Hell or Richmond by Ralph Peters Read Free Book Online

witness your pain. His own wounds ached more often than not, and a lingering toothache pushed him halfway to madness. But nobody knew how bad it was, even Bella.
    He was going to punish the Confederates for what they had done to him at Gettysburg. They were going to pay and pay. He intended to grind their misery into their snouts.
    Barlow watched Hancock’s bulky figure grow smaller: The corps commander rode more carefully now. But if Hancock was in pain, Barlow knew some others who were going to feel pain soon enough. Hancock hadn’t fooled him one least bit. He’d let the cat out of the bag, and it wouldn’t be coaxed back in. Meade obviously had been displeased with the appearance and marching of the brigades of Smyth, Frank, and Brooke. And Frank, a worthless Teuton, had no business leading a brigade in any case. Nor was Smyth all he should be, although he and his Hibernians did show spunk. Even Brooke could stand to improve his performance. If orders to march did not arrive first, the division was going to have an early morning. And the world would see who could march in step and who couldn’t.
    He considered calling for his provost marshal to discuss the disposition of Private Rainey, but stepped back into his tent for a moment alone. Carlyle? He didn’t believe Hancock had ever cut the first pages of one of his books.
    They all made so much of his standing at the top of the Harvard class of ’55, but had no idea how utterly worthless his education had been. Barlow smirked. Nor did they know what jackasses most of his classmates were, destined for safe Unitarian livings or privileged positions amid family fortunes. He had been amazed at the naivety—not just on the part of the students, but the professors as well. He had arrived at Harvard Yard with rather more knowledge of the world than even the two sorry whore-chasers in his class. What were their names? Couldn’t even remember, they were inconsequential men. Probably safe at home after purchasing substitutes, or off on grand tours that would last through the end of the war. Collecting art in Paris and syphilis in Rome.
    He had Brook Farm to thank for his own knowledge, tawdry but useful. The Blithedale Romance did not half capture the farce he’d been subjected to as a boy. All the sententious idealism and the grave communal sanctimony had collapsed into a swamp of petty jealousies and recriminations over who was to do the laundry. And his beautiful mother had been in the thick of it, not for the better. Even a lad still missing teeth could tell the arrangements were cockeyed. And yet … there had been lovely days before the mood turned vicious, and idyllic memories intertwined with embarrassments that came later. Before he was ten, he not only had learned the practical things that eluded his Harvard classmates, but knew how it felt to be expelled from Eden.
    And thanks to his mother’s vapid and wan admirers, he’d had quite enough of “the life of the mind” to last him for eternity. Now he took pains to conceal the extent of his reading from those around him: It had been an indiscretion to blather about Frederick to Hancock, who was just a marvelous blue bull turned loose in the Rebel china shop. Barlow despised men who lived in books, the august figures of his New England childhood, who said much and did so little of any consequence.
    Was there anything more disgusting, more useless, than a man devoted to fondling his own intellect? A man had to act . Even Emerson had become too much to endure, an “uncle” who once had seemed a beacon of brilliance. His self-adoring nonsense struck Barlow as morbid now. Emerson could plead all he wanted, but he would never return to New England. Manhattan might be sordid, but it had life .
    Damn the black-clad gentlemen his mother had needed to please after his father went mad and ran away from his wife and three young boys! The shame of certain things she had done, the beggarly things to which he had seen her