Killer Angels, The - Michael Shaara [74]
Chamberlain heard the first gun, a cannon, a long soft boom of a gun firing a long way off.
A short while later the Corps was stopped. They were told to stop where they were and rest. The men sat in a flat field, an orchard to the left, trees and men everywhere, higher ground in front of them. They waited. Nothing happened.
There was the sound of an occasional cannon.
But even the crows nearby were silent. Some of the men began to lie back, to rest. Chamberlain rode briefly off to find out what would happen, but no one knew. When he returned he found himself a place under a tree. It was very hot.
He had just closed his eyes when a courier arrived with a message from Meade to read to the troops. Chamberlain gathered them around him in the field, in the sunlight, and read the order.
Hour of decision, enemy on soil. When he came to the part about men who failed to do their duty being punished by instant death, it embarrassed him. The men looked up at him with empty faces. Chamberlain read the order and added nothing, went off by himself to sit down. Damn fool order. Mind of West Point at work.
No time to threaten a man. Not now. Men cannot be threatened into the kind of fight they will have to put up to win. They will have to be led. By you, Joshuway, by you.
Well. Let's get on with it.
He looked out across the field. The men were sleeping, writing letters. Some of them had staked their rifles bayonet first into the ground and rigged tent cloth across to shade them from the sun. One man had built a small fire and was popping corn. No one was singing.
Kilrain came and sat with him, took off his cap, wiped a sweating red face.
"John Henry's still with us." He indicated the woods to the east. Chamberlain looked, did not see the dark head.
"We ought to offer him a rifle," Kilrain said.
There was a silence. Chamberlain said, "Don't know what to do for him. Don't think there's anything we can do."
"Don't guess he'll ever get home."
"Guess not."
"Suppose he'll wander to a city, Pittsburgh. Maybe New York. Fella can always get lost in a city."
A cannon thumped far off. A soldier came in from foraging, held a white chicken aloft, grinning.
Kilrain said, "God damn all gentlemen."
Chamberlain looked: square head, white hair, a battered face, scarred around the eyes like an old fighter. In battle he moved with a crouch, a fanged white ape, grinning. Chamberlain had come to depend on him. In battle men often seemed to melt away, reappearing afterward with tight mirthless grins. But Kilrain was always there, eyes that saw through smoke, eyes that could read the ground.
Chamberlain said suddenly, "Buster, tell me something. What do you think of Negroes?"
Kilrain brooded.
"There are some who are unpopular," he concluded.
Chamberlain waited.
"Well, if you mean the race, well, I don't really know."
He hunched his shoulders. "I have reservations, I will admit. As many a man does. As you well know. This is not a thing to be ashamed of. But the thing is, you cannot judge a race. Any man who judges by the group is a pea-wit. You take men one at a time, and I've seen a few blacks that earned my respect. A few. Not many, but a few."
Chamberlain said, "To me there was never any difference."
"None at all?"
"None. Of course, I didn't know that many. But those I knew... well, you looked in the eye and there was a man. There was the divine spark, as my mother used to say. That was all there was to it... all there is to it."
"Um."
"We used to have visitors from the South before the war. It was always very polite. I never understood them, but we stayed off the question of slavery until near the end, out of courtesy. But toward the end there was no staying away from it, and there was one time I'll never forget. There was this minister, a Southern Baptist, and this professor from the University of Virginia. The professor was a famous man, but more than that, he was a good man, and he had a brain."
"Rare combination."
"True.