Confederates (41 page)

‘Goddamit, Diggie! If
should
was
could
we'd both be …'

He was about to say we'd both be generals, or some such grand thing. Before he got it out, he saw a private soldier turn away from the firing line ahead. ‘Oh Jesus,' said Wheat. ‘Oh Jesus, Diggie!'

The private had taken a ball in the jaw. He would have been better to lie still instead of encouraging by movement the gush of his life's blood. But with his mouth open and his hands out, he stumbled straight for Colonel Wheat, as if he trusted the colonel to set things right. Wheat's arms went forward and received the boy.

‘Now, now. Jest rest there, feller. Jest you rest.'

He helped the private down to the ground to sit by the young captain. He looked terrible himself with his coat all fouled and muddy red, and children resting against his knees.

Colonel Wheat yelled, ‘There must be something coming from the flank.' It was the only explanation of why he'd been ordered up here along with all the other regiments for such a close look at the enemy. It could only mean that any moment now there would come a wild Confederate attack on the Union flank. For the meantime he supposed his task was to hold the Union line in place by the shoulders, in a firm wrestle-hold so it would get the full shock of that flank blow.

The Reverend Dignam got a thought too painful to yell out in noise like this. What if there
was
no flank attack – Tom Jackson wouldn't tell them one way or another – and what if the Yankees went on standing?

Dignam knelt down and slid the weight of the boy with the jaw wound off Wheat's shin-bone. The boy fell on his back amongst the stained lupins. His eyes were open but it was mainly the whites that were showing. So Dignam bent over to do some merciful work on them and to close them up.

He was just flexing the muscles at the back of his left ankle so that he could rise again when there came a bad jolting impact on the top of his bowed head, right beneath the crown of his hat. Somehow he knew straight away that his hearing would never be any good any more. But he could hear, just the same, above the ringing silence the remote voice of his good, earthy friend Lafcadio Wheat screaming, ‘Diggie, for Jesus's sake. Diggie!'

It came to Dignam gently, coming up from his belly, that he had taken a mortal wound. Receive your unworthy servant, he said interiorly.

It was not the dying that frightened him; he was not at all afraid of something that seemed simple and reasonable the closer you got to it. Besides, he believed in the Resurrection of the Dead as truly as most people believe they'll be paid on Friday. But the big knot in his brain as he died was this: In Bedford County, where he'd had a good living and a fine church, he'd wanted and had twice got Mrs Alison Kane, wife of the presiding elder of the county, Mr Emery Kane, a dry-goods merchant of Bedford. Alison was a tall woman with a long and subtle mouth and deep eyes. The memory of her face sat in his mind now like a single live and well creature in a doomed house. And he was free to cling onto it all the way down that funnel that opened beneath him and drank him down. Yet even as he fell he accused himself. For soldiering had been vanity and the war had been a gift to him, getting him away from Mrs Dignam, a fine girl he had failed to love through no fault of hers, and away from the sharp thought of Mrs Alison Kane.

Colonel Wheat began dragging his friend up not two seconds after the bullet went into the crown of Dignam's head, but from the feel of the preacher's limbs, he could tell already that one of the best and most sensible of men had perished in an instant of time.

3

‘Oh hell, boys, will y'look at that,' Dick Ewell said, and sat over slowly on his right hip.

It was a little after seven that savage night. Popeye Ewell stood by his horse at that fence the Northern boys had taken the rails down from earlier in the evening. With him he had a few young officers. They all felt they were well to the rear of the battle. They were in fact but a short walk from it. Now Tom Jackson was considerably further back, over the ridge and by the railroad cut, and that was sensible of him. Because everyone would be lost if he was hurt, given that he carried the plan round in his head.

But Popeye Ewell, by his horse, by the fence, didn't feel he was taking any particular risk being where he was. He knew soldiers tended to overshoot in battle, but he wondered if anyone would overshoot to the extent of shooting him up there on that little rise.

One of these young officers standing with Popeye was in fact a young general. A general from Georgia called Andie Lawton. Once, an age or a month ago, Lawton had, rather than be judged slow by Tom Jackson, jumped from a window in Gordonsville. Now his brigade was holding the line just across a field or two, just by the road there.

Before he'd called out, Popeye'd been a little agitated. He kept pulling at the corner of his rich moustache which came down a long way past each corner of his mouth. He kept raising his chin in little jerks, like a man who's not satisfied he's tall enough to get a good view of the proceedings. And he felt a little confused.

That goddam Jackson hadn't so much as told him any flank attack would come in, though Dick Ewell, just like the deceased Reverend Dignam, believed there must be one coming. In the meantime there were too many boys getting felled. But he knew what a withdrawal meant. If you ordered a retreat you had to tell Bill Telfer who was in charge of all those Stonewall boys. And even if you could make it a good withdrawal, it was an axiom you lost one in ten men as prisoners or maimed or corpses through running. For that was the awkward bit. The boys down by the road were wound up so tight to stand there swapping fire that if you called them back a hundred paces, they'd read it as a threat and start galloping. Dick Ewell knew a lot about how calm standing can give way to flight and rout.

So, before he cried out, Popeye Ewell couldn't see much alternative for the moment to what he was doing already. And then the high-pitched minie ball entered his knee. He knew what it was at once. Some goddam Indiana boy must have been aiming at an early goddam star. At the goddam Blue Ridge.

Handsome Andie Lawton looked down on his general, who'd been standing the last time Andie looked. He looked at Popeye's baggy grey trousers with the blue stripe down them. They were long on him; Popeye wasn't much of a dresser. They flopped down well over his dusty boots, even when he was sitting down like that on his hip. The knee of the left side had been punctured and was already running with blood. The wound had done nothing for Popeye's temper, and he looked up at Andie and grunted. ‘Look to your own goddam command, Andie. It ain't no goddam circus for a boy like you to go gawping at.'

Andie didn't go away. He knelt down beside Ewell. ‘Where is it?' he asked, though he knew exactly where the ball had gone. One of Popeye's staff officers called Byron knelt down with a flask of brandy. That really angered Popeye. He roared. ‘You expect me to drink that stuff, boy? That crunchgut? With the stomach I have?'

The shouting turned his skin grey and his eyes rolled and he fell right over on his side, whimpering.

Andie Lawton was just thirty and ambitious. But he thought: ‘Oh Lord of Hosts, the whole left of this line is now in my command.' So it showed you Popeye's advice about not gawping was not pure peevishness. Andie Lawton thought he had better go and have a look at his line.

He turned to Byron and the other boy officer there.

‘Back there there's that railroad cut and you should find Surgeon Maguire somewhere along it. Get Popeye – General Ewell – up there.'

Byron indicated with a wave of his hand that gushing kneecap. ‘How?' he asked.

‘For God's sake, there's only one quick way, you know that. Put him on his horse.'

In fact he took time off his command and helped them lift the general. Popeye tottered in his saddle and muttered and complained through the half faint he was in. He lay forward against the mane of his horse, and his mouth was crushed sideways by the firm horseflesh. Byron had fetched a spare shirt out of his own saddlebag and tied it tight around the knee, but the linen got scarlet in seconds and began dripping on the horse's belly.

Andie thought, he won't keep that leg. There'd be a hacksaw job and he'd be away from the army for months or years if not for a lifetime. It came to Andie with a fearful glow that he would command that division for a long time. On a long-term basis the idea excited him, but to become a division commander during this particular crazy fight was something he didn't want.

‘You, Byron,' he said. ‘Take him fast. And you, you come with me. We're going to visit my colonels.'
My
goddam colonels!

This second officer, maybe twenty-one years old, started to argue. ‘No, General Lawton, you stay here. I'll find a runner.'

‘Why in the name of hell …?'

‘Well, they can't afford another shot commander.'

He could see the boy meant it, and was scared of what it might do to the risky balance of that firing line if too many generals got shot.

‘Staying here didn't do Dick Ewell much good,' Andie Lawton said. ‘So you better come when I tell you.'

Tom Jackson saw the two horses cross the railroad cut at a poor pace. He thought some officer had sent him a few lazy despatch riders. Hunter Maguire, watching too, saw him set his face, readying himself to yell and roar at them.

But at the same second both Stonewall and Hunter Maguire came to the knowledge that it was Dick Ewell there, flopping about loosely on that horse. Surgeon Maguire ran a little way down the slope to this patient who had dropped in on him. He did not drag Dick Ewell off the horse – he could see the horse's withers were slick with too much of the discharge of Popeye's blood.

‘Dick Ewell?' Stonewall called. Maguire inspected the knee without touching it.

‘The patella, General. The kneecap.'

‘Bad, would you say, Hunter?'

‘No doubt,' said Maguire.

A few grooms were round about, hanging on to the staff's horses. So was the surgeon's orderly. Maguire told these boys to lay blankets out on the ground. They delayed about it for they knew the blankets wouldn't be much use after a general or anyone else had bled away on them. ‘Put down goddam blankets!' Maguire roared.

Jackson drew near to Popeye's horse. ‘Hullo, Dick,' he said. Standing, he was taller than the neck of Ewell's little mount. Dick Ewell didn't answer. ‘He's a bad colour, Doctor Maguire,' said Stonewall, as if the information would be of professional help to Hunter.

Hunter had the grooms and his own orderly lift Ewell down. The orderly was a good man and he held the leg in its slight bend as the others dragged Popeye down, and he said the things that needed to be said: ‘Don't haul him like potatoes! No jolts there, goddamit!'

On a pile of blankets and waterproofs, they laid Popeye down. Hunter's orderly, dropping further blankets atop Dick Ewell's upper body, looked in the mouth to see what was making all the grunting and gagging noise that was going on. He found the general's false teeth askew in the mouth and jammed hard up against the palate. He took them out. He didn't have any bedside stand to put them on, and Maguire was yelling at him to fetch his medical bag. So he put the teeth in his own jacket pocket.

The shiny instruments were laid out. Instruments shinier than most of the wounded got treated with, laid out there on the ground on strips of sealskin. Hunter Maguire cut into the cloth of General Ewell's trousers, cutting close to the left crutch with a sawtooth penknife.

‘Can you see all right there, Hunter,' Tom Jackson called over his shoulders. His eyes were still on the fight some half-mile off, down past the railroad cut near the road. Maguire was somehow pleased that Tom Jackson wouldn't be staring down at the surgical work. He went on sawing and ripping but gently as he could. If you gave this knee a good jolt one of the deep arteries might spout.

All round the blankets where Popeye Ewell lay, Maguire's orderly was putting down star candles that had been found on the march, and lighting them so there'd be enough illumination. By their flame, Maguire got Popeye's leg bare. It was a white, wizened little leg with the veins blue high up on the thigh. It was blue too and awfully swollen all round the kneecap which had been hit, as Maguire had guessed, square on. The bone had been fragmented by the minie ball and turned all inside out. The cartilages had been twisted too and it would have looked to a layman like there were strands of rope mixed up in the mess. You could bet, without probing, that the head of the femur was all shattered. There was nothing that could be done to pack those bones back into their correct relationship one to the other. There was no fancy surgery you could try on that mess. The knowing orderly was already tying a tourniquet high on the leg. In the background – because to Hunter anything else than this task was background – Tom Jackson sent Byron off with orders for Lawton. ‘There's a barn there, well up the road,' Stonewall was saying. ‘I want him to anchor his flank right there.' ‘I think, sir,' said this Byron, ‘that's already been done by General Ewell's orders.'

‘Then make sure they stay there,' Stonewall said.

‘I believe the leg must go sir,' Hunter called. He uttered the sentence firmly. A lot of generals thought that amputation was the method of quacks and butchers and poor country doctors. A lot of them thought that, if they were shot in the leg or arm, the good doctors they had on the staff could always save that limb, no matter what.

‘Go?' asked Stonewall, a subscriber to the general theory.

‘The bones are a shambles. I can't get at those deep arteries to stop the bleeding. It has to come off.'

Hunter was very sure not to make apologies. His Professor of Ethical Medicine and Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania had always said that apologies were the last recourse of the second-rate surgeon. Once you start apologising, he'd said, you'll never finish. You'll be apologising to yourself in the end, for you're bound to be finished off by the same diseases that afflict your patients and for which you're always saying that you're sorry. If you had to treat President Buchanan for piles, he used to say, and they still pained him after a year's treatment, you might frown a little, but you never said, sorry, Mr President.