ONE
 

April 29, 1864
Warrenton, Virginia
“Lord in Heaven, Old Abe’s a desperate man,” Bill Wildermuth said. “Lifting Brownie up to be a sergeant. This army ain’t scraping the bottom of the barrel, no, sir. We’re reaching down under that barrel.” He leaned over and gave Brown, his old workmate, a blow where a corporal’s stripes still graced a sleeve. “Ain’t that right, boys?”
Scattered on stumps and scavenged chairs set out in the wonderful sun, the old comrades drew their pipes from their mouths to offer up mock dismay at the coming promotion. Recruits new to the company smiled cautiously.
Apple blossoms feathered down around them. Promotion or not, Corporal Charles Brown told himself, the world went on, and the war went on, and one man no longer counted for very much. Yet, he was pleased by the prospect of adding a stripe.
“Promoting Brownie ain’t half so bad as making Doudle a corporal,” Charlie Oswald, a corporal himself, declared. “I predict complete defeat for the Union in no time at all. Short rations a-coming, boys, Andersonville’s a-calling.…”
“That’s nothing to laugh about,” Doudle said. “Andersonville, I mean.”
“But you do agree it’s a grave … a grave and desperate measure … making you a corporal and Brownie there a sergeant,” Wildermuth insisted. He cackled and tapped the ashes from his pipe. “I fear for the glorious Union, boys,” he told the new recruits. “You’ll be crying for your mothers, if they ain’t crying for you. Between Brownie, Doudle, and U. S. Grant, it’s a-going to be something.”
A quiet man, solid as oak, Private Henry Hill startled them all. Not only by speaking, but by the force in his tone: “Nobody’s ‘making’ Corporal Brown a sergeant. He made himself a sergeant. And you know it.”
Hill meant well. He always did. But solemnity wasn’t in season. A mood as fine as the afternoon—all green and gold and blue and free of rain—had captivated the men. The teasing continued amid the drifting blossoms.
Wildermuth stretched like a sun-warmed cat and turned back to the new faces. All of the gathered soldiers, green or veteran, had been canal boatmen back home. Except for Sammy Martz, the Pottsville blacksmith, who could not be deterred from joining their fellowship.
“Boys,” Wildermuth resumed, “it’s hard enough for a man to tell you four Eckerts apart. I mean, I don’t know if you’re brothers, cousins, uncles, or everything at once. Fellow gets to wondering what all goes on back home on Eckert Hill. Tell you this, though: Private Hill there might be the first sergeant’s confessed and proven cousin, but him and Brownie got some relation they ain’t admitting. Can’t hardly separate ’em, can’t hardly tell ’em apart. Same great big inky-head targets for the Johnnies, same jut-out jaws just a-begging for a fist.” He stretched again, smiling as if he knew all and would soon tell all. “Only difference I see is that Henry there got black eyes fit for a gypsy gal. Which sets a man wondering in a new direction entirely.”
Thrilled by spring, two birds swooped overhead. Delighted to have an audience still unwise, Wildermuth went on: “I figure it’s all up with us now. Over and done. You new fellows joined up at a terrible time, just terrible. Before you know it, ‘Sergeant’ Brown’s going to be running the company, if not the regiment. Then you look out! Yes, sir! General Burnside himself won’t be able to save a man among you.”
Surfeited, Brown spoke for himself at last: “Bill, if words were bullets, we could point you south and there wouldn’t be one Reb left alive come Sunday. And First Sergeant Hill might have something to say about who runs the company.”
“Not for long,” Wildermuth said. “I hear they’re going to make him a lieutenant any time now. And lieutenants never do nothing.”
“He’d make a good officer,” Doudle said. “What say, Henry? Pair of shoulder straps for Cousin Willie?”
Hill shrugged. His first loyalty, as all the veterans knew, was to the soon-to-be sergeant. Henry Hill and Charles Brown had not been close back home on the Schuylkill Canal, but war had bound them together in the odd way it had with men.
Sensing, as old soldiers do, that the call to form up was coming, Brown rose and said, “You Eckerts. You there, Martz. Line up, let me have a look at you. I’m not going to have you embarrassing this company.”
The new men fumbled about, but got themselves into what passed for order. Brown was struck, yet again, by how young they appeared. There would be, at most, two or three years’ difference between the survivors of old Company C and the new recruits they’d collected during their reenlistment furlough in February. Yet, the men who had left their barges and mule barns in ’61, who had fought from Port Royal to Knoxville, looked a decade older to Brown’s eyes.
He thought of his elder brother, dead of a simple sickness and buried at Vicksburg, above a river whose breadth stunned men bred on the humble Schuylkill. The regiment had moved from north to south to the west and back again, staking claims to strange earth with its dead. Now its flag drooped on a Virginia field. They had gone in a circle, blindfolded mules in a mill.
Flicking away a blossom that called to mind women and private things, Brown tightened the belt on one of the Eckert boys, asking, “You’re William, right?”
“No, Corporal. I’m Johnny. That’s William.” Dutchie as could be, the new man pronounced the names as “Chonny” and “Villy-yam.” The Eckerts were their own breed. In more than one way, folks said.
Brown grunted. Of the four Eckerts in the company now, the only one he could be sure of naming right was Isaac, who had been with them from the beginning. Standing off to the side, Isaac Eckert did not take a protective or helpful attitude toward his relatives, but let Brown straighten them out.
“I have a thing I must ask you, please, Corporal Brown,” the next Eckert in line said. His accent was thick as lard on farmhouse bread.
“What’s that?”
“Them Rebel girls, the ones in town there?” Dem Reppel kirlz, ta wuns in tawn dare? If Brown sometimes had trouble understanding the speech of Reb prisoners, he was sure the Johnnies wouldn’t know what to make of the Eckert boys or the other Dutchmen in the 50th Pennsylvania.
“What about ’em?”
“They are all so verdammt mean? I try to make polite … but when I lifts my cap, die kleine Hexe looks like I am the snake and she wants for the hatchet.”
“The ladies of Warrenton have seen their fill of Yankees,” Brown told the boy. He thought about the matter for a moment. “You just do like I told you and stay away from those darkey gals who come around of evenings. Or you’ll go home with something you won’t be proud of.”
Henry Hill spoke again. Twice in an afternoon was something of a milestone.
“First sergeant just...