One moment he was in the saddle and the next he was on the ground with dirt in his mouth. He tried to get up and white, blinding pain exploded through his entire body. He fell and lay still, blood pouring from the great wound in his arm.
When he regained consciousness, it was night. He felt sick and weak. His mouth was parched. All round him he could hear the awful cries of the wounded and the groans of the dying. He had no idea where he was. I’d better get back, he thought. A man in a blue uniform appeared from nowhere, carrying a lantern.
‘Over here!’ he shouted. ‘Stretcher-party, over here!’ He knelt down and gently touched the wounded arm. White pain lanced through Jed again and he screamed.
‘Sorry, son,’ the man said softly. ‘Lie still, now. The stretcher will be here in a moment and we’ll get you to hospital. ‘
Stretcher? Hospital? Who for?
‘Am I hurt? Am I hurt badly?’ he asked.
‘What’s your name, son?’ the man in the Federal uniform asked him. That’s easy, he thought. It’s … He shook his head. Damned stupid. The man in the uniform frowned, his face hardening with impatience.
‘Now listen, boy,’ he said. ‘I’m a doctor. You’ll be well looked-after. Don’t be afraid. But I’ve got to have your name.’
‘I don’t know what it is. I can’t remember!’ Panic surged in him. He tried to sit up. Pain stopped him like a physical force. For God’s sake, what is my name? He could see the letters formed in the back of his mind, like a cat in the shadows. He could not make the words out.
‘You’re cavalry,’ the man said patiently. ‘Were you with Stuart this afternoon?’
Stuart: yes. ‘My name is Jedediah Strong,’ he said. ‘First Virginia Cavalry.’
‘Ah,’ the doctor said. ‘That’s better.’
‘Did we win?’
‘No, son,’ the man said gently. ‘Lee has retreated back across the Potomac. He’s been badly whipped.’
Jed felt an overwhelming sadness. It had all been a waste. All of it: locked armies tearing out each other’s hearts. And for what?
It all came back to him now, as he waited on the bloody grass for the stretcher-bearers: the sweeping cavalry charge, the shocking impact of the Federal cavalry riding against them. He vividly recalled the incredible sight of a Federal officer in a velvet uniform with gold braid in loops and whorls up to his elbows, long golden hair streaming in the sun, screaming ‘Come on, you Wolverines!’ to his men as he hurled himself into the very thick of Stuart’s cavalry. It had been a hand-to-hand fight, bloody, merciless. We might have beaten them but for the artillery, Jed thought. The damned artillery ruined us. He reached around with his left hand and gingerly touched his right arm. From the forearm to the shoulder it felt like a sponge full of water. He wished that there was light so that he could see, and he was glad that there was none so that he could not.
Gettysburg.
Jeb Stuart’s cavalry had been positioned on Popeye Ewell’s left flank to protect it from Federal attack and, if the chance presented itself, to attack the Federal right and rear. Every man in the command was bone weary before they even took up their positions. They had all been in the saddle for thirty-six hours, some longer. The horses were like bags of bones. Couriers bringing messages had to shake officers hard to get their attention. Men slept leaning on their horses’ necks or slid to the ground, unconscious before they hit it.
At noon on July 3, Stuart sent Jenkins’ skirmishers forward. The idea was to have Hampton’s and Fitz Lee’s brigades fall on the Federals after the skirmishers had shaken them up a little. But the damned skirmishers only had ten rounds of ammunition each and had to pull back when the Federals came out to meet them, supported by their artillery.
Seeing his skirmishers falling back, Stuart ordered cavalry forward: the 1st Carolina, the Jeff Davis legion, and one of Chambliss’s regiments. Cheering and screaming the Rebel yell, their over-used horses stumbling with exhaustion, the massed Confederate cavalry fell upon the Federals and cut them to pieces, driving them irresistibly back. But then they in turn were checked by the Federal artillery, firing canister into their packed ranks with devastating accuracy, tearing great gaps in the advancing line. Then, as the barrage lifted, the Federal cavalry, led by the long-haired blond man in the ornate uniform, counter-charged.
And that was all Jed knew.
Of the bigger battle in which he had taken part he knew even less. He had heard the deafening thunder of the guns high on Cemetery Ridge and the incessant roaring rattle of the massed rifles of the infantry. He had seen the movements of great bodies of men on the open ground, hidden beneath the rolling pall of white-gray smoke that lay across the battlefield like fog. From afar it sounded like giants dueling: their weapons fire, steel, thunder. He now knew the Federals had won the day. But nothing more.
Two stretcher-bearers came and lifted him on to the blood-wet stretcher. He cried out with the pain. They took no notice. They jogged stolidly across the field. All round Jed could hear the cries of other wounded men.
Pain spread like molten iron from his arm through the whole of his body. The white light searing his brain went red and then black and then he was in another place. He could see the two men carrying him on the stretcher across the dark, body-strewn battlefield. He could see the wounded and the dead. He could even see the bloody mess of his own shattered arm and he thought, poor me, I’m going to die. And in this place, beyond life, yet not quite as far from it as death, Jedediah Strong hovered above the pain with time as his plaything.
He was standing on the sunken road behind the stone wall below Marye’s Heights and the Federal soldiers were coming up the long, flat hill from Fredericksburg as though they were on parade, fifes skirling, drums in cadence, the bold, striped banners flying in the bright December sun. He watched them melting to the ground as the irresistible hail of shot struck them like a solid wall. Whole lines of walking men all at once lay down, like corn before a scythe. It was awful and it was wonderful, and unbelievably still more of them came, and more, clambering over the bodies of the dead and wounded to be killed themselves, gallant beyond any gallantry you could imagine, a gallantry pointless beyond any stupidity you could conceive.
And then pain.
It wrenched him back to consciousness. He was in a large tent. All round him he could hear screams. There was a stench he knew well: the copper stink of death. Great chunks of bloody flesh lay on the floor. Amputated limbs made piles as high as the table he was lying on, like offal from some insane butchery. The duckboards on the ground were soaked and slippery with blood. The surgeon who came across to him wore a once-white smock whose entire front was coated with gleaming blood, as if the man himself was mortally wounded. Even his arms were coated with it.
‘Well, son, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re going to lose that arm.’
‘No!’ Jed said. ‘I won’t let you.’
‘I know, lad, I know,’ the doctor said. ‘Orderly!’
Someone clamped a wet cloth over Jed’s nose and mouth, and he smelled the sweet, treacherous reek of chloroform. His senses whirled. He went down and down and away; but somehow, somewhere beyond the edges of his conscious self, he felt the knife and the saw, his body registered each hasty incision, each grating cut. Although he had no knowledge of it at all, somehow Jed was as aware of those burning strokes as if he had been fully conscious.
When he came to he was lying on a stretcher, torn by pain. You could not remember it afterwards. It swept through you, laying your senses waste. Then it was gone and you waited for it to come again and when it did it was beyond cognition. The sun was broiling hot. He was bathed in sweat; then he shook with fever and cried out for water that made him vomit when they brought him some. His throat was stiff and dry. He thought it was thirst. In fact it was from screaming. An orderly bent over him; his shadow blocked the sun.
‘Drink this.’
And all at once the pain was gone and did not come back for a long time, a long, long time. And then it came again, and swept over his senses like a tide. I am going to die of the pain, he thought, I am going to die of pain alone.
‘Drink this,’ the orderly said.
He was in a cot. The sun was gone. He saw a roof above his head. ‘What is it?’
‘Morphia,’ the man said. ‘For the pain.’
There were two states of existence: blessed, wonderful pain-free hours after they brought the morphia, the mind afloat in a sea of memories. Or the other state, when the filthy, broken, bloodstained thing in the cot dragged it back down to the pain, grinding, murderous, awful pain that clamped the teeth in a death’s-head grimace and convulsed your guts, pain you thought must surely drive you insane.
He was in the Montgomery house in Ashland, tall windows with white curtains letting in the soft sunlight, and the little Montgomery girl was playing the piano for Jackson, who sat in a plush chair, watching her fondly. She blushed with pleasure when he applauded, and he asked her to play ‘Dixie’. It was a tune some minstrel-show singer had written as a ‘walkabout’ he said, and its simple, striding melody had captured the fancy of every soldier in his army.
‘I heard it for the first time a few days ago,’ he said. ‘And thought what a splendid tune it was!’
‘But general,’ said Miss Montgomery, prettily dismayed. ‘I just played it!’
‘Ah,’ Jackson said. ‘I didn’t recognize it.’
‘Well,’ Bill Stevenson said later. ‘If he planned to surprise her with his knowledge of music, he sure as hell succeeded!’
Daylight.
He opened his eyes. He could hear the sound of mens’ voices. It was very warm, humid. His mouth felt bone-dry, his throat tight. He saw a woman in white leaning over one of the close-ranked beds. He tried to raise his arm to attract her attention. Nothing happened. And then he remembered and tears filled his eyes. Oh, God, he thought, why did such a thing have to happen to me? I would rather have died than this. He turned his head to the right. A man with dark hair was sitting on the next bed to his, watching Jed warily, the way a man would watch a wild deer come to feed at a pool, not wishing to startle it.
‘Water?’ Jed whispered. His mouth felt swollen, misshapen. All at once, in shuddering waves, the pain rolled through him like thunder, surge upon mounting surge of it. He heard shouting, the sound of running feet. He felt them lift him and the soft sweet trickle of liquid in his mouth. Then the roaring pain became a dull throb and then it was gone, and he was following a bright red light into a long black tunnel that led to oblivion.
He was under the trees at Chancellorsville and Bill Stevenson was dying in his arms. Others had picked up the wounded Jackson and hurried him to the rear, his arm shattered by bullets from his own panicked infantry, who had mistaken Jackson and his staff for Federal cavalry. Stevenson had been riding on Jackson’s right. Three bullets had. hit him, all in the chest. He thrashed on the ground until Jed got hold of him and held the bloody body against his own, as though by doing so he could stop his friend from dying.
‘Holy Mother of God!’ Bill whispered. ‘I never thought it would hurt like this, Jed! They never told me it would hurt like this!’
‘Hold on, Bill,’ Jed comforted him. ‘The stretcher-party will be here in a minute. Hold on to me.’
‘Like to … oblige you, Jed,’ Bill said. ‘But I don’t think I can manage it.’
He was silent for a long time. There was heavy firing off to their left. Once in a while a shell crashed through the trees. Wagons bashed along the road that led up to the Chancellor house, sparks flying from the horses’ shoes. Jed thought his friend must already be dead, but as he did, he felt him stir.
‘Remember our bargain, Jed?’ he whispered.
‘Bargain?’ Jed said, blinded by tears. ‘What bargain was that?’
‘About dying.’
‘I remember.’
‘Well, old son, it’s … bad news,’ Bill said, trying for a grin. ‘I can’t see a damned thing.’
And then he was dead.
Jackson died, too. They took off his arm and he was getting better, but pneumonia set in. Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees, he said.
Jed awoke, remembering Bill Stevenson.
He had been one of the golden lads made to win fame in war. They were not meant to die. They were meant to laugh their way through it, playing pranks like Jeb Stuart did, wearing a plumed hat. He remembered what he had dreamed, Bill Stevenson lying in his arms beneath the dark spread of the trees, the front of his uniform a bloody mash of flesh and bone. Golden lads and girls all must, something, something, come to dust. Poor, dear, smiling Bill. All those poor, dear, smiling, golden lads.
‘Howdy,’ someone said.
Jed looked up. It was the man he had seen watching him, the one with the dark hair and the dark eyes who was sitting on the next bed.
‘I’ve felt better,’ Jed said.
‘You’ve been out a long time,’ the man said. ‘My name’s Hampson. Friends call me Gerry.’
‘Jedediah Strong. Jed.’
‘Where’d you get it?’ Hampson asked, pointing at Jed’s arm with his chin.
‘Cavalry fight,’ Jed said. ‘Somewhere east of the town.’ He looked his own question. Hampson grinned and got up by using a crutch. Now Jed could see that Gerry had only about four inches of leg below the knee. ‘We was with Kershaw’s brigade,’ he said. ‘I got it in the Peach Orchard on the second day, an’ I was lucky at that. My company went in there forty strong. Only four of us come out alive!’
‘Does it hurt much?’
‘Like hell,’ Hampson grinned. ‘Just the same as yours.’
‘I’m tired,’ Jed said abruptly. He was asleep almost as soon as his lips formed the words. Hampson nodded and went back to his own cot.
He was passing through a railroad station, way up in the hills. The depot was empty except for a poor, thin waif of a girl, maybe twenty, wearing a faded calico dress and a sunbonnet. She had a little girl with her. While he watched her the train pulled in. The child skipped and laughed with delight at the noise and confusion. The girl did not move. Then, from one of the freight cars, two Confederate soldiers took out an unplatted pine coffin and laid it gently on the platform. They took off their caps for a moment then got back into the freight car. The girl sat down on the ground and put her arms around the box and leaned her head on it. The little child went on playing. The train pulled away. The girl did not move.
‘Come along, now,’ someone was saying.
He felt irritated. Why didn’t they leave him alone? He awoke to see a woman smiling down at him, a nice, motherly-looking woman of perhaps forty, with plain, country-wife features and warm brown eyes. She wore the white uniform of a Sister of Mercy.
‘Try to sit up, Colonel,’ she said gently. ‘We have to change your dressings.’
He struggled to a sitting position and for the first time was able to see the place he was in properly. It was a long, raw, hastily erected hut. The upright beams were of rough timber, with weatherboard nailed to them. There was no plastering and no windows. Daylight came in through apertures in the roof across which were stretched canvas sheets which could be rolled back, as they were now. At each end of the hut there was a door with a desk in front of it. There were two long trestle tables and chairs in the center of the hut. Along both walls stood closely packed rows of beds, with maybe no more than two feet between them. Sixty-four, Jed counted, as the nurse propped him up with a pillow. There was a droning sound; he realized it was the groans of the men in the beds. He could smell the ever-present stink of death. The nurse mixed something in a glass and gave it to him.
‘Drink this,’ she said.
He reached for it and nothing happened. Got to get used to there being no arm there any more, Jed thought. The strange thing was, it felt as if the arm was still there. If he closed his eyes, he could feel the fingers of his right hand flexing. The woman smiled and waited. She was obviously used to this.
‘There,’ she said as he took the glass in his left hand and drank the liquid.
‘What is it?’ he asked her.
‘Medicine,’ she said brightly. ‘It will do you good.’
He wondered why she felt it necessary to treat him like a child. He thought about asking her, but all at once he felt disinclined, relaxed and drowsy. He tried to remember what he had been thinking about and could not remember. It didn’t matter. He smiled as the doctors came across towards his bed. There was no pain as they took off the bandages and examined the stump where his arm had been. He watched their faces. They take it all so seriously, he thought. I suppose they have to. When they were done with him he slid into untroubled sleep.
Along the Rappahannock in June it was like summer. Hot sunlight irradiated the bright foliage of the close-set trees like green fire. Mockingbirds tried to ousting each other. There were wild strawberries ripening in the grass. Pickets, Confederate and Federal together, swam in the river, laughing and joking, trading tobacco for coffee, secure in their unofficial truce.
Off to Pennsylvania in the morning, the men sang as they marched. They did not sing any more when they came to the old battlefields, still littered with the detritus of earlier fights: rusted muskets, shoes, canteens, the shriveled skins of dead animals, human skulls, bones poking out of partially uncovered graves.
The pungent stink of pennyroyal, suffocating heat, no water. The cherries were not yet ripe but the men ate them anyway, and suffered for it afterwards with belly cramps and diarrhea. They marched through acres of grain, golder than the green growth and greener than the gold of ripeness. They trampled the flat fields of white daisies beneath their bare feet, Robert E Lee’s scarecrow army marching north.
He awoke.
His arm felt numb. Must’ve slept on it, he thought. Then he realized again that it could not be so because there was no arm there. Somehow the thought that his body was tricking him made him angry. The numbness turned to a throb.
‘Howdy, Jed,’ Gerry Hampson said. He was sitting at one of the tables with four other men playing cards. ‘How you feelin’ today?’
‘Good,’ Jed said. ‘Better. Hungry.’
‘We get fed around noon,’ Gerry said. ‘Half an hour.’ He introduced the other four. Joe Herndon, Mike Starr, Laurence Douglas, Peter Jordan. They were all leg amputees. Herndon was a lanky, slow-drawling man from Texas. He had honey-colored hair and malicious blue eyes that reminded Jed of his cousin Travis. Starr was from Georgia, Douglas from South Carolina. Pete Jordan was one of the boys who had walked across that mile of open ground towards the Federal cannon with George Edward Pickett’s division.
‘Right next to General Armistead,’ Pete told Jed in answer to a question. ‘About a hundred of us made it up there as far as Cemetery Ridge, followin’ Armistead with his cap on his sword.’ A hundred out of fifteen thousand men who had marched forward that day towards Hancock’s massed cannon and infantry, he said.
They talked desultorily. Jed was astonished to learn that it was the third week in August. Even more to be told that, on the day following their defeat at Gettysburg, Grant had taken Vicksburg. While they waited for the food, they each told him about their part in the battle of Gettysburg. He learned once more as he listened that every soldier remembers a battle only from his own point of view. He remembers what piece of ground he fought over, what he helped win or what he was forced to surrender. He recalls brief vignettes, a sight of his commander, the death of a comrade or an officer whose name he knows. He remembers exactly, where he was wounded himself and how it happened. He will never forget that. Little enough, Jed thought. He listened to them, endlessly trying to reconstruct the battle, knowing they never could. That would be a job for the historians.
Food came: corn bread, beans and meat in gravy. It was better food than Jed had seen for a long time. He found that he was very hungry, and very clumsy. After a few efforts with the knife, he banged it down on the tray.
‘No use gettin’ mad at the grub, Jed,’ Gerry Hampson grinned. ‘It’s ain’t doin’ nothin’ but sittin’ there, waitin’ to be et!’
‘I can’t cut the meat!’ Jed said. ‘I’m so damned useless I can’t even cut a piece of meat!’
‘Well, don’t expect no sympathy from me!’ Joe Herndon said. ‘Shit, man, I got to hop to the john!’
‘That’s right,’ Joe Starr chimed in. ‘Put the whole damn lot of us in a bag, we’d only make three whole men atween us!’
They laughed uproariously at that. Yeah, yeah, very funny, Jed thought, as he tried to manipulate the knife. It made him angry to be so clumsy: he had always prided himself on his co-ordination. But he stuck at it: there was only one way to learn. By the time he finished eating he was exhausted. He lay back and slid into a doze. The throb in his stump was like advancing thunder. He felt the pain coming like an army over a hill. Panic rose like water inside him. No, no, please, God no, he thought. He did not know that he was shouting aloud. He was lost in pain. They came running and again he recognized the sweet-soft taste of morphia. The red-black demons of agony slowly released their hold on him. He slept.