“Ready! Aim!”
The gun came up to Jonathan’s shoulder and he sighted down the barrel, was dimly aware of red-clad men swimming at the end of his muzzle.
“Fire!” The word was not all out of the officer’s mouth before Jonathan squeezed the trigger, felt the familiar jar of the butt plate against his shoulder.
The smoke and the noise and the concussion of the whole line firing at once was unlike anything Jonathan could have imagined, the numb calm that he felt now unlike anything he might have guessed at. He was standing up in the flying river of iron, the minie balls and shells screaming past, making their terrible sound, and his arms and hands were performing the manual of arms, and he was hardly aware of any of it.
He felt the paper cartridge in his teeth, tasted the powder as he bit into it and tore off the top, but he was not sure how it had come to be in his mouth. His thoughts, such as they were, revolved around the stunning fact that he had just aimed his rifle at a human being and pulled the trigger. He had tried to kill the man, and he seemed not to care. He was more like a distant observer, watching this young man perform in his first battle, than he was a part of the scene.
His rifle came up again to the firing position, but this time he hesitated and looked at the scene beyond the shining barrel. The smoke was lifting and he could see the line of field guns, but the former military perfection was gone.
There were dead men everywhere, humps of crimson cloth and red legs sprawled out at odd angles and terrified horses and wounded horses screaming, an ungodly sound.
Some of the troops, the Zouaves and the red-pants regiment, were standing to fire, then dropping to their knees to reload. Still more were backing away down the hill, and some actually running, leaving the artillery units unprotected. And still the guns fired, as if they were unaware of the battle among foot soldiers taking place around them.
Jonathan looked to his left. Nathaniel was going through the drill, biting cartridge, pouring powder down the barrel, ramming the ball home.
Someone raised a shout, somewhere down the line, and a ripple of excitement moved through the men and Jonathan checked himself as he put his rifle to his shoulder and looked down the hill. From the woods on the left burst ranks of horsemen, Confederate cavalry, and with sabers flashing in the sun they charged down on the retreating Zouaves.
Jonathan watched, transfixed, as the battle played out just a few hundred feet away, horses prancing and whirling and sabers hacking up and down and the men on foot lunging with bayonets and firing up at riders, knocking them from the saddle. It was a macabre ballet, and the music to accompany it was the crash of artillery, the scream of minie balls, the wail of shells passing overhead.
Jonathan remembered the rifle in his hands. He shouldered the weapon, pointed it in the general direction of the battery, fired. The butt dropped to the ground, his hand found a cartridge.
The dance of horse and infantrymen was over, the cavalry retreating back to the woods, the Zouaves moving farther down the hill.
And then that officer was there again, racing down the line, sword raised, and he was shouting, “Advance! Thirty-third Virginia, advance!”
The line of men took a step forward, the great mass of soldiers building the first bit of momentum. The officer turned toward the front and then his head seemed to explode, as if a charge in his brain had been fired off. He flew back, landed on his back, arms outflung, sword still in his twitching fist, but the Confederate line pushed past him and moved down the hill.
Jonathan looked at the dead man, half his face and head gone, the one remaining eye staring at the sky, but he felt nothing, no sensation in his gut, just a casual interest, and then his eyes were forward, on the artillery park, because that was where they were going.
Over the crest of the hill and they climbed over a rail fence and on the other side the officers formed them up in a line, shouted some words that Jonathan could not hear.
“Here we go, now!” Nathaniel yelled. Jonathan turned to look at his brother. He was grinning an odd grin and Jonathan knew his brother was as charged as he, as ready to go forward.
“Advance!” the word came rolling down the line and then the 33rd stepped out, and Jonathan and Nathaniel with it. A few hundred feet from the artillery and Jonathan could see two of the big guns swing around, their round mouths pointing at the Confederates, and he tensed, turned his head slightly away, readied himself for the blast, but it did not come.
One hundred and fifty feet and the colonel of the 33rd neatly turned the regiment so they were coming more directly at the battery. The two guns still stared silent at them, but now some of the other guns were being limbered up, ready to move. It seemed all confusion among the artillerists. Jonathan wondered why they did not fire. He wondered if the 33rd’s blue uniforms were confusing them.
The Zouaves at the bottom of the hill were massing, and now someone was swinging one of the guns around to bear better on the advancing Confederates, and Jonathan thought, That’s it, then, the jig is up.
“Fire! Fire!” The order moved along the Confederate line and as one they stopped, shouldered weapons, fired from just over a hundred feet. The last rifles were still going off when the Confederate line rolled forward again, and as they jogged through their own smoke they could see the destruction and panic they had wrought. Dead men were everywhere, Zouaves, red-legged infantrymen, artillerymen. Horses thrashed out their lives still bound by their traces. Hundreds of men raced down the hill, tossing aside any encumbrance—knapsacks, rifles, canteens.
The 33rd rushed into the gap and then they were among the guns and only the dead and wounded of the Yankees remained behind. The rest were racing for their lines. A cheer went up from somewhere on the left and it was taken up along the line and soon among all of the 33rd, and Jonathan and Nathaniel Paine were shouting like madmen, whooping it up over their captured artillery.
A gang of soldiers tossed their rifles aside, grabbed the trails of one of the guns, swung it around to bring the weapon to bear on the fleeing Yankees. Others busied themselves pulling shoes of likely-looking size off the bodies of the late artillerymen. And off to the right, the rest of Jackson’s 1st Brigade began to move forward. The Confederates, on the verge of being crushed, were now on the offensive.
But the Yankees had some fight left in them. Even as the jubilation of taking the battery was fading, Jonathan became aware of small-arms fire. Minie balls were whipping past, buzzing by, at a furious rate, the noise much louder, the air even thicker with iron and lead. He looked down the hill. A regiment of bluecoats was making its way up the hill, firing in volleys as it came. A Virginian not ten feet away was knocked from his feet, a dark hole in his chest. Another screamed as his leg buckled under him, his knee shot through, and he fell to the dry grass, landing on top of a dead Yankee.
“Here they come!” Nathaniel shouted, raising his rifle and firing, dropping the butt to the ground and reloading.
Damn, damn… Jonathan had forgotten about his rifle. He set the butt on the ground, reached for a cartridge. Fingers were plucking at his sleeve and his pants and he looked to see who it was and saw nothing but a series of holes where bullets had passed.
Damn… The calm was deserting him, and he could feel panic rising up like the sickness he had felt before. He took a step back, could see more of the 33rd backing away from this onslaught. He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger.
To his left he heard his brother grunt, as if he had stubbed his toe, and he turned but Nathaniel was not there.
He looked in the other direction, but his brother was not there either, and he wondered if Nathaniel had panicked, had run for the crest of the hill. And then he thought to look at the ground.