by Ralph Peters
Stepping close enough to get a noseful of horse stink, Smith said, “Lieutenant, there’s a mile of difference between gallantry and stupidity. You go on back to Stuart and make yourself useful.”
* * *
They beat back the Yankee patrol with surprising ease. Smith reckoned there were at least two companies of Union cavalry present, but even fighting dismounted they stayed near the road, as if preparing to flee from the very start. He’d been ready to recross the river, orders be damned, and fight beside his crew, but the men who’d been hauling and hammering minutes before proved sufficient to send the Yankees reeling back to wherever they came from.
“Not much to that, was there?” Captain Tyler said. “I suppose you can get back to work.”
They stood on what remained of the mill’s upper floor, looking northward through a skeletal window frame, past the river, over the fields, and into the scrub oaks and waste pines. There was nothing more to see, the Yanks had gone high-tail.
Pleased with the one-sided skirmish, Tyler added: “That poor old fellow meant well, he did his duty. But you can’t rely on civilians to count soldiers.” He smiled, almost as if Smith were his equal, a confidant. “Civilians do multiplication, not addition.”
The corporal nodded. But the gesture was meaningless. He was fixed on thinking. Something didn’t make sense.
“Didn’t expect to find us here, that’s plain,” the captain continued. “Figured they’d use the ford and be on their way.”
Smith dipped his chin again, another bit of nothing, then he said: “They went quits awful easy. I didn’t see one man fall.”
“They’re on a scout, they weren’t looking for a rumpus.”
“Yes, sir. Still…”
The captain smiled warmly, pleased with the wonders of spring and his superiority. “Don’t go getting the jumps on me, Corporal Smith. I rely on you to keep the men steady.”
But Bill Smith had stopped listening. For a second that seemed a lifetime, he just stared.
“Oh, Jesus.”
The captain followed his line of sight. Not one, but two Yankee infantry regiments had stepped from the far trees in a line of battle. With flags unfurled.
And that was the least of it. The mill stood at a loop in the river, outflanked on both sides from the northern bank. No one had ever thought they’d have to defend it.
Now the undergrowth teamed with blue-coated skirmishers who’d worked around the flanks.
It was not going to be a good day.
* * *
They fought. As long as they could. Longer than was sensible. Smith watched as the Yankees scooped up his work crew. On the south bank, the remainder of the detachment fired and reloaded as swiftly as experienced hands could work, determined to extract a price from anyone who tried to cross. But converging Yankee lines of fire drove heads down and hearts faltered.
“Where’d all them sumbitches come from?” The comment from a private summed up every soldier’s thoughts.
Clouded with smoke, the ruined mill stank of gunpowder. Smith looked toward the captain, who clearly struggled with the only decision left in the world: whether to save what men he could or to continue defending the ford.
“Captain, it’s useless,” Smith told him. “They’re everywhere, there’s too many.”
“They’re not everywhere. Not yet.” Tyler’s voice sounded firm and determined. But his hands quivered as he tried to reload his revolver.
“Hell they ain’t,” Smith hollered, casting rank aside. A daring peek through the window frame revealed Yankees crowding onto the south bank, too. Closing the trap. “They’re already over here, we’ve got to go, sir.”
The captain nodded but couldn’t form the words. Bullets stung the interior walls and ricocheted. Even the best soldiers cowered and made themselves small.
“Captain,” Smith tried again, voice severe, “we have to get out. Someone has to tell General Mahone.”
“Surely,” Tyler muttered, as if pondering other matters entirely. Then he snapped back to life and shouted: “Clear out. Everybody. Clear out, just run for it.”
A lieutenant added an eager voice to the order. Smith hollered, too. But the men clung to the walls, dazzled by the volume of bullets seeking them. Even hard kicks and curses couldn’t move them.
A Mississippian knotted a dirty rag to his rifle’s muzzle, prepared to give up if the officers wouldn’t.
Smith broke from the rear of the mill, leapt a ditch full of huddled soldiers, and ran up through the campsite, past steaming kettles and unhitched wagons, darting away from Yankees thick as rattlesnakes in a den.
The firing slackened considerably as ever more men surrendered. Smith lost sight of the captain, of all but a few fleet privates.
“Give up, Johnny. You’re got, give up. Don’t want to shoot no Christian in the back.”
But Smith ran on, heedless, determined, unreasoning, as if being taken prisoner would be worse than dying.
At last, bleeding and breathless, he got beyond the Yankee shouts and shots. He reckoned they’d bagged enough men to make them happy.
And they had the bridge. It was going to be finished, right soon, by other hands. It grated to think he’d built it for the blue-bellies.
As he gained a ridgetop Smith paused and glanced back to the ford.
On the roads and in the fields north of the river, it looked as if the whole Union army had come.
Late afternoon
Ely’s Ford on the Rapidan River
You shouldn’t be this far forward, General,” the captain commanding the cavalry escort insisted.
George Gordon Meade stilled his horse and steadied his spectacles, turning black-bagged eyes on the worried officer.
“Captain, I shall go wherever I want. If you haven’t the stomach to come along, this army has an abundance of other captains.”
“Yes, sir,” the captain said, chastised and mortified. “I only … those Rebs across the river might take a shot…”
“It seems to me, Captain, that the best way to prevent such an occurrence would be for you and your men to drive them away.”
Meade knew immediately that he’d been too harsh. He often spoke more sharply than he intended, Margaret had admonished him countless times. War was no place for Philadelphia manners, of course, but he’d wronged the captain, who had no chance for redress.
The lad was as brave as any, but his job was to see to Meade’s safety, not seek a fight.
For his own part, though, Meade had learned that he quite liked to fight. All the years of building government lighthouses and mapping waterways counted for nothing compared to war’s exhilaration.
Grim it might be, but battle was almost voluptuous.
Charlie Griffin trotted up with his staff, outpacing his division. Dusty and fierce, with more mustaches than face, the former artilleryman was the sort who always rode forward, too.
“Expected to have to swim that creek to find you,” Griffin said. “But here you are.” He lifted his kepi by way of a salute. “Got the slows today, George? Thought you’d be biting Bobby Lee’s ass by now.”
“Griffin, that’s no way for you to address your corps commander.” But Meade found himself struggling against a smile.
“Hell, George … if I don’t keep you humble, which one of these piss-cutters will?”
Griffin was a hard case who only revealed his humor to trusted comrades. But Charlie Griffin was honorable, too, which was something of a rarity these days. Charlie had stuck by Fitz John Porter throughout his court-martial, while others skulked off or lied to save their careers. To his soldiers, Griffin was profane and demanding, but he spared their lives when he could and his men adored him.
Meade didn’t have that common touch and envied it.
He turned back to the cavalry captain and offered a more measured tone. “Thompson, go on ahead now. Clear off those Johnnies, there can’t be more than a dozen. And catch one, if you can. I’d rather like to hear what he has to spill.”
&nb
sp; The captain looked doubtful about leaving Meade unguarded.
“General Griffin is bringing up his division. I think I shall be adequately protected.”
Young Thompson, a 16th Pennsylvania man, saluted and set to the task. Perhaps relieved, Meade thought, to have escaped me.
“You’d think I was the crown jewels,” Meade grumbled to Griffin. “Charlie, don’t let them make you a corps commander. The palace guards want to watch you while you squat.”
“Not a task for which I’d volunteer, watching you shit, George. I hear Slocum’s across at Germanna Ford.”
“Just heard myself, had a courier. His lead division’s over. Seems the Johnnies were in a generous mood and left him a bridge.”
Griffin soured his lips under his mustaches. “No such luck up here, of course. Have to wade the Jordan.” He snorted. “Scouts report it’s running deep. With a current.”
Meade glanced at the heavens. A fine spring day was closing with a promise of rain in the night. “Men will get wet, one way or another.”
Griffin shrugged. “Never saw a rusty soldier. They’ll curse like micks, but do fine.”
“I’ll have my escort form a chain downstream, fish out anybody who loses his footing. Show the men the cavalry’s good for something.” He met Griffin’s eyes—eyes as disdainful of folly as his own. “Just get your division across, Charlie.”
“Just you get out of my way.” Griffin grinned, showing rough teeth, and his face cracked into countless lines incised by the sun in the New Mexico Territory. “Isn’t this something, though? Who’d have thought Joe Hooker had it in him?”
Meade smoothed his beard. “I’ll grant you that I’m impressed. Joe stole a two days’ march on Bobby Lee, which takes some doing. Might even stretch it and say three days entire.” His fingers rose from his beard to resettle his spectacles. “I didn’t understand it, not at first. Hooker’s not a man for explanations. But things have worked out rather finely, haven’t they? Three corps across the Rappahannock, with hardly a shot fired. And no resistance to speak of along the Rapidan. Take away Lee’s river lines and you take away his primary defense.” He dropped his hand to his saddle. “Can’t believe they didn’t catch on to us yesterday, at the latest. Stuart must be off in some opium slumber.”
“Wouldn’t mind knowing what Joe has in mind next, though. Never was one for guessing games.”
Meade’s horse whisked its tail and calmed again. “My bet is he intends a grand envelopment. We sweep east, Uncle John pushes west from Fredericksburg with Reynolds. Couch and Sickles reinforce where needed. And Lee’s all but trapped, give us one more good day.” Meade offered another rationed smile. “Joe’s done all right.”
“So far, so good,” Griffin snorted. “Now let’s see how Bobby Lee responds.”
“Charlie, if Joe Hooker fights this army half as well as he’s maneuvered it … well, isn’t it about time someone did it? Gave Lee a thrashing? Show what this army can do when it’s well led?” Meade thought for a moment. “I could be wrong about the plan, of course. I don’t think even Butterfield knows the whole of it. And he’s the only man that Hooker trusts.”
“Well, if we don’t know, maybe the Rebs won’t know. For once.”
Of a sudden, Major General George Gordon Meade, commanding the Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac, felt a wave of renewed urgency, a fresh sense of time’s value, of minutes measured in blood.
He buried his smile. “Just get your division across that piss trough, Charlie. And get yourself to Chancellorsville in the morning.”
Nine p.m.
Culpeper, Virginia
Stuart tried to put up a good face for his staff, to summon his smile. At least until he could close a door behind him. But at a banjo chord, his self-control quit:
“You want to claw that thing, you go outside.”
When Jeb Stuart couldn’t bear music, his mood was beastly. And the officers serving him knew it.
He slammed the door to the little room off the parlor that served as his sanctum, preferring to take his gall and wormwood alone. He tossed his hat toward a table. It missed and slapped the floor, plume shuddering, but he didn’t pick it up. Instead, he dropped onto a hard chair, punishing a rump already sore: hemorrhoids, the cavalryman’s plague.
One mistake after another. When he’d gotten the first report of Yankees crossing the Rappahannock, he’d assumed that it was just another raid, if a heavier one, headed south for the rail depot at Gordonsville. The night before, he’d sent a telegraphic message to Lee saying as much and reporting that one infantry division might be reinforcing the Union cavalry.
He’d gotten it utterly wrong. By noon, word had come in that the Yankees were not marching south, but had turned east by Madden’s Tavern. And he’d disbelieved it, clinging to his notion of what was afoot. At least he’d had the sense to see for himself, riding out on a pleasant day that promised showers later.
His scouts had been right, the Yankees had turned east. Outflanking the much-reduced Army of Northern Virginia and Robert E. Lee.
He’d dispatched patrols to round up Yankee stragglers, and his men had returned with prisoners not from a single division but from three Union corps. Then Lieutenant Price had ridden in on a murdered horse that somehow was still breathing, hollering like a snakebit missy that Yankees were in strength at Germanna Ford.
Stuart had hastened back to Culpeper to ensure that a corrected report was telegraphed to Lee.
Lee, whom he all but worshipped. Lee, whom he’d almost failed.
Lee. Of course, he’d long admired him from afar—they all had—when Lee was a colonel in blue and the West Point commandant. But their first intimate encounter had come thanks to good timing and John Brown. Stuart had been visiting the War Department just when Lee was ordered to Harper’s Ferry to suppress a slave rebellion. Stuart had volunteered to go as his aide.
Brown’s uprising hadn’t amounted to much. At least, not then. No slaves had rushed to massacre their owners, and Brown, born to be hanged, had made an inept defense of an engine house. But Lee had commended Stuart for his role in a few spare words that had meant more than the rhetoric of famed orators would have done.
Lee had the gift not merely of greatness, but of discovering greatness in those around him.
He could not bear the thought of failing Lee.
When a knock braved his mood, Stuart answered, “No.”
Didn’t want to move, didn’t even want to take off his boots. Kick that darkey in his cannonball head if he barged in now.
Convinced that he’d given Lee warning and made things right, he’d then learned that one of the telegraph stations along the patchwork of relays had shut for the night, with no one in attendance to tap the key. Lee would not learn of the scale and direction of the Union movements until the morning.
Stuart wondered if the previous night’s message had been delayed, too, if matters were even worse than he’d believed, if he’d left Lee blind. Of course, the detachments on the Rapidan, scant as they were, must have sent Lee word of the Yankee advance.
He prayed it might be so.
Damn, though. They all had been seduced by copper wire, every last one of them. Lured by newfangledness and mechanical ease, the siren song of the telegraph. When a man on a horse was still the most reliable means of passing reports.
He’d sent two couriers off in furious haste, each with a copy of his latest message, but they’d have to ride roundabout to avoid the enemy. At best, they’d reach Lee an hour or two before dawn. And all the while the Yankees were on the move, surely across the Rapidan in force, with as good as nothing on Lee’s left.
How had that scoundrel Hooker pulled it off, that drunken whoremaster? Even Lee, of retiring speech, had mocked Hooker’s appointment to command, belittling his soubriquet of “Fighting Joe” by referring to him disdainfully as “Mr. F. J. Hooker.”
Now Joe Hooker was closer by half to Lee than Stuart’s cavalry.
Had Stuart been a drinki
ng man, had he not sworn temperance to his mother and clung to that promise—along with the memory of his beloved, charming, worthless, drunken father—“Beauty” Stuart would have downed a bottle of whiskey and asked for more.
He could not fail Robert E. Lee.
Sudden rain dazzled the roof. Stuart glanced toward the unlit fireplace. The room felt queer, as if it were unknown to him. A place where he did not belong. And he didn’t belong there, he belonged on horseback.
Rousing himself, he noted that in his rush to Madden’s Tavern, he’d left in plain sight the poem he’d been writing to Flora.
Stuart rose, took up the paper, and crumpled it. He’d been writing poems when he should have been in the saddle.
When he had been snowbound on the prairie the winter before the war, his highest aspiration had been to publish his poems, at least a few of them. His grand ambition had not been to gain a general’s star—such had seemed impossible in those days—but to be celebrated as “the American Wordsworth.”
Now words weren’t worth a lick. Only actions mattered.
Outside, the rain gushed. Mud, too, would slow his couriers.
He flung open the door and strode into the parlor. The room had been abandoned by all but the essential men of his staff.
“Pack up and get on your oilskins,” Stuart told them.
Ten p.m.
Headquarters, Army of the Potomac
Falmouth, Virginia
Handsomest officer in the U.S. Army, that was Joe Hooker. Butterfield was envious, but only to a point: A man could be too handsome for his own good.
Women hurled themselves at Hooker, harlots, wives, and virgins. Cleaning out the camp for the campaign had stirred up a riot of petticoats, pouts, and impertinent demands—the latter not always from women in the trade.
Not that Daniel Butterfield minded a turn of quinny. He and Joe shared a taste for flesh and the devil, with Sickles making a third. In the presence of females, Hooker possessed the power of a magnetic device amid iron shavings, and he himself had the knowledge befitting a gentleman of the best establishments, from Manhattan to the reeking streets of Washington. He even knew a house or two in Boston, though they lacked vitality.
