Cain at Gettysburg by Ralph Peters Read Free Book Online Page B

squadron forward.
    Meade rode over to General Hunt, who had sheltered under the wooden awning of a shop to light a cigar. Meade dismounted, tied Old Baldy to the nearest rail, and stormed up the steps, spurs clanking.
    â€œIt’s Sickles,” he snapped. “Again. The man takes nothing seriously but his debauchery.” He whisked some of the water from his uniform, a useless effort. Too hot for an oilskin, he had made the best of it and now he was soaked.
    â€œStorm’s passing,” Hunt said calmly. “That should help.”
    â€œIt’s not the storm. It’s Sickles.” Meade went back into the slackening rain to fetch pencil and paper from a saddlebag. Waving away a cigar, he wrote against the flat of a door frame, giving Sickles the very devil.
    Out in the main crossroads of the town, the jumble of wagons had begun to move. But not quickly enough for Meade. The army was a vast animal, hard to manage and always ready to stray. As he moved his headquarters forward, he had ridden along choked roads, often taking to the fields to speed his passage. The journey had led him past countless mired wagons and caissons with broken wheels, past knots of arguing officers and sergeants with their vocabulary ablaze. And, always, the endless columns of regiments came on, men marching in their undergarments in the killing heat, kerchiefs trailing behind their caps, and many of them as barefoot as the Confederates. With his telegraphic communications cut by Stuart’s raiders, he had nonetheless tried to get a message through by courier, asking not for reinforcements—he knew there were none—but for a shipment of shoes, if shoes were available.
    As for Stuart, Meade refused to take the bait and chase him across Pennsylvania. Let Pleasanton and his cavalrymen fend him off as best they could. The thing now was to concentrate the army, not weaken it. Stuart was, in the end, more nuisance than danger. And Meade wasn’t certain he minded having Lee’s cavalry separated from the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia. If Stuart was raiding in the east, he wasn’t scouting in the west. Meade couldn’t understand the logic of what seemed to him a folly, but he meant to take advantage where he could. He had sent Reynolds a message to ensure he was pushing Buford’s First Cavalry Division forward as far as Gettysburg.
    Lee was at Chambersburg. He knew that now. Rumors put some of his men across South Mountain … although that could have been warmed-over talk from Ewell’s passage the week before. Or it might be a token force meant to cover the passes. Or a sign Lee’s entire army was on the move again. He needed more information, much more, if he hoped to shape the campaign to his own advantage.
    Finished with the note to Sickles, Meade turned to Hunt. “Find Sickles. Give him this. Damn it, I know you’re a busy man, Henry, but he won’t take anything seriously unless he hears it from the mouth of a fellow general. Give him this note, and tell him I’ll be damned if I let him afflict this entire army with his slows. He needs to keep to his march schedule. It’s not a damned suggestion.”
    Hunt didn’t protest at being handed a courier’s mission. And Meade didn’t worry about diverting the man for a few hours. As chief of artillery, Hunt was thoroughly competent. Meade trusted him to do all that had to be done in his sphere of action.
    But just as the artilleryman had flicked the stub of his cigar into the mud and started off, Meade called, “Hunt?”
    â€œGeneral Meade?”
    â€œWhen you cross Pipe Creek, see what you think of it as a defensive position. For the entire army, I mean. It looks all well and good on the map, and I’ve got Warren inspecting the length of it, but I’d appreciate your view on the subject. An old gunner’s opinion.”
    Hunt saluted, a bit carelessly, and moved for his horse. He