Minutes only in reality. Only minutes to breathe, to understand his friend was dead and himself alive by inches.
His hand trembled as he reached inside his uniform, carefully took out the photograph. Eliza. Lizzy. His Lizzy with hair like sunlight and a smile that opened his heart. She loved him, despite all. She waited for him, and when this hell was over, they’d marry. He’d build her a house—not so very far from where he lay now. But the house would live with love and joy, with the laughter of their children.
When this hell was over, he’d go back for her. He’d had one letter, and only one. Smuggled out of her house, to his mother, and passed on to him. He’d read her despair at being locked in on the night they’d planned to elope, and her unwavering faith that they would find each other again.
He’d written her only the night before, carefully forming the words while restless in camp. He’d find a way to get the letter to her. No man could live through hell and not believe in heaven.
He’d have his with Eliza. They’d have forever.
He heard the shouted orders to regroup, to advance again on that damned sunken road. He closed his eyes, pressed his lips to the image of Eliza, then slipped her carefully away again. Safe, he promised himself. Safe against his heart.
He got to his feet. Breathed, breathed. He would do his duty to his country, trust in God, and find his way back to Lizzy.
He charged again, the murderous hail of bullets flying from both sides.
He lived again as bodies, torn and rent, littered the once quiet farmland. Hours passed like years—and somehow like minutes. Morning into afternoon. He knew by the sun he’d lived another morning. He never wavered in duty, shouldered beside others who’d vowed to serve.
He moved forward, climbing fences, through an apple orchard where windfalls scattered over the ground and bees half-drunk buzzed over them. And on the rise looked down at the men in that old road. Finally the high ground served, and they ripped through a gap. He stood near the bend of the road, looked down into horror.
So many dead. It seemed impossible; it seemed obscene. They lay stacked on each other like cordwood, and still those who survived fired, fired, determined to hold that bloody ground.
For what? For what? For what? he wondered in some grieving part of his brain, but he heard the order to fire and obeyed. He thought of George, and obeyed. Robbing another mother of her son, another woman of her love.
Taking another life that, like him, only wanted home.
And he thought of Lizzy, pressed against his heart. Lizzy who loved him, despite all. Who waited for him.
He thought of his mother weeping over his brother Joshua, dead at Shiloh.
He couldn’t fire again, could not stop one more heart, drive one more mother to weeping. This was slaughter, he thought. Hundreds dead and hundreds more to die. Farmers and masons and blacksmiths and shopkeepers. Why didn’t they surrender? Why would they fight and die in that depressed earth surrounded by their dead brothers?
Was this honor? Was this duty? Was this the answer? Exhausted, heart-broken, sickened at the carnage below, he lowered his weapon.
He didn’t feel the first shell punch into him, or the second. He only felt suddenly and terribly cold, and found himself once more on the ground, looking up at the sky.
He thought clouds had rolled over the sun. Everything grayed and flattened. And all the noise, all the hell of it dimmed into an almost peaceful quiet.
Was it over? At last, was it over?
He reached a hand inside his uniform for Lizzy, drew her photograph out. Stared, stared as blood smeared over her beautiful face.
Then he knew.
He knew.
Pain came in a sudden, shocking flood as blood streamed out of his wounds. He cried out against it, cried out again in a sorrow too deep to bear.
