It had been a very long day. Henry slowly dismounted, letting me reins of his horse drop, one of the staff taking the horse and leading it away. Headquarters had been pitched off the pike a mile or so north of Union Mills, half a dozen tents with sides rolled up, coal-oil lamps gleaming. The scent of rain was in the air, a brief shower having dampened the field minutes before.
They were gathered here, Meade, Hancock, Sickles, Slocum, Sedgwick, along with dozens of staff, orderlies, cooks, cavalry guards, provost guards, reporters, even Sullivan the photographer.
Henry was barely noticed as he stepped into the largest tent where the generals were gathered around a table, maps spread out, the air thick with cigar smoke and the scent of whiskey, sweat, and unwashed bodies.
Meade looked up and nodded a recognition. His eyes were deep set, hollow, obviously half-closed with exhaustion.
"Your report, Hunt," Meade snapped.
"Sir, nearly all the guns will be in place by six A.M. Four batteries, however, will definitely not arrive from Gettysburg until later in the morning. The road is a shambles, and it looks like rain, which will make it worse getting them through."
"What can we count on?"
"I'll have nearly forty batteries in place, including those batteries nominally under corps command. A grand battery of a hundred and twenty guns on the heights just above Union Mills, a secondary battery of sixty Napoleons downslope a third of a mile to the right, and then other batteries positioned farther down the line.
"We have an average of two hundred rounds per gun; that's everything, solid shot, case and shrapnel, canister. We have no real reserve anymore."
"I know that," Meade snapped.
"Sir, it means I can offer, at best, two hours of sustained fire, at which point we will be getting dangerously close to depletion, except for canister."
"Can you put enough fire into the point of attack to support a breakthrough?*'
Henry did not reply for a moment.
"Can you?"
"Sir, I can't promise."
"Damn it, Hunt, just give me a straight answer."
"Sir, there are too many variables. I plan to put upward of twenty thousand rounds of fire into a front less than a mile wide. I think that will have a serious impact That's all I can promise, sir."
Meade grunted. He sat back, striking a match on the table leg, and puffing a half-smoked cigar back to life. "Then that's it" Meade said. "Any questions?'
Henry looked around at the four corps commanders standing about the table. Hancock seemed to have recovered from his shock of earlier and was sitting quietly, eyes intent on the map, sipping whiskey from a tin cup. Slocum and Sedgwick were whispering softly to each other to one side, while Sickles stood alone.
Henry could sense the disquiet, a terrible sense that this was not what any of them had dreamed possible only four days ago.
"Hunt, is it possible to get more guns on my flank?" Sickles asked.
"I want everything massed," Meade said, before Henry could reply.
Sickles was uncharacteristically quiet and simply nodded.
The gathering was silent, and Henry looked back at Meade. "Sir, if there is nothing else, to be honest I'd like to get a little sleep. It's going to be a long day tomorrow."
"Yes, Hunt, a very long day. You're dismissed."
Henry stepped out of the tent, glad to be back in the open. He looked around, trying to spot where his own staff had gathered, and then saw them alongside a house adjoining the field where headquarters was pitched. He started toward them.
"Hunt"
He almost wanted to ignore the summons. It was Sickles.
"Hunt, a moment of your time."
Henry turned slowly, offering a salute as Dan approached out of the shadow, tip of his cigar glowing.
"What do you think of this?" Sickles asked.
"Sir, my job is to follow orders. I was to position my guns to support a grand assault come dawn, and that is what I've done."
Sickles, hands in his pockets, looked down. "Hancock's badly shaken. It will be his corps that starts the assault. Meade has already given him a direct order that he can't go forward with them. The man is heartsick."
Henry was surprised by the note of sympathy in Sickles's voice.
"Hunt, it's going to be bloody, very bloody. Second and Twelfth Corps advancing side by side, then Sixth Corps coining in behind as the breakthrough force, with First Corps arriving before dawn as additional support We both know that the old Second and the Twelfth are decimated."
Henry said nothing. He had heard the plan earlier, the argument by Sickles to strike to the right if need be to slice down toward Frederick, Maryland, the suggestion sent down by Howard to retreat back to Harrisburg. He had heard all the arguments, the endless damn arguments. And now they had settled on this, a full-out frontal assault come dawn.
If there was a hope, any hope, it was that Lee's men were just as exhausted from their grueling march, the two days of running battles, and the casualties inflicted on them. Combine that with a massive bombardment at dawn, the greatest of the war from the way things were developing, and maybe, just maybe they would break through.
"Hunt it will be a frontal assault across twelve hundred yards of open ground. As bad as Fredericksburg."
"Burnside fed it in piecemeal there. Meade at least knows to do it all at once," Henry replied.
Sickles shook his head. "Goddamn. I looked at the land around Gettysburg. Maybe this is it I thought Maybe just for once it is us on the high ground and them coming at us. I could see it from atop Rocky Hill, imagine them coming across those open fields with our guns bellowing in their faces. Now, yet again, it's us."
Henry nodded.
"Meade can't do anything else," Henry finally offered.
"I know! There's been no word yet from Washington, but we both know what those damn politicians will scream for."
Henry couldn't help but smile. Sickles, a politician, denouncing his own.
"But it doesn't have to be tomorrow," Sickles said softly.
"That will give them another day to dig in."
"And maybe another day for us to think, to think and then try and maneuver."
"What about Washington?" Henry asked.
"As I said before, the hell with Washington. Lee can't take it; anyone with a brain knows that We slide to the west and break off the action. Lee can't get across the Susquehanna; all the bridges are down, and Couch has twenty thousand men up in Harrisburg."
"They're militia, not worth a damn in a real fight" Henry said.
"Enough, though, to keep Lee from trying to force a crossing. Let him take Baltimore, if he wants the damn place. We slide around to the west cross the Potomac, and start marching on Richmond if need be. Do that and in the end Lee will have to bow to the same pressures that are on Meade right now. He'll have to break off and come after us."
"It will never happen," Hunt said wearily. "The attack goes in at dawn."
"And do you think it will succeed?"
Henry sighed. "I have to believe it will. Give me enough ammunition, and I can suppress their guns. Do that and there's a fair chance with a full assault, of three corps; forty thousand men, hitting all at once, just might break through."
Sickles dropped his cigar and snuffed it out with the toe of his boot "Fine, Hunt," he said dejectedly. "Just keep enough ammunition in reserve to cover the retreat You'll need it"
Henry watched as' Sickles turned and went back to the command tent
What more could he say? That he felt sick to his stomach, that he wished the hell he could just go to sleep and not wake up for a week? Sickles was a corps commander looking to him for advice.
Then again, he could almost feel sympathy for a man who prior to this campaign he had viewed with outright distaste. Sickles was outside the mould. He was vain, self-serving, glory hunting, and yet he loved his men and had the guts to stand on the front line. If there was to be a sacrifice tomorrow, he wanted it to mean something, and not just be another mad exercise in futility. There was nothing for him to offer though.
Henry slowly walked over to where his staff was camped. The boys were all asleep; he could not blame them. They had tied his horse off, brushed it down, and by the soft, glowing fire left a plate with some salted beef and hardtack. He didn't have the stomach for it
Finding his blanket roll, Henry opened it up. Looking up at the sky, he decided to put the rubber poncho on top and lying down on the cool, damp grass felt good, comforting.
A light rain began to fall, but Henry didn't notice. He was fast asleep.
Across the fields to either side of Pipe Creek ten thousand campfires flickered, glowed, and then slowly guttered out as the cool blanket of a summer's night rain drifted down from the heavens. It was not enough to wash away the blood in the pastures around Taneytown or to still the smoldering embers of Westminster, but for the moment it was a comfort after the long days of heat and dust and misery.
Some were still awake. Armistead, looking up at the sky, thinking of the colonel he had tried to save, wondered if that gallant soldier was still alive. At least I am still alive this evening, he thought and curling up under a horse blanket he drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
Winfield Scott Hancock did not sleep, gazing out from under his tent watching the droplets fall, watching the night slowly pass, wondering what this day of July 3rd had brought and why it could not have been different
George Pickett lost in dreams of glory won and the embrace of a fair lass, slept the sleep of the victorious.
Major Williamson, sitting on the bluffs overlooking Pipe Creek, was wrapped in silence, comrades asleep about him, wondering what the morning would bring and would the day to come be his last
Wesley Culp, a private with Johnson's division, lay curled up on his side near the Taneytown-Emmitsburg Road, clutching his torn stomach, crying softly, as his life trickled out Only the day before he had crept through the lines to visit his family home at Gettysburg, a Northern boy who had somehow wound up in the Southern ranks. Now he was dying here. At least I could have-died on my own land, he thought
John Bell Hood, arms folded, walked slowly through the camps of his division, nodding, offering a few words of congratulations, as men looked up at him. Finally he walked out into the fields, alone, looking north toward the fires burning on the other side. His arm hurt scratched by a ball. It could have been worse though, he realized.
Porter Alexander crawled under a limber wagon, stretching out calculating the numbers in his head, glad for once that there was more than enough ammunition to go around, in fact more ammunition, than he could fire in a long battle; glad as well that the day was over as he closed his eyes.
And thousands more drifted in and out of sleep. Those who were still alive, who might have been dead, and those who were alive and would be dead come morning. From the far reaches of a nation or from just down the lane they had come, these 160,000 boys and men, filled with tragic dreams of glory or with no dream at all other than a realization that they had to be here.
They had flowed over the roads, cresting mountains, leaping rivers, a tidal flow of a nation that still had not resolved if it could, indeed, be a nation. They were unlike any armies in history. Few of them truly hated; none had dreams of conquest of pillage and rape and destruction. Both armies fought mostly for an ideal, ironically the same ideal in the minds of many, and a few fought for a greater vision of all that could be, a dream that transcended the moment and the age they lived in. If they prayed, both prayed to the same vision of God, and even at this moment thousands had that same book open to favorite passages, most of them turning to the Psalms, silently reading while comrades and enemies slept.
Some now wandered the fields near Taneytown, lanterns bobbing up and down in the night mists. And when a comrade was found, more than one sat in silent grief, wondering why, wondering as well if fate had been different might that smiling friend be alive this evening, rather than cold and ready to go back into the earth.
The campfires guttered out All was still except for the muffled calls of sentries, the snoring of exhausted men, the steady patter of rain, and the distant muffled sobs of the wounded. Occasionally a man asleep would cry out stir, and sit up. Looking around, he'd remember that it was but a dream, and then silently lie back down. The nervous who could not sleep sat by die dying fires, staring off into the night pondering, as all soldiers have pondered, the meanings behind all things, the reasons why, the dreams yet to be lived, the fears of what might be.
And so, four score and seven years after the founding of the Republic, July 4,1863, began.