“What do you have, Edwin?” Dempsey Eure demanded when Powell returned. Caudell’s stomach growled like a starving bear. He’d known some lean times before the war—what man hadn’t, save maybe a planter like Faribault? —but he’d never known what real hunger was till he joined the army.
Powell said; “Got me some cornmeal and a bit o’ beef. Likely be tough as mule leather, but I won’t complain till after I get me outside of it. We still have any o’ that bacon your sister sent you, Dempsey?”
“Little bit,” Eure answered. “You thinkin’ o’ makin’ up some good ol’ Confederate cush?”
“I will unless you got a better notion,” Powell said.” Ain’t none of us what you’d call fancy cooks. Why don’t you get out that bacon and toss me our fryin’ pan? Here, Nate, you cut the beef small.” He handed Caudell the meat, the hairy skin still on it.
The pan had once been half a Federal canteen; its handle was a nailed-on stick. Powell tossed in the small chunk of bacon and held the pan over the tire. When he had cooked the grease out so it bubbled and spattered in the bottom of the pan, Caudell added the cubed beef. After a minute or two, he poured in some water. Meanwhile, Allison High used more water to make the cornmeal into a tin of mush. He passed the mush to Caudell, who upended the tin over the frying pan. Powell stirred the mixture together, then kept the pan on the tire until the mush soaked up all the water and a brown crust began to form along the sides.
He took the pan off the fire, set it down. with his knife, he sliced the cush into five more-or-less-equal pieces. “There you go, boys. Dig in.”
“I hate this goddam slosh,” Rufus Daniel said. “When I get home from this damn war, I ain’t goin’ to eat nothin’ but fried chicken and sweet-potato pie and ham and biscuits and gravy just as thick as you please. Aii, that goddam pan’s still hot.” He stuck a burned knuckle into his mouth. While he’d been complaining, he’d also been using belt knife and fingers to get his portion of supper out of the frying pan.
Caudell tossed his slab of cush from hand to hand till it was cool enough to bite. He wolfed it down and licked his fingers when he was through. It wasn’t what he would have eaten by choice—it was as far as the moon from the feast Rufus Daniel had been imagining—but cornmeal had a way of sticking to the ribs that made a man forget he was hungry for a while.
Dempsey Eure lit a twig at the fire, got his pipe going. Daniel did the same. Caudell lit up a cigar, tilted his head back, and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. The cabin filled with fragrant smoke. “Glad we’re not short of tobacco, anyhow,” he said.
“Not in this regiment,” Eure said. The 47th drew its men from the heart of North Carolina’s tobacco country; half a dozen soldiers had been tobacconists before the war.
“Almost makes me wish I was on picket duty up by the Rapidan,” Powell said, shifting a chaw from one cheek to the other. “Might could be I’d find mea friendly Yank on the other side, trade him some tobacco for coffee and sugar and maybe some o’ them little hard candies they have sometimes.”
His messmates sighed. That kind of trading went on all the time. Confederates and Federals winked at it. Why not? Caudell thought—it isn’t going to change who wins the war, only make both sides more comfortable. At the moment, with some food in his belly, a cigar in his hand, and a warm cabin around him, he was comfortable enough. He took another drag. “Picket duty’s cold,” he said reflectively.
“That’s true,” a couple of the other sergeants said. Dempsey. Eure added, “To hell with your coffee and sugar, Edwin. I ain’t gonna freeze to get it.”
They talked awhile longer, and smoked, and passed around the new repeater. One by one, they went to bed. The last thing Caudell saw before he fell asleep was Edwin Powell sitting close by the fire, assembling the AK-47 and taking it apart again.
Reveille the next morning hit Caudell like an artillery barrage. He threw off his threadbare blanket, scrambled out of bed, and put on his shoes, tunic, and slouch hat. Everyone else was getting dressed at the same time. The hut wasn’t really big enough for five men to dress in all at once, but they managed; by now they’d been doing it for three months.
Dempsey Eure’s black felt hat was even more disreputable than Caudell’s, but he kept a gaudy turkey feather in the band. “You walk out wearin’ that bird, somebody’ll shoot it off you,” Rufus Daniel said. He cracked the same joke about once a week.
Caudell went outside. As always, he had mixed feelings about that first breath of early morning air. It was sweet and fresh and free of most of the smoke that built up inside the cabin, but it was bitterly cold. When he exhaled, he breathed out as big a cloud as if he’d started another cigar.
Soldiers came scrambling out of their shelters to line up for morning roll call. In the Federal army, their appearance would have given apoplexy to any noncommissioned officer worth his stripes. Not all of them had shoes. Their torn trousers were variously blue—Union booty—gray, or butternut. No one wore a blue blouse, for fear of being mistaken for a Yankee troop, but that was as far as uniformity went there. Some wore forage caps, others slouch hats like Caudell’s. The only thing of which that imaginary Federal sergeant would have approved was their bearing. The Castalia Invincibles might have been in rags, but they could fight.
“Dress ranks!” Allison High shouted. The men shifted a little. Company D, as a whole, numbered between five and six dozen men, which total included two corporals, four sergeants, First Sergeant Nate Caudell, a couple of lieutenants, and a captain. Right after Gettysburg, sergeants had commanded some companies of the 47th North Carolina; at the moment, the Invincibles were oversupervised.
Captain Lewis limped up. “Call the roll, First Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.” Caudell took from his pocket a much-folded piece of paper. After so many repetitions, he hardly needed to look at it as he called the men’s names: “Bailey, Ransom…Barnes, Lewis D. W… Bass, Gideon…” He finished a few minutes later: “Winstead, John A…Winstead, William T.” He turned back to Lewis with a salute.” All present, sir.”
“Very good. Sick call?”
“Sick call!” Caudell said loudly. A couple of men took a step forward. “What’s your trouble, Granbury?” he asked one of them.
“I got the shits—beggin’ your pardon, First Sergeant, the runs—again,” Granbury Proctor said.
Caudell sighed. With the bad food and bad water the regiment got, diarrhea was a common complaint. This was Proctor’s third bout this winter. Caudell said, “Go see the assistant surgeon, Granbury. Maybe he can do something for you.” Proctor nodded and walked off. Caudell turned to the other sufferer. “What about you, Southard?”
“Don’t rightly know, First Sergeant,” Bob Southard answered. His voice cracked as he answered; he was only eighteen or so. He bent his head and coughed. “I’m feelin’ right poorly, though.”
Caudell put a skeptical hand on the youngster’s forehead. Southard had already deserted the regiment once; he was a shirker. “No fever. Get back in line.” Dejectedly, the private went back into his slot. The cook banged on his pan. Caudell said, “Dismissed for breakfast.”
Breakfast was corn bread. The meal from which it had been made was ground so coarse that some kernels lay in wait, intact and rock-hard, to ambush the teeth. Caudell plucked at his beard to knock crumbs loose. He heard a wagon—no, more than one—rolling down from Orange Court House. “You don’t suppose—?” he said to Rufus Daniel.
“This early? Naah,” Daniel said.
But it was. The wagon train turned off the road and rumbled toward the regimental parade ground. Benny Lang rode beside the lead wagon’s driver. Slaves accompanied the others. Caudell held out his hand, palm up, to Allison High. “Pay up.”
“Hell.” High reached into his hip pocket, drew out a wad of bills, and gave two of them to Caudell. “Here’s your twenty. Who’d’ve thought anybody’d move so quick? Hell.” He walked off scowling, his head down.
“Easy there, Allison,” Caudell cal
led after him. “It’s only. twenty dollars Confederate, not like before the war when that was a lot of money.
“Benny Lang leaped down from his wagon and started shouting like a man possessed: “Come on, get those crates off! This isn’t a bloody picnic, so move it, you lazy kaffirs!” The slaves started unloading the wagons at the same steady but leisurely pace they usually used. It was not fast enough to suit Lang. “Move, damn you!” he shouted again.
The blacks were used to letting such shouts roll off their backs, secure in the knowledge that the work would eventually get done and the yelling white man would shut up and leave them alone. Lang met that quiet resistance head on. He stamped over to one of the slaves, threw him to the ground with a flip like the one he’d used against Billy Beddingfield. “Ow!” the man cried. “What’d I do, boss?”
“Not bloody much,” Lang snarled, punctuating his words with a kick. The slave cried out again. Lang said scornfully, “You aren’t hurt. Now get up and work. And I mean work, damn you. That goes for the rest of you lazy buggers, too, or you’ll get worse than I just gave him. Move!”
The black men moved. Boxes came down from wagons at an astonishing rate. “Will you look at that?” Rufus Daniel said…If I had me enough niggers to hire an overseer, that there Lang’d be first man I’d pick for the job.”
“Maybe so,” Caudell said. But he watched the sidelong glances that were the only safe way the slaves could use to show their resentment. “If he treats ‘em like that all the time, though, he’d better grow eyes in the back of his head, or else he’ll have an accident one fine day—or lots of runaways, anyhow.”
“Might could be you’re right,” Daniel allowed.
Once the wagons were unloaded, Lang ordered the work crew to carry a share of the crates to each company standard. When the slaves again didn’t work fast enough to suit him, he booted one of them in the backside. They moved quicker after that.
Lang followed them from company to company. When he came to the Castalia Invincibles, he picked Caudell out by his chevrons, handed him a length of iron with a curved and flattened end. “Here you are, First Sergeant—a ripping bar to get the crates open. We found some of your units had a spot of trouble with that.”
“You think of everything,” Caudell said admiringly.
“We do try. You’ll have two magazines per weapon there, more or less—enough ammunition to get a start at practicing. Your ordnance sergeant needn’t fret. We’ll get you plenty more as you need it.” With a nod, Lang was off to Company E.
Caudell watched him go. After yesterday and this morning, he believed Lang’s promise. This was a man who delivered, But then, the Army of Northern Virginia always got the ammunition it needed, one way or another. Caudell wished Benny Lang or someone like him would take over the Confederate commissary department.
The soldiers gathered round the stacked crates. “Those the repeaters the bad-tempered feller was showin’ off to y’all yesterday?” asked Melvin Bean, a smooth-faced private with a light, clear voice.
“Yup.” Caudell attacked a crate with the bar. The lid came up with a groan of nails leaving wood. Sure enough, an AK-47 lay inside. Caudell said,” Anybody with the tools to give me a hand, run and fetch ‘em. We’ll get the job done that much quicker.” Tom Short, who worked as a saddler, left and returned shortly with a claw hammer. He fell to work beside Caudell. Before too long, all the Castalia Invincibles held new repeaters.
A heavyset private named Ruffin Biggs gave his weapon a dubious look. “We’re supposed to whup the Yankees with these little things?”
“It ain’t the size of the dog in the fight, Ruffin,” Dempsey Eure drawled, “it’s the size of the fight in the dog. These here puppies got plenty of fight in ‘em, believe you me.”
Captain Lewis said, “Break into groups of six or seven men each. That way, everyone who learned about these repeaters yesterday will have one group to teach.”
The division, into groups smaller than squads, went rather awkwardly. Eyeing the soldiers in his group, Caudell suspected that the sergeants and corporals—the company’s regular squad leaders—had stuck him and the officers with the men they wanted least.
He shrugged. Everyone would have to learn. He held up his rifle, pointed to the lever below the charging handle. “This is the change lever. See, it has three positions. For now, I want you to make sure you have it in the topmost one.”
“Why’s that, First Sergeant?” Melvin Bean asked.
“Because if you don’t, you’re liable to end up shooting yourself before you find out how not to,” Caudell answered drily. That made everyone sit up and take notice.
He went through the lesson Lang had given him. The soldiers practiced attaching and removing a magazine. He showed them how rounds were arranged inside the clip and had them practice putting rounds into it.
A rifle cracked, over in another company. Shouts of alarm rose after the gunshot. “That’s why I want that change lever up top,” Caudell said. “As long as it’s there, the repeater can’t go off by accident. It’s called the safety.”
Paschall Page, the regimental sergeant major, came up to Captain Lewis and saluted. “The colonel’s compliments, sir, and the companies will practice shooting at our targets one by one, in order.”
“Very good, Sergeant Major. Thank you,” Lewis said. Page saluted again and marched off, every inch a gentleman. His blue sergeant’s stripes were joined above by an arc that showed he was the most exalted of all the regiment’s noncommissioned officers.
The lessons went more smoothly than Caudell dared hope. For one thing, Benny Lang had done a good job with his instructions the day before, and Caudell had paid careful attention. For another, despite being different from a rifle-musket, the AK-47 was an easy gun to use. Even Ruffin Biggs and Alsie Hopkins, who had not a letter between them, soon got the hang of the repeater. Caudell wondered how they would do when time to clean the weapon came around. He intended to hold off on that till his pupils had fired.
The soldiers were learning how to chamber the first round in the banana clip when a volley of shots came from the parade ground. Company A was shooting for the first time. Almost at once, the gunfire rang so thick and fast as to remind Caudell of a whole regiment on the line, not just one understrength company.
“The Chicora Guards got new guns! Run for your lives!” Henry Joyner yelled out toward the practicing graycoats. Like the Castalia Invincibles, the Chicora Guards were mostly recruited from Nash County; which made the rivalry between them all the fiercer. For that matter, each company currently boasted three Joyners. The relationships between them were too complicated for Caudell to keep straight.
One of the soldiers of Company A—maybe one of the Joyners—yelled back, “Shame we ain’t got the bullets to waste to turn these here fine new repeaters on you all!”
“Couldn’t hit us if’n you did,” Henry jeered. He thumbed his nose.
“Enough,” Caudell said. Horseplay was fun, but horseplay between men who carried rifles had to be controlled before it got out of hand.
Companies B and C—neither of which had a name—took their first turns practicing with the AK-47. The men came away from the firing line exclaiming and shaking their heads in wonder. Some of them slung the new repeaters on their backs. Others carried the carbines in both hands, as if they could not bear to let them go. Three or four men from Company C started a chant: “Enfield, Springfield, throw ‘em in the cornfield!” Before long the whole company, officers and all, was singing it.
Captain Lewis said, “Form column of fours…to the parade ground, march.” A couple of new men just up from North Carolina started off on the wrong foot, but growls from the sergeants soon had them in step with everyone else. “Shift to the left from column to line…move,” Lewis said.
The company performed the evolution with mindless precision born of unending practice. Caudell remembered the first day of marching down at Camp Mangum, when an irate drill sergeant had compared their ragged l
ine to a drunken centipede in an ass-kicking contest. Even that drill sergeant, assuming he was still alive, would have been satisfied to see them now.
“Load your rifles,” Captain Lewis said. In one motion the men drew back their charging handles, and each chambered a round. “Fire!”
Not every repeater spat flame. “Check your change lever!” Caudell shouted, along with everyone else who had had instruction the day before. Soldiers checked. Some of them swore at themselves. The next volley was fuller; in a moment, a fusillade of shots made separate volleys impossible to distinguish.
The company’s privates shouted in wonder and delight at how rapidly their repeaters fired and how easy they were to shoot, Caudell knew how they felt. The AK-47 was so different from any other rifle that hearing about it wasn’t enough. Even after you shot with it, it was hard to believe.
“What happens if you put this here change lever thing on the middle notch?” Henry Joyner asked. “If it’s as much different from the bottom one as that there one is from the top, reckon this gun’ll march out and shoot Yankees an by its lonesome. I’m for it, I tell you that.”
“Sorry, Henry.” Caudell explained about full automatic fire. He also explained about how much ammunition it chewed up, finishing, “Shooting fast can be bad if you run out of cartridges before the battle’s over. That’s not easy to do with a rifle musket. With one of these repeaters, especially on full automatic, it’s easy as pie. You’ll want to be careful about that.”
Melvin Bean said, “I got shot in the arm the first day at Gettysburg after I’d used up all my cartridges. Even if I’d seen the damn yankee who nailed me, I couldn’t’ve done nothin’ about him.” The new men listened and nodded solemnly. Caudell reflected that a wound on the first day had kept Bean out of the third day’s charge and very possibly kept the private from being captured or killed.
Ruffin Biggs fired one more round at the paper target circle, which by now looked as if it were suffering from measles or smallpox. He yelped out a rebel yell, then said, “Next time the drummers play the long roll, them Yankees is gonna wish they was never born. This here rifle shoots like hell-beatin’-tanbark.”
The Guns of the South Page 6