ELEVEN

12:35 p.m.

Union center

With splendid discipline, the 5th Maine Battery’s guns fired in sequence.

“Ignore the order, Stevens,” Colonel Charles Tompkins told his subordinate. “Keep up your fires.”

“But General Wright—”

“General Wright can remove me, should he find my performance wanting. Back to your labors, Captain, mind on the enemy.”

Tompkins, commanding the Sixth Corps artillery, found alarm distasteful. If Wright had lost his stomach—which it appeared he had, ordering off these guns—a stoic posture was the proper tonic. In the best spirit of Rhode Island, his home state. He drew his pistol, though, as he steered between the caissons: not in fear of Confederates, but ready to shoot any cannoneer who ran.

The situation did have a nasty look. The field of battle was as confused as any Tompkins had known, and these guns were all that stood between the oncoming Confederates and a stolen victory. But a cool eye and steady hand calmed many a storm. Even if, in the end, he could not stop the Johnnies, he might at least give the infantry time to reorganize and leave things a bit less bad.

“Steady, steady,” he whispered, as much to himself as to his mount.

Sheridan’s attack had gone in late, stumbled, and resumed. The graybacks had counterattacked. Old Ricketts and Getty hit back in turn. On the right, the Nineteenth Corps swirled about in a maelstrom all its own. Now the Johnnies called the tune again, gamboling down the middle of the field, their tactics and timing impeccable.

Fleeing with vigor, a blond-bearded soldier nearly ran into Tompkins and his staff. Catching himself just short of a collision, he stared mad-eyed at the colonel, as if he had happened upon General Lee and Satan devouring children, rather than a redleg from Rhode Island.

Tompkins didn’t threaten the fellow. The infantry was not his charge. His concern was his guns, and his guns were sound.

He suspected that the weakening in the chain of command had started with Sheridan and proven contagious to Wright. Tompkins had seen the phenomenon before. Generals, a peculiar breed, had to be given time to come around when nettled by doubts, and it was the work of subordinates to sustain things in the meantime. In battle, spirits altered in a blink, capricious as the April weather in Newport.

Tompkins nudged his horse forward and let the beast paw the ground behind the gun line while he peered through the smoke and shot-stripped trees. The cannoneers about him behaved splendidly. If the Johnnies wanted to pass, they’d pay a toll.

He rode up to Captain Stevens, who had heart, for all his misgivings. The lad was not the sort to defy orders—especially those from the corps commander himself. On the whole, that recommended the fellow. But obedience had to be clear-eyed, rather than blind.

“Canister soon, I think,” the colonel said.

“Plenty of Rebs, sir.”

Indeed, the Johnnies were many. Howling like all the monkeys in Panama. But hurling lead, not coconuts.

“Abundant targets ease an artilleryman’s labors,” Tompkins said. “Your number three gun’s shooting long, you’d best see to it.”

Tompkins waved up his adjutant.

“Bring up Adams’ battery and McCartney’s lot.” He pointed. “I want them just there, on the left, to sweep the Pike.”

“Sir, that’s our last reserve, you—”

“I’d rather not debate the matter, Peabody.”

The aide bustled off.

No, he had never seen that trollop War change lovers so often in a single hour. But the way to lose the day was to lose your head.

Steady, steady.

Tompkins rode the gun line, alert to hints of weakness, but the Maine lads loaded and fired with all the snap of an exhibition drill. The colonel did not think it sensible for any man to live in Maine by choice, but the unimaginative sort who did quite lent themselves to bravery.

Gore burst from the belly of a cannoneer wielding a ramrod. Without a fuss, his sergeant drove the charge home.

“Number two gun there, mind your elevation,” Tompkins called. His voice was firm as granite, but not too loud.

Powder-blackened, the cannoneers leapt to it.

Where was Russell, though? His division should have come up, it formed the reserve. And if ever the reserve was needed, now was the blasted time. Tompkins was glad that the men he led could not tell how thoroughly drenched he was by sweat.

The great gray wedge, a howling mob, had gotten unsettlingly near.

“Double-canister, Stevens, double-canister. Don’t husband the inventory.”

Along the Pike, a battery raced forward. Tompkins noted the guidon of Battery G, 1st Rhode Island Lights, under whose colors he’d begun this war. Adams, the present commander, was a cool one. He’d stand firm.

Before the Rhode Islanders finished unlimbering, the 1st Massachusetts Battery rattled up.

Quietly, Tompkins addressed his foe: “If you want that Pike, you’ll have to take it from me.”

The Johnnies were nearly close enough to hurl rocks. Afoot now, Stevens strode up to Tompkins’ horse.

“Sir … we’ll lose these guns. General Wright said—”

“Shoulders back, chest out, man. Better to lose the guns than lose the battle.”

That was heresy, Tompkins knew, an assault on the dogma of gunnery’s episcopate. You were supposed to save your guns at all costs, even if it meant you lost the battle. Well, heresy was an old Rhode Island specialty, beginning with Roger Williams and his pack, for whom even the Puritans were too orthodox.

Tompkins wasn’t minded to budge an inch.

“Canister, Stevens, canister! That’s the way!”

12:45 p.m.

Union center

Delighted to be unleashed at last, Brigadier General David Russell rode proudly through the chaos of the day, guiding his division into battle. Russell had feared his corps commander intended to withdraw. The notion had shocked him, since Wright was known as a steady man in a fight. But the best men had bad days, and that was the truth of it.

It would be all right now. Sheridan had appeared mesmerized himself, but had snapped out of his trance in time, recovering his spunk and telling Wright, in Russell’s presence, to “send Russell in right now, put this in order.”

And Russell meant to stop the bloody crumbling. He had been chafing, anxious to help Jim Ricketts and George Getty. The way Russell read the field, Early was desperate, throwing in all he had. If the Nineteenth Corps just held out on the right, Russell believed he could not only blunt the Rebel assault—which seemed to him to be thinning—but reverse the tide again.

Ollie Edwards had taken in his Third Brigade, and the First Brigade was coming up fast, ready to swing in on Ollie’s flank. Russell intended to use those brigades to stabilize the line and grind back the Rebs. Then he’d unleash Upton and his Second Brigade.

Upton was an enigma, a hardened Christian, mean as a Turk. The boy-general’s hostility to slavery was at least as fierce as that of a Knight Templar toward Mahomet. A brilliant, intolerant, merciless young man, Upton had seemed a madcap martinet, yet had outperformed every other officer in the entire army at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.

Russell meant to send in Upton the moment the Johnnies wavered.

Work to do in the meantime, though. He rode through the spatter kicked up by errant shells, ghosting through billows of smoke and passing knots of soldiers catching their wind after their flight. The stream of wounded only convinced him that everything hung on a few quick actions.

Half a soldier’s torso hung from a tree.

After overtaking two regiments of his First Brigade, the 4th and 10th New Jersey, Russell personally led them forward until he was certain they were solidly on his line of attack. The men seemed game and grisly. Next, he rallied two orphaned regiments from Jim Ricketts’ division, sending them up on the flank of the New Jersey men.

Russell could feel it, sense the momentum shifting. The Confederates had advanced too far, running themselves breathless and losing contact on their flanks. The balance was tipping again on this seesaw day.

He spotted Ollie Edwards from a distance, making out his profile through scarves of smoke. Ollie was in the thick of it, cap pulled down and sword thrust out, directing his brigade in the advance.

Russell gave his horse the spurs, warning himself to master his emotions: His impulse was to ignore his own resolve and call for Upton to go in immediately, to come up behind Edwards and add weight … but boldness was one thing, impetuosity another. Discipline, not passion, had to rule.

The world was alive with possibilities, though, with the prospect of victory, of the field redeemed. And Russell knew himself to be as ambitious as the next man.

Discipline, he warned himself. You ask it of your soldiers, show it yourself.

It was ever a thrill to command men going forward, to feel the power and thrust. There simply was nothing like it in the world. But it was a power that needed harnessing.

And he owed it to Little Phil to save this battle. After all, he had been Sheridan’s captain back in the old Army, when their relationship had been reversed. Hadn’t he trained Sheridan for his astonishing rise? Little Phil’s victory—or loss—would be Russell’s legacy, too.

As he neared the front line, men dropped on every side. The firing was quick and lethal, veterans killing veterans with resolve. Nor was he certain that either side wasn’t firing on its own kind amid the confusion: There was no solid battlefront now, just a savage ebb and flow. Dueling batteries warred like the gods above the plains of Troy.

Amid the uproar, he caught up with Ollie Edwards.

“Charge them, Ollie. They’ll fold like a poor hand at cards. Just charge and keep going.”

12:55 p.m.

Dinkle farm, east fields

Colonel Oliver Edwards turned to explain that he planned to go forward en echelon, but as his mouth opened he heard a thud he recognized. Beside him, Russell jerked in the saddle, then stiffened.

“Good God, General … are you badly … how badly are you hurt?”

Clutching his side with one hand, Russell waved away his concerns with the other. “It makes no difference, Ollie. Not at a time like this.” He gasped. “Go on and charge. Order your brigade to charge.”

Russell appeared to be stuffing his shirt into his side, attempting to stop up a deep wound. Yet the general managed to draw his saber.

“Charge, Ollie! I’ll go with you!”

A shell burst above the two officers, deafening, rending the air with gale force. Gashed at the neck, Edwards’ horse reared and whinnied. As he struggled to control his mount, the brigade commander saw that fortune had favored him, but had finished Russell.

The division commander leaned oddly in his saddle, as if he meant to fall but was unable. Blood painted what was left of him. A third of his chest had been torn away.

Men rushed toward them. Russell’s orderly reached the general first, but seemed afraid to touch him. Russell’s cut-up horse meandered, wobbling. The general’s body pitched about, but remained eerily in the saddle.

In a voice as fierce and heartless as battle demanded, Edwards told the orderly: “Leave him. Go find Upton. He’s senior, he’s got the division.”

And God help us, Edwards thought.

1:00 p.m.

Center of the battlefield

“And there was given unto him a great sword…”

Brigadier General Emory Upton had been chosen by the Lord for this day’s purpose. The hand of Jehovah was at work, even in Russell’s death. God’s wisdom did not yield to the will of men, or to their sentiments.

He, Emory Upton, had been given a great sword.

“Maintain your ranks,” he called to his hurrying soldiers.

The Lord had opened his eyes, as the Lord had seen fit to open them before, letting him spy the weakness of Satan’s legions. How else explain the way he saw opportunities to which those who served beside him remained blind?

“Come on, men!” he called sharply. The double-quick pace was not quite quick enough, not for Emory Upton.

His men came on, and they had the force of a multitude. He had been mocked for his rigor at drill, his discipline. The unbelieving never understood. Now, in the storm of battle, on a field obscured, his brigade rushed forward with a precision unmatched and a bloodlust unrivaled. Men who had hated him cheered him. Reviled, he had redeemed himself in fire.

“And there was war in Heaven…”

He would shine again, upon this battlefield. His brigade—now it was his division, too—would gleam like the archangels. And his division would not take one step back.

“And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword,” he recited to himself, “that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron; and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.”

The division’s other brigades had staunched the slave-drivers’ attack, and the Lord had revealed, as if divine light had cut through the clouds of smoke, that the enemies of God and man had an exposed flank as tasty as a cutlet.

He came up on Ranald Mackenzie, who had turned the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery into an infantry regiment as good as any. Mackenzie was not a devout man. Upton even suspected him of unseemly lust toward women. But Mackenzie fought worthily, bravely, wonderfully. He, too, would be a tool of the Lord this day.

“Our day, Mackenzie, this is our day. Deploy when you reach those trees. The brigade pivots on you.”

“Shame about Russell, sir.”

“God’s will be done.”

Mackenzie rode to the head of the column, spirit immune to danger. His sword soon flashed, pointing the way, and the blue ranks began to unfold into battle formation, their actions crisp, nearly flawless. Bayonets shone like the fiery swords of angels.

The first rank disappeared into a grove between two batteries. Upton noted Tompkins, the corps’ artillery chief, seated placidly on his horse, watching matters unfold as if he were viewing a sporting match of no particular interest. A man of suspect theology but courage, Tompkins, too, had done the Lord’s work this day.

Upton rode southwest, until he found Oliver Edwards, whose brigade gnawed forward. The carnage was hideous to the eyes of men, but surely pleasing to the Lord as a sacrifice to the cause of Abolition.

Upton’s first extended contact with Negroes had come at Oberlin College, to which he had walked, still a boy, from his family’s farm on the hard soil of western New York. Striving beside them as he sought to prepare for a place at West Point—a place he prayed God would grant him, as God did—he had found those colored scholars reverent toward God, respectful toward men, and hungry for knowledge. They were no less human because of the hue of their flesh. No less, but more, by virtue of their suffering. Godly men, the lost tribe of Israel found, those sweet-souled Negroes had led him to fight slavery with every means in his power, standing—at first alone—against the Southern cadets at West Point, and now, on this day, on this field, for the sublime cause of freedom for all, a brigadier general, by the Lord’s grace, at the age of twenty-five.

“Edwards, you’ve got to push harder. They’re ready to break. Don’t stop!”

He could read the other man’s face, the face of a common sinner but fair soldier: temper, resentment.

Jealousy?

“Yes, sir.” Edwards’ eyes had narrowed, not from the smoke. The colonel added, “My boys have pushed them back a quarter mile, they’re hardly shirking.”

“A good start, Edwards. But no more than a start.”

A roar rose on their right.

“Hamblin’s got my brigade,” Upton said. “Mackenzie’s in the lead. They’re splitting the Rebs open, the way they tried to split us. They’ll break in your front, too. Run them down like dogs.”

“I don’t think my boys will have to be told.”

“And don’t fuss about prisoners,” Upton added.

He next rode to Campbell, who led the division’s First Brigade and its solid New Jersey regiments. Campbell’s men had thrust past a farmyard encrusted with dead Rebels and crawling with wounded. It was a splendid sight, a righteous judgment.

After ensuring that Campbell understood he was to maintain his alignment with Edwards at all costs, Upton galloped back through the carnage and wasteland of smashed caissons and discarded weapons, avoiding the wounded as best he could but halting for no man, outrunning the staff inherited from Russell. He did not slow until he had caught up to his old brigade. With Mackenzie’s defrocked cannoneers setting the pace, the brigade had burst from a grove a mere hundred yards from the flank of the Confederates.

The result had been devastating. The slave-drivers and whoremongers had barely resisted. Now they ran.

Upton rode to the fore of his advancing, unbroken ranks, careless of any Rebels who wished him harm. The Lord would take him when the Lord saw fit, and his soul would rise up as his body fell.

On his right flank, the Nineteenth Corps was under way again, punching forward, too.

Paring the air with his sword, Upton kept pace with the blue ranks striding westward. After their first contact with the enemy, the men of his old brigade had re-formed immediately, advancing shoulder to shoulder. These men had mocked his rigor, as another had been mocked. But not now, not today. In battle, they were as firm as Frederick’s Prussians. He and the Lord had made them so.

“And there was war in Heaven…,” Upton whispered, “and Satan which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out … and his angels were cast out with him.”

The last Rebels quit their attempts at organized volleys and made for the rear, even as slave-master officers tried to rally them. Soon enough, Upton’s ranks outpaced the smoke, emerging into a brilliant afternoon marred only by puffs from batteries resisting the Lord’s judgment.

“And there was given unto him a great sword,” Upton repeated.

2:00 p.m.

Gordon’s Division

All chance of a victory was gone, bled out, and the best hope now was for a stalemate until dark, followed by another Yankee withdrawal. But Gordon had begun to doubt even that possibility. Sheridan would not quit; he felt it and feared it.

The shelling and rifle fire had grown so intense that he had dismounted, sending his horse back to lower ground. It was an action taken with great reluctance. The soldiers liked to see officers on horseback—especially him.

“Try again,” he told Atkinson, wishing all the while Clem Evans were back. “Ed, I know the men are tired. But we have to silence that battery. Force them back, at least.”

The Yankees opposite his division had finally brought their guns to bear effectively, disabling two of the precious cannon north of Red Bud Run and blunting every attempt at a fresh counterattack. His men had been driven back again and again to a rocky ledge, savages in gray confronting savages in blue and dying for a gain of a dozen yards, only to see it lost again.

The pounding of the artillery was terrific, the bass drums of battle beating a rhythm beneath the rifle volleys.

Atkinson’s posture was that of an old man, a portrait of weariness, as if he had aged decades in a day. Traces of blood streaked the powder smudges on his forehead and cheeks.

“Yes, sir,” he told Gordon. “Just need to fill their cartridge boxes.”

“No. Now. You have to go now. I don’t care if you have to use your bayonets.”

“Sir…”

“Damn it, Ed. I feel for those men just as much as you do. I led them for most of this war. I know their names, I know their wives’ names, I just about know each man’s stink. But they have to do what they have to do.”

Atkinson was willing, but barely able. Gone pale, despite the ravages of the sun.

“Come on,” Gordon said. And he led the way himself, shouting at the Georgians, calling out the names of valiant men he knew, cajoling them to give their lives for the faintest of faint hopes.

He had discarded his sword and scabbard as too unwieldy, and he pointed the way with his pistol. His soldiers followed him again, some even cheering, despite their long-dry throats. They leapt from their cover of trees and lips of stone and broken walls, advancing raggedly but doggedly, their bravery scorned by Yankee volleys, a lottery of death.

“Don’t stop, boys, don’t stop!” But Gordon let the men pass him now, aware that he had to act as a major general, not a captain. Risk, yes. But not folly. Early needed him whole. The entire army needed him. As it needed Ramseur and Cull Battle, and Breckinridge, who had got caught up in a bad fight to the north. Rodes was dead, and Zeb York, of Gordon’s Louisiana Brigade, had been carried off terribly wounded. And the toll down among the line officers was grim.

Returning to a scrap of trees, pursued by breathless aides, he turned only to see his men repelled again—not running, but retiring, their movements those of laborers exhausted by the hardest work of their lives, put to a task they just could not perform. As Gordon watched, a man threw wide his arms and fell.

For all that, the nearest Yankee battery appeared to be pulling back. Out of ammunition or out of nerve.

How many lives had that cost?

Don’t try to count them now, Gordon told himself.

He wanted a drink of cool water, but there was none. Perhaps there’d be well water back at the house he’d picked as the centerpiece of his next position, should the Yankees force him back again.

Hold until night, just hold until night. Don’t let them turn the flank.

A Yankee who had been too brave to survive, who had come too far, sat bedazzled against the trunk of a tree, cramming intestines back into his belly. He didn’t even move his lips, just clawed at his slopping innards. His hands worked like the paws of a frantic mouse.

That is war as it is, Gordon thought, not as men will remember it.

Had to give Early credit, that was a fact. After that pigheaded rush to Martinsburg and the break-a-man night march back, Early had shone on this battlefield, ornery but everywhere, full of bile, but equally full of fight. Gordon had to admit that for all the individual bravery he had witnessed, it was Early who had made the right decisions with promptitude, a man as gifted as he was unlikable.

The human species never failed to interest John Gordon.

“Here they come!” a soldier shouted.

And the Yankees took their turn at failure. Tiny gains were soon reduced to no gains. When this latest round of firing eased again on Gordon’s front, the armies glared at each other over their guns, each unable to advance and unwilling to retreat.

They had come close, so close, to embarrassing Sheridan. Only to be driven back a mile and more. Now they stood behind barricades of hate. Waiting.

He would not, dare not, let on, but Gordon’s spirit was not as firm as his posture. He sensed that if Sheridan managed to bring up more forces—if he had more troops available and used them with any art—Early could not hold on for very much longer. Valor might withstand numbers, but only to a point: After all, the Persians, not the Greeks, had won at Thermopylae.

Early understood. They all did. The jolly naïveté of this war’s early days had been put to death. And every man in command knew that a retreat, if forced upon them now, would break not only morale, but perhaps the army. With Winchester at their backs, a debacle loomed.

The only hope was to hold on until night.

“I will encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in mine arms…” That was Shakespeare, Gordon knew, though he could not recall which play. What good had his love of the classics done, after all? War took men beyond words, exposed their uselessness. Strut an hour upon the stage, indeed.

What if they couldn’t hold, if they just could not? Fanny was in Winchester, and she wouldn’t be sensible. She’d wait for him, or news of him, before leaving. And by then it might be too late. She was such a hardheaded, irresistible woman.

A woman worth living for, that one.

In the lull that fell upon his weary soldiers, another encounter, off to the north, grew audible. Were Breckinridge and Wharton still up there, trying to stave off some unholy passel of Yankees? Gordon knew that Early had sent repeated orders to Breckinridge to come down to Winchester at once, but every battle had a mind of its own. And if Breckinridge did obey, who would stand in the way of a Yankee envelopment? Fitz Lee? Gordon had seen him in passing that morning. Lee had been fit for a Chimborazo ward, leading his tattered cavalry when he should have been in bed, taking quinine.

The cavalry weren’t much these days, but Early was too dismissive of Fitz Lee.

Jubal Early. A man who might win battles, but never hearts. And Bob Rodes dead, a thing still hard to believe. Zeb York carried off screaming.

Dear Christ, it was a bad day.

“They’re coming again,” a bloodied lieutenant warned.

2:00 p.m.

Eversole’s Knoll

“Plans change, Phil,” Crook said. “Point is to win.”

Sheridan nodded. “Grates on me, though. If you could’ve swung south, cut off their retreat…”

“Have to get them to retreat first. Old Bricktop’s right. I rode over there, had a look. If I extend his flank with one division and swing the other north of that creek bottom—”

“Red Bud Run,” Sheridan said.

“—then clear out that artillery and recross, we can turn their flank and set them running like rabbits. I believe it’ll do the trick, Phil, I really do.”

Staff men kept their distance, sensing that the generals wanted privacy. Between the hill on which they stood and Winchester, volleys prickled on, but with less fury.

“Not just you, though,” Sheridan said. “You flank them, George. And I’ll resume the attack across the front. I’ll be damned if a single man in this army won’t do his part.” His face was blotched and hard-set. “Whole day’s been a piecemeal affair, I’ve made damned-fool mistakes. But I’m done making them.” He snorted. “Would’ve liked to trap that bastard, though.”

“Still might. We’ll see.”

“Cavalry were supposed to do it. Come in on their flank, not play at pony rides.”

“Still might happen. Probably will,” Crook reassured him. “Torbert’s not one to take his ease on a battlefield. Nor are those boys of his. My bet’s that we’re going to give Early a whipping he won’t forget. His quiver’s about empty, way I figure.”

“Hell, George, hasn’t this been a wicked a day?”

“Isn’t over.”

“No.” Sheridan sighed. “I’ll miss Davey Russell, though. That sonofabitch.”

Crook nodded, but just said, “I’ll get my corps moving.”

Sheridan broke off his foray into sentiment. “How long until you get up?”

Crook drew out his pocket watch. “Three. I can go in by three. My corps’s well positioned for the movement.” He neglected to add that he’d brought it up without orders.

“Do it, then,” Sheridan said. “I’ll have the Nineteenth Corps go in beside you.” All of his decisiveness had returned. “Then the Sixth Corps, hit them with everything.”

“Cavalry’s going to show, you wait and see,” Crook said, still bucking up his old comrade. “We’ll make a pretty rout of this mess.”

“Torbert had damned well better show. After I sang the cavalry’s praises to Grant. Which division of yours makes the flanking move? North of the creek?”

“Duval’s. Thoburn’s division is leading my column, he’ll break off and extend the Ninthteenth Corps’ flank. Duval will keep on going across the creek, then wheel to the left.”

“Duval’s brigade commanders? Remind me.”

“Hayes and Johnson. Only two brigades.”

“That enough?”

“They’re good men. The best.”

“Hayes? The politician? The Ohio man?”

Crook smiled his old-Army smile, a phenomenon as thin as frontier rations. “He’ll do. Waxes philosophical, then fights like a Comanche. Honest, for what that’s worth nowadays.”

“Honest? Politician?”

“No man I’d trust more.”

Sheridan smiled, too. “Except for present company, you mean?”

Crook’s smile, a mere cut between his lips, hinted at hidden teeth. “Excepting present company, of course.”

Dropping his smile, Sheridan said, “Tear their guts out.”

3:00 p.m.

Rutherford farm, north of Winchester

Fitz Lee beheld the most awe-inspiring spectacle he had witnessed in the war. It was not a welcome sight.

Across the open fields to the north of the grove to which he’d been driven, at least five thousand blue-clad troopers advanced stirrup to stirrup on a front that filled the horizon. Tidy as if on parade, the mounted men came on at a steady walk, flags and banners aloft, with brass bands urging them southward. It was a display of insolence, of arrogance, of shameless vanity, that filled Lee with raw hatred. And with envy.

Rare was the Confederate officer now who possessed a horse as sound as a Yankee private’s.

One obstreperous band played “Rally ’Round the Flag,” and another answered back with “Yankee Doodle.” Above the thud of hooves on hardening soil, the tack and spurs, carbines and sabers, of all those thousands jangled.

“Dear, sweet Jesus,” Billy Payne said, sitting his horse beside Lee under the trees. He swept his hand back over slicked-down hair.

“Sonsofbitches,” Lee judged. His uncle would not have approved of his language, but his uncle wasn’t there.

After receiving a final, peremptory order from Early, Breckinridge had slipped off with his infantry and guns, leaving Lee with his scattered, exhausted, wildly outnumbered horsemen to hold off what had to be the greatest concentration of cavalry since Ney led the French horse at Waterloo. The whooped-up charges of the Crimea, for all the singsong poesy they’d inspired, surely had been nothing compared to this.

And Lee had about six hundred riders on hand, commanded by Colonel Billy Payne, pure Virginia, a Warrenton lawyer and Black Horse hellion, still a young man and already sire of more children than a quartermaster could number. The rest of Lee’s men had been spread wide to cover roads or regroup from encounters in which they’d been battered badly. He’d delayed Merritt and Averell—two of Torbert’s divisions—since morning, but only a fool could believe the end wasn’t near.

All around him, Virginians on hard-used horses cooed at the spectacle, some attempting jokes at which no one laughed. Payne looked as serious as a man about to be hanged and as murderous as a man who deserved the hanging.

Brave boys all, Lee knew, but the fear in the air was enough to choke a hog.

“You all right, sir?” Payne asked.

All right? And go to the devil. Lee felt sick as a failing consumptive and tired as a slut come Sunday morning. His left arm was bound high where a round had clipped him—the damned thing hurt—but the paw still served for the reins. He’d needed an aide to reload his revolver, though. No, he was not all right at all. Dizzy and puking sick. But that was not the sort of thing a man said to another man. Not at a time like this.

At the end of a man, when all else was used up—health and love and worth and even honor—duty remained.

“Wish they’d at least play a jig a man could cotton to,” one trooper said.

Lee turned toward the voice. “Don’t like the tunes they’re playing, I reckon we’ll have to register an objection.” He looked at the grime-faced, hard-faced men about him. Then he turned to Payne.

“Got to buy time, only one thing to do,” Lee said. “Order your men forward, Billy. Guide to the right of the Pike. You give the order.”

Payne rose in his stirrups and barked the plain command. No time now for inspiration or flourishes.

They left the trees, a shabby gray line, solemn.

“Must admit, I’m not fond of the odds,” Payne said to Lee. “Always fancy a pleasant gallop, though.”

Lee nodded his assent. Payne rose again.

“Charge, Virginia!” the attorney-in-arms shouted. “Charge!”

Ants attacking a buffalo herd, Lee thought. Mean ants, though.

As they came to a gallop, the cavalrymen began screeching their Rebel yell. Some cursed ferociously, doing down the Devil himself and unleashing every shred of anger they’d ever known and held in. Lashing mounts that caught their desperation, the men drew carbines or revolvers, or unsheathed sabers, each turning to the weapon he had left.

The harvested field beneath their hooves had dried well enough, if not fully. It didn’t much slow the horses, but caked mud flew everywhere, stinging faces and eyes.

They pounded into a depression, briefly losing sight of the advancing Yankees, and Lee had to slap down a dizzy fit before jumping the stream that meandered through the low ground.

They crested another field and, dear Lord, the Yankees spread before them in a multitude.

No man faltered, not one.

At first the Yankees hardly seemed to notice them. Or care. As if they were ants, indeed, or maybe nothing but a billow of blackflies. Belatedly, a Union regiment posted as skirmishers closed ranks.

Too late.

“Virginia! Virginia!” Payne cried, echoed by dozens of voices.

Remembering their pride, remembering that they had served under Stuart, the men charged as if not one cared for his life, devil-may-care as they had been in the early days of the war, when all things seemed a lark.

Lee just hoped he could stay in the saddle. He knew he couldn’t wield a saber—his pistol would have to do. Above all, he did not intend to give the Yankees the pleasure of taking him prisoner.

The sickness that gripped him could not cloud his reason: He knew he should not have ridden forward himself. But the time for reason had passed.

As they closed on the Yankee skirmishers, Lee began to shout with the others, another madman in a hopeless world. His worn horse pounded to burst its heart.

They smashed into the Yankees, shooting and slashing, and tore through them, leaving empty saddles and bloodied blue-bellies in their wake.

“Don’t stop!” Lee shouted. “Charge, charge!”

Payne was shouting, too.

Lee felt he might vomit over himself and his horse. The horizon wavered. But he shouted again and again between bouts of choking.

The Virginians swarmed forward, almost merry in their hatred now, their sullenness vanquished, their souls exhilarated. When more Yankee regiments spurred out to meet them, the collision cracked like doors slamming in Hell.

Reins tight in a left hand going numb, Lee shot a captain through the heart and swung his pistol across his horse’s mane to fend off a sergeant. Nearby, two men skewered each other at the same moment, each man’s blade propping up the other on their bewildered horses. It took but a minute for the Yankees to break.

Cheering, the Virginians—fewer now—followed after them. Billy Payne hallooed, as if riding to the family hounds back in Fauquier County.

“Virginia! Virginia!”

They pounded over another harvested field, hard on the tails of the Yankees. The bluecoats emptied their pistols toward them, firing wildly back over their saddles.

How many rounds had he fired? Lee tried to remember.

Near him, a horse collapsed, hurling its rider over its head.

“Come on, Nellie Gray,” Lee urged his own horse. “There’s oats on earth and plenty of corn in Heaven.”

Who had said that? His father. The words had leapt out of him.

“Virginia!”

A jolly, deadly steeplechase ensued. They chased the shattered Yankees for a half mile, then more.

Lee knew it was time to stop, to re-form. They had become scattered, disordered. These men had done all that they could, it was time to call off the pursuit.

He also knew that it was already too late.

A band, all too near, struck up “Yankee Doodle.”

The men they had chased re-formed behind a fresh blue wall of troopers. To the left, where that infernal music sounded, a full brigade, in perfect order, emerged from a swale in the earth.

Red scarves. Custer’s men. The scum who killed Stuart.

Lee’s dizziness left him. They were not going to kill him. Not those sonsofbitches.

He reined up. Fifty yards off, Payne drew back, too, calling for his Virginians to re-form. Too late, too late.

The Union cavalrymen to their front had divided, some dismounting with their carbines, while others rallied to countercharge. But the worst threat, Lee sensed, came from Custer’s brigade. Who, unlike their brethren, did not draw pistols or carbines, but came on with their hundreds of sabers flashing.

In front, prancing before that brigade’s flags, a black stallion bore a floppy-hatted officer with long locks.

Kill him myself, Lee swore.

But he knew he would not, could not. His purpose now had to be to rescue what remained of Payne’s command.

“Yankee Doodle” was a hateful tune.

He heard a shout of “Wolverines!” And that minstrel-show officer, Custer, waved l’arme blanche.

Sabers leveled, Custer’s brigade thundered at them from the flank. The Yankees to their front charged them as well.

Gathering back into a herd meant to serve as a formation, Payne’s survivors didn’t need orders to withdraw. They turned back south and gave their mounts the spurs.

They didn’t get far before reining in again. A double line of blue horsemen blocked their retreat.

Custer’s brigade wasted no time crashing down on them from the flank, men with sabers undeterred by men with empty revolvers. Lee fired his pistol until it clicked uselessly, then swung it at the troopers nearest him, hammering his way through. Sabers hacked flesh, and men died shouting obscenities. Fighting stirrup to stirrup, knee to knee, they splashed one another with sweat and blood, and faces foretold the hate and pain of damnation. Gray coats went under in a sea of blue.

Overwhelmed, Payne led his horsemen in a last charge back across the ground they had recently crossed with so much pride, riding headlong at the double line of Yankee cavalrymen in their path.

“Come on, you,” Lee urged his horse. He spurred and lashed it, something he had not had to do in years: The beast was near quits.

Another crash of men, mounts, and metal, then a remainder of a remnant of Payne’s troopers had, miraculously, broken through the lines blocking their retreat.

They rode hard. More horses collapsed. The Yankees pursued. Vengeful.

Asking the last of their horses, the Virginians made the woods from which they had charged. Fragments of other units awaited them there and did their best to halt the Yankees, but the bluecoats were unstoppable.

Lee tried to rally Payne’s men for a final stand, but they were finished for now. He rode with them rearward, evading the Yankees, sick in body, sick in heart, hoping he might still gather enough men for one final stand.

Behind him, the Yankee bands struck up again.