On the Brock Road, Billy fell to his knees and crawled into a ditch as a shell whistled in and burst, tossing up a cloud of dirt and stones. Sharp rock fragments rained on his bare neck as he lay in the weeds, the wind and what little strength he possessed knocked out of him.
From the west, the north, the east, he heard the multitudinous sounds of battle. They seemed loudest to the east. He had worked his way through the smoke-filled streets of Spotsylvania Court House and out this far without detection or interference. But as he began to breathe regularly again, and with effort regained the road, staggering from tiredness and hunger and lingering pain, a captain on horseback — from one of Jubal Early's commands, he presumed — loomed through the smoke deepening the gray of the morning.
The bearded officer galloped past Billy before he really took notice of him. He reined in, dismounted swiftly, and wrenched his sword from his sheath. "No straggling," he shouted, hitting Billy's back with the flat of his sword. 'The lines are that way."
He pointed eastward with the blade. The ends of a strip of black silk tied around his right sleeve fluttered in the breeze. Mumbling to disguise his voice, Billy said, "Sir, I lost my musket —"
"You won't find another cowering back here." A second stab east. "Move, soldier."
Billy blinked, thinking, I'll have to try to cross someplace. Guess it might as well be here.
"You and your kind disgust me," the captain said gratuitously. "We lose a great man, and your tribute to his memory is a display of cowardice."
Billy didn't want to speak again but felt he must. "Don't know what you mean, sir." He didn't. "Who's been lost?"
"General Stuart, you damn fool. Sheridan's horse went around our flank to Richmond. They killed the general at Yellow Tavern day before yesterday. Now get moving or you're under arrest."
Billy turned, staggered down the road shoulder, and moved in ungainly fashion through high weeds toward distantly seen entrenchments. A shell burst over him, a black flower. He covered his head and stumbled on, hurting more at every step.
At Potomac Creek, the gap from bluff to bluff was four hundred feet. A deck bridge eighty feet above the water spanned it, but the Confederates had destroyed the bridge. Haupt had rebuilt it; Burnside had destroyed it a second time so the enemy couldn't use it. Now the Construction Corps was building it again.
At the bottom of the chasm, George and his men cut and laid logs for the crib foundation. Haupt was gone, but not his plans and methods. In forty hours, a duplicate of the trestle Mr. Lincoln had wryly referred to as a mighty structure of beanpoles and cornstalks was complete.
They had to rush the work, sacrificing sleep, because men returning from the battle joined around Spotsylvania Court House said the Union and Confederate casualties were piling up like cordwood in the autumn. The temporary hospitals could hold only the worst cases. During the frantic rebuilding of the trestle, eight men fell off from various places. Four died. Their funeral rites consisted of quick concealment beneath tarpaulins.
Now the rails were laid, the huge hawsers rigged across the bridge, the locomotive brought up.
"Pull," the black men and their white officers chanted together, thick ropes running through their hands and over their shoulders and across the trestle to the locomotive spouting steam on the far side. "Pull — and — pull."
As Haupt's Wisconsin and Indiana volunteers had done once before, they pulled the empty locomotive across the trestle while a lurid green twilight came down, presaging storm. Lightning flickered and ran around the horizon. The sky seemed to complain, and so did the bridge. It swayed. It creaked.
But it stood.
Now. Now. Now.
He had been saying that to himself for ten minutes to strengthen his nerve because his body was still so weak. Finally he knew he had to obey the silent command. One hand tight on the Confederate musket they had given him, Billy clawed a hold on the top of the earthwork and labored over while the torrential rain soaked him.
"Hey, Missouri, don't be crazy. You go any closer, you'll get kilt sure."
That was some reb noncom shouting from the earthworks he had just left. He lurched to his feet and limped through long, slippery grass, rapidly using up the small reserve of strength left to him. His kepi did little to shield his face from the hard rain.
He stumbled, sprawled, gagged when he slid into a dead Union vidette gazing at a lightning flash without seeing it. When the glare faded and darkness returned, he dropped his musket and flung off the kepi. The next flash caught him struggling to remove his gray jacket, his mouth opening and closing, silent gasps of pain. He was spotted by the same rebs who had earlier accepted his arrival without much question since the heavy fighting had shattered and mixed different commands all along the Confederate line. The noncom's voice reached him again.
"That dirty scum ain't attackin' nobody. He's runnin' to the other side. Shoot the bastard."
"Running — oh, damn right," Billy panted, trying to beat back fear with mockery. Guns cracked behind him. Lungs hurting, he kept moving, away from them. One shoulder rose and fell in rhythm with his hobbling gait. Thunder rolled in the wake of the last lightning, then in a new burst silhouetted fresh-budded trees and lit a Union bayonet like white-hot metal.
The picket with the bayonet, one of Burnside's men facing the rebel position, spied the filthy figure. Behind the picket, other shoulder weapons started crackling as loudly as those of the rebs. "Don't shoot," Billy yelled in the crossfire, hands raised. "Don't shoot. I'm a Union officer escaped from —"
He tripped on a half-buried stone and twisted, falling. He flapped his arms, losing all sense of direction. So he never knew who fired the shot that hit him and flung him on his face with a muffled cry.
George learned more about the spring offensive from Washington papers than he did from anyone in the war theater. Everyone called it Grant's campaign and praised Grant's brave men, although the actual commander of the Army of the Potomac was Major General Meade. Grant, however, was a general of the armies who took the field. Meade was relegated to a role something like that of a corps commander. It became Grant's war and Grant's plan. Ignore Richmond. Destroy Lee's army. Then the card house would fall.
But the papers also used one more phrase accusingly and often: Grant's casualties. The dispatches took on a sameness as the decimated army refilled its ranks and marched by night in pursuit of the retreating Lee. The repetitious headlines fell like a slow drum cadence: IMMENSE REBEL LOSSES AND OUR LOSS TWELVE THOUSAND and HEAVY LOSS ON BOTH SIDES.
George and the youngster named Scow watched one of the death trains traveling north from Falmouth on the reopened Aquia Creek & Fredericksburg. They could always identify the trains of the dead from Falmouth because they traveled noticeably faster than those carrying wounded or prisoners. Hundreds of firefly sparks swarmed above and behind the locomotive, which rapidly vanished. The line of cars was so long that despite its speed it seemed to take forever to pass.
"Twenty, twenty-one — twenty-two," Scow said, watching the last go by. "That's a mighty lot of coffins."
"The general's killing a mighty lot of men, but he'll kill more."
Scow said "Um" in a way that denoted sadness. Then asked, "How many you figure?"
Depressed, George swatted at a floating spark. He missed, and it stung his cheek. "As many as it takes to win." He was proud of the work he and the black men, so diverse in appearance and personality and yet so united in purpose, had accomplished. But he hated the reason for the work.
He clapped Scow on the shoulder in a friendly way that wasn't suitable for an officer, but he didn't give a hang, because the corps was an odd outfit. Odd and proud. "Let's find some food."
Presently George sat cross-legged next to Scow at a campfire built of pieces of broken crossties. He was spooning beans from his tin plate when a whistle signaled the approach of another Falmouth train. He and Scow peered through a maze of stumps toward the track a quarter of a mile away. Northern Virginia was a land of stumps; few uncut trees remained.
George watched the white beam of the headlight sweep around a bend, stabbing above the stumps and bleaching Scow light tan for a few moments.
"Wounded," George said, having judged the speed. He went back to his beans as the car carrying his brother rattled by.