Rebel in Time

'You're a good man, Robbie Shaw, and it has been my pleasure to make your acquaintance. Now let us get back to Manhattan and enjoy ourselves. We need a bang-up dinner with bottles and bottles of good wine. After that we are going to the theatre. We are going to celebrate and have a good time while we can. Because all of this is going to end soon. There is war over the horizon. A most deadly war of brother against brother that is going to tear this country apart. So now we are going to enjoy ourselves — and then we are going to part. I hope to meet up with you again, but I don't know where or when.'

'You make it sound so final. What do you intend to do?'

'What I do best. I'm going to try to enlist in the Army. That war is coming and nothing will stop it. You and the other abolitionists fought your peacetime war against slavery, but that period is coming to an end. In the not too distant future the shooting war will begin.

'It is going to be a long, long time before it ends.'

Chapter 36

JULY 1, 1863

The water had been freshly boiled and was still warm when Troy poured it over his arm. It burned painfully and it washed the open shrapnel wound and started the freshly-clotted blood flowing again. The jagged cut wasn't deep, but it was painful, and Troy gritted his teeth as he swabbed it clean. His antibiotics were gone, used up on the wounded during the years of fighting, so the boiled water would have to do. The length of bandage had been boiled too, and he wrapped it around his arm until the wound was covered. This last effort on top of the fatigue of battle had brought him to the edge of exhaustion; he leaned back against the bole of the tree, eyes closed, arms draped limply across his knees, more asleep than awake as confused memories tumbled through his tired brain.

How quickly the years had gone by, yet how slowly as well. So much had happened since that day when he had said good-bye to Robbie Shaw in New York. He had quickly discovered that his idea of enlisting in the army had not been as easy as he had planned. Black men were not wanted — except as servants or ditch-diggers. He would not settle for that. It had taken a year of hard work, and all of McCulloch's money, to organize the first Negro battalion in Boston, The First Regiment of Massachusetts Coloured Volunteers. The amount spent lobbying and bribing the city fathers had been almost as large as that spent on equipment. But he had done it, that was what counted. When the war began they had been ready. And they had fought — oh how they had fought! — and died as well. Yet there had been no shortage of volunteers. In a little over two years of battle they had replaced over fifty per cent of their number. Half their strength, gone. Dead men, faces now dimly remembered, names already forgotten. Troy nodded, half-asleep, his thoughts stumbling in endless circles through his brain.

'Sergeant, I brung you some vittles. Beans mostly, but if you look real close maybe you see some bits of the rabbit.'

The voice startled Troy awake. He looked up, blinking at the big man with the lopsided grin; half his teeth were missing. He smiled back and dug the spoon from his pocket, reaching up for the tin plate.

'Thanks, Luther, I can use that.' His fatigue was so great that Troy had not even realized that he was hungry as well as exhausted. He dug his spoon into the beans and chewed a great mouthful. Wonderful! When was the last time he had eaten? It was hard to remember, his brain still numbed by the day's fighting. Yes, it had been that morning, biscuits and acorn coffee. Nothing since. Except bullets and canister shot. But you didn't want to eat too much of that.

The evening was warm and dark. Up here on the hillside he could see the campfires of the Union army spread out to both sides along the flanks of Cemetery Ridge; twinkling beacons in the night. The exhausted survivors of the day's battle huddled around them, cooking their dinners and trying not to think about what the morning would bring. They kept their backs turned to the night, not wanting to peer through the surrounding darkness to the distant lines of fires that marked the Confederate lines. There were an awful lot of them, stretching out on both sides of the little town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.