SIX
Five fifty p.m.
Eleventh Corps’ right flank
All God’s greenery gripped, grabbed, tugged, scraped, and just plain tried to trip up Sam Pickens, but on he went, busting his way through the undergrowth. Ahead, the skirmishers were having it out with the Yanks and the stump-a-fellow strangeness was that a blue-belly band just kept on playing, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Couldn’t yet smell gunpowder, but the perfume of Yank beef and frying bacon reached into the woods to lure on hungry men, to torment them body and soul.
“Keep moving, keep going,” Captain Williams shouted, barely heard above the thrashing and crashing of who knew how many thousand men going forward. All of the officers were hollering.
Pickens burst through a veil of blackflies, spitting them out and freeing a hand from his rifle to wipe his eyes.
More firing now, forward and to the right. A pair of cannon opened up.
The band’s music withered to a last few honks.
Somebody yelled, “Yankees!”
Men stopped, lifted their rifles, and fired into the brush. Then more of them fired. Peering forward, Pickens did believe that—maybe—he saw a blue line ahead.
He planted his feet and fired, shoulder bucking.
“Stop firing, cease firing! There’s nothing out there. Cease firing! Reload, men, reload at a walk!”
They went forward again, thrusting their carcasses through the dense, green nothingness into which they’d aimed their volleys.
There were no Yankees. Not yet.
Gobble some of that bacon, oh, Lord Jesus. Smelled like Christmas twice over.
The smell was everywhere but the bacon nowhere.
A deer shot from a hide. Pickens crouched, startled.
Infernal place. A man couldn’t see at all.
“Double-quick, march!” Lieutenant Colonel Hobson’s voice. Junior officers repeated the command.
Pickens didn’t see how they could go any faster through that Hell-sprouted undergrowth, but they did. They started screaming and howling.
Fright the Yankees and wake the dead.
No true line of battle left, just a scatter of souls by the dozens, hundreds, thousands.
In the thrill, he forgot the misery of his feet.
They broke through a wall of briars and found madness. In an open patch, men in gray and blue ran every which way, some just scooting off, others clinging to ranks and leveling volleys, the hardiest swinging rifles at each other, butts and barrels, smashing skulls. Men cursed and threatened or grunted ugly nothings. Pickens heard heavy speech he reckoned was German.
He swore he wouldn’t fire again without a plain target. Stepping over a blood-puling Yank who clutched a shiny horn, he just kept moving. The Yank had terrified, otherworldly eyes and graying hair.
Another Yank, confused or crazy, marched toward them at carry arms, as if on parade. Someone shot him. He twirled and fell. Then he got up, laid his rifle against a bloodied shoulder, and came forward again and got shot again.
Some fellows did get carried away, killing blue-bellies trying to surrender. Lieutenant Colonel Hobson saved one Yank himself and sent him rearward.
Smoke spread at shoulder level.
Yanks off to the right got up a match, but nothing much stood in the way of the 5th Alabama. Just bad ground and fools.
Everybody wanted somebody to fight, but they just weren’t there. They’d spilled so far around the Federal flank, it seemed, that they had all but free going.
Bullets zipped past, a flurry of them. Coming from behind.
Shot in the back, astonished, a man toppled.
In a rage, Hobson wheeled about, screaming and waving his sword.
“You’re shooting your own men! Cease fire, cease fire!”
Pickens realized that he’d outrun every last man he knew except the lieutenant colonel. He decided to stick with Hobson.
Where did everyone go? Plenty of yelling, gone-crazy soldiers crowded around, but not a one he recognized.
A second line overtook them, mingling.
“Forward! Forward!” unknown officers shouted.
A Yankee sergeant sat against an overturned wagon that had tried to run through the brush. The Yank just shook his head, staring down at the crimson-streaked slop of guts he held in his hands.
“Oh, my,” he said. “Oh, my…”
A line of blue-bellies tried to make a stand, maybe two companies. A longer line of Rebs formed, triple their number, to answer the challenge. They traded volleys, cutting the Yankee enterprise by half.
A wounded Union officer tried to pull his men back in fighting order, but Rebs swarmed all around them.
A Yank gun section let loose. Canister. Those who were not struck threw themselves to the ground.
By the time Pickens dared to raise his head, the guns had been captured, the horses of their limbers and caissons shot down.
He stopped a mad-eyed boy from firing into the melee, knocking the barrel of his rifle skyward.
“Don’t you shoot till you got something clear to shoot at, hear?”
The boy looked at him as though he understood nothing.
He briefly lost sight of Hobson amid the wild gray mass. So he just went on, yelling when everyone else yelled.
At the base of a tree, a beauty of a Newfoundland dog, shot through its belly, stared up at him.
His wound from Cross Keys had picked this day of all days to revisit him, but Colonel Leopold von Gilsa ignored the pain.
Riding along his crumbling lines, bellowing commands and trailed by a dwindling retinue, he cursed Heaven and earth, Devens and Howard. They had been warned, again and again.
Now they were all in the shit.
“Du Feigling, kehr um!” he told a fleeing man.
He slapped the fellow with the flat of his sword, but it did no good. The fellow ducked and cursed and called, “I ain’t none of your goddamned Dutchmen.”
There was pride, though, too. Good men stood their ground or gave it up grudgingly. The 153rd Pennsylvania stood like heroes.
But too many men grasped the odds they faced. Lines buckled and broke.
And the damned wagons. Those that had teams at hand clogged up the road, preventing the effective movement of troops. Dieckmann’s gun section on the Turnpike had been shot down or captured, unable to escape. The damned Rebels were everywhere, swarming, their lines extending as far as a man could see.
He’d had to watch from a hopeless distance as the Johnnies took Charlie Glanz, the colonel commanding the 153rd, prisoner in a fistfight. But Major Rice managed to re-form the regiment—what remained of it—a hundred yards to the rear.
The 54th New York was all but surrounded.
It galled him, but the only choice was to withdraw or lose his entire brigade.
He rode through his shattered regiments, unable to give the order. Until he heard another wave of triumphant Rebel yells.
He’d be blamed, of course. The “Germans,” the “Dutchmen,” would be faulted for this debacle. But he could live with shame. After the revolution had failed, the renegade Prussian officer had survived in exile by playing the piano and singing in Bowery bars. Yes, he could endure shame, even humiliation. But he could not kill brave men when there was no hope, when no good would come of it.
The 153rd Pennsylvania was the most exposed, their position had become a salient.
The Johnnies screamed that unearthly howl of theirs.
Von Gilsa turned to one of his two remaining aides.
“Captain Blau, trag mal mein Befehl an Major Rice. Er soll—nein, er muss—schnell retirieren.”
Order Major Rice to withdraw his men. He should—no, he must—do it quickly.
“Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst.” The young man spurred his horse.
The captain dropped from the saddle, hands clutched to his breast, before he had gone fifty yards.
Von Gilsa looked to his remaining aide, Ludwig Bisky.
Bisky nodded: Verstanden. I understand.
Spurring his mount into the smoke, the captain launched himself forward. In seconds, his head splashed blood and brains and bone.
“Scheisskerl.”
Feeling the weight of his years and wounds, von Gilsa thrust his saber into its scabbard and drew out his pistols.
Guiding his horse with his knees à la Russe, he charged into the maelstrom, cursing and firing to left and right. Not caring a damn whether his flag or any man followed.
Amazed, he reached the shrunken Pennsylvanian line, where Rice was manhandling any soldier who tried to run away.
“Gottverdammt, was willst Du, Rice? To send these boys to Hell? Withdraw now, save your regiment. Form on the next line.”
Blood splashed from von Gilsa’s neck.
He saw the horrified look on Rice’s face before he felt the pain.
Von Gilsa calmly holstered one pistol and probed the wound with his fingers. He wiped the blood on his trousers.
“Ist doch nichts. It is nothing. Withdraw your regiment, Herr Major.”
Rice began shouting orders. Faces blackened by powder, the Pennsylvanians inched back, struggling to keep their order. One man shouted:
“Let them other sonsofbitches run, we don’t skedaddle.”
Still capable of booming a response, von Gilsa wiped away more blood and told him:
“You obey orders, ja?”
As he turned to ride to another threatened spot, his horse reared, spurting blood from an artery, shrieking and writhing.
It fell on top of him.
The shock was enormous, stunning.
Rice and a handful of soldiers wrestled the quaking horse off the colonel, drenching themselves in gore.
Covered in blood himself, von Gilsa stood up. Astonishing his rescuers.
“Don’t just stand there,” the old Prussian told them. “Catch me another damned horse.”
“General, don’t you think you’re too close?” Sandie Pendleton—not without trepidation—asked of Jackson. Stray rounds fizzed past, teasing a man’s ear.
“I can’t see,” Jackson snapped. “I can’t see what’s happening.” He kept on riding forward.
Indeed, Pendleton thought. Already hard to make sense of the pieces. But the vital thing was that they were moving forward, and rapidly. Disarmed Yankees streamed toward the rear. Most were hushed and high-nerved, but some abused each other in English and German. As if soldiers in gray weren’t even present.
But present they were. Raleigh Colston’s line had just passed forward, headed into the fray. The division commander rode over when he saw Jackson. Pendleton eased his horse aside to make way.
A double punch of cannon sounded ahead.
Jackson called to a soldier headed the wrong way: “You turn around and do your duty. Where’s your rifle?” His voice was of iron and scorn.
Confused, the soldier, a young one, held up a tied-off stump where a forearm had been. Flies circled the clotting blood.
Jackson made no apology but rode on.
“Look at this,” Colston said as he came abreast.
Around them, the wreckage of Union camps displayed the wealth of Babylon—a Babylon now broken in the dust. Smoke wreathed the trees and the landscape stank of powder, shit, and bacon.
The air was alive with the means of death. Spent bullets pelted the earth like a storm’s first raindrops. On the ground, the wounded quivered beside the dead. But the stilled bodies in gray were few, vastly fewer than the number of Federal prisoners. It had all gone too fast for much killing to be done.
Just ahead, Colston’s lines were already threatened with disorder, ruptured by the landscape before they’d fired a shot.
“See to your men, General,” Jackson said. “By the grace of God, they must carry us to the end. See to their order.”
“Just moving so quick, all of it,” Colston said. He braved a smile. “It’s a triumph, General.”
Another Rebel yell rose.
“Not yet,” Jackson told him.
A runaway ambulance nearly felled both Howard and his horse. Turning into the brush, he lost his hat and a sharp branch scratched his face.
The Turnpike was a doomsday pageant of ditched wagons and overturned caissons. Artillery sections attempted to set up in the roadway, the only spot that promised fields of fire, only to find crowds of fleeing soldiers blocking their discharges. Then the Rebs flowed over them.
Major General Oliver Otis Howard, followed by a fraction of his staff, rode in among the soldiers who had gone quits.
“Don’t shame me, men! Don’t embarrass me!” Then he added, “Don’t shame yourselves, boys!”
A few men heeded him. Others paused then went on. Those infected with panic just ran gaping.
“I’ll have you all shot!” Howard shouted, but his voice had frayed. In quieter tones, he said, “I’m ruined, I’m ruined.…”
Devens’ division was all but gone. Exchanges of volleys, unseen, promised that lone regiments resisted, but those who attempted to form on the road were rapidly swept away.
Howard had barely returned from Barlow’s brigade when the world exploded. He’d ridden, promptly, toward the sound of the guns, leaving Schurz to change his front in haste.
The thought of the know-it-all Germans having been right was too much to bear.
Would Washington and the newspapers blame him? Yes, those reeking Germans had warned him of an attack, but Hooker was the one truly at fault. It was Hooker who had insisted that Lee was retreating. Wasn’t it? The view had been forced upon him. He was only responding to higher headquarters, a martyr to the errors of other men.…
Howard tried to recall if he had put any dismissive remarks in writing. He didn’t think so.
Could he trust Meysenburg to destroy anything embarrassing? Or would the man stick with his Germans? Better to ask Assmussen, who knew what was good for him.
All this was their fault, actually. The Germans. Yes, they’d warned him. But had they done anything? They could have acted on their own. But the Germans hadn’t lifted a finger, had they? And Joe Hooker, robbing him of Barlow’s brigade, his reserve …
How could he be blamed for any of this?
Would Greeley stand by him?
A regiment broke apart before his eyes. While some men stood, bitter and fierce, most ran. The Rebs surged almost to touching distance.
Howard seized the national colors from a fleeing bearer. He heaved the pole across his saddle and tucked it under the stump of his missing arm.
“Stop, boys!” he cried. “Rally on me! Rally!”
His horse reared and hurled him to the ground.
Orderlies dismounted and rushed to his aid. One of them fell with a cry, shot through the knee.
This was war. The fellow didn’t matter.
“Help me up,” Howard demanded. “Help me.”
Pickens almost shot the Yank in the belly. The fool had leapt out of the brush right in front of him, throwing down his rifle. Startled, Pickens came within a shaved second of pulling the trigger.
Instead, he commanded, “Give me that canteen, Yank. Hurry up.”
Slinging the canteen over his neck—it had the good weight of water in it—Pickens ignored the blue-belly and trotted on, catching up with the raggedy, broke-back pretense of a line. He continued to stick close to Lieutenant Colonel Hobson, and the colors rejoined them. Ed Hutchinson and Doc Cowin came up, too. Moving forward, they crested a mild slope and poured down the other side amid a gray torrent. There were ever longer intervals between the pauses required to drive off Yankees.
It seemed like they’d gotten well behind them. Unless all the Yanks had run off. No, that couldn’t be so. Organized volleys still tossed the pepper back and forth on the right, down toward that road.
Didn’t hear no Yankee cheering, though. They’d feel this whupping for a goodly time.
The light softened a touch. Excitement wrestled exhaustion.
“Fifth Alabama!” Hobson called. “To your colors, Fifth!”
Dutifully, Williams waved the battle flag. But other flags encroached, with other voices. Splintered off among strangers, Pickens’ chaw of the regiment seemed barely the size of a ration detail.
Beside him, a stranger clutched his thigh and fell headlong. The Yankees were still out there, after all.
Untended but handsomely saddled, a fine horse grazed amid pines.
“Get that horse!” the colonel cried. “Grab on to that-there horse!”
He scooted off toward it, yelling he had first claim.
Distracted, Pickens tripped over a played-out Yank, dropping across the man’s legs to slam the ground. His rifle didn’t go off, but it smashed his knuckles.
The blue-belly groaned. Then he whispered, “Help me, Johnny. Give me a swig, some water.” In the shadows, Pickens read a lieutenant’s rank. Barefaced but for small mustaches and young, the Yank was in a bad way, lung-shot and bubbling blood.
“Don’t know as it’s wise,” Pickens told him.
“Water. Please.”
From whence my succor cometh, Pickens thought. He took to his knees and helped the Yank to drink. The Yank tried to swallow, choked, and gasped. Blood foamed pink from his torn uniform. But the boy insisted on drinking again. His eyes gathered fading light.
When he could speak again, the lieutenant asked:
“What’s your name and regiment, Johnny? I’ll be ever mindful of you.”
“Sam Pickens, Fifth Alabama.”
“Can you help me? I need a surgeon. I’m bad.”
“Ain’t none here. Can’t even help my own kind.”
Sam Pickens decided he’d tarried long enough. The helplessness of it, his own and the Yank’s, unsettled him. He left his enemy and—feet still forgotten—ran puffing to rejoin his brethren.
There was a fight ahead.
“It’s our turn next,” Schurz told the Polish colonel. “Alex is doing the best he can on the road, but you … your regiments are all this army has for a flank now, Kriz. We’ve got to buy time for von Steinwehr, let him realign his division.”
Krzyzanowski remained imperturbable. Schurz could imagine the man in full Husaria armor, facing down the Turks before Vienna. The odds weren’t much better here.
In a calm voice, the Pole responded, “I understand.”
The Rebel yells sounded closer.
Lee felt a vast relief. The nagging probes of his overstretched lines had ceased, those people had other worries.
The sounds of battle from the west were music.
Jackson’s music.
As defeated soldiers streamed across the Chancellor house clearing, Joseph Hooker asked, “What happened?”
Amid his enemy’s devastation, Jackson found Robert Rodes attempting to impose order on his division.
Rodes had done well. But the critical hour lay ahead, the twilight hour, when they must turn a Federal calamity into a catastrophe, when they must inflict the Lord’s fulminous wrath upon heathen transgressors.
If Rodes expected congratulations, he was to be disappointed.
“The attack is slowing. It cannot be permitted to slow down,” Jackson told him.
“Sir … the regiments, the brigades … they’re intermingled. Even the divisions, it’s beyond description. And the men…”
Jackson understood that Rodes—an excellent officer—was trying. But he needed to try harder.
“Excuses don’t win battles. We must press them, General Rodes. You must press them.”
The Federals would be struggling to build a defense. It must not be permitted.
“Drive them,” Jackson ordered. “Shoot any man who runs. We must finish them now.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll see to it.”
“Show them no mercy,” Jackson ordered.
The Lord’s will raged within him.
What the devil was going on? Frank Barlow wondered. For over an hour he’d heard the sounds of battle from the northwest, about where he judged the Eleventh Corps to be. Yet he’d heard nothing from Howard, and his last notice from Sickles, sent hours before, had been to remain where he was and await orders.
Actually, he wasn’t sure quite where he was. He’d been given no map, and contact with Sickles’ corps did seem a bit tenuous. He’d begun to feel rather isolated.
A proper racket back there. It sounded like a rough match, with guns in play. He would have liked to get into it.
Of course, if he were needed, they would have recalled him.
Robert Rodes bullied bits and pieces of his division back into the semblance of a line. And he sent the men forward again, overtaking clots of soldiers splashed from a stew of regiments. Broken companies fought their own lesser battles in the brush, while more and more men, wearied, had gone to ground, waiting to be called to account by authority. Stray officers seemed to do more shouting than leading.
It was grand, though, despite all. They’d smashed into the Yankees, overwhelming them. By Rodes’ calculation, they’d advanced over a mile from the first contact.
And they would go farther. Jackson wanted it, he wanted it. It was essential to continue to overwhelm the Federals, to keep them off balance, to push beyond any resistance, to flood around their flanks, to complete the victory.
But what did Jackson have in mind for tomorrow? Or even for the next hour? With twilight nigh, how much farther should they go? Judged by the prisoners taken, they’d only encountered a single Union corps. At some point, a reorganization would be essential, before night descended and they themselves became vulnerable to the Yankees, before the odds reversed themselves.
Around him, officers and men shouted out the letters and numbers of companies and regiments, lost sheep all.
In blue or gray or patchwork brown, wounded men staggered about.
Cannon boomed close by, but he could not see their flashes.
Obedient and ever inspired by battle, he drove his men forward. He just wished that Jackson weren’t so infernally closemouthed, that he’d share some expectation of what came next and outline a plan.
Meanwhile, there was plenty of work to do.
He saw ghosts. Phantoms. Out there in the deep brush, deeper still than the tangles that clutched his uniform.
Lieutenant Karl Doerflinger, of the 26th Wisconsin, waited for his first sight of the elephant: Were those Johnnies? Or did he just have the jumps?
Commanding the center of the skirmish line, he hesitated to give the order to fire. He couldn’t tell if those darting forms—they seemed real now—were his own kind in flight or actual Rebs.
He peered into the premature dusk of the woods.
This was it, then. This was what it was like.
Late in the afternoon, Colonel Krzyzanowski and Colonel Jacobs had gathered in the officers of the 26th Wisconsin and of the 58th New York, which stood on their flank. The brigade commander had explained that they, a mere two regiments, formed the deep right flank of the entire corps. If the Rebs attacked, they would have to hold the high ground by the farmhouse, the only open terrain their division had, or the Johnnies would sweep into the rear and cut off the corps from the army.
For almost an hour, they’d heard the war, but they could not see it. The only physical evidence of combat came from fugitives, crazed men straying left and right, one crying that “a million” Rebs were upon them.
Hadn’t seen one Reb.
Until now. Perhaps. Those shadows.
Men, all right.
Rebs? Skedaddlers?
“Should we fire, Lieutenant?”
Doerflinger felt reluctant. He did not want to kill comrades.
The isolated phantoms swelled into a thrashing line of battle. They began to wail, unnerving.
“Aim and fire!” the lieutenant called. Hoping, even now, that he was right.
One rifle, two, dozens fired into the woods.
The advancing line halted. Voices foreign to Doerflinger’s ears barked orders.
A terrible volley slashed through the vegetation.
“Fire! Fire!” He could not remember another command.
The Rebs rushed forward again, screaming that wild witches’ cry, their Hexengeschrei.
“Gott im Himmel,” a soldier near him called out as he fell.
But no man ran. They stood by him. Expecting him to do things correctly.
A sergeant found him amid the brambles.
“Captain Pizzala … dead … brains come right out of his head…”
He was in command now. And the skirmish line’s fire seemed paltry, the Rebs a multitude.
“Fall back!” he shouted. “Fall back on the forward companies. Fall back!” He ran along his line as fast as the brush allowed, striving to ensure that every man heard him.
The Rebs were so close he could see their faces clearly, even in poor light. One man’s eyes met his. Hating eyes.
The Johnny raised his rifle.
Saber useless in his fist, Doerflinger dodged and followed his men.
Dutifully, his soldiers aligned with two companies posted forward, at the wood’s edge. They reloaded with speed.
All of that endless drilling had served a purpose.
With the last skirmishers cleared—barely in time—the companies let go a volley. The Rebs wavered, but only for a moment. There were so many, so many.…
The companies fired again. This time, the Rebs paused for a proper volley.
Directly to Doerflinger’s front, a soldier’s tunic tore open, spraying blood at shoulder level.
Others fell, too.
Doerflinger and his handful of men realized they’d been left behind, their comrades had already fallen back on the regiment.
The Rebs were nearly on top of them.
“Run!” Doerflinger ordered. “Run for the regiment! Run!”
He and his small flock of soldiers dashed across the open ground, cheered on by the blue line atop a slope. Doerflinger saw that he’d gotten mixed up in the woods: He was in front of the 58th New York, not his Wisconsin brethren. But he hadn’t time to correct his course and he aimed for the New Yorkers’ color guard, running as fast as he’d ever run in his life.
Something knocked him down, with a clang. When he leapt back to his feet, he saw that his sword’s sheath was bent at a useless angle.
No time to feel for a wound. He ran on and felt a tug on his haversack, felt it slipping away. Still running madly, he clutched the bag against him. The strap had been shot through.
“Come on, come on!” the New Yorkers hollered.
He finally grasped that they needed to shoot and didn’t want to hit him.
With a leap, he thrust himself through a gap they made for him.
Behind him, the Johnnies howled.
The New Yorkers fired.
By God, they stood the fire! Colonel Willie Jacobs was proud of his men, proud beyond words. As he sat on his mount directly behind them, he didn’t have a thought left for himself. Only for them, his boys, his Burschen.
“Give it to them!” he barked, in a voice that would have shocked him had he heard it raised in his bank back in Milwaukee. He had always insisted upon decorum, and the Second Ward Bank had been an island of civility, of order and financial chastity, in the city’s lively, grab-a-dollar streets.
He had never dreamed of going to war. But war had come to claim him. Now men who had trusted him with their savings trusted him with their lives.
“That’s it, boys! Knock ’em down. Knock ’em down like pins. Gib Feuer!”
Not a hundred yards away, Rebs massed in ragged lines took turns spitting flames from their rifle muzzles. In the softening light, the flashes appeared to be hundreds of giant fireflies.
Deadly fireflies. Hugo Carstangen, Jacobs’ sergeant major, crumpled. The senselessness of his posture, the odd sprawl of his limbs, announced his death.
The noise was painful. No drill field could prepare you for the noise.
Smoke thickened over the crest.
Jacobs’ horse quivered beneath him, as if gripped by a fever. Before Jacobs knew what was happening, the creature collapsed on its forelegs and he tumbled past its neck.
The animal shook its head and its mane flared, as if sweeping off flies. It struggled back to its feet and collapsed again. Jacobs rolled out of the way with a second to spare.
“You all right, sir?” Major Baetz asked. Men nearby had stopped firing, staring in concern.
Aching and raging, Jacobs got to his feet. “Zum Teufel, what are you looking at? Look at the Chonnies, not me. An die Arbeit!”
A miracle. The Rebs, greater in number, began to withdraw.
Krzyzanowski pierced the smoke, a broad-shouldered, somber man on a great black horse.
“They’ll be back,” he cautioned. “Fine work, but they’ll be back.” Above cutting cheekbones, his eyes were grave. “They’ll move around your flank. Refuse it by a company. Two, if you want. But hold as long as you can.”
Stung, the Rebs re-formed by the tree line. Within a minute, they sent out a well-controlled volley.
Krzyzanowski sat calmly in his saddle, leaning forward, as was his habit. But his eyes registered the losses all around him.
“We’ll hold,” Jacobs told him.
The Pole nodded but said nothing. He turned his horse to the left, toward the New Yorkers holding out on the other side of the farmhouse.
More of Jacobs’ soldiers dropped. And still more.
No man ran away.
Captain Winkler and his horse toppled together. Back from his duty on the skirmish line, Lieutenant Doerflinger shouted encouragement to the men, clutching his sword in one hand and, oddly, holding his haversack in the other. The young fellow managed to look both heroic and comical.
As Jacobs watched, Doerflinger’s leg buckled. Forgoing the sword and sack, the lieutenant clutched his thigh, bellowing in pain, rocking back and forth. Two of his soldiers dragged him behind the farmhouse then dashed back to the line.
Good men, such good men. The best men in Milwaukee’s German community.
They began to take fire from the flank, as Krzyzanowski had predicted.
He just didn’t have enough soldiers. He couldn’t pull more from the line.
How long had they been fighting? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? It seemed like hours and yet no more than an instant.
“Stand, boys, stand! Make your families proud! Stand for Wisconsin!”
Krzyzanowski reappeared. His face had been spattered with blood.
“Withdraw your regiment fifty paces. Re-form on the reverse slope.”
Jacobs gave the order. The company officers still on their feet repeated it.
Before he faded back into the maelstrom, the Pole told Jacobs, “I’ve sent to Schurz, I’ve told him we need reinforcements.”
“What’s happening?” Jacobs asked. “Everywhere else?”
Krzyzanowski opened his mouth to speak. Then he closed it again. Pondering. At last, he said:
“What matters is what happens here.”
The regiment stepped backward in good order, pausing to fire and bringing along as many of its wounded as could be carried. Many, too many, could not be moved.
The Rebs followed after. Shouting curses and threats. But they were more cautious now.
The back-and-forth volleys and loose firing resumed, reducing the regiment by the minute. The reverse slope helped little, it merely shortened the range. Looking over at the Johnnies, peering through the smoke, Jacobs understood that if the Rebs made one determined rush, his regiment would be overthrown in a blink.
His regiment. Never before in battle. And here the men stood. As unwilling to move as he was himself. No one would ever dare mock Germans again.
Back on his feet, Captain Winkler reported:
“Sir, we’re under fire from the rear, they’ve gotten behind us.”
“How many?”
“Some. Not many. Yet.”
What order could he give now? To refuse the refused flank? Was there such a command?
Krzyzanowski returned, at a gallop this time.
“I’ve ordered the Fifty-eighth to fall back. A fighting withdrawal. You need to pull back, too. We’re all but surrounded.”
“But … the reinforcements?”
“There are none. Not for us. They’re being held back with von Steinwehr. What few there are.”
“Where’s the rest of the army?”
The Pole shrugged. “Wherever they are, they’re not here. You need to pull back now, Willie.”
To his embarrassment, Jacobs felt tears crowd his eyes. His men … they’d fought for this ground. They were still fighting for it.
“I can’t. We can’t withdraw. I can’t leave all my wounded. There are too many.…”
Krzyzanowski’s expression didn’t change. He might as well have worn a mask.
“You will obey orders. Immediately.” His voice softened a degree. “Willie, you either pull back now, or you’ll all be captured. Those who aren’t killed outright. Your duty now is to save what remains of the regiment.”
The tears broke free.
“I can’t.”
In a voice trimmed by agonized centuries spent fighting off Poland’s enemies, Krzyzanowski told him:
“You will give the order this instant. Or I will relieve you from command.”
Jacobs did as bidden. As his men began to pull back, loading and firing as they went, the Pole sat fiercely upon his horse, as if bullets had best avoid him.
As the long spring twilight deepened, Jackson’s anger grew. It wasn’t enough to destroy a Union corps, or even two. His plan had been to split Hooker’s army apart, to drive past Chancellorsville and reunite with Lee, to devour half of the Army of the Potomac.
He meant to reach the Chancellorsville crossroads, at least, before halting for the night. Tired they might be, but the men did not need to sleep. Or eat. They only needed to rejoin their regiments and brigades and refill their cartridge pouches. In the first predawn light, they would renew the attack and connect with Lee’s right flank.
They had not gone far enough, not yet. He judged that another mile had to be covered before dark. Or after dark, if need be. They must not stop. The Federals must not be given one moment to breathe.
He rode from flank to flank, from general to colonel and on to the next general, always insisting that they continue the advance without the least pause, hastening batteries along, clearing ambulances out of the way for ammunition wagons to pass, ignoring the prisoners plodding rearward like sheep … if his men were disorganized, the Yankees were demoralized. They had been defeated. Now they had to be crushed.
His soldiers could do it. Men did not understand what they could achieve until you taught them. And Thomas Jonathan Jackson would see that they learned.
Joseph Hooker issued a flurry of orders. Swinging between interludes of near despair and bursts of confidence, he had directed Sickles to hurry Berry’s division back to bolster Howard; ordered Van Alen to prepare to contract the lines; established a provost marshal’s line to intercept runaway soldiers; alerted Slocum to be prepared to support; and called up the artillery reserve.
When the chief of staff approached him with another report, he concealed his quivering hands inside his pockets.
He was all right, though. His mind was clear.
The artillery was an especial challenge. He saw now that he had erred by taking away authority from Hunt. The damned self-righteous artilleryman had seen it all along: the guns needed a central figure in control, no matter how the corps and divisions complained. Now, on the field of battle, his artillery was all captains and no colonels.
It was always the one thing you took for granted that bit you, a snake coiled in the outhouse. The way he had assumed that barley and wheat would prosper on his ranch in Sonoma.
Brushing off the latest report of disaster, he called for his horse. It was time, at last, to see matters firsthand.
They surged forward again, weary men walking at a steady pace, flushing terrified Yankees from their hiding places just by putting one foot in front of the other.
“Got himself wounded,” Bill Lenier said. “Not to a muchness, though.”
Sam Pickens was sorry to hear that: He and Bob Price had shared many a blanket. He hoped that, indeed, Bob wasn’t too badly off.
In a small miracle, a number of the Greensboro Guards and more men from the 5th Alabama had found their various ways back to one another. Lieutenant Colonel Hobson had been wounded, too, but lightly. Colonel Hall didn’t quite have himself a regiment, but he had a respectable company’s worth of men again.
General Rodes came and went, all but flaying any man who lagged. The entire attack seemed to have regained its ambition.
Worn, though. They were worn. Ed Hutchinson was cursing to kill a deacon, angry as ever he’d been after tumbling, corporal’s stripes and all, into what he was convinced was a poison ivy patch.
“Hate this place,” he said. “Just hate it.”
Somehow they’d gotten rightward of the road, about the distance of a full company front, with men from the brigade gathered on both flanks and Colonel O’Neal in every bit as whipping a mood as Rodes.
“Old Jack lit a fire under those boys,” Joe Grigg put in. “Bet you gold dollars.”
“You ain’t got no gold dollars,” Ed Hutchinson told him, cranky.
Joe cackled. “Got me two Yankee watches, though. And looking for a third.”
Doc Cowin, recently reunited with his camp mates, said:
“Ah, the spoils of Troy.…”
They entered an open space marred by Yankee debris. It was a tad brighter, once out of the woods, with the field and sky about the same half-night paleness. They were even closer to the road now. A double line of strangers advanced ahead of them.
Rifle fire crackled here and there, and the occasional gun thumped in the distance, but they seemed to be through the worst of it.
“Think the Yanks went quits?” Joe Grigg asked.
His answer came immediately.
One right after the other, artillery pieces thundered to their front. The shadowed line ahead of theirs burst apart: men flew or fell, while some dissolved in a blur.
A severed head bounced toward them.
“Canister!” a man shouted. Others took up the cry. But few men went to ground. Instead, ranks closed and thrust forward.
A second turn of canister slowed them.
“Where are they?” a voice demanded.
“In the road. Ahead there, in the road.”
“Going to kill those blue-belly sonsofbitches.”
Again and again, Battery I of the 1st Ohio Light Artillery had been forced back—not by the Johnnies alone, but by the endless fugitives corrupting their already limited fields of fire. By the time the skedaddlers cleared the muzzles, the Rebs were all but atop them. Each Napoléon got off one round before the battery had to pull back and repeat the cycle.
Now it was different. Captain Hubert Dilger’s six guns faced a rough-made battle line of Rebs crossing a clearing. His artillerymen blasted them, reloading with practiced speed. It was the first time that day that Dilger felt he’d served a purpose.
The Rebs kept coming, regardless, their losses made good by ever more arrivals. His men kept firing. Gun crewmen jerked suddenly and collapsed, but the savvier Rebs aimed at the limber and caisson horses.
General Schurz appeared in the roadway.
“Dilger,” he called. “Hold as long as you can. We’re forming a new line.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Wiedrich’s lost half his guns. He’s in a bad way. I’m counting on you.”
Dilger wasn’t certain he heard much hope in Schurz’s voice.
He thought again of that dismissive cavalry major lounging at Hooker’s headquarters, the bastard who’d called him a coward when he tried to report that the Rebs weren’t retreating at all.
Where was that lout now?
Remnants of broken regiments rallied briefly by his guns, but as the Rebs closed the distance they melted away.
“One more round of canister each,” he shouted, riding his gun line. “Then move. Five hundred yards to the rear and unlimber again.”
Six muzzle blasts in succession sent Confederates flying to Hell. His men scrambled as Reb sharpshooters paused to aim at the horses.
Neighs, shrieks, chaos.
Three guns got off quickly, followed by a fourth then the fifth. The last gun had three horses down out of four. Still, its crew tried to cut the traces and drag off the gun. The Johnnies shot them down, one after another.
“Leave it,” Dilger told the survivors. “Get out of here, leave it.”
The gun was lost, he didn’t want to lose good men as well.
He turned his horse to follow his battery.
Johnnies screamed behind him, cursing him.
The horse buckled and fell, pinning him beneath its flank. As the animal convulsed, Dilger yanked the right rein as hard as he could, desperate. And the mount twisted up just far enough for the captain to free his leg.
He got up. Fast. Hurt like the devil. He almost lost his footing.
Bullets stung the air. Southern voices cried: “Give up, Yank. Give up, you murdering sumbitch.”
He ran, hobbling.
Not enough time.
The Rebs.
Hate to be shot in the back.…
His orderly rode back toward him through a blue cloud of fleeing infantrymen. Dilger ran stiff-legged toward him, aching at each second step. Inexplicably, his mind filled with the phrase the world as will and idea. He repeated it like a prayer, willing his survival.
Young and gun-crew brawny, the orderly barely halted his mount as he helped Dilger swing up behind his saddle.
Then they rode headlong.
His artillerymen cheered when they saw him. Their guns were ready to do their work again.
Schurz’s last attempt to form a division line consisted of the remains of five regiments. The men stood well, until a flood of Confederates flowed past their flanks, threatening to engulf them. The surviving field officers struggled to hold their commands together as the line broke.
Schurz tried to rally them, too. Several times he persuaded a number of soldiers to stop and face about. But as soon as the gigantic swarm of Rebs approached, they ran again.
There were just too many of them. The Johnnies were wild and disordered, but they came on in multitudes, smelling blood.
This wasn’t a contest of armies any longer. It was a battle between mobs.
He galloped back to Buschbeck’s line, where Schimmelfennig and Krzyzanowski were rallying their survivors to stand with von Steinwehr’s men by a country church. Even in the dying light, Schurz could see from one end of the blue line to the other. And there just weren’t enough men.
While they waited for the shrieking Rebs to appear through the brush or across the scant open ground, the soldiers dug frantically at their shallow entrenchments, wielding bayonets, tin plates, or naked hands.
Even the regiments that had held together smelled of defeat. They’d fight. For a time. But no man could say for how long.
Why hadn’t Hooker rushed up reinforcements? Why hadn’t Barlow’s brigade returned?
Before Schurz could reach his brigade commanders, Howard intercepted him. He’d glimpsed Howard often, right at the front lines—to the extent one could speak of lines—and no one could accuse the man of cowardice. Of folly, yes. But not of cowardice.
The corps commander had regained a degree of composure.
“Krzyzanowski,” he began, mispronouncing the Pole’s name as he always did, “was magnificent. At that farmhouse. My compliments.”
“You should tell him yourself, sir.”
Howard’s features weakened. “I tried.” After a painful interval, he added, “He was busy. He was too busy.…”
Schurz said nothing.
“I’m ruined, you know,” Howard said, with remarkable calmness.
Schurz almost exploded, a human round of canister. Howard wasn’t ruined. He never would be. Schurz knew the politics of it better than any man on the field. Many another might be ruined over this debacle. But not Howard.
“I need to see to my men,” Schurz excused himself.
Buschbeck’s line collapsed and with it went the hope that von Steinwehr’s division might redeem the corps. Outflanked yet again, the surviving regiments withdrew in relative order this time, simply unable to withstand the onslaught, their ranks infected with a soldier’s sense that they had been hopelessly beaten and could do no more. Generals and colonels rode back and forth in the deepening darkness, attempting to maintain discipline and rally the soldiers on the brigades rushing forward from other corps.
An unidentified officer galloped about, shouting an order to the last holdouts to join the withdrawal.
But Hubert Dilger did not want to abandon his position. So he didn’t. He kept his five remaining guns in battery, covering the collapse.
The Rebs were at once triumphant and angry, converging on him in the gloaming, roiling shadows under the sky’s faint paleness, spooks from a child’s nightmare.
He had one stroke of luck. The last blue-coated men to retire along the road were Ohio boys, from the 61st. Dilger hailed an officer he recognized, but when the captain didn’t respond he spoke right to the men:
“Don’t abandon Ohio’s guns, Sixty-first! Stand with us, cover our flanks.”
Men slowed, but didn’t stop. The few officers seemed doubtful.
“Damn it, Ohio!” Dilger snapped. “We’re staying. Somebody’s got to put up a fight.”
“By God,” a man called from the ranks, “that Dutchman’s right.”
At first a few, then dozens of the Ohio infantrymen spread out by the guns.
For a handsome moment, they stopped the Rebel advance, with the foot soldiers firing and shouting, “Ohio! Ohio!” while Dilger’s crews worked their fieldpieces. The artillerymen were black as minstrels now and wreathed with smoke, darker than the new night.
Dilger had no time to revel in his small victory. His turned his attention back to directing fire at the most urgent targets, the lunging shadows in the open stretch.
“Converging fires, midfield! Number two gun, drop a quarter turn. Report!”
“Number one ready!”
“Number three…”
The Rebs were undeterred, and they were a multitude. Man by man, then in small groups, the Ohio infantrymen faded into the shadows until only a hard-minded dozen or so remained.
Dilger had taken his orderly’s horse. He dismounted and returned it. His men were deafened and he had to grasp Lieutenant Dammaert by the sleeve to command his attention. He shouted in the man’s ear:
“Withdraw every piece but Allen’s, he’s got the last intact crew. Take them back to wherever the next line’s forming and go into battery. Listen to me: Leapfrog the caissons as you go, dump charges and all the canister that’s left by the side of the road, pile it every hundred and fifty yards, all the way back. Jump to it!”
“You—”
“Just go, Bill. Save the guns. Go!”
He strode over to Corporal Allen’s fieldpiece and told the men, “Rope her up and wheel her into the center of the road. Then load double canister. Don’t fire until I tell you.”
Turning to a last cluster of infantrymen, he announced:
“We’re staying. One gun. Glad of any support you choose to give.” And he turned his back, leaving them to their consciences.
With hard-practiced agility, the gun crews limbered up. Dead horses were cut from their harnesses and whips cracked.
And they were gone.
An artilleryman with a swab in hand fell bleeding.
The Rebs howled and rushed forward again.
Dilger let them come.
An infantryman, a man who had made the fateful decision to stay, dropped beside him and lay there with stilled eyes.
“Let them get closer.”
“Sir, for—”
“Closer!”
Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel waere … Yes, the world was full of devils, packed with them.
“Now!”
The doubled canister shredded man-meat four rows deep and ten yards in breadth.
“Haul her back, let’s go.” He looked to the remaining infantry soldiers, still a solid dozen. “Grab the ropes, half of you. Help us.”
Their fellow Ohioans pitched in. Chased by bullets and taunts, they dragged the cannon along the road at a dog’s trot, with Dilger limping beside them. The infantrymen who had not found a grip on the guide ropes returned fire.
The night was alive with blinks of light and brief glares. There was just enough last paleness along the road for Dilger to spot the piled ammunition.
“Halt. Load single canister. Then double it. Corporal Allen, fire when ready.”
An unexpected volley from a wood line swept the gun crew, leaving only the corporal and one man standing.
Dilger pitched in, putting his shoulder into the wheel to turn the loaded gun toward the wood before the Rebels had time to reload.
Infantrymen rushed to help.
“Drop trail. Now. Back!”
Corporal Allen yanked the lanyard.
The fieldpiece bucked and spit fire.
“Re-center, re-center.”
As they wheeled the gun back to face down the road, an infantry sergeant told Dilger, “We can crew ye up, Cap’n. For we’ve seen it done time enough.”
And they did. They gave the Rebs another double load of canister then manhandled the piece back another stretch.
The darkness was their last friend.
Thrice more, the lone gun and its guardians made a stand. Corporal Allen was wounded, as were men whose names remained unknown to Dilger. At last, out of ammunition and all but surrounded, Dilger ordered his tiny command to abandon the piece and save themselves.
Without a word spoken, the infantry soldiers chose to save the gun.
When they were safely behind a thickening Union line, with fresh troops pouring in, the infantry sergeant dropped the gun rope and told Dilger:
“Couldn’t leave her, yer honor, sir. For we’d formed us a fond attachment.”
The sin of pride was a danger unto him. He knew it and he resisted. He would not revel in what his men had done. Nor would he accept this verdict of weariness. The work was not yet accomplished, the last and sweetest grapes had not been gathered.
Sensing Hill’s presence in the smoke-addled darkness, Jackson said:
“We cannot stop. Not now. You must drive your men forward.”
“General Jackson, I can hardly find my men. We need to reorganize. Hooker still has entire corps uncommitted.…”
Jackson knew that Hill resented—perhaps hated—him. But it mattered not. Hill was a loathsome sinner, visited by the Lord’s enduring punishment.
Hill had been weak and derelict, at West Point and at Cedar Mountain, and here there could be no weakness.
“You will go forward.”
They were so close. Another half mile, perhaps less.
Cut them down, cut them in two. Smite them, drive them from Israel, from Judah, and then from Canaan.
They were close, tantalizingly close, to shattering Hooker’s pagan army by midnight, before the Lord’s day began.
Yes, there would be fighting on the morrow, whatever happened tonight. But less, less.
Cannon still thundered. Union guns. Their defense had begun to show character. This labor had to be made complete, Pharaoh’s chariots must be overturned, their masters drowned not in the Red Sea, but in a sea of their unholy blood.
One last, hard push.
He closed his eyes in prayer and beheld a pale horse.
