The Warriors (2 page)

The road had grown dark as the devil. But above, there was an eerie light compounded of the glow of the rising full moon, the pulsing glare of the Federal cannon to the east, and the sullen red of burning woodlands around the horizon.

Gideon speculated about whether the fighting might go on throughout the night. Perhaps not. For some reason unknown to him—but evidently clear to the generals—the Yanks commanded by Fighting Joe Hooker had failed to commit their admittedly superior numbers to the battle. Old Marse Robert’s mad double gamble seemed to be on the point of succeeding.

Gideon started. On his left—to the north, where smoke drifted through the gargoyle tangle of tree trunks—he thought he heard infantrymen moving.

He reined Sport to a walk. Whose troops were those?

He immediately decided he’d go only another quarter mile or so in his search for the leader of II Corps. The lines were obviously still shifting. And he couldn’t be positive the information given earlier was correct—that the general and a small party of officers, couriers, and Signal Corps sergeants had ridden east on this same turnpike to scout ahead of the re-forming lines. If he didn’t soon locate the man his father had known in Lexington before the war, he’d turn about and seek better guidance. Beauty Stuart didn’t like officers on his staff to be tardy delivering reports on the cavalry’s position.

He started and gasped as an artillery barrage exploded a half mile to his right. He heard the crash of falling branches. That patch of sky was now something out of an artist’s conception of hell. It flickered and shifted through every shade of red. It seemed the whole Virginia countryside below the Rappahannock was afire.

Again he heard screams—distant but unnerving. In the dark to his right, beyond the road’s south shoulder, he sensed more men moving.

Were they Yanks caught behind the forward sweep of the Confederate ranks? Or were they friendly reinforcements being brought up, responding to the general’s favorite command—“
Press on! Press on!”
The general drove his men so hard and fast they were sometimes called the foot cavalry.

Gideon didn’t like not knowing who was out there. His hand dropped to the butt of the Le Mat revolver tucked in his sash as he nudged Sport forward with his knees. He began to be quite concerned that the general might have advanced well beyond the point of safety.

All day an unconfirmed story had circulated among Stuart’s staff members. The story ran that the commander of II Corps had risen after a bad sleep and sipped some cold coffee before starting his men on the audacious flank march that culminated in the charge at Dowdall’s Clearing. While the general drank the coffee in the cold dawn air, his scab-barded sword had been standing against a nearby tree. And then, with no one touching it—no one even near it—the sword had suddenly clattered to the ground.

Gideon didn’t count himself especially superstitious. Yet that story bothered him more than he liked.

And there
was
reason for worry. He’d ridden quite a way down the Fredericksburg Turnpike.

Why hadn’t he found General Stonewall Jackson?

He tried to push the worry out of his mind. In a moment it became easy. Another shell arched overhead. Gideon ducked as it blew up trees about half a mile behind.

He wished to God he could see more clearly. Even if there were men on the road ahead it would be almost impossible to detect them from a distance. Pressing his threadbare gray trousers against Sport to urge him on, he strained to see through shadows and drifting smoke now tinged red by the fire glare, now yellow by the full moon.

To counter his weariness and fear, he again reminded himself that the battle seemed to be going favorably. By all logic it shouldn’t have been going that way at all.

Estimates said Hooker had brought down between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and fifty thousand men—including Stoneman’s cavalry, which had disappeared somewhere further south. The Union commander was desperate to give Lincoln a decisive victory after the debacles of McClellan, the political general who’d dawdled and ultimately failed on the Peninsula, and Burnside, of the formidable side whiskers, who’d been routed at Fredericksburg.

Fighting Joe’s gigantic Union force was faced by less than half as many Confederates. And few of those were in good shape after a winter of privation in the camps around Fredericksburg. Gideon remembered all too well the pathetic sights of the cold season: young boys, most of them barely fifteen, their uniforms in tatters, their mouths scurvy-rotted, grubbing in the forests for wild onions—

Feet wrapped in scraps of blanket leaving scarlet tracks in the mud as men filed out of the religious services held to keep their spirits up—

The round, alarmed eyes that first glimpsed the curious bulblike bags carrying men in big baskets and bobbing on anchor ropes in the blowing mists north of the river—

Gideon himself had been one of those startled and worried watchers. He had never before laid eyes on an observation balloon, but he’d heard about them. The balloons were a disheartening sight. They were more evidence of the superior resources and ingenuity of the industrial North. Against it the South could only muster dogged courage and the spirit epitomized by Jeb Stuart’s baritone voice bellowing “Jine the Cavalry” as he led his brigades into a firefight.

Finally Hooker’s onslaught had come. He’d hurled his columns over the Rappahannock on pontoon bridges. General Lee had then done the unthinkable—split the outnumbered Army of Northern Virginia into even smaller components. First he’d left ten thousand under Early at Fredericksburg. Then he’d sent twenty-six thousand with Jackson. That left fourteen thousand Confederates to confront the Union center, which consisted of three entire corps, something like seventy thousand men.

Lee’s division of his strength was deliberate. By taking a supreme risk, he hoped for a supreme triumph. Stuart’s riders had spotted a weakness in the Union plan. Hooker’s right wing straggled out southward, unprotected.

Only last night, Major Hotchkiss, an engineer, and Reverend Lacy, both of whom knew the countryside well, had located a route through the tangled woods along which Jackson might march down, around, and behind the exposed Union right. And so, after his sword had fallen, Stonewall had buckled it on, and with Lee’s approval, started at seven this very morning, urging his twenty-six thousand men to
“Press on!”

Toward the close of the day, the stern, curious soldier who resembled some Old Testament prophet, had ripped into Howard’s encamped Germans, the surprise march a complete success.

Gideon, a tall, strong-shouldered young man who would be twenty next month, took a fierce pride in that kind of daring. He found it in Jackson, in Marse Robert, and in his immediate superior, General Stuart, to whose staff he’d been assigned just after the Fredericksburg triumph. Again outnumbered at Chancellorsville, the Southern commanders had had to strike more boldly, gamble everything. Only a general whose military skills approached genius would have agreed to dividing inferior manpower not once but twice, in the faint hope of turning what appeared to be almost certain defeat into possible victory. Only other generals of equally incredible vision and audacity could have executed such a plan.

Moonlight through a break in the trees lit Gideon’s tawny hair for an instant. He’d lost his campaign hat around six o’clock when a Yank ball had blown it off. As he thought of brave, imaginative Lee and the hard-driving Jackson, he barely heard another rattle of brush on his left.

Vaguely he realized the turnpike was dipping downward. The soft
chock
of Sport’s rotting hoofs changed to a mushy sound. There was swampy ground at the foot of the little hill. But Gideon paid only marginal attention to the terrain. He was happily bemused by the real possibility of a victory.

With a few more decisive routs of Lincoln’s procession of inept or hesitant generals, the Confederacy might be able to negotiate a peace. Then he could go back to Richmond. Back to his wife and their infant daughter. It was time. Of late he’d been bothered by a feeling that his luck was playing out.

A year earlier, when he had been chosen as one of the twelve hundred men to ride with Stuart to scout McClellan’s Peninsular army, he’d nearly lost his life at Tunstall’s Station. He’d been leading a detachment burning the rolling stock on the York River Railroad. Some of his men had started firing revolvers to celebrate. Some corporal’s careless shot had blown Gideon’s beloved roan Will-O’-the-Wisp out from under him.

Stunned, he’d lain unnoticed while the freight cars crumbled around him like fiery waterfalls, setting his uniform afire. Somehow he’d found enough strength to crawl to a ditch and roll frantically until he’d put out the flames. He’d spent the night in that ditch, half conscious and hurting. At dawn he’d discovered that Stuart’s horsemen had all ridden on and the district was swarming with Yanks.

He’d crawled out of the ditch, limped into some trees, and hidden out all day, delirious with pain. After dark he’d managed to rouse himself and move on, finally blundering into the dooryard of a small tobacco farm. The farmer had put him to bed, and the farmer’s wife had dressed the worst of his burns with poultices.

The family tended him for over five weeks. At last the itching tissue had sloughed off his arms and chest, leaving only faint scars.

Then Gideon had disguised himself in country clothing and slipped back into Richmond to find his wife—who had feared him lost forever.

That sort of brush with death—his first had come at Manassas in ’61—had relieved him of all conviction that this war was glorious. Stuart still fought with zest, and Gideon still joined the cavalry’s singing as they rode. But his emulation of his commander’s spirit was forced. He now found the war a necessary but filthy business. He wanted it over, settled with as much advantage to the South as could be gained.

Perhaps that was why he felt so strangely euphoric just now. If a victory could be wrenched out of the night’s confusion it might lead at long last to the European recognition Jeff Davis sought for the government. It might lead also to a negotiated peace, with the South once again prospering as a separate nation on the American continent. But most importantly, it might lead him home to Margaret and little Eleanor.

Gideon’s head jerked up. Musketry rattled ahead. He reined Sport to a dead stop. The fire-reddened moon hung above the trees but did little to relieve the gloom on the turnpike.

The firing died away. Gideon scratched his nose. The air stank of powder—and worse. Hoof thrush wasn’t his mount’s only affliction. Too many hours of a saddle on Sport’s back had opened one of the familiar and nauseous sores that plagued cavalry horses. Gideon could smell the fetid ooze beneath him; the sore ran constantly. It pained him to think he was only worsening it by riding his spunky mount so hard.

But he only had one horse. And he also had a very important dispatch in the pouch thrust into his frayed, dirty sash.

Now that the muskets were silent, he could hear a party of horsemen approaching. He quickly swung the stallion to the north side of the road. The moon glinted cold and hard in Gideon’s blue eyes as he scanned the turnpike.

The small arms fire from the direction of Chancellorsville started again, then gradually died away beneath the rhythmic plopping of hoofs. The horses were coming up the slight incline from the low place.

Next he heard voices. Did they belong to friends, or to enemies?

Gideon drew his Le Mat. He thought briefly of heading Sport into the brush beyond the flinty shoulder. But then he heard more sounds of movement and decided against it.

Dry-mouthed he waited. Should he hail?

No, better wait and see whether the broken moonlight revealed gray uniforms—or blue ones.

A horseman materialized, followed by several others. The leading rider, thin to the point of emaciation, turned his head at the sound of another shell bursting south of the road. Gideon saw the rider was wearing gray. The man had a straggling beard, eyes that glittered like polished stones, and an unmistakable profile.

Relieved, Gideon holstered the revolver. He’d found Jackson.

He touched Sport gently with his spurs. The stallion started forward. Behind the general, Gideon thought he saw six or eight mounted men in a double column. There could have been several more; it was impossible to be sure in the bad light. He headed the stallion back across the turnpike, moving toward the general at an angle.

As he opened his mouth to hail, someone hidden in the woods to Jackson’s left let out a shout. From the same spot a horizontal line of flame flashed. Rifled muskets roared, volleying at the road.

The general’s horse reared. Gideon crouched over Sport’s mane just as a ball whizzed past his ear. To Jackson’s rear, men yelled out as he fought to control his alarmed mount.

“Who’s there?”

“Damn Yanks!”

“No, those have to be our men, Morrison.”

“No firing!
Cease firing!”

In answer to the last cry from the road, the unseen riflemen volleyed again.

Sport shied, neighing frantically. Over the roar of the guns, Gideon heard a fierce, familiar wail from the dark trees—

The Rebel yell.

The men in the woods weren’t the enemy. Perhaps they were from A. P. Hill’s division. The officers Gideon had met earlier had told him the division was supposed to be advancing somewhere in this area. With visibility so poor, Jackson and his party had been foolish to push out so far ahead of the Confederate lines.

Gideon kicked Sport forward, realizing from the rising clamor of voices that soldiers were crashing through the trees on his side of the road as well. He’d evidently escaped an attack because he was a single rider, proceeding in relative quiet.

The voices on the turnpike grew louder, creating confusion as horses screamed and reared: “
Who are you men out there?”

“Hold your fire! You’re firing at your own officers!”

“Damned lie!” a Southern voice howled from the blackness. “It’s the Yank cavalry we was warned about, boys.
Pour it to them!”