The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara [51]
“That happened to us once,” the Maine man said. “Half the regiment charged and the other half retreated. You had your choice.” He chuckled. “Seems a good system, come to think of it.”
“Well, in this brigade we got a special call. You hear that call and you know the next call is for you. Goes like this:
“We call it ‘Dan Butterfield,’ just like this: ‘Dan, Dan, Dan, Butterfield, Butterfield.’ ”
The Maine man said glumly, “In the middle of a fight I’m supposed to remember that?”
“It’s easy if you remember.” He sang it again: “Dan, Dan, Dan, Butterfield, Butterfield.”
“Um,” the Maine man said.
“Ole Butterfield wrote a lot of bugle calls. You know ‘Butterfield’s Lullaby’?”
“Butterfield’s what?”
Tom hummed a few bars of what was still known as “Butterfield’s Lullaby” but which the army would later know as “Taps” and which now had no connotation of death, which simply meant rest for the night, rest after a long day in the dust and the sun, with the bugles blaring, and Joshua Chamberlain, listening, thought of the sound of “Butterfield’s Lullaby” coming out of the dark, through a tent flap, with the campfires burning warm and red in the night, and Chamberlain thought: you can grow to love it.
Amazing. Chamberlain let his eyes close down to the slits, retreating within himself. He had learned that you could sleep on your feet on the long marches. You set your feet to going and after a while they went by themselves and you sort of turned your attention away and your feet went on walking painlessly, almost without feeling, and gradually you closed down your eyes so that all you could see were the heels of the man in front of you, one heel, other heel, one heel, other heel, and so you moved on dreamily in the heat and the dust, closing your eyes against the sweat, head down and gradually darkening, so you actually slept with the sight of the heels in front of you, one heel, other heel, and often when the man in front of you stopped you bumped into him. There were no heels today, but there was the horse he led by the reins. He did not know the name of this horse. He did not bother any more; the horses were all dead too soon. Yet you learn to love it.
Isn’t that amazing? Long marches and no rest, up very early in the morning and asleep late in the rain, and there’s a marvelous excitement to it, a joy to wake in the morning and feel the army all around you and see the campfires in the morning and smell the coffee …
… awake all night in front of Fredericksburg. We attacked in the afternoon, just at dusk, and the stone wall was aflame from one end to the other, too much smoke, couldn’t see, the attack failed, couldn’t withdraw, lay there all night in the dark, in the cold among the wounded and dying. Piled-up bodies in front of you to catch the bullets, using the dead for a shield; remember the sound? Of bullets in dead bodies? Like a shot into a rotten leg, a wet thick leg. All a man is: wet leg of blood. Remember the flap of a torn curtain in a blasted window, fragment whispering in that awful breeze: never, forever, never, forever.
You have a professor’s mind. But that is the way it sounded.
Never. Forever.
Love that too?
Not love it. Not quite. And yet, I was never so alive.
Maine … is silent and cold.
Maine in the winter: air is darker, the sky is a deeper dark. A darkness comes with winter that these Southern people don’t know. Snow falls so much earlier and in the winter you can walk in a snowfield among bushes, and visitors don’t know that the bushes are the tops of tall pines, and you’re standing in thirty feet of snow. Visitors. Once long ago visitors in the dead of winter: a preacher preaching hell-fire. Scared the fool out of me. And I resented it and Pa said I was right.
Pa.
When he thought of the old man he could see him suddenly in a field in the spring, trying to move a gray boulder. He always knew instinctively the ones you could move, even though the greater part was buried in the earth, and he expected you to move the rock and not discuss it. A hard and silent man, an honest man,