The Last Full Measure (9 page)

Armistead caught Chamberlain’s look. “He has spirit, captain. A vital element in any group of men, but especially important now. These are good men, but they lack enough experience fighting alongside each other, especially against regular troops in force. When Lee begins his attack we must give them simple and clear orders, and ensure they see us during the action. Do you understand?” His arm raised and swept across the hill top. “They must stay under cover as best they can for protection, but you and I must be seen by them if they are to remain steady. Unfortunately, that means the enemy will see us as well.”

Chamberlain managed to smile. “Like Julius Caesar or other Roman generals. They had to lead their legions from the front.”

“Exactly, sir.” Armistead paused, his eyes on the regulars. “They’re on the move. Still in column, but only a company. Surely Colonel Lee would not attempt that, but that is Sickles leading the company. He is rash enough to try such a move without waiting for approval from Lee.” Armistead indicated the stone wall to the east of the road. “If you will take up position there, captain, I will command from the right. Wait for my command to fire, and ensure you have enough force at your bastion near the road to hold it against a rush.”

His throat suddenly felt very dry, but Chamberlain saluted. “Yes, sir.”

He walked over behind the stone wall, but close to it, seeing his men crouched behind the wall and the dirt they had thrown up while digging shallow entrenchments. His men. It didn’t feel real at the moment, nor did the steady march of the regulars on the pike, who had now brought their rifles to port arms but were still coming up the pike in a column.

Sergeant Maines walked up beside Chamberlain and shook his head. “It’ll be more murder than battle in a moment, captain. Those regulars are going to try to bust through us in column instead of forming a line for fighting.”

“Why are they doing it?”

“Because they’ll think we’ll break at the first blow, sir, and a column makes a fine hammer against light resistance. But if you throw a column against those determined to hold their ground, it is nothing more than a mass of men forming a target a fool could not miss.” Sergeant Maines moved along the stone wall, checking to make sure every man was ready to fire.

To Chamberlain, the marching regulars already seemed far too close, an officer riding before them with casual arrogance, not even having bothered to draw either sword or pistol. Now the officer called out. “On the hill! Surrender in the name of the Army of the United States!”

Armistead replied, his voice carrying easily down the slope. “The Army of the New Republic holds this hill, sir, and will hold it in the name of liberty for the people and for the Constitution of the United States of America.”

The officer seemed to hesitate, as if surprised to have his order rejected, his horse dancing as its reins were jerked in different directions. Then the mounted officer drew his sword with a dramatic gesture, raising it high as he called out loudly. “Company, advance!”

Armistead’s voice came again. “Steady on the left! Steady on the right!”

Chamberlain, his eyes on the officer whose horse was now trotting forward, drew his pistol and echoed Armistead. “Steady!”

“Ready!” Armistead called. Behind the officer, the column of regular soldiers hurried forward, still in tight formation, but slowing as they tackled the slope of the road leading up the hill. “Fire!”

The stone wall before Chamberlain erupted in a blaze of fire and gouts of smoke that momentarily obscured his view of the pike. Amid the chaos of smoke and noise Sergeant Maines kept walking along the wall, ordering the men to continue shooting while Maines himself reloaded his carbine, pausing each time he aimed and fired. Remembering Armistead’s orders, Chamberlain forced himself to walk at a steady pace despite legs which threatened to shake uncontrollably, walk to the tiny bastion near the road, where a half-dozen men were firing as fast as they could load.

“Cease fire!” Armistead’s command came across the pike, and once again Chamberlain repeated it as the defenders’ fire tapered off into a final few shots.

As the smoke blew clear Chamberlain saw that the pike was choked with bodies, blood covering the surface of the road in a dark pool. He wondered what had become of the officer, then saw his horse galloping toward the rear, the regular officer slumped in the saddle. In the officer’s wake, the surviving soldiers from the company were running back, but as they encountered the rest of the regiment they were stopped.

Armistead came walking through the smoke, his face impassive. “They will not make that mistake again. Colonel Lee now knows he must fight here, and Major Sickles appears badly enough wounded that he will not be urging any more heedless attacks.”

As Armistead had predicted, the next advance revealed a more serious attitude by the regulars toward the defenders. In clear view of the defenders on the hill, but well out of range of any of their weapons, two other companies in the regular regiment marched even with the farm house, then shifted their formations into lines facing the hill. Behind them, the two cannon unlimbered, then began hurling shots toward the defending volunteers. Chamberlain felt an urge to seek cover as the cannon shells began exploding, then realized that the artillery fire was all overshooting, falling behind the defenders’ positions. “Them toy guns ain’t a problem for us,” Sergeant Maines assured the other men behind the wall. “Hitting the top of a hill is hard work even for the best artillerymen. They’ll keep dropping rounds on the civilians in the town behind us. You just keep your heads down and aim well when the next attack comes.”

Chamberlain got his feet into motion again, walking up and down his short line, trying to act confident as the lines of regular infantry came marching steadily toward the hill. Behind him he could hear sporadic bursts of gunfire and bugle calls where Buford was still tying down Stuart in the streets of the town. If silence fell it would mean Buford had been defeated. It was a surprise to realize that the sounds of combat could be comforting.

The two companies of regular troops had formed up in a straight line, each company’s line formation separated from the next by a small gap. Each company line of about one hundred men stood about fifty men long in two ranks, the second close behind the first, each man’s shoulders almost touching those of his companions on either side. Officers stood out before their companies, then another officer rode out in front of them all, called a command, and the entire force of regulars began moving up the hill. “How can we miss?” Chamberlain wondered as he looked at them coming steadily closer.

“Not easily,” Sergeant Maines observed.

“Why are they attacking like that?”

“By the book, sir. Many a time I’ve drilled formations in the same way.”

It was as Longstreet had said. The regulars were fighting by old rules, even though weapons had changed. But Chamberlain spotted something else that worried him. “The regulars’ front is so wide it overlaps ours on each end. Should we spread out our line?”

“That’s up to you and Major Armistead, sir,” Sergeant Maines deferred.

He thought about asking Armistead, then shook his head. “If we spread out, it will thin our line. I think we need to keep our fire concentrated.”

The regulars marched up the slope, maintaining their tight formations, until Armistead called another command. “Riflemen, aim and fire! All others hold fire!”

This time the explosions of fire, noise and smoke took place sporadically along the stone wall and on the other side of the pike among the trees and tombstones. Chamberlain watched as regulars in the oncoming ranks jerked as if they had been punched, knocking backwards to roll a short distance down the slope. The horse of the officer leading the attack reared and fell with an awful scream, but the officer disentangled himself from the stirrups, picked himself up, waved his sword and kept walking.

The long line of regular troops was almost even with the point where the column had been decimated earlier when Armistead gave the order for everyone to open fire. Shotguns, muskets and pistols joined in the barrage. Chamberlain watched as more and more regulars fell, their commander shouting orders which Chamberlain could not make out through the din of gunfire. The regulars halted, raised their rifles to their shoulders and fired in a long rippling volley.

Chamberlain heard the balls from the rifles whipping past, felt the wind from some of them, heard impacts in trees and along the stone wall. A couple of the defenders fell backwards, one yelling in pain. But the others kept firing as the regulars methodically reloaded. This time when the regulars raised their rifles to fire everyone ducked, and Chamberlain stepped behind a tree. The volley tore more holes in living wood and stone, but hit none of the defenders.

Staring through the clouds of powder smoke, Chamberlain wondered why the regulars’ lines seemed to be getting shorter. It finally dawned on him that as soldiers fell, the regulars kept closing up their ranks, shoulder to shoulder, and as a result their lines kept shortening so that now the regulars’ formation no longer overlapped the defenders’ line. “Why are they doing that?” he shouted to Maines, bewildered. “Closing ranks like that?”

Maines paused to give Chamberlain a puzzled look. “That’s what you do, captain. Maintain a tight formation. That’s how the regulars drill, that’s how they’re trained to fight.”

Chamberlain got it then. “Like Harold’s Saxons at Hastings.” Staying close together, providing a tight mass of targets. Eight hundred years separated those regulars from these, yet they were fighting by the same rules.

The officer leading the formation had fallen again at some point, this time not to rise again, but one of the other officers with the regulars came out in front, waved his sword and charged forward, the surviving regular soldiers in the companies running after him to storm the defenders’ line.

Now
, something told Chamberlain. Now he had to stand out and lead from the front as Armistead had advised. Jogging forward to the very edge of the defensive line, his legs touching the low stone wall before him, he shouted over the sound of firing. “Hold them! Keep firing!”

The regulars were very close now, scrambling up the hill, more and more of them falling as the defenders kept firing and both pistols and shotguns took a greater toll on the attackers. Chamberlain drew his own revolver, aimed with a sense of dread and reluctance, then fired for the first time at a living target. He couldn’t tell if he had hit the regular, so Chamberlain fired once more, then other regulars were coming close and he fired again and again.

His pistol’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber, and Chamberlain realized he couldn’t see any more regulars. All along the line, the volunteers were cheering or yelling insults. Gazing through the drifts of smoke, Chamberlain saw the regulars racing down the slope in a mass, their neat formations dissolved into a single clump of humanity. He stood, breathing heavily, his throat painful from the harsh smoke filling the air. Looking down at his pistol, Chamberlain swallowed, then reloaded it with fingers that shook badly. He watched his hands fumbling the bullets into the chambers of the weapon, feeling strangely detached and numb, as if watching someone else far away. Part of him wondered what he would feel when the lack of sensation was replaced by feeling once more.

“Captain Chamberlain!” Someone was calling him from the west side of the pike. Trying to appear calm, something made easier by his temporary emotional removal from everything about him, Chamberlain strolled across the pike, wondering why someone other than Major Armistead had called him.

He found Armistead on the ground, Sergeant Maines kneeling next to him, a dark, wet patch spreading ever larger across the breast of the major’s uniform. The sergeant looked up, tears running down his face, as Chamberlain approached. “Took a ball in the chest. He ain’t got a chance, sir.”

Chamberlain knelt on the other side of Armistead, shocked into feeling again. Major Armistead was taking deep, quivering breaths, each one causing a new swell of blood to well up from the wound in his chest. His eyes met Chamberlains’. “We stopped them again…captain, but…Bobbie Lee will not give up…so easily.”

“Yes, sir.” He could not think of anything else to say. What did you say to a man dying before you?

“You must…command them, captain.” Armistead, his face pale, shuddered again before he could continue speaking. “Take my sword…use it…as a symbol.
Hold
this position, captain.”

“I will, sir.”

“Hancock…Longstreet…Buford…our country…need us to hold.” Armistead coughed up a gout of blood, then shuddered before speaking again. “It is God’s will that…I die here, but I thank Him that I have fought my last…alongside Winfield Hancock.” His breath rasped as he fought for air and Chamberlain blinked back tears of his own, certain that death was but moments away. But Armistead roused himself once more, focusing on Chamberlain again. “Tell Colonel Hancock…from me…that I have done my duty and…do not doubt the justice of our cause.”

“Yes, sir, I will.”

Armistead must have heard, because as his last breath sighed from him the old soldier had a contented expression. Sergeant Maines made a low sound of pain as if he had also been shot, then the sergeant picked up Armistead’s sword and held out the grip toward Chamberlain.

Moving in a daze, Chamberlain grasped the sword and rose to his feet. Chamberlain looked south to where the regular army forces could be seen forming up near the farmhouse for another attack. His gaze shifted to his own forces and he saw uncertainty and fear rising like a physical fog as word of the major’s death raced along the thin line.

“Hold your places there!” Sergeant Maines shouted, running toward where some men were beginning to rise.

The sergeant’s curses and discipline would not be enough, Chamberlain knew. He took another look at Armistead, then strode toward the center of the line, onto the Baltimore Pike, raising Armistead’s sword high like a banner. Always before this, his speeches had been about theory and ideas. They had not been about convincing men to stand and die at his word. But he knew many such speeches, and now Chamberlain’s mind raced from Caesar to Shakespeare to Patrick Henry, trying to craft the words needed to keep these men here.