William and he did not communicate much with each other during these months, even though they ate at the same table three times a day. If a letter came from his mother which Henry thought that William should see, he handed it to him without comment; and William did the same. Both brothers were enjoying their solitude, the pleasures of introspection and intermittent company and freedom from parental interference and the noise of domestic life, but more than anything they were both wrapped up in their reading.
This was, on the other hand, an heroic time in Wilky’s life, which he would not experience again, and would not, indeed, recover from. He volunteered to serve under Colonel Shaw as an officer in the 54th Regiment. Its departure from Boston was a glorious occasion, which Henry James senior travelled specially to Boston to see, using the house of Oliver Wendell Holmes senior as a vantage point to view the parade, which would be for him a pivotal moment in the history of his family and the history of liberty in America.
William and Henry learned of the event from their mother. When her letter came informing them of their father’s arrival, it was clear that she presumed both brothers would wish to view for themselves Wilky’s brave triumph and personally to witness a singular conjoining of the family’s history with that of the country’s destiny. It seemed not to occur to her that they might not wish to attend.
William wrote, however, immediately to tell her that he had an important experiment to perform in the laboratory on that very day, that he would make every effort to be there, but should these efforts fail, then the event would have to take place without him.
Henry waited until the date came closer and then he wrote to his mother about his back, which was providing him with pain, and his need for rest and his hope that he would be much improved by 28 May, the date of the event, and, in fact, he promised to do his utmost to be there, but should his back continue to trouble him, or take a turn for the worse, then he would not be able to meet his father and accompany him to the house of Dr Holmes. He did not read it over before he sent it.
On the morning of 28 May Henry did not go to breakfast at Miss Upsham’s and, on arriving for lunch, found that William had arranged to absent himself from all meals that day. Professor Child and two of the others, all fanatical abolitionists, were preparing to attend the parade and presumed that William’s absence was due to his eagerness to see his brother, whose bravery in joining the 54th under Colonel Shaw they all admired. It struck Henry that they also presumed he had organized his own viewing of the regiment and, as he got ready to slip away, no one asked him where he was going.
As Henry lay on his bed, having returned quietly to his quarters, he felt that the stillness and the silence were more profound than usual, as if all noise had concentrated itself into the path of the parade and left him in this place on the undisturbed margins where there was no sound or action or movement. He stretched and walked over to the table and drummed his fingers lightly on its polished surface and relished the dullness, the faintness of the sound. He took down from his shelf a volume of Sainte-Beuve and flicked through it, but the feeling of being away from the heart of things was overwhelming now. He was suspended like a caught breath. It was almost exciting, but, more than that, as the afternoon wore on, he felt something approaching happiness, which did not resemble the happiness arising from work done, or from pure repose. Rather, he was in a room with a bed and books and a desk on a day when the outside air carried danger with it. When everyone else had fire in their blood, he was calm. So calm that he could neither read nor think, merely bask in the freedom that the afternoon offered, savour, as deeply as he could, this quiet and strange treachery, his own surreptitious withdrawal from the world.
THE HOUSEHOLD, when he returned to Newport, was in a constant state of expectation. The family barely noticed his arrival and did not pay any attention to his semi-exiled state. At meals nothing but Wilky and Bob and their comrades, many of whose names were known to the family, was discussed. Each letter was greeted with a fluttering cry from his mother and Aunt Kate and Alice but was preserved unopened to be handed first to Henry senior, who read it slowly and judiciously and quietly to himself before handing it over to his wife, who would read aloud the parts she deemed worthy of immediate release. Then it was given to Henry or William,if they were present,and then to Aunt Kate and Alice, who read it in unison. Henry senior would then peruse the letter again several times over, deeming some of Wilky’s correspondence worthy of reproduction in the Newport News, and he would set out alone, as briskly as he could and with much purpose, to hand over the missive to the editor.
It was a letter they received dated 18 July 1863 that told them Wilky was now entering his most testing time and that every day he would be in the most serious danger. The Newport News proudly printed it in full:
Dear Father, We are sailing down the Ediston River, on our way to the front. I have only time to say that we came out of the fight on the 16th with 47 killed and wounded. The regiment behaved nobly; and I would give my right arm to keep up the good name it has won. We are now on our way to Morris Island, the new attack on Fort Wagner commencing tomorrow at dawn. I hope and pray to God that the regiment will do as nobly there as it did at James Island.
All of them knew about Fort Wagner. It was, Henry senior told them gravely, the strongest single earthwork in the history of warfare. It would have to be taken, he said, but it could not be taken easily. Henry senior was greatly exercised at the wisdom of sending in the 54th, a regiment whose footsoldiers were mostly black, whose very appearance would provoke a fury among the Confederate soldiers. In the days afterwards, when they heard no news, he discussed this with the many anxious visitors who called to the James’s house and repeated everything he said to the next visitor and the next until he was sure that his attitude towards the battle was the correct one, indeed the only one worth having.
All they could do was wait. They knew that the battle had been a disaster and that Fort Wagner was still held by the confederate soldiers. They heard that the soldiers of the 54th had excelled themselves in bravery. And they heard that many of them were dead. But they knew nothing of Wilky. In the hot summer days and nights, so deeply associated with ease and happiness and pleasure, they did not sleep, their meals became enforced, awkward gatherings, and as time passed they understood that Wilky could not have walked away unscathed from the battle. He would have notified them by now. And so they waited in dread.
Henry thought of him buried with a pile of bodies, having no name to mark his resting place.
‘That would be the worst for your mother,’ Aunt Kate said to him, ‘thinking that he might have survived and thinking that he might come into the hall at any moment to surprise her. Your mother would never stop hoping.’
No one at any stage mentioned the threat, or rumour of a threat, that Jeff Davis had issued in a manifesto ordering the white officers of the 54th Massachusetts hanged if captured alive. When Aunt Kate found it in a newspaper, where Henry had already seen it, he watched her taking the paper into the kitchen and burning it in the stove.
In time, of course, they would discover the full horror of what happened at Fort Wagner, the ranks mowed down at almost every step, the bodies heaped high, the death of Colonel Shaw personally witnessed by Wilky, the death of his friend Cabot Russell, Wilky’s first wound in the side, and then the shock of a canister ball in the foot. As he lay injured he was noticed by two stretcher bearers who began to carry him to a temporary resting place for the wounded when a round shot blew off the head of the stretcher bearer to his rear. Wilky witnessed his instant and horrible death. The other stretcher bearer took to his heels. Wilky woke the morning of the following day inside the tents of the Sanitary Commission,nearly three miles away. After a while he was moved to Port Royal Hospital, which was not really a hospital, but a field full of the desperately injured and the dying, barely covered with a thin canvas, its patients offered only the slightest medical assistance. Wilky lay there half conscious, his wounds slowly becoming infected, with no way of contacting his family.