Deserter Read Online Free

Some—maybe many—have done it. Hell, after a big battle so many men are killed and ripped up that it’s impossible to tell who is who. All a man has to do is leave something with his name on it on a body that can’t be identified and he’s all set. He just chooses a new name and goes off to wherever he decides to go.”
    â€œWell. But he can’t go home an’ he can’t claim what was his before the war. When folks see a deserter comin’back they know he’s yellow and that he run off. It’s like slappin’ President Davis’s face. Folks liable to lynch him.”
    â€œThere are lots of places to go, a whole lot of land out there. I’ve heard a man out West doesn’t need a last name and doesn’t need a history.” Sinclair hesitated. “Thing is, I—we—signed on to defend a way of life we believe in. Neither one of us can walk away from that.” He shook his head slightly, negatively. “Nobody said anything about following orders that’re so stupid that a man’s pretty much guaranteed not to walk away from a battle, though.”
    â€œSeems like you’re saying two things at once, Jake.”
    Sinclair sighed. “Maybe I am.”
    The night of July 2 and into July 3 passed slowly for the Confederates who sat awake and too quickly for those who slept. A selfish breeze that began an hour before dawn and lasted barely an hour did little beyond disturbing the white ash of dead cook fires, not cooling the men or horses in the least. The heat, even in predawn, was a malignant force, a weighty blanket of stifling, humid air that turned breathing into labor and drew sweat from every pore. Flies plagued the horses and descended in clouds on the latrine ditches. Cooks, dizzy from the combined heat of their fires and the ambient temperature, drew from their rapidly diminishing supplies of biscuits, hardtack, and coffee, cursing at their slow-moving helpers.
    Men and horses, drenched with sweat, had been dragging artillery and ammunition into place since the first vestiges of light. The cannons of all the Rebel divisions—every piece that could be moved and that could be coaxed to fire—were needed for the initial barrage. Mounds of canister and ball rounds as tall as a man were fronted by wooden kegs of black gunpowder, tops already wrenched off, awaiting the siege. Movement along the entire length of the Confederate encampment at Seminary Ridge seemed chaotic, frenzied, as if the army was in a race with time. Officers rode in and out of battalions and companies of soldiers; General Pickett and several of his aides rode the length of the camp, waving as cheers and Rebel yells rose at the sight of him. General Lee, seated on his magnificent horse Traveler, observed the preparations, acknowledging the thunderous hurrahs he generated with nods of his head and sweeping waves of his arm.
    Pickett’s officers, on foot and on horseback, weavedthrough the masses gathered to the rear of the forest that fronted Seminary Ridge. Orders were given, repeated, modified, and contradicted. That made little difference: The plan was one of the most basic simplicity. Well over eleven thousand Confederate soldiers would march at double time in ranks as orderly as practicable across a mile of uphill terrain that even this early baked and shimmered under the burgeoning strength of the morning sun.
    Uriah Toole worked gun oil into the action of his Henry rifle, a weapon he’d brought to war from his home in Texas but hadn’t carried since he began as a sniper’s spotter for Sinclair. Now cloth sacks of ammunition sagged from his belt on either side of his body, the left with rifle rounds, the right with .44-caliber cartridges for his Colt revolver. Sinclair, a similar sack bulging with the big .54-caliber cartridges that would feed his Sharps slung across his chest bandolier-style, sipped at acidic, overboiled coffee in a tin cup.