Brothers in Arms
a love story
by
Robert Reams
I
Preston Dalton, dog tired and filthy, stood in the pouring rain, waiting to die. A quick musket ball to the head might be a merciful eighteenth birthday present. He thought back to his first battle, just thirteen days ago. They had been so pumped up and shiny and gray and confident, eager to drive the Yanks out of the valley and keep them runnin' 'til the Fourth of July. Then the Yankee artillery had begun. On the first barrage Jamie Wells had been taken, screaming, into the next life. When the smoke cleared, they had seen the long blue mass of infantry rifles. The Lieutenant waved them forward and they had begun to die. Within a few minutes, men lay screaming and moaning all around him. Somewhere to his rear a plaintive voice cried, "Mama, mama," over and over. Musket balls whizzed and whistled around his head like a swarm of bees. A ball had slammed into the butt of his musket, ripping it from his hands, and he had wet himself.
Since then, he pretty much figured himself a dead man. His thighs were chaffed from the scratch of dried urine. He did not ever remember ever having gone so long without washing. When he pulled out his shriveled little penis to pee, the rancid smell of it rose strongly to his nostrils. What he wouldn't give for a long hot soak in the family tub back in Jacksonville.
In twenty minutes they were to advance again. It seemed crazy to Preston to keep advancing straight into the hell of smoke and fire and death. "Couldn't we jest sneak up on the Yanks from behind or something," he asked himself?
The sergeants and corporals were receiving their orders all up and down the line, grouping their men for the attack. From across the long green meadow, the sound of the other side's advance began. Press's legs felt suddenly weak and shaky. He looked left and right, not really seeking a way out, just sort of hoping. He sighed deeply, affixed the bayonet to his rifle as the sarge was ordering them to do, and waited nervously for the order to charge. Could he really stick its ugly sharpness into a living, breathing man? Poke the blood and life from a lad much like himself?
The ragged line of soldiers began to move slowly forward,dragging him along as if he were tied. The lieutenant's voice rang out. "Charrrgge," and the line moved faster, faster. Prescott couldn't see the enemy, but the buzzing of the lead bees began again. Blood spattered across his face and he hoped beyond hope it wasn't his own. In front of him a soldier twirled, fell. Preston jumped, landed, twisted his ankle and fell. Someone stepped on him, then another. God he hoped he didn't have to, couldn't, get up.
Dirt and grass, small rocks, bits of flesh and blood rained down on him from the constant artillery fire. Musket balls buzzed around him like hornets,often thudding into the ground, close, oh so close to his body.
His honor, his training, his bravery deserted him absolutely. Frantically, in absolute, blind terror he dug in his elbows and knees and crawled wildly away from the noise and confusion. He crawled 'til his elbows and knees bled. Crawled blindly.
Suddenly the ground disappeared from under him and he fell, tumbling head over heals, he crashed against something very hard. Sight, sound, consciousness left him and blackness swallowed him.
* * *
Sean McFadden lay on his back on the hard ground. Dust and smoke swirled around him, obscuring the battlefield. Cautiously his hands moved over his body, searching for the site of the wound that had driven him to the earth. He laughed thinly when he discovered that only his old deer musket had been hit, its beautiful maple butt, shattered by a musket ball. "Well!" He said to himself as if it were a huge joke, "I guess no one can blame me for not fighting, if I don't have a gun."
Sean was hardly more than a boy. He had turned 20 on his last birthday. He had never wanted to fight in this damn war anyway. He had taken the fifty dollars from a Dutchman from upstate only because it went a long way to fill the bellies of his eight brothers and sisters. He had thought he could run off as soon as some sergeant's back was turned. But they had watched him constantly during his brief training, sent him south by train, and force marched him to this hellish battlefield, all in a matter of weeks. At an encampment along the route, he had witnessed the firing squad shooting of two deserters, and that had stifled his will to run.
But now all that was over. Despite the firing, the flak and the moans of the dying, he turned and walked. He walked slowly. Back. Back the way he had come. He wandered for hours, always moving away from the sounds of fighting, moving toward the quiet, the peace. No one stopped him. No one challenged him. No one saw him.
He had no idea how long he had walked, how far he had walked, where he was. It was the gnawing hunger in his belly, the ravening thirst, that eventually roused him, brought him to reality, to life.
By sheer luck he found an abandoned apple orchard, its farmhouse blown full of holes, its once crisp white fences trampled. He downed three apples immediately, scarcely pausing to chew. Water, he needed water. He went toward the ruined farmhouse. A wooden swing drifted in a lonely arc from the
arms of a huge oak. A cloth doll lay trampled in the soil. He found the pump, but its handle had been wrenched or blown off, its mechanism worthless. Sean entered the old house in search of anything. He found a worn gunnysack he thought he might fill with apples. Then in a pantry, half a bag of flour and a few wrinkled potatoes. He stuffed them in the sack and drifted upstairs, searching from room to room. From a side window he saw a far off stand of willows and knew that meant water.
Sean reached the river and threw himself face first in the shallows, gulping so deeply he choked. When he was sated, he sat for a time, reason returning. The utter quiet in the midst of turmoil was unsettling and a bit spooky.
Having no means of transporting water, he decided to follow the river. After several hours walking, he came upon what had obviously been a battlefield. The corpses had been removed, but the odor of decaying flesh and black powder still hung lightly in the air. He had made his decision. He was finished with war and all it meant. He gave no care for which side won or lost. Freedom, slavery, union, all meant nothing to him. Live! He waned to live.
Fearful that someone might still be around, might see him, he descended into the deep ravine the river cut here, keeping close to the bank and out of sight. Sean heard a sound, froze in his tracks.
The sound came again, a low anguished moan. There!
From the cliff on one side of the deep ravine a single gnarled willow hung suspended, and beneath it, a body. But not a body, a live person. A boy apparently several years younger than he, pale, ashen, close to death, dressed in the gray of the enemy. The boy's foot was turned half around the wrong way, his ankle obviously broken. For long minutes Sean merely sat and looked at the boy, arguing with himself about humanity and decency and safety and self-respect and danger and. . . "Hell," he said to himself, "I gotta do something!"
