And so it was decided.
Devereux spent the night of the 10th of May at Lee’s forest headquarters. He sat alone with Lee in the general’s tent for a meal hardly worthy of the description. The old camp furniture was familiar. Claude remembered the chairs from hunting trips with his grandfather and Major Lee, as he had then been. The familiar camp sounds and smells were comforting. The noise and chaos of the last days’ fighting seemed far away. There was talk of home and Alexandria. There was talk of family.
Lee was intrigued by the intimacy that had developed between Claude and President Lincoln and disturbed by Lincoln’s persistent enquiries about himself.
“I think you should feel complimented, sir,” Devereux commented. “He has made it clear that he considers you and he to be the principals in this struggle and wishes you had chosen the North…”
Lee stirred uncomfortably in his chair. Devereux knew that the old man was ill. The present inactivity of the army spoke volumes about that.
The general looked at him. “I had no choice… You know that, and now we must fight it out to the end, the bitter end.”
Devereux nodded. “Let me come back,” he pleaded. “I detest this work. I can’t manage the life I have been forced into. There are too many demands, too many people pulling at me… I need to simplify my life. I used to think that I enjoyed playing with these Yankees, but it is too much, too much. Let me come back to the army, to this army, with you and my brother, and cousins. Please.”
Lee rose and walked to the front of the tent, looking out into the dim light of a fire a few yards away.
An orderly officer broke away from a group by the fire to start toward him, only to be waved away.
“Do you want Herbert’s regiment? Do you want the 17th?” he asked after returning to his seat.
“Yes.”
Lee considered that. “They are down in North Carolina at the moment…”
“I know they are,” Devereux said.
Lee laughed silently, “Yes, you would know, colonel. Unfortunately, the enemy’s knowledge of us has improved. Do you have anything to do with that?” There was sharpness in the voice. Claude had never heard that before. “No,” he quickly replied. “it is all George Sharpe, all Colonel Sharpe. My brother…” He thought of the help Patrick had given Sharpe at Gettysburg.
We paid for that. God punished us for our weakness. He wanted to belong. Will God punish me as well if I help them?
Lee shook his head. “No, Claude, you are going back to Washington City if we can get you there alive and still seemingly one of their own... That is what Benjamin thinks best and I am now convinced as well. If you are seen here by someone who reports your presence with us, there is no explanation that could be made without causing a massive search for more of our people. Think of your family… No. You must return. Whether or not your duty there will bring some good is a mystery, but the die is cast in this matter. We will send you to Richmond as soon as we can see a path that is cleared of federal cavalry. Benjamin can find a way to get you home.”
Devereux recognized defeat. He had hoped, but not believed that escape from secret service work was possible. His feet had been placed on this path long ago. No escape had ever been possible. He had tried to fool himself, but the self deception had never been convincing. He thought of home. He thought of the women who waited for him there. “I should leave you to rest, sir,” he said to Lee.
“There is one more thing,” the grey man said in the reflected fire light. “I thought it best to tell you myself…”
Devereux looked at the wall of the tent. “My father…”
“Yes. He died last week. The report of his heart crisis… We lied to you.”
“That is understandable. Good night, sir.” As he walked into the night and the darkness that would shelter him, he heard Lee’s voice behind him.
“I will ask Benjamin, Claude. I can not accept seeing you like this. Would you take a colored brigade? We will have to begin with that soon. The army knows that. Would you?”
Devereux looked back. “Whatever you think best.” He nodded once and went to find somewhere to spend the night, somewhere he could be alone to think of a father who had never loved him, and whom he knew he had never really pleased.
Charles Marshall tried all day on the 11th to find a way to send Devereux to Richmond. Small parties of cavalry from the army commander’s escort rode southeast out of the bivouac. They tried three times and in each attempt turned back after meeting much larger Union cavalry forces. Several men and horses were lost in the resulting skirmishes. A prisoner was taken in the third effort. He was a captain from Pennsylvania.
He was not afraid of the Rebels. “You are finished this time,” he laughed. “Grant is going to crush you here and everywhere else.”
“Here, and where else?” Claude asked, intrigued by the man’s poise in view of his present circumstances.
“We are going all the way to Richmond down this road and Butler is coming from the south. We will meet him in front of your capitol building. If you like, I will accept your surrender…”
One of the North Carolina troopers drew his revolver and held it up to the man’s head. “Maybe I’ll just shoot yeh now, loudmouth. How do yeh feel about that?”
In the end, common sense prevailed and the Union officer rode meekly back to camp where he was astonished to meet Lee himself standing hatless by the side of the road reading reports. He saluted automatically.
Lee looked up, nodded to him and then returned to his reading.
Devereux waited patiently until the lieutenant who had been trying to get him through the lines, explained his lack of success to Lee and Marshall. The battlefield was surprisingly quiet. Birds could be heard in the trees. Insects hummed in the grass. After the prisoner had been taken away, Lee beckoned. “Claude, I am very busy trying to get Johnson’s division out of the salient over there.” He waved vaguely toward the north. “I can’t worry about you now. Stay with the staff until we can send you…” He seemed to be pleading.
“Yes. I will wait here,” Devereux replied.
Chapter 20
The Mule Shoe
That night Lee removed his artillery from within the Mule Shoe and ordered Edward Johnson to withdraw the Stonewall Division to the new line across the “jaws” of the bulge into Grant’s lines.
Somehow, knowledge of the artillery’s early movement never reached Johnson. He waited in the darkness and rain for the dawn when he would leave the salient.
The wet was affecting the neuralgia that crippled his wounded ankle. He welcomed a few hours sleep and time off his feet even if he slept propped up in a corner of the canvas covered dugout that was his division command post.
Across no man’s land in the territory of the blue army, Winfield Scott Hancock worked all night to move the twenty thousand men of his Second Army Corps into position a mile from the “nose” of the Mule Shoe. He moved them several miles in the dark to reach the starting points for the attack that Grant and Meade had committed him to make. He was finished by three in the morning.
The vast column of dripping, miserable men sat down in the drizzle to wait for the word to go forward.
The men who would make the attack tried not to think about what would happen. They were veterans of many lethal fights. They knew there was no use thinking about what might be.
At about the same time, Johnson was shaken awake by his staff and learned two things.
The first was that his artillery support had disappeared. That was discovered by an officer who went looking for the gunners to make arrangements for the general withdrawal in the morning. Where they had gone, no one knew.
The second was that the men in his forward trenches believed the enemy had been moving somewhere to their front for most of the night. These sounds had suddenly stopped in the last half hour.
Johnson was upset that no one had told him these things earlier. From his point of view nothing had gone well in several days. He cursed fo
r a while, and then sent a courier to Lee demanding the immediate return of the guns. Then he left for the front line with an aide and a bugler.
In the lines of the Stonewall Division, the silence of the false dawn was broken by the cry of “Hurrah!” “Hurrah!” that reached the men resting behind earth walls and barriers built of tree branches. Some of them heard it first while they were in the woods where they had gone to relieve themselves. Others remembered being awakened by comrades who shook them and then held up a finger so that they would listen. Everyone knew what the sound meant. The Yankees were coming, and they were coming in the dark.
The order to bring the artillery’s guns back into the Mule Shoe arrived in the battalion bivouacs around half past three. Fifty guns were formed in “march order” columns. The difficult night movement began. Drivers led the teams through the forest. As they crossed the ditch in front of the new line of defense, heavy firing began a quarter mile ahead.
At that moment, Francis Barlow’s Division of Hancock’s corps swarmed out of the dark against the dirt wall in front of the Stonewall division. In what seemed limitless thousands they poured over the wall and into the rifle pits where they swiftly disarmed hundreds of soldiers still trying to rouse themselves from sleep.
Edward Johnson was captured thirty yards behind his front line. The big man was astonished to find himself suddenly surrounded by blue infantry. He was enraged and stood in a circle of Federal soldiers swinging his cane at men armed with rifles and bayonets. “God damned artillery. God damned artillery!” he muttered as he swung the cane. The light was growing and his captors could see him well enough to know that they had a Rebel general in their grasp. He kept swinging.
A Federal officer told him that if he did not stop they would shoot him.
At that, he walked to the man and said “your prisoner, sir.” For him the war was over. His captors let him keep the cane and marched him off to the rear.
Blue troops pressed forward in a flood of men through the meadows and clumps of trees behind what had been Johnson’s front line.
Most of the guns of the Confederate Artillery were seized while still in battery columns. In the dim light of dawn they were “easy meat” as they made their way towards the positions from which Lee had withdrawn them the previous evening. One minute they were moving forward and the next they were prisoners.
In Carter’s Virginia Artillery Battalion one battery succeeded in getting its four twelve pounder Napoleon smoothbores into battery before the blue multitude reached them. A volley cut down gunners and horses alike.
A lieutenant, shot through the abdomen with a disemboweling wound, knelt next to one of the guns. With his left hand he gripped the iron shod wheel of the gun for support. With his right he struggled to hold his belly together. His eyes were on the ground.
A corporal standing by the breech of the gun stared in alarm at the blue shadows moving steadily through the mist and trees. They were everywhere. “Where shall we fire, sir,” he asked.
“At the Yankees,” was the whispered reply. With that, the young man fell forward and the gunner raised his hands in surrender.
Claude woke to the sound of the guns. He heard the cheering typical of the Union Army. He was sleeping in a clump of trees away from the hooves of passing or hobbled animals. He pushed off the strip of canvas which he had found to cover himself against the dew, rose and walked around to restore feeling to his legs.
The headquarters was waking up around him. Men stood, half dressed, listening to the roar and the cheers.
Devereux pulled his boots on. His feet had swollen and they went on hard. He had expected that to happen, but he had not had his boots off in days and had been worried about the condition of his feet. His joints ached from sleeping on the ground. He decided that he would not obey Lee’s orders any longer. Something bad was happening in the Mule Shoe. He would not stand by while it happened. He checked the loads in his pistols, rubbed his unshaven chin and walked across the camp in the direction of Balthazar’s battalion half a mile away.
Several people noted his departure, but none thought to stop him. They were busy.
He found the battalion. The men had gathered their personal equipment and now lounged around their fires waiting for orders. The wagons filled with their baggage were ready. The horses looked around in empty curiosity.
Smoot stood by a fire. He watched Devereux approach. He looked friendlier than he had recently. “Coming with us?” he asked with a smile.
The noise from the salient grew steadily louder.
“If you’ll have me…” Claude replied.
“We’ll have you, cousin,” Balthazar said as he came out of the courthouse. “Stay with me. We are attached to Gordon’s command. He is going to counter-attack to clear the penetration. We are to go in on his right flank.”
The Union Second Corps swept on. Its twenty thousand men filled the space between the “shoulders” of the Mule Shoe.
Rebels on the left and right watched in dazed surprise as the blue mass pushed past them in the new day. Commanders began to pull their men back on the flanks of the enemy force to form a new front that would have some chance of keeping the sudden shock from turning into a general rout.
Gordon’s division of Virginians, North Carolinians, Georgians, and Louisiana “Pelicans,” went forward once again and met the Federals half way down the length of the Mule Shoe. They went forward that morning in the sure knowledge that if they could not push back this mighty force, then Grant would break Lee’s line and that would be the end of all their hopes. There were only two thousand of them. Gordon’s men drove through the morning mist. The rain stopped.
Gordon soon met the broken remnants of the Stonewall Division streaming to the rear in the first shock of their defeat. They had been awakened by the sound of cheering as the Federals poured over the breastworks. Many of their leaders were lost in the confusion of the first minutes. There had been no choice but to run or be captured. Now, a realization of the calamity that had befallen them was settling on their minds and they searched for a way to rally.
Gordon sat high on a brown horse squarely in the center of his advancing line. Enemy bullets cut branches and leaves around his ears. He did not seem to hear. The “zzzzz” of rifle bullets in the air was everywhere, but his attention was on the crooked lines of infantry to either side of him.
The Stonewall division looked at him and saw what they were looking for. Many fell in behind his lines and went with him.
On the right of Gordon’s line, Balthazar’s men called out to the retreating men. There was a Louisiana brigade in Johnson’s division.
Raphael Harris saw people he knew among those falling back. He shouted at them and hearing him speak in French, other soldiers pleaded in the language of bayou and home for these Pelicans to come with them. “A nous frères, on va frapper les sales Calvinistes. Aidez nous!” Fifty men joined the attack.
Balthazar was on foot. He would never risk Victoria’s mare in such a desperate moment. His line of battle came out of the trees into the clearing where the artillery lieutenant had died. The Yankees had already dragged the two guns away, but the young officer’s body lay face down in the grass. Captain William Fagan’s company walked over him, the men stepping carefully so as not to tread on his corpse. Fagan noticed that the men were looking away from the body, and then saw that the young officer lay in a pile of his own guts. Grey loops of intestines, just starting to lose the sheen of life lay on the ground near his torso. “Poor lad.” “Steady, boys, ye’ve seen worse. Steady. Just keep goin’ forrard and watch yer dress. Jones! God damn it, pay attention!”
Firing grew heavier and heavier over on the left flank. Balthazar’s men felt forward movement slow as the line, dressed to the left became progressively engaged in that direction.
Devereux and Joe White were side by side. Claude wore a collection of old clothing that made him look like a private soldier of the battalion. He had left his Union Army uniform in Lee’s
camp.
If I am killed, no one will know..
Wild cheering came from the left. The whole line began to move rapidly.
Claude remembered the day at Manassas when he had led his company forward in Dutch Longstreet’s grand attack into Pope’s flank. It had felt like this.
Two deer that had been hiding in the forest jumped to their feet and ran away from the troops.
The battalion came out of the forest and Devereux could see the backs of thousands of Union Army troops. Some were running. Some had lost their hats. He guessed that they had been caught at the moment of uncertainty that comes when an attack has succeeded beyond expectation and men look around hoping to be told what to do next.
The shock of Gordon’s sudden appearance and the forbidding character of his relentless advance had thrown these freshly victorious soldiers back on their heels. They would recover their equilibrium but not until they found the chance to sit down somewhere to think about what had happened. For now, they were moving away. More and more of them were running.
In the distance, Devereux could see the red soil behind the trenches that the Confederates had lost three quarters of an hour before. Re-occupation of that line was the goal.
Half way there a body of blue infantry stopped and faced to the rear to confront the Rebels.
The battalion halted.
Devereux would have been mildly surprised to know that this was the 17th Maine Infantry, the regiment in Alexander Hays’ brigade that he had led forward against the Brock Road a few days before.
Unaccountably, these lumbermen from the far North decided to make a stand to hold a space through which the rest of their brigade could escape. In the ranks were men for whom Claude had seemed an apparition sent from heaven to bring them to victory in the smoke and fire of the Wilderness. Now, he would kill and maim some of them.
A ragged volley from the Maine men whizzed through the ranks knocking down several and sending two to the rear with blood on their clothing.
Death Piled Hard: A Tale of the Confederate Secret Services Page 27