Confederates (19 page)

It was not till after eight in the evening that the Shenandoah Volunteers, less its stragglers and its heat-sick, crossed and found an encampment a mile north of the ford.

That evening Tom Jackson wrote to Robert E. Lee. ‘Some regiments of Winder's and Ewell's divisions marched as far as eight miles today, and most of Hill's barely two. I'm not making much progress. I regret to tell you that Union cavalry were today allowed to make raids on both Winder's and Hill's waggons. The heat has been oppressive, and General Hill's unfortunate confusion over my movement orders permitted the sun to take a high toll on the health of my men. Tomorrow I do not expect much more except to close up and clear the country around the train of the enemy's cavalry. I fear that the expedition will, in consequence of my tardy movements, be productive of little good.…'

Yet next morning, when he got up before dawn, he began to suspect the elements were shaking together properly. Robertson's cavalry was out harrying before four a.m., Ewell's division took the road by five, and Winder's marched behind it, then Hill. All the waggons, 1200 of them, travelled to the rear, making cumbrous time and guarded by two brigades of Georgians. The whole column stretched out for seven miles on the Culpeper Road; but it made good time.

At noon Tom Jackson seemed to be asleep in Old Sorrel's saddle but pointed all at once to a hill off to his right, a steep one for this rolling country. The mapmaker Hotchkiss didn't have to consult a map yet. He knew the place, he said. It was called Slaughter's Mountain.

Old Popeye Ewell, who'd been riding that morning with Tom Jackson, said, ‘Not a promising name, that one.'

Hotchkiss said, ‘It's just the name of the family who farm it.'

It was another of those fierce noons, and the ominous name was still settling redly in their minds when a cavalry officer came down the column, flogging his horse. The poor horse seemed in a frightful lather and spat foam in a way that said little for its chances of lasting the afternoon. Up there, this officer said, beyond the mountain, beyond a stream, the enemy were occupying a ridge in copious numbers.

Tom Jackson and his group reined off to the side of the pike and crowded up against a worm fence which bounded someone's timber lease from the public road. This action allowed the infantry to go on marching, while Hotchkiss rummaged in his saddlebags for the right map. He found it quickly and pointed out its features to the General. The stream was called Cedar Run. It flowed down from the Blue Ridge, running north-west to south-east.

Dick Ewell said that if anyone wanted to anchor a line of battle, Slaughter's Mountain over there with its deep green, wooded slopes, would be a good feature to anchor it on. He seemed pretty pleased when the cavalry officer told him the enemy weren't on it. He kept saying, jabbing at the map: ‘That's our anchor. Yessir, as anchors go, that anchor's as good as anyone could want.'

And while he was still repeating himself, everyone heard Yankee cannon speaking far up the road. Tom Jackson didn't raise his eyes from the map.

A new disposition came over humble soldiers though, and rumours zipped with electric speed down the seven miles of army and then zipped back so transformed that even by the men who'd started them they could not be recognised.

‘It's McClellan up there,' went one rumour Usaph heard. ‘He's got himself back from the James already.'

‘Goddamit, if it ain't a solid army of niggers up there. Ole Abe's gone and emancipated the beggars.'

‘I heard Abe's got himself down from Washington to watch Pope and Banks face up to us. Rumour is he says the Union can't pull back from the Rapidan without them goddam British reckernising our cause.'

They were all lies you could laugh at afterwards. But when you stood in that crowd of shoulders, with little knowledge except of whose head was in front of you, blocking your view, then maybe you took some of them as gospel.

Jackson and Popeye and their retinues had taken to the road again, jogging in the dusty space between two of Popeye's brigades. They did not halt till they got to a little rise in the pike from which the stream and the Union ridge behind it could be seen. Again the General turned off the road. There was a more spacious clearing here, the sort of place where travellers on the pike could pull off at noon to chew on a bit of bone or suck from a jar.

Tom Jackson sat there silent for a time and Popeye knew not to ask him questions. They used binoculars on what they could see of the enemy.

‘A fine ridge they got themselves there,' Popeye muttered, making calculations in his head of the lines of blue uniforms he could see over there amongst the trees.

‘How many of them would you say, Dick?'

‘I'd say two divisions. And that's minimum, Tom.'

Another cavalry man visited them, his horse in better condition than the earlier one. It seems the cavalry'd caught a poor Yankee picket urinating in a wooded stretch of Cedar Run. He'd said he belonged to Alpheus Williams's U.S. division, but that there was also General Chris Auger's division there on the ridge, and Rickett's Pennsylvanians were said to be coming down from Culpeper.

Tom Jackson thought to himself that Ewell could have the right of the road, including the mountain he'd been so keen about as an anchor. Popeye was used to getting by on the bare letter of Tom Jackson's orders. He didn't get much more than bare letters now.

Jackson leaned down way over Sorrel's mane and squinted. ‘Dick, you can have this side of the pike. The nature of the ground suggests an attack on their centre. Let me know when your boys are deployed.'

‘You'll be with Winder, Tom?' Popeye asked, wanting an address to send messages.

‘Right first off, Dick.'

And Jackson just rode away then, as if they'd been discussing some idle deal in real estate. Dick Ewell believed he understood Tom Jackson's purpose just the same. He – Dick Ewell himself – was to pin his line along the base of the mountain and, as Tom Jackson had said, punch at the middle of the other people's line. (Dick Ewell always called the enemy ‘those other people', perhaps because he had so many old friends over there.) Meantime Tom Jackson would no doubt send Winder's boys off amongst the blind woods and low hills over to the left, with the idea of taking the other people from the flank. It was exactly what had been tried at Kernstown last spring. Except that today there were more reserves – there was the whole of Hill's division coming up the road, and it could be used as needed.

Popeye saw the guns of a battery he'd sent for come straining up the Culpeper Road. The horses weren't so fast but they looked goddam sturdy. Each cannon with its caisson was driven through a hole in a fence a hundred paces ahead of where Dick Ewell stood. The guns were unlimbered in damn quick time, and the battery officers knew Dick Ewell was watching them and approving. The horse teams were taken back to an edge of forest, and there stood the six guns, loading up with solid shot or shrapnel!

Dick Ewell watched them send off one round, then another. And then another 25 seconds later. Within another 25 seconds there was shot and long-range shell from the other side falling and banging away all round the battery. Dick Ewell saw no one hurt yet, but a maple tree was cut in two near the place where the horses were tethered.

Surrounded by aides, dictating messages and talking to colonels, he still had time to tease his brain with ideas about the ironies of battle. When young – in the days before his stomach gave way – he had fought in the Mexican war. Up the thorny cliffsides of Churubusco and Chapultepec had gone the young Popeye, blinking at the flash of Mexican cannon like a man mildly and reasonably annoyed. After that he spent years in garrisons from Maine to Florida; and inland, escorting the mails on the great ice-bound plains of Kansas. In other words, he had had time to reflect on those mad Mexican battles, and to reflect also on the way the anatomy of a battle is set by accidents.

For example, by the accident of whose division took the road first this morning. There'd be mothers' boys from these regiments passing here in brown bagging coats and torn hats who'd be dead tonight because Jackson trusted one Popeye Ewell more than he trusted Ambrose Hill. But the accidents didn't stop with that. Popeye Ewell had a brigade commander called Jubal Early, a lawyer, foul of mouth, ambitious by temperament. Just the man to push forward up the little slope ahead and down to Cedar Run. So there'd be mothers' boys in Early's brigade who would likewise perish or be maimed because Popeye Ewell liked the style of Jubal Early.

Now, as Early's brigade marched by him, some of them on the road, some of them on a cross-country line across the meadows, five regiments, three Virginian, two Georgian, Popeye watched the boys' faces out of the corners of his eyes to see if their destiny that day was any way marked on them.

Half an hour later his adjutant came up. All his fifteen regiments, the adjutant said, were lined up like a sickle between the road and the far side of Slaughter's Mountain.

He hoped it was the truth. But when you had colonels who were elected by their regiments and learned warfare as they went, you could never be sure they did things properly.

Bumpass and others, marching blind in the column of dust, heard the Union guns about noon. At their first sound, Cate scooped up the dust from his bottom lip with a harsh tongue, looked quickly at Bumpass two ranks ahead and told himself to flee or pretend to be ill, and did nothing, stayed there locked in place, locked in the marriage of Ephephtha and Usaph Bumpass and so locked in the war.

At the sound too, a pretty young conscript staggered from the line and slumped on the embankment of the Culpeper Road and sobbed. The Irish fiddler who had befriended him stood by him, trying to wheedle or reason him back into line.

Joe Murphy, passing, mimicked the two of them. ‘Ah, don't desert me,' he yelled in a falsetto voice, ‘and don't drop dead of the heat, me darling. Oh, what would I ever do without your plump pink cheeks.'

Murphy could talk and josh because he was a veteran, and could tell the cannon were far up the road and that as yet the risk was akin to the risk of being struck by summer lightning.

There was a point Usaph got to in the road, trudging along in a mêlée of other boys, which was the same one where Dick Ewell and Tom Jackson had recently been talking, and where Dick Ewell had had his thoughts about chance and the follies of colonels. From this point, in spite of the dust and the distance, you could see the Federal cannon smoke on a far ridge and, some seconds later, you would hear its bang and whistle. Here Usaph and Gus and the others got one of their rare views of a Confederate general. General Winder sat there in a meadow, resting against an artillery caisson. The top buttons of his jacket were opened to help his breathing and he looked grey-faced, as if he needed the rest. He had only just caught up with his division. His adjutant, a genuine tidewater aristocrat, stood by him and instructed the colonels as they drew level with him. Usaph saw him talking to bird-like Colonel Wheat and Colonel Wheat nodding, nodding.

Railings had been ripped out of a stretch of fence here, so that soldiers could march off leftwards, sideways away from the enemy you could spot way over there on the ridge. The general's adjutant had come right down to the gap in the fence now and was waving Usaph and the others through and telling them to do it at the run.

‘We're on a flanking move here, Usaph,' Gus panted. It wasn't a hard conclusion for any veteran private to come to.

‘Goddam,' yelled Ash Judd gaily, knowing he couldn't be killed himself, ‘ain't it exactly the sort of nonsense that jest about got us all killed at Kernstown.'

Now, as the regiment went over a narrow pasture and in amongst cedar stands, it wasn't possible any more to keep even the loose ranks they'd kept in column down the avenues of maples and quaking elm all morning. Usaph began to look around to see if Cate had managed to straggle away and hide, but there he was, over to the left. The Shenandoah regiment had lost boys with lameness and dysentery and some had slipped off into woods and hidden, the Irish fiddler and his boy amongst them. But of all those who could have fallen by the way and straggled off, ole Bolly with his parasol in his belt and Cate, the two scourges of poor Usaph, had kept on as if with a purpose – and it seemed to Usaph of course that their demonish purpose was to go on reminding him of his dead uncle and of the portrait and of the manner the letter from Ephie had come to him by.

‘That general back there,' Cate said in his resonant college-boy voice.

‘His name's Charlie Winder,' said Bolly.

‘I don't think he looks like he'll last the day.' Cate sounded like a truly concerned Confederate.

Usaph remembered seeing some Irishmen who'd been punished by General Winder two weeks back for straggling. Usaph had come across them one day by the side of the road, a stick under their knees and their arms passed under its protruding end and tied with rope in front of their legs. They looked ridiculous. The fiercely tied cords cut into the flesh of their wrists. While men laughed and called jokes at them in passing they cussed back in their black Irish way, and one of them called: ‘Keep an eye on Charlie Winder, you whoresons! Next battle the bastard dies by my goddam bullet.'

And that was about all Usaph Bumpass knew about General Winder. But he hoped the man would not die of illness or Irishmen during the afternoon, and that his head would stay as clear as ordinary boys had a right for it to be.

They went loping along in open woods and now came to a cleared and gentle hillside. There were a number of colonels waiting out there on horseback, right in the open, Colonel Wheat amongst them. There was no one but colonels there. Even the man commanding the Stonewall Brigade today was a colonel called Charles Ronald. There was no general available. The thing was A. J. Grigsby, the regular substitute brigade commander since Garnett was dropped, had dysentery today. That was it, you never knew whose orders you might die under. You looked at their faces hard but they were always the faces of strangers.