Hell or Richmond (3 page)

“Yes, sir.”

Grant cocked his head above the overcoat’s collar, sizing up a horse he had just purchased. “Now take me around and introduce me to your staff, let them have a sniff. Early tomorrow, I’m going back to Washington, then back out west for a time to tidy things up.” He forgot his cigar as he thought on distant matters. “I’ll miss some of those men … good men, fine men…” He grunted. “Some of ’em I can’t say I’ll miss at all, though. Listen, you might as well ride along with me tomorrow. Since you’ve got that committee business. No sense taking separate trains like we’re the emperor of France and the king of Prussia. And either call me ‘Sam’ or just plain ‘Grant.’ Way it was in Mexico. Doesn’t do to make everything sound like a speech.”

As the two generals stepped out into the rain, Meade said, “I’m afraid you’ll find Virginia a forlorn place, Sam.”

“Going to be a sight more forlorn when we’re through with it,” Grant told him.

March 11, 1864
Orange & Alexandria Railroad

As the train clacked along the rails, with Meade a few rows back working on his testimony, Grant turned his face from the staff men and the guards. Hidden behind the collar of his overcoat, he smiled through the window. The look on Meade’s face yesterday! On a devilish whim, he had tossed his cigar butt on the planks, just to see how George Meade would react. The Philadelphia patrician’s look had been priceless. Old Meade standing there in full uniform, bags under his eyes that could have held a peck of potatoes each …

Well, they’d get past the fussiness. Meade would be reminded soon enough that not every man born west of Pittsburgh picked his teeth with a knife.

Baldy Smith had, indeed, been in the running for command of the Army of the Potomac, but Meade had said all the right things and seemed to mean them. If his performance disappointed, he could be removed. Meanwhile, Meade would do as he was told and see to the details, leaving him free to run the wider war.

As for Lee, Grant rejected the notion that the man was invincible. Oh, they all had admired the dashing Lee in Mexico, where he was Scott’s pet, but that had been a very different horse race. Grant intended to break Lee as soon as campaigning weather came to Virginia. All that was needed was to hit Lee good and hard, shockingly hard, and not let go of him. Just keep hitting him and hitting him. The South couldn’t stand that for long.

If he could smash Lee’s army and Sherman could take Atlanta, the war would end. As for the great and glorious Generals Butler, Banks, Sigel, and their ilk, if he had to keep them in command for election-year reasons, he would not let them jeopardize his purpose: The upcoming campaign in Virginia and Sherman’s match with Joe Johnston down in Georgia would be the combination to kill the Confederacy. Everything else was free eggs.

As for Meade, the man had fight in him, but he was, in the end, an eastern general who believed that wars could be fought as they had been waged by the great captains of the past, with a battle followed by a pause that allowed the enemy’s army to rest up. There was still too damned much Jomini in the East, all highfalutin angles marked on maps and too little grit or even common sense. Grant intended to bring this burgeoning colossus of an army to bear in one decisive campaign, no matter how long that campaign might last, and not let it rest until Lee was crushed. If George Meade needed prodding, he meant to provide it.

To his surprise, he had
liked
Meade, who was far from the bumbler malicious tongues implied. He remembered only scraps of the man from Mexico, but didn’t recollect Meade as a bad fellow, just old before his time with all that eastern, old-blood gravity of demeanor. And Meade had struck the proper tone in their meeting: His selflessness felt genuine. As for any haughtiness, there’d been a good sight less in Meade than George Thomas displayed.

How he wished Cump Sherman were on hand, though! Cump would have loved the tale of the cigar butt.

A captain thrust his head into the cabin. The guards tensed and gripped their weapons. It gave the railway officer a start.

“Anybody for Warrenton Station?”

A few additional officers had jumped a ride on the train. Two shuffled forward, carrying dispatch bags. Grant returned his attention to the world beyond the car: the raw morning, billows of steam, and burned-out ruins around a muddy station yard. Ragged whites averted their eyes, going about their business. With their darkies gone, they looked lost.

That called to mind his father-in-law, in the fine house in Missouri. He, too, would be lost without Negroes to do for him. Grant’s experience had been of a different kind, working beside loaned slaves in his fields at Hardscrabble, teased by other whites for his indulgence to them. But as the darkies sweated at his side, Grant had grasped that even a slave needed a reason to work for a hard-up white man whose kin saw him as a failure.

Grant sighed. Plenty of soldiers stood guard at the junction, so many it seemed a waste. Fearful men in Washington had warned of partisan rangers, as if guerrillas might swoop down and tuck the train in their saddlebags. Stanton himself had insisted that a company of infantry travel with him. Grant had not resisted the gesture, but he was sick to death of other men’s fears.

With a great metal groan and shrieking wheels, the train pulled northward again. In the soiled light, the landscape appeared ravaged by a power greater than man: Scrub growth encroached on desolate fields and most of the surviving houses were shacks. He might have been on another continent, rather than a few hundred miles from the Ohio Valley and fat farms of his childhood. Even his father’s tannery, whose gore had appalled him, seemed a lusty affair compared to this wretchedness.

These people had wanted war, and they had gotten it.

As the train rattled over a bridge, the major in charge of the guard detail approached Grant.

“Your pardon, sir, but you might want to move from the window. Wouldn’t want Mosby’s men to get a shot at you. They’ve been playing Hell up the line.”

Grant didn’t move.

ONE

April 29, 1864
Warrenton, Virginia

“Lord in Heaven, Old Abe’s a desperate man,” Bill Wildermuth said. “Lifting Brownie up to be a sergeant.
This
army ain’t scraping the bottom of the barrel, no, sir. We’re reaching down
under
that barrel.” He leaned over and gave Brown, his old workmate, a blow where a corporal’s stripes still graced a sleeve. “Ain’t that right, boys?”

Scattered on stumps and scavenged chairs set out in the wonderful sun, the old comrades drew their pipes from their mouths to offer up mock dismay at the coming promotion. Recruits new to the company smiled cautiously.

Apple blossoms feathered down around them. Promotion or not, Corporal Charles Brown told himself, the world went on, and the war went on, and one man no longer counted for very much. Yet, he was pleased by the prospect of adding a stripe.

“Promoting Brownie ain’t half so bad as making Doudle a corporal,” Charlie Oswald, a corporal himself, declared. “I predict complete defeat for the Union in no time at all. Short rations a-coming, boys, Andersonville’s a-calling.…”

“That’s nothing to laugh about,” Doudle said. “Andersonville, I mean.”

“But you do agree it’s a grave … a grave and desperate measure … making you a corporal and Brownie there a sergeant,” Wildermuth insisted. He cackled and tapped the ashes from his pipe. “I fear for the glorious Union, boys,” he told the new recruits. “You’ll be crying for your mothers, if they ain’t crying for you. Between Brownie, Doudle, and U. S. Grant, it’s a-going to be something.”

A quiet man, solid as oak, Private Henry Hill startled them all. Not only by speaking, but by the force in his tone: “Nobody’s ‘making’ Corporal Brown a sergeant. He made himself a sergeant. And you know it.”

Hill meant well. He always did. But solemnity wasn’t in season. A mood as fine as the afternoon—all green and gold and blue and free of rain—had captivated the men. The teasing continued amid the drifting blossoms.

Wildermuth stretched like a sun-warmed cat and turned back to the new faces. All of the gathered soldiers, green or veteran, had been canal boatmen back home. Except for Sammy Martz, the Pottsville blacksmith, who could not be deterred from joining their fellowship.

“Boys,” Wildermuth resumed, “it’s hard enough for a man to tell you four Eckerts apart. I mean, I don’t know if you’re brothers, cousins, uncles, or everything at once. Fellow gets to wondering what all goes on back home on Eckert Hill. Tell you this, though: Private Hill there might be the first sergeant’s confessed and proven cousin, but him and Brownie got some relation they ain’t admitting. Can’t hardly separate ’em, can’t hardly tell ’em apart. Same great big inky-head targets for the Johnnies, same jut-out jaws just a-begging for a fist.” He stretched again, smiling as if he knew all and would soon tell all. “Only difference I see is that Henry there got black eyes fit for a gypsy gal. Which sets a man wondering in a new direction entirely.”

Thrilled by spring, two birds swooped overhead. Delighted to have an audience still unwise, Wildermuth went on: “I figure it’s all up with us now. Over and done. You new fellows joined up at a terrible time, just terrible. Before you know it, ‘Sergeant’ Brown’s going to be running the company, if not the regiment. Then you look out! Yes, sir! General Burnside himself won’t be able to save a man among you.”

Surfeited, Brown spoke for himself at last: “Bill, if words were bullets, we could point you south and there wouldn’t be one Reb left alive come Sunday. And First Sergeant Hill might have something to say about who runs the company.”

“Not for long,” Wildermuth said. “I hear they’re going to make him a lieutenant any time now. And lieutenants never do nothing.”

“He’d make a good officer,” Doudle said. “What say, Henry? Pair of shoulder straps for Cousin Willie?”

Hill shrugged. His first loyalty, as all the veterans knew, was to the soon-to-be sergeant. Henry Hill and Charles Brown had not been close back home on the Schuylkill Canal, but war had bound them together in the odd way it had with men.

Sensing, as old soldiers do, that the call to form up was coming, Brown rose and said, “You Eckerts. You there, Martz. Line up, let me have a look at you. I’m not going to have you embarrassing this company.”

The new men fumbled about, but got themselves into what passed for order. Brown was struck, yet again, by how young they appeared. There would be, at most, two or three years’ difference between the survivors of old Company C and the new recruits they’d collected during their reenlistment furlough in February. Yet, the men who had left their barges and mule barns in ’61, who had fought from Port Royal to Knoxville, looked a decade older to Brown’s eyes.

He thought of his elder brother, dead of a simple sickness and buried at Vicksburg, above a river whose breadth stunned men bred on the humble Schuylkill. The regiment had moved from north to south to the west and back again, staking claims to strange earth with its dead. Now its flag drooped on a Virginia field. They had gone in a circle, blindfolded mules in a mill.

Flicking away a blossom that called to mind women and private things, Brown tightened the belt on one of the Eckert boys, asking, “You’re William, right?”

“No, Corporal. I’m Johnny. That’s William.” Dutchie as could be, the new man pronounced the names as “Chonny” and “Villy-yam.” The Eckerts were their own breed. In more than one way, folks said.

Brown grunted. Of the four Eckerts in the company now, the only one he could be sure of naming right was Isaac, who had been with them from the beginning. Standing off to the side, Isaac Eckert did not take a protective or helpful attitude toward his relatives, but let Brown straighten them out.

“I have a thing I must ask you, please, Corporal Brown,” the next Eckert in line said. His accent was thick as lard on farmhouse bread.

“What’s that?”

“Them Rebel girls, the ones in town there?”
Dem Reppel kirlz, ta wuns in tawn dare?
If Brown sometimes had trouble understanding the speech of Reb prisoners, he was sure the Johnnies wouldn’t know what to make of the Eckert boys or the other Dutchmen in the 50th Pennsylvania.

“What about ’em?”

“They are all so
verdammt
mean? I try to make polite … but when I lifts my cap,
die kleine Hexe
looks like I am the snake and she wants for the hatchet.”

“The ladies of Warrenton have seen their fill of Yankees,” Brown told the boy. He thought about the matter for a moment. “You just do like I told you and stay away from those darkey gals who come around of evenings. Or you’ll go home with something you won’t be proud of.”

Henry Hill spoke again. Twice in an afternoon was something of a milestone.

“First sergeant just stepped out of the captain’s tent.”

He spoke to Brown as if no one else were present.

“All right, then,” Brown said to the new men, straining to remember his canal Dutch. “Try to look like soldiers out there.
Stramm und still, versteh’? Mach doch keine Schweinerei.
And keep a crimp in your knees, the way I told you. Any man passes out in front of Captain Burket, he’ll have guard duty for a month. Let’s go now.
Los geht’s.
”