Love and War

by John Jakes

  At Urbana, quite a few hurt Hampton riders went for treatment at a hilltop academy that General Stuart had lit up for the evening. A goddamned ball, of which the vainglorious Virginian couldn’t seem to get too many. The sight of bleeding men sort of spoiled the festivities. Most of the girls went home; some—a few—stayed to help. But even their pretty round eyes glared in the candlelight, fearful of the dirt and odors of the strange wild men who had ridden in to say a great force was moving beyond the night horizon.

  Ninety thousand, it was, although straggling quickly bled it to less. Bob Lee did not yet know the strength of his opponent. And that army, for a change, did not have the usual McClellan slows. It was not exactly prancing along, but it didn’t have the slows. Old Bob didn’t know that, either.

  Twelfth of September. Westward, Lee boldly, crazily split his army—that much Charles learned, guessing at the rest. Old Bob wanted his supply line down to Winchester open and secure before he struck fiercely north to Hagerstown; hell, maybe even to Philadelphia. That meant nullifying the Harpers Ferry garrison. That meant dividing his forces. The order had been written on the ninth, but Charles didn’t know it then.

  He had met Lee in Texas, dined with him, talked with him at length—but that wasn’t battle, just field duty with occasional Indian skirmishing. Besides, Lee had been away a lot, leaving the command to subordinates. So now, as others did, Charles got reacquainted by sixth-hand hearsay.

  Old Bob was universally acknowledged as a polite fellow, slow to anger—and who had ever heard him curse or seen him do a discourteous or ungentlemanly deed? But the sound of guns got his blood up, and when he was making military bets, he sometimes pushed in all the chips he had, like a flash gambler on a Mississippi boat. Charles and Ab decided he had done it again. He had figured he could split his forces—the very idea of which would produce foam on the mouths of writers of strategy texts—and put them back together with time to spare. Because Little Mac, as always, would have the slows. The general had also politely, eloquently asked Marylanders to rise up and embrace their deliverers. Nobody paid attention to that, unfortunately.

  Stuart went west out of Frederick, behind Lee, the morning of the twelfth. Charles and Ab and Hampton’s troopers lingered behind, the rear guard, looking for men in blue—And God, there they came, marching at incredible speed. What had cured Mac’s slows? A cup of Bruised Ego Tea, brewing since the peninsula? A promise of a dose of Dr. Lincoln’s Elixir of Demotion?

  No time or means to answer that now. Away the rear-guard troopers went across the Catoctin Ridge, Charles already fevered with the tiredness he knew would not pass or be relieved, except slightly, for days, possibly weeks.

  The threat, the sense of building forces, rose up like the temperature. Something was wrong, but what?

  Not many signs of great joy greeted the deliverers. Near Burkittsville, with blue riders clearly visible, chasing them, raising dust, Charles sped past a tiny girl with yellow braids who hung on a farm fence waving a tiny Stars and Bars, but that was the extent of any patriotic uprising he witnessed. Doan, who had appropriated the horse of a dead man, screamed at the girl to get out of the obscene way of the obscene bluebellies coming over the near hill. The child kept waving her tiny flag.

  Hampton’s boy Preston held his father’s overcoat at Burkittsville in a swirling little fight. Charles shotgunned a Yankee from the saddle—he never did such a thing but that it wrenched his stomach—and got his left cheek shaved by another’s saber before they were away.

  Thirteenth of September. Old Marse Bob’s men moving swiftly through the cuts in the beautiful heights of the northern spur of the Blue Ridge, which the locals called South Mountain. Now the army was split for fair, Old Jack whipping around one way, over the Potomac and hooking back, his scab-footed demons marching and marching to invest Harpers Ferry from the southwest, while McLaws’s division aimed for the Maryland heights and Walker’s for Loudoun Heights, a triangle of force closing upon the point of land at the confluence of the Potomac and the river of that sweet-song name, Shenandoah.

  Charles and the scouts exchanged fire with some marching men they thought to be Jacob Cox’s Ohioans, but of course there was no way for a man riding fast, hungry, and sleepy, but needing to watch and shoot, to know for certain. The heat grew, and the tiredness.

  And that was the day of the cigars, which changed everything. Charles learned of it only later.

  Three cigars—found by some dumb-luck Yankee on ground where Daniel Harvey Hill’s men had encamped at Frederick. More interesting than the cigars was the paper in which they were wrapped: a beautifully scripted, apparently authentic copy of Order 191. Who left it nobody knew. Who read it was soon clear. McClellan read it and knew Lee had split his army. Fueled with that information, Little Mac began to move like a blue storm. Surprise, initiative, time all began to run like water between Old Bob’s fingers.

  Fourteenth of September. In the morning, Charles emptied his revolver four times in forty-five minutes of fighting at Crampton’s Gap, southernmost of the three mountain passes the Confederates sought to hold. Out of ammunition for the Colt and starting to worry, really worry, that Sport would be hit, he drew his shotgun. Running low on ammunition for that, too.

  Stuart ordered Hampton away hastily to support and protect McLaws, with Lee in desperate need of time to reassemble the split army lest Little Mac eradicate its separate parts with hardly any effort. Orders: dig in; hold the passes.

  But the passes slowly gave, the shells coming in true and blowing holes in the hillsides and in the gray lines, and all it gained Lee was a day.

  Galloping horsemen sped for Harpers Ferry. Nobody knew what would happen next. Charles was uneasy. Had the advantage been lost? As they rode on through the night, he sometimes shut his eyes to sleep ten minutes, trusting Sport to carry him without falter or fall.

  Then, soon after dawn, in mist the color of a reb’s sleeve, Charles and Ab and Doan and a fourth scout circled back and exchanged shots with more videttes in dark blue jackets that looked black in the foggy gloom—Yanks who had forced through Crampton’s Gap and were coming on—coming on—to squeeze them between their guns and the garrison at Harpers Ferry. The passes were lost, surely. The advantage, too. Could Lee save anything now, including his army?

  Fifteenth of September. No danger waiting at Harpers Ferry. Instead, they found singing, cheering, feasting. Old Jack had gotten unconditional surrender.

  The victors smashed the doors of magazines and granaries. There were thirteen thousand small arms and federal fodder for the starved horses. Eleven thousand men taken, two hundred serviceable wagons, cannon numbering seventy or more. And ammunition in plenty, some for Charles’s Colt.

  A curious thing happened when Old Jack went abroad late in the day. He wore his dirtiest, seediest coat and filthy old wool hat. He didn’t smile. He looked like some ignorant, smelly, mad-eyed Presbyterian deacon from the hills of western Virginia as he rode by. His men saw him and threw their hats in the air and cheered. The captured Yankees cheered him, too. Red-faced, they cheered him. Uttering yells as wild as any reb’s, they cheered him. Sitting on Sport, hunched and dizzy-tired, Charles could only shake his head as one boy whooped it up in the improvised prison pen, screaming, “By damn, good for you, Jack! You’re something. If we had you, we could whip you boys for sure.”

  As night came on, Charles tied Sport to his wrist and sat down against the wall of the arsenal and slept. After half an hour Ab woke him.

  “I think they’re gettin’ ready to go at it some place north of here. Jack’s ordered rations cooked for two days.”

  A calm descended with the dark. The peculiar peace of those hours when battle became a certainty. Awaiting orders, Charles went here and there and saw bits of it. Some butternut boys—literally that; eighteen, seventeen—broiling meat and joking and chattering and nudging one another in the cook-smoke. Charles knew they had not seen the elephant before. Troops who had were quieter. They dozed while they had
a chance. Wrote letters. The devout Christians meditated, reading little Testaments, readying for a possible journey up the bright stairs to their certain heaven.

  Around eleven, the issuing of ammunition began, done late to keep the powder as dry as possible. Fifty rounds of powder and ball per man, someone told Charles, though whether that was true he couldn’t say. But the drums would sound the long roll for immediate assembly soon, that he could tell as he continued to walk here and there; now Ab was napping with both horses tied to his wrist.

  At huge fires built beside the bubbling rivers, colonels were following the custom of addressing the veterans and the untried alike.

  “Remember, men. it is better to wound than to slay, since it takes time to carry an injured man to the rear and sometimes requires two of the enemy rather than one.”

  In the dark, Charles walked on.

  “—and when we are deployed upon the field of Mars, we shall achieve decisive victory and conquer the egalitarian mercenaries dedicated to despoiling your liberties, your property, and your honor. Do not forget for one moment that the eyes and hopes of eight millions and more rest upon you. Show yourselves worthy of your race and your lineage. Of your wives, of your mothers, of your sisters, of your sweethearts—of all Southern womanhood, which is dependent upon you for protection. With such incentive and firm trust in your leaders and in God the most high, you shall succeed. You cannot fail.”

  In the dark, Charles walked on. Waiting.

  Sixteenth of September. Jackson sounded the drums and marched at one in the morning.

  Up in the saddle went Charles and the others. Brigadier Hampton looked fresh and fiery-eyed as he organized his regiments for deployment behind the main column. How did he do it at his age, Charles wondered, feeling Sport friskier again, fed and rested. Wish I were.

  “Where we goin’, Charlie?”

  “Tagging after Old Jack. Protecting his backside again.”

  “I know that. Where’s he goin’?”

  “Frank Hampton told me Sharpsburg. Little town fifteen, sixteen miles up the road. When Old Jack won, I guess Old Bob decided to dig in and fight.”

  “Way we was all divvied up, ’twas either that or be buried, strikes me.” Charles agreed. After a pause, Ab said, “The foot cavalry looks wore out.”

  “The foot cavalry has plenty of company.”

  Sharpsburg proved a small, green village in pleasant countryside with a few hills but none of the peaks found along the Potomac. Lee’s headquarters was Oak Grove, a short distance southwest of town. His main line, nearly three miles long and attenuated, ran north from the center of Sharpsburg, roughly following the Hagerstown Pike. Stuart’s cavalry shifted all the way up to the extreme left, Nicodemus Hill, near a bight of the river. John Hood had two brigades and Harvey Hill five, digging in and peering eastward through high corn in a forty-acre field to the hilly land along Antietam Creek, which, like the pike, ran roughly north and south, though on a course much less straight. From the east Little Mac would come with his seventy-five thousand. Little Mac had stragglers, too, but he was the player with the most chips; he could throw them away by the handful and still dominate the table.

  While Old Jack placed his troops to brace the northern sector of the line, Charles was kept busy bearing orders to Stuart and other orders for outposts along Antietam Creek above and below the place where the pike to Boonsboro crossed it. He saw dust in the autumn sky eastward. The outposts pulled back, and Hunt’s blue batteries began shelling, answered by those of Pendleton and Stuart, from his relatively higher ground. Booming fieldpieces flashed red light into the darkening day.

  Returning to headquarters, southbound on the pike at a gallop, Charles saw pickets slipping forward through the field of corn. When he next encountered Ab, outside headquarters an hour later, the other scout told him, “They say the pickets is so close to each other out there that when one side breaks wind the other side feels it.”

  There had been sporadic skirmishing, which Charles had heard but not seen, and heavy bombardment throughout most of the twilight hours. At dark Lee’s army lay quietly along the Sharpsburg Ridge, with McClellan’s off by Antietam Creek and who knew where else; some woods at the left of the line had looked especially ominous to Charles in the daylight. They were thick, dark woods, fine for hiding preparations for an advance.

  Things settled down to an occasional shout or bang of a musket. In the small hours of the night it started to drizzle. When daylight broke, the hell began.

  Seventeenth of September. The blue waves appeared early, rolling from those suspicious woods Charles had spied. Shoulder weapons showing in the gray mist, banners unfurling, they trotted forward, double line of skirmishers first, then the main force, firing and loading, firing and loading—coming on. A Southern soldier cried, “Joe Hooker!”

  Joe Hooker, handsome and a hell of a fighter, raised a hammer of two Union corps and let it fall on the Confederate left flank. Charles was dispatched up through Hood’s position, west of the pike in some trees around a small white Dunker church, carrying instructions for the Nicodemus Hill gunners. The Union troops coming out of the woods opened fire on Hood, and Yankee artillery out of sight beyond those same woods let loose, shot coming in, and shell, and the Yankee foot pushed through the corn with heads down or turned aside as if to avoid a rain shower.

  The fighting began at six, and by nine the sides had thrown each other back and forth across the cornfield several times. The waving cross of St. Andrew, the South’s battle ensign, had gone down in the noise and smoke and been raised several times. The battle was so huge and swiftly shifting that Charles saw only threads, never the pattern.

  Coming back from Nicodemus Hill, head down, revolver in hand, he was caught in a driving charge of federals against Old Jack’s men, who lay waiting amid trees on rocky ridges. A colonel who had lost several officers ordered Charles off Sport at gunpoint and screamed, “Hold this position at all hazards.”

  So he fought in the woods with two squads of the foot cavalry for fifteen incredible minutes, shooting at Yankees who came running over the pike, bayonets gleaming steadily brighter as the sun burned off the mist and hot, cheerful light broke over the battle.

  In the midst of Old Jack’s men, Charles fired, reloaded, shouted, encouraged—helped repulse the charge that cost the Yankees almost five thousand men in under half an hour. When the jubilant foot cavalry went hollering and countercharging toward the cornfield, Charles, feeling that his duty to the anonymous colonel had been discharged, ran back, untied Sport, and went on his way, shaking from nerves and excitement.

  As he rode out from the rocks behind the Dunker Church, a bloodied figure in blue rose up and rammed a bayonet at Sport. Charles shot the soldier—in the face, as it happened; he had been aiming lower. He saw beardless flesh and red tissue and an eye fly away as the boy went down. The sight did something to Charles’s sensibilities, set some unwholesome process in motion.

  Shells burst; the ground trembled. He shook himself like a wet dog and pressed on, fearing Sport wouldn’t survive the morning.

  Along about eleven, the cockpit of the battle had shifted to a sunken road east and slightly south of the cornfield, which Charles passed through about this time. In the last three hours at least a dozen charges had gone screaming and lurching and shooting back and forth where the stalks could no longer be seen. Head high yesterday, they were gone, beaten and stamped and crushed down by living men, and dead.

  He sensed he was staring into some demonic kaleidoscope, each gory scene a new variation in horror. Seeing them, Charles felt his self-control slipping. He gripped the rein more and more tightly. While turtle’s instinct brought his head down beneath another billowy burst in the sky, he thought of a face. A name. Anchored himself to both.

  He had an impulse to dismount and hide. It passed, and he kept going in the direction of the sunken road, where Old Bob’s officers and men were not just scrapping to save the army now but maybe the whole Confederacy,
too.

  Charles forced Sport ahead. He was a man adrift on a vast, destructive sea. No cause could save his life; no slogan. Just scraps of memory.

  Name.

  Face—

  Her.

  Near the sunken road, he was among madmen—soldiers in gray seeing the elephant for the first time and berserk with fear. He watched one throw his canteen away; another pound one, two, three, four balls down his rifle muzzle without counting, without noticing; a third standing with clenched fists, squalling like an abandoned child. A sky-borne chunk of exploded iron cut off his left leg and his yell in one neat slice. Blood pattered the ground like the earlier drizzle.

  “Get up, get up, damn you!”

  Charles saw the shouter, a red-faced, red-bearded lieutenant booting a fallen horse. The lieutenant’s men crouched around a three-inch Blakely gun foundered in a rut. The lieutenant kept kicking the horse. Charles bent low as another shell burst, then slid from the saddle, found a rock, put it on the loose end of the rein. He ran forward at a crouch and pushed the hysterical officer with both hands.

  “Get away. That horse can’t pull anything. That leg’s broken.”

  “But—but—this gun’s needed up by the road. I was ordered to move it to the road.” The lieutenant wept now.

  “Stand aside. You men”—Charles pointed—“cut the traces. We’ll pick it up by the trail handle and pull it. Some of you push each wheel. One of you watch my horse.”

  Through Minié balls thick as bee swarms, shell bursts scattering shrapnel, they hauled the little rifled field gun, cursing like dock hands, sweating ferociously, pulling it forward yard by yard till they found a major, who flourished his saber to salute them. “Good for you, boys! Wheel her right up there.”

  “The captain done it,” said one of the horse artillerymen pushing a wheel. “Our lieutenant couldn’t. He’s scairt out of his pants.”

  “Who are you, Captain?” the major asked.

  “Charles Main, sir. Scout for Hampton’s Brigade.”