The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (31 page)

He looked back up toward Fort Pegram. In a few more minutes surely they would see or hear something.

“Sir?” It was the runner.

“Give us a few more minutes,” he said, voice tight. “Just a few more minutes; the fuse must be burning slow.”

He wanted to shout out that if they had been given a damn galvanic battery and proper detonator the fort would already be gone. The road would be taken, the way to Petersburg and beyond that to Richmond already open.

Did I do all of this in vain,
he wondered?

The runner saluted, forgetting the protocol of the front-line trench, and turned to dash back down the covered way, obviously glad to be the hell out of a position directly in front of four tons of powder that could blow at any second.

HEADQUARTERS, NINTH CORPS
4:25
A.M.

The telegrapher handed up another message. He no longer needed a lantern to read it.

“This is insanity,” Burnside cried, looking down at the preemptive order from Meade and back toward Fort Pegram, which was now clearly visible as a dark line on the western horizon.

“My God, if the men go in now and then it detonates, the entire corps will be annihilated.”

He took a deep breath.

“Hold this telegram,” he replied sharply. “I did not see it.”

He looked back to his staff.

“One of you, go. Damn it, run! Tell Pleasants to send someone in and find out what has gone wrong!”

An officer climbed up over the parapet and started off at a run.

4:28
A.M.

“I’m going in,” Pleasants announced, peeling off his uniform jacket.

“Sir?”

It was one of his diggers, Kochanski.

“What is it?”

“Regiment will be in one hell of a fix if we lose you before the fight even starts. I’ll go.”

Pleasants started to shake his head. But Kochanski, jacket off, was already up over the safety barrier.

“O’Shay, come with me.”

“Oh, God bless you, Sergeant, and the saints watch over you, of course,” O’Shay snarled, tearing off his jacket and following Kochanski, the two running to the entrance.

“If I wind up getting blown to hell,” O’Shay hissed, “I’ll curse you forever while we’re sitting down there, you damn Polack.”

Kochanski almost chuckled as he picked up the lantern, bent low, and stepped into the dark chamber.

4:30
A.M.

“My God, they must see us by now,” Russell gasped, looking back to the east, then back toward the Rebel line.

“Are they blind?”

FORT PEGRAM
4:35
A.M.

Captain Sanders stood on the parapet. In a few more minutes that would be suicide, but it was still dark enough behind him that he felt relatively safe.

Shading his eyes against the increasing glow of light, he carefully scanned the ground. Something seemed different on the broad open slope leading back to the main Union line. The landscape looked darker somehow.

He opened his watch and looked at it. Sunrise was little more than thirty minutes away. With dawn, he knew he could most likely breathe easy for another day, and perhaps his team of diggers would at last find whatever it was the Yankees were doing beneath them.

INSIDE THE MINE
4:37
A.M.

“Hail Mary, full of Grace … Hail Mary, full of Grace…”

“The next damn line is, ‘The Lord is with Thee,’” Kochanski snapped, without bothering to look back at Michael. Holding the lantern up, he pressed forward, O’Shay behind him, running his hand along where the fuse had been laid. All that was left was a blackened trail. Now, by the glare of the lantern, they could see the sandbag barrier ahead at the intersection into the two galleries.

“It’s burned; it’s burned through to the other side of the sandbags. Sweet Jesus, now what do we do?” O’Shay hissed.

Kochanski struggled against absolute terror, against just turning around and running. If it had burned this far, they were little more than thirty feet from the tons of powder. There was a fleeting thought:
Would the explosion kill me instantly, before next breath? Am I going to be standing before Saint Peter? Dear God, don’t let me be burned, buried.
He had pulled out too many bodies from faulty blasts, their faces blue, contorted in agony.
Make it quick; please make it so quick I don’t even know it.

“God, please forgive me my sins…”

“Fuse!” O’Shay gasped.

There it was. Just before the beginning of the canvas hose that snaked the fuse in between the sandbags.

They stopped, both staring at the end of the fuse, dangling out of the canvas hose; this last splicing, just before the fuse disappeared into the built-up wall of bags, had failed.

The other possibility had terrified Kochanski, because, if they had not found the break by this point, it would have meant tearing into the sandbag barrier and trying to worm into the explosive-packed gallery.

Both were panting for breath, since the ventilation had been cut off. They stared at the charred end of fuse sticking out in front of them.

“It could still be a partial burn,” O’Shay gasped, “part of it could still be burning in there.”

Both had seen it, or the results of it, before. A fuse appears to have failed, a blaster goes in to find out what went wrong, and the last thing he ever sees is that the fuse is still dangling there, but a “partial” burn is still sputtering along inside of it.

Kochanski pulled the cover off of the lantern, held it up, and puffed the half-chewed cigar in his mouth to life. Hand trembling, he touched the tip of the cigar to the fuse. God, if it did not sputter then O’Shay was right, there was a partial burn still going on … and they were dead men who were still breathing, at least for a few more seconds.

The fuse flashed to life.

“Out!” Kochanski cried. “Run!”

In his excitement, O’Shay dropped the lantern, with coal oil spilling out as it overturned. Flaring up, the open flame added to their terror.

Squatting low, the two set off at a run. Kochanski, at one point, banged into a shoring with such force that it dislodged, triggering a partial cave-in, just as O’Shay pushed through behind him.

Ahead they could see the dim square of the tunnel entrance, illuminated by the rising light of dawn.

The two burst out, standing up.

“It’s gonna blow!” O’Shay cried, racing for the safety barrier as Pleasants and others reached out to pull them over.

FORT PEGRAM
4:45
A.M.

“Get Captain Sanders!”

Sergeant Joshua Allison, twenty feet down into the counter tunnel, was looking up anxiously. After long hours of silence he had heard something: voices and then something falling.

He turned to press his head back against the wall of the tunnel.

“Merciful Lord, please watch over me,” he whispered.

Less than ten feet away, the burning fuse had already reached the split and had raced the final twenty feet up the two chambers. The flame in the southwest chamber reached the open pound of powder carefully laid out by Colonel Pleasants a few seconds before its counterpart in the northeast chamber hit its open charge.

The pound of powder flashed. No explosion yet, just a lurid blue burst of light igniting with a dull thump rather than a blast, for it was not contained. The flash burst into the open barrel of twenty-four pounds of powder, which ignited a quarter of a second later.

Sergeant Joshua Allison was the first to hear the beginning of the greatest explosion yet recorded on the American continent. He did not even have time to recognize it for what it was … as he was dead. A merciful Lord had answered his prayer, bringing him a death so quick that it did not allow even a moment for fear.

HEADQUARTERS NINTH CORPS
4:45
A.M.

“Tell General Meade…”

General Ambrose Burnside was interrupted in mid-sentence.

“My God, there it goes!” someone cried.

He pivoted, looked west. The ridge appeared to be rising up, like a distant wave coming into shore, distorting the horizon, rising higher and higher.

No noise yet. Just the ground rising upward, and then suddenly breaking apart into ten thousand fragments that continued to soar heavenward.

Still no noise, but all could feel the shock wave racing through the earth, shaking them.

“Merciful God!” some screamed. “This is it!”

*   *   *

James Reilly stood up, sketchpad in hand, blank page ready to record the moment. Only seconds ago, he had feared that the pages he was about to sketch would be only of confusion and terror. He had been afraid that the Rebels had finally seen the mass of over twelve thousand men deployed and that then all hell would break loose. He had heard Burnside arguing about Meade’s order to charge even without an explosion and had seen the agony Burnside was feeling. To charge without the mine going off would be to create yet another debacle. To charge and have the mine explode while thousands of Union soldiers struggled to surround the fort only yards away would be nothing less than murder.

But now the earth was lifting up. He knew he would have only seconds to register his impressions, impossible to make any clear sketch as it happened.

What had been Fort Pegram was now rising heavenward, an explosion at least a hundred yards wide igniting, tearing the Confederate position asunder. It was all darkness for another second or so, and then twin columns of flame rose up out of the earth, combining together a split second later, spreading up and out.

He tried to keep focused, to soak in every detail. He had been under fire scores of times and had learned to fix attention on a particular detail, imprint it in memory, then draw it later.

But this?

It was almost beyond his powers of observation. The first detail to catch his mind and hold for a brief instant was an entire field piece, weighing more than a ton, tumbling end over end as it continued to climb toward the sky.

The illumination from the flash grew in intensity, for a second or so like that of a rising sun as some of the powder, blown clear out of its place deep beneath the earth, was tossed upward, some of the barrels now bursting apart with brilliant flashes.

The explosion reached a climax. Around the edges fragments of earth, some half as big as houses, were now tumbling back down. In the center of the explosion, the column of thousands of cubic yards of earth, contained six artillery pieces, the caissons of which were exploding as well. Tentage, rifles, and more than three hundred men were being blown apart.

*   *   *

Captain Sanders barely had enough time to register what was happening to him. There was a brief instant of conscious thought, that he had been right and this now proved it, the beginning of a prayer for the good Lord to watch over his young wife and newborn child and then darkness for him as well, as he slammed into the ground fifty yards away from the fort where he had been standing but five seconds earlier.

*   *   *

Hunkered down behind the sandbag barrier, Pleasants heard the men around him cheering, shouting, even as some of the blast, which had raced down the collapsing tunnel, burst into the trench and was finally stopped only by the safety barriers they were positioned behind.

The shock wave raced through the earth and was followed less than half a second later by the sound of the explosion. It was not the sharp crack that many expected, some saying it would be like a volcano blowing up, though none had ever experienced such an event. It came more as an over-pressure punching into their lungs, a heavy thump like a giant door being slammed shut with a rush of air ahead of it.

Pleasants looked straight up, his horizon blocked off by the top of the trench in which they were lying. And then he saw it, a rain of debris climbing upward, reaching apogee, and then starting to come down. He had expected some of the wreckage to wash over their trench. And now it was, as he had expected, coming down upon them.

*   *   *

Garland White just stood silent, the explosion mushrooming outward, and then collapsing back down, the sound of it having washed over the regiment seconds before.

In spite of orders, every man was on his feet, shouting, cheering. The officers were as amazed as the men. Many of them stood dumbstruck, not shouting orders, for clearly no one could hear them through the noise of the explosion and its aftermath.

Though eight hundred yards distant, he thought he could actually see men, or what was left of men, tumbling through the air, carried aloft by the blast and now slamming back down into the earth.

He stood silent and offered a short prayer for God to grant them swift and painless deaths, for surely no man deserved to die in such a manner.

The rumble of the explosion washed over them. Then the noise just gradually died away. The vast mushroom cloud of dirt was disappearing, small fragments of it still raining down, while a dark cloud of dirty, yellowish-gray smoke, made lurid by the rising light of dawn, climbed a thousand feet or more into the morning air.