by Ralph Peters
Ramseur nodded.
“General Breckinridge,” Early continued, “I want you to get a division across whatever ford McCausland stumbled on by whatever God-given miracle occurred and finish up with those blue-belly sonsofbitches. Before McCausland loses the whole damned Confederacy while we’re here tugging on our willies.”
“Yes, sir,” the former vice president said.
“Which division of yours is closest?” Early demanded, just as an artillery shell smashed into the barn, showering the generals with hay.
“Gordon’s,” Breckinridge said, coughing.
1:45 p.m.
Worthington farm
After letting each of his colonels take their turn, Tiger John McCausland peered through the upstairs window a last time. He was furious at himself for his earlier haste—had he only had the wits to climb the farmhouse stairs before ordering his attack, he would have seen the Yankees lying in wait, plain as could be.
“Look at that,” he said, although his shoulders blocked the view, “just you look. I don’t care if they’re Sixth Corps troops, they barely have enough men to reach that brick house. Line’s as skinny as a starving cat, and the flank’s in thin air.”
“Boys are ready to go back in,” Hen Bowen offered. “Hopping mad. Way I told you, sir.” He tut-tutted himself. “Almost pity those blue-bellies.”
“Don’t.”
McCausland took a last hard look, then turned from the panorama to the colonels. “We’re going to work around them. Keep the men hidden, behind that bump of a hill off to the right. Hen, you lead the way, pick us a jump-off point. Same order of regiments for the attack. Hit ’em like a hammer, turn their left, and keep going. No parading, come over the crest at the double-quick. Get on ’em fast as we can. And skirt that damned cornfield.” He looked around at the sweat-faced men. Bowen had washed off the blood he’d worn with well water. They all looked ready, if sobered.
Early would not scorn the cavalry today.
“Have your men head straight for that big brick house, both sides of it. Go!”
2:00 p.m.
Thomas farm
Ricketts ached to hear a train or to see his last two and a half regiments come marching along the road. He needed every man, but remained shy a good fifteen hundred of those he’d promised Wallace. Even five hundred … three hundred … would have been as welcome as Christmas to a child.
Another Confederate battery opened across the river, thickening the air with its shot and shell. The impacts seemed almost constant now, with Reb cannon firing on them from various angles. He had ordered his men to lie down, but there was nothing else that he could do for them. The line Truex’s brigade had been forced to occupy, from the yard of the brick house down to the river bluff, was exposed to the enemy guns for most of its length. And the only consolation—a grim one—was the thought that if he were commanding the Rebel artillery, there’d be a great deal more damage.
Truex met him by the gates of the lane that led up to the mansion.
“Sir … I need more men. At least a few hundred. My left’s dangling.”
“For God’s sakes, Bill, I don’t have more men.” He almost added, “And you know it.” But fewer words were always better than more.
Ricketts had already stripped his Second Brigade of all the companies he thought safe to remove from the river line … although he suspected he’d call up the rest before long. There simply were not enough soldiers. Too much ground, not enough men: the defender’s eternal complaint.
“You’ll just have to do what you can,” he told the colonel.
Truex nodded, touched two fingers to his hat brim, and spurred his mount back up the shaded lane. Explosive shells bracketed the mansion’s outbuildings as soldiers hauled laden stretchers down the slope.
The fragrance of early harvests had been smothered by the stink of powder and men.
Ricketts led his staff party up the lane before Truex’s dust had settled. Obliged to see things himself. That was yet another constant dilemma, the need to balance control of his entire division with the need to be close enough to the point of decision.
There was much to be said for being a grizzled captain in charge of a single battery.
He reached the yard of the house just in time to see the Rebs swarm over a low hill off to the left, long lines driving for his flank at a perfect, fatal angle.
He rode for Truex, but the colonel was already acting, calling in his skirmishers from the fence that had served them so well, then riding for his flank to refuse the line.
The Rebs came on fast, no nonsense about them now.
“Hold as long as you can,” Ricketts shouted as Truex galloped past.
He needed those missing regiments.
“Sir,” an aide called out, “you’re too far forward.”
“I’m not too far forward,” Ricketts snapped. “The damned Rebs are.”
On they came, yelling and hooting, pausing to fire, then trotting forward again.
They caught Ricketts’ flank regiments just as they were realigning themselves. Men went at each other with clubbed rifles, some even with bayonets, a rarity. And fists. Fighting engulfed the mansion and the thrust was clear: The Johnnies had momentum, his own men had been caught on the wrong foot.
The racket was so extreme, there was no point in shouting. He signaled his intentions to his aide and standard-bearer by pointing—quickly—down to his Second Brigade.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul, he thought. And not enough coin to satisfy either one.
“Tell your colonel to re-form on the Pike,” Ricketts shouted to a major from Truex’s staff. “I’ll shift the Second Brigade to support your right.”
Stopping now and again to fire, his veterans withdrew down the slope that led from the house toward the junction of the Pike and a farm road. Soldiers fell, but not too many. The Rebs didn’t seem to be pursuing with serious intent, whether under orders to halt or unsure of what might await them down below.
He glanced back and saw Truex rushing about, ablaze with urgency, imposing order where there, briefly, had been none.
Amid the roar and chaos, Ricketts sensed that the tide had begun to turn again.
2:20 p.m.
Gambrill House Ridge
From the hillside, Wallace watched the Confederate flank break into pieces. It wasn’t even under fire, or not under much. Yet the body of men disintegrated, dispersing about the sprawling yards of the mansion, among the outbuildings, and even into the adjoining fields. As if uncertain where they were or why they had come to this place, the men who had rushed forth in impressive lines had become a mob.
He bent toward Ross to be heard. “Find Truex or Ricketts. Quick as you can. Tell them I suggest a counterattack … an immediate counterattack, with whatever troops are at hand. Aim left of the house. They’re disordered, they won’t hold up. But we need to hit them now.”
The instant he realized that Wallace would say no more, Ross kicked his horse hard and galloped down into the semi-chaos of troops re-forming after their short retreat, of stragglers and wounded men, ambulatory and not, of shouted orders and ammunition boxes thrown from the backs of wagons and broken open with rifle butts, of shrieking horses and shell bursts.
Wallace longed to ride down there himself, to take direct command. He burned to do it. But he knew his place was here, where he could see most of the field and issue orders, where he could be found.
The hardest part of battle wasn’t fighting.
2:24 p.m.
Georgetown Pike (the Washington road)
Captain William Lanius, aide to Colonel Truex, had separated from his commander in the confusion. He was helping to re-form the 14th New Jersey when Lieutenant Colonel Ross, whom he recognized as Wallace’s aide-de-camp, rode up and gasped a question.
“Where’s Colonel Truex?”
“Don’t know,” Lanius admitted.
“You’ve got to find him. I’ve got to find him. Or Ricketts. Somebody. General Wallace thinks th
e Rebs are all in a mess. Up by that house. He recommends that Colonel Truex counterattack. Immediately.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll see to it.”
Well, Lanius figured as Ross rode off again, better to be broken for doing too much than for doing too little. He steered his horse through the press of men to Lieutenant Colonel Hall, who was bleeding from the neck and ignoring the wound.
“Sir, General Wallace orders you to charge that house. The Rebs have nothing to them, they’re played out.”
Hall snorted. “Didn’t have nothing to them a few minutes back.” But he began shouting orders.
Lanius pushed on to the 87th Pennsylvania. Lieutenant Colonel Stahle already had his men formed up, awaiting orders.
“Colonel Stahle!” Lanius shouted. “General Wallace says take that house back now!”
2:30 p.m.
Thomas farm
They were cavalrymen, after all, that was the cursed thing. They had every bit as much spunk and fight in them as any infantry soldier, McCausland believed, but they had been trained to form up, maneuver, fight, and regroup on horseback. They could skirmish well enough dismounted, but this …
He rode across the fields, bellowing at stray soldiers to re-form on their colors. When he passed the skeletal semblance of a regiment, he gave them the orders he would have given infantrymen, but their understanding fell short.
They had done well, had done just fine, sweeping right over the Yankees, driving them. And then the attack had simply petered out, as if the lot of them had decided as one that it was just too risky to press on and finish the kill. And McCausland did have to admit that there was a sight more Yankees down in the swales and hollows he hadn’t spied out.
But he’d had his fill of mathematics in Lexington. It was a matter of spirit now, of not giving up, of facing down the Yankees, of bluffing them right off this field.
As he neared the brick house again, he heard cheers. The wrong sort.
Yankees came swarming up the lane and through the grounds. Some of his boys were inside the mansion, sharpshooting, but as the blue-bellies closed the distance the rifles retracted from the windows and did not reappear.
Tavenner found him. “Gave them a right licking, sir.”
“And now they’re set to give us one. See to your men, W.C.”
The realization that it would be his fault if they were beaten back just increased his fury. Determined to overwhelm the Yankees, he had put all his men on the line, had kept no reserve. And now he needed one.
He rode toward the melee around the great brick house, ready to apply his knuckles to a Federal mouth should the opportunity present itself.
“Kill them, damn you!” he shouted. “They’re nothing but worthless coward Yankee bastards, kill every one of them.”
2:40 p.m.
Thomas farm
Ricketts personally guided his Second Brigade’s regiments—barely half of those who should have been present—into place on their new line, freeing up the First Brigade’s right to advance again and complete the repulse of the Johnnies. Someone, bless him, had led a splendid countercharge, and the Rebs were going high-tail and white-tail from the brick house back across the fields, with his men cheering and shooting through the smoke drifts.
He told the brigade commander exactly how he wanted the line established, then rode up past two guns Wallace had sent and onto the high fields surrounding the brick house.
Dead men from both sides lay intermingled, the routine leavings of advance and retreat. Corpses presented a sameness, despite their odd contortions or surprised expressions. But the wounded came in a nearly endless variety, from the moaning boys he passed and the terrified pleaders, through the men who cursed the universe and their bloodied, broken limbs, to the leg-shot, spade-bearded, black-eyed Johnny who looked up as he rode by and called, “They’ll come back, you nigger-loving bastard, our boys are coming back.”
And they did come back, twice more, in attacks that were brave, determined, frail, and hopeless. They were dismounted cavalrymen, all of them, not infantry brigades, and Ricketts realized that all his command had just endured was little more than teasing.
His men seemed to understand that, too, and took it meanly. The last time the Rebs tried to cross those fields, they concentrated on the foolish mounted officers and shot down five.
3:00 p.m.
Worthington Ford
Nichols caught the voice of Elder Woodfin before he could make out a word the chaplain spoke. For all the thrashing and splashing up ahead, the artillery banging away on the left and the oaths of cannoneers gun-stuck in the ford, there was no mistaking the chaplain’s mighty call, a bull voice that commanded the Lord’s attention.
Lieutenant Colonel Valkenburg stood on the near bank, shouting to be heard. “No time to take off your shoes, men, hurry on. Bottom’s rocky, anyway. Keep on moving.”
Nichols had a fair admiration for most officers, but a special liking for Valkenburg, who had been kind to him once and who had done fine service in the Wilderness. Handsome fellow, too, the kind the girls liked, bad girls and the good.
Nichols hoped a girl might take to him. After this fuss was done. A good girl, in clean gingham. Who wouldn’t play jokes and laugh at him, but like him rightly and truly. A fair-haired girl, if he had his druthers, who could cook and who read her Bible. The kind of girl his mother wouldn’t mind and his pa would take to.
“Get along now, men. We’re needed up top,” Valkenburg encouraged them.
Nichols and his mess mates splashed on in, sinking knee-deep, thigh-deep, waist-deep, holding their rifles high, with cartridge pouches looped over them. The water was shock-cold, but warmed up fast, running muddy and fast enough to carry off a child, but not a man.
He felt the waters wash him. Like the Jordan.
Elder Woodfin stood atop a rock on the far bank, as if the Lord himself had planted him there, a steady hand raised to Heaven. His words rang clear now, the shouts and busy batteries no more than a frame for his pulpit voice: “Jephthah passed over unto the children of Ammon to fight against them; and the Lord delivered them into his hands. And he smote them…”
Foot tricked by a rock, Nichols stumbled. Saved by the grip of Ive Summerlin, he righted himself just before the water washed over his cartridge box. That bad leg again.
Colonel Lamar himself came back to hurry the men along. “Come on, boys, get on up that bank, come on. The old Sixty-first’s going to settle things right fast, come on now, Georgia!”
“… even twenty cities, and unto the plain of the vineyards, with a very great slaughter,” the chaplain recited, disdaining mortality.
Judges 11:33, Nichols recollected. But bad things happened in the following verses.
“‘Very great slaughter’ all right,” Ive said, nearly losing his own balance. “Reckon on that.”
3:00 p.m.
Worthington farm
Gordon rode the fields and folds with his brigade commanders. He had restricted each man to a single aide to keep the party small, with flags and banners held back in the trees. The terrain posed an ugly problem with no good solution: There was no alternative to crossing broad fields lined by at least two fences that would need to be climbed over or knocked down. Worse, great shocks of hay studded the fields to be traversed, obstacles that would break up advancing lines. Beyond those impediments—bad enough—he saw two well-placed Federal lines, the second two hundred yards behind the first. If more Yankees lurked in the low ground to their rear, he had no way of knowing.
Didn’t see any batteries lined up. That was queer. Yankee artillery was a monstrous thing, devastating, plentiful. Yet, here … he could spot only two guns for certain and what might or might not have been a third set back.
What if the Yankees had kept their batteries hidden? To spring a surprise?
He said nothing of his fears to his subordinates. He never did. And far too much of the day had burned away to spend time on debate and deliberation.
Drawing up
on a mild rise, he waited for his brigadiers to settle around him and soothe their horses. Every equine mouth was green with foam: Their march had been hurried, their scouting fevered.
“Well, gentlemen … your eyes see as well as mine. There is no good way to do this.” He considered his three brigadiers: Evans, the man he trusted most, with his parson’s smile and fervent heart, commanding Gordon’s old brigade of Georgians. Zeb York, with the remains of ten Louisiana regiments combined under his command, their rolls not amounting to half of a full brigade. Reared in Maine, but seduced by Louisiana, York had been one of the few truly wealthy men to go to war and stick it out. It was said he owned—or had owned, given present conditions in Louisiana—nigh on two thousand slaves. This day, the men he led numbered barely a third of that. But York would fight like a bull, charging ahead. And Bill Terry, newly made a brigadier general, somehow combined intelligence and gallantry, two qualities the war had taught Gordon were generally exclusive of one another. Terry’s Virginia Brigade gathered in the survivors of fourteen regiments shattered in the Wilderness or bled out at Spotsylvania. Especially Spotsylvania.
Clem Evans would fight with heart, York with his knuckles, and Terry with his brain. Gordon had a purpose for each man.
“We’re going to advance en echelon, from the right. Overlap their left, spook them into weakening their center along that crest.”
“Looks like that could require some serious spooking,” Zeb York told him. York retained the wealthy man’s sense of a God-given right to speak up. Gordon knew it, expected it, and tolerated it. York followed orders, that was the thing that mattered.
“Well, that’s where you’ll play your part, Zeb. But you’re running on ahead of me.” Gordon fixed his eyes on Evans. “Clem, you’ll be on the right, you’ll go out first.” He saw the flicker of doubt in Evans’ eyes, but it was only a flicker, soon snuffed out. “The Georgia Brigade’s going to face the worst of it, I understand that. But I need you to keep the pressure on their left. Zeb here will be in trail, on your left. He won’t dally now, just give the Yankees time enough to issue the wrong orders.” Looking from one man to the other, he said, “I expect you to break both of those Yankee lines. Between the two of you.”
