The Damned of Petersburg

Book 4: The Battle Hymn Cycle

by Ralph Peters

Genres: War & Military

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author Ralph Peters returns with the fourth installment in his Boyd Award–winning series on the Civil War.

Glory turned grim … and warfare changed forever.

From the butchery of the Crater, where stunning success collapsed into a massacre, through near-constant battles fought by heat-stricken soldiers, to the crucial election of 1864, The Damned of Petersburg resurrects the American Civil War’s hard reality, as plumes and sabers gave way to miles of trenches.

Amid the slaughter of those fateful months, fabled leaders—Grant and Lee, Winfield Scott Hancock and A. P. Hill—turned for help to rising heroes, Confederates like “Little Billy” Mahone and Wade Hampton, last of the cavaliers, and Union warriors such as the tragedy-stricken Francis Channing Barlow and the fearless Nelson Miles, a general at twenty-four.

Ralph Peters does not forget the men in the ranks, the common soldiers who paid the price for the blunders of commanders who would never know their names. In desperate battles now forgotten—such as Deep Bottom, Globe Tavern, and Reams Station—soldiers on both sides were pushed to the last human limits but fought on as their superiors struggled to master a terrible new age of warfare.

The Damned of Petersburg revives heroes aplenty, enriching our knowledge of our most terrible war, but above all, this novel is a tribute to the endurance and courage of the American soldier, North and South.

Release date: June 28, 2016

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 432

Sample

ONE



Early evening, July 28, 1864

Deep Bottom, Virginia

In heat as thick as syrup, skirmishers pecked. The crack of the rifles seemed dulled, the sparse commands reluctant. And the usual catcalls were missing, the hard teasing. Too hot even for insult. Suffocating.

Between the shots, flies hummed. Vermin, at least, could be relied upon. Loyal to the army to the end.

Dust marred the light. The stench of men and stink of powder had weight. Scorched air scraped lungs. Bewildered, random casualties drifted rearward. Others, shattered, rode litters toward their pain.

The romance of war, Barlow mused.

Flies surrounded him. Unable to figure out how to reach the shit encrusting his drawers. Just as Grant and Meade couldn’t get at Lee, stymied by the forts and trenches at Petersburg. Or here, in front of Richmond. The black flies and the brown couldn’t pierce his sweat-hardened shirt or fouled britches, and the behemoth Union Army of the Potomac, augmented by Butler’s Army of the James, could not penetrate the Confederate lines. It was all of a piece, one grand incapability.

A rush of the dizzies unsettled him. His horse snorted and stepped. The day would never end.

“You all right, Frank?” Nellie asked, not lightly. Nelson Miles had not shone, but he’d still performed better than Barlow’s other subordinates. As usual. A clerk before the war and newly a brigadier general, at his best Miles fought with spectacular savagery. But no man had been at his best the past few days.

“Hardly matters, does it?” Barlow soothed his fly-pricked horse. “Another grand absurdity. Poor plan, badly carried. Hancock doesn’t know what to do, what with Grant and Meade and Humphreys dispensing ‘advice.’” He looked away, unready to bear the features of any man, even one who almost passed as a friend. “We should’ve tried again today, at least properly tried. Now Lee knows the whole farrago’s a bluff.”

“The men are blown,” Miles said. “I lost more to heatstroke on the march than I did to the Johnnies.”

Barlow’s eyebrows tightened. “Not sure that’s an achievement to be proud of. Anyway, they’re shirkers and slackers, the half of them. Bounty-jumpers. Dregs of the draft, what have you. You need to drive them hard.”

“Frank, I think I know how to ‘drive’ men. They were falling in bunches before we crossed the James. Why anyone thought, in this weather…”

Barlow laughed. One low, unattractive syllable. “We’re a diversion, you understand that? That’s what galls me, Nellie. Winning wasn’t ever in the cards.” He lifted a hand. “I believe all this was only meant to draw off troops from Petersburg. In service to the great mine, the secret that’s no secret.” He laughed that lonely syllable again. “With Burnside behind it, that ass.…”

Miles’ horse quivered in the heat. Barlow’s gelding copied him.

“Frank”—Miles tried again—“you look seriously ill.”

This time, Barlow’s laugh was genuine. “Of course I’m ill. Everyone’s ill. Virginia bears more plagues than Pharaoh’s Egypt.”

Shitting blood for a month. Feet worse than ever, itching infernally. Hard not to scratch the flesh right down to the bone. And the toothache back. Along with the stab of old wounds. A fine specimen of humanity he was, at the venerable age of twenty-nine.

Long way from Harvard Yard. Or Brook Farm. Or his Manhattan law office.

And Hancock, the sorry bugger, had it worse. It was obvious that he lived with constant pain from the Gettysburg wound. There had been stretches earlier in July when Hancock could not get up from his cot. And conditions behind the ever-expanding trenches had grown so grim, so torrid and filthy, that even Hancock’s English valet—a distinctly unsavory character—couldn’t keep the corps commander in clean collars.

A pair of litter bearers passed, lugging a panting boy with his eyes rolled back. Barlow couldn’t see blood and it got his temper up: If he could face the heat, so could the men.

Behind the scrap of shade that Barlow and Miles had commandeered, and beyond the herd of staff men keeping their distance, distempered ranks of troops waited in a tree line, allowed to kneel or lie down to wait, all of them measuring shadows that grew too slowly, hoping that no order would come to advance. It was far from the splendid division Barlow had led just three months earlier, before they plunged across the Rapidan. That division had been squandered in mindless fights for worthless plots of land, in grinding slaughters. By the time they’d reached Cold Harbor, Barlow had almost sympathized with the shirkers. The best men had fallen at the forefront of repeated attacks, leaving the cautious and cowardly to crawl back. His ruined division had been replenished with scum.

The sole hint of grace in all of it, in the long, blood-sodden summer, in the murderous heat and lung-tormenting dust, had been his Belle. When she took sick, he had been shocked at the depth of his emotion, finding himself less the stoic than he’d believed. She’d been stricken with typhus, caught from a soldier nursed at the City Point hospital, infected because she had given herself to the horror of wards and surgeries to remain near to her husband.

They had married at the outbreak of the war, their affinity more one of minds than of crude passions, a match of congenial spirits. Arabella stood ten years his senior, which philistines found odd, but the marriage had been logical enough. She was the cleverest woman he’d ever known: well-read, of strong opinion, unafraid. It had seemed quite a good arrangement, and so it proved.

When he’d thought her lost, he’d been astonished at his desolation. Alone in his tent, he had wept.

Now she was mending, under good care in Washington. Magnificent, marvelous Belle.

When the war ended, he’d keep his promise immediately. He’d take her to Europe, to Rome. She wished to sit where Gibbon had paused in the Forum. His Arabella. The flesh of his lip brushed a crooked tooth and approximated a smile. His Belle. A woman more excited about the history of Rome than the latest Paris fashions, a serious woman.

His mother, whom Barlow adored, always took pains with her toilette, had even done so when they’d lived on pennies, blue-blooded beggars. Of course, she had rather disliked Arabella at first. That was in the natural order of things. But Barlow felt the breach had been repaired.

Yet, he remembered: his mother, at her most regal, saying, “Francis, she never laughs.” And then, with a moment’s reflection, adding, “But neither do you.…”

Unfair and untrue. He still felt the slap of her words.

To Europe, though. To Rome. Perhaps some foreign doctor could heal his feet.

“What’s that?” Barlow demanded.

An assault? By Gibbon’s men?

“Cavalry at it again,” Miles responded. “Not much to it, but they do go on.” He patted his mount. “Hard on the horses.”

Of course. The firing was well to the north. Where Sheridan, fierce and foul, was back in action. If “action” described the feckless cavalry fighting.

It troubled him that he hadn’t placed things properly.

Dizziness. Flies. Heat. His own stink engulfed him. Suspenders off his shoulders and dropped to his flanks, checkered shirt clinging, saber a dead weight, Barlow felt hollow and top-heavy. Was he, in fact, capable?

Capable or not, he would not give up his command until they carried him off. The man who quit in war was no man at all.

“Nellie, I don’t mind a fight…,” Barlow began.

It was Miles’ turn to laugh.

“I don’t mind a fight,” Barlow repeated. “But the pointlessness, the blundering…” He straightened in the saddle and the flies tracked his change of posture. “I’d like, just once, to see a plan of quality, a scheme with some least forethought. Something beyond ‘Go out there, bleed, and come back.’ I have no more confidence in Grant—or Meade—than I would in a howling madman.”

His father. Gone mad, God-infected. Lost. A man of the cloth who had torn the cloth asunder, deserting kith and kin, driven by demons. Barlow had not seen his face since childhood. And he did not wish to see it now.

Yet, at times, he wondered what had become of that fallen star.

Shooing off his personal escort of flies, Miles said, “I don’t know. Wastage aplenty, I give you. But Grant did fight Lee all the way to Richmond. And over the James.”

“And now we’re stuck. Butler was stuck, now we’re all stuck. Wait and see, Nellie. Burnside’s affair will be another cock-up. Everyone’s out of ideas.” His guts churned. “If ever any man in this army had one.”

“Lee’s stuck, too,” Miles said.

“And it just goes on.”

Miles declined to argue the point further. Too hot for speech. Out of sight, on the edge of the skirmish line, the firing quickened. Only to swoon again.

Sweat burned Barlow’s eyes.

This, he told himself, is life’s reality. Immeasurably removed from the Harvard classrooms where, as an undergraduate, he had played at thought and preened. The experiments of the great Professor Agassiz on viscosity couldn’t begin to measure this fetid air, nor had the lectures on aesthetics foreseen this blighted landscape. Except for Arabella, all of the things he had valued seemed a fraud now, as empty as the boasts of an Irish drunkard.

Harvard valedictorian? What had come of that? The truth was that he had not cared for the honor, had striven to come in first only to deny the place to Teddy Lyman, who had wanted it so much. He had scored a hollow triumph out of meanness—was that the quality, above all others, that equipped Francis Channing Barlow to be a general? Smirking again, he recalled those awful hours of German philosophy, the imagined importance of the “latest ideas” to cross the Atlantic. What had they amounted to? Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung? Will certainly mattered, but reality was more than the mind’s concoction. The world wasn’t some figment. It was blood and shit and bone. And a witless sky.

Poor Teddy Lyman. A good chum, despite all. Forgiving. Volunteer aide to that old crab Meade and always good for the latest gossip from Boston.

Barlow gulped bitter water from his canteen, wondering if he should try to eat a cracker to calm his insides. The skirmishers, his recalcitrants and the Johnnies, had fallen silent, too drained to do more.

“Might want to stir things up a bit,” he told Miles. “At least, make sure those scoundrels of yours are awake.”

With his sunburned, freckled face revealing annoyance, Miles nodded. No man, colonel or corporal, wanted to move, to do anything. The heat was an animal pinning you down and slobbering all over you.

Before Miles nudged his horse into motion, Charlie Morgan appeared. Back where a primitive road parted the trees. Hancock’s chief of staff rode at a pace that defied the heat, kicking up dust and drawing curses from soldiers.

“Oh, Christ,” Miles said. “We’re going back in after all.”

Barlow shook his head. Warily. “Doesn’t make sense, at this point.”

They waited for Morgan to close the distance. Barlow’s feet itched monstrously.

Hancock’s chief of staff reined up. Dust swelled and Barlow snapped, “I doubt you bear glad tidings, Charlie. Shall I take a guess?”

A noted cynic and famously profane, Morgan looked oddly somber. He was so discolored by dust that a skirmisher might have taken him for a Johnny.

Uncharacteristically, Morgan paused before speaking. As if he brought orders for a suicide charge.

“General Barlow…,” Morgan began. Then he stopped.

What the devil? Barlow wondered. A shiver went through him. Good God. He wasn’t being relieved, was he? For what cause? He’d followed his worthless orders as best he could. They couldn’t have marched any faster, there was no reason—

“General Barlow”—Morgan tried again—“Frank … perhaps you’d like to dismount?”

“For God’s sake, Charlie. I’m glued to the saddle with shit.”

“If you’d dismount, though…”

“Oh, bugger it. Fine.” He swung out of the saddle, long-legged, fanning his own fumes, smelling his reek. Aware of slime, grit, itch.

He stood on firm ground, but was hardly firm himself.

Miles, too, had dismounted. Morgan eyed him, as if weighing whether or not to ask for privacy.

“Whatever you’ve got to say, Nellie can hear it,” Barlow told him. “Nothing in this army stays a secret.”

“General Barlow, I regret—”

“You’ve conveyed your demure reluctance. Just get on with it.”

It struck Barlow that Morgan had yet to utter a single obscenity. That was queer, indeed.

Surely, Hancock wouldn’t let Meade or Grant relieve him? They’d had their disagreements, but Win had seemed to be grooming him. To take over the corps, should Hancock’s wound continue to suppurate.

Morgan stepped closer, immune to the scents of humankind. His whore-weathered, war-hardened face, so fierce, all but trembled.

“General Barlow … we’ve just gotten word. Frank, your wife is dead.”

Barlow stared through the man.

“I’m sorry,” Morgan went on. “You have my condolences. Hancock’s, of course.…”

“When?”

“Yesterday. We just got the news. From Teddy Lyman, the message went through Meade’s headquarters.”

Barlow nodded.

“Hancock’s ordered a tug up to the landing. To take you to City Point, to the steamers. We’re just waiting for Meade’s authorization. For your leave. There’s the usual nonsense. Miles will take the division while you’re away.”

“Yes.”

“I’m so sorry, Frank,” Miles put in.

“It doesn’t matter,” Barlow said. He placed a hand atop his saddle to steady himself. Feeling his bowels about to betray him again. One more death. Why should it matter? Amid all this? Why should it matter? Why should it matter at all?

Tears raced from his eyes, a humiliation.

“Did you say something, Frank?” Morgan asked. “Are you all right?”

Afternoon, July 29

Camp Holly, eastern defenses of Richmond

Watermelons. Two wagonloads. The boys did spark when the drivers turned into camp. Oates was glad he had done it, gone into Richmond and dug into his own pockets. Which were hardly deep.

No time at all and his men—these men who were his consolation after the great wrong done him—were at the melons with buck knives and bayonets, or just busting them open on the ground, revealing and reveling in that woman-pink fruit, wet pulp, eager as children, made children again by war. His boys, his men. The 48th Alabama, “Fortykins” to their brethren, since so many of these hill men had blood relations in the regiment, usually in the same company. Strong, willing, able men, if rubbed thin by poor rations and hard marching. Men as good as a cheated colonel could ask.

Just weren’t his old 15th. The regiment he had led up that hill at Gettysburg, a hill nameless then, where he left his brother John dying, left him to the Yankees, because he had his duty, and later he learned that the hill was called “Little Round Top,” though it had been plenty big enough for a slaughter. He had led that regiment, his 15th, that many-footed, many-headed beast he had loved more than any woman he recollected. His men. He had led them until he was wounded in the autumn and then he had come back to lead them again, limping, hip grinding bone on bone, pestle and mortar. He’d led their falling numbers through the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, each killing ground worse than the last, and then through the one-sided butchery at Cold Harbor, that day no more than a massacre, the killing so easy and terrible that his own men, unscathed, had vomited.

The 15th had been his, his, his, until Major Lowther, a shirker in a fight, had come back from Richmond with the rank of colonel, granted by the Senate of the Confederacy, and bearing along with his undeserved patent the news that Oates wasn’t really a colonel after all, his commission had never been signed, and maybe he wasn’t a lieutenant colonel, either. Gloating, Lowther had offered to let Oates stay on as the regiment’s major.

He would not, did not.

He had gone to Lee himself to plead his case, and Lee had passed him along to Jefferson Davis, both men full of useless sympathy, unwilling to fuss with legislators. Davis had acknowledged his right to his colonelcy, though, and given him the 48th to salve the wound, since Oates already knew the regiment, had led it along with his own back in the bloody, bloody, bloody days of May, when it had not had one field officer left standing. Even now, it wasn’t truly a regiment, but a remnant.

He had clutched the command, gnawed by the injustice done him, reminded of it each day because Law’s Brigade was held in reserve and his 48th tented right beside the dastardly Lowther and his 15th Alabama. His days were as bitter as wormwood.

His mother did love that expression: “My days are as bitter as wormwood.” She would shake her head and speak in the glory voice, though not at the volume, of a circuit preacher, the sort who rode a mule, not a horse, and had mastered the cadence of the Holy Bible, of speech impregnable. His mother and her chore-burnished faith in the Lord. On a swept-clean porch, she would mouth those words with a lean sort of affection, as if complaint were a thing to be nursed and cherished.

Complaint, that ready delight of hard-used folk, song of his blood.

Oates stood with folded arms, watching the men devour the watermelons, their cheeks shining with drip. His back was to the river in the distance, turned resolutely to the Yankee gunboats, inured to their occasional puffs of devilment, the range too long for the shells to do him one-tenth the evil Lowther had done unto him.

Washington had encamped on this very spot, so it was said, with his army triumphant. Just after Yorktown. The echo was pleasant, but Oates wasn’t blithe about another such victory, here, with his people pressed against Richmond by the Yankees. Who kept coming on again and again, drab devils.

Oates didn’t take to feeling cornered.

Well, you just had to face it one fight at a time. And not overponder.

Still, it had been a queer sort of relief when, two days before, they had been ordered down the New Market Road, where the Yankees had stirred up a fuss. And then they had marched back again, after the scrap went quits. Nothing to it but the heat and dust.

He watched, bemused, as a first few men strayed over from the camp of the 15th, slavering, enticed. As if by Eve herself. By watermelons as tempting as Delilah, as plain a come-hither as a lifted skirt. Oates understood desire. And he watched them come, watched them edge their way in, watched them take the offered fruit in hand, intruders teased but tolerated. His men, new and old.

More of the boys from the 15th brisked their way over, hound dogs on the scent. Just too many, and it would not do. They had to learn that this fruit, this gift, was for his new men now. Let Lowther, the tightfisted bastard, scour his own purse. Let him buy a treat for the men he’d stolen away. Let him burn.

Oates strode forward, hip not much of a bother this ripe day, maybe heat-soothed, and he said, “You men there. Cates, Jones, Kirby. Rest of you. Those melons are for the Forty-eighth, and they won’t stretch. Y’all get back to your camp.” He could not help but add, “I’m sure Colonel Lowther’s got watermelons coming.”

“Aw, Colonel. There’s plenty enough.”

Oates shook his head. “I don’t see it, and don’t you sass me, Farley. You get along now. Take what you have in hand and go your way. Hear?”

And go they did, in sorrow. Cut down to sulking children. War made a man a creature of dependencies, waiting, helpless, for rations, garments, orders. Independent fellows who would have beaten and perhaps slain the man who took a tone of command with them back in low-country Alabama, his realm, or in the hills that spat out the 48th, these hill men who had brethren of Yankee leanings and no love for the Confederacy, men without niggers who couldn’t see fighting to keep niggers where they belonged, men from hills where only white faces showed themselves and lived, particular people who wished to be left alone, yet here they were, almost three hundred still, now that he had drained the Richmond hospitals.

He had taken over this rump of a regiment, men who had strayed from discipline, and he had let them know that the days of slumped shoulders were over. He’d drilled them hard, hardest on his captains and lieutenants, and they had not troubled him much, for they knew his reputation for knocking down any man who needed knocking down, and he had led them in battle and well, and for all the groggy, sun-ain’t-up-yet murmurings, the truth was that they wanted a firm hand, desired it as a woman desired things she could not admit.

He had taken on Richmond, menacing clerks not only with requisition forms, but with generous hints of violence, and he had gotten his new men better rations—such as they were—and new uniforms and even replacement rifles for the worst his inspections discovered. His little regiment was the best-looking outfit in Law’s Brigade these days, and he had done that in a matter of weeks, let Lowther get down on his knees and lick his ass.

He burned with hellfire each time he saw that man.

Joe Hardwick, a lieutenant of some grip, stepped up to Oates. He held out a cut of watermelon. “You’ll join the men, sir? Have yourself a piece?”

Oates remembered Billy Hardwick, young Joe’s elder brother, from the brigade’s old days. Two blinks after his promotion to lieutenant colonel, Billy had been captured by the Yankees and not heard of since.

Thick-bearded and dark of mien, a purposeful man and let every last soul know it, the new commanding officer of the 48th Alabama, William C. Oates, Colonel, CSA, pending confirmation by the august powers, shook his head as if declining to buy a fine hog cheap.

“You eat that up,” he told the lieutenant. “Never cared for watermelon myself.” A lie, a gargantuan lie! But the men had to know that the melons were for them, not purchased to satiate a colonel’s craving.

Oates had satisfied a deeper craving on one foray into Richmond. He had asked after a house where the girls were clean and had taken his chances with pink, quivering flesh, that other rich and immemorial pulp. And he seemed to have come through unscathed. Despite the odds.

He might have lingered, but he’d been repulsed by the unclean sheets he’d only noticed when done with his doings. Even a whore had no cause to be a slattern.

Different standard for colored gals, of course, and he’d always been fond of them, of their engulfing scent and merry laughter. But a man didn’t dare touch that sort around here, given all the contagion. He’d lost good men that way. So the best on offer had been that bored, too-costly white woman, a creature of painted nails and dirty toes, a slut who hardly bothered to lace her gown up between callers: a full month’s pay in worthless money for a damned poor ride. Well, that about summed up the entire Confederacy, did it not?

Things hadn’t worked out quite the way they’d reckoned.

Oates’ eyes tracked Captain Wiggenton and waved him over through the shimmering air.

Passing a rind to his left hand, J.W. saluted with his right. “Yes, sir?”

“You let your brother officers know that I want the entire regiment turned out. Soon as the heat breaks. Get in an hour of drill before dark settles.”

“Sir, I don’t know as I’d say this heat ever breaks.”

“Well, then you turn ’em out when you think I think it breaks.” Oates refolded his arms, letting his hard face harden even more. “And don’t you ever back-talk me again, not even a hint. Hear?”

“Sir, I—”

“You go on now. Do just what I told you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Before the younger man could flick a salute and move along, the captain’s eyes jumped to another target. Behind Oates.

Oates turned and found Colonel Lowther striding up, dressed in every last inch of braid a colonel commanding was authorized. Too damned hot for that kind of fuss, but Lowther did enjoy his one-man parades.

“You go on now,” Oates told the captain. “Git.”

Lowther drew up a few feet away, as if he preferred not to smell Oates up too close. Or, perhaps, get his jaw broken.

“Oates, I’m told you’ve been luring my men with watermelons. Without asking my permission. As an officer and a gentleman, I must ask you—”

“Lowther,” Oates said, “you clear out of my camp. And keep your boys out of my camp. If they’ll listen to you.” He narrowed his eyes. “As for watermelons, you sonofabitch, I look at you and know just where one’d fit.”

Early evening, July 29

Union Ninth Corps, Petersburg lines

“Think that mine’ll work?” Sergeant Eckert asked in his don’t-trust-one-thing voice. “Think she’ll go up?”

“Be quiet, Levi,” Brown said. “Let Sam call the roll.”

“Nobody’s missing.” Eckert scratched inside his shirt. “’Least, not yet.”

“Quiet.”

First Sergeant Losch read the too-brief list of names. Unable to stand in ranks, the men of Company C sat on the firing stoop or squatted along the trench walls, tanned by dust and darkened with sweat but sheltered from the Johnnies a shout away, just up the slope. Johnnies who took a mind to shoot now and then. Levi was right, of course. Brevet Lieutenant Charles Brown knew the whereabouts of every man he led: fifty-four in all. And only that many because of returned convalescents. The only time a man left the baking trench was to lug the slops buckets back through the traverses—a duty some men sought for a break in the boredom—or to fill canteens or bring up hot eats or mail. Or for Brown to report back to regiment that nothing much had changed. Or for orders that only warned of more orders to come.

Today’s orders had been unwelcome.

A few months before, men told they’d attack in the morning would have grown agitated, flaring at little things and scribbling letters. Dulled now, like knives used badly, they cleaned their rifles by rote and tried not to think. But men who had once slept soundly would shout in the dark.

Brown hoped he wasn’t one of those who cried out. If he was, no one ever told him. But his dreams, too, were unsettled.

He needed to be steady, to remain sound.

Peering down the trench as the men responded to rasped-out names, Brown knew the faces, the habits, the man-by-man smells, of those left on the roster. Most were friends or acquaintances from home, canal boatmen just as he’d been and hoped to be again. With his own boat, bought clear. A man of property.

The roll call echoed unspoken names, as well.

So many, so terribly many, had died, not least his brother Benjamin, dead of a fever at Vicksburg, on the banks of a river grander than the Schuylkill, sweating out his life atop bluffs that belonged to a different world. Since May, though, the pace of the killing had passed all decency. In April, Brown had been a corporal, in May a sergeant and then first sergeant. In June, with the last of the officers dead or wounded, he had been anointed an “acting” lieutenant, waiting for orders to make the rank real and leading the survivors of Company C of the 50th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry. Even the regiment’s former colonel, lifted up to brigade command, had been wounded in one of the useless assaults made after the army snuggled up to Petersburg. The tally of dead, wounded, or missing exceeded the number of voices that answered, “Here!”

All the dead friends, the comrades. Others suffered captivity, like the Israelites in a sermon. Jake Guertler had died in one of the last assaults, just a month after Jake’s brother Bill had been captured at Spotsylvania. Taken, along with a dozen other men from Company C. Poor Johnny Doudle, who had dreaded becoming a prisoner, had been collared by scarecrow Rebs. As Brown looked on, helpless, across a swale.

He did hope Doudle was faring all right, that he was still alive.

And his own best friend, Henry Hill, who had made a madman’s stand back in the Wilderness, had been wounded the day the others had been captured. Henry, at least, would return. To endure an unsought and unwanted promotion to sergeant. Brown missed Henry, couldn’t wait to see him again. Sometimes, Brown feared he missed him more than his brother.

A terrible time it had been, all senselessness. Hard to say which day had been the worst since they waded the Rapidan, but that charge at Spotsylvania was up for the prize.

First Sergeant Losch crabbed along the trench, waving off swarming flies. “All men present, Lieutenant. All those fit for duty. In dieser Schweinerei.”

Lieutenant. The rank still sat uneasily, but the men had taken his promotion well. And that was the hardest thing: These men whose kin he knew by first names all, they trusted him now. Even as Brown had to struggle to trust himself. By the magic of rank alone he’d become their father. But a father destined to kill at least a few of them, Isaacs to his Abraham, with no hope of an angel’s hand to rescue them.

What would Pastor Colley say to that?

“The two days’ rations? For the men to carry?”

“Verdammt noch mal. They’re coming. The boys try, but the commissary comes late.”

The commissary sergeants were all squeezers, heartless