Gods and Generals - Jeff Shaara [131]
Chamberlain could see wider, fatter hills now, deep green mounds, and they began to climb, a slight incline. Down the road, coming toward him, was a line of men, walking slowly, with heads down, kicking through the dust, and he saw: prisoners.
The men were mostly barefoot, torn and ragged clothes hung loosely from thin bodies. There were pieces of an identifiable uniform. He saw one man who seemed to be an officer, and the man looked up at him as they passed by, glanced at the fine fat horse, and Chamberlain wanted to stop, talk to the man, but they were gone. Then there were more, thirty, forty, and they did not look up, moved steadily, their guards walking alongside with long bayonets they did not need. Chamberlain wondered, Are they still at war? Am I the enemy, even now? Their war is over . . . maybe. Or maybe it will never be over.
In front of him the line of troops began to climb the larger hill. He could see the blue moving up, toward a small pass, a slight break between two taller mounds. Please, he thought, let us reach those hills, let us stop up there, it would be cooler, it has to be. The sun hung just above a long line of low mountains that stretched far away, to the left. His mind drifted again. He began to focus on the sun now, talking to it: go on, move . . . down . . . He closed his eyes, willing it lower.
The climb became steeper. He had to lean forward now, and Ames suddenly pointed, stuck an arm out in front of him. Chamberlain focused, saw a tree split and shredded into a great pile of white splinters, and now there were more, and the smell of fresh earth, scattered sprays of dirt, small holes, then larger ones, and now beside the road there were broken and crushed wagons, pushed aside by the lead troops, pieces of lumber and metal, and some twisted forms that Chamberlain eyed with fascination.
Ames said, “A good fight here yesterday . . . Turner’s Gap, they held us up for a while. Gibbon’s ‘Black Hats’ pushed them back.”
Chamberlain saw more evidence of the fight now, a small farm, the house burned, a thin line of black smoke still rising, drifting away finally, high above. Beyond, there was a shattered barn, torn into pieces, great rips in the thin walls. He saw men out in a field, working . . . a burial detail, a long line of fresh, open dirt, and he looked for the bodies, the dead, saw some blue and white and brown . . . things—they were too far away to see clearly. Now they were inside the gap, cresting the wide mountain, high hills rising on both sides of them.
He had seen a tornado once, just for a few brief moments, a hard storm of wind and rain, and a thick black funnel dropping down like some great evil claw. It had touched down only for a minute, had torn through the fields near his family’s farm. He had stayed out in the fields, watched it through stinging bites of cold rain, until it lifted again, pulled back up into the blackness. He never forgot that, had followed with pure amazement the clean path it had cut, the total destruction weaving through the fields and woods and then suddenly stopping. Now, here, he saw it again, the total obliteration of trees and bushes and wagons and cannon, torn and ragged pieces of raw death alongside the untouched, the perfect.
It was cooler now. The sun had dropped behind the big hill, and he turned around in the saddle, looked back down the line of men, saw fewer than he had expected. The line seemed stretched out, pulled from the rear,