It was a different war now.
In March 1864, Grant was made commander-in-chief of all the Federal armies, and ‘Old Brains’ was demoted to the post of chief of staff. Grant moved his headquarters to Culpeper and after almost three years Andrew Strong came home. Home: it was an empty word. His father was dead, the grave still unmarked. The savage destruction which had been visited on Washington Farm appalled him.
‘It used to be so beautiful,’ he said sadly. Jessica took his hand and kissed it.
‘We’ll rebuild it, Andrew,’ she vowed. ‘I’ll rebuild it.’
A week after their arrival in Culpeper, Andrew found old Aunt Betty working in an army field kitchen. Their reunion was joyous, yet sad. She told him about his father’s funeral, about Jed. There was no word of Jed. All he knew of his brother was that Jed had been with Jackson and Jackson was dead. Jed had been with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and that army had been cut to pieces at Gettysburg, and was about to be cut to pieces again, and again, and again, until there was nothing left to fight.
They brought old Aunt Betty back with them to Washington Farm and installed her, with Jessica, in the old living quarters behind the house where David Strong had lived.
‘We are going to make it as it used to be, Andrew,’ she promised him. ‘So it’s up to you and General Grant to make sure I’m not disturbed while I’m doing it.’ It was not altogether a joke: the Confederate Army was no more than a few miles to the south, holding the Rapidan.
‘It’s dangerous, Jess,’ he said. ‘I wish you’d stay in Washington, till they’re pushed back.’
She kissed him and smiled and told him to go away and get on with winning the war. She was confident that the Rebels would never again come north of the Rappahannock and, as it turned out, she was right.
It had been a triumphant winter for Grant and an even sweeter spring. His home county in Illinois gave him a diamond-hilted sword in a gold scabbard. Congress approved the revival of the rank of lieutenant-general, and Lincoln conferred it upon him early in the year. In March he was summoned to Washington to be appointed commander-in-chief of all the Federal armies. Cheering crowds waited for a glimpse of him outside the White House.
‘Well, general,’ Andrew said to him. ‘You’re famous.’
‘My God!’ Grant said, as if that was the worst thing he could imagine.
As soon as headquarters were established in Virginia, Grant began his reorganization. He put ‘Little Phil’ Sheridan, one of the few officers he had brought with him from the Military Division of the Mississippi, in charge of the cavalry. He appointed General George Meade, the hesitant victor of Gettysburg, as his right-hand man. They told him Meade was proud, touchy, irascible and had a temper like a Turk. They said that unless it was absolutely necessary to deal with him, the best plan was to give him a wide berth. Grant heard them all out and nodded his agreement.
‘All you tell me is true,’ he said. ‘But this is the man we need. We are not going to win this war, as Colonel Strong here never tires of telling us, until we completely break the military power of the Confederacy. Our next offensive, gentlemen, is going to be a total one. We have the manpower and we have the machinery. All we need is men with the know-how, and Meade is such a man. He’s over-cautious, yes, but he’s safe. He’s reliable. If I give him a job, he’ll do it, but that’s all he’ll do. And that, gentlemen, is the kind of general I need right now!’
‘About that manpower, general,’ Andrew said. ‘I can get you more.’
‘How?’ rasped Grant, scowling as usual.
‘We’ve got over eight hundred thousand men on the muster rolls,’ Andrew reported. ‘Of those, perhaps half a million are nominally available for duty. But in fact, general, the figure is more like four hundred thousand. There are a lot of men sitting on their butts in soft garrison jobs up North, guarding supply lines that don’t need guarding.’
‘How many?’
‘Fifty or sixty thousand at least, general. Maybe more.’
‘Can you pry them loose?’
‘I’d have to cut a lot of red tape, sir.’
Grant smiled. ‘Cut it!’ he ordered.
The final battle plan was drawn up. It called for General Benjamin Butler to march up the James River with his army, and then to attack Richmond or Petersburg or both. The Prussian, Sigel, was to push down the Shenandoah Valley, driving Jubal Early’s Confederates ahead of him. General Banks would march on Mobile from New Orleans and Sherman would cut across Georgia, keeping General Joseph Johnston too busy to join Lee. Meanwhile the Army of the Potomac under Meade, with Grant in command, would smash into Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, entrenched on a line south of the Rapidan.
‘Our first job is to destroy Lee,’ Grant said. ‘Then Richmond will fall into our hands. Good luck, gentlemen!’
The Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan at Ely’s and Germanna Ford on the morning of May 4. It was a beautiful day, the sky bright and blue, with white fluffy clouds in clusters moving on a gentle breeze. Yellow primroses blossomed in the grass. Violets, swamp honeysuckle, dogwood in blossom daubed bright spots of color on the ever-thickening tangle of woodland into which the regiments were moving.
The Wilderness, they called it, and it was well-named. It had no definite boundaries. The thickest part extended from Chancellorsville to Mine Run, and south from the Rapidan almost as far as Spotsylvania courthouse. In Colonial days, so the story went, the trees had all been cut down to fuel the iron furnaces of the Revolutionary Army. Out of the torn earth and leveled forest had sprung a new, thicker second growth, mostly pine; but pine which grew so closely together that all the lower limbs of the trees had interwoven, strangling themselves and leaving dry, spiky, wicked tangles. Into this tangle grew scrub oak and bramble, beech, cedar and other kinds of underbrush. The result was an often impassable barrier of greenery. In swampy places – and there were many – willow and alder saplings stood as close as the bars of a birdcage, woven together by wild vines. The ground itself was gullied, pitted, ravined. Throughout the area ran serpentine wood trails which forked without purpose and ended without warning. Here and there stood infrequent clearings and one or two farms.
The soldiers moved into the Wilderness and disappeared as completely as if they had been swallowed by the sea. The officers kept track of their men only because most of them, it seemed, were singing ‘ John Brown’s Body’. Grant’s idea was to get his wagon train – seventy miles long if filing down one road – out of this tangled jungle before Lee left his trenches. He sought a fight in the open, but Robert E. Lee did not oblige. He threw his columns into the Wilderness against ‘those people’ – the phrase he had always used to describe his opponents – almost a year to the day that he had outgeneraled ‘Fighting Joe’ Hooker and lost his ‘right arm’, Stonewall Jackson.
What followed was a two-day battle, fought blind. Someone said later that it was like a hand-to-hand fight between two blindfolded giants, each finding the other as much by accident as by design. As the battle spread north and south of the turnpike, troops of both sides disappeared into the jungle gloom of the twisted forest. Fighting became piecemeal, fragmented. Officers guessed at the progress of the battle by the sound of musketry or cannon. Here and there, the woods caught fire and wounded men died horribly in the crackling underbrush. In some places, companies advanced or retreated in single file, never knowing whether friend or enemy might lie ahead of them or on both sides. At the end of two inconclusive days of fighting, both sides were so well entrenched than an attack by either would have been nothing short of suicide.
But after this battle there was one difference, and that difference was the stocky little, cigar-smoking, hands-in-pockets officer who now led the Federal Army. As the exhausted troops began posting their guards around the bivouacs on the smoking battlefield, and counted their dead – fifteen thousand plus on the Federal side, more than eleven thousand on the other – an electric rumor passed through them. Instead of retreating to lick his wounds, as every commander before him had done, Grant was going south! The 5th Corps had turned and gone down the road to Spotsylvania courthouse!
And south he kept on going, no matter what the cost. His weary soldiers stumbled along the unfamiliar country roads, falling into ditches, floundering in swamps, seeing mirages in their exhaustion. Imagination turned a clump of bushes into enemy cavalry lurking before a charge. Men fired jumpily at startled jackrabbits and sometimes killed a buddy.
Spotsylvania.
Men fought at the Bloody Angle hand-to-hand for twenty-four hours in driving rain. The trenches ran red with blood. A tree eighteen inches in diameter was cut down completely, so intensive was the musket fire. The flags of both armies waved at the same moment, over the same breastworks, while beneath them, Federal and Confederate alike tried to bayonet each other through the interstices of the logs. Men fought so close that the ends of their muskets touched as they fired into each other’s faces. Wounded and dying were trampled into the bloody mud by the frantic feet of the screaming, yelling, insane men fighting over them.
In the last serious fighting, on the nineteenth, General Grant formed a plan he hoped might lure Lee out of his entrenchments and end the bloody deadlock. General Hancock was to advance rapidly southwards along the line of the Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad, five miles east of Spotsylvania courthouse. The rest of the army would remain in position until Hancock was about twenty miles away. He was to be the bait. Grant hoped Lee would attempt to overtake Hancock and destroy him, giving Grant a chance to attack him in the open before he could entrench again. If Lee did not take the bait, Hancock could swing around and take a bite at the Confederate flank.
Lee countered by ordering Ewell to advance on his front and determine whether troops had been withdrawn from the Federal right. Popeye Ewell was no longer the bold captain of earlier days. He was forty-seven now and had lost a leg at Second Manassas. He was newly married too, and didn’t seem to relish the fight as he had once. Since his corps was now down to something like six thousand men – less than a division in the old days – he asked Lee’s permission to move around the Federal flank rather than take their position head-on. The whole area was a mud-trough, so he left his artillery behind. At about three in the afternoon, he launched his attack on the Federal troops covering the Fredericksburg road. The Federals were green: the men drafted into Grant’s army by the series of sweeping changes Andrew Strong had instigated when Grant told him to cut all the red tape.
Among them were some 6000 artillerymen he had drawn from garrison and fortress duties in the capital and other cushy billets far from the front line.
Anticipating just such a probe as Ewell launched, Andrew set up heavy guns in V-shaped redoubts on a bluff above the road. When the yelling Confederates came running, slithering, yelling, firing through the ceaseless gray rain, there was a moment of panic in the Federal lines, stilled by the solid boom of the heavy guns. Time and again they roared, smashing great gaps into the advancing lines, the shot whickering through the air, steaming as the hot metal was drenched by the cool rain.
‘Steady, lads!’ Andrew shouted above the din. ‘Shoot low! Roll the balls at them like skittles and knock their damned legs from under them!’
Somehow the grim humor of his words appealed to them. He saw them look over their shoulders, teeth white in grimy faces, turning back to their ramrods, their fuses, their shells. Ewell’s line was wavering.
‘All right, boys!’ he heard someone shout. ‘Let’s go down there and give it to them!’ There was a hoarse cheer from the infantrymen and he saw the lines come out of the trees and move forward past the guns.
He was opening his mouth to shout ‘Cease firing!’ when he was knocked off his feet and lay sprawled in the mud. It felt exactly as if he had been punched. He was more amazed than anything else: my God, I’ve been wounded! he thought. He felt no pain. He looked down and saw a tiny little L-shaped tear in his uniform jacket just above the belt. He put his hand around behind his back and felt wetness. Down below, he could hear the screams of dying men, the rackarackarackarack of rifle fire. He scrambled to his feet, cursing the wet mud that had soaked all down his side and back where he fell. One of the gunners saw him get up and gave a cheer. Andrew waved a hand at the man and looked down the hill. Ewell’s men were in full flight.
Another impasse, he thought. There has been no victory here. And yet, there had. By not winning this battle, Lee had lost it. Every time he stopped to fight, death, disease and desertion would winnow the remaining strength of the once-proud Army of Northern Virginia. There was no question of how it was going to end any more. Only when. Grant was going south, come Hell or high water. And I’ll be right there with you, Sam, Andrew thought. He started to walk to the rear and all at once his legs turned to jelly. He sat down in the mud and stared stupidly at the ground. Somewhere, vaguely, he heard them shouting for a stretcher party. Then he blacked out.
Fredericksburg was one vast hospital: every church, every public building, every store, every house from attic to cellar was full of wounded and dying. They lay in groaning rows on the sidewalks, in churchyards, in open fields. In the cannon-pocked Presbyterian church on the corner of Princess Anne and George. Streets, the wounded lay on the pews and the altar was moved so that more could be laid upon the steps. Dying men lay bleeding beneath the boxwood tree planted by George Washington’s mother, in the back yard of her house at the corner of Charles Street and Lewis. Everything was appropriated, everything: the courthouse, the Masonic Lodge, beautiful Kenmore, where Washington’s sister Betty Lewis once lived, The Rising Sun tavern, Stoner’s store. And still it was not enough. The ambulances came in seemingly endless convoys from the battlefields, bearing more wounded and still more. The surgeons, already working without rest until they dropped, could not keep up with the flow. Any man brought in mortally wounded was immediately passed over: there was no point wasting time trying to repair his shattered body. No attempt was made to save a limb: amputation was the safest and quickest means of keeping the casualty alive. Volunteer nurses collapsed from the incessant strain and anguish. Young clerks from Washington who had volunteered for half-month duty as nurses and orderlies, dropped exhausted on to the blood-drenched floors.
And over the whole town, like the vastly amplified sound of a summer beehive, rose the sounds the men made: groans, prayers, cries for water, cries for the sweet release of death, to lie like a heavy blanket in the hot, still air.
Andrew Strong was one of the lucky ones. The bullet which had knocked him down had entered his body low on the left side, clipping the very top of his pelvis, burning past the large intestine without damaging it and tearing a chunk out of his external oblique muscles.
‘You’ll probably have twinges there for the rest of your life, Colonel,’ the doctor told him. ‘Take it easy for a week, and then report back for duty.’
They had him walking in four days and out of the hospital in another: the pressure for space was enormous. Although he still felt a little tottery and every step caused a slow throb of pain in his left side, Andrew knew how lucky he was. It was easy to be killed, whether you were an officer or enlisted. In the fighting of this one bloody month of May, one major-general, Sedgwick, and four brigadier-generals had been killed. In the ten days of fighting around Spotsylvania, over four thousand Federal troops had died, and more than ten thousand were wounded. A long puckered scar and a twinge of pain were a small price to pay to have come through that. As soon as he was discharged from the field hospital, Andrew went to the provost-marshal’s office, told them who he was and got traveling papers. He still had a few days: Grant could manage without him that long. The moment the confirmation came through, Andrew headed for home. He bribed a leathery old sergeant to give him a ride in a supply wagon by promising to share a half-flask of whiskey he’d been given by one of the townspeople visiting the wards. They rode the thirty-some miles to Culpeper in a warm and companionable glow, reminiscing about earlier campaigns.
Culpeper, like Fredericksburg, was overflowing with casualties, but they were no longer the fresh-wounded of the day. Here, men who had got their wounds in the bloody thickets of the Wilderness filled the makeshift wards and thronged the busy streets. Even terribly wounded men smiled to be this far from the battlefield, tended by local women who had volunteered as nurses, eating regularly issued rations, buying such little luxuries as could be obtained. Andrew could not recall ever seeing so many men on crutches. There seemed to be hundreds of them. He walked up Main Street and across to the courthouse. The gallows outside the jail was still there. The sight of them made him wonder what had happened to Edward Maxwell. All he had been able to learn in the short while he was in Culpeper was that Maxwell had fled the town after the last invasion by the Confederates, when Lee marched north for the last time. Whether he had gone north or west, Andrew had not been able to ascertain. That, like a lot of other things, would have to wait until after the war.
At the courthouse, he shamelessly pulled rank to get a horse and carriage placed at his disposal. He was on his way to the farm within an hour. The pike was crowded with wagons and ambulances. Once a squadron of flying artillery thundered past, harness jingling, the heavy metal wheels of the guns roaring on the stony road.
He came down the hill and saw her standing in the doorway of the old house, her forearm across her forehead, the bright auburn of her hair burnished by the sinking sun. He called her name and he saw her smile. She ran towards him and he stopped the carriage and got down. She ran into his waiting arms, kissing him breathlessly, saying his name over and over.
‘What are you doing here? Where have you come from? How long can you stay? Is anything the matte?’ She let go of him all at once and stepped back, the torrent of questions stopping.
‘You’ve been hurt.’
‘A scratch.’ Andrew replied. ‘Nothing, really.’
‘Oh, my darling!’
‘Now, Jess,’ Andrew said. ‘It was nothing I tell you. That’s the way it goes, they say. If you get hit. It’s either awful, or it’s nothing.’
‘Your lovely body,’ she whispered.
He grinned. ‘It still works,’ he told her. She grinned back at him.
‘We’ll soon find out,’ she said.
Andrew patted the seat of the carriage. As they clattered down the drive to the house, she told him that it had been cleaned up and was being used as convalescent quarters for wounded men. He saw knots of them now, lounging beneath the trees, smoking, talking. The old house looked almost as it had always done.
‘I’ve been working with the doctors,’ Jessica told him. ‘They need all the help they can get. Even Aunt Betty pitches in. She can do wonders with the men’s rations. They’re happy to turn them over to her and let her work her miracles.’
They drove the carriage around to the rear of the house. Aunt Betty came out of the little cottage and her smile grew broader when she saw Andrew.
‘Well, Mahse Andrew!’ she said. ‘You got here pre-zackly de right time! You got here prezackly right. I’s bakin’ some fresh bread.’
‘I’ll put the horse up,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll see if I can’t eat the lot.’
He led the horse across to the lean-to and Jessica walked beside him, listening without speaking as he told her about the Wilderness and the fight near Spotsylvania in which he had been wounded.
‘You didn’t write much,’ she said.
‘I wanted to,’ he told her. ‘There just never seemed to be time. Grant was intent on pushing, pushing the Rebs back.’
They walked back across the yard. Soldiers sitting on the bench beneath the dying oak tree watched them indifferently. Convalescent torpor the doctors called it. While the broken body did its best to mend itself, everyday life mattered little or not at all to the wounded man. He could sit idly beneath a tree and watch the fleecy clouds scud past for hours on end, chewing on a piece of grass and hardly thinking at all. It was blessed respite from the clangor of the battlefield, to which he would return soon enough.
After supper, Jessica and Andrew sat on a wooden bench in front of the house. Inside Aunt Betty was humming happily. A whippoorwill called plaintively somewhere in the dusk.
‘When will you go back?’ Jessica whispered, twining her fingers in his. ‘Not too soon?’
‘I have two days,’ he said. ‘It’s not much but it’s more than a lot of poor devils get.’
‘Two days,’ she whispered. ‘We’d better not waste any time, then.’
On Wednesday, June 1, 1864, while Ulysses S. Grant threw his valiant army against the equally valiant army of Robert E. Lee, near the half-isolated intersection of roads leading to the Pamunkey, Chickahominy and York river fords called Cold Harbor, Andrew Strong kissed Jessica McCabe good-bye and headed back to Culpeper.
She let him go without tears, without clinging. She knew he did not like good-byes. He was the kind of man who preferred to go alone to railroad stations and was uncomfortable with the kind of small talk people made while waiting for departure. But it was hard to do: you watched the loved figure recede into the distance and wondered will he come back? is this the last time? Such a precious, fragile thing to hurl into the maelstrom of scything lead and iron erupting from the mouth of cannon and musket. She had seen the things that could happen to the human body a thousand times in the hospitals. You could not altogether believe that it could be so torn and ruined and yet function somehow. Sometimes you wondered, how will I handle it if he comes home like one of these men?
Her gentle fingers had traced the raised, puckered scar in his side and she had shuddered inwardly at how close death had come. Naked in Andrew’s arms, she kissed him drowsily, her movements slow and languorous. He held her hard against him and she rolled away.
‘No, my darling,’ she whispered. ‘I want this to last and last and last.’
‘I have to warn you,’ he said smiling as he kissed her. ‘I’m not supposed to do anything strenuous.’
‘But you will,’ she hissed into his ear, her hand sliding sinuously down his body. She found the hot, hard center of him and the softest groan of pleasure left him like a sigh. She pushed the bedclothes back and away. ‘I want to see you,’ she said. ‘I want you to see me.’
He ran his hand down the long valley of her back and under the high, firm rise of her buttocks. She rolled over and on top of him. Her body was soft-warm-damp and her hair fell across his face like gentle rain.
‘Ah, Jess,’ he said. ‘Jess.’
He turned so that she gently rolled upon her side and then again so that his long weight lay upon her. She felt rather than saw him wince.
‘Let me, my darling,’ she said. ‘Let me.’
And now, slowly, gently, she turned so that they lay side by side facing each other. She kissed his lips, his eyes. And then she bestrode him, sitting upon his thighs, and used both her hands to hold him as she rose and then lowered herself upon him. He reached up and put his hands on her breasts, stroking downwards to the slender waist and the swell of thigh below.
‘I thought you said you wanted this to last and last,’ he said as she began to move.
‘Ah, my love,’ she said, her smile as wicked as Eve’s, ‘but I want it to end, too!’ And as she moved herself he moved too, and then they were in unison, one joined, blind wanton need that mounted and grew until its sweet intensity was all they knew in all the world, and then, and then, like the explosion of some far-off rocket, bursting silently, their oneness became separate again, joined yet apart, dying, falling, done.
Afterwards, they talked of marriage. Perhaps in the fall, if the war was ‘over. If not, in the spring. Surely it must be over in the spring, she said.
‘Let’s hope so,’ he answered, not wishing to sadden her. He did not think the war would be over for a long time yet, but no use to tell her that. He remembered Senator McCabe telling him that sometimes it was better not to tell the truth. ‘There are times when wisdom lies in saying nothing,’ he had said. Andrew thought he would agree that this was one of them.
He didn’t look back as he drove up the hill from the farm, although he knew she would be watching. His mind was already full of the things which would await him when he got back to Grant’s headquarters, back to the chaotically ordered routine of daily life on the battlefield, the coming and going of couriers, the chattering of the field telegraphs, the tinny blare of the bugles, cavalry jingling through camp. He stopped the horse at the gate on the turnpike, his mind far away. As he did he saw a man come up out of the ditch. The horse shied violently and Andrew fought to control it. When he got the animal under control he turned to face the man and as he did, the man said ‘Andy?’
Jesus Christ, it’s Jedediah, he thought. Jed was wearing a battered Federal infantry overcoat, stained pants, muddy boots. A slouch hat concealed his eyes, a bushy black beard his face. He looked haggard: there were dark rings beneath the deep-set eyes.
‘Jed!’ Andrew said, jumping down from the carriage. ‘Jed, is it really you?’ He threw his arms around his brother and hugged him, and only then realized that the right-hand sleeve of the overcoat was empty. He recoiled, horrified.
‘Oh, Jesus, Jed, where did it happen?’ he said.
‘Gettysburg.’ Jed did not elaborate. ‘Bo, it’s good to see you! You wouldn’t have anything to eat in that rattletrap, would you?’
‘You’re in luck,’ Andrew said. ‘Aunt Betty made me some sandwiches. Here, take them!’ He unwrapped the bread and gave it to Jed, who wolfed the food down in great mouthfuls. ‘God, that’s good,’ he said. Then, after a momentary frown. ‘Aunt Betty?’
‘She’s down at the farm,’ Andrew told him. ‘With Jess.’
‘And who is Jess?’
‘I met someone, Jed. Her name is Jessica McCabe.’
‘You still with Grant?’
‘I’m just heading back. I was wounded. Nothing worth talking about,’ he said. ‘Now tell me how the devil you got here. ‘
‘Walked,’ Jed replied. ‘I’ve been on the road for a long time. I was … sick for a while. Stayed with … someone. Then I made my way down here. Hiding in barns, dodging militia patrols. Plenty of places up north they’d be glad to hang a Johnny Reb like me!’ His face changed to a bitter set as he spoke the words. ‘You know about Pa, I guess.’
‘I know,’ Andrew said. ‘That black bastard Edward Maxwell!’
‘That’s why I’ve come down here,’ Jed said. ‘To try to get a line on him.’
‘I’ve tried,’ Andrew said. ‘Nobody knows.’
‘You got any money, Bo?’ Jed said, ignoring Andrew’s words.
‘About forty dollars. Take it.’
‘I’ll take twenty. That’ll be enough.’
‘It’s dangerous, walking around in those clothes, Jed. If you were stopped and questioned … .’ He let it trail in the air.
‘Ah, the whole damned countryside is full of stragglers, men trying to get back to their units. Anyone asks me, I’m trying to find the Twentieth Maine. They’re down on the James or somewhere.’
‘How did you … tell me about Gettysburg.’
Jed told his brother about the battle and the hospital, and what Billy Christman had done. ‘They were getting ready to send us to some prison camp, so I got the hell out of there. ‘
‘Listen, why don’t we go on down to the farm? Aunt Betty can feed you, and you can meet Jess—’
‘Thanks, Bo,’ Jed said. ‘I’ve got to get moving.’
‘You trying to reach Lee’s army?’
‘Why’d you ask?’
‘ Jed, Jed, don’t go back!’ Andrew pleaded. ‘They’ve lost. It’s only a matter of time. I don’t want to see you killed for a lost cause.’
‘I wouldn’t be too mad about the idea myself,’ Jed said and the years fell away as he grinned.
‘You’ll never make it through the lines,’ Andrew told him. ‘Federal troops are as thick as flies between here and Richmond, for God’s sake!’
‘Don’t worry, Bo,’ Jed said quietly. ‘I’m not going back.’
‘What, then?’
‘I told you. I’m going to skulk around Culpeper for a little while. See if I can’t get a handle on that black hearted sonofabitch Edward Maxwell.’
‘And then?’
‘Then I am going to go wherever he is,’ Jed said calmly, ‘and kill him.’ He said it the way another man might have said he was going to have another cup of coffee.
‘No, Jed, listen …’ Andrew began, but Jed held up his hand to stop any remonstration.
‘Don’t tell me it can’t be done or it shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘My mind’s fair made up, Andrew. He’s got to be somewhere in these United States, and if he is I intend to hunt him down!’
‘I’d like to say I’ll come with you,’ Andrew said quietly. ‘But that isn’t the way I’d go at it, Jed.’ Jed looked at him for a long moment and then laid his hand on Andrew’s shoulder in a gesture of fondness and farewell.
‘I know it, Bo,’ he said. ‘You go fight your war your way. And I’ll fight mine my way.’
‘There’s nothing you need?’
‘Only luck,’ Jed said. ‘And I seem to have plenty of that.’ He lifted his hand and then strode off across the fields towards the woods. After a while, Andrew clucked the horse into movement and headed on into Culpeper.
He got back to headquarters to find that he had been breveted brigadier-general for, his part in repelling Ewell’s flank thrust at Spotsylvania.
‘We’ve lost a lot of good men,’ Grant rasped when Andrew thanked him. ‘Fortunately, we seem to have equally good ones to replace them.’ He shook Andrew’s hand, scowling with pleasure around his cigar as the other staff officers crowded around to congratulate Andrew. Then he clapped Andrew on the shoulder and jerked his head towards the door.
‘Well, General,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with the goddamned war!’