Chapter 6

Homo Homini Lupus

“Cemetery Hill, July 1st

“My dear Juliet…”

The small camp fire gave only a little light, and Adam had to sit in an awkward position to prevent a shadow being created on the paper by his writing hand. He knew he should be resting, should be building up strength for the next day, but he also knew that sleep was likely to elude him, and that even if not his sleep would not bring any rest at all. The only thing that would give him some sort of relaxation was, indeed, this letter. A letter that would never be sent, just as all those other letters he had written never had been sent. He had carried them with him for a day or two, then thrown them into the campfire and watched how they slowly turned into ashes.

Those letters were…not really letters. He had seen many men writing journals—Leo did it, too, nearly every night—but Adam didn’t find a journal to be what he needed. The things he needed to shape into words and sentences were not things he wanted to keep. Not things he wanted to store somewhere to be able to come back one day and read them. What for? To remember? As if a man could forget those things. As if a man would not, on every single day of his life, wish, hope, and pray to forget those things and never have to recall any of them. Juliet of all people would understand the urge to write—and the need to keep it secret.

He smiled. Juliet would also insist that he’d send her the letters; she would read them and never say a word if he didn’t ask for one. She would listen if he felt the urge to talk, and she would understand—would understand also if he never talked.

Of course, he would never actually burden her with…with this. But he would pretend he did because telling her put things into perspective, gave him a distance he desperately needed to make sense of what happened to him, of what happened with him.

He crossed out the first words and started anew.

“My beloved Juliet,

Lupus est homo homini; that is the essence of today’s events: man is a wolf to man. And I, dearest, am not sure anymore if I am man or wolf.

Early this morning, we were ordered to march to Gettysburg to reinforce General Reynolds’ troops which were outnumbered by Confederate forces. We arrived there around noon and were sent north to…”

It had been a hot march. The sun had burnt down on them relentlessly, making them short-breathed and tired even before they’d reached their destination. Their knapsacks had become heavier by the minute, the straps cutting deep into aching shoulders. Goodness, Adam wasn’t unaccustomed to working in heat, but his heavy woolen jacket had given him the feeling of being cooked alive in a custom-made potbelly stove.

Upon arriving at Gettysburg, news had spread that Reynolds had been killed in action and that now General Howard was commanding officer of all present Union forces. Subsequently, Major General Schurz had been appointed temporary commander of the XI Corps, and Adam’s division put under command of Brigade General Schimmelpfennig, a man Adam couldn’t really assess. While, in the past weeks, he had come to know and appreciate Schurz as a thoughtful leader who stayed on top of things, had a knack for tactics and a keen perception for the enemy’s next move, he knew nearly nothing about Schimmelpfennig, only that the man was a decided supporter of nativism. He was an unknown quantity to Adam—and therefore something that made him uneasy.

All too soon, Adam’s bad feelings about this change in command would prove right.

“We took position in the north of town, below Oak Hill, in a terrain of farmland, featureless and plain. It wasn’t easy to defend in the first place, and soon we found ourselves attacked from two sides, heavily outnumbered and trapped in artillery crossfire, unable to find cover. A slaughterhouse, a veritable slaughterhouse. The noise—”

The noise. Adam stopped writing and ran his hand over his face, not even noticing how the edge of the pen ripped a long scrape into his skin. He stared into the low fire next to him, watched the sparks dance merrily and listened to the crackling embers’ gentle song.

The noise had been the worst. The noise: artillery, gunfire, and screams. Cannons, rifles, men.

Gunfire and screams. Shots from thousands of barrels, shouts from thousands of lungs, the overlying deep, dark thunder of bombardment—all that had accumulated into one single roar: a cacophony of dread.

“It was a slaughterhouse—and a madhouse. The air was thick with noise and smoke; it wasn’t easy to retain orientation. Half of the time I didn’t know where exactly I was or where to head—not realizing that there hardly was a way to go. Man after man fell, comrade, friend, foe…sometimes you couldn’t even discern which. Does it make a difference at all?

“They say it lasted barely an hour, but it surely didn’t feel so. It was a lifetime, no less. An eternity. As if my very existence consisted solely of this one roaring, smoking rage.”

Rage. Rage. Adam shuddered. He pulled at the edges of the blanket slung around his shoulder to close them over his chest. He snorted. No matter how many blankets he wrapped around himself, no matter how close he huddled to the fire, he couldn’t rid himself of the chill that had taken residence in his body, that made his hands ice cold and his shoulders shake from fatigue.

Rage. He closed his eyes and nodded to himself. Rage, that was it. The one thing that had taken him by surprise. He had felt rage during the battle, rage—and nothing else. Not excitement (even though there had been a certain element of anxiety among the corps before the battle had begun, or rather anticipation, a tense commotion not unlike the nervous hoof stomping of a race horse seconds before the start); not fear (despite the fact that he’d been sure he would not survive the day); not sorrow (that came later)—none of that, only rage.

He snorted. Whom was he kidding? His rage had been fed by excitement, fear, and sorrow, had been kindled by them.

He didn’t remember much from the battle, just smoke and noise, and rage. He had tried to keep track of his men in the beginning, but, of course, in the general mayhem he’d lost them soon enough. He had fired his gun, most of the time not even checking if he’d hit his target—there was always another man in grey leveling a rifle on him. A gun pointing in his direction was the only sure indicator that a soldier was indeed a foe, though. The Confederates weren’t as well equipped as the Union soldiers; sometimes they didn’t even have a uniform or wore one they had captured from a Federal.

Once he had used his bayonet. He hoped he would never have to do it again. The man he had stabbed had fallen down on his knees, only an arm’s length from Adam. His eyes wide in surprise, he hadn’t even clutched his blood-spilling chest; and then his mouth had curled into a small sad smile before he’d fallen face first into the dry topsoil. “Why?” he had seemed to ask, and Adam still didn’t know an answer to that.

“We were already falling back toward Gettysburg, when we were ordered to retreat through the town, thus bringing the fight into it. Smaller skirmishes everywhere, on the street between the houses, in gardens and yards. Some, I’m ashamed to say, sought refuge in houses, basements, anything with a fence to hide behind it.”

He had seen General Schimmelpfennig climbing a fence—but the general hadn’t made it to Cemetery Hill, so apparently his cowardice hadn’t served him at all and he had been killed or captured anyway.

Seeing the general setting such a bad example had enraged Adam even more, and he had started looking into the yards and back gardens, rousting men who had thought their fight was over—surely not making too many friends with that.

And then he had found Karl and Fritz Boettcher.

Hidden in the sheltered doorway of a house, little Fritz was sitting on the stairs, his brother settled between his legs on a step below him, the giant’s back resting on Fritz’s chest. Fritz stared at Adam, looking not a bit like the notorious mischief maker but like a frightened child.

“He’s too heavy, I can’t drag him anymore,” Fritz whispered.

Adam crouched down. The biggest part of Karl’s left arm was missing and his coat was a bloody mess, but the hole in his abdomen and the stump of his arm weren’t pumping out new blood. Even though he knew the result already, Adam searched for a pulse at the big man’s throat.

“He’s gone,” he said softly. “You don’t have to carry him anymore.”

“No, he can’t…he cannot, cannot be—” Fritz choked. He patted his brother’s pale cheek, rattled his shoulders. “Karl?”

“Fritz, he’s dead. And we have to leave. We have to go. Now.”

Fritz looked up, bewildered. “But you don’t understand: he…he’s my brother.”

“I know. I know it’s hard, but you have to—”

“And he’s dead.”

“Yes.”

Fritz shook his head. “He wasn’t supposed to die.”

“Fritz…we have to go.”

“No. I won’t leave Karl here.”

Adam sighed. “I know how you feel, really, but if you stay here then you are a deserter. You don’t want to be a deserter, do you, Fritz?”

The boy—Lord, he was a boy, a boy just like Joe, maybe even younger—winced but didn’t show the slightest inclination to move.

Adam sighed again. Joe, he thought, and then he adopted his big brother voice. “Go ahead,” he said. “Be a deserter. Be a coward. I’m sure your brother, wherever he might be now, will enjoy it.”

Fritz swallowed visibly. “I don’t…I’m not a coward,” he said defiantly. “But I can’t leave Karl here where he won’t get a proper burial.”

“Fritz, think! We can’t carry him, he’s too heavy. And he has got a coin, hasn’t he?” Adam fumbled at Karl’s coat. “He showed it to me, said I should get one, too.” He found the small medal with Karl’s name and corps and carefully laid it on top of the coat. “Look, whoever lives in this house will find him and see the coin. They will report his death and he will get a proper burial.”

“And a headstone.”

“And a headstone with his name on it, yes. Now let’s go!”

Adam didn’t know how they had made it to Cemetery Hill; somehow it felt as if he’d dragged Fritz with him the entire way. He also had no recollection of when the enemy fire had finally died down; the only thing he remembered was that eventually someone had stopped him, had held him until his struggle to get free had subsided, all the time yelling in his ear, “You’re safe, comrade, you’re safe!”

“Beloved, I’m safe now. For tonight, I’m safe. There’s an exhausted silence hanging over the camp. So many are missing. Leo…I haven’t seen Leo tonight. Nearly half of the corps has fallen or was captured—I will force myself to hope Leo is among the latter.

General Hancock arrived in the afternoon and has taken command over the forces. General Meade is expected later tonight, as are more Confederate troops. This is far from over, and I presume the worst is yet to come.

God help us.”

__________
What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends,
and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world;
to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors,
and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world. ~Robert E. Lee

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