The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara [12]
He said, “These are all Maine men?”
“Yes, sir. Fine big fellers. I’ve seen them. Loggin’ men. You may remember there was a bit of a brawl some months back, during the mud march? These fellers were famous for their fists.”
Chamberlain said, “One hundred and twenty.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Somebody’s crazy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How many men do we now have in this Regiment?”
“Ah, somewhat less than two hundred and fifty, sir, as of yesterday. Countin’ the officers.”
“How do I take care of a hundred and twenty mutinous men?”
“Yes, sir,” Kilrain sympathized. “Well, you’ll have to talk to them, sir.”
Chamberlain sat for a long moment silently trying to function. He was thirty-four years old, and on this day one year ago he had been a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin University. He had no idea what to do. But it was time to go out into the sun. He crawled forward through the tent flap and stood up, blinking, swaying, one hand against the bole of a tree. He was a tall man, somewhat picturesque. He wore stolen blue cavalry trousers and a three-foot sword, and the clothes he wore he had not taken off for a week. He had a grave, boyish dignity, that clean-eyed, scrubbed-brain, naïve look of the happy professor.
Kilrain, a white-haired man with the build of an ape, looked up at him with fatherly joy. “If ye’ll ride the horse today, Colonel, which the Lord hath provided, instead of walkin’ in the dust with the other fools, ye’ll be all right—if ye wear the hat. It’s the walkin’, do you see, that does the great harm.”
“You walked,” Chamberlain said grumpily, thinking: shoot them? Maine men? How can I shoot Maine men? I’ll never be able to go home.
“Ah, but, Colonel, darlin’, I’ve been in the infantry since before you was born. It’s them first few thousand miles. After that, a man gets a limber to his feet.”
“Hey, Lawrence. How you doin’?”
Younger brother, Tom Chamberlain, bright-faced, high-voiced, a new lieutenant, worshipful. The heat had not seemed to touch him. Chamberlain nodded. Tom said critically, “You lookin’ kinda peaked. Why don’t you ride the horse?”
Chamberlain gloomed. But the day was not as bright as it had seemed through the opening of the tent. He looked upward with relief toward a darkening sky. The troops were moving in the fields, but there had been no order to march. The wagons were not yet loaded. He thought: God bless the delay. His mind was beginning to function. All down the road and all through the trees the troops were moving, cooking, the thousands of troops and thousands of wagons of the Fifth Corps, Army of the Potomac, of which Chamberlain’s 20th Maine was a minor fragment. But far down the road there was motion.
Kilrain said, “There they come.”
Chamberlain squinted. Then he saw troops on the road, a long way off.
The line of men came slowly up the road. There were guards with fixed bayonets. Chamberlain could see the men shuffling, strange pathetic spectacle, dusty, dirty, ragged men, heads down, faces down: it reminded him of a history-book picture of impressed seamen in the last war with England. But these men would have to march all day, in the heat. Chamberlain thought: not possible.
Tom was meditating. “Gosh, Lawrence. There’s almost as many men there as we got in the whole regiment. How we going to guard them?”
Chamberlain said nothing. He was thinking: How do you force a man to fight—for freedom? The idiocy of it jarred him. Think on it later. Must do something now.
There was an officer, a captain, at the head of the column. The captain turned them in off the road and herded them into an open space in the field near the regimental flag. The men of the regiment, busy with coffee, stood up to watch. The captain had a loud voice and used obscene words. He assembled the men in two long ragged lines and called them to attention, but they ignored him. One slumped to the ground, more exhaustion than mutiny. A guard came forward and yelled and probed with a bayonet, but abruptly several more men sat down