Hell or Richmond

by Ralph Peters

  They walked a few steps in silence, letting the heat of the words cool on the air. At last, Strickland said, “I remember how thirsty I was. That’s what I always think about. How thirsty I was.”

  “You just keep your hellions together, doing what they’re meant to do. This war’s going to get even uglier, mark my words.”

  As he spoke, it struck Oates that, above all, he was speaking to himself. Strickland needed to hear this counsel. But William C. Oates was the man who needed to take it to heart: When he got in a fight, he just wanted to fight, to go at the enemy with gun, sword, knife, knuckles, teeth, anything at all. He was the one who had to control himself.

  They walked back toward the temporary camp. They had been there but one night and the men had not yet had time to render it foul. The air smelled of spring, not mankind.

  “Funny thing,” the captain said to his commanding officer, “as much as they complained about the work, the men enjoyed the review the other day. Once they got to it. Never saw them so proud. More spit than polish, but you saw how they stood up proper.”

  “Complaining,” Oates said, “is the soldier’s one inalienable right.”

  “And General Lee…,” Strickland went on. “I do believe every man present would have died for him right there.”

  Oates snorted. “They’re going to get the chance.”

  Lee. A fine man, no doubt. But a man. Having knocked down the God above, Oates wasn’t looking for a substitute on earth. He was willing to fight for Robert E. Lee. To die for him, if dying was required. But he wasn’t about to worship any creature that walked on two legs or four.

  Lee’s magic had touched him, too, though, on that splendid afternoon: the erect old man in his unsullied uniform, riding his fine dapple gray, with his daughter in a borrowed carriage behind him, spine as straight and face as stiff as her father’s. The men had cheered their throats raw. Oates only hoped that Longstreet hadn’t imagined that any of the cheers were for him.

  Lee’s daughter now. Fellow would be afraid to marry her, even if he took an interest. Which seemed unlikely, given what Oates had seen of her: plain and prim, with not one hint of pleasure anywhere near her. With a few startling exceptions, white women had never been sporting enough for his tastes: The ones who weren’t outright slatterns had too little joy about them and a bushel too many worries. Every one of them thought too much. He’d take a brown girl for pleasure any day: They lived in the moment, the way he did himself. Women, good women, had always been powerful fond of him, but he had no interest in subsequent domesticity, with all the do’s and don’ts, the ifs and buts and maybes. When the war finished up, he meant to buy himself the finest piece of tail in Alabama and shut the door. Maybe old Toney would sell him that pleasing missy with whom he had developed an acquaintance. Cheekbones of a Cherokee and the rump of the devil’s dam. Or if Toney didn’t have a mind to sell her, perhaps he’d put her out to him on loan. For services rendered to the glorious Confederacy. The way the old man had given him William for a manservant in the field.

  It was a fine thing to have a nigger to clean your boots.

  Thinking about all that put him in the mood for a woman’s company, for the rut smell of just one of them, even though nothing would come of it. If the Yankees held off a few days, perhaps one of the local families would ask the brigade’s field officers in for a dinner. He could tolerate that nicely about now.

  They were being held in reserve, well south of Ewell’s Corps and Hill’s men. That meant hard, fast marching to get to the battle, when it came. For now, though, there was no danger and the sentries ahead stood slackly. He decided not to upbraid them, but recalled another concern.

  “Billy, I hear two Texas boys got smallpox, they put ’em in one of the pesthouses back of town. You make sure nobody goes wandering off where they don’t need to be. Yankees are bad enough.”

  Belatedly spying Oates, the pickets straightened. As he stepped close, arms were presented and proper salutes rendered. The men had come a long way back from the despondency he had found them in at Bull’s Gap.

  Parting, Oates told Strickland, “You go on now and look in on Morgan and Ball. If Jimmy’s come to, you let him know how goddamned close he came to losing those stripes.” Oates winked at the captain, a man who had been but a boy when the war began.

  Strickland saluted and started to turn away.

  A rider burst from the stand of trees where the road ran. Galloping from the town toward the encampment. Waving his cap and hollering, he was still too far off for his words to make any sense.

  “Now what the Hell?” Oates asked the air.

  The regiments closer to Gordonsville came to urgent life as the rider passed. Refusing to gentle his hip, Oates stepped off sharply to intercept the horseman. Soon enough, he made out the rider’s words.

  “The Yankees are moving!” the man cried. “Git ready to march!”

  Midday

  Clark’s Mountain

  Lee thanked the Lord that his soldiers could not see the Rapidan Valley from the signal station. He had ridden up to the mountain to observe the Union movement with his own eyes, to measure its scope and intent. And what he saw was daunting: Bereft of crops this year, the landscape had grown an army of fearsome size.

  Across the river, long blue columns wound along the roads amid billows of dust, their seeming slowness a trick of the distance as they advanced southeastward. Lee could tell those men were marching hard. Dark blurs in the dirtied air, battalions of guns pursued the brigades and divisions they would support. Behind the marching men and jouncing cannon, the white ribbons of supply trains stretched for miles, their bounty immense. Lee knew he was outnumbered two to one.

  The commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia lowered his field glasses, careful not to let his expression reveal his dismay to the members of his staff. Before detouring to the summit on his way forward, he had set Ewell and Hill in motion on parallel roads to the east, but had hesitated to summon Longstreet’s reserve corps and had ordered Hill to leave a division behind, in case the Federal movement was a ruse to cover a thrust down from the west. But the spectacle before him made his opponents’ intent plain. Within minutes of his arrival on the mountain, he had ordered Longstreet to come up as swiftly as possible on the army’s right. There was no mistaking it: Meade and Grant were moving the entire army south by way of Germanna Ford and Ely’s Ford. They had stolen a march on him.

  He needed to make up in resolve the time he had spent on caution. But he could not be as daring as he would have liked, not with such legions against him. Nor was it only the numbers. This blue-clad army gleamed, supplied and supported with all the wealth of the North, while his own men covered taut bellies in rags.

  Oh, after he had gone begging—begging—time and again to Richmond, the authorities had grudgingly issued uniforms and shoes. But they never sent enough. The government he served was parsimonious with goods, but spendthrift with men’s lives, and his interviews in the capital demanded an increasing level of self-control. More than once, he had felt his temper pressing him, threatening an ungentlemanly outburst against self-important officials or even President Davis. At a low point in midwinter, his men had been reduced to a quarter pound of wretched meat a day, mostly rancid bacon. Unpaid for months and left to their own devices, his officers had turned to cajoling their own men to share out their rations. But Lee had yet to encounter a famine-struck table in Richmond, nor did any man at a desk above the James wear the malnourished, beggarly look of his soldiers.

  To be with his men and of them, he had done a foolish thing with good intentions. Although he never barred his subordinates from accepting the hospitality of local families for their winter quarters—Powell Hill had taken up residence in the grandest mansion in Orange—Lee had insisted on living in a tent on the Bloomsbury grounds. And when Mrs. Taylor sent down treats from Meadow Farm, he had shared them with the soldiers. But his gestures had not eased his soul or helped his men. Instead, they had on
ly let his chest pains grieve him, while his digestion remained an embarrassment.

  Mrs. Taylor’s generous gifts of buttermilk, jars of jam, and fresh-baked bread had pleased a few men, no doubt, but neither the cold he shared in goodwill nor the delicacies passed down had staunched the flow of deserters. Nor had it escaped him that more of his own men sneaked north to surrender than Federals came south. Desertions plagued the army, and he had needed to have men shot as examples. But he did what military law allowed to discriminate between cowards and shirkers on one hand, and the many who had gone southward to their homes in the hope that they might eat their fill and sleep warmly for a few months before returning to the ranks when the weather turned.

  The winter had been terrible. But spring had come, as it always did, and the April rains left May a shimmering legacy. Ragged or not, his men stood straight again.

  Not a week before, he had reviewed Longstreet’s returned corps in the first fine weather. The sight of the men raised his spirits and broke his heart. They were so few, barely ten thousand of all arms, the size of a division a year before. The soldiers had burnished their leathers and polished the brass that remained to them, they had washed themselves and brushed their threadbare uniforms. Their cannon gleamed. But for all that, and for all their heartfelt, heartening cheers, those brave men had looked like tatterdemalion vagabonds. And still so very many went unshod.

  But they would fight. He knew he could depend on them for that.

  They would have to fight with an even graver ferocity now. Contemplating the campaigns to come, he had bleak days when he feared he had displeased God, or that the South had sinned against the Lord. Each visit to Richmond discouraged him anew, as President Davis demanded ever more, speaking with a grandiosity to which Lee could respond only with temperate silence. Richmond was so near, yet so painfully far from the reality of this army. He endeavored to make the president understand that there were not men enough to take the offensive now, and that those still in the ranks had to be supplied. In turn, the president offered empty assurances. Mr. Davis still believed that the continental powers could be enticed to support the Confederacy, if only Lee delivered one more great victory.

  Lee no longer believed that. He struggled to keep faith with President Davis, ever careful to demonstrate his subordination to the civil authorities. But he understood that the last hope of the Confederacy was to frustrate the Union here on Virginia’s soil, to make this war so costly to the North that, come autumn, those people would elect a peace candidate who would allow the South its freedom. He would have to fight as he never had fought before, to always be the one to choose the ground, to set the terms of every battle, to send the Federals reeling. And he could not afford to match Meade and Grant in losses, not in soldiers on the firing line or in the generals who led them.

  Thankfully, his Old War Horse was back, the best of the generals left to him now. But chastened by disappointments in the west, Longstreet ached to redeem his reputation, and that worried Lee. He wanted Longstreet to be aggressive, but not to risk his person out of vanity. He had too many generals obsessed with their reputations, from Stuart to Hill, and he worried that, on a fateful day, one of them would behave foolishly. He needed them in command, not in their coffins. Bravery took many forms, and leaders had to have the strength within to choose the right one.

  He could not afford to lose Longstreet, for all the man’s testy squabbling with his subordinates. Longstreet was the only man he had left fit for corps command, who could think beyond the battlefield in front of him. Had he had good replacements for them, Lee would have removed Hill and Ewell, the first a man not meant to command more than a division, the second an erratic leader who, on his bad days, seemed spent. But there were no replacements. The casualties of the past year had been appalling, the loss of Jackson above all. Each day, Lee felt the absence of the one man who could wield independent command.

  How he missed Tom Jackson!

  It was an odd thing, Lee mused. When Jackson had been at his side, he had never called him “Thomas,” and certainly not “Tom.” Yet, that was how he thought of Jackson now, as if they had been boyhood friends.

  Grim 1863 had been disastrous, with even the early victory of Chancellorsville blighted by Jackson’s wounding and death. Then came Gettysburg and Vicksburg. After a glimmer of hope at Chickamauga, Chattanooga had become another debacle. And after that, Knoxville. The best he himself had been able to do was to dig Meade to a standstill at Mine Run.

  A recent remark of Longstreet’s troubled him as deeply as the sight of those columns hurrying across the Rapidan. At the sparse repast to honor his review of Longstreet’s corps, Lee had said, “When those people cross the river, we will have to strike them very hard, to drive them back and gain a month or two.”

  Longstreet’s good humor—so rare a thing these days—had fled the tent, leaving the corps commander almost funereal.

  “Grant won’t go back,” Longstreet told him. “I know him. Once he gets his teeth into our leg, he’ll never let go.”

  What if Longstreet was right? How could they endure?

  The best hope, Lee believed, was to prove his senior corps commander wrong, to thrash Grant and Meade so severely that they saw no choice but withdrawal, as stunned as Joseph Hooker had been at Chancellorsville.

  But what if neither man proved to be a Hooker? Meade was not one to panic, that much he knew. Had he been, he would have ordered his men from the field that first evening at Gettysburg. As for Grant, it was said he was given to drink. But the men who held forth on his vice seemed not to have met Grant. Longstreet knew him. And Longstreet did not count the bottle their ally.

  How much, in the end, could be known of any man?

  A courier rode up in a plume of dust. Lieutenant Colonel Marshall intercepted the man and took his dispatch. The military secretary scanned the note to ensure its contents merited troubling Lee. They did. Features drumhead tight, Marshall approached him.

  “From General Ewell, sir.” Marshall held out the paper, in case Lee wished to review it personally, but summarized its contents: “He sends his compliments and requests permission to call up Gordon’s Brigade.”

  So many decisions seemed difficult now. Age? The weariness of the spirit that no mortal sleep could cure? The only time when decisions came easily anymore was on the battlefield, amid the cacophonous butchery and terrible thrill of war. Then he could make decisions in an instant, possessed by a greater spirit, perhaps by grace.

  “General Gordon may withdraw his brigade from the river. There will be no movement on our left by those people. He will rejoin General Early.” Something irked Lee, though. There was an admonition to add to the message. He took a step back toward Marshall. “You will stress to General Ewell that he is not to become engaged … not beyond any skirmishing forced upon him. I do not wish any part of this army to excite a battle, not until Longstreet is up. We will not have a repeat of Gettysburg.”

  Speaking that fateful name brought Lee up short. It would not do to single out Ewell for such an admonition, since Hill bore far more responsibility for stumbling into the meeting engagement that began that dreadful ordeal in Pennsylvania.

  “I wish the same counsel to go to General Hill,” Lee added. “He is not to become inextricably engaged. We will conduct ourselves with restraint until this army has closed up and we have chosen the ground on which to greet our visitors.”

  He had been thinking about a battleground not merely for hours, but for months. And still he found himself plagued with indecision and had to force himself to issue orders. It was essential to move quickly, to wrest control of developments from those people. They would be well into the tangles of the Wilderness this day, with at least one corps past it tomorrow and the remainder of their army strung out behind. If he caught an exposed portion of their force in there … taking them on the flank … it would deny the Federals use of their artillery, given the restricted fields of fire. Lee had learned at Malvern Hill, then doubl
y so at Gettysburg, to respect the Army of the Potomac’s guns. On the other hand, a major attack in that labyrinth would break down in a shambles, a brawl that would defy all attempts to control it. It had been a blessing that those people had not grasped how disordered Jackson’s men had been in the wake of their triumph the year before. No, the Wilderness would not be the place to fight a full-scale battle. Not without Jackson. But it had to be used gingerly to delay the Federals, to divert them from their purposes and help him regain the initiative.

  He saw it now. His opening gambit would be to surprise an isolated corps on terrain where skill trumped numbers, to play havoc with the strategy of his opponents, then disengage before they could bring the weight of their numbers to bear. He could threaten their lines of retreat to the fords, while Stuart embarrassed their trains. And he could always withdraw to the entrenchments along Mine Run, if things went awry.

  Still, he would take no irrevocable action until Longstreet brought up his corps. His men would need to march hard.

  As Marshall wrote out the orders on the little board he carried in his saddlebag, Lee turned his back decisively on the spectacle across the river.

  Speaking with more heat than usual, he said, “Colonel Marshall, you must stress to Generals Ewell and Hill that they are not to do more than reconnoiter carefully, not until I am present. Write forcefully, sir. We cannot afford to have a misunderstanding.”

  He would have to fight those people within days, but he did not mean to—could not afford to—rush into it headlong. For now, the cavalry could annoy their forward elements to delay them. But he needed more information to craft a plan in detail and bait the trap. He would refuse battle tomorrow, if he could. The day after that was a question mark.