“Don’t just stand there,” Captain Lewis said sharply. “Form by squads. I want you to look smart.”
The company lined up behind the Castalia Invincibles banner, which now more nearly resembled a lace doily than a proper flag, so many bullets and shell fragments having pierced it in the late campaign. Its polished mahogany staff was new, however, as was the gilded eagle atop that staff. The men had clubbed together to buy them in Washington. A Minié ball had snapped the old staff in the fighting near Fort Stevens.
Two squad leaders were also new. Edwin Powell had taken a fourth wound outside Washington City. From this one, unlike the others, he would not rejoin Confederate service; it cost him his left arm. And Otis Massey went into the trenches around the Federal capital, but he never came out again. Two veteran privates, Bill Griffin and Burton Winstead, took their places. For that matter, Captain Thorp of the Chicora Guards headed the regiment; a leg wound had laid up Colonel Faribault.
Bill Smith and Marcellus Joyner, the surviving regimental musicians, got the 47th North Carolina moving. Some people cheered as they marched through Manassas Junction. Some just stood and watched, their faces expressionless. The Yankees had held the town for most of the war; by the look of them, a good many local shopkeepers hadn’t let that stop them from getting fat. Almost everyone seemed better fed than the victorious soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia.
The men tramped southwest down the line of the railroad. They’d gone less than a mile before Caudell whistled softly. “When the Yankees set out to tear up a train track, they didn’t fool around, did they?” he said softly.
“Nope,” Dempsey Eure agreed, surveying the line with a critical eye. “That there’s what I call wreckin’ with a vengeance.”
Railroads were prime targets for soldiers North and South all through the war. Locomotives hauled more men and supplies faster than they could move any other way. Wrecking the enemy’s tracks was one of the best ways to keep him from doing what he wanted to do. Here the Federals had torn up a ten-mile stretch of their own track to keep the Confederates from using the line against them after the battle of Bealeton.
Burning ties, uprooting rails, heating them in the flames, and then bending them—that was all part of the game. But the Yankees had gone a step farther. Somehow they’d not just bent the rails they’d taken up, but twisted them into corkscrews that lay in the tall grass and shrubs as if discarded there by giants.
When Caudell spoke that conceit aloud, Dempsey Eure said, “Wish I had me the bottle them giants was openin’ with corkscrews that size. Reckon I could put walls inside an’ live like it was a plantation house. There’d be room and to spare, that’s certain.”
“I just wonder how long it’ll be till this stretch gets rebuilt,” Caudell said. “But for Tredegar Iron Works, the South doesn’t have any place that rolls track, and a godawful lot of it’s been ruined.”
Dempsey Eure worried less over the state of the Confederacy’s railroads than that Caudell hadn’t cared for his joke. Snapping his fingers in annoyance, he said, “Your fret tin’ over things bigger’n you ain’t gonna change ‘em none.”
Since that was true, Caudell didn’t answer. Neither did he stop worrying. Night was falling by the time the 47th North Carolina reached Catlett’s Station, where the railroad became functional once more. The regiment camped outside. the little town.
Not everything flammable had been burned. A tumbledown barn furnished wood for campfires. Caudell reflected that one day soon the army would have to give over its free and easy ways of destruction; that barn had undoubtedly belonged to a citizen of Virginia. Caudell hoped he was a Union man, but whether or no, his property was going up in flames.
Soldiers gathered round the fires, boiling coffee, toasting hardtacks, cooking up stews with salt pork and desiccated vegetables. Caudell ate till he was full, filled his tin coffee cup three times. He’d started getting used to a full belly again, after so long living on less. He suspected the vast supply dumps in and around Washington City could have fed the entire Confederate nation, not just the Army of Northern Virginia. The soldiers were still enjoying captured Yankee rations.
He stuck a twig into the flames, used its lighted end to get a cigar going. He held the flavorful smoke in his mouth a long time, savoring it; it went so well with real coffee. He tried to blow a smoke ring when he let it out, but it emerged in a ragged cloud. He lay back on his elbows with a smile. Failing usually annoyed him, but not tonight.
“Get you somethin’ more to eat, Nate?” Mollie Bean said, standing. “I could use a bit more myself.”
“No thanks…Melvin. I’ve had plenty. There was so much of everything up in Washington that I sometimes wonder why the North ever wanted us back. Seems they had a-plenty just by themselves.”
That drew mutters of agreement from everyone who heard it. Allison High said, “Without our new rifles, reckon the Yankees might’ve wore us down in the end. Like Nate says, they had them a heap more of everything else.”
“You always were a gloomy cuss, Allison,” William Winstead said. “We’d’ve licked ‘em no matter what kind of guns we was totin’. We’s tougher’n they are.”
“They were plenty tough enough, Bill,” Caudell put in, and again no one said no.” And there were always an awful lot more of them than there were of us. I’m just awfully happy I had myself a repeater.”
“That’s so, Nate; can’t argue it,” Winstead said. “I’m going to see if I can’t sneak mine back with me down to the farm. It’d make a better huntin’ gun than the one I got, so long as I can keep it in cartridges.”
“You got that straight, Bill,” said Kennel Tant, another farmer. “Ain’t lookin’ forward to a one-shot muzzle-loader again, no indeed.”
“The guns and cartridges come out of Rivington, for heaven’s sake,” Caudell said. “That’s not a long trip for any of us. I expect we’ll be able to buy more ammunition there.”
“That’ll take gettin’ used to, havin’ to buy cartridges again,” Allison High said. He paused, his long, gloomy features visibly souring further. “Wonder what them Rivington men’ll charge for ‘em.”
Silence—unhappy silence—reigned around the campfire. Prices all through the Confederacy had spiraled dizzily high. In the army, that did not matter so much: food, a little; shelter, of a sort; and clothing, sometimes, were provided. But when a man had to pay for them again…Caudell thought about laying down fifty or seventy-five dollars for a hat, when that was several months’ pay for a teacher. The farmers who made up the vast majority of the Castalia Invincibles were lucky. At least they would be able to feed themselves once they got home. He wondered how he would manage.
Someone else was thinking along with him: Dempsey Eure said, “Might could be I’ll stay in the army.”
“I only hope they’ll want to keep you,” Caudell said. That brought on another break in the talk. With peace at hand, the army would shrink drastically. Still, he doubted it would shrink to the tiny force the United States had had before the war—how could it, with such a long border to defend against those same United States? Men without prospects, men without families would want to stay in, and some might be able to.
“Wouldn’t mind another stretch myself,” Mollie Bean said. “Still and all, wouldn’t be so easy—” She let her voice trail away. Caudell understood her hesitation. Soldiering now would be garrison duty, most of it, and how could she hope to keep up her masquerade under such circumstances? On the other hand, having known the true comradeship of men, how could she go back to serving as a mere receptacle for their lusts? If she couldn’t stand that any longer, though, what could she do? All good questions, and he had answers for none of them.
Or was that so? “You know, Melvin,” he said, careful to respect her public façade of masculinity, “the better you read and cipher, the more choices you have with your life, the more different things you could do if you wanted to.”
“That’s so,” Alsie Hopkins said. “Me, I do
n’t know my letters from next week, so I can’t do much but farm. ‘Course, I never wanted to do much but farm, neither.”
Mollie looked thoughtful. “You’ve taught me some, Nate. I reckon I could do with more. You still carry a primer in your knapsack?”
“Two of ‘em, and a Testament, too,” he answered.
“Whip ‘em out,” she told him. Caudell dug in his knapsack, came out with a good Confederate primer: “If one Southern man can lick seven Yankees, how many Yankees can three Southern men lick?” was one of its arithmetic lessons.
“What’d she ask him to whip out?” Dempsey Eure asked. But he spoke softly, so Mollie would not hear and be hurt. Everyone in the Castalia Invincibles was fond of her. She walked over, sat down beside Caudell, and bent her head to the book.
The Orange and Alexandria Railroad was broken again north of Bealeton; the regiment had to detrain and march over the recent field of battle. The furrows plowed by shell and solid shot still tore the ground, though sprouting grass and wildflowers were beginning to repair those gashes on the green body of the earth.
“It’s like a different place now,” Rufus Daniel said. “A sight more peaceful without Yankees allover it, too.”
So many Yankees and Confederates would never leave Bealeton again. Humped-up dirt marked shallow common graves. Some of them had been dug too shallow; from one a fleshless arm protruded, the clawlike hand at the end of it reaching toward the sky. Dempsey Eure pointed. “Look at the old soldier, beggin’ for his pay!”
Caudell snorted. “And you want to stay in the army, Dempsey, so you can end up just like him?”
“We’ll all end up like him sooner or later, Nate,” Eure answered, unwontedly sober.
“There you are right, Sergeant,” Chaplain William Lacy said. “The questions that remain are the path one takes to reach that end and one’s fate thereafter.”
Eure could not stay serious long. “Preacher, if it’s all the same to you—I’d sooner take the railroad.”
A lot of chaplains would have swelled up in righteous wrath and thundered damnation at him for his flippancy. Lacy made as if to grab the AK-47 off a nearby soldier’s back and aim it at the sergeant. Laughing, Caudell said, “Go easy there, Chaplain, you’re a noncombatant.”
“A good thing you reminded me.” But Lacy was laughing, too. Laughing came easy on a bright summer’s day with the war well and truly won. No one had laughed around Bealeton back in May, no one at all.
The regiment boarded another train south of the little town. The wheezing locomotive that pulled it had served all through the war without much in the way of servicing. Nor had the rails seen enough repairs. Before the train got to Orange Court House, it went off those rails twice, dumping soldiers in wild confusion. In the second spill, one man broke an arm, another an ankle. “Hell of a thing, takin’ casualties after the fightin’s over,” Allison High said glumly.
“Could have been worse, as rickety as this line’s gotten,” Caudell answered. Both men were panting. Along with everyone else, they had shoved their car back onto the tracks by main force. Caudell contrasted this stretch of the Orange and Alexandria to the formerly Federal track and engine north of Manassas Junction. He shook his head: just another sign of the abundance of Northern resources. He wondered how long the Confederacy would need to rebuild and recover after three years of hard fighting.
The train rattled past Orange Court House, then past the 47th North Carolina’s winter quarters. Some of the huts had been burned; most of the others were torn down for their timber. Caudell watched the camp disappear behind him without regret. That had been the hungriest winter of his life.
At Gordonsville, the train swung onto the Virginia Central line for the trip down to Richmond. The roadbed was so rough that here and there Caudell’s teeth would click together as if winter’s cold had suddenly returned. “Anybody want to put some money down on how often we derail before we finally get there?” Rufus Daniel asked. The pool drew some lively action. Caudell bet on three times, and shared the pot for winning. An extra ten dollars Confederate didn’t hurt, though he would sooner have had a two-dollar Yankee greenback or, better still, two dollars in silver. He hadn’t heard the sweet jingle of coins in his pocket for a long time.
The train stopped for the night just past Atlee’s Station, a few miles north of the Confederate capital. Captain Lewis announce’d, “We’ll lay over for a day here, to let the whole Army of Northern Virginia gather. Before all the regiments head for their home states again, they’ll hold a grand review—we’ll all march through the streets and let the people cheer us.”
“I like that,” Allison High said. “Let ‘em have a good long look at the poor skinny devils who did the fightin’ for ‘em. Give ‘em somethin’ to remember, not that they will.”
Caudell waved his hand. “They may not remember us, but I expect they’ll remember our campfires glowing against the sky.” As far as the eye could see, fires flickered every few feet, thousands of fires. Caudell blinked, a bit bemused. Artists would paint this moment one day: the last bivouac of the Army of Northern Virginia.
“They should just be glad it’s our fires they’re seeing, ‘stead of the Yankees’,” Rufus Daniel said. Derisively, he hummed a few bars from the Northern “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—”I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps.” Daniel spat into the campfire. “And that for John Brown’s goddamned body, too.”
Again, the talk ran far into the night. The officers did not try to make the men go to bed. They were going home soon, too, and instead of captains and lieutenants would soon become farmers and clerks, friends and neighbors once more. No more battles lay ahead, only a triumphal parade. The discipline of the field was fading fast.
The next morning, the army woke, not to the bugle’s blare or the rattle of the snare, but to the wild bellow of steam whistles, calling the soldiers to their trains. Company by company, regiment ‘by regiment, they filed aboard. One by one, the trains puffed off toward Richmond. The one in which 47th North Carolina rode made the trip without incident, which cost Caudell the banknote he had won the day before.
Shouting officers in impossibly clean uniforms did their best to maintain order as the troops disembarked at the wooden shed which served as the Virginia Central depot. They pointed northwest up Broad Street: “Go on, go on! No, not you, sir! Wait’ your turn, if you please. Now go!”
“Come on, boys,” Captain Lewis yelled. “Just like we were back at old Camp Mangum—let’s show these Richmond ladies how we can march.” There was a stratagem nicely calculated to get the best from the Castalia Invincibles, Caudell thought—but then, Lewis had always had that knack.
Bands blared as the assembled soldiers marched up Broad Street, blasting out tunes like “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp! The Boys Are Marching.” The sidewalks were packed with people wearing their holiday best, ladies in hoop skirts and bonnets and lace, men with stovepipe hats that interfered with the view of those behind them. Some waved small flags: the Stainless Banner, the earlier Stars and Bars, and Confederate battle flags of every description. Red, white, and blue bunting decorated every building, as did garlands of bright summer flowers.
The railroad tracks that ran down the center of Broad Street made Caudell careful about where he put his feet; the last thing he wanted was to stumble in front of such an enormous audience. A man who fell here might not live it down for the rest of his life, not with so many witnesses from his own county to keep bringing it up and reminding him about it.
Because he worried more about his marching than where he was, Caudell hardly looked up for the first several blocks of the grand review. When he did, the 47th North Carolina was tramping past the First African Baptist Church, at the northeast corner of Broad and College. The large, sprawling building had a slate roof, no spire, and a low iron fence and gate all around it.
Despite the church’s name, Caudell saw no
Africans in front of it. The thought made him pay more attention to the crowd. Richmond had a good-sized Negro population, most slave, a few free, but he spied hardly any colored faces. A few grinning pickaninnies gaped at the parade; that was all. The black folk of Richmond, he suspected, would sooner have come out for a parade of blue coats through their city’s streets.
Across the street from the African Baptist Church was the Old Monumental Church, a two-story building in the classic style, surmounted by a low dome and fenced with stone below and iron bars above. Streamers ran from tree to tree in front of the fence; small boys perched in the trees and cheered the passing soldiers. Caudell reached up to wave his hat to them, then jerked down his hand, feeling foolish—he still hadn’t replaced that old felt he’d lost in the Wilderness.
Capitol Square was just a short block south of Broad Street, but the bulk first of the Powhatan Hotel and then of Richmond’s city hall kept Caudell from seeing as much of it as he would have liked. Across the street from the hotel stood the almost equally massive Greek Revival pile of the First Baptist Church.
“Eyes—left!” Captain Lewis said. Caudell’s head twisted as if on clockwork. Just past the city hall—a building as severely Hellenic as the church—was a reviewing stand. On it stood President Davis, tall and supremely erect. Beside him, in a coat much too large for his slim frame, was his Vice President, Alexander Stephens. Stephens, hardly bigger than a boy of fourteen, looked pale and unhealthy, and seemed to be holding himself upright by main force of will.
Other civilian dignitaries—congressmen, judges, Cabinet members, what have you—crowded the reviewing stand, but Caudell had eyes only for two gray suits in the midst of the black. Just below Jefferson Davis stood General Lee, his hat off in salute to the soldiers marching past. Another, older man in fancy uniform, a man with a high forehead, rather foxy features, side whiskers, and an elegant imperial of mixed brown and gray, was a couple of people away from Lee.
The Guns of the South Page 27