Confederates (44 page)

There's no argument, Searcy old chap (so he told himself). You're damned well placed.

So placed, Searcy saw swarms of Union troops emerge from distant woods and run at the cut. Those who reached it were clubbed or shot and, falling into it, made a squirming, whimpering surface for their brethren coming on behind. The young boys of the Army of Righteousness and the young and likewise precious boys of the Army of Blindness fought each other in the cut for a while with stones and rifle butts, and tried to choke each other. Then the boys of the Army of Righteousness would drag away and leave the cut to these others.

This sickening rite repeated itself till ten o'clock.

Searcy worked through. He wrote copy that showed a genuine sense of outrage and which would appear in
The Times
25 days later. He even made sketches in his notebook, diagrams of the country, quick impressions of what he could see of the cut.

A little after ten the boys of the Army of Righteousness flowed over and through the cut – from this distance they came on just like a mulberry tide, on which Ambrose Hill's reserves, just fifty paces ahead of Searcy, drew a bead.

He saw it all with the blurred and slewing vision of a drunk. He would have got up and run but he couldn't be sure of his legs.

Then there were blue individuals there, just ahead, and animal conflict with bayonets and stones, and rifles swung as clubs.

Still he felt the mysterious duty to stand on, near blind with smoke, blinking, stupefied by the noise.

When it was over and the Northerners escaped in pitiable groups of two and three, Searcy the correspondent went strolling along the back of Hill's lines. He scarce heard the strange cut-off yelps of joy or pain. Turning left and stepping out from amongst the trees Searcy saw a Georgian unhinging the cartridge belt of a young German who had been shot through both legs. ‘Don't take my pitchers, mister,' the wounded man was calling. ‘Don't take my pitchers, plis, mister.'

The Georgian handled him almost gently. ‘I ain't intending to take yore goddam pitchers,' he snorted. ‘What'd I want with your goddam pitchers? I got pitchers of my own, you know. You goddam Dutchies ain't the sole owners of goddam pitchers.'

All over the slope Confederates looted the dead and wounded for cartridges. The sight for some reason set Searcy weeping. He wanted, he itched to get at Tom Jackson. And say, sir, in European armies I have known, a general would see the fact that his troops were scavening the dead at 10.30 in the morning for the wherewithal to continue the battle as a sign that he'd soon have to surrender or withdraw. But Tom Jackson seemed to see this sort of thing as no more than a proof that his boys meant business.

So why didn't I cry and start trembling like this in the Crimea? Well, I'm older now. And this is … yes, it
is
, Searcy old boy … this
is
a holier war.

Searcy wandered on across the slope. He was still working as a journalist. He knew the various badges Union soldiers wore on their sleeves. Some of the dead down near the cut displayed the oval insignia of Sigel's German Corps – they had been killed early this morning. The men who had fallen in the past few minutes and were just getting accustomed to their wounds and wondering if the pain and terror could be managed, they wore the diamond badge of General Jesse L. Reno's IX Corps. Hill's division had by some means held out two corps. It was axiomatic that that sort of thing couldn't keep on happening. Someone ought to go and state the axiom to Tom Jackson.

Searcy did not do so straight away. He spent some time on the slope, letting his rage against Tom Jackson build. From his tin canteen coated with the fur of arctic seal – an explorer's special from the Army and Navy Stores – he fed water to those who cried for it, even to boys with belly wounds and a bloody froth already on their lips. He pushed the water fatally and unwisely down their throats, as if it were the only gift he was capable of, and he'd be damned if he didn't give it.

About a mile south of where he'd spent that early part of the morning, Searcy found Tom Jackson in a clearing in the forest. Searcy had intended to come rushing up and start straight off raging at the madman, but it could not happen that way.

Tom Jackson was at the time sitting on a caisson behind some of Andie Lawton's Georgia batteries. He had a pad on his knee and was writing a despatch. Sandie Pendleton and Kyd, and some others Searcy didn't know, stood around the caisson like a protective wall.

‘General!' Searcy called, dismounting in a flurry. Sandie put a hand up to halt the journalist. ‘Shh!' Kyd said, hardly turning towards Searcy.

A shell hit the forest floor on the far side of Tom Jackson's party. It was maybe the length of a small church-aisle away and Tom Jackson's shoulders and the page he was writing were showered with grit and pieces of leaf. It didn't surprise Searcy that the General just shook the page off.

‘Searcy,' said a large cavalry officer, stepping from the group around the General. The way the man said his name, it came out Zeerzy.

Searcy flinched and inspected the officer. It was von Borcke all right. ‘Ve git drunk, der last time ve zee each der odder. Dat vas in Milano in '59, ain't it so?'

‘Yes,' said Searcy. Why did I ever drink with you? ‘I'd heard you'd come to this war.'

‘I am wit Jeb Stuart. I turn up in Richmond wit der letter der introduction from Cheneral von Montauffel und here I am, ridink wit Stuart.'

Von Borcke wore a big grey hat with a plume in it and a grey jacket of ornate and non-Confederate design from one of the many armies he'd belonged to. Searcy wanted to say: ‘When I got drunk with you, you Prussian bastard, I didn't know what a foul thing a mercenary is.'

And then he thought, aren't you a sort of mercenary, Searcy old chap? Oh yes, you don't do it for pay, you do it for the moral thrill of being in a great war of liberation.

The air von Borcke likes is air laced with the stink of powder, the presence of dead young boys and open wounds. What sort of air do you like, Searcy old chap?

At heart von Borcke was a European though and would understand better than Americans that Jackson was breaking the rules.

‘He has to give it up, Heros,' said Searcy in a voice that was louder than he wanted it to be. ‘He has to give it up, for pity's sake.'

Some of Jackson's staff turned and began looking at him. Good! thought Searcy.

‘There've been two corps beating up against your left flank,' Searcy found he was yelling directly at Jackson. ‘They have Kearny's and Heintzelman's in reserve and God knows what else.… Ambrose Hill's men, Heros, are depending on the dead for ammunition. I saw, sir … with my own eyes … I saw a major gathering pebbles of a calibre suitable for muskets. It's not even noon. For God's sake, this line can't … simply can't be held.'

There was a sort of hush, even though artillery was banging away all around. Tom Jackson himself got up from the caisson and, still holding the despatch pad in his left hand, came up to Searcy. He reached out his free hand and put it on Searcy's wrist. My God, Searcy saw with surprise, my damned hands are trembling. There was a frightful kindliness in Jackson's eyes.

‘I'm touched by your distress, Mr Searcy, but you mustn't fret.' And then a slow country smile rose from beneath the dark whiskers. ‘Longstreet's arrived,' the General whispered. ‘General Hood's Texans have just turned up down on the Gainesville crossroads. We have the means, dear sir, to hold. The means …'

Patting Searcy's wrist once, Jackson turned back to his seat on the caisson. Searcy heard him say: ‘Give him some brandy.'

6

Orville Puckett lay on a waterproof blanket that morning, on the shaded side of McFail's ordnance waggon. Even while he drowsed, his head was full of pain and he kept his eyes shut against the mild sunlight in this clearing. His knees were held up towards his chest to ease his stomach cramps. Already his stomach had rejected the little bowl of corn gruel McFail had fed him for breakfast.

McFail was a Scot. He'd grown up in the Highlands somewhere and had this thick way of talking you could just understand. He was grey and tough and well in his forties. In the poor white section of Wilmington, North Carolina, he'd owned a grocery store, but his wife had sold it some ten months past and gone further south, taking with her McFail's ten-year-old son and the sale price and a Cherokee lover. McFail was hungry for money to start his life afresh. He'd taken $10 from Patrick Maskill to mind Orville in these last few days and to carry him in his waggon. As well as that, Maskill had said that if Orville was still alive in a week, McFail would get $20.

‘Orville is the sort of boy we need to have alive,' said Maskill.

McFail had whisky from Manassas in his waggon. He'd been saving it for the time that was bound to come when boys would pay $2 a half cup for it. Why, he'd heard that in the army of the Tennessee they were already parting with $2.50 for a sip of the stuff in a tin can. While waiting for the price to rise, he fed Orville a slug of it three times a day. Not just because he had a fatal kindness, but also because the war might come to its close before the big prices came in, and then boys would be able to buy as much of the stuff as they wanted for $2 a bottle. A prize of $10 in a week's time just for keeping a gunner alive was worth thinking on.

McFail stood amongst the waggons speaking of fast money this morning as every morning. Every time Orville woke, which was about once every two minutes, there was McFail talking about the way this man or that had been visited by divine wealth.

‘I'm told there was a driver of sixteen years, a mere bairn. He was serving in the army of the Confederacy in Kentucky this past spring, and what does he do but go to a Union general by night and he offers to deliver forty Confederate waggons for money. Well, one night these forty waggons is eking along south of Perryville and this traitorous bairn is driving the lead waggon. And some Union cavalry comes out of the woods and makes captives of the cavalry escort at the front of the column and then leads the whole waggon train in a circle to the North. That boy became the happy possessor of $1200 in U.S. treasury notes jest frae that wee enterprise.'

‘If you mean,' one of the other drivers said, nodding towards the noise of cannon from the ridge, ‘to go and make deals with General Johnny Pope, the time is now. For there seems to be so much conversation going on atween them and us right now.'

‘Why, there's more ways of making fortunes than that,' said McFail. ‘I was reading in a copy of
Harper's
that a sergeant of 24 frae Chicago dreamed up a wee false hand a mon could use to do up his buttons and hold his member with while pissing. Why, this war augurs to make so many one-armed people that the baby sergeant will be the richest mon in all the continent.'

‘Goddamit, McFail,' someone called. ‘Them Yankee horsemen might come round this morning and deliver you from all your dreams of wealth.'

For there was a sort of anxiety in this clearing amongst the waggon-masters. There were litter-bearers around there too, trying to delay in the shade on the edges of the forest, skulking from their surgeons and their officers. Amongst all of them there was this funny feeling about the battle up there on the ridge that was beyond their influence. And they often spat tobacco juice, the waggon-masters, and said with what sounded almost like real hate that they hoped the goddam infantry was doing its job up there. ‘I hope they can hold that goddam line,' they'd say occasionally, as if the boys up there would just give it all up if you let them have half a chance of so doing.

Well, Orville understood these feelings in a way. For the soldier, the wondering and the frowning ended once the firing started. Back here you could wonder and frown all day, and nothing happened to ease that tautness of the brain.

A little after nine o'clock by that jangled watch Orville Puckett carried in his trouser pocket, and which he sometimes squinted at when the cramps or the sharp voice of McFail woke him, a whole force of Union cavalry – just about three regiments of it, came riding into that clearing. They were horsemen who'd spent the morning creeping away from Longstreet, and so they'd come over Catharpen Run and by a series of country lanes to the edges of these woods. What they saw before them was a goodly part of the supply and ordnance waggons and the medical side of Jackson's army. It was said later that they were Germans, for they didn't hold surgeons sacred. They leaned in the saddle as they galloped into the clearing and shot a Georgia doctor in the face while the man had a bonesaw deep in the marrow of some poor boy's leg. Loitering litter-bearers were shot by their empty litters. McFail and his friends ran to their waggons. They were not meant to be armed, but they were, better than any infantry man, with breechloaders they'd acquired by what was called alienation of supplies; that is, by bribing officers or cavalry men with whisky. McFail stood by the axle trees of his waggon and fired off one round. Then the rifle seized, and he was working its lever when he was shot through the chest.

The clearing was now full of blue cavalry men. Orville thought, I can clear the mechanism of one of those. He rose from the blanket and the cramps kept him bent. But he took the rifle from McFail's side and, working the lever, got rid of a stuck round and then shot a young horseman clean out of his saddle.

Now no one except cavalry officers kept sabres, and even then few officers carried them in battle. But all at once there was an officer coming at Orville and gesturing with a sabre. He was about the same age as the boy Orville had just killed and he was coming to punish Orville for that death. Even without his cramps, Orville couldn't run, being backed up against the axle tree like that. Orville thought how he didn't want to kill his young subaltern, but he could see the horseman's mouth set like an old wound. And the idea came that if only he and the cavalry officer could go aside from all that heat and fire and speak with each other they might find they were both Americans and mutually forgiveable. The other consideration was that the Spencer had seized up once more. No wonder someone had sold it to goddam McFail – it choked on every second round. I am defenceless, O God, thought Orville, backed up against enough ammunition to keep a brigade in the line for a week or so.