Out of Their Minds

14

Something nudged me and woke me so quickly that I sat bolt upright and bumped my head on one of the boulders. Through the stars that spun within my brain I saw a man scrooched down and staring at me. He held a rifle and while the barrel was aimed in my direction, I got the impression that he wasn't really pointing it at me. He had used it, more than likely, to nudge me into wakefulness.

He wore a forage cap which did not fit well because it had been some time since he had had a haircut, and his jacket was a faded blue with brass buttons on it.

"It do beat all," he said, amiably, "how some folk can fall asleep just any time at all."

He turned his head aside and spat a neat stream of tobacco juice onto the face of one of the boulders.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"The Rebs are bringing up their guns," he said. "All morning they been at it. They must have a thousand of them, on the rise across the way. Lined up, hub to hub."

I shook my head, "Not a thousand of them. Two hundred would be closer to it."

"Mebbe you are right," he said. "I guess them Rebs ain't got no thousand guns."

"This must be Gettysburg," I said.

"Of course it's Gettysburg," he said, disgusted. "Don't tell me you don't know. You couldn't have been here long without knowing what it. is. There've been right smart doings here, I tell you, and if I don't miss my guess, we'uns are going to start catching hell again in just a little while."

It was Gettysburg, of course. It simply had to be. There had been, I recalled, a fleeting familiarity to the grove of trees the night before—last night, I thought; had it been

last night, or a century before last night? In this world did time make as little sense as all the rest of it?

I crouched on the bed of leaves and tried to get my bearings. Last night a grove of trees and a clump of boulders and this morning Gettysburg!

I bent my head and crawled out from between the boulders, but stayed squatting to face the man who'd wakened me. He shifted the quid from one cheek to the other and looked me over closely.

"What outfit are you with?" he asked, suspiciously. "I don't recollect no one rigged out the way you are."

If I had been a bit more alert, perhaps I could have found an answer, but my mind still was fogged with sleep and my skull still hurt from the knock upon the boulder. Waking up at Gettysburg hadn't helped me, either. I knew that I should answer, but there was no answer I could think of, so I simply shook my head.

On the summit of the slope above me, cannons were ranged in line, with the cannoneers beside them, standing stiff and straight, staring out across the swale that lay below the ridge. A field officer sat erect upon a horse that was prancing nervously, while on the slope below the cannon the infantry lay sprawled in a long, uneven line, some of them behind barricades variously constructed, some of them flat upon the ground, while others sat around at leisure, all staring off across the swale.

"I don't like it," said the soldier who had found me. "I don't like the looks or smell of it. If you are from the town^ you ain't got no business up here."

From far off came a heavy bang, sonorous, but not very loud. At the sound, I stood up and looked across the swale_ and could see that from the tree line on the opposite ridge a puff of smoke was drifting up. Further down the line of trees there was a sudden flash, as if someone had opened the door of a red-hot stove, then closed it immediately.

"Get down!" the soldier was yelling at me. "Get down, you goddamn fool..»

The rest of what he said was blotted out by a jarring crash from somewhere just behind me.

I saw that he was flat upon the ground and so were all the others. I threw myself heavily, sprawling. Another crash sounded to my left and then I saw the sparkling of many stove doors opening along the other ridge. From the air above and ahead of the ridge on which I lay came the sound of whickering objects traveling very fast, and then, on the ridge behind me, the entire world blew up.

And kept on blowing up.

Beneath me the very ground was bucking with the cannonade. The air thundered until it was unendurable and kept on being unendurable. Smoke drifted across the heaving ground and as a sort of undertone to the crashing of the shot and shell were whirring, whistling noises. With that utter clarity of thought which sometimes comes when one is stiff with fear, I realized that the whistling was made by chunks of metal flying off the ridge behind me and spraying down the slope.

With my face pressed tight against the ground, I twisted my head so that I could have a look back at the ridgetop. I was surprised to find there wasn't really much to see— certainly not what I had expected seeing. A heavy fog bank of smoke obscured the entire ridge, hanging not more than three feet above the ground. Below the smoke I saw the legs of frantic gunners as they worked their battery of guns, as if a group of half-men were firing a battery of half-guns, with only a little better than a half of the carriages showing, the rest obscured by roiling smoke.

Out of that roiling smoke came stabbing bursts of fire as the hidden guns fired back across the swale. At each belch of flame, I felt an angry flare of heat sweep through the air above me, but the uncanny thing about it was that the barking of those cannons firing directly over me was so muffled by the racket of the bombardment which swept the ridge that it sounded as if they were being fired from some distance off.

Through the cloud bank of smoke, and above it, the shells were bursting, but the bursts, dimmed by the smoke, were not the quick, bright flashes of light one would have expected them to be, but twinkling spurts of red-orange flame that ran along the ridge like a flashing neon sign. A huge explosion sent a flare of brilliant red flashing through the smoke and a massive volcano of black smoke went surging upward through the gray cloud bank. One of the plunging shells had found a caisson.

I huddled closer against the ground, doing my best to burrow into it, to press myself so flat and make myself so heavy that my weight would dent the ground and thus offer me protection. I remembered, as I huddled there, that I probably was in one of the safest spots on all of Cemetery Ridge, for on that day more than a century ago the Confederate gunners had been aiming high, with the result that the worst of the bombardment fell, not on the ridge itself, but on the reverse slope of the ridge.

I twisted my head around to its original position and looked across the swale and over on Seminary Ridge another cloud of smoke was boiling above the treetops, while near the base of the cloud ran tiny flickerings, marking the mouths of the Confederate cannons. I had said two hundred to the soldier who had spoken to me and now I recalled that it had been a hundred and eighty and that on the ridge behind me were eighty others replying to that hundred eighty—eighty-odd, the books had said. And that it now must be somewhat after one o'clock, for the cannonade had started at shortly after one and had continued for two hours or so.

Over there, somewhere, General Lee sat on Traveller and watched. Over there, somewhere, Longstreet sat glumly on a rough rail fence, pondering his conviction that the charge which he must order would surely fail its purpose. -For this kind of charge, he figured, was the Yankee way of making war that the South's best hope had always been a stubborn defense, luring the Union forces into attack and holding hard against them and wearing down their strength.

But, I told myself, my thinking held a flaw. There was no Lee or Longstreet over on that other ridge. The battle that had been fought on this ground had been fought more than a century ago and would not be fought again. And this mock battle which here was being staged would not be a re-enactment of the battle as it had been really fought, but a playing over of the tradition of it, of the way in which later generations had imagined it had been fought.

A chunk of iron plunged into the ground just ahead of me, tearing up the turf. I reached out a cautious hand to touch it, but jerked it back before I touched it, for the iron was hot. And that chunk of iron, I felt very sure, if it had hit me, could have killed me as easily and effectively as if this had been an actual battle.

Over to my right was the small grove of trees where the Confederate charge had reached highwater mark and then had dwindled away, back down the slope again, and back of me and also to the right, but now concealed by cannon smoke, were the great ugly cemetery gates. The country looked, I had no doubt, as it had looked that day more than a century ago and this re-enactment of the battle would adhere to the timetables, so far as they could be known, and the movements of specific regiments and smaller military groups, and all the rest of it, but there would be much that would be lost, the little details that later generations did not know or glossed over in preference to really knowing them—all the things that Civil War round tables, meeting once- a month for dinner and discussion, might know for a certainty or might suspect were right, would be here re-enacted, but one would not find here the things that no man could have known without having lived through the actual battle.

The pandemonium went on and on and did not let up—the clangor and the pounding and the hammering, the dust and smoke and flame. I clung tightly to the ground that seemed to keep on heaving underneath me. I could no longer hear and in time it seemed that I had never heard and would never hear again, but there had never been such a thing as hearing, that I had imagined it.

To either side of me and out in front of me, the blue-clad bodies also hugged the ground, crouched behind boulders, snuggling closely against piled-up fence rails, cowering in shallow and hastily dug pits, behind stone walls, keeping their heads down, clutching rifles that pointed up and outward toward the hill where the Confederate cannon spouted. Waiting for that time when the cannon, stopped and the long line of marching men, walking like troops upon parade, should come tramping across the swale and up the hill.

How long had it been going on? I wondered. I twisted my wrist up in front of my face and it was eleven thirty and that was wrong, of course, for the cannonade had not started until one o'clock at least, and probably some minutes after that. It was the first time I had thought to look at my watch since I had been pitchforked into this stupid land and there was no way of knowing how time here might compare with time on earth, or if, even, this place had such a thing as time.

I decided that perhaps it had been no more than fifteen or twenty minutes since the cannonade had started—although it seemed much longer, which was only natural. In any case, I was certain I had a long time yet to wait before the guns ceased firing. So I settled down to it, making sure that I presented as small a target as was possible. Having decided that all I could do was to wait it out I began to worry about what I'd do when the cannonade had ended and the Confederate line came tearing up that final slope, with the red battle flags snapping hi the wind and the sun glinting off the bayonets and sabers. What would I do, I wondered, if one of them came lunging at me with a bayonet? Run, of course, if there were anywhere to run— and there'd probably be plenty of others running as well, but more than likely there'd be blue-clad officers and men back across the ridge who'd take a very dim view of anyone fleeing headlong from the battle. There was no question of trying to defend myself, even if I could get my hands upon a gun, for those guns were the most awkward-looking things a man had ever seen, and as far as firing one of them, I'd have no idea whatsoever how to go about it. All of them seemed to be muzzle-loaders and I knew less than nothing about that kind of weapon.

The battle fog was growing thicker, blotting out the sun. The swale was filled with drifting smoke and a layer of smoke floated only a short distance above the heads of the men who crouched upon the slope in front of the belching Union batteries. Looking down the hill, it seemed to me that I was looking down a narrow slot that was hedged in by a flapping curtain of very dirty gray.

Far down the slope something was stirring—not a human being, smaller than a human. A small dog, I thought, caught between the lines, although it was too brown and furry and didn't look quite like a dog. A woodchuck, more than likely. And I told him: Chuck, if I were you, I'd pop back into my den and stay there for a while. I don't think I really spoke to him, although even if I had, it would have made no difference, for no one, let alone that screwy woodchuck, ever would have heard me.

He kept on sitting there for a while, then he started moving up the slope toward me, pushing through the pasture grass.

A swirl of smoke dipped down in front of me and blotted out the woodchuck. Behind me the battery still was firing, with the guns going chuff-chuff instead of speaking out, the customary bellow of them muted by the overriding scream and crash of the avalanche of exploding metal pouring through the sky. Bits of metal at times came pattering down, like heavy raindrops falling from the smoke cloud, and occasionally a bigger fragment went tearing along the sod, ripping out and throwing tiny gobs of dirt into the air.

The swirl of smoke cleared away. The woodchuck was much closer now and I saw that it was no woodchuck. How I could have failed to distinguish immediately that pointed thatch of hair, the juglike ears, I will never know. Even at a distance I should have been able to know that the Referee was not a woodchuck or a dog.

But now I could see him clearly and he was looking straight at me, daring me, challenging me, like a defiant bantam rooster, and as I watched him, he lifted one splay-fingered hand and deliberately thumbed his nose at me.

I should have had more sense. I should have let him go. I should have paid no attention to him. But the sight of him, standing there, bandy-legged and cocky, thumbing his nose at me, was more than I could bear.

Without thinking, I surged upward, raging at him. I took one step down the slope before whatever it was that hit me, hit me. I don't remember too much, just a little of it. A red-hot iron that glanced along my skull, a sudden dizziness, a sense of falling down the slope, falling very fast, and that was all there was.