Glory In The Name

after luring Nathaniel to his death, not with the things he had seen on the battlefield that day.

He looked at his brother’s face, gray-colored, mouth open, the skin growing tight around his features. Jonathan wondered how many Yankees he himself had killed, how many young men had been turned into so much clay by his bullets.

He looked up. The Confederate line was approaching, the Yankees falling back, but he was still far out ahead of his own people. He snatched up his rifle, reached for a cartridge. He bit the top off and tried to spit it out, but his mouth was so dry he could not spit at all, so he pulled the paper out with his fingers, then poured the powder down the barrel and pushed the bullet in. He pulled out his ramrod and thrust it down the barrel but he could not push it even halfway in. He slammed the ramrod down the barrel, twisted it, but it would not go.

He stared dumbly at the thing, tried to recall if he had been putting percussion caps on the nipple. He could not recall having done so. Was his rifle filled with unfired bullets and power?

He shook his head, tossed his weapon away. No time to puzzle it out. He grabbed up Nathaniel’s rifle, lying beside his brother. He paused. Nathaniel was forever getting mad at him for borrowing things without asking. He had been apoplectic the time Jonathan took his painting kit and used it to create genuine Red Indian designs on their canoe.

“Sorry, brother,” he said and took the rifle and ran, crouching, for the Confederate lines.

The gray-and blue-clad Virginians were still advancing, walking slowly into that murderous fire. Men took bullets two and three at a time, twisting in their macabre dance that ended with them crumpled and left behind by the advancing line. The shrieks of agony were like nothing Jonathan could have imagined, but they were far less disturbing than the pitiful cries for help, for water, for mother.

Jonathan loaded and placed a percussion cap on the nipple and looked through bleary eyes over the barrel and fired. The butt of the gun slammed into his shoulder, and something else slammed into his side and half spun him around. He looked down and saw strips of his shell jacket hanging down and blood and torn skin. He put his hand on the wound. It felt warm. He pulled his hand away, and his palm was bright red with blood. He stared at it for a moment, then stepped off again with the advancing Confederates. He could not think of anything else he might do.

Load, fire, advance. The bluebellies had been joined by more troops coming up the hill, and now the Virginians were not stepping forward so fast, and in places they were even beginning to back away.

Jonathan pulled a percussion cap out of his box and placed it on the nipple and then his right leg was swept out from under him and he fell and twisted as he went down, saw the blue sky, the blinding sun, swirl past, and he hit the ground, screaming, screaming.

He propped himself up on his elbow. His leg from the knee down was hanging at an angle that was not right. He could see white, jagged bone sticking out from rent gray cloth and bright blood, and he screamed again.

Can’t fall here…can’t fall here… The words ran through his head. He could not stop there, right in the line of the Yankees’ advance. He rolled over, grabbed up his rifle, and held it like a post in the ground. He worked his hands up its length, pulling himself up on his one good foot. The pain was like a brilliant white light in his head, eclipsing everything, but he gritted his teeth and he screamed when he had to and he pulled himself up.

He balanced on his remaining foot and flipped the rifle over so that it was more or less like a crutch. He tucked the butt under his arm, took a hop forward. The pain ripped through him, not just in his leg but all-consuming. He screamed, panted, waited as the pain passed. Much more of that and he would pass out, he knew.

He gasped for breath, looked around. The Confederates seemed to be falling back, he seemed to be alone on the field, save for the writhing wounded and the dead.

He looked in the other direction. The Yankees were coming strong up the hill, firing in volleys, advancing.

Oh, hell, hell… He had to move, but he knew what the pain would be and he could not bring himself to do it. He looked at the advancing blue line, and out of all of those men, he saw one look at him, look right at him, and raise a rifle to his shoulder.

Son of a bitch…that Yankee son of a bitch is trying to kill me…

Three hundred feet away and he could see that little round black spot that was the muzzle and for the briefest instant a blossom of red and yellow, and then nothing.

For Lieutenant Robley Paine, Jr., it had been the worst day in memory. Twice more the battalion had shuffled into line, marched forward, splashed through the Bull Run River, then stopped. They milled around, the lines drifted away, and all the shouting of the officers could not keep the men in order. It was as clear to the men as it was to Robley that they were not going into a fight.

Robley did his share of shouting at them, more than his share, despite his own admission of the futility of it all. He kicked men in the ass to get them back in line and in the legs when he caught them sleeping in the grass, shoved them back into formation. Once he made his company go through the manual of arms. He was furious and taking his fury out on the men and he knew it and did not care.

All the day long, taunting him, the sounds of the fight off to the left grew louder, the cloud of smoke denser. From the south and the east and the north they could see dust clouds where more and more regiments rushed to the battle, and all the while the 18th Mississippi crossed back and forth at McLean’s Ford, or sat and did nothing at all.

With each hour that crawled by, with each muffled escalation of the fighting off to the left, Robley grew angrier by degrees. He felt utterly betrayed, that his brothers should march off and leave him that way. He felt sick at the thought that they might well be in the thick of the fighting, while he sat on his hands.

How would it be if this was the first and last battle of the war? How could he endure it, the rest of his life, listening to his younger brothers tell tales of the fighting they did while he sat silent? And when pressed, he would say only, “Third Brigade, we never did get into the fight.”

But your brothers were in 3rd Brigade. How did they get into the battle?

He almost went off to the fight himself, half a dozen times at least. Once he even took two steps in the direction of the gunfire, but even then he stopped. He could not do it. He was an officer, it was not his business to go. He felt as if his soul was being drawn and quartered.

It occurred to him, more than once, that his brothers could be wounded, terribly disfigured, perhaps dead. But even that thought did little to mitigate his misery. How would it be, back home, if his brothers were killed in the fight, and he never even showed the courage to go? Would he be able to make the others understand that he could not go? That his duty lay in doing as he was ordered to do?

He says it was his duty, but Jonathan and Nathaniel, they went into the fight anyway. Gave their lives for the cause. They understood the real meaning of duty. And honor. That was what people would say. Could he ever convince himself that duty, and not cowardice, had held him back?

The long afternoon dragged on, and Robley sank deeper into his funk. He found himself engaged in mock arguments in his head, eloquent explanations of why he had not left his regiment to join the fight, discourses on how, heroic as his brothers might seem, it was he, Lieutenant Paine, who was the real soldier, for wars could not be fought with renegade troops, rushing off where they pleased, but by steady, reliable men who obeyed orders.

As the sun was moving toward the horizon, and the sounds to the left of the line changed once again, two rumors ran through the 3rd Brigade, one to fill Robley with horror, one with hope.

The first was that the enemy was routed, that Jackson and Evans and Bee and the rest, aided by the timely arrival of reinforcements and Stewart’s cavalry, had sent the Yankees fleeing for the Bull Run and the defenses of Washington. The word was that it was not a retreat but panicked flight, that the great Union army had crumbled completely, that it was every bluebelly for himself.

Robley could think of no news that he less wanted to hear. The Yankees whipped, his brothers a part of it, and him having not fired a shot? It was too much to bear.

Then on the heels of that dreadful news came word that the 18th Mississippi was moving out, going in support of Longstreet’s 4th Brigade. They would be advancing on Centreville, hitting the Yankees from the other side, cutting off their retreat. It would be real fighting, finishing off what the men on the left had started.

Oh God, oh, God, let it be so…

Twenty minutes later they were moving out again, following the Bull Run River northwest to join up with the 4th Brigade, which even now was halfway across Blackburn’s Ford and marching north.