Just after he’d finished drafting the general order for the melancholy necessity, Charles Venable poked his head into the tent. “Telegram for you, sir.” He paused for dramatic effect. “It’s from Rivington.”
“Read it to me at once, Major,” Lee said.
“Yes, sir.” Venable unfolded the flimsy sheet of paper. “Stopped at Rivington northbound per your orders of January 20. Many crates of two different shapes taken on board. Townsfolk helpful and well organized. After departing, opened two crates at random, one of each type. Contents, metal cartridges and carbines of curious manufacture. A dozen men also boarded. Asbury Finch, First Lieutenant, C.S.A.”
“Well, well,” Lee said, and then again, “Well, well. Our mysterious Mr. Rhoodie does indeed have the rifles he promised, or some of them, at any rate. Despite his certainty, I wondered, I truly did.”
“I did more than wonder, sir,” Venable answered. “I doubted, and doubted strongly. But as you say, he seems to have kept the first part of his promise.”
“So he does. When General Stuart sees what these carbines can do, he will want no others. The repeaters, which ever more of the Federal cavalry employ, have hurt his troopers badly. Now he will be able to reply on equal—or better than equal—terms. And if Mr. Rhoodie was not “spinning a tale all out of moonshine, there will be rifles for our infantry as well.”
“I wonder how much the Bureau of Ordnance is paying for these—what did he call them?”
“AK-47s,” Lee supplied. “Whatever the price, it may well mark the difference between our liberty and suppression. It would be difficult to set that price too high.”
“Yes, sir.” Venable hesitated, then went on, “May I ask, sir, what you think of Mr. Rhoodie?”
“Well, I certainly think a good deal better of him now that I know for a fact he is not a solitary charlatan with a solitary, if marvelous, carbine,” Lee said at once. Then he too paused. “But that wasn’t the whole of what you asked, was it, Major?”
“No, sir.” Normally a fluent speaker, Venable seemed to be struggling to put what he thought into words: “I do believe he is the most peculiar man I’ve ever met. His carbine, his gear, even the food he eats and the coffee he drinks…I’ve not seen nor heard of their like anywhere.”
“Nor have I, and with their uniform excellence and convenience, I should hope I would have, the better to wage this war,” Lee said. “There is also more to it than that. The man knows more than he lets on. How could he have learned of my orders sending General Hoke south? That still perplexes me, and worries me no small amount as well. Had he been exposed ‘as a fraud, I would have had some hard questions to ask him about it, and asked them in as hard way as need. As is—” Lee shrugged. “He is manifestly a good Southern man. How long do you suppose we could have lasted, Major, had he chosen to go north and sell his rifles to the enemy?”
Venable made a sour face, as if disliking the taste of that idea. “Not long, sir.”
“I quite agree. They outweigh us enough as is. But he chose our cause instead, so for the time being the hard questions can wait. And he is a pious man. No one who was not would read his Testament late at night where nobody could be expected to see him.”
“Every word you say is true, sir,” Venable said. “And yet—I don’t know—everything Rhoodie has seems too good to be true somehow.”
“The Union has had the advantage in material goods all through the war, Major. Are you saying we are not entitled to our share, or that, if fortune should for once choose to favor us, we ought not to take advantage of it?”
“Put that way, no, of course not, General Lee.”
“Good,” Lee said. “For I intend to wring every drop of advantage from it that I may.”
A plume of woodsmoke announced a train heading up the Orange and Alexandria Railroad to the little town of Orange Court House. Lee pointed to it with the eagerness of a boy who spies his Christmas present being fetched in. “If I have calculated rightly, gentlemen, that will be the train from Rivington. Shall we ride to meet it, and see this first consignment of Mr. Rhoodie’s rifles?”
His aides hurried off to get their horses. Andries Rhoodie went with them. Perry brought up Traveller. Lee swung onto the gray. The staff officers and Rhoodie soon joined them. They rode down from the hills to Orange Court House together. Lee and his aides were all fine horsemen. He soon saw Rhoodie was not, though he managed well enough.
Old civilian men, walking or riding along the streets of Orange Court House, lifted their hats in tribute to Lee as he passed. He gravely returned their greetings. Few young male civilians were to be seen—in the town or anywhere else in the Confederacy. There were a fair number of soldiers, seeing what the shops had to offer: not much, probably. They saluted Lee and his staff officers. Some pointed at Andries Rhoodie: his size, his strange clothes, and the fact that he, a stranger, rode with Lee drew their notice to him.
The train station was not far from the courthouse that gave the hamlet half its name. For that matter, nothing in Orange Court House was far from anything else. The train had already arrived by the time Lee and his companions got to the station. Under the watchful eye of the crew, slaves loaded cut logs into the tender for the next trip south.
Other blacks were starting to unload the freight cars. Some of the men who supervised them wore the Confederate uniform; others were dressed like Andries Rhoodies, in caps and mottled jackets and trousers. Even their ankle boots were the same as his. Lee rubbed his chin thoughtfully. What one man wore was his own business. When a dozen men—a baker’s dozen, counting Rhoodie himself—wore similar outfits, that suggested the clothes were a uniform of sorts. Indeed, Rhoodie’s colleagues looked more uniform than the Southern soldiers with them, whose pants, coats, and hats were of several different colors and cut in a variety of ways.
Behind Lee, Walter Taylor turned to Rhoodie and remarked, “Your friends are all good-sized men, sir.” He was right. The smallest of the men m spotted clothes had to be five feet ten. Most of them were six-footers; two or three were as big as Rhoodie. They all looked well fed, too, in spite of the war and the hard winter. The Confederate soldiers came to attention when Lee and his aides rode up. The men from Rivington did not. A few of them greeted Rhoodie with a nod or a wave. Most just kept calling orders to the slaves, who were taking crates off the train.
“Your fellows here have the same interesting accent as you yourself,” Charles Venable observed.
“We are countrymen,” Rhoodie said blandly. Lee smiled at the major’s polite probe and at Rhoodie’s equally polite but uninformative reply. Rhoodie had given a lot of polite but uninformative replies, the last few days. Lee told himself that a trainload—maybe a great many trainloads—of repeaters and cartridges gave him the right to hold his tongue.
Lee dismounted. His aides and Rhoodie followed him to the ground; Venable hitched Traveller to the rail. A soldier with two bars on either side of his collar walked up to them. His face, Lee thought, was too thin for the whiskers he’d chosen, which were like those of the Federal general Burnside. He saluted. “Asbury Finch, sir, 21st Georgia.”
“Yes, Lieutenant. I received your telegram.”
“Yes, sir.” Finch sent a glance to Andries Rhoodie, who had gone over to greet his comrades. “So you’ve already met one of these all-over-spots fellows, have you, sir? They’ve purely done wonders for Rivington, that they have.”
“I commanded in North Carolina a couple of years ago, Lieutenant, but I must confess I do not remember the town,” Lee said.
“A couple years ago, General Lee, sir, wasn’t nothin’ worth remembering, just a town barely big enough for the train to bother stoppin’ at it. But it’s growin’ to beat the band now, thanks to these folks. A big bunch of ‘em done settled there, bought a raft o’ niggers, and run up new houses and warehouses and I don’t know what all. And all in the last three, four months, too; I heard that from one of the folks who’s lived there all his life while we were takin’ on these
crates. They pay gold for everything, too, he says.”
“No wonder they’re welcome, then,” Lee said. Confederate paper money had weakened to the point where a pair of shoes cost a private soldier three or four months’ wages. That was one reason so many men in the Army of Northern Virginia went barefoot even in winter. Another was that there were not enough shoes to be had at any price.
“Pity they couldn’t have come a year ago,” Walter Taylor said. “Think what we might have done with those rifles at Chancellorsville, or up in Pennsylvania.”
“I have had that thought myself a fair number of times the last few days, Major,” Lee said. “What’s past is past, though, and cannot be changed.”
“The guns, they’re as fine as all that, sir?” Finch asked. “They are indeed, Lieutenant,” Taylor said. “With them, I feel we truly may hold in our hands the goose that lays the golden eggs.”
“Or it holds us,” Charles Marshall said, his voice sour.
Lee looked at him sharply. Marshall had not taken to Andries Rhoodie, not at all. But after a moment’s thought, Lee decided he had a point; Trainloads of repeating carbines might save the Confederacy. But if Rhoodie and his friends were the only source for them, they held a hand to the throat of the South. They were not squeezing now—far from it. If, however, they chose to…
“Major Marshall,” Lee said.
“Sir?”
“Please draft a letter to Colonel Gorgas in Richmond. I would like his opinion on the practicability of our manufacturing copies of these weapons, as we do now with the Springfield and Mississippi rifles. When the first shipment of rifles reaches our headquarters, you might also send one and a stock of cartridges to Colonel G.W. Rains in Georgia, who is, I think, the man most expert in the Bureau of Ordnance on matters pertaining to powder. Perhaps he can enlighten us on how these rounds produce so little smoke.”
“I will attend to it, sir,” Marshall said. His spectacles’ wire frames could not hide a raised eyebrow. “Your trust in Mr. Rhoodie is not perfect, then?”
“The only perfect trust is in God,” Lee answered. Marshall smiled and nodded. A relative of the great chief justice, he had been a lawyer till the war began, which gave him another reason besides religion to place perfect trust in no human institution.
Just then, Rhoodie came back to Lee, his staff officers, and Lieutenant Finch. Several of his friends were right behind him. He said, “General, let me introduce some of my comrades. Here are Konrad de Buys, Wilhelm Gebhard, Benny Lang, and Ernie Graaf.”
“Gentlemen,” Lee said, extending his hand.
They came up one by one to shake it.” An honor to meet the great General Lee,” Ernie Graff said. He was about Lee’s height, and wore a neat, sandy chin-beard, which only partially hid a scar that ran up to the angle of his jaw. As Major Venable had noted, he and the rest of the men in mottled clothes spoke with the same not-quite-British accent as Rhoodie, and the same harsh undertone—if anything, that was stronger in his voice than in Rhoodie’s.
“You needn’t say my name as if you’d found it in some history book, sir,” Lee protested mildly. All of Rhoodie’s comrades smiled or laughed at that, rather more than the small joke deserved. Even so, Lee was pleased to put them at their ease.
“General Stuart is the man I want to meet,” said the one who had been introduced as Konrad de Buys. Most of the strangers had a businesslike look to them, but de Buys’s tawny eyes held a gleam that reminded Lee of a cougar. This man fought for the joy of it.
Then Lee remembered how Rhoodie rode. De Buys would have to do better than that to satisfy Jeb Stuart. “You are a horseman, sir?” Lee asked. De Buys nodded in a way that left no doubt. Lee said, “Then I am certain General Stuart will be pleased to make your acquaintance as well. Colonel Mosby also, perhaps, with his partisan command.” By the way de Buys grinned, Lee knew he had judged his man aright.
“General Stuart is by—Fredericksburg?” Wilhelm Gebhard asked.
He turned the soft g of general hard, as a German might have. Behind Lee, one of his aides whispered “Dutchmen” to another. Lee guessed it was Marshall; he seemed most dubious of Rhoodie, and the bulk of Germans in America—including a good many who lived in the Confederacy—were Unionists.
But these men were far too open—and far too strange—to be spies, and in any case, General Meade knew where the Army of Northern Virginia’s cavalry was passing the winter. “Yes, around Fredericksburg,” Lee answered. He would sooner have had Stuart’s troopers closer to hand, but getting horses through the winter was harder and required more land than men did.
Gebhard turned to Rhoodie, asked him something in a language that sounded close to English but was not. Rhoodie replied in the same tongue. Dutchmen they are, Lee thought, In English, Rhoodie said, “He wants to know whether he and de Buys should arrange to go to Fredericksburg to show off our guns, or whether you will call General Stuart here.”
Lee thought about that. At last he said, “With the cavalry spread out on the countryside as it is, the more efficient course would appear to be convening General Stuart and his divisional and brigade commanders here at Orange Court House so they can judge your repeaters for themselves.”
“Fine,” Rhoodie said. “When we shoot, though, better we go back up to your headquarters, to keep word of what these guns can do from reaching the enemy.”
“A sensible plan,” Lee agreed.
Talking to himself as much as to Lee, Rhoodie went on, “Since this will be the center from which we give out guns to your army, we ought to rent quarters here, and warehouse space, too. We have a lot of work to do before spring, getting your men ready.”
“The officers of the Army of Northern Virginia should prove of some assistance to you,” Lee said drily.
Irony bounced from Andries Rhoodie like solid shot off an ironclad’s armored hull. He looked Lee full in the face and said, “Some will help us, General; I don’t doubt it. But if I were on the other side of the Rapidan and dealing with the Federals, say with General Burnside or General Sigel, they might not even have given me a hearing. They have their Springfields, after all, and once a routineer settles in with something, it’s hard to boot him loose from it.”
“You will be treating with better men in this army than the two you named,” Lee said. “I should certainly hope so, at any rate.”
“You vouch for every brigadier, every colonel?” Rhoodie persisted. “My comrades and I haven’t enough manpower to do more than show the basics of how to shoot and clean the AK-47, regiment by regiment. Getting your soldiers to use it afterwards will be up to those commanders. Some of them will mistrust anything new and different.”
“I see what you are saying, sir,” Lee admitted. There was some truth to it, too. The Confederate States themselves had banded together in the hope of preserving their old way of life against the growing numbers and growing factories of the North. But here—”You get my men these repeaters, Mr. Rhoodie, and I shall undertake to see they are used,”
“That’s what I wanted to hear, General Lee.”
“You have heard it.”
Singing as they worked, slaves carried long crates with rifles in them and square crates of ammunition out of the freight cars and stacked them beside the railroad tracks. The stacks grew higher and higher and higher.
* II *
“What else, Alsie?” First Sergeant Nate Caudell asked patiently.
Private Alsie Hopkins furrowed his brow, as well as a man in his early twenties could. “Tell ‘em I feel good,” he said at last. “Tell ‘em the arm where I got shot at Gettysburg don’t hurt no more, and the diarrhea ain’t troublin’ me, neither.”
Caudell’s pen scratched across the page. Actually, it wasn’t a proper page, but the back of a piece of old wallpaper. He wrote around a chunk of paste that still clung to it. He was sure he wrote more letters than anyone else in Company D—maybe more than anyone else in the whole 47th North Carolina. That went with being a schoolteacher in a unit full
of farmers, many of whom—like Alsie Hopkins—could neither read nor write for themselves.
“What else, Alsie?” he asked again.
Hopkins thought some more. “Tell ‘em we had us a rip-roarin’ snowball fight the other day, and one feller, he got two teeth knocked out of his head when he got hit with a snowball with a rock in the middle of it. We all laughed and laughed.”
“Except the man who got hit,” Caudell said drily.
“No, him too.”
Caudell thought that likely to amuse Hopkins’s family, so he started to write it down. Just then, though, a bugle call came through the open shutters of his cabin’s single window. He put down his pen. “Have to finish this another time, Alsie. That’s assembly for officers, sergeants, and corporals.”
“Everybody but us privates,” Hopkins said, happy at the prospect of his superiors working when he didn’t have to. “Can I leave this paper here, First Sergeant, and we get it done maybe some time later on?”
“I suppose so,” Caudell said resignedly. His battered felt slouch hat lay beside him on the bed. He put it on, got to his feet. “I’ve got to go now, though.”
He and Hopkins ducked out through the cabin’s low door. With nothing better to do, the private ambled away. Caudell hurried up the lane that ran through the cabins and lean-tos and tents of the regiment’s winter quarters. His cabin, which he shared with the other four sergeants of Company D, lay farthest from the open space at the center of the encampment. Closest to that open space was Captain Lewis’s tent; being captain, he had it all to himself. The company banner stood beside it, the words CASTALIA INVINCIBLES picked out in red silk on a blue ground, pierced by more than one bullet hole.
Men with chevrons or collar badges converged on the parade ground. They did not begin to fill it up; they were perhaps one part in seven of the six-hundred-odd soldiers who regularly drilled there.
The Guns of the South Page 3