What might have been, p.33
What Might Have Been, page 33
Among the stands of brigade and regimental colors was another stand, or rather a perch, with a pair of black birds sitting quizzically atop: Hugin and Munin, named after the ravens of Wotan. The brigade called themselves the Ravens, a compliment to their commander.
The general stood on the siding and watched the brigade as it came to a halt and broke ranks. A few smiling bandsmen helped the general load his horses and buggy on a flatcar, then jumped with their instruments aboard their assigned transport. The ravens were taken from their perch and put in cages in the back of the general’s carriage.
A lance of pain drove through the general’s thigh as he swung himself aboard. He found himself a seat among the divisional staff. Sextus Pompeiius put the general’s bags in the rack over his head, then went rearward to sit in his proper place behind the car, in the open between the carriages.
A steam whistle cried like a woman in pain. The tired old train began to move.
Poe’s Division, formerly Pickett’s, began its journey north to fight the Yanks somewhere on the North Anna River. When, the general thought, would these young men see Richmond again?
One of the ravens croaked as it had been taught: “Nevermore!”
Men laughed. They thought it a good omen.
General Poe stepped out of the mourning Starker house, the pale dead girl still touching his mind. When had he changed? he wondered. When had his heart stopped throbbing in sad, harmonic sympathy at the thought of dead young girls? When had he last wept?
He knew when. He knew precisely when his heart had broken for the last time, when he had ceased at last to mourn
Virginia Clemm, when the last ounce of poetry had poured from him like a river of dark veinous blood. . . .
When the Ravens had gone for that cemetery, the tombstones hidden in dust and smoke.
When General Edgar A. Poe, CSA, had watched them go, that brilliant summer day, while the bands played “Bonnie Blue Flag” under the trees and the tombstones waited, marking the factories of a billion happy worms . . .
Poe stood before the Starker house and watched the dark form of his fourth and last brigade, the new North Carolina outfit that had shown their mettle at Port Walthall Junction, now come rising up from the old farm road like an insubstantial battalion of mournful shades. Riding at the head came its commander, Thomas Clingman. Clingman saw Poe standing on Starker’s front porch, halted his column, rode toward the house, and saluted.
“Where in hell do I put my men, General? One of your provost guards said up this way, but—”
Poe shook his head. Annoyance snapped like lightning in his mind. No one had given him any orders at all. “You’re on the right of General Corse, out there.” Poe waved in the general direction of Hanover Junction, the little town whose lights shone clearly just a quarter mile to the east. “You should have gone straight up the Richmond and Fredericks-burg tracks from the Junction, not the Virginia Central.”
Clingman’s veinous face reddened. “They told me wrong, then. Ain’t anybody been over the ground, Edgar?”
“No one from this division. Ewell pulled out soon’s he heard we were coming, but that was just after dark and when we came up, we had no idea what to do. There was just some staff creature with some written orders, and he galloped away before I could ask him what they meant.”
No proper instruction, Poe thought. His division was part of Anderson’s corps, but he hadn’t heard from Anderson and didn’t know where the command post was. If he was supposed to report to Lee, he didn’t know where Lee was either. He was entirely in the dark.
Contempt and anger snarled in him. Poe had been ignored again. No one had thought to consult him; no one had remembered him; but if he failed, everyone would blame him. Just like the Seven Days’.
Clingman snorted through his bushy mustache. “Confound it anyway.”
Poe banged his stick into the ground in annoyance. “Turn your men around, Thomas. It’s only another half mile or so. Find an empty line of entrenchments and put your people in. We’ll sort everyone out come first light.”
“Lord above, Edgar.”
“Fitz Lee’s supposed to be on your right. Don’t let’s have any of your people shooting at him by mistake.”
Clingman spat in annoyance, then saluted and started the process of getting his brigade turned around. Poe stared after him and bit back his own anger. Orders would come. Surely his division hadn’t been forgotten.
“Massa Poe?”
Poe gave a start. With all the noise of marching feet and shouted orders, he hadn’t heard Sextus Pompeiius creeping up toward him. He looked at his servant and grinned.
“You gave me a scare, Sextus. Strike me if you ain’t invisible in the dark.”
Sextus chuckled at his master’s wit. “I found that cider, Massa Poe.”
Poe scowled. If his soft cider hadn’t got lost, he wouldn’t have had to interrupt the Starkers’ wake in search of lemonade. He began limping toward his headquarters tent, his cane sinking in the soft ground.
“Where’d you find it?” he demanded.
“That cider, it was packed in the green trunk, the one that came up with the divisional train.”
“I instructed you to pack it in the brown trunk.”
“I know that, Massa Poe. That fact must have slipped my mind, somehow.”
Poe’s hand clenched the ivory handle of his came. Renewed anger poured like fire through his veins. “Worthless nigger baboon!” he snapped.
“Yes, Massa Poe,” Sextus said, nodding, “I is. I must be, the way you keep saying I is.”
Poe sighed. One really couldn’t expect any more from an African. Changing his name from Sam to Sextus hadn’t given the black any more brains than God had given him in the first place.
“Well, Sextus,” he said. “Fortuna favet fatuis, you know.” He laughed.
“Massa always has his jokes in Latin. He always does.”
Sextus’s tone was sulky. Poe laughed and tried to jolly the slave out of his mood.
“We must improve your knowledge of the classics. Your litterae humaniores, you understand.”
The slave was annoyed. “Enough human litter around here as it is.”
Poe restrained a laugh. “True enough, Sextus.” He smiled indulgently. “You are excused from your lessons.”
His spirits raised by the banter with his darky, Poe limped to his headquarters tent, marked by the division flags and the two ravens on their perch, and let Sextus serve him his evening meal. The ravens gobbled to each other while Poe ate sparingly, and drank two glasses of the soft cider. Poe hadn’t touched spirits in fifteen years, even though whiskey was a lot easier to find in this army than water.
Not since that last sick, unholy carouse in Baltimore.
Where were his orders? he wondered. He’d just been ordered to occupy Ewell’s trenches. Where was the rest of the army? Where was Lee? No one had told him anything.
After the meal, he’d send couriers to find Lee. Somebody had to know something.
It was impossible they’d forgotten him.
Eureka, he called it. His prose poem had defined the universe, explained it all, a consummate theory of matter, energy, gravity, art, mathematics, the mind of God. The universe was expanding, he wrote, had exploded from a single particle in a spray of evolving atoms that moved outward at the speed of divine thought. The universe was still expanding, the forms of its matter growing ever more complex; but the expansion would slow, reverse; matter would coalesce, return to its primordial simplicity; the Divine Soul that resided in every atom would reunite in perfect self-knowledge.
It was the duty of art, he thought, to reunite human thought with that of the Divine, particled with unparticled matter. In his poetry he had striven for an aesthetic purity of thought and sentiment, a detachment from political, moral, and temporal affairs. . . . Nothing of Earth shone in his verse, nothing contaminated by matter—he desired harmonies, essences, a striving for Platonic perfection, for the dialogue of one abstract with another. Beyond the fact that he wrote in English, nothing connected the poems with America, the nineteenth century, its life, its movements. He disdained even standard versification—he wrote with unusual scansions, strange metrics—the harmonies of octameter catalectic, being more rarified, seemed to rise to the lofty ear of God more than could humble iambic pentameter, that endless trudge, trudge, trudge across the surface of the terrestrial globe. He wanted nothing to stand between himself and supernal beauty, nothing to prevent the connection of his own mind with that of God.
He had poured everything into Eureka, all his soul, his hope, his grief over Virginia, his energy. In the end there was the book, but nothing left of the man. He lectured across America, the audiences polite and appreciative, their minds perhaps touched by his own vision of the Divine—but all his own divinity had gone into the book, and in the end Earth reached up to claim him. Entire weeks were spend in delirium, reeling drunk from town to town, audience to audience, woman to woman. . . .
Ending at last in some Baltimore street, lying across a gutter, his body a dam for a river of half-frozen October sleet.
After the meal Poe stepped outside for a pipe of tobacco. He could see the soft glow of candlelight from the Starker parlor, and he thought of the girl in her coffin, laid out in her dress of virgin white. How much sadder it would have been had she lived, had she been compelled to grow old in this new, changing world, this sad and deformed Iron Age dedicated to steam and slaughter . . . better she was dead, her spirit purged of particled matter and risen to contemplation of the self-knowing eternal.
His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of a man on horseback. Poe recognized Colonel Moxley Sorrel, a handsome Georgian, still in his twenties, who was Longstreet’s chief of staff. He had been promoted recently as a result of leading a flank assault in the Wilderness that had crushed an entire Union corps, though, as always, the triumph had come too late in the day for the attack to be decisive.
“General.” Sorrel saluted. “I had a devil of a time finding you. Ewell had his command post at Hackett’s place, over yonder.” He pointed at the lights of a plantation house just north of Hanover Junction. “I reckoned you’d be there.”
“I had no notion of where Ewell was. No one’s told me a thing. This place seemed as likely as any.” Poe looked oft” toward the lights of Hanover Junction. “At least there’s a good view.”
Sorrel frowned. He swung out of the saddle, and Sextus came to take the reins from his hand. “Staff work has gone up entirely,” Sorrel said. “There’s been too much chaos at the top for everything to get quite sorted out.”
“Yes.” Poe looked at him. “And how is General Longstreet?”
The Georgian’s eyes were serious. “He will recover, praise God. But it will be many months before he can return to duty.”
Poe looked up at the ravens, half expecting one of them to croak out “Nevermore.” But they’d stuck their heads under their wings and gone to sleep.
He will recover, Poe thought. That’s what they’d said of Stonewall; and then the crazed Presbyterian had died suddenly.
Just like old Stonewall to do the unexpected.
The army had been hit hard the last few weeks. First Longstreet wounded in the Wilderness, then Jeb Stuart killed at Yellow Tavern, just a few days ago. They were the two best corps commanders left to Lee, in Poe’s opinion. Longstreet had been replaced by Richard Anderson; but Lee had yet to appoint a new cavalry commander—both, in Poe’s mind, bad decisions. Anderson was too mentally lazy to command a corps—he was barely fit to command his old division—and the cavalry needed a firm hand now, with their guiding genius gone.
“Will you come inside, Colonel?” Poe gestured toward the tent flap with his stick.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Share some cider with me? That and some biscuits are all the rafraichissements I can manage.”
“You’re very kind.” Sorrell looked at the uncleared table. “I’ve brought your orders from General Anderson.”
Poe pushed aside his gold-rimmed dinner plate and moved a lantern onto the table. Sorrel pulled a folded map out of his coat and spread it on the pale blue tablecloth. Poe reached
for his spectacles and put them on his nose. The map gave him, for the first time, an accurate look at his position.
This part of the Southern line stretched roughly northwest to southeast, a chord on an arc of the North Anna. The line was more or less straight, though it was cut in half by a swampy tributary of the North Anna, with steep banks on either side, and at that point Poe’s entrenchments bent back a bit. The division occupied the part of the line south of the tributary. In front of him was dense hardwood forest, not very useful for maneuver or attack.
“We’re going on the offensive tomorrow,” Sorrel said, “thank the lord.” He gave a thin smile. “Grant’s got himself on the horns of a dilemma, sir, and General Lee intends to see he’s gored.”
Poe’s temper crackled. “No one’s going to get gored if division commanders don’t get their instructions!” he snapped.
Sorrel gave him a wary smile. “That’s why I’m here, sir.”
Poe glared at him, then deliberately reined in his anger. “So you are.” He took a breath. “Pardon my . . . display.”
“Staff work, as I say, sir, has been a mite precarious of late. General Lee is ill, and so is General Hill.”
Poe’s anxiety rose again. “Lee?” he demanded. “Ill?”
“An intestinal complaint. We would have made this attack yesterday had the general been feeling better.”
Poe felt his nervousness increase. He was not a member of the Cult of Lee, but he did not trust an army without a capable hand at the top. Too many high-ranking officers were out of action or incompetent. Stuart was dead, Longstreet was wounded, Lee was sick—great heavens, he’d already had a heart attack—Ewell hadn’t been the same since he lost his leg, Powell Hill was ill half the time. . . . And the young ones, the healthy ones, were as always dying of bullets and shells.
“Your task, general,” Sorrel said, “is simply to hold. Perhaps to demonstrate against the Yanks, if you feel it possible.”
“How am I to know if it’s possible?” He was still angry. “I don’t know the ground. I don’t know where the enemy is.”
Sorrel cocked an eyebrow at him, said, “Ewell didn’t show you anything?” But he didn’t wait for an answer before beginning his exposition.
The Army of Northern Virginia, he explained, had been continually engaged with Grant’s army for three weeks—first in the Wilderness, then at Spotsylvania, now on the North Anna; there hadn’t been a single day without fighting. Every time one of Grant’s offensives bogged down, he’d slide his whole army to his left and try again. Two days before, on May 24, Grant had gone to the offensive again, crossing the North Anna both upstream and down of Lee’s position.
Grant had obviously intended to overlap Lee on both flanks and crush him between his two wings; but Lee had anticipated his enemy by drawing his army back into a V shape, with the center on the river, and entrenching heavily. When the Yanks saw the entrenchments they’d come to a stumbling halt, their offensive stopped in its tracks without more than a skirmish on either flank.
“You’re facing a Hancock’s Second Corps, here on our far right flank,” Sorrel said. His manicured finger jabbed at the map. Hancock appeared to be entirely north of the swampy tributary. “Warren and Wright are on our left, facing Powell Hill. Burnside’s Ninth Corps is in the center—he tried to get across Ox Ford on the twenty-fourth, but General Anderson’s guns overlook the ford and Old Burn called off the fight before it got properly started. Too bad—” Grinning. “Could’ve been another Fredericksburg.”
“We can’t hope for more than one Fredericksburg, alas,” Poe said. “Not even from Burnside.” He looked at the map. “Looks as if the Federals have broken their army into pieces for us.”
“Yes, sir. We can attack either wing, and Grant can’t reinforce one wing without moving his people across the North Anna twice.”
General Lee had planned to take advantage of that with an offensive against half Grant’s army. He intended to pull Ewell’s corps off the far right, most of Anderson’s out of the center, and combine them with Hill’s for a strike at Warren and Wright. The attack would have been made the day before if Lee hadn’t fallen ill. In the end he’d postponed the assault by one day.
The delay, Poe thought, had given the Yanks another twenty-four hours to prepare. Confederates aren’t the only ones who know how to entrench.
Plans already laid, he thought. Nothing he could do about it.
He looked at the map. Now that Ewell and most of Anderson’s people had pulled out, he was holding half the Confederate line with his single division.
