The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (34 page)

He ran after Vincent, passing wounded who were streaming to the rear, noticing as well that for every man bearing a wound, two, three, four were just heading to the rear, some having discarded their weapons.

Vincent slipped down into a side entry into the covered way, James right behind him.

“Ferrero. I’m looking for General Ferrero!” Vincent shouted over and over.

“Here!”

In the semi-darkness of the covered tunnel, James saw an officer, Colonel Thomas, pushing his way back through the press of men crowded together, mingled with wounded begging to be allowed to pass to the rear.

“Ferrero?”

“I don’t know where that son of a bitch is,” Thomas cried. “I’ve taken command of the division in his absence.”

Vincent took that in, hesitating for a moment. James wanted to scream with rage, push his way forward, fearful Vincent would fail to act now based on some obscure military protocol. Rumors had already hit corps headquarters that both Ferrero and Ledlie could be found in a nearby bunker—a forward medical aid station—drunk, having taken some whiskey from a surgeon.

“Send them in,” Vincent shouted. “General Burnside orders you to send the division in, retrieve the situation, and take the Jerusalem Plank Road.”

“Thank God!” Thomas cried.

It would, however, have been one thing for Thomas to then have simply stepped in front of the two brigades out in an open field, nearly four thousand men, and cry for them to stand up, fall in, and prepare to charge. Instead, they were jammed six to eight deep inside a covered trench, the column several hundred yards in length.

Thomas, shouting for the men to fix bayonets, pushed and elbowed his way through the press, trying to gain the front of the column, James falling in behind him.

*   *   *

“Fix bayonets! Fix bayonets!”

Garland White, standing near the head of the column packed into the covered trench, looked back through the gloom. It was nearly impossible to discern anything between the thunder of battle outside, the press of men inside, the lamentations of the wounded, and the cries of the panic-stricken.

He saw Thomas struggling through the press of men.

“We’re going in!” Thomas roared. “Follow me!”

He set off at a run, a cry sweeping through the confines of the covered way, men shoving, banging into each other, Garland looking over his shoulder. He suddenly became frightened that a man behind him, carrying a bayoneted rifle at the charge, could very well stab him from behind if he should slow.

The swarm surged down the tunnel, Thomas, Russell, and several other officers shouting for the wounded crowded in their way to clear back.

Garland suddenly wanted to laugh at the panic-stricken look of the white soldiers, wondering what they must be thinking as this swarm of armed black men came thundering forward, screaming and yelling.

Ahead he could see the light marking the end of the covered way and then the battlefield beyond.

*   *   *

“Here they come at last, thank God!”

Colonel Pleasants, crouched down low on the lip of the trench, looked to where his men were pointing, then scrambled back from the entry to the covered way.

Several officers emerged, and then a dark volcanolike explosion of men emerged behind them … and for a moment stalled.

The covered way terminated in the trench of the forward line, not on open ground. Inwardly he groaned at the sight of it. The month of digging, of planning, of going over the details with Burnside, should have meant that within seconds after the explosion, two solid phalanxes of colored troops would come storming forward at the double. Those two columns, as unstoppable as battering rams, would sweep up the slope and even before the debris settled would be up and over the Rebel entrenchments to either side of the two-hundred-yard-long gash torn into the enemy line.

But the explosion had been but half of what he had planned for. No charge had gone forth. They were now three hours into the battle, with the Rebels closing in from every direction. Now, at last, the men trained to lead the way were coming up, but coming up as a confused mass, pouring out of a covered trench with no semblance of formation or control. The men should have been racing across an open field in solid phalanxes, led by officers and NCOs who knew what was to be done, every man behind them knowing his position and duty as well. Instead, they were pouring out into yet another trench, disoriented, not even sure which way they were to go.

“Up here!” Pleasants screamed, catching the eye of an officer in the lead.

“48th! Help these men up!”

Men of Pleasants’s command, who had stood impotent, watching the attack collapse, now pointed the way, trying in any way possible to help push the attack forward. Many of them climbed out of the protection of their trench, turning back, reaching down to extend helping hands to their black comrades, pulling them up out of the trench.

Pleasants pulled Thomas up, then Russell. The two officers of the Fourth Division paused for a second, looking at the chaos 130 yards ahead of them.

“Oh, God,” Russell gasped, instinctively ducking low as a minié ball zipped between him and Thomas.

Russell turned to pull up Lieutenant Grant and then Garland White. The two were standing upright, with Garland most likely not even aware that he was drawing fire.

“We will form up here, then go in!” Thomas shouted. “If we feed them in piecemeal, they’ll get lost and slaughtered up there. Hold your men here, Russell!”

Russell seemed to hesitate, but then nodded agreement. Thomas jumped back down into the trench and pushed his way back toward the covered way, out of which men were spilling in a continuous rush.

“Sergeant Major White! Get the column formed up and keep the men down!”

Russell stepped away, looking back at the swarm of men.

“Colors of the 28th to me!”

The two flag-bearers, flags cased, poles held at slope arms, pushed out of the covered way, climbed up out of the trench, and tore off the canvas covers, tossing them aside, twirling the flag staffs to reveal the National Flag and the gold flag of their USCT regiment.

“28th to me!” Russell kept screaming, over and over.

As quickly as men climbed up out of the trench, Garland shoved them forward, showing no deference even to the white officers, shouting to them to gather their companies in by column and then keep down.

As they worked to get organized, the first casualties of the 28th were already falling. As Garland was pulling a man up out of the trench, the top of his head disintegrated into a pulpy mist of blood and brains, life going out of his eyes in an instant, his grasp on Garland’s hand relaxing.

White had seen death before. The skirmish they had been in, which at that time he had thought to be a full-pitched battle, had claimed only two killed and ten wounded of the regiment. But this was beyond anything his training had prepared him for. He had seen death many a time as a preacher, called to sit by the bed of a friend about to breathe his last. But this? The soldier was an older man, flecks of gray in his beard. He had been a corporal of Company C and his life had just been snuffed out; he had accomplished nothing in this fight other than to be added to the roster of the dead after it was over.

Garland let go of his grip, the dead man falling back into the trench.

He saw another hand reaching up and was almost fearful to grasp it. Was he becoming the angel of death? The hand was white; he looked past it into the man’s eyes … it was the artist, looking up at him, features contorted in a tight grimace as if trying to smile.

“Help me up, Sergeant Major,” he gasped.

Garland all but pulled him up out of the trench, James gaining his footing and with the instincts of a veteran squatting low as he looked about.

Men crowded the trench now, spreading out, looking for a foothold, a hand above to help them up. Garland caught a glimpse of Sergeant Malady, standing upright, walking up and down the length of the trench line, at times lapsing into Gaelic, swearing the most obscene oaths, now directed at the Rebels. He then turned to shouting encouragement to the troops swarming up out of the trench: “Come on, my brave laddies, you damn black sons of bitches, now is your chance to get even! Come on, damn you, get ready!”

Russell, standing tall, flag-bearers by his side, looked up and down the line. Men of the 29th and 31st were coming out of the covered way, piling in behind his own command. Confusion was starting to take hold as the various commands mingled together.

“I’m taking them up!” Russell shouted to Thomas.

He turned back again to face his men.

“Up 28th, up! Now is your time! Charge!”

The men had waited for nearly four hours for this moment, indeed all their lives. They came to their feet, a cheer rising up from their throats.

James stood up with them. He thought he was a veteran newsman, impervious to emotions other than cynicism and grief and self-preservation, but for this moment, this brief instant, he believed. And his soul was one with them.

“At the double quick, forward!” Russell screamed, holding his sword aloft.

The colonel started up the slope, the 250 men of the 28th swarming in behind him.

“Guide on the colors!” Garland cried, repeating the litany over and over. “Guide on the colors, boys!”

Sergeant Major Garland White, once a reverend, felt a thrill of exultation unlike anything he had experienced in his entire life. Directly ahead of him was the glorious flag of his regiment; even as he gazed at it, the colors were being torn by bullets and shrapnel. But his eyes lingered and his heart swelled with passion on the flag next to it. The national colors. His flag. This was now clearly his flag. Never again, never could any man ever say that this was not his flag as well.

*   *   *

A storm surge of men swept up the slope, bayonets flashing in the sunlight, men cheering, screaming, some in tears of emotion, their voices commingling, overcoming for this brief instant the roar of battle.

The Rebel line was eighty yards away, fifty, then thirty. Garland could see men rising up, rifles poised, lowering the barrels, flashes of light, a man next to him screaming, collapsing, clutching his stomach, and dropping. A drummer boy next to him was shouting hysterically, beating on his drum. Russell had ordered the drummer boy to stay to the rear but the lad was with them anyhow, beating out the tattoo of the charge.

Ahead were the dreaded abatis, rows of sharpened stakes. They charged into them, men slowing, pushing their way around and through. Ordered to leave the axes and footbridges behind, they were using the butts of their muskets to knock the barriers aside to clear a path for themselves and those who followed.

Men dropped to either side of Garland, one of them tumbling forward after being shot, impaling himself on a sharpened stake, screaming. The sight of it only enraged Garland, pushing him forward into the dry moat, for a brief moment beneath the rifle fire of the Rebels occupying the opposite trench. They were but a few feet away, on the other side of the earthen embankment.

Men piled into the moat around him. They could not stay here!

“Charge, men, charge!” Garland screamed and with rifle raised high he scrambled up the last few feet of embankment. Scores followed him, Russell in the middle of them, flag-bearers still flanking him.

As they came up to the crest of the parapet, a volley slammed into the 28th, a dozen or more men dropping, some dead before they hit the ground; others crying out, screaming. Some were silent, trying to suppress the agony of a minié ball having cut through an arm, a leg, or lodged fatally in their chest or stomach.

“Don’t stop!” Garland screamed.

Climbing over the parapet he jumped down into the Rebel trench, the trench which throughout a month of training they had been told would be empty, the panic-stricken occupants having fled in the minutes after the mine exploded.

Scores of Rebels now occupied the position. What ensued in the next few moments truly fulfilled Garland’s worst visions of hell.

There was no quarter. The pent-up rage, the insanity of a world that had driven them to this moment, was unleashed, both sides screaming “No quarter, no prisoners!” as they shot, cut, and slashed at each other.

More and more men of the 28th, now joined by men of the 29th and 31st coming up in support, piled into the Rebel trench, until at last the Rebels broke, falling back, dodging down narrow trenches and their own covered ways that led to the rear.

Murderous acts were perpetrated by both sides, as men fought, gouged, kicked, and bayoneted each other. Garland for a moment stood still, horrified, an inner voice screaming at him to somehow stop the insanity that was being unleashed.

And then the Rebels were simply gone. They had abandoned the trench to the men of the 28th, and the men swarming up from their brother regiments, and to the dead and dying of both sides piled in twisted tragedy, from the ghastly struggle to take the trench, flanking the smoke-shrouded crater.

*   *   *

Some semblance of survival instinct had at last held James Reilly back—for after all, what could he do if an enraged Reb came at him with bayonet lowered? Hold up his pencil and offer to draw him? During those few desperate moments, Reilly reached the Rebel trench—ducking low, crawling up over the embankment, and sliding down into the trench’s relative safety.