[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  Pickett’s division, the army’s rear guard, missed the first two days of the battle centered around the small crossroads town in Pennsylvania. Arriving that night, they made camp behind a sheltering ridge and were told that they would attack the next day in the assault that would shatter the Yankees for good and all. Pickett, who had been assigned elsewhere during Lee’s last two victories, was delighted. At last he would have his opportunity for glory.

  The next morning the officers of Pickett’s division and the other two divisions that would make the attack were taken forward over the sheltering ridge to see the enemy positions. The attack would go there, said Lee, pointing with a gloved hand. Aiming for those umbrella-shaped trees on the enemy-held ridge, beneath which there was said to be a cemetery.

  Standing in the stirrups of his white-socked thoroughbred, craning at the enemy ridge, Poe felt a darkness touching his heart. Across a half-mile of open ground, he thought, in plain sight of the enemy, an enemy who has had two days in which to dig in…

  Was Lee serious? he thought. Was Lee mad?

  No. It was not to be thought of. Lee hadn’t lost a major battle in his entire career, Sharpsburg, of course, being a draw. There was method in this, he thought, and he could discern it through ratiocination. Perhaps the Yanks were weary, perhaps they were ready to give way. In any case, he had resolved not to complain.

  Pickett left the ridge whistling, riding toward the Yanks to scout out the ground. Poe and the other brigadiers followed.

  Longstreet remained behind. Poe discovered later that he had seen the same things that Poe had seen, and wanted a last chance to change Lee’s mind. When time came to order the advance, Longstreet could not give the order. He just nodded, and then turned his head away.

  Later that day Poe brought his men forward, marching with drawn sword at the head of the Ravens, Hugin and Munin crackling and fluffing their feathers on their perch just behind. He remembered with vivid intensity the wildflowers in the long grass, the hum of bees, the chaff rising from the marching feet, the absolute, uncharacteristic silence of the soldiers, seeing for the first time what was expected of them.

  And then came the guns. There were two hundred cannon in the Northern lines, or so the Yankee papers boasted afterward, and there was not a one of them without an unobstructed target. In the last year Poe had forgotten what shell-fire was like, the nerve-shattering shriek like the fabric of the universe being torn apart, the way the shells seemed to hover in air forever, as if deliberately picking their targets, before plunging into the Confederate ranks to blossom yellow and black amid the sounds of buzzing steel and crying men.

  The sound was staggering, the banging and the clanging of the guns, guns, guns, but fortunately Poe had nothing to do but keep his feet moving forward, one after another. The officers had been ordered to stay dismounted, and all had obeyed but one: Dick Garnett, commanding the brigade on Poe’s left, was too ill to walk all that way, and had received special permission to ride.

  Garnett, Poe knew, would die. The only mounted man in a group of twelve thousand, he was doomed and knew it.

  Somehow there was an air of beauty about Garnett’s sacrifice, something fragile and lovely. Like something in a poem.

  The cemetery, their target, was way off on the division’s left, and Pickett ordered a left oblique, the entire line of five thousand swinging like a gate toward the target. As the Ravens performed the operation, Poe felt a slowly mounting horror. To his amazement he saw that his brigade was on the absolute right of the army, nothing beyond him, and he realized that the oblique exposed his flank entirely to the Union batteries planted on a little rocky hill on the Yankee left.

  Plans floated through his mind. Take the endmost regiment and face it toward Yankees? But that would take it out of the attack. Probably it was impossible anyway. But who could guard his flank?

  In the meantime Pickett wanted everyone to hit at once, in a compact mass, and so he had the entire division dress its ranks. Five thousand men marked time in the long grass, each with his hand on the shoulder of the man next to him, a maneuver that normally took only a few seconds but that now seemed to take forever. The guns on the rocky hill were plowing their shot right along the length of the rebel line, each shell knocking down men like tenpins. Poe watched, his nerves wailing, as his men dropped by the score. The men couldn’t finish dressing their ranks, Poe thought, because they were taking so many casualties they could never close the ranks fast enough, all from the roaring and the soaring of the guns, guns, guns…. He wanted to scream in protest. Forward! Guide center! But the evolution went on, men groping to their left and closing up as the shells knocked them down faster than they could close ranks.

  Finally Pickett had enough and ordered the division onward. Poe nearly shrieked in relief. At least now the Yankees had a moving target.

  But now they were closer, and the men on the Yankee ridge opened on Poe’s flank with muskets. Poe felt his nerve cry at every volley.

  Men seemed to drop by the platoon. How many had already gone? Did he even have half the brigade left?

  The target was directly ahead, the little stand of trees on the gentle ridge, and between them was a little white Pennsylvania farmhouse, picture-book pretty. Somewhere around the house Poe and his men seemed to lose their sense of direction. They were still heading for the cemetery, but somehow Garnett had gotten in front of them. Poe could see Garnett’s lonely figure, erect and defiant on his horse, still riding, floating really, like a poem above the battle.

  The cemetery was closer, though, and he could see men crouched behind a stone wall, men in black hats. The Iron Brigade of Hancock’s Corps, their muskets leveled on the stone wall, waiting for Garnett to approach…

  And then suddenly the battle went silent, absolutely silent, and Poe was sitting upright on the ground and wondering how he got there. Some of his aides were mouthing at him, but he snatched off his hat and waved it, peremptory, pointing at the cemetery, ordering everyone forward. As he looked up he saw in that instant the Federal front blossom with smoke, and Dick Garnett pitch off his horse with perhaps a dozen bullets in him; and it struck Poe like a blow to the heart that there was no poetry in this, none whatever….

  His men were plowing on, following Garnett’s. Poe tried to stand, but a bolt of pain flashed through him, and all he could do was follow the silent combat from his seated position. A shell had burst just over his head, deafening him and shattering his right thigh with a piece of shrapnel that hadn’t even broken his skin.

  Another line of men rushed past Poe, Armistead’s, bayonets leveled. Poe could see Armistead in the lead, his black hat raised on saber-tip as a guide for his men, his mouth open in a silent cheer, his white mane flying…. And then the last of Pickett’s division was past, into the smoke and dust that covered the ridge, charging for the enemy trees and the cemetery that claimed them, leaving Poe nothing to do but sit in the soft blossoming clover and watch the bees travel in silence from one flower to another….

  The first sound he heard, even over the tear of battle, was a voice saying “Nevermore.” Hugin and Munin were croaking from the clover behind him, their standard-bearer having been killed by the same shell that had dropped Poe.

  The sounds of battle gradually worked their way back into his head. Some of his men came back, and a few of them picked him up and carried him rearward, carried him along with the ravens back to the shelter of the ridge that marked the Confederate line. Poe insisted on facing the Yanks the entire way, so that if he died his wounds would be in the front. A pointless gesture, but it took away some of the pain. The agony from the shattered bone was only a foretaste of the soul-sickness that was to come during the long, bouncing, agonizing ambulance ride to the South as the army deserted Pennsylvania and the North and the hope of victory that had died forever there with Armistead, he had died on Cemetery Ridge, shot dead carrying his plumed hat aloft on the tip of his sword, his other hand placed triumphantly on the barrel of a Yankee gun.
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  “Law is dead, General Gregg is wounded,” Poe reported. “Their men have given way entirely. Colonel Bowles reports he’s lost half his men, half at least, and the remainder will not fight. They have also lost some guns, perhaps a dozen.”

  Robert Lee looked a hundred years dead. His intestinal complaint having struck him again, Lee was seated in the back of a closed ambulance that had been parked by the Starker house. He wore only a dressing gown, and his white hair fell over his forehead. Pain had drawn claws down his face, gouging deep tracks in his flesh.

  “I have recalled the army,” Lee said. “Rodes’s division will soon be up.” He gave a look to the man who had drawn his horse up beside the wagon. “Is that not correct, General Ewell?”

  “I have told them to come quickly, General.” Ewell was a bald man with pop eyes. He was strapped in the saddle, having lost a leg at Second Manassas—during a fight with those damned Black Hats. Now that Poe thought about it, perhaps the Black Hats were becoming a leîtmotiv in all this shambles. Ewell’s horse was enormous, a huge shambling creature, and the sight of it loping along with Ewell bobbing atop was considered by the soldiers to be a sight of pure high comedy.

  Poe thought it pathetic. All that stands between Grant and Richmond, he thought, is a bunch of sick old men who cannot properly sit a horse. The thought made him angry.

  “We must assemble,” Lee said. His voice was faint. “We must assemble and strike those people.”

  Perhaps, Poe thought, Lee was a great man. Poe could not bring himself, any longer, to believe it. The others here had memories of Lee’s greatness. Poe could only remember George Pickett, tears streaming down his face, screaming at Lee when the old man asked him to rally his command: “General Lee, I have no division!”

  Poe looked from Ewell to Lee. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I would suggest that Rodes be sent north to contain Hancock.”

  Lee nodded.

  “The next division needs to be sent to Hanover Junction. If we lose the railroad, we will have to fall back to Richmond or attack Grant where he stands.”

  Lee nodded again. “Let it be so.” A spasm passed across his face. His hands clutched at his abdomen and he bent over.

  We may lose the war, Poe thought, because our commander has lost control of his bowels. And a case of the sniffles killed Byron, because his physician was a cretin.

  The world will always destroy you, he thought. And the world will make you ridiculous while it does so.

  General Lee’s spasms passed. He looked up, his face hollow. Beads of sweat dotted his nose. “I will send an urgent message to General W.H.F. Lee,” he said. “His cavalry division can reinforce that of General Fitzhugh Lee.”

  Bitter amusement passed through Poe at Lee’s careful correctness. He would not call his son “Rooney,” the way everyone else did; he referred to him formally, so there would be no hint of favoritism. Flattened by dysentery the man might be, and the Yankees might have stolen a day’s march on him; but he would not drop his Southern courtesy.

  Another spasm struck Lee. He bent over double. “Pardon me, gentlemen,” he gasped. “I must retire for a moment.”

  His aides carefully drew the little rear doors of the ambulance to allow the commander-in-chief a little privacy. Ewell turned his head and spat.

  Poe hobbled a few paces away and looked down at his own lines. Gregg and Law’s brigades had given way an hour ago, on the fourth assault, but of the Yanks in the woods there had been no sign except for a few scouts peering at the Confederate trenches from the cover of the trees. Poe knew that the longer the Yankees took to prepare their attack, the harder it would be.

  A four-wheel open carriage came up, drawn by a limping plow horse, probably the only horse the armies had spared the soberly dressed civilians who rode inside.

  They were going to the funeral of the Starker girl. Battle or no, the funeral would go on. There was humor in this, somewhere; Poe wondered if the funeral was mocking the battle or the other way around.

  He tipped his new hat to the ladies dismounting from the carriage and turned to study the woods with his field glasses.

  Hancock had broken through to the north of the swampy stream, but hadn’t moved much since then—victory had disorganized his formations as much as defeat had disorganized the losers. Hancock, when he moved, could either plunge straight ahead into the rear of Anderson’s corps or pivot his whole command, like a barn door, to his left and into Poe’s rear. In the latter case Poe would worry about him, but not till then. If Hancock chose to make that lumbering turn, a path which would take him through dense woods that would make the turn difficult to execute in any case, Poe would have plenty of warning from the remnants of Gregg and Law’s wrecked brigades.

  The immediate danger was to his front. What were Burnside and Wright waiting for? Perhaps they had got so badly confused by Poe’s attack that they were taking forever to sort themselves out.

  Perhaps they were just being thorough.

  Poe limped to where his camp chair waited and was surprised that the short walk had taken his breath away. The Le Mats were just too heavy. He unbuckled his holsters, sat, and waited.

  To the west, Rodes’s division was a long cloud of dust. To the south, Rooney Lee’s cavalry division was another.

  Another long hour went by. A train moved tiredly east on the Virginia Central. Rooney Lee’s men arrived and went into position on the right. Amid the clatter of reserve artillery battalions galloping up were more people arriving for the funeral: old men, women, children. The young men were either in the army or hiding from conscription. Soon Poe heard the singing of hymns.

  Then the Yankees were there, quite suddenly and without preamble, the trees full of blue and silver, coming to the old Presbyterian melody rising from the Starker house. The bluecoats made no more noise on the approach than Pickett’s men had on the march to Cemetery Ridge. Poe blinked in amazement. Where had they all come from?

  Then suddenly the world was battle, filled with the tearing noise of musketry from the trenches, the boom of Napoleon guns, the eerie banshee wail of the hexagonal-shaped shells from the Whitworth rifled artillery fired over the heads of Poe’s men into the enemy struggling through the abatis, then finally the scream and moan and animal sounds of men fighting hand to hand….

  Poe watched through his field glasses, mouth dry, nerves leaping with every cannon shot. There was nothing he could do, no reserves he could lead into the fight like a Walter Scott cavalier on horseback, no orders he could give that his own people in the trenches wouldn’t know to give on their own. He was useless.

  He watched flags stagger forward and back, the bluecoats breaking into his trenches at several points, being flung again into the abatis.

  He felt a presence over his shoulder and turned to see Lee, hobbling forward in his dressing gown and slippers, an expression of helplessness on his face. Even army commanders were useless in these situations.

  The fighting died down after Wright’s first assault failed, and for the first time Poe could hear another fight off on his right, where the Lee cousins were holding off Burnside. The battle sounded sharp over there. Poe received reports from his commanders. Three of his colonels were wounded, one was dead, and Clingman had been trampled by both sides during a squabble over a trench but rose from the mud full of fight.

  The Yankees came on again, still with that grim do-or-die silence, and this time they gained a lodgement between the Ravens and Corse, and the Confederates tried to fling them out but failed. “Tell them they must try again,” Poe told his messengers. He had to shout over the sound of Whitworths firing point-blank into the Yankee salient. He looked at the sad figure of Lee standing there, motionless in his carpet slippers, his soft brown eyes gazing over the battlefield. “Tell the men,” Poe said, “the eyes of General Lee are upon them.”

  Maybe it was Lee’s name that did it. Poe could no longer believe in great men but the men of this army believed at least in Lee. The second counterattack drove the
shattered Yankees from the works.

  The Yankees paused again, but there was no lack of sound. The Confederate artillery kept firing blind into the trees, hoping to smash as many of the reassembling formations as they could.

  What did a man mean in all this? Poe wondered. Goethe and Schiller and Shelley and Byron thought a man was all, that inspiration was everything, that divine intuition should overthrow dull reason—but what was inspiration against a Whitworth shell? The Whitworth shell would blow to shreds any inspiration it came up against.

  Poe looked at Lee again.

  A messenger came from Fitz Lee to tell the commanding general that the cavalry, being hard pressed, had been obliged by the enemy to retire. A fancy way, Poe assumed, for saying they were riding like hell for the rear. Now both Poe’s flanks were gone.

  Lee gave a series of quiet orders to his aides. Poe couldn’t hear them. And then Lee bent over as another spasm took him, and his young men carried him away to his ambulance.

  There was no more fighting for another hour. Eventually the rebel artillery fell silent as they ran short of ammunition. Reserve ammunition was brought up. Messages came to Poe: Hancock was moving, and Burnside was beginning a turning movement, rolling up onto Poe’s right flank. Poe ordered his right flank bent back, Clingman’s men moving into Hanover Junction itself, making a fort of every house. His division now held a U-shaped front.

  What did a man mean in all this? Poe wondered again. Nothing. Byron and Shelley were ego-struck madmen. All a man could do in this was die, die along with everything that gave his life meaning. And it was high time he did.

  Poe rose from the chair, strapped on his pistols, and began to walk the quarter mile to his trenches. He’d give Walter Whitman a run for his money.

  The fight exploded before Poe could quite walk half the distance. Wright’s men poured out of the woods; Burnside, moving fast for once in his life, struck at Hanover Junction on the right; and unknown to anyone Hancock had hidden a few brigades in the swampy tributary of the North Anna, and these came screaming up out of the defile onto Poe’s undermanned left flank.