Confederates (20 page)

First the boys dropped their blankets and haversacks and left them in piles and then formed a firing line, under the direction and the curses of Captain Guess, the dentist who had been changed so much by the conflicts around Richmond. The adjutant – Reverend Major Dignam – and Guess and sober Captain Hanks and young Lucius Taber stood amongst the lupins and daisies, viewing the whole process and with their backs to the North, as if they were supposed to be indifferent to anything Union snipers could send their way.

‘Don't bunch, goddamit!' Guess snarled in the undergrowth. ‘Two paces apart! Two paces apart!'

If Guess got through the war whole, his old customers would come back to his surgery to get their rotten teeth out. They would remember him as a gentle man. Well, they'd be in for a shaking, shuddering shock once he got his pliers on them next year. ‘Don't hunch, goddamit!' he'd scream at them.

Other regiments were marching across the front of the Volunteers, right across the clearing, calling stupid things Usaph did not even listen to. He noticed now that he had Gus Ramseur on one side of him and Joe Nunnally, the boy who'd shot the dog, on the other. Then – as if Cate had worked at it – goddam Cate. Beyond Cate, Ash Judd and Joe Murphy and ole Bolly yelled insults at the Irishmen of the 5th Virginia who were marching west across the middle of the clearing.

Everyone in other regiments yelled and hooted when they saw Bolly. Bolly was a favourite with anyone. And he got a sort of animal joy, the old blackguard, out of keeping marching when younger men fell out. He loved to turn up in the battle lines with his dirty yellow parasol hooked into his belt so that men could see him readily and then judge what stuff he was made of. ‘Hey, Bolly, rumoured you was with a plantation lady in Orange!' they called. ‘Weyhey, Bolly Quintard! There he be, neat as a goddam parson with his 'brella hangin' from his whatsis.'

Later, a whole
brigade
of Winder's division went the same way, mashing the daisies with their feet. These boys vanished into the woods way ahead. Everyone started to decide that this meant the Shenandoah regiment was in reserve.

‘Is it a good thing, this-here reserve?' Joe Nunnally asked Usaph in a low breathy voice. For all around some were expressing pleasure at the idea and others disappointment.

‘I think it may be, Joe,' said Usaph. ‘Let them goddam Irishmen do the ploughing and we'll take in the crop. If you take my meaning.'

In the next hour Usaph heard fresh Confederate cannon opening up to his front. He had no way of knowing that this was the Rockbridge Artillery, way up along the Culpeper pike, lined out in a meadow and answering the cannon of the enemy.

‘Orville, what do you say?' called Patrick Maskill, Puckett's handsome friend. ‘You're a goddam philosopher, boy. Do you think they mean to stand or will they probe and run?'

All around them boys were working;
working
wasn't quite the word. No one was bursting his bone cage. There were boys milling round the limber chest, looking in at the shells and charges like they were seeing what mother had packed for the picnic. There were boys swabbing thoroughly, but not too rushed, the black mouths of the cannon. Orville Puckett saw it all as an example of the strange, cool, easy way men often began battles.

Maskill noticed how Puckett stood a little stooped from the cramps in his belly, reaching out and with his fingers indicating to a young artilleryman the length of match the boy ought to cut. ‘I think, Patrick,' he said, ‘they're in big numbers for people who mean to run.'

‘That's what I think too, Orville,' yawned Patrick Maskill. ‘You got belly-ache, Orville?'

‘Some,' admitted Puckett. He felt they – the six guns of Brynam's battery – stood a long way up the road and that feeling didn't help the cramps in his gut. But General Jackson had this habit of pushing his artillery way out to the front, instead of stringing it out in the rear, as generals used to do in far-off 1861.

Orville bent to the elevator screw of his smooth-bore Napoleon and adjusted it a touch. The effort cramped his belly. Turning his head sideways with the pain he saw Pat whistling.

He just about hated Maskill for that.

In a second, Captain Brynam would finish talking with that aide of General Winder's, who'd been sent up here on a visit from the sickly general. Orville knew what the aide was saying. ‘You're well forward here but we'll send infantry to protect you.'

They always said that and it was only sometimes the truth.

Anyhow, when the aide had finished whispering these half-verities, Brynam would give the order: ‘Fire at will, two rounds per minute.' And the boys who were now reading the instructions pasted inside the lid of the limber boxes, all that stuff about how much powder to use with how much shot, and anyone else who was lazing about, maybe leaning against the wheel of a caisson, would come rushing up to serve the guns.

At last Brynam looked up and called the expected order.

These Napoleon smooth-bores could fire five rounds in a minute, but they wouldn't be firing at that rate yet, they were still feeling out that ridge beyond the stream. Puckett's gun was aimed on a diagonal across the road and into the centre of those far-off flecks of blue. Back in the edges of the woods the six horses of Orville's gun team snuffled and stayed docile in their harness. There was a boy called Ellis back there, who would talk to them through all the noise.

Puckett himself was sensitive about horses. He had a feeling for them. He believed the worst things of all he had seen in the war happened in the early days when, in obeying the instructions in military manuals, you took the horses a bare twelve yards back from the place where your gun stood. The slaughter of the horses was then frightful. Orville remembered a beast he saw at Manassas, a good broad-shouldered artillery horse struck in the withers by solid shot. He remembered how it struggled up on its front legs out of a swamp of meat and cartilage. Its screams were as high-pitched and piercing as a child's. It was Private Orville Puckett's task, given that his place was with the horses, to cut it out of the traces with his bowie knife, to saw through its leather harness and separate it from the other five mad-eyed, rearing, kicking survivors.

So the Rockbridge had learned you kept the horses back – even 200 paces wasn't too far in Orville's opinion. They could be brought up quick enough if there was need to move the guns. In like manner you kept the limbers back more than the six yards the textbooks had suggested. If a full limber box was hit, it could scythe down its whole gun crew from behind.

A private taking spherical shot up to the cannon shoved it under Orville's nose. Orville was supposed to inspect it and give it the nod. It looked all right to Orville, though his sight blurred at these times. This shot was done up in a long linen tube, the shot and powder all in one linen container. There was a fuse screwed into the surface of the shot, a circular fuse of metal with numbers on it, and you could turn a pointer to the right number. The boy back at the limber box had correctly set this fuse at five seconds. This meant that if the powder was of even quality and if the fuse was well made and was not knocked out of its socket by the explosion inside the gun, or did not fall out in flight, then the shot should blow itself into vengeful fragments over there above the ridge and rain its harsh manna down on poor Yankee boys. But you had to have a lot of some sort of faith for that to happen.

The others seemed to be amused by the uneven quality of Southern powder and the unpredictability of Southern fuses and long-range shells. But when Orville was faced with them he felt a feverish helplessness. He didn't find it amusing that the missile he inspected now might, in twenty seconds' time, blow up anywhere between the mouth of his cannon and the distant enemy.

Orville saw his friend Maskill moisten his lips. ‘Hot work, Orville!' yelled Maskill in gaps in the noise. To Orville's stunned ears the words sounded hollow, his head floated with an excess of sunlight.

As Orville stood, inspecting shot, calling advice and order in what could be called a well-oiled daze, a round of spherical case shot fired from his own cannon exploded at the muzzle. The crack was amazing and stopped Orville's weak heart. Breathless, he could see fragments of the shell-casing whipping the low vegetation two hundred yards ahead. As the gun whipped back and the smoke cleared he expected one or two of the gun-crew to show wounds. In fact the one injury was far down the line of the battery, a boy working one of the Parrott rifled pieces. He held his hand up tranquilly and three fingers were missing. One of his friends began wrapping the mess in a shirt. The boy just stayed there whey-faced. Orville's gun-crew took little notice; maybe some of them didn't know. It was no use making apologies. The blame was on the gimcrack factories of the South.

Men from Maskill's gun started shouting at Orville's crew. ‘What was that one, eh? Full of sand, was it?'

‘Lordy, one or two more like that, boys, and we can go into the lumber business.'

Orville started to smile, a boy brought another round of spherical case from the limber chest and shoved it into his sight; and all at once, because of the great anger he felt, the smile became a grimace.

He shoved his right hand into his jacket on account it was jerking. Oh God, but do I need a woman, a wife, someone to soothe me! One of these nice Lexington girls whose fathers are theologians or physicians and you get invited round to their place to eat cake, drink coffee, sing songs, argue politics or God in a mild sort of way on a Saturday evening. One of those girls who could herself sing and sample, play the piano and make jokes in Latin if that was what you needed.

‘Shall … shall we try another round, gentlemen,' he managed to call.

He saw his friend Sergeant Pat Maskill smiling towards him, carefully sharing the joke, and could tell Pat Maskill knew: that it was a moot point what would happen first with Orville – his mind go or his heart burst.

Under the grin of Sergeant Maskill, Orville Puckett got some of his health back. ‘Next week,' he called to Maskill, ‘we're going to try Christmas puddings. The components, sir, the components are more reliable.'

Maskill laughed in some sort of relief. Orville remembered a time in Lexington when they'd spent too long in a beer parlour and Maskill began weeping in front of everybody about the death of Shelley. He was sure touched by the circumstances of Shelley's death – the poet's corpse being washed ashore on an Italian beach and cremated right there on the sand in the pink dawn by Lord Byron and other great men. When did that happen? Forty years past? Well, the world had lost all its innocence since then, and no Northern boy who was struck by Maskill's fire, or by his own, by Orville Puckett's, made any sort of decent corpse, any touching corpse at all. Any boy that was struck by Maskill's fire or Puckett's, be he the equal of Shelley or not, turned into a foul thing. His own mother wouldn't want to look at him. His own mother would swear that that steaming meat there in the meadow was no flesh of hers.

‘No. 3 gun,' called Captain Brynam, ‘should elevate by a degree.'

8

About two o'clock Colonel Lafcadio Wheat began to ride along his line giving advice to his boys. Sometimes he would stop in front of a particular company and deliver himself of a speech. He stopped for example in front of Guess's Company, settling himself in the saddle like a farmer about to have a good talk, and stared about with his hawkish eyes. From these mannerisms alone Usaph knew that he would hear some oratory. It was very still in that clearing. All the noise of batteries seemed to be distant and lazy, and the lack of business to the front meant that everyone must be in his place, and still, and at his ease.

‘Boys,' said Colonel Wheat now, ‘there might well be more noise soon than the night Cousin Carrie lost her virtue. Now you may have guessed we're in reserve again, being that we're the boys best suited to save a day or to point up a goddam triumph, and I'm sure it's the latter we'll be employed upon today. I want you now to keep fixed between your ears these few considerations. No matter what noise descends on this peaceful segment of our Virginia, you're to keep where you been put, right there, fixed in place. Lest any of you conscript boys consider you have more to fear from the enemy than you have from me, let it be said clear that any skulker or backslider can fear from me an inferno that will make the Union muzzles seem like his mammy's lap. Goddamit, I bit the tit off a whore in Charlottesville and I'll bite the head off any one of you, or to save my goddam incisors, I'll shoot it off! So there it is, boys, the grim talk first.'

No one spoke. There was still the far-off thudding and the noise of waggons or of masses of boys moving down there on that road. But even veterans were listening to each of Wheat's words. And the conscripts listened like they were about to get
the
essential word from him, the one that would save them.

‘Now the sweeter news. It's my suspicion that none of us is going to be hurt this afternoon unless we manage it through our own unregenerate laziness. You know the rules. You don't go shooting too early, you wait till the range is what we call
effective
. Ain't that so? Newcomers wait till the veterans fire, they know when, and if they goddam don't, let 'em remember that goddam titless whore and see in her defaced state the image of what will befall them if they go firing at a crazy long range. Now fire deliberate – no closed eyes – and aim low. This entire goddam brigade is susceptible to overshooting as if there's something wrong with getting a man in the kneecap. Aim for his goddam kneecap and you'll get him, and if you do but wound him, so be it and Hallellulah! For he'll need to be taken off the field by sound men.'

Usaph saw Joe Nunnally frowning for fear he might not be able to take in all this good advice.