The Guns of the South

* VI *

General Lee sat easily on Traveller, watching his soldiers splash up out of the Rapidan at Raccoon Ford. Once on the north side of the river, the men paused to put their trousers back on before they formed ranks again. Many of them had no drawers. That bothered Lee more than it seemed to bother them. They grinned and cheered and waved their hats as they marched past.

Lee waved back every so often, letting the men know he saw them and was pleased with them. He turned to Walter Taylor. “Tell me the truth, Major: did you ever expect to see us moving to the attack again?”

“Of course I did, sir,” his aide answered stoutly. Startlement filled his eyes as the possible import of the question sank in. “Didn’t you?”

“I always had the hope of it,” Lee said, and let it go at that. A new regiment was fording the river, its battle flag fluttering proudly as the color-bearer carried it in front of the troops. Lee had trouble reading a printed page without his spectacles, but he easily made out the unit name on the flag forty feet away. He called, “You fought splendidly in the Wilderness, 47th North Carolina.”

The soldiers he’d praised cheered wildly. “You’ve made them proud, sir,” Walter Taylor said.

“They make me proud; any officer would reckon his career made to command such men;” Lee said. “How can I help but admire their steadfastness, their constancy and devotion? I stand in awe of them.”

“Yes, sir.” Taylor looked back over the Rapidan, toward the winter encampments of General Ewell’s corps. “Only a few regiments still waiting on the road. Then all of General Hill’s corps will have crossed, along with Ewell’s.”

“I wish Longstreet’s men could be with us as well, but for the time being I must leave them behind to guard the fords further east, lest General Grant, rather than shifting in response to my movement, should try to cross the Rapidan again and march on Richmond. I think that unlikely, but neglecting the possibility would be ill-advised.”

“Strange to think of one corps, and that made up of but two divisions, holding back the whole Army of the Potomac,” Taylor observed.

“Even with our repeaters, I am uncertain whether Longstreet could do that, Major. But he can certainly delay those people and give us the chance to return and perhaps pitch into their flanks.” Just for a moment, Lee’s smile turned savage. “And let me remind you, the whole Army of the Potomac no longer exists, at least not as it did before the fighting in the Wilderness began. Hancock’s corps is for all intents and purposes hors de combat, and the rest of the Federal force received rough handling as well. I doubt anything less than that would have persuaded General Grant to retreat.”

“He had little choice, unless he aimed to stay where he was and have his whole army chewed up,” Taylor said. “Another day of fighting at close quarters and he’d not have had left an army with which to retreat.”

“The maneuver was well executed; Grant made skillful use of his superiority in cannon to hold off our infantry while he pulled back his own.” Lee stroked his beard as he thought. “He handles his men better than any previous commander of the Army of the Potomac, save perhaps General Meade, I believe, and he is more aggressive than Meade by far.”

Taylor grinned. “One of the prisoners we took said he had the air of a man who had made up his mind to ram his head through a stone wall. He ran up against one in the Wilderness, but he didn’t go through.”

“No, but now we shall have to go through him, and that after he has made the acquaintance of our repeaters. Any man may be taken by surprise once, but only a fool will be surprised twice, and General Grant, I fear, is not a fool.”

“What then, sir? Shall we try to outmarch him and approach Washington from the north and west, as we did last year?”

“I have been considering precisely that.” Lee said no more. His mind was not fully made up, and might change again. But if he moved straight up the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad toward Washington, Grant would have to try to block his path. Without the new repeaters, assaulting a bigger army that stood on the defensive would have been suicidally foolhardy. Lee had made it work even so, against Hooker at Chancellorsville. But the Wilderness had shown him Grant was no Hooker. Grant could be beaten; he could not be made to paralyze himself.

Lee made his decision. He pulled out pen and pad, wrote rapidly, then turned to a courier. “Take this to General Stuart at once, if you please.” The young man set spurs to his horse, rode off at a trot that he upped to a gallop as soon as he could. Lee felt Walter Taylor’s eyes on him. He said, “I have ordered General Stuart to use his cavalry to secure the Rappahannock crossing at Rappahannock Station and to hold that crossing until our infantry joins them.”

“Have you?” One of Taylor’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “You’ll go straight for Grant, then?”

“Straight for Washington City, at least for the time being,” Lee corrected. “I expect General Grant will interpose himself between his capital and me. When he does, I shall strike him the hardest blow I can, and see what comes of it.”

“Yes, sir.” By Taylor’s tone, he pad no doubt what would come of it. Lee wished he had no doubts himself. His aide asked, “How soon do you think we could reach Washington City?”

“We could reach it in four or five days,” Lee said. Taylor stared at him. Deadpan, he went on, “Of course, that is only if General Grant becomes a party to the agreement. Without his cooperation, we shall probably require rather more time.”

Taylor laughed. Lee allowed himself a smile. He had slept perhaps four hours a night since the campaign started, rising at three every morning to go see how his men fared. He felt fine. His chest had pained him a couple of times, but one or two of the tablets the Rivington men had given him never failed to bring relief. He was not used to medicines that never failed.

With reins and feet, he urged Traveller forward. His aides rode after him. He scarcely noticed them; he was thinking hard. He’d beaten Grant once, and badly. But simply beating the Army of the Potomac did not suffice. He’d beaten the Federals again and again, at Chancellorsville, at Fredericksburg, at Second Manassas, in the Seven Days’ Campaign. They kept returning to the fray, and, like the mythical Hydra, seemed stronger every time they were cast to the ground. They were as determined in their insistence that the South return to the Union as the confederate States were in their desire to depart from it.

“I must suppress them,” Lee said aloud. But how? The new repeaters had caught Grant by surprise in the Wilderness. There Lee had also been able to use the detailed knowledge of Grant’s movements the Rivington men had brought him from 2014. They’d wanted to change the world of here and now, and they’d succeeded, but that meant they were no longer a move ahead of the game.

As for Grant, he’d handled his army about as well as could be expected, given the trouble in which he’d found himself. In a defensive fight, with his powerful artillery to back up his numbers, he might yet be very rough indeed.

And, Lee wondered, how long before some clever Northern gunsmith works out a way to make his own AK-47? Colonel Gorgas had been unsure it was possible. Gorgas was gifted, but for every man like him in the Confederacy, the North had three or five or ten, and the factories to assemble what those gifted men devised. If the Federals suddenly blossomed forth with repeaters of their own, the situation would return to what it had been before the men from out of time arrived.

“Not only must I suppress those people, I must do it quickly,” Lee said. Every minute’s delay hurt him and helped Grant. He brought Traveller up to a trot. The exact moment he got to Rappahannock Station almost certainly would not matter, but all at once any delay seemed intolerable.

In the middle of the afternoon, a courier on a blowing horse rode up to him, held out a folded sheet of paper. “From General Stuart, sir.”

“Thank you.” Lee unfolded the paper, read: “We hold Rappahannock Station. Federal pickets withdrew northeast past Bealeton. We pursued, and discovered more Federals approaching the town from the southeast, their cavalry leading. We shall endeavor to hold the place unless your orders are to the contrary. Your most ob’t. servant, I. E. B. Stuart, Commanding, Cavalry.”

Bealeton. Another sleepy hamlet was about to have its name written down in history in letters of blood. Lee wrote: “General Stuart: Hold your position at all hazards. Infantry is advancing in your support. R. E. Lee, General Commanding.” He gave the message to the courier, who booted his tired mount into a trot and then forced a gallop from it.

Lee turned to Walter Taylor. “Major, I should like to confer with my corps commanders. We have driven the enemy’s pickets past Bealeton, General Smart informs me, but the main force of the Army of the Potomac is now approaching that town with a view to contesting our possession of it.”

“I’ll fetch the generals, sir,” Taylor said. He rode away:

Dick Ewell came back to Lee first, his peg leg sticking out from the saddle at an odd angle as he reined in his horse. Having fought farther to the north in the Wilderness than Hill’s men, his corps headed the line of march today. He cocked his bald head and listened intently as Lee explained the report from Smart. “When Lee was done, he asked, “Can the troopers hold back the whole Federal army long enough to permit us to deploy?”

“That is the question,” Lee admitted. “With their repeaters, I hope they may.”

“We’d best hurry, all the same.” Ewell glanced at one of his aides. “Order the men up to quickstep.”

As the aide rode off, A. P. Hill rode up. Always gaunt and hollow-eyed, he no longer seemed on the edge of breaking down, as he had before the campaign began. Victory, Lee thought, agrees with him. As he had with Ewell, he told Hill of the new situation.

Hill’s jaws worked as he listened. Finally he said, “I don’t care for the prospect of fighting with the river close in our rear. We almost paid for that at Sharpsburg.”

“I remember,” Lee said.

“Grant isn’t such a slowcoach as McClellan was, either,” Hill persisted. “He wasn’t what you’d call smooth in the Wilderness, but he got more of the Army of the Potomac into the fight than we’ve seen before.”

“I want him to put his men into the fight, if that means they are advancing straight into the fire of our new rifles,” Lee said. “Not even the resources of the North will stand such bloodlettings indefinitely repeated…which reminds me, have we enough ammunition for another large fight?”

“Two trains full of cartridges came into Orange Court House from Rivington this morning,” Walter Taylor said.

“That should be all right, then,” Lee said, relieved. Thanks to the Rivington men, his soldiers had won a smashing victory in the Wilderness. Thanks to them, the Army of Northern Virginia would have the wherewithal to pursue another one. But without a continued flow of munitions from the Rivington men, his army would soon be, if it was not already, unable to fight at all. Lee reminded himself to write once more to Colonel Rains in Augusta to see if he had succeeded in producing loads suitable for the AK-47.

“How would you have us deploy?” Ewell asked.

Lee had been working on that with most of his mind ever since the message came back from the cavalry. He saw battlefields as a chess player looked over his board, save that for him no two matches were played on the same squares and both players moved at the same time. “Post your men in the most advantageous line south from Bealeton toward the Rappahannock, General, using General Johnson’s division as your reserve,” he answered. “General Hill, you will form the left. Move behind the line General Ewell will establish and into position. Be prepared to attach, or defend, as shall seem most advantageous.”

The corps commanders nodded. Walter Taylor drew out a map from a saddlebag, unfolded it. Lee traced with his finger the dispositions he had in mind. The generals looked, nodded again, and rode off, Hill all business in the saddle, Ewell instantly recognizable because of his out thrust wooden leg.

“Send also to General Longstreet, Major,” Lee said as Taylor put away the map. “Tell him he must be ready to move at a moment’s notice, either to pitch into General Grant’s rear or to come to the support of the rest of this army. Send the order by telegraph; he must have it as soon as possible.”

“Yes, sir.” Taylor noted down Lee’s instructions, summoned a courier to take them to the army’s field telegraphy wagon.” I’ll also send a copy by messenger,” he said.

“Very good,” Lee said. Like the Confederacy’s railroads, Southern wires were imperfectly efficient. He envied the Federal army its far more elaborate system. But he could have headed that Federal army, sent messages along that system as he chose. Having declined, he was content to make do with what his chosen country could provide.

Dempsey Eure let out a loud, unmusical bray. “If I was a mule, they’d shoot me after a march like this, on account of I wouldn’t be of no more use nohow.”

“You’re a damn jackass, Dempsey, and you’re marchin’ to give some Yankee the chance to shoot you,” Allison High answered. A few men who heard the exchange had the breath left to chuckle. Most simply plodded on, too busy putting one foot in front of the other to have room for anything else.

Mulus Marianus, Nate Caudell thought in the small pan of his mind not emptied by fatigue. He wished Captain Lewis were close by; of all the Castalia Invincibles, Lewis was the only other man who had any Latin and might have appreciated the allusion. But the captain’s bad foot was giving him trouble on the march, and he’d fallen back to the rear of the company.

Caudell coughed. The 47th North Carolina was not in the lead today. The men tramped through a gray-brown cloud of dust that left their hides and uniforms the same color. Every time Caudell blinked, the grit under his eyelids stung. When he spat, his saliva came forth as brown as if he were chewing tobacco.

He’d already forded both the Rapidan and the Rappahannock, but the memory of splashing through cool water was only that, a memory. Reality was muggy heat and sweat and dust and tired feet and the distant thunder of gunfire to the east. The Federals were not going to leave Virginia without more fighting, and were not of the mind to let the Army of Northern Virginia get free of its home state again, either.

Then shots came from the right front, not heavy rolling volleys mixed with artillery where General Ewell’s men were already hotly engaged with the Federals, but a spattering of skirmisher fire. “Grant’s looking to flank us,” Allison High guessed. “He’s got men and to spare to try it.”

“If he didn’t lose three for our one in the Wilderness, I’ll eat my shoes,” Caudell said.

“And if he did, he still has more men than we do,” High answered, which was so manifestly true that Caudell could only click tongue between teeth by way of response. He tasted wet dust when he did.

The regimental musicians beat a brisk tattoo on their drums. “By the right of companies into line!” Captain Lewis echoed, shouting as loud as he could so the whole company could hear him. With a certain relief, Caudell strode off the dust-filled roadway into the field to one side of it. The air would be fresher, at least for a while.

General Kirkland’s whole brigade was shifting into battle formation, 44th, 47th, and 26th North Carolina forward, with the 11th and 52d going into line behind them. Regimental and company flags took the lead as color-bearers stepped out in front of their units. Caudell looked leftward for the banner of Company E of the 44th North Carolina; it was his favorite in the whole brigade. He grinned when he spied it, though it was too far away to seem more than a tiny green square. He knew its device—a snapper with mouth agape—and the company nickname, TURTLE PAWS, spelled out below.

“Skirmishers forward!” Colonel Faribault yelled. Men from every company trotted ahead of the main line.

“Get a move on, Nate,” Rufus Daniel called when Caudell failed to advance with the rest of the skirmishers. “Lieutenant Winborne done got hisself shot, so they’re your boys.”

Caudell was glad for the thick coat of dust on his face; no one could see him turn red. He’d completely forgotten that, with the third lieutenant wounded, the skirmishers fell to him. A couple of them laughed as he dashed up to join them. “Make sure your pieces are loaded and ready,” he growled. The skirmishers paused to check, which took their attention off him for a moment.

They hurried forward, each man a couple of yards from his neighbors to either side. “Do we aim to go straight toward the shooting?” somebody called. Caudell didn’t know the answer.

Third Lieutenant Will Dunn of Company E did. “No, we’re to move to the left of it,” he answered. “If there’s a hole there, we’ll plug it till the rest of the brigade comes up.”

A few minutes later, three people sang out “Yankee skirmishers!” at the same time. Wishing for his lost hat, Caudell raised a hand to shade his eyes. Sure enough, a thin line of bluecoats, tiny as insects in the distance, was approaching the thin gray-clad line of which he was a part. Behind them, a cloud of dust masked more Federal soldiers.

The Yankees were still too far away to make worthwhile targets. They spotted the rebels at about the same time they were seen. Caudell watched them adjust their line. He admired the way they shifted; they might have been on the parade ground, exercising for an inspector general rather than maneuvering on the field of battle. Polished rifle barrels and bayonets revealed the men who kicked up so much dust to their rear.

Lieutenant Dunn carried a pair of field glasses on a leather strap around his neck. He lifted them to his face for a better look at the foe ahead. When he let go with a cry of outrage, Caudell and all the Confederates in earshot stared at him. The field glasses had already fallen to his chest again. Pointing ahead, he shouted, “You know what those are up ahead, boys? Those are nigger troops!”

A couple of rebels started shooting the second they heard that. At a range still close to half a mile, they did no harm Caudell could see. Whatever color they were, the Federal skirmishers had the discipline to hold their fire. Caudell’s jaw tightened. Escaped slaves and free Negroes—they would have no reason to love Southern men any better than he and his comrades loved them.

The bayonets on AK-47s were permanently secured under the barrel by a bolt. Caudell hadn’t brought his forward at any time during the Wilderness fighting. Neither had any other Confederates he remembered seeing. Now several men paused to deploy them. With black men ahead, bullets were not enough for them. Seeing black men in uniform made it literally war to the knife.

As far as Caudell was concerned, any man with a rifle musket in his hands, be he white, black, or green, was a deadly enemy so long as he wore a blue coat. Still as if on parade, half the Yankee skirmishers—now they were close enough for Caudell to tell they were Negroes with his unaided eye—brought their Springfields to their shoulders in smooth unison and fired a volley at Caudell and his comrades.

The range was still long; had Caudell been leading that Federal skirmish line, he would not have had his men shoot so soon. Even so, a couple of men from the skirmish line fell, groaning and cursing at the same time. The Negroes who had fired began to reload; those who had not raised their weapons to volley again.

“Give it to ‘em!” Caudell shouted. All the other company skirmish leaders yelled orders that meant the same thing.

Caudell raised his own rifle and started firing while he advanced on the Negro skirmishers. They began to drop as the Confederates’ repeaters filled the air in their neighborhood with bullets. The blacks still on their feet, though, kept loading and firing as coolly as any veterans. A couple of white men with swords—officers, Caudell supposed—shouted commands to them. Those officers soon fell. They would have been natural targets on any skirmish line and were all the more so here because of whom they led. But even after they went down, their black soldiers continued to fight steadily.

“Jesus God almighty!” shouted a private named Ransom Bailey, a few feet away from Caudell. He pointed toward the oncoming line of battle behind the colored skirmishers. “They’s all niggers! Looks like a division of ‘em!”

“Worry about them later,” Caudell told him. “These ones up front are enough trouble for now.”

Skirmish lines seldom came to grips with each other. One would usually retreat because of the other’s superior firepower. The Confederates badly outgunned the black Union troops, but the Negroes would not retreat. They made charge after charge against the Southerners’ merciless rifles. Only when just a handful of them were still on their feet did they stubbornly withdraw.

By then, they did not have far to go; the regiments of which they were a part had almost caught up with them. The black troops’ line was wide and deep. Because their regiments were new and untried, they had far more men in them than units which had already seen hard fighting. They deployed with the same almost fussy neatness the skirmishers had shown.

Behind Caudell, behind the whole brigade, cannon went off with a crash. Round shot and shells began landing among the Negro soldiers. A cannon ball knocked down a whole file of men. The Negroes did not break. Their front rank went to one knee; the second rank raised rifle muskets above their comrades, heads. They volleyed as smartly as had the Federals rushing up the Brock Road to attack the breastworks there.

The 47th North Carolina was not behind a breastwork now. It had been hurrying forward to get round the Federals’ right; Grant had sent these blacks to stop Lee’s advance. Where they collided, they would fight. Officers shouted, “Advance!” Bugles echoed the command. After that blast of fire from the Negroes, though, some Confederates would never advance again.

Yankee artillery was on the field, too. A shell shrieked past Caudell, exploded just in front of the main rebel battle line. The blast and the fragments blew a hole in it. The men on either side who had not been hit closed ranks and came on.

The third and fourth ranks of black soldiers stepped forward, while the first and second reloaded. Their volley was not as neat as the first one had been; fire from the Confederate repeaters tore at their line. Officers went down one after another. In most units, North and South alike, officers commonly wore outfits like those of their men, —but for insignia of rank, the better to avoid drawing the enemy’s eye to them. But the men who commanded the black troops stood out not only because of the color of their skin but also for their fancy dress. “Shoot the nigger-lovers before the nigs!” a private not far from Caudell shouted. Many of his comrades seemed to be taking his advice.

After that second volley, the Negroes raised a cheer—a wild shout much closer to a rebel yell than to the Northern white soldiers’ usual hurrah—and advanced on Kirkland’s brigade at the double-quick. Caudell and his fellow skirmishers fell back into their own front ranks, to keep the main body of Confederates from shooting them in the back.

Between shells and rifle fire, the battle din was deafening. A near miss from a shell knocked the man beside Caudell into him. He fell over. Somehow he hung on to his repeater. Two men stepped on him before he managed to get to his feet. He looked down at himself, hardly daring to believe he was still intact. Muttering a prayer of thanks, he started shooting again.

The black soldiers were frighteningly close. They’d taken dreadful casualties, but still they came on. Even as he did his best to kill them, Caudell admired the courage they showed. It occurred to him that George Ballentine might have fought well, if anyone had given him the chance—and if Benny Lang hadn’t made him want to run away instead.

Because their regiments started so large, the colored troops greatly outnumbered the rebels at the start of the engagement. That meant they still had men left when their battered line and that of the Confederates crashed together. They threw themselves on the Southerners with bayonets and clubbed muskets.

The Confederates wavered. Their AK-47s were not made to double as spears. But they could still shoot. Black men fell, clutching at chest or belly or legs. Screams and curses almost overwhelmed the thunder of gunfire.

Right beside Caudell, a colored soldier drove a bayonet into a Southerner’s belly. The Confederate shrieked. Blood dribbled from his mouth. He crumpled to the ground as the Negro ripped out the bayonet. Caudell fired at the black man. His rifle clicked harmlessly. He’d fired the last round in his clip without noticing. Grin flashing whitely in the middle of a black face made blacker by gunpowder stains from Minié ball cartridges, the Negro spun toward Caudell, ready to spit him, too.

Before he could thrust with the bayonet, a rebel landed on his back. The two men went down in a thrashing heap. The Confederate tore the Springfield from the colored man’s hands. He heaved himself up onto his knees, rammed home the length of edged steel that tipped the musket. The Negro screamed like a lost soul. The Southerner stabbed him again and again and again, a dozen times, a score, long after he was dead. Then, grinning like a devil that seizes lost souls, he got to his feet.

“Thanks, Billy;” Caudell gasped. “That was bravely done.”

“Shitfire, Caudell, you don’t got to thank me none for killin’ niggers,” Billy Beddingfield said. “I do that for my own self.”

Hand-to-hand fighting seldom lasted long. One side or the other soon found the punishment too much to bear. So it was with the black Federal troops now. They broke away from their foes and retreated to the north. The Confederates raked them with heavy fire from their repeaters. That was finally enough to make the Negroes run, though even then some turned back to shoot at the Southerners.

A fresh magazine in his AK-47, Caudell took his own pot shots at the colored soldiers. Rescuing him like that was the sort of thing that could earn Billy Beddingfield his corporal’s chevrons again. As long as the regiment was in active combat, he was as good a soldier as any officer could want. Trouble wits, he’d already shown he couldn’t hold his temper in camp.

Kirkland’s brigade—Heth’s whole division—pushed ahead, trampling down early wheat and corn as they advanced. The very precision of the blacks who opposed them cost those Negroes dearly. Their officers still handled them as if they were in a review rather than a battle, and used extra time to make every maneuver perfect. Meanwhile, the ragged Confederates took a heavy toll with their repeaters.

A few Negroes tried to surrender when the rebels overran them. Caudell brusquely jerked the muzzle of his AK-47 southward; two frightened blacks babbled thanks as they shambled away. A few seconds later, a rifle barked behind him. He whirled. The colored men lay twisted on the ground. Their blood spilled over cornstalks and soaked into the dirt. Billy Beddingfield stood above them, that devilish grin on his face once more.

“They’d given up,” Caudell said angrily.

“A nigger with a rifle in his hands cain‘t give up,” Beddingfield retorted.

Before Caudell could answer, Captain Lewis tapped him on the shoulder.” An ammunition wagon just came up,” Lewis said, pointing. “Pullout as many of your skirmishers as you can find, then have each man draw two or three clips’ worth of cartridges. Make for that stand of plum trees up there.” He pointed again. “From there, you ought to have a fair shot at that Yankee battery that’s been tearing us up.” Even as he spoke, another shell whistled overhead, to land with a crash an instant later.

Caudell looked from the plums to the distant battery. The Federal artillerymen were busy at their pieces, working together with drilled precision. “Even that’s long range,” he said dubiously.

“I know it is,” Lewis said. “I wouldn’t send you out there if we still carried our old muzzle-loaders. But these repeaters let us send enough bullets their way that some are likely to hit.”

“All right, sir.” Caudell rounded up four men who’d been on the skirmish line with him. They got their extra ammunition and made for the plums. One was wounded before he got there. He staggered back to the rebel line. Caudell and the other three reached the little grove.

Up ahead, the artillerymen were still at their trade. One soldier Set ball and powder inside a Napoleon’s muzzle. Another rammed them down to the bottom of the barrel. A third jabbed a wire pick through the vent to pierce the bag that contained the powder. Still another attached primer and lanyard. That same man yanked on the lanyard and fired the piece. The fellow with the rammer swabbed it down. Back at the limber that held the ammunition chest, two more soldiers handed another bag of powder and a ball to a third, who carried them at a run to the man who loaded them into the smoothbore. The process began again.

Caudell and his comrades began to interrupt them and the other five gun crews that made up the battery. “Take your best shots,” he told the skirmishers. He and they stood behind stout tree trunks, not so much for protection as to give themselves cover. “We aren’t going to hit all the time, but we’ll do them some harm.”

A gunner went down, then another. Caudell kept firing steadily. Still another man reeled away from his cannon. A few seconds later, a rammer was hit as he ran up to the muzzle of his piece with a soaked sponge. Replacements took over for men wounded or killed. They began to fall, too.

Although the Confederates were shooting from cover, the muzzle flashes of their rifles quickly gave them away. Someone pointed toward the plums. Artillerymen leaped to a Napoleon’s handspike, began swinging the twelve-pounder toward the stand of trees. Even from half a mile, the gun’s bore, though only a bit more than four and a half inches wide, seemed a huge and deadly cavern to Caudell.

“Take out that crew!” he shouted—needlessly, for the skirmishers had already started shooting at the gunners. The corporal or sergeant who stood behind the Napoleon to gauge the range clapped a hand to his face and toppled. A rammer fell, grabbing at his leg. Another man snatched up the swab-ended. pole and carried on.

The brass cannon belched flame and a great cloud of thick white smoke. A round shot smashed a tree not twenty feet from Caudell with a noise like a giant clapping hands. The artillerymen began their drill once more. Two more of them went down before they could fire again. This time they chose a bursting shell. “My arm!” a skirmisher wailed. The Federal artillerymen stolidly resumed their appointed tasks. When yet another man was hurt, one of the drivers from the limber crew replaced him.

Another shell exploded in the grove. Fragments thumped against the trunk which sheltered Caudell. He fed bullets into a banana clip and hoped the next shell would be a dud. Federal gunners, unfortunately, used better fuses than their Southern counterparts.

But the next shell did not come. The depleted gun crews fired a last couple of shots, then rushed to attach their cannons to the limbers. Some of them snatched out pistols and began to fire them. The drivers urged teams into motion.

Four of the guns in the battery made good their escape. Caudell shouted with delight as rebels advancing from the southeast swarmed over the other two. One of those was the Napoleon that had been trying to blast his comrades and him out of the grove. “We did something worthwhile, boys!” he yelled to the other skirmishers. “We kept ‘em too busy to run till it was too late for ‘em anyhow.”

The Yankee infantry was pulling back too, north and east along the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. The black foot soldiers did not run like a frightened mob, but they did not show the same extraordinary stubbornness they had displayed earlier in the day, either; against the Confederates’ repeaters, that had only gotten more of them killed.

Caudell sent a fatigue party out to a stream not far away. He waited to eat until they came back; he wanted to boil water for a desiccated meal. Most of the Castalia Invincibles did not bother to wait. After plundering the haversacks of the black troops they’d fought, they had plenty of hardtack and salt pork. The rich smell of brewing coffee soon filled the night air around the campfires. More than a few Confederates sported new blue trousers or new shoes—more spoil from the battlefield.

“They sent them niggers out carrying’ everything but bake ovens on their backs,” Rufus Daniel said. He had a new pair of pants himself.

“Niggers.” Otis Massey spat as he said the word. “Niggers with guns. That’s what the Yankees want to do with us—goddam niggers with guns, allover the South.”

A general mutter of agreement rose from the soldiers who heard him. Dempsey Eure said, “Heard tell the Yankees’d given ‘em guns. But you give a man a gun, that don’t mean he can fight with it. Never reckoned in all my born days that if you give a nigger a gun, he’d fight the way them fellers did.”

“They’s too stupid to know they’s get tin’ whipped,” said a private named William Winstead.

More people nodded at that, but Caudell said, “You weren’t with us at Gettysburg, Bill. They’d seen what we did to their skirmish line, so they had to know they were going into the meat grinder. But they kept coming, the same way we did then. Anybody here going to tell me they didn’t fight like soldiers?”

“Only thing niggers is good for is slaves,” Winstead said positively. Again, a good many soldiers nodded along with him.

Caudell wanted to argue more. Despite questions about Georgie Ballentine, he’d always thought pretty much as Winstead did. So did most people in the South; so, for that matter, did most people in the North. But as a teacher, he’d urged his students—especially the bright ones—to test what people said about the world against the world itself. Here, what they said and what he’d seen didn’t add up the same way. The Negroes had fought as well as anyone could expect.

One of the other things he’d seen in the world, though, was that most people didn’t really want to look at it straight on. Going with what they said—whoever they were—was easier and more comfortable than trying to figure out how things truly worked.

So instead of directly challenging Winstead, Caudell shifted the argument: “I saw Billy Beddingfield kill a couple of niggers who’d surrendered. I didn’t reckon that was right—I sure as hell wouldn’t want them to kill us if we had to give up to them.”

“Any nigger comes at me with a gun, that’s a dead nigger,” Winstead said. “An’ I wouldn’t surrender to ‘em anyways, no matter what, on account of what they’d do to me if I done it.”

“Some truth in that,” Caudell had to admit. “But if they can learn to fight like soldiers, they might be able to learn to act like soldiers other ways.”

“They better,” Dempsey Eure added. “Otherwise this here war’s gonna turn even uglier’n it is already.”

“You’ve got that right, Dempsey,” Caudell said. This time, nobody disagreed. Who could deny that black men and what to do about them lay at the heart of the war between the states? The North was convinced it had the right to dictate to the South how to treat them; the South was equally convinced it already knew. Caudell wanted no part of having someone hundreds of miles away telling him what he could or couldn’t do. On the other hand, if Negroes really could fight like “white men, the South’s answers didn’t look so good, either.

Caudell reflected that America would have been a much simpler place were the black man not around to vex it. Unfortunately, however, the black man was here. One way or another, North and South would have to come to terms with that.

“Major Marshall, I should like you to draft a general order to the Army of Northern Virginia, to be published as soon as it is completed,” Lee said.

“Yes, sir.” Charles Marshall took out notepad and pen. “The subject of the order?”

“As you must be aware, Major, the enemy has begun to employ against us large numbers of colored soldiers. I aim to order our men that, if these colored troops be captured, their treatment at our hands is to differ in no particular from that accorded to any other soldiers we take prisoner.”

“Yes, sir.” Behind Marshall’s spectacles, his eyes were expressionless. He bent his head and began to write.

“You do not approve, Major?” Lee said.

The younger man looked up from the folding table on which he was working. “Since you ask, sir, in no way do I approve of arming Negroes. The very concept is repugnant to me.”

Lee wondered what his aide would have thought of General Cleburne’s proposal that the Confederacy recruit and use Negro troops in pursuit of its independence. But President Davis had ordered him to keep silent about that. Instead, he said, “Major, not least of my concerns in issuing this order is fear for the safety of the thousands of our own captives in Northern hands. Last summer Lincoln issued an order promising to kill a Confederate soldier for each Union man slain in violation of the articles of war, and to put at hard labor one man for every black captive returned to slavery. By all means make that point explicit in the language of the order, to help the men understand its promulgation is, among other things, a matter of practical necessity.”

“You’ve thought a step farther ahead than I did,” Marshall admitted. “Put that way, I see the need for what you have asked of me.” He bent to his task again, this time with a better will. A few minutes later, he offered Lee the draft.

The general skimmed through it. “This is very fine, Major, but could you not insert, perhaps after ‘the valor of your arms and your patient endurance of hardships,, something to the effect of ‘your patriotic devotion to justice and liberty’? You might also end by appealing to the men’s sense of duty, than which no soldierly virtue is of greater importance.”

Marshall noted the changes, handed the paper back to Lee. “Now we have it,” Lee said. “Have the order distributed at once; I want it read in every regiment by this evening, or tomorrow at the latest.”

“I’ll see to it, sir,” the aide promised.

“Good. Now on to other business.” Lee unfolded several newspapers. “These have been sent on to me by those behind Federal lines who are in sympathy with our cause. Not only does the government in Washington City often inadvertently reveal its intentions in the press, but through it we can gauge Northern sentiment toward the war.”

“And?” Marshall asked eagerly. “What is the Northern sentiment toward the war, now that we have beaten back yet another ‘Forward to Richmond!’ drive?”

“I shall be delighted to provide you with a representative sampling, Major.” Lee held a newspaper close to his face; even with his spectacles, the small, cramped letters were hard to read. “This is the New York Times: ‘Disaster! Grant’s army overthrown in the Wilderness. Forced to retreat above the Rappahannock, and there defeated once more.’ Below these headlines, the story continues as follows: ‘Unhappily, like many of our engagements, the late fighting, though serving to illustrate the splendid valor of our troops, has failed to accomplish the object sought. The result thus far leaves us with a loss of upwards of 40,000 men in the two battles’—useful information there—’and absolutely nothing gained. ‘Not only did the rebels hold their lines, but they are advancing behind the impetus of their new breech-loading repeaters, against which the vaunted Springfield is of scarcely greater effect than the red man’s bows and arrows.’”

“I wish that were true,” Marshall said.

“It would make the task before us rather easier, would it not?” Lee chose another paper. “Here is a statement from Stanton, the Federal Secretary of War, as reported in the Washington Evening Star: ‘A noble enthusiasm must reanimate our gallant army, who have been battling so long for the preservation of the Union. We have, it is true, recently met with serious disasters. We have suffered much, and must be prepared to suffer more, in the cause for which we are struggling. Let us, then, fellow countrymen, tread the plain path of duty. Let us show the fortitude, endurance, and courage of our race, and not permit the brute force of the enemy’s arms to extinguish the life of this Republic.’”

Marshall smiled the special smile of a man contemplating his foe’s discomfiture. “That, sir, is a cry of pain.”

“So it is. Secretary Stanton is notorious for them,” Lee said. He shook his head. “It is also almost perfectly foolish. So far as I am concerned, so far as anyone in Richmond is concerned, the United States may proceed exactly as they care to, provided only that they extend to us the same privilege.”

“Does Stanton go on?”

“Oh, at some length.” Lee put the newspaper aside. “None of it, however, is much more to the point than that which I just read you.”

Charles Venable came into Lee’s tent. “Dispatches from Richmond, sir, and a copy of yesterday’s Daily Dispatch.” He glanced over at the Northern papers on the folding table. “I suspect its tone is rather more cheerful than theirs.”

“I suspect you are correct, Major,” Lee said. “Business before pleasure, however. The dispatches, if you please.”

Venable handed them to him. As he read the first, he felt a great load of worry lift from his shoulders. “General Johnston has held General Sherman at Rocky Face Ridge, with heavy losses on the Federal side, and then again at Resaca and Snake Creek Gap, when he tried to use his superior numbers to outflank us. Sherman’s forces are now halted; prisoners report he dares not seek to outflank us again for fear of the casualties he would sustain from our rifles.”

“Business and pleasure together,” Venable exclaimed.

“True enough, Major.” Lee had feared that only his own army would derive full benefit from the repeaters the Rivington men had provided. He’d never been so glad to be proved wrong. True, Johnston had given up a little ground to the enemy instead of advancing as the Army of Northern Virginia was doing, but the enemy in Georgia had more room to maneuver than was true here. And Johnston was a counterpuncher in any case, a master of the defensive. Lee would not have wanted to be a Federal general assaulting a position he chose to hold, the more so when his men were armed with AK-47s.

“What is the other dispatch, sir?”

“We shall know in a moment.” Lee opened the envelope. He read the paper inside, refolded it, and put it back in its place before he lifted his head to face his aides, both of whom were fidgeting in an effort to contain their curiosity. Lee said, “In southwestern Virginia, General Jenkins with twenty-four hundred men was engaged by Federal General George Crook with between six and seven thousand on the ninth of this month just south of Cloyd’s Mountain.”

“Yes, sir,” the two men said together. They both sounded anxious; close to three-to-one was long odds against any army.

Lee lifted their suspense: “Our troops succeeded in holding their position; the Federals withdrew to the north and west up the Dublin-Pearisburg Turnpike. Among their dead were General Crook and Colonel Rutherford Hayes, who commanded a brigade of Ohioans. I regret to have to add that General Jenkins was also wounded in the action and had his right arm amputated. But as General McCausland—who replaced him—adds, the victory has preserved our control of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, without which rail connection between the two states would have been broken.”

“That’s excellent news, sir!” Charles Marshall said. “Perhaps the tide has turned at last.”

“Perhaps it has,” Lee said. The words seemed to hang in the air, as if only now, when he spoke them aloud, did he acknowledge their truth in his heart. He’d grown so accustomed to fighting at long odds that the edge the Rivington men’s repeaters gave remained difficult to believe in completely. He read on in the dispatch: “General McCausland reports that a prisoner declared the fire from our repeaters made the battlefield appear one living, flashing sheet of flame.”

“The Daily Dispatch certainly thinks the war as good as won.” Charles Venable began to read from the newspaper he’d brought: “ ‘Our information is such as to give encouragement to the hope that the sacred soil of Virginia will soon be rescued from the hands, and divested of the polluting tread, of the Yankee invader. The great battles of the week just past, fought in the Wilderness and in and around the hamlet of Bealeton, resulted in the overthrow of the army of the Federal Government, with a loss that is perhaps unequalled in the annals of the present war. General Lee has utterly routed the force under Meade and Grant. There are no grounds upon which to question the glorious success of our arms.”

“Were wars fought in the newspapers, they would be won by both sides in the first days after they were declared,” Lee observed. “In one way, that would be as well, for it would spare a great part of the effusion of blood which accompanies warfare as it actually is. In another sense, though, newspaper chatter can be dangerous. If those responsible for actually prosecuting a war take seriously the contempt for the foe which is typical newspaper fare, they leave themselves open to a defeat for which they would have only themselves to blame.”

“But we actually do have the Federals on the run,” Venable protested.

“No one could be gladder than Ito see those people in retreat, Major,” Lee said. “But if we only drive them into the fortifications across the Potomac from Washington City, then we have gained nothing but time, and these people can make better use of time than we. They have come back from too many defeats. I want to give them a lesson sharp enough to impress itself upon even the most stolid and stubborn of their leaders.”

“What do you intend, sir?” Charles Marshall asked.

Slamming his way straight up the line of the Orange and Alexandria no longer seemed as attractive to Lee as it had before. He traced on the map the plan that had come to slow fruition in his mind. “This will require General Stuart’s cavalry to more effectively screen our forces from the enemy than was achieved in last year’s campaign, but I trust and believe he has learned that lesson by heart—and once more, the repeaters his troopers carry will aid their efforts. As for General Longstreet’s part in keeping the enemy off balance, no one, I think, could play it better; Major Marshall, if you would be so kind—?”

Marshall took out the pad on which he had drafted Lee’s general order. The leader of the Army of Northern Virginia began to frame the specific commands that would set his men in motion once more.

Andries Rhoodie’s horse came trotting up to Lee as he rode alongside the head of a long column of gray-clad troops. The Rivington man politely stayed a few feet outside the group of generals and officers with Lee and waited to be recognized. “Good morning, Mr. Rhoodie,” Lee said. He studied the way Rhoodie handled his bay gelding. “Your horsemanship has improved, sir, since I first had the pleasure of your acquaintance.”

“I’ve had a good deal of practice since then, General Lee,” Rhoodie answered. “Before I came to join your army, I’d spent little time on horseback.”

The officers with Lee concealed scornful expressions, some well, some not so well, A man who habitually rode in a buggy was hardly a man at all—and what other reason could there be for eschewing horses? Lee thought he knew the answer to that question, which to the others must have been purely rhetorical: by the distant year 2014, men must have discovered better means of transport than either horses or buggies. Lee wondered whether railroads ran down the center of every street in every city in the almost unimaginable time from which the Rivington man had sprung.

One day, he might ask Rhoodie about such things. The priceless knowledge that man had to hold in his head! No time now, though; no time, all too likely, until the war was done. No time for anything save the immediate till the war was done. To the immediate, then: “How may I help you today, Mr. Rhoodie?”

“I’d like to speak with you in private, General Lee, if I could,” Rhoodie said.

“Wait until I finish my business with these gentlemen, sir; then I am at your disposal,” Lee said. The staff officers took his ready acquiescence without blinking, but some of his commanders raised eyebrows. Rhoodie wore no uniform save the mottled clothing the Rivington men habitually used—who was he to deserve their chief’s sole attention? Lee gave them no chance to dwell on it: “Now, gentlemen, let’s make certain of our dispositions as we approach Middleburg…”

The division commanders and brigadiers rode off to make sure their forces conformed to the line of march Lee had spelled out. He glanced at his aides. They fell back fifteen or twenty yards. Lee nodded to Andries Rhoodie. He brought his bay up shoulder to shoulder with Traveller.

“And what can I do for you, sir?” Lee asked.

Rhoodie’s answer took him by surprise: “You can rescind your general order for treating captured kaffirs—niggers—like white prisoners of war. Not only that, General Lee, you can do it immediately.”

“I shall not, nor, let me remind you, have you the right to take a tone of command to me, sir,” Lee said coldly. “Common humanity forbids it, not only in regard to our treatment of the Federals’ colored troops, but also in that the Federals have promised to mistreat the prisoners they hold to the same degree to which we maliciously harm their men.”

“You go about giving the nigger equality in anyone way, General Lee, and you set foot on the path to making him equal in all ways.” Rhoodie sounded less peremptory than he had a moment before, but no less serious. “That is not what America Will Break stands for, General. If you don’t care to bear that in mind, we don’t care to keep providing you with ammunition.”

Lee swung his head around to stare at the Rivington man. Rhoodie’s smile was less than pleasant. Lee nodded slowly. Having wondered if this moment would ever come, he was the more ready for it now that it was here. He said, “If President Davis ordered me to do such a thing, sir, I should present him with my resignation on the spot. To you, I shall merely repeat what I said a moment before: no.” He urged Traveller up to a trot to leave Rhoodie behind.

Rhoodie stayed with him; he was a better rider than he had been. He said, “Think carefully about your decision, General. Remember what will happen to the Confederacy without our repeaters.”

“I remember what you said,” Lee answered with a shrug. “I have no way of verifying it for myself, save by living up to the days I bid you remember that, if our cause should fail, yours fails as well. You must act as your conscience dictates, Mr. Rhoodie, as shall I.”

Now it was Rhoodie’s turn to stare at Lee. “You would sacrifice your precious Virginia for the sake of kaffirs who were doing their best to kill your own men?”

“As General Forrest has said upon occasion, war means fighting, and fighting means killing. But there is a distinction to be drawn between killing on the battlefield, where foes face one another man against man and army against army, and killing helpless prisoners after the fighting is done. It is the distinction between man and beast, sir, and if it is a distinction you find yourself incapable of drawing, I shall pray to God for the salvation of your soul,”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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