The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (8 page)

James’s glance was actually one of anger.

“Mr. President, if it was anyone else in the world asking me this, I would tell them to go to hell.”

Lincoln forced a homey smile.

“But you won’t say that to your President and your friend.”

“You know I can’t refuse a request from my President,” and he finally smiled again. “And my friend.”

Lincoln slowly stood up and extended his hand.

“Thank you, James. Now back you go to Willard’s. I can try to order you not to drink, but I don’t want you to make a promise you will not keep. But do try for moderation.”

“After tomorrow, but tonight…” He shook his head. “Sorry, sir.”

Lincoln patted him on the shoulder again and guided him out the door. Nicolay looked up, holding a sheaf of papers, as James left the front office.

“New dispatches?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anything pressing I need to do right now?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“Tomorrow, then,” and he closed the door to be alone.

He went back to the window. The last of the boats had turned the bend and were out of sight, five thousand more men for the front lines.

He thought of the song so popular only a year ago, but rarely heard anymore, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” and the refrain: “And we’ll fill our vacant ranks with a million freemen more…”

The nation was running out of men willing to fight. But then again, so was the South.

One victory, dear Lord,
he thought,
just one good clear victory.
No mistakes by generals this time, no lost orders, and no bitter infighting. The men on those boats deserved their chance, and perhaps they would be the key to that victory, for they had a stake in this fight, if anyone did.

CHAPTER THREE

PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA
JUNE 25, 1864

“T
hat’s it,
S
tan, just a mite higher; slowly now, slowly.”

The boys watched expectantly as Stan Kochanski ever so slowly raised the stick with a battered kepi atop it.

“Come on, slow like. Bob it up, then down, and then back up again. Play it, damn it, play it.”

Stan grinned, his newfound comrades almost treating him as an equal even though he was a “fresh fish,” a new recruit to the 48th Pennsylvania Volunteers.

He edged the brim of the hat above the lip of the trench.

“Now down, quick, you dumb Pole, quick!”

He jerked it back down as ordered by his brother, Johann, a sergeant.

“All right, boys, now we move a few feet and catch ourselves a Reb.”

The group crawled along the trench, Stan suppressing a gagging feeling as they passed an open latrine pit dug into one wall of their forward line.

“Here’s a good spot,” Johann announced. “Now again, but this time pop it up and keep it there.”

Johann looked farther down the line.

“Michael, you ready?”

Private Michael O’Shay, purportedly the best shot with the regiment, was concealed in what the men called a “spider hole” dug into the forward side of the trench during the night, a narrow indentation, dirt piled atop the lip, then carefully leveled, a small aperture cut into the dirt, fixed in place with a few boards from a ration box and masked with canvas scrubbed with red clay so that it blended in. His rifle was laid in place, with the front of the barrel covered in grease so it would not glint under the noonday sun. Michael did not reply, merely tapping a foot in reply, stock of his gun set tight against his shoulder.

“Now, Stan!”

Stan did as ordered, raising the hat atop the pole up over the lip of the trench and waiting.

He didn’t have long to wait.

A bullet caught the hat square, barely an inch to the right of center of the brow, the hat whipping backward, flying off the stick, the hit from the .58-caliber minié ball shattering the stick as well, knocking it out of Stan’s grasp.

“See him,” Michael hissed, shifting slightly; a little more than a second later his rifle recoiled with a sharp crack. He pulled the gun back out of the firing slit and flung himself down. A few seconds later, two minié balls slapped through the firing slit he had just vacated.

“Get him?” Johann asked.

“Think so,” was all Michael replied, breathing hard, slumped against the wall of the trench.

“Good shooting, Yank!”

The taunting cry echoed in the hot midday air.

Johann stood up halfway, cupping his hand around his mouth.

“We get ’em?”

“He wet his britches, he did,” came a reply. “But nope. Ya missed. What about your man?”

“You missed me, you sons of bitches!” Michael shouted.

“Now that ain’t polite, you bastard sons of bitches, calling us that. We was born here, you wasn’t.”

“You started this sharpshooting,” Johann retorted. “And I’m as good a man as you are, born here or not, by God.”

“You started it, shooting poor Jimmy in the ass when all the lad wanted to do was shit outside the trench, him with the bloody flux.”

“Sorry about that, Rebs!” Johann shouted. “It weren’t us. We’re the 48th Pennsylvania, it was them Connecticut boys that done that.”

“We’ll stop it if you stop it, Yank, even if you are some damn bohunk or Polack from the sounds of it.”

Johann laughed.

“I’m Irish, damn ya,” Michael shouted.

“Well, a son of the sod,” came the retort. “Heard you gonna get darkies in the ranks next, once we kilt off all you white boys.”

The men looked at each other in confusion.

“Ain’t heard that,” Johann finally replied. “No colored here with this corps.”

“Well, we shoot to kill if they show up, Yank, and you, too, if you got the same corps badge as them.”

“Ain’t none of ’em here. So we got a deal, Reb?”

There was a momentary pause, echoes of voices debating and finally a reply.

“Deal, Yank. Nighttime no shootin’, but during the daytime if one of you boys gotta drop his britches outside the trench, you gotta wave a white flag first.”

“Hell, no,” Johann replied. “No white flag. Our officers would hang us for sure for that. How about wave a cap back and forth three times.”

Again a discussion on the far side.

“Deal, Yank, but there be a problem.”

“And what’s that?’

“We ’uns are the 25th North Carolina, but we can’t speak for the boys to either flank.”

“Ah, shit, Reb!” Michael shouted. “What good is a truce if we get shot in the ass sideways from farther down the line?”

There was a rancorous laugh from the Rebel fort above them.

“Well, we can be all democratic like and send delegations up and down the line, if that’s what you want to negotiate out, fair and proper like. But that will be a heap of talkin’ and a lot of delegations given how many different regiments stuck out here in this godforsaken place.”

Johann shook his head and laughed sadly.

“We did that, I think we’d vote to end this damn war today and just go home, and the hell with this Petersburg.”

“That we would, Yank, that we would,” the Reb shouted back.

“All right, Reb. At least this: We don’t shoot anymore straight at you; you don’t shoot straight at us. If we go off the line, we’ll tell you. You do the same for us, so there’s no mistakes. Fair enough?”

“Deal, Yank.”

“Does that mean we can stand up now?” Stan asked, and even as he spoke the new recruit actually did stand up to take his first look, in daylight, at the massive Rebel fort, poised on the brow of the ridge, 130 yards away.

“My God, Stan!” Johann shouted as he leaped forward, tackling his brother around the knees and knocking him down; as he did so a bullet zipped across the lip of the trench.

“You stupid ass! Don’t you ever stand up like that. Never!” He then lapsed into Polish as he slapped his brother several more times before hugging him.

“But the Reb said,” Stan gasped, mouth bloody from the drubbing dealt out by his brother.

“Sorry ’bout that, Yank. It was them damn South Carolina boys off to our left. They’re meaner than snakes,” a cry echoed from the other side.

“Tell ’em the next one of ’em I see they’re dead. They damn near killed my brother!” Johann cried.

Silence from the other side.

“He must be a fresh fish standing up like that,” and there was a chorus of chuckles.

Johann did not reply, holding his brother tight.

“I promised father I’d bring you back safe,” Johann snarled, delivering an angry punch to his brother’s side. “Don’t stand up like that, ever.”

Obviously shaken, Stan did not reply.

“Still safer here than some of the mines we worked in back in Pottsville,” Michael announced, sitting against the wall of the trench, working a patch down his rifle to clean it out before reloading.

“Ya, that it is, that it is,” Hans Lubbeck, a corporal with the company, replied, biting off a chew of tobacco and handing the thick, dark block of cured tobacco over to Johann, who, still a bit shaken, sat back against the red clay wall of the trench.

Johann bit off a chaw, offering it to his brother, who, ashen faced, shook his head, and then gave it back to Hans.

“Found it on a dead Reb last week when we took their first line,” he sighed. “Doubt if we’ll get any more for a long time to come. We stuck in this damn hole forever now.”

A chorus of agreement greeted his words, the men falling into casual complaining about the war, the trenches, everything.

“That Reb was right,” one of them offered. “If we all stood up, met in the middle, and talked it out decent like, we’d be going home by the end of the day.”

“Home to what?” Hans replied. “The coal mines? Jesus, I don’t know about you men, but I say, it is safer here.”

“Cave in, it’s quick and you already got your grave, just need a priest then to consecrate it,” one of them replied. “Think about the poor bastards shot at Cold Harbor. No cease-fire, them screaming and begging for water under that hot sun. No thank ye, I’ll take the mines.”

The debate went back and forth, pausing as a watering party crawled out of the communications trench, lugging canteens refilled from the swampy creek a couple of hundred yards to the rear.

The temperature in the narrow confines of the trench, dug into the brick-red Virginia clay, was near 100 degrees or more; the noonday sun beating down on the sweating, suffering men.

“To hell with going back to the mines,” Michael announced, finished with cleaning his rifle, reloading it, and cautiously venturing a peek through the inch-wide aperture of his spider hole. “That damn Rebel fort up there will be the death of us anyhow. Some lunkhead general will get frustrated and finally order a charge, and then, me laddies, no more worries.”

A minié ball buzzed over Michael’s head. He stuck his hand up for a second to wave and then ducked back down. Several seconds later there was a dull thump.

“Mortar,” Johann announced.

All eyes turned heavenward and a couple of seconds later they could see the shell arcing heavenward.

“Two bits say it’s short and to the left,” one of the men announced.

“I’ll take that, long and to the left by twenty yards, is where my money is,” Michael replied.

The round reached apogee, started its descent, and seconds later Michael was grumbling as he handed a quarter over.

He sagged back against the trench wall.

“Boys, I know how to get us the hell out of here.”

“Don’t start that desertion talk again, Michael O’Shay,” Johann snapped. “I won’t stand for it.”

Michael grinned.

“No, seriously, Sergeant. I was a blaster in the mines; you all know that. Hell, after the war I’m going out west, make good money blowing tunnels when they build that railroad to California.”

“If they build it,” one of the men grumbled.

“So how does that get us out of here now?” Johann asked, feigning at least some interest. Poor Stan was still shaking and he wanted to divert the lad with talk of something else.

“That mortar shell just now. Packed with a couple of pounds of powder. What a waste. Even if it lands in a trench we usually got time to run from it. But down underground, you laddies know what a couple of pounds of powder will do to ya inside a tunnel.”

There were nods of agreement. Nearly every man of the 48th had come up out of the coalfields of Schuylkill County.

Michael took the chaw from Lubbeck and bit off a piece.

“I was thinking on it last night while taking a look at that damn fort up there.” As he spoke, half-a-dozen mortars back behind their lines opened from the fort called “fourteen gun battery,” lobbing their rounds high, seeking out the Confederate mortar, which had just fired. Michael paused, a few casual bets were offered, but there were no takers; it was far too risky to venture a peek for the results, even if the Rebs up in the fort were claiming a truce.

Several of the shells detonated with hollow pops, the others were duds.

“So what was you leading up to?” Johann asked.

“Well, I was thinking. How long do you think it’d take us boys to dig a tunnel up under that fort?”

As he spoke, he pulled out a pocketknife, opened it, and stuck it into the wall of the trench.

“This ain’t no hard Pennsylvania rock. It’s clay and sand, boys. How long?”