Caudell looked away, tried not to hear the cries of other men who had been wounded close by. Gettysburg had hardened him to horror. And if he did not help slay the Yankees rushing up the Brock Road toward the barricade behind which he crouched, he and all his fellows, hale and wounded alike, would surely perish.
The Yankees were reloading as they ran; most of them had to stop to use their ramrods. Caudell and everyone else on the breastwork who could still handle a rifle fired again and again and again. Men in blue coats began to drop and kept on falling, faster and faster. A few managed to fire again, but only a few. After that. first volley, the rebels had it all their own way.
Miraculously, every bullet missed one Federal corporal. His face set and grim, he charged on alone toward the breastwork. “Don’t kill him!”—call ran up and down the line. The Confederates could still admire gallantry, even in a foe.
Firing slackened for a moment. “Go back, you damned fool!” Caudell shouted to the Yankee. “Look behind you!”
The corporal’s double-quick faltered as the words reached him. Caudell could see him leave the exalted state in which he’d rushed toward certain death. He knew that state himself; it was all that had sustained him as he advanced on the Union guns up in Pennsylvania. Its ebbing came hard, hard. When it left a man, he felt more drained than after a week of forced marches, and rightly so for with it, he lost spirit as well as strength.
The Federal did look around. His shoulders sagged as he took in the carnage on the Brock Road, the ruin of his regiment. Some of his comrades were crawling or creeping or dragging themselves away from the dreadful fire of the Confederate repeaters. Others would not move again until the Last Trump sounded.
The corporal slowly turned back toward the barricade. “You rebs don’t fight fair!” he shouted. Now his exaltation was gone, leaving only (ear behind. He fled into a pine thicket off to one side of the road.
He was none too soon, for more Federals tramped up the Brock Road a few minutes later. The crossfire would have chewed him to pieces. The bluecoats came to a ragged halt when they saw what had happened to the first attacking party, but then moved ahead all the same. The South had gone into the war doubting Yankee courage. After three years of fighting, few in the Army of Northern Virginia doubted it anymore.
This group of Union men attacked more cleverly than had the previous one. Instead of forming a neat firing line—and a target that could not be missed—they advanced in rushes, a few men pausing to shoot while others moved up, then the men who had gained ground ducking into the bushes and providing covering fire for their companions to push ahead.
Caudell shot, missed, shot again, missed again. A Minié ball buzzed past his head. He involuntarily ducked—only men with no nerves whatever could keep from dodging when bullets zipped by. He fired again, at a Yankee less than two hundred yards away. The fellow threw down his Springfield and grabbed at his shoulder. He lurched away from the front line of fighting. A lot of Confederates were behind the breastwork. Even though Caudell had aimed at the Northerner, he couldn’t be sure his was the round that had wounded him.
No matter how cleverly, no matter how boldly they attacked the rebel barricade, the Federals on the Brock Road could not drive the defenders from it. The fire from the Confederates, repeaters swept the roadway clean of life. Men fell, killed or wounded, but more replaced them. Teamsters and other soldiers fetched crates of cartridges to the breastwork. Ironic cheers rang out every time the crates proved to contain the proper ammunition. Once or twice they didn’t, and the cartridge-bearers retreated, scorched by curses from the fighting men.
In the Wilderness proper, especially east of the Brock Road, the Federals were able to come to closer quarters with their foes. Their hurrahs and the boom of their Springfields crept ever nearer the line the Confederates held south of the Orange Plank Road.
Off to the north, a huge racket of riflery and cannons broke out. Lee had said the Federals had trouble putting their attacks together. They’d managed now. Had they done it sooner, the rebel lines between them would have been thin. The Confederates had won a critical couple of hours to bring more men forward and widen the stretch they held along either side of the Orange Plank Road. The Yankees were hitting them with everything they had now. They had more men. The Confederates had better rifles. Caudell hoped that would do the job.
Between assaults up the roadway, he filled banana clips, chewed on corn bread and salt pork, and drank from his canteen. The water was warm and turbid. It went down like champagne even so. He and his companions smoked and listened to the gunfire all around and tried to guess how the fighting was going away from their little piece of it.
“I think we got ‘em,” a beardless soldier declared.
“Didn’t notice you come up, uh, Melvin,” Caudell said. “Hope you’re right, but I wouldn’t bet on anything yet. They’re putting a lot of their people into the fight this time. We’re holding so far, but—”
Mollie Bean interrupted him: “Holy Jesus.” She was looking over the breastwork; Caudell sprawled with his back against it. He whirled around. The Federals had given up on subtlety. A deep column of bluecoats, their bayonets fixed, stormed up the Brock Road at the double-quick. Officers trotted ahead of them, urging them on.
“All or nothin’ this time, boys,” somebody not far from Caudell said. “Them bluebellies is gonna run over us or die tryin’.”
Caudell vastly preferred the second alternative. He aimed at a color-bearer in front of the first rank. As soon as the advancing Yankees reached the first men lying in the road—some of the wounded, as before to the north, tried to hold their fellows back, but others cheered them on—he started shooting. He did not know if his bullet struck home, but the color-bearer stumbled and fell. Another Yankee caught the regimental flag before it touched the ground, bore it forward a dozen paces more before he, too, was hit. Yet another Federal grabbed it and carried it on. Three more fell before the banner drew close enough for Caudell to read it: SIXTEENTH MASSACHUSETTS. Then still another color-bearer went down and the banner fell in the dust. No one picked it up.
No one was left to pick it up. Like the corporal before him, that last brave and lucky—at least lucky up to a point—color-bearer pushed far beyond his comrades. The Southerners’ repeaters had worked a fearful slaughter. There was a limit beyond which flesh and blood could not be made to go. Caudell had met that limit on the third day at Gettysburg. Now he and the soldiers crouching to either side of him acquainted the Federals with it.
But another regiment came in right behind the slaughtered Sixteenth Massachusetts. The Federals leaned forward as they advanced, as if moving into a heavy rain. So they were, but the rain was of lead.
“This ain’t war!” Mollie Bean yelled in Caudell’s ear. “This here’s murder.”
“I reckon you’re right.” he answered, “but if we don’t keep shooting them, they’ll surely shoot us.” She kept firing, so he supposed she agreed with him.
After that second Federal regiment wrecked itself assaulting the barricade, the rebels behind it had another brief respite. They used it to strengthen their protection. “If the Yankees are pushing this hard, they’ll try us again before long,” Caudell said as he set another log in place. By the way the rest of the soldiers worked alongside him, they thought as he did. More ammunition came up. He filled his pockets again. He wondered how many rounds he’d fired. He’d lost track. Far more than on any day with his old Enfield, he was certain. So had everyone else here. The drifts of Yankee corpses in front of the barricade, sometimes two and three men high, testified to that.