Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  “Go back,” Lee said, enunciating carefully, “and tell General Hill to leave his men in camp. They must have rest. The Union actions above him are merely a feint, the regiments on picket can address them. The enemy is preparing to cross below, toward Hanover Junction.”

  Three thirty p.m.

  South bank of the North Anna, Jericho Mill Ford

  Brigadier General Charles Griffin rode along his line, watching his men entrench. Blouses off, they tore at the clay with spades or swung axes at nearby trees to bank up logs and uncover fields of fire. Crawford’s division had begun to fill in on his left, closing the gap all the way back to the river, while Cutler’s division was just a few hours behind, assigned to extend the right. And Wainwright, that redleg bastard—more power to him—had the corps artillery rattling up at a gallop.

  If the damn fool Rebs didn’t come on soon, they’d miss their chance and pay for it. But the fields to the front remained empty. There’d been a fuss with skirmishers, but nothing after that. Either the buggers were in retreat, or their generals were taking a Mexican siesta.

  Griffin’s division had been hard used since the first day in the Wilderness, and the pointless assaults at Laurel Hill had cost him many of his finest soldiers. But, as an old trooper, he was a fair judge of men, and he sensed now that the boys still in the ranks had not had their spirits broken, just banged up a bit. They wanted to get their own back, that was all, to have a chance to do to the Johnnies what had been done to them.

  And it looked to Charlie Griffin as if the chance might come very soon.

  He paused behind the raw dirt line thrown up by Sweitzer’s men. When their general didn’t spur off in a billow of dust, the men eased up on their work and turned toward him, wiping sweat from their faces with the filthy sleeves of filthy undergarments. Waiting.

  “Damn right,” Griffin barked. “Dig in deep, you sorry sonsofbitches. Those grayback cocksuckers are like to be along, and we’re going to let them do the charging this time. Then we’ll see who’s fucked for beans come suppertime.” These men were mean, hardened, and beautifully vengeful. Not about to run away for two shits and a whistle. They wanted their fair turn at doing the damage. “Well, stop playing with your willies and dig, goddamn it.”

  Several of the men began to cheer him.

  “You sorry sonsofbitches,” Griffin told them. “What the Hell are you cheering for? Get back to work, you buggers.”

  His boys. God bless them.

  Four p.m.

  Headquarters, Third Corps, Army of Northern Virginia, Anderson’s Station

  Powell Hill told Wilcox: “Cad, I feel like I’ve been handed a shit-bucket. And the bucket’s just about full. Here I’ve got this report of Federals up at Jericho Mill. And over here I have a message from General Lee saying it isn’t to worry me, there’s nothing to it, let the men rest. I have one message from young Rooney Lee telling me there’s nobody out there to speak of, and another telling me there’s Yankees across the river, but not how many, and no time of day written down on either one.”

  “Well,” Cadmus Wilcox said, “the boys I sent out for a look ought to come in soon. Orr didn’t think he was up against any major force. Just big enough to make him wary of taking them on with one cut-to-the-bone regiment. Figured I ought to send out men I could trust, get a proper report.”

  Hill punched a bony fist into his left palm. Not fiercely, but repeatedly. “I swear, I’ve got half a mind to dig up Stuart’s body and see if I can’t breathe life into his carcass. I’ve never felt so blind during a campaign.” As he spoke, Hill realized the claim was not true. He had been even less well-informed at Gettysburg, on that first morning. And Stuart had been alive then. Off on a lark to get his name in the papers.

  Wilcox didn’t say a word, just looked at Hill with that slightly cross-eyed stare of his.

  Hill went on: “Word is the old man’s feeling poorly.”

  That, too, Hill realized, might have been left unsaid. Given his own recent absence from command. It just seemed a day when nothing would go right, when none of the numbers added up to the proper sum.

  “Any idea,” Wilcox asked, “what Lee means to do?”

  Hill shrugged. “Fight. Beyond that, I’m not sure he knows himself. That peckerwood Grant…”

  “Man got spunk, say that much,” Wilcox remarked.

  “Damned butcher.”

  The division commander sucked in a cheek. “Wouldn’t pretend to admire the gentleman … but we do seem a tad closer to Richmond than when we started out.”

  Hill spit. “McClellan got closer. And look how that ended up.”

  “I reckon. But I’m not convinced to a certainty we’re dealing with Georgie McClellan.”

  Looking up sharply, meeting his subordinate’s close-set, not-quite-right eyes, Hill said: “You think he can whip us?”

  “Didn’t say that. Stubborn feller, though.”

  Hill thought: There is no man upon this earth as stubborn as Robert E. Lee.

  “Wouldn’t mind hearing from one of those gussied-up, Charleston staff boys of yours,” Hill told his subordinate.

  “Getting them a good look, I expect.”

  Hill’s mood was as changeable as that of an ill-trained horse. “Probably nothing, after all. Lee’s like to be right.”

  One of Wilcox’s aides, Major Browning, galloped into camp, horse lathered and heaving.

  “Young buck of yours is reckless with a horse,” Hill commented.

  “Not as a rule,” Wilcox said. “And he’s from Raleigh, not Charleston.”

  Browning swung out of the saddle. With too much flair for Hill’s mood. Mustachioed like his division commander and looking a bright paragon of health, he strutted up to the generals, saluting and then sweeping his cap from his jet black hair. Hill decided he did not like the lad.

  “Well, Browning?”

  “Yankees, all right,” the major said. “Passel of them. Digging in.”

  “How many?” Hill asked.

  “Got as close as we could, didn’t want—”

  “How many?”

  The staff man recoiled at the corps commander’s tone. “At least a brigade. Could be two.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “All we could see, sir.”

  “Artillery?”

  “Didn’t see any.”

  Hill turned to Wilcox. “Get your division moving. Run those bastards back across that river. No. Cut them off from the river. And kill every man who won’t surrender when asked.” He snorted. “Looks like the old man was right. Yankees dangling some bait, get us looking the wrong way. We’ll make ’em pay for it.” He bore down on Wilcox. “How fast can you get up there with all your men?”

  Seven p.m.

  The heights south of Jericho Mill

  Colonel Charles Wainwright, chief of the Fifth Corps’ artillery, watched with immeasurable pride as Charlie Mink’s battery rolled forward through the shambles of Cutler’s division. The New York gunners trotted up as neatly as if on parade, parting the mass of fleeing soldiers to unlimber on the knoll the just arrived troops had abandoned.

  In moments, Mink’s boys were blowing canister into the screeching, hallooing Rebs, stunning them into confusion.

  Wainwright wasted no time: He sent riders to Walcott and Matthewson to bring up their batteries on line with Mink’s roaring guns.

  Even before the reinforcing pieces went into action, the Confederates halted in the open field. Unready to retreat, they concentrated their fire on Mink’s gun crews, dropping men rapidly. But the best of Cutler’s lot had thought better of their flight and rallied around the battery, with infantrymen leaping to serve the guns.

  When they saw Walcott’s battery crest the hillock, the Confederate officers goaded their men to go forward again, to rush the knoll before the additional pieces could open up. But the effort was futile. Walcott’s sections, then Matthewson’s, shredded what remained of the Reb formation.

  Just in time to finish them off
, Bartlett’s fresh brigade burst out of the trees, extending Sweitzer’s embattled flank and hitting the bewildered Johnnies at a right angle.

  Wainwright had the splendid pleasure and downright joy of watching Lee’s veteran infantry break and run.

  His boys would never receive due credit, of course. The artillery never did. But he knew that his men had broken the Reb attack that threatened to slash all the way to the river, cutting off Griffin’s and Crawford’s divisions in another damned debacle.

  As for those two divisions, they had held their ground. Sweitzer’s brigade had been threatened by the collapse of Cutler’s mob, but Charlie Griffin had simply refused his flank and kept on fighting. Now, to Griffin’s front, other Confederate regiments turned and ran. Without, Wainwright had to admit, falling subject to the effects of artillery.

  The Johnnies just didn’t seem to have their old spark.

  Or numbers. Wainwright galloped over to the knoll, full of advice and orders to prepare to receive a renewed Rebel attack. But nothing materialized on the right flank, the one vulnerable point. Instead, the Johnnies made a last halfhearted effort to break into Charlie Griffin’s lines. The old buzzard saw them off sharply.

  Had they been mad? Attacking a corps with what appeared to be no more than a single ill-led division?

  In the softening light, Wainwright watched through his field glasses as a last, weak assault crumbled, its survivors running pell-mell for their lives.

  Before the victorious batteries, Johnnies lay dead in heaps, while their wounded crawled and pleaded.

  Ragged prisoners shambled in, mocked by gloating soldiers who, a half hour past, had been on the run themselves.

  On his way to inspect the batteries he had positioned across the field behind Crawford’s division, Wainwright met a grinning Charlie Griffin riding along, trailed by his division flag and a gaggle of prancing staff officers.

  Griffin reined up just long enough to say, “Damned fine work there, Wainwright. You’re not completely worthless.” He swept an arm toward the Confederates, who had disappeared into groves and gullies and distance. “Who’s fucked for beans now?”

  Nine p.m.

  Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia, near the Miller house

  “We cannot abandon Hanover Junction,” Lee said from his throne on the upthrust root of an oak tree of biblical age. Looking around at his gathered generals, he waited for someone to brave a suggestion as to a course of action. Ewell, Anderson, and their flocks of subordinates stood about the map spread over the ground. In the lantern light in the purple dusk, the faces were those of weary, uneasy men.

  The day had turned against them. His son’s reports had been faulty, and Hampton’s were little better. Hill had squandered his opportunity, sending one division into the maw of a Union corps. And moments before the lighting of the lanterns, word had followed that the artillery fire off to the north had heralded an assault on the redoubt defended by Henagan’s men. Those people—Birney’s division of Hancock’s corps—had stormed forward under a brief and isolated shield of rain, and Henagan had failed to hold the northern end of the Chesterfield Bridge. Compounding the effects of the reverse, Lee did not believe the south bank could be held at that site, nor did his engineers.

  He chastised himself for being sick, for giving in to his body’s complaints, and for his errors of judgment. He had misled Hill, even before the corps commander misled himself. Now, as soldiers’ fires dotted the meadow in the gloaming, he forced himself to sit erectly on the bench nature provided, to keep his features steadfast and his voice infused with confidence. He refused to be ill. As he refused to be beaten.

  He had sent a message to Powell Hill to remain with his corps and position it advantageously, but the true reason for the order was that he did not want to lose his composure with the man. Whatever he had believed the situation to be, Hill had owed it to his troops to ride to the sound of the guns, to reinforce the attack when it became clear those people had crossed more than a brigade or two. If only Hill had struck with his entire corps …

  Regrets never won a single battle, Lee reminded himself.

  “Well, gentlemen?” he said. “Do we retire behind the South Anna? I dread it. The rail line must remain open.”

  “Fight ’em along the railroad,” Anderson offered. “Embankment makes a good line.”

  As night settled over the landscape of men, horses, and mules, of lush spring and rising damp, Lee said: “No, General Anderson. Warren could turn General Hill’s left too easily that way.”

  “I’m with you, sir,” Ewell put in. “Got to hold Hanover Junction. Just got to. Can’t do that, we might as well head straight for the Chickahominy. Or Richmond.”

  “But how, General Ewell? Hancock will cross the river in the morning. Warren is already on our left, on solid ground and entrenched. Our position … our present position … appears untenable.”

  His belly bit him again, but he kept his features steady.

  The generals fell silent. A few miles to the north, the Union guns bombarded positions Lee had ordered abandoned. That spendthrift shelling was seconded by artillery off to the west, where Hill had failed and, if reports were to be believed, once proud brigades had broken and fled the field.

  The pestering insects grew louder than the men surrounding Lee.

  “Sir, if I may?” The speaker was Colonel Martin Smith, his senior engineer, a man who possessed a genius for plotting fieldworks. Lee knew that whatever the colonel had to say would be reliable, for good or ill, and his words would be spoken temperately. The colonel had waited to offer his views until the generals had talked themselves out, so no man’s pride was threatened. Smith preferred making fortifications to making enemies.

  A Northerner by birth, Smith had married south. Lee knew his type full well: the insecure man who feared putting a foot wrong, a gifted man who let fools step ahead of him.

  Lee nodded: Go ahead.

  In a tone ill-suited to the hour, the ailing Ewell said, “Well, the floor recognizes Colonel Smith, our favorite Yankee. Do tell, Colonel, do tell.”

  Ignoring Ewell, Smith knelt at the head of the map, across from Lee and careful not to block the cast of the lanterns, whose glass was under mad assault by moths.

  “Sir, I rode across the army’s front today. And beyond it. There’s a natural line of defense, we’d just have to cut some trees in front of the batteries.” He traced a finger along the map. “That old stage road to Ox Ford? It follows the line of a ridge that’s better than any ground we’ve held since Mine Run. It rises from the rail line … just over here.” He tapped the current position of Hill’s Corps. “Then it slants northeast to the river, to Ox Ford. The high ground up there’s a natural bulwark, absolutely commanding.”

  Guts in turmoil, Lee nodded. “I saw that ground myself. Go on.”

  “The bluff follows the river east for a half mile, then drops off toward the Chesterfield Bridge. But a spur runs southeast, back toward the rail line.” He retraced the entire position, west to east.

  “That’s another damned salient,” Ewell burst out. His voice squeaked, as it often did when the man grew excited. “Had enough of that at Spotsylvania.”

  Annoyed by the man, by his unthinking language and brashness, Lee felt the impulse to give him a public dressing-down. But Ewell was ill and this was no time for a rupture.

  Lee signaled for Smith to resume.

  Speaking even more carefully, the engineer said, “Of course, it appears to be something of a salient. General Ewell’s correct, in that sense.”

  “Damned right I am.”

  “But there are other factors in play that render the position advantageous. This ‘salient’ has no vulnerable apex, no tip, but a half-mile wall of natural battlements towering over the river.” The engineer sought Lee’s eyes across the map. “A direct assault by the Federals at Ox Ford would be disastrous for them. And the legs of the position, stretching back to the railroad on both flanks, follow splendid terrain
that begs fortification. Beyond, the rail embankment provides a base, extending our flanks.”

  Lee grasped the brilliance. “It splits their army in two! Should they rush forward. I see it, Colonel, I see it.” Lee almost smiled. “We must conceal ourselves, our strength. And lure them to divide the wings of their army.”

  “Precisely, sir,” Smith agreed. “It’s Napoleon’s ‘strategy of the central position.’”

  “Napoleon!” Ewell snorted. “Hah!”

  Lee concentrated on his engineer. “Once they’re across the river … by the time they discover what we’re about … for one of their flanks to reinforce the other, those people will have to make two river crossings. And march several miles.”

  As more officers caught the vision, they crowded around the map. For a few bright minutes, Lee soared above all illness.

  “If,” he went on, “they reinforce Warren, passing another corps over the river on our left … a third corps would have to remain … at least two divisions of a corps … on the north bank to bind the wings of their army together. Any such force would be fixed in place and useless.” Lee pointed at the tattered map. “That would leave a single corps exposed on our right, south of the river.”

  A major could not contain himself. “Hancock! We could trap Hancock!”

  Porter Alexander put in, “Artillery can control the Chesterfield Bridge, keep off reinforcements.”

  “Or keep Hancock from getting away,” Early said with bloodlust in his voice.

  Anderson, whose corps held the center, added: “He’ll be caught up in a vise. Whether he swings west, or heads straight south, don’t hardly matter, once he’s crossed that river. Either way, he comes up against entrenchments to his front. While we envelop him.”

  “Exactly!” Even Venable, a creature of worry this day, had grown excited.

  “Gentlemen…” Lee considered rising, then decided the wiser course was to remain seated. “We must thank Colonel Smith for his diligence. I believe we see a way. Should matters develop as hoped … should it be the Lord’s will … we may destroy the finest corps in the Union army tomorrow.”