Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (31 page)

Steady, steady.

Tompkins rode the gun line, alert to hints of weakness, but the Maine lads loaded and fired with all the snap of an exhibition drill. The colonel did not think it sensible for any man to live in Maine by choice, but the unimaginative sort who did quite lent themselves to bravery.

Gore burst from the belly of a cannoneer wielding a ramrod. Without a fuss, his sergeant drove the charge home.

“Number two gun there, mind your elevation,” Tompkins called. His voice was firm as granite, but not too loud.

Powder-blackened, the cannoneers leapt to it.

Where was Russell, though? His division should have come up, it formed the reserve. And if ever the reserve was needed, now was the blasted time. Tompkins was glad that the men he led could not tell how thoroughly drenched he was by sweat.

The great gray wedge, a howling mob, had gotten unsettlingly near.

“Double-canister, Stevens, double-canister. Don’t husband the inventory.”

Along the Pike, a battery raced forward. Tompkins noted the guidon of Battery G, 1st Rhode Island Lights, under whose colors he’d begun this war. Adams, the present commander, was a cool one. He’d stand firm.

Before the Rhode Islanders finished unlimbering, the 1st Massachusetts Battery rattled up.

Quietly, Tompkins addressed his foe: “If you want that Pike, you’ll have to take it from me.”

The Johnnies were nearly close enough to hurl rocks. Afoot now, Stevens strode up to Tompkins’ horse.

“Sir … we’ll lose these guns. General Wright said—”

“Shoulders back, chest out, man. Better to lose the guns than lose the battle.”

That was heresy, Tompkins knew, an assault on the dogma of gunnery’s episcopate. You were supposed to save your guns at all costs, even if it meant you lost the battle. Well, heresy was an old Rhode Island specialty, beginning with Roger Williams and his pack, for whom even the Puritans were too orthodox.

Tompkins wasn’t minded to budge an inch.

“Canister, Stevens, canister! That’s the way!”

12:45 p.m.

Union center

Delighted to be unleashed at last, Brigadier General David Russell rode proudly through the chaos of the day, guiding his division into battle. Russell had feared his corps commander intended to withdraw. The notion had shocked him, since Wright was known as a steady man in a fight. But the best men had bad days, and that was the truth of it.

It would be all right now. Sheridan had appeared mesmerized himself, but had snapped out of his trance in time, recovering his spunk and telling Wright, in Russell’s presence, to “send Russell in right now, put this in order.”

And Russell meant to stop the bloody crumbling. He had been chafing, anxious to help Jim Ricketts and George Getty. The way Russell read the field, Early was desperate, throwing in all he had. If the Nineteenth Corps just held out on the right, Russell believed he could not only blunt the Rebel assault—which seemed to him to be thinning—but reverse the tide again.

Ollie Edwards had taken in his Third Brigade, and the First Brigade was coming up fast, ready to swing in on Ollie’s flank. Russell intended to use those brigades to stabilize the line and grind back the Rebs. Then he’d unleash Upton and his Second Brigade.

Upton was an enigma, a hardened Christian, mean as a Turk. The boy-general’s hostility to slavery was at least as fierce as that of a Knight Templar toward Mahomet. A brilliant, intolerant, merciless young man, Upton had seemed a madcap martinet, yet had outperformed every other officer in the entire army at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.

Russell meant to send in Upton the moment the Johnnies wavered.

Work to do in the meantime, though. He rode through the spatter kicked up by errant shells, ghosting through billows of smoke and passing knots of soldiers catching their wind after their flight. The stream of wounded only convinced him that everything hung on a few quick actions.

Half a soldier’s torso hung from a tree.

After overtaking two regiments of his First Brigade, the 4th and 10th New Jersey, Russell personally led them forward until he was certain they were solidly on his line of attack. The men seemed game and grisly. Next, he rallied two orphaned regiments from Jim Ricketts’ division, sending them up on the flank of the New Jersey men.

Russell could feel it, sense the momentum shifting. The Confederates had advanced too far, running themselves breathless and losing contact on their flanks. The balance was tipping again on this seesaw day.

He spotted Ollie Edwards from a distance, making out his profile through scarves of smoke. Ollie was in the thick of it, cap pulled down and sword thrust out, directing his brigade in the advance.

Russell gave his horse the spurs, warning himself to master his emotions: His impulse was to ignore his own resolve and call for Upton to go in immediately, to come up behind Edwards and add weight … but boldness was one thing, impetuosity another. Discipline, not passion, had to rule.

The world was alive with possibilities, though, with the prospect of victory, of the field redeemed. And Russell knew himself to be as ambitious as the next man.

Discipline,
he warned himself. You ask it of your soldiers, show it yourself.

It was ever a thrill to command men going forward, to feel the power and thrust. There simply was nothing like it in the world. But it was a power that needed harnessing.

And he owed it to Little Phil to save this battle. After all, he had been Sheridan’s captain back in the old Army, when their relationship had been reversed. Hadn’t he trained Sheridan for his astonishing rise? Little Phil’s victory—or loss—would be Russell’s legacy, too.

As he neared the front line, men dropped on every side. The firing was quick and lethal, veterans killing veterans with resolve. Nor was he certain that either side wasn’t firing on its own kind amid the confusion: There was no solid battlefront now, just a savage ebb and flow. Dueling batteries warred like the gods above the plains of Troy.

Amid the uproar, he caught up with Ollie Edwards.

“Charge them, Ollie. They’ll fold like a poor hand at cards. Just charge and keep going.”

12:55 p.m.

Dinkle farm, east fields

Colonel Oliver Edwards turned to explain that he planned to go forward
en echelon,
but as his mouth opened he heard a thud he recognized. Beside him, Russell jerked in the saddle, then stiffened.

“Good God, General … are you badly … how badly are you hurt?”

Clutching his side with one hand, Russell waved away his concerns with the other. “It makes no difference, Ollie. Not at a time like this.” He gasped. “Go on and charge. Order your brigade to charge.”

Russell appeared to be stuffing his shirt into his side, attempting to stop up a deep wound. Yet the general managed to draw his saber.

“Charge, Ollie! I’ll go with you!”

A shell burst above the two officers, deafening, rending the air with gale force. Gashed at the neck, Edwards’ horse reared and whinnied. As he struggled to control his mount, the brigade commander saw that fortune had favored him, but had finished Russell.

The division commander leaned oddly in his saddle, as if he meant to fall but was unable. Blood painted what was left of him. A third of his chest had been torn away.

Men rushed toward them. Russell’s orderly reached the general first, but seemed afraid to touch him. Russell’s cut-up horse meandered, wobbling. The general’s body pitched about, but remained eerily in the saddle.

In a voice as fierce and heartless as battle demanded, Edwards told the orderly: “Leave him. Go find Upton. He’s senior, he’s got the division.”

And God help us, Edwards thought.

1:00 p.m.

Center of the battlefield

“
And there was given unto him a great sword…”

Brigadier General Emory Upton had been chosen by the Lord for this day’s purpose. The hand of Jehovah was at work, even in Russell’s death. God’s wisdom did not yield to the will of men, or to their sentiments.

He, Emory Upton, had been given a great sword.

“Maintain your ranks,” he called to his hurrying soldiers.

The Lord had opened his eyes, as the Lord had seen fit to open them before, letting him spy the weakness of Satan’s legions. How else explain the way he saw opportunities to which those who served beside him remained blind?

“Come
on,
men!” he called sharply. The double-quick pace was not quite quick enough, not for Emory Upton.

His men came on, and they had the force of a multitude. He had been mocked for his rigor at drill, his discipline. The unbelieving never understood. Now, in the storm of battle, on a field obscured, his brigade rushed forward with a precision unmatched and a bloodlust unrivaled. Men who had hated him cheered him. Reviled, he had redeemed himself in fire.

“And there was war in Heaven…”

He would shine again, upon this battlefield. His brigade—now it was his division, too—would gleam like the archangels. And
his
division would not take one step back.

“And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword,”
he recited to himself,
“that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron; and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.”

The division’s other brigades had staunched the slave-drivers’ attack, and the Lord had revealed, as if divine light had cut through the clouds of smoke, that the enemies of God and man had an exposed flank as tasty as a cutlet.

He came up on Ranald Mackenzie, who had turned the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery into an infantry regiment as good as any. Mackenzie was not a devout man. Upton even suspected him of unseemly lust toward women. But Mackenzie fought worthily, bravely, wonderfully. He, too, would be a tool of the Lord this day.

“Our day, Mackenzie, this is
our
day. Deploy when you reach those trees. The brigade pivots on you.”

“Shame about Russell, sir.”

“God’s will be done.”

Mackenzie rode to the head of the column, spirit immune to danger. His sword soon flashed, pointing the way, and the blue ranks began to unfold into battle formation, their actions crisp, nearly flawless. Bayonets shone like the fiery swords of angels.

The first rank disappeared into a grove between two batteries. Upton noted Tompkins, the corps’ artillery chief, seated placidly on his horse, watching matters unfold as if he were viewing a sporting match of no particular interest. A man of suspect theology but courage, Tompkins, too, had done the Lord’s work this day.

Upton rode southwest, until he found Oliver Edwards, whose brigade gnawed forward. The carnage was hideous to the eyes of men, but surely pleasing to the Lord as a sacrifice to the cause of Abolition.

Upton’s first extended contact with Negroes had come at Oberlin College, to which he had walked, still a boy, from his family’s farm on the hard soil of western New York. Striving beside them as he sought to prepare for a place at West Point—a place he prayed God would grant him, as God did—he had found those colored scholars reverent toward God, respectful toward men, and hungry for knowledge. They were no less human because of the hue of their flesh. No less, but more, by virtue of their suffering. Godly men, the lost tribe of Israel found, those sweet-souled Negroes had led him to fight slavery with every means in his power, standing—at first alone—against the Southern cadets at West Point, and now, on this day, on this field, for the sublime cause of freedom for all, a brigadier general, by the Lord’s grace, at the age of twenty-five.

“Edwards, you’ve got to push
harder
. They’re ready to break. Don’t stop!”

He could read the other man’s face, the face of a common sinner but fair soldier: temper, resentment.

Jealousy?

“Yes,
sir
.” Edwards’ eyes had narrowed, not from the smoke. The colonel added, “My boys have pushed them back a quarter mile, they’re hardly shirking.”

“A good start, Edwards. But no more than a start.”

A roar rose on their right.

“Hamblin’s got my brigade,” Upton said. “Mackenzie’s in the lead. They’re splitting the Rebs open, the way they tried to split us. They’ll break in your front, too. Run them down like dogs.”

“I don’t think my boys will have to be told.”

“And don’t fuss about prisoners,” Upton added.

He next rode to Campbell, who led the division’s First Brigade and its solid New Jersey regiments. Campbell’s men had thrust past a farmyard encrusted with dead Rebels and crawling with wounded. It was a splendid sight, a righteous judgment.

After ensuring that Campbell understood he was to maintain his alignment with Edwards at all costs, Upton galloped back through the carnage and wasteland of smashed caissons and discarded weapons, avoiding the wounded as best he could but halting for no man, outrunning the staff inherited from Russell. He did not slow until he had caught up to his old brigade. With Mackenzie’s defrocked cannoneers setting the pace, the brigade had burst from a grove a mere hundred yards from the flank of the Confederates.

The result had been devastating. The slave-drivers and whoremongers had barely resisted. Now they ran.

Upton rode to the fore of his advancing, unbroken ranks, careless of any Rebels who wished him harm. The Lord would take him when the Lord saw fit, and his soul would rise up as his body fell.

On his right flank, the Nineteenth Corps was under way again, punching forward, too.

Paring the air with his sword, Upton kept pace with the blue ranks striding westward. After their first contact with the enemy, the men of his old brigade had re-formed immediately, advancing shoulder to shoulder. These men had mocked his rigor, as another had been mocked. But not now, not today. In battle, they were as firm as Frederick’s Prussians. He and the Lord had made them so.

“And there was war in Heaven…,”
Upton whispered,
“and Satan which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out … and his angels were cast out with him.”