Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War

by Donald McCaig

  “Ten days,” Corporal McComac told Fisher. “We left winter camp first of May and been marchin’ and fighting ever since. I cannot purely count how many times we fought. I remember the first fight in the Wilderness when we was holdin’ the road and they flanked us. But everything’s a blue after that.”

  “Let Marse Robert worry about it,” Catesby suggested. “It’s in his and God’s hands.”

  “Lee tries to lead any more charges his ownself, it won’t be in anybody’s hands. Federal sharpshooter get General Lee in his sights, that sharpshooter he’ll think about going home.”

  “General Lee never used to lead no charges,” Fisher said. “He let Stonewall do it, or Pender or Armistead or Hood.”

  “They’re dead—except Hood—and most of Hood is shot away. Might be Marse Robert thinks he’s the only one left.”

  Fisher shook his head. “This army’s gone plumb to hell without me.”

  “Oh, we missed you something awful, Sergeant.” Private Mitchell brushed crumbs from his lips, and his tongue darted into his palm to retrieve them. “Come over here and set.” He patted a rain-slick gun carriage. “This Grant fellow ain’t like them other Federal Generals,” he began. “Grant don’t stay whupped.”

  They’d whipped Grant at the Wilderness, smashed attack after attack, and they’d outmarched him here to Spotsylvania Courthouse though they’d marched all night to do it and they’d whipped him here too. Yesterday they’d beaten back a terrific attack on the mule shoe. Wagonloads of Federal dead and wounded trundled north and replacements trundled south, but Grant kept on coming.

  “Oh, we been hit hard,” Mitchell complained. “Many brave boys, and officers kilt. Poor Private James, a mortar cut him plumb in half. When Colonel Higginbotham took us over, they kilt him too, and Lieutenant Colonel Buckner is dyin’. Anybody know our new colonel?”

  “Witcham seems a good man,” Catesby said. “He says we’re to get some conscripts.”

  “Eighteen-year-old boys . . .” That was Corporal McComac “They been eatin’ too regular be any help to us. They got too much room in their gut and their feet are unblemished as a virgin’s good name. How they gonna live? How they gonna march without shoes?”

  “Hell,” Fisher said, “good strong boy of eighteen—I’ve seen many a good soldier younger. Stuart’s drummer, that boy’s not fifteen. Remember Private Ryals? He made a soldier at Gaines’s Mill. What was it killed Ryals? I disremember.”

  “Cholera. My son, Thomas, turned seventeen in February,” Catesby said.

  Private Mitchell prayed, “This Christian army is blessed in your sight, Lord. It is not ourselves we pray for, Lord, but our dearest ones at home. Amen.”

  “If I was a prayin’ man like you,” Corporal McComac replied, “I’d pray for any reinforcements the good Lord might care to send us. Shoot one bastard Federal and two more spring up to take his place.”

  “Don’t curse,” Catesby said quietly.

  Corporal McComac patted the top log of the breastworks. “So long as I got a plenty of dirt and wood ’twixt me and them, I ain’t awful scared. I’m a man puts his faith in a deep rifle pit.”

  The five-foot breastwork was dirt they’d dug from the trench they stood in and faced with logs. A spiky abatis of pointed poles paralleled the lines fifty feet in front, with small gaps where the pickets could slip through. The breastworks were topped with logs, and a man could fire underneath the top log without exposing himself. Inside the fortifications, perpendicular to the breastworks, were log traverses—walls—and should a Federal assault penetrate the line, the Confederates could retreat behind these interior walls and pour fire on the attackers.

  The survivors of Company F faced a meadow and, across it, dark, dark woods.

  “Here comes the rain again,” Sergeant Fisher announced.

  “See anything over there?” Catesby asked. “I wonder what they’re up to?”

  “Same as us: gettin’ wet. I wish we had a fire.”

  Catesby closed his eyes to pray but couldn’t think of anything he wanted. Thank you, Lord, he prayed in his mind, for all you have given us. May we be worthy of your grace.

  “You prayin’ for me?” Fisher asked.

  “Nope. I don’t figure to press my luck.”

  Fisher grinned. “Cap’n, you’re a fine fellow and one hell of a soldier, but you got to learn to laugh. Man can’t laugh at this”—a dribble of rain slipped from his slouch hat onto his nose—“can’t laugh at anything. Think on it. There’s a hundred fifty thousand of them and fifty thousand of us. The cropland around here is two inches of good soil over dead red clay. Tomorrow or day after there’s gonna be two hundred thousand men willing to give their lives for ground wouldn’t have fetched ten bucks the acre before the war. Now, I think that’s funny.”

  Fisher’s laugh sounded to Catesby like a mule’s bray, and he said so.

  Corporal McComac said, “Remember that mule our sharpshooters killed when they was trying those new English rifles? I never thought to eat roasted mule before. If we don’t find ourselves some well-rationed dead Federals in the next day or so I’m gonna ‘reconsider’ our mules.”

  Artillerymen were hooking guns to the limber chests and hitching up.

  Catesby splashed through the mud. “We pullin’ out?”

  The lieutenant of artillery shrugged. “Evenin’, Captain. Can’t say. I heard Grant was retreating to Fredericksburg and that Marse Robert wants to hit him before he gets away. Pull the guns back before dark—that’s my orders. Maybe you’ll be pulled out too.”

  “This rain ever going to let up?”

  “Another day of it and we won’t be moving anywhere. Least the guns won’t. You infantry can keep going a sight longer than us.”

  “Fredericksburg, eh?”

  Another shrug. “That’s what I heard.”

  Warmness settled into Catesby’s chest. Maybe once again Lee’s ragged veterans had broken the Federals’ will. Maybe another Federal general was retiring across the Rappahannock to lick his wounds. Maybe Lincoln would lose the fall election to a more reasonable man—a new northern President who’d let the Confederate States depart in peace. Again Catesby closed his eyes and prayed his thanks.

  “What’d the gunner say?” Sergeant Fisher asked.

  Catesby had an aversion to spreading pleasant rumors. Life was hard enough without disappointed hopes. “Said he had orders to move his guns before sundown.”

  Fisher pursed his lips. “We’re bare-ass naked out here without those guns. You know, I’m beginnin’ to wonder if coming back to this army was the best idea I ever had.”

  Catesby said, “Maybe we’ll be pulled out too.”

  “Sure thing.” Fisher watched the last gun disappear in the woods before he slumped down against the traverse and cut a plug of tobacco. “You’re welcome to join me,” he said. “Rain don’t blow so bad on this side.”

  Catesby unfolded his groundsheet, wrapped blankets around his legs, and tucked his ammunition pouch behind his knees to keep it dry. One fat log crossed his back just at the shoulder blades and a smaller log was exactly the right height for his pillow.

  “You think any of us gonna live through this?” Fisher asked in a voice absent of its familiar acidity.

  “If it is God’s will,” Catesby said.

  “That really does comfort you, don’t it? I wish to hell I had something to comfort me. My brother’s got himself killed at Manassas and my nephew died in the hospital at Chattanooga. My mother and sister are tryin’ to hold things together on the farm, but there’s work they can’t do. Our nigger Mose been with us since he was a youngster—just like a member of the family—but he run off. Might be he’s guardin’ Confederate prisoners somewheres. I hear Grant’s got colored troops.”

  “I haven’t seen any.”

  “Care for a chew? I wonder if Mose is over there with the Federals, studyin’ on how to kill us. I thought I knew that boy, but I guess I didn’t.”

  “No thanks. I smok
e some tobacco when I have it.”

  “Night like this, man with a pipe, he’s out of luck. You can chew anytime.”

  “See anything out there?”

  “Fog’s comin’ off the ground. Twenty-first Virginia is pickets tonight. They’ll let us know if the Federals come.”

  “They’re good boys,” Catesby said. But his eyes were closing and he was thinking the prayer he’d learned in childhood:

  Now I lay me down to sleep.

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  If I should die before I wake

  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  Catesby fell into sleep as a boy dives into a quarry pool; relief closed over him from top of his head to tip of his toes.

  Someone shook him awake. Although it was still pitch-black, it wasn’t raining. He rubbed his blurry eyes and, guided by the logs at his back, got to his feet. “Major.”

  “Captain Byrd, our pickets report a godalmighty rumbling out there. Come with me.”

  Major Anderson was officer of the day. Catesby asked, “Do you know the time?”

  “It must be after midnight.” The glow behind the clouds was the moon. The traverses were filled with sleeping men; none had fires.

  “This rain will be good for the grass,” Catesby found himself saying.

  “You are a farmer then?”

  “Lawyer. County-seat lawyer, hoping to be a judge.”

  “I was a planter before. I wonder how I can return to that patient occupation when this war is over.”

  Anderson was a thick young man with a flourishing beard. “Corporal Osbourne was certain he heard drums, but I heard nothing.”

  The moon poked a hole in the clouds and illumined the sleeping breastworks as the officers climbed on top. Ahead, the spiky man-made thicket of the abatis and beyond a stretch of meadow and beyond that fog. Catesby was still yawning.

  “Do you hear that?”

  “It is . . . it’s like the rush of a waterfall,” Catesby said.

  “Or ten thousand men moving through wet grass.”

  They stood for a time, hoping to hear something more definite.

  “Captain Byrd, inform General Johnson. He is quartered at the McCoull House.”

  Afraid to lose his way in the woods, Catesby trotted the inside face of the mule shoe until he struck the farm lane to old General Johnson’s headquarters. Outside the double-story log house, lanterns were burning, and other officers waited on the porch. “Bad night, Captain.”

  “It could be worse in the morning.”

  “You hear the military bands?”

  “Bands?”

  “Yep. They’re playing since midnight on our front. We’re Ramsuer’s brigade.”

  Catesby shook the other captain’s hand. “Forty-fourth Virginia. Since Higginbotham was killed, we’re Witcham’s brigade.”

  “Once a man gets to be colonel, he’s a goner. My wife entreats me to refuse all promotions.”

  General Edward “Allegheny” Johnson stood by his fireplace. “So?” he demanded. “So?” He blinked.

  Catesby made his report.

  Johnson was a bearded, sharp-headed man in his forties. Wounded two years ago at McDowell, he’d just come back to the army. “So?” he said, and blinked furiously.

  Catesby didn’t know whether to acknowledge the general’s tic, perhaps blink back. “We fear the Federals are readying an assault.”

  Johnson pivoted. “Lieutenant Samuels, inform General Ewell that the enemy are massing outside my salient. He has removed my artillery for God knows what purposes. Tell him I must have it back.” His left eye blinked while his right eye glared. “Captain. Thank you for confirming information I have received from others. Alert your command. We must be prepared to receive them at first light.”

  It was raining again, and the fog cocooned Catesby in soft dense white. He followed the rutted farm lane back by the feel of it under his feet.

  Morning pickets from the 48th Virginia were passing silently through the breastworks. Within a few feet of the abatis they vanished in the fog, as if they had never been.

  Catesby informed Major Anderson, shook his weary men awake, turned aside their hopeful rations inquiries, and told them to extract their cartridges and replace them with dry ones.

  A lightening in the air promised dawn wasn’t far away.

  Sergeant Fisher said, “What was that?”

  “I hope to Christ . . .”

  Suddenly the pickets were back, clawing at the abatis, slipping through the gaps, some clambering right over the spikes. Inside the fog there was a rumble like a potato wagon rolling down a hill. A wall of blue appeared.

  “We’re for it now.” Fisher poked his Enfield through the firing slot.

  “Fire,” Catesby shouted, and a ragged volley spattered. Catesby aimed his pistol through the logs and dropped a color bearer. The Federals tore at the abatis like wild men, indifferent to the bullets cutting them down. Poles and sharpened limbs were tossed aside, but Confederate fire strengthened, and Federal ranks withdrew into the fog, leaving blue flotsam behind them.

  “Christ.” Fisher jerked his head around. “They’re behind us. The bastards’ve flanked us.”

  A blue flood poured toward them, flowing over the breastworks, as countless as the waves of the sea.

  “Run!” Fisher screamed. “Or you’ll rot in Point Lookout Prison!” Abandoning the breastworks, he bolted. Catesby followed him.

  Federal soldiers surmounted every obstacle, and sometimes when men surrendered they were taken prisoners and sometimes they were clubbed to death.

  The butternut soldiers were like breadcrusts on the tide. A swirl where General Johnson kept the Federals at bay with his walking stick. “Get away from me, you devils.” Outside his flailing circumference, soldiers angled for a straight shot. “Don’t shoot him, William. We got us a Johnny general!”

  “Keep away from me, you devils. Leave me alone.”

  Sergeant Fisher was cursing—“You bastards ain’t gonna take me again!”—and swung his Enfield like a felling ax.

  Confederate cannons galloped up and artillerymen unfastened limbers and turned horses loose but Federal soldiers fell on them before they could load a single charge.

  A loose artillery horse ran past Catesby, who grabbed at its harness and launched himself onto its back. Pressed into the neck of the terrified animal, Catesby Byrd clung to the check straps as rifle flashes lit up the world. Down the farm lane he rushed, and for a moment, charging from dawn into dark, he thought he might go on forever, that he might outrun death. His face lowered into the horse’s mane, Catesby flew.

  He emerged in a clearing where butternut reserves were forming. “What brigade are you?” Catesby cried.

  “Georgians,” one soldier answered.

  “And who are you, sir?” The man on the gray horse was General Robert E. Lee.

  “Captain Byrd, 44th Virginia.” The calm in Lee’s voice brought Catesby back to himself. “They have destroyed General Johnson’s division. The general himself is taken prisoner or slain. I saw him surrounded.”

  “The Stonewall Brigade? The Louisiana Tigers?”

  “Overwhelmed utterly.”

  Lee had sadness etched deep into his face. “How many of those people are there?”

  “They were twenty ranks thick. Hancock’s corps.”

  “Accompany me to General Gordon,” Lee said.

  Catesby and Lee rode through the Confederate troops pressing forward in the dim light and joined their officers.

  “I am informed that General Johnson is lost, his division overwhelmed. General Gordon, I trust that your men will not disappoint me.”

  Gordon was a fiery little man, stiff with the peculiar rigidity of a man who has been often wounded. “General,” he said. “I am attacking with Evans’s and Hoffman’s brigades.”

  “Can you drive them, sir?”

  “My Carolinians are already engaged.”

  “A brigade against a Federal corps?”<
br />
  “We are all we have.”

  Tremendous thundering racketed the woods ahead.

  “Yes,” Lee said. And nudged Traveler and gave him a “tsk.” He removed his hat and rode bareheaded to the front.

  General Gordon came quickly beside him. “General, it is too dangerous. You must retire.”

  Lee kept his eyes fixed to the front.

  “General Lee, you shall not lead my men in a charge. Another is here for that purpose. These men are Virginians and Georgians and Carolinians. They will not fail you, will you, boys?”

  “No sir!” one cried.

  “Dear God, no,” another groaned.

  Angry, anxious, Gordon stood in his stirrups and cried, “General Lee to the rear!” Troops surrounded Traveler and began to push the horse, as if he were a stone, an insensate thing they must remove by main force.

  The brigade took up the shout. “General Lee to the rear!”

  Catesby gripped Traveler’s bridle, and Lee offered no further resistance as the younger man led him through the cheering, weeping Confederates.

  “We’ll not fail you, Marse Robert!”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll drive them, by God we will.”

  “Hurrah for Marse Robert! Hurrah!”

  Catesby and the general stopped where the ambulance wagons were preparing as Lee’s men hurled themselves into the woods, screaming against the gunfire that drowned the yip-yip-yip of the rebel yell.

  So softly Catesby could scarcely hear, Lee said, “It is sometimes easier to die for one’s country than live for it. Death can become too precious to a soldier.” Then, recovering himself, he said “Those are your countrymen, sir.”

  Catesby threw General Lee a salute, booted his artillery horse, and galloped toward the fighting.

  Rain fell in torrents, the blaze of musketry and cannons outshone the sun, only a gleam through the fog. The woods were inhabited by dead and wounded Confederates, but when Catesby came into the open the Federal troops were withdrawing to the far side of the breastworks, driven by Gordon’s continuous volleys. Catesby’s horse lurched; Catesby loosed his hold and came off as the horse fell dead. Catesby took a revolver and ammunition pouch from a dead Federal. In another’s knapsack he found hardtack and bacon and palmed them into his mouth as he trotted behind the advancing Confederates.