by Ralph Peters
Gordon surveyed the beautiful, tattered, willing ranks before him. Without dropping his rump down into the saddle, he let his mount step along. The men knew the rules and patterns of his performances and he could feel them waiting for the kicker.
“I’ll tell you why you shame me, boys.” He let his face expand in a mighty smile. “Because, once y’all get going at the Yankees, I can’t keep up with you! You make your general look like a shirking skedaddler, like a shade tree do-nothing. God bless Georgia!”
A thousand voices and a thousand more howled, cheered, and bellowed their approval.
“You jest watch us, Genr’l,” a voice called, piercing the hubbub. “Even that horse a your’n won’t catch us up.”
“Oh, I don’t want to slow you down,” Gordon responded to his bearded interlocutor, to them all. “No, gentlemen, no! I wouldn’t want to be the cause of sparing those Billy Yanks one mite of the terrible blow this brigade is set to deliver upon that pusillanimous blue multitude. So … I’m just going to do my best to keep up with y’all. I want you boys to go at those blue devils like a high-summer hurricane and send them running back to Hell or Boston, whichever’s closer.”
He paused, letting the renewed cheers dissipate and scanning the ranks before him. His horse pranced and Gordon preened. Wishing Fanny were there to admire him, as she had that sweet gift of doing. He was grateful for every glimpse of the woman, for every breath she took.
Men said he loved to hear the sound of his own voice, but Gordon didn’t mind. It was the Lord’s own truth. He loved to stand up and speechify, and his men loved to listen and play their parts in the spectacle. The trick, of course, was to know the men, to reach past their desires to get at their needs. Once you knew the audience, you knew the words to say, and all you had to do was to say them proper.
Softening his tone, but making his voice carry like an actor on the best stage in Savannah, Gordon told them, “Think now of those dear hearts at home in Georgia, fearing the depredations and monstrosities infernal the invader proposes for the defenseless fair … think of the indignities those hellish legions would gladly visit upon your wives and daughters, your sweethearts and your frail, beloved mothers. Win here, boys, win this battle that’s coming our way … vanquish the iniquitous foe, these vandal-like invaders, this barbaric horde … and the flimsy efforts of the Federals infecting a small corner of our state, our beloved home, will be as nothing but air. Drive out Useless Simpleton Grant, with his coon-dog Meade at his heels, and all their hellish stratagems will fail. Here … perhaps on this very day … here in Virginia … this is where we defend Georgia’s sacred soil.” He lifted his hat, extending his arm to the full. His horse nickered. And with all the force his powerful voice could muster, Gordon called, “Georgia, are you with me?”
This roar was the mightiest response of all. A good speech never failed to spunk up the men and set them marching hard.
But Gordon’s poetic idyll was destined to end. He saw a rider galloping from the direction of Early’s headquarters. That messenger would bear the order to march.
The general gestured for quiet. And when the multitude had calmed, he told them, “Let us pray.…”
“Glory hallelujah, Jesus is Lord!” a voice called.
“Hallelujah,” another seconded, followed by a third.
Gordon waved down the voices and deepened his own, pushing it to the extreme that had worked so well back in his college debating society, the sonorous timbre that would have served him beautifully as the valedictory speaker, had not his father’s misfortunes put too soon an end to his education.
“Oh, Lord of hosts … God of battles … great Jehovah, who taught the armies of Israel to smite thine enemies … Lord, we call upon you and your only begotten son to bless us this day … to give us strength in the rightness … in the righteousness of our cause … to guide us to do your will. Let us bear your blessing into battle … into battle against those who, if not heathen in their faith, are become heathens through their wicked acts. Spread out your shield before us, and raise your fiery sword against the iniquitous. Look with favor upon our plea for victory in thy name … and dispense your endless mercy to that earthly rival to Eden, the blessed, beloved, and bounteous State of Georgia. Amen.”
No congregation had ever answered with an “Amen” greater.
Gordon had calculated perfectly, as he was wont to do. Just as the amens echoed off across the glistening fields, the messenger covered the final stretch and reined in his mount by the general.
“It’s all right, son,” Gordon told him. “Georgia’s ready to march.”
* * *
Gordon liked to think of himself as a shepherd to his men, but knew that his brigade was a pack of wolves. And that was all right. Alexander had conquered the known world with lesser soldiers. And if he had gotten too late a start in military affairs to become an Alexander, that was all right, too. He preferred to cast himself as another Ulysses, courageous, but wise in guile and a skillful orator. He only hoped his homecoming would not drag on for ten years.
His Fanny was a warm, loving woman who deserved a husband by her side every single night of the year. Nor was there a better place on earth than in his Fanny’s arms. When his wife held him close in their blessed bed, it mended the world’s deficiencies. She made him laugh and laughed at him when he needed to be laughed at, but did it as though she were petting a favored dog. As fair as Helen, she was Penelope in her fortitude and loyalty. Brave as an Amazon, too. Not content to visit him in the lulls between campaigns, she followed the army in the field, whenever she could come by a team of horses. His Fanny. Had ever nobler woman lived, the Attic bards would surely have made her immortal.
Gordon was a happy man, if a sane man could be happy amid a war. He had his moods, as did everyone, but relished the joys to be found each given day. And on those hard, rare days when not one jot of pleasure was to be had, he reveled in memories of other, better times. He loved a well-roasted chicken, well-made whiskey, and well-bred horses, his wife’s affection and the baked-bread smell of her, and war had only intensified his pleasure in common things. He found battle exciting and had a gift for leading men through the Valley of the Shadow. He could fight.
But he never forgot that every war ends—even the walls of Troy had fallen at last—and he thought beyond the day when peace would come. If the Lord permitted him to survive, he meant to plunge into politics as furiously as he had plunged into every battle, determined to win at all costs. If the Confederacy fought its way to freedom, the heroes of the war would be invincible at the ballot box. Not even a low-country congressman by birthright would be able to steal enough votes to beat a veteran. And if the South was humbled in defeat—a possibility that had to be faced quietly—Georgia would need her heroes to raise her up again.
Politics would suit him, he believed. He loved adulation, and was man enough to admit it: The cheers of his soldiers were worth any risk to his life. He envisioned himself as a governor or senator, a tribune of the people, a generous Caesar. And when he passed on, at a patriarchal age, throngs of mourners would respond as did Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to Antony’s death: “The odds is gone and there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.”
“What say, General?”
“Just thinking out loud,” he told his temporary adjutant, “just thinking out loud, son.”
“Going to be a hot one, sir.” The captain lifted his hat, fanned himself, and covered his head again.
“Virginia hot,” Gordon said. “But not Georgia hot.”
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“Put a question to you?”
“You may, lad. And I may, or may not, answer it.”
They rode past a black child sucking its thumb by the roadside and marveling at the circus the fates had delivered.
“Sir, what do you think Sherman’s going to do? Where’s he going to aim at? In your opinion?”
“You mean what’s he going to try t
o do. Before General Johnston lures him unto defeat and degradation.”
“Yes, sir. Pardon. My folk are out of Dalton, you know.”
“General Sherman will never reach Dalton, Captain. He shall not glimpse the spires of her churches.”
“And that’s what you really think, General?”
Gordon spit beyond his stirrup, willing his mouth clean of the endless grit. They were marching at the tail end of the division and the clouds of dust looked a quarter mile high.
“Hell, boy, I don’t know. Sherman’s going to do his best to march right down to Atlanta, and old Joe’s going to do his best to stop him. The Lord and the guns will decide.”
“I wish we were down there, sir. To give Bloody Billy the licking he deserves. Rather than up here, where we can’t help none.”
“Here or there,” Gordon said, “it’s the same war.” He urged on his slowing horse and returned a much-diminished company’s greeting with a flourish. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he told the adjutant, “just wait and see. We win this battle coming on and, the good Lord willing, everything will be fine. Now ride on back and see we don’t have any stragglers.”
But Gordon wondered, as he rode along, how he would feel if his kinfolk lived in Dalton.
Nine a.m.
Orange Turnpike
Brigadier General Charles Griffin was an abstemious man with a barroom temper, and he didn’t like what he saw. The commander of the First Division of Warren’s Fifth Corps was loved by his men for a number of reasons, some of them unreasonable, but above all because they sensed that he would not waste their lives, if he could help it. That morning, as he watched dust clouds on the Turnpike resolve themselves into Confederates, he knew that a battle had come to him, just not where anybody had expected it. And lives would be wasted indeed.
“Where the fuck-all is the cavalry?” he asked in the gentlest tone he would use all day. “Those sonsofbitches were supposed to be picketing that road, the worthless pissants.”
None of his aides or couriers proposed an answer. Avoiding his eyes, they pretended to calm their horses.
But there they were, Reb infantry in at least brigade strength, not a mile away and going to ground on a ridge Griffin damned well didn’t want to charge. And a Reb brigade meant a division was behind it. A division meant a corps.
He drew a notebook and pencil from a pocket of his tunic. His horse shook and settled again. As Griffin wrote, he glanced up now and then, monitoring the arrival of his enemies, and said, twice, “Warren’s fucked for beans.” The second time, he added, “I suppose the damned plan took account of every last thing but Robert E. Lee.”
When he finished writing, he handed the dispatch to an officer he trusted. “You get this to General Warren, if you have to carry that fucking horse on your back, boy. If you can’t find goddamned Warren, go right to General Meade.”
As the captain galloped off, Griffin watched a knot of Reb horsemen pause on the high ground down to the west, looking toward the Union force just as Griffin was measuring them.
“Fuck me to blue blazes,” he said.
Skirmishers pecked at the morning.
Griffin began shouting orders to couriers to race up the forest track that veered from the Turnpike and along which the bulk of the corps had been advancing, like idiot Texans strolling right into a Comanche ambush. His brigades were to halt their marches, to hold where they were, face right-front, and get to work on field fortifications, in case the Rebs intended to come on and not just dig ditches up along that ridge.
The general spurred his horse forward, deeper into the field, barking that he wanted a battery placed just there. Cursing himself for his oversight, he sent another rider forward to inform the corps’ lead divisions about the appearance of Reb infantry on their right flank. Raging and impatient and feeling cornered by fate, he turned to the nearest artilleryman too soon for his query to make any sense and barked, “Schuyler, where the fuck-all are my guns?”
Before the dumbfounded redleg could answer, the division commander spurred toward his nearest brigadier.
“Bartlett! Get some of your boys out, prod ’em. See what they’re up to. Don’t get into a goddamned wrestling match, just find out who we’re up against. I need some fucking numbers. Warren’s going to be pissing all over, and we can’t just scratch our asses.”
As Griffin rode along his lined-up regiments, the men cheered. And when he snapped, “I don’t see one goddamned thing to cheer about, you dumb bastards,” they cheered more heartily.
His men, his boys. In dusty blue or the faded costume-ball outfits of Zouaves. His boys.
“Fucked for beans,” he muttered to himself.
Ten a.m.
Orange Plank Road
Approaching the dismounted cavalrymen from behind, the chaplain called, “Fear not! For if the Lord hath granted them a multitude, he hath given unto you the Spencer carbine!”
Lieutenant Colonel John Hammond dashed across the Plank Road toward the chaplain, who was standing erect as Minie balls split the air.
“The Lord’s judgment shall be visited upon the infamous brethren of Joseph, who enslaved the cherished son…”
Louis Napoleon Beaudry had been captured just after Gettysburg and had suffered for months in Rebel prisons before being exchanged. Since the preacher’s return to the regiment, he had put the fear of God into his charges and the Fifth New York Cavalry had the lowest court-martial rate in the mounted arm, but Hammond had come to question the man’s soundness.
As the colonel cleared the open ground, a bullet smacked into a scrub oak right in front of him. Hammond yanked the preacher to his knees. Clutching his Bible in one hand and putting right his spectacles with the other, Beaudry looked affronted.
Behind the man of the cloth crouched Sergeant McManus, waiting for Company K to pass back through so he could sport with the Rebels again. The sergeant fondled his carbine with the affection he might, under other circumstances, have displayed toward a woman. Face soiled by hours of fighting and scarred by years of hard living, he grinned at Hammond’s discovery of the preacher.
Yelling over the din, Hammond told the chaplain, “I ordered you to the rear an hour ago.”
Even on his knees, the preacher held his spine upright. He would bend in prayer, but not to the dross of the world. His calling was more Old Testament than Gospels, with a great deal of smiting heathens recommended.
“The men of the Fifth New York are a flock in my keeping, sir,” the chaplain announced. “I must not abandon my sheep this day, no more than you would desert your command, Colonel Hammond.”
“Chaplain…” Hammond wondered if the man really understood that there was a definite border between life and death. “I just had to leave Captain McGuinn behind. Terribly wounded, maybe dead. I don’t want—”
“The Lord will look fondly upon Captain McGuinn.”
“Chaplain, listen to me. I’m giving you a second direct order: Go to the rear. Comfort the wounded. And tell Lieutenant Hayward to send ammunition.”
The one curse of the Spencer, with its seven-round magazine and high rate of fire, was that the ordnance system had not caught up with the increased ammunition expenditure. Hammond considered himself an honest Christian, but he had broken a decalogue of military commandments to amass extra rounds for his regiment. Even so, the length of this running fight had drained his stock.
The chaplain didn’t move.
“Chaplain Beaudry … do not defy me.”
The chaplain lowered his eyes. In dismay at mankind’s folly. “I answer to a Higher Power,” he said.
Hammond had no more time to spare. The Confederates threatened to overrun Company K in its forward outpost. Captain O’Connor should have pulled back minutes before.
Hammond hoped O’Connor hadn’t fallen. Company K needed a commander, and its surviving lieutenant wouldn’t do. He would have to go forward himself and see them extricated. A dozen tasks competed for his attention. And here he was, deba
ting with a preacher.
Another volley tore through the trees and shrubs, ripping leaves from their branches and splintering wood.
“Damn you, Chaplain!”
Ignoring the death that filled the air, Beaudry got to his feet. A prematurely wizened man, as scrawny as starvation in the flesh, he possessed eyes ablaze with faith and a voice made for the pulpit. He stared down at the colonel with a look to curdle the milk of human kindness.
Sheepish, Hammond rose and stood as well. Knowing it was idiocy.
“John Hammond!” the chaplain bellowed in his tent revival voice. “What would your dear wife and children say … if they knew you had disgraced yourself by profane language in the face of eternity?”
Sergeant McManus—who had not signed the chaplain’s Temperance Union pledge—rolled half over and cackled, “You school that colonel, Chaplain. For we’ll all be in Heaven or elsewhere before nightfall.” The sergeant turned back to his business, aiming his carbine down the road, finger caressing the trigger in a manner to evoke lascivious thoughts.
Moments were precious. Hammond’s regiment had delayed the Rebel host for over three hours, parrying a Confederate brigade. And mighty dust clouds rose behind that brigade. Leapfrogging backward from one position to the next, clinging to each until it was about to be overrun, his cavalrymen had pulled off an earthly miracle. Thanks, as the chaplain had noted, to the Lord and their repeating carbines.
They had fought for every yard. But the yards had turned to miles. Parker’s Store, where they had spent the night, was far behind the Secesh infantry now.
“I’m sorry, Chaplain,” the colonel said. “Forgive me.” Even as he spoke, he knew it was bedlam mad to waste time on such things in the middle of a maelstrom. Lifting his cap, he wiped the grease of sweat and dust and powder from his forehead. His eyes ached. “But you still have to go to the rear. Do you want to go back to Libby?”
A grisly chance at redeeming the situation thrashed out of the dwarf pines. Two troopers were making a rearward run, with the arms of a wounded man over their shoulders.
