September 19, 3:00 p.m.
North of Red Bud Run
Rud Hayes halted his men and formed them in line of battle ten yards inside the tree line, out of sight. Then he waited.
“You didn’t answer my question,” his brother-in-law pestered. “You still think we can overcome the animus, put this country back together … as one nation? You really think that, Rud? After all this?”
“Yes,” Hayes said, looking at his pocket watch.
“Well, then,” Doc Joe said, “Lucy ought to make you wear a dunce cap.” He stroked his horse’s neck, soothing the beast. “This country won’t be united in a hundred years. Too much killing, too much hate.”
“Good men will repair it.”
“The best men are dead.”
“Thank you, Doctor, for that encouraging diagnosis. Joe, go on back to your surgery. You’ll be busy enough before long, and I’m busy now.”
Joe smiled. “All right. But no tomfoolery. My sister wouldn’t make a kindly widow.”
“Just git.”
“Boils tolerable?”
“You just git.”
After Doc Joe turned his horse, Russ Hastings sidled up. The adjutant’s horse, Old Whitey, was admired throughout the brigade. “I thought we were going right in, sir?”
“General Crook doesn’t want to go in headlong.”
Neither man said anything about Kernstown, that hard-learned lesson.
And yes, the boils were tolerable. But sitting in a saddle was no delight.
The sounds of battle back across the creek were tired, grudging. But men were still dying. Hayes turned toward the soldiers he commanded, scanning the features of those who would lead the attack. Most faces were familiar to some degree. Not all, but most. What always struck him, once a man looked past the enforced uniformity, was that such men weren’t uniform at all, not in the least. Each was complete unto himself. Distinct. Filled with yearnings, fears, and considerations as mundane as a fellow wishing he’d taken that last chance to drop his drawers and squat. Human.
He had begun to accept that his idol, Emerson, was far from a perfect guide to the human species. Introducing Swedenborg in Representative Men, Emerson had scorned the commoners “of the world of corn and money.” But was any man truly common? Deserving of such condescension? The man who labored with his hands fed the man who worked with his mind. Wasn’t one of the points of this war that all men should enjoy an equal right not only to freedom and justice, but to respect? Hayes would not dismiss the man who shouldered a rifled musket as lower in worth than one of greater intellect. These, his fellow citizens, the men he led in a fratricidal war … each possessed the same spark of life as Emerson, but these men had, the most of them, volunteered to risk that spark, that life, for a prospect greater than themselves, a vision few commanded the words to describe, but which they felt profoundly. Emerson and his ilk discussed ideas. These men would go forward and die for an idea, because they sensed instinctively it was right. Who was the worthier?
He took a drink from his canteen. His aide copied the action.
“Stay close to me, Russ,” Hayes said. “When this thing starts.”
The frail breeze could not pierce the grove. Flags hung limp. Men rustled and murmured. Waiting. That was somehow the worst of it, the waiting. Men wanted to know, that was the thing. The idled mind was the domain of devils.
Across the fields, a Rebel battery limbered up to leave. Were they aware of the impending attack? Had surprise already been lost?
His brigade would go forward, anyway.
He wondered what Lucy was doing at that moment. He hadn’t had a letter from her in days. Had her pregnancy grown troubled? He always feared for her, not for himself. The slightness of his fate, amid all this, seemed a trivial matter.
“Sign me a leave to go home this minute, Colonel,” a soldier called, “and I’ll vote for you in every single election.”
Before Hayes could reply, another soldier added, “Let me go, and I’ll vote for you twice come election time.”
Men laughed. That was good.
“Wouldn’t mind going home myself,” Hayes admitted. “But I’m told we have some pressing business hereabouts.”
These good men.
Thrashing back in the trees. Riders. Colonel Duval, the division commander, and his party.
Time to go in?
Kicking thorns away from his trouser legs, Duval steered his horse through the briars.
“Rud,” Duval said.
“Isaac.” Hayes lifted his hat and settled it again. “Go in?”
Duval shook his head. “Don’t know what’s holding things up. Crook seemed ready. Then he sent McKinley back to find Sheridan.”
“Well, we’re fixed to go.” Hayes canted his head toward his men.
“I know it’s hard, the waiting,” Duval said. “Makes my skin crawl.”
More ride-through-the-canebrake racket rasped toward them. Hayes recognized Will McKinley. General Crook and a few aides followed after.
This was it, then.
Hayes kept his face impassive, the way a sound man waited out the vote count. He admired Crook. Sheridan had the effect of lightning on men who barely knew him, but Crook inspired loyalty in those who knew him well. He was a just man, George Crook, and fairness eluded the common run of generals, all of whom played favorites. Above all, when he made a mistake, Crook took responsibility. He lived by a code Hayes recognized.
Greetings all around, rendered quickly, by sweat-glazed officers striving not to betray their concerns to the soldiers.
“I see that battery turned tail,” Crook said.
“Just pulled off, sir,” Hayes told him.
Crook nodded. “Not sure that’s a good thing, or a bad thing.” He concentrated on Duval. “Your division ready, Isaac?”
“Yes, sir. Been ready.”
Crook glanced at Hayes, then back at Duval. “Rud leads off?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. Rud, as soon as you cross that field—get well across it, well onto their flank—you wheel left, recross the creek, and hit them hard. You understand?”
“Colonel Duval explained things, sir.”
“When you charge the flank, the Nineteenth Corps will renew the attack on the enemy’s front. Thoburn will come up on their right and your left, tie things together.” Crook looked around at the tense, expectant faces. “You boys will have to set this brawl to rights.”
Hayes saluted, triggering a flurry of raised hands. Turning their horses awkwardly in the underbrush, the others left Hayes, Hastings, and two couriers as the only men still mounted before the ranks.
Service in the wilds of West Virginia had convinced Hayes a sword was a bother. He left the blade in its scabbard and raised his hand.
“Brigade!”
“Regiment!”
“Regiment!”
“Regiment!”
“Regiment!”
“Attention!”
That command, too, was repeated down the line, first by regimental commanders, then by junior officers leading companies.
“Forward!”
Again, the word echoed.
“March!”
A grand, many-footed creature, the brigade broke through the last stretch of brush and ducked interfering branches, emerging into the westering light, with the sun still high enough to spare their eyes.
Clear of the trees, the veterans aligned themselves on the move. Color guards snapped out their flags. Officers afoot marched backward, facing their men, inspecting their lines before pivoting toward the foe again.
No one joshed now.
Sharpshooters opened from distant trees and thickets. A first man fell. A soldier from the second line scurried up to fill the gap.
These good men.
Hayes let the first rank pass him, but kept ahead of his second rank. Determined to see that all things were well done.
At least they did not have to assault that battery and face canister. Volleys were bad enough, but attacking guns across an open field was a downright terror.
Marching at quick-time, his soldiers devoured the high field, step by step. Where the Rebel guns had been, the earth was stained black and artillery waste lay about: a useless swab, split crates, a caisson overturned. If the Johnnies had lost any cannoneers, they had carted off their dead.
A shell burst to the front. Hayes tasted grit.
Men coughed.
How far across these fields was far enough? Before it came time to turn the brigade to the left and attack back across that creek? The ground looked different than it had from the tree line, more complex. Across the depression cut by the stream, the Confederates, in their thousands, were hard to spot, masked by trees and shrubbery, crouched behind walls. Wraiths of smoke blinked flames.
Hayes’ brigade advanced through naked light.
The first shell had marked the range. Adjusted shells exploded in rapid succession. One struck near the first rank, downing several men.
The fire could not be returned. Their own batteries, du Pont’s guns, trailed the advance. This ground just had to be crossed.
Sharpshooters felled more of his men. One of his couriers tumbled. The man’s horse bolted.
Nothing to be done. Not now. Go forward. Forward.
“I love you, Lucy,” he muttered. “Know that. I loved you.”
He almost ordered the men to the double-quick, but feared losing control before they made their turn and crossed the streambed. They just had to face the shelling. He had to face it.
Such a terribly beautiful day. For this.
More shells. Men burst, scattering limbs. Bodies spewed innards. Other soldiers sprawled, uncannily still. As comrades stepped around them, the wounded writhed, clutching their changed flesh, bewildered. But every gap in the front rank filled again.
Straight ahead, Reb cavalrymen bolted from a copse like flushed game birds, racing off toward the Confederate rear.
Across the creek, to the south, the greater fight resumed, hungry for flesh and thirsty for blood again.
Hayes longed to walk Cincinnati’s streets in peace. To live to do that, with Lucy on his arm.
Correcting his posture, he lifted his right hand. Holding it high. Letting all the regimental commanders see it. Letting all the sharpshooters see it, too.
He had never thought to bear such weight as this.
Russ Hastings twitched in the saddle and slammed to earth. One foot caught in a stirrup but broke free.
“Russ!”
The adjutant tried to get to his feet, but faltered. Blood marred his coat.
No time. No time to care for good men or for bad. No time.
Hayes turned his eyes to the front again.
Hoping he had gone far enough, that he was not just giving in to fear, Hayes signaled for the brigade to wheel left, to face the creek and the enemy beyond it.
Another battery loosed its guns upon them. Rifle fire spewed from the far bank. A man shrieked—it always amazed Hayes that so few of the wounded screamed.
Different men? Or differing pain? His own wound at South Mountain had been excruciating. But he did not think he had screamed.
Lucy had found him, nursed him. And Doc Joe.
“At the double-quick … forward!” he called to his men. He had to get them out of these open fields. And across the creek.
He spurred his horse lightly, quickening its pace, though not enough to outrace his forward rank: Wanton displays of valor were an indulgence. The important thing was to keep control, not carry on like a laird in Walter Scott.
Then came the great shock. Reaching the edge of the field, where the earth dropped to the creek, his horse pulled up on its own. Snorting, fearful. The ground dropped sharply through brambles and scrub trees. But the worst of it was that the trickling stream they had splashed through a mile back had become a swamp, a morass, a slough, a good twenty-five yards wide. And the far bank required a steep climb to reach the enemy.
Bullets ripped past, an unwelcome bounty of them. The Johnnies had been waiting. It was all a horrible trap.
To right and left, men hesitated. Their officers shouted at them to go on, while sergeants shoved the doubtful down the bank. The attack was in danger of faltering before it had gotten properly under way.
Hayes spurred his horse. Harder this time. A better judge of ground than its master, the beast choose its own course and carried him down. Hayes fought to remain in the saddle.
With the ranks collapsed, a number of soldiers beat him to the bottom. Hastily, they slung their cartridge boxes over their rifles, holding the weapons high as they plunged into shallows crusted with moss and scum.
Slapping it with the reins, Hayes drove his horse into the water. All around, men lost their footing and fell, gripped by the muck of the creekbed. His mount struggled to keep its footing and Hayes had to stab his spurs into its flanks.
A sergeant flopped in the water, sank, and did not reappear. Above the mad splashing and curses of struggling men, Hayes heard Southern catcalls. Concealed high on the far bank, the Johnnies were just shooting targets at a county fair.
His horse thrashed and whinnied, bucking and panicking, as it sank in the mud.
The stream—the morass that should have been a stream—was crowded with his soldiers now, companies and regiments a jumble. Some men tried to return fire, pausing foolishly in midslough, while others floated, facedown.
Hayes didn’t see how he could go forward. His horse was stuck and terror-stricken. He waited for the bullet that would part him from Lucy forever.
Lucy.
He could save these men, some of them. The attack was a disaster. He could at least minimize the cost, preserve some lives, by ordering a withdrawal.
A soldier, halted in midstream, stared up at him. As if reading his thoughts. Waiting for his decision, the command to turn for the rear.
A bullet snapped back the soldier’s head.
Go back. Take them back now. Spare them.
Hayes opened his mouth to give the order.
No.
There was no going back. If these men went back—these men, any men—the war would never end. And if he gave the order to withdraw, he would foul the memories of every man who’d fallen.
Hayes unholstered his pistol and dropped from his horse. Mud grabbed him. Tugging at him as if it were alive and starved for human flesh.
“Come on!” he shouted, battling the emulsion underfoot. His riding boots gulped water, demanding his surrender. Splashed by bullets peppering the surface, he plodded toward the far bank, unsure of each next step, as likely to drown as lead his brigade onward. Even where the bottom firmed, slime tricked a man’s feet.
“Come on! Get through this slop. Come on, boys! We’re going to give those Rebs a whipping, just get to the other side! Come on now!”
As soon as he called to the others, he felt a renewed strength. Drenched to his chest, he plunged ahead, dragging leaden weights instead of feet. He held up his pistol, keeping that one thing dry.
“Rally to me! Ohio! West Virginia! Rally to me!”
Mostly Ohio men, it looked like. No. West Virginia boys, too. All a muddle.
Wonderfully, miraculously, the trapped herd of men surged forward.
Still, when Hayes clawed up into the mud that passed for a bank, he was alone. With bullets hissing and hunting, sniffing close. Soaked and wrapped in slime, he got to his feet and stood with his back to the enemy. Waving on his men.
“Let’s go, Ohio!” Hayes called. “Come on, West Virginia! Come on!”
Miracle after miracle. He had been alone. Now men—muck-covered, wonderful men—crowded around him. Some dropped down, exhausted, but the best of the veterans organized themselves without need of officers, hugging the slope and testing their weapons, drying their hands on the brush before handling their cartridges.
Beside Hayes, a man flopped backward. A wild hand slapped his shoulder and slipped away.
Lieutenant Reasoner, of the 36th Ohio, sat calmly on a rock, drawing off his boots to pour out the water. The action struck Hayes as eminently sensible: Hard to lead a charge hauling gallons of slime.
As quickly as he could, Hayes worked off his own boots, upended them—they gushed—and yanked them back on. Wet grit gripped his feet.
He stood up again, in the open, where the men could see him and he could see their officers. Jim Comly had drawn together some bucks from the 23rd Ohio, but the Rebs were still making sport of their predicament.
“Up that bank!” Hayes shouted. “Come on, boys. Pay them back!”
He scrambled ahead, thorns grazing hands and cheeks. Hoping the men would follow one more time.
They did. Hundreds of soaked and filthy men clawed their way up the south wall of the gulch, rushing to rob the Johnnies of time to reload.
Hayes surprised a big Reb working his ramrod. He pointed his pistol, giving the fellow one chance to surrender.
Deft as a gopher snake, the Johnny swung his weapon as a club. Hayes ducked the blow, reaimed, and pulled the trigger.
The revolver misfired.
Eyes met.
As soldiers in blue crowded up, the Rebel ran.
“Come on, boys!”
Their order may have been lost, but the men were furious. Shooting them down in that morass had been unfair, according to the odd views soldiers held. Of course, they would have done the same to the Johnnies, had the circumstances been reversed. But logic made no difference.
His men had taken the high ground, but the Rebs withdrew grudgingly, pausing to fire back at their tormentors.
Stubborn. Proud.
This whole war was about stubbornness and pride.
One Reb who had lost his rifle dropped his drawers and showed Hayes’ men his ass.
“Officers! Take charge of the men around you,” Hayes called. “Don’t try to sort out your regiments. Soldiers! Rally to the nearest officer.”
Never would have worked with green troops, Hayes knew. But these men had scrambled over mountains together, been bushwhacked, and fought countless, hard engagements that barely got a mention in the newspapers. They knew what to do.
As his men chased the retreating Rebs with a volley, it dawned on Hayes that his brigade was alone. The grand attack had not caught up on his left, nor did there seem to be anyone behind him.
Two hundred yards to the front, Reb cannoneers manhandled a section of guns, turning them to block the interlopers.
Hayes figured the militarily sensible thing to do would be to consolidate his position and wait for Thoburn’s boys—or anyone—to come up. But he was angry, as much at himself as at the Rebs. That moment of weakness, of doubt, down in the creek had been unworthy.
Determined to do his duty, to be one of those “good colonels” among whom he liked to count himself, he wasted no time before leading his soldiers forward, toward the guns. After a brief, bloody interlude, the artillerymen scooted off, followed by the infantry supporting them.
Hayes read the Johnnies’ predicament all too clearly: Those Rebs had been assigned an orphan position, forward of their main line, to protect the flank. Now they were hurrying back to their division to make a stand. Things weren’t over, that was painfully certain.
But the prey had become the hunters. Grim and wary, his men forged on through a mist of smoke. Off to the left, the battle had gained such force, it shook the earth. A fight had flared up on the distant right as well. Hayes wondered what that signified.
He wished he could see more of the field, or that someone would tell him what was happening elsewhere. Colonel Duval owed him that much. He needed to know. He didn’t want his brigade to be cut off, perhaps surrounded.…
But he just was not ready to stop. Nor were his men. Each yard gained had been earned with the blood of friends and comrades, of brothers.
His ragged line pressed on until the smoke thinned.
As they came within range of a fine-looking house, a volley flamed out, halting Hayes’ men with its devastating power. This was it, the Rebs’ next line of defense. Officers ordered their men to ground or drew them toward cover. They had gone as far as they could until support came up; each veteran sensed it.
Startling himself with his lust for blood, Hayes longed to go on, to shoot men down, to skewer them.
But he’d learned from the errors of others how alluring folly could be. Charging that position with the handful of men he had would have been an unforgivable sin, a collapse into passion worse than any carnal deed. The remnants of his brigade could not have been more disordered had they been stirred around in a witch’s cauldron. His men had played their part well; now he had to play his own part wisely.
As he panted for breath and weighed the situation, stray Ohioans and mud-caked West Virginians gathered around, taking up positions behind a wall to trade shots with the Rebs. Listening to the ragged exchange, Hayes sensed something new: The Rebs were only trying to hold on. There was no hint of a counterattack, none of that feeling you got from the Johnnies when they were ready to pounce.
Off to the left—still too far to the left—the fighting had become a gale, a storm. Sheridan’s entire army was on the attack.
No reinforcements here, though. Where was Johnson? Where was Thoburn?
Hayes sat down, struggling for clarity. Given that he didn’t have the numbers to rush that house, what else might be done? Anything? Beyond waiting for reinforcement? Once ignited by action, he always found it hard to snuff the flame. He even feared that the day might come when he gave an insane order, maddened by the … the ecstasy.
For all the press of bodies, their stink and the raucous voices, he felt alone. And he was alone, in a very practical sense. Russ Hastings had gone down early—Hayes hoped the wound wasn’t grave—and his last courier had disappeared. He had left his staff behind with orders to follow, but he saw none of them.
The men kept up their fire over the wall, pleased enough with what they’d done and telling the Johnnies—who couldn’t hear one word—what a licking they were going to get, just wait. Hayes grew newly aware of his own breathing, of the sodden grip of his uniform, of the foul taste in his mouth, a gagging mix of blown powder and bad water.
It had been only moments since they halted.
It was time to sort out his regimental officers and to send a detail to bring up ammunition, in case the chain of supply had broken down. He needed runners. And skirmishers had to probe the flanks, to uncover who was out there. He had to identify the best point to strike when reinforcements came up and the advance resumed.…
When he tried to reload his pistol, his hand shook. He could barely open his soaked ammunition pouch.
With the suddenness of revelation, Will McKinley appeared. The young man looked sufficiently fresh to have found a wiser place to cross the creek. McKinley, bless him, had that sort of luck.
Kneeling beside Hayes, his former adjutant said, “Colonel Duval’s been wounded, sir. Pretty bad. General Crook says you’re to command the division.”
4:00 p.m.
Gordon’s front
Wasn’t right, none of it. They’d whipped the Yankees fair and square, twice over. Then they’d caught the blue-belly fools trying to sneak around on them, just come right up on the flank, and by rights they should have whipped them a third time, catching them down in that swampy bottom, a true Slough of Despond, like in Pilgrim’s Progress. But the Yankees seemed to have lost their senses this God-given day and they just kept on coming, plastered up and down with mud, a-saying, “Kill me, please, and thank you kindly,” and even doing that—killing them—wasn’t enough. One of their officers had near shot down Dan Frawley with a pistol, though Dan got away, and Nichols, unused to the new rifle he had taken up, had missed when he took a shot at the Yankee, who looked like a man from the town bank, the kind who prized ledgers and laws over the Lord. Then he had found himself going backward in anger and in shame, unwilling to be captured again by heathens, men apt and fitted to fornicate with niggers in broad daylight, men who would not be tolerated on the soil of Georgia, nor should have been anywheres else.
Tom Boyet was bleeding, but not quitting. None of them was anywheres close onto quitting. But it was like the Lord himself whispered to every man at the same time, saying not “Go down, Moses,” but “Y’all git out of here now, too many Yankees.”
How could the Lord allow this? To cause them to flee before Lucifer? When they were the Righteous, the Poor who would inherit?
He loaded and fired, loaded and fired, wishing he had his own fine rifle back, but glad of the yard wall by this rich man’s house, a succor unto the people. The fellows had been as pleased to see him as pork chops when he came back, marveling at his tale of bold escape, maybe not believing every word of it—which was an injustice—but clapping him on the back and laughing and sharing their rations with him, even bottomless Dan Frawley, whose favorite miracle, surely, had to do with those loaves and fishes.
Elder Woodfin had called him “the Prodigal Son returned,” which did not seem right, for Nichols did not believe he ever had behaved badly toward his father, not as the Prodigal Son had done, and he had never been a squandering, gambling, drinking fellow, displeasing to the Lord and rightly afflicted, but the chaplain was not a man to bear reply. Elder Woodfin was, after all, a Virginian and could not be reasoned with like the Georgia-born.
Firing at the blue hants in the smoke, Ive Summerlin said:
“I don’t like this at all. I don’t like this feeling.”
None of them did, that was the gospel truth. With the Yankees whipped and whupped and whipped, and too ignorant to accept it, rumors of great wickedness had spread, luring men into the temptation of fear.
“More cartridges, boys,” Sergeant Alderman called. “Come back one at a time and help yourselves.”
A soldier clutched his face and collapsed backward.
General Gordon reappeared. A time back, things had been so ugly that even General Gordon, a man who feared naught but the wrath of the Lord, had dismounted and gone afoot. He was back up on his latest stallion, peerless.
There was shooting to do, but Nichols stole time to glimpse the true-Christian face, that Christian-soldier visage, of General Gordon passing. With that broken-cross scar on his cheek.
Nichols found no consolation there.
4:20 p.m.
Union Sixth Corps
“Remarkable,” Ricketts allowed. “Simply remarkable.”
Rigid on his blood-streaked horse, George Getty snorted. “Can’t say how the little runt brings it off.” He spat.
“Sometimes, I don’t think I know soldiers at all,” Ricketts said.
“Volunteers. Different breed. The men we led would’ve laughed.”
“I’m not sure,” Ricketts said. “Remember how the Regulars cheered Zach Taylor?”
Around the two generals, litter bearers gathered up the wounded, deciding who would have a chance to live.
“Well, he got them going,” Getty allowed.
To the astonishment of everyone on the field, Sheridan had revitalized the attack by galloping the entire line of the Sixth Corps, ten yards out in front of the men, grinning and waving his hat, hallooing the Rebs with spectacular obscenities. He had continued on to the Nineteenth Corps, prolonging the stunt, all the while in full view of the Confederates. The howls from the men had smothered the noise of the guns.
“And here we are blathering,” Getty said. Stalwart and taciturn, George Getty was even more of an Old-Army man than Ricketts. Sheridan’s performance had excited him to what passed for ebullience. “Got them untangled, time to get on.”
Ricketts nodded. When the charge resumed, it had moved so fast that their flank units had collided. It had required the division commanders themselves to sort things out.
To their front, another cheer resounded.
“Glad to get the worst of the ground behind me,” Getty said, lingering anyway. He turned up one side of his mouth. “You got the easy dirt today.”
“Not sure every one of my men would agree.”
“Any more about Upton?”
“Just that he’s wounded.”
“Let his holy angels comfort him. Shame about Russell.”
Their staffs, held at a distance, had grown restive. It was time to rejoin the attack. Even generals had to be nudged along, in the view of majors.
But generals were human, something that would not have occurred to Ricketts in the old days. They, too, needed their respites.
Getty tugged his riding gloves tighter. “All this ends, I look forward to some quiet post in the Territories. Where all I have to fuss about is corporals with the clap.”
“They’ll bust you down first. Both of us. Reversion to Regular Army ranks.”
Getty permitted himself what passed for a smile. “Hell, they can make me a first lieutenant. Just give me an orderly life, wake-ups at five a.m., and a good pair of boots.”
Having been a lieutenant longer than Getty, Ricketts saw less appeal in such a demotion. He quite liked being a general, and Frances liked it, too. The orderly side of peace had its appeal, though: days refined by bugle calls and smoothed by regulations. There was something about the Army, the Army he had known, that was wonderfully pure.
“I don’t think we’ll revert to a grade below major,” he said seriously.
That rekindled Getty’s tiny smile. “See you in Winchester, Jim.”
4:20 p.m.
Gordon’s Division, Confederate left
As his soldiers carried Patton from the battlefield, the fury on the colonel’s face struck Gordon. The wreckage of Patton’s leg had to be painful, but it wasn’t suffering that ruled poor George’s features. It was rage, Homeric, unmatched in Gordon’s experience.
“Bless you, George,” Gordon said, riding beside the litter, rationing moments. “Splendid work, you held them.”
Patton could not speak. He shook his head. Faintly. Glowering.
“Get you back in the fight before you know it,” Gordon tried.
Patton closed his eyes. Bloody lips trembled.
He’ll lose that leg, Gordon figured. If not his life. Patton’s war was done.
Gordon’s was not. But Patton’s Brigade, Virginians from Breckinridge’s Division, had arrived just in time to block another Yankee assault, granting Gordon a gift of time—precious minutes—to rally his shrinking division again, behind another web of stone walls, with the left refused and the line backed up against the Valley Pike, a hop from Winchester.
Leaving the wounded colonel, Gordon rode along his line again, encouraging his officers and men, cajoling them and promising a miracle. Hope remained, however slight, that they might hold the Yankees until dusk. On his right, Battle and Ramseur had rallied their men yet again, with Early crisscrossing the field, overflowing with threats and imprecations. But Gordon felt the noose closing.
His men had to hold on. He could not let them break, not before the men of the other divisions did. As the chances of the Confederacy winning the war declined from day to day, it was crucial not to be seen as one of those who invited defeat. Back in Georgia, men had to say, “We lost that war despite all Gordon did.”
Gordon did not intend to be a failure, not in war, and not in peace. He had seen failure enough along his bloodline. His father had begun with a farm whose arcade of elms let it claim to be a plantation, bestowing upon the males the status of gentlemen, however threadbare. The elder Gordon then became a preacher, but pulpits and poverty ran too close a race. “Pap” had moved on through various enterprises, getting up a mineral springs retreat for the well-to-do and rhapsodizing over the prospect of imminent wealth, then moving—in veiled ignominy—to the mountains on the Alabama border, almost backing into Tennessee, where wheedled resources went into mining and timbering among hill folk who sold their land cheap, then worked it cheaper.
Along the way, Gordon acquired the manners of an aristocrat, but without the ducal purse. The curtain dropped in his senior year at the University of Georgia, where he had excelled in debates, the classics, and general bonhomie. Instead of standing up as valedictorian, he had outraced court orders and sheriffs’ writs back to the mountains, where he worked a mine and falsified ledgers to save the family enterprise. Thereafter, he chose to read the law, already aware it was made of India rubber, and met his Fanny, whose family was as staid as his was irregular. Each of them longed to escape to the other’s side.
But it had been in the mountains and mines where he first learned to lead men—indeed, to fool them, which was far from the least part of leadership. He had mastered that art amid desperation, shouldering creaking timbers underground, then tugging at numbers into the night by the glow of an oil lamp. Cornered by his father’s truant ethics and plain lies, John Brown Gordon had vowed to armor himself in respectability, or its appearance.
Now he was here, on this awful field, determined not to be blamed for the army’s collapse. And that collapse was coming, all but certain. His men looked gaunt as ghouls, exhausted, approaching the point where resolve gave way to terror.
He dared not dispatch even one man to set Fanny on the road southward to safety. Every rifle counted, every visible body, each man the brick that, if removed, might cause the wall to crumble.
The Yankees had brought the weight of their guns to bear. A few hundred yards to the front, where Patton’s Brigade still clung to its ground without its colonel, the pounding was incessant. Nor would the Federal infantry let up. Patton’s boys held on, though. Running through their ammunition, but still brim-full of spite.
The cries and curses, smash of shot on stone, the awful splintering. Men bleeding, blinded, lost.
“Steady, boys,” Gordon trumpeted. “Look at Patton’s Virginians, aren’t they fine?”
“They’re fine with me,” a soldier called, “’long as they stay between us and the Yankees.”
Hooting. The unstable merriment of soldiers facing death.
“Now, that’s a fact,” a powder-burned soldier agreed.
Hold until dusk. Until the Yankees had to quit. After that, an orderly withdrawal.
He just did not know how long he could master these men. Good men they were, the finest, fighting on with empty cartridge cases and empty bellies. But there came a point …
“I do believe,” Gordon called as he rode the line, “that you boys have just about tuckered out the Yankees. You just hold on now. Night’s coming. You hold on.”
Fragile, the hearts of men. Immensely strong, and then abruptly fragile. War had less to do with rifles and guns, the external totems, than with the unmeasured depths within each breast.
Should’ve made Fanny go back South. Early had been right, that sour old man. But Gordon had found excuses to keep her near, blaming her own stubbornness.
The Yankees weren’t barbarians, of course. She would not be mistreated. Quite the contrary, he expected. Knowing his Fanny, she’d soon be celebrated and waited on. But even the looming shame of her “capture” paled against the pain of separation.
The remnants of Patton’s Brigade were caught in the fight of their lives. Gordon wished he could advance to support them. But he knew that the best he could hope for now was to keep his men steadied right here, behind these walls. Advance? He had all he could do to keep them from running.
His men. On this bad day.
Last until dusk.
Fanny.
All but deafened, he heard the growl of battle, the endless crack of rifles and thump of cannon, as if through water. There was bile in his empty belly and shit pressing his guts, but he didn’t dare dismount even to piss. The men had to see him in the saddle now. He feared that simply getting down to water a tree would trigger a rumor that he had been wounded, even killed. And then they would run. Even the bravest longed for an excuse.
Their bodies were used up. All the folly of rushing off to Martinsburg, then that killing night march to get back. Shoulders bruised to a terrible tenderness by the kick of rifles, and forearms worn to cramping. Thirst. Spirit and temper were all that remained. Even loyalty, that loyalty on which he had relied for three grand years, would crack like sugar brittle.
“Good Lord! Look!”
Gordon turned, eyes following a captain’s outstretched arm.
Hardly a rifle shot to the north, lines of blue-clad cavalry advanced at a trot, aimed at the flank and rear of Patton’s Brigade. As Gordon watched, mortified, bugles sounded and the Yankees sped to a gallop, bending toward their horses’ manes and leveling their sabers. The thunder of hooves pierced Gordon’s deadened ears.
The scene robbed him of suitable commands, of any words.
His men had been positioned to spot the Yankees before Patton’s boys could do so. The Virginians were fighting desperately, their flank refused and Yankees feeling beyond it. Each man out there had been occupied with his own immediate war.
Now the first of Patton’s men grasped the danger. A few ran for the rear, toward the imagined safety of Gordon’s line. Most stood, though. Brave men face-to-face with their executioners.
Nearing the Virginians, the Yankees raised a hurrah. Then came the crash, the human-animal-metal collision, the uproar. Horses leapt walls. Sabers flashed, hacking.
A few of Gordon’s men fired at the Yankees, but the riders in blue jackets swarmed among the Virginians, making clean shots impossible.
There was not one thing to be done. Leaving the wall in a rescue attempt would only feed his men into the rout. For once, John Brown Gordon was at a loss.
More Virginians turned to run. The Yankees rode them down, slashing their blades into shoulders, at necks, across backs. Here and there, a soldier swung a rifle and unhorsed a rider, who could expect no mercy. But Patton’s Brigade was being annihilated. As Gordon and his men watched.
“Goddamn them, goddamn them,” a soldier cried.
A fallow field away, hundreds of men in gray or shades of brown threw down their rifles. Well-drilled Yankee horsemen began to herd them. Like cattle.
“Goddamn them!”
Virginians who escaped leapt over the walls his men defended. Blind to anything but a vision of safety, they would not be stopped short of being shot down dead. And Gordon was not about to shoot down Confederates and risk destroying his future.
He was glad that poor George Patton had not remained to see his brigade end thus.
Then things got worse.
The Yankee cavalry parted, revealing advancing ranks of Federal infantry, rifles leveled at their waists, bayonets shimmering. The blue-backed horsemen wheeled to the north again, ready to sweep deep into Gordon’s rear.
Where’s our cavalry? Gordon demanded of no one. He knew the Confederate horse was weak, but, surely, Fitz Lee …
Where was the rest of Breckinridge’s Division?
Confederate artillery began to shell the advancing Yankees. Some of the rounds landed amid the men just taken prisoner.
The sight further horrified Gordon’s soldiers.
There was no one to dispatch to correct the guns. No time, anyway.
Some of his own men began to run, joining the fleeing Virginians. Then more broke. Gordon rode after them. Not far. Just far enough to turn on them.
“For God’s sake, men! Stand! Stand! We’ll beat them again, stand with me one more time!”
The fight was out of them, though. The trickle of those running became a flood.
Gordon tore off his hat and hurled it down.
“Don’t shame your states! Georgia! Louisiana! Don’t shame yourselves, boys!”
No one paused to reply.
Yankee artillery shells gave chase. Gordon pleaded, unwilling to show his rage. That was Early’s foolish manner, not his.
A private grabbed his bridle and tried to turn Gordon’s horse toward the rear.
“Save yourself, General! Save yourself!”
Tears flecked the boy’s eyes.
Gordon looked down on him, burning. “Release my horse, son.”
The private let go the leather strap, but didn’t join those fleeing. Instead, he positioned himself in front of Gordon, back to the general and rifle across his chest, defying the entire Yankee army to try to get past him.
Gordon recognized the lad. Twelfth Georgia. If the boy was a day more than sixteen, it didn’t tell.
The regiment’s flag-bearer limped up and positioned himself by the private. He held up the banner, waving it.
More men joined them.
Nearby, another color-bearer paused, doubt on his face.
Gordon rode over to the man, grasped the pole from his hands, and said, “You’ll let me borrow this?”
Lofting the tattered battle flag, Gordon rode through his men, making a miracle. Soldiers who had fled returned to the stone wall, took aim, and fired at the oncoming, hollering Yankees.
A Confederate battery found the correct range and pounded the Federals. For all Gordon knew, those were the same guns that had fired into the prisoners.
Fortunes of war.
His men applied themselves to the fight again. There were fewer of them now, far fewer. But those who remained meant to stand.
For Christmas—for that last, impoverished Christmas—Fanny had given him William Cowper’s translation of the Iliad, an old copy with a leather cover burnished by many hands over the decades. She knew he loved that book above all others—although he favored the rendering by Pope.
Now he took his own stand, not on the plains of windy Troy, but on the fields before Winchester. Not an Achilles, but, perhaps, a Hector. With the doomed city at his back.
Lofting the flag and calling out encouragement, Gordon knew it was only a matter of time. But with his men rallied around him, it was a glorious time.
5:00 p.m.
Union center
“Faster!” Emory Upton demanded. “Get up to the top of that rise, I need to see!”
The firing threatened to outdistance them.
His litter bearers picked up the pace, but not enough to satisfy him. The officers and orderlies accompanying the stretcher appeared doubtful, though they had given up on attempts at reason.
This was no time for reason. Not when he was winning.
He knew his wound was severe, didn’t need to be told. He had tied off the thigh himself when the others hesitated. The pain blazed, not least when one of the bearers put a foot wrong. But pain could be endured. Jesus Christ had suffered worse than this, as had the Martyrs.
Think on the Oxford Martyrs.…
His men had broken through, that was what mattered, and now they raced the rest of the army to Winchester, brushing aside the last, enfeebled resistance. After a bloody afternoon’s frustration, including a confrontation with a Nineteenth Corps colonel who proved a coward, Upton had driven his men on without mercy. And Mackenzie and the others had cracked the Rebel defense, bursting through their lines at last like a horde of avenging angels. His wounding amid that triumph had been a sign, a warning to shun mortal pride in an hour of glory. Perhaps it was even a riddle-wrapped sign of grace.…
He had kept faith. And the Lord had given him victory.
When he rose to his elbows, he saw the steeples of Winchester. The fighting was not done, the godless slavers harbored too much spite. Satan did not bow at the first blow. But Upton was determined that his men would be the first Union troops to reach the town. No matter the cost.
He prayed. Not for the Lord to ease the pain in his thigh, but for the strength to endure it and finish his work.
He had been granted a vision of how to smite them. All his reading in military science, his dedication to the art of war, was as naught before revelation. He had studied his trade until the last candle guttered, but Jomini shed little light beside the fiery sword of Jesus Christ.
“And there was given unto him a great sword … a great sword…”
Upton caught himself swooning. Much blood had been lost. He propped himself higher. Pain pierced him.
Nothing, he told himself, this is nothing.
“Tell Mackenzie he must press on.” He wanted to add, but did not, “Show no mercy.”
The true mercy would be to end this war, to break the chains of bondage forever and ever.
At an aide’s command, the bearers lowered the stretcher to let a fresh team take it up. When they lifted him again, a bolt of pain made Upton want to shriek. He had forced himself to examine the wound at first, to confront this mortification of his flesh, but now he found it unsettling to view the ruptured meat.
We are but carrion, dross …
If the Lord wished to take his leg, even his life …
Not before I take Winchester, he blasphemed, surprising himself.
“Faster!” he snapped. “How can I command, if you can’t keep up?”
Horsemen rushed out of the lengthening shadows. The first cool of evening preceded them, balm in Gilead.
“Put him down, for Christ’s sake,” a no-nonsense voice commanded.
Balancing care and haste, the bearers lowered Upton to the ground again.
“Damn it,” the voice profaned. “I sent orders for you to go back to the surgeons.”
Sheridan. Gazing down from that great black mount of his. The horse’s mouth dripped slime.
“I can lead my division.”
“The hell you can.”
“Sir, I request…” Upton rallied against the pain. “I demand to remain in command of my division.”
He could feel the air change around him, grasping that Sheridan would brook no man’s defiance. He stiffened himself to withstand a blast of rage.
Instead, Sheridan slipped down from the saddle, instantly small when parted from his horse. He knelt over Upton.
Audible to the officers and men surrounding the litter, Sheridan announced, “General Upton, your performance has been heroic, selfless. No man has done more to turn the tide of battle. You have my personal thanks.”
Then Sheridan leaned close, bitter of breath and flashing eyes as hard as the hardest gemstone. Lips almost kissing Upton’s ear, he whispered, “Upton, you will go to the rear right now, or I will break you down to fucking private.”
5:00 p.m.
The eastern edge of Winchester
“Halt, you cowardly sonsofbitches,” Jubal Early cried. “Stop, you cowards. God almighty, halt! Stop, I say, and fight like goddamned men.”
5:00 p.m.
The northern approach to Winchester
What a jolly afternoon! Nothing like it in the great, wide world, Custer decided. Mankind had never devised a better sport. They’d run the Rebs mile after mile, the sorry devils.
Grinning, he returned to the head of his re-formed column of fours, facing the last scraps the enemy had mustered to guard his flank: a few bled-out troops of horse, a section of guns that could be enveloped easily, and a ruptured fort on a knoll. The fortification didn’t interest Custer—an experienced cavalryman let fixed defenses rot—but he fancied taking those guns and finishing off the graybacks who’d dropped from the backs of their nags. Couldn’t let Devin have all the fun, now, could he?
Turning to an orderly, Custer said, “Bring up the band.”
He drew his saber.
5:15 p.m.
The northern edge of Winchester
Damnedest thing. Fitz Lee felt about the best he’d felt all day. He’d started out weaker than an old maid with the ague, got worse rushing about, sweating like a hog and worrying like a churchgoing gal on her wedding night, and then got whipped by Yankees more times than he could count, ending up here with his rump all but touching Winchester. His men had done their best, but they were scattered now, he’d lost contact with most of their commanders, and Breathed’s guns appeared to have been put to another man’s use. But, damnation, if he didn’t feel almost peppery.
He didn’t care to think that getting whipped might be good for a man. He didn’t care to consider that at all.
Ask Breathed. What did his medical books say of such phenomena?
“Let ’em get close,” Lee ordered, for the benefit of any man who could hear him over the racket. The horses weren’t worth much now, and the party he had gathered fought dismounted. “Just wait, they’ll come on sure. Just let them get close.”
“Might care to slip down from the saddle yourself, sir,” a captain suggested. “Air seems a trifle populated.”
Lee pulled up a beard-spreader smile. “And let one of your bandits steal my horse? Rather chance it with those Yankee sharpshooters.”
“Hoss?” a private asked in mock incredulity. His tone conjured the porch of a country store and genial times. Better times. “Genr’l, I took that critter you’re settin’ astride for a milk-cow. What have we come to, what has this army come to?”
Lee played along, waiting for the Federals to make their move. All he could do now was wait. “Cow? I’d cut myself a beefsteak right this minute!”
That was about true. Hadn’t had so much as a cracker all day. Starved himself back to health, was that it? he wondered. Queerest thing: Even the dizziness had slipped away.
The dizziness was gone, but the Yankees weren’t. Their pride, their haughty pride, had grown intolerable. They didn’t even bother to wield their repeaters, just came on with sabers, as if mocking men who had beaten them steady for two years, then gave them a time for another year and a half. As if to say, “Yes, we have these fine new rifles that shoot jackrabbit fast, but we don’t even need ’em for your sort.” There was a cruelty in their condescension fiercer than the bite of blades on flesh.
“Get ready, boys.”
The men tightened their grips on their weapons, coiling their innards. Across yet another inglorious field, Yankees trotted to and fro, up to some new deviltry.
Horse artillery rushed up on the flank. The cannoneers wore blue jackets, not gray.
Lee believed he heard fighting off behind him, down in the streets of Winchester, and hoped it was a fevered hallucination. Anyway, didn’t do any good to ponder it. His place, his purpose, was here, and nowhere else. To hold until the rest of the army escaped.
Escape. A shameful, unaccustomed word.…
“They’re coming!”
Bugles sounded. A band resumed its mockery. The Yankee gun section on the flank dropped its trails with handsome speed. In moments, the crews were ramming home their first shells.
“Let them get close,” Lee called, speaking of the cavalry. There was nothing to be done about those guns, except bear the torment.
As the Union force advanced, increasing its pace to a canter with fine discipline, the horses first created a rumble that challenged the clamor of battle. But when they lowered their sabers and spurred to a gallop, their hoofbeats overwhelmed all other sounds.
A few of his men, the worst of them, didn’t wait to fire, but ran for the town. Lee let them go, figuring they’d be cut down all the quicker.
The artillery on the flank opened up. One round fell short, but the next smashed into a tree that anchored Lee’s line, hurling branches downward and men upward.
“Steady!” he called. He could make out the eyes of the horses. A few more yards, and he’d read the eyes of the men. “Steady now!”
Shells from some blessed, unseen Confederate battery struck smack amidst the first wave of blue-clad horsemen. Mounts tripped and riders tumbled. Lee noticed that the men in the second rank had drawn their carbines, rather than sabers.
Yankees weren’t taking chances, after all.
More bugles. But more artillery rounds shrieked overhead, plummeting toward the Yankees, flaying man and beast.
Lord Jesus, did he have a fighting chance?
His loss of consciousness was brief, if bewildering. He came to on the ground, grasping for the reins. Quicksilver pain raced over him, invading every part of his body at once. Lee fought for air. The wetness sheathing him wasn’t sweat this time, he could tell that much.
“Get him out of here,” a voice—raw with dread—commanded. “Carry him to the rear, we’ll hold the bastards.”
He tried to speak, but could not. The pain had crushing weight. Teeth, too. It bit with rabid fury, surpassing all previous wounds.
Pounding hooves. Men shouting. Clashing metal. Bring up your guns, Major Breathed. Where was Lomax? He needed to speak with Wickham, had to …
“Get him out of here,” the voice repeated.