Walter Williams - No Spot of Ground

“Fortunately,” said Poe, “one has Bowdler.”

“I thank that gentleman from my heart,” said Moses. “As I thank Tennyson, and Mr. Dickens, and Keats.”

“Keats.” Poe’s heart warmed at the mention of the name. “One scarcely could anticipate encountering his name here, on a battlefield.”

“True, sir. He is the most rarified and sublime of poets? along, I may say, with yourself, sir.”

Poe was surprised. “You flatter me, Major.”

“I regret only that you are not more appreciated, sir.” His tiny hands gestured whitely in the air. “Some of my correspondents have informed me, however, that you are better known in Europe.”

“Yes,” Poe said. A dark memory touched him. “A London publisher has brought out an edition of the Complete Tales . Unauthorized, of course. It has achieved some success, but I never received so much as a farthing from it.”

“I am surprised that such a thing can happen, sir.”

Poe gave a bitter laugh. “It isn’t the money- it is the brazen provocation of it that offended me. I hired a London solicitor and had the publisher prosecuted.”

“I hope he was thrown in jail, sir.”

Poe gave a smile. “Not quite. But there will be no more editions of my work in London, one hopes.”

“I trust there won’t be.”

“Or in France, either. I was being translated there by some overheated poet named Charles Baudelaire- no money from that source, either, by the way- and the fellow had the effrontery to write me that many of my subjects, indeed entire texts, were exactly the same as those he had himself composed- except mine, of course, had been written earlier.”

“Curious.” Moses seemed unclear as to what he should make of this.

“This gueux wrote that he considered himself my alter ego .” A smile twisted across Poe’s face at the thought of his triumph. “I wrote that what he considered miraculous, I considered plagiarism, and demanded that he cease any association with my works on penalty of prosecution. He persisted in writing to me, so I had a French lawyer send him a stiff letter, and have not heard from him since.”

“Very proper.” Moses nodded stoutly. “I have always been dismayed at the thought of so many of these disreputable people in the literary world. Their antics can only distract the public from the true artists.”

Poe gazed in benevolent surprise at Major Moses. Perhaps he had misjudged the man.

A horseman was riding toward him. Poe recognized the spreading mustachios of the aide he’d sent to Gregg and Law. The young man rode up and saluted breathlessly.

“I spoke to General Law, sir,” he said. “His men were still eating breakfast. He and General Gregg have done nothing , sir, nothing !”

Poe stiffened in electric fury. “You will order Generals Gregg and Law to attack at once !” he barked.

The aide smiled. “Sir!” he barked, saluted, and turned his horse. Dirt clods flew from the horse’s hooves as he pelted back down the line.

Poe hobbled toward the four messengers his brigadiers had sent to him. Anger smoked through his veins. “General Barton will advance at once,” he said. “The other brigades will advance as soon as they perceive his movement has begun. Tell your commanders that I desire any prisoners to be sent to me.”

He pointed at Fitzhugh Lee’s aide with his stick. “Ride to General Lee. Give him my compliments, inform him that we are advancing, and request his support.”

Men scattered at his words, like shrapnel from his explosion of temper. He watched them with cold satisfaction.

“There is nothing more beautiful, sir,” said Major Moses in his ear, “than the sight of this army on the attack.”

Poe looked with surprise at Moses; in his burst of temper he had forgotten the man was here. He turned to gaze at the formed men a few hundred yards below him on the gentle slope. They had been in garrison for almost a year, and their uniforms and equipment were in better condition than most of this scarecrow army. They were not beautiful in any sense that Poe knew of the word, but he understood what the major meant. There was a beauty in warfare that existed in a realm entirely distinct from the killing.

“I know you served in Greece, sir,” Moses said. “Did the Greek fighters for liberty compare in spirit with our own?”

Poe’s heart gave a lurch, and he wondered in alarm if his ears were burning. “They were- indifferent,” he said. “Variable.” He cleared his throat. “Mercenary, if the truth be told.”

“Ah.” Moses nodded. “Byron found that also.”

“I believe he did.” Poe stared at the ground and wondered how to extricate himself. His Greek service was a lie he had encouraged to be published about himself. He had never fought in Greece when young, or served, as he had also claimed, in the Russian army. Instead- penniless, an outcast, thrown on his own resources by his Shylock of a stepfather- he had enlisted in the American army out of desperation, and served three years as a volunteer.

It had been his dread, these years he’d served the Confederacy, that he would encounter some old soldier who remembered serving alongside the eighteen-year-old Private Edgar A. Perry. His fears had never been realized, fortunately, but he had read everything he could on Byron and the Greek War of Independence in hopes he would not be tripped up by the curious.

“Ah,” Poe said. He pointed with his stick. “The men are moving.”

“A brilliant sight, sir,” Moses’s eyes shone.

Calls were rolling up the line, one after another, from Barton on the left to the Ravens next in line, then to Corse- all Virginia brigades- and then to Clingman’s North Carolinians on the right. Poe could hear the voices distinctly.

“Attention, battalion of direction! Forward, guide centerrrr- march !”

The regiments moved forward, left to right, clumps of skirmishers spreading out ahead. Flags hung listlessly in the damp. Once the order to advance had been given, the soldiers moved in utter silence, in perfect parade-ground formation.

Just as they had gone for that cemetery, Poe thought. He remembered his great swell of pride at the way the whole division had done a left oblique under enemy fire that day, taking little half-steps to swing the entire line forty-five degrees and then paused to dress the line before marching onward.

Sweeping through tendrils of mist that clung to the soldiers’ legs, the division crossed the few hundred yards of ground between the entrenchments and the forest, and disappeared into the darkness and mist.

Poe wondered desperately if he was doing the right thing.

“Did you know Byron, sir?” Moses again.

Poe realized he’d been holding his breath, anticipating the sound of disaster as soon as his men began their attack. He let his breath go, felt relief spreading outward, like rot, from his chest.

“Byron died,” he said, “some years before I went abroad.”

Byron had been feeding worms for forty years, Poe thought, but there were Byrons still, hundreds of them, in this army. Once he had been a Byron himself? an American Childe Harold dressed in dramatic black, ready with the power of his mind and talent to defeat the cosmos. Byron had intended to conquer the Mussulman; Poe would do him better, with Eureka , by conquering God.

Byron had died at Missolonghi, bled to death by his personal physician as endless gray rain fell outside his tent and drowned his little army in the Peloponnesian mud. And nothing had come of Byron in the end, nothing but an example that inspired thousands of other young fools to die in similar pointless ways throughout the world.

For Poe the war had come at a welcome moment. His literary career had come to a standstill, with nine thousand seven hundred fifty-one copies of the Complete Tales sitting in his lumber room; his mother-in-law had bestirred herself to suggest, in kind but firm fashion, that his literary and landscaping projects were running up too fantastic a debt; and his relations with Evania- on Poe’s part at least- were at best tentative.