The Killer Angels (17 page)

“Where was you boys at Chancellorsville?”

“Well now.” A painful subject. Joshua Chamberlain opened his eyes.

“The fact is,” Tom said gloomily, “we was not engaged.”

“Well now, a lot us wa’n’t engaged. That there Hooker, I hear he froze right up like a pond in the dark.”

“Well, we had us a misfortune.” Tom turned eyes sad as a trout. He was a lean, happy, excitable man who had turned out to be calm and serene in combat. Soldiering was beginning to intrigue him.

“The thing was, damn, we had these here ’noculations. You ever been ’noculated?”

The man swore earnestly. Tom nodded. “Well, then, you know. Only thing was, we wound up sick, half the dang regiment. And come time for the fight at Chancellorsville our surgeon major—that’s a stumble-fingered man named Wormy Monroe—he up and reported us unfit for combat. So they went ahead and sent us back to mind the dang telegraph wires. We wasn’t allowed to ’sociate with nobody. Old Lawrence there he went on up and argued, but wouldn’t nobody come near us. It was like he was carrying the plague. Lawrence said hang it, we ought to be the first ones in, we’d probably give the Rebs a disease and be more useful than any other outfit in the whole army. Matter of fact, way things turned, we probably would’ve been more use than most of them people. Anyway we wasn’t in it.”

The Maine man was chuckling. Chamberlain thought: would have thought mountain men were tougher than city boys. But mountain men get all the diseases. City boys get immune as they grow up. We were a thousand strong when we left Maine.

Gallant six hundred … Half a league, half a league …

It was quieter now. No one was talking. Sound of troops at route step, shuffle in the dust, dull clink of mess kits, a band in the distance, tinny, forlorn, raw call of a cow in the sunlight. A voice in his ear, a hand on his arm.

“Colonel, sir—” exasperated “—beg the Colonel’s pardon, but would the Colonel do us all a favor and get back on that damned horse?”

Colonel opened his eyes into the glare, saw: Tozier. Color Sergeant Tozier. A huge man with a huge nose, sweat bubbling all over his face. “I tell you, sir, be a damn site easier handlin’ these here new recruits if the officers would act like they got sense, sir.”

Chamberlain blinked, wiped at his sweat. Some of the men were watching with that odd soft look on their faces that still surprised Chamberlain. He started to say something, shook his head. Tozier was right. He mounted the horse.

Tozier said, “How are you, sir?”

Chamberlain nodded, grinned weakly.

“We don’t need no more new commanding officers,” Tozier said. “Here you, Lieutenant, keep an eye on the colonel.”

Tom said, “Yes, sir.” Tozier departed. Chamberlain thought: good thing old Ames didn’t see him. My boys. Ames shaped them. But they’re mine. Year ago they held meetings to decide what to do; if they disagreed with an officer, they stopped and argued. Can’t conduct an army as a town meeting.

They were coming into Hanover. Out in a field dead bodies lay in untidy rows. The arms were up above the heads, the clothes were scattered, shoes were missing. The hair of some was flickering in the wind and they looked alive. Chamberlain learned: Stuart had been through here and there’d been a brush. The sight of dead men awakened them all.

A clear day, very hot. Wind swinging to the south. Buzzards ahead. As they rode ladies waved handkerchiefs, a band played the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Chamberlain wondered: will the people here let the buzzards have them? Or will they bury them, Stuart’s men?

The people of Hanover were delighted to see them. Now as they got closer to the Rebels people seemed much happier everywhere. Happiness seemed to increase in direct proportion to how close you were. When we actually get there, Chamberlain thought, it will be easy to tell: the men will be kissing you.

Chamberlain rode upright through town. On the far side he slumped again. For a short while General Vincent came up to ride with him. Vincent was the new brigade commander—a very handsome
man with thick sideburns, from the 83rd Pennsylvania. He had a good reputation and he had the air of a man who knew what he was doing. But Chamberlain had seen that air before. Hooker had it. And if ever there was a man who did not know what he was doing …

Vincent had heard about the 114 volunteers. He was impressed. He thought that things were looking up. The army was ready for a fight. That in itself was an impressive fact, after all that had happened. He showed Chamberlain the new brigade flag: triangular, white, with a blue border, a red Maltese Cross in the center. The man looked at it without interest. It meant nothing much, as yet. Vincent rode back. The man from the Second Maine said sadly, “You ever hear about
our
flag? It cost twelve hundred dollars.”

But the men were tired. There was silence again. Chamberlain saw a rider going to the rear, a blue courier. Then there was the first wagon, then another. There was fighting at Gettysburg. Off against the horizon he could see a haze, a dark haze, as of dirt stirred into the air.

Nothing to do now but rest on the march. The troops became very still. It was darker now. The land around them was hilly and green, turning slowly gold, then hazy purple. It was a beautiful afternoon. At dark, word came forward to go into bivouac. Vincent came up and stopped the column, and the men moved gratefully out into a field, carrying the rails of the fences with them for evening fires. They had marched more than twenty miles again; it was now a hundred miles in five days. Now for the first time the new Maine men heard the call: Dan, Dan, Dan, Butterfield! Butterfield!

And then down the road came more riders, rushing to the rear on lathered horses. Chamberlain looked up to watch them go, sensing alarm. He could feel the Gray army beyond the hills. A moment later there came the bugle call: Dan, Dan, Dan, Butterfield, Butterfield, then forward.

A universal groan. No rest now. The rattle of the rails being dropped, a general cursing. Chamberlain re-formed the regiment out in the road. Dispatch from Vincent: Move out.

Word of what had happened moved slowly down the column, but it was a long while before word came down to Chamberlain. By that time
it was well after dark and the moon was rising, yellow in hazy air, huge in the trees, gazing like one single vacant eye, and Vincent rode up.

Two corps had been engaged at Gettysburg and had been driven off. The First Corps had done well, but the Eleventh, those damn Dutchmen, had run again, as they did at Chancellorsville. Now the First was holding and screaming back for reinforcements. John Reynolds was hurt, possibly killed. Proceed with all possible speed.

Chamberlain did not protest. In the darkness he could feel his strength rising, coming over him in the cooler air of evening. Not far to Gettysburg now. He could hear no guns. But now along the roadway there were people rushing out, people lining the rail fences, anxious, overjoyed. From houses back off away from the road there was a waving of flags, a fluttering of white handkerchiefs; women lifted lamps at the windows. There were many healthy-looking young men lining the road and some of the men from Maine grumbled. But the rest were too tired. Chamberlain saw some staggering, then one fell out. He collapsed in a clatter of falling rifle, of mess tins rattling in the dust. He was pulled aside. Chamberlain arranged a detail to pick up fallen men.

On and on. Now it was much darker and the moon was high, and then ahead there was an officer, a staff officer, sitting on a black horse. He rode out to meet Chamberlain as he passed.

“Colonel, tell your men. General McClellan has assumed command of the army.”

Chamberlain did not have to spread the word. It went down the ranks like a wind in wheat. Some of the men cheered hoarsely. One man fired a rifle, and then Tozier talked to him. For a long moment Chamberlain believed it. McClellan was back. God bless old Lincoln. The only general of the whole mess who knew what he was doing. But then the troops moved on and the moon went behind a cloud and Chamberlain knew that it could not be true.

But the men marched believing they were behind McClellan. He was the only general Chamberlain had ever seen who was truly loved. The Rebs loved Lee, no doubt of that. And we loved Mac. Chamberlain thought: Two things an officer must do, to lead men. This from
old Ames, who never cared about love:
You must care for your men’s welfare. You must show physical courage
.

Well, Chamberlain thought, there’s no McClellan. There’s only Meade, whom none of these people know, let alone like, and he’ll be cautious. So I’ve taken care, as best I can, of their welfare. Now tomorrow we’ll see about the courage.

Now there were the wounded, the stragglers. Men limped back, sat out in the fields making fires, sulked along eastward, out in the dark. Now there were rumors: a terrible defeat, someone had blundered, two hundred thousand Rebs, the Eleventh Corps had deserted. Chamberlain ordered his men to close up and keep moving and not to talk. Damn the rumors. You never knew what was true until days or weeks or even months afterward. He called close up, close up, first order he had given since morning, and then shortly after that the order came to stop, at last.

It was almost midnight. There were clouds again and it was very dark, but Chamberlain could see a hill in front of him and masses of troops and tents ahead. The 20th Maine went off the road and most went to sleep without fires, some without pitching tents, for the night was warm and without a wind. Chamberlain asked a passing courier: How far to Gettysburg? and the man pointed back over his shoulder. You’re there, Colonel, you’re there.

Chamberlain lay down to rest. It was just after midnight. He wondered if McClellan would really be back. He prayed for a leader. For his boys.

He rode out of Gettysburg just after dark. His headquarters were back on the Cashtown Road, and so he rode back over the battlefield of the day. His staff recognized his mood and left him discreetly alone. He was riding slumped forward, head down, hat over his eyes. One by one they left him, moving ahead, cheering up when they were out of his company. He passed a hospital wagon, saw mounded limbs glowing whitely in the dark, a pile of legs, another of arms. It looked like masses of fat white spiders. He stopped in the road and lighted a cigar, looking around him at the tents and the wagons, listening to the rumble and music of the army in the night. There were a few groans, dead sounds from dying earth, most of them soft and low. There was a fire far off, a large fire in a grove of trees, men outlined against a great glare; a band was playing something discordant, unrecognizable. A dog passed him, trotted through the light of an open tent flap, paused, looked, inspected the ground, padded silently into the dark. Fragments of cloth, trees, chewed bits of paper littered the road. Longstreet took it all in, began to move on. He passed a black mound which seemed strange in the dark: lumpy, misshapen. He rode over and saw: dead horses. He rode away from the field, toward higher ground.

Lee would attack in the morning. Clear enough. Time and place not yet set. But he will attack. Fixed and unturnable, a runaway horse. Longstreet felt a depression so profound it deadened him. Gazing back on that black hill above Gettysburg, that high lighted hill already speckled with fires among the gravestones, he smelled disaster like distant rain.

It was Longstreet’s curse to see the thing clearly. He was a brilliant man who was slow in speech and slow to move and silent-faced as stone. He had not the power to convince. He sat on the horse, turning his mind away, willing it away as a gun barrel swivels, and then he thought of his children, powerless to stop that vision. It blossomed: a black picture. She stood in the doorway:
The boy is dead
. She didn’t even say his name. She didn’t even cry.

Longstreet took a long deep breath. In the winter the fever had come to Richmond. In a week they were dead. All within a week, all three. He saw the sweet faces: moment of enormous pain. The thing had pushed him out of his mind, insane, but no one knew it. They looked at the plain blunt stubborn face and saw nothing but dull Dutch eyes, the great darkness, the silence. He had not thought God would do a thing like that. He went to church and asked and there was no answer. He got down on his knees and pleaded but there was no answer. She kept standing in the door:
The boy is dead
. And he could not even help her, could say nothing, could not move, could not even take her into his arms. Nothing to give. One strength he did not have. Oh God:
My boy is dead
.

He had tears in his eyes. Turn away from that. He mastered it. What he had left was the army. The boys were here. He even had the father, in place of God: old Robert Lee. Rest with that, abide with that.

His aides were all gone, all but two. Goree hung back from him in the growing dark. He rode on alone, silently, Goree trailing like a hunting dog, and met one of his surgeons coming up from camp: J. S. D. Cullen, delighted, having heard of the great victory, and Longstreet succeeded in depressing him, and Cullen departed. Longstreet lectured himself: depression is contagious; keep it to yourself. He needed something to cheer him, turned to two men behind
him, found there was only one, not an aide, the Englishman: Fremantle. Exactly what he needed. Longstreet drew up to wait.

The Englishman came pleasantly, slowly forward. He was the kind of breezy, cheery man who brings humor with his presence. He was wearing the same tall gray hat and the remarkable coat. He said cheerily, tapping the great hat, “Don’t mean to intrude upon your thoughts, General.”

“Not ’t’all,” Longstreet said.

“Really, sir, if you’d rather ride alone …”

“Good to see you,” Longstreet said.

The Englishman rode up grinning broadly through widely spaced teeth. He had entered the country by way of Mexico, riding in a wagon drawn by a tobacco-chewing man who had turned out to be, in his spare time, the local judge. Fremantle had seen many interesting things: a casual hanging, raw floods, great fires. He was continually amazed at the combination of raw earth and rough people, white columned houses and traces of English manner. He had not gotten used to the crude habit of shaking hands which was common among these people, but he forced himself. He was enjoying himself hugely. He had not changed his clothes in some days and he looked delightfully disreputable, yet mannered and cool and light in the saddle. Longstreet grinned again.