by Ralph Peters
Oh, they were excited enough tonight, suddenly convinced that not only the Confederates but the Great Cham and Grand Turk were descending on Washington. Yet even now, with the crisis upon them, one department failed to speak with the other, and one command issued one set of orders, only to see contradictory orders issued by a rival.
This day had been exasperating above all others in Garrett’s experience. He was used to getting things done—by blunt force, if necessary—but the tortured acrobatics he had needed to perform to get the fools in Washington to apply a single ounce of common sense had been infuriating. He had kept his temper with Stanton, of course, thanks not least to the orderly tick of the telegraph, but had been a tyrant otherwise. Refined manners had their place, and their place was in good society. Not in a railroad office during a war.
He sat back in his splendid chair, but found its embrace too tender for his mood. Planting his elbows on his desk, he let his fingers wrestle until the knuckles whitened. Good Christ, for a dash of old Peabody’s aplomb! The English had that knack of remaining, or at least feigning, calm when faced with extremity.
A hand tapped his door. Not boldly.
“Come in.” He almost added, “Dammit,” but swallowed the words: A railway man had to be hard, but needn’t be vulgar.
Moder stalled in the doorway. Afraid to proceed.
“Well, what is it?”
“They’re disembarking from the ships, sir. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Well, hallelujah! Somebody in Washington has an interest in saving the blasted Union. Secretary Stanton?”
“Yes, sir. We copied the message.”
“Anything more?”
“Yes, sir. I mean … only that we have the extra repair crews and telegraph people ready.”
“How many?”
“One hundred and twenty. Last count.”
“Get more. Kidnap them from the Reading, if you have to.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Moder … you make sure that every man in this company knows that trains carrying troops or military supplies—I don’t care if they’re hoop skirts and monkey jackets—will have absolute priority. And I’ll not only dismiss the man who causes the least obstruction, but do my best to put the swine in jail.”
“Yes, sir. Anything else for General Wallace, sir?”
“No.”
Wallace. Poor devil. The only man in uniform who had taken his reports seriously. Initially, he’d thought Wallace a bag full of nothing, given the taint of failure and then his wife’s all-too-loud whispers at Mrs. Hopkins’ reception about her husband having written a novel. As if that might impress Baltimore society! A novel! About Spaniards in Mexico, or something of that ilk. Romantic, no doubt. Unpublished, of course.
Garrett could not imagine an endeavor less befitting a soldier or, for that matter, any man than scribbling out novels for women sprawled on daybeds. He had maintained cordial relations with the new department commander after learning of his literary bent, but had written Wallace off as better suited to the Baltimore Club than to battlefield gore.
Then the fellow had taken himself off to Monocacy Junction with a tatterdemalion collection of the lame and left-over in uniforms smelling of camphor, not blown powder, determined to fight the Rebels and damn the risk and sheer impossibility. A slender David with a Frenchman’s beard and pomaded hair, Wallace had proven the only true man among the bloody, blue lot of them.
Which did not portend the defeat of the gray Goliath.
He had hesitated to send any further messages to Wallace after his excited report that veteran troops had arrived in transports off Locust Point. That message had been premature, to put it mildly. Oh, the veterans were there, all right, riding at anchor, regiments of the Third Division of the Sixth Corps, among the best in all the Union’s armies. But they’d been sent with orders not to disembark until their division commander arrived and sniffed around. And when Garrett, frenzied, had gotten Stanton to intervene himself to bring them ashore, that horse’s ass Halleck had ordered the troops to reinforce Maryland Heights—which would take them far from the impending battle.
Even now, Garrett was not certain which orders had prevailed or who truly was in charge of the wretched mess … but he was ready to take charge, if no one else would. He was going to get those disembarking regiments packed into train cars and sent off to Wallace, if he had to do it at gunpoint. Once the troops got to the junction, Wallace could handle the Maryland Heights tomfoolery.
Good Christ, though …
When the war began, Garrett’s personal sympathies had leaned southward: He had viewed the B&O as a Southron line. But he had not needed long to figure out who could pay and who couldn’t—and shortly thereafter the Rebels had taken to ripping up his track and burning his rolling stock, stations, and warehouses. John W. Garrett became the staunchest of staunch Union men.
And he had learned to profit amid war, despite the repeated destruction, turning the B&O into the Union’s backbone in the East. If the government stationed its poorest troops and shabbiest officers to protect the line, the protection still had worth—and cost the line nothing. But there were limits to all things, and, as he had told Wallace in clarion terms, he would not see the new iron bridge over the Monocacy damaged or destroyed.
John W. Garrett hoped to save the nation’s capital. But he was damned well determined to save his bridge.
July 8, dawn
Rohrersville road, Maryland
Brigadier General Clem Evans rode back along his ranks, encouraging men where he could and wondering whether Joshua’s soldiers ever had been as weary as his brigade. John Brown Gordon was a splendid man and tolerably Christian, the finest leader Evans had ever known. But Gordon did like to march men hard and go at the enemy harder.
Times it paid, as it had that first afternoon in the Wilderness, when Gordon had ordered the brigade to attack in two directions while fighting in a third, defying military logic and whipping the devil out of the bewildered Yankees.
But Evans also remembered the Mule Shoe slaughter, when Gordon had been willing to sacrifice every man he led to hold the line, even as Evans had tried to reason with him. Gordon had been right, of course. But it had gone down hard: the merciless orders and that imperious look on Gordon’s face, the expression of an intelligent beast in ecstasy.
It wasn’t that Gordon didn’t care for the men. He surely did. But he cared for winning more than anything else this side of Paradise. Evans liked Gordon, liked him well enough … loved him, maybe … but, while he did not wish to blaspheme, there was something demonic about John Gordon, a devil revealed in his nakedness on the battlefield.
Even Gordon’s younger brother, Eugene, a captain and Evans’ aide, felt an awe of his older brother that was edged with fear. Love, yes. But fear, too.
Evans didn’t want to make too much of things, though, or to be unjust to any man—least of all John Gordon. After Fredericksburg, in the wake of that horror, he had pledged himself to the Methodist ministry, if the Lord saw fit to let him survive this war. There would be no more lawyering and politics hereafter, a decision in which his beloved Allie concurred with all her heart. Nor would he preach the anger of the Prophets, only the perfect love of Jesus Christ.
“Just a little more walking now, soldier,” Evans told a laggard shadow. “Rest those hind paws soon enough.” He knew the names of almost all his men, took pains to know them, as a minister must know his congregants, but the lingering dark and the fog of dust blurred this fellow’s features.
The soldier did not reply, but shuffled along.
Likely didn’t even know I was talking to him, Evans figured.
The latest order he had received from Gordon called for a halt of two hours at Rohrersville, then for the march to resume. It wasn’t enough time for the men to recover. And they’d be marching into the heat of the day. Evans understood the need to make haste, if they intended to reach the Yankee capital, that Gomorrah. But the soldiers had t
o be fit for a scrap when they got there.
Blame the devil, where were the Yankees, anyway? Nothing but militia in the towns, running high-tail, and Sigel’s fellows huddled up back on the Heights. Didn’t they have an inkling what was passing?
Let the Lord be praised.
And God bless Allie and the children, the living and those who had gone to eternal life straight from the cradle. He allowed himself to think of little Ida, the apple of his eye, and her trouble learning geography, then of tiny Lawton, a merry hellion, a year and a half old. He thought, too, of the dreadful loss of Charlie, of other losses … but at the end of all sorrows, Allie waited, her smile as full of grace as Heaven must be. They had wed when he was twenty and she fifteen—he could not wait longer, nor did she desire delay—and for eleven years she had been the finest wife to him that any man could want, a woman of sweet ardor. He longed for her every night.
At least their home was south of Sherman’s path. He wondered again if Allie had settled last winter’s debts, incurred when he—a cautious man with money—had upended the family’s finances, borrowing to come home and see his family on a month’s leave. The cost of all things, from railway travel to biscuit flour, had soared, but pay had not kept pace as the currency withered. Last month, he, a brigadier general, had strained to settle his commissary bill.
“When this cruel war is over,” he muttered.
Too dry to sing anything, even a hymn, let alone a soldier song, he tempered his stallion’s pace to a meeker mildness, unwilling to stir up dust to afflict his men.
Brilliant slants of light purpled the ridges. Evans tugged back the reins.
“Who’s that walking peg-a-leg there? George Nichols, that you, boy?”
Nichols limped from the column, nodding a salute. Two of his comrades moved to the roadside with him, one on each flank.
“What’s the matter, son? New shoes a trial?”
The soldier seemed hardly more than a child between his broad-shouldered friends.
“No, sir. Nothing wrong a-tall.”
Evans recognized Lem Davis as the man who spoke up next. “Spent shell casing got him back at the Heights, Genr’l. Fool won’t take to a wagon, show some sense. That leg’s swelled to busting.”
Evans turned to his aide, performing as General Gordon might have done in similar circumstances, saying, pulpit-loud, “Hear that now, Captain Gordon? That’s the kind of men we grow in Georgia.” Then he bent from the saddle toward the boy. “You’ve shown a fine side, Nichols. But wait on the wagons now and take your ease. Hear?”
The lad stepped forward again. On that bad leg.
“If’n that’s an order, sir, I’m set to obey it. But I’d as lief walk.”
Evans told himself that, yes, it was an order. For the boy’s own good. But he also knew that the ways of the heart were many and the needs of the soul were legion.
“Son … you do what you want,” Evans told him. “Just remember that pride comes before a fall.”
“I ain’t going to fall none. Leg’ll carry me.”
In the shadows below a shimmering sky, Evans smiled.
“Well, then … y’all get along and catch up to your company.”
The men saluted, each in his odd manner, just as none of their uniforms were uniform. Evans rode on.
Behind the last mob that passed for a march formation, he entered the domain of limping forms and quitters. That eager boy, Nichols, was made of rock-hard stuff, even if he looked barely fit for man-britches.
Turning his mount in the richer-each-moment light, Evans thought: Lord, isn’t that just us, though? All of us? From that young private to General Robert E. Lee, we’re so doggone stubborn we just don’t know what’s good for us.
TWO
July 8, dawn
Monocacy Junction
“Sir, sir!” The orderly shook Wallace, none too gently. “I hear a train. Coming from Baltimore way.”
Wallace brushed off the man’s hand and rose, stiff and groggy, from the floor. He heard the swelling throb of a locomotive. God grant it be the veterans.
He pulled on his boots and fumbled with his coat, forgoing sash and sword. Ross had orders to stop any train that approached the iron bridge, but Wallace feared that his own two stars might be needed to settle matters.
The noise of the great machine grew huge, then screamed to a hissing stop.
Righting his hat, Wallace hurried out of the shack. Sleep’s claws pursued him: He’d known little rest for days. In the foreground, a locomotive steamed, impatient. Dark forms leaned from passenger car platforms and crowded the doors of freight wagons. Mist smoked off the river.
A figure alighted from one of the cars, moving with a haste that betokened anger: a big fellow, blacksmith brawny, followed by stumbling underlings.
Wallace strode toward the tall officer, who looked around as if anxious to land a punch. Sweat prickled Wallace’s back.
“What’s the meaning of this?” the new arrival bellowed at anyone who might hear. “Why has this train been stopped? What damned idiocy is it now?”
Wallace spotted Jim Ross, his senior aide and a newly promoted lieutenant colonel. Ross would be no match for the bull in blue.
Quickening his pace again, Wallace waved to Ross: Let me handle this.
“And who the hell are you?” the big man, a colonel, snapped. He marked Wallace’s shoulder boards, but didn’t recoil or salute. He merely lowered his voice to a muzzled growl. “You in command here?”
Wallace extended his hand. “Major General Wallace, Middle Department. To whom do I owe the honor?”
The scent of coffee rose from a cook-fire, teasing him. He wished he had been allowed a cup before this confrontation.
The big man paused, then accepted Wallace’s paw, enclosing it. “Bill Henry, Tenth Vermont. Why have my men been stopped?” He freed Wallace’s hand, which hurt. The colonel was short a finger, Wallace noted, and his uniform was hard used.
“You don’t have orders to stop here, then?” Wallace asked. “At Monocacy Junction?”
“None.”
Confined to the train, bleary soldiers eyed the two officers. One man emptied a slop bucket from a freight car.
“And your orders are?”
“Proceed to Point of Rocks. Either continue on the train, or march if the line’s interrupted. Report to Harper’s Ferry for duty at Maryland Heights.”
Wallace tried to judge the man before him, what his temper really signified. “And the Tenth Vermont belongs to?”
“First Brigade, Truex commanding. Third Division, General Ricketts. Sixth Corps.”
“Where’s General Ricketts?”
The colonel shrugged, stretching a bit. His complexion had been burned as brown as a pig turned on a spit. “Doubt he’ll be up before tonight. Hadn’t arrived in port when we entrained. What’s going on?”
A cup of coffee would have been a blessing. He would have liked to offer one to this still-seething colonel, too.
Hundreds of morning-blurred faces watched the exchange now, those on the train and more from the roused camp.
“Colonel Henry,” Wallace began in a confidential tone, “if you proceed to Point of Rocks—and if the line has not been cut by now—you will take yourself and your men away from a battle coming to this place today or, at the latest, tomorrow. General Early is going to sweep over the ridges to our west with a reinforced corps, and his men are going to march as fast as their legs can go for our national capital.”
Fending off sleep’s last grip, Wallace straightened his back. “I have twenty-three hundred raw recruits, and two hundred good cavalry. The enemy’s said to number between twenty and thirty thousand. That number may be exaggerated, but they’re veterans all. Yesterday, we held off their advance guard just west of Frederick. But if you and those coming behind you continue to Point of Rocks, they will overwhelm us and be on their way to Washington. And your regiment will have done no good to anyone.”
Wallace reached out a hand, bu
t withdrew it before touching the other man’s sleeve. “I need you, Colonel. I don’t expect to beat Early. Just hold him long enough for Grant to reinforce Washington.” He met the man’s eyes in the seeping light. “I have no authority over your command. I leave the decision to stay or proceed to you.”
The colonel stared down at him for a dreadful stretch of seconds. Off to the side, Ross held still. On the cars, the soldiers, too, were silent, all their routine foolery suspended. As if they sensed—knew—that their fate was in play.
“Let my boys cook up some breakfast,” the Vermonter said at last. “And tell me where you want us.”
July 8, 9:00 a.m.
Fox Gap, Maryland
“They should’ve let us go, John,” Breckinridge said. “They just should’ve let us go.”
Erect in the saddle, as always, Gordon nodded. “Didn’t, though. And here we are.” He smiled. A gentleman always knew just when to smile. “Not a bad place at all, wasn’t for this dust.” He spread an arm toward the ripening fields that graced the valley. “All the bounty of Ceres.”
Before and behind the two generals and their staffs, long gray columns moved through tunnels of dust. Above the dirty air, the sun attacked.
“All the more reason they should have let us go,” Breckinridge told him. “Rich country, bountiful. The North has all it needs. Could’ve even spared us Maryland, way this Kentucky boy reckons.” He coughed. “John, I put it down to New York greed, Boston pride, and damnable Yankee spite. That’s what this war’s about.” He brushed dust from his long, slender mustaches.
Well, Gordon thought, pride and spite on our part, too, if love of a way of life in place of greed. None of them had expected this: the long years of blood and sorrow, of glory increasingly dimmed by lamentation. For months now, he had privately contemplated the possibility that the South might lose. He was in it to the end, all right, partly from pride and unabated anger, and partly in foreknowledge of what would fix a man’s status after the war, win or lose. But the probable end looked different to him now than it had before the slaughter below the Rapidan: The South was bleeding to death.
