Killer Angels, The - Michael Shaara [54]
Fragments of cloth, trees, chewed bits of paper littered the road.
Longstreet took it all in, began to move on. He passed a black mound which seemed strange in the dark: lumpy, misshapen. He rode over and saw: dead horses. He rode away from the field, toward higher ground.
Lee would attack in the morning. Clear enough. Time and place not yet set. But he will attack. Fixed and unturnable, a runaway horse. Longstreet felt a depression so profound it deadened him. Gazing back on that black hill above Gettysburg, that high lighted hill already speckled with fires among the gravestones, he smelled disaster like distant rain.
It was Longstreet's curse to see the thing clearly. He was a brilliant man who was slow in speech and slow to move and silent-faced as stone. He had not the power to convince.
He sat on the horse, turning his mind away, willing it away as a gun barrel swivels, and then he thought of his children, powerless to stop that vision.
It blossomed: a black picture.
She stood in the doorway: the boy is dead. She didn't even say his name. She didn't even cry.
Longstreet took a long deep breath. In the winter the fever had come to Richmond. In a week they were dead. All within a week, all three. He saw the sweet faces: moment of enormous pain. The thing had pushed him out of his mind, insane, but no one knew it. They looked at the plain blunt stubborn face and saw nothing but dull Dutch eyes, the great darkness, the silence. He had not thought God would do a thing like that. He went to church and asked and there was no answer. He got down on his knees and pleaded but there was no answer. She kept standing in the door: the boy is dead. And he could not even help her, could say nothing, could not move, could not even take her into his arms.
Nothing to give. One strength he did not have. Oh God: my boy is dead.
He had tears in his eyes. Turn away from that. He mastered it. What he had left was the army. The boys were here. He even had the father, in place of God: old Robert Lee. Rest with that, abide with that.
His aides were all gone, all but two. Goree hung back from him in the growing dark. He rode on alone, silently, Goree trailing like a hunting dog, and met one of his surgeons coming up from camp: J. S. D. Cullen, delighted, having heard of the great victory, and Longstreet succeeded in depressing him, and Cullen departed. Longstreet lectured himself: depression is contagious; keep it to yourself. He needed something to cheer him, turned to two men behind him, found there was only one, not an aide, the Englishman: Fremantle. Exactly what he needed. Longstreet drew up to wait.
The Englishman came pleasantly, slowly forward. He was the kind of breezy, cheery man who brings humor with his presence. He was wearing the same tall gray hat and the remarkable coat. He said cheerily, tapping the great hat,
"Don't mean to intrude upon your thoughts. General."
"Not Tall," Longstreet said.
"Really, sir, if you'd rather ride alone..."
"Good to see you," Longstreet said.
The Englishman rode up grinning broadly through widely spaced teeth. He had entered the country by way of Mexico, riding in a wagon drawn by a tobacco-chewing man who had turned out to be, in his spare time, the local judge, Fremantle had seen many interesting things: a casual hanging, raw floods, great fires. He was continually amazed at the combination of raw earth and rough people, white columned houses and traces of English manner. He had not gotten used to the crude habit of shaking hands, which was common among these people, but he forced himself. He was enjoying himself hugely. He had not changed his clothes in some days and he looked delightfully disreputable, yet mannered and cool and light in the saddle.
Longstreet grinned again. "Did you get a chance to see anything?"
"Well as a matter of fact I did. I found rather a large tree and Lawley and I sat out in the open and there was quite a show. Lovely, oh lovely."
"You didn't