The Damned of Petersburg - Hardcover

Peters, Ralph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765374064 ISBN 13: 9780765374066

Verlag: FORGE, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

New York Times bestselling author Ralph Peters returns with the fourth installment in his Boyd Award-winning series on the Civil War

GLORY TURNED GRIM…
…and warfare changed forever. As Grant pinned Lee to Petersburg and Richmond, the Confederacy’s stubborn Army of Northern Virginia struggled against a relentless Union behemoth, with breathtaking valor and sacrifice on both sides. That confrontation in the bloody summer and autumn of 1864 shaped the nation that we know today.

From the butchery of The Crater, where stunning success collapsed into a massacre, through near-constant battles fought by heat-stricken soldiers, to the crucial election of 1864, The Damned of Petersburg resurrects our Civil War’s hard reality, as plumes and sabers gave way to miles of trenches.

Amid the slaughter of those fateful months, fabled leaders―Grant and Lee, Winfield Scott Hancock and A. P. Hill―turned to rising heroes, Confederates “Little Billy” Mahone and Wade Hampton, last of the cavaliers, or Union warriors such as tragedy-stricken Francis Channing Barlow and the fearless Nelson Miles, a general at twenty-four.

Nor does Ralph Peters forget the men in the ranks, the common soldiers who paid the price for the blunders of leaders who’d never know their names. In desperate battles, now forgotten, such as Deep Bottom, Globe Tavern and Reams Station, soldiers on both sides, pushed to the last human limits, fought on as their superiors struggled to master a terrible new age of warfare.

The Damned of Petersburg revives heroes aplenty―enriching our knowledge of our most terrible war―but, above all, this novel’s a tribute to the endurance and courage of the American soldier, North or South.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ralph Peters is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former enlisted man, a controversial strategist and veteran of the intelligence world; a bestselling, prize-winning novelist; a journalist who has covered multiple conflicts and appears frequently in the broadcast media; and a lifelong traveler with experience in over seventy countries on six continents. A widely read columnist, Ralph Peters' journalism has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines and web-zines, including The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Harpers, and Armchair General Magazine. His books include The Officers’ Club, The War After Armageddon, Endless War, and Red Army. Peters grew up in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, and studied writing at Pennsylvania State University. He lives and writes in the Washington, D.C. area.

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The Damned of Petersburg

By Ralph Peters

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 2016 Ralph Peters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7653-7406-6

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Epigraph, 
Part I: The Mine, 
Part II: The Roads, 
Part III: The Railroad, 
Part IV: The Station, 
Part V: The Mill, 
Epilogue, 
Author's Note, 
Also by Ralph Peters, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

Early evening, July 28, 1864 Deep Bottom, Virginia

In heat as thick as syrup, skirmishers pecked. The crack of the rifles seemed dulled, the sparse commands reluctant. And the usual catcalls were missing, the hard teasing. Too hot even for insult. Suffocating.

Between the shots, flies hummed. Vermin, at least, could be relied upon. Loyal to the army to the end.

Dust marred the light. The stench of men and stink of powder had weight. Scorched air scraped lungs. Bewildered, random casualties drifted rearward. Others, shattered, rode litters toward their pain.

The romance of war, Barlow mused.

Flies surrounded him. Unable to figure out how to reach the shit encrusting his drawers. Just as Grant and Meade couldn't get at Lee, stymied by the forts and trenches at Petersburg. Or here, in front of Richmond. The black flies and the brown couldn't pierce his sweat-hardened shirt or fouled britches, and the behemoth Union Army of the Potomac, augmented by Butler's Army of the James, could not penetrate the Confederate lines. It was all of a piece, one grand incapability.

A rush of the dizzies unsettled him. His horse snorted and stepped. The day would never end.

"You all right, Frank?" Nellie asked, not lightly. Nelson Miles had not shone, but he'd still performed better than Barlow's other subordinates. As usual. A clerk before the war and newly a brigadier general, at his best Miles fought with spectacular savagery. But no man had been at his best the past few days.

"Hardly matters, does it?" Barlow soothed his fly-pricked horse. "Another grand absurdity. Poor plan, badly carried. Hancock doesn't know what to do, what with Grant and Meade and Humphreys dispensing 'advice.'" He looked away, unready to bear the features of any man, even one who almost passed as a friend. "We should've tried again today, at least properly tried. Now Lee knows the whole farrago's a bluff."

"The men are blown," Miles said. "I lost more to heatstroke on the march than I did to the Johnnies."

Barlow's eyebrows tightened. "Not sure that's an achievement to be proud of. Anyway, they're shirkers and slackers, the half of them. Bounty-jumpers. Dregs of the draft, what have you. You need to drive them hard."

"Frank, I think I know how to 'drive' men. They were falling in bunches before we crossed the James. Why anyone thought, in this weather ..."

Barlow laughed. One low, unattractive syllable. "We're a diversion, you understand that? That's what galls me, Nellie. Winning wasn't ever in the cards." He lifted a hand. "I believe all this was only meant to draw off troops from Petersburg. In service to the great mine, the secret that's no secret." He laughed that lonely syllable again. "With Burnside behind it, that ass...."

Miles' horse quivered in the heat. Barlow's gelding copied him.

"Frank" — Miles tried again — "you look seriously ill."

This time, Barlow's laugh was genuine. "Of course I'm ill. Everyone's ill. Virginia bears more plagues than Pharaoh's Egypt."

Shitting blood for a month. Feet worse than ever, itching infernally. Hard not to scratch the flesh right down to the bone. And the toothache back. Along with the stab of old wounds. A fine specimen of humanity he was, at the venerable age of twenty-nine.

Long way from Harvard Yard. Or Brook Farm. Or his Manhattan law office.

And Hancock, the sorry bugger, had it worse. It was obvious that he lived with constant pain from the Gettysburg wound. There had been stretches earlier in July when Hancock could not get up from his cot. And conditions behind the ever-expanding trenches had grown so grim, so torrid and filthy, that even Hancock's English valet — a distinctly unsavory character — couldn't keep the corps commander in clean collars.

A pair of litter bearers passed, lugging a panting boy with his eyes rolled back. Barlow couldn't see blood and it got his temper up: If he could face the heat, so could the men.

Behind the scrap of shade that Barlow and Miles had commandeered, and beyond the herd of staff men keeping their distance, distempered ranks of troops waited in a tree line, allowed to kneel or lie down to wait, all of them measuring shadows that grew too slowly, hoping that no order would come to advance. It was far from the splendid division Barlow had led just three months earlier, before they plunged across the Rapidan. That division had been squandered in mindless fights for worthless plots of land, in grinding slaughters. By the time they'd reached Cold Harbor, Barlow had almost sympathized with the shirkers. The best men had fallen at the forefront of repeated attacks, leaving the cautious and cowardly to crawl back. His ruined division had been replenished with scum.

The sole hint of grace in all of it, in the long, blood-sodden summer, in the murderous heat and lung-tormenting dust, had been his Belle. When she took sick, he had been shocked at the depth of his emotion, finding himself less the stoic than he'd believed. She'd been stricken with typhus, caught from a soldier nursed at the City Point hospital, infected because she had given herself to the horror of wards and surgeries to remain near to her husband.

They had married at the outbreak of the war, their affinity more one of minds than of crude passions, a match of congenial spirits. Arabella stood ten years his senior, which philistines found odd, but the marriage had been logical enough. She was the cleverest woman he'd ever known: well-read, of strong opinion, unafraid. It had seemed quite a good arrangement, and so it proved.

When he'd thought her lost, he'd been astonished at his desolation. Alone in his tent, he had wept.

Now she was mending, under good care in Washington. Magnificent, marvelous Belle.

When the war ended, he'd keep his promise immediately. He'd take her to Europe, to Rome. She wished to sit where Gibbon had paused in the Forum. His Arabella. The flesh of his lip brushed a crooked tooth and approximated a smile. His Belle. A woman more excited about the history of Rome than the latest Paris fashions, a serious woman.

His mother, whom Barlow adored, always took pains with her toilette, had even done so when they'd lived on pennies, blue-blooded beggars. Of course, she had rather disliked Arabella at first. That was in the natural order of things. But Barlow felt the breach had been repaired.

Yet, he remembered: his mother, at her most regal, saying, "Francis, she never laughs." And then, with a moment's reflection, adding, "But neither do you...."

Unfair and untrue. He still felt the slap of her words.

To Europe, though. To Rome. Perhaps some foreign doctor could heal his feet.

"What's that?" Barlow demanded.

An assault? By Gibbon's men?

"Cavalry at it again," Miles responded. "Not much to it, but they do go on." He patted his mount. "Hard on the horses."

Of course. The firing was well to the north. Where Sheridan, fierce and foul, was back in action. If "action" described the feckless...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: FORGE
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765374064
• ISBN 13: 9780765374066
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 432
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar