March Toward the Thunder Part 5

"Why'd you join up?"

Wanting to show I could put on a uniform and prove myself as good as any white man? To get money to make life better for M'mere and me? Because I was a fool boy looking for excitement?

Too many answers to that question and no good one.

"Because," Louis answered and left it at that.

It hadn't deterred Merry from keeping on with the conversation, though. Merry reached for the gold ring on one of the fingers of his left hand. Louis had noticed that ring before because Merry was always doing that, touching it. A wedding ring most likely, though Merry looked too young to have a wife.

Merry caressed that ring as if it was giving some comfort in the dark, smoky night. When he spoke again, his voice was less gruff than usual.

"I joined up because my . . . my brother Tom was serving. I haven't seen him yet, but he's somewhere near here. He's a captain in the Sixty-third New York. He doesn't know what I did. I know he wouldn't approve. But I just had to try, because there might be a chance I could see his dear face and hear his voice. I even dream sometimes that because I'm a soldier I'll be able to save him."

Merry's voice broke and he stopped talking.

Louis said nothing in return, just reached over to pat Merry's thin shoulder before the two of them moved back to their posts. The little soldier had a great love for that brother of his. Louis respected that kind of family feeling.

Louis peered into the smoky haze that was pa.s.sing for dawn. The hidden Reb pickets were close enough for him to hit them with a rock. But they weren't firing.

Being gentlemen this morning, giving everyone a chance to get breakfast, maybe, before we get back to trying to kill each other.

Louis was not guessing about how close the enemy was. The voice of that Southern soldier who'd spoken up sometime near midnight had been near enough for him to hear but his whisper.

It had happened just after Merry had wandered back to the farthest end of his part of the picket line.

"Yank, hey Yank," the man called to him in a whisper-soft voice.

It hadn't startled Louis. He'd sensed the presence of someone watching him for some time.

"Reb?" Louis answered in an equally low voice.

"Got any tobaccy?" the enemy soldier asked. A faint shadow moved near the trees no more than ten yards away.

"Don't smoke," Louis replied, waited as the silence between them grew.

"Where y' from?" the man finally asked.

"Canada," Louis said. No harm in such an answer.

"Y' Indian?"

"Yup."

"Part Cherokee myself. From North Carolina. Just outside Raleigh. But I was a-working a farm here in 'Ginny when it started, so this is where I joined up."

"Unh-hunh," Louis said.

He could see the man's shape clearly now. He could bring his gun up and fire before this talkative Reb could take cover. But in his heart he knew that though this was the enemy, a soldier who might try to kill him the next day, it would be wrong.

"Awful ground to fight here, ain't it?"

The shadowy shape slid down to rest against the tree. What looked like a long stick was propped next to him. The man's rifle.

"Yup."

"That is why Ma.r.s.e Robert picked it, though. General Lee, he surely does know how to get advantage out of ground. Doesn't matter how bad outnumbered we might be if we kin jes' get the better ground to fight from. Second time we fought here, y'know. A year ago we whupped Hooker in this same wilderness. With the help of all them briars and grapevine and scrub, tanglefoot brush and snakes. Hooo-whee! Saw me a rattler must of been six foot long today. Then there's those fires. Sure would hate to get burnt up like some of our boys was today, wouldn't you?"

"Yup," Louis agreed.

A long silence followed. The man's shape seemed to melt into the dark. But Louis knew he wasn't gone.

"That there was my cousin you done pulled to safety today. Had you clean in my sights, but held off on shootin' when I seen what you was a-doin'."

"Oliwni," Louis said. He didn't explain that it was the Abenaki word for thanks.

"Wado," the man answered back in Cherokee.

Then it was almost totally quiet. Louis's keen ears, though, picked up the soft sound of someone slipping back into the trees.

"Indian?" the man said. His voice from farther away.

"Ay-yuh," Louis answered.

"I do hope you don't get kilt tomorrow."

"You too, Reb."

And that was the end of what Louis knew was one of the strangest conversations he'd ever have-even though it felt as if he'd been talking with a friend.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

NEW WORDS.

Sat.u.r.day, May 7, 1864

The company's two drummers had survived the first days of battle. Bing and Bang, everyone called them, stocky twin brothers as alike as peas in a pod. Louis remembered how, four days before, the even ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum-dum -dum had stirred their hearts as they crossed the brown Rapidan River at Ely's Ford. Lee's army waited on the southern side of the Rapidan. The beat of those drums had kept feet together, minds focused on their march as the thousand men of the Sixty-ninth went into the Wilderness.

The work the regimental drummers were doing today, Louis saw, was different. No longer keeping feet together. They'd been a.s.signed to the surgeon's tent behind the last line of field fortifications that had been hastily thrown up under the supervision of General Hanc.o.c.k's engineers.

The long wall of logs and soil stretched as far as Louis could see to either side. He stepped up onto the earthen platform that ran along the inner face of the parapet, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun with one hand.

Bing and Bang pa.s.sed beneath him, carrying yet another wounded man into the blood-spattered canvas walls. Soon they'd be holding him down as the surgeon worked with scalpel and bone saw. They had a thing called chloroform, a liquid poured onto a cloth held over a man's mouth before they started the business.

Chloroform, Louis thought. Another word I'd as soon not have learned.

It knocked you out so that you never felt the pain. Louis was not so sure about that. Chloroformed or not, men still screamed and moaned as their limbs were lopped off like b.l.o.o.d.y tree branches.

Louis would have preferred to give the hospital a wider berth. But there was no other way to pa.s.s through to get his message back to the supply train. With a sigh he clambered down from the low breastworks and made his way past the tent. He was so close that he could hear Surgeon William O'Meagher's calm and polite voice addressed to the soldier who had just been carried in.

"Young man, 'tis sorry I am, but I must tell you straight," the sawbones was saying.

O'Meagher's voice had as strong an Irish lilt to it as any son of Erin in the brigade. According to Sergeant Flynn, O'Meagher had already been a doctor when he emigrated from Killenaule in County Tipperary. He'd served in the 37th New York at the start of the war, then re-enlisted as head surgeon of the 69th.

The tent flap was wide-open.

Don't peer inside, Louis said to himself.

But he couldn't keep from looking.

O'Meagher stood over the wooden table on which the wounded soldier had been placed. His hands were raised like those of a priest about to offer communion. But what he held was not wine or the Host. It was a surgeon's scalpel. Behind him stood Dr. Purcell, the a.s.sistant surgeon, holding a cloth and a bottle.

"The bone and flesh, you see, are mangled beyond repair," the gentleman surgeon explained to the soldier, whose eyes were closed tight, as if not seeing might prevent the loss of his ruined left leg.

"Remove it now below the knee, there are three chances in four that you shall survive." O'Meagher motioned for Purcell to step forward.

Like the man on the table, Louis turned his face away. He was sorry the moment he did. His gaze was now square upon what was behind the tent. It was evidence of how long O'Meagher and Purcell had been at work.

A grisly pile of arms and legs of men who might survive, but would never shoulder a musket or march again to battle lay stacked four feet high behind the operating area. If and when there was a lull in the action, those lost limbs would be buried in the same earth where men were digging trenches. No time for that now. Everyone in the tent, from the surgeons and doctors on down to the civilians who served as nurses, had too many wounded men to help.

Louis shuddered at the thought of being hit in his own arm or leg.

A minie ball catches a man in any extremity, the result's an awful mangling of flesh and shattering of bone. Struck square, there's little chance a limb can be saved.

He turned from the severed limbs toward the place where injured men were being tended by the volunteer nurses. One of them, a bearded man with a sensitive face, looked up toward Louis and nodded a greeting.

Louis nodded back. He'd seen the man before. His name, if he recalled it right, was Mr. Whitman.

Mr. Whitman turned his attention back to his charge, a stocky smooth-faced private who'd been struck in the knee and was waiting for the inevitable amputation.

"You did a fine thing," Mr. Whitman said as he stroked the lad's forehead. "It was brave of you to venture out as you did to bear your wounded sergeant back to the lines."

"Thank you, sir," the private said in a voice made tense by the pain.

"No," Whitman said, tears in his eyes. "No 'sir' to you, brave boy. Never sir. Just call me Walt."

Louis heaved a deep sigh and pressed on toward the supply depot.

Any fool believes war to be a grand and glorious thing, he thought, let 'em spend a minute in the field hospital. War's a dirty business.

A dirty business. When had he just heard someone say those words? It had been the morning before the battle, when they'd given way to let another brigade past. The bright banners and gaudy uniforms proclaimed it to be a Zouave Brigade, volunteers dressed like French Algerians in colorfully embroidered coats and ta.s.seled caps. They cut a dashing figure in their perfectly tailored, scarlet-trimmed, dark blue outfits and red fezzes as they quick-stepped proudly by.

Corporal Hayes gave a low appreciative whistle. "The 140th New York," he said. "My Lord! They dress as well as they drill."

"Aye," Sergeant Flynn had replied, "and we'll see how they appear at the day's end. War's a dirty business and never ye forget that."

Dirty in more ways than one, Louis thought as he approached the supply train. Excavating soil was as much the business of a soldier as marching and shooting. Digging trenches and graves. Sc.r.a.ping holes in the earth for the living and the dead.

"Private Louis Nolette," he said, remembering to salute as he held out the folded piece of paper.

The supply sergeant, whose gray hair and pouched cheeks showed him to be a veteran of more than this conflict, took the message from him without bothering to open it.

"Would it be that you'd be wanting more shovels and cartridges, boy? Indeed, and I thought so. That's the need all up and down the line."

The old soldier looked toward the long line of supply wagons behind him. "It's well-prepared that we were for this-thanks to our good General Grant. Half of them wagons is filled with shovels and picks and the like. Enough for us to dig our way to China. And wouldn't we all rather be there now and not here?"

The old supply sergeant wiped his hands on his pants. "Isn't it a wonder how they always find some way to have us Micks digging ditches? That's what I was doing before I joined up meself. As sure as me name is Coyngham, I was one of them ca.n.a.l lads who finished shoveling Clinton's ditch all the way across the fair state of New York in October of 1825."

Louis nodded in understanding. His own father had worked for a time digging out the great Erie Ca.n.a.l.

Supply Sergeant Coyngham waved a hand toward the southwest.

"Now, the Rebels over there, they have another way of doing it. D'ye know that they have their slaves with them doing that hard labor of weaving those wicker baskets we call gabions and shoveling up the red earth into them to make their bombproof walls? They've pulled 'em from the plantations and the cotton fields to do all of the dirty work of war except for the actual killing. There's tens of thousands of 'em over there behind those lines. And there's a wee bit of irony. Here we are in this war that our wise abolitionists tell us is a struggle to free those poor benighted Negroes. And there they are over there sweating blood to build the fortifications to keep us out."

Coyngham shook his head. Then he clapped Louis on the shoulder. "But enough of me jabbering, lad. Go and tell your captain that supplies are on the way to the Sixty-ninth."

When Louis got back to the company there was barely time to eat a bit of the salt pork stew Merry had concocted over a campfire in the skillet that their mess shared. There were greens in it that actually added a surprising amount of flavor.

Though it might just be the hunger that has been eating at my belly so much that even an old shoe would have tasted good. I don't know which I worry about most-getting shot or not getting anything to eat!

Louis wolfed the final bite of his meager breakfast and washed it down with the last cup of coffee from the pot Merry had carried with him, tied with a spare shoelace to the back of his pack. Then he looked around at the other men in their mess.

Mess, another one of those new words I've learned. But now I take it for granted as much as breathing.

A mess was the smallest and the most informal of all the units in any army. And in some ways, Louis had learned, it was the most important, made up of those men who chose to take their meals together in the field.

They all shared the duties of cooking, cleaning up, fetching water to fill the canteens and the coffee pot, and-when they could pry it out of Merry's hands-carrying the iron skillet. Joker Kirk and Scarecrow Dedham, Possum Page (flat on his back and snoring, his hat over his chubby face, able to take a nap anywhere), Merry, Happy Smith with his perennial scowl, Songbird Devlin, Knapp, Ryan, Kinney, Bishop. One by one he found the familiar faces of the other ten men in their mess. One apostle short of twelve, as Joker put it.

Not a one was missing. Men from other messes, like Wilson and O'Day, had died or become casualties. It was a small comfort that none of the men in their mess had been lost or even wounded in the hurly-burly of the previous day.

Every one of them, though, had broken fingernails and black, blistered hands. A stack of shovels lay piled against the side of their rifle pit. Their faces looked like those of the men Louis had seen once in a minstrel show, although the charcoal smears were not from burnt cork but from powder and ashes and Southern dirt.

And there-at the edge of the group-was one extra face. That face wore a look on it Louis had not seen before-a mix of uncertainty and hope.

"Belaney's asked to join us," Devlin said. "Every man in his mess was kilt or wounded. We've chosen to wait on a vote till you arrived. Ready? All in favor?"