Soldier's Heart (7 page)

“Reload and fire at will!”

Charley automatically loaded, raised and fired, but there were few targets. Those horses back on their feet were quickly shot down and any man who stood was hit ten, twenty times.

“Cease fire!”

Silence except for the screaming horses and the groaning of wounded men. Charley reloaded, capped his rifle and kneeled, resting. He was thirsty and took a sip from his canteen. He did not look at the horses stumbling and kicking and falling.

Was that it? he wondered—just the one
charge? It was nearly dark now—a soft dusk—and he looked to the rear to see where they might camp for the night and get fires going for coffee and heat. He loved coffee, though it tore his guts and gave him a constant stomachache, and he thought of going to the shattered Confederate charge to see if they had any sugar in their saddlebags. There was good sugar in the South and he might find some for his coffee. He salivated, thinking of coffee with sugar in it.

“On the left! Form line-of-battle and wheel left!”

He turned and his heart nearly stopped. Coming from their left oblique, walking toward them in the gathering twilight, seemed to be the whole Rebel army.

Two thousand, Charley thought. Maybe three thousand of them. Marching straight at Charley in a head-on attack.

“Range four hundred!” the sergeants called.
“Set sights for four hundred. Fire when ready.”

Charley thought it more like three hundred yards but he flipped up the rear sight for four hundred and raised and fired. He didn't hear his rifle because everybody around him fired at the same time.

Some of the Rebels fell. Not many, not nearly enough. Charley reloaded and fired, then again and again, and each time the Union soldiers fired more of the Rebels fell—jerking backward and down, spinning forward, sitting back with the shock of being hit.

The Rebels had not fired yet but had started to trot. They were down to two hundred and fifty yards and Charley and the men around him kept up a steady rate of fire. Charley fired fifteen rounds and hit perhaps seven or eight Rebels, but most of the men shot high—a common failing when firing on advancing infantry.

They were only seventy-five yards away now.
It was nearly dark and the flash from the rifles momentarily blinded Charley.

At fifty yards the Rebels fired and at least fifteen hundred bullets tore into the Union line. Men went down in droves—twenty around Charley alone. His own clothing was hit four times, the brim on his cap sliced off, wood knocked off the stock of his rifle and one of his shoe heels creased.

“Fix bayonets!”

It was to be steel, Charley saw. The men from Minnesota could have run but didn't; they held their ground, and Charley held with them. With his bayonet locked onto his muzzle, he loaded one last time just as the Rebels hit the Union line.

Oh, he thought, this is nasty work. This is right
nasty
work. It was nearly dark and hard to tell uniforms apart in the bad light and the smoke from firing, and Charley did not know where to turn, where to fight. The decision
wasn't his. In the murk a man suddenly appeared, his bayoneted rifle aimed at Charley's chest. Charley parried with his own rifle and took the Rebel soldier just below the breastbone with his bayonet. The man had been running so hard he ran himself onto the bayonet before falling off to the side, dying as he fell, his lungs and heart torn. Charley's bayonet was stuck and he had to put his foot on the man's chest to jerk it loose.

After that there was no order, no sense, no plan. Charley became a madman. He attacked anything and everything that came into his range—slashing, clubbing, hammering, jabbing, cutting—and always screaming, screaming in fear, in anger and finally in a kind of rabid, insane joy, the joy of battle, the joy of winning, the joy of killing to live.

And at last there was nothing around to hit, to fight, to kill. He stood with the rifle hanging at his side, his bayonet bent at the tip, the
stock shattered, his arms weak, his legs soft, his chest heaving as he sucked air, his throat rasping.

“They've run,” somebody said. “They've took foot.”

“You're hit.” A corporal stood in front of Charley.

“No. I'm all right.”

“You're hit there, in the shoulder.”

Charley looked down. He was covered in blood, his arm and chest and pants wet with it. “Oh …”

“The surgeon's tent is back there a half mile, in those trees. Can you walk it?”

“I think so.”

“Go it, then. Get patched. We'll see you later.”

Charley walked in a kind of daze, dragging his broken rifle by the sling. With the dark the temperature had plummeted but he didn't feel the cold. He didn't feel anything.

He saw the lanterns of the surgeon and the ambulance drivers and walked toward them. Somebody in a bloody apron stopped him and held a lantern up, lighting his face with a yellow glow.

“Where are you hit?”

“I don't know. They sent me back. I think it's my shoulder but it don't seem to hurt.”

“Over there. Sit with that group by the tent and we'll get to you when we can.” The man turned back to the tent with no sides where a doctor working by lantern light was sawing a leg off a soldier. Near the tent was a pile of arms and legs that stood four feet high and ten or twelve feet long.

Ambulance wagons kept coming with more men, and Charley moved to an area where fifteen or twenty men lay on the ground waiting for attention. Off to the other side of the tent there was another group of two or three hundred men. They were not moving and Charley realized they were dead.

He sat and waited for the pain to come. Once when he was a boy he'd struck his foot with an ax. The blade had cut a three-inch gash between two of his toes and he'd walked to town to get it sewed up. It hadn't hurt for the entire walk, hadn't hurt until the doctor had stitched it up and he'd walked home. Then it had kept him up all night.

He thought it would be the same here but the pain didn't come. He tried to sip some water from his canteen but it had frozen into slush and wouldn't drain through the neck of the bottle, so he lay back on the ground. Men around him moaned and some died waiting to be taken under the tent.

Presently—it could have been an hour, a day, a week, for Charley no longer thought in terms of time, no longer really thought at all—the man with the bloody apron came back to him.

“Shuck your coat—let's see how bad you're hurt.”

Charley unbuttoned his greatcoat, then his uniform jacket and his flannel shirt.

“Let's see …” The attendant held the lantern up, pulled the shirt away and looked down the front and back. “Hell, boy, you ain't hit.”

“I'm not?”

“Not a scratch. That's other men's blood all over you.”

“Oh.”

“You can go back.”

“Not yet.” A doctor came out of the tent. “I need help here. The wind is making up and the cold is freezing my hands. I need some kind of windbreak—see if the two of you can't fix something up.”

“With what?” The attendant looked around. “There's nothing here.”

The doctor looked around, then back, then at the bodies. “Use
them
.”

“The dead?”

“They won't feel it. You”—he pointed a
bloody hand at Charley—“give him help there. Pile them up to stop the wind from the side of the tent.”

And so they did. Each taking an end, they moved the bodies, stacking them like bricks and angling them at the corners so they would not tip over, until they had a stout frozen wall five feet high and thirty feet long to stop the wind.

When it was done Charley lay on the ground in the lee of the dead men's wall, just to get out of the wind for a minute and get warm, and slept there for five hours, sheltered by the dead.

Third battle.

GETTYSBURG

I
t was in many respects exactly the same and yet completely different.

He had been in more skirmishes and he had killed more men. He had had men die next to him. But he had not been in another major battle.

Now he was at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on top of a gradually sloping hill, looking down at what seemed to be the entire Southern army assembling to attack.

What was the same was the meadow. There
was always a forest and always a meadow. In this case the forest where the Rebels were assembling was over a mile away and well below the Union army. In between was a large meadow a mile or more wide. The Rebels would have to leave the trees and walk, under constant fire from artillery, across the meadow and up the incline to the fences and rock walls where the Union soldiers waited.

What was different about this battle was that Charley was above the Rebs, in a sheltered position, with all the guns in the world behind him.

It was a warm day and he sipped some water from his canteen and checked his rifle. He had taken a new one from a dead man after his own had been destroyed. This rifle had a tendency to foul its nipple, so he carried a small needle stuck in his shirt to clean the hole out if it plugged. He did so now and put a fresh cap on the nipple, then tightened his shoelaces in
case he had to run. That was always in his mind—either run at them or run away. He did not want to stumble.

He peeked through the rock wall again and saw the Confederate artillery wheeling their cannon into place. The Rebs would try to prepare the hill with artillery before their charge, and as Charley looked the first batteries began firing. Soon they were all hammering away. It was the worst barrage Charley had undergone. Shells burst overhead and killed men and horses and destroyed some Union artillery and rear positions.

But it could have been far worse. The line of Union troops waiting to take the Confederate attack were at the brow of the hill, which dropped away to their rear as well. The Rebel artillery was massed and firing heavily, but rounds aimed at the top of the hill that went even slightly high just passed over and exploded down the back side.

Casualties were not as heavy as all the noise and smoke indicated. When shooting tapered off and the Rebels started moving their massed troops across the meadow and up the hill, the Union artillery wheeled into position and tore into them with exploding rounds: chain and grapeshot. The Confederates had to march through a storm of fire and Charley lay and watched them and nearly felt sorry for them.

They were so brave, he thought—or foolish. They kept coming, even when thousands of them were down and dying. The cannon ripped them to pieces, wiping them out before they were even within rifle range, slaughtering them like sheep as they marched in even rows. Sometimes whole rows were dropped where they stood, so the dead lay in orderly lines. And still they came on.

At first it all seemed so distant, as if it was a staged tableau. Men marched, then they spun and fell, exploding red bursts into the air.

But as they came closer and Charley could see what the artillery was doing to them—tearing, gutting, blowing apart—he could not believe that anyone would continue,
could
continue against the fire.

Yet they came on and on, close enough now so those not hit could return fire, and Charley could hear their bullets hitting the rocks in front of him and he thought, so this is what it's like to be safe, to fight from a good position.

“All right—up, men.” The sergeants roused them. “Ready to fire! Shoot low, shoot low—take their legs out. Present, aim, fire!”

Charley raised, aimed and fired, all in less than two seconds. He did not know if he hit, did not care. He reloaded behind the wall, rose, aimed, fired, and thought, this is the way it should be done. The bullets over his head sounded like a storm but they were all high, and he kept reloading and firing as the remaining
Rebs screamed and started to run at the wall.

“Up, men! Bayonets! Take them.”

Charley did not think any of the Rebels would reach the line but they came on. Torn and bleeding and many in rags, they yelled and came with bayonets, and for a moment it seemed they would carry it, win the hill, win the battle against impossible odds.

But a colonel saw the danger and ordered the only unit still in relative shelter—the First Minnesota Volunteers—to make a countercharge.

They rose and went as one man, Charley among them. Screaming their own yells, they tore down the hill at the Rebel unit storming up the hill, and the two bodies of men collided in a smash of steel and powder, standing toe-to-toe, hacking and shooting at each other, neither giving, climbing over the bodies of friends to hit enemies, Charley in the middle
jabbing and screaming until he was hit, and hit again, spun and knocked down, and he saw the red veil come down over his eyes and knew that at last he was right, at last he was done, at last he was dead.

JUNE 1867