Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (28 page)

He let his own staff and colors catch up, then got down to empty his bladder. Before he could get to the business, though, a courier burst from the trees, lashing his horse.

Without waiting for his mount to still, the rider shouted, “General Ricketts, you’re to advance at once!”

Removing his fingers from his trouser buttons, Ricketts remounted, loins complaining. It was turning into one thoroughly wretched day.

“On whose authority?” It was important, even now, to do things properly.

“General Wright’s, sir. By order of General Sheridan.”

Satisfied, Ricketts called, “Bugler, to me!” He drew out his watch to mark the time: It was precisely eleven forty.

Horn shining on his hip, the bugler brought his horse abreast of Ricketts.

“Sound the advance.”

TEN

September 19, morning

Northern approach to the battlefield

Nichols was wearied to a fright, so whupped down he nigh on lost his fear of the Good Lord. As the Georgia men marched out of the darkness into eye-cutting light, making haste just to halt and halt again, with every man sensing—just plain knowing—a fight lay up ahead, even that mortal excitement of the spirit had not been enough to master quitting flesh and punished souls. Men stumbled along, with equally tired officers coaxing them, pulling them, all but lashing them forward, and even the stalwart fell to sleeping upright at each sudden, tempting, unreasonable halt, leaning on their rifles as female leaned on male, snoring pillars of flesh, waiting to be roused, rumple-hearted, to hurry on down toward Winchester again.

The only blessed man in the entire regiment who retained his manly vigor was Elder Woodfin. The chaplain had begun the night march ranting like a prophet against drunkenness as the hardest fellows puked out the last of their rotgut, then he preached in the pauses, warming up to Deuteronomy and howling chapter 20 over and over again, challenging Georgia’s manhood to rally itself to smite Israel’s foes, who surely lurked:

“When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses and chariots,
and
a people more than thou, be not afraid of them: for the Lord thy God
is
with thee
…”

That was heartening somewhat, although no man was pleased at the thought of “a people more than thou,” which seemed all too frequent a situation these days. As night’s black fur grayed and slant-light stung strained eyes, the chaplain proved as relentless as Jehovah, pounding the morning with iron words:
“Let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble, neither be ye terrified…,”
and Ive Summerlin had muttered, “I’m too dogged tired to be terrified of much.”

Instead of quickening against Ive’s near-enough blasphemy, Nichols had found himself in sour agreement.

The daylight had taken on weight, yet another burden, and the dust was a smothering curtain a man had to gasp through. In the distance, rifles crackled, still far off, the concern of other men, and only as the sun climbed Heaven’s flagpole did the cough of artillery call for broad attention.

Men griped and grumbled, heavy of eye, but their backs began to stiffen.

Couriers spurred their horses along the line of march, discourteous. As one lieutenant pounded by, brush-your-sleeve close and freely distributing horse-stink, Lem Davis, that good Christian of soft temper, remarked, “Bet that rich boy never sprouted one blister.” To which Dan Frawley, nurtured with the milk of human kindness, added kill-voiced, “Feet probably never touched the ground in his life, even shits in his stirrups.”

“And has a nigger to reach up and wipe his ass,” Tom Boyet, who never had a nigger, said.

Of greater force than any Yankee artillery, Elder Woodfin bellowed, “
What man
is there that is
fearful and fainthearted
?”

“Passel of such, I reckon,” Ive Summerlin grumped.

They were ordered off the road to clear it for guns and supply wagons, exiled like the people of Israel, into the fields and groves, the thickets and creek-cuts, hundreds of yards to the left to shield the trains against a surprise attack by the Yankees. Just made things worse, that did, with fall-down-right-here-and-go-to-sleep men required to push through briars and clumsy-climb fences, hurrying surly through foot-wetting streams that would have been dry in September, but for the mocking rain the day before, as if, unthinkable thought, the Good Lord had switched sides and joined the Yankees, a thing impossible.

“… thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword…”

“Suppose a bayonet will have to do,” Sergeant Alderman put in, his tired voice longing to be one of them again, to be among equals as he had been before his elevation to striped sleeves.

“Or a Barlow knife,” Ive Summerlin proposed. Untangling himself from a scourge of thorns, he added, “Lord does work in mysterious ways.”

They did fierce labor, marching cross-country while struggling to remain a proper regiment, a brigade, and not a mob, all the while keeping up with the horses and vehicles rolling along the Pike, at least a quarter mile to their right now, and every man afoot hating those who rode.

The battle sounds edged closer, yet remained without form, as the earth had been in the early time of Creation, so that a veteran soldier could not tell if either side felt serious about fighting, or even where.

With a marked limp, Captain Kennedy worked back along their ranks, or what passed for ranks, and surveyed the beat-down faces before calling, “Private Nichols to flanking duty. With them four yonder. Yanks are out there somewheres, don’t get us surprised.”

The captain, a brave man, yawned.

“Yes, sir,” Nichols said, made instantly miserable by this separation from close comrades, condemned to join men from another company, good men, surely, but still …

Ive Summerlin laughed, not harshly. “That there’s what you get, Georgie-boy, for being famed as the soberest man in the regiment.”

“Here now, give over your blanket and haversack,” Lem Davis told Nichols. “You won’t want to be laden.” And Nichols, after a moment’s doubt, passed the treasures over his shoulder, relieved to be less encumbered for this duty.

Off he went across a stubble field, over earth clotted by yesterday’s rain, thrusting heavy-limbed into the near-noon, catching up to the four men moving abreast, them advancing almost languidly, weary as the ages and wary, too.

Louder and louder. Those guns. But the war was not yet upon them, nor were they in the war. On this late and lovely forenoon, when any man of sense wished to be elsewhere.

The flankers bickered about just how far out they ought to go, cutting a path diagonal from the long gray caterpillar crawling many-thousand-footed over the ups and downs of earth eternal, five carved from the multitude, just five, headed off to skunk out the Yankee army, that ungodly agglomeration of Amorites and Jebusites.

“Keep them eyes of your’n open,” the corporal in charge warned.

Words to summon demons.
No sooner had the corporal spoken than a skirmish line of Yankees rose from thick, high clover and coon brush, the closest of them not ten paces off, rifles leveled.

A burly sergeant thumbed rearward and said, in a used-to-things voice, “You Johnnies just get along now, walk back thataway. And count yourselves damned lucky.”

Nichols opened his mouth to shout a warning to his kind, but a less amiable Yankee pointed his rifle at Nichols’ belly, stepping so close that his bayonet almost touched the spot where a button had gone missing.

“Shut your pie-trap, boy.”

It was all wrong, overwhelming. This wasn’t only a skirmish party of Yankees. Long blue lines emerged from a yellowing grove. More Yankees than Nichols had ever seen this close. With a grand hurrah, the Federals rushed forward, thousands of them, hounds let off the leash. Following his four fellow captives to the rear, to Yankee Hell, Nichols paused to look back, with all the confused longing of Lot’s wife, only to stand stiffened, as if some backwoods wisewoman cast a spell on him. He witnessed a thing he had never seen, had never wanted to see, as the sweeping blue tide neared his surprised brigade. He watched his gray-clad officers struggling to bring the march formation, disordered by traitor trees, into battle order. The Yankees halted midfield and gave them a volley, disintegrating the gray ranks, then rushing at the remnants like hungry dogs. Barking, too.

Mortified, Nichols watched his own brigade break and run, a thing it had never done on any field. All of them—all of those Georgians who remained upright—just ran back into the trees, pursued by Yankees.

Nichols jumped at the tap on his shoulder. Whipping about, more nerves than man, he found a bewhiskered Yankee captain, no taller than himself, staring at him in wonder, hardly a pipe-stem off and smelling, indeed, of bad tobacco. On both the captain’s flanks, a second battle line of Yankees advanced, but the captain and those soldiers nearest him paused.

The captain gestured at Nichols.

“Chonnie, your gun. Gif it me now, or be shot.”

The captain wrenched the rifle from Nichols’ grip. Bewildered, Nichols only then realized that he had held on to his weapon, at insane peril.

For all that, he rued its loss: He had fired many hundreds of balls, perhaps a thousand, from its barrel. Toward such men in blue. It was a fine piece, cared for like the prize horse of a stable.

The captain saw its quality. Turning to a soldier, he held out the rifle and said,
“Jacob, hier gibt’s eine feine Waffe, schau mal.
Leave yours
und nimm
this one.
”

Turning to Nichols again, inspecting him as if weighing a purchase, the captain said,
“Du armer Kerl, du stinkst zum Himmel hoch.
You go back there.” He pointed eastward, toward humiliation. “No one is hurting you. Maybe you can eat.”

But as Nichols shifted to step off, the captain caught his wrist.

“To which brigade are you belonging?”

“General Gordon’s. I mean, it
was
his’n.”

The captain straightened as if on parade. Delighted, he cried,
“Komm mal, los geht’s! Der
Gordon retreats!
Los geht’s, los geht’s!”

Nichols believed he had never felt a hurt as cruel as that inflicted by those words in English.

As the foreigner-Yankees rejoined the advance—hurrying overjoyed—Nichols shambled into the trees, a crushed thing, scorched with tears. The shame of being captured, taken without even putting up a fight, was a terrible wrong. But the prospect of marching off to a Yankee jail seemed worse by a measure. He felt he would rather die than rot in a prison camp.

Surely the brigade would re-form. And the other brigades were back there waiting, closer to the Pike. When the Yankees ran into all of them, those sorry blue-bellies had to come reeling back. Gordon’s old brigade could not be whipped, it could not happen. Even if General Evans had not returned to lead it this day, Colonel Atkinson was a Christian man. The men of Georgia could not falter long, they
had
to counterattack.…

Instead of passing meekly to their rear, he followed the Yankees.

11:55 a.m.

Union center

Ricketts dared the Confederates to kill him. Galloping past knots of men left leaderless and others clutching the earth—waiting for someone, even a corporal, to take charge—he spotted Keifer near the front of his brigade, bellowing orders as round shot roared past, each projectile a miniature hurricane, accompanied by a hail of Minie balls. Behind Keifer’s mount, a crazed soldier flailed his arms as if trying to fly, splashing blood from the stumps of his wrists and keening. Keifer’s words were unintelligible, but clearly he hoped to restore his failing attack.

The brigade commander spotted Ricketts and turned his horse to meet him.

The attack in the center had faltered almost from the start. And poor Getty, on the left, was trying to advance his division over even worse ground. Only the Nineteenth Corps, on the right, seemed to have made easy progress—although Ricketts didn’t trust it. The Rebs didn’t just quit.

Keifer’s bad arm flopped in its dirtied sling. Before the colonel could speak, Ricketts said:

“I don’t give a goddamn how you do it, but get your men moving again.”

“Yes, sir. It’s that damned artillery. And there’s a gap on my right.”

“Plug it. Then take those guns.”

“Yes, sir. I’m trying.”

“Don’t
try
.
Do
it, man.”

“Yes, sir. How’s Emerson coming?”

“I’ll see to Bill Emerson. Look to your own front.”

A round shot howled by, so close they could feel its tug, almost an abrasion.

“I heard that—”

“Vredenburgh’s dead, Dillingham’s good as dead, and I need
you
to get the Rebs off Emerson’s boys till I get
them
moving again. Plain enough?”

Keifer nodded.

“Well, get on with it,” Ricketts told him.