by Ralph Peters
For all the press of bodies, their stink and the raucous voices, he felt alone. And he was alone, in a very practical sense. Russ Hastings had gone down early—Hayes hoped the wound wasn’t grave—and his last courier had disappeared. He had left his staff behind with orders to follow, but he saw none of them.
The men kept up their fire over the wall, pleased enough with what they’d done and telling the Johnnies—who couldn’t hear one word—what a licking they were going to get, just wait. Hayes grew newly aware of his own breathing, of the sodden grip of his uniform, of the foul taste in his mouth, a gagging mix of blown powder and bad water.
It had been only moments since they halted.
It was time to sort out his regimental officers and to send a detail to bring up ammunition, in case the chain of supply had broken down. He needed runners. And skirmishers had to probe the flanks, to uncover who was out there. He had to identify the best point to strike when reinforcements came up and the advance resumed.…
When he tried to reload his pistol, his hand shook. He could barely open his soaked ammunition pouch.
With the suddenness of revelation, Will McKinley appeared. The young man looked sufficiently fresh to have found a wiser place to cross the creek. McKinley, bless him, had that sort of luck.
Kneeling beside Hayes, his former adjutant said, “Colonel Duval’s been wounded, sir. Pretty bad. General Crook says you’re to command the division.”
4:00 p.m.
Gordon’s front
Wasn’t right, none of it. They’d whipped the Yankees fair and square, twice over. Then they’d caught the blue-belly fools trying to sneak around on them, just come right up on the flank, and by rights they should have whipped them a third time, catching them down in that swampy bottom, a true Slough of Despond, like in Pilgrim’s Progress. But the Yankees seemed to have lost their senses this God-given day and they just kept on coming, plastered up and down with mud, a-saying, “Kill me, please, and thank you kindly,” and even doing that—killing them—wasn’t enough. One of their officers had near shot down Dan Frawley with a pistol, though Dan got away, and Nichols, unused to the new rifle he had taken up, had missed when he took a shot at the Yankee, who looked like a man from the town bank, the kind who prized ledgers and laws over the Lord. Then he had found himself going backward in anger and in shame, unwilling to be captured again by heathens, men apt and fitted to fornicate with niggers in broad daylight, men who would not be tolerated on the soil of Georgia, nor should have been anywheres else.
Tom Boyet was bleeding, but not quitting. None of them was anywheres close onto quitting. But it was like the Lord himself whispered to every man at the same time, saying not “Go down, Moses,” but “Y’all git out of here now, too many Yankees.”
How could the Lord allow this? To cause them to flee before Lucifer? When they were the Righteous, the Poor who would inherit?
He loaded and fired, loaded and fired, wishing he had his own fine rifle back, but glad of the yard wall by this rich man’s house, a succor unto the people. The fellows had been as pleased to see him as pork chops when he came back, marveling at his tale of bold escape, maybe not believing every word of it—which was an injustice—but clapping him on the back and laughing and sharing their rations with him, even bottomless Dan Frawley, whose favorite miracle, surely, had to do with those loaves and fishes.
Elder Woodfin had called him “the Prodigal Son returned,” which did not seem right, for Nichols did not believe he ever had behaved badly toward his father, not as the Prodigal Son had done, and he had never been a squandering, gambling, drinking fellow, displeasing to the Lord and rightly afflicted, but the chaplain was not a man to bear reply. Elder Woodfin was, after all, a Virginian and could not be reasoned with like the Georgia-born.
Firing at the blue hants in the smoke, Ive Summerlin said:
“I don’t like this at all. I don’t like this feeling.”
None of them did, that was the gospel truth. With the Yankees whipped and whupped and whipped, and too ignorant to accept it, rumors of great wickedness had spread, luring men into the temptation of fear.
“More cartridges, boys,” Sergeant Alderman called. “Come back one at a time and help yourselves.”
A soldier clutched his face and collapsed backward.
General Gordon reappeared. A time back, things had been so ugly that even General Gordon, a man who feared naught but the wrath of the Lord, had dismounted and gone afoot. He was back up on his latest stallion, peerless.
There was shooting to do, but Nichols stole time to glimpse the true-Christian face, that Christian-soldier visage, of General Gordon passing. With that broken-cross scar on his cheek.
Nichols found no consolation there.
4:20 p.m.
Union Sixth Corps
“Remarkable,” Ricketts allowed. “Simply remarkable.”
Rigid on his blood-streaked horse, George Getty snorted. “Can’t say how the little runt brings it off.” He spat.
“Sometimes, I don’t think I know soldiers at all,” Ricketts said.
“Volunteers. Different breed. The men we led would’ve laughed.”
“I’m not sure,” Ricketts said. “Remember how the Regulars cheered Zach Taylor?”
Around the two generals, litter bearers gathered up the wounded, deciding who would have a chance to live.
“Well, he got them going,” Getty allowed.
To the astonishment of everyone on the field, Sheridan had revitalized the attack by galloping the entire line of the Sixth Corps, ten yards out in front of the men, grinning and waving his hat, hallooing the Rebs with spectacular obscenities. He had continued on to the Nineteenth Corps, prolonging the stunt, all the while in full view of the Confederates. The howls from the men had smothered the noise of the guns.
“And here we are blathering,” Getty said. Stalwart and taciturn, George Getty was even more of an Old-Army man than Ricketts. Sheridan’s performance had excited him to what passed for ebullience. “Got them untangled, time to get on.”
Ricketts nodded. When the charge resumed, it had moved so fast that their flank units had collided. It had required the division commanders themselves to sort things out.
To their front, another cheer resounded.
“Glad to get the worst of the ground behind me,” Getty said, lingering anyway. He turned up one side of his mouth. “You got the easy dirt today.”
“Not sure every one of my men would agree.”
“Any more about Upton?”
“Just that he’s wounded.”
“Let his holy angels comfort him. Shame about Russell.”
Their staffs, held at a distance, had grown restive. It was time to rejoin the attack. Even generals had to be nudged along, in the view of majors.
But generals were human, something that would not have occurred to Ricketts in the old days. They, too, needed their respites.
Getty tugged his riding gloves tighter. “All this ends, I look forward to some quiet post in the Territories. Where all I have to fuss about is corporals with the clap.”
“They’ll bust you down first. Both of us. Reversion to Regular Army ranks.”
Getty permitted himself what passed for a smile. “Hell, they can make me a first lieutenant. Just give me an orderly life, wake-ups at five a.m., and a good pair of boots.”
Having been a lieutenant longer than Getty, Ricketts saw less appeal in such a demotion. He quite liked being a general, and Frances liked it, too. The orderly side of peace had its appeal, though: days refined by bugle calls and smoothed by regulations. There was something about the Army, the Army he had known, that was wonderfully pure.
“I don’t think we’ll revert to a grade below major,” he said seriously.
That rekindled Getty’s tiny smile. “See you in Winchester, Jim.”
4:20 p.m.
Gordon’s Division, Confederate left
As his soldiers carried Patton from the battlefield, the fury on the colone
l’s face struck Gordon. The wreckage of Patton’s leg had to be painful, but it wasn’t suffering that ruled poor George’s features. It was rage, Homeric, unmatched in Gordon’s experience.
“Bless you, George,” Gordon said, riding beside the litter, rationing moments. “Splendid work, you held them.”
Patton could not speak. He shook his head. Faintly. Glowering.
“Get you back in the fight before you know it,” Gordon tried.
Patton closed his eyes. Bloody lips trembled.
He’ll lose that leg, Gordon figured. If not his life. Patton’s war was done.
Gordon’s was not. But Patton’s Brigade, Virginians from Breckinridge’s Division, had arrived just in time to block another Yankee assault, granting Gordon a gift of time—precious minutes—to rally his shrinking division again, behind another web of stone walls, with the left refused and the line backed up against the Valley Pike, a hop from Winchester.
Leaving the wounded colonel, Gordon rode along his line again, encouraging his officers and men, cajoling them and promising a miracle. Hope remained, however slight, that they might hold the Yankees until dusk. On his right, Battle and Ramseur had rallied their men yet again, with Early crisscrossing the field, overflowing with threats and imprecations. But Gordon felt the noose closing.
His men had to hold on. He could not let them break, not before the men of the other divisions did. As the chances of the Confederacy winning the war declined from day to day, it was crucial not to be seen as one of those who invited defeat. Back in Georgia, men had to say, “We lost that war despite all Gordon did.”
Gordon did not intend to be a failure, not in war, and not in peace. He had seen failure enough along his bloodline. His father had begun with a farm whose arcade of elms let it claim to be a plantation, bestowing upon the males the status of gentlemen, however threadbare. The elder Gordon then became a preacher, but pulpits and poverty ran too close a race. “Pap” had moved on through various enterprises, getting up a mineral springs retreat for the well-to-do and rhapsodizing over the prospect of imminent wealth, then moving—in veiled ignominy—to the mountains on the Alabama border, almost backing into Tennessee, where wheedled resources went into mining and timbering among hill folk who sold their land cheap, then worked it cheaper.
Along the way, Gordon acquired the manners of an aristocrat, but without the ducal purse. The curtain dropped in his senior year at the University of Georgia, where he had excelled in debates, the classics, and general bonhomie. Instead of standing up as valedictorian, he had outraced court orders and sheriffs’ writs back to the mountains, where he worked a mine and falsified ledgers to save the family enterprise. Thereafter, he chose to read the law, already aware it was made of India rubber, and met his Fanny, whose family was as staid as his was irregular. Each of them longed to escape to the other’s side.
But it had been in the mountains and mines where he first learned to lead men—indeed, to fool them, which was far from the least part of leadership. He had mastered that art amid desperation, shouldering creaking timbers underground, then tugging at numbers into the night by the glow of an oil lamp. Cornered by his father’s truant ethics and plain lies, John Brown Gordon had vowed to armor himself in respectability, or its appearance.
Now he was here, on this awful field, determined not to be blamed for the army’s collapse. And that collapse was coming, all but certain. His men looked gaunt as ghouls, exhausted, approaching the point where resolve gave way to terror.
He dared not dispatch even one man to set Fanny on the road southward to safety. Every rifle counted, every visible body, each man the brick that, if removed, might cause the wall to crumble.
The Yankees had brought the weight of their guns to bear. A few hundred yards to the front, where Patton’s Brigade still clung to its ground without its colonel, the pounding was incessant. Nor would the Federal infantry let up. Patton’s boys held on, though. Running through their ammunition, but still brim-full of spite.
The cries and curses, smash of shot on stone, the awful splintering. Men bleeding, blinded, lost.
“Steady, boys,” Gordon trumpeted. “Look at Patton’s Virginians, aren’t they fine?”
“They’re fine with me,” a soldier called, “’long as they stay between us and the Yankees.”
Hooting. The unstable merriment of soldiers facing death.
“Now, that’s a fact,” a powder-burned soldier agreed.
Hold until dusk. Until the Yankees had to quit. After that, an orderly withdrawal.
He just did not know how long he could master these men. Good men they were, the finest, fighting on with empty cartridge cases and empty bellies. But there came a point …
“I do believe,” Gordon called as he rode the line, “that you boys have just about tuckered out the Yankees. You just hold on now. Night’s coming. You hold on.”
Fragile, the hearts of men. Immensely strong, and then abruptly fragile. War had less to do with rifles and guns, the external totems, than with the unmeasured depths within each breast.
Should’ve made Fanny go back South. Early had been right, that sour old man. But Gordon had found excuses to keep her near, blaming her own stubbornness.
The Yankees weren’t barbarians, of course. She would not be mistreated. Quite the contrary, he expected. Knowing his Fanny, she’d soon be celebrated and waited on. But even the looming shame of her “capture” paled against the pain of separation.
The remnants of Patton’s Brigade were caught in the fight of their lives. Gordon wished he could advance to support them. But he knew that the best he could hope for now was to keep his men steadied right here, behind these walls. Advance? He had all he could do to keep them from running.
His men. On this bad day.
Last until dusk.
Fanny.
All but deafened, he heard the growl of battle, the endless crack of rifles and thump of cannon, as if through water. There was bile in his empty belly and shit pressing his guts, but he didn’t dare dismount even to piss. The men had to see him in the saddle now. He feared that simply getting down to water a tree would trigger a rumor that he had been wounded, even killed. And then they would run. Even the bravest longed for an excuse.
Their bodies were used up. All the folly of rushing off to Martinsburg, then that killing night march to get back. Shoulders bruised to a terrible tenderness by the kick of rifles, and forearms worn to cramping. Thirst. Spirit and temper were all that remained. Even loyalty, that loyalty on which he had relied for three grand years, would crack like sugar brittle.
“Good Lord! Look!”
Gordon turned, eyes following a captain’s outstretched arm.
Hardly a rifle shot to the north, lines of blue-clad cavalry advanced at a trot, aimed at the flank and rear of Patton’s Brigade. As Gordon watched, mortified, bugles sounded and the Yankees sped to a gallop, bending toward their horses’ manes and leveling their sabers. The thunder of hooves pierced Gordon’s deadened ears.
The scene robbed him of suitable commands, of any words.
His men had been positioned to spot the Yankees before Patton’s boys could do so. The Virginians were fighting desperately, their flank refused and Yankees feeling beyond it. Each man out there had been occupied with his own immediate war.
Now the first of Patton’s men grasped the danger. A few ran for the rear, toward the imagined safety of Gordon’s line. Most stood, though. Brave men face-to-face with their executioners.
Nearing the Virginians, the Yankees raised a hurrah. Then came the crash, the human-animal-metal collision, the uproar. Horses leapt walls. Sabers flashed, hacking.
A few of Gordon’s men fired at the Yankees, but the riders in blue jackets swarmed among the Virginians, making clean shots impossible.
There was not one thing to be done. Leaving the wall in a rescue attempt would only feed his men into the rout. For once, John Brown Gordon was at a loss.
More Virginians turned to run. The Yankees
rode them down, slashing their blades into shoulders, at necks, across backs. Here and there, a soldier swung a rifle and unhorsed a rider, who could expect no mercy. But Patton’s Brigade was being annihilated. As Gordon and his men watched.
“Goddamn them, goddamn them,” a soldier cried.
A fallow field away, hundreds of men in gray or shades of brown threw down their rifles. Well-drilled Yankee horsemen began to herd them. Like cattle.
“Goddamn them!”
Virginians who escaped leapt over the walls his men defended. Blind to anything but a vision of safety, they would not be stopped short of being shot down dead. And Gordon was not about to shoot down Confederates and risk destroying his future.
He was glad that poor George Patton had not remained to see his brigade end thus.
Then things got worse.
The Yankee cavalry parted, revealing advancing ranks of Federal infantry, rifles leveled at their waists, bayonets shimmering. The blue-backed horsemen wheeled to the north again, ready to sweep deep into Gordon’s rear.
Where’s our cavalry? Gordon demanded of no one. He knew the Confederate horse was weak, but, surely, Fitz Lee …
Where was the rest of Breckinridge’s Division?
Confederate artillery began to shell the advancing Yankees. Some of the rounds landed amid the men just taken prisoner.
The sight further horrified Gordon’s soldiers.
There was no one to dispatch to correct the guns. No time, anyway.
Some of his own men began to run, joining the fleeing Virginians. Then more broke. Gordon rode after them. Not far. Just far enough to turn on them.
“For God’s sake, men! Stand! Stand! We’ll beat them again, stand with me one more time!”
The fight was out of them, though. The trickle of those running became a flood.
Gordon tore off his hat and hurled it down.
“Don’t shame your states! Georgia! Louisiana! Don’t shame yourselves, boys!”
No one paused to reply.
Yankee artillery shells gave chase. Gordon pleaded, unwilling to show his rage. That was Early’s foolish manner, not his.
