Cain at Gettysburg (48 page)

“He's put a terrible burden on me.”

Wright spit dry-mouthed again, a man with a chewing habit who lacked tobacco. “Truth is, your guns won't decide this. Oh, they'll help. Wouldn't want to go in without 'em, if I was part of this grand and glorious circus. But today's going to be about numbers, about who's willing to throw in the most and take the hardest hammering.” He shook his head, entertained by the ways of the world. “Anyway, there won't be any holding back Georgie Pickett. We're past that point. Ain't a man in this army could do it, short of Marse Robert himself. You'll be lucky if Pickett waits until you call for him.”

Alexander didn't answer. He was listening and not listening. Thinking about how best to advance his guns during the charge, about the commitment of the small reserve he'd withheld, about his ammunition stocks, ranges, and trajectories.

“Tell you the same damned thing I just told Pickett,” Wright went on. “It's mostly a question of supports. It's not as hard to get up there as it looks. I was there yesterday, with my brigade. The real difficulty is to stay there after you get there. Whole Yankee army's up there in a bunch. If Lee himself hasn't seen to proper supports, we'll be crying in our whiskers come this evening.”

A cannon boomed on the right. Alexander quickened. The signal? When Longstreet was ready, the Washington Artillery would fire off two rounds.

There was no second shot.

*   *   *

Their meal was hard biscuit and bacon grease, mean fare in the heat. Blake had wanted to send his men's canteens back to the creek again, but the new lieutenant with whom they had been graced worried that they'd be called to form in the meantime. That wasn't the boy's only worry. He'd gone over the ridge with the other officers to have a look at the ground where they'd make their attack. The boy had come back speechless.

Blake understood. Since moving up near the line the evening before, he and plenty of other men had wandered over to survey the battlefield, so they knew the immensity of the fields they were now expected to cross. A few men were all for it, but most were just resigned, scratching out last letters home or cleaning their rifles.

There were so blessed few of them now, only a few hundred still on their feet from a regiment that had begun the battle with more than eight hundred men. All of them would fight, out of the blind obligation that passed for a sense of duty, out of suicidal pride and orneriness. But few looked forward to it.

Cobb had pared him like an apple, skinning him down to the raw, the night before. Everything that Cobb had said about him had been as true as it was difficult to shoulder. He had been the most ungrateful of men, making the least of the gifts he had been given. As strong as he was in body, so weak had he been in spirit. Surrendering his soul to a fickle girl and a drunken father's memory. When all the world had been given him, he had closed his eyes and wickedly clenched his fists.

He thought of John Bunyan with his brains blown out. And Corny with his private parts shot through, waking from sleep to screaming pain. Then bleeding to death. Pike Gray and Jack Ireton, Art Peachum and Ollie Wright. James Bunyan and Tam McMinn. Hugh Gordon waiting to live or die at a field surgery. All of them, all of them …

Death. Where is thy sting?

Everywhere.

And he had thrown away the gift of life.

Tapping his empty canteen, Charley Campbell said, “I hear a feller just died of the heat. In Company C.”

“Probably fainted,” Cobb said, “when he heard we were going to charge over that prairie.”

“No,” Charley said, “he died. God's truth.”

Cobb managed to grin, black-mouthed, and snarl at the same time. “‘God's truth'? I'd call that another matter entirely. But sticking to the business here at hand, I'd say a feller goes down with the heatstroke, he might be the lucky one. Better'n having your balls shot off while you're sleeping. Or lying out in them fields, bleeding in the sun.”

“Why you always got to be pestimistic?” Charley asked.

Blake opened his mouth to correct the word, then thought better of it. “Pestimistic” suited Cobb. Like a hand-sewn set of drawers.

“Look on the dark side, you get a nice surprise every so often,” Cobb explained. “Look on the bright side, you're apt to be disappointed.”

“That ain't no way to live,” Charley muttered.

Cobb grinned again, delighted. “Won't be too long and many a wondrous hero of the Twenty-sixth North Carolina—which covered itself in glory, if you ain't heard—well, he won't have to worry about how to live no more. Deliverance courtesy of His Majesty, Jefferson Davis, and the Confederate States of America. Just toss that heroic sack of meat in the pit and throw on the dirt.
Hallelujah! Amen!
”

“Billie, you sonofabitch,” Charley said, “you'll probably be the one who walks away without a scratch. I swear there ain't no justice in the world.”

“No, there ain't. Been saying that all the while, but nobody listens. Blowing my horn like the Angel Gabriel, and all you're worried about is your share of the drippings.”

The lieutenant strutted up, a determined child. Blake stood. The others didn't. No one saluted.

Standing stiff as a board, the boy looked them over. “I thought you men should know that an order's been given to shoot any man who malingers or tries to run.”

“That's nice,” Cobb said. “Officers included? You were back in the rear the day before yesterday, ain't that right?”

The lieutenant reddened. “I was detailed to guard the trains.”

“These men won't run,” Blake told him. “I can vouch for them.”

“They're insubordinate, Sergeant. Especially that one.” He pointed at Cobb, who showed him his black teeth. Repulsed, the boy turned on Blake. “If you want to keep those stripes, I'll expect appropriate discipline in the future.”

Little Cobb rose off his haunches and tugged up his filthy trousers. “You shit yourself already, son? Or you holding it in to dump one on the Yankees? Up real close, like?”

“I'll bring you up on charges!”
the lieutenant cried. He sounded as if he were about to weep.

Cobb laughed.

NINETEEN

July 3, Noon

Brigadier General Henry Jackson Hunt loved the army. He believed in the Union's practical advantages, but despised his government's nagging corruption. The army, not the pork barrel, was his passion, an obsession nurtured quietly behind a disciplined front. When he had been orphaned at the age of ten, army associates of his father and grandfather ensured he was never homeless. It was thanks to those loyal men, as well, that he and his younger brother got to West Point. Thereafter, the army had been his home and the artillery his calling, with room in his life for precious little else.

The practice of artillery was a beautiful thing to Hunt, with its combination of science and honed instinct, of art and mechanical skill. It set the purity of mathematics and the laws of ballistics against barometric pressure and the wind, against the countless tricks of the earth's relief—and, not least, human foibles. In Mexico, he had received brevet promotions, first to captain, then to major, for his valor from Contreras to Chapultepec, but he was prouder still of his work on the army manual
Instructions for Field Artillery
. Hunt believed that any soldier could stand in the line of fire, but more of them needed to think.

If there was any resentment in Henry Hunt, it was that the men who served his guns never got due credit for their work. When glory was apportioned, the artillery would receive, at most, a nod. Promotions stagnated, while infantry officers and cavalrymen leapt upward. But Hunt knew what his men did. Yesterday, they had held a line the infantry could not hold, long enough to save the entire flank. If there had been a hero of that shambles, it had been McGilvery of the artillery reserve. But Hunt had lived long enough to know that the lieutenant colonel's name would not be crowned with laurels.

Now Henry Hunt reined in his horse on the blasted forward slope of Little Round Top, beside the battery Rittenhouse had inherited from the fallen, valiant Hazlett. The position was spectacular for gunnery. Hunt regretted that the ground would not admit more cannon. Rittenhouse's rifled ten-pounders could range nearly every target on the field.

Hunt gazed past the shot-up groves to the quieted fields beyond, envisioning what must come: long ranks of Confederate infantry, determined to cross that expanse and steal a victory. Hunt agreed with Meade that the attack would strike the center, hitting the long ridge that declined from the cemetery. He found it hard to believe that some of his fellow generals—not least, Hancock—remained unsure of what the Rebels would do. Hunt knew: An old artillery hand saw the terrain and its hidden laws more sharply than others did. And the logic of this battlefield was inexorable: Lee would come at the center.

He had spent the morning watching the proof develop. The Confederates had been shifting guns all morning, amassing an impressive concentration directed unmistakably at the ridge. The odd shots that had pocked the calm were obvious ranging efforts. Yet, Hancock had argued with him that, while an attack
might
be in the offing, an artillery barrage could also provide cover for Lee's withdrawal. That was nonsense. Lee wouldn't have enough ammunition left to waste on a deception. And the Army of Northern Virginia still had fight in it. Lee had come close to a win the evening before. He wouldn't quit now. The artillery bombardment, when it came, would play for all or nothing.

Without resort to his field glasses, Hunt could see the distant ranks of cannon in front of the treeline, from the high ground by Sickles' damned orchard to the southern edge of the town. Lee was massing everything he could.

Hunt was ready. Meade had left him a free hand to direct the army's guns, and he'd made the most of it. Rittenhouse's lone battery on the heights was only a tiny part of his scheme of fires. Hunt was determined to devastate the advancing Confederate infantry so severely that few, if any, would reach the Union lines. Let other men claim the glory if they craved it, the third day of this battle would hinge on gunnery.

Before riding back down the hill to begin his third inspection of the day, Hunt turned to Lieutenant Rittenhouse.

“No nonsense,” Hunt said. “Every shot to be aimed, and delayed if the target's obscured. One round per minute, no more. No squandering ammunition. Ignore the rate of fire of the enemy. Excitement is no substitute for effectiveness.”

A gleaming boy, the inheritor of Battery D, Fifth U.S. Artillery, nodded earnestly. He saluted sharply as Hunt turned his horse to lead off his detachment of staff men and couriers.

Discipline was everything. Or damned near it. If he could prevent the gun crews from firing madly into the smoke, they'd have rounds in plenty to meet the Confederate infantry—while leaving enough reserve stocks to carry on. For all of gunnery's geometry and formulae, the ultimate calculation wasn't hard: You needed more ammunition than your enemy when the crisis came, and you didn't achieve that superiority by creating thunderous shows that accomplished nothing. Fools measured success by rates of fire—which only mattered for canister and close combat. Accuracy and discipline were the keys.

Convinced by long experience that anything neglected would go wrong, Hunt headed down to the low ground and the great surprise he had got up for Lee. He let his horse go easy and a few members of his retinue edged ahead of him. Their horseshoes sparked off the rocks of the forlorn hillside. Only when they reached a farm lane did Hunt spur his mount to a trot.

McGilvery occupied the bottomland that Sickles had so detested. His concealed gun line stretched from the sunken meadows where the evening's attacks had withered, to the flank of the corps defending the Union center. As Hunt led the way past cannon after cannon, he was pleased to see their crews had filled again. Infantry volunteers replaced yesterday's casualties, some of them men who imagined they'd have an easier time with the guns than in their old ranks. They had no idea of what was waiting for them.

Absorbing bad habits as well as good from the veterans, many a man had stripped to the waist to stoke the guns in the furnace of the day. A believer in a soldierly appearance, Hunt let the violations pass this time: The heat was heavy and worsening, and all that mattered now was the work ahead.

He found McGilvery at the foot of the ridge inspecting a field piece.

“Well, Freeman?”

Face smeared with yesterday's powder, the lieutenant colonel smiled. “It's the most beautiful site for guns I've ever seen.”

Hunt thought so, too, but declined to be effusive. It was no time for overconfidence. The position was superb, though, although it took a seasoned gunner to see it. Few of McGilvery's thirty-nine pieces were visible to the Confederates. Neither could his men see the Rebel gun line, but that didn't matter. The purpose of these batteries wasn't to duel tit for tat with Lee's artillery, but to sweep the attacking infantry from the flank, and neither the Lord nor the devil could have better shaped the ground to such a purpose. The batteries sat on a rising lip in the trough Sickles had abandoned. As soon as the Rebel infantry passed the middle of those fields—focused straight ahead and unsuspecting—they'd be exposed to McGilvery's raking fires. The effect would be shattering.

Hunt spared McGilvery one of his lectures. The fellow knew his trade. Nodding his approval, Hunt trotted on up the long ridge to the batteries in the center, the guns that would bear the brunt of the Rebel barrage and had to hold on to send canister into any attackers who made it through his crossfire. Not all of these exposed guns or their crews would survive, and he had positioned reserve batteries to their rear, their number another cold-blooded calculation.