The Damned of Petersburg Read online

  Then he remembered that he was an officer, too.

  “Some general needs to shit or get off the pot,” Sergeant Eckert said.

  This time, Brown didn’t shush him.

  Want to waste a unit’s ration of spunk, this was how to do it. As they’d rushed from the covered way to form up, they’d seen the slope that led up to the pit. A Reb gun section concealed on the right spewed canister. The slaughter every man witnessed didn’t lift hearts, and giving men time to ponder it was a cruelty.

  The 50th had been mostly spared so far, but Brown reckoned they’d get no more than thirty yards up the slope before the roll of the ground served them up like beefsteaks.

  “Alles doch Wahnsinn,” First Sergeant Losch complained. “What do they wait for?”

  Even Losch, a Dutchman as hard as anthracite, sounded unsteady.

  Just get up the damned hill, Brown coaxed himself. Just get your men up the hill and into those trenches. Just do that. Then see what comes next.

  The heat, fierce and early, stuffed his mouth with dirty cotton. He’d warned the newer men to ration the water in their canteens. But they’d waited so long, through darkness and light, that his own canteen sloshed hollow.

  “What the bejeezus?” Levi Eckert asked. He’d raised his head to stare northward.

  Brown looked, too: The brigade’s right wing was up and moving forward. Part of it, anyway. The movement seemed out of joint.

  He heard no orders from anyone, but hard on the flank of the 50th, the New York Germans scrambled to their feet. A moment later, they, too, plunged uphill, in disordered lines.

  With Major Schwenk still recovering from his wound, Captain Brumm was the regiment’s senior officer. He dashed along the 50th’s front.

  “On your feet, men!” he ordered. “Dress the line, dress your lines!” But the captain didn’t—couldn’t—wait: The assault had taken on a life of its own. Brumm pointed uphill with his sword. “Forward, Pennsylvania!”

  “Led into battle by a damned watchmaker,” Levi grumbled. Not meanly, though. Brumm was one of their own, a Company C man, and he’d risen by merit.

  With his own sword still an oddity in his hand, Brown called orders to Company C, pulling the others along by his example.

  Up that slope. Calves burning from the first steps. Brown about-faced and briefly marched with his back turned to the enemy, inspecting the ranks that followed, bidding them close on him.

  A soldier staggered and dropped. Not from Company C.

  Brown faced the ridgeline and the great ruckus again. A few more yards and they’d be in butcher’s range.

  Off to the right, men cheered.

  Smoke drifted downward, speckled with points of light.

  “Auf! Auf!” a burly German officer called. He sounded like a barking dog to Brown.

  Captain Brumm shouted, “Charge!”

  The 50th gave a dry-throated hurrah. Brown rushed uphill, comrades running beside him. Men panted and growled, leaning into the steepness.

  The trench line’s parapet loomed through the smoke. Those speckles of light came from rifles thrust beneath head logs. Brown judged that his men could cover the open ground before most of the Johnnies up there had time to reload.

  An enfilading artillery round struck the front rank of the New York Germans, spraying blood across the slope to the 50th. Some Dutch bastard wailed, “Verloren! Alles verloren!”

  The New Yorkers turned and ran.

  Didn’t go straight back down the hill, either. They bolted to the left, away from the Reb crossfire, stampeding through the ranks of the Pennsylvanians.

  Brown swung the flat of his sword at the closest runaways, threatening them with his pistol, and Levi went at them with his rifle butt, cursing to fright the devil out of his doings. But the New Yorkers wouldn’t be stopped.

  Some men from the 50th joined the rout.

  Not Company C, though.

  Not yet.

  Reb shells found the range and added to the chaos. The left wing of the brigade’s attack collapsed.

  Captain Brumm manhandled men with no regard for their regiment, shoving and punching and kicking them back up the hill. But for every man arrested, a dozen more fled.

  The captain’s eyes met Brown’s.

  Brown shook his head: Plain hopeless.

  “Fiftieth Pennsylvania!” the captain shouted, raw-throated, fighting the uproar. “Fiftieth to the ground! Lie down, down where you are! Officers, see to your companies.”

  Brumm didn’t lie down himself, though. And somewhat to his surprise, Brown didn’t go to ground, either. He paced the broken ranks, counting heads and trying to rally those good men gripping the hillside.

  “Oh, cripes, Brownie,” Billy Wagner said, “get down yourself and don’t be no damned fool.”

  “That’s ‘Lieutenant Brown’ to you,” Adam Burket corrected him. Then he added, “Lieutenant Brown, get the hell down, would you? God knows who they’d make a lieutenant next.”

  Men lying nearby cackled and catcalled, possessed by the soldier’s humor amid death.

  Brown dropped to his knees. But he didn’t join the merriment. He felt sickened.

  Just another colossal, useless waste. All of it. Only good that he could see in the business was that, for once, Company C had not suffered a single loss. That made the failed assault almost worth celebrating, he supposed.

  Brown wondered if anyone’s heart had been in the attack. Soldiers handled badly behaved badly. Men would risk their lives, even give their lives. Plenty had done so since they crossed the Rapidan. But they wanted to see a point to it. There had just been too many head-on, headlong, headstrong attacks that amounted to nothing but dead and wounded comrades. Especially here, in this godforsaken place, a landscape so forlorn it was nature’s poorhouse.

  Captain Brumm ordered a withdrawal by companies. Their fight was over.

  Seven forty a.m.

  30th U.S. Colored Troops

  His men had a chance to fight at last, and Colonel Delavan Bates led them with all the vigor of his twenty-four years. His regiment of U.S. Colored Troops long had been consigned to minding the rear and guarding supply trains, to chasing wayward beeves or digging trenches. But not today.

  Even the vague orders passed down through Colonel Sigfried, that terse command to “Go forward at once,” had not daunted him, nor had the apparent stalemate up on the ridge. He believed in the men he led, believed in them deeply, and intended to prove their worth for all to see.

  “Fix bayonets!” he shouted, a command echoed quickly by the company officers.

  Steel scraped steel.

  “Trail arms. By the right flank … march!”

  And this was it, their moment. He led the way, scrambling over the sandbag bridge to pass the old lines, and his men funneled after him in a double file. It surprised him that the way forward had not been cleared in the hours of struggle, but excitement beat down a momentary doubt.

  The slope ahead crawled with wounded men struggling down through the corpses. Fired from a flanking Rebel battery, canister and solid shot scraped the ground, playing rag doll with living and dead alike.

  Turning, Bates called, “Thirtieth, forward! Forward!” He stepped on the paw of a wounded man, who cried out.

  Don’t falter, he warned himself. Do this for them.

  A fan of canister found the regiment, slaying half his color guard. Blood hosed the survivors and a head flew past, chased by other bits of meat and bone. Bates saw a first man turn and run, only to be beaten by his sergeant, clubbed back into the ranks.

  The colors rose again.

  “Lieutenant Bowley,” Bates shouted, “align your company.”

  Bowley, in turn, bawled orders at his line-closers.

  Many a black face was ashen now. But jaws were fixed and eyes narrowed.

  “Company officers! Look to your alignment!”

  Not enough to be brave. Bates wanted his men to show better than those who had gone before and faltered. Bett
er than those who jeered at the notion of the Negro in uniform.

  More men fell. Some cowered. Sergeants raged. The majority tramped onward. Up the slope. In what passed for good order on this day.

  Bates had not been in a battle since Gettysburg, where he had led white men, and he had forgotten how the singular roar broke down into parts as you entered it, separating into the crumping of distinct blasts, the rip and hiss of shot, the queer singsong of bullets that missed their mark, and, not least, the myriad sounds men made in fury and suffering.

  He lofted his sword again, pointing to the right flank of the pit, where he believed Colonel Sigfried wanted the regiment. He wished his orders had been a bit more detailed.

  As Bates closed on the crater, debris and bodies challenged the regiment’s order. Men surged forward, sensing protection amid the jagged walls raised by the blast.

  Bates leapt over a shelf of earth and nearly tumbled forward, blundering into soldiers bursting with curses. His own men pushed from the rear.

  “Good Lord, Bates!” an almost familiar voice called. He recognized General Bartlett, of the famed cork leg. Another brigade commander, Colonel Marshall, stood beside him, uniform filthy. “Get your Abyssinians out of here! There’s chaos enough!”

  “Del, go to the right,” Marshall told him more calmly but as firmly. “Your men can help out there, clear out more trenches. You’re worse than useless here.”

  When he turned to his soldiers he felt their lust to kill. And nearly anyone would suffice for an enemy.

  He shouted his voice to a ruin, pushing back through the tumult to master his men, pulling them out of the flank of the pit, confusing them with no time to explain. Feeling his way as best he could, he led them to the right, northward, along a trench line so crowded the regiment barely could pass Indian file. By turns, white soldiers cajoled his men or mocked them, making way grudgingly.

  He tried a traverse, but found it packed with troops milling without purpose. Dead men lay trampled underfoot, their uniforms blue or a vague and ragged gray.

  It was impossible to make an attack from those trenches.

  Bates ordered his men to face about again. He led them in a scramble back over shattered head logs and ruptured parapets, back into the treacherous freedom of the killing ground between the former lines. Bellowing until he choked, he warned his officers to control their men.

  Deprived of other courses of action, he tugged his dwindling regiment northward again, paralleling the trench line and braving a storm of fire. No longer pausing to look back to see if men followed, he dashed ahead, sword held aloft, until he judged he had passed the final traverse in Federal hands.

  When he turned about at last, most of his men were still with him. Their order was barely discernible, but it would do. Pivoting toward the Reb abatis, he raised his cap on the tip of his sword and shouted, “Forward, Thirtieth! Charge!”

  His voice was so raw and the racket so great, he realized few men heard him. Cap lofted high on the tip of his blade, he waved his men on with his left hand and began to weave his own way through the obstacles. Blessedly, the artillery had blown gaps in the defenses.

  Busy sniping at Federals in the traverses, the spread-thin defenders were shocked not only by blue-clad soldiers leaping the parapet, but by their black faces.

  His soldiers went at the Rebs with the fury of madmen. Some Johnnies just ran. Others fought back in a rage and were shot, bayoneted, and clubbed. Quick contests of man against man collapsed into mob killings. Waving his soldiers on to the next traverse, Bates saw a Reb pop out of a bombproof and fire his rifle against a corporal’s chest.

  “Nigger sonofabitch,” were the Reb’s last words

  One man after another put bullets in him. When he dropped, Bates’ men beat him with their rifle butts and bayoneted his corpse.

  The sight appalled Bates, but there was no time to chasten those soldiers or anyone. And he could not help but feel he understood. To the degree any white man might.

  A black sergeant brought a Reb battle flag to show him. The fellow was bloody and beaming.

  The close-quarters fighting pressed to its end, the ugliest business Bates had seen in the war. The remaining Johnnies ran high-tail or surrendered, and Bates’ next challenge was to come to the aid of a captain shielding a half dozen disarmed Confederates from his own soldiers.

  “Don’t let them niggers kill us,” a cracker voice pleaded.

  Bates shoved the leveled rifles aside and snapped, “Stop it. That’s enough.”

  The command met bulging eyes and flaring nostrils, curled mouths and heaving chests. Men in blood-christened uniforms, with bayonets ready to plunge. For a brazen moment, Bates was uncertain whether he’d be obeyed.

  “The next man who harms a prisoner will hang,” he said in a voice he hoped was sufficiently firm. “Move on, if you want to fight. There’s work aplenty.”

  His soldiers grunted and went along, trailing a mood of grievance.

  “Good Lord, Del,” a white voice said.

  Bates turned and found Seymour Hall, colonel of the 43rd U.S. Colored Troops, heading a file of his soldiers.

  “Followed you in,” Hall explained. “Only thing that seemed to make any sense.”

  First, Bates spoke to his captain. Pointing at the prisoners, he said, “Get these men out of here. Fast. Hand them over to the first white soldiers you find.” Then he asked Hall, “Morrie, can you shift to the right? Can you push over to the right?”

  Hall nodded. “Do what I can. Ain’t this the damnedest, though?”

  Shouts and screams sounded a few traverses off.

  “Have to keep them in hand,” Bates said. He shook his head. “And the high and mighty insisted these men wouldn’t fight.…”

  Hall nodded and set off.

  Bates followed a blood trail past mutilated corpses. When he reached the ditch where the thrust had finally stalled, he found his men silent and panting. The angriest of them leveled their rifles over the lip of dirt, enthralled by the prospect of killing men who once might have been their masters. Others sat inspecting their wounds, more amazed than distraught. The rest reloaded their weapons, ramrods clanking, or wiped gore from bayonets. One man vomited hugely.

  A hard-eyed soldier asked Bates, “We done good for you, Colonel?”

  Before Bates could answer, a tap on his shoulder made him jump embarrassingly.

  Major Van Buren, one of Burnside’s staff men.

  “You’re a long way from home, Van Buren,” Bates said.

  “Where’s Colonel Sigfried?”

  The question surprised Bates, although he couldn’t say why. He, too, had been caught in the frenzy, if less brutally.

  “Haven’t seen him,” Bates told the major, “since we left the line.”

  “Why have your men stopped?”

  That question, too, startled Bates. “This is as far as my orders go. If they went this far.” He glanced about. “And these men … these men have done splendidly.”

  “But you’ve stopped.”

  “Good Lord, man, we just broke through the Rebs and took dozens of prisoners. More than dozens. And a battle flag.” He grimaced and gestured toward the next Reb position. “Listen to that volume of fire. How much do you expect of a single regiment?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I expect. General Burnside wants Sigfried’s brigade to take the cemetery, up on the next ridge. And you’re closest.” He took off his cap and wiped away sweat with his sleeve. “Look, Colonel, it can’t be far. You need to go forward now. By order of the corps commander.”

  Bates listened to the implacable rifle fire to his front.

  “If you need to see a written order…” Van Buren reached into his blouse.

  Bates waved him off. “If you wouldn’t mind asking Colonel Hall to support us? On our right?”

  “Where’s Hall?”

  Bates gestured down a traverse. “Over there somewhere.”

  “That’s not much help,” the major said. But he d
id head off in what seemed like the right direction.

  Bates considered his men, their evident combination of shock and exalted exhaustion, of bloody ecstasy and lingering doubts. They needed to be reorganized, made back into soldiers again. But if they had to resume the attack, well, the sooner the better. Every moment allowed the Rebs to organize their next line.

  Walking the trench and addressing the men, he said, “One more bit to do, boys. One more stretch of line out there needs taking.” Trying to read these faces made suddenly strange, one, then the next, and the next, faces that he had believed he knew, he declared, “I’m proud of you. I could not be more proud. You showed them what you can do. Now I need you to follow me again. And to behave like soldiers, disciplined soldiers.”

  They understood. “Fort Pillow,” a man muttered.

  Bates turned on the fellow. “Damn Fort Pillow. You need to be better than them. Can’t you see that?” He stopped himself. No time for sermons. Words wasted lives.

  “Officers! Get your men up.…”

  Perhaps two hundred soldiers remained within range of his voice. Forgoing the formal orders of the drill field, he simply shouted, “Come on!” And he led the way over the parapet.

  A shocking volley struck them as soon as they left the ditch. As if the Johnnies had known they were coming and waited. Men tumbled back into the trench or doubled over, gut-shot.

  “Come on!” Bates sliced the air with his sword.

  It wasn’t far to the Rebs, not far at all. A man could throw a stone and hit them square.

  But his men fell too fast. The barely formed line staggered.

  “Come over here, you black-ass sonsofbitches, see what you get,” a Reb yelled out.

  Another called, “Shoot their goddamned nigger-loving officers.…”

  It was the last thing Bates heard before something struck him powerfully in the cheek, snapping back his head and almost dropping him. He stumbled and clutched his face, discovering a bloody slop on the side of his head, a mess of flesh and bone. Maybe teeth, as well.

  Blinded, he thrust out his other hand, grabbing the air and fighting to keep his balance.

  A second bullet struck him and spun him around.