Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (16 page)

“Help me.”

A sergeant fit the stirrup to Gordon’s toe. Gordon gathered the strength to haul his bones up into the saddle.

“Y’all go on now,” he told the little crowd. “See to your business.”

He rode back through the smoke, sure of his direction, the way he always had been, in the deep forests of north Georgia or on battlefields. His body seemed sound, if aching. And his head was clear enough now. He spurred the strange mount toward the river, where Terry’s Brigade had been ordered to halt. He’d sent them forward just far enough to clear out any threat of a flanking maneuver.

The smoke thinned. Noise still clapped his ears, though, a sharp pain. As Gordon emerged from the gray fog into the sunlight, the blaze hit his eyes, his skull, with the force of a mallet. He realized that his hat was gone. But he looked better—fiercer—without it, he fancied.

Alone, he galloped across fields strewn with bodies, most of them in gray or shades of brown. His men, McCausland’s. A few Yankees by a fence. The cries of the wounded knew not North or South, only abrupt, unmanageable suffering. But pity was not his dominion. His purpose was to win battles.

Over a rolling crest. Down the far slope, Terry sat his horse, flanked by his staff.

As Gordon reined in, Terry looked him up and down, almost regal, as if condescending to breathe the same air. Yet the fellow was pleasant for all that, as Virginian as fine tobacco and proud women.

“New horse, I do believe,” the brigade commander remarked.

The black, dying or dead, had been his favored mount.

“I was inconvenienced,” Gordon told him.

“Seems you tired of your hat, as well.”

“Never was a proper fit.”

“May my brigade be of service, sir? In this heady hour?”

“Yes. You may be of service, Bill. No more time for foolery.” He turned in the saddle and pointed to a crest back up the slope and to the left. “Move your men up there. Quick as you can, without disordering them. You’re going to roll up the Yankees and put an end to this.”

“Bad up top?” Terry asked, serious now.

“Spotsylvania. Smaller, but as bad.”

Terry took a moment to swallow that. “And when I get to the top, I’m to—”

“I’ll meet you there.”

Terry had become faintly unsettled. “But if something should happen? I hear—”

“I’ll meet you there,” Gordon repeated. “If I don’t, you’ll see what needs doing, where to attack.”

Prepared to ride off, facing myriad tasks, he nonetheless paused before digging in his spurs. Struggling to think like Ulysses, who understood the ways of men like no other: their yearnings, their pride.

“Now we’ll see what Virginians are made of,” he announced to all who might hear.

4:15 p.m.

Georgetown Pike (Washington road)

Wallace had sent an aide to warn him that his detachment of Vermonters was in retreat, leaping across the girders of the rail bridge, chased by what looked like a full Rebel division. Ricketts pictured men shot in the back and plunging into the river. Who had been in command? Young Davis, was it? Few officers left his senior, far too few. The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor. Well, Davis had done yeoman’s work, holding out with his pitiful handful. But the fact that mattered now was that the Rebs would soon be in his division’s rear.

Ricketts felt he was playing poker with disappearing cards.

Wallace had claimed he could hold another half hour, but that had been almost fifteen minutes back. Ricketts imagined the Home Brigade men—who had not done badly at all—losing their courage in one fateful instant and starting to run. He knew how that contagion went. This was the hour for veterans, with all hell bubbling up. But even veterans would hold only so long before they broke.

He was tired. Growing too old for this. But he remained determined to stay at the table to play this final hand. Wallace had authorized him to retreat whenever he deemed it necessary, but Ricketts disliked quitting. Stubborn, all his life. Far more than was politic. One of the reasons he had remained a lieutenant for epochs, then a captain for ages.

And the one time he had softened his principles, at that damnable court-martial, he had marked himself with an odor that wouldn’t wash off. Better to be stubborn and pay the price.

He could no longer see the brick house, although it stood but a few hundred yards away. A cloud had grown around it, spreading along the crest, dense as a nightmare. The noise told him his men were holding, though. A few skedaddlers wandered back, and a multitude of wounded men had withdrawn, but the fight was not yet over, not just yet.

And the dead? The lives he was betting in a hopeless game?

He would not order a retreat while Truex held that ridge. He just would not do it. But he had directed his Second Brigade to swing back, now that the river was lost and their flank turned. He intended to firm up a third, last line on the Pike.

Perhaps he could bring off an orderly withdrawal? Even now? With the First Brigade falling back upon the Second, and the Second withdrawing again. Things would need to go smoothly, more smoothly than battle generally allowed, but there was a chance: Hold the Rebs while the Home Brigade men cleared off and Wallace saved the guns, then withdraw in stages, making any Rebel pursuit pay a premium.

He had been taught, many years before, that a fighting withdrawal was the most difficult military feat, and he doubted things would go nicely. But if you held a poor hand, you had to play boldly.

“Over there,” he greeted a Second Brigade officer he recognized. “Put your men over there, when they come up. Build a firing line this side of the road.”

Black with smoke and powder, the major stared in bewilderment. “Sir … I have no men … I don’t know where…”

Before Ricketts could shape a useful question, Truex’s aide, Captain Lanius, emerged out of the smoke, galloping down from the shrouded battle line and nearly riding over a wounded man. One of the many, many wounded men.

Before Ricketts could admonish him, Lanius called from the saddle, “Colonel Truex’s compliments, he needs help. Right now, sir. They’re breaking our center, Louisiana Brigade. We’re holding up on the left, it’s a bloody mess, but we’re holding. It’s the center that’s cracking.”

Ricketts made an instant decision that changed his plans again.

“Tell Colonel Truex I’m sending him my reserve. No. Wait. You can guide them up yourself.”

His “reserve.” Two bloodied, played-out regiments, with several companies already stripped away. His best hope of a last defense of the Pike.

After he had spoken, Ricketts felt a rush of doubt. But it was too late. He had promised help for Truex.

Ricketts played the last card in his hand.

4:25 p.m.

Thomas farm

Brigadier General Terry hurried his troops along, all but giving each man a boot in the haunches. Getting them up to that crest in good order, if a tad breathless.

No sign of Gordon. As Terry approached the high ground, all he could see was bald dirt and a world of smoke beyond it, set to the noise of all the devils in Hell banging pots and pans.

Spotsylvania? Bad as that? My, oh my. Terry believed he had glimpsed a spot of alarm in Gordon’s eyes. And Gordon was the most confident creature, man or beast, that Terry had ever met. Oh, surely Gordon had known doubts, the man was human. But Terry had never seen a sign until that afternoon.

If he
had
seen it. With Gordon, a man could be certain without being sure.

Surprising him, the leading men in his brigade began to growl as they neared the ridgetop. Climbing blindly, with the fighting still hidden from view, marching up toward the smoke and sky, they just started in to snarling, like animals that had put up with all they meant to stand. It was an uncanny sound, one Terry did not recall from previous battles.

Had to wonder what men sensed, how they came to that wordless knowing that enthralled them all at once, melting them into one big pot of mischief.

Terry heard cheering, Southern cheering, from down along the river, off toward those bridges, loud enough to compete with the roar of battle. Sounded like Ramseur might have got up from his daybed.

Growling and snarling, rabid, his men were ready to savage all in their way. It filled him with pride.

Terry reached the true crest, horse high-stepping again, and there was Gordon. Sitting upright on that borrowed nag, cool as branch water, as if he had nothing more to do than wait on old Virginia.

It was Gordon restored. In that red shirt, and still without a hat.

When the first rank spotted Gordon, the soldiers sent up a cheer.

“Hurry on, now. Hurry on,” Gordon called. His regular voice of command was back upon him, ordering men to their deaths in a tone that was downright affable.

Riding up to that “inexplicable paragon of mystifying, exasperating manliness”—as Zeb York once had put it—Terry said, “Virginia is at your service, sir.”

A fence ahead. Then a field. Another fence lower down, broken. Beyond it, the battle, with all the sparks and smoke of Vulcan’s forge.

As the two generals watched, a pair of Yankee regiments marched up from the low ground, oblivious to their presence, headed into the maelstrom and exposing meager flanks.

Terry’s men surged forward on their own. Growling again. The sound seemed to take even Gordon aback.

“Hold on now, hold on!” Gordon called, princely even on that borrowed nag. “You’ll get your chance, boys, your time’s going to come. Just get through that fence and form back up.”

“Something’s got into them,” Terry said. “Not sure they’ll be bridled again, once we turn ’em loose.”

The men rushed the fence, funneling through a gap, breaking down more gaps, or climbing over the rails in their impatience.

Hurrying to assuage some terrible need, the Yankees marching into the fight still showed no awareness that they were about to be gobbled. The bluecoats were formed up smartly, advancing at right-shoulder-shift, as if on parade.

“So much for all those reports of militia and mules,” Gordon said. “Let those Federals clear the slope, then advance, once you’re formed up.”

But the time for orders had passed. A pack of hungry dogs smelling fresh meat, Terry’s men began to run down the slope toward the Yankees. Somebody yelled “Charge!”

“What the devil?” Terry demanded.

Hundreds of men poured over and through the fence, joining the attack. It was the wildest thing that Terry had ever seen. But he had his orders, his sense of how things should go, and he rode forward to halt them, to beat them back into their proper formation.

Gordon caught up with him.

“Not going to stop them now,” he said. “You were right, they won’t be bridled.”

Terry’s Virginians raised a Rebel yell.

4:40 p.m.

Thomas farm

“Yanks are running,” Ive Summerlin hollered.

Nichols saw it, too, the sudden breaking up of the line of shadows, the individual flights.

He felt relief, immense relief, as if he had just stopped running after ten miles. Exhausted. He wanted to sit down. His leg decided to hurt again.

“Let’s go. Get them sumbitches!” somebody shouted. And they all plunged forward, into the torn smoke, howling. Nichols screamed, too, running along with the others.

It was all so sudden, so reasonless. They had stood there killing each other, as though they would just keep shooting until all but a last one was dead and maybe him, too. Then the Yanks broke.

Some tried to resist even now, but were clubbed down, shot down, run through. Others raised their hands where they stood, faces fearful—faces that surely had worn murderous looks spare minutes before. Ive Summerlin shot a Yank in the belly before the man could get his hands high enough. And they kept running, stumbling over the wounded and dead, even kicking them out of the way, charging down the slope through drifts of smoke. Ahead: a confusion of Yankees, shrieking horses, stray commands.

“Git ’em, git ’em!”

The Yanks weren’t done, not quite. Nichols ran past herded prisoners, men made sheep, past individual combats like wrestling matches at the fair, only without rules, and he came up short just as a Federal line, ragged but still standing, fired from the far side of a road.

The volley felled Rebs and their prisoners alike.

The blue-bellies yelled, “Pennsylvania! Pennsylvania!”

A nearby voice, Louisiana-toned, said, “I’ll give them shit-eating bastards Pennsylvania.…”

Nichols’ own kind formed up again, with amazing rapidity, even though no officers were near. He joined a line of strangers and near strangers, faces he knew but couldn’t quite slap a name on. In seconds, men had reloaded, raised their rifles, and fired into the blue line, just as the Yankees unleashed a volley of their own.

Men fell. The smoke thickened again.

A Yankee officer rode right between the two lines, galloping up the road, crazed, or perhaps carried along by a runaway horse. Men fired at him, but he eluded the bullets. Then he was gone, a wisp, and the men on foot went back to slaying one another.

Nichols loaded and fired, reached down into his cartridge box again—and found it empty. He knelt to snatch cartridges from a Federal lying open-eyed and still, but had no sooner bent than a fresh volley felled the soldiers who had stood to either side of him.

Nichols looked from one fallen man to the other, a broom-bearded sergeant pawing the air and a fair boy writhing. It made him want to stand up and shout at the Yankees, “You’re
whipped
. We whipped you, fair and square. Why don’t you quit?”

As if his outrage had willed it, the last Yankee line began to dissolve. Brave men ran. Men in gray seemed to be everywhere now, rushing up from the left, even appearing behind the last clots of resisting Yankees.

Men threw down their rifles and raised their hands. Wherever a Yankee officer tried to bring off his men, he was quickly shot. Still, the killing dragged on down in the hollows.

It was over, though. Some men just didn’t have the sense to see it. Or the Christian strength to bear defeat. But for all the shooting and shouting that continued, a fellow just knew that things had finished up, the way you knew the blood was all drained out of a strung-up hog.