Spotsylvania

Spotsylvania Court House

May 9, 1864

I found ’em.

Not the regiment like it was. That 27th is buried across too many fields. But what’s left of it. Faces older, bodies thinner, eyes that look past you like they’re measuring how long you’ll last.

I reported in with my shoulder still weak and my belly still pulling, and I figured they’d send me off. Instead a tired officer looked me up and down and said, “If you can tote water, tote it. If you can tote cartridges, tote ’em. If you can dig, dig.”

So I dug. I have never been so glad to dig in my life.

The whole army is throwing up dirt. Logs and earth and brush piled into walls, the line running through the woods like a long scar. Men crouch behind it like critters that have learned the shape of danger. I had to stop more than once today and act like I was fixing my gear so nobody’d see me bent over holding my side.

Spotsylvania Court House

May 12, 1864, night

Before day this morning the whole world blew up off to our left. Rain pouring, and the word came down the line that the Yankees had hit the big bend in the works, the Mule Shoe, with thousands of men rising up out of the dark, and broke clean through and took guns and prisoners.

All day long the sound of it never quit. It wasn’t like any battle I ever heard. One long roar, like boards being ripped apart and nails being driven all at once. They say men fought hand to hand over them logs from daylight till way past dark, in the mud and rain, stabbing and clubbing across the top of the works.

I wasn’t in it, praise God. I was where they send a wounded man that can still walk, hauling cartridge boxes and water and dragging the hurt back into cover. My left arm did the work my right ought to. My shoulder hollered every step and the rupture nearly made me pass out twice. But nobody out there was a whole man today. Everybody was broken some way.

The line didn’t break. But it bent so hard I thought it might never straighten.

Spotsylvania Court House

May 21, 1864

Two weeks of this. The Yankees hit the works, the works hold, they fall back, and both sides bleed into the mud. Now the word is Grant is sliding south again, not retreating, just moving on to the next place to pry at us. And Lee is racing to get there first and dig.

I don’t know what’s ahead. I know I can’t never charge like Bristoe again. But I can be present. I’m a shadow toting water and cartridges, but I’m a shadow amongst my own, and that has quieted something in me.

Maps from the printed book