The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (35 page)

What greeted him was a nightmare of bodies clad in blue, butternut, and gray—black men and white—piled together; some crying out piteously for help, for mercy.

Those still standing seemed like the living dead; dark features drawn, sweat soaked, gasping for air in the ever-increasing heat. One of them was sobbing, cradling a comrade who was writhing in agony; another was bent double, vomiting, and then just collapsed.

“We can’t stay here!”

He looked up. It was Russell, half standing out in the open on the far side of the Rebel trench.

“Come on, boys. We must take the road and the hill with the church beyond it! Keep moving, keep moving!”

Russell grabbed the shoulder of the flag-bearer carrying the standard of the regiment, pulling him up to his side.

“28th, on the colors! Charge to the road! Charge!”

James, stunned, felt as if he would collapse, his legs unable to respond to the command of his mind and heart to stay with these men.

The regimental flag-bearer came up out of the trench, holding the golden standard aloft.

“Come on!” he screamed, holding the colors high over his head, waving them back and forth.

A wild shout of primal rage, of fear, of exaltation roared up from the men. James caught a glimpse of Garland standing atop the trench, rifle in hand, holding it aloft, gesturing with it for the men to keep moving, to just keep moving.

The renewed charge began to surge forward. A second later, dozens of men were down: doubling over, collapsing face down, screaming, clutching a torn arm, leg, face, stomach. The charge was being mowed down by Rebel fire. A white officer, Lieutenant Grant, grabbed Russell as if to restrain him. Just then, the officer was nearly cut in half, a blast of canister from their flank tearing his body. The lieutenant shielded Russell as he died.

The attackers fell back into the captured trench.

James pulled back from the lip of the trench, shamed by the fact that he was terrified. In the lost hours, the Rebels had managed to throw up a cordon around the torn, devastated hole of the crater, were boxing it in, and would die if need be to contain this ugly wound, this break in their lines.

Russell fell back into the trench, the flag-bearers still by his side.

More men were coming up the slope from the Union line and the covered way. But tragically, there would not be a gallant rush of all four thousand men of the Fourth. Because of the order to wait in the covered way, they were pouring forth in ragged clusters. Instead of a tidal storm sweeping all before them in the immediate aftermath of the mine being blown, they were coming on in small, weak groups. Their officers had tried to gather a cluster of their gallant command about them, but then, unable to wait any longer, led what men they had into the inferno.

Russell, eyes wide, near hysteria, looked at those filling the trench behind him.

“My God, men!” he cried. “We can still do it! We can still do it!”

The words came out as a strangled cry of hope, but also of frustration and rage.

“Get ready! Load and get ready!”

James could see that nearly all were ready for this final try. But he could also see the desperation in their eyes, the trembling of their hands as they fumbled to load their rifles. The drummer boy, caught up in the fury, continued to beat his drum, the sound of it echoing in the confines of the trench.

To their right James could hear increasing fire, and with it the dreaded Rebel yell. Whatever Rebel regiments had fled the line in the first minutes of battle, or had tried to hold and been pushed out by the first rush of the 28th and their comrades, were now rallying as well, preparing to charge in from the flank and close the breach.

“Ready with the bayonet!” Russell screamed.

A shout went up from the men clustered around him.

“Charge!”

Again Russell scrambled up the embankment of the trench, flag-bearers flanking him. The sergeant carrying the regimental colors reached the crest, holding his precious banner aloft, waving it high overhead. James looked up at him, awestruck. And then the man seemed to spin around like a child’s top, staggering to keep his footing.

His right arm had been blown off just below the shoulder, the impact throwing him back into the trench. As the man fell, to James’s horrified disbelief he landed on a broken rifle barrel, bayonet still fixed, impaling him through the chest.

Russell looked back at him, eyes wide.

“Take him to the rear. My God, someone take him back to the rear!”

And then Russell turned to face forward.

“Charge boys, charge!”

All around James, hundreds of men, for a moment transfixed by the sight of their flag-bearer going down, now let loose with a wild roar of rage and swarmed up out of the trench.

James stood, unable to move, though with all his heart and soul he willed himself forward. The agonized cries of the flag-bearer, still impaled on the upright bayonet, tore into his soul. He went up to the impaled soldier, grabbing him around the waist.

“Grab hold of my shoulder with your good arm!” James cried.

As he stood up, he could almost feel the grating of the bayonet as it slid back out from between the man’s ribs. He held the flag-bearer tight, feeling his warm blood pulsing from what was left of his arm.

He saw a canteen on the floor of the trench, beside it a soldier of the 28th, who just started at the two of them as he clutched his side, blood leaking out between his fingers.

“The canteen!” James cried. “Cut the strap!”

The wounded—in fact, dying—man roused himself, picked up the canteen, using the upended bayonet as a blade, and sawed the straps off. James wrapped it around the stump of the flag-bearer’s arm, tying it off the way he had seen it done on so many other stricken fields. Picking up a broken ramrod, he stuck it through the twisted strap, using it to twist the strap tighter and tighter until the pulsing flood of blood was stilled.

“Back to the rear,” James gasped, and somehow he managed to help push the two back over the side of the trench toward the Union lines.

“For God’s sake, don’t stay here. Don’t stop! Get to the rear.”

The two set off, leaning against each other for support.

They disappeared into the smoke, out of which yet more men of the Fourth were advancing.

Reilly looked back to the west, where the men of the 28th had gone. In the smoke and confusion they had disappeared from view, and for that moment he seemed all alone on the battlefield, in a trench filled with horrors.

*   *   *

Sergeant Major Garland White had heard men describe battle as like being in a nightmare, the type of dream where all seems to move painfully, frightfully slowly, as if struggling to move while waist deep in mud and filth.

The field ahead was not as it had been described to them during their training. There were many bunkers, some shallow trenches, the shattered earth confusing. Every step he took, weaving his way around bunkers and leaping over trenches, seemed to take an eternity.

Garland, at the front of the charge, kept looking back; men were still following, many from the 28th, mixed with troops of other regiments, even a scattering of white soldiers, who, seeing the USCT go forward, had at last ventured out of the shelter of the crater to join in the assault. He caught a glimpse of an officer, standing awkwardly, leaning heavily on a cane, sword in the other hand, pointing forward, and men rising around him to join in the attack.

“We can still do it!” Garland cried, urging all of them on. They were nearly halfway between the crater and the Jerusalem Plank Road.

And then he saw it.

A dark-clad column of men was coming down the Jerusalem Plank Road at the run. Then, like a well-oiled machine, even while running the Rebels swung outward to either side from column to line of battle.

As, charging, they swept toward him like apparitions, men not fifty yards ahead seemed to rise up out of a raw slash of earth cut across the field. They had lain in a shallow trench, not more than knee deep; perhaps it had been cut even as the three divisions that were supposed to charge had remained stalled in the crater.

“Damn! Damn all this!” Garland cried, the first time such a word had escaped his lips in years. He looked back. The men of his regiment and brigade were indeed advancing, joined by a fair number of white troops coming out of the crater, urged on by the crippled General Bartlett. But they were scattered, broken up, across a couple of hundred yards of field.

Russell had taken it in as well, and he turned and reached for the flag-bearer still holding the national colors; the regimental flag had disappeared.

“Form volley line! Form line on me!”

But the men were too spread out, too disjointed. Some of the 28th was most likely still all the way back in the covered way. Men of other regiments who were mixed in were separated from their officers and NCOs in the confusion.

Russell’s voice carried authority and, with back turned to the charging Rebels, Garland looked at him and could only feel awe for such leadership and courage.

He started to turn, to grab men, to create some semblance of a cohesive front to meet this countercharge, when the advancing Rebels suddenly seemed to disappear behind a cloud of dirty, yellow-gray smoke. A split-second later their volley of .58-caliber minié balls slashed across the field at nine hundred feet per second. The minié balls slammed into the men of the USCT and their comrades from the other divisions who had joined them.

Dozens collapsed. The flag-bearer, struck several times, sank to the ground, and Sergeant Felton leaped forward to grab the colors and raise them back up. Garland saw that the drummer boy had kept pace with them, but that one or more rifle balls had pierced his drum, shattering it. The once taut head of the drum was now limp, yet he still continued to beat on it.

“Give it back!” Russell cried. “Independent fire at will. Give it back!”

Those still standing raised rifles, leveled them, and fired, triggering a momentary resurgence of morale. For many of them it was the first time they had actually fired their rifles in action.

They were not much stronger than a skirmish line but more men were coming up every second, falling in on either flank, broadening the line out. Garland took position behind the line, pacing it as he had been trained, giving advice, repeating the litany:

“Load ’em right, boys, and then aim low. That’s it. Aim low, aim low!”

He heard another voice repeating the words and looked down the line to see the barrel-chested Sergeant Malady also pacing the line, grabbing men who were coming up and pushing them into position. Their gazes locked for a second and Malady actually gave him a nod. For Garland it was perhaps the most meaningful salute he had ever received.

Then another volley tore into them, men staggering backward, some collapsing to their knees and pitching forward. The blow was shattering.

“Keep at it, boys!” Russell screamed.

And then they heard it. They had been told often enough of it, their officers trying to describe it, but now they heard it for real—the Rebel yell. It was true; it sounded like wolves baying at the scent of blood and now charging them at the run.

Back on the road Garland saw a battery of Rebel field guns was swinging into position. These were the dreaded Napoleons, which could deal such deadly work at short range. Two of the pieces had already unlimbered and were firing, recoiling as they hurled blasts of canister into the far-left flank of the Union line.

“Charge them!”

It was Russell, stepping forward, pointing toward the wall of smoke, and Garland knew it was the only command left to give. This attack had to be met head on.

“Come on!” Garland pushed the man ahead of him and grabbed another who seemed about to turn and run.

“Stay with me!” Garland cried.

The thin line hesitated for a second and then, as if shocked by an electric current, appeared to leap forward in one last act of desperation.

The range closed within seconds. If they had been the solid block formation as they had once trained, they would have battered through the thin Rebel line with barely a pause. Sheer weight and momentum alone would have carried them through. But now?

A half thousand men, scattered in knots and clusters, a few following a trusted sergeant, others around a flag or trusted officer, surged forward in the confusion. Some were tripping into the dugouts, moats, and bunkers that mazed the field behind the main line. They had almost reached the freshly cut trench, when out of it, troops holding up the flags of Virginia arose, joined now by the reinforcements pouring off the road. The Rebels came straight in at them, bayonets leveled.

Both sides were screaming foul oaths of hatred and rage. Centuries of slavery and the cruelty and fear it engendered, combined with three years of bitter war with no end in sight, unleashed a pent-up fury on this day as both sides screamed: “No quarter, no prisoners!”

The thin ragged line of blue collided with the thicker, better organized, and more cohesive tide of butternut and gray.

A Confederate officer, pistol raised, pointed it straight at Garland’s face from ten feet away and squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty chamber and, with musket butt raised, Garland knocked the man over backward with a blow to his face. It landed with such violence he could hear bones crunching.

Garland had struggled long with the question of whether he could ever strike another man to kill him. The question had just been answered. He found himself filled with a wild rage, but also a pain so frightening that he only wanted to scream for all of them to stop.

Even as he struggled with that thought, he dodged to one side as a Rebel lunged at him with a bayonet. One of his men grabbed the weapon by the barrel, pulling the man forward, while another clubbed him down.

More and more Union soldiers swarmed into the melee, but for every Union soldier it seemed that two, three, or more Confederates pushed into the fight. Garland could feel the men around him giving ground, backing up.

He saw Malady, just a dozen feet away, swinging his musket like a club, while several Rebels closed in around him. He tried to push toward the man to help him, screaming his name, ducking a clubbed musket aimed at him as well. Then a Rebel leaned in toward Malady and shot him in the chest at point-blank range. Malady staggered backward, falling into a shallow trench.