Forever Man -- Chapter 33

Wilderness Calls

Chapter 33

Wilderness Calls

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By late summer, the war stopped feeling like a series of battles and began to feel like weather, something that moved in and settled over everything, something you endured day after day because there was no other choice.

Benjamin learned that most of a soldier’s life was not fighting. It was walking. It was waking before dawn to the sound of men coughing in the dark, rolling stiff blankets, and swallowing whatever breakfast could be managed, like hard bread, salt pork, coffee thin as river water. It was tightening straps and lifting packs, then falling into line while the sergeants shouted and the officers pretended they knew where they were going. It was dust in the mouth during dry stretches, mud that sucked at boots when the rains came, and the constant ache that lived in the hips and shoulders no matter how strong a man was.

It was also waiting. Waiting by the roadside while wagons bogged down. Waiting while scouts went ahead. Waiting while rumors ran through the ranks faster than any messenger. Waiting for the next order, the next hill, the next time the world would turn violent and demand proof of loyalty in blood.

Benjamin did what he could to stay ordinary. He sweated when the other men sweated. He slowed when they slowed. At night he lay down and let his body feel its honest weariness. He was not made of iron. He got hungry like the rest, and when rations ran low, he felt the same hollow ache in his gut. He grew tired in the wet and cold. His feet blistered. His hands split and bled.

But he could not hide what rank demanded. Men came to him with questions. They came when their socks were rotting from wet marches and their heels were raw. They came when a boy in the next tent had been taken by dysentery so fast it felt like theft. They came when letters stopped arriving from home, and the silence gnawed worse than hunger.

Benjamin learned their names the way a farmer learns weather signs, slowly, through repetition, through attention, through the simple fact of seeing the same faces in the same misery.

Corporal Harlan was still there, beard thicker now, laugh quieter. He had a wife in Bangor and a newborn he had never held. He kept a small lock of the baby’s hair wrapped in cloth inside his pocket and took it out at night as if it were a charm.

Deacon kept his Bible and wrote careful letters by lantern light. He had a mother in Bath who could not read, so he wrote as if speaking aloud, slow and plain, so someone else could read it to her without tripping over fancy words.

Pierce had stopped pretending he wasn’t afraid. Gettysburg had made a different kind of man out of him. He still joked when the mood allowed, but there was a new watchfulness in his eyes, a habit of listening even in laughter as if expecting the world to snap.

Benjamin learned their families, their farms, their fears. He learned which men talked too much when they were nervous and which men went quiet. He learned which boys needed an encouraging word and which needed to be left alone. He learned that a man could endure almost anything if he believed he would see home again. Yet, he could be broken by a single letter that said home had changed without him.

He grew protective of them almost against his will. It was not heroic. It was practical. He had lived long enough to know that people died easily. Young men died fastest.

When he could, he made small choices that saved lives. He made the men drink when they didn’t want to, because marching thirsty made fools of them. He made them change socks even when they complained, because trench foot and rot would cripple a man quicker than a bullet. He pushed them to eat before sleep, even when the food tasted of salt and grease and bad luck. He walked the line at night and made sure fires were banked properly, because a careless flame could kill as surely as Confederate shot.

Sometimes the men resented him for it. Sometimes they thanked him without words, by simply doing what he said.

There were skirmishes that autumn, small collisions that left bodies behind but never quite rose into history the way Gettysburg surely would. Men fired from tree lines, fell back, advanced again. The war took a finger here, an eye there, a leg crushed beneath a wagon wheel, a life ended in a ditch with no one to mark where it had gone.

The first snow came early and made everything quiet. By November, the regiment was in winter quarters. They built huts from logs and mud, roofs of canvas stretched tight, chimneys of whatever stone could be found. Smoke curled low and constant. The ground turned hard. The cold made men curse and then fall silent as if words cost too much heat.

Sickness came like it always did. It moved through camp in waves, fevers that left men shivering beneath blankets, coughs that rattled deep in the chest, dysentery that drained strength until a man looked like he’d aged ten years in a month. Benjamin sat with men who sweated through their shirts and whispered for water. He wrote letters for those too weak to hold a pen. He helped bury the dead when the ground was too hard for proper graves and they had to pile stones instead.

One night, Pierce woke him by shaking his shoulder. “Lieutenant,” Pierce whispered, voice tight with panic.

Benjamin sat up. The hut was dark except for the faint glow from the stove. “What is it?”

Pierce jerked his head toward the door. “It’s Harlan. He’s…” Pierce swallowed. “He’s not right.”

They found Corporal Harlan outside, crouched behind the hut as if ashamed to be seen. He was vomiting into the snow, each retch contorting his body. When he tried to stand, his knees buckled and he grabbed at Benjamin’s sleeve like a drowning man.

“Don’t let them,” Harlan rasped, eyes unfocused. “Don’t let them send me to the surgeons.”

Benjamin knelt and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. Harlan’s skin was hot, fever-burned.

“No one’s sending you anywhere,” Benjamin said. He kept his voice low. Calm mattered. “You’re sick. That’s all.”

Harlan tried to laugh but it turned into a cough that sounded like tearing cloth. “Sick,” he said, as if the word were a mercy. “Tell my wife if…tell her I tried.”

“You’ll tell her yourself,” Benjamin said, though he did not know if it was true.

He got help. He got Harlan water, a blanket, whatever scraps of medicine the camp surgeon was willing to part with. For days Harlan drifted in and out of fever dreams, talking to a baby he had never met, calling the child’s name as if it were a rope he could hold to keep from slipping away.

Benjamin stayed with Harlan longer than he should have. Not because he believed he could save the corporal by will alone, but because leaving felt like surrender.

Harlan survived. Barely. When the fever finally broke, he looked at Benjamin with eyes that seemed older than before.

“I thought I was done,” Harlan whispered.

Benjamin nodded. “So did I.”

Harlan fumbled in his pocket and pressed a small cloth bundle into Benjamin’s hand. “Hold it,” he said. “Just hold it for a minute.”

Benjamin unwrapped it and saw the lock of baby hair, fine as thread, pale gold in the lamplight. He held it carefully, the way you hold something that cannot be replaced.

Harlan’s eyes closed. Tears leaked out, slow and quiet.

Benjamin wrapped the cloth again and gave it back.

He did not trust himself to speak.

That winter did something to him. He could feel it. Not in his body, but in the part of him that had once believed he could keep his men alive if he simply tried hard enough.

He began to understand a truth he had avoided: leadership did not grant control. It only granted proximity to fear, to death, to the consequences.

By spring the mud returned and the roads became rivers.

They marched again.

The men were leaner now, harder in the face. They joked less. They wrote fewer letters. Some had stopped expecting replies.

When the regiment crossed into Virginia, it felt as if the land itself had been wounded by the war. Fences were broken, fields abandoned, homes burned down to chimneys. The air smelled of damp and decay, and beneath it, something else, smoke that never fully cleared, even on bright days.

The orders came in early May. The army was moving. Grant was pushing south.

Benjamin stood in line with his men as they checked weapons and distributed ammunition. His platoon looked at him with a kind of quiet attention he had not seen in their faces before. These were no longer boys playing at soldiering. They had seen too much. They knew what the next march meant.

Pierce sidled up beside him while the others adjusted straps and tightened packs.

“You think this’ll be the big one?” Pierce asked, trying to sound casual.

Benjamin looked out toward the trees. The forest ahead was thick, tangled, green with new growth. It looked peaceful from a distance, which was the most dangerous thing about it.

“I think it’ll be bad,” Benjamin said.

Pierce swallowed. “I keep thinking about that man at Gettysburg. The one you…” He stopped, ashamed.

Benjamin kept his eyes forward. “So do I.”

Pierce’s voice dropped. “Does it ever go away?”

Benjamin could have lied. He could have told the boy it faded with time, that memory softened like old fabric. But he had lived long enough to know some things never softened. They only sank deeper, becoming part of the shape of you.

“No,” Benjamin said. “You just learn to carry it.”

They moved into the Wilderness on the fifth of May.

The forest swallowed them.

There were no open fields here, no wide vistas where lines could form and flags could be seen. The trees stood close, branches tangled, undergrowth thick. Smoke clung to the leaves. Sound behaved strangely, muffled in one direction and sharp in another. Men shouted orders that dissolved into confusion before they reached the next company.

Benjamin’s world narrowed to what he could see: trunks, brush, flashes of movement, faces appearing suddenly and vanishing. The air filled with the sour stink of gunpowder and sweat. Men fired at shadows. Sometimes the shadows fired back.

A man in gray burst from the brush to Benjamin’s left, so close that Benjamin could see the man’s stubble, the frantic white ring around his pupil. Benjamin did not hesitate.

He raised his rifle and shot the man through the chest.

The Confederate folded as if cut by a string and fell into the leaves. His hands twitched once, then went still.

Benjamin stared at him for half a breath, then turned away and reloaded.

That was the difference. At Gettysburg the first kill had made him sick. Here, in the Wilderness, the act landed in him like a stone and stayed there, heavy but silent. He felt no nausea. No shock. Only the grim knowledge that if he paused, he would die.

He moved his men forward in short bursts. He shouted until his throat burned. He pulled Pierce down behind a log when bullets snapped overhead. He dragged Deacon by the collar when Deacon froze, staring at a man who had been hit in the face.

“Move,” Benjamin barked. “Move now.”

Deacon stumbled, eyes wide. He looked at Benjamin as if seeing him for the first time, as if Benjamin had become harder, stranger.

Fire broke out in the undergrowth. At first it was small, just a line of flame running along dry brush. Then wind caught it, and the smoke thickened until the world turned gray. Men coughed, choking, their eyes streaming. The flames moved unpredictably, leaping from bush to bush like a living thing.

Benjamin heard screaming, a man caught in fire, the sound rising high and terrible, beyond what a human throat should hold. Benjamin tried to move toward it, but the smoke blinded him, and the press of bodies pushed him another direction.

When the smoke cleared enough to see again, the screaming had stopped.

He found bodies afterward with burns so severe they did not look like men anymore. He found wounded men lying face down in shallow mud, their fingers clawed into the earth as if they had tried to burrow away from pain.

His unit took heavy casualties. Harlan, who had survived winter fever, was shot through the shoulder and fell hard. Benjamin and two others dragged him behind cover. Harlan kept trying to sit up, teeth clenched, insisting he was fine. The blood soaked his sleeve and turned the fabric black.

Pierce took a graze along the scalp that bled like something fatal but was mostly surface. Still, the sight of it made Pierce shake as if he’d been struck. Benjamin pressed a cloth against the wound and told him to keep his head down, to breathe, to stay with him.

They lost men in ways that felt obscene. A boy named Carrow—barely twenty, with freckles and a quick grin—was hit in the belly and died in less than ten minutes, his hands clutching at Benjamin’s sleeve as if Benjamin could keep him here by force. Another man wandered off in the smoke, separated from the unit, and was found later with a bullet through his eye, lying in a ditch as if he’d laid down to rest.

By the second day Benjamin’s voice was hoarse from shouting and his hands trembled from reloading. He had not eaten properly in twenty-four hours. When he swallowed, his throat felt raw. His legs burned with fatigue the way any man’s legs would burn, immortal or not. The difference was only that he had no choice but to keep going. He could not afford collapse. He could not afford to be seen as weak. Weakness got men killed.

When the fighting finally slowed, it did not feel like relief. It felt like the world had paused to draw breath before striking again.

Benjamin walked among the survivors as dusk came, trying to count them, trying to put names to faces, trying to decide who needed bandages, who needed a firm hand on the shoulder, and who needed to be left alone to stare into the dark.

Deacon sat on a stump, his Bible open on his lap. He was not reading. His hands rested on the pages as if holding them down to keep them from blowing away.

Pierce sat beside him, eyes fixed on nothing.

Benjamin crouched in front of them. “You’re alive,” he said, not as comfort but as fact. “We’re alive.”

Pierce blinked slowly. “For what?” he whispered.

Benjamin did not answer immediately.

He could still name the cause. He still believed slavery was wrong. He still believed the Union mattered. But the righteousness of those beliefs felt buried now beneath the reality of men burning alive in a forest.

He looked at Pierce—at the boy’s blood-caked hair, at the hollow in his cheeks, at the way his hands shook even at rest—and he felt something inside himself shift again. Not breaking. Not yet. But wearing thin.

“We keep going,” Benjamin said finally. “That’s what we do.”

Pierce’s mouth tightened. He nodded as if the words made sense, though his eyes did not.

Benjamin stood and walked away to the edge of the camp where the trees thickened again, dark silhouettes against a sky stained by smoke. He leaned his forehead briefly against a trunk and closed his eyes. He had come to war believing he was fighting for something clean. Now he understood that nothing about it was clean. Not the cause, not the killing, not the survival.

And somewhere inside him—beneath duty, beneath resolve, beneath the demanding discipline of command—he could feel the war consuming something essential. Something he might not get back.

When he opened his eyes, the forest stared back without feeling.

Behind him, men groaned and prayed and muttered names of places that sounded like home.

Benjamin stood there a long time, listening, until an orderly came looking for him with new instructions and a voice that carried the weight of inevitability.

They were moving again soon. Southward. Toward more fighting.

Benjamin turned from the tree and went back to his men.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading this serialized version of my novel, Forever Man. Please be sure to click the like/heart on this post, and feel free to share it with your friends. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the story. Any questions or comments are greatly appreciated.