by Ralph Peters
The cavalry weren’t much these days, but Early was too dismissive of Fitz Lee.
Jubal Early. A man who might win battles, but never hearts. And Bob Rodes dead, a thing still hard to believe. Zeb York carried off screaming.
Dear Christ, it was a bad day.
“They’re coming again,” a bloodied lieutenant warned.
2:00 p.m.
Eversole’s Knoll
“Plans change, Phil,” Crook said. “Point is to win.”
Sheridan nodded. “Grates on me, though. If you could’ve swung south, cut off their retreat…”
“Have to get them to retreat first. Old Bricktop’s right. I rode over there, had a look. If I extend his flank with one division and swing the other north of that creek bottom—”
“Red Bud Run,” Sheridan said.
“—then clear out that artillery and recross, we can turn their flank and set them running like rabbits. I believe it’ll do the trick, Phil, I really do.”
Staff men kept their distance, sensing that the generals wanted privacy. Between the hill on which they stood and Winchester, volleys prickled on, but with less fury.
“Not just you, though,” Sheridan said. “You flank them, George. And I’ll resume the attack across the front. I’ll be damned if a single man in this army won’t do his part.” His face was blotched and hard-set. “Whole day’s been a piecemeal affair, I’ve made damned-fool mistakes. But I’m done making them.” He snorted. “Would’ve liked to trap that bastard, though.”
“Still might. We’ll see.”
“Cavalry were supposed to do it. Come in on their flank, not play at pony rides.”
“Still might happen. Probably will,” Crook reassured him. “Torbert’s not one to take his ease on a battlefield. Nor are those boys of his. My bet’s that we’re going to give Early a whipping he won’t forget. His quiver’s about empty, way I figure.”
“Hell, George, hasn’t this been a wicked a day?”
“Isn’t over.”
“No.” Sheridan sighed. “I’ll miss Davey Russell, though. That sonofabitch.”
Crook nodded, but just said, “I’ll get my corps moving.”
Sheridan broke off his foray into sentiment. “How long until you get up?”
Crook drew out his pocket watch. “Three. I can go in by three. My corps’s well positioned for the movement.” He neglected to add that he’d brought it up without orders.
“Do it, then,” Sheridan said. “I’ll have the Nineteenth Corps go in beside you.” All of his decisiveness had returned. “Then the Sixth Corps, hit them with everything.”
“Cavalry’s going to show, you wait and see,” Crook said, still bucking up his old comrade. “We’ll make a pretty rout of this mess.”
“Torbert had damned well better show. After I sang the cavalry’s praises to Grant. Which division of yours makes the flanking move? North of the creek?”
“Duval’s. Thoburn’s division is leading my column, he’ll break off and extend the Ninthteenth Corps’ flank. Duval will keep on going across the creek, then wheel to the left.”
“Duval’s brigade commanders? Remind me.”
“Hayes and Johnson. Only two brigades.”
“That enough?”
“They’re good men. The best.”
“Hayes? The politician? The Ohio man?”
Crook smiled his old-Army smile, a phenomenon as thin as frontier rations. “He’ll do. Waxes philosophical, then fights like a Comanche. Honest, for what that’s worth nowadays.”
“Honest? Politician?”
“No man I’d trust more.”
Sheridan smiled, too. “Except for present company, you mean?”
Crook’s smile, a mere cut between his lips, hinted at hidden teeth. “Excepting present company, of course.”
Dropping his smile, Sheridan said, “Tear their guts out.”
3:00 p.m.
Rutherford farm, north of Winchester
Fitz Lee beheld the most awe-inspiring spectacle he had witnessed in the war. It was not a welcome sight.
Across the open fields to the north of the grove to which he’d been driven, at least five thousand blue-clad troopers advanced stirrup to stirrup on a front that filled the horizon. Tidy as if on parade, the mounted men came on at a steady walk, flags and banners aloft, with brass bands urging them southward. It was a display of insolence, of arrogance, of shameless vanity, that filled Lee with raw hatred. And with envy.
Rare was the Confederate officer now who possessed a horse as sound as a Yankee private’s.
One obstreperous band played “Rally ’Round the Flag,” and another answered back with “Yankee Doodle.” Above the thud of hooves on hardening soil, the tack and spurs, carbines and sabers, of all those thousands jangled.
“Dear, sweet Jesus,” Billy Payne said, sitting his horse beside Lee under the trees. He swept his hand back over slicked-down hair.
“Sonsofbitches,” Lee judged. His uncle would not have approved of his language, but his uncle wasn’t there.
After receiving a final, peremptory order from Early, Breckinridge had slipped off with his infantry and guns, leaving Lee with his scattered, exhausted, wildly outnumbered horsemen to hold off what had to be the greatest concentration of cavalry since Ney led the French horse at Waterloo. The whooped-up charges of the Crimea, for all the singsong poesy they’d inspired, surely had been nothing compared to this.
And Lee had about six hundred riders on hand, commanded by Colonel Billy Payne, pure Virginia, a Warrenton lawyer and Black Horse hellion, still a young man and already sire of more children than a quartermaster could number. The rest of Lee’s men had been spread wide to cover roads or regroup from encounters in which they’d been battered badly. He’d delayed Merritt and Averell—two of Torbert’s divisions—since morning, but only a fool could believe the end wasn’t near.
All around him, Virginians on hard-used horses cooed at the spectacle, some attempting jokes at which no one laughed. Payne looked as serious as a man about to be hanged and as murderous as a man who deserved the hanging.
Brave boys all, Lee knew, but the fear in the air was enough to choke a hog.
“You all right, sir?” Payne asked.
All right? And go to the devil. Lee felt sick as a failing consumptive and tired as a slut come Sunday morning. His left arm was bound high where a round had clipped him—the damned thing hurt—but the paw still served for the reins. He’d needed an aide to reload his revolver, though. No, he was not all right at all. Dizzy and puking sick. But that was not the sort of thing a man said to another man. Not at a time like this.
At the end of a man, when all else was used up—health and love and worth and even honor—duty remained.
“Wish they’d at least play a jig a man could cotton to,” one trooper said.
Lee turned toward the voice. “Don’t like the tunes they’re playing, I reckon we’ll have to register an objection.” He looked at the grime-faced, hard-faced men about him. Then he turned to Payne.
“Got to buy time, only one thing to do,” Lee said. “Order your men forward, Billy. Guide to the right of the Pike. You give the order.”
Payne rose in his stirrups and barked the plain command. No time now for inspiration or flourishes.
They left the trees, a shabby gray line, solemn.
“Must admit, I’m not fond of the odds,” Payne said to Lee. “Always fancy a pleasant gallop, though.”
Lee nodded his assent. Payne rose again.
“Charge, Virginia!” the attorney-in-arms shouted. “Charge!”
Ants attacking a buffalo herd, Lee thought. Mean ants, though.
As they came to a gallop, the cavalrymen began screeching their Rebel yell. Some cursed ferociously, doing down the Devil himself and unleashing every shred of anger they’d ever known and held in. Lashing mounts that caught their desperation, the men drew carbines or revolvers, or unsheathed sabers, each turning to the weapon he had left.
T
he harvested field beneath their hooves had dried well enough, if not fully. It didn’t much slow the horses, but caked mud flew everywhere, stinging faces and eyes.
They pounded into a depression, briefly losing sight of the advancing Yankees, and Lee had to slap down a dizzy fit before jumping the stream that meandered through the low ground.
They crested another field and, dear Lord, the Yankees spread before them in a multitude.
No man faltered, not one.
At first the Yankees hardly seemed to notice them. Or care. As if they were ants, indeed, or maybe nothing but a billow of blackflies. Belatedly, a Union regiment posted as skirmishers closed ranks.
Too late.
“Virginia! Virginia!” Payne cried, echoed by dozens of voices.
Remembering their pride, remembering that they had served under Stuart, the men charged as if not one cared for his life, devil-may-care as they had been in the early days of the war, when all things seemed a lark.
Lee just hoped he could stay in the saddle. He knew he couldn’t wield a saber—his pistol would have to do. Above all, he did not intend to give the Yankees the pleasure of taking him prisoner.
The sickness that gripped him could not cloud his reason: He knew he should not have ridden forward himself. But the time for reason had passed.
As they closed on the Yankee skirmishers, Lee began to shout with the others, another madman in a hopeless world. His worn horse pounded to burst its heart.
They smashed into the Yankees, shooting and slashing, and tore through them, leaving empty saddles and bloodied blue-bellies in their wake.
“Don’t stop!” Lee shouted. “Charge, charge!”
Payne was shouting, too.
Lee felt he might vomit over himself and his horse. The horizon wavered. But he shouted again and again between bouts of choking.
The Virginians swarmed forward, almost merry in their hatred now, their sullenness vanquished, their souls exhilarated. When more Yankee regiments spurred out to meet them, the collision cracked like doors slamming in Hell.
Reins tight in a left hand going numb, Lee shot a captain through the heart and swung his pistol across his horse’s mane to fend off a sergeant. Nearby, two men skewered each other at the same moment, each man’s blade propping up the other on their bewildered horses. It took but a minute for the Yankees to break.
Cheering, the Virginians—fewer now—followed after them. Billy Payne hallooed, as if riding to the family hounds back in Fauquier County.
“Virginia! Virginia!”
They pounded over another harvested field, hard on the tails of the Yankees. The bluecoats emptied their pistols toward them, firing wildly back over their saddles.
How many rounds had he fired? Lee tried to remember.
Near him, a horse collapsed, hurling its rider over its head.
“Come on, Nellie Gray,” Lee urged his own horse. “There’s oats on earth and plenty of corn in Heaven.”
Who had said that? His father. The words had leapt out of him.
“Virginia!”
A jolly, deadly steeplechase ensued. They chased the shattered Yankees for a half mile, then more.
Lee knew it was time to stop, to re-form. They had become scattered, disordered. These men had done all that they could, it was time to call off the pursuit.
He also knew that it was already too late.
A band, all too near, struck up “Yankee Doodle.”
The men they had chased re-formed behind a fresh blue wall of troopers. To the left, where that infernal music sounded, a full brigade, in perfect order, emerged from a swale in the earth.
Red scarves. Custer’s men. The scum who killed Stuart.
Lee’s dizziness left him. They were not going to kill him. Not those sonsofbitches.
He reined up. Fifty yards off, Payne drew back, too, calling for his Virginians to re-form. Too late, too late.
The Union cavalrymen to their front had divided, some dismounting with their carbines, while others rallied to countercharge. But the worst threat, Lee sensed, came from Custer’s brigade. Who, unlike their brethren, did not draw pistols or carbines, but came on with their hundreds of sabers flashing.
In front, prancing before that brigade’s flags, a black stallion bore a floppy-hatted officer with long locks.
Kill him myself, Lee swore.
But he knew he would not, could not. His purpose now had to be to rescue what remained of Payne’s command.
“Yankee Doodle” was a hateful tune.
He heard a shout of “Wolverines!” And that minstrel-show officer, Custer, waved l’arme blanche.
Sabers leveled, Custer’s brigade thundered at them from the flank. The Yankees to their front charged them as well.
Gathering back into a herd meant to serve as a formation, Payne’s survivors didn’t need orders to withdraw. They turned back south and gave their mounts the spurs.
They didn’t get far before reining in again. A double line of blue horsemen blocked their retreat.
Custer’s brigade wasted no time crashing down on them from the flank, men with sabers undeterred by men with empty revolvers. Lee fired his pistol until it clicked uselessly, then swung it at the troopers nearest him, hammering his way through. Sabers hacked flesh, and men died shouting obscenities. Fighting stirrup to stirrup, knee to knee, they splashed one another with sweat and blood, and faces foretold the hate and pain of damnation. Gray coats went under in a sea of blue.
Overwhelmed, Payne led his horsemen in a last charge back across the ground they had recently crossed with so much pride, riding headlong at the double line of Yankee cavalrymen in their path.
“Come on, you,” Lee urged his horse. He spurred and lashed it, something he had not had to do in years: The beast was near quits.
Another crash of men, mounts, and metal, then a remainder of a remnant of Payne’s troopers had, miraculously, broken through the lines blocking their retreat.
They rode hard. More horses collapsed. The Yankees pursued. Vengeful.
Asking the last of their horses, the Virginians made the woods from which they had charged. Fragments of other units awaited them there and did their best to halt the Yankees, but the bluecoats were unstoppable.
Lee tried to rally Payne’s men for a final stand, but they were finished for now. He rode with them rearward, evading the Yankees, sick in body, sick in heart, hoping he might still gather enough men for one final stand.
Behind him, the Yankee bands struck up again.
TWELVE
September 19, 3:00 p.m.
North of Red Bud Run
Rud Hayes halted his men and formed them in line of battle ten yards inside the tree line, out of sight. Then he waited.
“You didn’t answer my question,” his brother-in-law pestered. “You still think we can overcome the animus, put this country back together … as one nation? You really think that, Rud? After all this?”
“Yes,” Hayes said, looking at his pocket watch.
“Well, then,” Doc Joe said, “Lucy ought to make you wear a dunce cap.” He stroked his horse’s neck, soothing the beast. “This country won’t be united in a hundred years. Too much killing, too much hate.”
“Good men will repair it.”
“The best men are dead.”
“Thank you, Doctor, for that encouraging diagnosis. Joe, go on back to your surgery. You’ll be busy enough before long, and I’m busy now.”
Joe smiled. “All right. But no tomfoolery. My sister wouldn’t make a kindly widow.”
“Just git.”
“Boils tolerable?”
“You just git.”
After Doc Joe turned his horse, Russ Hastings sidled up. The adjutant’s horse, Old Whitey, was admired throughout the brigade. “I thought we were going right in, sir?”
“General Crook doesn’t want to go in headlong.”
Neither man said anything about Kernstown, that hard-learned lesson.
And yes, the boils were tol
erable. But sitting in a saddle was no delight.
The sounds of battle back across the creek were tired, grudging. But men were still dying. Hayes turned toward the soldiers he commanded, scanning the features of those who would lead the attack. Most faces were familiar to some degree. Not all, but most. What always struck him, once a man looked past the enforced uniformity, was that such men weren’t uniform at all, not in the least. Each was complete unto himself. Distinct. Filled with yearnings, fears, and considerations as mundane as a fellow wishing he’d taken that last chance to drop his drawers and squat. Human.
He had begun to accept that his idol, Emerson, was far from a perfect guide to the human species. Introducing Swedenborg in Representative Men, Emerson had scorned the commoners “of the world of corn and money.” But was any man truly common? Deserving of such condescension? The man who labored with his hands fed the man who worked with his mind. Wasn’t one of the points of this war that all men should enjoy an equal right not only to freedom and justice, but to respect? Hayes would not dismiss the man who shouldered a rifled musket as lower in worth than one of greater intellect. These, his fellow citizens, the men he led in a fratricidal war … each possessed the same spark of life as Emerson, but these men had, the most of them, volunteered to risk that spark, that life, for a prospect greater than themselves, a vision few commanded the words to describe, but which they felt profoundly. Emerson and his ilk discussed ideas. These men would go forward and die for an idea, because they sensed instinctively it was right. Who was the worthier?
He took a drink from his canteen. His aide copied the action.
“Stay close to me, Russ,” Hayes said. “When this thing starts.”
The frail breeze could not pierce the grove. Flags hung limp. Men rustled and murmured. Waiting. That was somehow the worst of it, the waiting. Men wanted to know, that was the thing. The idled mind was the domain of devils.