The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (156 page)

He went to where the battery’s great ten-pound Parrotts and twelve-pound howitzers were being secured to flatcars with heavy chains. The cannon were being loaded in the yellow light of large calcium lamps that sputtered and flickered, throwing shadows that appeared to move with a life of their own.

“Doctor,” someone said softly.

The man stepped out of the darkness next to him and took his hand, making the signal of recognition. Too nervous even to feel absurd, Rob J. endeavored to perform the countersign as though he had done it many times before.

Ordway looked at him. “Well,” he said.

53

THE LONG GRAY LINE

They came to hate the troop train. It crept so slowly across the length of Kentucky and wound so tiredly between the hills, a snake-shaped, boring jail. When the train entered Virginia the news traveled from car to car. The soldiers peered from the windows, expecting at once to witness the face of the enemy, but all they saw was a country of mountains and woods. When they stopped for fuel and water in small towns, the people were as friendly as they’d been in Kentucky, because the western section of Virginia supported the Union. They could tell when they reached the other part of Virginia. There were no women at the stations with drinks of cool mountain water or lemonade, and the men had bland, blank faces and watchful, heavy-lidded eyes.

The 131st Indiana detrained at a place called Winchester, an occupied town, blue uniforms everywhere. While the horses and equipment were unloaded, Colonel Symonds disappeared inside a headquarters building near the railroad station, and when he emerged the troops and the wagons were arrayed in marching order, and they set out southward.

When Rob J. had signed on, he’d been told he had to buy his own horse, but there had been no urgent need for him to have a horse in Cairo, because he didn’t wear a uniform or take part in parades. Besides, horses were scarce wherever the army was located, because the cavalry claimed every remount in sight, whether the animal ran races or pulled a plow. So now, horseless, he rode in the ambulance on the seat next to Corporal Ordway, who drove the team. Rob J. was still tense in Lanning Ordway’s presence, but Ordway’s only question had been to wonder warily why a member of the OSSB should “speak with a foreigner’s tongue,” referring to the trace of Scots burr that on occasion still crept into Rob J.’s speech. Rob had said he’d been born in Boston and taken to Edinburgh as a youth to be educated, and Ordway appeared satisfied. He was now cheerful and friendly, obviously pleased to be working for a man who had a political reason for taking good care of him.

They passed a marker on the dusty road that indicated it was the route to Fredericksburg. “God Almighty,” Ordway said. “I hope nobody’s got it
in mind to send a second group of Yankees up against those rebel gunners on the heights at Fredericksburg.”

Rob J. could only agree.

Several hours before dusk the 131st came to the banks of the Rappahannock River, and Symonds halted them and ordered a camp. He called a meeting of all officers in front of his tent, and Rob J. stood on the fringes of the uniforms and listened.

“Gentlemen, for half a day we have been members of the Federal Army of the Potomac, under the command of General Joseph Hooker,” Symonds said.

He told them Hooker had gathered a force of about 122,000 men, spread out over a long perimeter. Robert E. Lee had about ninety thousand Confederates and was at Fredericksburg. Hooker’s cavalry had scouted Lee’s army for a long time and they were convinced Lee was getting ready to invade the North in an attempt to draw Union forces away from the siege at Vicksburg, but no one knew where or when the invasion would take place. “The people in Washington are understandably nervous, with the Confederate Army only a couple of hours away from the White House door. The 131st is traveling to join other units near Fredericksburg.”

The officers took the news soberly. They laid out several layers of pickets, far and near, and the camp settled down for the night. When Rob J. had eaten his pork and beans, he lay back and looked up at the fat summer stars of evening. It was too much for him to contemplate contending forces that were so enormous. About ninety thousand Confederate men! About 122,000 Union men! And all of them doing their best to kill one another.

A limpid night. The 614 soldiers of the Indiana 131st lay on the warm bare ground without bothering to raise tents. Most of them still had northern colds, and the sound of their coughing was enough to warn any nearby enemy of their existence. Rob J. had a brief doctor’s nightmare, wondering about the sound of 122,000 men all coughing at the same time. The acting assistant surgeon clasped his arms about his body, chilled. He knew that if two such giant armies were to meet and fight, it would take more than the men of the band to carry the wounded away.

It took them two and one-half days to march to Fredericksburg. On the way they almost succumbed to Virginia’s secret weapon, the chigger. The tiny
red mite fell on them when they passed under overhanging trees and became attached to them as they walked through grass. If it clung to their clothing, it migrated until it reached bare skin, where it burrowed its entire body into human flesh to feed. Soon men had chigger rashes between their fingers and toes, in their buttocks and on their penises. The mite had a two-part body; if a soldier saw one working its way into his flesh and tried to pull it out, the chigger broke at its narrow waist, and the portion that was embedded did as much damage as a whole chigger would have. By the third day most of the soldiers were scratching and swearing, and some of the wounds already had begun to fester in the moist heat. Rob J. could do nothing more than sprinkle sulfur on the embedded insects, but a few of the men had had experience with chiggers, and they taught the rest that the only remedy was to hold the glowing end of a stick or a lighted cigar just off the skin until the chigger started to back up, drawn to the heat. Then it could be seized and pulled out slowly and carefully, so it wouldn’t break. All over the camp, men removed chiggers from one another, reminding Rob J. of the monkeys he used to watch grooming each other for lice in the Edinburgh Zoo.

Chigger misery didn’t eradicate terror. Their apprehension grew as they approached Fredericksburg, which had been the scene of such Yankee slaughter at the earlier battle. But when they arrived they saw only Union blue, because Robert E. Lee had adroitly and quietly pulled out his troops several nights earlier under cover of darkness, and his Army of Northern Virginia was heading north. The Union cavalry was scouting Lee’s progress but the Army of the Potomac wasn’t in pursuit, for reasons only General Hooker knew.

They camped at Fredericksburg for six days, resting, tending to blisters on their feet, removing chiggers, cleaning and oiling weapons. When they were off-duty, in small groups they climbed the ridge where only six months before almost thirteen thousand Union men had been killed or wounded. Looking down at the easy targets their comrades made struggling to climb after them, they were glad Lee had left before they got there.

When Symonds got new orders, they had to move north again. They were on the march along a dusty road when they heard the news that Winchester, where they had disembarked from their troop train, had been hit hard by Confederates under General Richard S. Ewell. It was another rebel victory—ninety-five Union men had been killed, 348 wounded, and more than four thousand were missing or taken prisoner.

Riding uncomfortably in the ambulance along that peaceful country
lane, Rob J. didn’t allow himself to believe in combat, just as when he had been a young boy he hadn’t allowed himself to believe in death. Why should people die? It made no sense, since it was more pleasant to live. And why should people actually fight during a war? It was more pleasant to proceed sleepily down this curving, sun-baked road than to engage in the business of killing.

But just as Rob J.’s childhood disbelief in mortality had been ended by his father’s death, the reality of the present was brought home to him when they came to Fairfax Courthouse and he saw what the Bible meant when it described an enormous army as a host.

They camped on a farm in six fields amid artillery and cavalry and other infantry. Everywhere Rob J. looked there were Union soldiers. The army was in flux, troops coming and leaving. The day after the 131st arrived they learned that Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia already had invaded the North, crossing the Potomac River into Maryland. Once Lee had committed himself, so did Hooker, tardily sending the first units of his army north, trying to stay between Lee and Washington. It was forty more hours before the 131st fell in and resumed its northward march.

Each army was too large and diffuse to be relocated swiftly and completely. Part of Lee’s force still was in Virginia, moving to cross the river and join its commander. The two armies were shapeless, pulsating monsters, spreading and contracting, always on the move, sometimes alongside one another. When their edges happened to touch, there were skirmishes like bursts of sparks—at Upperville, at Haymarket, at Aldie, and a dozen other places. The Indiana 131st had no concrete evidence of the fighting except in the middle of one night when the outer line of pickets exchanged brief and ineffectual fire with horsemen who hurried away.

The men of the 131st crossed the Potomac in small boats at night, on the twenty-seventh of June. The next morning they resumed their march north, and Fitts’s band struck up “Maryland, My Maryland.” Sometimes when they came to people, somebody would wave, but the Maryland civilians they passed seemed unimpressed, because for days they had been witnessing troops marching through. Rob J. and the soldiers soon grew heartily sick of the Maryland state anthem, but the band still was playing it on the morning when they made their way through good rolling farmland and into a neat central village.

“What part of Maryland is this?” Ordway asked Rob J.

“I don’t know.” They were passing a bench on which an old man sat and watched the military. “Mister,” Rob J. called, “what’s the name of this pretty community?”

The compliment seemed to disconcert the old man. “Our town? This town is Gettysburg.”

Although the men of the 131st Indiana didn’t know it, the day they passed into Pennsylvania they had had a new commanding general for twenty-four hours. General George Meade had been named to replace General Joe Hooker, who paid the price for his tardy pursuit of the Confederates.

They went through the little town and marched along the Taneytown Road. The Union Army was massed south of Gettysburg, and Symonds called a halt at an enormous rolling meadow where they could camp. The air was heavy and hot and full of moisture and fearful bravado. The men of the 131st talked about the rebel yell. They hadn’t heard it when they were in Tennessee, but they had heard a lot about it, and listened to a lot of imitations. They wondered if they were going to hear the real thing in the next few days.

Colonel Symonds knew work was the best thing for nerves, so he got up labor parties and had them dig shallow firing positions behind piles of boulders that could be used as sangars. That night they went to sleep to birdsong and katydid shrill, and next morning awoke to more hot and heavy air and the sound of frequent firing several miles to the northwest, toward the Chambersburg Pike.

About eleven
A.M
. Colonel Symonds received new orders, and the 131st was marched half a mile over a wooded ridge to a meadow on high ground east of the Emmitsburg Road. Evidence that the new position was closer to the enemy was the grim discovery of six Union soldiers who seemed to be sprawled asleep on the mowing. All the dead pickets were barefoot, the poorly shod Southerners having stolen their shoes.

Symonds ordered new breastworks dug, and he placed living pickets. At Rob J.’s request, a long narrow log framework like a grape arbor was put up at the edge of the woods and roofed over with leafy branches to provide shade for the wounded, and outside this shelter Rob J. placed his operating table.

They learned from dispatch riders that the first gunfire had been a clash between cavalry. As the day progressed, the sounds of battle grew to the
north of the 131st, a steady, hoarse noise of rifled muskets like the barking of thousands of deadly dogs, and a great ragged, unending cannon thunder. Each slight movement of the heavy air seemed to smite their faces.

Early in the afternoon the 131st was moved a third time that day and marched toward the town and the sound of the fighting, toward the flash of cannon fire and clouds of white-gray smoke. Rob J. had come to know the soldiers and was aware that most of them yearned for a minor wound, no more than a scratch, but one that would leave a mark when it quickly healed, so the folks back home could see how they had suffered for a valorous victory. But now they were moving toward where men were dying. They marched through the town, and presently, as they climbed a hill, they were surrounded by the sounds they had earlier heard from afar. Several times artillery rounds whooshed overhead, and they passed dug-in infantry and four batteries of cannon being fired. At the top, where they were told to settle in, they found they’d been placed in the middle of a burial ground that gave the place its name, Cemetery Hill.