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Dan FitzGerald and the drummer boy McCarthy has sprung up a friendship between them and Dan is schooling McCarthy in the matter of Irish tunes. Made an Irish drum out of the dried skin of a mule and a spliced barrel-stave. Whittled him a striking stick and he’s all set. The two of them go running at these dancing tunes and it puts a lick of enjoyment into slack times. Not many of them now. We’re poured down slowly into northern Virginia and we was hoping to hear that tracks had been laid but no hope of that. We’re walking.

Lige Magan’s little detail carries the colours and it’s a sight. Nice banner sewed by nuns somewhere, they say. I got to keep my men fore and back in good order and John Cole has his own bunch and it has to be allowed Starling Carlton knows his army
business and we don’t feel too bad with the captain leading our company. In fact must be said all the men are in devilish high spirits and want to be running at Rebels as soon as can be arranged. Starling carries weight but even without a horse he’s strong as the centre of a river current. He bulls along mightily. We don’t miss our old sergeant’s singing but McCarthy beats out the march on his drum. Left right, left right. Eternal soldiers, it don’t ever change. You got to get from one point to another and the only way is the old forced march. Otherwise you get dawdling, fellas peeling off to drink from a stream, taking an interest in the farms we pass in case some good woman has baked cakes. Can’t be having that. And then we are stomping down into that two-faced country, it’s north Virginia, we don’t know where allegiances may lie. Could be death to find out. Got to say Virginia appeals. Great mountains stand to the west and old forests there are not thinking about us, not for a minute. They say the farms are tired worn-out places but they got the look of plenty. Four regiments is a noisy river but still the songs of birds pierce through our din and local dogs come to the edges of their domains and bark their fool heads off at us. That pack and the musket and the rough uniform got to be borne gaily. Or else it start to crush you. Best think your way into feeling strong, best. No man likes to fall out because he can’t manage a little jaunt down into Virginny, as Dan FitzGerald calls it. Anyhows aren’t we going down to show the Rebs where they went wrong. Error of their ways. We got a nice deal of ordnance and it is our wish to show them what it can do. It’s not our lot to know the orders that drive us on but that ain’t needed. Just point us at
those Johnny Rebs, says Dan FitzGerald. Sometimes we sing big songs all together as we go and we don’t offer the birds of Virginia the versions on the printed sheet as you might find in Mr Noone’s hall, but new versions with every stinking word we know stitched in. Every lousy stinking low brothelly word.

Before we leave I send a letter to Mr McSweny hoping Winona is going on well and I hope he gets it. We was not paid the first two months and then we were to general rejoicing and then it was possible for men to send money to their families and we was no exception. The Catholic chaplain carried our wages to the postal depot and sent our put-together sum up to Grand Rapids under army wrap. He never asked no tricky questions about wives. John Cole’s daughter was a handle good enough for him. But he’s one of those sociable easy-hearted Italian pastors and all ranks like him and all religions. A good heart carries across fences. Fr Giovanni. Small man wouldn’t be much good for fighting but he good for tightening those screws that start to come loose on the engine of a man when he’s facing God knows what. A few nights into the march I’m on sentinel duty and relieving Corporal Dennihy and it’s clear to me the man is shaking. Even in the moonlight as we exchange our words I can see he ain’t good. So it ain’t everyone looks forward to the fight. But Fr Giovanni creeps over to him and starts to buttress him up. Looks better for it in the morning anyhow. So, Corporal, he says to me, you send any other man gets windy. I will, Father, I says.

Sense of ferocious danger then descends when we reach the spot where we must deploy. News is the boys in grey are beaded into the great line of woods that seem to rush down that country.
Three long great meadows rise to a bare and blasted headland. Deep three-foot grasses such as would make a cow hurry on to partake. Our batteries are ranged in expert wise and by afternoon our section’s positioned and good. Something building in the hearts of the soldiers, if you could see that thing it might have strange wings. Something fluttering in their breasts and then a great clattering of wings. Our muskets are loaded and where we are a line of fifty men kneels and another fifty stand behind, and then a loading line, and then men there anxious and silent ready to step forward and fill the gaps. The field guns start firing into the trees and soon we are marvelling at the explosions such as we ain’t ever seen before. Fire and blackness bursts in the tree-tops and then you might think the green of the forest washes forward and back to close the destructed place. All this a quarter mile off and then we see the grey-coated soldiers appear at the ravelled margin of the trees. Captain is peering through his glass and he says something I can’t hear and it’s spoken back in a relay and it sounds like he is saying there be about three thousand men. That sounds like a great number but we’re just a thousand more. The yellowlegs group on the top meadow and our batteries are trying to get a pin on them. Then they are getting a pin and then the Rebels are moving down because there ain’t nothing joyous in receiving well-served bombs. The Rebels run down towards us in a fashion never expected at least by me and then when they come in range the officers steady us and then call out to fire and then we fire. Those crazy Rebs go down in numbers and then just like the forest seem to close with green courage over the gaps of deaths and then they keep
coming on. Each line of us reloads and fires, reloads and fires, and now the Rebs are firing, some by standing for a moment, some on the hoof as they hurry down. It ain’t the slow march we were taught at all but a lurching wild gallop of human creatures. You wouldn’t think so many could be killed and it not stop them and then all round us we are falling with a bullet in a face or a bullet in a arm. Those fierce little minie bullets that open in your poor soft corpse. Then the captain screams out to fix our bayonets and then we are bid to stand and then we are bid to charge. Of my little bunch of men one still kneels in dazed conviction so I deftly kick him to his feet and on we go. Now we are one heart running but the grass is tufty and thick and it is hard to run nobly and we are stumbling and cursing like drunkards. But somehow by fierce tuck of strength we keep our feet and suddenly it seems desirable to lock with our foe and suddenly the grass seems no obstacle at all and one in the company cries out
Faugh a ballagh
and then there is a sound made in our throats we have never heard and there is a great hunger to do we know not what unless it is stick our bayonets into the rush of grey ahead. But not just that because there is another thing or other things we have no names for because it is not part of usual talk. It is not like running at Indians who are not your kind but it is running at a mirror of yourself. Those Johnny Rebs are Irish, English, and all the rest. Canter on, canter on, and enjoin. But suddenly then the Rebs swing right and turn their charge across the meadow. They’ve seen the great swathe of our men come up behind and maybe seen a engine of death complete and whatever it is we can hear the officers calling out in the chaotic uproar. We’re stopped
in our charge and kneel and load and fire. We kneel and load and fire at the side-on millipede of the enemy. Our batteries belch forth their bombs again and the Confederates balk like a huge herd of wild horses and run back ten yards and then ten yards reversed again. They greatly desire to reach the cover of the far woods. The batteries belch behind, they belch behind. Some bombs come so low they want a path through us too and many fall in our lines as a missile forges a bloody ditch through living men. A frantic weariness infects our bones. We load and fire, we load and fire. Now in the burgeoning noise dozens of shells hit into the enemy, sharding them and shredding them. There is a sense of sudden wretchedness and disaster. Then with a great bloom like a sudden infection of spring flowers the meadow becomes a strange carpet of flames. The grass has caught fire and is generously burning and adding burning to burning. So dry it cannot flame fast enough, so high that the blades combust in great tufts and wash the legs of the fleeing soldiers not with soft grasses but dark flames full of a roaring strength. Wounded men fallen in the furnace cry out with horror and affront. Pain such as no animal could bear without wild screeching, tearing, rearing. The main body of soldiers find the mercy of the trees and their wounded are left now on the blackened earth. What is it causes the captain to halt our firing and by relayed message halt the guns? Now we are merely standing watching and the wind blows the conflagration up the meadow leaving many a howling man and a quiet man in its wake. The quiet are in their black folds of death. Others where the fire hasn’t touched are just groaning and ruined men. We are bid retire. Our surge of
blue draws back two hundred yards and boys go out in gunless details from the rear and there are the medical boys and the chaplain too. Out from the Rebel trees come similar souls likewise and a truce is struck without a word. Muskets are thrown down both sides and the details charge up now not to fire and kill but to stamp out the black acre of lingering flames and tend the dying, the rended, and the burned. Like dancers dancing on the charred grasses.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

N
OTHING
TOO
TRICKY
about dying for your country. It’s the easiest item on the menu. God knows the truth of it. Young Seth McCarthy he come up from Missouri to be a drummer boy in the Federal army and what does he get only his head took off by a Federal shell. We seen that on the morning after when we strode the field looking for papers and the like we could send home. Seth there with his drum still roped to his young body. But he didn’t have his head. It wasn’t the only or the worst sight of the aftermath. Let’s put the charred corpses first on the list. How come God wants us to fight like goddamn heroes and then be some bit of burned flesh that even the wolves don’t want. Burial detail told to bury grey and blue alike and say the prayers. Fr Giovanni tells his beads and we hear him muttering in his Latin. The boys that never seen battle afore some of them were not cheerful. I don’t know what those bad sights do to a person. A few soldiers just shaking in their tents and no amount of beef jerky or even whisky can pull them straight. They got to get sent back to some place but the battlefield ain’t right for them now. Couldn’t hold a spoon let alone a musket. John Cole is very concerned in his nice-hearted way and two of his privates is dead
as poked-out winkles. Took the fire from their own hind firers. That’s how it goes oftentimes. Just comes home to me how curious dark is battle. Does anyone know what in tarnation’s going on? Well, not this Christian. Me and John Cole thank God and old Lige Magan and Starling come through and also Dan FitzGerald. Else how we going to play cards God damn it.

When my sentinels is set up that night I pull away alone to a little copsewood. Alone there a while. Moonlight pouring down through the scrubby oaks as if a thousand dresses. I am thinking man is something of a wolf but also ain’t he something stranger too. I am thinking of Winona and about all her travails. I couldn’t say who in that while I was myself. Sligo seem a long long time ago and only another brush of darkness. The light is John Cole and all the copiousness of his kindness. Can’t get that drummer boy out of my inner eye. He’s stuck in there like a floating thing. I guess he should a got more from living than he did. Brave lad out of Missouri and cheery and not expecting nothing. His head rolling about a lonesome meadow in Virginia. Bright eyes and now they put him in a hole. By God it wouldn’t even be good enough to weep for him. How we going to count all the souls to be lost in this war? I am shaking like a last dry leaf on a branch in winter. Rattling. I don’t guess I have met two hundred souls in my time and knew their names. Souls ain’t like a great river and then when death comes the souls pouring over the waterfall and into the bottom land below. Souls ain’t like that but this war is asking for them to be. Do we got so many souls to be given? How can that be? I am asking the gap between the oaks these questions. Got to go now in a minute and relieve No. 2 post.
Relief, halt! Arms-port! Relief, support-arms! Forward-march!

It is so silent you could swear the moon is listening. The owls are listening and the wolves. I took off my forage cap and scratch my lousy head. The wolves will come down after a few days from the mountains when we are gone and start to dig through the stones we’ve piled up. Nothing more surer than that. That’s why the Indians put their dead on poles. We put them in the dirt because we believe it to be respecting. Talking about Jesus but Jesus never knew nothing about this land. That’s how foolish we are. Because it just ain’t so. The great world lights like a poor lamp because the snow begin to come down into the clearing. Dimly illumined over in the east corner is a huge black bear. Guess he just have been there the whole time, nosing about for grubs and roots. I hadn’t even heard him. Maybe he too was respecting the queer silence. He saw me now and swung his heavy head in a slow arc towards me to get a better view. He was considering me. His eyes looked clever and calm and he sized me up for a long time. Then he swung his whole body as if hanging from ropes and went crashing away into the forest.