Most of John Gordon’s infantry had pressed up the gently slope toward a dense hedgerow behind which must be another meadow containing an infantry corps camp.
Some Southerners had not followed and were busy among the tents of the defeated. They took overcoats, boots and anything else that might be useful in the coming winter.
Confederate officers pulled and pushed these men and those eating by the fires. They pushed them away from the food and warmth. They pushed them toward the woods on the far side of the clearing.
The four gun battery found a country lane that pointed in the same direction and followed uphill.
Devereux reached the waiting train at four that morning. Smoke poured from the engine’s stack. He climbed metal steps to board from the quay. The night was still black outside the lamp lit area in the station.
Philip Sheridan sat in the saloon car. Whatever Sheridan thought of Devereux, army custom required that he invite a general officer to sit with him.
“Early morning,” Sheridan said, “too early. Want coffee?”
A nod brought a steward with a coffee pot from a potbellied stove at one end of the car.
The enameled mug felt good in the hand.
The train lurched into motion.
“Did you bring a horse?” Sheridan asked.
“No. I thought to find one in Winchester.”
Sheridan looked at him for a moment. “I have a couple of extra horses with me. You can have one. I favor Morgan horses.” He looked at an aide-de-camp.
The officer nodded.
“Early will want to fight me somewhere around Strasburg?”
Devereux shook his head, “No, he will not want to fight you anywhere. He knows how much stronger you are, but he will feel that he must. He will fight you somewhere along Cedar Creek… That is where you are, and so…”
“Then, this will be a great opportunity to crush him once and for all.”
“Yes.” Yes, damn you. This will be the end for the Valley Army, the end.
The black haired, round headed little man stared. “If Early voted against secession in ’61, why does he persist in his disloyalty when it is clear that we will win?”
“I imagine that he feels trapped, and that he does not have a choice.” Careful, he thought. Careful, this conversation is not about Early.
“Why?”
“I suppose that he is reluctant to admit that he picked the wrong side, the losing side…”
Sheridan looked unconvinced.
The staff listened closely, seeking clues as to what they should think of this unfamiliar general.
Philip H. Sheridan
Their leader finally nodded in an evident show of agreement and then leaned back into the corner of his seat. He was instantly asleep.
Devereux examined him as the train rattled westward.
At six o’clock the train entered the Winchester station.
Standing on the platform, they could hear the sound of artillery to the south.
The horses came down from the train and Claude looked at his strange mount. It was big, and black. It looked at him apprehensively. He patted the animal on the neck and held out his hand for it to smell. The gelding rubbed its nose against his fingers.
Sheridan watched. He nodded in acknowledgement of the other horseman’s skill.
They rode out of the station yard, clattering across the bricks as they went. It was almost twenty miles to Strasburg.
The sound of Gordon’s attack along Cedar Creek was heard four miles away on the Valley Pike. When the rattle of rifle fire reached him, Early ordered a general advance against the federal blockhouses. Confederate infantry ran forward to splash across Cedar Creek. They captured the log forts and surged past, going north toward Belle Grove Plantation on the Valley Pike.
Union Army prisoners stood beside this road in forlorn groups. Many were half dressed. Bodies littered the ground. One dead man lay across the log parapet of a blockhouse. His blood lay red and wet on the ground. His pockets were turned out. A hungry enemy had taken a moment to search for whatever food the dead man might have had.
Gordon’s advance from the river crossing continued up the steep slopes. Beyond each wooded rise was another flat place kept in grass by local farmers. On the second of these “steps”, another Union Army Corps was encamped. These troops heard the uproar below and nearer to the river. Staggering from their tents still half asleep, they seized their rifles and formed ranks. Most were dressed in odd pieces of clothing that they found in the hurry of the moment.
As Gordon’s men came out of the woods, they stopped in surprise at the sight of a thousand blue soldiers waiting for them elbow to elbow. A ragged volley knocked a few Confederates down. This was returned with the usual tightly grouped Southern rifle fire, fire that swept the grass like a scythe, cutting men’s legs out from under them like stalks of hay.
The four gun Rebel “mule” battery came around a bend in the dirt road from below.
Yankee infantrymen stared at the guns unlimbering for action. Some threw down their weapons and ran for the rear before the guns could speak.
In the blue ranks, a lieutenant colonel from New York yelled at his men, “All I ask is that you don’t run ‘til the Vermonters do…”
The Confederate Napoleons roared, firing from right to left en echelon loaded with canister. The canvas bags of musket balls burst after leaving the muzzles. The mass of lead projectiles spread as it flew until the “cone of death” from each muzzle was ten feet across when it reached the Union soldiers.
Men fell by dozens ripped in their bodies by invisible claws; some were dead before their bodies struck the ground.
Among them was the officer who had appealed to state pride.
The gray ranks started forward while the Napoleons re-loaded. By the time they reached the tents there were no federal soldiers there except the sick, the wounded and men with their hands in the air.
The two prongs of the attack came together a mile north of Cedar Creek. From the point of convergence, Belle Grove Plantation could be seen in the middle distance perhaps two miles farther up the Valley Pike. The grey stone house stood among lawns and pastures on a low knoll among old oak trees. A white mist drifted across the meadows and among evergreen trees that were scattered on the land. The haze hid many of the details of the rolling ground. The rising yellow sun was a vague disk behind the low overcast.
There was another mass of soldiers in blue around Belle Grove. They were moving away, flowing around the house, and walking to the north. As the combined Rebel force moved onward, the enemy beyond the house vanished from view. To the right, along the Valley Pike the Union infantry that had earlier been routed fled as fast as they could manage. There was no organization left in their flight. They looked finished as fighting men.
Far away Devereux followed Sheridan south. The sound of the guns grew louder as the party of staff officers and orderlies pounded along the road. Sheridan halted the group every half hour to rest the horses. There was little talk. At one river crossing they led the animals down to the water and let them drink a small amount, careful not to allow the kind of self-indulgence that would kill or disable their mounts. Even so, the animals’ coats were covered in white foam. In Newtown, halfway to Strasburg, they took more horses from a livery stable, leaving their own worn out beasts with the proprietor.
Sheridan kept the Morgan Horse he had ridden this far. The animal seemed inexhaustible and Sheridan was a small man.
Devereux inspected his own mount and decided that the beast would go the distance.
Five miles from Cedar Creek they came over the crest of a low rise in the road to find the village of Middletown before them. The road was filled with the infantry of the two beaten army corps. They were still moving away from the sound of battle. The men saw Sheridan and began to cheer, running toward him by the hundreds.
Sheridan’s Ride
The little black haired man seized a national color carried by a member of the fir
st group that reached him. “God damn you!” he shouted. “Don’t cheer me! If you love your country, come back to the front!” With that, he spurred the Morgan through the crowd and walked the horse down the road to the south carrying the flag as he went.
The men turned to follow him. At first he led only a few hundred, but soon there were thousands of veteran soldiers following him back toward the enemy who had so soundly crushed them a few hours before.
Devereux watched him go and decided that there was nothing to do but follow.
Three miles down the road past the village of Middletown the Confederate leadership argued in the middle of the road. They knew not where Sheridan might be and were ignorant of his presence on the battlefield.
Jubal Early, the army commander, sat in his buggy looking out across the fields at his men. It was around ten o’clock and the day had warmed enough for jackets to be unbuttoned and sweat to form on the foreheads of soldiers who had walked and fought their way five miles from their “start lines” in the pre-dawn.
The Rebel infantry had stopped moving forward in the open areas between the Valley Pike and Belle Grove Plantation. Men sat in small groups on the newly harvested ground to examine the loot they had acquired in the Union camps. Some of the overcoats had personal possessions in the pockets. These were examined with the amusement that people often find in the habits of others.
“Hey, Jimmy, what’s this?” one private called to a messmate. He was holding up a string of rosary beads, something he had not seen before.
“Those are prayer beads,” Jimmy answered. “Cathlicks pray with’em.”
The first man put the beads back in a pocket.
In another group a whole cooked ham was being whittled on and made into sandwiches on slabs of bread cut from a couple of loaves taken from a field kitchen.
“Sir, you have to get them to move,” John Gordon pleaded. He had been arguing with Early for nearly an hour.
His Second Corps had almost reached Middletown around eight thirty when he noticed that the rest of the army had stopped moving. Unwilling to move ahead with an open and unprotected flank on his left, he rode that way and discovered Early comfortably “installed” on the wagon’s seat watching his “boys” rest in the fields.
“They will re-form beyond Middletown and be back at us later today… We must get the men up and moving, sir, please!” Gordon grew desperate. In his mind, he could “see” the routed Union troops slowly finding their emotional equilibrium as they trudged away from the scenes of their humiliation. He imagined their leaders trying to halt them and slowly succeeding. He could “see” them turn…
“Calm down, Gordon, they are finished. These are the same men that we whipped at Lynchburg in May. They are afraid of us and have had another demonstration of why they are afraid. They will keep going. The boys need some rest and a chance to eat all that lovely Yankee food they picked up this morning. We will stop here. Justin,” he said to his driver, “go get us a couple of sandwiches from those men over there.”
“They will be back,” Gordon started again.
“No! Dammit! They will not be back! In any event, I am going to pull back to the Fisher’s Hill position tomorrow. We are not strong enough to stay here where the Valley is so wide. General Lee has sent me a message that he wants some of these men returned to him at Petersburg… Relax; you did a great thing attacking across the mountain like that last night. Relax.”
“What about the federal cavalry, we haven’t seen them yet?”
Early waved him into silence and reached for the ham sandwich his driver had just brought.
Unfortunately for Lieutenant General Early’s theory of the likely course of future events it was not true that all the federal infantry had been “whipped” that morning. In fact, US Sixth Corps, the very body of men who, at Ft. Stevens, had stopped his advance towards the White House were present and had not been “whipped’ at all.
Wright’s Sixth Corps were camped around Belle Grove the previous night. Under pressure from the advancing Rebels they moved back behind the house, re-formed their ranks and then gradually withdrew to the north, moving from one low ridge to the next. The divisions leapfrogged back a few hundred yards at a time until they finally came to stand at the top of a strikingly steep slope a half mile west of Middletown. At the top of the slope was the Middletown cemetery. It extended for hundreds of feet in every direction. The Sixth Corps halted among the headstones of the cemetery. The blue soldiers stood in ranks there and stared back down the long slope up which they themselves had come.
The Confederates had not followed closely.
The mist that had hidden much of the battlefield since dawn was lifting. The sun’s orange disk had burned its way through the cloud. As they watched, the Sixth Corps men saw the fog lift in the valley below.
Even as it vanished the first Confederates came into view. More and more appeared at the bottom of the hill. The brown ranks started up the hill behind their red flags.
Firing by regimental volleys, Wright’s infantry drove their enemies back to the bottom of the hill.
There, the Confederates reformed their ranks and started back up the slope. Once again they were beaten back by rifle fire.
By then the mist was gone and the true number of the attackers was evident. Attrition during their advance from the river line, the loss of men fallen out to loot and the inevitable straggling that occurs in any difficult and dangerous action, all these contributed to the small size of the force ranged against Sixth Corps in the cemetery.
Wright’s men saw that they outnumbered their assailants.
On the Valley Pike, Sheridan watched his defeated legions form behind officers who were empowered by his presence to regain control of their commands. He looked at his watch and then at the angle of the sun above the western horizon. The Allegheny Mountains were there. He had only a little time left.
Devereux waited. He watched in anticipation of a conclusive move. He felt sure that he knew what it would be.
“General Devereux,” Sheridan called.
“Sir?”
“Ride to the Cavalry Corps. They are over there somewhere near the mountains. Tell whoever is in command to assemble and be ready to attack mounted against the left flank when I am ready. It will take me time to be ready here. The signal will be four guns fired at half minute intervals.” He looked at his watch again. “Look for the signal at about three thirty.”
Devereux kicked the black horse into action and disappeared into the west.
Out of sight on the Pike to the south, John Gordon begged Early. “Sir, can we not reinforce the left flank somewhat? I saw their cavalry in camp over there by the mountains.” He pointed the northwest.
Early was exasperated by this man. He was so intelligent, so handsome so married to that lovely woman… “Well, what do you want?”
Gordon pointed to John.
Early understood. “John, go take up a position to cover the left flank. Make General Gordon happy.” With that, Jubal turned away in evident irritation with Gordon and unwilling to look at him.
“Yes, my General,” Balthazar responded and mounted his horse, the troop horse he had found to ride when Victoria’s mare went home.
The battalion waited close by. Men sprawled in the dry grass of autumn. The horses and mules stood patiently, their noses buried in nosebags. A gunner from the artillery section held the bridle of a horse whose nose bore a lozenge shaped white “blaze.” He cradled the animal’s head in the crook of his arm and rubbed its muzzle. The horse pushed its nose further into the crook of his arm.
“Fall in!” Roarke bellowed at the top of his voice. “Fall in, get off your asses, and on your feet!”
The four hundred and fifty man battalion marched northwest. Its infantry led the way. The two Napoleons and the supply wagons followed. Their route took them up farm cart paths and passed behind Belle Grove mansion onto a grassy plateau that commanded the approaches from the Allegheny Mountains on the left. No
federal troops were in sight except for a few dead men scattered in the grass, and a wounded officer whom they found surrounded by blue and brown bodies by the side of a dirt road.
To the northeast, near Middletown the wooded hills rang with gunfire from the fight at the cemetery.
Balthazar called his officers to him and told them where to place their men. Three one hundred man companies were to be positioned in a semicircle with the open side to the south toward Belle Grove. Captain Jake Devereux’s “A Company” was on the left. Captain Taylor Randall’s “B Company” was placed in the center and Lt. William Fagan’s “C Company” on the right.
The two 12 pounder Napoleon cannon went into battery in the middle of the “horseshoe.”
Lt. Adam Gallagher’s “D Company” was spread across the open, rear side of the semi-circular arrangement. The Irish school teacher was the least known of Balthazar’s company commanders and therefore the likely man to command the reserve.
All of these companies were at more than full strength.
Most units in Early’’s “Army of the Valley” were much under strength but Balthazar’s 2nd Confederate Infantry Battalion was an exception. The unit was formed in the autumn of 1863 from men that no one wanted. Soldiers from the remnants of destroyed Confederate regiments, Northern deserters, foreign volunteers, physically fit civilians who asked to be “taken in”; some of them too old to be conscripted, some too young. All of these were the material from which the battalion had been formed. There seemed to be an unending supply of such human material.
The “well springs” of “home town” recruitment of the volunteer regiments had long gone dry but Balthazar’s “riff-raff” could still be found in sufficient numbers to keep the battalion at strength. Their commander’s long experience of small unit command and his skill in training infantry troops had made his “ruffians” into a force more potent than they might seem.
The Second Corps commander, Jubal Early came to rely on this battalion as his personal reserve. Thus far, they had not failed to justify his confidence.
Down the Sky: Volume Three of the “Strike The Tent” Trilogy Page 13
