by John Jakes
“I’m glad to run into you this way,” the general said to him, “because it allows me to bring you two bits of news you may regard as vindications.” Puzzled, Charles waited for him to continue. “In attempting to drill his men recently, Captain von Helm fell off his horse and cracked his neck. He was intoxicated at the time. He died within the hour. Further, your favorite, Private Cramm, has disappeared without leave.”
“He’s probably twenty miles behind with a few hundred others.”
“Cramm is not a straggler. He deserted. He left a note informing us he had enlisted to defend Southern soil, not to campaign in the North.”
“God above. I’m surprised he didn’t hire a lawyer to write up his explanation.” Charles stifled laughter. So did Ab.
“I thought the news would be of some comfort.”
“Shouldn’t admit it, General, but it surely is.”
“Don’t be ashamed. The shame was that a leader as good as you lost that election. If we had only Cramms and von Helms, we’d be finished. Godspeed, Captain. I’m sure I’ll be calling for your services and Lieutenant Woolner’s quite soon.” He galloped off to rejoin his staff.
After presenting their report, Charles and Ab spent the evening awaiting new orders. They didn’t get any. They ate, tended their horses, tried to sleep, and in the morning went down to watch Old Jack lead his men into Maryland.
In the mind of Charles Main and many others, Stonewall Jackson had undergone a transformation during the past year. His fame was so enormous, his feats so Olympian, that you tended to think more and more of Jackson as merely a name—a legend that couldn’t possibly be connected with a real human being, especially not one like the shy bumpkin Cousin Orry had befriended in his plebe year. But Jack was real, all right, smartly sitting his cream-colored mount as he crossed over the river to the trees while a band blared “Maryland, My Maryland” to welcome him.
Ab gave Jackson some attention, but was more interested in the long column of infantry following him. Jackson’s men looked as if they had marched and fought and slept in their clothes for years without washing them. They carried weapons but little else. Gone were the bulging knapsacks and haversacks of ’61.
These were the fabled soldiers known as Jackson’s foot cavalry because they could march sixty miles in two days, and had. Charles stared in amazement at rank on rank of wild beards, crazy glinting eyes, cheeks and foreheads burned raw by exposure to sun.
“My God, Ab, a lot of them don’t have shoes.”
It was true. Whatever footwear he saw was torn or in separate pieces kept together by snippets of twine. Watching the column pass, Charles estimated that fifty percent of Jackson’s men marched on bare feet that were cut, bruised, stained with old blood, stippled with scabs, covered with dirt. A man might learn to tolerate such misery in warm weather, but when winter came—?
Studying one wrinkled, mean-faced private sloshing through the shallows, Charles presumed the soldier was forty, then saw he was wrong. “They look like old men.”
“So do we,” Ab said, hunching over Cyclone’s neck. “Taken notice of the gray in your beard lately? They say Bob Lee’s is almost white. A powerful lot of things have changed in a year, Charlie. And it ain’t the end.”
Unexpectedly, Charles shivered. He watched the dirty feet marching into Maryland and wondered how many would march back.
57
NINTH OF SEPTEMBER. HOT light of late summer hazing the rolling country. The green yellowing now, drying and withering. The time of gathering a harvest.
The cavalry strung out a line nearly twenty miles long. Behind it, Lee’s divisions maneuvered, ready to strike clear to Pennsylvania, some said. Below the line, over the blurry hills—McClellan, surely. Coming out in force from Washington. Slow as ever, but coming out. Bogus rustics on horseback had been spied along the Potomac, watching the movement through White’s Ford. Scouts for the other side.
Hampton encamped at Hyattstown, a few miles south of Urbana. Charles packed all but essential possessions into the field trunk holding his original legion sword and the Solingen blade. Out of the trunk he took his gray captain’s coat. It didn’t take many brains to conclude that the invasion would lead to some heavy fighting. He wanted his own side to be able to identify him. He watched his trunk lifted into one of the baggage wagons as if for the last time.
He bundled his coat and tied it behind his saddle—his well-worn McClellan model, bought new in Columbia. The saddle had been adapted from a Prussian design by the man so earnestly trying to destroy them. Queer war, this.
Hungry war, too. Ab Woolner complained half the evening. “Nobody around here gonna feed us. It’s more green corn for the two-legged as well as the four-legged. We ought to name this the green corn campaign, Charlie boy.”
Charles said nothing, seeing to his powder and ball so he could get some sleep. They might need it, wish for it, pray for it soon.
Tenth of September. Charles and eight other scouts out after nightfall, probing. They damn near rode into blue-coated videttes. They charged the videttes on the white-drenched road and heard no yells about Black Horse, Black Horse!
Gunfire. One scout blown down—and luckless Doan lost another mount. The scouts galloped off carrying two wounded; Charles carried Doan, hot wind in his face under the moon. Had they met Pleasonton’s men, he wondered. Those boys had shot straight and ridden better than any Yankees he had seen so far. Maybe the shoe salesmen and machinery operators were learning how to fight on horseback. Maybe the Union cavalry would be something to worry about one day.
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 f
ew 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.