The Killer Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

only nobody will send them home, and nobody knew what to do with them, until they thought of
us
, being as we are the other Maine regiment here in the army. There’s a message here signed by Meade himself. That’s the new General we got now, sir, if you can keep track as they go by. The message says they’ll be sent here this morning and they are to fight, and if they don’t fight you can feel free to shoot them.”
    “Shoot?”
    “Ay.”
    “Let me see.” Chamberlain read painfully. His head felt very strange indeed, but he was coming awake into the morning as from a long way away and he could begin to hear the bugles out across the fields. Late to get moving today. Thank God. Somebody gave us an extra hour. Bless him. He read:
 … you are therefore authorized to shoot any man who refuses to do his duty
. Shoot?
    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