Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (55 page)

No point in blaming Ricketts, Getty corrected himself. Not Jim or anyone else. Blaming others was the resort of the lowest kind of officer. Just do your duty, Getty thought, and let other men see to their own concerns.

Jesus Christ, though, how had the Rebs pulled it off?

He heard them coming closer, thrashing dew-heavy grass, with their officers calling orders to straighten ranks and their intervals, shouting in accents he knew so well from the old Army they’d shared.

This war was madness.

“Steady, steady!” he called out. “Nobody rises or fires until they’re within thirty yards. Just stay down, boys, and listen for your commands.” He gulped breath. “Officers, do your duty. Thirty yards, thirty yards.”

He’d already spoken more than his wont. His preference was to issue orders and let his subordinates see to their tasks unbothered. But this day was an exception, reeking of disaster and desperation.

And Getty didn’t mean to be part of the failure.

He saw man-shadows down below, in the fog that clutched the brook. And he listened, again, to those ever-familiar voices. They echoed from bygone garrison parades, from late night poker rounds fueled by poor cigars and poorer whiskey, handsome voices ordering men to kill him.

McKnight let them have canister. Getty felt, could not quite see, the gashes torn through the lines and the bloodied air.

“Steady!”

He knew what the men were feeling, their worry that their officers would tell them to rise too late, that the Rebs would be atop them. Training and discipline couldn’t banish fear. They just helped a man resist his natural impulses.

And there they were, bursting through curls of mist, a dozen, a hundred, hundreds, banners waving, a horde of screaming men rushing up the thigh-tormenting slope, lines melting into a swarm.

He saw beards. Faces. Eyes.

“Now!”

With not a second of hesitation, his officers got the men to their feet, raced through the briefest commands, and unleashed a volley that stopped the Rebs a third of the way up the slope.

He watched, merciless and pitying at once, as gray-clad officers—brave men—lashed their soldiers with words and wielded the flat of their sabers, demanding a more-than-human effort. But their orders grew confused. Some demanded that their soldiers charge on and break Getty’s lines, while others halted their men to return fire.

His own men discharged a second, disciplined volley, dropping Rebs by the score, some within ten paces.

One of McKnight’s guns wheeled about to clear the slope with more canister. A round swept the Reb line diagonally. Blood cascaded, blink-quick.

A third volley from his men repulsed the attack.

His soldiers cheered. It was the first Union cheer he’d heard that day.

“Officers, see to your men. Get the stretcher-monkeys up. Prepare your lines to receive another attack. They’ll come back up.”

“And we’ll send ’em back down again,” a soldier responded, his voice Northern, flinty, formed by woodlands and mountains, an accent more foreign to an old Regular than the cawing and drawls of the enemy.

Getty rode his line northward, pausing at the highest point of the cemetery, straining to see. He did believe the mist was thinning to haze, but he’d thought the same thing earlier.
Did
seem to be patchier. He would have liked to get a look at the battlefield. But if the fog lifted and he could see the Johnnies, the Rebs would see his men, too. Exposed to their artillery.

Off in the murk, his enemies sent up a whoop. Signaling another triumph? Over whom? Or was the ruckus a greeting for some general?

He heard a voice call out his rank and name, but couldn’t spot the man.

“Up here,” Getty shouted. “Top of this damned boneyard.” Hoping he wasn’t summoning Rebel sharpshooters as well. Even in this muck of haze and smoke, he dreaded sharpshooters. Remembering Uncle John Sedgwick.

The courier, a major, found him. Getty recognized him as one of Wright’s staff boys.

“General Getty? General Wright’s compliments. General Ricketts has been wounded, sir. You’re to take command of the corps.”

“How bad’s Jim hit?”

“Bad, sir. In the chest.”

Getty felt an unaccustomed pang. Of course, Jim hadn’t let him down. Couldn’t do much with a bullet deep in your meat.

“He’s a tough bugger,” Getty said. “As for the goddamned corps, I don’t know where it is. Just this division.”

“Other side of Middletown, sir. The officers are rallying the men. General Wright wants you to—”

“Emerson’s bunch? Crook’s lot?”

Wary, as staff officers often were, the major hesitated. “The Nineteenth Corps is … there are signs that order
may
be reestablished. Given time, sir.”

Well, I’ve goddamned well been giving you time, Getty thought.

“Crook’s pack?”

“Very much reduced. Not presently effective.”

“Any sign of Sheridan?”

The staff man shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

“Christ. Where will I find General Wright?”

“North of town, sir. Rallying the troops. He wants you to—”

“I
know
what he wants, Major. But, near as I can tell,
this
division’s the only thing keeping the Johnnies from finishing what they’ve started.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, bugger it. All right.” Reminding himself of his boast that he never disobeyed orders, he realized that he had to leave his division. As senior brigade commander, Lew Grant would have to see this business through. Well, the men could do worse than that hardheaded bastard. Tell him to hold, and Grant would be stubborn as stones.

“All right, Major. You come along with me. Let me transfer command and we’ll get going.”

He spotted Grant as the Rebs swept forward again. Surprising Getty, the second assault, instead of having been reinforced, felt weaker than the first.

As he and the staff major rode up behind Grant, the brigadier cut a fine figure on his mount, hewn from cold blue granite. Getty let him fight his action, which proved blessedly brief, with the Rebs hurled back again.

Still unaware of Getty’s presence, Grant rose in his stirrups, shaking his fist at the retreating Johnnies and calling,
“Vermonters don’t run, damn you! Vermont doesn’t run!”

He’ll do, Getty thought.

Brusquely, he told Grant, “I’ve got the corps, you’ve got the division. Hold this ground. Until I send further orders.”

As he turned his horse northward, a red sun burned through the mist.

10:00 a.m.

Southern edge of Middletown

Gordon found Early just where he’d left him half an hour back. As the army reunited along the Pike, Early had resumed overall command, sending Gordon down to his division. When last seen, Early had been raving about “the sun of Middletown,” as if he’d rivaled Napoleon at Austerlitz, as if that fierce red ball’s abrupt appearance had been a tribute to Jubal Early from God.

Since then, the attack had withered and lost direction, and no orders had come down. Except for clumsy assaults on the Union Sixth Corps—identified on the ridge cradling that cemetery—there seemed to be no movement, no push, of significance.

That alarmed Gordon.

When he reached the army commander, Early was still grinning like a lunatic. Very much alive, “doomed” Dod Ramseur sat his horse beside him. Dod had found a white flower for his buttonhole, despite the turn of the seasons. Wharton had come up, too. It looked as though all were enjoying a pleasant chat.

“General Early,” Gordon began, reining in his mount, “everybody’s stopped.”

“Hah! Let me get a good look at you, now that a man can see.” Early turned to Ramseur. “Ain’t that something! John Gordon,
Gentleman
John Gordon, with mud up over his ass and a dirty face. Ever seen the like?”

“We did get a tad muddy down by the river,” Ramseur told him. Eager to keep the peace.

Gordon spared no time on banter. “General Early, we have to push on, to finish them.”

“Gordon, you’d shit at a wedding. Just to call attention to yourself.” But Early was in unconquerable spirits. He rebuilt his smile and said, “Glory enough for one day. Even for you.” He slapped a hand down on his thigh, positively gleeful. “You know what day this is, Gordon? October nineteenth, that’s what day it is. One month ago, precisely one month ago today, we were going in the opposite direction.”

“All the more reason to keep going northward now. General Early, it’s all very well, but we have to strike one more blow and finish this. Hit them one more time, with everything. Start by sweeping that ridge clean of those Sixth Corps boys. Strike them one more blow, and there won’t be one infantry company left standing in Sheridan’s army.”

“Want me to shoot the wounded, too? And the prisoners? Then keep on going to Washington again? Damn you, Gordon. Don’t you know a victory when you see one?”

Gordon looked to Ramseur and Wharton, but both men were determined to stay out of it. Given Dod’s premonition of the night before and how such imaginings rattled even a strong man, Gordon figured Ramseur was glad the fighting was over. He’d done his part that morning, though. No holding back.

“Sir,” Gordon tried again, “just one more effort. My division’s ready. Ready enough. But we
all
have to go, destroy the Sixth Corps forever. Do that, and Sheridan won’t have any army.”

“God almighty, can’t you see that your men are blown, that they’re plain tuckered out? We’ve worn them to a nub, can’t ask for more. That night march of yours. Everything else. They’re plain worn out, used up.” Early sharpened his features. Gone mean. “And
you
want to grind them to nothing. For one last sliver of glory.” He snorted. “Half
your
men have fallen out, picking those Yankee camps clean.
More
than half of them.” He delivered a second, grander snort. With effluvia. “Seems to me that your men are a damned mob. Worse than back in Martinsburg. I doubt you’ve got enough soldiers in ranks to fight through a Mex bordello.”

That was a foul exaggeration. Some men had fallen out, indeed, but only to scoop up rations. But Gordon did not intend to be diverted by that argument. The air had cleared of haze and most of the smoke, and he pointed to the ridge not a mile to the west, still bristling with Yankees, the last shred of resistance.

“Give me Ramseur’s Division. To cooperate with my own. Just let me clear that ridge. Just that.”

Early took off his hat, scratched his head, and inspected his paw, as if he’d collected a louse under a fingernail. “No use in that. Dod’s boys already had a go at that hill, you know it yourself. Wharton here went, too. Waste of lives, at this point. Yankees are finished. That bunch will go off directly, they’ll all go directly.”

“That’s the Sixth Corps, General. It won’t go, unless we drive it from the field.”

“Gordon, sometimes you don’t know your butt from a stump. Listen to me. They’ll go, too. Directly.” Early’s grin widened, growing enormous, sharing his black-gummed, tobacco-stained teeth with the world. “Now just you look over there. Just have yourself a good look,
General
Gordon.”

Gordon looked. And his heart sank. The Union troops were, indeed, evacuating the ridge. Before they could be erased from the Union rolls.

“Hit them now.”

“No use. They’re quitting. It’s over.”

“They’re moving with good discipline. They’ve been ordered off, not beaten.”

“They were only covering the retreat. Sheridan’s finished. Hah! Captured half his guns. Likely three-quarters. Nothing but a sham, reputation built on tinder-sticks. I told you he was no general.”

Gordon felt sick. Heart right down in his boots. He remembered Early halting before, at Gettysburg. And his unwillingness to attack that flank in the Wilderness.

This was a victory, certainly. But it wasn’t victory enough.

The artillery renewed their harassment of the withdrawing Union troops. Shells burst amid half-stripped trees and distant gravestones. It wasn’t enough, wasn’t enough.

Hennie Douglas emerged from Middletown, coming on at a broken trot. His horse seemed reluctant to run. Yes, every living thing, each man and beast, was weary to falling down. But one more effort …

As the aide closed toward them, Early called, “Bring me the news, son. They still running? Or they slowed to a walk now? Hah!”

There was trouble in Hennie’s eyes. The young man was no fool.

“They’ve got their cavalry lined up. On the Pike and to the east. Say, a mile north of town. Infantry’s regrouping to the west.”

A few seconds tardy in his reply, Early said, “Rear guard. Covering the retreat. Picket line of cavalry, you say?”

Douglas shook his head. “Not just pickets. Looks like most all of them, at least five thousand up there. Pickets out front, all right, but the rest behind them.”

“Just covering the retreat,” Early repeated. But he had grown agitated, less assured. He turned on Gordon:

“About time you got back to your men. We’ll hold right where we are. Let the Yankees take their tails to Winchester at their leisure.”

“At least,” Gordon tried, “withdraw the army to better ground. We’ve won the day, I grant you. But we can’t hold this terrain any more than the Yankees could. Our flanks are open, and their cavalry—”

“God almighty,” Early snapped. “A minute ago, you wanted us all to attack. Now you want to retreat. As if we’d got our tails whipped.” Early’s face expressed limitless disgust. And anger. And—just perhaps—a first glimmer of fear.

“I didn’t say ‘retreat.’ Just take up better—”

“Go back to your damned division,” Early told him.

11:00 a.m.

Belle Grove grounds

Nichols was mud happy. Hadn’t they whupped the Yankees, though? Hadn’t they just done it? Live to be a hundred, even two hundred, a man would never forget the sight of those blue-bellies running like deer and grunting like pigs, or dumb-face Dutchmen with their hands up and their drawers down, the streams of prisoners. And all of it done before dinner.