Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (47 page)

Something had to be done.

And the choice, as Breathed saw things, was up to him. He could keep on going and save his guns, or take up a position and—maybe—save the damned cavalry from complete annihilation. It was a harder decision than any he had faced over a patient.

“Over there, Johnston,” he shouted to his nearest battery commander. “Deploy up on that rise, in front of the tree line.”

Spurring his horse back to his trailing battery, he called, “Thomson, take the other side of the road. Sweep the lower fields that Johnston can’t cover.”

His officers and soldiers didn’t hesitate, but went into battery as smoothly as if drilling.

Clusters of blue-clad horsemen rushed into range, but Breathed’s guns didn’t open, letting the riders come on, aware of how wasteful long-range fires would be with half their ammunition lost and the Yankees dispersed by the speed of their success. Breathed raised his binoculars, only to see Yankees saber the drivers of a last few wagons careening southward.

Munford came up, though, with a good hundred men still under his command. Soon others joined them. A raw defense developed.

The Yankees had lost all order in their pursuit, galloping after prizes until the fields resembled a massive, madcap steeplechase.

Still gentleman enough to recall that profanity had to be stayed behind the lips, Breathed watched gray riders throw up their hands, some in surrender, others in the dependable reflex of men shot in the back.

But Munford gathered in more of his fleeing troopers. Then Payne came up with a company’s worth of Virginians.

The men
wanted
to rally, that was the thing. They still had a dose of fight in them.

Where was Rosser? Not that Breathed missed him unto a heartache.

“Let them get close,” Munford warned him. The colonel was sweating and panting, but hardly from fighting. Breathed had suffered about as many cavalrymen’s prescriptions as he could abide in a single morning.

“I know my business,” he said, voice sharpened past insult.

He was hot, he couldn’t help it.

Munford looked at him hard, but let it go. The cavalryman rode back to the tree line and his much-diminished command.

When the leading Yankees spotted the guns, they weren’t deterred in the least. Instead, they closed together again, into packs just short of military order, responding to animal instinct and training, neither factor weightier than the other. Some increased their pace and began to hurrah, swinging their sabers or extending their carbines.

Breathed trotted out into the roadway, where all of his artillerymen could see him. And he raised his hand.

Waiting. Listening to Yankee shots rip by, fired from the saddle and longing to hit him.

Closer. A little more.

As soon as the Yankees entered the effective fan of canister, he dropped his hand.

Horses and riders tumbled. But not enough, not nearly enough. The attack slowed, though, with riders milling about, as if they’d lost their bearings and needed orders.

His men reloaded, working swabs and ramrods with veteran speed.

Munford and Payne, the damned fools, didn’t wait. With ragged cries, their horsemen burst from the trees, from swales, countercharging the Yankees.

And the Yankees turned all right, the few hundred of them who had neared the batteries. They took off like rabbits in their turn, pursued by hallooing Confederates. But Breathed’s lips had tightened to a grimness. He knew every step of this cotillion and didn’t care for the music the band would play next.

8:40 a.m.

Custer found his men in retreat, rallied them, and quickly repelled the Confederates who’d chase them. Had to admire the Johnnies’ pluck, they kept up their end of the game as best they could. He had hoped to spot Tom Rosser—wouldn’t it be lovely to capture old Tex?—but the big fellow hadn’t showed since his lines collapsed.

Custer had called in his brigade commanders to issue new orders. Before his old brigade, advancing at a walk, could overtake them.

“Wells, you’re on the right,” he said. “Pennington, the left. Get your boys sorted out quickly. I want a division front, two ranks. And not a second to spare, you understand?”

He was not going to let Merritt in on this prize. Not even Merritt in the guise of his Wolverines.

Trailed by their pennants and flags, his brigade commanders hurried off. After giving an aide instructions for Peirce and his artillery, he turned to scan the fields for his old brigade. Instead, he spotted damnable George Sanford, one of Torbert’s pet captains and a creature who had always favored Merritt.

Sanford rode up and saluted. Custer returned the salute with a practiced smile.

“So glad I found you, sir,” Sanford told him. “Given that you’re lagging a bit, I thought you’d want to be apprised of developments. General Merritt has given Lomax a thrashing out on the Pike, it’s a complete rout.” Smirking like the cat that ate the prize goldfish, the captain added, “Merritt has taken five guns, it’s been something of a spectacle.”

“Sanford, you’re just in time!” Custer said in the merriest voice he could scavenge. “Hold on a minute and I’ll show you six.”

Sanford raised an eyebrow under his kepi but said nothing.

“Sound the advance,” Custer ordered. Hoping that Pennington and Wells had their men ready.

They were ready. The entire division moved forward, first at a walk, then at a trot. It was a glorious sight, almost rivaling Winchester, and Custer wished his darling girl could see it. Wouldn’t she be proud of her boy today?

Rather to Custer’s surprise, Sanford joined the advance. Custer called to him, less indulgently now, “Off you go, Sanford. If you see my old Wolverines, tell them they’re welcome to follow and share in the spoils. Plenty for all, I’m not the jealous sort, you know.” And he touched his horse’s wet flanks with his spurs.

9:05 a.m.

Breathed saw the Yankees coming, with a few gray horsemen preceding them, heralds of disaster, men crying warnings of doom and dragging it with them.

He had tried to rally more troopers around his guns, but few had halted: Terror was the order of the day. Under such circumstances, the artillery officer’s version of the Hippocratic oath said, “First, save your guns.” But Breathed had decided to risk everything. In the hope of buying a few more slivers of time, not for the cavalry to reorganize itself and put up a fight—that was beyond all hope now—but for the horsemen to escape to fight another day: They had been savaged, but not destroyed. Not yet. And Breathed saw clearly that only he stood between them and destruction.

He rode the lines of his two batteries in turn, giving an order he never had imagined would pass his lips.

“Fight the guns to the last. Then save yourselves. If we can bring them off, all right. But I want heroics
before
we’re driven, not afterward. Fight the guns to the last, then leave them, if need be.”

No man said a word. No japes, no gibes. Not even frowns. Just faces cast in mottled brass, as hard as any gunmetal.

Across the fields, a magnificent show materialized: blue lines, metal and leather gleaming, their front a half mile wide. Breathed guessed their number at two thousand horsemen. Maybe more.

In the distance, a band began to play a piece Breathed didn’t recognize.

“Open at maximum range,” he called. “No need to conserve ammunition now.”

9:15 a.m.

New command, new music. Throughout his days leading a brigade, Custer had favored “Yankee Doodle” as the anthem for his attacks. Now, commanding a division, he’d decided he’d need something more distinctive, uniquely his own. And “Garryowen,” an Irish jig, stuck in a fellow’s ear and jollied the spirit.

The division’s band, a hodgepodge affair not yet up to his standards, didn’t render it perfectly, but could play it well enough to quicken a charge. He’d been saving it up all morning. For the
coup de grâce
.

And a lovely charge it was about to be, over perfect ground: harvested fields with their fences long since removed by soldiers hunting firewood and copses of trees so slight they didn’t figure. It was almost as he imagined the western plains.

A few quick clashes had brushed aside the ragged bits of resistance that turned up, and Custer was surprised to crest a low ridge and see, in the distance, guns in battery on each side of the road, apparently unsupported.

Those guns were
his,
he wouldn’t let the Rebs bring them off a second time. He’d thought to bluff Sanford, but here the pieces were, after all, just begging to be captured. Six, at least.

Custer’s luck.

The guns across the fields puffed smoke, and rounds whistled down their arcs. Explosive shells ruptured the earth before his ranks, hurling cascades of dirt and stone upward and outward.

“Sound the charge!” he called.

That clarion call. The rumble of hooves swelling into earthly thunder. And, behind them, the brass band striking up to give them “Garryowen.”

Hurrahs. Lowered sabers. Flags snapping overhead.

The Johnnies reloaded quickly, but had trouble adjusting the range, given the speed of the attack. He’d issued the order to charge so quickly, the Rebs had been thrown off balance.

Along the Back Road, a lone lost wagon clattered between the forces, its teamster doubtless terrified.

The charge gobbled distance. Reb guns spit. Horses tumbled. Custer drew his own saber and leaned forward, torso paralleling his stallion’s neck.

Men shouted, “New York!” or, “Pennsylvania!” or, “Vermont!” But the words were barely intelligible amid the uproar. The earth quivered.

He expected the Rebs to run up their limbers and try to haul off their guns. But they didn’t. As the distance between the cannoneers and their attackers narrowed, the crews went about their work, as if unaware of the danger.

They got off last blasts of canister, the Rebs did. But too late to save them. And what damage Custer glimpsed was blessedly slight.

And the Rebs took off, abandoning their guns to leap on team horses cut free of harness, plunging back into the trees where a charge would slow and promptly lose order.

He had the guns, though. There were exactly six.

Noon

Custer’s riders pursued the Rebs for a dozen miles and more, all the way to Woodstock and beyond the hard-used town. Their route had been scarred with the wreckage of an army, overturned wagons and caissons, lame horses left by their masters, dismounted men with terrified eyes, eager to surrender to the blue swarms covering the countryside or clearing the road ahead in a column of fours, sabers sheathed, so indisputably victorious that the pride-swollen riders rarely felt the need to draw a revolver.

Prisoners wept, cursed, asked for food, and stumbled northward in beggars’ rags. Their wounded waited, disconsolate, by the roadside, objects of pity for the few, of satisfaction for others, but of disinterest to most.

Along the main street of Woodstock, Torbert and Merritt caught up, trailed by their staffs and—it seemed to Custer—ridiculously somber, under the circumstances.

“Why, gentlemen!” he called, doffing his hat. “Where have you been all morning?”

And yes, Merritt took only five guns.

The pursuit faded off. The horses were blown and there hardly seemed to be anything left worth chasing. The haul in booty was simply grand, given the awful poverty of the Johnnies. They’d taken Rosser’s entire wagon train, his ambulances, a load of Enfield rifles still in their crates, a battalion’s worth of caissons, strings of skeletal remounts, and, as Colonel Wells had ridden up in person to inform him, Rosser’s headquarters equipage, complete with the general’s personal effects.

Wouldn’t Tex have a fit, though? He’d have to send him a thank-you note for the gifts. He pictured the color rising in Rosser’s face through choler to blue.

Custer already had decided that the day’s events would be christened “the Woodstock Races,” canceling the embarrassment of the previous year’s “Buckland Races,” a decidedly lesser affair across the Blue Ridge. That time, the Johnnies had printed captured love letters from Libbie in their papers, a despicable act, and Tom Rosser was going to get a taste of it now.

Poor Tex!

Oh, it was all grand, bully, splendid, though! The smell of a hot horse on a cool day, a drink of sweet water, and a proper shit to crown the victory. He wished the band had been able to keep up, but he reckoned he’d worn their lungs out.

Followed by a staff drunk on elation, Custer rode back through the ramshackle town whistling his newly chosen musical signature and enjoying the sullen looks of the Rebel gals who dared to come out on their porches.

A little tornado of red leaves danced around him.

On such days, Custer wished the war could last. Certainly, he wanted to see his darling—needed to see her, to caress her and the rest, to hear her whisper, “Oh, Autie!” in the darkness. But what else would be left when this was over? And, he feared, it would be over soon. He meant to stay in the Army, of course, could imagine no other life, no other calling. But what would it be like when the Army returned to its duties on the Plains, with its dusty, dreary garrisons and uneventful days, the rare, one-sided clashes and plodding chases that ended in frustration more often than not, or, at best, in the capture of a few starved and stinking wretches? The frontier was a place, Custer foresaw, where a man might soon be forgotten by the world.

9:00 p.m.

Sheridan’s headquarters

“All right, Torbert, all right,” Sheridan said, all but laughing with pleasure at the reports of captives and booty, of the vaunted Confederate horsemen scattered with unprecedented ease. “It’s the greatest overthrow of their cavalry in this war, I can hardly believe it myself. Almost pity the hopeless, hapless bastards.” He shook his head. “Early’s finished, this proves it beyond a doubt.”

The officers in the crowded headquarters tent murmured their agreement. More than a few of them wished to get on to a celebratory round or two of whiskey, Sheridan knew. But he wasn’t quite finished.