The Guns of the South

*V*

The drums beat on and on, not just in the 47th North Carolina but in all the III Corps’s winter quarters. The hoarse, monotonous sound warned of battle to come.

Nate Caudell heard the long roll without surprise. For the past couple of days, couriers had galloped back and forth between Lee’s headquarters and the encampment, a sure sign something was in the wind. Just the night before, Colonel Faribault had relayed the order that all men were to have three days, cooked rations at hand, which meant the army would move soon.

Caudell hurried to the cabin that had been his home for the past few months. A couple of his messmates were already there, frantically getting ready to move out. Dempsey Eure and Rufus. Daniel came in hard on his heels. “Gonna feel funny, never seein’ this place again,” Daniel said as he started loading his meager personal property into his blanket.

“Sure is,” Caudell said. “You want to pass me our frying pan there? I have room for it.” With it in his blanket went the latest letter from his mother, a pocket Testament, a couple of reading primers, a second pair of socks, and his toothbrush. He tied the ends of the blanket together, covered it with an oilcloth, and draped it from left shoulder to right hip.

His marching rations consisted of a big chunk of corn bread, a smaller piece of salt pork, and several of the packaged desiccated meals that had lately started showing up in their supply shipments. He thought highly of those—they were better than what the cooks turned out almost any day and did not weigh down his mess bag.

He clicked a banana clip into his AK-47, made sure the change lever was in the safe position. Three more full magazines went into his pockets. He looked around to see if he had anything’ else to take. He didn’t. He snaked through his comrades and went outside.

Only a few men had fallen in. More still ran here and there, shouting at each other, getting in one another’s way. Captain Lewis and a corporal were loudly trying to bring some order to the confusion. Caudell added his voice to theirs. Then his fellow sergeants came up. The soldiers were used to obeying them. Inside half an hour, the company was fully formed on the parade ground along with the rest of the regiment. The blue CASTALIA INVINCIBLES banner fluttered in the sweet spring breeze in front of the captain.

Atlas Denton, the regimental color-bearer, carried the 47th’s Southern Cross battle flag out in front of the assembled troops. Colonel Faribault followed the flag. “Company—attention!” Captain Lewis called. The other company commanders gave the same order. The whole regiment straightened in its ranks.

Without preamble, Faribault said, “The Yankees have crossed the Rapidan. They’re moving south through the Wilderness. General Hill’s corps will march east by the Orange Plank Road. We have the honor of being lead regiment in the lead brigade of the lead division.”

Some of the men cheered. Caudell kept quiet, but a grin spread across his face. Being the lead regiment was privilege as well as honor—other soldiers would eat their dust, instead of their eating other men’s.

Faribault went on, “We are to camp near Verdiersville tonight. As the morning is already well along, we have some smart marching to do. God willing, tomorrow we shall start to drive the Yankees out of our country.”

The soldiers cheered again, this time with a baying eagerness in their voices. “By companies, form column of fours—and march!” Colonel Faribault called. With officers, sergeants, and corporals amplifying the simple command, the 47th North Carolina became a long gray serpent that wound its way out of the encampment, as if shedding a confining winter skin, and tramped north up the road toward Orange Court House.

The weather was fine and mild. A better day to march could hardly have been imagined. As Caudell had hoped, his new repeater seemed to weigh nothing. He looked back over his shoulder. That gray serpent seemed to have no end, as regiment after regiment followed the 47th North Carolina. But other, even longer, snakes, these clad in blue, surely lay ahead.

At Orange Court House, the 47th swung east onto the Orange Plank Road. Despite its name, the road was imperfectly corduroyed. Much of it was just dirt. When Caudell looked back again, dust partially obscured the rear of Henry Heth’s division and the lead brigades of that of Cadmus Wilcox, which took their place behind Heth’s men.

More clouds of dust rose into the eastern sky ahead; General Ewell’s corps was also on the move. Caudell looked south: sure enough, more dust still. Longstreet’s men were heading east on the Pamunkey Road. The first sergeant nodded in satisfaction, warmed by the thought that the whole Army of Northern Virginia was back together again. He could not imagine any force of Federals beating these lean, tough soldiers. He felt proud to be part of such an army.

Before long, more than pride warmed him. Sweat trickled down from under the brim of his hat, darkened his tunic at the armpits. His feet began to complain; they hadn’t worked so hard in months. The AK-47 on his shoulder did weigh something after all. What had been a pleasant outing turned into work.

The men had been singing since they set out. Some kept on; more, Caudell among them, began to find saving their breath the wiser course. After the fourth or fifth time, “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” even the Southern version, wore thin.

Because the 47th North Carolina was at the head of the long Confederate column, parties of high-ranking officers often rode nearby. Caudell was used to seeing General Kirkland, the brigade commander, and General Heth. When A. P. Hill came by in his red battle shirt, he pointed him out to Allison High. “I don’t know why you’re raisin’ such a fuss,” the dour sergeant said. “When we get shot, it’s on account o’ the likes of him.”

Not much later, the North Carolina regiment behind the 47th raised a cheer. Craning his neck to find out why, Caudell saw a gray-haired man aboard a gray horse with dark mane and tail; several younger soldiers rode with him. “It’s General Lee!” he exclaimed.

His words were drowned out by a perfect torrent of cheers. Lee smiled and nodded; for a brief instant, his eyes locked with Caudell’s. The first sergeant felt ten feet tall, able to conquer Washington City single-handed. When the cheers, would not stop, Lee took off his hat and waved it. Someone called, “We’ll whip ‘em for you, Marse Bob!”

“Of course you will,” Lee said. The soldier whooped with delight at having his beloved commander answer him. Caudell instantly felt jealous. He called to Lee too, but the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia chose that moment to swing Traveller’s head around and ride back down the column. His aides followed. Caudell’s shoulders slumped as he trudged along.

Everyone was dragging by the time twilight brought a halt to the day’s march. Caudell wanted to throw himself full length on the ground. Instead, he went over to Captain Lewis, who looked even more worn than Caudell felt. “Sir, where’s the nearest stream?”

Lewis pointed. “There’s a creek over that way, about a quarter of a mile.”

Caudell went back to the men of Company D, who were sprawled out as he wished he could be. “Fatigue detail,” he said. A chorus of groans greeted the announcement. “Corporal Lewis, Privates Batts, Bean, Beard, Biggs, and Floyd, fall in with canteens to fetch water.”

Now the groans came from the soldiers he had named. Mollie Bean took off a shoe and sock to display blisters the size of half-dollars. Ruffin Biggs pleaded that he had twisted an ankle. John Floyd alleged his Gettysburg wound was acting up.

Caudell would hear none of it.” Everyone else is as frazzled as you are, but it’s your turn for the duty. We especially need the water for the desiccated suppers a lot of us are toting.”

Authority and logic were both on his side. Grumbling and letting out martyred sighs, the members of the fatigue detail slowly and sadly got to their feet. Their luckier comrades passed them canteens until each of them was carrying six or eight. Caudell aimed them toward the creek. They shambled away, complaining still.

Caudell told off another detail to gather wood for cook fires. Some men did not wait for hot food, but chewed on corn bread or wheatcakes. Others went without; a good many soldiers preferred eating their three days’ rations at the start of a march to carrying them.

A frying pan was not the ideal instrument for boiling water, but it was what Caudell had, and he managed. Then he opened one of the metallic ration packs and poured the water over it. A couple of minutes later, he was spooning up noodles and ground meat in tomato sauce. He’d had that supper before, and liked it. After a day on the march, he was hungry enough to lick the inside of the pack clean.

A few men carried shelter halves—spoil from the Federals. The ones who did joined together to put up their little tents and sleep inside them. More, Caudell among them, lay down on their oilcloths, spread their blankets over themselves, and slept under the stars, with hats for pillows.

Crickets chirped. Little frogs peeped; bigger frogs croaked. The suddenly glowing periods that were fireflies punctuated the night. Caudell loved fireflies. When he was a boy, he’d snuck out of bed to press his nose against the window to watch them. He watched them now, but not for long. The snores from the men alongside fazed him not in the least. His own soon added to the chorus that threatened to drown out bugs and frogs alike.

When the drums woke him the next morning, he was convinced he could not march a step. His legs were one vast ache, his feet two sharper pains. The whole regiment moved like so many old men with rheumatism.

“Sign me up for the Invalid Corps,” Dempsey Eure groaned. That corps took its members from men too badly wounded to stay in the regular army but still able to hold down a prison guard slot or other duty that required little in the way of activity.

“I can’t move fast enough to get into the Invalid Corps,” Edwin Powell said, neatly topping his fellow sergeant.

For all their complaints, the men moved out while the dew was still wet on the grass and the sun just coming up to shine in their faces. Caudell’s feet still hurt, but before long he warmed up and limbered up and no longer felt elderly, just worn. When, Lieutenant Winborne started singing “Maryland, My Maryland,” he even joined in.

The 47th North Carolina led General Hill’s corps past Verdiersville and New Verdiersville just south and east of it. About an hour after the soldiers passed New Verdiersville, they came to the massive earthworks Lee and Meade had dug by Mine Run the November before, each hoping the other would attack him. They were both disappointed, and the campaign had been a fizzle.

As he came up to the works, Caudell wondered if the army would be ordered into them. He could think of nowhere better to stand on the defensive. But Colonel Faribault rode up to the head of the column and shouted, “Forward!” They marched on, into the Wilderness.

“We’re going to have ourselves a big fight today,” Caudell said.

Nobody argued with him. Mollie Bean said, “Wonder where the Yankees are in there.”

Caudell peered down the Orange Plank Road. Grant’s whole army could have been within a quarter mile. As long as they kept quiet, the Confederates would never know until they stumbled over them. Trees and underbrush grew right up to the edge of the road, their branches interlacing overhead. The Wilderness was second-growth country, gullied and full of scrubby chinkapin and blackjack oaks, scraggy pines, hazel, and every kind of thorn- and bramble-bearing bush known to man. Get off the road and you were lost, maybe for good.

The occasional clearing seemed like a lamp going on in a gloomy room. Caudell blinked in the sudden strong sunlight as he marched past New Hope Church on the south side of the road. “Place like this, ‘No Hope Church’ would be a better name for it,” Dempsey Eure remarked.

Colonel Faribault rode up again. He had his sword out, which meant he thought action was near. No sooner had the thought run through Caudell’s mind than the colonel said, “Skirmishers forward! We may come upon them any time now.”

The picked men trotted east, their repeaters at the ready. Some hurried down the road; others crashed through the tangled undergrowth and headed into the woods. Caudell could trace their progress for a while by the way they swore when thorns and stickers gouged their flesh. But the skirmishers soon fell silent. Today, the Wilderness held more dangerous things than thorn bushes.

It was still midmorning when a brisk crackle of rifle fire started up, ahead of the main body of the regiment. The men looked at one another. Caudell saw pale, tense faces all around. He suspected his own was no ruddier, no calmer. However little they spoke of it, few men went into battle without fear. But the best way to overcome it, to avoid deserving comrades’ scorn, was to pretend it did not exist. Without being ordered, the soldiers stepped up their pace.

A skirmisher, his tunic ripped, came pelting back. He gasped, “Bluebellies up ahead, cavalry fightin’ on foot”‘

“Company, load your rifles!” Captain Lewis ordered.

Caudell unslung his repeater, pulled back the charging handle. “Two clicks on your change levers, mind,” he called. “Don’t go shooting off all your rounds without good targets.”

“Two clicks,” the other sergeants echoed.

The regiment drew closer to the firing. Another skirmisher came back, this one staggering and cursing and dripping blood from his left forearm. “Where’s Fowler?” he said. Several men pointed the way to the assistant surgeon’s wagon. Still cursing, the wounded man went on toward the rear. Caudell’s gut knotted. How many more would face chloroform and the knife—or the bone saw—before this day’s work was through? And would he be one of them?

Then two more skirmishers appeared. They weren’t hurt; they were grinning from ear to ear and prodding along a glum-looking Yankee whose buff chevrons said he was a cavalry corporal. Colonel Faribault came up to him, on foot now. “What’s your unit?” he asked.

“Fifth New York Cavalry,” the prisoner answered, readily enough. His voice held more than a bit of a brogue. He looked from his captors to the rest of the 47th North Carolina. “Faith, do the lot of yez have these funny-looking guns? I thought it was half a brigade we’d run into, not a wee skirmish line.”

The Carolina men howled like wolves to hear that. “Take him back to General Heth for more questions,” Faribault told the men who had captured the New Yorker. They led him away. The colonel went on, “Company I, forward to support the skirmishers. Other companies, form line of battle.”

Behind their banner, the men of Company I hurried down the Orange Plank Road toward the fighting. Company by company, the rest of the regiment moved off the road into the Wilderness. The Castalia Invincibles were close to the center of the line, and so still close to the roadway. All the same, Caudell discovered at once that this was no place for fancy parade-ground maneuvering. Even keeping the line straight was next to impossible. “Forward!” he called to the handful of men he could see.

Forward meant vines wrapping around his ankles like snakes and branches hitting him in the face and pulling at his arms. He fell three times before he’d made a hundred yards, Then a bullet cracked past his head and slapped against a tree trunk not five feet away. He threw himself flat and crawled through the bushes on his belly.

Another shot rang out, and another. Bullets probed the underbrush, looking for him. The Federal cavalrymen had repeaters of their own. They might not have been AK-47s, but they were bad enough. Caudell peered through a screen of leaves, tried to spy the Yankee who was trying to kill him.

He saw no trace of uniform—the fellow was hidden as well as a red Indian. But he could not hide the black-powder smoke that rose every time he fired. It drifted up from behind a clump of blackberry bushes. Carefully, so as not to give away his own position, Caudell brought the rifle to his shoulder, squeezed off two rounds, one after the other.

He’d flushed his bird. The blackberry bushes stirred as the Federal trooper scrambled toward what he hoped was better cover. Just for a second, Caudell caught a glimpse of blue. He fired. The Yankee screamed. Caudell fired again. The scream stopped, as abruptly as if it had been cut off by a knife. Caudell dashed forward, past the bushes where the dead Yankee had been hiding.

The crash of gunfire resounded all around, louder by the minute as more and more Confederates got into the woods and collided with the Federals already there. As was their way, the dismounted cavalry had firepower out of proportion to their numbers, thanks to the seven-shot Spencer carbines they carried. But now the men of the 47th North Carolina could match them and more. It was a heady feeling. So was pushing the Yankees back.

They went unwillingly. In the tangled badlands of the Wilderness, a few determined men behind a log or hiding in a dry wash could knock a big piece of an assault back on its heels.

Caudell discovered “one such knot of resistance by tripping over the corpse of a skirmisher who had been shot through the head. “Gitdown, dammit,” a live Confederate growled at him. “They ain’t playin’ games up ahead there.” He pointed over to a clump of oak saplings. “There’s at least three of the bastards in there, and they won It move for hell.”

Twigs cracked off to the right. Caudell swung his rifle that way, but the newcomers—almost invisible against the bushes in their gray and butternut clothes—were Confederates. “Yankees there,” he called, pointing at the thicket. As if to underscore his words, a couple of Spencers barked, making all the rebels flatten out against the brambled ground.

He nudged the private next to him. “You and me, let’s put some bullets through there, make them keep their heads down.” When the fellow nodded, Caudell looked over to the soldiers who had just arrived. “You flank ‘em while we keep ‘em busy.” The words were punctuated by a dive into better cover as the Federals fired at the sound of his voice.

He fired back. So did his companion. The other Confederates scrambled forward, from log to tree to bushes. Before they’d moved fifty feet, they disappeared from Caudell’s sight. A few seconds later, though, their AK-47s snarled. As Caudell had noted on the practice range, the new repeaters had a shorter, sharper report than any rifle he’d known before. He could tell which was which without having to turn and look, an asset on a field like the Wilderness.

The oak thicket shook like a man with the ague. Caudell grinned savagely—the Yankees’ cover from the side couldn’t have been as good as it was from his direction. Four bluecoats ran for a stand of cedars. The private next to Caudell shot one of them. He went down in a thrashing heap, screaming and cursing at the same time. Dust puffed from the back of another Federal’s jacket as one of the flankers scored a hit. That Yankee pitched forward onto his face and did not move again.

The other two cavalrymen stopped in their tracks. They threw down their carbines, thrust their hands into the air. “You got us, goddammit!” one of them shouted.

The private flicked a glance at Caudell. He nodded; he had no stomach for butchery. Cautiously, he made his way through the brush to the Federals. “Throw down your cartridge boxes and your mess bags,” he told them. “Then pick up the wounded fellow there and head west. I reckon someone will take charge of you sooner or later.”

“Thank you, Johnny Reb,” one of the men in blue said as he shed ammunition and rations. He stooped beside his injured comrade. “Come on, Pete, we’re going to pick you up now. It’ll be all right.”

“The hell it will,” Pete gasped out between clenched teeth. He gasped again when the two unhurt cavalrymen hauled him to his feet and supported him between themselves. Seeing Caudell, he fixed him with a baleful stare and growled, ‘“‘Where’d you bastards come by all these repeaters? I ain’t been shot at so much in the last two years put together, and now one of you had to go and nail me.”

“Don’t anger him up, Pete,” the cavalryman who had spoken before said. But his gaze kept flicking to Caudell’s AK-47, too. “What kind of rifle is that, anyway, Johnny?”

“Never you mind.” Caudell gestured with the barrel of the repeater. “Just get going.” As the dispirited Federals obeyed, he scooped up their haversacks. He handed one of them to the private who had fought beside him. Both men grinned. “Good eating,” Caudell said; even with the Rivington men’s desiccated meals, belts had been tight all winter.

“Coffee and sugar too, likely,” the private said dreamily. Not far away, a Spencer spoke. The private and Caudell dove for cover. A bullet could end all dreams in a hurry, or turn them to nightmares.

Caudell kept moving east, now quickly, now slowly. The Federal cavalrymen put up a stubborn fight, but more and more Confederates were coming into line against them. Caudell spotted men he did not recognize. “What regiment?” he called to them.

“Forty-Fourth North Carolina,” one of them answered. “Who are you all?”

“Forty-Seventh.”

“Let’s go, Forty-Seventh!” A rebel yell ripped the air. “Let’s flank these bluebellies out of their shoes again.”

They drove the Federals past Parker’s Store and the handful of houses that huddled in the clearing with it. The open space gave the Confederates a chance to dress their lines a little; victory had left them about as disorganized as defeat had the Yankees. Caudell almost stumbled over Captain Lewis. “What are we aiming to do now, sir?” he asked.

Lewis pointed east.” About three miles from here, I hear tell, the Orange Plank Road crosses the Brock Road. We want to grab that crossing. If we can do it, we cut the Yankees in half.”

“Three miles?” Caudell gauged the sun, and was surprised to find how early it still was. “We can be there before noon.”

“The sooner, the better,” Lewis said.

Along with as many of the Castalia Invincibles as had reassembled around Parker’s Store, Caudell plunged into the woods again. As he scrambled along, he munched on a hardtack from the Yankee cavalryman’s haversack. The square, flat biscuit lived up to its name by the way it challenged his teeth. He choked it down, swigged from his canteen, and pushed on.

The Wilderness was like no battlefield on which he’d ever fought. At Gettysburg, the whole panorama of war had spread out before him. When the 47th North Carolina joined in the great charge against the center of the Federal position, Caudell had seen every rifle, every artillery piece that slaughtered his companions. Here, he could not even see more than a handful of those companions, let alone the Yankees they were doing their best to slay. All he knew was that the Confederates were still rolling east, which meant they were driving back the enemy.

By twos and threes, the Confederates dashed across a narrow roadway. Yankee bullets from the other side kicked up dust around their feet and knocked down more than one man, but before long the dismounted cavalry had to retreat again—they were not only outnumbered but outgunned. Caudell wondered if this was the Brock Road of which Captain Lewis had spoken. He didn’t think he’d come three miles since Parker’s Store, but in the tangle he couldn’t be sure.

Evidently the Brock Road lay further on—he heard an officer yelling, “Come on, men, keep it moving! Give those damnyankees hell!” More rebel yells rang out. Caudell did his best to keep it moving. He reached up to settle his hat more firmly on his head, only to discover he’d lost it to a grasping branch or bush without ever noticing.

Somewhere to the north, he could hear a great crash of gunfire. Ewell’s II Corps and the Federals were tearing at each other along the Orange Turnpike, then. He took a moment to wish his fellows well. A bullet crashed past his head and made him pay full attention to his own battle.

Cheers came from just ahead. Caudell wondered why; the fight seemed no different now from what it had been all along—confusing, exhilarating, and terrifying at the same time. Then, without warning, he found himself out of the underbrush and standing in the middle of a dirt road which had recently seen heavy traffic, a dirt road that, by the sun, ran north instead of east.

“It’s the Brock Road!” a first lieutenant from some other regiment bawled in his ear. “We done beat the Federals to the crossroads and trapped the ones who’ve already gone by.”

For a moment, that made Caudell want to yell, too. But when he said, “Holy Jesus,” it came out in a whisper. He turned to the lieutenant. “Does that mean they’ll be coming at us from north and south at the same time?” The lieutenant’s eyes got wide. He nodded. Now Caudell shouted, as loud as he could: “Let’s get some branches, stumps, rocks, whatever the hell, onto this road. We’ve got lots of Yankees heading this way, and we’d better have something to shoot from.”

The Confederates worked like men possessed. Attacking the Federals’ fixed positions at Gettysburg had taught them the value of field fortifications, no matter how quickly improvised. Caudell dragged fallen logs across the roadway to help seal it off. On the other side of the junction with the Orange Plank Road, more soldiers ran up breastworks facing south. Still others started building barricades along the Orange Plank Road east from the Brock Road.

The first lieutenant seemed to be the highest-ranking officer around. “Run ‘em back west, too,” he said. “If the Yankees can’t go through us, they’ll try to go around. They have to reconnect, or we chew ‘em up in detail.” He grabbed two men by their jackets. “Go back and tell ‘em to fetch us all the cartridges they can. We’re going to need ‘em.”

The privates sprinted off. In a way, Caudell envied them. He’d already seen his share of fighting this morning. If he stayed here, he would see a lot more than his share. He hunkered down behind the thickest log he could find and settled himself to wait.

He did not wait long. A party of Yankee horsemen came trotting down the Brock Road toward the breastworks. They pulled up in obvious dismay as soon as they saw them.

The first lieutenant whooped. “Too late, Yankees! Too late!”

The horsemen—officers, some of them, by their fancy trappings—rode forward again, more slowly now, to see just what sort of barrier the Confederates had built and how many of them crouched behind it. Caudell took careful aim at the lead man, whose gray hair said he might be of high rank. The range was long, close to a quarter mile, but worth a try. He rested the barrel of the rifle on the log in front of him, took a deep breath, let it out, pulled the trigger.

The Yankee tilted in the saddle, as if he’d had too much to drink before he mounted. He slid off his horse and crashed to the dirt of the Brock Road. “Good shot!” shouted one of the men by Caudell. He and several others started firing at the men who had leaped down to help their stricken comrade. The Federals heaved him over the back of the horse. They all galloped away, though a couple of them reeled as if they were hit.

“Skirmishers forward!” the lieutenant said. “There’ll be more where those came from.”

Men hurried up the road and north through the woods. An ammunition wagon reached the crossroads. Its horses were lathered and blowing. Caudell and several other soldiers helped the driver unload crate after crate of cartridges. The wagon also carried hatchets and shovels. The driver passed those out, too, so the men could strengthen the breastworks in whatever time was left before the enemy descended on them.

A corporal pried the lid off an ammunition crate. He started to reach down for a handful of cartridges, stopped and stared in disbelieving disgust. “What the hell goddam bucket-headed jackass sent us up a load of Minié balls?” The whole crate was full of paper cartridges for the rifle muskets the Army of Northern Virginia no longer carried.

By the howls of rage that rose from several other soldiers, they’d made the same unwelcome discovery. Caudell ground his teeth in fear and fury. A big part of the Army of the Potomac was bearing down on him. He and his comrades would need every possible round, and here were boxes and boxes of cartridges they couldn’t use. “I just brung ‘em up here,” the wagon driver protested when the angry Confederates rounded on him. “I didn’t load ‘em in.”

A few hundred yards to the north, the skirmishers began a brisk fire. A couple of them let go on full automatic. Caudell scowled and worked his jaws harder. Either they were overeager or a whole lot of Yankees were on the way, all packed together. He suspected he knew which.

“Here’s the right ones!” somebody shouted, his voice rising in relief. Caudell hurried over, grabbed a couple of magazines, and stuffed them into his pockets. The firing was getting closer in a hurry, not just AK-47s but also the familiar deep roar of Springfields. Under the gunfire came the tramp of marching men.

The Confederate skirmishers dashed back toward the breastworks. Some turned to fire last shots. Others just scrambled over the barricade or off into the concealing woods.

“Yankees!” The shout came from a dozen throats at once, Caudell’s among them. A thick blue column appeared on the Brock Road, a sword-swinging officer at its head. He pointed his sword at the Confederates’ makeshift works. The Northern men, their bayonets gleaming even in the uncertain light, upped their pace to double-quick. They cheered as they charged, not the wild rebel yell but a more studied, rhythmic “Hurrah! Hurrah!”

Caudell thumbed his change lever to full automatic. His rifle spat flame. He used up what was left of his first banana clip in the twinkling of an eye. He rammed in another, fired it off at full automatic, too. He knew he would never find a better, more massed target.

When, a few seconds later, the second magazine was also gone, he stuck on a third banana clip and glanced down to switch the change lever back to single shots. He looked up over his sights at the head of the oncoming Federal column. The lead ranks were all down, some writhing, some still and obviously dead—he was far from the only rebel to have hosed the Yankees with a stream of thirty bullets, or more than one.

The Northern officer, incredibly, still stood, still waved his men on. Even as Caudell took aim at him, he spun backwards and fell, clutching at his right side. But the Federals, stumbling over the wounded and slain men in front of them, advanced without him. Through the unending rattle of gunfire came a bugle’s high, thin cry, urging them forward.

The bluecoats in the lead fired at the Confederates who were slaughtering them. Two men over from Caudell, a rebel sagged to the dirt, the back of his head blown out. One or two others at the breastwork screamed as they were hit. But then the Yankees had either to stop and reload or keep on charging and trust they would live long enough to use bayonets or clubbed rifles.

Even against a firing line of single-shot Springfields, both choices would have been evil. Caudell had not been at the battle of Fredericksburg, where Lee’s men on Marye’s Heights smashed wave after wave of attacking Yankees; the 47th North Carolina had not yet joined the Army of Northern Virginia, but was further south in that state, on provost guard duty at Petersburg. Now, though, he knew what the defenders must have felt then, with men too brave to run away coming at them again and again, rushing headlong toward annihilation.

The Federals on the Brock Road were brave men too, as brave as any Caudell had ever seen. They kept trying to rush the long barricade. None of them got within a hundred yards of it; no man in the open roadway could push farther than that in the face of the withering fire the Confederate repeaters put out. Wounded soldiers reached out and grabbed at the legs of men pushing past, trying to hold them back from the deadly stutter of the AK-47s. But the fresh troops shook off those hands and advanced—until they were wounded or killed themselves.

At last even their courage could bear no more. The Federals stopped hurrying forward into the meat grinder. Even then, they did not break and run. They ducked into the woods and huddled behind the dead bodies of their mates and kept up as strong a fire as they could.

Off the Brock Road to either side, the crackle of rifle muskets crept closer to the Orange Plank Road. Caudell gnawed nervously on his lip. The Yankees had cover in the thickets and tangles of the Wilderness. That let their numbers count for more against the repeaters than was possible on the road itself. If they forced their way around the crossroads, they might yet link up with the corps trapped to the south.

A whistling through the air, a crash—Caudell threw himself flat, all strategic considerations driven from his mind by pure and simple terror. The Wilderness was such a jungle that artillery could find few jobs. Firing straight down the Brock Road at the Confederate breastwork, unfortunately, was one of them.

The first shell landed short. A moment later, another one screamed overhead, to detonate about fifty yards beyond the barricade. Caudell’s belly turned to ice. Split the difference between the two of them and…He’d been shelled at Gettysburg. He knew only too well what came after “and.” The Federals started their hurrah again.

But the third shell was also safely long. If the Yankees had set up two guns in the roadway, perhaps the first one’s crew had overcorrected. That kind of luck, though, could not last long.

It did not have to. Off to the left rose a great racket of AK-47 fire and rebel yells. The Northern hurrahs turned to shouts of dismay. Yankees began bursting out of the bushes and dashing across the Brock Road from west to east. For a moment, Caudell was too bemused even to shoot at them.

The first lieutenant, who still seemed to be the ranking officer at the crossroads, let out a whoop. “Here comes the rest of the corps, by God!”

Caudell whooped, too. If the Federals had formed their line in the woods to try to force the Confederates off the Orange Plank Road, then the rebels advancing from the west toward the junction with the Brock Road would have been ideally placed to take them in flank and roll them up—and, incidentally, to reach the Brock Road and drive away those field guns or put their crews out of action. Caudell had no idea which had happened. He did know no more shells landed close by, for which he was heartily glad.

Not all the Yankees had been smashed; firing continued in the woods as knots of soldiers refused to give ground. On a more open battlefield, that would have been impossible; in the Wilderness’s thickets and tangles and clumps of bushes, men could find places to make a stand even after their comrades had given way. But the Confederates had gained a long stretch of the Brock Road.

Caudell sniffed. Along with the familiar tang of black-powder smoke and the sharper, thinner odor of the nonsmoking powder in AK-47 cartridges, he smelled burning weeds. All that shooting in the undergrowth had set the Wilderness ablaze. He shuddered at the thought of wounded and helpless men in there, watching the little flames lick closer…

The jingle of horses’ trappings released him from his unpleasant reverie. He glanced back over his shoulder. Where the lowly lieutenant had led the Confederates through the heavy fighting at the crossroads, now Generals Kirkland and Heth were here to see how things stood. That was the way the world worked, Caudell thought.

“How clean the men look,” William Kirkland said, a remark seldom made about the Army of Northern Virginia, especially after some hours of combat.

Henry Heth, quicker on the uptake, figured out why: “They haven’t been biting cartridges all day, not with these new brass ones, so they’ve no need to look as though they were in a blackface minstrel show.”

“That’s true, by God,” Kirkland said. “I hadn’t thought about it.” Caudell hadn’t thought about it, either. After his struggle through the forest, he suspected he was quite grimy enough for any ordinary purpose.

He used the lull in the fighting to take some cartridges out of his pockets and refill the banana clips he’d emptied. Another horse came clopping down the Orange Plank Road, a dark-maned gray—Where Caudell had sat and tended to his business in the presence of his brigade and division commanders, he scrambled to his feet for General Lee. So did most of the other soldiers close by.

“As you were, gentlemen, please.” Lee peered north up the Brock Road toward the blue-clad bodies that corduroyed it like so many planks. “Those people are paying dearly for every acre of Wilderness they hold,” he remarked as he turned to look south. “Henry, push such forces as you can spare down along this road, if you please. General Hancock will be along shortly, unless I miss my guess.”

“Yes, General Lee,” Heth said. “We might have been in a bad way if he’d hit us from the south at the same time as Getty was coming down from the north.”

“So we might have,” Lee said, “but however brave its men may be, coordination of attacks has never been the Army of the Potomac’s strong suit.”

A good thing, too, Caudell thought. A dispatch rider galloped up to Lee. He held reins in one hand, an AK-47 in the other, and his message between his teeth. Lee read it, nodded, and rode off with him.

After reloading, Caudell lit up a cigar. He’d only taken a couple of drags on it when General Heth said, “I expect you heard what General Lee wants, boys. The sooner we get moving, the farther south we’ll get, and the better the works we’ll be able to set up before Hancock’s men hit us.”

The Confederates at the crossroads would have obeyed some commanders only slowly and reluctantly; they’d already seen their share and more of hard fighting for the day. But Heth and Kirkland and their staff officers rode down the road in front of the infantry, as if the idea that danger might lie ahead had never entered their minds. With that example before them, the foot soldiers followed readily enough. Fresh troops coming up the Orange Plank Road took their places at the breastwork they’d built.

A little more than a quarter of a mile south of the crossroads, the Brock Road narrowed and bent slightly to the east. Heth reined in. “This looks to be a good spot, boys,” he said. “We’ll stop ‘em right here.”

The soldiers attacked the timber on either side of the road for the field fortifications, mixed earth and stones in with the logs. Off in the woods, Caudell heard men making even ruder works to protect themselves from Yankee bullets.

Just as the skirmishers Heth had pushed out south of his main line began to fire, a couple of ammunition wagons brought fresh cartridges down the road. “Better not be them goddam Minié balls,” several soldiers growled, using almost identical words. This time, they weren’t. Caudell filled his pockets again, crouched behind the breastwork, and waited.

More and more single shots from Yankee Springfields mingled with the bark of the skirmishers’ repeaters. The skirmishers crashed back through the undergrowth to Heth’s main line. “We stung ‘em,” one called, off in the woods.

Federal skirmishers came first, trotting up the Brock Road to learn what lay ahead for their comrades. They stopped short when they spied the rebel breastwork that barred their path. One of the bluecoats raised his rifle musket to his shoulder, fired. The bullet kicked up dust a few yards short of the barricade. The Yankee dove into the bushes to reload. His companions turned and ran south to report what they’d seen.

A minute or so later, the head of the main Federal line came into view. Caudell’s stomach churned. Lee might remark that the Yankees had trouble putting their attacks together, but every one they made was fierce. “Fire at will!” a Confederate officer shouted.

“Which one’s Will?” some army wit shouted back. That stupid joke got made on every firing line, Yankee or rebel. Somehow it helped Caudell relax.

The front rank of Federals suddenly dropped to one knee. The second rank took aim over their heads. A couple of Yankees fell over or reeled back out of line—the Confederates had already begun to shoot: But then the Northerners’ muskets, all in a row, belched flame and great curls of greasy black smoke.

Caudell thought the rebel beside him at the breastwork had tapped him on the left shoulder. He automatically glanced down. Neat as a tailor’s scissors, a bullet had clipped his uniform without touching him. He shuddered. He could not help it. Lower by only a couple of fingers’ breadth, and his precious arm would have ended up on the slaughterhouse pile outside a surgeon’s tent…if he’d managed to make it back to a surgeon’s tent at all.

The fellow beside him, who he thought had tapped him, would never need a surgeon again. A Minié ball had clipped him, and clipped off the top of his head. Blood and shattered brains poured from the wound as he slowly toppled over backwards.

Caudell looked away, tried not to hear the cries of other men who had been wounded close by. Gettysburg had hardened him to horror. And if he did not help slay the Yankees rushing up the Brock Road toward the barricade behind which he crouched, he and all his fellows, hale and wounded alike, would surely perish.

The Yankees were reloading as they ran; most of them had to stop to use their ramrods. Caudell and everyone else on the breastwork who could still handle a rifle fired again and again and again. Men in blue coats began to drop and kept on falling, faster and faster. A few managed to fire again, but only a few. After that. first volley, the rebels had it all their own way.

Miraculously, every bullet missed one Federal corporal. His face set and grim, he charged on alone toward the breastwork. “Don’t kill him!”—call ran up and down the line. The Confederates could still admire gallantry, even in a foe.

Firing slackened for a moment. “Go back, you damned fool!” Caudell shouted to the Yankee. “Look behind you!”

The corporal’s double-quick faltered as the words reached him. Caudell could see him leave the exalted state in which he’d rushed toward certain death. He knew that state himself; it was all that had sustained him as he advanced on the Union guns up in Pennsylvania. Its ebbing came hard, hard. When it left a man, he felt more drained than after a week of forced marches, and rightly so for with it, he lost spirit as well as strength.

The Federal did look around. His shoulders sagged as he took in the carnage on the Brock Road, the ruin of his regiment. Some of his comrades were crawling or creeping or dragging themselves away from the dreadful fire of the Confederate repeaters. Others would not move again until the Last Trump sounded.

The corporal slowly turned back toward the barricade. “You rebs don’t fight fair!” he shouted. Now his exaltation was gone, leaving only (ear behind. He fled into a pine thicket off to one side of the road.

He was none too soon, for more Federals tramped up the Brock Road a few minutes later. The crossfire would have chewed him to pieces. The bluecoats came to a ragged halt when they saw what had happened to the first attacking party, but then moved ahead all the same. The South had gone into the war doubting Yankee courage. After three years of fighting, few in the Army of Northern Virginia doubted it anymore.

This group of Union men attacked more cleverly than had the previous one. Instead of forming a neat firing line—and a target that could not be missed—they advanced in rushes, a few men pausing to shoot while others moved up, then the men who had gained ground ducking into the bushes and providing covering fire for their companions to push ahead.

Caudell shot, missed, shot again, missed again. A Minié ball buzzed past his head. He involuntarily ducked—only men with no nerves whatever could keep from dodging when bullets zipped by. He fired again, at a Yankee less than two hundred yards away. The fellow threw down his Springfield and grabbed at his shoulder. He lurched away from the front line of fighting. A lot of Confederates were behind the breastwork. Even though Caudell had aimed at the Northerner, he couldn’t be sure his was the round that had wounded him.

No matter how cleverly, no matter how boldly they attacked the rebel barricade, the Federals on the Brock Road could not drive the defenders from it. The fire from the Confederates, repeaters swept the roadway clean of life. Men fell, killed or wounded, but more replaced them. Teamsters and other soldiers fetched crates of cartridges to the breastwork. Ironic cheers rang out every time the crates proved to contain the proper ammunition. Once or twice they didn’t, and the cartridge-bearers retreated, scorched by curses from the fighting men.

In the Wilderness proper, especially east of the Brock Road, the Federals were able to come to closer quarters with their foes. Their hurrahs and the boom of their Springfields crept ever nearer the line the Confederates held south of the Orange Plank Road.

Off to the north, a huge racket of riflery and cannons broke out. Lee had said the Federals had trouble putting their attacks together. They’d managed now. Had they done it sooner, the rebel lines between them would have been thin. The Confederates had won a critical couple of hours to bring more men forward and widen the stretch they held along either side of the Orange Plank Road. The Yankees were hitting them with everything they had now. They had more men. The Confederates had better rifles. Caudell hoped that would do the job.

Between assaults up the roadway, he filled banana clips, chewed on corn bread and salt pork, and drank from his canteen. The water was warm and turbid. It went down like champagne even so. He and his companions smoked and listened to the gunfire all around and tried to guess how the fighting was going away from their little piece of it.

“I think we got ‘em,” a beardless soldier declared.

“Didn’t notice you come up, uh, Melvin,” Caudell said. “Hope you’re right, but I wouldn’t bet on anything yet. They’re putting a lot of their people into the fight this time. We’re holding so far, but—”

Mollie Bean interrupted him: “Holy Jesus.” She was looking over the breastwork; Caudell sprawled with his back against it. He whirled around. The Federals had given up on subtlety. A deep column of bluecoats, their bayonets fixed, stormed up the Brock Road at the double-quick. Officers trotted ahead of them, urging them on.

“All or nothin’ this time, boys,” somebody not far from Caudell said. “Them bluebellies is gonna run over us or die tryin’.”

Caudell vastly preferred the second alternative. He aimed at a color-bearer in front of the first rank. As soon as the advancing Yankees reached the first men lying in the road—some of the wounded, as before to the north, tried to hold their fellows back, but others cheered them on—he started shooting. He did not know if his bullet struck home, but the color-bearer stumbled and fell. Another Yankee caught the regimental flag before it touched the ground, bore it forward a dozen paces more before he, too, was hit. Yet another Federal grabbed it and carried it on. Three more fell before the banner drew close enough for Caudell to read it: SIXTEENTH MASSACHUSETTS. Then still another color-bearer went down and the banner fell in the dust. No one picked it up.

No one was left to pick it up. Like the corporal before him, that last brave and lucky—at least lucky up to a point—color-bearer pushed far beyond his comrades. The Southerners’ repeaters had worked a fearful slaughter. There was a limit beyond which flesh and blood could not be made to go. Caudell had met that limit on the third day at Gettysburg. Now he and the soldiers crouching to either side of him acquainted the Federals with it.

But another regiment came in right behind the slaughtered Sixteenth Massachusetts. The Federals leaned forward as they advanced, as if moving into a heavy rain. So they were, but the rain was of lead.

“This ain’t war!” Mollie Bean yelled in Caudell’s ear. “This here’s murder.”

“I reckon you’re right.” he answered, “but if we don’t keep shooting them, they’ll surely shoot us.” She kept firing, so he supposed she agreed with him.

After that second Federal regiment wrecked itself assaulting the barricade, the rebels behind it had another brief respite. They used it to strengthen their protection. “If the Yankees are pushing this hard, they’ll try us again before long,” Caudell said as he set another log in place. By the way the rest of the soldiers worked alongside him, they thought as he did. More ammunition came up. He filled his pockets again. He wondered how many rounds he’d fired. He’d lost track. Far more than on any day with his old Enfield, he was certain. So had everyone else here. The drifts of Yankee corpses in front of the barricade, sometimes two and three men high, testified to that.

While he worked, Caudell kept an ear cocked to try to gauge how the rest of the battle was going. To the north, Federals and rebels still went at it hammer and tongs; by the sound of things, the line hadn’t moved there, which was all to the good as far as he was concerned. The Yankees also kept trying to break through east of the Brock Road. A sudden flurry of hurrahs said they were close to doing it, too. Rebel yells and the wild snarl of AK-47s fired on full automatic answered them. The hurrahs ebbed.

“Knocked ‘em back,” Caudell guessed.

“They just keep comin’,” a soldier said. “Dang fools don’t know when they’s licked.” Remembering Pickett’s charge, Caudell thought that a failing of which both sides were guilty. Just then, the soldier dropped the fence rail he was carrying and snatched up his repeater. “Oh, sweet Jesus, here they is again.”

The new Federal attacking column marched up the Brock Road in perfect order, fining the roadway from edge to edge, each bluecoat a regulation thirteen inches from the man on either side of him. The Yankees hesitated when they saw ahead of them the ruins of the two regiments that had gone in before them; a few men in the first ranks took half steps instead of fun marching paces. But shouts and curses from officers and sergeants quickly got their lines dressed once more, and they bore down on the breastwork with a hurrah.

The Confederates broke them. Mollie Bean had the right of it, Caudell thought as he fired again and again—using repeaters against such a bunched target was murder. But he had been right, too, for it was necessary murder if he was to live himself. The Northerners went down like ninepins. But more and more pushed forward to take their places until, at last, they would advance into the face of death no more, but turned and ran for the rear.

Caudell and his companions on the firing line raised a tired cheer to see them go. Dead and wounded men were thick on the ground behind the barricade, too, even if the Yankees had never come close to reaching it. The soldiers gave what rough first aid they could, and sent to the rear men who could walk. Hospital stewards, some wearing green sashes as their Federal counterparts did, came forward to haul off on stretchers men too badly hurt to travel on their own.

A small brushfire reached the roadway a couple of hundred yards south of the breastwork. It caught in the clothes of a Federal lying there. A few seconds later, his cartridges began exploding, pop-pop-pop, almost as if they were kernels from an ear of popping corn. Wounded men writhed frantically, trying to escape the flames.

Several Confederates started to scramble over their piled logs and rails and stones to go to rescue the Yankees from the fire. But they scrambled back a moment later, for yet another regiment of Federals appeared, battle flags flying, to hurl their bodies at the barricade.

Caudell’s repeater was hot in his hands. He’d been shooting at bluecoats the whole day long—forever, it seemed. He glanced through leaves and drifting smoke at the sun. It was getting low in the west. Before too long, night would halt combat if nothing else did.

After three regiments had tried the barricade and failed, the Brock Road in front of it was clogged with bodies. More than one shot had come from behind them, as lightly wounded men used their comrades’ corpses as barricades of their own. Now dead and wounded alike broke up the neat ranks of the oncoming Federals. They came on all the same. Caudell and his fellows began the grisly task of educating them about what repeaters could do.

The Federals had sufficient horrid examples right before their eyes. They did not rush with the same élan their predecessors had shown. When men at the head of the column began dropping, the bluecoats behind them hesitated. Through the cries of the wounded, Caudell heard officers screaming at their men, trying to get them to advance in spite of the scourging fire that lay ahead.

Then, drowning cries and screams alike, a great new eruption of gunfire broke out to the south. The Federals on the Brock Road looked back over their shoulders in surprise and alarm. Even their officers stopped urging them forward for a moment.

Caudell frowned. As he tiredly wondered what the new fighting was about, Mollie Bean pounded him on the shoulder and yelled, “Longstreet!”

“Longstreet.” He said the name once with no particular feeling. Then the lightning flashed inside his head. He yelled too; “Longstreet!” If Lee’s war horse had pitched into this Federal corps from —the south while A.P. Hill kept it from going north, the Yankees hereabouts were in more trouble than you could shake a stick at.

They knew it, too. They milled about, just out of good shooting range. But then they came on once more. Now the officers had no trouble with balky men. They knew they had to break through if their corps was to survive.

“Fire low!” Caudell shouted as the blue wave again surged toward the breastwork that dammed its progress. As the Confederates had three times before, they shredded the charge. No Yankee could come within fifty yards of that rude wall and live. The captains and lieutenants who headed the rush fell bravely, leading their men. Like most troops on both sides in the war, the common soldiers took heart from the example their officers set. Without that example, most of those who could made for the rear and at least temporary safety.

A couple of bluecoats stood where they were, their empty hands high in the air. “Don’t shoot, you rebs!” one of them shouted, his northern accent sharp in Caudell’s ears. “You done caught us.”

Caudell looked around. “Where’s that lieutenant?” he asked, seeing no one of higher rank than himself.

“He got shot,” Mollie Bean answered laconically.

“Oh.” Without showing more of himself than his head, Caudell called to the Federals, “Come ahead, Yanks. Make it pert, though—if we have to start shooting again, you all will be right in the middle.”

The Northern men sprinted toward the barricade. More shouted directions from Caudell took them out of the roadway and through the edge of the Wilderness. Caudell listened to them scrabbling over the lower fieldworks there; they disappeared from sight until they came back out onto the Brock Road. The Confederates promptly relieved them of their haversacks and whatever money they had on them. “Shoes, too, Yanks,” a barefoot private said. “One of you might could be my size, and if you ain’t, I’ll wear one pair anyways and pass the other on to somebody else.”

The prisoners did not protest.” You just take what you want, rebs,” one of them said as he pulled off his stout marching shoes. “I’m so glad you’re not shooting at me anymore, I don’t care about anything else. The way the bullets came at us, I figured you had a million men back here, maybe two.”

The Confederates grinned at that. Caudell sent the two Federals to the rear. He stayed by the barricade, waiting to see if the Union men would mount yet another attack. The firing to the south was coming closer—that had to mean Longstreet was doing well. The firing to the north grew louder, too, or rather deeper; more artillery was mixing with the rifles there.

The sun sank, a blood-red ball looking down on blood through tangled branches and curls of smoke from gunpowder and brushfires. The fifth Yankee attack had not come. As darkness gathered, the sound of fighting to north and south began to slacken. It also eased in the woods east of the Brock Road, though it never died away altogether, and would flare up every so often in a brief spasm of ferocity.

Caudell looked up and down the breastwork. But for Mollie Bean, he saw no one he recognized. Any battle was liable to tear up a neat line of march; battle in country like the Wilderness made such disorder a sure thing. He asked, “Melvin, do you know where the rest of the boys from the 47th are?”

Mollie pointed east.” Some of’ em’s over in the thickets yonder, maybe half a mile. I was with ‘em for a while. Then I heard all the shootin’ over here and figgered I’d come lend a hand.”

“Things are dying down for the night, seems like,” Caudell said. “Let’s see if we can’t bed down with our regiment.” She nodded, and followed him as he headed into the undergrowth. Pushing through the rank second growth of the Wilderness was even worse in the evening twilight than it had been during the day. A red Indian would have laughed himself sick at Caudell’s noisy, stumbling fight with thorn bushes and cedar saplings.

“Who’s there?” a nervous voice called from up ahead.

“Two men from the 47th North Carolina,” Caudell answered quickly, before the nervous owner of that nervous voice started shooting. Behind him, Mollie Bean chuckled softly. He ignored her; he had to think of her as a soldier now, not a woman. He called back, “Who are you?”

“Fifteenth North Carolina—Cooke’s brigade,” the still invisible fellow answered. He sounded less nervous now. “Y’all are out o’ Kirkland’s brigade, right?”

“That’s us,” Caudell agreed gratefully. At least he was talking with someone from his own division.

“Keep goin’ east. You’ll find ‘em.”

Caudell kept going east. He never did see the man who’d given him directions. He and Mollie were challenged twice more in short order. He also challenged a couple of small groups of men himself: soldiers heading west, looking for their regiments. He was certain what they were before he opened his mouth. He challenged anyhow. In the Wilderness, certainty meant little.

That half mile took close to half an hour to cover. Then, to his disgust, Caudell learned he’d somehow gone right past his regiment and had to double back. Had Mollie scolded him for that, he would have sworn at her. But she said only, “The goin’s rough hereabouts, Nate.” Nodding a grateful nod she probably couldn’t see, he pushed on.

He stumbled into a tiny clearing. Some soldiers were sitting around a campfire. One of them looked up. It was Dempsey Eure. “I will be damned,” he said. “We reckoned you was buzzards’ meat, Nate.”

“I thought so myself, a couple of times.” Caudell sank to the ground, footsore and weary. “You even managed to hang on to your plumed hat, Dempsey. I lost mine straight off.”

“Wouldn’t lose this beauty, Nate.” Eure doffed it to Mollie. “Glad we didn’t lose that there little beauty, either.”

“You shut up, Dempsey, you hear?” she said. “Don’t want no officers catchin’ the wind from your big flappin’ mouth.”

“Sorry, uh, Melvin,” Eure said contritely.

“Any water close by?” Caudell asked, shaking his empty canteen. “I’m bone dry.”

Eure jerked his thumb to the north. “There’s a little creek down that way, couple minutes’ walk.”

Hoping the couple of minutes would not stretch as the trip to find his regiment had, Caudell went off to look for the creek and to answer a call of nature which Mollie Bean’s presence had forced him to suppress until now. Such modesty was a foolish thing, but it was his own; he sighed with relief as he unbuttoned his trousers.

He found the water by stepping into it. He took off his shoes and bathed his tired feet before he filled the canteen. Once he’d drunk, he felt better. He knew his comrades were only a few yards away, knew tens of thousands of Federals and Confederates were within a few miles, but for all he could see of them, he might as well have been alone in the Wilderness.

His ears told him otherwise. In spite of full darkness, firing went on between rival pickets. But the cries of the wounded were worse. In the tangle through which both armies had pushed their lines, a hurt man had a hard time getting to the rear, nor could his mates easily rescue him—or sometimes even find him. Wails, shrieks, moans turned the thickets to the haunt of tormented ghosts. Most of the sounds of pain came from the south, which meant they rose from Yankee throats. But Confederates also shouted out their hurt to the world.

Caudell shivered as he made his way back to the clearing, though the night was warm. What, save luck, had kept his tender flesh, rather than someone else’s, from pouring out its blood in the unwelcome track of a bullet? Nothing of which he was aware. He patted himself, as if to prove he was still whole and unholed. How marvelous that each hand grasped, that each foot moved confidently in front of the other!

Once sitting again by the fire, he shared some of his food and the spoil from captured Yankee war bags with men who’d already gobbled the rations they were supposed to carry. A couple of soldiers went to sleep, their hats either over their eyes or under their heads as pillows. More, though, stayed up awhile to smoke and to hash over the battle and try to draw a bigger picture from the tiny pieces they’d seen.

Plainly, Lee had trapped a big chunk of the Federal army between Hill’s corps and Longstreet’s.’ Mollie Bean said, “Reckon we’ll go on and try poundin ‘em to pieces come mornin’.”

“That’s clear enough,” Otis Massey agreed. The corporal patted the AK-47 that lay on the ground beside him. “With these repeaters, might could be we’ll even do it, too. Be a nasty butcher’s bill to pay for certain if we was usin’ muzzle-loaders instead.”

“You’ve got that right, Otis,” Caudell said as a general murmur of agreement rose from the soldiers.” A Yankee said we weren’t fighting fair.”

Dempsey Eure spat into the fire. “Fair didn’t stop their cavalry from usin’ their repeaters against single-shot muskets. Now they see what the shoe’s like on t’other foot.”

Talk about repeaters reminded Caudell he hadn’t yet cleaned his. With more fighting ahead tomorrow, he wanted the rifle as ready as he could make it. He stripped the AK-47 and dug out a rag and the gun oil that had come with the weapon. The little black oil bottle said Break Free CLP. The sweet, almost fruity, smell of the oil mixed with the odors of coffee, food, and woodsmoke.

He was in the middle of putting the repeater back together when someone came crashing through the brush toward the clearing. Mollie Bean and a couple of other privates reached for their rifles, in case it was a Yankee who needed capturing. But it wasn’t a Yankee—it was Colonel Faribault.

“Turn those aside, boys, if you please,” he said when he saw he was looking down the barrels of several repeaters. “However much I admire Stonewall Jackson’s memory, I have no desire to share his fate.” The rifles were hastily lowered. But for accidents like that which had befallen Jackson, only a bad officer risked bullets from his own men. Faribault was a good one.

“What’s the word, Colonel?” Caudell asked.

“Tomorrow morning, five o’clock, we go after Winfield Scott Hancock again,” Faribault said. “God willing, we may put an end to the whole Federal II Corps. General Heth told General Lee we are driving them beautifully; I heard him say it myself.”

The men round the campfire grinned and nodded to one another, pleased at the news and, as common soldiers have a way of being, proud they’d already figured out what their officers had planned for them. Caudell said; “How are we doing up by the Orange Turnpike?”

“We pushed them hard there, too, all the way back to the Germanna Ford Road—they don’t care for our repeaters, not a bit of it,” Faribault answered, and a couple of soldiers yowled with glee. But the colonel held up a hand. “I think the Yankees have all the artillery in the world set up in the clearing around Wilderness Tavern. General Ewell tried mounting an assault on it, but the Federal guns knocked his men back into the woods.”

Soldiers’ talk is sometimes curiously bloodless. Caudell did not need any sanguinary speech to picture the storm of shells and cannon balls, case shot and grapeshot, that must have greeted the onrushing Confederates—or the torn and broken bodies that bombardment must have produced. He’d heard the big guns start to roar late in the afternoon. Now he knew why.

“What’re they going to do up there, Colonel?” Otis Massey asked.

“That I can’t tell you, Otis; for I don’t know,” Faribault said. “I shouldn’t worry, though; I expect General Lee will come up with something.”

“Reckon you’re right about that, Colonel,” Massey said. Caudell thought so, too. Lee had a way of coming up with something. The 47th North Carolina had joined the Army of Northern Virginia after Chancellorsville, but he knew how Lee had divided his outnumbered army and then divided it again, to fall on Joe Hooker’s flanks and drive him back over the Rapidan in dismay’ and defeat. Not even all the artillery in the world could long contain a man with the nerve to devise a scheme like that. Caudell was sure of it.

“Want to sleep here tonight, Colonel?” he asked. “It isn’t fancy hospitality, but it’s what we have!’

Faribault’s laugh sounded more tired than amused. “I thank you, First Sergeant, but I’ve a ways to go before I think of sleep. If I’m to lead the regiment tomorrow, tonight I must learn where this day’s fighting scattered the men and let them know what is required of them. Thus far I’ve found less than a quarter part. I expect I shall be busy well into the evening.”

“Yes, sir,” Caudell said. He expected that Faribault wouldn’t sleep at all tonight, not if he intended to track down the whole 47th in the jungle of the Wilderness. He also saw Faribault knew that. It was part of what went with being a colonel if one aimed to make a proper job of it, as Faribault plainly did.

“May we succeed tomorrow as we did today, and may God keep all of you safe, through the fighting to come,” Faribault said. He limped off into the woods. Before long, the occasional spatters of picket firing and the. never-ending groans from the wounded swallowed the sounds of his footsteps.

“He’s a good colonel,” Mollie Bean remarked.

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Caudell said as he clicked the receiver plate back into place on his rifle. “He sees to his men before he worries about himself.” He spoke as if he were giving a lesson back in the classroom; he wanted Otis Massey to listen to him. Though a corporal had fewer men in his charge than a colonel, he needed to look out for them, too. But if Massey was paying attention, he showed no sign of it.

Caudell’s sigh turned into a yawn. He undid his blanket roll, wrapped himself up, and fell asleep by the fire.

The long roll woke him early the next morning, or so he thought until he realized where he was. The rattle was not drumsticks on snares; it was gunfire, the reports bunched tighter together than the fastest drummer could hurry his sticks. The fighting had begun again, even if sunrise still lay ahead.

No time to boil water for a desiccated meal. Caudell choked down a couple of Yankee hardtack biscuits. He clicked off the AK-47’s safety, clicked again to fire single shots. The private who’d been on watch in the clearing woke the men too worn to rouse even for the racket of battle close by.

“We don’t have an officer with us,” Caudell said. That was nothing new; after the third day’s fighting at Gettysburg, three of the 47th’s ten companies had been commanded by sergeants. He went on, “Remember, though, the Yankees are likely in worse shape than we are, because we whipped their tails yesterday. Let’s go get ‘em.”

One by one, the Confederates climbed over the rude barricade of branches and earth and stones behind which they’d fought the day before. They spread out into a firing line, though not one of the parade-ground sort, not in half-light in rugged, overgrown country.

A rifle fired, not far ahead. It was a Springfield. Caudell burrowed deep into the brush he’d been cursing till that moment. He crawled forward. Twigs and thorns grabbed at his clothes like children’s hands.

The Springfield boomed again. He peered through bushes, waited. Something moved—something blue. He fired. An instant later, a bullet buzzed past his head, so close he felt the wind of its passage on his ear. It had not come from the man at whom he’d shot—a couple of Yankees were working an ambush, and he’d stumbled right into it.

He scuttled backwards toward a fallen log he’d seen a few yards away. Another bullet zipped by him before he got there, and no sooner had he taken cover than another flew by, just over his head. He buried his face in the musty dirt. A twig the last Minié ball had clipped fell on the back of his neck. It tickled. He did not brush it away.

After half a minute or so, he slid sideways toward the far end of the log. He still could not see the Federals who were shooting at him, but the smoke that lingered in the cool air under the trees told him where they might be. He fired several times in quick succession, blessing his repeater all the while. He didn’t know whether he’d scored any hits, but a thrashing in the bushes ahead said the Yankees were getting out of there.

Or he thought it said that. These Yankees were sneaky customers. He advanced with infinite caution. Only when he’d gone past the clump of oak saplings where they’d hidden did he dare believe he’d really driven them off.

He pushed farther south. Once or twice, Federals shot at him. He shot back. Again, he had no idea whether he hit anyone. That was hard enough to tell on a battlefield where the foe stood right in front of you. In the Wilderness, it was impossible.

He rejoined Otis Massey and several other soldiers with whom he’d spent the night. The firing ahead grew ever more intense. A few minutes later, he discovered why: the bluecoats were fighting from behind a breastwork of their own. Hereabouts, it stood at the far edge of a cleared space. Even with the AK-47 in his hands, his mouth went dry at the prospect of charging those blazing rifles.

“Form your line here in the woods, men,” an officer said. Most of the Confederates stayed low, on their knees or their bellies. The officer walked up and down as if on a Sunday promenade. Minié balls made branches dance all around him, but he affected not to notice them.

As he strode past the stump behind which Caudell crouched, the first sergeant recognized Captain John Thorp of Company A. Thorp was a slim, little fellow with nondescript features. He wore a thin line of mustache that tried to give him the air of a riverboat gambler but couldn’t quite bring it off. However he looked, though, his courage was beyond reproach.

“Make sure your banana clips are full, men,” he said, and paused to let the soldiers stuff in as many bullets as they could. “At my word, we’ll give them a good shout and go for their works. Ready?…Now!”

Yelling like fiends, the rebels burst from cover and dashed toward the barricade. Half—more than half—of Caudell’s yell was raw fear. He wondered if that was true of the men to either side of him, or if, like Thorp, they were immune to the disease. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than the private on his right spun sideways and crashed to the grass, blood spurting from his thigh.

Caudell squeezed the trigger again and again and again. His aim was poor, but he put a lot of bullets in the air. With the AK-47, he could shoot and move at the same time. No more stopping to reload under remorseless enemy fire, no more ramrod slipping through sweaty fingers, no more jabbing it against the ground or hitting it with a rock—if you could find a rock.

More Confederates fell, but so did Yankees in back of the breastwork. Just in front of Caudell, a bluecoat’s head exploded into red ruin. He yowled like a catamount and started scrambling over the logs.

A bayonet almost pinned his arm to the untrimmed branch he was holding. With a four-foot rifle and eighteen inches of steel on the end, the snarling Federal who stabbed at him had all the advantage in that kind of fight. The fellow raised his Springfield for another thrust. Caudell shot him at a range of perhaps a yard. The Federal folded up like a man punched in the belly. Unlike a man punched in the belly, he wouldn’t unfold later.

Then Caudell stood on the south side of the barricade, another Confederate beside him. One of them turned east, the other west. They both shot rapidly down the crumbling Yankee line—repeaters were made for enfilade fire; Federals went down one after another. More and more men in gray reached the breastwork.

Caudell suddenly realized the AK-47 wasn’t kicking against his shoulder. He threw himself flat while he clicked in a fresh clip. With his old Enfield, loading while prone had been next to impossible, leaving a man not only without a bullet but a perfect target for any foe who had one. Still prone, Caudell started firing again.

A few Yankees kept shooting back at the rebels. More fled into the woods, some with their rifles, some throwing them away to run the faster. More yet threw down Springfields but did not flee. They threw their hands into the air and shouted, “Don’t kill us, Johnny! We give up!”

Captain Thorp sent the bluecoats who had surrendered north over the barricade and into captivity.” Just keep your hands high, and you’ll be all right till someone takes charge of you,” he told them before giving his attention back to his own men. “Come on! We’ve broken them. One more good push and they’ll fall to bits.”

South and south again—Caudell’s clothes were tatters by afternoon, but he did not care. Thorp had been right: once the Yankees’ field fortifications cracked, some of the dogged fight went out of them at last. When repeater fire broke out near them, they started to yield instead. of shooting back. Or some of them did; here and there, stubborn bands of bluecoats gave no quarter and asked for none.

A bullet hissed malignantly past Caudell. He dove for cover. Bullets whistled through the brush where he lay. He rolled frantically. The fusillade continued. Either that was a couple of squads of Yankees up ahead or—”Lee!” he shouted. “Hurrah for General Lee!”

The shooting stopped. “Who are y’all?” a suspicious voice called.

“Forty-Seventh North Carolina, Hill’s corps,” he answered. “Who are you?”

“Third Arkansas, Longstreet’s corps,” the unseen stranger answered. “What kind of rifle you carryin’ there, No’th Carolina?”

No Yankee was likely to know the right answer to that yet. “An AK-47,” Caudell said.

By way of answer, the fellow who’d shot at him let loose with an unmistakable rebel yell. Caudell cautiously stood. Another man in gray came out of the thicket ahead. They clasped hands, pounded each other on the back. The soldier from Arkansas said, “Goddam good to see you, No’th Carolina.”

“You, too,” Caudell said. More than half to himself, he added wonderingly, “We really have broken them.” He still had trouble believing it, but if he and his comrades coming down from the north were meeting Longstreet’s men coming up from the south, the Federals caught between them had to be in a bad way.

The private from the 3d Arkansas might have picked the thought right out of his mind. “Damn straight we’ve broke ‘em,” he said happily. “Now we pick up the pieces.”