The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (5 page)

The ceremony was over, but not for Garland.

Men were looking toward him, but none had yet taken hold of a shovel.

Garland stiffened.

“Battalion, attention! Hats off!”

Garland let a long moment of silence pass.

“Men of the 28th. Look upon our comrades. Did they want to die for you?”

He paused.

“I do not think so. They were men just as we are, men who wished to live, to have families, to grow old, to be placed to final rest with dignity, with children and grandchildren by their graves. They wanted to live as much as we do.

“Look upon your comrades. I doubt, though, if many of them would have called us comrades, though some might have indeed gone to this war believing in our freedom. Perhaps only a few, but that does not matter now, for they are dead. Their war is finished forever; they rest with God.

“They died and you are alive, and I now ask you, my brothers: What do we owe them in return?”

There was silence for a moment.

“What do we owe to them?”

“Our freedom,” came a reply, and the words were picked up; some whispering, others shouting it; some in tears, others standing silent, stoic.

“Our freedom.”

“We owe our brothers and sisters our lives. We have made two pledges, my comrades. We have pledged to fight for the Union, and so we shall. In so doing, if need be to die as these men have died, we shall prove to the world, as Frederick Douglass said, that we will defy any power on earth that says we are not free and equal men. That, my comrades, I believe is worth dying for.”

More than a few simply replied with one word: “Amen.”

Looking down at an open grave, Sergeant Major Garland White stiffened and slowly raised his right hand to his brow in salute. He knelt down on one knee, scooped up a handful of mud, and let it drop into the grave before him.

“From dust we come and to dust we shall return. Thus is the will of God. Amen.”

He stood back up and nodded a dismissal. At each grave one of the men knelt down and did the same, scooping up a handful of muddy earth and letting it trickle into the grave before they set to work with shovels. The ceremony—their ceremony—ended, and the men picked up shovels and started to fill in the graves.

Lost in prayerful thought, Garland White started to walk down the line of graves.

“Sergeant Major?”

He looked up. It was the man who had helped Lieutenant Grant carry the body out of the ambulance. The man stood before him, tears mingled with the rain. He tentatively raised his hand and extended it.

“Thank you.”

“Sir?”

He was not sure if this man was military or not. Looking closer at his uniform jacket, he saw no insignia of rank on his shoulders, but from long experience as a man of color, both in and out of the army—and not all that long ago as a slave—he hesitated, not sure of the gesture offered to him. The man took a step forward, open hand still extended.

“Sergeant Major, take my hand and thank you.”

He detected the hint of Ireland in the man’s voice. The gesture of equality was at times offered by abolitionists, but in the bitter world before the war, with men of color competing for work with the millions of impoverished immigrants leaving their famine-afflicted isle to seek refuge in America, there was little love lost between the two.

A bit nervous, he took the man’s hand, the grip solid. Looking into his eyes, Garland saw the emotion.

The handshake after several seconds became one of nervous embarrassment for both. Garland was not sure when to let go, but the man held his hand tight.

“That was my brother you helped to carry. Your prayer was for him.”

“Sir, I am so sorry,” was all Garland could say.

They released their grip. Garland was not sure what to say next, feeling that he should turn away and continue on with watching his men, but the man’s gaze held him.

“My name is James Reilly, and yours, Sergeant?”

“Garland White, sergeant major with the 28th United States Colored Troops, and again, sir, my deepest sympathy.”

James looked back at the grave, and Garland felt as if he should turn the man away. His men, now eager to get the job done and back to their barracks for breakfast, were hurriedly filling the grave in, half shoveling, half scooping the thick, wet mud back into the hole; the clods of earth and muddy water thumping against the body wrapped in cheap linen, covering it over.

James, as if in imitation of Garland, knelt down on one knee, scooped up a handful of mud, let it drop in, made the sign of the cross, and stood back up, nearly slipping as he did so. Garland instinctively reached out to steady him and prevented him from falling in.

“Thank you,” James whispered as he stepped back.

“Patrick was my half brother,” James said, voice flat, almost without emotion. “We were never close, but still, he was all the kin I had left in this world.”

He paused. As a preacher, Garland had presided over many a funeral long before he donned the uniform, and he knew when it was best to just let a man talk.

“My mother died from the famine on the boat coming over from Ireland. Dad brought me here to America. Drunkard he was, though a good man at heart. He met Patrick’s ma on the boat over here. She had no use for me, and I moved on a few years later. That was back in ’46 or so. We were never close, but when I heard he joined the army, I tried to see him whenever I could.”

“You are with the army, sir?” Garland asked after a long silence.

James shook his head.

“Artist. I’m with
Harper’s Weekly,
covering the war.”

James started to look back again to the grave, and Garland, seeing the way the mud and water were rising around the body, put a hand on James’s arm and turned him away, walking slowly.

“Your brother, then, was a soldier?” he asked.

James nodded.

“Told the lad not to join, but he was all afire to do his part. He was wounded three days ago at Cold Harbor,” his voice began to break again. “Lost his legs, both of them, by the time they got him back here to the hospital. Blood poisoning had him. I didn’t even know he was on the same boat as me until just before we docked, and I heard him call my name. I should have found him earlier. I should have…”

Garland stopped walking, looking back into James’s eyes.

“He is at peace now, sir.”

“Some peace. They couldn’t even give him a proper grave to himself.”

“I’ll make this pledge to you, sir. Later today I’ll bring some of the boys down, we’ll dig a grave, good and proper, lift him out of where he is now, rebury him, and make sure his cross is properly marked. Can you write his name down for me?”

“You would do that?”

“I would do that for any man,” Garland replied forcefully.

James started to make the gesture of reaching to his pocket for his wallet, but a look, almost of anger from Garland, stopped him.

“I will do that for a comrade, sir,” he said quietly but forcefully.

Embarrassed, James let his hand drop to his side.

“Thank you,” James whispered.

“No, sir, it is I who thank you.”

There was another awkward silence.

James looked past him to the long line of graves; the men filling them in.

“I’ll give you his name,” James said, and opening his haversack, he pulled out a battered sketchpad. Opening it, Garland could not help but see the man’s work. Some of it was incomprehensible: a scattering of quickly drawn lines, vague outlines of men, a flag, numbers around them, but as he turned the pages, several made him draw in his breath. A man clutching his abdomen and, merciful God, entrails spilling out; the face of a boy, dirt smeared, but the eyes hollow, empty as if he was gazing off to some distant place thousands of yards away; a man holding another, whose face was contorted, crying; a fence row, bodies draped over the rails, a note in the corner, “memory of Antietam”; men crouched against a trench, and on the back of each was a white square of paper with a name on it; a priest, kneeling in a trench, surrounded by dead, hand held up as if in benediction or anguished lament.

James flipped through the pages, Garland stood gazing at the images.

“My God,” he whispered. “Is that what it is really like?”

James looked up at him, eyes steady, and finally he just nodded, saying nothing.

He reached a blank page, took a pencil out of the haversack, and wrote down a name. He hesitated as he did so, his hands beginning to tremble.

“Are you all right, sir?”

James nodded, trying to force a smile.

“Just reminded me of something. I’m fine,” but his voice betrayed the truth. With shaking hand he wrote down Patrick’s name, age, and regiment. He tore off the corner of the sheet and handed it to Garland, who carefully took the piece of paper, folded it over, and put it into his breast pocket.

“I promise I shall see it done.”

“Thank you, Sergeant Major.”

There was another awkward silence as James looked down at the sketchpad, which was now splattered with raindrops.

“It seems like sacrilege, what I’m thinking.”

“And what is that, sir?”

“James, just James, please.”

Garland nodded.

“What do you think is sacrilege?”

“To sketch what I am seeing now.”

Garland looked back at his men.

“I think you should, sir. You have the gift of the artist. Things like this should be remembered. A history of it, you might say.”

“What?”

“Something I’ve thought about much,” Garland replied. “I hope that someday an historian will remember this sacrifice in blood.”

He hesitated, looking into James’s eyes.

“I think your brother would want you to draw it.”

James smiled.

“Thank you,” he hesitated, “Garland.”

“Men of the 28th!”

Garland turned and saw that Colonel Russell, surrounded by the other officers, was stepping out from under the tarp. Something was afoot, some of the officers were actually grinning, though more than a few were tight-lipped. The mixed reaction was hard to read.

Garland turned away from James and back to his men.

“Battalion, attention!”

The men laboring on, quickly filling the graves, looked up, falling silent.

Russell stepped closer, holding up a sheet of paper.

“Men of the 28th United States Colored Troops. We have received orders! We have been officially assigned to the First Brigade of the Fourth Division of the Ninth Corps. Men, we ship out tonight to join the Army of the Potomac! We are going to war!”

All stood as if struck dumb.

“Sergeant Major White. See that this detail is completed. March the men back to the barracks. All uniforms to be cleaned, all equipment packed, and ready to march to the docks at Alexandria by four this afternoon!”

“Three cheers for the Union lads!” one of the officers shouted. The cry was picked up—men holding up shovels, cheering, slapping each other on the back, laughing—some in their excitement all but dancing.

“Battalion!” Garland roared. “See to your work, men. See to your work!”

They fell back to their labor with enthusiasm, racing each other now to fill in their grave first.

“Merciful God.”

It was James.

Garland looked back at him, sketchpad in hand, a few lines already drawn, numbers and symbols dotting the rain soaked paper.

Garland gazed down at the pad as if to comment on the horrors it contained of the world they were now marching toward, and then just shook his head, saying nothing.

Again James could only nod.

Garland looked back to the grave of James’s brother, where all sense of ceremony had been forgotten. Men were eagerly pushing the earth in, mounding it over, tamping it down; one of them already hammering a single cross into the ground with the back of his shovel.

“I promise you before we leave, I’ll bring some men down here and make sure he is given his own grave. I promise.”

“I doubt if you will have time,” James sighed. “I know you mean it. Perhaps someday, someday after this war is over, we’ll do it together.”

CHAPTER TWO

WHITE HOUSE
JUNE 6, 1864
8
P.M.

C
lutching a long scroll of flimsy telegraphy notepaper, President Abraham Lincoln stood by the open window of his office, head bowed, sheets of paper turned to catch the last light of the sun setting behind Arlington.

It was the latest dispatches from the fronts—all of them bad. In crises of the past, there had always been some glimmer of hope, except perhaps after Fredericksburg. A hope that a sharp riposte, an aggressive turn, could reverse fortune or news from one front counterbalance the bad news from another. He now had in place two of the most aggressive, tough, intensely willful generals of this war—Grant and Sherman—and they were stalled. A month into the campaign, started with such high hopes, the daily casualty lists were appalling—and there was no end in sight. Grant was just outside of Richmond, Sherman only halfway to Atlanta, and yet they were checkmated. Their armies were stalled in squalid trenches; the nation stunned by casualty rates averaging two thousand men a day.