Alternate Generals (28 page)

Tom sat down by his brother's side, gaze fixed on the western horizon. Twilight was settling in, the distant ridgeline of the South Mountains silhouetted by the deep indigo blue of the gathering night. A roll of thunder disturbed them and, looking back to the east and north, he saw flashes of light, as if a summer storm was driving eastward. The pursuit was spreading out, pushing down the Baltimore Pike, Hanover Pike and to Washington beyond. In the valley below all that was left of the old Third Corps and most of the Fifth Corps were being gathered in by their captors.

Word was that Hancock was dead, Meade wounded and captured. Howard was in command. Poor Howard, good Maine man, a Christian warrior, but up to a fighting withdrawal?
The army has no confidence in him, still blames him unfairly for the fiasco at Chancellorsville.
Joshua shook his head at the thought.

Stuart was at last doing something right, coming down out of the north as if by plan, falling on their retreating columns, triggering panic and pushing the pursuit through the night. First and Eleventh Corps had been destroyed on the first day of battle. Third, Fifth, and most of Second on the second day. Only the sixth and Twelfth were relatively intact but word was coming back that they were now disintegrating into a rabble on the roads heading east as Stuart's boys slashed in out of the darkness. The grand old Army of the Potomac was already fading into history.

A band, tinny and out of tune, was playing "Dixie." He saw a cavalcade of horsemen bearing torches, moving across the open fields, heading up to Cemetery Ridge, a lone figure on a gray horse in the middle, cheers echoing up around them.

"Must be your Lee going forward," Tom sighed.

"He's a good man, Tom, a good Christian."

"So I heard."

Joshua looked over at Tom.

"You want to tell me something, don't you?"

Tom nodded.

"Go on, we could always talk."

"When I was below, seeing about my wounded, Longstreet came up to me, asked if I was your brother."

"And?"

"Told him I was. Longstreet said you were the hero of the battle. You won it with your charge. Won the war as well most likely. Chamberlain's Charge, he said they'd call it. Heard someone else say they were giving you Hood's division to command. Everyone's talking about you, Joshua, saying you could go home, be Governor of Virginia, maybe even a President of the Confederacy some day."

Funny, the thought of afterwards had never occurred to Joshua until now. It was Jackson, his friend whom he had fought for. But Jackson was dead.

"Joshua?"

"Yes, Tom."

"I guess you did good. Maybe some day we'll meet here again, be able to shake hands. Your Alabama boys aren't a bad sort. Once the fighting was done they pitched in to help my wounded, said we were a tough lot and good opponents. Some of them are helping to bury our dead. Strange, you and I, all of us, brothers. We try to kill each other, then weep over out dead together. Strange war.

"Joshua, are you proud of what you did?"

The question startled him. Jackson would have been proud. What happened this day was always his dream—the decisive battle, the one that decides a war, rather than the half victories of the past.
Maybe some day I'll understand this, be able to write about it, but now? Come back here later to think about it all, sort things out, to try and figure out the why of it and the reason fate put me here. The biggest question though . . . just where is home after this, which country is mine?

"A hard day for Mother you said," Tom whispered. "You were right. This will be a hard day for Mother, Joshua. A very hard day when she learns of what you accomplished."

Joshua nodded, unable to reply. Fate of the nation, Hood said. He looked across the summit of Little Round Top and could indeed see that he had shaped the fate of a nation.
Fate put me here, now what shall I do?

Patting Tom on the shoulder he stood up, looking off to the north. A flash of light erupted, followed long seconds later by a distant rumble. By the glow of the campfire of his headquarters he saw the battle standards taken this day, the flag of the 20th Maine in the center. Drawing himself up to attention he saluted the colors, then turning, disappeared into the night.

My fellow comrades, soldiers of the South and North. We are gathered here today on this the fiftieth anniversary of the battle that decided the war. The years have drifted by as a dream. I have been haunted my entire life by the memory of so many boys I had once led into battle and those from my home state who stood against us and who shall be forever young. Their honored graves are just below us, resting forever in the shadow of the hill where so many of us gave the last full measure of devotion.

My comrades, I call upon us all to highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

Little did I expect, never did I dream that my country would call me to one last duty, to hold the exalted office of the Presidency of my adopted country. Yes, my adopted country. For Presidents Lee, Longstreet, Stuart and others were born of the South while I, guided by the Divine Will, was of the North.

If fate had been but slightly different I might very well have worn the honored uniform of blue as my brother did and stood upon this hill in defense of the Union. That thought has haunted me these past fifty years and has shaped all that I have become. I have repeatedly asked of our Creator why was I fated to be here at this, the deciding place of the war.

I think now that I understand. So much that once divided us is in the past. Slavery is dead, ordered so by President Lee. Both nations have learned the need for the power of a central government to be circumscribed by the wishes of the people through their respective states.

We comrades who once struggled to kill now extend to each other the hand of friendship. And I must ask, why should not that clasp of friendship be a permanent bond yet again? I wish now to present to you the inner dream, which first dimly took form, so long ago, when I saw the glorious banners of my brigade take this hill, and beside them, the glorious and unsullied banners of the state that gave me birth . . .

Speech by the President of the Confederate States of America Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, which paved the way for the Referendum of National Reunification ratified by both Congresses on July 4, 1914. Joshua Chamberlain died four months before the reunification of the North and the South at the age of eighty-three, as a result of wounds received while leading his division on July 8, 1863, during the capture of Washington, D.C.

Captain Sir John Paul stood on the quarterdeck of His Majesty's seventy-four-gun ship-of-the-line
Torbay
, shading his eyes against the Caribbean's brilliant August sunlight.
Torbay
, the seventy-four
Triumph,
and the sixty-four
Prince William
, were four days out of Antigua with a Jamaica-bound convoy, and he lowered his hand from his eyes to rub thoughtfully at the buttons on his blue coat's lapel—twelve golden buttons, in groups of three, indicating a captain with more than three years' seniority—as he watched the sloop
Lark
's cutter pull strongly towards his ship.

The cutter swept around, coming up under
Torbay
's lee as the seventy-four lay hove to. The bow man neatly speared the big ship's main chains with his boathook, and the officer in the stern leapt for the battens on her tall side. A lazy swell licked up after him, soaking him to the waist, but he climbed quickly to the entry port, nodded to the lieutenant who raised his hat in salute, and then hurried aft.

"Well, Commander Westman," Captain Paul said dryly. "I trust whatever brings you here was worth a wetting?"

"I believe so, sir."
Lark
's captain touched his hat—no junior dared omit any proper courtesy to Sir John—then reached inside his coat. "
Lark
sighted a drifting ship's boat yesterday evening, sir. When I investigated, I discovered three Frenchmen—one dead officer and two seamen in but little better shape—from the naval brig
Alecto.
She foundered in a squall last week . . . but the officer had this on his person."

He held out a thick packet of papers. Paul took it, glanced at it, then looked up quickly.

"I, ah, felt it best to deliver it to you as soon as possible, sir," Westman said.

"You felt correctly, Commander," Paul replied almost curtly, then beckoned to the officer of the watch. "Lieutenant Chessman, make a signal. All captains are to repair aboard
Torbay
immediately!"

It was sweltering in Sir John's day cabin, despite the open windows, as Captain Forest was shown in.
Prince William
's commander had had the furthest to come, and he was acutely aware that he was the last captain to arrive . . . and that Captain Paul did not tolerate tardiness. But Sir John said nothing. He didn't even turn. He stood gazing out into the sun dazzle, hands clasped behind him and lost in memory, while his steward offered Forest wine. His fixed gaze saw not the Caribbean's eye-hurting brightness but the seething gray waste of the Channel and surf spouting white on a rocky shore as Sir Edward Hawke's squadron pursued Admiral Conflans into Quiberon Bay.

By most officers' standards, Hawke had been mad to follow an enemy into shoal water in a rising November gale when that enemy had local pilots and he did not. But Hawke had recognized his duty to keep the invasion army gathered round nearby Vannes in Brittany, not England. Confident of his captains and crews, he had driven Conflans' more powerful squadron onto the rocks or up the Vilaine River in an action which had cost the French seven ships of the line and almost three thousand men in return for only two of his own ships.

Quiberon had been the final triumph of what was still called the "Year of Victories," and Midshipman John Paul of Kirkbean, Scotland, serving in the very ship Captain Sir John Paul now commanded, had seen it all.
Torbay
had been the second ship in Hawke's line, under Captain Augustus Keppel, and young Paul had watched—twelve years old and terrified for his very life—as broadsides roared and a sudden squall sent the sea crashing in through the lee gunports of the French seventy-four
Thésée
and drove her to the bottom in minutes.

Paul would never forget her crew's screams, or his own ship's desperate efforts to save even a few of them from drowning, but more even than that, he remembered the lesson Hawke had taught him that day as he turned to face the captains seated around his table with their wine. Every one of them was better born than he, but John Paul, the son of a Scottish gardener—the boy who'd found a midshipman's berth only because his father had aided the wife of one of Keppel's cousins after a coach accident—was senior to them all.

Which means
, he thought wryly,
that it is
I
who have the honor of placing my entire career in jeopardy by whatever I do or do not decide this day.

It was ironic that twenty years of other officers' reminders of their superior birth should bring him here.
Under other circumstances, I might well have been on the other side,
he mused.
Traitors or no, at least the rebels believe the measure of a man should be
himself
, not whom he chose as his father!

But no sign of that thought showed on his face, and his voice was crisp, with no trace of the lowland brogue he'd spent two decades eradicating, as he tapped the papers Westman had brought him and spoke briskly.

"Gentlemen, thanks to Commander Westman"—he nodded to
Lark
's captain—"we have intercepted copies of correspondence from de Grasse to Washington." The others stiffened, and he smiled thinly. "This copy is numbered '2' and addressed to Commodore de Barras at Newport for his information, and I believe it to be genuine. Which means, gentlemen, that I've decided to revise our present orders somewhat."

"Toss oars!" the coxswain barked, and Captain Paul watched with carefully hidden approval as the dripping blades rose in perfect unison and the bow man hooked onto
Torbay
's chains. The captain stood, brushing at the dirt stains on his breeches, and then climbed briskly up his ship's side. Pipes wailed, pipeclay drifted from white crossbelts as Marines slapped their muskets, and his first lieutenant removed his hat in salute.

Paul acknowledged the greeting curtly. In point of fact, he approved of Mathias Gaither,
Torbay
's senior lieutenant, but he had no intention of telling Gaither so. He knew he was widely regarded as a tyrant—a man whose prickly disposition and insatiable desire for glory more than made up for his small stature. And, he admitted, there was justice in that view of him.

The motley human material which crewed any King's ship demanded stern discipline, yet unlike many captains, Paul's discipline was absolutely impartial, and he loathed bullies and officers who played favorites. He was also sparing with the lash, given his belief that flogging could not make a bad man into a good one but could certainly perform the reverse transformation. Yet he had no mercy on
anyone
, officer or seaman, who failed to meet his harshly demanding standards, for he knew the sea and the enemy were even less forgiving than he. And if he sought glory, what of it? For a man of neither birth nor wealth, success in battle was not simply a duty but the only path to advancement, and Paul had seized renown by the throat two years before, off Flamborough Head in HMS
Serapis,
when he sank the American "frigate"
Bonhomme Richard
. The old, converted East Indiaman had fought gallantly, but her ancient guns, rotten hull, and wretched maneuverability had been no match for his own well-found vessel. Her consort, the thirty-six-gun
Alliance
, could have been much more dangerous, but
Alliance
's captain—a Frenchman named Landais—had been an outright Bedlamite, and Paul had entered port with
Alliance
under British colors.