March Toward the Thunder (23 page)

Reese puffed on his pipe. “Fine tobacco, this,” he said again.

Louis looked back toward the dark mouth of the tunnel, imagining the closeness of that chamber where tons of explosive powder were being stacked.

"Y' want to go in and take a look, Chief?” Reese said, a wry smile on his face.

He shook his head.

Reese nodded.

“Late for the Fourth of July, but we'll be having some fine fireworks soon, y' know.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE FEINT

Louis looked up from his whittling to cast an eye around the mid-afternoon camp. He was up on a little hill with his back against a tree. Below he could see the hundreds of tents in their regimental rows, like neat herds of white sheep. On the hillside next to him, Artis was stretched out with his cap over his eyes.

Not really sleeping, though.

Now that he and Artis were spending even more time together, he'd come to realize that his Mohawk friend hardly ever slept. He'd catnap now and then, but if Louis should wake at three in the morning and look out of the tent, like as not there Artis would be stirring the fire with a stick.

The consolidation of units had resulted in Artis and four other men from his old company being reassigned to E. None of them, though, had been Artis's friend, the good-natured bantering Irish soldier.

Louis had asked about O'Grady when Artis arrived.

Artis just shook his head and swung his hand palm downward. Louis understood. Don't say the names of the dead.

An already familiar face, Artis fit in easily as E Company settled into a routine like that of the men in all the other regiments dug in around Petersburg—Rebel and Yankee alike.

Drilling, eating, playing cards, and swapping stories and songs to ease the boredom. So the hot summer days passed. Sometimes they'd get up a game of baseball. Louis had never heard of it before joining the army. But soldiers like Bull, who came from New York City, were crazy for it.

Just yesterday baseball had been the source of a heated argument between Bull and Joker.

“Why, in Brooklyn alone,” Belaney said with great fervor, “there's no fewer than three fine teams—the Stars, the Eckfords, and the Atlantics. And you should see what Candy Cummings of the Stars can do! He can hurl a ball in such a way that it scoots to the right or the left in flight.”

“A curveball? Hah!” Kirk sniffed. “It's a myth. A scientific impossibility.”

“I seed it with me own eyes.”

“An optical illusion,” Kirk replied. “Or maybe you had so many beers that it blurred your vision.”

Belaney got so worked up about it that he'd insisted on the two of them taking a ball and going out to a level piece of ground. There Bull had tried for a solid hour without success to make a ball curve sideways through the air the way he swore his man Cummings could.

Today, though, was too torrid for even a game of pitch and catch. The few clouds in the sky were stuck in place, seemingly as stunned by the heat as the humans moving like tiny ants in the lines of trenches below.

Even the sharpshooters had been affected by the counterfeit peace between the two great armies. Almost no shots were being fired. In the twilight, informal truces sprang up between companies of young men in blue and gray.

At first, jests were traded back and forth across the no-man's -land between the Army of the Potomac and Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

“Hey Yank, y'all still as good at runnin' as you was at Manassas?”

“Reb, any of you got any shoes left or has you et them all by now?”

Then, as the mid-summer quiet continued, a few from the two armies began to venture forth to meet in the middle and trade Southern tobacco—the only staple the ragged men in gray ever seemed to have in abundance—for sweets, a little salt pork, or even a few precious sheets of writing paper so that some homesick Carolinian might write a letter to his sweetheart or his mother.

But in that one little valley, despite the heat, feverish activity had been taking place as Pennsylvania miners, faces streaked with red clay and sweat, labored on their tunnel.

“We'll be filling in the tunnel for about forty feet, you know,” Sergeant Reese had explained. “Tamped in tight like a stopper. The only thing that worries us now is whether or not we'll actually get it to blow when the time comes. Our request for insulated wire and a galvanic battery failed t' come through, y'know. So what we have is two fifty-foot fuses spliced together.”

Quiet, but it's the calm before the thunder
.

Sure enough, after the evening meal, things began to happen.

“It's a night march for us, men,” Sergeant Flynn said. “And this time, saints be praised, it's along a well-marked road and we'll not get lost.”

Before night fell, Second Corps was on the move. They struck out to the north, making no effort to hide their movements from the enemy.

Their march was a long one, all the way up through the small peninsula to the spot on the curving James River where Tenth Corps had thrown a pontoon bridge across. The dawn was breaking as they made their attack on the works at Deep Bottom, the combined Irish Brigade at the front.

After three weeks of rest, Louis and the other men around him had thrown off the feeling of doom that oppressed them a month ago. The green regimental flag with its Irish harp waved proudly over their heads as they advanced into battle with a great shout.

They took the enemy so much by surprise that the fight was over almost before it started. In what seemed like the space of only a few heartbeats to Louis they found themselves in control of the first line of earthworks, four twenty-pounder Parrott guns, and two hundred Rebel prisoners. But there they stopped.

Their movement had been supposed to be little more than a feint to draw a large force up from the Petersburg line. Scouts reported that a large force of Rebel soldiers was being shifted their way to face what the Southern commanders feared was a major attempt to break through to Richmond.

Sergeant Flynn grinned as he passed on the orders to withdraw. “Sure and we've finally done something just as we'd planned,” he said. Even Corporal Hayes had the hint of a smile on his face as they began their withdrawal to a stronger position.

Louis was assigned with his friends to guard one group of prisoners. As they marched along, some of the men in gray seemed eager to strike up friendly conversations. Most of them seemed relieved to have been captured and taken out of the fight. Also, orders had been given to feed the prisoners, who all were glad to have some food to put into their bellies.

“The way you Southern boys is chewing on hardtack,” Joker said, “you'd think it was maple sugar.”

“Never shoulda jined the infantry,” replied a thin, long-haired Southern soldier. The skinny Rebel's clothes fit him like a scarecrow and his shoes were so worn out that the soles flapped against the ground as he walked. His voice, though, was pleasant and friendly. Everyone within earshot was finding the man's company amusing.

“Life in the infantry ain't worth a goober,” the skinny Rebel explained. “Them cavalry boys has it good. Jest riding about and havin' a fine time. They never wants for food either. Jest grab up a chicken or a porker as they rides along an' then gallop away without a howdy-do and leave us to do the fightin'. No suh, if'n you wants to eat and can't arrange to be in the quartermaster's department or the commissary, then the cavalry is sure the place to be. And if it wasn't for the fact that ah just hates them stuck-up cavalrymen, ah would of been one of them. If'n ah could ride a horse, that is.”

The man paused to lick the last crumbs of his piece of hardtack from his fingers, pushed the hair back from his eyes, and squinted over at Louis and Artis.

“You two Yanks colored boys?” he asked.

The man's tone wasn't unfriendly.

“Nope,” Louis replied.

“Indian,” Artis said.

“Unh-hunh, so you are. Wouldn't of mattered, though, if'n you was colored. Ah ain't got nothin' agin' the coloreds. Biggest mistake we ever made was not jest setting them all free onct the war began. Most of us fighting this war, they's poor folk like me. Never ownt a slave, never wanted one. We jest fightin' for our rahts since you Yankees invaded us. Them no-account senators we got up in Richmond, Lord, some of them got plantations with hundreds of darkies. They got more slaves than they got sense, if'n you know what ah mean.”

Songbird had drifted closer as the man delivered his monologue.

“What do you mean by that?” Songbird asked.

“Wull,” the talkative Rebel said, “jest that aside from Jeff Davis, who appears to have a head on his shoulders, about all them men supposed to be representin' us does is argue with each other like mules. Now, ah was a farmer afore all this begun. Worked twenty acres with my ma and my pa and my two brothers. And one thing ever' soul who works the soil knows is that if'n you got a crop, you needs to sell it if'n you wants the money to live on. That's jest one thing them mules in fine suits up in Richmond is too dumb to figger out.”

“What's your meaning?” Devlin said.

“Cotton,” the man said. There was a different look about him now. Although the ragged young Southerner had seemed at first like a country bumpkin, Louis saw the intelligence in the man's eyes.

“Cotton?”

“Cotton, the sale of which would've paid for uniforms—not like these rags we're wearing—and food for us to eat. We grows the finest cotton in the world here in the South and the English would have kept on buying it from us, even if they was against slavery—which as ah said we should of just got rid of all on our own at the start of this set-to. So what did those eddicated idjits in Richmond do? They told the British they wouldn't sell any of our cotton to them unless they declared for our side against the North. But as long as we still got slaves, them English was not about to do that. So where's all our Southern cotton? Rottin' in warehouses for the last three years and not bringing in a dime.”

Soon they reached the James River and crossed. Another company was waiting there to take the captives on to City Point. From there the Rebs would be sent north by ship to a POW camp.

Off to Elmira. And it's sad I am to think of you going there
.

“Good luck to you, even if you is Yanks,” the long-haired young Southerner shouted over his shoulder. He waved good-bye with his left hand since his right was clutching the additional pieces of hardtack that the men of E Company had given him.

“You too, Reb,” Louis called back.

It was another long march through the dark from Deep Bottom back to Petersburg. A beautiful dawn began to break over the hills. The sky streaked with rose red and burnished gold. Small birds fluttered up in the air to twitter their songs to welcome the new day, seemingly unaware of the war going on between the two-leggeds camped in the woods and fields and crouched in the trenches around them.

Louis took a deep breath of the sweet morning air. He turned toward Artis and opened his mouth. But whatever words he had planned to say were never spoken. There was a sudden deep crumping sound. The two of them felt as much as heard it. The earth under their feet shuddered like a beaten horse.

Louis squinted his eyes toward the part of the line a mile ahead where the Pennsylvania miners had been laboring for the past month.

Just time enough to think that word before the answer was made brutally clear.

A great column of smoke and earth shot up, sudden as a giant's fist thrust into the air. Even as far away as they were, the massive cloud lifted up and up above them. It was so huge that Louis immediately felt the wrongness of it. It shot out sparks of fire, and flashes of lightning as it rose, formless at first, then taking the shape of a dark arching elm with a trunk made of fire. Two heartbeats later a sound like the roaring of a huge hungry beast struck them, so loud it was deafening.

Men around Louis and Artis shrank back from what seemed like the end of the world. Some covered their faces or dropped to the ground. But the two young Indian soldiers did not look away. Their keen eyes saw what was falling out of that cloud. Earth, broken timbers, stones—and what looked to be blackened human limbs.

“Good God!” Artis said.

Louis shook his head. “Nothing good about this.”

A thunder crash of cannons came hard on the heels of the blast. One hundred and forty-four field pieces had been lined up for the assault to follow the setting off of the mine. It seemed as if every mortar and siege gun let go at once as shocked artillery men pulled their lanyards. But there was no second round, no answering fire. A brittle silence hung over the lines. Both sides were stunned by the largest explosion ever set off by human hands.

“What have we gone and done?” Louis said as the men of his company slowly rose to their feet around him and Artis. “What have we gone and done?”

CHAPTER THIRTY

THE CRATER

Louis and Artis kept low as they made their way over to the new camp of the 48th. In the week since the explosion the Pennsylvanians had been moved farther back from the great hole that had once been a section of the Rebel line. The Confederate sharpshooters over there were all as angry as hornets now. Any Union soldier who raised his head was in danger of losing it.