Deserter Page 2

  “I can’t see the pair of us in a mercantile selling ribbons to women and cut plug to cowhands,” Jake said. “I like your idea about a ranch, though. I like it a lot. Flat racing is big in the West. I know some about breeding and we might could raise some good horses, make a nice living with them.”

  “Maybe so.” Uriah nodded. “Maybe we could just do that. Be a good life.”

  “That’s assuming we both make it out of—” Jake began.

  “Whoa, now!” Uriah interrupted. “They ain’t made the Yankee bullet that’ll end either one of us, Jake. I know this for sure. Some things a man just knows—and that’s one of them.”

  Sinclair had no response to that, and Uriah knew that he wouldn’t. The two men continued on to the encampment.

  Rumors—Lincoln is dead, Lee is dead, a wagonful of whores is on its way, the war is over—ran about in army camps like a plague, leaving no man untouched, whether he believed what he heard or not. The predominant topic—the one that caused battle-jaded eyes to widen and hands reaching for pieces of fried chicken to tremble—was the story of General Lee’s plan for the next day.

  “We’ll soften them up with artillery till they’re staggering, an’ then we’ll go right on up the chute—it ain’t but a mile, give or take—an’ we’ll shoot their asses off when we’re over that Cemetery Ridge,” a new sergeant told his men, pacing back and forth in front of where they sat and sprawled on the ground.

  “Ain’t but a mile, give or take,” a grizzled and bearded soldier with a soiled, bloody bandage wrapped around his right wrist mocked. “Shit! Might as well be a hundred miles! There won’t be a man left standing to engage the Yanks on the ridge.”

  “But the artillery—there’ll be a barrage like no other before that’ll—”

  “It’s gonna be a damn slaughterhouse, nothin’ less an’ nothin’ more,” the private argued. “I won’t believe none of this till I hear it right from Bobby Lee’s own mouth—an’ even then I’d tell him he’s pure crazy.”

  “Lookit here,” the sergeant said. “Lemme say something. Tell me if it’s not true that General Lee always done right by us, by the Confederacy. We’re goin’ through the Yankees like shit through a Christmas goose this campaign, ain’t we? Answer me that. Go ahead an’ tell me we ain’t—if you can say it without God striking you dead for lyin’.” He glared into the group, knowing there could be no valid response that proved other than what he’d just stated. The grumbles, low, quick, anonymous, “. . . stupidest plan I ever heard,” “. . . impossible,” “. . . pure craziness,” died out.

  “It ain’t our place to question orders,” the sergeant said, pacing again. “General Lee tells us to march on an’ take Cemetery Ridge, and that’s what we’ll do.”

  “Or get our heads blowed off,” someone mumbled, “followin’ a damn fool half-crazy order.”

  Jake Sinclair ran a cleaning rod with an oiled cotton patch at its end through the barrel of his Sharps, inspecting the residue it removed in the flickering light of the cook fire. “It’s another rumor.” He grinned. “I’d as soon believe Abe Lincoln’s going to join up with us tomorrow.”

  “Jake’s right,” Uriah agreed. “All you boys seen that field, that slope up to the ridge.”

  The dozen or so men around the fire, some still eating, some smoking pipes or building cigarettes, a few sucking at a canteen of whiskey that was being passed around surreptitiously, watched as Jake set his rifle aside and smoothed a square of dirt in front of the fire. Using a pebble he scribed a shaky line at the top of the area and another at the bottom. “Here’s Seminary Ridge,” he said, pointing at the lower line. “Right behind it is where we are right now.” He pointed to the top line. “Here’s Cemetery Ridge.” He swept his hand across the space between the two lines. “This is about a mile. It’s wide open—no cover of any kind once Seminary Ridge is left behind. The Yanks”—he pointed again to the top line—“have perfect cover—the ridge itself—and their artillery has a clear and open field of fire. If we got into musket or rifle range, the Yanks would make mincemeat out of us. And look: Even if our artillery is placed here”—he punched a couple dozen holes at the sides of the cleared area and several more in front of the bottom line—“dropping canisters or balls over the ridge and onto the troops would be a problem. Plus, it’s an uphill run all the way from where we are, which would slow us down, make us easier, better targets, tire us out quicker.” He looked around. “Anybody here fancy joggin’ a mile uphill in the kind of heat we’ve had, through cannon and rifle fire, to a perfectly protected ridge with maybe twenty thousand Yankees behind it?” He sat back. “I sure as hell don’t. And neither does General Pickett. He’s not crazy. He wouldn’t do something like that—wouldn’t even think about it. He’s too good of a soldier. Like I said, the whole silly thing’s only another rumor.”

  “Damn it, Jake, it isn’t either!” One of the men stood and faced Jake. “My cousin Horace, he was right there when Longstreet was tryin’ to talk General Lee out of his plan. Horace even wrote down what Longstreet said.” He crouched close to the fire, its light illuminating the half page of paper he held. “Here’s what Longstreet told General Lee—listen up, now: ‘It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.’ ” He carefully folded the paper and put it back into his shirt pocket. “Horace,” he added, “is a churchgoin’man. He wouldn’t lie. He said Longstreet had tears runnin’ down his face when he rode away from General Lee.”

  Jake looked down at his diagram in the dirt. “I’m not calling your cousin a liar,” he said. “But I’d be willing to bet that he misunderstood what it was he heard. A man would have to have no more sense than a chicken to go into a battle like that.”

  “You talkin’ desertion, Jake? Disobeyin’ a direct order?” a voice asked.

  “No. I’m not. What I’m saying is that I don’t believe Lee would concoct such a shit-for-brains battle plan, and I’m no big supporter of Lee. You boys know that.”

  “It’s true, men,” Lieutenant Xavier Lewis said, stepping from the darkness up close to the fire. “General Pickett will lead a major attack on the Union troops at Cemetery Ridge tomorrow afternoon. It’s a well thought out plan that has the backing of General Lee and all of his officers. Our artillery will pound the Yankees as long as it takes to weaken them, and then our ground forces will sweep over them like a new broom. We will be successful. We will devastate the Army of the Potomac in their own backyard.” He emphasized the word “will” in both sentences.

  Much the same words, delivered in much the same fashion, were being spoken by officers to men throughout the encampment. Here and there a ragged cheer erupted, but for the most part, the news was greeted with silence. Many Catholic soldiers made the sign of the cross; those of other denominations bowed their heads. Some men sat as if dazed, staring at nothing, picturing the impossibly long grassy slope that ran uphill to the crest of Cemetery Ridge.

  Jake and Uriah stopped to allow a wagon loaded with cases of ammunition and kegs of gunpowder to pass in front of them. Sitting at the fire had become like being caged. Even aimless walking seemed better, if for no other reason than to escape the comments and projections of their fellow troops. The arguments were hot and strident and more than a few ended in fistfights. Those who were convinced that the charge would crush the Yankees punched, bit, and kicked those who were certain that they’d be dead within twenty-four hours—and were in turn battered and beaten by soldiers who saw the operation as a hideous and bloody mistake. The fights were short-lived. The men, ultimately, seemed to realize that they were comrades—and that they’d need one another the next day.

  Men drifted away from groups and huddled near campfires or lanterns, scratching out letters to mothers, fathers, and sweethearts. Some knelt, unashamed, heads bowed, lips moving silently in prayer. Others sought the casks of whiskey they’d hidden in the woods, filling their canteens with Pennsylvania’s finest, swilling it until they vomited or, preferab
ly, passed out to a dreamless sleep that carried them at least until morning, far from Cemetery Ridge.

  “Damn. Lookit that,” Uriah said, nodding toward a wagon creaking by, heading toward the rear lines of the camp. It was pulled by two stout horses, the coats of which gleamed with frothy sweat. The gaits of both animals were unsure, toes of their steel shoes dragging the ground from exhaustion. The driver, in a business suit and wearing leather gloves to handle the reins, looked straight ahead, ignoring the ripple of disgust—of fear—he and his wagon raised in the troops he passed. The wooden sign affixed to the sides of the wagon read:

  EMBALMING & SHIPPING

  FAST—ECONOMICAL—SANITARY—ODORLESS

  MENDON H. DURFEE, MD

  FAIR RATES

  “Sons-a-bitches are like flies buzzin’ around a dead dog,” Toole said. “You’d think the army would chase them the hell away.”

  “Might be they do some good,” Sinclair said. “I talked to one once, early on after I joined up. What they do is have a big stock of cheap coffins at the nearest railroad depot and haul the corpses they embalm to the coffins and send the dead away to their homes so their families have something to bury.”

  “Makes me queasy an’ scared, Jake. Like I seen a ghost or somethin’.”

  They walked on, watching the back of the embalmer’s wagon until it turned off into the deeper woods, the yellowish light from the two lanterns mounted above the driver barely piercing the darkness. “I s’pose he’ll do some business tomorrow,” Uriah said.

  “I suppose he will.”

  “Gonna be bad, ain’t it, Jake?”

  “Yeah. It’s gonna be bad.”

  It was as if Toole had to force out his next words. “You ever think of skeedaddlin’, Jake? Sayin’ the hell with it an’ grabbin a horse an’ lightin’ out? Goin’ home or wherever?”

  “Think about it? Sure,” Jake answered. “Just like you have, partner, and like all the men in the whole damned army, and in the whole Union army, too. Some—maybe many—have done it. Hell, after a big battle so many men are killed and ripped up that it’s impossible to tell who is who. All a man has to do is leave something with his name on it on a body that can’t be identified and he’s all set. He just chooses a new name and goes off to wherever he decides to go.”

  “Well. But he can’t go home an’ he can’t claim what was his before the war. When folks see a deserter comin’back they know he’s yellow and that he run off. It’s like slappin’ President Davis’s face. Folks liable to lynch him.”

  “There are lots of places to go, a whole lot of land out there. I’ve heard a man out West doesn’t need a last name and doesn’t need a history.” Sinclair hesitated. “Thing is, I—we—signed on to defend a way of life we believe in. Neither one of us can walk away from that.” He shook his head slightly, negatively. “Nobody said anything about following orders that’re so stupid that a man’s pretty much guaranteed not to walk away from a battle, though.”

  “Seems like you’re saying two things at once, Jake.”

  Sinclair sighed. “Maybe I am.”

  The night of July 2 and into July 3 passed slowly for the Confederates who sat awake and too quickly for those who slept. A selfish breeze that began an hour before dawn and lasted barely an hour did little beyond disturbing the white ash of dead cook fires, not cooling the men or horses in the least. The heat, even in predawn, was a malignant force, a weighty blanket of stifling, humid air that turned breathing into labor and drew sweat from every pore. Flies plagued the horses and descended in clouds on the latrine ditches. Cooks, dizzy from the combined heat of their fires and the ambient temperature, drew from their rapidly diminishing supplies of biscuits, hardtack, and coffee, cursing at their slow-moving helpers.

  Men and horses, drenched with sweat, had been dragging artillery and ammunition into place since the first vestiges of light. The cannons of all the Rebel divisions—every piece that could be moved and that could be coaxed to fire—were needed for the initial barrage. Mounds of canister and ball rounds as tall as a man were fronted by wooden kegs of black gunpowder, tops already wrenched off, awaiting the siege. Movement along the entire length of the Confederate encampment at Seminary Ridge seemed chaotic, frenzied, as if the army was in a race with time. Officers rode in and out of battalions and companies of soldiers; General Pickett and several of his aides rode the length of the camp, waving as cheers and Rebel yells rose at the sight of him. General Lee, seated on his magnificent horse Traveler, observed the preparations, acknowledging the thunderous hurrahs he generated with nods of his head and sweeping waves of his arm.

  Pickett’s officers, on foot and on horseback, weaved through the masses gathered to the rear of the forest that fronted Seminary Ridge. Orders were given, repeated, modified, and contradicted. That made little difference: The plan was one of the most basic simplicity. Well over eleven thousand Confederate soldiers would march at double time in ranks as orderly as practicable across a mile of uphill terrain that even this early baked and shimmered under the burgeoning strength of the morning sun.

  Uriah Toole worked gun oil into the action of his Henry rifle, a weapon he’d brought to war from his home in Texas but hadn’t carried since he began as a sniper’s spotter for Sinclair. Now cloth sacks of ammunition sagged from his belt on either side of his body, the left with rifle rounds, the right with .44-caliber cartridges for his Colt revolver. Sinclair, a similar sack bulging with the big .54-caliber cartridges that would feed his Sharps slung across his chest bandolier-style, sipped at acidic, overboiled coffee in a tin cup. There would be no Confederate sniper deployment today; all men able to walk and shoot other than the artillery units would march in the assault on Cemetery Ridge. A buzz of activity and a low hum of conversation was pervasive, but the huge gathering was strangely quiet.

  Toole peered around from where they sat in the skimpy shade offered by a young oak. “Damn,” he said almost reverently, “I’ve never seen so many men in one place in all my life.” Without pausing, he swung to a totally different topic. “Funny how you an’me ended up in Pickett’s division, ain’t it? With all these Virginia boys, I mean—you bein’ from Georgia and me from Texas, an’ all.” To someone who didn’t know him well, Toole’s voice would probably have sounded normal. To Sinclair, the minute quiver of nervousness and the speed of the flow of words stated that his friend—the man who trusted Robert E. Lee implicitly—was plain scared.

  “I guess that’s the army for you,” Jake said. “It worked out, though. I never met a man with eyes like yours, Uriah. I swear you could count the hairs on a gnat’s balls at a hundred yards—at dusk.”

  Toole’s smile was both quick and very obviously forced.

  “Look, Uriah,” Jake said quietly. “We’re both going to walk away from this battle. It’ll be a pisser, there’s no doubt about that. But like you said, the Yankee round that’ll take either of us down hasn’t been made yet.” To Sinclair’s own ears, his words sounded artificial, spoken for impact rather than credibility. Nevertheless, they seemed to cheer Toole slightly.

  Jake fervently wished he believed what he’d just said.

  Some of the light came back to Toole’s eyes. “Be good to run some cattle ’long with raisin’ horses,” he said. “After the war, I mean—after we see our folks an’ then meet up again. A man can always turn a dollar if he’s got a few head of beef to sell.”

  Jake had to force the words at first, but as he spoke—rambled, in a sense—the pretense of normalcy, that this was merely another casual conversation with his best friend—paid the dividend of eliminating the image of the mile of open field leading to Cemetery Ridge. “That’s true,” he said. “It takes some time to raise up a horse, break him to saddle, and train him to race. That’s better than a two-year process. Even a small herd of hardy stock—longhorns, maybe—would pay the bills while we . . .”

  The hours passed as molasses flows in the dead of winter, slowly, thickly, barely moving. The position of the sun change
d as slowly as the minutes and hours passed. The temperature continued its way upward, leaving the nineties of the previous day behind, reaching for the hundred-degree mark. About noon, officers began moving men into the woods, ready to form quickly and efficiently into lines when the order was given. The rare report of a Yankee sniper’s rifle was the only sound louder than the shuffling of feet and the quiet conversation of Pickett’s troops.

  At one o’clock the Confederate artillery fusillade began. It was more than an ungodly racket, more than a wild cacophony of sound. It was a physical force that made the very earth tremble before it, shook the trees, shattered the air, tore the color from the sky, and turned it from deep blue to the hazy darkness of thunderclouds. That such a furor could continue for more than a few moments was impossible. Yet the clamor continued. Blood seeped through the balls of raw cotton stuffed in the artillerymen’s ears from ruptured eardrums. Most were deaf within the first minute of the opening volley. But they needed no sense of hearing to obey their order: Fire! Buckets of water were dashed against barrels of cannons and directly down their maws—followed by the next canister and the powder and the torch. Beards, hair, eyebrows smoldered in the heat from the cannons and skin blistered when it inadvertently touched the guns. The thin glass of windows shattered in the Seminary building, not from being struck but from the sheer force of the waves of sound. The Union response to the Rebel enfilade, rolling thunder in itself, was feeble by comparison to the Confederate onslaught.

  Two full hours later the cannonade was over. Longstreet, atop a knoll adjacent to the rear cannons, waved an arm to Pickett and then formally saluted him. Pickett returned the salute, spun his horse, and issued the order that started the troops from the woods and onto the grassy, uneven field leading to Cemetery Ridge.