The Last Full Measure

  "We felt-General Hancock felt-we were led to believe there was a considerable force of the enemy south of our flank. There was some fighting below the Plank Road. It seems... it was only the cavalry. General Hancock has been ordered back up to the Brock Road intersection. We did not believe the enemy was advancing there in force... until Getty was attacked."

  Grant said nothing, thought, cavalry.... That's what the cavalry is for, to find the enemy, to tell us where he is moving. He felt his hands clench, was beginning to see it now. Lee had waited for him to extend on the roads in the Wilderness, had never intended to wait behind cover. Now they were spread out in a long line, fighting on two fronts. He looked again at the map, at the wide space between the two roads, said in a quiet hiss, "General Meade, how many men do we suppose Lee is sending at us?"

  Meade blinked.

  "I don't know... we have heard... best guess is about sixty thousand. We have met Ewell's corps on the turnpike, Hill's corps on the Plank Road. We had thought Longstreet was further south, down the Brock Road... but he's not shown himself. Wilson's cavalry didn't find anyone but Stuart. It seems... our information may have been wrong about Stuart being at Fredericksburg."

  Grant leaned back, looked across the open ground toward the sound of the fighting, felt the anger growing, thought, Is all our information wrong? Grant looked down to the map, said, "You haven't found all of Lee's army, General. Where's Longstreet?"

  Meade looked down at the map, said quietly, "We... actually don't know, Sir."

  "Then you have not accounted for sixty thousand men. We are not facing an enemy that strong. He has to be spread out pretty thin."

  "There's no one, as far as we can tell, here." Meade pointed to the space between the two roads.

  "We've sent some people in there, but the ground is awful. Swamps, gullies, visibility less than fifty yards."

  Grant clamped the cigar tightly in his teeth, said, "If we can't see through that ground, neither can Lee. We need to punch through there. If he's on the two road sunder strength, we can split his army in two.

  Meade nodded, said, "Well, yes, but I thought... Burnside could cover that gap, protect our flanks. We're spread pretty thin too." I know.

  Grant stared at Meade, felt the man's hesitation, the caution flowing across him like a disease.

  "General, I would suggest you press the enemy's position. Advance your men on both roads. Order Warren to extend southward, Hancock to extend northward, until they link up in the center. Even without Burnside, we have twice the enemy's strength. If that means we are spread thin, then he is in much more serious trouble than we are. Is that not plain to you, Sir.

  Meade looked at the map, stood suddenly, moved away quickly.

  Grant watched him, heard the sharp bite Meade's voice, orders going out, aides writing furiously, horses beginning to move.

  Grant looked down at the map again, pushed it aside with his foot, saw a fat chunk of wood, picked it up, rolled it over in his hand. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pocketknife, began to slice slowly at the wood, small shavings curling away, floating to the ground around his feet. He stared hard at the wood, felt his anger flowing out through his hands, thought, Why can they not understand? Is it that we are too big, there is too much of this army? Are we so cumbersome that it is not possible to move effectively? He was beginning to see the flaw in the army's organization, that Meade was hesitant to act with his commander so close, and the hesitation was magnified when the enemy was watching you waiting for it. He thought of chess, a game he had played a few times. But he was impatient, did not enjoy the game, waiting for an opponent to make a move. It was a game he could not control, could not use enough energy, could not press an attack to any advantage. He had thought, Maybe I don't understand it. He had a mind for mathematics, but there was more to chess than simply solving a problem, and the frustration of that was too much. Now he had the feeling of being back at the board, facing an opponent who understood the game better than he did, and if the opponent did not have as many pieces, if he was missing, say, his knights, or his queen, then this should be easy. We have the pieces, he thought, with more in reserve. All we have to do is press him, confront him. Is this not, after all, a question of wilpower? His hands worked the knife, the block of wood slowly getting smaller, and he thought of playing that game, of how the game should be played, the extra pieces you could add.... Porter stood to one side, watched him quietly, saw Grant working the pocketknife furiously, saw the knife now shredding the fingers of Grant's glove, the dull yellow thread falling around Grant's feet, his eyes focused far away, staring at an imaginary chessboard.

  ACROSS THE THICK MASS OF GREEN AND BROWN, OVER THE DEEP ravines and sloping hillsides, through the dense mass of trees and brush and muddy swamps, the sounds of the growing battle swelled and poured up toward the Lacy house. Along the roads that led west, the commanders sent their men into a fight against an enemy they could not see, the troops feeling their way along the rugged ground, the big guns behind them silent and useless. If the flanks were unprotected, if no coordination could be possible in the thick wood, it did not seem to give either side an advantage.

  Throughout the afternoon both sides clawed carefully at each other, blasts of musket fire ripping through small trees. The men who stood and peered out, frustrated by blindness, aiming for some glimpse, for anything that moved, were the first ones cut down, never seeing their enemy. As the lines of battle fell into confusion, the men who survived the deadly whisper of the musket ball were the ones who lay flat, patient and still while leaves and small limbs rained down on their heads, clipped and sliced from the growth above them. If their officers tried to move them, prod them forward, screaming and cursing through the horrible din of the firing, it was the officers who became the best targets, their shiny gold buttons the only part of a man the enemy might see.

  All day the two sides had pressed forward and pulled away, men scampering across small rises and down through sharp gullies, only to race back to where they had begun. By late in the afternoon even the officers understood that no one would win this day, that no lines would be carried, no enemy overrun. When the darkness spread over the field, both sides still lay flat, sometimes only yards apart, still firing at small sounds, at the flashes from the men firing back.

  Now, between the lines, the wounded began to call out, the screams and the praying echoed through the darkness. The horror of the sounds grew in each man because there could be no help, no one could move forward. Those who could not accept that, who tried to crawl, to reach the voices, if only to take a canteen or pull a man back to the safety of a rock, found a deadly response, that someone was watching, waiting. There would come the brief terrible flash of the musket, the sharp whine of the ball, the smack of lead against tree, against rock, against bone. In the growing darkness each man began to feel that the enemy was all around him, not just the man waiting with the musket, as blind as you, but this horrible ground, the small black spaces around each man, and each man wondered why those men back there-with the fine horses and the hot food, polished brass and white tents-Why they would send their soldiers into this terrible place.

  12. LEE

  LATE EVENING, MAY 5, 1864

  There HAD BEEN TWO GREAT FIGHTS, THE MOMENTUM SHIFTING BACK and forth between the turnpike and the Plank Road. Ewell's men had absorbed the first major push, but held their ground, the men digging in quickly in the thick woods, a crude line of cut trees, mounds of dirt piled as fast as bayonets or tin cups could dig. The Federals had hit them hard, but could not move Ewell away. Soon the Federal forces on the turnpike were scattered and groping with the confusion of men who have lost their officers, all sense of direction swallowed by the woods around them.

  Then the great roar of the fight had shifted down to the Plank Road, where Hill's advance eastward toward the intersection of the Brock Road suddenly and completely reversed, a hard thrust by the Federal Second Corps. Hancock's troops had reached the key point first, wit
h far greater strength, and pushed out hard against the only enemy that came close to him, Harry Heth's division. With Hancock's forces outnumbering Heth by nearly five-to-one, it did not take long for Heth to find himself in serious trouble, his men clinging to whatever cover they could find. By late in the day Heth had been reinforced by Hill's other division, under Cadmus Wilcox, and Hancock's great strength had been neutralized by the ground, as all of Grant's numbers had been. The assault, which had outflanked Heth on both sides, now ground down, and as to the north, Hancock's men found themselves in utter confusion, the momentum of their attack blunted and turned away by the thickets and the steady response of Heth's muskets.

  Late in the afternoon, Ewell had pushed out again, striking at the jumbled mass of blue troops in front of him, but the order had to come from Lee. Ewell was still tightly behind his makeshift wall, but Lee could not allow the fight to swing southward with all the power Grant could bring, and so he prodded Ewell to do... something, create some opportunity. Grant had shown no willingness to move away, to leave the Wilderness) and the long lines of march were now tightened into thick lines of battle. The dangerous gap between Lee's two corps had already invited Grant to push through, and it was only the ground itself that kept the blue troops from splitting Lee's forces in half.

  If Lee were to turn the tide in his favor, he would have to take every chance to strike at confusion, at disorganized regiments, at the chaos that the attacking troops had stumbled into. But Ewell had hesitated, and asked for clarification, the couriers moving back and forth between the two parts of the army in a mad rush, often passing each other on the rugged trails. Lee was seeing it more clearly than ever, that if Ewell were to do anything at all, make any decision that would show the old spirit, the orders would have to come from him. But even then Ewell pressed forward only as far as his own men could make a coordinated attack, and soon the coordination collapsed in the dense woods. Finally Ewell pulled his men back to their entrenchments, content to let the night darken the bloody ground where so many had fallen.

  THERE HAD BEEN NO PAUSE, NO BREAK FOR FOOD OR REST. LEE had been on Traveller for most of the day, and he could feel the wet hide of the tired animal, his pants soaked by thick foam. He had kept close to the steady fight in front of Hill's men, but there would be nothing to see, no sign of the enemy's strength except for the sounds of their muskets, and there had been many muskets. Lee counted seven separate assaults, each one a vast wave rolling toward them from the east, and each time there were more blue troops, new units, the prisoners coming now from every division, every brigade of Hancock's enormous corps. Lee had watched Hill carefully, saw clearly that if Hill had never shown the talent for commanding an entire corps, he was still the best man the army had at leading a division.

  "In this place, where there was no coordination and no way to even know where a corps would begin and end, where the placement of a single regiment could turn the tide of the attack, Hill had been brilliant. Lee tried to stay with him, but in the chaos, Hill had never stopped moving, guiding the smaller units back and forth through the rush, down the small trails, shifting the troops into place against the blind heavy punches of Hancock's great numbers'. With Wilcox's help, he had held his ground, and as the light began to fade, the darkness filling the small spaces in the gloomy woods, Hancock finally pulled away, his men now flowing back behind his own fortifications, thrown up quickly along the Brock Road.

  Lee was still focused toward the front, could hear the shouts of men, the sounds echoing on all sides, the same sounds that had filled these woods all day. There was a rhythm to it, the voices rolling into one long sound just before each new assault, another wave of Hancock's men striking hard at Hill's weakening lines. Only then would the voices be pushed away, drowned out by the roar of the guns, the steady chatter of musket fire. Lee expected it again, waited for it, moved the horse onto the road itself, a dangerous place, listened hard, thought, Hancock will come again, he will not stop. He's the best they have.

  He felt himself shaking, gripping the leather straps hard, his chest pounding. There were scattered sharp cracks, single shots, and he strained to see, stared out toward the wide path through the trees. The smoke was clearing away, and the road was filling with blessed darkness. Now the sound of the muskets was gone, and he heard cheering, faint and hollow, but it was not a celebration of victory, but of relief, and there was no strength behind the voices, no energy, and now they began to fade away as well.

  Men were moving down the road toward him, slowly, many wounded, and he saw the stretcher bearers now, and slowly the road began to fill with new sounds, faint cries, the rattle of ambulance wagons. A wagon rolled by him, moving forward, and he stared at it, breathing heavily. Looking behind him, he saw more wagons, more wounded. He tried to focus, took one long breath, let it out slowly, tried to calm the hard thumps in his chest, thought, It's... over.

  There were more horses now, and he heard a voice, turned, saw Taylor, covered with dirt, his horse soaked with muddy sweat. Taylor said, "General Hill is over this way, Sir. He is ill. He asked me to... inform you, Sir."

  Lee said nothing, pulled at the horse, moved slowly into the field, looked across through the last faint daylight, glanced at the far edge of the woods, where the blue soldiers had appeared that morning. Now he saw Hill's staff gathering, saw the headquarters flag. There was a tent, the dirty white canvas straightening as the tent poles were pulled tight. Hill was sitting on the ground, leaning back against a log. He was bareheaded, his dark red hair matted flat, his face black with dirt. Lee dismounted, touched the ground with stiff legs and was suddenly lightheaded, unbalanced. He held the saddle for a moment, steadied himself. He felt a hand under his arm, was startled at the touch, saw it was Taylor.

  "You... all right, Sir?"

  There was something tender in Taylor's voice, and Lee felt himself suddenly giving way, touched by the young man's care. He wanted to say something, to thank him. He felt his legs now, pulled himself up straight, and Taylor backed away, and Lee saw embarrassment.

  Taylor said, under his breath, "I'm sorry, Sir. Please excuse me." Lee tried to smile, made a small nod. Taylor had responded with instinct, a helpful hand, and it was an awkward moment. There was no one in the army closer to Lee, and still there was a distance, a boundary clearly understood by both of them. Of course, he thought, we must not show weakness, not in front of the men. Lee turned slightly, away from Hill and the staffs, said quietly, "It's all right, Colonel. I have been in the saddle... my legs were a bit stiff. Do not be troubled by it. This has been a long day for all of us."

  He looked at Hill now, who did not try to stand, but looked up at him with black eyes, the thin face drawn and hollow.

  "General Hill, are you well enough to speak with me?" Lee moved close, leaned over. Behind him, Taylor motioned to the others, and the staffs backed away.

  Hill looked at Lee, said, "General Lee, my men... have honored themselves. This was a day for all of them to remember."

  Lee looked at the pale sickness in the man's face, thought, It has been a long time... there has not been much to be proud of in this command. He said, "General Hill, you have honored your men."

  Hill sat up straight, shifted his legs, his face showing a sharp twist of pain.

  "Sir, I regret I am not well tonight. I am surprised... all day there was no problem, nothing kept me from my men. But when the fighting began to slow, it came all at once... like... a wave."

  Lee straightened, said, "General Hill, you will again be of good service to this army. Rest now." He turned, said aloud, "We should all rest now. Those people will be back tomorrow, I am certain of it. We must make preparations."

  He looked down at Hill again, and Hill said, "Sir, my men... they must be relieved. I do not see how they can hold out for another day like today."

  Lee lowered his voice.

  "Don't worry, General. They will be relieved. General Longstreet will be here by morning. We will face General Grant with a
fresh corps, fresh gurfs." He looked around, motioned to Taylor, and Traveller was led forward. Lee moved to the big horse, climbed up slowly, made a small groan as he sat, shifted his weight.

  He turned the horse, his staff gathered behind, and he looked at Hill again, said, "General Hill, this army has many things to be thankful for. But we must make preparations. When General Longstreet arrives, your men will shift to the north, locate and anchor against General Ewell's flank. I will prepare the orders. We will close that open space, and we will meet those people as one solid line. Rest now, General. The Almighty has shown us we are not to be beaten, not here, not on our own ground."

  Hill saluted weakly, and Lee spurred the horse, moved back to the road, past the wagons, the sounds of the wounded, past rows of big guns, crews watching him move by, hats in the air. He stared out down the road, away to the west, thought, Godspeed, General Longstreet.

  THEY SLEPT WHERE THEY HAD FOUGHT, LYING FLAT ON WET leaves, on soft mud, behind a cover of old logs or the bodies of the dead. There were few shots now, most of the Yankees were gone, back to their camps, their fires, their food. But there were still skirmishers, stragglers, men who had not yet found their units, had not heard the orders to pull back. They held their muskets at the ready, would shoot at anything that moved, any sign of the enemy, and so you did not raise your head, you did not make a sound. Now, all along the lines, or what was left of lines, the blanket of darkness brought safety, and the men began to sleep, most still gripping their muskets, some holding to a new musket, taken from the man beside him who would not need it in the morning. Some crawled slowly, moving from body to body, searching for unused cartridges, maybe a piece of hardtack, a full canteen.