Hell or Richmond (6 page)

Damn the black-clad gentlemen his mother had needed to please after his father went mad and ran away from his wife and three young boys! The shame of certain things she had done, the beggarly things to which he had seen her stoop, would rankle him until his dying day.

If Boston’s self-congratulation had become odious, he had not found a home in uniform, either. Having turned his back on those who spoke
ad infinitum
without acting, he now found himself among active men incapable of speech. He never had a proper conversation. Except with Arabella, when she visited.

His smirk was his armor; he wore it as his custom. He found the human species absurdly limited. No doubt that rogue of an Englishman was right and they were all descended from apes. Although the proposition seemed hard on the monkeys.

He sat down in the camp chair Hancock’s bulk had threatened to crumple. About to call for his orderly to help him with his boots, he decided that he preferred to extend his solitude. Carefully, he worked the boots off himself and felt, simultaneously, the relief of cool air on his damp wool stockings and the attack of the infernal itching that wouldn’t leave him.

Rolling off the stockings, he examined the peeling, flaking skin that led down to his toes. It was a wretched business. He’d seen doctors. Their succession of salves seemed to help for a time, as did the salt baths mixed like alchemist’s potions. But the damnable itch always, always returned. One ass of a doctor in New York had prescribed a summer at Newport, where Barlow could go barefoot and bathe his feet in the sea each morning and evening.

Barlow did not doubt that his feet would get wet as the weather warmed. But it was going to be from the mud of Virginia’s swamps, not the great salt ocean.

“Orderly!” he bellowed.
“Orderly!”

The man appeared at the double-quick. He was new at the work, a replacement, and wonderfully terrified.

“Bring me a bucket of water.”

“Hot water, sir?”

“Cold.”

“Yes, sir.”

The corporal eyed Barlow’s exposed feet, and Barlow caught it.

“Sir … if you don’t mind my saying…”

“I
do
mind, Corporal.”

“Yes, sir.”

Barlow believed that Hancock had it wrong. Whether or not this was the Prussian army—and it damned well wasn’t, more’s the pity—he believed that Frederick had been absolutely correct that the men should fear their officers more than the enemy. Look at the rabble they were putting in uniform these days. Oh, the old veterans were fine. He still loved to visit the men of the 61st, his first real regiment, down in Miles’ brigade. But the drafted lot, and the Irish, the bounty-jumpers. They hadn’t the mettle. The gaps in his division had been filled with the scum of the earth, he didn’t see how a sane person could deny it, and the only way to get such men to face the bayonets to their front was to place even sharper bayonets at their backs. And the only thing worse than a cowardly soldier was a cowardly officer.

Barlow had never quite understood the importance men attached to their puny lives. Certainly, he preferred life to death. That was ordained. But evaluated by a man of sense, life wasn’t to be taken all that seriously. As far as commodities went, human lives sold cheap. The politicians could spout their praises of the common citizen, but many a man wasn’t worth the food he stuffed in his maw at dinner.

He just could not understand the fear men felt on the verge of battle or in its midst. There was nothing on earth more exhilarating. Certainly, it was an incalculably greater thrill than intimate association with a woman, an enterprise much overpraised by poets. Of the many causes for his appreciation of his wife, not least was Arabella’s sense of proportion.

The orderly returned, announcing himself before entering the tent. The bucket the man carried was sloshing full.

“Your pardon, sir, but Colonel Miles is trotting up the way.”

“Put down the bucket. Outside, put it outside, man. And come back here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sentenced to suffer, Barlow drew on his stockings again.

The corporal stepped back under the canvas. He looked at Barlow’s now clad feet. Doubtfully.

“Don’t stare, you ass.” He could hear Miles clopping up. “Help me with my boots.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Move.”

The man moved. He was deathly afraid. That was good.

Fully clad below the waist again, Barlow stood and said, “Now get out of here.”

His feet burned, damn them. He dreaded the coming summer.

And yet, he relished the suffering, too, and knew he did. He took a fierce pride in treating hardships casually, in living rough, in enduring more than the Irish toughs and the muscle-clad farm-boys still not dead of dysentery. In winter, he wore an overcoat only when the cold became truly unbearable, a rare thing in Virginia. He intended to be more spartan than the Spartans, more stoic than the Stoics. He relished humbling other men with their weaknesses.

Barlow stepped outside as Miles dismounted. They had served together, on and off, since the Peninsula. If there was any officer Barlow trusted, it was Nelson Miles.

“Well, Nellie!” he said. “You look like a damned Red Indian. Careful of that Virginia sun, old man.” Feet be damned, he was happy to see Miles. The fellow was not just a fighter, but almost had a brain.

“Drilling,” Miles told him. “Have to put the new men through their paces. Your skirmishing evolutions.”

“Meade sent down a compliment for you. Regarding the review. He thought your brigade looked splendid. Now come into the tent, for God’s sake. I could bear losing you to a bullet, but not to sunburn. What’s on your mind? Drink?”

“Just water. For now, sir.”

As Barlow poured from a pitcher, Miles looked about. “I see the new saber arrived.”

“Here. At least the well water’s decent in this godforsaken place. Nice blade. Good and heavy. Whack a coward with the flat of that one, and he’ll think twice. Sit down, sit down. Hancock was just here. Not sure his leg’s all it should be.”

“Any news?” Miles took the camp chair, weary and forgetful of decorum. Barlow let it go.

“He thinks we’ll get marching orders any day now.”

Miles looked around. As if he could see through the canvas. “Shame to waste this good weather. Rather fight now, before the heat sets in. Listen, Frank”—in private, they were “Frank” and “Nelson” or, when Barlow was in the spirit, “Nellie”—“maybe you should address the men. I know you don’t go in for that sort of thing … but all of the other division commanders are doing it. They’re hollering up a storm fit for shouting Methodists: ‘God bless the sacred Union … our holy cause triumphant … damnation to the Confederacy…’ You know the sort of thing. The men expect it.”

Barlow’s grimace took his jaw a good inch out of alignment. “If I’d wanted to preach from a pulpit, I would have pursued a different vocation.” He thought of Coriolanus, the much maligned. “All the men need to hear from me is ‘Fix bayonets!’ and ‘Charge!’ And, really, only you and the other brigade commanders need to hear that much. The men need clear orders, not rhetoric.”

Barlow abhorred and dreaded public speaking. Even as a lawyer, he had preferred settling things in chambers. Fighting a battle was easy compared to addressing a throng. He had sat through enough pandering lectures in churches, parlors, assembly halls, and classrooms to know exactly what speeches were worth, and what a shabby thing it was to plead for the mob’s approval.

“Frank”—Miles tried again—“you’ve got the old Third Corps men disgruntled that they’ve been resubordinated to Second Corps. And everyone’s grumbling—company commanders included—about your order to strip the men’s packs of everything not on your list. At least show them you’re human.”

“They’ve been loading themselves like donkeys. Lighten the packs, and we’ll have fewer stragglers. I want men on the firing line, not lining the damned roads and playing possum.” He folded his arms. “The Johnnies don’t carry gewgaws into battle. That’s why they move so fast while we bump along.”

“Oh, Christ, Frank! It’s as if you’re
determined
to make them hate you. And they want to like you, they really do. The veterans understand what you’re after, and they tell the new men what’s what.” Miles leaned toward him. “They do look up to you, you know. But soldiers want to like their commanders, too.”

“I don’t need them to like me,” Barlow said. “I just need them to fight.”

TWO

May 4, late morning
Gordonsville, Virginia

Colonel William C. Oates watched the two sergeants fight. Although he wasn’t a gambling man, he did like a good match. Didn’t mind taking part in one, either. He’d have to rely on brawn, though, if it came to fisticuffs. He wasn’t going to do much dancing around with his shot-through hip. He could move just fine again, no need of crutches, and could even run when the spirit was upon him. But he wasn’t fit for a quickstep anymore, whether with a belle or knuckles up.

As each blow landed, the onlookers yipped and yowled, hollering out encouragement to the sergeant they preferred. It was quite a go-to, scattering sweat and blood. Under a blue sky clean enough for churchgoing. Or for sweet-saying a woman, a matter of fond recall. Here and now, the ladies weren’t for touching. And he wasn’t about to risk what health he had with one of the mammies who came around selling fried chicken. Nothing here to occupy a man but the infernal wait for the Yankees, the wondering over what the next days would deliver. At the hospital pavilions behind the rail stop, idle surgeons lurked like vultures atop a fence: The sick, of which there always was aplenty, weren’t much pleasure for a sawing doc.

They wouldn’t have to wait long to bloody their aprons. Oates felt it. The Federals would come splashing across that river, hell-bent on getting to Richmond this time, and the fighting would be a sight worse than this brawl.

The match had been set up to settle some paltry grievance, with his permission as the regiment’s colonel of some duration, a tenure interrupted only by the annoyance of a wound. Law had sought to make him a brigadier, but Longstreet put Law under arrest—out of shame and malice—so none of Evander Law’s favorites was going to see higher rank for a good, long time. As for Longstreet, Oates had turned against him hard after Tennessee, when he struggled back to the regiment in March and found it run-down as a poor-white’s hogpen, fewer than four hundred men present and a passel of the best left dead at Knoxville. The living had been half-frozen and hungry enough to eat dirt. Old Pete had made a mess of things and, instead of facing his failure like a man, had tried to relieve or arrest his division commanders and any unlucky colonels who caught his eye, shifting the blame like a tramp caught stealing a pie.

Longstreet hated Law’s Alabama Brigade, he’d tried to leave it rotting in Tennessee. But Lee had thought better of things. Longstreet’s revenge, when the Alabamans returned to his command, was to place his own man, Colonel Perry, over the brigade while Law stood aside under charges. Oates’ willingness to serve as his old brigade commander’s attorney, if it came to a trial, had been the worst of treasons in Longstreet’s eyes.

The army was worse than the red-clay politics back in Alabama. He would have liked to have Old Pete right here in this ring of soldiers. Then they’d see which one was the proper man.

The fight turned sluggish and cruel. Both of the Company I sergeants, Jimmy Ball and Clarence Morgan, were wearing down, painted with blood and welts. For years, the two had been the best of friends. But something had happened out there in Tennessee, something neither of them cared to speak to. Now they were fit to kill each other. Oates watched the proceedings with a sharpened eye: He was going to need both men. Hell, he was going to need every man, halt, lame, or blind. The return of wounded veterans had brought the 15th’s roster back above four hundred men, but that wasn’t even half the authorized strength.

If Old Pete were to ride up, Oates knew, he’d lose his command for letting the fight go ahead. But Alabama men had their own way of settling matters, and they didn’t need some jackass fool of a West Point martinet to come around to judge the quick and the dead.

Oates took in the downright glee on the faces of the men watching the fight. For these few carved-out minutes of manly violence, they had forgotten their troubles, their old complaints, and their own long-standing grudges, captivated by bloodshed not their own. Out of all the beasts in the fields and all the birds in the air, a man was the strangest creature: When the fight was done—and he meant to end it soon—these men would be all kindness to victor and vanquished alike.

He wished he had been at Knoxville with them and not a pampered guest in a plantation house. Nothing against Colonel Toney and his family, who had treated him like a son and nursed his wounds. The gentlemanly old fellow had anticipated each of a young man’s needs and had even sent a gal around on the quiet, warm skin shining like saddle leather. But no loin-quickening memory could free him from the ghosts of the men who had died during his absence: Frank Park, John McLeod … so many of the first volunteers from southeast Alabama, men with whom he had shared many a misery. It wasn’t as bad as Gettysburg, where he’d lost his brother John to those Maine sonsofbitches, but it came near.

Ball landed a blow that sent Morgan reeling. Big for his kind, the Welshman didn’t go down, but staggered. To the extent he could maintain a direction for his unwilling feet to follow, Morgan aimed back toward Ball. The two sergeants were mean-fighting men, Hell on the Yankees. Oates needed them to save some meanness up.

“That’s enough,”
he barked, stepping into the circle of ragged uniforms. “Fight’s over, hear?”

He and Ball made eye contact. Ball had heard him all right. But the sergeant turned back to his opponent, who was struggling to hold up his fists. Ball thrust a straight-armed punch at Morgan’s jaw.

The Welshman went down.

Oates strode up to the sergeant. Just as the victor turned his way again, Oates let go a widow-maker that put Ball down beside the man he’d bested.