Valley of the Shadow: A Novel

by Ralph Peters

  “Bless you, Bobby. Give those boys the devil.” He lifted his hat. “I’d better get back up there. Does sound unpleasant.”

  A round of solid shot struck the earth close enough to spatter both men with dirt and bits of stone. Rodes, who wore a new-looking uniform, seemed more bothered at that than at the prospect of battle.

  “Close, that one,” Gordon said.

  Rodes smiled broadly, spreading his mustaches. “Close don’t count.”

  No more time. Gordon pulled his horse around and teased it with the reins, no spurring required. One with its master, the great beast gathered speed.

  Guns raged and the battle roared, deafening, newly alarming. Explosive rounds impacted and men screamed.

  He neared a section of rifled pieces firing from a knoll, hardly a hundred yards along his way, and he realized that something was wrong. As if he smelled it well before he saw it.

  The cannoneers, first of one gun, then of the next, ceased their labors and peered in his direction, openmouthed in shock. At first, Gordon thought they were startled by his appearance.

  But that wasn’t it, he sensed as much in a moment. He turned to look back at whatever had caught their attention.

  Through curls of smoke, he saw a dreadful thing. It was Rodes. Unmistakably. It was Bob Rodes, no longer in the saddle, but flat on the ground, as soldiers tried to control his maddened horse. The animal sprayed everyone with blood. Aides and others rushed to the fallen general. All nearby activity came to a halt.

  Gordon galloped back down the slope and leapt from the saddle before his horse had stopped. Running to keep his balance, he pushed men aside then dropped to his knees beside his friend and rival.

  Rodes stared heavenward, unblinking. One side of his head was a slop of jagged bone, blood, and slime. Blood drenched his chest as well.

  Gordon stood up, glaring.

  “All of you. Back to your business.” He firmed his spine and stiffened his jaw to master his own emotions. When he was certain that he could continue to speak without flaw or weakness, he told them, “General Rodes wouldn’t want you crying like women, he’d want you fighting. Killing goddamned Yankees. Now get to it!”

  He grabbed a captain he knew to be reliable. “Ride back and find General Battle. Bring him here. I don’t care what he’s doing, you bring him here. On my order. And don’t go blathering to everybody you meet.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  But Rodes, before his death, had himself summoned Battle to report. Drenched with sweat and horse foaming, the brigade commander appeared barely a minute after the aide had ridden off.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said when he got a look at Rodes.

  Gordon turned to the dead man’s befuddled staff. “Well, don’t just let him lie there. Fetch an ambulance. Get him out of sight, take him back to Winchester.” He turned to Cullen Battle, who was a hard man. “Damned shame and worse, but there’s no time now to fuss. You’re senior brigadier, I do believe?”

  Battle, still appalled, could only nod.

  “Well, take command, man. By General Early’s order and on my word, you’re to take this division…” Gordon realized that he was getting ahead of himself, that he needed to explain about the gap the Yankee advance had opened. But there was no time left, every sound around them had grown ominous.

  Battle rescued the situation. “And take it into that gap out there, out front of us. Yes, sir. General Early overtook me, caught me up on what’s doing. Damn Yankee fools.”

  “Thrash the devil out of them, Cull. Take Sheridan’s scalp, if you can.”

  “Wouldn’t say that around my Alabama boys. Might take you serious.”

  They looked down at Rodes a last time as two officers and a sergeant lifted him onto a litter. Battle saluted, followed by Gordon.

  John Brown Gordon took off his hat and wiped an eye.

  “Sweating like a Dalton hog,” he explained. “Go kill some Yankees, Cull.”

  12:05 p.m.

  The fields north of Red Bud Run

  Major James Breathed deemed it absurd to stand on the “dignity of an officer.” Needing to be in on the sport, he dismounted for a time and helped serve a piece, relishing the roar and recoil, the long trail of shot through the blue sky and the rising smoke, the abrupt devastation visited upon the Yankees. Fitz Lee had been right, damned right, that the high fields were a perfect artillery position. As the Yankees advanced, their right flank lay as open as a belly exposed by a clumsy surgeon’s knife. His guns had never done a better day’s service.

  The Yankees appeared as foolish as they were craven, just blundering forward, one rank after another, and not one blue-belly officer in authority stopping to think, Why, my, oh my, those Rebs have guns over there, we’d best look into it. No, they just stumped forward, stalwart and stupid, and Breathed’s guns swept them away like ants.

  Fitz Lee had added more horsemen from Wickham’s Brigade to defend the guns, but it seemed a waste of man-flesh and horsemeat now. The Yankees didn’t even take an interest, just let themselves be slaughtered. The ladies of Winchester might have laid out a luncheon between the caissons, for all the danger posed by Sheridan’s army. The blue-bellies didn’t even respond with artillery, let alone an infantry assault.

  They deserved to lose, deserved to be killed. This wasn’t murder, just culling inferior beasts from the human herd.

  Across the creek and to the right of his blue-clad, mindless targets, Breathed saw gray ranks advancing at last.

  12:05 p.m.

  Gordon’s front

  Nichols felt caught up in one of those dreams in which things made sense and didn’t make sense at all, one of those troubling dead-of-night journeys during sleep when you watched yourself doing peculiar things, thinking all the while, That can’t be right, that can’t be right at all. He’d trailed the Yankee ranks over low hills and into swales, across shot-ripped fields and through groves sheltering skulkers, Yankees who took no interest in his wanderings, since each man’s sole concern was his own hide in his own britches.

  There were wounded men, too, and dead men, some from his brigade, but none he marked from his regiment, though he didn’t look too hard, didn’t want to blunder. Most of the fallen were Yankees, though, swept by artillery fire from fields off to the north, the guns spitting flame and puffing balls of smoke, bewilderingly unmolested by the blue-bellies. Errant shells from his own kind posed more danger to him than Yankees now.

  Yankee wounded drifted past him, careless of all matters beyond their pain or bewilderment. Not one bothered him or spoke a word.

  Trailing the last line of Yankees at a cautious fifty yards, he crossed a stream still clear of blood, flowing quick from some spring off in a grove. He could not remember crossing the stream before, although he knew that he had been too tired to note much all the ages ago that had been that morning.

  He wasn’t tired now, only gone strange, a kind of ghost, a ghost with a thumping heart. Not tired, though. Keyed up like a thoroughbred racer with peppered loins.

  He stopped. Because the rear rank of Yankees stopped, just below the crest of a low hill. When they dropped to the ground, he dropped to the ground.

  More shooting. Volleys. Closer. Not too close, but closer. And he heard again, at last, that kickering wail he knew, the Rebel yell.

  They were coming, he’d known they’d come.

  Nichols eased forward, crawling, to what he took to be a safer position, less exposed, maybe twenty yards behind the Yankees. Close enough to hear their officers shouting. It was odd to hear those words, the same words used by his officers, spoken in different accents.

  A few Yankees ran past him. Nichols sprawled, playing dead. He knew that even frightened men preferred to sidestep a corpse.

  More Yankees hurried rearward. Slowly, uniquely awkward, the wounded followed. Wasn’t a stampede, though. ’Least not yet. He wondered if he should have remained in that streambed a little ways back. Might pay to crawl on back there, wasn’t so far.

&
nbsp; “They’re flanking us!” a Yankee cried. “On the left.”

  And then they were off to the races, with their officers ordering their soldiers to withdraw and trying unsuccessfully to keep order.

  Nichols contorted himself, throwing out an arm and a leg, imitating the dead, of which he’d seen plenty.

  His heart drummed. So close. He could hear distinct cries, individual voices, wonderfully Southern. The two sides traded volleys. But the Yankees didn’t intend to hold their ground, not this ground. While Nichols prayed in silence to the Lord, repenting his sins and promising flawless behavior, he felt the approach of the retreating Yankees, telegraphed through the earth. He pressed his eyelids tight, face turned toward the earth, struggling to keep his breathing shallow, afraid a Yankee would step on his flung-out hand, or stumble over him, and cause him to reveal that he was alive.

  A Yankee line paused only yards away, close enough for him to smell them and hear their leathers creak, to hear their excited gasping, as if they had to gulp all the air and leave none for their enemies.

  They fired a volley. He hoped he had not flinched.

  And then they were gone, withdrawing far more quickly than they had come. He waited, expecting his own kind to arrive, but more Yankees came by, last strays and skirmishers, cursing in every language in the world. They ran like rabbits, most of them.

  When the footfalls stopped and only the distant cannon shook the earth, he braved a quick look around. Just as gray ranks crested the top of the little hill where the Yankees had lain and waited.

  His people halted.

  Glancing back toward the retreating Yankees, he saw that a few regiments withdrew slowly, in good order, defiant still, while others had all but dissolved. Just beyond the little stream, one Yankee color-bearer, admirably brave, walked calmly backward, supporting his flag with one hand and emptying his pistol with the other.

  Nichols heard fateful, angry commands in Southern accents. He dropped back flat on the earth. His own side loosed a volley over his head.

  Some Yankees replied, but their strength had lessened greatly. After another volley, his people advanced at a walk. Wary of nervous men, Nichols allowed the gray lines to pass over him, just as the Yankees had done.

  When they had gone, he finally stood up. His impulse was to run for his own rear, to find his comrades, to be safe again, safe, if not from Yankee bullets, at least from the awful fate of a man abandoned on a battlefield, alone. But first he needed a rifle worth the carrying.

  He followed the advancing ranks in gray, glancing about for a weapon that had been carried with pride, cleaned and oiled, but he didn’t get far before voices called from clots of wounded Yankees down in the swale.

  “Johnny Reb, for God’s sake, give me water.” “Water, Johnny, on your mother’s love.” “Please, Johnny, water … water…”

  There were so many voices, it spooked him. But no man here meant him harm.

  “Tell my mother,” one voice cried, “someone tell my mother.”

  “Water…”

  He tugged a canteen loose from a dead Federal, rolling the man over and revealing a black hole and clotted blood where once a nose had been. Brains slipped from the Yankee’s head.

  Nichols ran down to the creek. Blessedly, it was not yet tainted with blood. He filled the canteen and followed the trail of voices, returning again and again to the stream, until the water turned pink and began to redden. The men who retained some alertness beyond their pain were grateful to him. Some jabbered madly. Others wept or just stared. One gut-shot man, bubbling blood and reeking of bowel stench, drank until sated, then cried out to God.

  Noble feelings had nothing to do with giving these wounded men water. Nor was it the conscious act of a Christian. Nichols had no high thoughts, none at all. He acted by rote, the way a man loaded his rifle in a battle, without thinking. The summons to action was crude, deep, and physical. He did not even pity the men to whose lips he brought a canteen. He just did a thing that needed doing, the way a man fed the chickens when it was time.

  “I love you, Isabelle,” a lieutenant told him.

  ELEVEN

  12:35 p.m.

  Union center

  With splendid discipline, the 5th Maine Battery’s guns fired in sequence.

  “Ignore the order, Stevens,” Colonel Charles Tompkins told his subordinate. “Keep up your fires.”

  “But General Wright—”

  “General Wright can remove me, should he find my performance wanting. Back to your labors, Captain, mind on the enemy.”

  Tompkins, commanding the Sixth Corps artillery, found alarm distasteful. If Wright had lost his stomach—which it appeared he had, ordering off these guns—a stoic posture was the proper tonic. In the best spirit of Rhode Island, his home state. He drew his pistol, though, as he steered between the caissons: not in fear of Confederates, but ready to shoot any cannoneer who ran.

  The situation did have a nasty look. The field of battle was as confused as any Tompkins had known, and these guns were all that stood between the oncoming Confederates and a stolen victory. But a cool eye and steady hand calmed many a storm. Even if, in the end, he could not stop the Johnnies, he might at least give the infantry time to reorganize and leave things a bit less bad.

  “Steady, steady,” he whispered, as much to himself as to his mount.

  Sheridan’s attack had gone in late, stumbled, and resumed. The graybacks had counterattacked. Old Ricketts and Getty hit back in turn. On the right, the Nineteenth Corps swirled about in a maelstrom all its own. Now the Johnnies called the tune again, gamboling down the middle of the field, their tactics and timing impeccable.

  Fleeing with vigor, a blond-bearded soldier nearly ran into Tompkins and his staff. Catching himself just short of a collision, he stared mad-eyed at the colonel, as if he had happened upon General Lee and Satan devouring children, rather than a redleg from Rhode Island.

  Tompkins didn’t threaten the fellow. The infantry was not his charge. His concern was his guns, and his guns were sound.

  He suspected that the weakening in the chain of command had started with Sheridan and proven contagious to Wright. Tompkins had seen the phenomenon before. Generals, a peculiar breed, had to be given time to come around when nettled by doubts, and it was the work of subordinates to sustain things in the meantime. In battle, spirits altered in a blink, capricious as the April weather in Newport.

  Tompkins nudged his horse forward and let the beast paw the ground behind the gun line while he peered through the smoke and shot-stripped trees. The cannoneers about him behaved splendidly. If the Johnnies wanted to pass, they’d pay a toll.

  He rode up to Captain Stevens, who had heart, for all his misgivings. The lad was not the sort to defy orders—especially those from the corps commander himself. On the whole, that recommended the fellow. But obedience had to be clear-eyed, rather than blind.

  “Canister soon, I think,” the colonel said.

  “Plenty of Rebs, sir.”

  Indeed, the Johnnies were many. Howling like all the monkeys in Panama. But hurling lead, not coconuts.

  “Abundant targets ease an artilleryman’s labors,” Tompkins said. “Your number three gun’s shooting long, you’d best see to it.”

  Tompkins waved up his adjutant.

  “Bring up Adams’ battery and McCartney’s lot.” He pointed. “I want them just there, on the left, to sweep the Pike.”

  “Sir, that’s our last reserve, you—”

  “I’d rather not debate the matter, Peabody.”

  The aide bustled off.

  No, he had never seen that trollop War change lovers so often in a single hour. But the way to lose the day was to lose your head.

  Steady, steady.

  Tompkins rode the gun line, alert to hints of weakness, but the Maine lads loaded and fired with all the snap of an exhibition drill. The colonel did not think it sensible for any man to live in Maine by choice, but the unimaginative sort who did quite lent themse
lves to bravery.

  Gore burst from the belly of a cannoneer wielding a ramrod. Without a fuss, his sergeant drove the charge home.

  “Number two gun there, mind your elevation,” Tompkins called. His voice was firm as granite, but not too loud.

  Powder-blackened, the cannoneers leapt to it.

  Where was Russell, though? His division should have come up, it formed the reserve. And if ever the reserve was needed, now was the blasted time. Tompkins was glad that the men he led could not tell how thoroughly drenched he was by sweat.

  The great gray wedge, a howling mob, had gotten unsettlingly near.

  “Double-canister, Stevens, double-canister. Don’t husband the inventory.”

  Along the Pike, a battery raced forward. Tompkins noted the guidon of Battery G, 1st Rhode Island Lights, under whose colors he’d begun this war. Adams, the present commander, was a cool one. He’d stand firm.

  Before the Rhode Islanders finished unlimbering, the 1st Massachusetts Battery rattled up.

  Quietly, Tompkins addressed his foe: “If you want that Pike, you’ll have to take it from me.”

  The Johnnies were nearly close enough to hurl rocks. Afoot now, Stevens strode up to Tompkins’ horse.

  “Sir … we’ll lose these guns. General Wright said—”

  “Shoulders back, chest out, man. Better to lose the guns than lose the battle.”

  That was heresy, Tompkins knew, an assault on the dogma of gunnery’s episcopate. You were supposed to save your guns at all costs, even if it meant you lost the battle. Well, heresy was an old Rhode Island specialty, beginning with Roger Williams and his pack, for whom even the Puritans were too orthodox.

  Tompkins wasn’t minded to budge an inch.

  “Canister, Stevens, canister! That’s the way!”

  12:45 p.m.

  Union center

  Delighted to be unleashed at last, Brigadier General David Russell rode proudly through the chaos of the day, guiding his division into battle. Russell had feared his corps commander intended to withdraw. The notion had shocked him, since Wright was known as a steady man in a fight. But the best men had bad days, and that was the truth of it.