The Deserter (7 page)

Second Lieutenant, 20th Mass. Vols., 25 Nov., 1861: First Lieutenant, 2 Oct., 1862: killed, at Gettysburg, Penn., 3 July, 1863.

—Harvard Memorial Biographies

… a painful accident happened to us this morning: First Lieutenant Henry Ropes (20th Massachusetts in General Gibbon's division), a most estimable gentleman and officer—intelligent, educated, refined … while lying at his post with his regiment in front of one of the batteries … was instantly killed by a badly made shell, which … fell but a few yards in front of the muzzle of the gun …
.

—L
IEUTENANT
F
RANK
H
ASKELL

B
ut the monkey show was not over. While Otis slept behind the schoolhouse, the coming afternoon loomed in the heavy air. Across the valley, 170 pieces of artillery were shifting and moving, hauled into place in a line two miles long between a Lutheran seminary to the north and a peach orchard to the south. Yesterday morning the trees of the orchard had been laden with green fruit. Now the peaches lay trampled in the ground.

Two hundred Federal guns were moving too, drawn by their laboring horses, rattling with their caissons into a line that stretched from the tombstones of a cemetery on the north to a pair of round-topped hills to the south.

The enlisted men of 633 regiments waited for whatever was fixing to happen, while their generals pondered and stared across the field.

In blissful ignorance Otis slept through the rest of the morning in the pleasant shade of the schoolhouse. He slept past the hour of noon. He would have dreamed through the rest of the day if a thunderclap of artillery had not jerked him awake.

It was the first signal shots of the rebel guns. The order for the cannonade had been given at last by Colonel E. Porter Alexander, who was undoubtedly enjoying it, because it was the way he always felt—
The very shouts of the gunners ordering … Fire! … in rapid succession thrill one's very soul
.

The noise was ten times the volume of sound that had exploded from the guns on Power's and McAllister's hills last night. Over Otis's head a tree shattered. Splintered branches crashed down amid a shower of deadly shrapnel. To his horror Otis saw a dark object whirl into the air and come down a mangled mass of flesh and bone, another skulker torn from his hiding place.

Otis sprang to his feet, snatched up his haversack and took to the road again, running away from the thundering guns, back toward the Baltimore Pike.

His comfortable skedaddling was over. For the next two hours, Otis encountered one crisis after another, while the guns roared at each other across the valley. The first crisis was a dazzle of sunlight on a hundred bayonets, Yankees in blue coats charging on the run in the direction of the Baltimore Pike. They weren't charging the enemy, they were charging poor old Otis Pike and his fellow skedaddlers. By order of the high command, no poor private or drummer boy or digger of latrines was to absent himself this day from the field of slaughter.

But Otis's high command was not Colonel Silas Colgrove, chief officer of the Third Brigade, nor was it Brigadier General Alpheus Williams, commander of the First Division. It was not even Major General Henry Slocum, in whose charge were both divisions of the Twelfth Corps. And it was certainly not Major General George Gordon Meade, the topmost commander of the entire Army of the Potomac. It was—well, who was it? After God, of course, that amiable major general in the sky.

Otis struggled to explain to himself the sense of purpose that stiffened his malingering spine. How could it be put into words? Well, it was art, of course, it was high art, no matter how melodramatic the words sounded, nor how foolish. All he needed was the rest of his life.

But today, as he discovered to his dismay, it was not the lofty commanders who were trying to deprive him of the precious years he needed, nor was it the bayonets of the provost guards. It was his own classmates.

Instead of fighting the battle, some of the men at Gettysburg could have rented a tent and held a jolly old college reunion, because Harvard men were all over the place, among the rebels as well as the Yankees.

Most of them, Otis knew, had come into the service as second lieutenants and risen rapidly to a higher rank. At Gettysburg they commanded companies, regiments, brigades, even divisions. Tens of thousands of foot soldiers who had never had the good fortune of strolling across Harvard Yard were obliged to obey their orders.

Or not obey them, like Otis Pike.

Otis encountered the first of them on the Taneytown Road. Although it was nearer to the tremendous noise of the bombardment, he reversed course in a hurry and loped that way because the rebel shells were falling thick and fast in his neighborhood. The twelve-pound shells had been aimed so high, they were sailing right over the heads of the fighting regiments along the ridge and smashing down in the rear, and the rear was where Otis just happened to be.

But on the Taneytown Road he was horrified to find himself just behind the battle line. Far into the distance the regiments lay cowering behind a stone wall while the shells from across the valley hurtled and burst over them, and in thunderous reply the Federal gun crews sponged and loaded and rammed their shot home and leveled and sighted their pieces and shouted in threadlike voices, and then the guns went off in blast after blast of fire and smoke and violently recoiled.

Otis ran crazily toward the first men he saw, a company ranged along the stone wall, all of them lying flat. Scared out of his wits, ducking and dodging while the air over his head exploded with enemy shells, he told himself wildly that he wasn't a skulker, he was an orderly carrying an extremely important message, racing from one high-up general to another on a matter of life and death

“Get down, you fool,” shouted someone, “get down. Oh my God, Pike, is that you?”

Otis gave a frightened glance at the man who had recognized him, and then instead of shouting in reply he kept on running, flinging one arm forward in the direction of an eminent brigadier general who was impatient for his report.

But then there was a louder crash, and in spite of himself Otis looked back. He saw something appalling. That popular athlete Henry Ropes—Henry Ropes of the Harvard boat club and the victorious university crew—lay dead, with his blood gushing into the ground.

Panic-stricken, Otis dodged away, ducking and running past a couple of batteries whose gun crews were sponging and loading and shouting and firing, too busy to notice a pitiful skedaddler. Still pretending to be the bearer of an important dispatch, Otis began to feel safe.

That is, until he encountered three more of his dear old classmates.

EUSTIS AND FARRAR

P
ROFESSOR
H
ENRY
L
AWRENCE
E
USTIS
Class of 1838

Colonel, 10th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

Beyond Doubleday's left, [Major General John Newton] found the ground to be “almost denuded of troops.…” Meade suggested that he ask Major General John Sedgwick, Sixth Corps commander, for units to fill the gap.… Eventually, the Sixth Corps brigades of Brigadier General A. T. A. Torbert and Colonel Henry L. Eustis extended the line.…

—J
EFFRY
D.W
ERT

H
ENRY
W
ELD
F
ARRAR
Class of 1861

Vol. A.D.C., staff of General Sedgwick, March, 1863; Second Lieutenant, 7th Maine Vols., 10 April, 1863.

As for the Sixth Corps, it had become the manpower pool of the army from which infantry units and artillery batteries were drawn and used to plug gaps or bolster weak places in the main Union line
.

—E
DWIN
B. C
ODDINGTON

G
ood God, it was Professor Eustis. It couldn't be Professor Eustis, but it was.

Otis halted his urgent scramble down the Taneytown Road, unsure what to pretend he was doing.

Professor Eustis was running directly toward him at the head of a great mass of men, three or four regiments, it looked like a whole brigade. The professor had always had a fierce and accusing eye. Otis blanched and shuddered and stopped breathing as it fell upon him now with a look that pierced him through, just as it had pierced him in the old days when a horribly distinguished trio of professors—James Russell Lowell, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles and Henry Lawrence Eustis—had officially “admonished” poor Otis and nearly thrown him out of school.

Luckily this was not the moment for another admonishing. Professor Eustis swept past Otis at the head of a column of eight or nine hundred men who were churning up the dust on the road and keeping their heads down, heading for another part of the line.

Breathing again, Otis kept going, but he was severely shaken. No longer could he persuade himself that he might just possibly have been entrusted with a vitally important dispatch from one commander to another. He was just another cowardly skulker heading south on the Taneytown Road.

And there was no cover, no handy little woodland to duck into when Henry Farrar appeared out of the smoke.

Otis had not seen Farrar since the Grand Opening Night of Hasty Pudding in March of 1860, when Otis's playbill had promised “
Talented Company! Gorgeous Scenery!! Magnificent Costumes!!! Utter Recklessness as to Pecuniary Considerations
!!!!” and Henry Farrar had appeared in a frolicsome farce as Mr. Snoozle.

Now the hilarious Mr. Snoozle was in uniform, shouting at a battery commander who was trying to move his pieces from one part of the ridge to another. While Otis stood frozen and staring, a shell struck one of the horses. It staggered and fell, spilling its guts on the road. The other horse reared in its traces and the whole caboodle tipped over and fell in a smash of flailing legs and spinning wheels.

The captain of the battery seemed dazed. He stood sweating and staring while Farrar threw himself at the dead horse and grasped the harness. The men of the gun crew gaped at Farrar as his fingers struggled with the buckles, then came to their senses and began pulling at the other horse, heaving it up on its legs. At once a crowd of men from another battery massed around the gun and set it upright.

If Farrar had seen Otis, he was too busy to do anything about him, and now a heavy layer of sulfurous smoke drifted over the road, hiding the guns and the panting men and Second Lieutenant Henry Weld Farrar.

The blanket of smoke smelled of brimstone, but in the welcome cover Otis scrambled away from the Taneytown Road and dove into the woods. He had no idea where in the hell he was going, and even among the trees there was no safety from the hideous random fall of the rebel shell, but he wouldn't run into anybody he knew. If he could make his way across lots and find a cozy shebang among the trees until nightfall, then maybe he could get away from this place entirely, without running into a provost guard eager to nab and put to death a habitual deserter like Otis Pike.