The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  “I believe in my heart, General Lee, that God has established that white men are to rule over blacks,” Rhoodie said, and Lee, no mean judge of character, discerned nothing but sincerity in his voice. The Rivington man went on,” As for General Forrest, his men didn’t take any high moral tone when they captured Fort Pillow last month. They found kaffirs in arms there, and they disposed of them.”

  Lee’s mouth twisted in a grimace of distaste; the report of the Fort Pillow massacre had come to his notice. For a moment, he wondered how Rhoodie had heard of it. Then he shook his head, annoyed at himself. In one sense, Rhoodie had known about Fort Pillow for a century and a half. Lee said, “General Forrest is not under my command. I would never deny his abilities as a soldier. Of his other qualities, I am less well qualified to speak.”

  In point of fact, most of what he’d heard about Nathan Bedford Forrest was unsavory. Much of the fortune the man had amassed before the war came from slave trading. Less than a year ago, he’d been shot by a disgruntled subordinate, whom he’d proceeded to stab to death with a penknife. He would never have fit in among the Virginia aristocrats from whose numbers Lee sprang, But only Jeb Stuart deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as a Confederate cavalry commander.

  Rhoodie said,” America Will Break is happier with Forrest’s performance than with yours, General Lee. I tell you again, if you do not rescind that general order, we will be forced to cut off your supply of cartridges.”

  Lee thought about swooping down on Rivington with a couple of brigades. That would assure the Confederacy of however many cartridges were there. But how many was that? As Secretary of War Seddon had said, the place seemed more a transshipment point than a factory town. And for all Lee knew, the Rivington men could disappear into the future and never come back. He rather wished they would, though what point to a raid on them then?

  He said, “As I told you, Mr. Rhoodie, do as you feel you must, and I shall do likewise. For now, I wish you a good morning.”

  “You will regret this, General Lee,” Rhoodie said. Though he held his voice low and steady, he could not keep angry blood from mounting to his cheeks. He jerked his horse’s head around, hard enough to draw an angry snort from the animal. He rode off at a fast trot, looking neither right nor left.

  The staff officers rejoined Lee as soon as Rhoodie had gone. Charles Marshall looked after the Rivington man. “Am I to construe that he did not gain of you that which he had hoped for?” he asked with lawyerly curiosity.

  “You may construe it if you like, Major,” Lee said drily. “Before too long, the whole army may well construe it. Nevertheless, we shall proceed.”

  All his aides looked curiously at him when he said that. He said no more. If Rhoodie did indeed cut off the flow of AK-47 ammunition, it would soon become obvious—perhaps not so soon as it might have under other circumstances, for the retreating Federals had wrecked the railroad between Catlett’s Station and Manassas Junction, which left the Army of Northern Virginia dependent upon horse-drawn wagons for supply, but pretty soon just the same.

  The aides had learned better than to push Lee when he did not care to be pushed. Everyone in the army knew better than to push him, save occasionally James Longstreet. That made Rhoodie’s blunt demand all the more startling, and all the more annoying. Lee angrily tossed his head to one side, as if snapping at his own ear. No matter how sweetly the Rivington man framed that demand, he would have refused it.

  What if no more cartridges were forthcoming? Lee thought about that. He did not care for any of the conclusions he reached. Reequipping his army with repeaters had taken a couple of months. If he required that much time to go back to rifle muskets, the Army of Northern Virginia was done for. The Army of the Potomac would never leave it alone long enough to make the changeover, not in spring.

  He reproached himself for not having had his men pick up the precious brass cartridges they’d expended in the fighting thus far. Even if Colonel Gorgas and Colonel Rains had to load them with ordinary black powder and unjacketed lead bullets, they’d keep the AK-47s in action a while longer. He thought about sending men back to Bealeton to glean such cartridges as they could—in the miserable tangles of the Wilderness, the brass was likely gone forever.

  He decided to hold off. He had succeeded in imposing his will upon Federal generals throughout the war; even the capable, aggressive, and determined Grant now moved to his tune—thanks in no small measure to Andries Rhoodie’s repeaters. Now to learn whether he could outlast Rhoodie, a man nominally an ally, in strength of purpose.

  The army continued past the dormered cottages of Middleburg, on toward Leesburg and Waterford. Stuart’s cavalry slashed up to seize a stretch of the Alexandria, Loudon and Hampshire Railroad and keep Grant’s men from using the train to get to Leesburg first. Lee ordered the troopers to hold the Federal infantry as long as they could. He would never have given such a command to soldiers with single-shot rifles. But one man with an AK-47 was worth a fair number with Springfields…and by now, the Federals knew that as well as Lee did.

  The lead elements of the Army of Northern Virginia went through Leesburg the next day, tramping past the elms and oaks that shaded the white-pillared buildings of the courthouse square. Lee rode back to check on the ammunition supply and learned a new wagon train had just come in, up from the end of the Warrenton railroad spur.

  “Excellent,” he said softly. “Excellent.” A few minutes later, he saw Andries Rhoodie riding along beside the long gray files of Confederates. He gave no sign he’d noticed the Rivington man, but affectionately patted the side of Traveller’s neck with a gloved hand. He’d called Rhoodie’s bluff, and got away with it. Rhoodie needed him as much as he needed Rhoodie.

  Rain in his face, rain turning the roadway to muddy soup. Nate Caudell slogged on. When the weather was fine, he’d wished for rain to cut the dust. Now that he had it, he wished for dust again. Mud was worse.

  The road, already chewed up by countless feet, disappeared into water ahead. White’s Ford had steep banks; two years earlier, Stonewall Jackson had had to dig them down before wagons and artillery could cross. Caudell held his repeater and haversack over his head as he splashed into the Potomac. The river was waist-high. He did not mind. He was already soaked. He knew only relief that the rain hadn’t made the water at the ford rise any higher.

  Regimental bands played on the northern—here, actually the eastern—bank of the Potomac. The downpour did nothing to improve their musicianship, but Caudell recognized “Maryland, My Maryland.” As it had the previous two summers, the Army of Northern Virginia stood once more on Northern soil.

  Thanks to the rain, that soil clung to Caudell in abundance. Similarly bedraggled, Dempsey Eure observed, “If this really was my Maryland, I’m damned if I’d go boasting about it.”

  “Doesn’t look like much, does it?” Caudell agreed. The wet weather kept him from seeing a great deal in any case; even the long, low bulk of South Mountain to the west lay shrouded in mist and rain. But he remembered Maryland as distinctly poorer country than the fat farms and houses farther north in Pennsylvania.

  And, though Maryland was a slave state, its citizenry did not gather at White’s Ford to greet the Army of Northern Virginia. Not a civilian was in sight. Somewhere out there, Caudell was sure, Federals scouts and pickets waited to catch their first glimpse of the men in gray. That could not be helped. Caudell knew more fighting lay on this side of the Potomac.

  “Come on, you Invincibles!” First Lieutenant Willie Blount shouted. “Keep it moving! Plenty more behind us, by God.”

  Caudell and the other sergeants echoed the command. They and their men crossed the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal—which ran parallel to the Potomac—on a makeshift bridge the army engineers had thrown across at a lock. A cavalryman sat his horse at a crossroads not far past the canal. Rain dripped from his horse’s mane and tail, from the brim of his hat, from the end of his nose. He used his saber to wave everyone south.

 
After a couple of miles, the road branched again. This time, several horsemen waited at the fork. “Whose division?” one of them called.

  “General Heth’s,” Caudell answered, along with several other men.

  The rider held out a gloved hand to shield a list from the downpour. After he checked it, he pointed southeast rather than due south. “y’all are on the road to Rockville—fifteen miles, maybe a tad more. Give it all you can. You’re supposed to be there by sundown.”

  The fellow was too obviously an officer to make laughing in his face a good idea, but Caudell felt like it. Nor was he the only one; snorts and half-stifled guffaws rose from the throats of a good many safely anonymous privates trudging along in line. The 47th North Carolina had crossed the Potomac a little before noon; it had to be after that hour now. Fifteen miles by sunset was forced-march speed, but might have been possible on a dry road. In mud, it was not going to happen.

  “We’ll do our best,” Caudell said. The horseman waved an acknowledgment. He didn’t repeat the order, so he probably knew it couldn’t be carried out.

  Caudell marched on. While Maryland was not flowing with milk and honey, it also hadn’t been a continual battleground. The foraging looked good. General Lee’s orders required any requisitioned goods to be paid for with Confederate money. With the Confederate dollar worth only a few cents in gold, Caudell did not mind throwing away some paper if that meant he could take what he needed.

  The regiment did not make Rockville by the time darkness fell. Instead of marching on through the night, Colonel Faribault pulled his men off the road to camp in a wheat field. “I’ll be glad for a little sleep,” Caudell said, relief in his voice, as he struggled to get a campfire going with damp fuel, and water still drizzling down from the sky. “Fancy-pants officers with their suede gloves can order you to march to hell and gone, but they don’t know anything about what it’s like to fight once you’ve got there.”

  “Y’all got that one right, Nate,” Allison High said. “Here, you want to take a burnin’ branch from me? I got this here fire goin’ pretty good, even if it is smoky enough for a smudge.”

  “Thanks, Allison.” With the help of the branch, Caudell’s fire finally caught. It too put out a great cloud of greasy black smoke. “If this were daylight, I reckon the Yankees in Washington City would figure we were burning Rockville, from all the smoke we’re making.”

  “Hell with Rockville.” Tall and lean, the firelight reflecting redly from his eyes, High resembled nothing so much as a leading wolf in a pack closing in on prey. “If I’m to do some burnin’, let me do it in Washington City. That’d be a burnin’ to remember, an’ a foragin’ we’d never forget. What do you want to bet Marse Robert’s right now cypherin’ out how to do it?”

  “No bet, Allison. He can’t be doing anything else, not with us in Maryland.” The mere thought of foraging in the vast Federal supply depots by Washington made Caudell breathe hard. But taking the Northern capital would mean more than that. “If we take Washington, the war’s as good as won.”

  “Wouldn’t that be somethin’?” Allison High said dreamily. He looked south and east, as if he could pierce rain and night and close to twenty miles’ distance to see the White House and Abraham Lincoln cowering inside it.

  Caudell feared that Lincoln wasn’t cowering. “There’s forts all around the place, they say.” Attacking the field works on Cemetery Ridge left him leery of moving against positions prepared years in advance and filled with guns bigger than any that could keep up with an army on the move.

  But High, so often gloomy like the current weather, was for once nothing but sunshine. “Yeah, there’s forts, but where’s old Abe gonna find the men to put in ‘em? Only Federals in the whole world can fight a little bit is in the Army of the Potomac, an’ that’s on account of they learned from us. Longstreet’s givin’ Grant hell down the other side of the Potomac, an’ we’ll surely whip any greenhorns the Yankees stick in those works o’ theirs.”

  “Hope you’re right, Allison.” Caudell glanced fondly at his AK-47. Without the repeaters, how could Lee have dared to attack Grant’s whole army with one ‘undersized corps? Even with them, the first sergeant could not imagine Longstreet defeating the immense Army of the Potomac. But if he could keep the Federals in play, offer threat enough to prevent them from filling the trenches in front of Lee’s men elbow to elbow with men in blue coats…if he could do that, Nate Caudell had some hope of going home to Nash County once the war ended. If Longstreet failed, Caudell would be lucky if his name was written in pencil on a piece of board above the shallow grave that would hold him.

  He wrapped his rubber blanket around himself to hold mud and rain at bay. His worries were not enough to keep him awake, not after the marching and fighting he’d been through. He slept like a stone.

  When he awoke before dawn the next morning, shots were coming from Rockville, the thunder of field artillery every so often braying through crackling rifle fire. He gnawed on corn bread. A weevil crunched between his teeth. He ignored it and finished the small square loaf. He was still chewing when the 47th North Carolina moved out.

  As he drew closer to the fighting, he recognized the reports of the Federal rifles ahead; he’d heard their like in the first hours of fighting in the Wilderness. “Sounds like dismounted Yankee cavalry with those seven-shot Spencers of theirs,” he said. “That could be trouble. Those are about the best rifles they have.”

  “There ain’t enough dismounted cavalry in the whole goddam United States Army to slow us down,” Rufus Daniel said, “not with these here guns in our hands.”

  He was right. The Federals fought briskly, but by the time the 47th North Carolina came up to Rockville, they had already been driven out of town. Confederate cannon had knocked down some of the houses; a couple of them were burning as Caudell marched past. A dead bluecoat lay in the street. Another one hung limply from a window of the Hungerford Tavern. His blood ran down the wall, collected in a puddle under him. Not far away sprawled a rebel in butternut, equally dead.

  Yankee field artillery was still in business south of Rockville, throwing shells into the town to slow the Confederate advance. Caudell ducked involuntarily as a projectile screamed by overhead and landed with a crash behind him. A moment later, human screams joined the shell’s mindless shrieks; that one had struck home.

  But the Federal field guns could not hold their positions, not after the dismounted cavalrymen who protected them had been driven out of Rockville. They limbered up and rolled off. As Caudell watched, two horses in one team went down. The drivers cut them out of harness. The bronze Napoleon limped away, hauled by the four animals left to the team.

  The dismounted Federals kept up a stubborn rearguard action, fighting from behind boulders, apple trees, and farmhouses to let the cannon make good their escape. Nor were the guns alone in their flight from the Army of Northern Virginia. Wagons and carriages of every description filled the road that led to Washington.

  “Doesn’t seem like Yankee civilians much care to take what their army’s been dishing out in Virginia,” Caudell said, pointing to the swarm of refugees ahead.

  “Reckon they figure we owe ‘em somewhat for that,” Rufus Daniel said. He shifted his pipe to one corner of his mouth, spat out of the other. “Might could even be they’re right.”

  “Maybe.” Caudell looked southeast. Nothing lay between Lee’s soldiers and Washington City but its ring of forts. It was a big but. He suspected Marse Robert would keep the army too busy for it to do much wrecking for wrecking’s sake.

  * VII *

  The spyglass showed Lee a small, bright circle in the middle of blackness. It made the heart of Washington City seem close enough to reach out and touch. There was the White House, flanked on the right by the three-story brick building with columned entranceway that housed the Federal War Department, on the left by the Greek Revival columns of the huge Treasury Department building, with the smaller State Department headquarters in front of it.
South of the White House, across a lot empty but for temporary barracks, he could make out the tall but unfinished obelisk intended to honor George Washington, to the east the Capitol, its great dome done at last.

  Lee admired Lincoln for continuing work on the dome in the midst of war; it showed the Northern President thought about more than the immediate present. Lee frowned a little. How to reconcile such thoughtfulness with the vicious tyrant Andries Rhoodie had described?

  He dismissed the irrelevant problem as he lowered the glass, sweeping in an instant across the city to the works that held him away from it. Those works were formidable. The Federals had cut down all the trees within two miles in front of them, to rob advancing rebels of cover from the big guns in their forts. A network of trenches in front of the forts protected them and the field artillery positions between them.

  “If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly,” Lee murmured.

  “Macbeth,” Charles Venable said beside him.

  “In this instance, Major, we would be wise to heed the Bard’s tactical advice.” Lee passed the long brass tube to his aide. “Examine the trenches carefully, if you would. They are not yet full, and the men in them, I hear, are garrison troops, not the veterans of the Army of the Potomac. We may break through tonight; tomorrow will be far more difficult, and the day after surely impossible.”

  “Tonight?” Venable echoed.

  Lee glanced at him with amusement. “Are you so careful of your words that you expend them only as single shots? Yes, tonight. The worst mistake I Ye made in all this war, and the one that cost us dearest, was the assault on Cemetery Ridge that third day at Gettysburg. The position ahead is stronger, and the cannon in it bigger. Were we to make a daylight attack, they would slaughter us before we drew close enough for our repeaters to rescue us. In the darkness, they will have more difficulty finding proper targets.”