Hell or Richmond Read Online Free PDF Page A

give anything to go home, and to Hell with the war. Nonetheless, the survivors of Company C had reenlisted almost to a man. War was a woman you hated but couldn’t let go.
    All of the high-flown purposes were gone now. There was only the rough ache to win that they all shared, and the being together like this, the queer feeling when faced with death that even those who survived would never be so completely alive again. Men learned to treasure the smell of campfire coffee and a shared tobacco pouch. A soldier repaired another fellow’s boot and made a friend who would die for him. If he lived—and Brown hoped to—he knew he would never be able to explain it.
    He had not chased promotions and looked down on those who did. Yet, men had always turned to him for orders, back on the canal and then at war. In barely twenty-three years of life, he had been forced to lead in countless ways, starting back when he was just a boy. So he did his part, and a little more, and tried not to lament what he could not change.
    Thinking about the great, big things led nowhere. The regiment had been camped right here in 1862, below the defiant town up on the hill. Now they were back again. And what difference had all the bleeding and dying made? The young darkies who had not run off expected less these days, although they still flattered, begged, cajoled, and stole, while the older Negroes just kept at their doings. You saw them leaving their shanties in the dawn, shuffling up to the fine brick houses to start the stoves and fireplaces, just as they had been doing all their lives. As for the white women of the sort who had startled that Eckert boy, their once fine dresses were faded now, but they carried themselves as high and mighty as ever. If anything, they’d grown haughtier. Except for the destruction and the slaughter, Brown was not sure that very much had changed. Or ever would.
    It had been jarring to go home for a month. It was good, because it was home, but unsettling because home had changed. After Knoxville, the regiment had endured its worst experience of the war, not a battle but a winter march through the mountains into Kentucky. Knoxville had been a horror of wicked cold and savage fighting with frozen hands and feet, but the worst came afterward, when the regiment, shy of winter garments and shoes, had been issued nothing but uncured hides in which to wrap their feet for a march of two hundred miles. The footwear they stitched and tied together had hardly lasted a day, and the regiment had left bloody tracks on the snow. Had the men of Company C not reenlisted the autumn before, the number who would have signed on again might have been a sight lower after that march.
    But ordeals end for the lucky men who survive them. They had been fitted out again, then carried home in railroad cars. After the ravaged Southland, it was a shock to see the prosperity of the North. When their train pulled into Schuylkill Haven, the men were amazed at the furious work behind the Turnverein band and the hollering families. Boats and barges jammed the canal basin, all but blocking the channel, and new construction had risen wherever there was dry land along the river. The rail yards, sprawling over the Flats, seemed greater now than those of a Southern city. In many ways, the war had been good to the town at the bends of the Schuylkill, with the Navy’s hunger for anthracite coal and industries begging for it. Schuylkill Haven was the point where the coal region ended and barges were filled for the trip to Philadelphia. It had always seemed a busy place, but never frenzied like this.
    There was money for those who had not gone to war.
    But there was a price, too. There were more rough-mannered Irishmen now, taking over the shacks on the Eck, where Brown had passed a brief and broken childhood. Louts in packs roamed Dock Street in the evenings, and sullen women in shawls cursed at Dutch grocers. The new men on the canal were surly, anticipating