Killer Angels, The - Michael Shaara [118]
He heard a man snoring loudly just below his tree. He saw a round face, bearded, mouth open, flat on his back on a rock ledge, hands folded on his chest. Chamberlain smiled in envy He thought: guess I better get down from here, look around.
But now he had sat for a long time and his leg had stiffened, there was a brutal pain in his foot. He limped along the rock, trying to work out the stiffness. Thirty-four years old, laddie, not the man you used to be. He walked painfully past the sleeping man. A tall thin boy grinned happily upward, touched his cap. Chamberlain said, "Good morning."
"Colonel, sir."
"How you getting along?"
"Hungry, sir." The boy started to get up. Chamberlain held out a hand.
"Never mind that. Take it easy." He looked down on the round-faced sleeper, smiled.
"Jonas can sleep anywhere," the boy said proudly.
Chamberlain moved on down the line. The battle in the north was growing. No diversion. Well. He felt oddly disappointed. Then a trace of pride. They tried this flank yesterday and couldn't move us. Now they're trying the other flank.
He wondered who his opposite number was, the colonel on the far right, the last man on the right of the Union line. What troops did he lead? What was he thinking now? Good luck to you. Colonel, Chamberlain said silently, saluting in his mind. But you don't have soldiers like these.
He limped among the men, passing each one like a warming fire. He shared with them all the memory of yesterday. He had been with them to that other world; they were in it now, the high clear world of the last man in line, and all the enemy coming. Tozier on the rock with the flag in his hand, Tom plugging the gap, bayonets lifted, that last wild charge. He looked down smiling as he passed, patting shoulders, concerned with small wounds. One boy lay behind a rock. He had been shot through the cheek yesterday but had not gone to the rear, had charged, had come all this way to the top of the hill. Now he was down with a fever, and the wound in the face was inflamed.
Chamberlain ordered him to the field hospital. There were several signs of sickness, one possible case of typhoid.
Nothing to do but detail the men down the hill. But none of them wanted to go, some deathly afraid of the hospital itself, some not wanting to be away from men they knew, men they could trust, the Regiment of Home.
Chamberlain began to grow restless for food. He thought: we're forgotten up here. Nobody knows what these men did yesterday. They saved the whole line, God knows, and now I can't even feed them. He was becoming angry. He clambered back up the hill and tore open the wound inside his boot, which began again to bleed. He sat down at the top of the hill, listening to the cannon fire and musketry raging in the north, momentarily grateful that it was over there, and took off the boot, bound the foot, wished he could get something to wash it down with, but what water there was was dirty and bloody. There was a creek down below: Plum Run. Choked with yesterday's dead. Good to be high up here; the smells of death don't seem to be rising. Wind still from the south, blowing it away. You know, the Regiment is weary.
That thought had taken a while to form, had formed slowly as he moved up and down the line. Just so far you can push a man.
He thought: a little food. A little rest. They'll be right again in a bit.
Fewer than two hundred now. And there on the rock, sitting staring down at the long line of dark men shapeless under dark trees, he felt for the first time the sense of the coming end. They were dwindling away like sands in a glass.
How long does it go on? Each one becoming more precious. What's left now is the best, each man a rock. But now there are so few. We began with a thousand and so whittled down, polishing, pruning, until what we had yesterday was superb, absolutely superb, and now only about two hundred, and. God, had it not been