The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  “That’s Joe Johnston,” Caudell exclaimed, pointing.

  “By God, you’re right,” Rufus Daniel said. “Is the Army of Tennessee here, too, then?”

  “Damned if I know,” Caudell answered. “There was so much confusion at the train station that the Army of the Potomac might be marching along behind us, and we’d never know it.”

  All he could see of the parade was the couple of companies ahead of the Castalia Invincibles and, twisting his neck, the company right behind.

  Rufus Daniel barked out a couple of syllables of laughter. “Reckon we’d find out right quick if there was bluebellies back there.” Just for a moment, his left hand slid to the sling of his AK-47. Caudell grinned and nodded. He was home from Washington City; the only Federal soldiers to have reached Richmond arrived as prisoners of war.

  The 47th North Carolina passed the reviewing stand and the Broad Street Methodist Church with its immensely tall spire. On down Broad Street they marched. As Captain Lewis had asked of them, they did the memory of their Camp Mangum days proud, keeping their alignment and distance from one another with an ease that bespoke their two years of practice in the field. Their step was smooth and elastic, the swinging of their arms as steady as the beat of a pendulum.

  A middle-aged woman threw a bunch of purple daisies. Caudell caught it out of the air. If he’d had a hat, he would have put it in the band; Dempsey Eure wore bright buttercups along with his turkey feather. Since he was bareheaded, Caudell reached over his shoulder and stuck the stems into the barrel of his rifle. The woman clapped her hands.

  Thus ornamented, Caudell made his way past the depot of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad and, a block farther on, the new and impressive Richmond Theater, with its pilasters reaching from the second floor almost to the top of the building. The railroad tracks continued down the middle of the street for close to another twenty blocks before they swung north toward the destinations the train line’s name promised.

  The crowds began to thin out by the time the tracks left Broad Street: that was at the very edge of town. Provost marshals waved the men on. “Out to Camp Lee!” they shouted, pointing north and west. Caudell marched with a fresh will: where better to end the grand review than a camp named for the South’s grandest soldier?

  The broad green expanse of Camp Lee lay about a mile beyond the point where Richmond’s buildings stopped. Another tall reviewing stand, its boards still white and new, stood at the western edge of the lawn. A big Confederate flag on an even taller pole flew beside it. In front of it were other banners mostly of red, white, and blue: captured Federal battle flags. Caudell puffed up with pride when he saw how many there were.

  “Hill’s corps, Heth’s division?” a provost marshal said. “Y’all go this way.” Along with the other units in Henry Heth’s division, the 47th North Carolina went this way. Caudell found himself off to the left of the reviewing stand, but close enough to the front that he might be able to hear at least some of what a speaker on that stand had to say.

  Before any speaker spoke, though, the grounds had to fill. Turning his head this way and that, Caudell saw the whole Army of Northern Virginia arrayed to the left of the reviewing stand, Hill’s corps, Ewell’s, and Longstreet’s, too. Then a provost marshal bellowed, “Bishop Polk’s corps? Over here.” Sure enough, the Army of Tennessee had also come to Richmond to join the review.

  “Who cares?” Allison High said. “Just means we have to stand here twice as long while they get wherever they’re supposed to go.”

  It wasn’t quite twice as long, for only part of the Army of Tennessee seemed to be here after all. The rest of it, Caudell supposed, was likely to be in Tennessee, reclaiming land that had been under the Federal thumb for most of the war. Even so, the sun had sunk low in the northwest—and, from where Caudell stood, almost directly behind the reviewing stand—when Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Joe Johnston rode down the aisle between the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee. The two armies shouted themselves hoarse, each trying to outcheer the other. The Army of Northern Virginia outnumbered its rival and so had the better of that contest. The President and his generals waved from horseback, acknowledging the salute. The three men ascended the reviewing stand together.

  Quiet came slowly and incompletely. The lean, hard soldiers who had done so much, endured so much behind their tattered battle flags, were not the sort from whom to expect perfect discipline or perfect courtesy. Lee and Johnston understood that. They had stopped a couple of steps below President Davis. Now they bowed, first to each other and then up to him. His answering bow, deeper than theirs, went not to them, but straight out to the soldiers they had led. The men raised another cheer. Their high, shrill war cries split the air.

  “We shall hear the rebel yell no more,” Davis said, which brought fresh outcries and shouts of No! He held up a hand. “We shall hear the rebel yell no more, for we are not rebels, nor have we ever been. We are free and independent Southern men, with our native Southern yell—”

  The President could not go on after that for some time. Caudell yelled at the top of his lungs but could not hear his own shout, for the cries of the two great Confederate armies rolled through his head, loud as the noise of the battlefield. His ears rang when the cheering finally faded away, and fresh yips and yowls kept breaking out somewhere in the assembled hosts every few minutes.

  As a result, he heard Davis’s speech not as a complete and polished oration, but as a series of disjointed phrases, a sentence here, a paragraph there: “We showed ourselves worthy of the inheritance bequeathed us by the patriots of the Revolution; we emulated that heroic devotion which made reverse to them but the crucible in which their patriotism was refined.” “—our high-spirited and gallant soldiers’,” I congratulate you on the series of brilliant victories which, under the favor of Divine Providence, you have won, and, as the President of the Confederate States, do heartily tender to you the thanks of the country whose just cause you have so skillfully and heroically served.” “—driven the invader from your soil and wrung from an unscrupulous foe the recognition of your birthright, community independence. You have given assurance to the friends of constitutional liberty of our final triumph in the struggle against despotic usurpation.”

  Repeated cheers rose as long as President Davis promised the soldiers before him. He did not content himself with that, however, but went on to speak of the Confederacy in the abstract: “After the war of the Revolution, the several states were each by name recognized to be independent. But the North willfully broke the compact between the independent states and claimed its government to be, not such a compact, but Set up over and above the states, perverting it into a machine for their control in domestic affairs. The creature was exalted above its creators, the principals made subordinate to the agent appointed by themselves. Thus our states dissolved their connections with the others, and thus our glorious Confederacy was born.”

  Caudell heard that part clearly, for the men stood quiet through it. It was an appeal to the intellect, not to the passions; had he been standing in that place on this occasion, he thought he would have left it out. Every word of it was true, but it was not what the soldiers needed to hear now: Davis thought too much, felt too little.

  He seemed to sense that himself, and why not?—he had been a soldier before he turned to politics. He did his best to reach a strong conclusion: “No one may successfully undertake the gigantic task of conquering a free people. This truth, always so patent to us, has now been forced upon the reluctant Northern mind. Mr. Lincoln discovered that no peace was attainable unless based upon the recognition of our indefeasible rights. For that, I have to thank the indomitable valor of our troops and the unquenchable spirit of our people. God bless you all.”

  Again, Caudell cheered as loudly as anyone. Realizing the independence of the Confederate States was a heady moment, one he still sometimes had trouble believing had truly come. But in thanking soldiers and peopl
e, Jefferson Davis had omitted one factor that also played a major part in freeing the South: the Rivington men and their repeaters. Caudell wondered if they resented remaining unmentioned and unpraised.

  The applause faded, died. The men of the armies of Northern Virginia and Tennessee stood in the deepening twilight, talking with their friends and comrades of what they’d done today. “Well, Nate, it’s all over now,” Mollie Bean said. “What the hell comes next?”

  “I wish I knew,” he answered. For himself, he had a pretty fair idea: he would go home and do his best to put his life back together the way it had been before the war came. For Mollie, though, that choice looked grimmer.

  Captain Lewis answered the question for the short term: “We’ll stay here at Camp Lee tonight. Rations are supposed to come tomorrow morning, and then they’ll start mustering us out.”

  The captain, Caudell noticed, hadn’t said anything about rations for tonight. That failed to surprise him; once the Army of Northern Virginia got down below Bealeton again, it had returned to the care of the creaky Confederate commissary department. He shrugged. He wouldn’t go hungry, as he still had his last three or four hardtacks from Washington. They were stale by now, but he’d eaten much worse—and much less. Going back to worrying over how fresh his food was—as opposed to whether he’d have any—would be strange.

  Mollie said, “When we get a fire goin’, Nate, will you spend some time with me by it with them books of yours?”

  “Sure I will, Melvin,” he answered. “You’ve learned a lot since you took up your studies in earnest.” He meant every word of that. He wished his students who were half Mollie’s age showed half the intensity she displayed.

  Her lips curled back in something that was not a smile. It pulled the skin tight against her bones, let him see for a moment how she would look when she was an old woman. She said, “I should’ve done more sooner. Now it’s about too late.”

  “It’s never too late,” he said. She shook her head, apparently determined to be gloomy. He persisted: “You have the trick of reading now. To hold it, all you need to do is keep on reading and not let it lie fallow. It’s just like”—he groped for a comparison that would make sense to her—”like stripping and cleaning your AK-47. That was hard at first, but you kept practicing till you got the knack. Now you don’t even have to think about it anymore.”

  “Maybe,” she said, anything but convinced.

  “You’ll see.” Instead of a primer, he got out his pocket Testament that evening. Mollie protested, but he said, “Try it. See if I’m not right.” He opened the little book, pointed to a place. “Start right here.”

  “I can’t do it.” But Mollie bent her head close to the tiny print of the Testament and began to read: “ ‘Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake’—why don’t it say broke?—‘it, and gave it to the…the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the re…uh…remission of sins.” Her face lit up in that special way she had; just for a moment, she outshone the campfire. “Goddam, I did it!”

  “Yup,” Caudell said smugly, almost as pleased as she was. “You stumbled a couple of times on the harder words, but that can happen to anybody. It doesn’t matter anyhow. What matters is that you read it and you understood. You did, didn’t you?”

  “I surely did,” she answered. “I surely did.” Caudell had been reading since he was a little boy; he took literacy for granted. Not for the first time since he’d joined the army, he saw how much it meant to someone who came to it late.

  Once started now, Mollie did not want to stop, not even when the campfire died into red embers and Caudell yawned until he thought his jaw would break. Almost everyone else was asleep by then, some men wrapped in blankets, more simply lying on the grass under the stars. That was no hardship, not on a fair, warm night. Caudell thanked heaven the war had not lasted into another winter. The men would have been without blankets then, too.

  Finally, he could hold his eyes open no more. “Melvin,” he said, “why don’t you just keep that little Testament? That way, you’ll always have something to read.”

  “A book of my own? A Testament of my own? To keep?” In the faint firelight, Mollie’s eyes were enormous. She glanced this way and that. When she saw no one close by was paying any attention, she leaned over and gave Caudell a quick kiss. Her voice sank to a throaty whisper: “We weren’t right out here in the open, Nate, I’d do better’n that.”

  Instead of rising to the occasion, he yawned again, even more gigantically than before. “Right about now, I think I’m too worn to do any woman any good, or myself either,” he said, whispering too.

  Mollie laughed. “Not one man in ten’d admit as much, no matter how true it was. Most’d sooner try, and then blame you when it turned out they couldn’t.” She shook her head, as if at a bad memory, then kissed him again. “Might could be we’ll find us another chance before too long, Nate. I hope so. You sleep good now, you hear?”

  “I will, Me—Mollie.” He risked her real name. “Thanks.” As he rolled himself in his blanket, he wondered if they would find another chance. They wouldn’t be thrown together anymore, not with the 47th North Carolina mustering out. He would go back to teaching, and she—he didn’t know what she’d do. He hoped it would be better than what she’d come from and that the letters he’d taught her would help make it so.

  He wriggled to get comfortable. The grass was soft against his cheek, but his long-lost hat would have made a better pillow. He twisted again, turned his head back toward the fire. There sat Mollie Bean, stubbornly reading the Bible.

  Just as troops had filled Broad Street in the grand review the day before, so now they filled Franklin Street. Then, marching out of Richmond, they had moved briskly. Now, coming back into the city, they advanced at a snail’s pace.

  Nate Caudell’s stomach growled. The promised morning rations had never arrived at Camp Lee. Somehow that seemed fitting. The Army of Northern Virginia had always been able to fight. Staying fed was another matter altogether. Well, no matter, he thought. When his point on this long, slow line reached Mechanic’s Hall at last, some War Department clerk would officially sever his connection with the Confederate army.

  “Maybe,” he said dreamily, “they’ll even pay us off as they let us out.”

  Allison High snorted. “This here’s just getting-out day, Nate, not the Judgment Day. They ain’t paid us in so long, reckon they forgot they’re supposed to.”

  “Besides, way prices are, what they owe us ain’t worth worryin’ over, anyhow,” Dempsey Eure added.

  “They owe us more than money,” Caudell said.

  “They won’t remember that either, not longer’n a few months,” High answered. Caudell wanted to contradict the cynical sergeant, but found he couldn’t. The guess seemed only too likely.

  Slowly, slowly they inched toward Capitol Square. Some people came out to look at them, but only a handful compared to the day before. A teamster driving an immense wagon from the back of the near wheeler of his six-mule team had to pull to a stop when the soldiers blocked his path down Fifth Street. He swore loudly at them.

  Allison High let out a grim chuckle. “Some of them bastards won’t remember longer’n a few minutes, let alone months.”

  Rufus Daniel dealt with the foul-mouthed teamster more directly. He unslung his AK-47 and pointed it at the man. “You just want to be a little more careful who you’re cussin’ around, don’t you, friend?” he asked in a pleasant voice.

  The teamster suddenly seemed to realize Daniel was far from the only man there with a rifle. He opened his mouth, closed it again. “S-s-sorry,” he managed at last. When the soldiers finally cleared the way, he snapped his whip over the mules’ backs, jerked the reins with unnecessary ferocity. The wagon rattled through. The Castalia Invincibles bayed laughter after it.

  They crawled p
ast Sixth Street, past Seventh. The sun climbed ever higher into the sky. Sweat poured down Caudell’s face. When he wiped his forehead with his sleeve, the wool turned a darker shade of gray. “I might not shoot a wagon-driver;” he said, “but I do believe I’d kill a man for a tall glass of beer.”

  As if in answer to that irregular prayer, four ladies came out of one of the fine houses between Seventh and Eighth. A black woman pushed the oldest lady in a wheeled chair. That lady had on her lap, and the other white women carried, trays filled with glasses of water. They all came up to the cast-iron fence in front of their house. “You must be hot and thirsty, young men,” the woman in the wheeled chair said. “Come help yourselves.”

  Soldiers crowded against the fence in the blink of an eye. Caudell was close enough and quick enough to get a glass. He downed it in three blissful swallows. “Thank you very kindly, ma’am,” he said to the woman from whose tray he’d taken it. She was not far from his own age, attractive if rather stern-featured, and wore a maroon satin dress that, like the house from which she’d come, said she was a person of consequence. Emboldened because he was sure he’d never see her again, Caudell plunged: “Do you mind if I ask whose kindness I’m thanking?”

  The woman hesitated, then said, “My name is Mary Lee, First Sergeant.”

  Caudell’s first thought was mild surprise that she’d read his chevrons. His second, when he really heard her name, was hardly a thought at all: he automatically stiffened to attention. Nor was he the only one; every man whose ears caught the name Lee straightened up at the mere sound of it. “Ma’am, thank you, ma’am,” he stammered.

  “There, now you’ve gone and frightened them,” said the youngest Lee daughter—actually, she was hardly more than a girl.

  “Oh, hush, Mildred,” Mary Lee said, sounding like every elder sister in the world. She turned back to Caudell. “After you brave men have done so much for your country, helping you now is our privilege, and the least return we can make.”