by Ralph Peters
Hayes stepped around the fire and poured, savoring scent and steam. The day had been damp and the night was chill, a foreboding of October.
“Told you a hundred times now, Joe. If I never see a star, that’s fine with me.” He smiled back at his brother-in-law, who had followed him through the war and sewn him up more than once. “Not that I’d mind. But I’m content to be one of the good colonels.” He settled the pot beside the fire and took up his own cup, letting the fragrance complete the work of waking him.
“‘General’ would sound better at election time,” Joe said.
Hayes lifted an eyebrow. “Sure about that? The men have some colorful words for generals nowadays.”
Joe drank and grimaced. “Soldiers are always complaining—you should hear them waiting in line for sick call. Oh, sure enough, they curse the generals now. But after the war, they’ll adore them like pagan idols, wait and see.”
“After the war…,” Hayes mused. Heated by the coffee, the tin cup stung his lips.
“After the war, Grant’s going to be president, mark my words. Now…” Joe paused, drawing up his shoulders as if for a public speech, and Hayes knew what was coming. “You might want to show a little more gratitude to the folks back home. Win the election next month, there’d be no disgrace in resigning your commission, none whatsoever. Take your seat in Congress. Will of the people.”
Too quick a swallow scalded Hayes’ tongue and throat. But even pain reminded a man that he was still alive. After the worst of his wounds, suffered at South Mountain, he had learned to value each day.
Despite the half hour’s reprieve Hayes had meant to grant them, his men stirred in the darkness. His adjutant was trying to look out for him, to ensure he was not caught drawers-down, but the boy couldn’t feel the rhythm of command. Russ was a fine young man, loyal and brave, but he lacked McKinley’s finesse, the ability to read a commander’s mind and get a step ahead of things, the right things. Hayes missed Will. Nonetheless, it had only been right to send him to Crook’s staff, where he would have a greater chance of advancement. Lucy regarded Will, a hopeless mooncalf around the ladies, almost as another son. She had been pleased when Hayes wrote to tell her of McKinley’s new position.
He had almost killed Will at Kernstown, dispatching him to guide a stranded regiment back to safety. He had not expected to see him alive again. But after a suicidal gallop cheered on by the men, the boy had returned to his side, blackened by smoke and flashing his fine, white teeth. Will McKinley had earned his chance at promotion.
Well, Will was gone and Russ Hastings would come along. Meanwhile, Hayes wasn’t having any more of his brother-in-law’s ambitions for the family.
“Joe, I told the party boys back home that, if nominated, I would not go home to campaign. And that, if elected, I would not take my seat until the war ends. I mean to stand by that.”
“You’d do more good in Congress than here. No great shortage of colonels, Rud. You’d think the Army calved them.”
“Any man who resigns his commission for politics should be scalped.” The fire had failed, but embers glowed. Hayes gestured at the surrounding camp. “They can’t resign. Never seemed quite fair to me.”
Joe splashed the dregs of his coffee on the ground. “Rud, you’ve paid off any obligation you ever had. Wounded twice, seen your share of fighting.”
“Took me a while to learn how to do things right,” Hayes said. He still felt a rawness of tongue and throat from his hasty swallowing. “Figure I ought to put what I’ve learned to use.”
Joe dismissed that. “No one’s going to be grateful, Rud. Not even the soldiers, not really. All this talk of duty’s a disease of the mouth that’s infected men who know better. And don’t ever use the word honor around me, I’ve heard that one enough. You try being a surgeon amid this carnage. Trade places with me, and I’ll show you honor’s results and duty’s end.” He stabbed the fire’s remains with a stick. “I might as well have been a proper butcher and saved my pap the cost of an education. This Army’s a scheming, scrambling sack of scoundrels, angling for promotion at any cost. The only thing honor gets a man is killed.”
“Stranger might mistake you for a cynic, Joe.”
“Better you hear the truth from me, than read more of Emerson’s nonsense—was he ever in a war? Not that I know of. The men who write the books always stay at home.” He discarded the stick he’d used to torment the embers. “You’re a western man, Rud, you don’t need New England ‘wisdom,’ anyway. More coffee in there?”
Hayes poured the last of it for his brother-in-law. “I may be an Ohio man—and proud of it—but my family’s roots go deep in New England dirt. They’re not all fools up thataway.”
“Devil they aren’t. Or Harvard Law School would’ve taught you how to argue a better case with yourself. I’m not letting go of it. You’re going to win that election, you know you are, and you need to go to Congress. Damn them all, you should’ve gotten a general’s star after Kernstown.”
“They don’t give out promotions for defeats.”
“Or for fighting a rearguard action for nineteen miles? And whipping the Johnnies at the end of it all? You saved Crook’s whole damned army.”
“Lucy wouldn’t care for your language, Joe.”
They smiled at each other, knowingly and warmly.
“My sister’s a Methodist,” Joe noted. “I’m merely methodical.”
“Lucy…,” Hayes said, looking away. He set his tin cup on the ground and absently scratched the last of his summer boils. It had been a painful season in the saddle. And he’d had a bad round of poison ivy, too. First time in his life he’d been impatient for the cold to overtake him. “I do wish I could…”
“Don’t you worry,” Joe told him. “It’s hardly her first child.”
“No.”
“She’ll be fine.”
“She wants a daughter, you know,” Hayes mused. “After all the boys.…”
“Rud, for Christ’s sake, she’s forgotten.”
“Neither of us will.”
“And what would your hero Emerson say? One infant’s death, amid this unholy slaughter?”
“Emerson would recognize the value—the validity—of each life.”
“Balderdash. For God’s sake, Rud, you couldn’t have prevented it. Typhoid doesn’t play favorites.”
“I never should have let her bring him to camp.”
“She wanted to be with you. It was her decision.”
“Eighteen months old,” Hayes said. He sighed, but put the iron back in his spine. “You’re right, I know that. As a matter of intellect. But I’m starting to think that intellect is the lesser part of a man.” He scratched himself again and added, “Lucy believes he’s in some celestial paradise, waiting for her up on a fluffy white cloud.”
“You don’t, of course.”
“My reason stands against it.”
“Well, she’s got other, healthy sons to be thankful for. And a husband who’s still alive. Despite his own best efforts to get blown to pieces.”
Abruptly, Hayes said, “I never wanted this war.”
Irascible again, Joe said, “But you wanted to end slavery, don’t say you didn’t. You always wanted that, ’long as I’ve known you.”
“I thought it might wear away, that we could chip at it, bit by bit.” Smoothing his beard, he spoke to his brother-in-law’s ears but to his own heart. “All those Negroes I defended in court … I believed I was doing the right thing, the moral thing. It seemed so clear. Now I see that I helped ignite all this. We all did, the self-righteous, the idealists … Emerson, too.” He jerked his head as if struck. “Good God, I want it to end, to bring an end to it.”
“Then go to Congress.”
“No.” He attempted another smile, but failed. “Anyway, brother-in-law of mine, I haven’t been elected yet.”
“You will be. No Copperhead Democrat’s going to beat our twice wounded, well-beloved colonel.”
Around the
m, the camp roused with curses and struggling cook-fires, with grumpy men laboring over damp wood or stepping off for privacy. Hayes did not need daylight to follow their ways. They had become his ways, too.
It was the oddest thing. For all the slaughter and even his wounds, he had never been in better health in his life. A sickly boy and a young man who flirted with tuberculosis, he had found hard muscles and refreshed lungs in the air of army encampments, even as camp life killed men by the scores and hundreds with measles, dysentery, typhoid, and the smallpox. And the years scrambling over the mountains of western Virginia chasing Rebs had left him with legs thick as tree trunks. Nearing forty-two, he was, despite those saddle boils, truly in life’s prime.
Emerson was right, so right, about life’s ineffability, its inexhaustible richness, and the divinity that resided within each man, rather than in a cold and distant God. Emerson saw the beauty behind the veil and the soul’s inherent greatness here on earth. The only thing his idol lacked, Rud Hayes had come to see, was a sense of humor. His soldiers had taught him the necessity of laughter.
Out in the fire-specked darkness, Lieutenant Henry demanded a count of the staff’s enlisted men, striving for authority and sounding like the boy he had recently been. Another eager soul, Henry had been brought in to fill Hastings’ position when Russ moved up to take Will McKinley’s place on what Doc Joe liked to call “the Army carousel.”
Hayes smelled biscuits, frying meat, and a hundred pots of coffee.
“You know what the damnable thing is, Joe? The thing I hate, that always sickens me afterward?”
“Rancid bacon?”
Hayes ignored the attempt at wit and said, “The way I feel in battle, right in the thick of it.”
“Fear?” Joe asked, surprised. “Every man feels that.”
A bugle sounded, followed by another.
“No,” Hayes said. “Alive.”
4:00 a.m.
The Valley Pike, north of Stephenson’s Depot
Men weren’t puking themselves belly-white anymore, and that was a kindness. The march the past evening had been the Devil’s own foot-burner, and many a man had staggered to the roadside, emptying himself from the wrong end, maybe even falling to his knees in a pagan mockery of prayer. “The wages of sin!” Elder Woodfin had cried, striding past those sickened by whiskey. “Hell’s going to stink a thousand times worse than your vomit.…”
Nichols had been proud, though, that of the men who’d indulged, only a handful had been from the 61st Georgia. And those men had paid a terrible price on the march, with the chaplain preaching that hellfire itself was rushing up their throats.
Nor had they been given time to sleep off their misery, for the brigade had stopped but three hours at Bunker Hill before the sergeants came hollering again and all but dragged weary men back onto the road, drunkards and those who had taken the Pledge alike. Now, with the pace yet another trial to foot and mortal spirit, empty-gutted men cursed themselves to damnation, but kept on going.
And a voice, solemn and terrible, had come out of the darkness after one of the chaplain’s sallies, the voice of good Lem Davis, who had not touched whiskey since the death of his wife and a child stillborn; Lem, who had not drunk one drop in Martinsburg; Lem, who had borne himself like a brawny Job, enduring: Lem had declared, “I have no fear of hellfire,” just that and not a word more. And nary a man had answered, for Lem’s tone had not asked, but Nichols had been glad that the chaplain had moved along to inspire some other company and had not heard Lem blaspheme, for he dreaded what else Lem might say, should he be admonished.
Who knew, from day to day, which man would pray and who would sink to outrage? So many things had grown changeable, and men had become as tetchy as wild beasts. It almost felt like a family nigh onto breaking up, threatening to go different ways for reasons that would not quite fit to words, maybe just the hand of the Lord at work, the Lord who commanded love but passed understanding. The men would fight, let no low wretch claim otherwise, but the days between the skirmishing had grown baneful, with flaring pride fading overnight into doubt. Maybe it was just that every last man was tired as a beast worked to its end.
Surely, they were weary men this night, hurrying through the darkness and the dust, hastening southward yet again, alert to every rumor coursing through the ranks, reading omens into each courier’s passing and yearning to see the expressions on the faces of Generals Gordon and Rodes as they trotted forward to cries of “Make way, you men, make way!” But there was no least light from above, nor burning bush nearby, only the hack of men clearing unsound lungs and the jostle and jangle of infantry, Georgia infantry, rushing it knew not where. Surely, word would come quickly, though, on a tide of shouted orders, for generals riding together at night’s bottom was a sign, even if they were famous friends, as Generals Gordon and Rodes were known to be.
Out there somewhere, waiting, lurked the Midianites.
In Martinsburg, Gordon had been as wrathful as Moses confronted with the Golden Calf, ready to smite, unlike himself in the fury and dread of his language, cursing the drunkards—his own men—who had shamed themselves, their officers, and the Confederacy. Not Sodom, not Gomorrah, had been so chastised. The general’s vocabulary would have made Lucifer blush, and no man, not one among them, had ever heard Gordon, a Christian man, speak thus. Elder Woodfin himself had been left speechless, as shocked as any soul, before Gordon marched them off at a murderous pace. And John Brown Gordon rode before them, a Joshua, hot and brooding, aflame with silence.
In the wake of a nothing-much scrap the week before, Nichols had gotten himself a new pair of shoes, assured by Elder Woodfin it was not theft to remove them from the dead Yankee, but good husbandry of which the Lord would approve, as he surely would lift the South up from its trials. Yet on this march neither shoes nor prayer saved a man’s feet from aching sorely. The brigade had rushed to Martinsburg and now was rushing back, but the rushing northward had been done in good-enough spirits, while this sour-bellied return boded no good.
“Going to be a fight,” Dan Frawley said. “A man can smell it.”
Sergeant Alderman told them all, “Only thing I smell is the unwashed manhood of Georgia. Y’all keep marching.”
6:00 a.m.
Locke’s Ford, five miles north of Sheridan’s main attack
Burnished by the early morning light, his favorite scout reported: “Won’t be no surprising them, General. They’re up wide-eyed and looking. Got them some sharpshooters this side of the creek, up by that old cabin, on the ridge there. They’re on the lookout.”
“Far bank?” Custer asked.
“Far bank’s higher.”
“I can see that.”
“Got rifle pits low down, near on the creek, but most of them’s up top, hid in the trees. Fence rails piled up. And you’ve got to cross you a down-running field before you reach the creek, all open shooting. Ground favors the Johnnies.”
“How far? In the open?”
“Sixty, seventy yards. Varies a bit.”
“How many of them?”
“Maybe a bled-out regiment.”
We’ll have the sun at our backs, Custer thought. And in their eyes.
“Good work, Sergeant Willoughby.” Custer turned back to the line of trees concealing his brigade and made straight for the 6th Michigan. The regiment’s colonel was yellow as a Chinaman with jaundice, but Kidd had refused to leave his command today.
They all sensed something momentous.
“Colonel Kidd!” the young brigadier called out. “Hot work!”
Kidd saluted. By the look of him, the colonel might well collapse, but Custer wasn’t going to order any man out of a battle who wanted to fight.
“Forward to the next tree line. Dismount there. You’ll see a shack and some sheds up across a field, place stinks of Rebs. Have your scalawags rush them and drive them out.”
“Right, sir.” Kidd drew off his riding gauntlets and tucked them into his blouse. His hand came t
o rest on his holster. “With your permission?”
Custer nodded. “I want you dismounted, too, Jim.”
Kidd waved his command forward, one of the Michigan Brigade’s bloodied, brilliant regiments. Custer joined them.
In a mere brace of minutes, the 6th was on foot and snapping their Spencer carbines to life.
Leaning down from the saddle, Custer asked, “See the cabin?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then let’s go.”
The colonel looked up at him.
Custer grinned. “Wouldn’t miss this for all the tea in China, Jimmy.” Keeping to his saddle, he drew his saber with a practiced, gorgeous motion. “Don’t mind company, do you?”
“I don’t imagine I really have a choice,” Kidd answered fondly. Turning to his men, the colonel shouted, “Wolverines! Open order! Forward!”
The men moved out, piercing the last fringe of trees and trotting up across a fallow field in bands of skirmishers, trained for independent action and no drill-book infantry nonsense.
The Rebs opened fire, sharpshooters up by the cabin and a few outbuildings. From across the creek, a greater number of rifles added support. Men in cavalry jackets dropped, and for a dangerous instant, the advancing troopers wavered.
Kidd ran ahead, shouting, “Come on, boys, and damn them!”
Custer pranced out in front of them all, long hair flapping and red scarf trailing over his velvet collar, seemingly amused by the hiss of bullets. “Another stripe for the man who takes their coffeepot! I’m thirsty, you Wolverines!”
Led by their colonel, the men surged across the field, howling the brigade’s own battle yell. Custer rode with them, leaping his horse across a stone wall and making straight for the cabin.
A few Rebs stayed too long and fell. The rest ran.
Custer pulled his horse around and located Kidd. “Well done, Jimmy, well done! Now you put those Spencers to work, keep the devils over there occupied.”