The Seven Days

Below Richmond

June 22, 1862

We got us a new colonel since New Bern, John Cooke, and he drills us like he aims to wring that morning out of us one step at a time. Up at daylight, drill. Noon, drill. Evening, drill again. The boys cuss him something awful behind his back. But I’ll say this for him: not one man has run on his watch.

Now they’ve sent us up to Virginia, down below Richmond. Folks talk about Richmond like it was the Promised Land. It smells like sweat and swamp water same as everywhere else. The heat lays on a man like a wet quilt, and the gnats like to eat us alive. The mud’ll suck the brogan right off your foot if you let it.

Talk is General Lee means to light into McClellan first. We’re way off on the right, nigh the James River, and some of the young’uns fret we’ll miss the fight and miss the glory. I don’t say much.

Glory don’t plug a hole in your chest.

Malvern Cliff

June 30, 1862

They moved us down toward the river road today. Told us to hold, to wait, to be ready. I hardly saw a Yankee all day long.

But the gunboats, Lord have mercy, the gunboats had their say.

It starts with a whistling you feel in your teeth, then a crack that rattles your ribs, then limbs raining down like the whole woods are coming apart. Bark flying like knives. Smoke and splinters and the stink of burnt sap.

A feller a few steps off from me took a piece of iron. He went down like his knees forgot their job. His eyes were big, not with hurting so much as with not believing, like he couldn’t abide that a thing he never even saw had reached out and struck him.

That’s what them gunboats do to you. Makes you feel little. Makes you feel like you’re being whipped by a machine.

Malvern Hill

July 1, 1862, night

If the devil’s got him a music, it sounds like what I heard today.

We laid in the edge of the woods all day, close enough to taste the powder but not close enough to see the field. Shells busting in the treetops. Wounded men drifting back through the trees with faces gray as ashes. A boy laying by me said, real soft, “That hill’s eating ’em.”

Nobody answered him. What was there to say?

The order to go in never came. Tonight we counted up and six of ours is hurt by the shelling, and it felt like a mercy next to what we heard happening out yonder. I am ashamed to be glad of it, and glad anyhow.

On the march

August 31, 1862

All summer we’ve marched and stopped, marched and stopped, like somebody dragging a plow through the woods and us the mules. Flies everywhere a man wishes they weren’t. Water never fit to drink. Shoes splitting open like rotten melons, and some of the boys wrapping their feet in rags and going on anyhow.

Today word came down the line that Jackson and Longstreet whipped Pope’s army up at Manassas and ran it back toward Washington. The boys are taking on like it’s a sign from God Almighty. Some swear one more good lick on Yankee ground and the whole war’ll be done.

I’m learning to go easy on hope. Hope makes a man careless. All I know for certain is the marching never stops, and it’s pointing north.

Maps from the printed book