by Ralph Peters
But they were back in solid ranks, instilled again—only the Lord knew how—with order and a refreshed, deepened confidence, going forward as one.
Yanks were little more than a hundred yards off now, not so thick a line, after all.
“At the double-quick … forward!”
“Georgia! Georgia!”
“Charge!”
The blue-bellies didn’t wait. It was only a bullied-up skirmish line. They fled. Yet, all the dead, the wounded this much had cost …
One man shrieked like a woman, a rare thing.
Colonel Lamar steered his horse ahead of the colors. The flags were carried by different soldiers now. The colonel paused just beyond the dip where the skirmish line had lurked.
“Halt and re-form. Halt, boys. Re-form.”
“Sure now. Jest let them Yankees have another free shot,” Ive said bitterly, for the hearing of those around him.
But these were dutiful men, ferocious and resigned, and they formed yet again after their brief charge, and they went forward again, and the second Yankee line exploded, so many rifles in play that after two volleys you couldn’t see the blue-bellies, just the smoke.
“Forward! Georgia!”
The colors tumbled, the battle flag. New hands reached out. The torn cloth lofted again.
Suddenly, unreasonably, they all began to howl, Nichols and his brethren. It felt wonderful to be a part of this sudden burst of power, to lunge forward again, hallooing, as if their war cry itself must slay the Yankees.
Hundreds of points of light blinked through the smoke. There were bodies underfoot now, from earlier struggles, their own kind, in cavalry jackets and rags.
Another man he knew from home, James Hendrix, clutched his belly and dropped to his knees.
“Onward! Georgia!”
The firing grew so fierce, it felt like walking into a storm wind. Men crouched as they went forward, as if assaulted by a driving rain.
They were close, so close. The racket of the Yankee volleys was ear-busting.
Another man groaned and dropped but paces from Nichols. It was a bewildering thing how any man could stand without being hit.
“Realign. Align on the colors!” Colonel Lamar bellowed. But even as he spoke, the colors fell again. Only to rise a fourth time or a fifth.
The colonel’s voice broke off. Men fell. Blood spattered. Nichols found his own face wet without knowing whose blood he wore. His hat was gone.
Another voice called, “Halt. Volley fire. By company. Company officers—”
Then that voice, too, fell away. But the men halted and did as ordered, standing at the edge of the expanding cloud, firing into it on command, then independently, as the smoke engulfed them, too.
A voice reported that Colonel Lamar was dead.
The regiment, the entire brigade, hardly seemed to exist. Nichols was faintly aware that he was shaking. But he dutifully reloaded, fired, and reloaded again, blasting into the smoke, aiming in the direction of those muzzle flames, unwilling to go back one inch.
They crowded together, toward the regimental colors. Before he knew it, Nichols was but a plank length from the single flag remaining. He fought madly, jamming home his ramrod, barely getting the stock back against his shoulder before pulling the trigger again, hating. Nobody was going to take those colors, nobody.
The flag toppled. This time, Lieutenant Mincy dashed forward to raise the staff, only to buckle and drop flat on his face.
The Yankees had been killing all the officers, concentrating on the officers, purposeful and cruel. The revelation made perfect sense to Nichols, but still came as a shock.
He filled up with a hatred less than Christian.
The Yankees didn’t come forward, and the remains of the Georgia Brigade would not move back.
The smoke became choking thick.
“Kerenhappuch!” Nichols said. Then he shouted, “Kerenhappuch!”
Lem turned. “What the—”
“Job’s third daughter! Kerenhappuch!” Nichols began to laugh as he felt for a cartridge.
“Best fix on matters to hand,” Lem advised.
They fired into the man-made fog, spotting rough forms now, Yankees no more than thirty yards away. Closer.
“Stand your ground, Georgia!” a grand voice called. “Georgia, hold fast, you’re licking them!”
“Well, that’s a damned lie,” someone said.
“Georgia, stand your ground!”
“That’s General Gordon!” The sound of the man’s voice, the sense it evoked, the image of the general remembered, filled Nichols with a determination he had not known he could muster. He wanted to rush forward, to go at the Yankees bare-handed. But he stood and fired, obeying the last order he had received, regular as a machine.
Moments later, word passed along the shrinking line that Gordon had been shot.
4:00 p.m.
Thomas farm
Gordon sat up, chasing breath, head hammering and puke dizzy. It had happened fast, the way it always did. Two rounds, maybe three, had struck his horse in a brace of seconds. The animal had reared, throwing him clean, but he’d landed hard.
He tested himself anxiously, checking bones. His vision wouldn’t settle and the noise was terrible, terrible. Hands gripped him. He slapped them away.
“I’m all right, damn it,” he said. “Give a man his space.”
He remembered, looked about. Faces. An aide. “Is York up?”
“Yes, sir. Louisiana’s in the fight.”
“Tigers,” Gordon muttered, meaning to speak firmly.
“Yes, sir. They’re right tigers.”
“I’ve got to … help me up.”
Hands, too many hands, assisted him. “General Evans. I need a report from Evans.”
“General Evans has been shot, sir. Your brother has taken temporary command. Until—”
“Colonel Lamar is to command it.”
“He’s dead, sir.”
Gordon bellowed. One wordless howl. Johnny Lamar. Old friend.
The moment of rage cleared his head.
“A horse…”
My kingdom for a horse … my brigade, my kingdom. Clem Evans, Johnny Lamar …
“Take my horse, sir. I’ll ride Sergeant Cook’s.”
“Just give me Cook’s horse.” He tried to smile toward the sergeant, unsure if he managed it. Then he told all of them: “Georgia must hold its ground. Can’t retreat.” He looked at the aide. His vision was sharp again. “You said General Evans has been shot. Wounded?”
“Yes, sir. In the side.”
“How bad?”
The captain shook his head. “Can’t say, sir. Heard he was conscious, though.”
“Find my brother. As soon as he can locate a ranking officer, he’s to relinquish command. Then find General York. Tell him to keep pressing them, not a step back. Only forward.” He tried to find the stirrup with his left boot, but failed twice. Still dizzy, after all.
“Help me.”
A sergeant fit the stirrup to Gordon’s toe. Gordon gathered the strength to haul his bones up into the saddle.
“Y’all go on now,” he told the little crowd. “See to your business.”
He rode back through the smoke, sure of his direction, the way he always had been, in the deep forests of north Georgia or on battlefields. His body seemed sound, if aching. And his head was clear enough now. He spurred the strange mount toward the river, where Terry’s Brigade had been ordered to halt. He’d sent them forward just far enough to clear out any threat of a flanking maneuver.
The smoke thinned. Noise still clapped his ears, though, a sharp pain. As Gordon emerged from the gray fog into the sunlight, the blaze hit his eyes, his skull, with the force of a mallet. He realized that his hat was gone. But he looked better—fiercer—without it, he fancied.
Alone, he galloped across fields strewn with bodies, most of them in gray or shades of brown. His men, McCausland’s. A few Yankees by a fence. The cries of the wounded knew no
t North or South, only abrupt, unmanageable suffering. But pity was not his dominion. His purpose was to win battles.
Over a rolling crest. Down the far slope, Terry sat his horse, flanked by his staff.
As Gordon reined in, Terry looked him up and down, almost regal, as if condescending to breathe the same air. Yet the fellow was pleasant for all that, as Virginian as fine tobacco and proud women.
“New horse, I do believe,” the brigade commander remarked.
The black, dying or dead, had been his favored mount.
“I was inconvenienced,” Gordon told him.
“Seems you tired of your hat, as well.”
“Never was a proper fit.”
“May my brigade be of service, sir? In this heady hour?”
“Yes. You may be of service, Bill. No more time for foolery.” He turned in the saddle and pointed to a crest back up the slope and to the left. “Move your men up there. Quick as you can, without disordering them. You’re going to roll up the Yankees and put an end to this.”
“Bad up top?” Terry asked, serious now.
“Spotsylvania. Smaller, but as bad.”
Terry took a moment to swallow that. “And when I get to the top, I’m to—”
“I’ll meet you there.”
Terry had become faintly unsettled. “But if something should happen? I hear—”
“I’ll meet you there,” Gordon repeated. “If I don’t, you’ll see what needs doing, where to attack.”
Prepared to ride off, facing myriad tasks, he nonetheless paused before digging in his spurs. Struggling to think like Ulysses, who understood the ways of men like no other: their yearnings, their pride.
“Now we’ll see what Virginians are made of,” he announced to all who might hear.
4:15 p.m.
Georgetown Pike (Washington road)
Wallace had sent an aide to warn him that his detachment of Vermonters was in retreat, leaping across the girders of the rail bridge, chased by what looked like a full Rebel division. Ricketts pictured men shot in the back and plunging into the river. Who had been in command? Young Davis, was it? Few officers left his senior, far too few. The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor. Well, Davis had done yeoman’s work, holding out with his pitiful handful. But the fact that mattered now was that the Rebs would soon be in his division’s rear.
Ricketts felt he was playing poker with disappearing cards.
Wallace had claimed he could hold another half hour, but that had been almost fifteen minutes back. Ricketts imagined the Home Brigade men—who had not done badly at all—losing their courage in one fateful instant and starting to run. He knew how that contagion went. This was the hour for veterans, with all hell bubbling up. But even veterans would hold only so long before they broke.
He was tired. Growing too old for this. But he remained determined to stay at the table to play this final hand. Wallace had authorized him to retreat whenever he deemed it necessary, but Ricketts disliked quitting. Stubborn, all his life. Far more than was politic. One of the reasons he had remained a lieutenant for epochs, then a captain for ages.
And the one time he had softened his principles, at that damnable court-martial, he had marked himself with an odor that wouldn’t wash off. Better to be stubborn and pay the price.
He could no longer see the brick house, although it stood but a few hundred yards away. A cloud had grown around it, spreading along the crest, dense as a nightmare. The noise told him his men were holding, though. A few skedaddlers wandered back, and a multitude of wounded men had withdrawn, but the fight was not yet over, not just yet.
And the dead? The lives he was betting in a hopeless game?
He would not order a retreat while Truex held that ridge. He just would not do it. But he had directed his Second Brigade to swing back, now that the river was lost and their flank turned. He intended to firm up a third, last line on the Pike.
Perhaps he could bring off an orderly withdrawal? Even now? With the First Brigade falling back upon the Second, and the Second withdrawing again. Things would need to go smoothly, more smoothly than battle generally allowed, but there was a chance: Hold the Rebs while the Home Brigade men cleared off and Wallace saved the guns, then withdraw in stages, making any Rebel pursuit pay a premium.
He had been taught, many years before, that a fighting withdrawal was the most difficult military feat, and he doubted things would go nicely. But if you held a poor hand, you had to play boldly.
“Over there,” he greeted a Second Brigade officer he recognized. “Put your men over there, when they come up. Build a firing line this side of the road.”
Black with smoke and powder, the major stared in bewilderment. “Sir … I have no men … I don’t know where…”
Before Ricketts could shape a useful question, Truex’s aide, Captain Lanius, emerged out of the smoke, galloping down from the shrouded battle line and nearly riding over a wounded man. One of the many, many wounded men.
Before Ricketts could admonish him, Lanius called from the saddle, “Colonel Truex’s compliments, he needs help. Right now, sir. They’re breaking our center, Louisiana Brigade. We’re holding up on the left, it’s a bloody mess, but we’re holding. It’s the center that’s cracking.”
Ricketts made an instant decision that changed his plans again.
“Tell Colonel Truex I’m sending him my reserve. No. Wait. You can guide them up yourself.”
His “reserve.” Two bloodied, played-out regiments, with several companies already stripped away. His best hope of a last defense of the Pike.
After he had spoken, Ricketts felt a rush of doubt. But it was too late. He had promised help for Truex.
Ricketts played the last card in his hand.
4:25 p.m.
Thomas farm
Brigadier General Terry hurried his troops along, all but giving each man a boot in the haunches. Getting them up to that crest in good order, if a tad breathless.
No sign of Gordon. As Terry approached the high ground, all he could see was bald dirt and a world of smoke beyond it, set to the noise of all the devils in Hell banging pots and pans.
Spotsylvania? Bad as that? My, oh my. Terry believed he had glimpsed a spot of alarm in Gordon’s eyes. And Gordon was the most confident creature, man or beast, that Terry had ever met. Oh, surely Gordon had known doubts, the man was human. But Terry had never seen a sign until that afternoon.
If he had seen it. With Gordon, a man could be certain without being sure.
Surprising him, the leading men in his brigade began to growl as they neared the ridgetop. Climbing blindly, with the fighting still hidden from view, marching up toward the smoke and sky, they just started in to snarling, like animals that had put up with all they meant to stand. It was an uncanny sound, one Terry did not recall from previous battles.
Had to wonder what men sensed, how they came to that wordless knowing that enthralled them all at once, melting them into one big pot of mischief.
Terry heard cheering, Southern cheering, from down along the river, off toward those bridges, loud enough to compete with the roar of battle. Sounded like Ramseur might have got up from his daybed.
Growling and snarling, rabid, his men were ready to savage all in their way. It filled him with pride.
Terry reached the true crest, horse high-stepping again, and there was Gordon. Sitting upright on that borrowed nag, cool as branch water, as if he had nothing more to do than wait on old Virginia.
It was Gordon restored. In that red shirt, and still without a hat.
When the first rank spotted Gordon, the soldiers sent up a cheer.
“Hurry on, now. Hurry on,” Gordon called. His regular voice of command was back upon him, ordering men to their deaths in a tone that was downright affable.
Riding up to that “inexplicable paragon of mystifying, exasperating manliness”—as Zeb York once had put it—Terry said, “Virginia is at your service, sir.”
A fence ahead. Then a field. An
other fence lower down, broken. Beyond it, the battle, with all the sparks and smoke of Vulcan’s forge.
As the two generals watched, a pair of Yankee regiments marched up from the low ground, oblivious to their presence, headed into the maelstrom and exposing meager flanks.
Terry’s men surged forward on their own. Growling again. The sound seemed to take even Gordon aback.
“Hold on now, hold on!” Gordon called, princely even on that borrowed nag. “You’ll get your chance, boys, your time’s going to come. Just get through that fence and form back up.”
“Something’s got into them,” Terry said. “Not sure they’ll be bridled again, once we turn ’em loose.”
The men rushed the fence, funneling through a gap, breaking down more gaps, or climbing over the rails in their impatience.
Hurrying to assuage some terrible need, the Yankees marching into the fight still showed no awareness that they were about to be gobbled. The bluecoats were formed up smartly, advancing at right-shoulder-shift, as if on parade.
“So much for all those reports of militia and mules,” Gordon said. “Let those Federals clear the slope, then advance, once you’re formed up.”
But the time for orders had passed. A pack of hungry dogs smelling fresh meat, Terry’s men began to run down the slope toward the Yankees. Somebody yelled “Charge!”
“What the devil?” Terry demanded.
Hundreds of men poured over and through the fence, joining the attack. It was the wildest thing that Terry had ever seen. But he had his orders, his sense of how things should go, and he rode forward to halt them, to beat them back into their proper formation.
Gordon caught up with him.
“Not going to stop them now,” he said. “You were right, they won’t be bridled.”
Terry’s Virginians raised a Rebel yell.
4:40 p.m.
Thomas farm
“Yanks are running,” Ive Summerlin hollered.
Nichols saw it, too, the sudden breaking up of the line of shadows, the individual flights.
He felt relief, immense relief, as if he had just stopped running after ten miles. Exhausted. He wanted to sit down. His leg decided to hurt again.
“Let’s go. Get them sumbitches!” somebody shouted. And they all plunged forward, into the torn smoke, howling. Nichols screamed, too, running along with the others.
