late in the day and failed to pursue an advantage all night long. The carpers were men who did not understand and could not imagine the awesome burden of battle. It was not only mortally frightening but cursedly hard work. It left the combatant drained — starved, thirsty, ready to lie down anywhere there wasn't a corpse.
So the battle day had ended with both sides exhausted but still facing the long, dreadful night of screams and moans and searching for survivors. Candles moved across the fields and through the woods, like the last of summer's fireflies. Pickets held their fire; both sides were searching.
That night Charles saw the ambulances roll with their wailing cargoes. He saw the improvised pavilions where surgeons pushed up their sleeves, took out their saws, and amputated mangled arms and legs by the hundreds. He saw corpses growing huge, ripening with the gasses of death. Near dawn, he saw one explode.
Next day, the eighteenth, assessments began to emerge.
McClellan had assumed a defensive posture, or he might have buried the Confederacy forever. Presented with an opportunity to destroy Lee's army, he merely stopped the invasion. Lee hadn't been whipped, but neither had he won. He had simply rushed his defensive units from one place to another, repelling in succession five apocalyptic attacks between daybreak and dark: at the west woods and cornfield three times; at the sunken road, leaving a lane of the dead six, seven, eight deep in one thousand-yard stretch; and, lastly, at the lower bridge on Antietam Creek.
Reinforced during the early hours of the eighteenth, McClellan chose to stand fast. The Confederate high command chose to withdraw. By now Charles had only fragmentary recollections of the day before. He couldn't remember all the places he had been sent or how many men he had shot at. Several times he had been on his own an hour or more, isolated from his objective or any familiar faces — a not uncommon happening in a battle that slid from here to there like mercury. He knew he would forever carry memories of his constant fear for Sport and his feeling that the September afternoon was eternal, the sun nailed to the sky, never to fall and force an end.
On the retreat, more segments of the tapestry — one an afternoon incident whose site he could not recall, though the images were burned into his mind. Three men in gray, one very young, with drool in the corners of his cracked lips, moved across Charles's line of vision thrusting their bayonets deep into the bodies of dead Union soldiers.
A wisp of a lieutenant colonel, perhaps a schoolmaster or attorney once but now a blood-covered casualty, managed to lift himself in the sunshine and indicate by raising a hand that he was pleading for — anticipating — mercy. The split-lipped boy was the first to stab him, through the bowels. The others stabbed his upper chest, then all lurched on, the smile of a pleased drunkard on each face.
That single memory planted a new conviction in Charles's heart and mind. It would be a longer war than anyone had dreamed and henceforward would be fought without the punctilio of that remote day when Union riders pursued Gus, and the Yankee lieutenant, Prevo, accepted his word as an officer and West Point graduate that she wasn't in the farmhouse. Gentlemanly conduct had disappeared along with the black horses and the brave, shouting lads he had led in that springtime he wanted to remember but could not because of the slain animals, the butchered or bloating bodies, the gray trio with their bayonets and grins.
Who had won, who had lost — who gave a damn? he thought in the strange, light-headed mood that came over him as he and Ab, reunited, rode toward the Potomac in the long procession that stretched away and away, forward and behind, over the hills of Maryland. They were about a mile to the rear of the troopers of the Second South Carolina, who were relatively fresh because they had been held in reserve on the extreme left during the entire battle.
In moonlight, near the river, they passed some infantrymen who had fallen out to rest. One, bitterly jocular, called to them, 'Bet you two boys didn't see the scrap, bein' in the critter cavalry.'
'That's right,' said another, 'bein' in the critter cavalry is jes' like havin' an insurance policy nobody will ever cash in.'
Ab looked bleak and feverish. He pulled his side arm and cocked and aimed it at the last speaker, who yelped, 'Hey, now,' and jumped up to run. Charles grabbed Ab's arm and pulled it slowly, steadily, down. He felt Ab's trembling.
The next day, Charles became like many of those who went into a great battle and came out again. He didn't smile; he hardly spoke. He felt his soul clasped by a deepening depression. He could function, obey orders, but that was about all. And when someone asked Ab Woolner why his friend had such a remote look in his eyes, Ab explained.
'We was at Sharpsburg. Charlie still is.'
58
Of the battle his army called Antietam, Billy wrote but one line in his journal:
A sense of it began to infect him on the advance to what became the battlefield. The engineers found it hard to march on the Maryland roads because those roads were jammed with ambulances. From the ambulances came sounds Billy had heard before, though he could never grow accustomed to them.
He saw the smoke and heard the firing from South Mountain but didn't reach the summit of Turner's Gap until after dark on the fifteenth. Reveille roused the battalion at four, and when the light broke they found they had bivouacked among fallen dead from both sides. Even men with strong stomachs lost everything they had eaten for breakfast.
From Keedysville, late in the afternoon, the battalion was rushed to the front. By five Billy and Lije were organizing detachments to search the surrounding farmland for every available stone. Other men carried these to Antietam Creek. Shirtless, Billy worked till the sun sank, seeing to the paving of soft spots in the creek bottom, creating a ford where the artillery could cross. A similar one was prepared for the infantry.
When the tool wagons arrived — late — grading of the approaches commenced. At half past ten the work was finished. Though Billy was yawning and ready to drop, nervousness kept him awake most of the night. Tomorrow there would be a battle. Would Bison be in it? He had thought of Charles frequently in the last few days. Was he still alive?
As was customary, the engineers were issued ammunition — forty rounds for the cartridge box, twenty for the pockets — and rations, but they were withheld from the actual fighting. Billy and Lije and the others sat out the bloody day on a ridge overlooking the fords constructed the night before. In view of what he saw, Billy wished he had been elsewhere. The sight of the dead and wounded induced a disloyal reaction in him for a time; how could any cause be worth so many human lives?
Rushed forward next day, the engineers acted as infantry support for a battery near the center of the line. Sporadic Confederate sniping harassed them, but caused no casualties. The day after that, the battalion withdrew toward Sharpsburg across the lower creek bridge, already being called Burnside's in honor of the general who had stormed it during the battle's final phase.
The federal pontoon bridge at Harpers Ferry had been wrecked by the rebels, so the engineers marched there, and late on the twenty-first fell to rebuilding it. Billy found the work restorative; with hands and backs and minds and a lot of sweat, the battalion created things instead of destroying them. He built a mental barrier and behind it hid the purpose of those creations.
From the shallows they dragged pontoon boats that could be salvaged and repaired them with wood from boxes in which rations of crackers were shipped. By now Billy's beard was two inches long. He existed in a perpetual bleary state and sometimes fell asleep on his feet for five or ten seconds. He longed for Brett.
During the night of the twenty-second, wagons arrived with the regular pontoon train and additional men — the Fiftieth New York Volunteer Engineers. He worked until dawn, frequently wading in chilly water, and at first light on the twenty-third was relieved to sleep a while. He covered himself with a blanket. The long separation from his wife produced night dreams and embarrassing evidence afterward.
After four hours, he woke and ate, feeling he could go on now. Some of the engineers formed a betting pool; each man drew a slip with a date on it. The date was understood to be that on which McClellan would be relieved. Choices were offered all the way through the end of December.
