is to attack according to my instructions.
Now.
No more delays. He must attack
now
. Tell him Major Fairfax speaks with my own voice.”

It was all turning into a farce, a series of witless pranks worthy of a minstrel show. McLaws wanted to attack, but had to wait. Longstreet wanted Hood to attack, but the Kentuckian, who had never shied from a fight, resisted his orders. Sellers had barely disappeared when Longstreet decided he had had enough. He strode over to McLaws, drawing him aside again.

“I'm riding down to see Hood. Do nothing until I return.”

He turned his back.

Calling for his horse, Longstreet felt more than half a fool. This pot of confusion was his responsibility. He had never before experienced such a devil's dance of ill luck, misunderstandings, and pigheadedness. Battle was always a welter of confusion, but this took the prize. The attack should have gone in hours before, they should already be inside the Union lines, rounding up the remnants of broken brigades and shattered divisions. Yet, not one regiment in gray had advanced beyond the gun line.

He rode hard, spurring and lashing his horse until it whinnied in terror. Daring it to stumble, to throw him hard and put the load on other shoulders.

It had come to that.

Passing Fairfax on the major's return ride, Longstreet just struck his horse harder. Soldiers bearing armloads of canteens leapt from his path.

When he found Hood, the Kentuckian's forward brigades were finally stepping out to the attack. That was something, at least. Longstreet calmed down to a frozen rage.

Spying him, Hood hurried over. His eyes lacked their usual steel.

“General Longstreet … call off this attack, I beg you. Let me go around them.”

“You have your orders, General. See to your advance.”

“We're throwing men away.”

Longstreet refused to hear another word. “We must obey the orders of General Lee. All depends on you now.”

But something had broken inside of Hood. Longstreet could feel it. He'd lost the goodwill of McLaws. Would Hood turn from him, too? Command was not the Sunday treat the stay-at-homes imagined.

Hood saluted and rode off to lead his soldiers.

Longstreet sat in the shade on his heaving mount, watching Hood's forward line advance into a cauldron of smoke and sunlight. His own batteries fell silent as the infantry swept past them. The gun-thunder from the Union lines intensified.

“Go now,” he told the gray ranks, “and God go with you.”

FOURTEEN

July 2, Late Afternoon

Meade would have liked to slash Sickles from his horse. Instead, he mastered his temper yet again and spoke with as much control as he could muster.

“General, I'm afraid you're too far out. You've compromised the army's position.” He surveyed the indefensible salient again, the peach orchard before them and the declining fields beyond. Shots from skirmishers prickled the air. “If Lee attacks from both sides, you'll lose your guns. If not your corps.”

Fear marred Sickles' eyes now. He knew that he had erred. But the man still possessed sufficient bravado to trivialize his blunder.

“This is higher ground. The lines of fire are better. I needed elevation. This seemed better than the low ground I was in.”

The horse Meade rode pranced nervously. Old Baldy had been unsaddled for a rest when word of Sickles' unauthorized movement arrived. Meade had accepted the loan of his cavalry chief's mount, but Pleasanton's horse was odd to the bit and obstreperous.

Meade's temper swelled back toward its breaking point. “
General
Sickles … this is, indeed, higher ground than the position you left to your rear. And there's even higher ground in front of you, if you want to keep going. If you'd like to advance right past the Confederate lines, you'll find constantly higher ground all the way to the mountains.”

His voice, if not his logic, abashed Sickles.

In a subdued tone, the Third Corps commander said, “I can withdraw.”

“You'll have to do it damned quick,” Meade told him.

But as he spoke, the Confederate guns opened, condemning them all to defend the ground they occupied. Short or long, rounds sought the range of the peach orchard, the apex of the position Sickles had chosen. The gun-by-gun battery firing quickly became a steady roar. Pierced by muzzle flashes, smoke fumed and thickened where Lee's infantry lurked.

Sickles' forward cannon replied, booming and recoiling. Stripped of their jackets and even their shirts, artillerymen leapt to swab and feed their guns.

Raising his voice to be heard, Meade said, “I wish to God you
could
withdraw, but it's too damned late for that now.” He shook his head in disgust. “The enemy will not permit it. You'll have to fight.”

“I just wanted higher ground,” Sickles repeated. His face had gone as pale as a man struck by the first pangs of cholera. “I didn't want the Rebels to have this position.”

“Damn it, Sickles … this is
neutral
ground,” Meade shouted. “Don't you understand that?” Artillery shells plowed the fields behind their escorts. Meade's horse rebelled again and had to be reined in tightly. “You can't hold it, and neither can the enemy.”

Meade's fury assailed himself above all others. To be beaten by Robert E. Lee would be a terrible thing, but to be defeated by Dan Sickles was abhorrent.

The entire affair was grotesque. Upon receiving word that Sickles had advanced his line without authorization, Meade had summoned the straying commander to headquarters. Twice called, Sickles sent excuses for not appearing, responding only to a third, peremptory order. Then he had galloped up with a swollen entourage—just as heavy skirmishing erupted back on his lines. Meade had been forced to send him back to his compromised troops immediately.

Now the army's scheme of defense was in jeopardy, all the careful planning squandered by one fool politician in uniform who had advanced an entire corps to the most amateurishly chosen position Meade could recall or conjure. All of Meade's faith in an engineer's precise approach to the battlefield seemed laughable now. And bitter.

It galled him to think how much more smoothly things must be going for Lee, who appeared to have granted himself the time for careful preparations, whose subordinates never displayed such bald incompetence. Sickles had advanced into a trap of his own devising, and Lee would not let such an opening pass.

Meade was forced to take Lee's blows where Sickles had tugged the army. The fool had to be supported, or else his corps would be butchered on the cheap. And the roar of the artillery duel suggested that Lee's main attack would come on the left, after all, worsening an awful situation. Even now, though, Meade needed to make certain that this great ruckus was not a mere diversion, that Lee's hardest blow would not hit the Union right and the Baltimore Pike in the end.

It was a devil of a fix.

Struggling with his mount, Meade shouted to Sickles: “You'll need more artillery. Call on the reserve, on Hunt. And God help you.”

Sickles began to reply, but the nearby detonation of a shell sent Meade's horse into a panic. The creature careened from the orchard, with its rider fighting to steer it away from the Confederates. The horse bucked and rose, attempting to cast the unfamiliar master from its back. It required Meade's last ounce of horsemanship just to remain in the saddle.

Flanked by artillery bursts, aides and staff men galloped after him, but could not close upon the maddened horse. Meade feared a stumble that would throw him hard, a humiliating way to end his command.

At last, he succeeded in turning the mount toward the Third Corps' rear. He loosened the reins and let the creature run out its vigor and dread.

It was what the animal needed.

As Meade drew up by a barn buttressed with stones, the better horsemen from headquarters swarmed around him.

“George,” Meade called to his son, “get Old Baldy, damn it. And tell Pleasanton to send an orderly to fetch this worthless beast before I shoot it. Where's Hunt?”

“He went to call up more batteries, sir.”

“Good.” Meade stroked the horse, trying to still it completely. Hot horseflesh quivered wet under his hand. He would have preferred to punish the animal, to hurt it. As he would have loved to punish Daniel Sickles. But Meade was learning to do a great many distasteful things out of necessity.

He turned to a courier. “Find General Sykes. Tell him the Fifth Corps
must
come up on the left, he's to move each brigade the instant it's ready to march.”

The captain saluted and spurred his horse, launching clods of barnyard waste behind him. Meade shielded his face and switched his attention to another aide. “Go to the Sixth Corps headquarters. Find out which units are already on the field. Tell General Sedgwick to be prepared to move to the left, on order. Report back here as fast as you can ride.”

As the second officer galloped toward the rear, an approaching rider in blue lashed his horse like a desperate jockey. Meade recognized one of Warren's men, a youthful engineer.

The boy pulled up sharply, gasping, and saluted. “General Warren's compliments, sir. The small round hill is unoccupied. Except for the signalers, there isn't a man on it. And the Rebels are on the move, you can see them from up there, they're coming on. It looks like they're aiming right toward those hills. General Warren believes it'll take a division to hold the high ground.”

Meade didn't have a division. He didn't even have a spare brigade on hand, not one available regiment. Not yet. Reinforcements soon would be on the way. But “soon” was not “now.”

The near fields and groves were bare of Union troops, save the usual stragglers where Birney's division had passed, marching to their fate on Sickles' order. On the right, in the middle distance, Humphreys' men went forward handsomely, faces to the late-afternoon sun, heading toward the Emmitsburg road to spread across the vast gap Sickles had opened.

“Major Ludlow,” Meade called to a trusted staff man, “ride over to General Humphreys. He's to wheel his division to the left rear immediately and move double-quick to occupy that first hill.”

“The local people call it ‘Little Round Top,'” Warren's man put in.

“I don't care what it's called,” Meade snapped. “I just don't want to lose it.”

Ludlow turned his horse to his task even as he threw Meade a salute.

One risk weighed against the other now. The great gap in the line on Sickles' right was an urgent matter. But the menace to the hill was even graver. He was robbing Peter to pay Paul, unsure if all of his actions were in vain.

The artillery bombardment had grown more intense. It could only mean that the Rebels had brought up more guns. Probably upon realizing how vulnerable Sickles was. How many pieces did Lee have available? Enough to deliver an equal cannonade on the Union right? Or
was
this the main attack?

Soon the troops in gray and brown would emerge from the far trees. And he would have to place his bet. Indecision was an enemy, too.

Meade's craving for sleep had faded to the feel of a mild hangover. The pulse of battle quickened all his nerves and sharpened his senses. He did a mental count of the units he might draw from other corps to deepen his left, calculating how long it should take each to march up and go in.

Hunt rode up. The chief of artillery was alone. Meade understood. Hunt had already dispatched the last member of his field staff to get the reserve guns moving. For an instant, Meade imagined that he heard batteries racing forward, but knew that bordered on a hallucination. The guns could not come up so quickly. Not even guns that Henry Hunt had positioned.

It was going to be an evening of sweating through each minute.

“Henry…,” Meade called, “can you save that damned fool Sickles?”

Hunt shook his head. “I've got plenty of guns on the way. But they can't hold without infantry.”

“How much time can you give me?”

Hunt considered the question for a few seconds. “An hour. At most. Probably less. Depending on how Lee comes on.”

An errant shell furrowed the dirt in a field between the farmstead and Sickles' threatened orchard.