Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (58 page)

3:30 p.m.

North of Middletown

Lucy.

Lucy and the boys.

It seemed to Hayes that nothing else mattered at all. War? This madness? He’d had his fill of it, wanted nothing more to do with the carnage.

And yet …

His borrowed horse stirred mildly. Hayes took off his hat and tilted back his head. Sniffing up the last blood.

His skull throbbed. Worst headache of his life. Cracked skull? Couldn’t tell. And many another feature of his body pained him, too. Not least, that ankle. He would’ve liked Doc Joe to look him over, but that was not going to happen for some time. His brother-in-law was busy just to rearward, sawing and sewing and sweating amid the gore of a field hospital missing all the tools left in Rebel hands.

The queer thing was that he had not really bled from all the thumping. Not until midafternoon, when a sudden gush from his nose crimsoned his shirtfront. Even that seemed to have stopped, for the most part. But his head felt the size of a mountain.

He longed to leave it all and return to Lucy, to life, to a pretense, at least, that men could live in harmony and accord, to go back to his law books, to Shakespeare, to lamplit evenings in a familiar chair.

But he knew that, even now, he wouldn’t go. He would keep his promise to these men around him, would not leave their ranks until, together, they were paroled into peace.

Correcting his posture for the hundredth time that afternoon, he looked about himself, at the faces. Faces with names he knew. A motley bunch, they were, these men of Ohio and West Virginia, weathered and withered by war. Some had trousers but no shirt or jacket. A few wore only undergarments. Others were as barefoot as the Rebs now, though not as toughened against the claws of the earth. Hats were rare.

But they had returned. To him. He had thought his division gone. And yes, it had suffered. But
these
men had come back to rally around their uncaptured flags, most returning of their own free will, but some driven by the provost marshal’s horsemen and others cajoled by the likes of Will McKinley.

Lucy.
He closed his eyes and let himself ache with longing for a last moment. Then he forced himself back to his unwanted duty.

Crook had told him that his division and poor Joe Thoburn’s—under Harris now—would not join the coming counterattack, but would be held in reserve. He should have welcomed the news, he knew. And in one sense he had. Yet these men around him, who had endured so much through years of war, must not be left with the sense that they had failed. They had fought too hard, won too often, and seen too many comrades fall away to finish what might be their last great battle like this, as defeated men left standing in their undergarments, stripped of their possessions and their pride. These men deserved better.

Crook understood, of course. Hayes had not needed to speak up on the matter. He’d read Crook’s voice, his expression, even the way his fingers clutched the reins.

These men did not deserve to be left behind when the others went forward. They did not deserve to be shamed. No, it was not the division it had been one day before. But it did not deserve shame.

It struck Hayes, again, how much he loved these men. Not with the odd, perfunctory love many officers professed, but in a bared and honest sense that was almost familial. He saw the paradox, of course, in his desire to lead them back into battle against his own dear wishes, against all reason, merely to save that intangible thing called “pride.” What an odd thing it was, that almost embarrassing tenderness you came to feel toward your brothers in arms. Was it possible to love so broadly? Was “love” even the right word? Was the human heart, so often sordid, capable of emotion so enormous?

Nearby, a sergeant returning to his troops from a personal errand hitched up his trousers and announced, “Boys, I’ve just taken the grandest shit of my life. ’Twas pure magnificence. I wish it had gone right down Early’s gullet.”

Wiping a drop of blood from his nose, Hayes smiled. Love had to take a number of things in stride.

3:40 p.m.

Sheridan’s knoll

“All right, Forsyth,” Sheridan said. “Issue the order. The army will advance at four o’clock.”

The confirmation had come at last that all the Longstreet rumors were pure nonsense. And the men were ready now, angry as wasps whose nest had been poked with a stick.

Forsyth rushed off. All around, officers and orderlies stirred into action. The air sparked. Even before the order could be transmitted, the blue lines beyond the knoll seemed to quicken and stiffen.

It was not a time for refinement. His plan was straightforward. Attack head-on with the infantry to knock the Rebs out of position, then envelop them with cavalry on both flanks. Early’s dispositions were idiotic, his flanks petered out in thin air, a display of overconfidence that hearkened back to the earliest months of the war. Jubal Early’s arrogance would be Jubal Early’s destruction.

Unexpected, unwanted, and, as usual, uncontrollable, Custer galloped up, fair hurled himself from his snorting, prancing mount, rushed over to Sheridan, wrapped him in his arms, and picked him up, dancing him around.

“Put me down, damn it!”

Custer cried, “Phil, it’s grand to see you! Now we’ll give them a licking!”

“Put me
down
!”

Grinning like a boundless fool, Custer set him back upon the earth.

Although the gaudy young cavalryman was oblivious, every two-legged being near them had tensed. Hushed. Waiting for a burst of outraged temper.

Instead, Sheridan smiled, shaking his head as at a naughty boy. “George, I’ve sent down the order to attack. You should be with your men, they’ll go in late.”

Custer’s delight collapsed. He looked like a lad who’d been told he might miss out on the cherry pie.

“I’ve been shifted about all day,” Custer said apologetically. “I just wanted to—”

“George, go back to your men and see to the enemy,” Sheridan said more firmly. Cannily and cruelly, he added, “Wesley Merritt’s already got the jump on you.”

A quarter mile to the south, the Sixth Corps received the order to attack. The army that had broken that morning roared.

4:40 p.m.

Middletown

“Ramseur’s holding,” Early snapped. “God almighty, he’s got infantry
and
cavalry on him. He’s holding, you can hold.”

Gordon peered toward Ramseur’s end of the line, but could see little for the smoke. “Whether he holds or not, I can’t. Not out there, not without being reinforced.”

“Damn you, Gordon, you know there’s no reinforcements.”

They sat on their horses on a patch of high ground outside of Middletown, careless of the lead thickening the air.

“Well, then,” Gordon said. “Pull back. Before it’s too late. If it isn’t too late already.”

“Just go back out there and hold your position.”

Gordon reached to grasp Early by the arm, but the ferocious, almost crazed expression worn by the other man stopped him.

“General Early, I’m struggling to hold back their infantry. Their cavalry’s on the way. I don’t know why they’ve waited, but the cavalry’s going to hit my flank and rear, I’d bet my life on it.” A deathly smile possessed his mouth. “I
am
betting my life on it.”

“Refuse your left, then.”

“I already have. It opened up my right. We need to—”

“
Damn you,
don’t you tell me what we need. I command this army, not you. Now go on back to your division. And be a man. Like Ramseur.”

The world howled, barked, shrieked: the men, the guns, the banshee shells in flight.

Ignoring the insult, Gordon tried a last ploy: “General, you’ve won a great victory. Don’t throw it away. Order a withdrawal.”

Early snorted, spit. “Why don’t you just go, if you’re so yellow. I’m not leaving this field.”

Gordon saluted, a gesture of sarcasm now. He turned his horse.

Barely halfway back to the tumult engulfing his division, he saw thousands of sabers flash as Sheridan’s truant cavalrymen exploded over a ridge, aiming for his flank and the army’s rear.

4:50 p.m.

Confederate right flank

He’d held them. Threw back their cavalry, then threw back their infantry. Then his division held against simultaneous attacks. But Stephen Dodson Ramseur understood—hated it, but understood—that his line was near to breaking.

A well-aimed Yankee shell struck a caisson, playing havoc with his last sound battery. Half-butchered horses shrieked, while those less injured struggled against their harnesses. A cannoneer circled madly, like a spring-loaded toy, spraying blood from a shoulder missing its arm.

The first few shirkers had begun to slink rearward, but the guards he’d posted turned them back to the fight. On threat of death.

If they could hold until dark …

Ramseur smirked. Remembering another day and the very same thought. They would not hold until dark. They would fight on, but would not hold. Their plight was as unforgiving as mathematics.

He saw the futility, yet he felt no fear. All that silliness about dying today. He regretted—would ever regret—sharing his melancholy with John Gordon. Gordon would remember it as weakness and there it would be, forever, a quietly mocking glint in Gordon’s eye.

Dying? His interest was in killing. In killing Yankees. In killing every damned Yankee that crossed those fields. He meant to kill Yankees and keep on killing Yankees. He’d kill them for months, for years, if they kept coming. And then, when the last smoke cleared, when the last filthy Yankee was dead, he’d go home to his wife and take their child in his arms.

John Pegram rode up. Face stained black as a coon’s. Eyes huge. Horse skittish.

Shells chased him.

“Sir, they’re set to flank us.”

“Bloody ’em up,” Ramseur told him. “They’ll think better of it.”

“It’s their cavalry. They’re massing. All but behind us.”

But what was to be done, what choice was left? It was too late for an orderly withdrawal, damn Jubal Early. Leaving them stranded on this useless ground.

“Just fight,” Ramseur told him.

5:00 p.m.

Hayes’ division

General Crook rode up, trailing flags and orderlies. Behind Crook, the Rebs were losing their grip on the field. At first, the Johnnies had put up a bitter fight, almost a daunting one. But they were breaking now. For all the smoke, it was easy enough to tell.

Hayes saluted. Crook smiled.

“Take your division in,” his superior told him. Then, in a louder voice, “Your men are needed.”

No, they weren’t needed. Crook even gave him a wink. Sheridan had understood. These men needed to be in on the kill. It was as if Little Phil had been right there beside him when, shortly after the counterattack began, a soldier had presumed to ask Hayes, “Sir, we being punished? ’Cause of this morning?”

How strange, how endlessly strange! That men who knew war so well should want more of it.

Excitement pulsed through his reduced, half-clad ranks; the fervor was unmistakable. It was all he and his officers could do to restrain the men, to keep them in formation as they advanced, flags lofted high and two rescued drums beating cadence, all of them marching square-shouldered into the smoke. They wanted, needed, to get at the Rebs, while there were still Rebs to be gotten at.

And as they neared the half-managed chaos of battle, Hayes, too, shrugged off reason and decency, surrendering to pride and the urge to kill.

5:00 p.m.

Gordon’s Division

Nichols gave up and ran. Wasn’t right, none of it. Yankees everywhere. After they’d whipped them fair that very morning.

He’d stopped his rearward trot twice, once when General Gordon, that scar carved into his left cheek like a broken cross and standing out in a face hot as pink sow meat, that time, that moment, when John Brown Gordon, a Joshua but a false prophet, swept in among them, crying, “Rally, boys, rally! We can whip ’em, if we just stand our ground.” That one time John Gordon proved a liar. For the Yankees were on them like the Plagues of Egypt, like sickness upon those firstborns, and they pulled the ground right out from under their feet, that was how it felt, the Yankees thieving the very earth they’d earned.

The other time was when General Evans, a saint among men, fooled him and half the others just as bad, calling to them, “Stand, men! We can hold!” General Evans, a Methodist, lying like a no-good Irish drunkard. Worse.

Yankees everywhere.
First, their infantry, that whipped and whupped-on blue-belly infantry, came crashing down upon them, rushing into the breaks in their line like floodwater, splashing bluecoats every which way and drowning all hope.

That was
before
their cavalry came on. The cavalry just finished them, adding more scare to the big scoot back to the rear. The men on horseback were cruel, showing no mercy.

Without quite deciding, Nichols stopped and turned. He raised the rifle he somehow had loaded and fired at a Yankee horseman, one as good as another, but missed for shaking. And he was not given to shaking, never that kind of scared, but tired, Lord, he was tired enough to lie down and just give up, though he would not.

A file of cantering Yankees cut off Sergeant Alderman, who had tarried.

He wouldn’t have run, not one step, had it been up to him. No, he did not believe he would have run. But all the others sure did. And when that happened, a fellow just went along and couldn’t help it. Some of them, Nichols included, had re-formed back a ways by the regiment’s flag, encouraged by Gordon. That hadn’t lasted. Then they rallied, briefly, by broken-up companies, herded by General Evans, that good shepherd. Finally, the survivors only paused in flame-spitting huddles or by themselves. Then they just ran.

All the treasure was lost, left behind, discarded, the tent halves and blankets finer than store-bought town ones. All encumbrances were discharged so a man could run deer-fleet, until, some terrible how, Nichols lost the spare pair of foraged shoes, the finer pair of the two, saved up, reducing him to the possessions he had ferried across the river before dawn, all else gone except for the one good pair of Yankee brogues he’d had the presence of mind to tie onto his feet back when things were quiet.