Hell or Richmond (21 page)

Meade had to be beaten, but Grant had to be shamed.

Walter Taylor cantered up. Lee waved the adjutant off. He needed a moment. And had the matter been vital, Taylor would have come on at a gallop. The members of his staff knew him by now, even the inflection of such a gesture:
Not now … unless the business cannot wait.

Ewell had won the day along the Turnpike, and Lee had heard that Gordon—an officer on whom he had long had his eye—had performed brilliantly at the decisive moment, carrying all before him. But here on the Plank Road the matter remained doubtful. Bravery, as he had learned so painfully at Gettysburg, went only so far.

The firing beyond the hill, down in the gunsmoke, swelled again.

All his life, Lee had scorned selfish prayers. But now he prayed:

“Lord, let it be night.”

Seven thirty p.m.
Brock Road

“Morgan!” Hancock barked to his chief of staff. “Ride down and get that Harvard sonofabitch. I need him
now
.”

His chief of staff smiled and tipped a salute. Morgan liked a battle, the little bastard. West Point hadn’t spoiled that one. Told hilarious stories about riding herd on the Mormons with Sidney Johnston.

“Wait a minute, Morgan,” Hancock bellowed. “Waste of goddamned time, I’ll—” He whipped about. “You there, soldier.
You.
Turn your ass around and get back in the fight, that’s no fucking wound.” And turning again to his chief of staff: “Tell Mott to get those twats of his back in the fight, they’re not here to spread their legs for Robert E. Lee. I’ll deal with Barlow myself. Walker, you come with me. And two couriers.” He pointed. “You two. The rest of you stay put, including flags.”

He spurred his horse, and a streak of white-fire pain shot from thigh to brain. Damned wound had been a bother all day. Just had to ignore it. Gettysburg. Finest hour. Bullshit, all of it. Just more slaughter. Now this mess. Getty pigheaded as ever, with Frank Wheaton moaning that his men were exhausted. Sweet Christ, they were all exhausted. And poor, damned Hays, dead as bones. Meade pushing him to attack, attack, attack. Not Meade’s way, either. Hancock felt the heavy hand of Grant behind all that.
Attack, attack!
And he had attacked and attacked, first to keep goddamned Getty from annihilation, then, as more of his men arrived, drenched in sweat, painted with dust, and throats as dry as your grandmother’s tits, because he had just enough success to make it worth continuing. “In you go, boys.” And out they came. Bloody mess. Mott’s men falling back in droves. All of them, his boys under Mott as well as Getty’s mob, backed off by two raggle-taggle divisions under Hill, the walking skeleton, and Longstreet not even up. Where was
that
sonofabitch?

“Walker,” he called behind him as he rode, “if you can’t keep up, I’ll get a damned aide who can.”

Goddamned Barlow. He’d have that cocksure look on his schoolboy face. But he was the man for this now, the little piss-cutter. Hancock wondered if the stories were true about Barlow’s mother whoring her way through New England society to keep her brood fed and clothed, with the father Bedlam mad and off to the races. If the rumors were true, Sir Frank wasn’t quite so fine as he let on.

Might explain his delight in killing, though. Shame had never made any bugger kinder. No matter how well concealed the shame might be. Was that the case with Powell Hill, with his plugged-up cock and his gal lost to Georgie McClellan, of all people?

Soldiers, some wounded, others not, leapt out of his way. Stripped to the waist and working like navvies, enlisted men shoveled up earthworks along the road and chopped down trees to open fields of fire. Still others meandered, shocked by battle or dumbstruck with the heat. Hard enough for a man to breathe in the smoke, and damned near impossible to hear. The battle raging to his right reminded him of ocean storms pounding on the California rocks. So long ago it seemed. California. Worthless place, and keep the gold for your troubles. But once you’d taken it over from the greasers, you damned well couldn’t return it and say, “Sorry.”

Hancock’s fury preceded him. A battery struggling up the road hurriedly drew to the side to let him pass. That only angered him more. He didn’t need more guns, he had no place for them. He needed infantry, damn it. To replace the infantry sacrificed in the utter absence of a sensible plan. Terrible damned place to fight. Favored the defender in every way.

But Grant wanted a fight, that much was clear.

And now he had one.

The trees fell away on the left. Hancock spotted Barlow up on a hillock, in front of his guns, high on a white horse, his damned high horse, as cool as if he’d never had to shit.

As always, Barlow’s men looked ordered and ready.

When Barlow saw Hancock, he cantered down to meet him. He didn’t gallop. Just cantered.

But there was an expectation on Barlow’s face.

“Barlow! Ready to go in, damn you?”

The white-faced—pasty-faced—boy pulled up, the two of them horse’s nose to horse’s ass.

“Of course, sir.”

“Then go in, damn it. Mott’s made a Mexican whorehouse mess of his attack. I need you on the left. Just up the road.”

“I know where Mott went in, sir.”

“Just follow the goddamned bodies. Christ, Barlow … we were breaking them! And I don’t know what happened. Oh, I do and I don’t. The bastards dig in so fast. And you can’t see a thing until you’re right on top of the sonsofbitches. Despite all the fucking interference from headquarters, we were pushing them like the devil’s broom in Hell. Then they dug in their heels, and now we’re shit for the birds.” Hancock stroked his agonized thigh. “Just shore up Mott on the left. Turn them, if you can. Do what you can before dark.” Hancock looked to the sky, its light already fading. “Can’t let the day end with those bastards thinking they’ve screwed us. Don’t want Deacon Lee feeling all holy about today’s sermon.” Before Barlow could speak, Hancock added, “Leave one brigade here. In case something does turn up along the road.”

“I’ll leave Paul Frank. His men just closed from the tavern. Miles and Brooke are the men I want now, anyway.” He looked straight into Hancock’s eyes, unblinking as a snake. Not much subordinate feeling in Frank Barlow. As if he were God Almighty and Commodore Vanderbilt wrapped into one. “What about Smyth, the Irish?”

“You’ll get Smyth back later,” Hancock told him. “We’ll have to wait until after dark to untangle things up there. Well, what are you waiting for? Teacher to ring the bell?”

Barlow smiled, then grinned. He had an ugly grin, all crooked teeth. The expression transformed the schoolboy into a murderer.

Turning to his own aide, Barlow called, “Black! Tell Brooke and Miles they’re to form their brigades for battle. Immediately.”

Eight fifteen p.m.
Below the intersection of the Plank Road and Brock Road

“Forward!” Barlow shouted. He lowered his saber, pointing it at the enemy. Out there in the brush and smoke.

If any of his subordinates had failed to hear the command amid the din, they saw the saber drop. His colonels aped the gesture. Bayonets fixed, the blue lines moved into the undergrowth, with Miles’ brigade forward on the right, four of five regiments on line, and Brooke trailing slightly on the left, refusing the flank just enough to address surprises.

There was no cheering. His men had seen enough from the battle’s edge to realize this was a bitter sort of fight, close and grinding, with men fed between the millstones. Nor was there any parade-ground nonsense, with weapons held at right-shoulder-shift to the last. His men went in with their rifles leveled at their sides, ready to charge.

Ahead: Ragged rifle volleys, shrieks, and curses unintelligible but distinguished by their tone. His skirmishers were out, alert, in their groups of four, trained specially for their task over the past month. He listened as majors and sergeants, captains and gaping lieutenants, chastised soldiers who fell one step behind. The lines would not remain unbroken, the terrain, the green and smoldering rottenness of it, would not allow it. But Barlow wanted them held together as long as possible. Each step counted. His orders were that no man was to fire until they were atop or among the enemy. He had had enough gentlemanly idiocy
à la
Fontenoy. There were to be no pauses, no premature volleys that did little more than immobilize his men as targets. And when the lines inevitably came apart, his soldiers had some training now in open-order fighting.

This would be a test. Of course, every battle was a test. And it bewildered Frank Barlow that any man was ever willing to fail.

But plenty were. Along with the wounded, stumbling, gruesome, or glad of a crimson excuse to make for the rear, other men just trod rearward, most still with their rifles, quitting, as if they had merely reached the end of their shift at the foundry.

Had it been up to him, every one of them would have been shot.

He took the flat of his own sword to the back of a limping sergeant, one of his own men, who had not quite kept up with his charges. Applying the saber soundly to the man’s back, Barlow snapped, “Get moving, or I’ll tear off those stripes myself.”

The man stepped out at the double, catching up to his men in a scatter of seconds. He still limped, but not as slowly.

The first corpses materialized, dark forms in the fading light. And the immobile or crawling wounded became an annoyance, pleading to be carried off or succored by men who had other tasks before them. His own ranks began to buckle, encountering stands of scrub pines and impenetrable briars. His officers did all they could to enforce alignments.

Other swathes of undergrowth had been trampled or broken off in the previous fighting and he was able to ride a jagged course behind the ranks of Miles’ leftmost regiments. In hardly a minute, he reached the brigade commander.

“Nellie, just don’t stop. Don’t let your men stop. They won’t be expecting us this late.” He glanced instinctively toward the sky, as Hancock had done. “Make the bad light a friend.”

“Rebs must be tired,” Miles said. “They’ve stuck, though, say that for them.”

What did he, Francis Channing Barlow, have to say for the Confederates? Nothing for their cause, which he believed odious. But wounded—mortally, they all thought—and taken prisoner at Gettysburg, he had liked their officers better than his own comrades. Their courtesy was as good as a cold drink on that July day, the manners of the officers courtly to quaintness. Even their ragamuffin rank and file had shown a respect toward superior officers that simply did not exist in the Union’s armies. All of them had been unexpectedly kind, and all things being equal—which they were not—he would have preferred to serve beside such men.

But the nation’s soil had to be rid of their “peculiar institution,” and the Union had to be saved. Both matters were givens. So Barlow would kill the men he liked with undiminished enthusiasm.

Battle was better by far than any sport. And the prizes were worth immeasurably more.

“If they’re tired, they can be panicked,” he told Miles. “If they panic, don’t let your front ranks stop to take prisoners. Don’t give their reserves a moment to react. If a soldier stops to loot, I want you to shoot him.”

Miles laughed. “Looting won’t be a problem. The Rebs have nothing worth stealing.”

But they did. Tobacco. An officer’s watch. Some of the men the North recruited now were inveterate thieves. And worse. Barlow wanted
those
men to go forward, to take the bullets in chest and loins, sparing his precious veterans.

That was never the way it turned out, though. The brave and best died first.

His horse danced across a corpse. It was hard to spot even living men in the dense vegetation. Barlow tugged the mount back toward Brooke’s trailing brigade, but didn’t get far. Brewster, one of Mott’s brigade commanders, found him. The man was disheveled, his horse dripped blood, and old blood crusted the side of his aide’s face.

“Thank God,” Brewster said. “My men need relief immediately.”

“Those who haven’t run away,” Barlow said coldly.

Brewster stiffened.

“Oh, bugger it,” Barlow told him. “Who’s up ahead?”

“You mean from my brigade?”

“I don’t give a damn about your brigade, Colonel.
The enemy.
”

“North Carolina boys. Lane’s crowd, I think. Tough as nails.”

“We’ll see,” Barlow said, and he left the brigade commander to his own business.

As he passed his 26th Michigan, Barlow warned its colonel anew not to let his men stop to fire volleys. An approximation of night had come to the fern glades and briars, and men from Mott’s division cursed as Barlow’s ranks passed over them where they lay, stepping on limbs and hands.

It would be but moments now.

Before he reached Brooke, a mighty shout erupted from his men, followed by massed firing. Barlow pulled his horse about.

His men were running forward, charging. Well, Brooke would know what to do. Remaining mounted, Barlow followed the fight, ignoring the maelstrom of lead. Calling, “Keep going, forward,
forward!
” and waving his saber, he kept up with his second line of troops, riding around obstacles and between men stricken with wounds.

“Keep going, get at them!” he yelled.

His troops had already rushed in among the Confederates, with men firing point-blank into each other’s torsos and clubbing each other with gun stocks, most still shy about using the bayonet, even hard men queerly timid about thrusting a blade deep into human flesh.

To his right, he saw Nellie Miles, a shadow on horseback, driving his men into a nest of Confederates.

Rebels appeared right at his side. Disarmed men. Herded rearward. But the firing hard to his right flank intensified.

An aide to Miles rode near, struggling through tangled flesh and vegetation.

“What’s happening?” Barlow demanded.

“Orders to the Hundred and Sixteenth Pennsylvania. Move to the right flank. Hot fight over there, sir.”

Well, he trusted Miles’ judgment.

A sergeant approached him, bearing a captured battle flag. Grinning as wide as Galway Bay in the gloaming.