Cain at Gettysburg (10 page)

Hunt pulled his riding gloves back on, another tired man. But a game one. He'd be off now to inspect his ammunition trains.

“Headquarters staying here?” the artilleryman asked. “This where I'll find you?”

Meade shook his head. A few drops of rainwater fled his hat brim. “I've ordered a move to Taneytown. I want every subordinate able to reach me quickly. I won't have the dilatory communications we all suffered under Hooker.”

A serious man, Hunt surprised Meade with a smile. Perhaps he was thinking fondly of his guns. “We'll fight at Pipe Creek, then?”

“Pipe Creek,” Meade assured him.

*   *   *

Lee read the dispatch the courier had delivered, then raised his eyes to Longstreet and to Hill.

“They chose George Meade, not Reynolds,” the old man said. He seemed uncharacteristically surprised. And not especially pleased. But, then, he had been out of sorts for days. Waiting with growing impatience for Stuart to materialize. The staff's jollity earlier that morning had been a mild rebellion against Lee's dourness.

“Well, that's fine,” General Hill said. Despite his grin, the gaunt Virginian looked uncomfortable in his own skin. Afflicted. Clots of brown hair rested on his shoulders and the red calico shirt he affected made him resemble a scarecrow. But his eyes burned. “Meade's an engineer. He'll be timid.”

“He wasn't timid at Fredericksburg,” Longstreet said.

“I'm an engineer myself, gentlemen,” Lee reminded them. “Perhaps you will not abuse the discipline too harshly.”

Longstreet thought that would close the topic, but Lee mused, “General Meade will commit no blunder in my front … and if I make one, he will make haste to take advantage of it.”

“We'll lick George Meade,” Powell Hill said. He was a valiant, volatile man.

Lee half-turned away. “I
must
know where those people are. I must know what Meade intends.” He wheeled on Longstreet, ignoring Hill. “It's taken two days for us to learn this news about General Meade. Of what else are we in ignorance?”

Say it,
Longstreet thought.
Go ahead
.
Admit that Stuart has let you down. Get it off your chest.

Lee mastered himself and addressed his next words to Hill. “General, I must know immediately, if you find those people to your front. Meade may not move swiftly, but he will move surely.”

“Nothing out there but a few militia,” Hill assured him. “Been quiet.”

Lee dropped the dispatch on a camp desk set up in the open air. “Those people will be fighting on their own soil now. That cannot help but steady their morale. When we find them, we must defeat them without delay. They must not have further opportunity to rally.”

The old man turned to Hill again and continued. “We cannot afford chance encounters, General Hill. No one is to bring on a general engagement until this army is concentrated. When our blow lands, it must be sudden, and it must be decisive.”

Longstreet chose not to speak. He had made his argument for choosing good ground and forcing the Federals to do the attacking. And he would make the argument again. But not in front of Hill. He could not be frank in front of the other man.

Hill adjusted his spattered britches, bothered by what they contained.

“In two days' time,” Lee said, as if to himself, “this army will be together again. Then we shall see to those people.”

*   *   *

As they marched beyond the picket line, a Virginia regiment joined the column behind them. The pike led through more good country. Rain kept flirting. The pace General Pettigrew set the brigade went hard.

“Swear to God, I smell Yankees,” Peachum said.

“That's just old Cobb there,” Ireton told him.

Cobb didn't respond beyond rubbing the sores on his nose. He was still sour. Blake wondered what else there once might have been to the man. Besides the woman who had run off long ago. There were blank pages in Cobb's history.

After covering several miles, the column halted again. A courier galloped past, headed rearward. It was impossible to move fast enough and far enough to avoid all the mud kicked up by his mount's hooves.

“Sumbitch,” Cobb said. Evidently, he was speaking again.

Minutes later, a civilian on horseback followed the courier's path, though at an easier pace.

Blake saw Lieutenant Colonel Lane, the regiment's second in command, trot back to confer with his company commanders. Lane was a hard man, with no time for nonsense. He looked hacked from oak, then painted in shades of brown. He was not a high gentleman born. Blake trusted him.

A minute later, Lieutenant Devereaux appeared to tell the men they could fall out. The company had to send out pickets, though.

“Time enough to cook coffee, sir?” Tam McMinn asked.

“Wouldn't risk it,” the officer said.

“What's holding things up, Lieutenant?” Peachum asked. He dug into his haversack for a cracker.

“Spy fellow claims there's Yankees ahead, next town yonder.”

“Told you I smelled 'em,” Peachum crowed.

“Lot of them?” Blake asked.

The lieutenant shrugged. He was the decent son of respectable parents, nothing more. Not among the highly favored, although better born than Lieutenant Colonel Lane. “We have orders not to get ourselves in a fight. That's all I know.”

Peachum looked up at the sky. “Well, now, I guess we can just stand here and get rained on.”

But the courier retraced his route, horse lathered, and the column quickly re-formed. The eastward march continued. Every man paid more attention to the flanks now. Watching for a glimpse of a blue uniform. Weariness faded. Senses peaked.

No Yankees appeared. No shots rang out. Rain fell again.

“'Least it keeps things cooled down,” James Bunyan said.

They passed another tavern, this one set on a ridge where country roads joined. The column descended the slope and compressed its files to hurry over a bridge. A narrow creek had overrun its banks.

Just short of the next crest, the column halted again.

“Just one time,” Pike Gray said, “just once, I wish I could be an officer up there on a fine, high horse so I'd know just what the devil's going on.”

“Get shot right off it, too,” Cobb told him.

Lieutenant Devereaux wheeled his mount from a group of officers and raced back along the column. Yanking back too hard on the bit, he reared up short of Blake.

“Sergeant Blake! Take out skirmishers! Right and forward. Honor to the Twenty-sixth!”

And the boy turned away again, without having said how many men were to go. Blake culled a dozen and waved them out along the edge of a woodline, then pushed on into the trees. On either side of him, men checked their weapons as they walked, then trailed their rifles to load them with dry powder.

Blake's senses burned bright. The rustle of the column off to his left fitted into a box, letting him hear the other, nearer sounds. Wet brush stroked him, briars went ignored. It was ever a wonder to him how the mind ranked dangers so finely, concentrating mightily on survival.

The trees weren't thick enough to hide a man. No birds sang.

He kept a watch on the men beside him, but they knew their work and maintained their intervals. Some crouched like hunters, while others walked upright and strained to see ahead, but all of them moved silently. The wet earth smelled of rot.

They climbed through the grove. Their silence grew wintry, the stillness of men intent on killing game.

The trees didn't thin, they just stopped. Every man paused before breaking from the concealment. The crest of the ridge lay just a dash ahead. But no one had a mind to run.

Blake stepped out into the open, going cautiously at first. Other men took his lead. A crow's abrupt complaint startled them all.

They had moved at an angle and, looking left, Blake saw that they had only come parallel with the head of the column. Other skirmishers had been thrown forward, too. He reached a narrow lane that traced the crest. A few hundred yards northward, General Pettigrew sat on his mount, surrounded by his subordinates, all of them focused on a distant scene.

Blake followed their line of vision.

Before a cluster of fine brick buildings, blue-jacketed cavalrymen watched the men in gray who were watching them. Some of the Yankees remained mounted, but others had their boots on the earth, carbines ready.

Blake waved his skirmish line forward, down a mild slope of wet wheat. A column of Federals trotted out from the town beyond the near buildings, reinforcing their comrades. They did not appear alarmed by the Confederate presence.

“Those ain't no militia,” Pike Gray said.

“Keep moving,” Blake told him, trying to pitch his voice just right. “No talking.”

This was it, then. How it began. Again. A few men against a few men. Would it remain a minor skirmish? Or lead to a fair battle? It hardly mattered to him and those beside him. As they descended the slope, headed toward the flank of the Union horsemen, they moved at the edge of the world.

A courier broke from General Pettigrew's side and cantered down the ridge toward the skirmishers. Blake signaled to the men to halt where they were. Some knelt down, half-disappearing into the wheat. Clutching their rifles.

The rider reached them, a lieutenant Blake didn't recognize. The officer eyed Blake's chevrons.

“Withdraw your men, Sergeant,” the lieutenant told him. “Fall back on your company. Orders are to reverse the march immediately.” He spurred his mount back toward his brother officers.

“Take a shot?” John Bunyan asked as the hoofbeats faded away. “I could drop one of them blue-bellies from here.”

“No,” Blake said.

*   *   *

Brigadier General James Johnston Pettigrew was born on July 4, 1828. His family possessed wealth and social prominence that reached from their North Carolina plantation southward to Charleston and northward to Philadelphia. Handsome and brilliant, Pettigrew graduated first in his class at Chapel Hill at the age of nineteen, received a prized appointment as an astronomer at the Naval Observatory in Washington, and soon discarded a position that slighted his genius. He read the law in a gentlemanly fashion, in the office of Charleston relatives, and took that city's society in thrall. He traveled to Europe, twice, and privately published a handsome account of Spain. A former superior called Pettigrew “the most promising young man of the South.”

But Pettigrew felt a lack in his lustrous life: military glory.

An eager member of the Charleston militia, he applied himself to the study of military science. In the course of his European sojourns, which included earning a law degree from Berlin, he first attempted to join the Prussian army, but royal officials found his interest suspect. He later sought to attach himself to the French army as it marched to face the Austrians in Italy, but the Battle of Solferino ended that war before he could find a suitable place among the officers of Napoleon III.

After returning to Charleston with fewer laurels than hoped, Pettigrew became the colonel of the First Regiment of Rifles, the most fashionable assembly of militia companies. After unsuccessful efforts to cajole the surrender of Ft. Sumter, he faced a setback when General Beauregard's arrival trimmed his authority. South Carolina seemed not to value his services sufficiently, so he acquired the colonelcy of the 22nd North Carolina. Within months, President Davis bowed to society's dictates and personally pressed Pettigrew to don a brigadier's star. After a polite interval of reflection, Pettigrew accepted.

His reputation grew, but not to the heights of fame scaled by other men. Opportunities for glory flirted, but then fled. Thus, on a gray afternoon in a Pennsylvania hamlet, James Johnston Pettigrew was dismayed by the reaction of his division commander to his report.

General Heth frowned and said nothing. In the street, commissary wagons roiled the mud.

“The Union army is at Gettysburg,” Pettigrew repeated. “I refrained from an attempt to enter the town, sir, in accordance with my instructions not to precipitate a battle. But there can be no doubt that the Federals are before us.”

“The Hell you say,” Heth told him.

It long since had struck Pettigrew that Heth, although a Virginian, was not quite a gentleman.

“We observed their cavalry for nearly thirty minutes,” Pettigrew continued. “Their behavior suggested a larger force nearby. I believe, sir, the Yankee army is to our front. General Lee must be informed.”

Heth shook his head. “Shit for the birds, Pettigrew. There's nothing out there but militia. You're seeing hants.”

James Johnston Pettigrew was mortified. He knew what he had seen. And he was not accustomed to being called a fool, if not a liar. Before the war, such treatment would have merited a visit from his seconds.

“Some of the men reported hearing drums, sir,” he pressed on. “Drums would, of course, mean the presence of infantry.”

“I know what goddamned drums mean.”

Appearing behind the trail wagon of the train, General Hill, the corps commander, came on at a trot, followed by his retinue. Spying the division and brigade commanders in consultation, he reined in his horse and dismounted.

“Get your new shoes, Harry?” he asked Heth.

Heth grimaced and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Not by a damned sight. General Pettigrew here didn't see fit to enter Gettysburg. He reports”—Heth curled his lip—“the presence of Yankee cavalry. Not farmers on mules, the real thing.”

A. P. Hill snorted. He looked pained, his tall frame cramped up. There were personal matters that did not bear discussion, indelicate considerations, Pettigrew understood. The general's long, greasy hair repelled him, too.

“Well now,” Hill said, “I've just come from General Lee.” He picked at his calico shirt as if hunting a louse. “His staff puts the Yankees down in Maryland. Haven't even struck their tents.” He smirked. “Scared, most like. Got a new commander. George Meade, the glorious builder of lighthouses.”