WILLY HAD BEEN COLD BEFORE. HE HAD BEEN CAUGHT OUT IN the open in a blizzard forty miles from home the previous winter. But never had he even imagined he could be so cold for so long as he had been on this “expedition” to the northwest of Virginia.

Oh, how could he have been so foolish as to leave behind his coat? But New Year's Day 1862, the day Stonewall's new eighty-five-hundred man command left Winchester in the lower Valley to traverse the east range of the Allegheny Mountains to recapture Romney in northwest Virginia from the Federals, had been sunny and warm. The weather was expected to remain that way for the duration of the trip. Full of youthful ebullience and following the lead of others older than himself, Willy had left behind not only the great woolen coat given him by his father but also his blankets, in a supply wagon.

Now, one day later, his feet and hands numb and the pain throughout his body too profound even to allow him to cry, he ground his teeth and attempted to rehearse Scripture and the Catechism.

Willy knew Stonewall's logic. The commander would love to have taken his expedition clear to the western reaches of Virginia and cleaned out the Union forces that successive Confederate generals, the latest of them Robert E. Lee, had failed, while greatly outnumbered, to clean out. He had said so to President Davis himself. Since the Confederate high command had evidently given up on that area, Stonewall had authored and proposed to Secretary of War Judah Benjamin an expedition to run the Federals out of near northwest Virginia before settling in for the winter, to prevent them gaining a foothold in the region and having a staging base from the west against Winchester and the lower Valley.

But was this worth it?

Willy gasped and shook his head as he struggled up the ice sheet that had been a road. The whole expedition appeared increasingly to be a folly. Stonewall, as he had done at Manassas, had judiciously managed to cobble together disparate pieces to form an efficient fighting force. But a major portion of this force, under the command of General Loring—who left an arm at the same Mexican battle Wayne Marley left an eye—had arrived in Winchester December 9, weeks after Stonewall expected them.

When Stonewall then issued orders that only general officers could enter the town of Winchester from their encampments without headquarters passes—and posted pickets to enforce the order—all five regimental commanders in the Stonewall Brigade accused him of “an unwarranted assumption of authority” and “an improper inquiry into their private matters.”

But the worst remained for this horrific trip itself: horses falling again and again on the steep marblelike frozenness until their knees streamed blood, dozens of them having to be put out of their misery with a bullet to the head; close-packed men tumbling down steep glassy grades on their backsides in groups of ten and twenty; others moaning, wailing, and, in some cases, dying, in the road of pneumonia from the arcticlike elements.

They had indeed chased the Federals first out of Bath, then out of Romney itself. I guess even the dad-blamed Yankees know this cursed land is not worth the keeping, Willy grimaced. Stonewall's audacious expedition stunned the winter-entrenched Northern commanders of the area into panicked retreat. But waves of men in the Confederate ranks, then their officers, had begun to turn on him. Others simply left and walked home. One company of “unmanageable Irishmen” in the Thirty-third Virginia had not even made it as far as Winchester with any officers. Stonewall preferred charges of “neglect of duty” against Colonel Gilham, his own colleague from the VMI. Gilham had chased a bunch of Yankees back across the freezing Potomac, forcing some of them to swim it. But, against withering rearguard fire, Gilham failed to take a depot assigned him by Stonewall. Gilham's return to the VMI a week later preceded by two days his receipt of the charges against him. Two days before, Stonewall had chastened his old brigade's commander Richard Garnett for not being on the move by “early dawn” with his frozen troops.

“But it is impossible for the men to march, especially in these conditions, without eating,” Garnett said.

“I never found anything impossible with this brigade,” Stonewall fired back.

Yeah, Willy thought, for the first time bitter as he watched several of his comrades trying to wrap their freezing blue bare feet with rags, even freezing to death by the dozens.

Later that day, as a blizzard blew down from the western Alleghenies, Willy watched the surreal scene unveiled before him of a column of men and horses groaning as one up a steep mountain and into the teeth of the worst nature could throw at them. He stopped as Stonewall rode past him, Little Sorrel—recovered from his Manassas bullet wound—somehow maintaining his footing while every other horse in sight seemed to be stumbling or falling. As he neared the high point of struggle for his men, Stonewall stared at them for a moment, blue-gray eyes blazing hot cobalt, then dismounted and threw his own shoulder into a wagon that teetered over the edge of a ditch.

“Those men cannot reach the top of that pass and they are going to quit,” Willy's buddy Tucker Randolph gasped while huffing out wild white clouds of air. “He cannot will the impossible.”

Willy knew who he was. As the boy slipped and stumbled up the path, he kept his aching red eyes on Stonewall. And then—My sweet Jesus, the entire column is going to collapse onto me as a human avalanche, Willy thought with panic, his eyes growing to large globes. He ducked away. But somehow, Stonewall helped corral the wayward wagon back onto the icy road. Somehow the men ahead of him took the cue and redoubled their efforts. Inch by inch, foot by grunting foot, stung by sleet, whipped by wind, and tortured by cold, they clambered toward the top, pushing, dragging, and just plain cussing animals and vehicles with them.

Holy Moses, he can will the impossible, Willy thought with incredulity. Even as Stonewall's own body threatened to burst through his whitened, soggy uniform, he pressed on, his men with him. His eyes bulged out of their sockets, his hamstrings and calves quivered, his shoulders shook, his pulsating lower back bowed outward. “But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles …” the general rehearsed in his mind.

And then they crested the top. Willy looked at Randolph, then whopped his disbelieving friend so hard on his arm that it nearly knocked him down. They both laughed very loud.

Willy looked back to the top. Sandie Pendleton held Little Sorrel as Stonewall gimped toward him, the general's nearly doubled-over frame shouting the pain his countenance refused to betray. It took two men to help him back onto his horse, and they, with those around Stonewall, cheered him as the sleet battering them grew to the size of strawberries. Willy shook his head, marveling. I love that insane man. And I should be pleased to march on hell itself for him.

But he already had—at Manassas.

Then the order came down: Stonewall and the his namesake brigade would return to Winchester for winter quarters. The cheers of Willy, Randolph, and hundreds of their mates had nearly ceased resounding off the high arctic walls around them before they heard the rest of it. General Loring and his men would remain stationed in and around Romney, to hold the area for the Confederacy through the winter months.

The latter order set in motion a furious series of complaints, reports, letters, and personal visitations by and on behalf of the “stranded” brigades, as they thought of themselves, that reached to the office of President Davis himself. But Willy knew little of that as he limped out of Romney in the midst of a driving subfreezing sleetstorm. The soles of his own boots had worn through, but since his feet were numb with cold, he knew they were pressed against the ice only when Randolph pointed to the blood Willy left smeared behind him.

Never would Willy forget the cursing and blaspheming of the teamsters he passed who were only then entering Romney for the winter. He had not known such words existed heretofore. What a revelation were the teamsters' oaths to him as to the variety, pith, and eloquence that men of that calling could give to their profanity. The peaks and gorges echoed and multiplied the cursing and swearing into a blasphemous roar that Willy believed must have shocked even the vermin that dwelt in the mountains. At least the horses and mules pulling their wagons are used to it, he thought with the closest thing to a chuckle he had mustered in days.

Like Willy, Tucker Randolph praised the God who had made him for his deliverance from the Romney hellhole. But as they descended the granitelike mountain trails, Randolph gazed at the human agony surrounding him, then lowered his voice, “General Jackson has a great load on his shoulders to answer for in this campaign.”

Anna saw to it that Stonewall had a great load on his supper plate his first night back in Winchester. Never had he been so happy to see her, or a crackling fire such as the one offered him in the parlor of Presbyterian minister James Graham. Three months it had been since he had last seen his wife.

“I intend to thaw every last icicle out of my darling's frostbitten system,” Anna giggled as they retired to the Grahams' master bedroom for the night.

General William Loring's one arm was as far from Stonewall's thoughts that night as the moon as he and Anna engaged in the most passionate embraces of their marriage.

“Well,” Pastor Graham said, referring to the orchestra of sounds emanating from the master bedroom and nibbling his wife's ear, “I present to you, exhibit A against the case for bluenosed Puritan joylessness.”

“Dear,” Mrs. Graham said with a lusty smile, “I believe we have exhibited that case six times.”

Her husband's dancing eyes precluded the need for him to ask, “Shall we strive for number seven?”

Stonewall Jackson's domestic bliss was of no concern to Colonel William Taliaferro, commander of one of Loring's suffering brigades, as he made the rounds of high officials in Richmond. With Loring's sanction, Taliaferro took the case against Stonewall and his handling of the Romney expedition to judges, Confederate congressmen, Vice President Alexander Stephens, and finally, President Davis.

“No one disputes the man's bravery, nor his abilities as a brigade commander, Mr. President,” Taliaferro said, barely able to contain his anger. “But our expedition lost four men killed to enemy fire and twenty-five to the elements, most of them frozen to death. Many who survived were frozen so badly they shall be maimed for life, sir. Not one regiment has more than one third of its men available for duty.”

Taliaferro looked down. When he again faced Davis, his eyes gleamed with moisture. “It was, sir,” he began slowly, his voice cracking, “a degree of severity, hardship, toil, exposure, and suffering that finds no parallel in the prosecution of the present war, if indeed it is equalled in any war.”

Davis, his ashen face blank, eyed him. “Why, Colonel, has no officer in the so-called Stonewall Brigade, which itself irrefutably suffered before returning to Winchester, nor in Anderson's Brigade, under Loring, signed your protest document?”

Taliaferro bristled. Stonewall Brigade indeed. Jackson's pet lambs. “I cannot answer for others, sir. I know only that the best army I ever saw of its strength has been destroyed by the bad marches and bad management. It is ridiculous to hold the place, sir.”

“Evidently the Federals agreed, Colonel,” Davis said blandly. “Despite having their entire east-west rail operations through the area destroyed by Jackson, they fled the whole region, some of them swimming the icy Potomac in their underwear—or so Turner Ashby has wired. General Jackson does seem to have cleared the field northwest of the Shenandoah Valley of Unionist threat.”

Taliaferro thought about that for a moment, then rolled the dice. “General Jackson, sir, is incompetent to administer so extensive a district and hold a separate command. It was his vaulting ambition upon which the entire debacle was girded.”

“I presume President Lincoln should wish for such debacles as he witnesses his men again sent fleeing across the Potomac by ‘Stonewall’ Jackson,” Davis said.

But Stonewall's “vaulting ambition” was stymied by Secretary of War Benjamin's January 31 telegram to him: “Our news indicates that a movement is being made to cut off General Loring's command. Order him back to Winchester immediately.”

The order would infuriate Stonewall's superior, Johnston, whom it circumvented. It would infuriate President Davis's chief military advisor Robert E. Lee, who was not consulted. It would infuriate others, great and small. And it brought a response from Stonewall the same day he received it:

Sir: Your order requiring me to direct General Loring to return with his command to Winchester immediately has been received and promptly complied with.

With such interference in my command I cannot expect to be of much service in the field, and accordingly respectfully request to be ordered to report for duty to the superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington, as has been done in the case of other professors. Should this application not be granted, I respectfully request that the President will accept my resignation from the Army.

I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

T. J. Jackson

Major-General,

P.A.C.S.