by Ralph Peters
“I’ve been shifted about all day,” Custer said apologetically. “I just wanted to—”
“George, go back to your men and see to the enemy,” Sheridan said more firmly. Cannily and cruelly, he added, “Wesley Merritt’s already got the jump on you.”
A quarter mile to the south, the Sixth Corps received the order to attack. The army that had broken that morning roared.
4:40 p.m.
Middletown
“Ramseur’s holding,” Early snapped. “God almighty, he’s got infantry and cavalry on him. He’s holding, you can hold.”
Gordon peered toward Ramseur’s end of the line, but could see little for the smoke. “Whether he holds or not, I can’t. Not out there, not without being reinforced.”
“Damn you, Gordon, you know there’s no reinforcements.”
They sat on their horses on a patch of high ground outside of Middletown, careless of the lead thickening the air.
“Well, then,” Gordon said. “Pull back. Before it’s too late. If it isn’t too late already.”
“Just go back out there and hold your position.”
Gordon reached to grasp Early by the arm, but the ferocious, almost crazed expression worn by the other man stopped him.
“General Early, I’m struggling to hold back their infantry. Their cavalry’s on the way. I don’t know why they’ve waited, but the cavalry’s going to hit my flank and rear, I’d bet my life on it.” A deathly smile possessed his mouth. “I am betting my life on it.”
“Refuse your left, then.”
“I already have. It opened up my right. We need to—”
“Damn you, don’t you tell me what we need. I command this army, not you. Now go on back to your division. And be a man. Like Ramseur.”
The world howled, barked, shrieked: the men, the guns, the banshee shells in flight.
Ignoring the insult, Gordon tried a last ploy: “General, you’ve won a great victory. Don’t throw it away. Order a withdrawal.”
Early snorted, spit. “Why don’t you just go, if you’re so yellow. I’m not leaving this field.”
Gordon saluted, a gesture of sarcasm now. He turned his horse.
Barely halfway back to the tumult engulfing his division, he saw thousands of sabers flash as Sheridan’s truant cavalrymen exploded over a ridge, aiming for his flank and the army’s rear.
4:50 p.m.
Confederate right flank
He’d held them. Threw back their cavalry, then threw back their infantry. Then his division held against simultaneous attacks. But Stephen Dodson Ramseur understood—hated it, but understood—that his line was near to breaking.
A well-aimed Yankee shell struck a caisson, playing havoc with his last sound battery. Half-butchered horses shrieked, while those less injured struggled against their harnesses. A cannoneer circled madly, like a spring-loaded toy, spraying blood from a shoulder missing its arm.
The first few shirkers had begun to slink rearward, but the guards he’d posted turned them back to the fight. On threat of death.
If they could hold until dark …
Ramseur smirked. Remembering another day and the very same thought. They would not hold until dark. They would fight on, but would not hold. Their plight was as unforgiving as mathematics.
He saw the futility, yet he felt no fear. All that silliness about dying today. He regretted—would ever regret—sharing his melancholy with John Gordon. Gordon would remember it as weakness and there it would be, forever, a quietly mocking glint in Gordon’s eye.
Dying? His interest was in killing. In killing Yankees. In killing every damned Yankee that crossed those fields. He meant to kill Yankees and keep on killing Yankees. He’d kill them for months, for years, if they kept coming. And then, when the last smoke cleared, when the last filthy Yankee was dead, he’d go home to his wife and take their child in his arms.
John Pegram rode up. Face stained black as a coon’s. Eyes huge. Horse skittish.
Shells chased him.
“Sir, they’re set to flank us.”
“Bloody ’em up,” Ramseur told him. “They’ll think better of it.”
“It’s their cavalry. They’re massing. All but behind us.”
But what was to be done, what choice was left? It was too late for an orderly withdrawal, damn Jubal Early. Leaving them stranded on this useless ground.
“Just fight,” Ramseur told him.
5:00 p.m.
Hayes’ division
General Crook rode up, trailing flags and orderlies. Behind Crook, the Rebs were losing their grip on the field. At first, the Johnnies had put up a bitter fight, almost a daunting one. But they were breaking now. For all the smoke, it was easy enough to tell.
Hayes saluted. Crook smiled.
“Take your division in,” his superior told him. Then, in a louder voice, “Your men are needed.”
No, they weren’t needed. Crook even gave him a wink. Sheridan had understood. These men needed to be in on the kill. It was as if Little Phil had been right there beside him when, shortly after the counterattack began, a soldier had presumed to ask Hayes, “Sir, we being punished? ’Cause of this morning?”
How strange, how endlessly strange! That men who knew war so well should want more of it.
Excitement pulsed through his reduced, half-clad ranks; the fervor was unmistakable. It was all he and his officers could do to restrain the men, to keep them in formation as they advanced, flags lofted high and two rescued drums beating cadence, all of them marching square-shouldered into the smoke. They wanted, needed, to get at the Rebs, while there were still Rebs to be gotten at.
And as they neared the half-managed chaos of battle, Hayes, too, shrugged off reason and decency, surrendering to pride and the urge to kill.
5:00 p.m.
Gordon’s Division
Nichols gave up and ran. Wasn’t right, none of it. Yankees everywhere. After they’d whipped them fair that very morning.
He’d stopped his rearward trot twice, once when General Gordon, that scar carved into his left cheek like a broken cross and standing out in a face hot as pink sow meat, that time, that moment, when John Brown Gordon, a Joshua but a false prophet, swept in among them, crying, “Rally, boys, rally! We can whip ’em, if we just stand our ground.” That one time John Gordon proved a liar. For the Yankees were on them like the Plagues of Egypt, like sickness upon those firstborns, and they pulled the ground right out from under their feet, that was how it felt, the Yankees thieving the very earth they’d earned.
The other time was when General Evans, a saint among men, fooled him and half the others just as bad, calling to them, “Stand, men! We can hold!” General Evans, a Methodist, lying like a no-good Irish drunkard. Worse.
Yankees everywhere. First, their infantry, that whipped and whupped-on blue-belly infantry, came crashing down upon them, rushing into the breaks in their line like floodwater, splashing bluecoats every which way and drowning all hope.
That was before their cavalry came on. The cavalry just finished them, adding more scare to the big scoot back to the rear. The men on horseback were cruel, showing no mercy.
Without quite deciding, Nichols stopped and turned. He raised the rifle he somehow had loaded and fired at a Yankee horseman, one as good as another, but missed for shaking. And he was not given to shaking, never that kind of scared, but tired, Lord, he was tired enough to lie down and just give up, though he would not.
A file of cantering Yankees cut off Sergeant Alderman, who had tarried.
He wouldn’t have run, not one step, had it been up to him. No, he did not believe he would have run. But all the others sure did. And when that happened, a fellow just went along and couldn’t help it. Some of them, Nichols included, had re-formed back a ways by the regiment’s flag, encouraged by Gordon. That hadn’t lasted. Then they rallied, briefly, by broken-up companies, herded by General Evans, that good shepherd. Finally, the survivors only paused in flame-spitting huddles or by themselves. T
hen they just ran.
All the treasure was lost, left behind, discarded, the tent halves and blankets finer than store-bought town ones. All encumbrances were discharged so a man could run deer-fleet, until, some terrible how, Nichols lost the spare pair of foraged shoes, the finer pair of the two, saved up, reducing him to the possessions he had ferried across the river before dawn, all else gone except for the one good pair of Yankee brogues he’d had the presence of mind to tie onto his feet back when things were quiet.
Lem Davis all but crashed into him, only to veer away, mad-eyed, glancing back as though he recognized no man. At least Lem was alive. Couldn’t see anyone else. Just the pillaged Yankee camps receding underfoot, one after another, prizes hard-won, even if by guile, and around him blue-jacketed troopers slashing blades down upon not armor but thin wool and cotton worn to a see-through, steel biting into flesh and muscle and bone, hard men atop beasts.
Let the dark come quick. Oh, let the dark come quick.…
Surely, I come quickly. Saith the Lord.
No time to pray.
Behind him, beside him, Yankees cheered, cursed, catcalled. Wasn’t much artillery now, the attack had outrun its guns, but the Yankees had themselves a time blazing away from their saddles with those devil repeaters, making a game of death, maybe even betting on which man could hit what and keeping score.
He reached the Pike and found there was no army left, just a mob forcing wagons into ditches to make way for the terrified and cannoneers whipping men away from their limbers, only to be pulled off and beaten themselves. Yankee horsemen, maybe an entire regiment, dismounted on the high ground and shot into the mass.
Nichols believed his heart was bound to fail him, set to burst, and his lungs felt like a barn-burner got at them. Only his feet, blessed by those splendid shoes, a provenance of the Lord, went along untroubled.
Leaving the Pike, he thrashed through brush and scrub trees, trying to work away from the feast of killing, only to find himself drawn back to higher ground and another plundered Yankee camp, where dead men lay in shameless states of undress, not yet swelled up but a first few stiffened in rictus.
Two soldiers, his own kind, sat before a dead campfire and spooned beans from a pot that had not been emptied.
“Yankees are coming!” Nichols warned them.
“Set a spell,” one soldier encouraged him placidly. “Them’s good beans, and plenty.”
“Yankees—”
“Oh, let him go, Ezra,” the other soldier said. “He ain’t figured out this here war’s over.”
Ezra nodded. “I reckon.” He looked up at Nichols, kindly enough. “You take yourself a paw-full of them beans, boy. There’s to spare, and beans won’t slow you down.”
Nichols ran back into the brush, away from the all-but-encircling shots and shouts, seeking the low ground, the creek or the river, safety.
How had it happened? When they’d whipped the Yankees so complete? How had it happened? Briars clawed him. Imagining Yankees all around and closing in, he had to fight the urge to drop his rifle.
How had it come to this? How had they sinned?
He emerged from the woods not in a quiet corner, but just east of the bridge over the creek. In the fading light, it offered a scene from Hell. On the southern bank, on the heights, some good men had put their cannon in battery and were firing back at the Yankees, brave as David, fending off a Federal Goliath, doing what they could to punish the blue-belly hordes closing on the bridge below.
The bridge itself was all wickedness. Men swung their rifles at their own kind to clear a path, and soldiers toppled shrieking into the water. Some tried to wade or swim across. Bodies floated downstream. On the narrow span, an ambulance was no more welcome than any other box set up on four wheels.
He would’ve stopped to fight, he told himself. But it wouldn’t do no good. Even before he turned away, determined to save at least one Confederate soldier and that one himself, he heard bugles pierce the thunderous racket and saw, in the half-light, Yankee cavalry sweep into view on the heights held by the battery, long blades catching the last rays of the sun.
In moments, that golden light was gone and the battery taken.
Trapped on the bridge, men hollered like women with snake-fright, brave men screaming. Soldiers tossed their rifles in the creek and raised their hands, so many of them that the Yankee horses couldn’t make any headway on the Pike, either side of the creek.
Nichols ran, stumbled, and crashed through brush and brambles, one of a few men nosing down the bank, trying to get out of sight of the swarming Yankees, out of any possible lines of fire, just trying to git.
The autumn dark fell fast, suggesting mercy. Nichols heard his own breathing, the gasps of a hunted animal. He heard other men, too, but could not see them. The world seemed newly vast, his day-scorched eyes reluctant to make sense of darkened spaces. Searching along the bank of the creek, he could not find one ford, though he reckoned there had to be several. Nor had he reached the river, he could tell that much.
He fell in with two of his own sort, South-talking men and notable for their smell, the three of them bumbling into each other and Nichols cry-whispering, “Don’t shoot, I’m of your’n.” And they went along together, which only made sense, as the war grated on in the distance and a wicked Yankee band far off played an Irish jig of a tune, its merriment like pissing on the dead.
That tune, or some other deviltry, worked on his new companions—one of them, anyway—for when they came upon a can’t-get-up Yankee, a shot-through man who must’ve lain there since morning, and he greeted their brush-thrashing footfalls with a plea of, “Water … for Mother’s sake…,” that soured new comrade hefted the stock of his rifle and beat the Yankee’s skull in, no reason to it, just spite, the way Nichols once had seen a boy smash in a turtle’s shell with a rock, just to feel bigger and better than something else, to kill something weaker, like he was saying, “I’m alive, goddamn you, and you’re not.”
Then they found what seemed to be, what had to be, a ford, for it wore an apron of mud and a trail led from it, climbing back up the hill, or so it seemed in that darkness unpricked by campfires or torches, and they waded in, Nichols last, just in case, for he was not much of a swimmer, not much at all, but, Lord, they did want to get away from the Yankees, all three of them did, you could smell it on them like stink, and when the creek proved their judgment wrong and the opposite of the sea parting for Moses, the two dark shapes before him fell waterward at the exact same moment, their splashes small but terrible, and only one emerged again to flail his arms and make wildly for the southern bank, while the other disappeared into that water and never resurfaced, not even to cry out in lamentation like the children of Israel. Perhaps he had been punished by the Lord for the sin of Cain, for pulping that Yankee’s brains—surely the Lord had selected the right man—and there in that creek, that creek that had swallowed a man as surely as the great whale swallowed Jonah, Nichols scared up and turned back.
As he struggled, unnerved and shivering, toward the Yankee bank, the mud stole one of his fine, new shoes, just sucked it off, though he’d laced it on real tight, and the creek wouldn’t let his bared foot find it again.
Returned to dry land—or to the bank mud, anyway—he tried to go on with one foot shod and the other as good as naked, but that was no use at all. In a sorrow immeasurable he kicked off, tore off, the left-behind shoe, a grand shoe of stout leather, a sad-as-a-family-burying, useless shoe, and he picked it up, adoring it with his fingers one last time, then he pitched it into the creek to rejoin its mate.
7:30 p.m.
Cedar Creek
None of it had the dignity of a retreat: It was a rout from start to finish. If, indeed, it was anywhere near finished. Which hardly seemed the case, with the Yanks giving chase.
Gordon had tried to rally them—his own men and the rest—to make a stand first on one bank of the creek, then on the other. Each time, it was no good. The Yankees were everywhere,
and that “everywhere” was usually right behind any line he formed.
He’d heard early on in the collapse that Ramseur had been wounded, perhaps fatally. Perhaps Dod’s premonition had been real. More to Heaven and earth than any philosophy could contain, he recalled a line in Hamlet to that effect. More likely, though, Dod meeting a bullet had been one of war’s coincidences. War found infinite ways to tease a man, sometimes to death.
Later, in the flame-streaked dark, amid the report of rifles and clang of sabers, John Pegram, tearful, had told him that the ambulance carrying Dod had been taken by Yankees. He wouldn’t even die among his kind.
Never did get to see his infant, Dod did not. But Gordon intended to live.
He was trying to halt the two guns left to a battery, to snatch a few more minutes from the Yankees and allow another shred of the army to flee, when yet another throng of blood-glutton horsemen swept down upon them.
So fast, it all went so fast.
In the grave-dark night, with moonrise hours off, he all but gutted his horse with his spurs, guiding the beast toward what seemed the least-Yankee-bothered corner of the field.
After dashing along for a few dozen yards, his horse shied and reared up.
Gordon stayed in the saddle. And somehow he saw, grasped, understood, that horse and rider had come to the edge of a precipice.
“There’s one of those bastards. Over there,” a Northern voice called.
Gordon didn’t know if the man meant him or some other unfortunate, but he did not intend to become a guest of the Yankees.
He said, aloud, “Fanny, I love you.” And he drove his horse over into the unknown.
11:00 p.m.
Belle Grove
He couldn’t bear the interior any longer. A chaotic mix of headquarters, surgery, and refuge for the dying, the old mansion reeked of the dark side of the war, of the place beyond glory. He went outdoors, sidling down the steps, careful of his spurs, and positioned himself before the fire in the yard. He’d borne enough in the hours past and did not need to witness any more misery. Or listen to any more excuses from staff men who’d found their way back only after the battle. He just wanted to stand there alone and unbothered.