North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  Without removing his gauntlet he picked up the busthead and pulled the cork with his teeth. He emptied the bottle before reveille.

  Book Three

  A Worse Place Than Hell

  The people are impatient; Chase has no money; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO QUARTERMASTER GENERAL MONTGOMERY MEIGS, 1862

  49

  “MOUNTED MEN UP AHEAD, SIR.”

  Charles, seated on Sport beneath a dripping tree where they had halted to await the scout’s report, drew a quick breath. There were six of them, returning from Stuart’s headquarters on this third day of 1862: Charles; the lieutenant shipped in to replace Ambrose; the junior lieutenant, bland Julius Wanderly; two non-coms; and the scout, Lieutenant Abner Woolner, who had just ridden out of the white murk to utter those five words and set Charles’s stomach churning.

  He tugged down the scarf tied around the lower part of his face. The Virginia winter was proving cruel—snow, winds, drizzle. Though it was above freezing this morning, the cold somehow struck through all his layers of clothing. The time was a little after seven. Visibility was down to a few yards. The world consisted of muddy ground, the wet black pillars of tree trunks, and the fog, luminous because the sun shone above but could not penetrate.

  “How many, Ab?” Charles asked.

  “Couldn’t see them in this soup, Cap, but I reckoned it to be at least a squad.” The scout, a lanky man of thirty, wore cord trousers, covered with mud, a farmer’s coat, and a crushed soft hat. He wiped his dripping nose before continuing. “Moving nice and quiet, right on the other side of the tracks.”

  The Orange & Alexandria. Charles’s party had to cross the right of way on this return trip from Camp Qui Vive. “Which way are they headed?”

  “Toward the Potomac.”

  Hope took a tumble. The direction almost certainly meant Yanks. Perhaps they had slipped through the lines to tear up stretches of track during the night. He was depressed by the possibility of a scrap, perhaps because it was the last thing he had expected.

  Calbraith Butler had sent the detachment to Stuart’s camp for three reasons. Two were military, one personal. The cavalry had run short of corn, and the major wanted the loan of some; he guessed that a request carried by an old friend of the brigadier—Stuart now had his promotion; Hampton was still awaiting his—might get more prompt and positive attention than a letter by courier.

  The detachment stayed two nights, and Beauty, who seemed jollier than ever, thriving in the atmosphere of war, entertained Charles at the small house in Warrenton where he had installed his wife, Flora, and his son and daughter. Of course he could spare some corn for fellow cavalrymen in need; he had brought back a whole wagon train of fodder from Dranesville in the autumn, though not without a price. He had maneuvered too boldly, as was his wont sometimes. Pennsylvania infantry had ambushed and threatened him in a two-hour battle, in which the wagon train had almost been lost.

  But it hadn’t been after all, so wagons would quickly be on their way to Major Butler, compliments of Brigadier Stuart, who asked politely about the health of Colonel Hampton. From that, Charles knew nothing had changed; Stuart had a professional regard for the older officer, but no affection.

  Calbraith Butler’s second reason concerned the replacement for Ambrose Pell. The new man had come from Richmond two days before New Year’s, having waited sixty days to be posted to the lines, so he said. Butler wanted to know how he would behave in the field. The day after his arrival, Butler spoke privately to Charles.

  “He was foisted on us because he’s somehow connected with Old Pete or his family”—Old Pete was Major General Longstreet, a South Carolinian by birth—“and, after I reported Pell missing, he showed up so fast I suspect someone was just waiting for an opportunity to get shed of him. I have talked with your new man no more than a half hour, but I received two strong impressions. He’s a dunce and a schemer. A bad combination, Charles. I suggest you be on your guard.”

  First Lieutenant Reinhard von Helm was a German from Charleston, eight or nine years older than Charles. He was a small, slim man, bald except for an encircling fringe of dark hair. His artificial teeth fit badly. Twice already, Charles had spied him standing alone in the open staring off to some private hell. Each time, he remained motionless for about half a minute, then bolted off like a rabbit.

  Von Helm said he had given up a law practice to answer the call to arms. This, together with the names of noted Charlestonians he dropped into his conversation, greatly impressed Wanderly. The young lieutenant and von Helm became a chummy pair the first day they met.

  On New Year’s Day, an officer from another troop, Chester Moore, from Charleston, had invited Charles to his hut for a drop and the purveying of additional facts about Lieutenant von Helm.

  “He was a lawyer, all right, but not much of a one. It was his father who had the successful practice, with three partners. He forced ’em to take sonny into the firm. Bad mistake. All the inherited money and high life ruined him. It does that to some. When he wrote a brief or was permitted to argue some unimportant case, he was usually drunk. The moment his father went to his grave, the partners showed von Helm the door. No other firm would touch him. That of your cousin’s husband, Huntoon, rejected him in a trice. Only his money kept him from sinking out of sight. He’s worthless, Charles. What’s more, he knows it. Failures are often vindictive. Be careful.”

  The personal reason for the mission was Charles’s own state of mind; gloom had possessed him ever since Christmas Eve, and Calbraith Butler recognized it. But the famed festivity of a Stuart encampment had done little to dispel this mood, even though Charles had been personally entertained by the brigadier, and he and his two lieutenants had received a cordial welcome at the officers’ mess. Charles soon learned that the famed Black Horse, the Fourth Virginia, now rode horses of different colors.

  The South Carolinians found innumerable visitors of the fair sex bustling around the camp at all hours; Stuart’s frequent parties and his reputation for gaiety attracted them. One to whom Charles was introduced was Miss Belle Ames of Front Royal. In cold need of a woman, he arranged a rendezvous at a nearby country inn where Miss Ames was staying the night.

  Miss Ames had forgotten to put away the certificate the prettiest visitors received. The certificates named them Honorary Aides-de-Camp to General Stuart, and each was authenticated by his signature and an impression of his signet ring in wax. After Charles and Miss Ames made love twice in a vigorous but essentially empty way, they found the certificate crumpled under her thin buttocks. He laughed, but she was vexed. Miss Ames never suspected her lover was astonished and disturbed because, right in the middle of things with her, he had seen a vision of Gus Barclay.

  “Sir?” the scout said. “Want me to ride back and try to get a close look at ’em?”

  “Why?” von Helm said, pushing his horse up beside theirs. “Can’t be any boys but ours.”

  Charles felt tired, colder than ever. “Sure of that, are you, Lieutenant?”

  Von Helm’s oddly vacant eyes fixed somewhere beyond him. “Of course. Aren’t you?” The question implied stupidity on Charles’s part. “Best thing is to hail them, so they don’t fire at us by mistake. I’ll do it.”

  “Just a minute,” Charles said, but von Helm was already spurring into the fog.

  Second Lieutenant Wanderly beamed admiration. “Has a touch of the Stuart dash, doesn’t he?”

  Charles had no chance to express an uncomplimentary opinion. Von Helm’s voice rang from the white murk hiding the tracks. Other voices, none Southern, answered the hail, overlapping almost too quickly for comprehension.

  “Who goes there, a reb?”

  “Sure he’s a reb. Can’t you tell?”

  “Hey, how many nigger wives you got?”

  Gunfire then. Charles yanked his shotgun up and didn’t allow himself the luxury of even one curse. “Trot�
�march.” He led, ducking, dodging, the fog and low-hanging branches dangerous impediments to speed.

  Behind him, Wanderly let out a long yipping cry of excitement or released tension. A ball snipped off a twig that nicked Charles’s eye and further hampered his vision. Ahead, von Helm’s rifle boomed. Charles took a fearful risk in view of the fog and the terrain but felt compelled to do it to save the witless lieutenant.

  “Gallop—haaaa!” In a fight, niceties of pronunciation disappeared.

  Sport took the touch of spur and the knee pressure perfectly. Charles heard von Helm cursing, trying to reload, he assumed. Damn fool, he thought. Hampton would never fight this way, unsure of the enemy’s strength—

  He bent beneath branches flying past overhead. Glimpsed squirts of ruddy light in the fog. Heard explosions whose rapidity defied belief. Unless they had run into a much larger body of men than Woolner estimated, some Yank was shooting almost without pause.

  He had broken his concentration, failed to see the fallen trunk of an immense elm directly ahead. Because of his speed and his position in the lead, it was too late to turn. The scout galloped behind him, reins in his teeth, a revolver in each hand. “Woolner, veer left!” he shouted. “There’s a tree down ahead.”

  Charles and Sport were nearly on the obstacle. None of the pages in the tactics manual on leaping the ditch and the bar by trooper and by platoon would help; he had to rely on instinct and faith in the gray. He signaled by bunching his thighs and calves in tight, reining slightly.

  Jesus, that trunk’s five feet high—

  Charles leaned forward as Sport readied to spring. He raised his buttocks off the saddle, and suddenly, up from the ground and away, man and animal sailed over, stirring the murk. At the top of the arc his heart nearly burst with love. He was riding the strongest, bravest horse on God’s earth.

  Down they came, striking, jarring Charles’s teeth. Woolner’s hurrah said the scout had heeded the warning and avoided the obstacle in time. Wanderly, a mediocre rider, reined in too fast before he reached the elm and shot forward over the head of his mount. The two noncoms, frightened, just galloped by, one passing each end of the log.

  Riding hard, Charles saw the Yanks between Sport’s laid-back ears. Three or four, off their horses, fired from behind the raised roadbed. Von Helm, likewise dismounted, had taken cover and alternately shot with rifle and revolver.

  Whoever commanded the Yankees abruptly ordered them to mount and retreat. A ball whizzed past Charles’s ear; a noncom following him cried out, slapped his other arm, and almost fell off before he caught the dropped reins again. The wounded man just hung on as his horse galloped away to the left oblique.

  Charles searched the line of enemy soldiers, mounted now, for the source of the rapid firing. He found it; the single marksman was within range. He reined Sport to a trot and with the shotgun steadied discharged both barrels. The blast hurled the Yank backward. His eyes rolled up in his head, horrifyingly white, the instant before he dropped.

  Woolner blew down two more Yanks and von Helm a third. The rest, their total number still a mystery, quickly vanished in the fog.

  As the hoofbeats faded, von Helm stamped toward the track embankment, brandishing his rifle and shouting: “Go tell the Gorilla we ignore our nigger wives when there are Yanks to be whipped!”

  “Whoo-ee!” the corporal cried approvingly. He slapped his kepi on his leg and doubled back to find his fallen comrade. Clearly the enlisted man was impressed with the Dutchman’s bravado—even though his rashness could have gotten them all killed.

  Charles slid from the saddle, laid the hot shotgun against a tree, and tried to fight away shivers of shock setting in as he realized how close he had come to a fatal spill. He should check on his wounded trooper; but he was distracted by a thought of the shoulder weapon fired with such speed; was distracted from that by the sight of von Helm turning his back and bobbing forward, like some drinking bird. Charles glimpsed a silver flash and something slipped back into a side pocket.

  Turning to the rear, Charles shouted into the fog, “How’s Loomis?”

  “Just nicked, sir. I’m tying it up.”

  Charles walked toward the embankment. The fog was whiting out, thinning as the sun climbed. “Fortunate that we weren’t really facing a platoon or a troop, though it sounded like it,” he said to von Helm, who started moving forward at the same time he did, evidently with the same idea.

  “But we weren’t.” The Dutchman sounded belligerent.

  They found three Union cavalrymen dead and a fourth, a sergeant, groaning from a gory belly wound. They would have to take him back for treatment, but he wouldn’t last long; stomach wounds usually proved fatal.

  Woolner and the unhurt trooper came racing forward, ready to scavenge. The first time Charles had indulged in it, after a skirmish last fall, he had felt like a ghoul. Now, scarcely bothered at all, he went after anything that would help him fight harder or longer.

  He stepped onto the crossties. The trooper knelt on the chest of one dead man, busily went through jacket and pants pockets. He found nothing except some tobacco and a pipe, and said, “Shit.” Simultaneously, Charles saw what he wanted lying in dead yellow weeds beyond the embankment. Von Helm saw it, too, tried to hurry past his captain. Charles pivoted, nearly causing the lieutenant’s shiny head to crash against his jaw.

  “Mine,” Charles said. “And one more thing. Next time, wait for my orders, or I’ll have you up on charges.”

  Von Helm clenched his denture-filled jaws and wheeled away; Charles had already smelled the spirits. All the warnings were right. He had a bad one on his hands.

  “Just proves what they say,” the trooper complained, bending over the feet of the dead soldier. “Damn Yanks ain’t worth nothing but a pair of shoes.” He stripped off the right one, swearing when he saw the upper separated from the sole. He peered inside. “Lashbrook of Lynn. What’s that mean?”

  No one bothered to answer him. Calming a little, Charles slipped down the side of the embankment and retrieved the weapon from the weeds. The look of the piece was completely new. About four feet long, it had a mysterious aperture in the butt of the stock. It bore the maker’s name on top of its receiver.

  SPENCER REPEATING-RIFLE CO.

  BOSTON, MASS.

  PAT’D. MARCH 6, 1860

  A memory door clicked open, showing Charles a paragraph from one of the many Washington papers read behind Southern lines. A specially commissioned corps of marksmen led by some famous New York sharpshooter had received or was to receive a new type of rapid-repeating rifle. Could he be holding one—perhaps stolen? The sharpshooters were still in Washington, so far as he knew.

  Death had relaxed the bodies of the Yanks; the stench was ripening over the roadbed. But he refused to leave without the ammunition for the piece. He found the dead man who had fired it. Woolner had already carried off his shoes and pocket items but left behind three odd tubular magazines. Charles plucked one from the weeds where it lay beside a stiffening hand. He opened it and discovered seven rim-fire copper cartridges, one behind the next. He now understood the function of the opening in the butt.

  Woolner appeared. “That the piece that was bangin’ away so fast? Never seen one like it.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t see many more. I recovered some of the ammunition. I want to fire it.”

  The sun broke through the fog in long shining shafts. They slung the wounded Yank across the back of Loomis’s horse and, leaving the dead, proceeded on toward camp. Julius Wanderly had missed the brief action, so von Helm rode beside him, describing it.

  The Yank’s belly bled all over the horse. When they arrived in camp, Loomis reached around and touched the man—“Hey, Yank, wake up.”—and found him dead. Loomis suddenly paled, fainted, and fell off his horse.

  Exhausted and still a little shaken, Charles arranged for disposal of the Yank’s body, dismissed the men, then saw to Sport: the unsaddling, rubbing down and brushing, feeding, and wate
ring. In casual, slipshod fashion, von Helm put up his mount in a third of the time.

  Finished at last, Charles patted the gray and went to the mess to fill his growling stomach. Von Helm had headed for the quarters he now shared with Charles. Their first few days as hut-mates had included little except remarks required by duty or politeness. Henceforth there would be even fewer exchanges if Charles had anything to do with it.

  It was late in the day before he found Calbraith Butler and reported on the trackside fight. “It was a totally pointless action, in my opinion. One we should have avoided.”

  Butler leaned back in his camp chair, silhouetted against the sun now shining brightly outside. “You’re not telling me everything. Ab Woolner’s been by. He seconded your opinion, but he also described the way the detachment got into the muss. The Dutchman dragged you.”

  “First and last time, sir,” Charles promised.

  “I warned you,” Butler said, not to reprimand but to sympathize. “Maybe I can get the little rodent transferred again. I must say he made quite an impression on Wanderly. Your second lieutenant is singing hosannas and comparing the new man to Stuart. He’s telling everyone von Helm exemplifies Stuart’s first axiom—gallop toward your enemy, trot away—and never mind that there may not be anyone left to trot after you gallop.”

  “I’ll handle Lieutenant von Helm,” Charles said, though with less confidence than his tone demonstrated. “Any further word from headquarters about Ambrose?”

  “No, nothing again today. I honestly don’t think we’ll ever know what happened.”

  Unsmiling, Charles bobbed his head to agree. He then described the shoulder weapon he had confiscated. “I want to take it to the drill ground tomorrow and test it. It’ll be no use to me later—there’s no ammunition beyond those three tubes. Twenty-one rounds.”

  “I should like to be there for the test.”

  “I’ll let you know when I go, sir.” A weary salute, and he left his commanding officer, who stared at the fallen tent flap for some moments after Charles disappeared. Then Butler shook his head in a melancholy way and went back to work.