The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  More Confederates fell, but so did Yankees in back of the breastwork. Just in front of Caudell, a bluecoat’s head exploded into red ruin. He yowled like a catamount and started scrambling over the logs.

  A bayonet almost pinned his arm to the untrimmed branch he was holding. With a four-foot rifle and eighteen inches of steel on the end, the snarling Federal who stabbed at him had all the advantage in that kind of fight. The fellow raised his Springfield for another thrust. Caudell shot him at a range of perhaps a yard. The Federal folded up like a man punched in the belly. Unlike a man punched in the belly, he wouldn’t unfold later.

  Then Caudell stood on the south side of the barricade, another Confederate beside him. One of them turned east, the other west. They both shot rapidly down the crumbling Yankee line—repeaters were made for enfilade fire; Federals went down one after another. More and more men in gray reached the breastwork.

  Caudell suddenly realized the AK-47 wasn’t kicking against his shoulder. He threw himself flat while he clicked in a fresh clip. With his old Enfield, loading while prone had been next to impossible, leaving a man not only without a bullet but a perfect target for any foe who had one. Still prone, Caudell started firing again.

  A few Yankees kept shooting back at the rebels. More fled into the woods, some with their rifles, some throwing them away to run the faster. More yet threw down Springfields but did not flee. They threw their hands into the air and shouted, “Don’t kill us, Johnny! We give up!”

  Captain Thorp sent the bluecoats who had surrendered north over the barricade and into captivity.” Just keep your hands high, and you’ll be all right till someone takes charge of you,” he told them before giving his attention back to his own men. “Come on! We’ve broken them. One more good push and they’ll fall to bits.”

  South and south again—Caudell’s clothes were tatters by afternoon, but he did not care. Thorp had been right: once the Yankees’ field fortifications cracked, some of the dogged fight went out of them at last. When repeater fire broke out near them, they started to yield instead. of shooting back. Or some of them did; here and there, stubborn bands of bluecoats gave no quarter and asked for none.

  A bullet hissed malignantly past Caudell. He dove for cover. Bullets whistled through the brush where he lay. He rolled frantically. The fusillade continued. Either that was a couple of squads of Yankees up ahead or—”Lee!” he shouted. “Hurrah for General Lee!”

  The shooting stopped. “Who are y’all?” a suspicious voice called.

  “Forty-Seventh North Carolina, Hill’s corps,” he answered. “Who are you?”

  “Third Arkansas, Longstreet’s corps,” the unseen stranger answered. “What kind of rifle you carryin’ there, No’th Carolina?”

  No Yankee was likely to know the right answer to that yet. “An AK-47,” Caudell said.

  By way of answer, the fellow who’d shot at him let loose with an unmistakable rebel yell. Caudell cautiously stood. Another man in gray came out of the thicket ahead. They clasped hands, pounded each other on the back. The soldier from Arkansas said, “Goddam good to see you, No’th Carolina.”

  “You, too,” Caudell said. More than half to himself, he added wonderingly, “We really have broken them.” He still had trouble believing it, but if he and his comrades coming down from the north were meeting Longstreet’s men coming up from the south, the Federals caught between them had to be in a bad way.

  The private from the 3d Arkansas might have picked the thought right out of his mind. “Damn straight we’ve broke ‘em,” he said happily. “Now we pick up the pieces.”

  * VI *

  General Lee sat easily on Traveller, watching his soldiers splash up out of the Rapidan at Raccoon Ford. Once on the north side of the river, the men paused to put their trousers back on before they formed ranks again. Many of them had no drawers. That bothered Lee more than it seemed to bother them. They grinned and cheered and waved their hats as they marched past.

  Lee waved back every so often, letting the men know he saw them and was pleased with them. He turned to Walter Taylor. “Tell me the truth, Major: did you ever expect to see us moving to the attack again?”

  “Of course I did, sir,” his aide answered stoutly. Startlement filled his eyes as the possible import of the question sank in. “Didn’t you?”

  “I always had the hope of it,” Lee said, and let it go at that. A new regiment was fording the river, its battle flag fluttering proudly as the color-bearer carried it in front of the troops. Lee had trouble reading a printed page without his spectacles, but he easily made out the unit name on the flag forty feet away. He called, “You fought splendidly in the Wilderness, 47th North Carolina.”

  The soldiers he’d praised cheered wildly. “You’ve made them proud, sir,” Walter Taylor said.

  “They make me proud; any officer would reckon his career made to command such men;” Lee said. “How can I help but admire their steadfastness, their constancy and devotion? I stand in awe of them.”

  “Yes, sir.” Taylor looked back over the Rapidan, toward the winter encampments of General Ewell’s corps. “Only a few regiments still waiting on the road. Then all of General Hill’s corps will have crossed, along with Ewell’s.”

  “I wish Longstreet’s men could be with us as well, but for the time being I must leave them behind to guard the fords further east, lest General Grant, rather than shifting in response to my movement, should try to cross the Rapidan again and march on Richmond. I think that unlikely, but neglecting the possibility would be ill-advised.”

  “Strange to think of one corps, and that made up of but two divisions, holding back the whole Army of the Potomac,” Taylor observed.

  “Even with our repeaters, I am uncertain whether Longstreet could do that, Major. But he can certainly delay those people and give us the chance to return and perhaps pitch into their flanks.” Just for a moment, Lee’s smile turned savage. “And let me remind you, the whole Army of the Potomac no longer exists, at least not as it did before the fighting in the Wilderness began. Hancock’s corps is for all intents and purposes hors de combat, and the rest of the Federal force received rough handling as well. I doubt anything less than that would have persuaded General Grant to retreat.”

  “He had little choice, unless he aimed to stay where he was and have his whole army chewed up,” Taylor said. “Another day of fighting at close quarters and he’d not have had left an army with which to retreat.”

  “The maneuver was well executed; Grant made skillful use of his superiority in cannon to hold off our infantry while he pulled back his own.” Lee stroked his beard as he thought. “He handles his men better than any previous commander of the Army of the Potomac, save perhaps General Meade, I believe, and he is more aggressive than Meade by far.”

  Taylor grinned. “One of the prisoners we took said he had the air of a man who had made up his mind to ram his head through a stone wall. He ran up against one in the Wilderness, but he didn’t go through.”

  “No, but now we shall have to go through him, and that after he has made the acquaintance of our repeaters. Any man may be taken by surprise once, but only a fool will be surprised twice, and General Grant, I fear, is not a fool.”

  “What then, sir? Shall we try to outmarch him and approach Washington from the north and west, as we did last year?”

  “I have been considering precisely that.” Lee said no more. His mind was not fully made up, and might change again. But if he moved straight up the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad toward Washington, Grant would have to try to block his path. Without the new repeaters, assaulting a bigger army that stood on the defensive would have been suicidally foolhardy. Lee had made it work even so, against Hooker at Chancellorsville. But the Wilderness had shown him Grant was no Hooker. Grant could be beaten; he could not be made to paralyze himself.

  Lee made his decision. He pulled out pen and pad, wrote rapidly, then turned to a courier. “Take this to General Stuart at once, if
you please.” The young man set spurs to his horse, rode off at a trot that he upped to a gallop as soon as he could. Lee felt Walter Taylor’s eyes on him. He said, “I have ordered General Stuart to use his cavalry to secure the Rappahannock crossing at Rappahannock Station and to hold that crossing until our infantry joins them.”

  “Have you?” One of Taylor’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “You’ll go straight for Grant, then?”

  “Straight for Washington City, at least for the time being,” Lee corrected. “I expect General Grant will interpose himself between his capital and me. When he does, I shall strike him the hardest blow I can, and see what comes of it.”

  “Yes, sir.” By Taylor’s tone, he pad no doubt what would come of it. Lee wished he had no doubts himself. His aide asked, “How soon do you think we could reach Washington City?”

  “We could reach it in four or five days,” Lee said. Taylor stared at him. Deadpan, he went on, “Of course, that is only if General Grant becomes a party to the agreement. Without his cooperation, we shall probably require rather more time.”

  Taylor laughed. Lee allowed himself a smile. He had slept perhaps four hours a night since the campaign started, rising at three every morning to go see how his men fared. He felt fine. His chest had pained him a couple of times, but one or two of the tablets the Rivington men had given him never failed to bring relief. He was not used to medicines that never failed.

  With reins and feet, he urged Traveller forward. His aides rode after him. He scarcely noticed them; he was thinking hard. He’d beaten Grant once, and badly. But simply beating the Army of the Potomac did not suffice. He’d beaten the Federals again and again, at Chancellorsville, at Fredericksburg, at Second Manassas, in the Seven Days’ Campaign. They kept returning to the fray, and, like the mythical Hydra, seemed stronger every time they were cast to the ground. They were as determined in their insistence that the South return to the Union as the confederate States were in their desire to depart from it.

  “I must suppress them,” Lee said aloud. But how? The new repeaters had caught Grant by surprise in the Wilderness. There Lee had also been able to use the detailed knowledge of Grant’s movements the Rivington men had brought him from 2014. They’d wanted to change the world of here and now, and they’d succeeded, but that meant they were no longer a move ahead of the game.

  As for Grant, he’d handled his army about as well as could be expected, given the trouble in which he’d found himself. In a defensive fight, with his powerful artillery to back up his numbers, he might yet be very rough indeed.

  And, Lee wondered, how long before some clever Northern gunsmith works out a way to make his own AK-47? Colonel Gorgas had been unsure it was possible. Gorgas was gifted, but for every man like him in the Confederacy, the North had three or five or ten, and the factories to assemble what those gifted men devised. If the Federals suddenly blossomed forth with repeaters of their own, the situation would return to what it had been before the men from out of time arrived.

  “Not only must I suppress those people, I must do it quickly,” Lee said. Every minute’s delay hurt him and helped Grant. He brought Traveller up to a trot. The exact moment he got to Rappahannock Station almost certainly would not matter, but all at once any delay seemed intolerable.

  In the middle of the afternoon, a courier on a blowing horse rode up to him, held out a folded sheet of paper. “From General Stuart, sir.”

  “Thank you.” Lee unfolded the paper, read: “We hold Rappahannock Station. Federal pickets withdrew northeast past Bealeton. We pursued, and discovered more Federals approaching the town from the southeast, their cavalry leading. We shall endeavor to hold the place unless your orders are to the contrary. Your most ob’t. servant, I. E. B. Stuart, Commanding, Cavalry.”

  Bealeton. Another sleepy hamlet was about to have its name written down in history in letters of blood. Lee wrote: “General Stuart: Hold your position at all hazards. Infantry is advancing in your support. R. E. Lee, General Commanding.” He gave the message to the courier, who booted his tired mount into a trot and then forced a gallop from it.

  Lee turned to Walter Taylor. “Major, I should like to confer with my corps commanders. We have driven the enemy’s pickets past Bealeton, General Smart informs me, but the main force of the Army of the Potomac is now approaching that town with a view to contesting our possession of it.”

  “I’ll fetch the generals, sir,” Taylor said. He rode away:

  Dick Ewell came back to Lee first, his peg leg sticking out from the saddle at an odd angle as he reined in his horse. Having fought farther to the north in the Wilderness than Hill’s men, his corps headed the line of march today. He cocked his bald head and listened intently as Lee explained the report from Smart. “When Lee was done, he asked, “Can the troopers hold back the whole Federal army long enough to permit us to deploy?”

  “That is the question,” Lee admitted. “With their repeaters, I hope they may.”

  “We’d best hurry, all the same.” Ewell glanced at one of his aides. “Order the men up to quickstep.”

  As the aide rode off, A. P. Hill rode up. Always gaunt and hollow-eyed, he no longer seemed on the edge of breaking down, as he had before the campaign began. Victory, Lee thought, agrees with him. As he had with Ewell, he told Hill of the new situation.

  Hill’s jaws worked as he listened. Finally he said, “I don’t care for the prospect of fighting with the river close in our rear. We almost paid for that at Sharpsburg.”

  “I remember,” Lee said.

  “Grant isn’t such a slowcoach as McClellan was, either,” Hill persisted. “He wasn’t what you’d call smooth in the Wilderness, but he got more of the Army of the Potomac into the fight than we’ve seen before.”

  “I want him to put his men into the fight, if that means they are advancing straight into the fire of our new rifles,” Lee said. “Not even the resources of the North will stand such bloodlettings indefinitely repeated…which reminds me, have we enough ammunition for another large fight?”

  “Two trains full of cartridges came into Orange Court House from Rivington this morning,” Walter Taylor said.

  “That should be all right, then,” Lee said, relieved. Thanks to the Rivington men, his soldiers had won a smashing victory in the Wilderness. Thanks to them, the Army of Northern Virginia would have the wherewithal to pursue another one. But without a continued flow of munitions from the Rivington men, his army would soon be, if it was not already, unable to fight at all. Lee reminded himself to write once more to Colonel Rains in Augusta to see if he had succeeded in producing loads suitable for the AK-47.

  “How would you have us deploy?” Ewell asked.

  Lee had been working on that with most of his mind ever since the message came back from the cavalry. He saw battlefields as a chess player looked over his board, save that for him no two matches were played on the same squares and both players moved at the same time. “Post your men in the most advantageous line south from Bealeton toward the Rappahannock, General, using General Johnson’s division as your reserve,” he answered. “General Hill, you will form the left. Move behind the line General Ewell will establish and into position. Be prepared to attach, or defend, as shall seem most advantageous.”

  The corps commanders nodded. Walter Taylor drew out a map from a saddlebag, unfolded it. Lee traced with his finger the dispositions he had in mind. The generals looked, nodded again, and rode off, Hill all business in the saddle, Ewell instantly recognizable because of his out thrust wooden leg.

  “Send also to General Longstreet, Major,” Lee said as Taylor put away the map. “Tell him he must be ready to move at a moment’s notice, either to pitch into General Grant’s rear or to come to the support of the rest of this army. Send the order by telegraph; he must have it as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, sir.” Taylor noted down Lee’s instructions, summoned a courier to take them to the army’s field telegraphy wagon.” I’ll also send a copy by messenger,” he s
aid.

  “Very good,” Lee said. Like the Confederacy’s railroads, Southern wires were imperfectly efficient. He envied the Federal army its far more elaborate system. But he could have headed that Federal army, sent messages along that system as he chose. Having declined, he was content to make do with what his chosen country could provide.

  Dempsey Eure let out a loud, unmusical bray. “If I was a mule, they’d shoot me after a march like this, on account of I wouldn’t be of no more use nohow.”

  “You’re a damn jackass, Dempsey, and you’re marchin’ to give some Yankee the chance to shoot you,” Allison High answered. A few men who heard the exchange had the breath left to chuckle. Most simply plodded on, too busy putting one foot in front of the other to have room for anything else.

  Mulus Marianus, Nate Caudell thought in the small pan of his mind not emptied by fatigue. He wished Captain Lewis were close by; of all the Castalia Invincibles, Lewis was the only other man who had any Latin and might have appreciated the allusion. But the captain’s bad foot was giving him trouble on the march, and he’d fallen back to the rear of the company.

  Caudell coughed. The 47th North Carolina was not in the lead today. The men tramped through a gray-brown cloud of dust that left their hides and uniforms the same color. Every time Caudell blinked, the grit under his eyelids stung. When he spat, his saliva came forth as brown as if he were chewing tobacco.

  He’d already forded both the Rapidan and the Rappahannock, but the memory of splashing through cool water was only that, a memory. Reality was muggy heat and sweat and dust and tired feet and the distant thunder of gunfire to the east. The Federals were not going to leave Virginia without more fighting, and were not of the mind to let the Army of Northern Virginia get free of its home state again, either.