by John Jakes
He shook his head. Mustn’t let anyone else see his state; others in his care surely felt the same way or worse, and were less experienced at dealing with it. It was his duty to look after them.
He rose and plopped his hat on his head as a nearby tenor voice began “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” He liked the melody and hummed along as he strapped on his revolver and took his gauntlets from their peg. He saw his breath as he ducked out the door; a light snowfall had begun. Ambrose planned to return by midnight, after which they were going to open a bottle of busthead bought from the sutler. Maybe they should organize a snowball fight first; the men were growing quarrelsome from inactivity.
Three messmates from down near the Savannah River came out of their winterized tent to gaze in wonder at the white flakes falling between great dark trees. Charles approached. “First you’ve ever seen, boys?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Better look sharp, Captain Main,” said another. “A snowball just might pop that hat off your head ’fore you know it.”
Charles laughed and walked on down the row of winterized tents; the lower walls were palisaded logs, the roofs canvas, flat or peaked. The unseen tenor began “Away in a Manger.” Two deeper voices joined. A burst of laughter from a card game briefly drowned out the carol. Charles kept walking, his boots crunching snow. It already covered the ground.
From a narrow lane between tents came a familiar sputtering sound. Angry, he turned into the lane. Sure enough, there was the malefactor with his pants and drawers down around his calves and his rear jutting over a soiled patch of snow.
“Goddamn you, Pickens, I’ve told you before—use the sinks. It’s men like you who spread sickness in this camp.”
The frightened boy said, “I know what you said, Cap’n, but I got a ter’ble case of the quickstep.”
“The sinks,” Charles said without pity. “Get going.”
The trooper clumsily tugged up his clothing and limped away with a kind of sideways crab step. Charles returned to the street and walked toward the camp entrance, two elaborate pillars and an arch, fashioned of peeled saplings woven together. Quite a work of art, that gate. It would stand till spring, when they would surely take the field to fight McClellan.
Charles passed men standing guard and returned each salute without really seeing it or the man who gave it. Gus Barclay’s face filled his thoughts. Outside a hut twice the size of his own, he said to the corporal on duty, “How’s the prisoner?”
“He cussed a blue streak for ’bout a half hour, Captain. When I dint pay no attention, he shut up.”
“Let’s go in and release him. No one should stand punishment on Christmas Eve.”
The corporal nodded, brushed snowflakes from his eyebrows and the bill of his kepi, and ducked into the hut. Charles followed. A certain reluctance mingled with his kinder impulse; the man put here just before supper call was the perennially rebellious Private Cramm. First Sergeant Reynolds had issued another order Cramm didn’t like, and as the sergeant was moving away, Cramm hawked and spat loudly. Charles ordered him bucked and gagged for the night. Sometimes he wished Cramm were a Yankee, so he could shoot him.
Cramm sat on the dirt floor of the guardhouse, a single bare room feebly lit by a lamp. Above the stick tied in his mouth, sullen eyes watched Charles. Cramm’s wrists were roped together behind his drawnup knees; a thick length of pine pole had been slipped between knees and forearms.
“You don’t deserve it, Cramm, but I’m going to release you because it’s Christmas Eve.” While Charles said this, the guard knelt and unfastened the gag. “Escort him to his tent, Corporal. Stay there until reveille, Cramm. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Cramm made a great show of grimacing and twisting his head as if badly hurt. No gratitude was visible on his face; just his eternal contempt. Feeling his temper start to rise, Charles quickly left.
The snow fell like pillow down. The most important call of the night was yet to be paid. He would go right now. The thought relieved the anger Cramm always caused.
Passing the winterized tents again, he stopped. Inside a tent whose sign announced it was the home of The Fighting Cocks, a name chosen in honor of Sumter, the hero of the Revolution, Charles heard a young voice: “Lord God. Oh, Lord God. Oh, oh.”
He recognized the speaker; it was Reuven Sapp, nineteen-year-old nephew of the doctor who had drugged Madeline LaMotte with laudanum for so long. The boy had the makings of a good cavalryman if he could get over letting his louder but less competent comrades intimidate him.
“Oh, Lord—oh.” Charles tapped on the door and pulled it open without waiting for permission. Seated on one of the four bunks, the straw-haired boy jerked his head up. A letter dropped from his lap. “Captain! I didn’t know anyone was close by—”
“I wouldn’t have come in, but I heard a voice that sounded pretty low.” Charles removed his hat, shook snow from it, walked down three plank steps to the dirt floor, which was excavated to a depth of three feet below ground level for added warmth. The hearth was dark, the tent freezing. “Where are your messmates?”
“Went out to see if they could club some rabbits.” Sapp struggled to sound normal, but his eyes betrayed him. “That was pretty scrummy food tonight.”
“Rotten. May I sit down?”
“Oh, certainly, Captain. I’m sorry—” He jumped up as Charles took a chair. He waved Sapp back to the bunk and waited, suspecting the boy would eventually tell him why he felt bad. He was right. Sapp picked up the letter. He spoke haltingly.
“Last August, I worked up the nerve to write a girl I like real well. I asked her whether she could ever look favorably on me as a suitor. She sent me a Christmas greeting.” He indicated the fallen letter. “Said she’s sorry but I can’t be a suitor because I’m not respectable. I don’t go to church.”
“That makes two of us who aren’t respectable then. It’s a damn shame you got the news at Christmas. I wish there was something I could—”
Bursting tears interrupted him. “Oh, Captain, I’m so homesick. I’m ashamed of feeling so bad, but I can’t help it. I hate this damn war.” He bent forward from the waist, hiding his face in his hands, down near his knees. Charles twisted his hat brim, drew a breath, walked to the bunk, and squeezed the shoulder of the crying boy.
“Listen, I feel the same way myself, and often. You’re no different from any other soldier in that respect, Reuven. So don’t get after yourself so hard.” The boy raised his wet red face, gulping. “I suggest we forget this and forget the rules about enlisted men drinking with officers, too. Stop by my hut after a while, and I’ll pour you something to brace you up.”
“I don’t touch spirits, but—thank you anyway, sir. Thank you.”
Charles nodded and left, hoping he had done some good.
He resumed his walk toward the shelters, built with sloping roofs and walls on one side to protect the horses from the worst of the weather. He heard the animals before he saw them. They were upset. His belly tightened as he spied someone crouching next to Sport, where he didn’t belong. The man reached for something.
Three long strides, and Charles was on him. He caught the man by the collar, recognizing him; he was an aide to Calbraith Butler.
“That’s my property you’re trying to steal, Sergeant. I foraged those boards so my horse wouldn’t stand on wet ground all winter. Go find some firewood for Major Butler somewhere else—and thank your stars I don’t report you to him.”
Taking a two-handed grip on the collar, Charles flung the thief away from the nervous horses, then booted him in the butt for good measure. The noncom fled through the falling snow without a backward look.
Sport recognized him. Charles peeled off his gauntlets, straightened the heavy gray blanket, and knelt in the mud to be sure the gelding’s feet were squarely on the boards. He stepped to the trough holding the evening fodder. Almost all of it was gone. No surprise there; a cavalry horse would eat another horse’s tail if he was hungry enough.
Charles f
ingered a bit of fodder left in the trough: coarse, dry straw; poor stuff. Winter pasturage was already scarce; thousands of cavalry and artillery horses were rapidly chewing away all the grasslands of Virginia. At least there would be another review tomorrow. Calbraith Butler ordered them frequently to keep the animals fit and the men busy.
Charles rubbed Sport affectionately. Taking a lantern from a nail, he lit it and walked along slowly behind the horses. They were growing quiet now that the forager was gone. Holding the lantern high, he checked for signs of disease. He saw nothing alarming. A minor miracle.
What an assortment of nags the troop rode these days. The fine notion of color matching had broken down before the summer ended. Most of the bays in that first springtime skirmish were gone, lost to disease, poor care, and, in four cases, to enemy fire. They had been replaced by browns, roans, Charles’s gray, even a couple of conjugates, including one piebald with the ugly lines of a draft horse. But the Yanks still lived in fear of the satanic and largely nonexistent Black Horse Cavalry. Funny.
Thinking about the horses kept drawing him back to the spring, so distant and different. It might have been part of another year, another life, so rapidly had changes come. He hadn’t heard Ambrose sing “Young Lochinvar” for a month. Men no longer read Scott for lessons in chivalry, only for entertainment. The behavior of the Yankee officer who had led the search for the quinine smuggler seemed quaint and foolish. He wished Ambrose would return early so they could get to drinking.
He inspected the rest of the troop’s shelters; empty spaces here and there belonged to the men patrolling with Ambrose. The color situation was the same in every shelter, proving what was said so often lately: in Virginia a cavalry horse was good for six months.
“We’ll prove them wrong, won’t we?” he asked Sport when he went back to say good night. He stroked the gelding’s head. “By God we will. I’d throw away my fine sword and everything else I own before I’d let you go, my friend.”
A passing picket halted. “Who goes there?”
“Captain Main.” Embarrassed, Charles kept his head averted, in shadow.
“Very good, sir. Sorry.” The footsteps faded. The snow fell, silent and beautiful against the lights of camp.
Charles trudged back to his hut and set out the bottle of busthead. Eleven o’clock. Still in his clothes, he wrapped up in blankets, sure that Ambrose would bound in before long. He slid into his bunk for a short nap, and dreamed of Gus. He woke with a start, rubbed his eyes, and pulled out his watch.
Quarter past three.
“Ambrose?”
Silence.
He rolled out, stiff from the cold. He knew the other bunk was empty before he looked. The busthead stood where he had put it.
He couldn’t go back to sleep. He bundled up, finishing by wrapping a scarf round and round his neck, and made a tour of the picket posts. He found one youngster asleep, an offense punishable by execution. But it was Christmas morning. He nudged the boy, reprimanded him, and walked on. Worry infected him like a disease.
At the sapling arch, he asked a guard if there had been any sign of Lieutenant Pell’s detachment.
“None, sir. They’re late, aren’t they?”
“I’m sure they’ll be here soon.” Some bone-deep instinct said it was a lie.
He rechecked the horse shelters, did a second tour of the picket posts. The snow had stopped while he slept and lay thickly everywhere. He waited and watched till he saw the first glimmer of icy orange daybreak. The sapling gate remained empty, the dirt lane beyond leading to pale distances, smoky with cold, where nothing moved. Ambrose wouldn’t be back. None of them would be back.
Who should he recommend for promotion before someone began electioneering for it? His junior lieutenant, Wanderly, was a nonentity; his first sergeant, well intentioned, was not smart enough. He recalled that Nelson Gervais had gone out with Ambrose. Along with the letters to the families of the men in the detachment, there was another to write, to Miss Sally Mills.
The changes were coming, steady as the seasons. Old Scott had been pushed aside. McClellan was waiting. First thing you knew, one of his troopers would go to Company Q and come back with a mule. He felt like hell.
Safe from observation in his hut, he bowed his head, swallowed several times, then straightened up. He walked to the mantel, gazed a while at the photograph of himself and his merry lieutenant, both of them looking so confident among the ferns and columns in front of the great proud flag. He turned the photograph face down.
Without removing his gauntlet he picked up the busthead and pulled the cork with his teeth. He emptied the bottle before reveille.
Book Three
A Worse Place Than Hell
The people are impatient; Chase has no money; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?
ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO QUARTERMASTER GENERAL MONTGOMERY MEIGS, 1862
49
“MOUNTED MEN UP AHEAD, SIR.”
Charles, seated on Sport beneath a dripping tree where they had halted to await the scout’s report, drew a quick breath. There were six of them, returning from Stuart’s headquarters on this third day of 1862: Charles; the lieutenant shipped in to replace Ambrose; the junior lieutenant, bland Julius Wanderly; two non-coms; and the scout, Lieutenant Abner Woolner, who had just ridden out of the white murk to utter those five words and set Charles’s stomach churning.
He tugged down the scarf tied around the lower part of his face. The Virginia winter was proving cruel—snow, winds, drizzle. Though it was above freezing this morning, the cold somehow struck through all his layers of clothing. The time was a little after seven. Visibility was down to a few yards. The world consisted of muddy ground, the wet black pillars of tree trunks, and the fog, luminous because the sun shone above but could not penetrate.
“How many, Ab?” Charles asked.
“Couldn’t see them in this soup, Cap, but I reckoned it to be at least a squad.” The scout, a lanky man of thirty, wore cord trousers, covered with mud, a farmer’s coat, and a crushed soft hat. He wiped his dripping nose before continuing. “Moving nice and quiet, right on the other side of the tracks.”
The Orange & Alexandria. Charles’s party had to cross the right of way on this return trip from Camp Qui Vive. “Which way are they headed?”
“Toward the Potomac.”
Hope took a tumble. The direction almost certainly meant Yanks. Perhaps they had slipped through the lines to tear up stretches of track during the night. He was depressed by the possibility of a scrap, perhaps because it was the last thing he had expected.
Calbraith Butler had sent the detachment to Stuart’s camp for three reasons. Two were military, one personal. The cavalry had run short of corn, and the major wanted the loan of some; he guessed that a request carried by an old friend of the brigadier—Stuart now had his promotion; Hampton was still awaiting his—might get more prompt and positive attention than a letter by courier.
The detachment stayed two nights, and Beauty, who seemed jollier than ever, thriving in the atmosphere of war, entertained Charles at the small house in Warrenton where he had installed his wife, Flora, and his son and daughter. Of course he could spare some corn for fellow cavalrymen in need; he had brought back a whole wagon train of fodder from Dranesville in the autumn, though not without a price. He had maneuvered too boldly, as was his wont sometimes. Pennsylvania infantry had ambushed and threatened him in a two-hour battle, in which the wagon train had almost been lost.
But it hadn’t been after all, so wagons would quickly be on their way to Major Butler, compliments of Brigadier Stuart, who asked politely about the health of Colonel Hampton. From that, Charles knew nothing had changed; Stuart had a professional regard for the older officer, but no affection.
Calbraith Butler’s second reason concerned the replacement for Ambrose Pell. The new man had come from Richmond two days before New Year’s, having waited sixty days to be posted to the lin
es, so he said. Butler wanted to know how he would behave in the field. The day after his arrival, Butler spoke privately to Charles.
“He was foisted on us because he’s somehow connected with Old Pete or his family”—Old Pete was Major General Longstreet, a South Carolinian by birth—“and, after I reported Pell missing, he showed up so fast I suspect someone was just waiting for an opportunity to get shed of him. I have talked with your new man no more than a half hour, but I received two strong impressions. He’s a dunce and a schemer. A bad combination, Charles. I suggest you be on your guard.”
First Lieutenant Reinhard von Helm was a German from Charleston, eight or nine years older than Charles. He was a small, slim man, bald except for an encircling fringe of dark hair. His artificial teeth fit badly. Twice already, Charles had spied him standing alone in the open staring off to some private hell. Each time, he remained motionless for about half a minute, then bolted off like a rabbit.
Von Helm said he had given up a law practice to answer the call to arms. This, together with the names of noted Charlestonians he dropped into his conversation, greatly impressed Wanderly. The young lieutenant and von Helm became a chummy pair the first day they met.
On New Year’s Day, an officer from another troop, Chester Moore, from Charleston, had invited Charles to his hut for a drop and the purveying of additional facts about Lieutenant von Helm.
“He was a lawyer, all right, but not much of a one. It was his father who had the successful practice, with three partners. He forced ’em to take sonny into the firm. Bad mistake. All the inherited money and high life ruined him. It does that to some. When he wrote a brief or was permitted to argue some unimportant case, he was usually drunk. The moment his father went to his grave, the partners showed von Helm the door. No other firm would touch him. That of your cousin’s husband, Huntoon, rejected him in a trice. Only his money kept him from sinking out of sight. He’s worthless, Charles. What’s more, he knows it. Failures are often vindictive. Be careful.”