The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (3 page)

And how—how could he ever capture the image frozen into his heart forever? That field just over the lip of the trench. The hundreds of bodies, each with a slip of paper pinned to his back …
PATRICK CALLAHAN, 44 PEARL ST., NEW YORK CITY, 23RD REG’T. WIFE: KATHY, FOUR CHILDREN … QUENTIN O’NEAL … ROBERT THOMPSON
 … So many names. The first stirring of morning breeze was setting the slips of paper fluttering.

How could he ever name them all?

But there was someone he could tell it to. The other reason he was here, which no one but his friend knew. The communications trench to the rear was clear now, except for the walking wounded who filled its shadowy darkness; walking, some crawling, men helping each other. He turned back and grabbed the drummer boy.

“Come along, son. You can help this man like the brave lad you are.”

Stifling back his sobs, the boy put his arm around a man who was hobbling on one foot, his left leg a mangled wreck below the knee.

“God bless ya, laddie.”

In the half-light of the covered trench he continued to sketch even as he walked, turning a page, drawing quick outlines of the boy and the wounded soldier leaning on him: the boy crying, the wounded man murmuring words of comfort even as he left a trail of blood with each step.

How could
Harper’s
capture in its engravings the blood—the blood that was in drips, trails, and pools within the trench? The body of a man who had collapsed and was dead, face down in the trampled earth?
TIM KINDRAID … 21 EXCHANGE ST., PORTLAND, 17TH MAINE,… MOTHER: ELIZABETH, FATHER: WILLIAM.

Gunfire rose up again. A second wave going in, and in less than a minute, dropped off. He hoped the men had refused to go, or had just made a sham of it for a moment to please those in the rear and then ducked back down.

Most of the veterans had learned that game by now. Their generals might urge, but they knew the reality far better. After the annihilation of the first wave, no man with any sense of battle would go into that killing ground, no matter who ordered it. This army was fought out.

James reached the end of the communications trench, six hundred yards behind the line, out in the open. Shots could reach this range and reserve regiments were down on the ground. With bayonets, canteen halves, the occasional small pick or shovel, they were already digging in.

He caught a glimpse of them. Hancock, commander of the Second Corps, still limping from the wound that had nearly killed him at Gettysburg, was pacing back and forth, head lowered. Was the man crying?

Grant, and Meade by his side, both with field glasses raised, and staff around them. In an outer circle, there were correspondents and the usual hangers-on.

“What was it like up there?”

It was his friend Jenkins with the
New York Herald.

“Why ask me? Go up yourself and take a damn good look,” James snapped.

Jenkins shook his head.

“They won’t let us. Provost guards have been ordered to stop us. It looks bad, James. They said we’d be in Richmond by noon and the war over.”

His voice trailed off, and he gazed toward the smoke-shrouded front.

James actually laughed derisively.

Jenkins motioned to his sketch board and he offered it over.

“How bad was it?”

James could not reply, as he was afraid he’d break.

“What’s this?” asked Jenkins, pointing at a sketch at the corner. “Who is ‘Lieutenant’…” he hesitated, trying to read the hurried print, “‘McCloskey’?”

James snatched the sketch board back.

“He’s dead. They’re all dead.”

Jenkins said nothing as he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a flask, unscrewing the cap and offering it over.

James took a long, grateful drink.

“Thanks,” he whispered.

“Looks like they’ve made some decision,” Jenkins said, nodding back to Grant and Meade, who had lowered their glasses, staff around them mounting up, hurrying off with orders.

“I better go see what’s up,” Jenkins replied.

“Don’t bother.”

“Why?”

“I can tell you already.”

“Tell me what.”

“We’ve lost the battle. Richmond will hold, and come November Lincoln will be defeated, and we will lose the war.”

Jenkins stood silent, and uncorking the flask, he drained the rest of it off.

“Coming with me?”

James shook his head and flinched slightly as battery after battery along the secondary line opened fire again.

He started to walk away.

“You heading back to New York to report? If so, would you carry a dispatch for me? Word is that headquarters is blocking us from filing reports from here.”

“No, Washington,” replied James.

“Why there?”

“A friend. I’m going to see a friend, that’s all.”

“Who?”

“Just a friend. Be careful out there, Jenkins. Don’t stop a bullet, it’s bad press when a reporter gets killed.”

Jenkins forced a smile and turned away as James walked off.

The sun was up, a red ball of glaring heat. In a few hours the bodies on the field would begin to swell, and by evening the cloying smell would carpet the battlefield, as it did all battlefields of this war, of any war. By the following morning, the uniforms they wore would burst at the seams, the pieces of paper pinned to their backs forgotten. When a truce was finally called, burial details would go forward with their faces covered with rags drenched in coal oil to block the stench. They would dig long trenches, no more than a foot or two deep, and then dump the bodies in and cover them over.

James would leave it behind for now. By tomorrow night he would be at the Willard Hotel in Washington, across the street from the White House, where his friend Abraham Lincoln now lived and was waiting for his confidential report … his friend who would want the truth about what happened here at Cold Harbor, Virginia, on this morning of June 3, 1864.

CHAPTER ONE

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
JUNE 6, 1864
THE ESTATE OF GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE
DAWN

“
H
ere they come, parson.”

Sergeant Major Garland White, 28th United States Colored Troops, turned from his labors and looked to where Jeremiah Smith, a private from Company A, was pointing north to the road leading down from the “Iron Bridge” across the Potomac.

It had been raining most of the night, a slow steady drenching downpour out of the east. It had done little to drop the temperature and now added to the misery of the men of the 28th who had been out toiling by lantern light since midnight. The Potomac was concealed beneath coiling fog and mists rising up from the river, shrouding the capital city on the opposite shore.

The first of a long line of ambulances, emerging out of the mists, was drawn by two mules, ghostlike in the morning light, followed by another and another, mud splashing up from the hooves of the mules and the wheels of the wagons.

“Back to it, Jeremiah. I want it dug straight.”

“Ain’t no difference, parson, we be filling it back up shortly.”

He put a fatherly hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder, guiding him back to the hole, seven feet by three and supposedly six feet deep.

“It’s not parson, it’s sergeant major now,” Garland said. “Do as you are ordered; back down there you go.”

Jeremiah looked at him sullenly, as Garland released his hold on Jeremiah and reached down to lend a hand to Private Thompson, who had finished his half hour stint in the hole.

“Come on, Willie, take a quick break, there’s hot coffee under the tarp.” He helped the private, covered head to foot in warm clinging mud, out of the ground and pointed to where the regimental cooks had ten-gallon vats of the brew waiting.

“Thank ya, Reverend … I mean, Sergeant Major, sir.”

“I’m a sergeant major, not a sir, save that for … the officers.” He almost said, “your boss man,” but caught himself.

Taking Willie’s shovel, he handed it to Jeremiah and helped him slip down into the hole.

“Hurry it up, men,” Garland announced, stepping back, his voice carrying to the rest of the regiment. “They’re almost here, and I want this done right and proper now.”

“Sergeant Major, damn it, it’s like trying to shovel out the Wabash River.”

Garland turned, struggling to control his anger as he gazed down at Corporal Turner in the next hole over. He bent over at the waist, fixing the corporal with an icy gaze.

“Corporal Turner,” he hissed, voice pitched low, remembering it was not proper to reprimand another noncommissioned officer in front of the men, or the officers for that matter. “I will not tolerate profanity in my presence. Next, I will not tolerate profanity on this ground, which is consecrated and…”

He hesitated.

“Damn it, I will not tolerate beefing from someone who is supposed to lead. If you don’t like that, Corporal, you can climb out of there right now, take off those two stripes, and I’ll find someone else to wear them.”

He gazed down at the mud-drenched corporal.

“Do I make myself clear, Corporal, or is it Private?”

“Yes, Sergeant Major.”

“You can stay down there and keep digging until I tell you different.”

Turner said nothing, though the next shovelful up, containing more water than muddy earth, landed within inches of Garland’s feet.

Garland turned away and noticed that young Lieutenant James Grant was looking his way. The lieutenant gave a nod of approval and turned away, going back under the tarpaulin where the officers of the regiment had gathered while the men labored.

Grant had wanted to “dig in” with the rest of the men of his company. As the detail started their labors in the pouring rain, however, Garland heard Colonel Charles Russell, commander of their regiment, restraining Grant, saying that this was an enlisted man’s job, besides, the lieutenant had to keep his uniform relatively unspoiled for the brief ceremony which would commence in a few minutes. Grant was a good man, a three-year veteran of the war, who at heart still acted as if he were a sergeant. He led by example and Garland deeply respected him for that, even though he was not much more than a lad of twenty.

He left Turner’s hole, and continued down the long line—a long line of seventy-one graves.

Seventy-one graves for seventy-one men—men who had died the previous day in the dozen military hospitals that ringed the city of Washington. Seventy-one graves for men wounded in the grueling campaign, which had started exactly one month ago today, on May 6th. Seventy-one graves for men transported back across rutted roads and aboard hospital ships from the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, the North Anna, and according to the newspaper reports, a new battlefield just six miles short of Richmond at a place called Cold Harbor. Graves for men who had survived all that, only to die in Washington and now be buried here.

Garland’s regiment had come to this city from Indianapolis at the beginning of May. Five months of training had prepared them for combat, for battles that every last man of them longed for, a chance to prove themselves, a chance to show that they were of the same blood as their comrades with the 54th Massachusetts. They wanted to show that they were as worthy of the honor of serving as any other citizen, white or black, and that they were therefore worthy of the rights of freemen.

Across the cold months of drills during their winter of recruitment and mobilization back in Indiana, Garland had joined their ranks as the “parson,” but had soon earned the coveted chevrons of a sergeant major, the highest rank a colored man could hold in this army. In their nightly prayer services, he had dwelled again and again on Psalm 91, calling it the soldier’s psalm, and entreated his men to memorize it to prepare themselves for the battles to come. He had promised them battle, and they were eager for it, as ready as any regiment had ever been.

On the day they arrived in Washington, he had still promised it. They detrained and marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the cheers of the colored in the city and many of the white folks as well.

And then they had been marched here, to this place called Arlington, the plantation once owned by General Lee. Muskets had been stacked, they had been handed shovels, and told to dig—not fortifications, but graves.

He had cajoled them, told them that to do this fittingly was an honor while they waited for the call to join the army on the front lines. That was a month ago—a long month of a dreadful routine. Each evening a telegram would be sent over, informing the colored troops of this and of two other regiments stationed here how many graves were to be dug during the night, in preparation for the funeral train of mule-drawn ambulances that would arrive at dawn.

The digging was done during the night so that this grisly task and the horrific numbers could at least in some way be concealed. That had been obvious to all of them. Bring the dead out quietly; put them in the ground quietly. The number this morning was typical, not as bad as the week after the Wilderness, when the daily number had been a hundred or more. Tonight was seventy-one graves, a typical night for those who died in Washington, and only one regiment, his regiment, had drawn the detail. Only the good Lord knew how many were being buried up on the front lines. There were rumors afloat that three days ago, up in front of Richmond, it had numbered in the thousands.