by Ralph Peters
“Didn’t see you rush to cook none. I figure on Pennsylvania myself. And that don’t ever like to turn out well. I’d as soon stay southwards of the Potomac. Nothing good comes of crossing it, you ask me.”
Sergeant Alderman had been listening. On his feet, arms folded, on the alert for officers, Alderman was a man who had earned his promotion. He took off his hat, wiped his forehead, and said, “My bet’s we’re headed to Washington, boys. I think we’re out to give ’em a good scare. And let folks in the Valley get a harvest in.”
“Heard something, Sergeant?” Lem asked.
Alderman shrugged. “Just front-porch talk. What I can’t figure is why there aren’t more Yankees getting themselves in our way. You’d think they’d be coming at us from every direction.” He turned. “You going to be able to march on that leg, Georgie?”
“Like to see Old Abe’s face, General Early showed up on his doorstep,” Frawley put in before Nichols could answer.
“Have to wonder if Old Jube even knows where we’re a-going,” Ive Summerlin said, following the words with a yard cat’s yawn. Ive’s tone had taken on a harder edge since his brother disappeared along the march. “Might have the Yankees confused because he’s confused himself.” He spit dry. “Sometimes I think he’s just looking for any old fight.”
“Like Old Jack.”
“That man ain’t no Jackson.”
“Well, thank God and Jesus Christ almighty for it. My back hooves are sore enough.” Shifting the coffee can, Frawley turned to Nichols. “What do you think, Georgie? You’re quiet as the preacher hid bare-ass under the bed when Farmer John come back early for dinner.”
“You wouldn’t talk rough if Elder Woodfin was here.”
The others laughed, accustomed to Nichols’ pleasant fear of the Lord and the regiment’s chaplain. Their teasing had settled into a friendly routine and, nowadays, was more apt to remark on his struggling beard than on his love for Jesus.
“Might be something to Little Georgie’s devotions,” Frawley offered. More sweat had turned his red hair maroon. “Got through all that fighting back in Virginny, not a scratch on him.”
“Must have skipped his prayers last night,” Ive Summerlin noted. “Only man in the company hit today.”
“Well now,” Frawley told him, “I’d call that more lucky than not. Everybody has to get hit sometime. And Little Georgie’s sitting there with nary a piece missing, praise the Lord.” He smiled an older-brother smile and pulled the coffee off the fire before it cooked any sharper. Saved up, the grains had been boiled over too often. He glanced at Nichols. “Reckon it’s a discomfort, though.”
“Can you get your drawers back on?” Sergeant Alderman asked Nichols. He glanced back over his shoulder. “Something’s doing.”
Responding to authority as always, Nichols reached for his rags, but found his leg stiff as a cannon barrel. He meant to march, he was determined. Just not yet, Lord, he prayed. Don’t let them give us marching orders yet. Amen.
In the wake of a pair of caissons, Corporal Holloway and his detail emerged from the dust. The men took their fine time coming on, laden with canteens, burdened with the good weight of fresh water.
Frawley turned to Nichols again. “Never did get me an answer. If you were a high general, where would you lead us, Georgie? New York City?”
“Home.”
As soon as the word escaped his mouth, Nichols regretted it. He sounded weak, cowardly, girlish. As if he wanted to flee to his mother’s embrace.
His mother, a woman as good as Ruth in the Bible. Her chore-strong arms had held him fast, unwilling to give him up to godless war.
His lone word silenced everybody, just locked them all right up. Nichols was about to insist that he didn’t really mean it, that he thought going to Washington or maybe Baltimore or even Philadelphia would suit him fine, come what may. But Sergeant Alderman spoke first, laughing through his words:
“I swear to God … there’s an honest man amongst us.”
July 7, noon
Monocacy Junction
Rivers coursed through his life. First the Wabash, rich with fish and the promise of adventure, sun-dappled and seductive, had made of him a truant from the schoolhouse and its regimen of multiplication tables. Then the Rio Grande had shaped a man from a dreaming boy, as the men of his volunteer regiment perished on its sickness-ridden banks, going to graves in multiples day after day, until no wood remained for coffins and corpses were buried in undergarments, only to be uncovered again by the winds from the Gulf of Mexico. Not one of his Indiana comrades, left at a forlorn post by General Taylor, had heard a hostile shot before dying in vomit. Then, in another war, this war, he had saved Grant’s freezing army on the Cumberland, only to be scapegoated for Grant’s near disaster on the Tennessee. Now this river, slight and brown, had summoned him to a questionable destiny.
His staff, a meager collection, had gathered about him, all of them staring across the Monocacy, past fields gilt with wheat and Frederick’s spires, northwest to the heat-softened mountains and the war that hastened toward them. There was nothing to be seen, not yet, only the sometimes thump of a distant cannon, but they all stared nonetheless, as if the Confederates might appear the moment they looked away, those lean men clad in gray and brown and patched-up rags of every harlequin color, who were bound soon enough to come pouring down the road from Frederick City toward this prize of bridges and main-traveled roads, where the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the highway to Baltimore, and the Pike to Washington converged.
Another invisible gun reported, a dull thud in heat as heavy as winter draperies, and Major General Lew Wallace felt the assorted lieutenant colonels and captains grouped around him tense. The first message from Clendenin, brought by a courier on a punished horse, had informed him that the cavalryman and his handful of troopers from the 8th Illinois had driven the enemy’s advance guard back toward Middletown, only to be driven in turn as reinforcements bolstered the Confederates. Clendenin had been obliged to withdraw to Catoctin Pass, and Wallace knew it was but a matter of time before Reb numbers would tell again and Clendenin—a quick, earnest man—would be forced to abandon the pass and descend into the rich fields leading to Frederick. And Frederick was but three miles from this junction, which of a sudden had become the most important point in the entire Union.
The unconcern in Washington had beggared belief, even as ever more reports warned of Confederates in a host. Halleck, Wallace’s nemesis since Shiloh—even before—had dismissed his initial concerns, agreeing with Grant’s conclusion that Early and his corps remained in the defensive works at Petersburg and could not possibly be invading Maryland. It had only been thanks to Garrett, the railroad man, that Wallace himself was alerted to the crisis. The government had known nothing and cared less.
Only now, so very late, had the grand Mamelukes of Washington begun to believe in the deadly ghosts they’d all dismissed with scorn. But would there be time enough to hurry troops back from Virginia to save Washington, a city whose defenses Grant had stripped to make good his terrible losses? Wallace’s mind was all too alive with images of the capital ablaze, the grand government buildings and the immense military stores, the Navy Yard and the Treasury’s wealth of bonds, all consigned to the torch by vengeful traitors. It was all about time now, and Wallace intended to fight for every hour.
Another courier appeared on the road from Frederick, a dark speck chased by grand billows of dust. The weather was ripe and beautiful, but dry near unto drought and killing hot, and Wallace felt for the men who must march through it. Even if they were his enemies.
“What do you think’s happening, sir?” Captain Woodhull, his junior aide-de-camp, asked. Woodhull’s voice was eager and still pitched high with youth.
“Clendenin’s giving them a fight,” Wallace answered. “If he wasn’t, there’d be more than one horseman chasing down that road.”
But his spirits were not as confident as his voice. On his own initiative, he had gathe
red every soldier he could scavenge from his department, an administrative post meant to console him and his political friends, a return to the war in form, but not in fact. Until this day, the major achievement of his Baltimore headquarters had been to finesse the recent Maryland elections, ensuring that the right candidates were favored. His handling of the matter had pleased Stanton and Lincoln himself, but he still had not been offered a fighting command.
And he knew why: Halleck. Halleck, with his limitless vitriol, was a figure too high to dismiss without embarrassment, but too lacking in judgment to command in the field, so he sat enthroned in Washington, dispensing orders and venom with equal glee. “Old Brains” had maintained from the first that only his fellow West Pointers were fit for command and that amateurs such as Wallace would butcher their soldiers. He stopped just short of labeling volunteer officers as criminals. Yet at Donelson, Wallace had disobeyed orders shaped by West Point educations to save the Union right wing from collapse. And when, at Shiloh, he had obeyed his orders to the letter, only to arrive too late to join the first day’s fight, he had been made the villain of the piece, although it was Grant and Sherman who had let down their guards and nearly lost an army. With all the spite of which the old vulture was capable, Halleck had stripped him of command and driven him into obscurity, letting him rot in Indiana while the war dragged on. Even when he saved Cincinnati, Ohio, from a Rebel incursion, it had made no difference. A man who held a grudge in perpetuity, Halleck had even argued against the Middle Department posting, determined to deny Wallace not only the battlefield, but even Baltimore.
So he had not informed Halleck at first when he left his headquarters for the railroad junction, which lay across the river from his department’s western boundary. He was violating orders again, but Wallace saw no choice: Someone had to stand between these Confederates and Washington, even if the stand was doomed from the start.
Wallace could foresee his fate, whether he did good service or failed completely. Leading twenty-three hundred green volunteers, many of them mere hundred-day men, militia and convalescents wearing the grandiose designation “VIII Corps,” he faced an approaching Rebel force reported to be between twenty thousand and thirty thousand in battle strength. Allowing for the exaggerations of excited informants, that still meant fifteen thousand to twenty thousand Confederates on the march. And Wallace intended to fight them, well aware that he must be badly defeated. He meant to fight to delay them as long as he could. And Halleck would have a real defeat to pin on him.
The situation was so dire that he had been made happier by the chance to commandeer Clendenin’s two hundred veteran horsemen than by anything since his wife accepted his marriage proposal. As for the rest of his scraped-up command, all he could do was to use the river and the good terrain along its southern bank to make a stand and count minutes earned with blood. Wallace had never favored mathematics in school, but twenty-three hundred raw recruits divided by a front greater than three miles provided a sorry answer.
He asked himself if he was merely playing with other men’s lives, still a prisoner of The Scottish Chiefs and the other heroic romances of his childhood … yet he saw no choice but to do what little he could. To allow Early and his paladins to stroll into the nation’s capital without making the least effort to delay them … better to fight and lose miserably, even if he robbed them of only an hour.
He didn’t believe that Early and his army were headed for Baltimore, although he could not be certain and had to cover the upriver bridge as well. All logic told him the Rebels aimed at Washington, hoping to shock the North and unseat Lincoln in the autumn election, and to encourage English and French intercession on the part of the South, even at this late hour.
To prevent all that, he had one six-gun battery of three-inch rifles and an unwieldy twenty-four-pounder. Against the battalions of cannon that Early would bring to bear. Well, he thought with a bittersweet smile, his boyhood hero, William Wallace, would not have been daunted.
As a lad, he had dreamed of military glory, inspired by his father’s brief army career and subsequent leadership of the local militia. And despite his disappointments and travails in Mexico, this war had seemed to grant it to him, only to steal it away again, as fickle as the Greek gods. It wasn’t about glory now, though. There would be no glory here. Only time gripped like a miser’s gold and the prospect of the Capitol in flames.
The far mouth of the covered bridge gobbled the courier. Invisible hooves slammed planks. Anxious of heart but strict of feature, Wallace watched as the rider reappeared and reined up, calling out to the nearby guards, doubtless asking where the devil that fool general was.
The man begged directions a second time before whipping his horse up the slope. The beast looked ready to drop. Celtic complexion further reddened by his exertions, the cavalryman saluted and fixed his eyes on Wallace, drawing a folded paper from his blouse and extending it without dismounting. Wallace stepped forward and took the missive. It was damp with the fellow’s sweat.
Before unfolding the paper, Wallace asked, “How is it with Colonel Clendenin?”
Interrupted while reaching for his canteen, the man gasped, “Oh … he’s giving them the right devil. That he is, sir. Cut from the proper mold, that boyo. But there’s Rebs enough, a great and terrible lot of them.”
“Does he still hold the pass?”
The soldier guzzled from his canteen. Water ran down through his whiskers.
“He did, sir, but he don’t. We was all set to pull back, when I rode off. The Rebs, sir, they’d gone to flanking us every which way. They’ve infantry and guns up with their cavalry now, and they’re terrible out of temper with the colonel, for he’s giving them the loveliest bit of frustration.”
Opening the scrawled report, Wallace thought: The poor bugger put it better than I could myself. We need to give them “the loveliest bit of frustration.”
“Rest your horse, man,” Wallace told the courier. “You’re apt to need him over the next few days.”
“Yes, sir, and that I will, sir. But if I may…”
“What?”
“Well, the good colonel up there, he’s feeling a touch of the lonesome. If O’Malley’s a judge of the weather.”
“We all are,” Wallace told him.
July 7, 3:00 p.m.
Sharpsburg, Maryland
Too damned hot for biscuits. The butter had separated on the plate, leaving pools for drowning flies, and the stink was downright grisly. Lemonade was fine, though.
Early waved Sandie Pendleton back up onto the porch, interrupting the boy’s conversation with Ramseur’s quartermaster.
Ascending in an aura of dust and spur clank, Pendleton called, “Yes, sir?” The boy had a narrow face and a wide writ. Twenty-three-year-old chief of staff. Damnedest thing. Inherited from Jackson and Ewell, no less. Tom Jackson must have lifted him out of the cradle.
“Here, now,” Early said. “Eat up these biscuits. Before that woman comes back out on the porch. Be quick now.”
Accustomed to Early’s ways, the young lieutenant colonel made no protest, but tucked in with all the appetite of youth.
Between swallows, Pendleton asked, “Take one down for—”
“No. You eat ’em. Then you fetch me up that message from Bobby Lee again.”
“About Point Lookout?” Pendleton brushed a crumb and a streak of butter from his chin.
“That’s right. The one from Robert E. Lee’s book of fairy tales for good Confederates. Have to read it a second time to believe it.” Early drew a twist of tobacco from his pocket and tore off a chaw. “Take yourself some of that lemonade now. Not all of it. And get along.”
He did appreciate that lemonade, had to admit. Woman of the house meant well. They always did. Most always. But the utility of womanhood was limited.
Sharpsburg. No good memories. That hateful hour in the cornfield, that bloody, wretched day. McClellan should have et them alive, but Little Mac’s appetite failed him. Man afraid of
his own shadow, of spooks and hants in gray. Jubal Early had never seen a battle waged with such determination at the front and such blissful incompetence in the rear. Yankees had almost done it, though, almost wiped Lee’s army off the map. Old Marse Robert letting himself get pinned against the river like that. And Hill off gallivanting.
He figured he had seen worse since that day nearly two years before—at Spotsylvania, certainly—but nothing had marked him deeper than the slaughter amid those cornstalks. Remarkable business, what canister could do to men unprepared and utterly unsuspecting. One blunder after another. On both sides.
Ramseur himself now. At the end of the street, waving his troops on. Bully lad, that one. But there were times when gallantry had to give way to judgment. Ramseur needed to keep himself out of the sun, he was obviously still weak from his latest—third—wound. Tried to hide it, but Early could tell. Another man-child. Major general commanding a division, and just turned twenty-seven in the distinctly unmerry month of May 1864. That’s what the army had come to now: scarecrows led by children barely got into long pants. And the cavalry … he didn’t want to think about those sonsofbitches and spoil the afternoon.
Ramseur would do. Fighting man, North Carolina boy. He’d do. If he didn’t fall over with sunstroke.
Pendleton, Ramseur … it was enough to make a man in his prime, a seasoned forty-seven, feel old as Methuselah. He spit tobacco juice from the high porch, careful to keep it short of the marching men.
Pendleton returned with the dispatch. It had been carried from Petersburg by Lee’s youngest son, as if the kinship might lend the foolishness gravity. Sheer, damned foolishness. Here he was, up in Maryland, with fewer than eighteen thousand men and more peeling off each day, and no, it wasn’t enough for Lee that he might get to Washington and turn Abe Lincoln out of house and home, making a great damned rumpus they might hear in London and Paris, no, that was not enough. Lee was still on the rocking horse of his cockamamie scheme for freeing the thousands of prisoners at Point Lookout. As if wishing would make it so.
