Cain at Gettysburg (37 page)

“Any sense of how many guns they've massed?”

This time, it was Hunt's horse that shied. “At least a full corps' complement. Maybe more.”

“Main attack, would you say?”

“It certainly isn't negligible.” Hunt's expression grew fierce. “Sickles doesn't have half enough men up to hold that orchard. He's got Birney covering damned near a mile of front with his division, and on wretched ground that doesn't hang together. I can't employ artillery back in those woods, and we're probably going to lose some guns up here.”

Meade understood the shame to an artilleryman of losing a gun, let alone full batteries. But nothing could be done. The cannoneers would have to redeem Sickles' error with bravery, blood, and bronze, with powder and steel.

Time. He needed time.

Leaving the lane that led to the orchard, the first reserve battery to arrive clambered into the high fields, crushing virgin grain. Whips flared and struck, but the cannonade's waves drowned the cries of man and beast.

How much more time would Lee give him? Before the Rebel yell announced the crisis? Mounted on a horse lathered to failing, another courier materialized. Meade didn't recognize this one.

“Sir … General Warren has a brigade from the Fifth Corps going into position on Little Round Top.”

“Whose brigade?” Meade asked. The Fifth was his old corps and, to him, the best in the army.

“Colonel Vincent's, sir.”

Meade nodded. “Vincent will do.”

“Any message for General Warren, sir?”

“Tell him to hold that hill. No matter the cost.” He waved over the captain of his bodyguard. “Have one of your men switch mounts with this man. Before that horse dies and falls on him.”

Displeased, as any cavalry officer would be, the captain saluted and got on with the business. Meade noted, though, that the captain did not turn over the finest horseflesh in the 6th Pennsylvania.

Meade summoned his last available aide. “Ride to General Humphreys. My orders to him are countermanded. He's to reverse direction and extend General Sickles' line along the road, in accordance with his earlier instructions. Now go, man.”

Humph's piss would boil at the seesaw orders. Meade imagined his old acquaintance cursing his incompetence. It couldn't be helped. The situation had changed. With Vincent deploying on the round hill and the Fifth Corps coming on, it was now more important to strengthen Sickles' line, to close at least a portion of the gap that had opened between his corps and Hancock back on the ridge.

The situation was appalling. Brigades and regiments would need to join the line piecemeal, as they arrived, reducing their effectiveness and making a muddle of every command arrangement. It wasn't the way Meade wanted to fight a battle. But Lee and Sickles between them had forced his hand.

Grimly, Meade told himself that the Confederate plan was doubtless running like clockwork. Lee's veterans would never succumb to the confusion plaguing the Army of the Potomac. The thought filled Meade with rage. And determination.

Let Lee come. Meade was determined to fight it out, to give as good as he got. Lee was
not
about to gain another easy victory, Sickles or no Sickles. Meade intended to make him pay for every foot of ground.

The Confederate barrage slackened, then stopped abruptly. Freshly arrived Union batteries sent their shells into the smoke, but the Rebel gunners resisted the urge to reply.

Meade understood. They were coming. Then he heard a distant Rebel yell.

*   *   *

By the time Longstreet got back to McLaws, the division commander was in an argument just short of blows with Billy Barksdale, the Mississippi politician who commanded one of Laff's two lead brigades. Kershaw, the other brigade commander fronting the division, stood off to the side, arms folded, as if deciding whom to wager on.

Barksdale was a strange bird. He could speechify like Calhoun or Clay, or blaspheme like a stevedore. Most men fought because they wanted to win the war and go home. Barksdale didn't seem to mind much how long things continued, as long as he could go on killing Yankees. His hatred had a spice to it that heated his Mississippi soldiers, too. Barksdale's attacks weren't elegant, and he sat a horse as if it were a mule, but he went where you pointed him and got there when you needed him to do so. Once Barksdale was unleashed, the Yankees were going to stop him only by killing him and most of those marching with him. And they might have to do it twice.

Spying Longstreet, Barksdale turned from his division commander and strutted up. Without a by-your-leave, he started in railing at the man who outranked him by two stars.

“Damn me to Hell, Longstreet, why are my boys sitting here holding their peckers? With the goddamned nigger-loving Yankee artillery thumping on 'em?” The Mississippian shook his head in disgust. “I wish you'd let me go in, General. My boys could take those batteries in five minutes.”

From the middle distance, the clamor of Hood striking the Union flank underscored the brigade commander's urgency.

“You just wait a little.” Longstreet slipped from the saddle, rump aching. “We're all going in presently.”

Barksdale was a beefy man with pale hair thin as a baby's. Once clipped short, the wispy tufts had grown out to form a halo around his raw-meat complexion. He always kept his cap on because he was bald on top.

“My boys ought to go in right now,” Barksdale insisted. The man retained the politician's sense of immunity.

Longstreet was not about to be stampeded. He gave Barksdale a look that would shrivel an oak tree. “You'll go in when General McLaws orders you to go in. Meanwhile, General, I expect you to see to it that the day's orders for officers are obeyed without exception. Brigade commanders and their staffs may remain mounted, but all regimental officers go forward on foot. I will not have needless casualties among our officers. Is that clear, sir?”

Barksdale snorted. Then he grunted. Then he stamped his foot and walked away. Heading back toward his nearby brigade. The man was insubordinate. But Longstreet knew he would fight.

He turned to McLaws. The division commander looked relieved to be free of Barksdale for the present, but the big man was still unsettled: The waiting was worse than the fighting. But after the day's long litany of blunders on every side, Longstreet was determined to regain control. Each next increment of the attack would advance in its proper order. Enough harm had been done this day through bravado and hasty judgment.

Longstreet glanced at Kershaw, who had not unfolded his arms, then told McLaws, “Send your right forward.”

The division commander passed the command to Kershaw, who had already heard it clearly enough.

“I'm going forward with Kershaw for a bit,” Longstreet said to McLaws. “Do nothing until I return.”

After ordering his shrunken retinue to remain behind, Longstreet led his horse toward Kershaw's line. He could see the South Carolinians rising in the treelines, eagerness vanquishing fear. Soon they'd step into the sunlight, dress their ranks, and advance.

He would not interfere. Kershaw knew what he was about. But Longstreet wanted the men to see him, to feel they were in his care, that he had confidence in them and the day's plan of battle. Even if he could not feel that confidence himself. Hope, yes. But not confidence. They would carry that first Union position, which was built on air, hanging out on an invisible limb, waiting to be snapped off. But he did not know what George Meade had hidden behind it. They all were paying for Stuart's long and inexcusable absence—the man's appetite for renown had left the army in the position of a blind man in a knife fight.

Still, if Hood grabbed those two hills, the attack would have a chance. Longstreet would have liked to have Pickett's division to exploit any success, but the men ready to attack had plenty of courage. The problem was that Longstreet didn't have plenty of men.

Valor would have to make up for hard numbers.

Billows of smoke, light gray to death dark, obscured the Union lines. Bursts of flame marked the muzzles of Union batteries, but the enemy could be seen only when a quirk of the air made a path through the earthbound clouds.

There was smoke in plenty around Kershaw's forming ranks, too, but shafts of golden afternoon light pierced it, gilding rifle barrels and bayonets.

“For South Carolina!” Kershaw shouted.

The regimental commanders echoed his war cry, but a mighty Rebel yell soon buried their words, its fury defying even the rage of the guns.

The batteries behind which they'd formed up ceased their bombardment and the gray lines passed into the rising smoke. Leading his horse by the reins, Longstreet strode beside them. A battlefield's sounds played many a trick, but he was certain that Hood was well into the fight on the corps' right. Now it was time to press the attack where the Yankees looked their thinnest.

Make them fear you,
Longstreet thought.
Shock them, make them run. Get behind them just once, and it all collapses.

Panic could do what strength of arms could not.

Noting his presence, some of Kershaw's men gave Longstreet a cheer. He nodded, but did not smile. It was a rough-hewn business now, best left to their own officers.

Union cannon found their range. Men dissolved in bursts of crimson spray. The South Carolinians closed ranks and continued advancing.

As they approached the road between the battle lines, Longstreet mounted and galloped back toward McLaws. Behind him, another grand Rebel yell rasped from thousands of throats.

The division commander had come forward to the edge of the treeline. His face asked,
Barksdale? Now?

Longstreet shook his head, then drew his field glasses from the case strung behind his saddle and passed his mount to an orderly. The series of assaults had turned into a classic oblique attack, even more so than Lee had intended. Events had dictated what needed to be done. When the situation changed, plans had to be altered.

Before scouting Kershaw's progress, Longstreet swung his glasses to the northeast. Searching for artillery smoke rising from the Confederate left, for any sign that Ewell had begun the diversionary attack the old man had promised.

The sky beyond his own front remained as blue as a baby's blanket.

As blue as the blanket his dead son had favored.

What in the Hell was delaying Ewell? Did Lee understand that his plan was coming apart on
both
flanks now? What, in the name of all the devils in Hell, was wrong with Ewell?

Tom Goree appeared beside him. Longstreet didn't like the dour look on his face.

“Tom?”

Goree raised his voice to be heard above the commotion: “It's General Hood, sir. He's been wounded. He's been carried from the battlefield.”

Longstreet lowered his eyes.
Not Hood. Good God. Not now.

He fought to steady his voice: “That leaves Law the senior brigade commander, am I correct?”

The Texan nodded.

“Ride back down there,” Longstreet ordered. “Make damned sure that Law understands he commands the division now, not just his brigade. He'll have to spread his attention, and that's a hard thing to do when a man's in a fight. He's to push the entire division, not just his own boys. And just keep going.”

Goree raised a salute and turned away.

Hood was a terrible loss, his wounding a grim turn of fate. Law wasn't ready for division command. The man was a good officer. Just not ready. For a moment, Longstreet was tempted to disobey Lee's order to remain with McLaws. But Hood's attack was well under way and Law would have to manage. He just had to keep up the pressure and not relent, not listen to the inevitable entreaties from subordinates that their casualties were too high or their ammunition too low. On the other hand, three of McLaws' brigades still had to be committed. Putting them in properly would require a steady hand.

He ignored the dismay on McLaws' plump face and turned back to the spectacle in the fields.

He, too, would have liked to send Barksdale in immediately, to commit everything he had. But one of them had to regulate his emotions.

Through rents in the smoke, he watched the long lines of Kershaw's men advance. Their alignment was far from perfect now, but they pressed steadily forward, centered on their flags. It was an odd thing to stand calmly and watch men die from a distance. Longstreet should have been used to it, but sometimes the spectacle bushwhacked him anew.

Kershaw's force had split into two wings, with the left regiments rushing handsomely for the line of Federal guns on the ridge by the orchard. Longstreet watched the proud red banners climb the slope, drawing on soldiers breathtaking in their valor, men bold enough to charge straight into the guns up on the high ground. Where the smoke permitted, he saw Union gunners serving their pieces desperately, ramming canister and case-shot down the barrels. The artillerymen appeared well-drilled, not wasting a movement as they continued their work amid their mounting dead and wounded. But all their efforts soon would be for nothing: Their batteries were bound to be overrun in minutes.

Then Longstreet witnessed a monstrous, inexplicable turn of events: The gray ranks attacking into the guns wheeled abruptly to the right, exposing their flank to the delighted Yankee gunners. Longstreet watched, riveted, as the Union batteries tore Kershaw's left wing to pieces.

Who could have given such an order?
Why?

What folly, in God's name, had he just witnessed?

They had come so near, so very near. And now this.

Longstreet turned to McLaws. “Order Billy Barksdale to take those guns.”

*   *   *

The boils on Barksdale's rump just made him meaner. There was no way to sit a saddle that felt good, so he stood in the stirrups whenever he halted his horse. Stiff knees aching, he straightened himself and balanced his bulk above the throbbing animal, determined to appear dauntless.