“A bite’s not enough.” Humphreys shook his head. “At least, the ground at Cold Harbor looks a bit better, we should be able to get at them for once.”
“
If
we hit them before Lee has time to turn it into a fortress.” Meade’s face grew as somber as the day was hot. “I can’t abide this slaughter, Humph, just banging up against entrenchments the men know can’t be taken.”
“Tell Grant.”
“I have.”
“And?”
“You know.”
Humphreys nodded. “And we’ll both obey our orders to the end. We’re trained like show horses.”
“Well,” Meade mused, “Grant was a champion horseman at West Point.” He shook his head, part weariness, part despair. “One hopes he knows what he’s doing, after all.”
“Lincoln believes in him. Grant’s got the man charmed. Two westerners. Speak the same language, I suppose.”
Meade sighed and could not resist saying, “I wish he’d believed just half as much in me. What you and I could have done together, Humph…”
The final increment of departing troops left a billow of dust. Another contingent of infantrymen turned into the road, marching in the opposite direction. These men, in distinctly different spirits, headed toward the war.
Humphreys shook his head. “You’re right, though. War’s changed. And I suppose it’s only going to get deadlier. Story of mankind’s history.” His smile twisted, as if screwed from within. “Give us time enough, and we’ll figure out a way to kill every last man and dog upon this earth.”
“Oh, come now. It’s not as bad as all that.”
“You’re more of an optimist than I am,” Humphreys said.
Meade laughed. He could not remember the last time he had laughed like that. “Great God, Humph! I believe that’s the first time any man’s ever said those words to me. I’ll have to write Margaret and tell her.”
Humphreys shared a smile, but didn’t quite laugh. “All right, George. Too much thinking, not enough doing. I’ll go back in, push Wright and pull on Hancock.”
“Warren?”
Humphreys shrugged. “Back to his old tricks. More promises than activity. Complains that his men are tired. We’re
all
tired, for Christ’s sake. And Burnside’s always got an excuse. He’s like a tardy schoolboy.”
Meade shifted the subject back to the day’s priority. “I wouldn’t mind a bit, if Wright—or even Baldy—gave Lee’s men a whipping. Not a good day when only Sheridan shines.”
“Well, shine he did. He’s a curious man, our little mick.”
Meade swept a drift of dust away from his face. “What I’ve noticed about Sheridan … is that he’s quite the shebeen scrapper, all right. He
likes
to scrap, that’s the thing. But ask the man to do what cavalry should, screen the army or conduct reconnaissance, and he’s Burnside on a horse.” He frumped his chin, pulling thoughts into words. “I’ll be fair to the man, though: He’s splendid when he’s doing what he wants to do. And worthless at anything else.”
The gnats swarmed the two men again. Virginia hardly seemed worth such a terrible struggle. “Make sure Hancock’s on the road by dark,” Meade said. “If Wright makes any progress, Grant will want a general assault in the morning.”
“And if Wright
doesn’t
make progress, Grant will want an assault in the morning.” Humphreys shook his head, swatting at the flies and turning to go. “I
want
to believe he’s right. After we’ve lost nearly half the men we had back on the Rapidan.” He raised his eyes. “What you said about our friend Sheridan? Apply it to Grant, too. He’s all for doing what he wants to do. And the rest of the world can go hang.”
From the miasma of dust along the road, a man emerged astride a grand brown horse. A small retinue trailed him, edging past the soldiers plodding south.
“Speak of the devil,” Humphreys said.
Four p.m.
Via’s Farm
None of them understood it. And explaining wouldn’t do. They wouldn’t know what to make of it. But some things just had to be.
He dismounted and, limping slightly, approached Meade and Humphreys. The injury he’d taken from his New Orleans tumble had come back to nag him, right out of the blue. The way an attack ought to come. You needed to hit the enemy the way pain struck a man, without warning and without mercy.
“Don’t hear the guns,” he said. There was desultory artillery fire in the distance, as well as the intermittent snap of rifles, but the two men understood him.
“Soon,” Meade said. “Wright and Smith don’t step off until five.”
Grant nodded. “Late.”
“The men were exhausted. Smith’s last division still hasn’t closed.”
Grant sensed that Meade would have liked to point out Orr Babcock’s role in the mess of a march the night before. But he knew Meade would restrain himself just short of mentioning it. Meade bucked sometimes, but never enough to embarrass a good rider. Unlike that damned black stallion in New Orleans. He could still hear the slice of horseshoes on wet cobbles in that instant before the beast tumbled sideward. With him still in the saddle.
“Smith’s only got the ammunition his men are carrying,” Humphreys put in. “No medical supplies, either. Or rations.”
“Give him what he needs,” Grant said. “Rather see the men first and supplies after, than the other way round.”
Meade and Humphreys. Excellent officers, good men. But they could not see beyond the coming fight. Meade knew exactly what the book said a man should do, and Humphreys could have written the book. But the book didn’t work anymore. Books tried to help a fellow win a battle, but what mattered now was to win campaigns entire.
The scale of war was bigger now. Big as the country.
“Things all right with Hancock?” Grant asked.
“Yes, Sam, they are,” Meade said. “He’ll begin to withdraw as soon as darkness falls. Skirmishers will remain to keep Lee occupied. Captain Paine from the staff will guide the march.”
“Hit Lee hard,” Grant said. “And early. Wright and Smith can start things up today, keep the Rebs off balance. But we’re going to have to finish the job in the morning.”
Meade nodded. “We’re agreed on that. The last thing any man in this army wants to do is give Lee time to entrench again. The casualty lists…”
Men who had never been poor as dirt didn’t understand the hard-figured cost of things. Meade and Humphreys were fine, fine men. But they did not understand, even now, how much killing this would take.
He figured things were just about up with Lee. Put up a devil of a fight, give the man that, but the Reb attacks across the past few days had been easily broken. Feeble. Lee’s boys had to be about bled out. Take more blood to finish them off, though. And you couldn’t shy from it.
Just had to make up your mind to do a thing. All the fine generals fought to win battles, trying again and again, while the war dragged on. Even Sherman had had a touch of that, thinking in terms of winning the next battle, all clean and proper. Cump was about over that now.
You just could not relent, no matter the cost. If you did, the lives already spent were wasted. The way the Union was going to win this war was to outspend the Confederacy on every account, in men and blood, war supplies and gold, and to apply a strategy that didn’t look just at Virginia or Tennessee or the Mississippi Valley, but at all of it at once, from Georgia to Indian territory. You had to step back and look at how the whole country fit together and not worry too much over any one little piece of it. You had to see farther and think bigger than your enemy. And you had to close your heart to suffering now to save yourself greater misery tomorrow.
He had been trained as all these fine officers had, by West Point, Mexico, and the frontier Army. They had been taught how to build bridges and harbor fortifications, how to fight brown men forced to fight by others, and how to keep a knee square on the back of broken Indians. But this war wanted more, a great deal more.
Meade, Humphreys, Hancock … good men and fine. Skilled officers. And skill mattered. But nothing mattered as much as strength of will. The man who couldn’t fight to the last of his soldiers just wouldn’t do anymore.
Lee had that strength, the necessary hardness. But Grant knew the man didn’t see the country whole.
He
hadn’t trapped Lee in Virginia. Virginia had trapped Lee.
Lee
had trapped Lee. And this was where the idol would be broken.
You had to swing the hammer, and not worry about whose fingers might be crushed.
Lincoln understood. Didn’t like all the pieces, but he saw the puzzle whole. Maybe it had to do with the western rivers, the way they captured the spirit. Maybe it all had started with him as a boy, taking his father’s tanned hides down the Ohio to the Mississippi and on down south, getting schooled in the bigness, the immensity, of the living land, with its muddy veins and arteries. Maybe all this was a child’s dream made real with the blood of millions.
Didn’t matter if it was. All that mattered was winning.
To the south, artillery opened
en masse
. Wright’s guns. And, he hoped, Baldy Smith’s batteries, too.
He lit a cigar to keep off the flies and said, “Wouldn’t mind a cup of your mud coffee, George.” He creased his mouth in a smile to put his hosts at ease.
No, they didn’t understand. Lincoln did. And Sherman, more and more. But the only other person who saw it was Bill.
“Yassuh,” his servant had said to him, “you jes’ like a dog has got him a big ole ham bone. Eat up all the meat to once, then chaw that bone in two. Even if it cut that ole hound’s mouth all up and bleeding. Just ain’t got no give-up, no suh-ree. I pities the man try to take that bone away.”
Lee was a bone that had to be chawed in two.
Four forty-five p.m.
Cold Harbor
The mulberry trees had been picked clean, as if by biblical locusts, and the dead had all been buried in shallow pits. His brigade had relieved the cavalrymen at noon, arriving so weary that many a soldier could barely keep his feet, but Brigadier General Emory Upton adhered to his hard-learned standards: The dead Confederates from the morning’s fighting had to be put in the earth, not to honor them—he would not honor men who fought for slavery—but to keep his own men in health. Discipline, sanitation, and faith were his bedrocks, and he would not have his men lie down among corpses.
There would be more corpses, many more. The artillery had already begun its work, firing at targets hidden by a veil of scrub pines. His trusted 121st New York had deployed a heavy skirmishing party to clear the Rebs from their forward rifle pits, but the main Confederate line lay across a field and beyond a grove. His skirmishers reported trees felled as obstacles in front of a trench line that had already been given head logs. The enemy had learned to fortify with speed.
He rode back into the low ground where his first line stood ready. The soldiers looked dusty and worn, impatient, nervous, and eager. Beneath the grit, their uniforms were new. They had not seen the elephant.
His shriveled brigade had been reinforced by a garrison artillery regiment, the 2nd Connecticut Heavies, who had been converted into infantrymen with the suddenness of Saul transformed into Paul on the road to Damascus. Those fifteen hundred new, untested men had more than doubled his brigade’s strength on the road not to Damascus, but to Richmond. And their colonel, a profane but earnest man, Elisha Kellogg, had volunteered his men to lead this attack. Upton had been glad of it. If the artillerymen wished to disprove the jeers that they were bandbox soldiers, that was meet and good. Their turn had come to suffer battle and put their trust in the Lord. And his ever-fewer veterans would be spared the worst of the fighting for one day.
The dead were buried, but the flies still sensed their presence and plagued the living. It would be a relief to go forward. It always was. Even when an attack appeared unlikely to succeed, all things became clear and purposeful once the first line stepped toward the enemy.
He had arranged his men in the same formation he had used three weeks before at Spotsylvania, four lines that would advance briskly, with the same instructions not to fire until they had breached the enemy’s entrenchments. He would not have the element of surprise today, but punching rapidly into the defense seemed the only hope.
The enemy knew they were coming. It was going to be bloody.
Colonel Kellogg harangued his men, shouting to be heard over the guns, encouraging them to prove their worth in battle. Upton waited for the man to invoke the Lord and ask his blessing, but the call never came. He did not interrupt, though. Kellogg had the loyalty of his men, and Upton had learned the value of worldly emotions.
He would pray for all of them.
Follow after me: for the LORD hath delivered your enemies the Moabites into your hands …
His horse knew him and fidgeted, ready to go forward. Upton sometimes felt mortal tremors, the rebellion of the flesh, but his mind was ever at ease in the face of death. He knew this was a holy war, against Moabites and worse, against human beasts that had enslaved God’s children. Their ruler was Pharaoh, their priests were the priests of Baal. He who fell in battle against such enemies would be lifted high upon the wings of angels.
And they slew of Moab at that time about ten thousand men, all lusty, and all men of valour; and there escaped not a man.
Lord, let it be thus. Let it be for the righteous as it was in the days of Joshua, of Judges and Kings.
And Judah went up; and the LORD delivered the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hand; and they slew of them in Bezek ten thousand men …
Lord, let it be so.
For thou shalt drive out the Canaanites, though they have iron chariots, and though they
be
strong.
Lord, grant us victory, in thy name.
He looked over the dust-caked, unknowing multitude, three ranks of former artillerymen and the last rank composed of his veterans. And he prayed that the Lord would have mercy on those who perished, especially on those deficient in their faith, for all would do the work of the Lord this day.