The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (28 page)

“Yes, damn it! Yes, I heard you. But understand it? No, damn it, I do not understand it!”

“One more outburst like that and I am relieving you of command as well,” Meade retorted. “And by God, if you had said that in front of our staffs I would have relieved you!”

“Relieve me of what? An attack you have just doomed to failure? Maybe that would be a blessing. Now you can take the full responsibility.”

“Then go ahead and resign, if that is how you feel,” Meade replied, “but I will forward that resignation without recommendation other than that you did so in the face of the enemy on the eve of an attack.”

“You would dare to call me a coward?”

“You are daring to be insubordinate,” Meade retorted heatedly.

Burnside took a deep breath. He was cornered and there was only one hope left of getting out of it. He stepped back toward Meade, head slightly lowered.

“Sir,” he began, “I beg you to reconsider this order.”

Meade shook his head.

“I am at least entitled to know why, then.”

There was almost the flicker of a smile, Meade having obviously regained control of this confrontation.

“You might place great store in this plan of yours, General Burnside, but there are few beyond you that do. From the beginning every engineer on my staff has warned against it.”

“And they were proven wrong by the fact that the tunnel exists, built by men, who, it is obvious, know far more about mining than all the West Point–educated engineers with this army.”

“Perhaps on that point, for the moment, but there are still sixteen hours to go. We know the Rebels are countermining. Even as we stand here they might very well break in and then we must blow the mine immediately. At that point any plan of attack is off anyhow.”

“I do not see that as a reason to change the order of battle.”

“I am ordering these changes for other reasons.”

“Because they are black, is that it?” Burnside snapped. “They’re not part of us, not of the Army of the Potomac as you see it. Is that the real reason?”

Meade bristled and Burnside fully expected that the next words spoken were that he was relieved of command.

“I will explain this once, and once only,” Meade said coldly, “and then you will accept the order as given and follow through on it without any damn abolitionist accusations.

“The Fourth Division is green. I don’t care how much you’ve trained them. They are green and we both know what that means the moment they are hit, and hit hard. You seem to presuppose that once your mine is blown up every Rebel will be gone and those colored regiments will just walk across the field and take Petersburg.

“No, it will be a slaughter. The sight of Negro troops will only redouble the fury of the Rebels to fight back. Therefore I want veteran troops to lead the way. Veteran white troops.”

“Are you saying my men will turn and run the moment things get hot?”

Meade stood silent.

“You are calling them cowards.”

“I have yet to see where men such as they have fought in a pitched battle against veteran Rebels and won.”

“A brigade of them with the Army of the James took some of these trenches during the first day of the fighting here.”

“Against mostly militia.”

“The 54th Massachusetts, surely that proved something.”

“Yes, that they were slaughtered and did not take the fort. The Southern press said it made their men fight twice as hard. The abolitionist press might make much of it, but it was a senseless slaughter. At Fort Pillow everyone knows they panicked and ran.”

“So you are saying my men will fail, and therefore you are pulling them out without giving them their chance.”

“I am pulling them out so that, if there is any hope whatsoever that your scheme actually does work, it has the best possible chance of doing so. And that is final.”

“Those men trained for a month solid. They know it like clockwork.”

“Clockwork for trained soldiers? And the moment the plan starts to go awry, and surely it will, they will fall apart.”

“It is going awry, sir, because you are making it go awry by changing the order of attack only hours before we go in.”

“You are pressing my patience, Burnside,” Meade said coldly.

Burnside stood silent and then took a deep breath.

“Sir, I wish to speak with General Grant about this.”

Meade, without saying a word, reached into his breast pocket and drew out the message of the night before.

“You can see from this that General Grant has already authorized and given me full control on this action. He has other things to do this day than listen to the protest of a subordinate, when this letter makes clear he will reinforce the chain of command, and that means my decisions are lawful and enforceable.”

Burnside scanned the note, including the time and date. It was all so much clearer now. He knew, as well, that if he went around Meade this afternoon and rode to City Point to find Grant, that Grant, by custom and tradition alone, would endorse Meade’s decision. And beyond that, there had never been any love lost between Grant and himself. If he were a Sherman or Sheridan it would be different. But the last thing Grant would ever want to see was a newspaper report that he had sided with “Burnside of Fredericksburg” against “Meade of Gettysburg.”

He was trumped and just lowered his head, handing the memo back.

“None of my other divisions are trained for this. Their orders were to simply follow the lead of the Fourth Division, secure the breakthrough, and back up the Fourth as its first brigade advanced on Petersburg.”

“When was the last time we fought any kind of battle where we had days or weeks to plan and train?” Meade replied. “I would suggest you have an officers meeting now, rearrange your order of battle, and see that they are ready to go by…” He hesitated and then asked, “What time was it set for?”

“It was three-thirty
A.M.
Less than fifteen hours from now,” Burnside said bitterly. “That is if the slow fuses your staff supplied work.”

“Call your officers together.”

“It will mean having to entirely rearrange where they will deploy during the night.”

“For God’s sake, man,” Meade shouted, “you have your orders, now see to them.”

He turned and stalked off. Burnside just stood there, thunderstruck. Silent, he watched as Meade mounted, along with his staff, and rode off.

Finally, one of his adjutants slowly came up to him. It was obvious to all that something had transpired. The man was clearly nervous.

“Officers call,” Burnside whispered. “I want all four of my division commanders to report to me immediately.”

2:00
P.M.

“So that is it,” Ambrose Burnside said morosely, leaning forward, hands clasped, head half lowered. His four division commanders, James Ledlie, First Division; Robert Potter, Second Division; Orlando Wilcox, Third Division; and Edward Ferrero of the Fourth sat in silence.

The bombproof they were in was hot and stuffy with the afternoon heat. The only light was provided by the open door up to the surface. A shell crumped nearby. The Rebel batteries seemed to be a bit more active today.

Burnside waited for some kind of response, any response, but there was only silence. He finally raised his head, scanning them to gauge response.

What caught him were two things. Ferrero actually seemed to be relieved. As he had spilled out Meade’s orders to them, Ferrero had blown out noisily, as if ready to voice something, but then just leaned back on his stool, looked to the ceiling, and was absolutely silent.

That had startled him. For God’s sake, Meade had directly insulted this man’s troops. He would have expected a bitter retort, a challenge back, an angry cry that by heavens his men were the best in the army and were being denied their chance, their honor besmirched.

There was only silence, and it was becoming clearer by the second that Ferrero was inwardly delighted with the news. His reaction was stunning. Ferrero, at the start of the war, had raised a regiment at his own expense. For three years he had risen steadily through the ranks, repeatedly cited for bravery. Some thought it a bit ironic that before the war his family had owned a rather famous chain of dance instruction studios, but Ferrero would grin and reply that learning drill under fire and trying to teach an overweight woman the latest craze, such as the polka, required just about the same skills and the same courage.

He had not hesitated when offered command of the Fourth, though there were rumors that Ferrero had claimed it as a path for further promotion; as more black regiments came into the army, they would be formed into their own corps, and by seniority he would gain that command position. He had seen to the task of drilling the men of the Fourth with some skill, bringing in a crew of tough and competent sergeants from his old regiment. To Burnside, however, he had appeared to be increasingly withdrawn from it all.

Like so many veterans of three years of war, had this man seen one battle too many? Perhaps he feared he had gone to the well once too often when it came to the luck of being a general on the front line. Was he now glad to be pulled from that line?

At the moment the concern struck Burnside as moot. Ferrero’s division was out of the front line, though within the last hour he had at least wrangled from Meade the concession that the Fourth could serve as the corps reserve—if a breakthrough did indeed occur.

Ferrero knew he was out of the discussion as well. He just sat back silently, gazing at his three compatriots the way a man might after folding his poker hand and who, out of curiosity, wished to see what would transpire next for those still in the game … in this case a game where lives were at stake.

No one expressed outrage other than a few muttered comments about “high command,” and how this most certainly threw plans awry, but nothing beyond that. Not one of the other three stood up to denounce the decision, then “beg” for the honor of his division leading the charge.

As he looked from Potter, to Wilcox, to Ledlie, all three avoided his gaze.

Burnside finally broke the silence.

“Gentlemen, we cannot reverse General Meade’s order. Ferrero’s division will be pulled to the rear of the column. I need one of you to volunteer for his division to lead the assault and to start to prepare that division for the task.”

He paused, pulled out his pocket watch, and flipped it open.

“In nine hours. That is when your men will begin to break camp and move into position for the attack.”

Again silence; none even dared to make a reply.

“Surely, one of you will volunteer?” Burnside asked, and there was a note of pleading in his voice.

Wilcox cleared his throat. Burnside felt that surely he could count on this man.

“Sir, you are asking which of us wishes to commit suicide. We have all been in enough frontal assaults to know the odds. I will not willingly volunteer my men to such a task without first consulting my brigade commanders and through them my regimental commanders. These men have been through pure hell the last three months. Perhaps you are now asking the impossible.”

The other two quickly nodded their assent to Wilcox’s bold words, which were essentially telling their commander to go to hell.

“I wondered, all along,” Ferrero whispered in assertion, “when has any operation with this army gone according to plan? At least when we were an independent command, things always went well for us. But with this army?”

Burnside shot him an angry glance, ready to ask why in hell then had he accepted command of the division and the task that was laid before him.

“They always do this at the last minute,” Potter interjected. “Just once, I’d like to see them stick to something. Damn them, we see how Lee does it, but not in this army. I wish we were back in Tennessee with you in independent command, General. You ran the show around Knoxville and the hell with Grant, or even worse this damn Meade.”

Again nods of approval.

Burnside sighed, unclasping his hands, extending them, and if not for the dark shadows of the stuffy bombproof, all would have seen that they were shaking.

“We can sit here until doomsday, gentlemen, and argue the rights and wrongs of it. But I need a volunteer.”

“Why not delay it a week?” Potter interjected. “That would give us time to train a division the way Ferrero trained his.”

“There is no more time. The Confederates have started countermining activities and could discover and destroy the tunnel at any time. It will be a matter of luck if we get through the next thirteen hours. If we wait for a week, surely they will find it,” Burnside snapped angrily, holding up his pocket watch as if to hurl it at them. “The attack goes in, in little more than thirteen hours. Meade committed to that at least, and to place Fifth and Tenth Corps into reserve support.”

That was not quite true and he knew it. Meade had insisted that the other two corps would remain under his command and that he would commit them if a breakthrough was achieved.

“Then blow the damn fort, kill several hundred Rebs, strike fear into the rest of them, and be done with it. At least it will serve that purpose,” Ferrero said dryly.

“I want this to end this damn war,” Burnside snapped. “It is the best chance we shall ever have to do it. Either we do it by surprise in this way, or we will be doomed to a long and bitter siege ahead, perhaps well into next year, and ten times as many will die over time as we will lose in this assault.”

He paused.

“I need a volunteer.”

Again he was rebuffed.

He looked down at the floor of the bunker. Planked over, it was covered with rushes and straw to absorb some of the moisture. He stared morosely at it, looking again at his pocket watch, snapping it shut as if he had made a decision.

He looked back up at the three division commanders. Ferrero of the Fourth was no longer of any concern and he wondered now as to the wisdom of appointing him to the colored troops. The man had seemed eager enough when approached and offered a second star. Had that been the only reason, and, in reality, had he held no faith in them?