Petersburg

On the road south

June 15, 1864

We pulled out of Cold Harbor like haints leaving a graveyard. No cheering. Nobody talking victory. The talk now is Grant has crossed his whole army over the James River and is making for Petersburg, where the railroads come together to feed Richmond. Cut that throat and the body starves.

My shoulder bites at every jolt. Nobody asks what hurts no more. They ask one thing: Can you still move?

I can.

The Petersburg lines

June 18, 1864

We came into the lines like men showing up late to a house already on fire. Powder smoke everywhere. Men digging and hollering and running all at once, and the ones that got here first looking like they ain’t slept in a week.

The Yankees hit again today, but it felt different, less like a man busting through a door and more like a man testing a locked one with his shoulder. By evening word went down the trenches that they were digging too.

When both sides take to digging in earnest, it means neither one believes the other is going anywheres. That’s a cold thing to know.

A young’un asked me was this the big one. I told him what I’ve learnt. “There isn’t one big one anymore, son.”

The Petersburg lines

July 8, 1864

I’ve quit counting days. The sun comes up, we dig. The sun goes down, we listen. A man raises his head too high and pays for it. The trench has got its own weather: heat trapped down in the dirt, damp that never leaves, flies, and a smell nobody names.

The siege work is heavy, lifting logs and moving earth and toting boxes, and the rupture punishes me for every bit of it. I hide it best I can. I’ve got right good at hurting quiet.

I survived Bristoe to wind up living underground like a mole.

The Petersburg lines

July 30, 1864

Before sunup this morning the ground shook like the Judgment, way off down the line to our left, and a cloud of dirt and smoke went up in the sky big as a thunderhead. The word came running: the Yankees had dug a tunnel clean under our works and blew it up with powder, and men and guns and logs went up in the air together.

We weren’t there. All day we stood to in our own trenches listening to the fighting in that hole, and every man kept looking at the dirt under his own feet. Tonight they say Mahone’s boys drove ’em back out and the hole is full of dead.

I never thought I’d be afraid of the ground itself.

Maps from the printed book