Down the Sky: Volume Three of the “Strike The Tent” Trilogy

by W. Patrick Lang

  “Where is that?” Sheridan asked.

  Colonel Wilson Ford left his seat, took Major Kimball’s pointer and placed the point on a spot beside the North Fork of the Shenandoah River.” It was a mute reminder that, he too, had been an operative of Baker’s National Detective Bureau.

  Sheridan looked at Ford and Topham and then at Devereux. He looked almost sympathetic. “I remember the spot,” he remarked to no one in particular. “The river is shallow behind the house. Many escaped from us there when we broke their line at Fisher’s Hill. The house needs paint,” he told Devereux. “Nevertheless, Sixth Corps and the cavalry should be withdrawn from the Valley…”

  Stanton looked at his watch. “Very well, you may do so. You were always going to have your way, General Sheridan. That was decided yesterday.” He did not bother to look at the dark little man. “The president will be here in a moment.” He looked at Sheridan. “I trust you will remember that there is a general election next month?”

  Phil Sheridan nodded and smiled bleakly. He saw now that the real purpose of this meeting had been to make him utterly accountable for any adverse consequences of the troop withdrawal. “Why is the president coming to this meeting?” he asked.

  “General Devereux will accompany you to Winchester and points south tomorrow morning,” Stanton said. “I hope you will listen to him. He knows the area in great detail. That, too, was already decided. Why is the president coming?” Stanton smiled in anticipation of the unhappiness that would fill Devereux’s enemies in the room. “He signed the papers this morning awarding Brigadier General Claude Crozet Devereux the new medal, the Medal of Honor, for his valor in the Wilderness in May. The Maine regiment that he led there after Alexander Hays was killed cannot say enough good things about him. Ah, here is the president.”

  Abraham Lincoln graciously offered Sheridan the opportunity to present the medal while Halleck read the citation.

  Sheridan looked more unreadable than usual.

  Devereux’s vision of what Jubal Early might do proved to be more true to Early’s nature than that of Sheridan and Sharpe.

  As Devereux expected, Early had followed the Union cavalry north in the wake of their withdrawal from rapine and arson among the farmers of the Shenandoah Valley.

  Dead and rotting bodies of farm animals, dogs and cats had lain everywhere along the Valley Pike. Many farmhouses had disappeared from the land leaving blackened timbers on the ground. Chimneys stood like watchtowers beside the roads and in the meadows as witnesses for wounded communities. The Scotch-Irish and German farmers came to the road to offer what little they had to the passing soldiers.

  “Jubal!” one man yelled at him outside New Market. “You kill these bastids! You hear me, Jubal?”

  Early took off his hat in greeting to the man’s wife.

  Sheridan Takes Command

  Her little son hid behind her but emerged to cry out, “They killed my pony. He never done nothin’, but they shot him. I begged ‘em. I begged ‘em.”

  By the time his men reached the old Fisher’s Hill line south of Strasburg and Cedar Creek, Early had decided, as Devereux thought he would, that he would take General’s Lee’s advice and attack Sheridan’s people, no matter what the odds.

  The northern end of the Massanutten ridge is called “Three Top Mountain.” At the very end is “Signal Knob,” named for a Union Army signaling station on the crest of the ridge. From the summit, the Shenandoah Valley is spread wide before the eyes of those with wind and legs enough to climb the steep slopes.

  Unable to climb so far, Early sent Major General John Brown Gordon to the top to see for him.

  Gordon commanded what was left of the Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia. They had lost a great many men at Spotsylvania. The Stonewall Brigade and the two Louisiana Brigades were grouped together in pitifully small numbers, but they had enough soldiers to send fifty up the wooded grade with Gordon. At the top they chased the Yankee signalmen off the crest.

  Gordon climbed the tower. From there he could see the green fields to the north, and the wood line along the river below as it ran from left to right, then rising ground beyond and Belle Grove Plantation five miles to the northwest. Most importantly he could see the Yankee camps. There were so many federal soldiers that the ground seemed to crawl in blue masses of color. The closest big camp was just beyond the river in the first large open space; the second was half a mile farther up the slope and the third yet farther back across the Valley Pike but not so far away as Belle Grove Plantation. Far off, beyond the mansion, Gordon could see a great many horses standing in long lines near straight rows of squad tents. Ah, the cavalry corps, he thought, the cavalry corps.

  18 October, 1864

  “And what were they all doing?” Jubal Early asked.

  The sun was warm. A few cheery looking white clouds sailed across the Valley from beyond the Alleghenies to the west in what the Union government called West Virginia.

  Early removed his jacket and handed it to his black camp cook who stood close by. “Thank you Justus,” he said.

  He considered Gordon. “Did she really go out in the street at Winchester to tell the soldiers to go back to their duty?” he asked. The old bachelor’s admiration for John Gordon’s wife was clear in his weather beaten face.

  “Yes, and I was angry with her,” the husband replied. “I would not lose her for any war, for any cause. She should go home, home to Georgia, but, she will not go… Poor Rodes would not have died there if he had not been distracted by helping her and the other women…”

  Early listened closely. “You are a lucky man, Gordon, an admirable man. You look more like a soldier than most of us who went to West Point or VMI. No, I take that back. Nobody could have looked more like a soldier than Rodes. Nevertheless, I want to see you live through this, do you understand?” Early blew his nose in the red bandanna that he always seemed to have in a pocket.

  John B. Gordon

  Leaves drifted down onto the trestle table that they had dragged out of a building. Early had his headquarters in the village of Tom’s Brook, a few miles south of Strasburg on the Valley Pike. The locals stood around in the background to watch the “goings-on.” They, too, looked a lot like the Illinois farmers of Lincoln’s memory at Fort Stephens. There were a few Confederate enlisted men in the crowd. Seemingly casual witnesses, they would carry word of plans to their friends.

  Early knew that the traditions of his army and people would not allow a secret conference that concerned the interests of so many.

  He and Gordon were the principals at the table, but Joe Kershaw, Gabriel Wharton and Thomas Rosser were there as well. John Balthazar stood quietly in the background. They all waited for a decision.

  Battle of Cedar Creek

  Jubal looked at Massanutten Mountain to the east. His hands were clasped behind his back. He looked at the map table again. “All right, this is what we will do,” he said…

  Devereux left the staff meeting on 17th Street to go to Amy Biddle at her office in the Sanitary Commission camp on Shooter’s Hill in Alexandria. He wanted her. In those autumn days he wanted her all the time, but that day he was unsure if he wanted her for herself or if his real motive was a desire to hurt Wilson Ford.

  He went home when he was through with her. When he arrived, he went to his wash room to get the smell of her off him.

  His wife and mother were talkative at dinner. He still wore the Medal of Honor on the breast of his high collared blue uniform. He knew how much his women hated that uniform, and in the depths of his complex soul he wanted them to suffer with him at the sight.

  There was white lace from France in the curtains of the windows, crystal from Belgium, silver from London, and a Hereke Turkey carpet on the floor. These were the everyday surroundings of his life, but he hardly noticed them. He was bred to good taste and took such things for granted.

  His wonderful blonde wife watched him closely. She knows what I have been up to. She always knows. He loo
ked at her across the table. She is so perfect. He resolved to have her as well before he left in the morning.

  She glanced at him and blushed.

  Ah, she knows that as well.

  “Victoria wants to know if you have word of her husband,” his mother said.

  He shook his head. “No. She will be the first to know. How is the baby?”

  “Elisabeth is fine, as she was this morning.”

  He smiled and nodded. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot that I had asked.”

  “Was it difficult?” his wife asked. “The meeting, I mean.”

  “Bad enough,” he said. He held the star of the medal up to look at it, “although at times you would never know that most of them do not trust me. They don’t know what to do… How is Smoot?”

  “He continues to improve,” his mother said. “Vraiment, he should be improving more quickly with the quality of the nursing that he is receiving.”

  He looked at his wife.

  She began to blush again.

  Ah, he thought. Well, why should she not want someone who treats her as she should be treated? Why not? “I will have to be up very early,” he said.

  Hope rose from the table and went to the back stairs, just off the kitchen. These led to the upstairs bedroom in the “ell” that they occupied. She looked back at him before ascending.

  He took the medal off his tunic and laid it in front of his mother.

  “In my family we had a lot of things like that in the time of the emperor,” she remarked. “Our men died in droves to receive them from his hand. Take it. Go to your wife. You are more of a fool than I had thought. Try to bring Joachim, and the White boys home alive… That is all that matters. You are doomed but perhaps something can be saved. Go now.”

  George and Betsy White waited by his horse in the night when he emerged from the house. A groom held the beast.

  “Do not forget my sons,” Betsy said.

  Claude kissed her before mounting to ride away.

  At sundown, John Gordon brought the remnant of the Second Corps, nine thousand men in all, to the junction of the Fisher’s Hill road and the Valley Pike three miles south of Strasburg. The veteran infantry waited soundlessly for the order to move. A little stream named Tumbling Run ran beside the dirt farm road. They stood in the road under the over-arching trees. These trees were still burdened with summer foliage. The leaves drifted down into the wagon ruts. Deer peered from the woods. Across the meadow beyond Tumbling Run a red fox watched.

  Gordon had decided to bring a mule drawn battery of six pounder Napoleon smooth bored guns on this night march. The mules looked around wondering why they were standing still for so long in the chilly evening.

  The column began to move down the dirt road to the east. It stopped and started repeatedly in the way that long columns always do. After half a mile the moving snake of men and beasts left the dusty road and followed a track that led to the left across another wide pasture. This one was filled with cows that stared at the passing humans. At the far side of the grassy space there was a line of sycamores and water poplars marking the bank of the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. There was a ford at the end of the track. The water was three feet deep on a stone ridged bottom.

  On the river bank the artillery gun crews dismounted the cannon and made the tubes, ammunition chests and wheels into pack loads for mules. They chose mules for this task because they were more intelligent, sure footed and involved in their surroundings than horses.

  The long column began to make its way up a logging trail that went up and across the nose of Signal Knob.

  Gordon had ordered the men and mules to be tied together with six foot cords to avoid “breaking” the column of march in the dark. The passage would be hard enough without such disruptions. The nine thousand men crept up the track, man after man, mule after mule. The mules listened to the whispers of men who had become their protectors. After sunset Gordon passed the word to close up until the man or animal in front could be touched.

  The moon was a narrow crescent crawling across the sky. The 9,000 soldiers moved in a silence broken only by the noise of hooves, boots and breaking sticks. The head of the column reached an intersecting path that led down and to the left in the direction of the river and the Union Army.

  Guides stood at the crossing to be sure the column turned. The posted men swung their arms and shivered in the October night.

  John Balthazar watched Gordon’s corps disappear on the road by Tumbling Run. By the time the tail of the column disappeared into the dusk, the head of the moving river of men and animals was two miles distant and climbing the mountain.

  Jubal Early waited with the battalion on the Valley Pike. It was his custom to keep Balthazar and his men close by.

  At eight o’clock, Thomas Rosser’s cavalry passed through Balthazar’s position and reached the darkened town of Strasburg. There was little resistance from a handful of federal soldiers left behind in the town. Rosser moved north on the Valley Pike. An hour later he waited south of Cedar Creek for Joe Kershaw’s division of infantry to come forward to join him. The local people had come to Rosser’s camps in the last few days to describe log forts just across the creek. It would be the infantry’s task to take those forts and clear the way north toward Middletown and Belle Grove Plantation.

  Joe Kershaw’s division entered Strasburg at nine to find the townspeople lining the streets. Women gave soldiers food and old men patted the unknown figures on the arm. Someone in the crowd started to sing. Kershaw asked them to stop.

  They watched silently as their men passed.

  Early rode into Strasburg with Balthazar’s battalion behind him. The iron tires of the two Napoleons clattered on the cobblestones of Main Street.

  The shabby two story buildings looked down on the Confederates in the darkness. The town had twelve hundred inhabitants. Three hundred were gone in the Confederate Army, of these, one hundred were dead, and another hundred were prisoners.

  The small divisions of Gabriel Wharton, Pegram, and Ramseur followed that of Kershaw. Twelve thousand men of the Army of the Valley marched up the road straight at the wooden blockhouses along Cedar Creek and the bivouacked, and massed 31,000 men of three Union Army Corps who slept peacefully behind the protection of the little forts.

  To the east Gordon brought his nine thousand down the trail to the bottom of Three Top Mountain. He looked at his watch by the light of a shuttered lantern. It was four in the morning. The roadbed of the Manassas Gap Railroad lay beside the macadam road that connected Strasburg to Front Royal in the east.

  The long column crossed the road, moving softly in the night. A wide and grassy field extended all the way to the trees that marked the North Fork of the Shenandoah River a quarter mile ahead. There were guides waiting in the meadow, guides from each unit. The men flowed into the field.

  The guides took them to their assigned places where they lay down to rest and wait for the order to go forward. They lay on the ground in three massive rows of regiments and brigades.

  The mules were kept behind in the railroad cut for fear that they would not be quiet.

  In the infantry there was a dead quiet. These men had been at war for three years. They knew their trade well. As they lay in the dead grass for hours, the chill set in, penetrating the rough brown uniforms. They hugged themselves and prayed for the dawn.

  In front of the silent and shivering mass of men, red dots could be seen moving back and forth on what must be a road beyond the river. The sound and smell of horses made it easy to know that this was a cavalry picket. The aroma of cigar smoke drifted across the grassy field.

  The soldiers in brown hoped that the Yankees would have a few cigars left when the sun came up.

  At six o’clock John Gordon held a gloved hand before him. He could count his fingers. He stood beside the commander of his leading brigade. “Go now,” he whispered.

  The men rose to their feet, stretching and stamping to get the blood flowing again.
The movement spread until all stood. The front ranks started forward. They crossed the space to the river bank, brushed past the trees and splashed down into the water.

  They were half way across when the Union cavalry became aware of them.

  Shots were fired, but the brown men swarmed up from the water in a mass that killed quickly.

  Beyond the dirt road on the river bank was a steep bank covered with brush and trees. It was fifteen yards high. Skirmishers clambered to the top, reaching down to pull comrades upward. At the top they came out of the trees in an ever increasing flood.

  Ahead was a large tent camp. The white shelters stood in perfectly straight rows in their hundreds. There were cooking fires. Company cooks stood around the fires wearing aprons emblazoned “US Army” in letters a foot high. The smell of coffee was in the air.

  The brown killers reached the tents as the first sleepy men came scrambling out. Many of them were still dressed in nothing but long handled underwear. The Confederate mass drove straight through the tents. Men were shot or bayoneted on all sides. The lucky surrendered and were herded into groups.

  The cooks served coffee to Rebel soldiers who observed them in sardonic amusement.

  The mule drawn battery had crossed the river with its pack loads and ammunition.

  Black pioneer troops made a path to the top of the steep bank. Axes rose and fell. Shovels threw dirt wildly. The mules moved up the slope, encouraged by their drivers and pulled forward by the pioneers. “Hee! Yah, Bessie! Get, girl! Get!”

  The mules came over the top and into the meadow beyond. Crews began to assemble the guns.

  Black pioneers ran across the grass to get their share of the hot coffee, bacon and hard tack that cooks handed out by the fires. The cooks’ own men stood nearby guarded by riflemen in brown. Everyone’s breath hung before them as steam in the frosty dawn.