Killer Angels, The - Michael Shaara [14]
"Then I'll be stayin', Colonel, laddie." Kilrain grinned.
"But you know I can't promote you. Not after that episode with the bottle. Did you have to pick an officer?"
Kilrain grinned. "I was not aware of rank, sir, at the time. And he was the target which happened to present itself."
"Buster, you haven't got a bottle about?"
"Is the Colonel in need of a drink, sir?"
"I meant... forget it. All right. Buster, move 'em out."
Kilrain saluted, grinning, and withdrew. The only professional in the regiment. The drinking would kill him. Well.
He would die happy. Now. What do I say to them?
Tom came in, saluted.
"The men from the Second Maine are being fed, sir."
"Don't call me sir."
"Well, Lawrence, Great God A-Mighty-"
"You just be careful of the name business in front of the men. Listen, we don't want anybody to think there's favoritism."
Tom put on the wounded look, face of the ruptured deer.
"General Meade has his son as his adjutant."
"That's different. Generals can do anything. Nothing quite so much like God on earth as a general on a battlefield." The tent was coming down about his head; he stepped outside to avoid the collapse. The General and God was a nice parallel. They have your future in their hands and they have all power and know all. He grinned, thinking of Meade surrounded by his angelic staff: Dan Butterfield, wild Dan Sickles. But what do I say?
"Lawrence, what you goin' to do?"
Chamberlain shook his head. The regiment was up and moving.
"God, you can't shoot them. You do that, you'll never go back to Maine when the war's over."
"I know that." Chamberlain meditated. "Wonder if they do?"
He heard a flare of bugles, looked down the road toward Union Mills. The next regiment, the 83rd Pennsylvania, was up and forming. He saw wagons and ambulances moving out into the road. He could feel again the yellow heat. Must remember to cover up. More susceptible to sunstroke now. Can't afford a foggy head. He began to walk slowly toward the grove of trees.
Kilrain says tell the truth.
Which is?
Fight. Or we'll shoot you.
Not true. I won't shoot anybody.
He walked slowly out into the sunlight. He thought: but the truth is much more than that. Truth is too personal.
Don't know if I can express it. He paused in the heat.
Strange thing. You would die for it without further question, but you had a hard time talking about it. He shook his head.
I'll wave no more flags for home. No tears for Mother.
Nobody ever died for apple pie.
He walked slowly toward the dark grove. He had a complicated brain and there were things going on back there from time to time that he only dimly understood, so he relied on his instincts, but he was learning all the time.
The faith itself was simple: he believed in the dignity of man.
His ancestors were Huguenots, refugees of a chained and bloody Europe. He had learned their stories in the cradle.
He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become.
This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state.
True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth.
But it had begun here. The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil.
They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it. But he was fighting for the dignity of man and in that way he was fighting for himself. If men were equal in America, all these former Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal