The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (36 page)

The dam now broke, his men falling back, Rebs pushing in, screaming obscenities, a primal rage unleashed that to Garland did not seem to be war at all, but instead a devilish exercise in mass murder.

He jumped down into the ditch where Malady lay gasping, trying to pull him up.

“Get out of here!” Malady cried. “Leave me for Christ’s sake and get out of here!”

“No!”

“Look out!”

With his remaining strength Malady pushed Garland to one side. A Rebel was aiming down at him. If he had squeezed a second earlier, the bullet would have struck Garland in the back. Instead it hit Malady. Garland lashed out with his rifle butt but the Rebel had jumped aside and was gone.

Malady’s eyes unfocused and he looked up at Garland.

“Damn proud of you,” he whispered. “You’re as good as any man of Ireland this day.”

Fighting back tears, Garland squeezed his hand, released it, and climbed out of the trench.

There was no semblance of order left. Some men of the USCT were still trying to come up but the veteran line of Confederates continued to push forward, pausing to reload, fire, then push forward again. He was nearly behind them. He caught sight of the drummer boy, who was helping a wounded soldier limp to the rear, and ran to him. Garland nearly scooped him off the ground, pushing the wounded soldier ahead of him. He started to run, bursting back into the confusion of his comrades, who were falling back but still trying to fight gamely.

Together they tumbled into the rabbit warren of trenches and dugouts just to the west of the crater. There was a moment of near-blind panic when he turned a corner and saw a swarm of Rebels, closing in on their flank, pushing forward.

Turning, he shoved the drummer boy in the opposite direction. The ground ahead was a jumbled mass of earth, in some places piled high, like boulders tossed by a giant. Scattered before it was wreckage, debris, dead men, and parts of dead men. There were many wounded, some trying to crawl toward the Confederate side, others up the sloping lip of torn earth.

He looked back.

The few men still standing against the Rebel charge were going down, shot from front and flank. Up toward the road the full battery of Napoleon field pieces now in play, firing case shot set to burst as the twelve-pound rounds skimmed over the ground.

The field was carpeted with Union and Confederate dead and dying. The only ones now standing and moving forward were Confederates.

“Garland! Get in here, you damn fool!” someone screamed.

He looked up the slope. There was the artist, beckoning to him.

Garland shoved the drummer boy and the wounded soldier he had been clinging to toward James. He scrambled up the hot red clay, following while minié balls smacked the earth to either side of him.

As he reached the crest, James extended a hand to pull up the drummer boy and then Garland.

Sergeant Major Garland White cleared the lip of the crater, and slid down into its relative protection. Gasping for air, he looked down into its depths and then swept his glance over the steep-banked slope. It was nearly a hundred yards wide, fifty across, and thirty or more feet deep.

Within its confines were packed nearly ten thousand men, crowded so tightly they could barely move. Those still with fight in them were manning the lip of the scorched hole, firing at the advancing Rebs, at last breaking their charge. They were tossing empty muskets down to the men behind them, who would pass up loaded replacements. When a shooter was finally hit—usually in the head, throat, or shoulders—and slid back down into the pit, he was replaced by another.

Garland took in a deep breath, gasping for air. It was scorching hot, as if the ground itself was still burning from the explosion; overhead a red-hued sun beat down upon them with a pitiless intensity. Garland reached for his canteen. It was gone, where he did not know, and he was grateful when James offered him a full one.

“We’re trapped in a sunlit picture of hell,” James whispered.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

10:30
A.M.

“S
ir, this is from
M
eade again.”

Ambrose Burnside barely stirred, took the offered telegraph, and scanned it.

In the last half hour Meade had peppered him with repeated queries and then at 9:30 had announced that it was increasingly evident that the attack had failed.

Burnside replied that if only the reserve corps were released and thrown in against either flank, the situation could still be reversed.

And then, fifteen minutes later, came the death blow: an order to withdraw all men currently engaged.

He looked again at the telegram just handed to him and could only shake his head. Now it was another contradictory order, from Meade’s chief of staff, to pass a command to the troops still in the crater to hold and dig in.

“Now what?” Captain Vincent asked, taking the telegram from Burnside’s trembling hands.

He looked up at Vincent, eyes red-rimmed. It was obvious the man was in shock, bitten by what his staff privately called “Burnside’s black dog.”

“Tell Humphries I no longer have any discretion in this matter as per General Meade’s previous orders to withdraw.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me,” Burnside whispered. “First, he tells me to attack whether the mine is detonated or not, this after changing the order of battle. Then he makes it clear that, somehow, I have insulted him, and it is evident he will have to bring me up on charges. He refuses to send in the other two corps and push them to either flank, when we have at least made a lodgment in their center. Then he orders me to withdraw. Now his chief of staff tells me to pass the order for the men to hold on and dig in?

“Tell me, Vincent. Which one of us is insane?”

Vincent stood wooden, unable to reply.

“Do you honestly think you can get a message up to those men now in the crater?”

Burnside knew Vincent to be a brave man.

Vincent hesitated.

“If you order me to do so.”

“Would you order others to try and get up to them, other than in a mass charge?”

Vincent stood silent and then finally shook his head.

“No one can get ten paces up that slope now, sir.”

Burnside sighed, burying his face in his hands.

“Send back to Humphries what I just stated. I no longer have such discretion, after being ordered but fifteen minutes ago to withdraw. Unless these instructions are countersigned by General Meade himself, his prior order stands.”

He sat in silence, staring off. Through the open door, down from the surface, the sounds of the continued bombardment from the Union lines began to slacken. This was not out of any desire on the part of the gunners, who could see the desperateness of the situation, but from the simple reality that after more than five hours of heavy fire they had depleted their huge reserves. They had been told that they would fire in support for one hour at most—not five.

THE CRATER
11
A.M.

“And I tell you, if they catch us in here with them damn darkies, we’re all dead men!”

Garland and those around him looked back nervously at the troops from Ledlie’s division, who were packed in a vast seething mob at the bottom of the crater, more than thirty feet below them.

The crater was a bedlam, a madhouse. The sun was beating down mercilessly, the sky overhead the color of copper.

Around ten thousand men were packed into the crater, a hundred yards in length, fifty or more yards wide, and thirty feet deep.

It was hard to hear anything because of the din of musketry blazing along the entire rim. Those men still with fight in them, mostly from the Fourth Division, were interspersed with white troops. Artillery shells from the Union side were winging in, close overhead, in a vain attempt at support. Rebel fire was increasing by the minute. After the repulse of the last charge, the Rebs had settled into a semicircle, in some places not more than a few dozen feet away, hidden in adjoining trenches. At least half a dozen of their mortars had found the range—several of them light “Cohorns” that could be manhandled along a trench by several men, and which lobbed twelve- or twenty-four-pound shells. The range was so close that all they needed to do was drop in several ounces of propellant, and the ball would arc upward just fifty feet or so, then tumble down into the crater to detonate with devastating effect.

The heat was debilitating, even to those veterans inured to months of hard campaigning in the Virginia summer. Their water was all but gone and many of the men had already torn off their wool jackets and cast them aside.

The dead littered the sides of the crater and carpeted the ground around it. The wounded slid down to the bottom, trying to find some semblance of shelter. They crawled into the crevices cut into the raw earth by the explosions, some still venting wisps of smoke after five hours. The men were enveloped by the rotten-egg stench left by four tons of detonated black powder, as well as that from the musketry of the defenders and those encircling them. In many of those crevices, more than one wounded man died, or was trampled and buried by the panicked pushing and shoving of comrades.

Groups of men would cluster along the eastern lip of the crater, closest to the Union lines. Together they would spring to their feet make a break for their own lines, but few made it unscathed.

Garland glared at the knot of men below, gazing up at him with such hatred.

Colonel Russell, hearing their comments, turned toward them.

“Get up here, you damn cowards, and fight!” he cried, but none of them moved.

“I’ll kill the first man who attacks any of my men!”

As they fought to keep back the Rebels along the rim, many soldiers of the Fourth gazed back anxiously; over the years, more than one had heard such talk and knew that at times it had ended with a rope and a tree.

11:45
A.M.

“I said to start digging!” Henry Pleasants screamed, but his words came out as barely a strangled whisper.

His men, soaked with perspiration, some of them down from the heat, dragged back to the covered way, just looked at him, numbed.

He pointed up to the cauldron, the damn crater—the crater he had created.

Another burst of men burst from the crest, some running full out—rifles, cartridge boxes, and jackets cast aside. A few were moving more slowly, dragging along wounded comrades … nearly all were white troops.

In that inferno of noise he could hear whoops from the Rebel line. Shouts rang out that more were breaking, and then men suddenly began to collapse—many caught in full stride, shot from behind or from the side, falling, rolling over; some staggered back up. In some cases the Rebs took pity after winging a man and would let him limp the last few yards to tumble into Pleasants’s section of trench.

But if it was a colored soldier, he would be absolutely riddled. Of the several hundred men of the Fourth who had tried to make a break to the rear, fewer than one in three were making it unscathed.

“We’ve got to dig to them!” Pleasants cried. “Those are your comrades up there!”

“Dig a hundred yards upslope?” one of his men replied wearily, obviously spent.

“Damn it, yes,” Pleasants gasped. “It doesn’t have to be deep, just a few feet across, a foot or two deep, enough to give them some cover. We can cut our way up there in three, four hours.”

He knew he was lying. His regiment was one of the very few out of the entire corps which had been exempt from the charge. After their labors on the tunnel, their job had been to hold the forward line just in case something went wrong with the attack.

Men of the regiment that had been out of the trench in the first minutes watched the effect of what they had labored so hard for. They urged their comrades forward, helped pull them up and out of the forward trench, pushed them up to the attack, and now acted to aid the wounded. No one back at corps had arranged for a cadre of medical orderlies to be waiting in the covered way to help the wounded to the rear. In the grand plan of it all, once Petersburg fell, sections of pontoon bridges would be laid over the trenches to facilitate the moving of artillery, followed by wagons of ammunition and ambulances for evacuating the wounded.

All those ambulances were now parked a thousand yards back behind the lines.

Nearly half of Pleasants’s regiment had by now been detailed off to help drag or carry wounded through the covered way and back to the aid stations behind the main line. More than a few of those men, in spite of the good discipline of his regiment, were not coming back, or were doing so as slowly as possible. All could see the debacle, and as veterans, none would be surprised if the Rebs decided to launch a surprise counterstrike into their trench to ensure complete encirclement of the four divisions, or what was left of them.

Several men, armed with shovels, finally stepped forward, one group led by Sergeant Kochanski. Without a word to their commander, they began to chop away at the forward edge of their trench. They were keeping low, for harassing fire was now beginning to skim the top of their position as well.

“Come on, I need more of you,” Henry pleaded. “I want a half dozen crawlways up that hellhole!”

By twos and threes, his weary men, who had not slept in more than a day, began using short-handled shovels and bayonets—with which they had dug nearly six hundred feet of tunnel—to construct pathways to save their trapped comrades.

And then, to his absolute amazement, Henry saw a knot of several dozen colored soldiers leap out of the crater and set off at a full run. None were armed, most still wore their heavy blue jackets, but what amazed him was that each of the men had eight, ten, a dozen canteens slung over his shoulders or around his neck.

The fire that closed in on them was merciless. Henry wanted to stand up, to scream at the Rebels: “For God’s sake, is it not obvious what these men are doing?”

Many were struck by well-aimed head shots, others wounded and knocked over. As they tried to rise they were hit again and again.

Little more than half of them made it to the lip of Pleasants’s trench, his own men standing up, cheering them on, and pulling them in as they leaped or slid to safety.