by Ralph Peters
Breckinridge. Damned politician. His war. That’s what this was. A war wrought by big talkers, pounding their desks and insisting that God almighty had established slavery at least as far back as the Garden of Eden, with darkies to polish the apples, and that “natural law” demanded that the institution be extended not just to Kansas, a worthless patch of prairie, but to all the Territories and, soon as they think of it, to the moon as well.
Served ’em right to take a whipping. If the white man had ever been the nigger’s bane, the situation surely had reversed itself. All this, because rich men had been too tight of purse to pay their monkeys a few pennies for their labor.
Didn’t mean no love lost for the Yankees, of course. He’d come to hate them more than a barrel could hold. Kill every one of them, every last one.
The only thing he had left was this war. A war that hadn’t been his, but had become his dearest possession, his true home. And the sonsofbitches wanted to take that, too.
Breckinridge muttered something about a better day tomorrow.
Early turned on the former vice president, the famed Kentucky firebrand.
“Ha,” he cackled. “Just you tell me, Breckinridge…” Early swung an arm at his retreating army. “Do tell me, General Breckinridge, what you think of the ‘rights of the South in the Territories’ now? Ain’t that how you used to put it, back when you were bellowing in Washington?”
Breckinridge did not reply, disappointing Early, who had hoped to pick at least one fight he might win.
Beside them, their soldiers tramped southward.
FOURTEEN
September 20, 1864, 3:30 p.m.
Fisher’s Hill
“Glad you’re back,” Pendleton said as Hotchkiss dismounted. “Saul needs David to strum his cartographic harp.”
The mapmaker passed his horse to the nearest orderly. The jest confounded him.
“Gordon,” Pendleton explained. “That’s what Gordon said. About you and the Old Man.”
Hotchkiss rubbed his saddle-bothered legs. “Sounds like Gordon. How’s Early?”
“About how you’d expect,” the chief of staff told him. “Blaming the sun, the moon, and the stars.” Normally fastidious, Pendleton was unkempt, dirty, and unshaven, with his collar undone and stained: He wore the look of a hard retreat, if not an outright disaster. “That’s between us, of course. Need watering, Jed?”
“Horse does, I don’t. Stopped at a farmhouse. He still on about the cavalry?”
“Hear him tell it, everything was their fault.”
“How’s Fitz Lee? Bad as the rumors?”
“Hit twice, maybe three times. Surgeons won’t give out a firm opinion.” Pendleton smirked. “Guess we’ve both seen enough of men protecting reputations they haven’t got.”
“Lee’s tough, he might pull through. Despite the surgeons.”
Around them, weary men purged old entrenchments of sediment. The weather was fine, if nothing else was.
“Touch of Jackson in Fitz Lee,” Hotchkiss went on. “Not entirely likable, but nowhere a truer heart.”
“I do miss Old Jack,” Pendleton reminisced. “Still get sick to my stomach, recalling that night.…”
“Doesn’t pay to think about it.” But Hotchkiss often thought about Jackson himself, recalling the man’s indomitable will and their shared Presbyterian prayers.
“Fitz Lee did all he could,” Pendleton resumed. “The Old Man just won’t see it. Yankees must be making cavalrymen up in those mills of theirs, never saw anything like it. Our boys tried.…”
The mapmaker nodded. “I passed the ambulance train.”
“One of the ambulance trains,” Pendleton corrected him.
“And the wagon with Rodes.”
“Godwin’s dead, too. Zeb York’s hit bad, but we brought him off. Patton was dying, we had to leave him in Winchester.” Pendleton sighed. “Not our best day.”
“Other losses? The men?”
“Can’t truly say, not yet. Strays still coming in.”
“Hundreds, though?”
“Thousands.”
“Bless us.”
“And three guns. Old Man’s angrier about the guns than anything.”
“Except the cavalry?”
“Except the cavalry.”
Hotchkiss glanced westward, scanning past a roadbed to the next height where men labored. He had been gone for hardly a week, back home in Loch Willow, then on to Staunton—where the Yankees had left a partisan force of bedbugs—but something way down deep had changed in the army. There was an odor of discontent to go with the routine stench.
“How are the men taking it?”
“Shocked,” Pendleton admitted. “Oh, they’re feisty again, talkwise. Going to lick Sheridan bare-handed, come next chance. But some of them have the jumps.”
“Not used to being on the wrong side of the outcome.”
The private truth was that Hotchkiss was sick of the war. Each time he went home, he found it harder to drag himself back to the army.
Pendleton stared northward, across the trickling run to the opposite ridge. Toward the enemy. “It’s just…”
“Just?”
“The way Early blames the cavalry…”
“The men blame him?”
Pendleton nodded. “You can’t help hearing things.”
“They’ll come around,” Hotchkiss said. Hoping it was true. If he was weary of the war, he nonetheless did not want it to be lost.
Pendleton’s eyes flashed anger. “He does his best, that’s the thing they just can’t see. He does his best, then cuts the ground out from under himself. He doesn’t have one friend, he’s pushed them away.”
“He has you. And me, if I count.”
“We don’t count, that’s the gist of it. It’s the other generals. Oh, they follow his orders, more or less, and fight like riled-up wildcats. But they just don’t like him.” A frail thing this day, the chief of staff’s temper collapsed, leaving Pendleton as glum as Hotchkiss ever had seen him. Once a font of humor—even with Jackson—the younger man had been subdued by marriage and sobered by war. Even the young were old now.
“Sheridan had the numbers,” Pendleton went on in a voice that weakened from anger to resentment. “Must’ve had three times what we had in the field. If not four. Early put up the best darned fight he could, you should’ve seen him.” He stared at the stubbled earth before his toe and kicked a clod. “I just wish he’d stop blaming everybody, talking them down. Doesn’t do any good, just makes him more enemies.” He grimaced. “Lord knows, I’m loyal to the man…”
“We both are,” Hotchkiss said.
Pendleton’s eyes were haunted. “You should have heard him an hour ago. Railing about Sheridan’s incompetence, how Sheridan should’ve done this or that and how he outfoxed him by bringing off the army. Jed, we just took a licking, and a bad one. He doesn’t help his cause, going on like that.”
“He’s never been a man to help his own cause.” Hotchkiss pictured Early in his common stance, hat brim turned up and mouth turned down, stained beard and mistrustful eyes. A man who found little comfort in this world, or in thoughts of the next.
“And Breckinridge. He’s off tomorrow,” Pendleton said. “Wangled his way out, orders from Richmond. He’s taking command down in southwestern Virginia.”
“Not much of a command.”
“He doesn’t care.”
“Always was some tension. Maybe it’s better so.”
Pendleton tried to smile. “How was your leave?”
Hotchkiss clicked his tongue, a childhood habit he never had managed to break. “Reckon I had a better week than you did. Oh, fine. Got Sara and the girls provisioned for winter. Folks are worried, though. Staunton’s had as much experience with Yankees as any of the inhabitants desire.” He began to parse his words, then decided on honesty. “Sandie, they’re scared. They put up a good front, but they’re scared to death, every one of them. They reckon that, if the Yankees come back again, i
t’ll go a good sight worse than it did the last time.”
“Chambersburg,” Pendleton muttered.
Hotchkiss nodded. “Can’t have a conversation, without the burning of Chambersburg coming into it. They fear the torch of vengeance. And they blame Early.”
“I don’t expect word about yesterday will provide a great deal of comfort.” Pendleton struggled to shake off his cloak of gloom. “Oh, pshaw. We’ll be all right. I’m just talking tired. Lee’ll send Kershaw back, we’ll be stronger than we were at Winchester.”
Hotchkiss, in turn, looked northward. Many a mile distant, his New York birthplace still held his parents in thrall, but he had been won by the Shenandoah, this Eden. And if it was a hard-used paradise now, the end of the war would see it bloom again, of that he was certain. He knew the composition of the soil, the strata of rocks, the springs and watercourses, and he loved that earth as the Jews of old loved Israel.
“Yankees close?” he asked.
“Cavalry south of Strasburg, on the Pike. Throw a stone and hit them. And they’re all over Hupp’s Hill. Probably watching us through a spyglass.”
For a second time, Hotchkiss surveyed the old position, covered again with men in gray and brown: Fisher’s Hill, “the Gibraltar of the Valley.” He wasn’t a master of military art, not in its entirety. But he knew terrain. And if there was a natural fortress, a safe line of defense where a beaten army could nurse its wounds and recover, that ground was here. With the Shenandoah River a moat guarding the right flank, high bluffs rolled west for three miles before dropping down to the Back Road. Little North Mountain, rising sheer and running north to south, made a flanking movement on the left impossible. Fisher’s Hill was the one exemplary bottleneck in the entire Valley, and the Yankees had never dared to assail it, no matter their numbers. You could move against it only from the front, and attacking that way was suicide.
“Well, we’ll hold them here,” Hotchkiss said. “Buy time for General Kershaw to come back. Reckon the Old Man has a mind to see me?”
Pendleton grinned, stretching gaunt cheeks. “Well, I’m so minded. Let him holler at somebody else for a while.” The smiled curled. “You’re going to catch it for being away, you certainly picked your time.”
They walked toward a cluster of wall tents southward of the crest. Artillerymen unhitched half-lame teams and a cook got up a fire.
Pendleton said, “I had a letter from my wife. Newest Pendleton’s set to arrive any time now.” He peered across hilltops garlanded with regiments. “We’re going to be very happy.”
“Surely,” Hotchkiss said.
September 20, 7:30 p.m.
Valley Pike, north of Strasburg
“We can’t let up, can’t give them time to recover,” Sheridan said. A lantern lit the tent, turning faces orange. The gathered generals looked tired but sternly attentive. “I intend to finish this business, gentlemen.”
Horatio Wright said, “I rode up to look at the ground in front of my corps. A direct assault would be madness.”
Sheridan glared at the taller man. “Nobody said one word about a frontal assault. Now … any members of this august convocation have an idea? How to turn those bastards off that hill? I’m ready to listen.” He pivoted to face Emory. “I heard you mumbling about a move on our left.”
The Nineteenth Corps commander shook his head. “Took a good look. I’d have to cross the river twice, in full view of the Johnnies up on the bluffs. And the attacking force would lose contact with the main body, might be cut off.”
Sheridan peered down at the map on his desk. The others crowded around. As if they might summon a sudden revelation.
“They’ve got us in a fix,” Wright said.
Sheridan flared. “No. We’ve got them in a fix. And we’re going to finish what we started at Winchester.”
By preference last to speak, George Crook stood with crossed arms. “Only way to get around them, to envelop that position, is on our right.”
Wright and Emory stared at him, incredulous.
“Over that mountain?” Wright asked.
“Work along the side of it. Say halfway up. Come down in their rear.”
Wright all but sneered. “A scouting party might make it, not a corps.”
“You couldn’t keep a regiment in good order,” Emory added. “The rocks, trees, brush … an attack would fall to pieces before one shot was fired.”
Crook scratched beside his nose. “My men could do it. One division, maybe both.”
Wright gave him a killing look that said Crook was just on the brag. There was jealousy aplenty in the air over credit for Winchester.
Sheridan said, “George … that’s begging for failure.”
Crook kept his tone as calm as if counting rations. “My men have spent this war scrambling over mountains, you should see the muscles in their legs. Little North Mountain’s far from the worst climb they’ve faced.” He briefly met Wright’s eyes. “I believe such a movement offers us our best chance of success.” His attention moved on to Emory, then to Averell, the only cavalryman present. “If anyone here has a better plan, I’ll defer and shake his hand.”
Sheridan’s features mixed skepticism and hope. “You truly believe you could bring that off? And your corps wouldn’t break down into a mob? Before you went three hundred yards? You think an entire division—not to say two—could negotiate that mountain and come down on the Rebels in fighting condition?”
Crook nodded. “I can swear we’d try. Look, Phil, all of you. The only weak spot in their entire position’s on our right, out on their left. Smack at the foot of that mountain.”
Sheridan turned to Averell. “What’s Early got over there?”
“Cavalry. At least one battery of horse artillery. No sign of anything to their rear, though. Infantry are all up on that high ground.”
“For now,” Wright said.
Crook banished all emotion from his voice. “I’ve crossed Fisher’s Hill on the march, more than once. It’s a formidable position, nature’s gift to a defense. But from the river to the foot of that mountain’s nearly four miles. Takes a lot of men to man that line. And Early’s got to be stretched thin, after yesterday. No, we don’t know if we’re seeing his final dispositions, but it looks like he’s taking his risk at exactly the wrong place, figuring on the mountain to shield his flank. He should have an infantry division down there to anchor his line. But he doesn’t have that division.”
“Talked this over with your division commanders?” Sheridan asked.
“I wanted you to hear it first.”
“Bring them in, I’d like to hear their views. George, you’re playing for high stakes. I don’t intend to undercut your authority, but I need a few more opinions. From those fabled ‘mountain-creepers’ of yours.”
“I’ll have them here in an hour. If they say I’m a fool, I’ll shut my mouth.”
8:45 p.m.
Sheridan’s headquarters
Rud Hayes wished the baggage train had caught up with his division: He still wore mud stains and splashes of other men’s blood. No one in the crowded tent was dressed for a ball, but neither did they look like they’d come from a hog wallow.
“Well, Hayes?” Sheridan asked in a voice that strained at camaraderie. “Division command suit you? I hear you took those boys of yours for a swim.” Without allowing a response, he wheeled on Hayes’ companion. “Come here, Thoburn. Look at this map. You too, Hayes.”
The two colonels squeezed in beside the army commander. They towered over Sheridan.
“Look here. Little North Mountain. Know it?”
“Marched past it, sir,” Thoburn told him with a shrug.
“What about you, Hayes?”
“Fields of boulders. Steep. Tangled undergrowth.”
“Passable? I don’t want a politician’s answer now.”
“Yes, sir. It’s passable. With some difficulty.”
“By a division?”
Surprised by the question, Hayes noted
that Crook’s eyes were fixed upon him. As was the attention of every man within the lantern’s cast.
“Yes.”
“Passable by an entire division? You’re confident about that, Colonel?”
“It wouldn’t go fast, but yes.” He understood exactly what was afoot now: an effort to turn the Rebs out of their position. A throw of the dice, it nonetheless made sense.
“What about two divisions?”
Hayes glanced at Crook for guidance, but the corps commander’s face was hewn of stone.
“Harder. Slower. More risk.”
“But possible?”
Hayes had taken about as much as he felt he needed to take.
“Sir, I won’t presume to speak for anyone else’s men or anyone else’s command. But my men have crawled over more boulders and worked their way through more mountainside thickets than any sensible fellow would have a mind to. My division can move along the side of that mountain or over it. With average luck, we can surprise the Johnnies, if that’s the intent. But I won’t make light of the effort.”
Sheridan canted his head toward Thoburn. “What do you think? Is Colonel Hayes here a madman?”
“Rud’s right. It can be done.”
Peeved, Wright interrupted. “I can’t believe we’re contemplating this. The Confederates would spot the movement immediately. They can see everything we do from Three Top Mountain.” He tucked in his chin, a ram about to charge. “I applaud the colonels’ enthusiasm, but I don’t believe they’d make it to Early’s rear with more than a skirmish party.”
“Well, you won’t bear the responsibility, if they fail,” Sheridan said. “I will.”
Crook stepped closer to the table. The map’s edges had curled. “Right now, they can’t see a single man in my corps. We’re still north of Cedar Creek, tucked out of sight.”
“They’ll see you when you move,” Emory countered.
Crook looked at Sheridan. “I propose that the army move in close to keep Early occupied, hold his attention through tomorrow. Demonstrations, maybe a feint or two. Steal a little ground. Make it appear as though everybody’s engaged, as though the whole army’s up and we’re positioning ourselves to hit him straight on. I’ll move my corps tomorrow night, at dark. Get close enough to the base of the mountain, then give the men a rest, but keep them hidden all through the approach march. On the mountain itself, the foliage is still so thick they won’t see us coming. And I’ll make sure they don’t hear us. We’ll go in light, knapsacks grounded, canteens and scabbards secured.” He stared down any last doubters. “We’ll hit them well before dark, day after tomorrow.”
