The little man from the west looked at him for a while longer, not saying anything, then replied. "Well, come by and have supper with me and Meade tonight. I'd like to hear what he has to say about your assignment here. You know him?"
"Yes, sir. I do. I should be happy to join you."
Outside the tent, Devereux took a deep breath. Having spoken to the man, he could see how dangerous Grant must be. He saw something of himself in the enemy commander. Pain had taught the Union general to conceal his hurts and move on. Devereux’s thoughts went to his brother, his cousins, and his friends waiting across the river. He wondered just how much pain Grant could take.
------------------------------------------------------------At dinner, Devereux learned that Winfield Scott Hancock’s Second U.S. Corps would lead the way, crossing at Ely’s Ford before dawn the next day. This was welcome news. It gave him an excuse to leave dinner early. It was clear that the senior officers’ mess would be happier without him. He would make it easy for them as soon as possible.
There was an elderly civilian dressed in black seated at the table. After a moment Devereux realized that it was Congressman Elihu Washburne, Grant’s patron in the House of Representatives. Washburne acknowledged Claude’s presence with a polite question about his father’s health. The table listened silently to this indication of Devereux’s connections in the capital.
As host, Grant could not avoid talking to Devereux but was noncommittal in his replies to questions and definitely on guard. This was not a surprise. Next to him sat Colonel George Sharpe, the Army of the Potomac’s chief intelligence officer. Sharpe had the courtesy to recall the last time he and Devereux had met. It had been behind Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg.
“Ah, I remember,” Meade said from Grant’s other side. “I met your brother in the little building we were using for the staff. He was helping with the information files...” He looked at Sharpe hopefully.
Devereux’s previous encounters with Major General George Gordon Meade had reinforced in his mind the man’s reputation for irascible nastiness. This concern for another human being’s feelings was something new. Looking at Meade’s sharp profile and bald head, he began to see why Meade’s Old Army friends in the Confederate Army still liked him.
Sharpe took the hint. “Yes. Yes. He was a great help. I don’t know how we could have managed without him... I saw you up on the hill after the Rebel attack failed. I saw you with him, after his death...
Meade cleared his throat and said, “May I offer my condolences?” He offered his hand across the table.
Grant watched with interest.
Devereux took the hand and held it. “Thank, you,” he said.
“I didn’t see you up there, Sharpe,” he said while continuing to look at Meade. “When did you arrive?” He released the hand.
Meade looked confused. He was not accustomed to having a man hold his hand. The embarrassment at physical contact which was so common in Northern people usually amused Devereux, but not now.
“Just as Hays rode down the line with the flags... Just then.” “What’s this?” Grant asked sharply.
Meade looked even more troubled. “I was... occupied at the time,” he said. The general in chief waited. A stubborn rigidity appeared in his features
as he waited.
“Alexander Hays,” Meade continued.
“He was at West Point with me,” Grant said. You could not tell from his
face if that was good or bad. Finally, he made up his mind to say something, “I have always been his friend but he can be…” “Well,” Sharpe said, lacking a cue as to how to proceed. “He rode down the line dragging an enemy flag behind him...”
Grant’s face was unreadable.
Meade looked away.
“His staff rode behind him. They each had one...” Sharpe said in a near whisper.
26th North Carolina Volunteer Infantry. Sharpsburg, Manassas, Savage Station...
The black embroidered words from the regimental color were burned on the inside of Devereux’s skull. He could see it dragging in the dirt. The fresh, wet stains of the Carolina color sergeant’s blood were caked with the billowing dust of a hot summer afternoon in Pennsylvania.
Henry Burgwyn, Devereux thought. That was his regiment. He must have been all of twenty five that day. Do you all have colonels that young? His body must have been in that wall of guts and broken bones in front of your line near the clump of trees. Second Corps, I believe...
“And what is General Hays doing these days?” Devereux asked.
They all looked at him.
“He has the same brigade in Birney’s division... Why?” Meade asked. “I haven’t seen him since that terrible day...” Devereux said.
“This should not have happened,” Grant said. He was evidently not much interested in his old schoolmate. They all knew what he meant. “We would not have done this in the west. To dishonor their flags is not good. They will retaliate if they know. Do they know?”
Meade was pale and quiet at the rebuke.
“You were more accustomed to winning,” Sharpe said. “These men were astonished at their own success in stopping Lee. Of course they know. Men escape. There have been prisoner exchanges.”
“Let’s drop the subject,” Grant said. “There won’t be many more prisoner exchanges. We are going to stop fighting the same men over and over...”
Watching them, Devereux knew that Sharpe would not be working for Meade much longer. Grant had chosen not to remove Meade from command of the Army of the Potomac. Instead, he was “accompanying” Meade in his role as General in Chief of the armies of the United States. This was a decision for which Devereux had urged acceptance in Washington believing that it inevitably would lead to friction between the two.
Damn! He will take Sharpe for his own staff. We don’t need that! We don’t need to have Sharpe working for Grant...
“Do I understand that your brother was killed while serving with this army at Gettysburg?” Grant asked.
“He was actually a civilian,” Sharpe answered for Claude. “Colonel Devereux was there representing the War Department, and the Sanitary Commission, somehow... His brother was with him, and volunteered to help us. He was quite good at the work.”
“Did the Army give its sympathy to your family?” Grant asked.
Why do these bastards have to be so civil? Devereux asked himself. He said nothing.
“The president attended the funeral, as did General Halleck and half a dozen members of Congress,” Sharpe answered for the silent blue coated figure seated across the table.
An awkward moment passed quietly as this reminder of the political importance of their “guest”” sunk in.
“By your leave, sir” Devereux said. “I shall go now. Ely’s Ford awaits and I would like to find General Hancock to inform him of my, my presence...”
“Certainly,” Grant said, nodding in agreement. He held a cigar in one hand, and felt his lip for shreds of tobacco with the other. “Give Hancock my regards. Why don’t you ride with Hays...? He will be thrilled with your, associations... Maybe you can keep him from doing some other fool thing. Good luck.”
Standing outside in the cool May night, Devereux listened to the conversation inside.
“What do you think?” Sharpe asked.
“I don’t know. Keep him away from me, for now... George, read to me again the last part of that order you sent your army.”
Meade’s dry voice cut through the fabric of the tent,
“...Actuated by a high sense of duty, fighting to preserve the government and the institutions handed down to us by our forefathers, victory, under God’s blessing, must and will attend our efforts.”
“Has this sort of proclamation been usual before an offensive?” Grant asked.
“Yes.”
Why didn’t you say anything about the Constitution?” Grant asked. The voice waited for the answer that would not be given. “Well,” Grant finally said. “We will see how well these men of yours fig
ht, George. We will see.”
Figure 2 - Grant's Overall Plan
-After midnight, 4 May – (North of the Fords of the Rapidan)
The tents were already broken down when Devereux and John Quick arrived at Alexander Hays’ bivouac. Wagons were in the final stages of preparation for their journey to join the field train of David Birney’s Division.
Hays commanded one of the two brigades in the division. He had commanded the same brigade at Gettysburg. Hays welcomed Devereux with a display of hearty, masculine camaraderie. The hand-written note from Meade that arrived with the visitor insured the welcome.
The corps commander, Hancock, had added his own words at the bottom of the page, asking Hays to take special care of their guest. Devereux’s official orders, drafted by him, but signed by the Secretary of War may have had something to do with the reception as well.
Hays poured Devereux a drink from a battered flask as they sat together watching the brigade’s infantry regiments march past on the road to the southeast.
The night was clear and chill. Bright stars crusted the black sky above. Sergeant John Quick sat on a third stump a few feet away with their saddle horses and the led pack mule. Quick had tied them to a sapling.
Hays’ staff hovered in the background respectfully. Devereux sipped the whiskey.
Not bad for some sort of Yankee swill, he thought.
“Pennsylvania?” he asked the big, square outline beside him.
“Why, yes!” Hays exclaimed in a rumbling baritone. “It’s from my cousin’s distillery outside Pittsburgh, the best Pennsylvania rye whiskey, not at all like the syrupy mess these people around here drink.”
Hays’ adjutant separated himself from the staff group, whispered in his chief’s ear, and then rejoined his colleagues. There was a short pause while the general tried to manage his recovery from the news that Devereux was one of “these people.”
“Alexander Hays, is it, general?” Quick asked from his stump. He had seemed absorbed in rubbing his horse’s nose, and his words were a bit of a surprise.
“Yes, yes!” Hays replied turning toward him, glad of an interruption in his impossible task.
“Would it be County Monahan? I know some Hays there. Would you be one of them?” This was malicious, for Quick knew well that the Hays of Monahan who looked like this man were all Anglo-Irish Protestants. He and Devereux watched while the Union General decided what to say to this obvious “Paddy.”
“Why, yes,” he said. “Did you know them well? They are my cousins, every one.”
One is Lord Lieutenant of the county. Another is the sheriff. May God curse the Sassenach swine!
“Yes, sor! And a luvvlier group of men ye’ve nivver seen! Ye’re the spit ov’em.”
My God! thought Claude. Were they so bad that you talk to him like that? I wish Bill or Jake were here to listen.
” Perhaps we should be going, General,” Devereux suggested. “Your staff looks impatient.” It was true. The young men had taken note that their proper place in the column of march had passed them by and were looking nervous.”
Hays tore himself away from an inspection of Sergeant John Quick. “You’re right of course! Colonel Devereux, please join us. I would like nothing better than to hear from you of the “inner workings” of our masters’ houses in Washington. And you, Sergeant Quigley? Was that it? I would like to hear more of my kin...”
“It will be our pleasure, sir,” Claude said, reaching to take the reins of his horse from Quick who was already in the saddle.
“I remember that one of the ladies of your house was named “Maude,” Quick said somewhere from the darkness.
“Yes. That would be my cousin… You knew her?” He sounded incredulous, as well he might. “One of my sisters has that name as well…”
Devereux smiled in the dark behind the mask that covered his hatred.
----------------------------------------------------------Alexander Hays’ Brigade passed the remaining hours of the night in the approach march to Ely’s Ford on the Rapidan. Beneath a cloudless sky, the brigade’s infantry moved down the road to the south, passing into history, passing into the folklore of the two peoples. This thought may have come to some among the marching infantrymen and gunners but few among them would have held that thought for long. They were more absorbed with the fit of their boots and the weight of their loads. Thoughts of home and the women they had left there filled their minds as they always fill soldiers’ minds.
Dawn found them across the river. It was eight o’clock before Devereux focused enough on his surroundings to know that they would soon reach a crossroads where the Orange Turnpike crossed the track they had followed from the ford. He knew that at that point they would see the ruins of the Chancellor House hotel. It was gone now, burned in the midst of the battle which had taken its name from the house the previous year. Claude remembered the daughters of the house. They were pretty girls, smiling, blonde and flirtatious in the sweet, seductive way that Virginia girls often were. He wondered where they might be now.
Hays fell silent after the river crossing. Perhaps their entry into the forest of the Wilderness depressed him. He had talked all the way to the river. You could see that he wanted to take advantage of the presence of someone from the War Department to curry favor on high. This forest was not a good backdrop for the effort. The Wilderness was a remnant of the primeval wilderness itself. It extended twenty miles or so along the south bank of the Rapidan-Rappahannock River system and at some points stretched as far as ten miles south of the rivers. It was a sprawling tangle of mixed coniferous and deciduous second growth timber tied together with deadfalls and Virginia creeper. German iron workers had been brought to the area by colonial government in the eighteenth century. Generations of them stripped the woods of first growth trees to feed the fuel needs of their “puddling furnaces.” The result was a nearly impassable barrier of vegetation in which only the local people had any chance of finding their way. It was a place that inspired silence.
Devereux was grateful for the quiet. He found Alexander Hays to be no more or less annoying than other extroverts, but the unfolding drama of Grant’s offensive called for mental effort to grasp its meaning. The prattle of yet another ambitious general did not help with the needed concentration.
Scouts from the cavalry and an engineer officer from Second Corps headquarters waited at the crossroads by the Chancellor House to make sure that the brigade crossed the turnpike and continued to the south.
Devereux understood from the discussions at Grant’s mess that the Fifth Corps under the command of Major General Gouverneur Warren had crossed the Rapidan at Germanna Ford to the west of Ely’s Ford and was advancing southeastward on a parallel road a few miles away. By this hour, they too, should have reached an intersection with the Orange Turnpike. There, they would also continue straight across, marching down the Brock Road through the tunnel of trees and tangled underbrush toward Spotsylvania Courthouse.
To the east of Devereux’s position with Hays’ brigade and Hancock’s 2nd Corps, the Army of the Potomac’s massive trains were marching in parallel toward the southeast, also moving towards Spotsylvania County Courthouse and the edge of the Wilderness forest.
As Lee had predicted on Clark’s Mountain, the trains could not move fast enough to reach the open ground in one day and for that reason the whole army would camp for the night along the roads in the woods, spread out as though waiting for the Southern army to arrive.
----------------------------------------------------------------On the evening of the Third of May, Tom Barclay, a Virginia boy in the Stonewall Brigade wrote his parents a long letter from the Second Corps’ camps west of Mine Run on the Orange Turnpike. Among the things he wrote that night appear these sentences.
“..our cause we believe to be a just one and our God is a just God, then why should we doubt? …The struggle will be a bloody one, but it is noble to die so with one’s friends.”
The Stonewall Brigade l
ed the advance to the east the next morning. It was the point of the spear that Lee was flinging into the Wilderness aimed at the side of Meade’s army. In the Second Corps column of march, Johnson’s Division led with the Stonewall in front, then came Early’s Division, followed by Rodes.
All that day Jubal Early’s men hiked eastward on the Orange Turnpike in the dust of Johnson’s Division. It was a beautiful spring day in Virginia. The winter had been cold and the trees were mostly still in bud, but the roadside glowed with early flowering Redbud and the white Dogwood had begun to open its cross shaped blossoms.
Early’s riflemen trudged along, grumbling about the horses in the artillery battalion that followed Johnson’s troops. “I thought these damned nags were short of food, if that’s so, how can they be so full of crap?” would have been a typical sentiment.
Balthazar’s men felt no differently, and it was with relief that they received news just after the halt at dusk that Dick Ewell, the corps commander, had decided to reinforce the advance guard with their battalion.
Wearily, they reformed their column of fours in the road. Balthazar stood among them. He seldom rode Victoria’s mare. That seemed odd to them at first, but now they expected it.
A soldier led the animal at the end of the battalion column.
Balthazar chatted with Lieutenant Harris and Sergeant Major Roarke while they waited for Smoot to return with a wagon full of rations for the next day.
Balthazar held the Sharps carbine by the muzzle. The trigger guard rested just behind his left shoulder with the weapon’s butt sticking up in the air behind. He often carried long arms this way, believing that it was more comfortable on the march. Looking back, down the column, he realized that nearly all of them were carrying their rifles the same way. He turned away to conceal his enjoyment of the moment, and saw Smoot approaching with the wagon.
“Forwaard! March! Route step! March!” The battalion went east to join the Stonewall Brigade at the point of the advance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------Far away, the two Presidents worried away the hours until dispatches could be expected from the front.
Death Piled Hard: A Tale of the Confederate Secret Services Page 20