SKIRMISHING
As rain fell again in sheets, General Robert E. Lee picked up his bloodied army and limped slowly back into Maryland. Meade didn’t have to let him get away. The Army of the Potomac was hurt badly too, with more than twenty-three thousand casualties, including some eight thousand dead or missing, but the Northerners were flushed with victory and far stronger than Lee’s men, who were slowed and hampered by a wagon train of wounded stretching behind them fully seventeen miles. But just as Hooker had failed to act in Virginia, now Meade failed to act in Pennsylvania, and there was no pursuit.
“Where does Mr. Lincoln find his generals?” Symonds muttered to Rob J. in disgust. But if the delay frustrated colonels, the enlisted men were content to rest and recover, and perhaps write home the extraordinary news that they were still alive.
Ordway found Lewis Robinson in one of the farmhouse hospitals. His right foot had been amputated four inches above the ankle. He was thin and pale but otherwise appeared in good health. Rob J. examined the stump and told Robinson it was healing well and that the man who had cut off his foot had known his job. Clearly Robinson was happy to be out of the war; there was a sense of relief in his eyes that was so profound it was almost palpable. Rob J. felt that Robinson had been bound to be hit, because he had feared the possibility so. He brought Robinson his sopranino cornet and some pencils and paper and knew he would be all right, because you didn’t need two feet to compose music or play the horn.
Both Ordway and Wilcox were promoted to sergeant. A number of the men had been promoted, Symonds filling the regimental table of organization with the survivors, handing out the ratings and ranks that had belonged to the fallen. The 131st Indiana had received eighteen percent casualties, which was light compared to many regiments. A regiment from Minnesota had lost eighty-six percent of its men. That regiment and several others were wiped out, in effect. Symonds and his staff officers spent several days recruiting survivors of the ruined regiments, with success, bringing the 131st’s strength up to 771 men. With some embarrassment, the colonel told Rob J. he’d found a regimental surgeon. Dr. Gardner Coppersmith had been with one of the disbanded Pennsylvania units as a captain, and Symonds had lured him with promotion. A graduate of a Philadelphia medical school, he’d had two years of combat experience. “I’d make you regimental surgeon in a minute if you weren’t a civilian, Doc Cole,” Symonds said. “But the slot calls for an officer. You understand that Major Coppersmith will be your superior, that he’ll run things?”
Rob J. assured him that he understood.
For Rob J. it was a complicated war, fought by a complicated nation. In the newspaper he read that there had been a race riot in New York because of resentment over the first drawing of names for the military draft. A mob of fifty thousand, most of them Irish Catholic workingmen, set fire to the draft office, the offices of the New York Tribune, and a Negro orphanage, fortunately empty of children at the time. Apparently blaming Negroes for the war, they swarmed through the streets, beating and robbing every black person they could find, murdering and lynching Negroes for several days before the riot was put down by federal troops freshly returned from fighting Southerners at Gettysburg.
The story wounded Rob J.’s spirit. Native-born Protestants loathed and oppressed Catholics and immigrants, and Catholics and immigrants scorned and murdered Negroes, as if each group fed off its hate, needing the nourishment provided by the bone marrow of someone weaker.
When Rob J. had prepared for citizenship he’d studied the United States Constitution and marveled at its provisions. Now he saw that the genius of those who had written the Constitution was that it foresaw man’s weakness of character and the continuing presence of evil in the world, and sought to make individual freedom the legal reality to which the country had to return again and again.
He was fascinated by what made men hate one another, and studied Lanning Ordway as if the lame sergeant were a bug under his microscope. If Ordway didn’t spew hatred every now and then, like a kettle running over, and if Rob J. didn’t know that a terrible unpunished crime had been committed a decade before in his own Illinois woods, he would have found Ordway among the more likable young men in the regiment. Now he was watching the litter-bearer grow and blossom, probably because the experiences Ordway had had in the army represented more success than he had ever before achieved.
There was a spirit of success in the entire regiment. The Indiana 131st Regimental Band showed dash and elan as it went from hospital to hospital, giving concerts for the wounded. The new tuba player wasn’t as good as Thad Bushman had been, but the musicians played with pride, because they’d shown they were valuable during battle.
“We been through the worst together,” Wilcox announced solemnly one night when he had had too much to drink, fixing Rob J. with his ferocious walleyed squint. “We strolled in and out of the jaws of death, sashayed on through the Valley of the Shadow. We stared right into the damned eyes of the terrible critter. We heered the rebel yell and hollered back.”
The men treated one another with great tenderness. Sergeant Ordway and Sergeant Wilcox and even sloppy Corporal Perry were honored because they’d led their fellow musicians to pluck up wounded soldiers and carry them back under fire. The story of Rob J.’s two-day marathon with the scalpel was repeated in all the tents, and the men knew he was responsible for the ambulance service in their regiment. They smiled warmly to see him now, and nobody mentioned latrines.
His new popularity pleased him inordinately. One of the soldiers of B Company, Second Brigade, a man named Lyon, even brought him a horse. “Just found him walking riderless by the side of the road. I thunk of you right away, Doc,” Lyon said, handing him the reins.
Rob J. was embarrassed but elated by this evidence of affection. True, the mud-colored horse wasn’t much, a skinny and swaybacked gelding. Probably he’d belonged to a slain or wounded rebel soldier, because both the animal and the bloodstained saddle bore the CSA brand. The horse’s head and his tail drooped, his eyes were dull, and his mane and tail were full of burrs. He looked like a horse that had worms. But, “Why, soldier, he’s beautiful!” Rob J. said. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I figger forty-two dollars would be fair,” Lyon said.
Rob J. laughed, more tickled by his own foolish yearning for love than by the situation. When the dickering was over, the horse was his in exchange for $4.85 and the promise that he wouldn’t bring Lyon up on charges as a battlefield looter.
He gave the animal a good feed, patiently picked the burrs from his mane and tail, washed the blood off the saddle and rubbed oil on the horse where the leather had chafed, and brushed the gelding’s coat. When all that was done, it was still an extremely sorry-looking horse, so Rob J. named him Pretty Boy, on the outside chance that perhaps such a name would give the ugly animal a modicum of pleasure and self-respect.
He was riding the horse when the Indiana 131st marched out of Pennsylvania on August 17. Pretty Boy’s head and tail still drooped, but he moved along with the loose, steady gait of a beast that was accustomed to the long ride. If anybody in the regiment didn’t know for certain which direction they were heading, all doubt disappeared when Bandmaster Warren Fitts blew his whistle, lifted his chin and his baton, and the band began to play “Maryland, My Maryland.”
The 131st recrossed the Potomac six weeks after Lee’s troops and a full month after the first units of their own army. They followed the late summer south, and the mild and seductive autumn didn’t catch up with them until they were well into Virginia. They were veterans, chigger-wise and battle-tested, but most of the action of the war at that moment was in the western theater, and for the 131st Indiana, things were quiet. Lee’s army moved along the Shenandoah Valley, where Union scouts spied on it and said it was in good condition except for an obvious shortage of supplies, especially decent shoes.
The Virginia skies were dark with fall rains when they came to the Rappahannock and found evidence that the Confederates had camped there in the not-distant past. Over Rob J.’s objections, they raised their tents right on the former Rebel campsite. Major Coppersmith was a well-educated and competent doctor, but he didn’t hold with worrying about a little shit, and he never bothered anybody about digging latrines. He wasn’t subtle about informing Rob J. that the time was over when an acting assistant surgeon could make medical policy for the regiment. The major liked to run his own sick call, unassisted, except on days when he might be feeling poorly, which wasn’t often. And he said that unless an engagement turned into another Gettysburg, he thought that he and one enlisted man were enough to apply dressings at a medical station.
Rob smiled at him. “What does that leave for me?”
Major Coppersmith frowned and smoothed his mustaches with a forefinger. “Well, I’d like you to handle the litter-bearers, Dr. Cole,” he said.
So Rob J. found himself caught by the monster he had created, trapped in the web of his own spinning. He had no desire to join the litter men, but once they became his main task, it seemed foolish to think that he would simply send the teams out and watch to see what happened to them. He recruited his own team: two musicians—the new bass horn player, name of Alan Johnson, and a fifer named Lucius Wagner—and for the fourth man, he drafted Corporal Amasa Decker, the regimental postmaster. The litter teams took turns going out. He told the new men, as he had told the first five litter-bearers (one now dead and one now an amputee), that going after wounded involved no more danger than anything else connected with war. He assured himself that everything would be all right, and he placed his litter team in the rotation schedule.
The 131st and a lot of other units of the Army of the Potomac followed the trail of the Confederates along the Rappahannock River to its chief tributary, the Rapidan, moving along water that reflected the gray of the skies, day after day. Lee was outnumbered and outsupplied and kept ahead of the federals. Things didn’t heat up in Virginia until the war in the western theater turned very sour for the Union. General Braxton Bragg’s Confederates struck a terrible blow against General William S. Rosecrans’ Union forces on Chicamauga Creek, outside of Chattanooga, with more than sixteen thousand federal casualties. Lincoln and his cabinet held an emergency meeting and decided to detach Hooker’s two corps from the Army of the Potomac in Virginia and send them to Alabama by rail, to support Rosecrans.
With Meade’s army deprived of two corps, Lee stopped running. He split his army in two and tried to flank Meade, moving west and north, toward Manassas and Washington. So skirmishing began.
Meade was careful to keep between Lee and Washington, and the Union Army fell back a mile or two at a time, until they had given up forty miles to the Southern assault, with sporadic fighting.
Rob J. observed that each of the litter-bearers approached his task differently. Wilcox went after a wounded man with dogged determination, while Ordway showed an uncaring bravery, scuttling out like a great fast crab with his uneven gait, and carrying the victim back carefully, holding his end of the stretcher high and steady, taking the strain on his muscular arms to compensate for his limp. Rob J. had several weeks to think about his first pickup before it occurred. His trouble was, he had as much imagination as Robinson, and maybe more. He could think about getting hit in any number of ways and circumstances. In his tent and by lamplight he did a series of drawings for his journal, showing Wilcox’s team running out, three men bent against a possible headwind of lead, the fourth carrying the stretcher in front of him as he ran, a flimsy shield. He showed Ordway coming back, carrying the right-rear corner of the stretcher, the other three bearers with tight, scared faces, and Ordway’s thin lips bent into a rictus that was half-smile, half-snarl, a largely no-account man who had finally found something he was very good at. What would Ordway do, Rob J. wondered, when the war ended and he couldn’t go after wounded men under fire?
Rob J. drew no pictures of his own team. They hadn’t gone out yet.
Their first time was on November 7. The Indiana 131st was sent across the Rappahannock near a place called Kelly’s Ford. The regiment crossed the river at midmorning but soon was bogged down by intense enemy fire, and within ten minutes word came to the ambulance corps that somebody had been hit. Rob J. and his three bearers went forward to a riverside hay field where half a dozen men huddled behind an ivy-covered stone wall, firing into the woods. All the way up to the wall, Rob J. expected the bite of a projectile into his flesh. The air felt too thick to suck up into his nostrils. It was as if he had to force his way through it by brute strength, and his limbs seemed to work slowly.
The soldier had been hit in the shoulder. The ball was in the flesh and needed to be probed for, but not under fire. Rob J. took a dressing from his Mee-shome and bandaged the wound, making certain the bleeding was controlled. Then they put the soldier on the litter and started back at a good pace. Rob J. was aware of the broad target his exposed back presented at the rear of the litter. He could hear every shot that was fired, and the sounds of bullets passing, tearing through the tall grass, thunking solidly into the earth near them.
Amasa Decker grunted on the other side of the litter.
“You hit?” Rob J. gasped.
“Naw.”
Feet thudding, they half-ran with their burden, sliding after an eternity into the shallow defilade in which Major Coppersmith had set up his medical station.
When they had given over the patient to the surgeon, the four bearers lay on the soft grass like fresh-caught trout.
“They sounded like bees, those miniés,” Lucius Wagner said.
“I thought we was shit dead,” Amasa Decker said. “Didn’t you, Doc?”
“I was scared, but I figured I had some protection.” Rob J. showed them the Mee-shome, and told them its strap of cords, the Izze cloths, would protect him from being hurt by bullets, according to the Sauk promise. Decker and Wagner listened seriously, Wagner with a small smile.
That afternoon, firing almost ceased. The sides were at stalemate until around dusk, when two entire Union brigades crossed the river and swept past the 131st’s position in the only bayonet charge Rob J. would see in the war. The 131st infantry fixed its own bayonets and joined the attack, whose surprise and ferocity allowed the Union to overrun the enemy, killing or capturing several thousand Confederates. Union losses were light, but Rob J. and his bearers went out half a dozen more times for wounded men as evening fell. The three soldiers had become convinced that Doc Cole and his Injun medicine bag made them a lucky crew, and by the time they had come back safely for the seventh time, Rob J. believed in the power of his Mee-shome as strongly as any of them.
That night in their tent, after the wounded had been tended to, Gardner Coppersmith looked at him with shining eyes. “Glorious bayonet charge, wasn’t it, Cole?”
He treated the question seriously. “More butchery,” he said, very tired.
The regimental surgeon regarded him with disgust. “If you feel that way, why the hell are you here?”
“Because this is where the patients are,” Rob J. said.
Still, by the end of the year he had decided he would leave the Indiana 131st. It was where the patients were; he’d come to the army to give good medical care to soldiers, and Major Coppersmith wouldn’t allow him to do that. He saw that it was a waste of an experienced physician for him to do little more than carry a stretcher, and it made no sense for an atheist to live as if he were seeking martyrdom or sainthood. It was in his mind to go back home when his contract ran out, the first week of 1864.
Christmas Eve was a strange affair, sorry and touching at the same time. There were services of worship before the tents. On one side of the Rappahannock the musicians of the 131st Indiana played “Adeste Fidelis.” When they were done, a Confederate band on the far bank played “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” the music floating eerily over the dark waters, and then started right in on “Silent Night.” Bandmaster Fitts raised his baton and the Union band and the Confederate musicians played together, the soldiers of both sides singing along. They could see each other’s fires.
As it turned out, it was a silent night, no gunfire. For supper there had been no festive birds, but the army had provided a very acceptable soup with something in it that may have been beef, and each soldier of the regiment was given a tot of holiday whiskey. That may have been a mistake, for it
whetted thirsts for more of the same. After the concert, Rob J. met Wilcox and Ordway, weaving in from where they had killed a jug of sutler’s rotgut at the edge of the river. Wilcox was supporting Ordway, but he was unsteady himself.
“You go on to sleep, Abner,” Rob J. told him. “I’ll see this one into his tent.” Wilcox nodded and walked away, but Rob J. didn’t do as he had promised. Instead, he helped Ordway away from the tents and sat him against a boulder.
“Lanny,” he said. “Lan, boy. Let us talk, you and I.”
Ordway considered him with half-closed drunkard’s eyes. “… Merry Christmas, Doc.”
“Merry Christmas, Lanny. Let’s talk about the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner,” Rob J. said.
So he decided that whiskey was a key that would unlock everything Lanning Ordway knew.
On January 3, when Colonel Symonds came to him with another contract, he was watching Ordway carefully filling his knapsack with fresh dressings and morphia pills. Rob J. hesitated only a moment, never taking his eyes off Ordway. Then he scribbled his signature and signed on for another three months.