No Spot of Ground (5 page)

“Look about you, Major,” Poe said. “What do you see?”

Moses looked at the grayback soldiers rolling out of their entrenchments and shuffling into line, the artillerists waiting on the hilltop for a target, officers calling up and down the ranks.

“I see that General Anderson has been anticipated, sir,” Moses said. “My mission has obviously been in vain.”

“I would be obliged if you’d wait for a moment, Major,” Poe said. “I may have a message for General Anderson by and by.”

“With permission, sir, I should withdraw. The general may need me.” Moses smiled. Dew dripped from his shoulder-length hair onto his blue riding cape. “Today promises to be busy, sir.”

“I need you
here
, sir!” Poe snapped. “I want you to witness something.”

Moses seemed startled. He recovered, a sly look entering his eyes, then he nodded. “Very well, sir.”

In a motionless instant of perfect clarity, Poe understood the conspiracy of this calculating Jew. Moses would hang back, wait for confirmation of Poe’s madness, Poe’s error, then ride back to Anderson to try to have Poe removed from command. Moxley Sorrel might already have filled the staff tent with tales of Poe’s nerves about to crack. Perhaps, Poe thought furiously, the sheeny intended to replace Poe
himself
!

Cold triumph rolled through Poe. Conspire though Moses might, Poe would be too crafty for him.

“When will the attack begin, Major?” Poe asked.

“It has already begun, sir. The mist cleared early to the west of us. The men were moving out just as I left General Anderson’s headquarters.”

Poe cocked his head. “I hear no guns, Major Moses.”

“Perhaps there has been a delay. Perhaps−” Moses shrugged. “Perhaps the wet ground is absorbing the sound. Or there is a trick of the wind−”

“Nevertheless,” Poe said, “I hear no guns.”

“Yes, sir.” Moses cleared his throat. “It is not unknown, sir.”

“Still, Major Moses,” said Poe. “I hear no guns.”

Moses fell silent at this self-evident fact. Poe whirled around, his black cape flying out behind him, and stalked toward his tent. He could hear Moses’s soft footsteps following behind.

Men on horseback came, reporting one brigade after another ready to move forward. Poe told them to wait here for the word to advance, then return to their commanders. Soon he had heard from every brigade but those of Gregg and Law− a messenger even came from Fitz Lee, reporting the cavalryman’s readiness to move forward at Poe’s signal. After ten minutes of agitated waiting, while the sky grew ever paler and the mist retreated to lurk among the trees, Poe sent an aide to inquire.

Poe gave an irritated look at his division waiting in their ranks for the signal. If the enemy had scouts out this way, they’d see the Confederates ready for the attack and warn the enemy.

Go forward with the four brigades he had? he wondered.

Yes. No.

He decided to wait till his aide came back. He looked at his watch, then cast a glance over his shoulder at Major Moses.

“I hear no guns, Major,” he said.

“You are correct, sir.” Moses smiled thinly. “I take it you intend to enlighten me as to the significance of this?”

Poe nodded benignly. “In time, Major.”

Moses swept off his hat in an elaborate bow. “You are known as the master of suspense, sir. I take my hat off to you, sir, I positively do.”

Poe smiled. The Jew was amusing. He tipped his own hat. “Thank you, Major.”

Moses put on his hat. “I am an enthusiast of your work, sir. I have a first edition of the
Complete Tales
. Had I known I would encounter you, I would have had my wife send it to me and begged you to inscribe it.”

“I should be glad to sign it,” Poe said, surprised. The
Complete and Corrected Tales and Poems of
Edgar A. Poe
had been published at his own expense six years ago and had sold precisely two hundred and forty-nine copies throughout the United States—— he knew precisely, because the rest of the ten-thousand-copy edition was sitting in a lumber room back home at Shepherd’s Rest.

“Before the war,” Moses said, “I used to read your work aloud to my wife. The poems were particularly lovely, I thought—— so delicate. And there was nothing that would bring a blush to her lovely cheek—— I
particularly
appreciate that, sir.” Moses grew indignant. “There are too many passages from poets that one cannot in decency read to a lady, sir. Even in Shakespeare——” Moses shook his head.

“Fortunately,” said Poe, “one has Bowdler.”

“I thank that gentleman from my heart,” said Moses. “As I thank Tennyson, and Mr. Dickens, and Keats.”

“Keats.” Poe’s heart warmed at the mention of the name. “One scarcely could anticipate encountering his name here, on a battlefield.”

“True, sir. He is the most rarified and sublime of poets− along, I may say, with yourself, sir.”

Poe was surprised. “You flatter me, Major.”

“I regret only that you are not more appreciated, sir.” His tiny hands gestured whitely in the air. “Some of my correspondents have informed me, however, that you are better known in Europe.”

“Yes,” Poe said. A dark memory touched him. “A London publisher has brought out an edition of the
Complete Tales
. Unauthorized, of course. It has achieved some success, but I never received so much as a farthing from it.”

“I am surprised that such a thing can happen, sir.”

Poe gave a bitter laugh. “It isn’t the money—— it is the brazen provocation of it that offended me. I hired a London solicitor and had the publisher prosecuted.”

“I hope he was thrown in jail, sir.”

Poe gave a smile. “Not quite. But there will be no more editions of my work in London, one hopes.”

“I trust there won’t be.”

“Or in France, either. I was being translated there by some overheated poet named Charles Baudelaire—— no money from that source, either, by the way—— and the fellow had the effrontery to write me that many of my subjects, indeed entire texts, were exactly the same as those he had himself composed—— except mine, of course, had been written earlier.”

“Curious.” Moses seemed unclear as to what he should make of this.

“This
gueux
wrote that he considered himself my
alter ego
.” A smile twisted across Poe’s face at the thought of his triumph. “I wrote that what
he
considered miraculous,
I
considered plagiarism, and demanded that he cease any association with my works on penalty of prosecution. He persisted in writing to me, so I had a French lawyer send him a stiff letter, and have not heard from him since.”

“Very proper.” Moses nodded stoutly. “I have always been dismayed at the thought of so many of these disreputable people in the literary world. Their antics can only distract the public from the true artists.”

Poe gazed in benevolent surprise at Major Moses. Perhaps he had misjudged the man.

A horseman was riding toward him. Poe recognized the spreading mustachios of the aide he’d sent to Gregg and Law. The young man rode up and saluted breathlessly.

“I spoke to General Law, sir,” he said. “His men were still eating breakfast. He and General Gregg have done
nothing
, sir,
nothing
!”

Poe stiffened in electric fury. “You will order Generals Gregg and Law to attack
at once
!” he barked.

The aide smiled. “Sir!” he barked, saluted, and turned his horse. Dirt clods flew from the horse’s hooves as he pelted back down the line.

Poe hobbled toward the four messengers his brigadiers had sent to him. Anger smoked through his veins. “General Barton will advance at once,” he said. “The other brigades will advance as soon as they perceive his movement has begun. Tell your commanders that I desire any prisoners to be sent to me.”

He pointed at Fitzhugh Lee’s aide with his stick. “Ride to General Lee. Give him my compliments, inform him that we are advancing, and request his support.”

Men scattered at his words, like shrapnel from his explosion of temper. He watched them with cold satisfaction.

“There is nothing more beautiful, sir,” said Major Moses in his ear, “than the sight of this army on the attack.”

Poe looked with surprise at Moses; in his burst of temper he had forgotten the man was here. He turned to gaze at the formed men a few hundred yards below him on the gentle slope. They had been in garrison for almost a year, and their uniforms and equipment were in better condition than most of this scarecrow army. They were not beautiful in any sense that Poe knew of the word, but he understood what the major meant. There was a beauty in warfare that existed in a realm entirely distinct from the killing.

“I know you served in Greece, sir,” Moses said. “Did the Greek fighters for liberty compare in spirit with our own?”

Poe’s heart gave a lurch, and he wondered in alarm if his ears were burning. “They were—— indifferent,” he said. “Variable.” He cleared his throat. “Mercenary, if the truth be told.”

“Ah.” Moses nodded. “Byron found that also.”

“I believe he did.” Poe stared at the ground and wondered how to extricate himself. His Greek service was a lie he had encouraged to be published about himself. He had never fought in Greece when young, or served, as he had also claimed, in the Russian army. Instead—— penniless, an outcast, thrown on his own resources by his Shylock of a stepfather—— he had enlisted in the American army out of desperation, and served three years as a volunteer.

It had been his dread, these years he’d served the Confederacy, that he would encounter some old soldier who remembered serving alongside the eighteen-year-old Private Edgar A. Perry. His fears had never been realized, fortunately, but he had read everything he could on Byron and the Greek War of Independence in hopes he would not be tripped up by the curious.

“Ah,” Poe said. He pointed with his stick. “The men are moving.”

“A brilliant sight, sir,” Moses’s eyes shone.

Calls were rolling up the line, one after another, from Barton on the left to the Ravens next in line, then to Corse—— all Virginia brigades—— and then to Clingman’s North Carolinians on the right. Poe could hear the voices distinctly.

“Attention, battalion of direction! Forward, guide centerrrr——
march
!”

The regiments moved forward, left to right, clumps of skirmishers spreading out ahead. Flags hung listlessly in the damp. Once the order to advance had been given, the soldiers moved in utter silence, in perfect parade-ground formation.

Just as they had gone for that cemetery, Poe thought. He remembered his great swell of pride at the way the whole division had done a left oblique under enemy fire that day, taking little half-steps to swing the entire line forty-five degrees and then paused to dress the line before marching onward.

Sweeping through tendrils of mist that clung to the soldiers’ legs, the division crossed the few hundred yards of ground between the entrenchments and the forest, and disappeared into the darkness and mist.

Poe wondered desperately if he was doing the right thing.

“Did you know Byron, sir?” Moses again.

Poe realized he’d been holding his breath, anticipating the sound of disaster as soon as his men began their attack. He let his breath go, felt relief spreading outward, like rot, from his chest.

“Byron died,” he said, “some years before I went abroad.”

Byron had been feeding worms for forty years, Poe thought, but there were Byrons still, hundreds of them, in this army. Once he had been a Byron himself− an American Childe Harold dressed in dramatic black, ready with the power of his mind and talent to defeat the cosmos. Byron had intended to conquer the Mussulman; Poe would do him better, with
Eureka
, by conquering God.

Byron had died at Missolonghi, bled to death by his personal physician as endless gray rain fell outside his tent and drowned his little army in the Peloponnesian mud. And nothing had come of Byron in the end, nothing but an example that inspired thousands of other young fools to die in similar pointless ways throughout the world.

For Poe the war had come at a welcome moment. His literary career had come to a standstill, with nine thousand seven hundred fifty-one copies of the
Complete Tales
sitting in his lumber room; his mother-in-law had bestirred herself to suggest, in kind but firm fashion, that his literary and landscaping projects were running up too fantastic a debt; and his relations with Evania—— on Poe’s part at least—— were at best tentative.

When Virginia seceded and Maryland seemed poised to follow, Poe headed south with Sextus, a pair of fine horses, equipage, a curved Wilkinson light cavalry sword, Hardee’s
Tactics
, a brace of massive nine-shot Le Mat revolvers, and of course the twelve hundred in gold. He kissed Evania and his beloved Mrs. Forster farewell—— within a few months he would return with an army and liberate Shepherd’s Rest and the rest of Maryland. He, as well as Byron, could be martial when the cause of liberty required it. He rode away with a singing heart.

Before him, as he woke in his bed his first night in Richmond, he saw his vision, the benevolent madonna giving him her benediction. In going south he was being, he thought, faithful to Virginia; and he hoped to find the spirit, as well as the name, of his lost love embodied in the state to which he swore allegiance.

Jefferson Davis was pleased to give a colonel’s commission to a veteran of the wars of Greek liberation, not to mention a fellow West Pointer—— the West Point story, at least, being true, though Poe did not remind the President that, because the horrid Allan refused to support him, Poe had got himself expelled from the academy after turning up stark naked at a parade.

There was no regiment available for the new colonel, so Poe began his military career on the staff of General Joseph E. Johnston, commanding in the Shenandoah Valley. He occupied himself by creating a cypher for army communications which, so far as he knew, had survived three years unbroken.

Johnston’s army moved east on the railroad to unite with Beauregard’s at First Manassas, and there Poe saw war for the first time. He had expected violence and death, and steeled himself against it. It gave him no trouble, but what shocked him was the
noise
. The continual roll of musketry, buzzing bullets, shouted orders, the blast of cannon, and the shriek of shells—— all were calculated to unstring the nerves of a man who couldn’t abide even a loud orchestra. Fortunately he was called upon mainly to rally broken troops—— it had shocked him that Southern men could run like that—— but in the end, after he’d got used to the racket, he had ridden, bullets singing over his head, in the final screaming, exhilarating charge that swept the Yankee army from the field, and he could picture himself riding that way forever, the fulfillment of the Byronic ideal, sunset glowing red on the sword in his hand as he galloped north to Maryland and the liberation of his home.