"No, thank you," Douglass said, and the colonel chuckled again. Van Nuys stooped to see how the coffee was doing, and, as if to confirm his words, Confederate artillery opened up on the Sixth New York. Now Douglass did throw himself flat; these shells came crashing down far closer than a couple of hundred yards away. Fragments scythed through the air above his head, hissing like serpents.
Through the din of the shelling, the roar of rifle fire also picked up. "To the firing steps!" Colonel van Nuys shouted. "Here they come! Let's give it to 'em, the sons of bitches."
A moment later, he cried out wordlessly and reeled back into the trench. The cry was necessarily wordless, for a bullet had shattered his lower jaw, tearing away his chin and leaving the rest a red ruin. He gobbled something unintelligible at Douglass. Maybe it was I told you so, but it could have been Tell my wife I love her or anything else. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and, mercifully, he swooned, his blood pouring out onto the floor of the trench. Douglass wondered if he would ever wake again. With that wound, eternal sleep might be a mercy.
High and shrill. Rebel yells rang out from the stretch of ground between C.S. and U.S. trench lines. "Reinforcements!" Douglass shouted. "We need reinforcements here!" But no reinforcements came. Cleverly, the Confederates were using the artillery bombardment to form a box around the sides and rear of the length of entrenchments they had chosen to attack. Anyone who tried to get through that bombardment was far likelier to get hit.
A U.S. soldier a few feet away from Douglass fired his Springfield. One of the Rebel yells turned into a scream of a different sort. But as the bluecoat was slipping another cartridge into the breech, a Confederate bullet caught him in the side of the head. Unlike Algernon van Nuys, he never knew what hit him. He slumped to the ground, dead before he touched it. The rifle fell from his hands, almost in front of Frederick Douglass.
He grabbed for it, wishing it were a carbine, whose shorter barrel would have made it easier for him to reverse it and blow out his own brains. But all his resolve about not being taken alive came to nothing, for a Confederate in dirty butternut leaping down into the trench landed on his back. Pain stabbed through him-a broken rib? He didn't know.
He didn't have time to think, either. "Come on, nigger!" the Reb screamed. "Up! Out! Move! You're caught or you're a dead man!" No matter what his head thought, Douglass' body wanted to live. However much it hurt, he scrambled out of the trench and, after getting jabbed in a ham by the Confederate's bayonet, stumbled toward the C.S. lines.
A Rebel captain was shouting, "Come on, you prisoners! Move! Move fast!" When he saw the journalist captured with eight or ten U.S. soldiers, his eyes widened. "Good God," he said. "It can't be, but it is. Frederick Douglass, as I live and breathe."
"The nigger rabble-rouser?" Three Confederates asked it at once. "Him?"
"Him-the same." The captain had no doubt whatever.
The soldier who'd captured Douglass jabbed him again, harder. "Let's string the bastard up!" His friends bayed approval.
Chapter 13
As the: Louisville campaign ground on, Colonel Alfred Von Schlieffen found himself with ever freer access to Orlando Willcox and to the map-filled tent where the commander of the Army of the Ohio planned his operations. He found himself less and less happy each time he visited the U.S. general. It was too much like having ever freer access to a sickroom where the patient grew visibly more infirm as day followed day.
Brigadier General Willcox seemed uneasily aware of the wasting sickness afflicting his campaign, aware but doing his best to pretend he wasn't. "Good afternoon, Colonel," he said when he spied Schlieffen through the partly open tent fly. "Come in, come in. Ah, I see you have coffee. Very good."
"Yes, General, I have coffee. Thank you." Carrying the tin cup stamped USA, Schlieffen ducked his way into the tent and came over to stand beside Willcox. "The guns in the night were not noisier than usual. Have I right-no, am I right; this mistake I make too oftennothing new happened?"
"Nothing new," Willcox agreed with a small sigh. He stared down at the maps, at the blue lines and the red that had moved so much less than he'd hoped. "It's always good to see you here, Colonel. I want you to know that."
"You are too kind to a man who is not of your country," Schlieffen said.
Without looking over at the German military attache, General Willcox went on, "You always keep your temper. You never judge me.
My corps commanders, my division commanders-sometimes this tent gets like a kettle full of live lobsters over the fire. But I never hear recriminations from you, Colonel, and, if you send telegrams to Philadelphia, you don't send them to General Rosecrans."
Schlieffen hadn't heard the word recriminations before, but he didn't bother asking Willcox to explain it; context made the meaning plain. An army that was winning had little backbiting. When things went wrong, everyone was at pains to prove the misfortune could not possibly have been his fault.
Willcox said, "Tell me what you think of our position at the present time."
"Let me examine the map before I answer." Schlieffen seized without hesitation the chance to think before he spoke. He wished he had Kurd von Schlozer's diplomatic talents, so he might come somewhere near the truth without destroying the U.S. commander's good opinion of him. At last, he said, "I think it now unlikely that you will from the east into Louisville break."
Willcox sighed again. "I'm afraid I think the same thing, although, if 1 admit it to anyone but you, I'll see my head go on a platter faster than John the Baptist's after Herodias' daughter danced before King Herod. We came close; I'll wager we scared old Stonewall out of a year's growth. But in war, the only thing that does any good if it's close to where it ought to be but not quite there is an artillery shell."
That was an effective image; Schlieffen filed it away to use if and when he had the luck to return to General Staff duty in Berlin. He said, "In the salient you made with the flanking move, you still have most of your men on the line facing Louisville, and in other places not so many."
"Well, yes, of course I do," General Willcox replied. "I have orders that I am still to do everything I can to capture the city, and I must obey them."
"If you think you can do this, then naturally you… are right," Schlieffen said, pleased he'd remembered the English idiom this time. "If you think you cannot do this, and you leave your flank as weak as it is-"
"The Rebs looked to have a weak flank," Willcox said. "It got strong a lot faster than we wished it would have, and that's the Lord's truth. If the Confederates could stop us, I reckon we'll be able to stop them."
"This may well be so, but your situation here seems to me not to be the same as that of the Confederate States," Schlieffen said.
"And why not?" Willcox bristled at what was to Schlieffen a gentle suggestion of something so obvious a schoolchild should see it.
Patiently, the attache spelled it out in words almost literally of one syllable: "The Confederate States had more depth to use than you have now. They could halt you for a little while, fall back, halt you again, and so on. This is not something you enjoy. If they break through your trenches from the south, they will go into the rear of the main body of your forces there."
"Ah, I see what you're saying." General Willcox was mollified. Nonetheless, he brushed aside Schlieffen's concern. "We do have men enough and guns enough to make them pay a high price if they try that. Myself, I don't think they'll do it. All their attacks up till now have been aimed at the line closest to Louisville." Someone came into the tent. Willcox nodded a greeting. "What is it, Captain Richardson?"