No Spot of Ground by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

night in Richmond, he saw his vision, the benevolent madonna giving him her benediction. In going south he was being, he thought, faithful to Virginia; and he hoped to find the spirit, as well as the name, of his lost love embodied in the state to which he swore allegiance.
    Jefferson Davis was pleased to give a colonel’s commission to a veteran of the wars of Greek liberation, not to mention a fellow West Pointer—— the West Point story, at least, being true, though Poe did not remind the President that, because the horrid Allan refused to support him, Poe had got himself expelled from the academy after turning up stark naked at a parade.
    There was no regiment available for the new colonel, so Poe began his military career on the staff of General Joseph E. Johnston, commanding in the Shenandoah Valley. He occupied himself by creating a cypher for army communications which, so far as he knew, had survived three years unbroken.
    Johnston’s army moved east on the railroad to unite with Beauregard’s at First Manassas, and there Poe saw war for the first time. He had expected violence and death, and steeled himself against it. It gave him no trouble, but what shocked him was the noise . The continual roll of musketry, buzzing bullets, shouted orders, the blast of cannon, and the shriek of shells—— all were calculated to unstring the nerves of a man who couldn’t abide even a loud orchestra. Fortunately he was called upon mainly to rally broken troops—— it had shocked him that Southern men could run like that—— but in the end, after he’d got used to the racket, he had ridden, bullets singing over his head, in the final screaming, exhilarating charge that swept the Yankee army from the field, and he could picture himself riding that way forever, the fulfillment of the Byronic ideal, sunset glowing red on the sword in his hand as he galloped north to Maryland and the liberation of his home.
    Maryland never managed to secede, somehow, and Poe’s Byronic liberation of his home state had to be postponed. Via blockade-runner, Poe exchanged passionate letters with his wife while remaining, in his heart, faithful to Virginia.
    At the horrible, bungled battle of Seven Pines the next year, Major General Daniel Harvey Hill made a properly Byronic, if unsupported, attack against McClellan’s left and lost half his men, as well as one of his brigadiers. Poe was promoted and given the shattered brigade. Joe Johnston, during the same battle, had been severely wounded, and the Army of Northern Virginia now had a new commander, one Robert E. Lee.
    It did not take Poe long to discover that the ferocious, dyspeptic Harvey Hill was both an ignoramus and a lunatic. Before more than a few days had passed, neither spoke to the other: they communicated only in writing. Poe broke the Yanks’ wigwag signal code, which didn’t mean much at the time but was of help later, at Second Manassas.
    But by then Poe was not with the army. Only a few days after taking command, Lee went on the offensive, and Poe, supported by exemplary reasoning and logic, refused point-blank Harvey Hill’s order to take his brigade into Boatswain Swamp.
    *
    Now, after three years of war, almost all the American Byrons were dying or had been shot to pieces—— Jeb Stuart, Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, Dick Garnett, Ewell, Hood, now Longstreet—— all dead or maimed.
    And Edgar A. Poe, leaning on his stick, a sick ache throbbing in his thigh, knew in his heart that Byron’s death had been more merciful than anyone had known.
    He had written the eulogy himself, never knowing it at the time: But he grew old—— /This knight so bold—— /And o’er his heart a shadow /Fell as he found /No spot of ground /That looked like Eldorado .
    Byron’s eulogy. Poe’s, too. Stuart’s, everyone’s.
    “Forty years dead,” he said. “We have other poets now.”
    “Yourself, of course,” said Major Moses, “and Tennyson.”
    “Walter Whitman,” said