Hell or Richmond (60 page)

You must remain clear of mind,
he told himself.

Sweat burst forth, not only from his wool-sheathed torso, but from his limbs and even the backs of his hands. His body was hot and the sweat was cold and everything was confused.

Just to lie down …

Fangs in his belly …

Marshall? What did he want?

“From Rooney Lee, sir. No major Union elements on our left. Only some minor doings at Jericho Mill, a few Yankees crossed at the ford.”

Lee felt his military secretary watching him. Venable, too, had come up. Venable and this vile carriage …

“A reconnoitering party,” Lee said, perhaps with too much emphasis. Almost with temper. “Those people will not cross there … not to their advantage … at most, a ruse.…”

“General Lee,” Marshall said, “
if
they have men across the river, even a few, General Hill must move against them. Before they can consolidate their—”

“They will
not
cross higher up,” Lee snapped.

The world hushed at the outburst.

“Sir…,” Venable said in a voice meant to soothe a child, “this is the turn to Ox Ford, the old coach road. Do you still wish to visit the ford? I could go myself. There’s really no need.…”

Why was there such doubt in Venable’s voice? Was it too hot for the pup? Of course Lee wished to inspect it. He needed to inspect the entire line.

Volcanic again, Lee’s bowels threatened to burst.

“The trees.
Stop there.
Those trees.”

He was not certain how long it took his party to reach Ox Ford, but the road was sunken, shaded, and cool for much of the way. At the bluff overlooking the river, he managed to dismount and walk, slowly, to the picket line. It was a fine position, high above the coursing water, with an overgrown island in midstream and lower, open ground on the opposite bank. The bluff could not be easily taken, if it could be taken at all.

There was no sign of those people.

He gestured for his field glasses. Holding them as steadily as he could, he scanned distant fields and groves. And saw nothing of import.

There were other fords, of course, at Quarles’s Mill and then Jericho Mill, farther up the river. He did not believe Grant and Meade would move their army so far west, but he needed to see the ground with his own eyes.

The way was long, though. And the heat … was killing.…

He craved rest, the chance to lie down and close his eyes. To gather strength for the battle, whenever it might come. The army
needed
him. They would not fight today, but, perhaps, tomorrow … or the day after.…

It made no sense for those people to cross higher up. No sense at all. Would it not be wiser to rest? Than to press on and risk debility?

What had Jackson said? Let us cross over the river. Not this river. Morbid thought. Rest under the shade of the trees. No. A cool room. Even a tent. Privacy. He dreaded soiling himself before the men. Not all his years in the army, in two armies, had hardened him against such a common disgrace.

He turned so quickly he almost lost his balance. His guts were in full revolt. But he would not let the men see him disabled. He thrust the field glasses into the nearest hands.

“The carriage.”

His aides closed around him.

“Away from here…”

“Yes, sir.”

Seated in the buggy again, forcing himself to sit as though he were in as full a command of his person as he was of the army, he beckoned Marshall to him.

“A courier,” Lee said. “Hill’s man.
Now.
”

Hill had been worried … worried … just returned to command and jumpy, unsettled. Seeing phantoms. In the heat. Under this blue sky. God’s blue. Not Union blue. Not the old blue … with which he had not kept faith … blue sky through myriad leaves, somnolent in the dead middle of the day. Where were they going? What road was this?

Where was Jackson? Longstreet? Stuart? They had left him behind.…

Not Longstreet. Peter had not deserted him. Longstreet would recover from his wound. Perhaps then …

Stuart!
The man had never brought him a false report. Now Rooney. His son. His beloved son. But no Stuart. White House plantation burned. Act of spite. Two years ago now. Was it that long? Why could they not behave as gentlemen? Rooney doing his best. Must not shame the family. Lees of Virginia … his father’s shame, his brother’s … all he had done to make the name glisten again …

The rider from Hill’s headquarters waited beside Marshall.

“Go back,” Lee said, enunciating carefully, “and tell General Hill to leave his men in camp. They must have rest. The Union actions above him are merely a feint, the regiments on picket can address them. The enemy is preparing to cross below, toward Hanover Junction.”

Three thirty p.m.
South bank of the North Anna, Jericho Mill Ford

Brigadier General Charles Griffin rode along his line, watching his men entrench. Blouses off, they tore at the clay with spades or swung axes at nearby trees to bank up logs and uncover fields of fire. Crawford’s division had begun to fill in on his left, closing the gap all the way back to the river, while Cutler’s division was just a few hours behind, assigned to extend the right. And Wainwright, that redleg bastard—more power to him—had the corps artillery rattling up at a gallop.

If the damn fool Rebs didn’t come on soon, they’d miss their chance and pay for it. But the fields to the front remained empty. There’d been a fuss with skirmishers, but nothing after that. Either the buggers were in retreat, or their generals were taking a Mexican
siesta
.

Griffin’s division had been hard used since the first day in the Wilderness, and the pointless assaults at Laurel Hill had cost him many of his finest soldiers. But, as an old trooper, he was a fair judge of men, and he sensed now that the boys still in the ranks had not had their spirits broken, just banged up a bit. They wanted to get their own back, that was all, to have a chance to do to the Johnnies what had been done to them.

And it looked to Charlie Griffin as if the chance might come very soon.

He paused behind the raw dirt line thrown up by Sweitzer’s men. When their general didn’t spur off in a billow of dust, the men eased up on their work and turned toward him, wiping sweat from their faces with the filthy sleeves of filthy undergarments. Waiting.

“Damn right,” Griffin barked. “Dig in deep, you sorry sonsofbitches. Those grayback cocksuckers are like to be along, and we’re going to let them do the charging this time. Then we’ll see who’s fucked for beans come suppertime.” These men were mean, hardened, and beautifully vengeful. Not about to run away for two shits and a whistle. They wanted their fair turn at doing the damage. “Well, stop playing with your willies and dig, goddamn it.”

Several of the men began to cheer him.

“You sorry sonsofbitches,” Griffin told them. “What the Hell are you cheering for? Get back to work, you buggers.”

His boys. God bless them.

Four p.m.
Headquarters, Third Corps, Army of Northern Virginia, Anderson’s Station

Powell Hill told Wilcox: “Cad, I feel like I’ve been handed a shit-bucket. And the bucket’s just about full. Here I’ve got this report of Federals up at Jericho Mill. And over here I have a message from General Lee saying it isn’t to worry me, there’s nothing to it, let the men rest. I have one message from young Rooney Lee telling me there’s nobody out there to speak of, and another telling me there’s Yankees across the river, but not how many, and no time of day written down on either one.”

“Well,” Cadmus Wilcox said, “the boys I sent out for a look ought to come in soon. Orr didn’t think he was up against any major force. Just big enough to make him wary of taking them on with one cut-to-the-bone regiment. Figured I ought to send out men I could trust, get a proper report.”

Hill punched a bony fist into his left palm. Not fiercely, but repeatedly. “I swear, I’ve got half a mind to dig up Stuart’s body and see if I can’t breathe life into his carcass. I’ve never felt so blind during a campaign.” As he spoke, Hill realized the claim was not true. He had been even less well-informed at Gettysburg, on that first morning. And Stuart had been alive then. Off on a lark to get his name in the papers.

Wilcox didn’t say a word, just looked at Hill with that slightly cross-eyed stare of his.

Hill went on: “Word is the old man’s feeling poorly.”

That, too, Hill realized, might have been left unsaid. Given his own recent absence from command. It just seemed a day when nothing would go right, when none of the numbers added up to the proper sum.

“Any idea,” Wilcox asked, “what Lee means to do?”

Hill shrugged. “Fight. Beyond that, I’m not sure he knows himself. That peckerwood Grant…”

“Man got spunk, say that much,” Wilcox remarked.

“Damned butcher.”

The division commander sucked in a cheek. “Wouldn’t pretend to admire the gentleman … but we do seem a tad closer to Richmond than when we started out.”

Hill spit. “McClellan got closer. And look how that ended up.”

“I reckon. But I’m not convinced to a certainty we’re dealing with Georgie McClellan.”

Looking up sharply, meeting his subordinate’s close-set, not-quite-right eyes, Hill said: “You think he can whip us?”

“Didn’t say that. Stubborn feller, though.”

Hill thought: There is no man upon this earth as stubborn as Robert E. Lee.

“Wouldn’t mind hearing from one of those gussied-up, Charleston staff boys of yours,” Hill told his subordinate.

“Getting them a good look, I expect.”

Hill’s mood was as changeable as that of an ill-trained horse. “Probably nothing, after all. Lee’s like to be right.”

One of Wilcox’s aides, Major Browning, galloped into camp, horse lathered and heaving.

“Young buck of yours is reckless with a horse,” Hill commented.

“Not as a rule,” Wilcox said. “And he’s from Raleigh, not Charleston.”

Browning swung out of the saddle. With too much flair for Hill’s mood. Mustachioed like his division commander and looking a bright paragon of health, he strutted up to the generals, saluting and then sweeping his cap from his jet black hair. Hill decided he did not like the lad.

“Well, Browning?”

“Yankees, all right,” the major said. “Passel of them. Digging in.”

“How many?” Hill asked.

“Got as close as we could, didn’t want—”

“How many?”

The staff man recoiled at the corps commander’s tone. “At least a brigade. Could be two.”

“And that’s all?”

“All we could see, sir.”

“Artillery?”

“Didn’t see any.”

Hill turned to Wilcox. “Get your division moving. Run those bastards back across that river. No. Cut them off from the river. And kill every man who won’t surrender when asked.” He snorted. “Looks like the old man was right. Yankees dangling some bait, get us looking the wrong way. We’ll make ’em pay for it.” He bore down on Wilcox. “How fast can you get up there with all your men?”

Seven p.m.
The heights south of Jericho Mill

Colonel Charles Wainwright, chief of the Fifth Corps’ artillery, watched with immeasurable pride as Charlie Mink’s battery rolled forward through the shambles of Cutler’s division. The New York gunners trotted up as neatly as if on parade, parting the mass of fleeing soldiers to unlimber on the knoll the just arrived troops had abandoned.

In moments, Mink’s boys were blowing canister into the screeching, hallooing Rebs, stunning them into confusion.

Wainwright wasted no time: He sent riders to Walcott and Matthewson to bring up their batteries on line with Mink’s roaring guns.

Even before the reinforcing pieces went into action, the Confederates halted in the open field. Unready to retreat, they concentrated their fire on Mink’s gun crews, dropping men rapidly. But the best of Cutler’s lot had thought better of their flight and rallied around the battery, with infantrymen leaping to serve the guns.

When they saw Walcott’s battery crest the hillock, the Confederate officers goaded their men to go forward again, to rush the knoll before the additional pieces could open up. But the effort was futile. Walcott’s sections, then Matthewson’s, shredded what remained of the Reb formation.

Just in time to finish them off, Bartlett’s fresh brigade burst out of the trees, extending Sweitzer’s embattled flank and hitting the bewildered Johnnies at a right angle.

Wainwright had the splendid pleasure and downright joy of watching Lee’s veteran infantry break and run.

His boys would never receive due credit, of course. The artillery never did. But
he
knew that his men had broken the Reb attack that threatened to slash all the way to the river, cutting off Griffin’s and Crawford’s divisions in another damned debacle.

As for those two divisions, they had held their ground. Sweitzer’s brigade had been threatened by the collapse of Cutler’s mob, but Charlie Griffin had simply refused his flank and kept on fighting. Now, to Griffin’s front, other Confederate regiments turned and ran. Without, Wainwright had to admit, falling subject to the effects of artillery.

The Johnnies just didn’t seem to have their old spark.

Or numbers. Wainwright galloped over to the knoll, full of advice and orders to prepare to receive a renewed Rebel attack. But nothing materialized on the right flank, the one vulnerable point. Instead, the Johnnies made a last halfhearted effort to break into Charlie Griffin’s lines. The old buzzard saw them off sharply.

Had they been mad? Attacking a corps with what appeared to be no more than a single ill-led division?

In the softening light, Wainwright watched through his field glasses as a last, weak assault crumbled, its survivors running pell-mell for their lives.

Before the victorious batteries, Johnnies lay dead in heaps, while their wounded crawled and pleaded.

Ragged prisoners shambled in, mocked by gloating soldiers who, a half hour past, had been on the run themselves.

On his way to inspect the batteries he had positioned across the field behind Crawford’s division, Wainwright met a grinning Charlie Griffin riding along, trailed by his division flag and a gaggle of prancing staff officers.