The Killer Angels (44 page)

Armistead and Garnett were dead; Kemper was dying. Of the thirteen colonels in Pickett’s division seven were dead and six were wounded. Longstreet did not look at the rest. He held up a hand and Sorrel went away.

But the facts stayed with him. The facts rose up like shattered fence-posts in the mist. The army would not recover from this day. He was a professional and he knew that as a good doctor knows it, bending
down for perhaps the last time over a doomed beloved patient. Longstreet did not know what he would do now. He looked out at the burial parties and the lights beginning to come on across the field like clusters of carrion fireflies. All that was left now was more dying. It was final defeat. They had all died and it had accomplished nothing, the wall was unbroken, the blue line was sound. He shook his head suddenly, violently, and remembered the old man again, coming bareheaded along the hill, stemming the retreat.

After a while Lee came. Longstreet did not want to see him. But the old man came in a cluster of men, outlined under that dark and ominous sky, the lightning blazing beyond his head. Men were again holding the bridle of the horse, talking to him, pleading; there was something oddly biblical about it, and yet even here in the dusk of defeat there was something else in the air around him; the man brought strength with his presence: doomed and defeated, he brought nonetheless a certain majesty. And Longstreet, knowing that he would never quite forgive him, stood to meet him.

Lee dismounted. Longstreet looked once into his face and then dropped his eyes. The face was set and cold, stonelike. Men were speaking. Lee said, “I would like a few moments alone with General Longstreet.” The men withdrew. Lee sat in a camp chair near the fire and Longstreet sat and they were alone together. Lee did not speak. Longstreet sat staring at the ground, into the firelight. Lightning flared; a cool wind was blowing. After a while Lee said, “We will withdraw tonight.”

His voice was husky and raw, as if he had been shouting. Longstreet did not answer. Lee said, “We can withdraw under cover of the weather. If we can reach the river, there will be no more danger.”

Longstreet sat waiting, his mind vacant and cold. Gradually he realized that the old man was expecting advice, an opinion. But he said nothing. Then he looked up. The old man had his hand over his eyes. He looked vaguely different. Longstreet felt a chill. The old man said slowly, “Peter, I’m going to need your help.”

He kept his hand over his eyes, shading himself as if from bright sunlight. Longstreet saw him take a deep breath and let it go. Then he
realized that Lee had called him by his nickname. Lee said, “I’m really very tired.”

Longstreet said quickly, “What can I do?”

Lee shook his head. Longstreet had never seen the old man lose control. He had not lost it now, but he sat there with his hand over his eyes and Longstreet felt shut away from his mind and in that same moment felt a shudder of enormous pity. He said, “General?”

Lee nodded. He dropped the hand and glanced up once quickly at Longstreet, eyes bright and black and burning. He shook his head again. He raised both palms, a gesture almost of surrender, palms facing Longstreet, tried to say something, shook his head for the last time. Longstreet said, “I will take care of it, General. We’ll pull out tonight.”

“I thought …” Lee said huskily.

Longstreet said, “Never mind.”

“Well,” Lee said. He took a long deep breath, faced the firelight. “Well, now we must withdraw.”

“Yes.”

They sat for a while in silence. Lee recovered. He crossed his legs and sat looking into the fire and the strength came back, the face smoothed calm again and grave, the eyes silent and dark. He said, “We must look to our own deportment. The spirit of the army is still very good.”

Longstreet nodded.

“We will do better another time.”

Longstreet shook his head instinctively. He said, “I don’t think so.”

Lee looked up. The eyes were clearer now. The moment of weakness had come and passed. What was left was a permanent weariness. A voice in Longstreet said: Let the old man alone. But there had been too much death; it was time for reality. He said slowly, “I don’t think we can win it now.”

After a moment Lee nodded, as if it were not really important. He said, “Perhaps.”

“I don’t think—” Longstreet raised his hands “—I don’t know if I can go on leading them. To die. For nothing.”

Lee nodded. He sat for a long while with his hands folded in his lap, staring at the fire, and the firelight on his face was soft and warm. Then
he said slowly, “They do not die for us. Not for us. That at least is a blessing.” He spoke staring at the fire. “Each man has his own reason to die. But if they go on, I will go on.” He paused. “It is only another defeat.” He looked up at Longstreet, lifted his hands, palms out, folded them softly, slowly. “If the war goes on—and it will, it will—what else can we do but go on? It is the same question forever, what else can we do? If they fight, we will fight with them. And does it matter after all who wins? Was that ever really the question? Will God ask that question, in the end?” He put his hands on his thighs, started painfully to rise.

He got to his feet, laboring. Longstreet reached forward instinctively to help him. Lee said, embarrassed, “Thank you,” and then where Longstreet held his arm he reached up and covered Longstreet’s hand. He looked into Longstreet’s eyes. Then he said, “You were right. And I was wrong. And now you must help me see what must be done. Help us to see. I become … very tired.”

“Yes,” Longstreet said.

They stood a moment longer in the growing dark. The first wind of the coming storm had begun to break over the hills and the trees, cold and heavy and smelling of rain. Lee said, “I lectured you yesterday, on war.”

Longstreet nodded. His mind was too full to think.

“I was trying to warn you. But … you have no Cause. You and I, we have no Cause. We have only the army. But if a soldier fights only for soldiers, he cannot ever win. It is only the soldiers who die.”

Lee mounted the gray horse. Longstreet watched the old man clear his face and stiffen his back and place the hat carefully, formally on his head. Then he rode off into the dark. Longstreet stood watching him out of sight. Then he turned and went out into the field to say goodbye, and when that was done he gave the order to retreat.

In the evening he left the regiment and went off by himself to be alone while the night came over the field. He moved out across the blasted stone wall and down the long littered slope until he found a bare rock where he could sit and look out across the battlefield at dusk. It was like the gray floor of hell. Parties moved with yellow lights through blowing smoke under a low gray sky, moving from black lump to black lump while papers fluttered and blew and fragments of cloth and cartridge and canteen tumbled and floated across the gray and steaming ground. He remembered with awe the clean green fields of morning, the splendid yellow wheat. This was another world. His own mind was blasted and clean, windblown; he was still slightly in shock from the bombardment and he sat not thinking of anything but watching the last light of the enormous day, treasuring the last gray moment. He knew he had been present at one of the great moments in history. He had seen them come out of the trees and begin the march up the slope and when he closed his eyes he could still see them coming. It was a sight few men were privileged to see and many who had seen it best had not lived through it. He knew that he would carry it with him as long as he lived, and he could see himself as an old man trying to describe it to his grandchildren, the way the men had looked as they
came out into the open and formed for the assault, the way they stood there shining and immobile, all the flags high and tilting and glittering in the sun, and then the way they all kicked to motion, suddenly, all beginning to move at once, too far away for the separate feet to be visible so that there seemed to be a silvery rippling all down the line, and that was the moment when he first felt the real fear of them coming: when he saw them begin to move.

Chamberlain closed his eyes and saw it again. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. No book or music would have that beauty. He did not understand it: a mile of men flowing slowly, steadily, inevitably up the long green ground, dying all the while, coming to kill you, and the shell bursts appearing above them like instant white flowers, and the flags all tipping and fluttering, and dimly you could hear the music and the drums, and then you could hear the officers screaming, and yet even above your own fear came the sensation of unspeakable beauty. He shook his head, opened his eyes. Professor’s mind. But he thought of Aristotle: pity and terror. So this is tragedy. Yes. He nodded. In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.

It was dark around him. There was one small gray area of the sky still aglow in the west; the rest was blackness, and flashes of lightning. At that moment a fine rain began to fall and he heard it come toward him, seeking him in a light patter up the slope. He had dust all over him, a fine pulverized powder from the shelling, dust in his hair and eyes and dust gritty in his teeth, and now he lifted his face to the rain and licked his lips and could taste the dirt on his face and knew that he would remember that too, the last moment at Gettysburg, the taste of raw earth in the cold and blowing dark, the touch of cold rain, the blaze of lightning.

After a while brother Tom found him, sitting in the rain, and sat with him and shared the darkness and the rain. Chamberlain remembered using the boy to plug a hole in the line, stopping the hole with his own brother’s body like a warm bloody cork, and Chamberlain looked at himself. It was so natural and clear, the right thing to do: fill the gap
with the body of my brother. Therefore Tom would have to go, and Chamberlain told himself: Run the boy away from you, because if he stays with you he’ll die. He stared at the boy in the darkness, felt an incredible love, reached out to touch him, stopped himself.

Tom was saying, “I guess you got to hand it to them, the way they came up that hill.”

Chamberlain nodded. He was beginning to feel very strange, stuffed and strange.

“But we stood up to them. They couldn’t break us,” Tom said.

“No.”

“Well, nobody ever said they wasn’t good soldiers. Well, they’re Americans anyway, even if they are Rebs.”

“Yes,” Chamberlain said.

“Thing I cannot understand. Thing I never will understand. How can they fight so hard, them Johnnies, and all for slavery?”

Chamberlain raised his head. He had forgotten the Cause. When the guns began firing he had forgotten it completely. It seemed very strange now to think of morality, or that minister long ago, or the poor runaway black. He looked out across the dark field, could see nothing but the yellow lights and outlines of black bodies stark in the lightning.

Tom said, “When you ask them prisoners, they never talk about slavery. But, Lawrence, how do you explain that? What else is the war about?”

Chamberlain shook his head.

“If it weren’t for the slaves, there’d never have been no war, now would there?”

“No,” Chamberlain said.

“Well then, I don’t care how much political fast-talking you hear, that’s what it’s all about and that’s what them fellers died for, and I tell you, Lawrence, I don’t understand it at all.”

“No,” Chamberlain said. He was thinking of Kilrain:
no divine spark
. Animal meat: the Killer Angels.

Out in the field nearby they were laying out bodies, row after row, the feet all even and the toes pointing upward like rows of black leaves on the border of a garden. He saw again the bitter face of Kilrain, but Chamberlain did not hate the gentlemen, could not think of them as
gentlemen. He felt instead an extraordinary admiration. It was as if they were his own men who had come up the hill and he had been with them as they came, and he had made it across the stone wall to victory, but they had died. He felt a violent pity. He said slowly, in memory of Kilrain, “Well, they’re all equal now.”

“In the sight of God, anyways.”

“Yes,” Chamberlain said. “In the sight of God.”

Tom stood up. “Better get moving, Lawrence, there’s a big rain coming.”

Chamberlain rose, but he was not yet ready to go.

Tom said, “Do you think they’ll attack again?”

Chamberlain nodded. They were not yet done. He felt an appalling thrill. They would fight again, and when they came he would be behind another stone wall waiting for them, and he would stay there until he died or until it ended, and he was looking forward to it with an incredible eagerness, as you wait for the great music to begin again after the silence. He shook his head, amazed at himself. He thought: Have to come back to this place when the war is over. Maybe then I’ll understand it.

The rain was much heavier now. He put on the stolen cavalry hat and blinked upward into the black sky. He thought: It was my privilege to be here today. He thanked God for the honor. Then he went back to his men.

The light rain went on falling on the hills above Gettysburg, but it was only the overture to the great storm to come. Out of the black night it came at last, cold and wild and flooded with lightning. The true rain came in a monster wind, and the storm broke in blackness over the hills and the bloody valley; the sky opened along the ridge and the vast water thundered down, drowning the fires, flooding the red creeks, washing the rocks and the grass and the white bones of the dead, cleansing the earth and soaking it thick and rich with water and wet again with clean cold rainwater, driving the blood deep into the earth, to grow again with the roots toward Heaven.

It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.

“Thus ended the great American Civil War, which must upon the whole be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.”