Cain at Gettysburg (57 page)

'Twas growing to be a hard day's work, if a sweet one.

The worthless buggers from the 72nd, good soldiers all, came on now, ranks in fair order, countercharging down toward the wall.

In a moment, the air went out of the Rebels in the killing field. They'd had enough. Weapons dropped, hands went up, and here and there a handkerchief waved at Nellie. Those who fought on were soon put paid and sent to visit their forefathers.

From up the line, where the volleys continued thick from the boys in blue, cheers went up and then a triumphant chant:

“Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!”

So quick it all was, in the end. An eternity of instants. A joy too fine for words—and then it was done.

“Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!”

Men cheered on every side.

A whore's miracle, several of the lads from Company F reappeared, as pleased as punch with themselves, leaping back from the other side of the wall.

When Gallagher got himself up, he registered all the confusions of a retreat, of failure, of humiliation, as the Johnnies with proper legs took themselves off, leaving back the sorriest. Between the wall and the line of the road, dozens and more of the Rebs raised their hands in surrender, or lay on the ground waving rags. Others, mean as landlords, kept firing back through the comrades who had forsaken them, determined to kill a last Union soldier or two.

“Get on with you, Johnny, get along now. Go on, the lot of you, that's the way.” It was Walsh's voice, lording it over a wonderful shame of captured Rebs.

Some of his own kind advanced beyond the wall, racing toward the road, with the doings-and-done a fire in them now, the scent of the hunt in their nostrils and blood in their hearts. Some fired into the backs of Rebs running away, while others contented themselves with claiming prisoners. The wise lads and the officers gathered flags.

“Sergeant Danny,” Walsh addressed him, standing there proud as a whore with a ring on her finger, “it's bleeding ye are, like the blind butcher's pig in the kitchen.”

But Gallagher knew he had no serious injuries. Nor pains that couldn't be mastered.

Off to the right, bits of skirmishing continued, and the sound of a squabble rose from the guns on the left. But here it was done.

The Rebel batteries tossed out some rounds to cover their retreating soldiers, and a bit more damage was tallied. But the thing was over. Naught but a memory now, as unforgettable as a man's first woman.

The officers, ever busy when all the work was done, cried out for the men to sort themselves out and rejoin their regiments.

“All in good time,” Gallagher told them all and none of them. For he had a last task to do to finish the victory.

He traced his way back through the maze of bodies, strewn and piled and twitching, with the wounded clawing the air and calling their mothers, until he found the officer he had shot. Gallagher didn't want him dying uninstructed.

Hardly more than a lad he was, with sweat-darkened tawny hair and wisps of beard. A captain, Gallagher decided, and never to be a major. The fellow wore a silk scarf around his neck, of the sort that must have been given him by a ladyfriend.

Gallagher knelt by the fellow's side and unknotted the scarf, drawing it away from the pulsing flesh.

“I suppose ye'd like some water, me lad,” he said.

The man's eyes blinked, but his body didn't move.

“Well,” Gallagher went on, “there's none to be had, not a drop. It's your ill luck.”

He wiped the blood from his face with the scarf, then thrust it under his blouse to sop up the gore where the blade had scraped his rib. Reassured that the slicing was nothing to interfere with business, he pawed through the wounded man's pockets and soon came up with the finest watch he had ever held in hand. And ticking it was, like an English heart at the sight of an Irishman's misery.

The gut-shot captain, who had suffered additional injuries in the tumult, struggled to raise a hand to stop Gallagher's theft. But he was too weak.

The captain was dying. But not yet. His eyes were alive and intelligent, his expression aware of his last bit of God-given life.

Gallagher scouted the captain's hands for rings, but found not one.

With a grin he summoned when beating men on the docks, Gallagher brought his mug close to the boy's fine features. Close enough to feel the lad's breath tickle his own whiskers, to smell its dry-mouthed staleness. The man's eyes flashed no more defiance, only a delicious dread.

Kissing close to the captain's ear, Daniel Gallagher whispered, “It's not just your watch I'm after taking, boyo. After this fine war's over, I plan to take meself south, if ye didn't know. And I'm going to fuck your sweetheart and your sisters. And when I've had me fill and grown tired of their weeping and begging for mercy, I'm going to pass the lot of them on to your niggers. You think about that now.”

Gallagher rose, a victor.

TWENTY-THREE

July 3, Afternoon

Brigadier General Dick Garnett had never wanted any of this to happen. As he waved his soldiers—his brave boys—onward toward the stone wall, hoping against collapsing odds that, somehow, the attack might be driven home, he felt their excitement multiplied within him, the peculiar human inability to stop when the stopping was good.

And now it was too late. Kemper was down, and he had last seen Armistead disappearing into the melee around the guns. The grand charge had become an affair of curses and screams, of rifled muskets swung as clubs, of heaved rocks and cracked skulls, of rage and numbers.

“Come on, boys! Come on! You're there, by God, you're there!”

He waved his hat at the sweat-streaked, battle-carved faces rushing past him. Their hides spit blood as they fell. Bullets wasped around him, too, biting into the horseflesh bearing his weight, and he knew it was only a matter of minutes until he joined the fallen. But he could not stop any more than those men could. His dizzies surged again, trying to unhorse him, but his sense of duty—what was life's purpose but duty?—glued him to the saddle amid the slaughter.

Garnett jerked his stallion about and rode back through the thinned-out mob in gray. The men had lost all military order, their brigades intermingled after that fateful left wheel and the shock of the flanking fire. Now they just plunged forward, leaderless, because going on was the one thing left to do.

“Over that wall, too!” he cried. “Git on, boys, git among 'em!” He waved his hat toward the scrambled blue line south of the copse. “Turn 'em, boys! Git around 'em! Cut 'em off!”

He had learned war—or thought he had—fighting the Seminoles and cornering Mormons, and in the minor Indian spats that briefly broke the boredom of Ft. Laramie. He had missed active service in Mexico, to his shame, but had done his best to comprehend its lessons. He had never imagined this, though: the magnitude, the bravery, the waste …

It was a bewildering thing, how a man could hope to win when he knew he couldn't. He rode amid his men and hoped. For their sake, if not his own. Striving with all the will remaining to him to crack that dark blue line, to force a miracle.

Yet, even now … here … in this final place, he sensed that all of it was a great wrong, that firebrands South and North had wrought this day from vainglory and spleen. It was not the end he had wanted for his service. But duty lay where the soldier found himself.

Garnett had been a Union man at heart, against secession. But when the parting of the people came, he felt compelled to go with his state, Virginia. So many years after leaving Rose Hill for West Point, his heart could not break its tether. He had murdered his ideals for blood and soil.

Now this: Smoke and madness. Raw screams far more blasphemous than curses. Southern voices, Irish voices, flat-voweled Yankees, shrieks past all allegiance. Rifles fired point-blank. His own revolver empty.

“Go on, go on!” he called to a wavering soldier. But the man only stood stock-still, planted in the middle of the battlefield, suddenly used up.

They were so few now, so few.

He strained to see through the haze. More Yankees coming up, entire tribes of them. Sweeping in, disorderly but enthused. Shouting unintelligible war cries.

So many, so many.

And so few with him now. He had expected to see supporting brigades appear through the earthbound clouds, to hear Rebel yells of reassurance nearing. But all he had was a bleeding horse, an empty revolver, and the remnants of three stricken brigades cast into this devil's cauldron, cheap as beans.

He could not bear to think it was all for nothing. Even now. Aware of the odds growing each moment more impossible, he could not give up. It could not be for nothing.…

Could it?

His horse was struck again, but would no more quit than Garnett would quit himself.

At his stirrup, the beard and jaw tore off a startled face. Blood splashed Garnett's boots. Aware and unaware, the shot man staggered on toward the Yankees.

Armistead had taken his boys over the stretch of wall left of the copse. Then Lo had disappeared into the tangle.

They had to punch through on the right of those trees as well. To have any hope of making the lodgment stick. They had to widen the break, to complete it, to outflank the battle-crazed men in blue—Irish as porridge and poteen, by the looks of them.

“Come
on,
lads!”

So close.

But as his men approached the wall, fresh-laid rifles knocked them down by the dozen. Union cannon began to bark again.

Where in the devil was Pickett? Where were the supports? They were so close.…

Broken-hearted and raging, dizzy and shamed, Garnett steered his horse directly for the wall. He waved his hat at his soldiers one last time.

*   *   *

The long line staggered. More shells struck. Reduced to bags of blood, men splashed their comrades. The flag of the 26th went down, but fresh hands took it up. Exploded dirt hit Blake in the face like buckshot.

“Dress your ranks!” Knock Jones called from their rear, while other voices cried, “Guide right, guide to the right!”

The men recovered from the first shock of the perfectly ranged Yankee guns, correcting their buckled line as they surged ahead, passing the hot ruins of the farmstead on their left and quick-marching down an incline toward a ditch that jagged across the fields.

A round of solid shot tore a bloody trail through the ranks to Blake's left.

“Get across that damn thing, get across any old way.”

The ditch contained no more than a hint of wetness, but lay just deep and wide enough to trouble them. The line bristled in both directions as some men leapt the obstacle or clambered down into it, while others hesitated, hunting urgently for a better spot to jump or stepping back to get a running start.

Blake leapt. A small man, Cobb had to fuss his way down into the trough and back up again. Charley Campbell paused, then mimicked Cobb. Blake reached down to give him a hand up.

A shell-burst tumbled him into the ditch. He just missed Charley's bayonet. After the shock, they sorted out arms and limbs, their rifles and fallen caps. Blake wore blood now, but nothing much seemed awry. Charley got up cursing.

Beyond the ditch, the line paused to re-form, punished all the while by the Yankee batteries. The hill that held the deadliest guns grew cotton bolls of smoke. As the soldiers of the 26th marched forward again, the distant goal of their charge grew indistinct. Hiding from them. Or hiding a surprise.

“Guide to the right, guide right!” a young voice called again. That damned gap yonder. Between them and whoever was on their flank.

Angry now, they knocked down another fence, leaving a trail of their dead and dying behind them.

A wheatfield stretched ahead—infinitely, terrifyingly wide—and ended at stout fencing that marked a road. Beyond, obscured by smoke, their enemies waited.

Crowding away from the deadly flank and the batteries on the hill, soldiers bunched together, offering denser targets to Yankee gunners. As officers struggled to keep control, the ranks drifted rightward toward the Yankee center. As if there were in fact a guiding hand—perhaps that of a God overcome with pity—the brigades advancing to their right made an abrupt leftward wheel. The movement was huge and clumsy, but angled their thousands toward a meeting point with Pettigrew's men, just where the Union line stuck out its jaw.

They would hit the Yankees together, after all.

Stride by stride, the line of the 26th formed a shallow wedge. A shell exploded at the toes of soldiers who had strutted beyond the flag, tossing them into the air. One man did a perfect skyward somersault, dying a clown's death. A second explosion followed, fired by the second gun of a section, and butchered the men who had rushed to close the gap.

Still others came forward, lest the Yankees think them weak. Pride trumped life. Dry-throated men howled a painful cheer. But its force was less than it would have been minutes before.

The fence. Just get to that damned fence, Blake told himself. Eat the bear one little bite at a time. Cobb and Charley Campbell were still with him, and the new lieutenant more or less kept up. The boy looked determined and terrified.

The Yankee fire grew still more intense, more accurate, despite the wreath of smoke around their batteries.

Hard to miss, Blake figured. What the hell had all that noise been about in the hour before, if the cannonade had not even dented the might of the Yankee guns?

Cries of agony trailed them through the wheat.

Crossing that field took hours, days, weeks, months. Blake felt the urge to run forward, to get somewhere, anywhere. But he stayed in the rank to which he had committed himself.

“Close up!”

Blake did not know the brittle-as-flint voice. Looking around to put a name to it, he saw the flash of a shell-burst and Colonel Marshall tumbling from his horse.