Confederates (59 page)

‘He broke his wrist. Jolly bad luck, I say.'

‘It sure is, sir. With all that's likely to happen.'

And that was all. Adjutant Chilton had packed up his portable table and his pens and his inks and was in a hurry to move, and no one, no one in that great passionate corps of officers wanted to question or punish the Honourable Horace Searcy.

When he knew that, Searcy leaned his forehead against his horse's saddle and wept silently and ached for Mrs Whipple. Then, because no other course offered, because the army would not let him escape it, he took a long mouthful of brandy and mounted his horse when the order came for the headquarters staff to do it. And rode away with them.

The following Saturday morning, Union Colonel Silas Colgrove of the 27th Indiana saw the fine sloping field where Searcy's envelope was hidden and moved his men into it about noon. They stacked their muskets and lay on the grass. The marks of old cooking fires were here and there but the Indiana boys wondered if these fires had been set by Confederates, since there weren't any relics around, no bones or tobacco wrappers or candy papers or old shoes or other army detritus. For the men of the 27th Indiana didn't have any more idea than McClellan did himself how hard up their enemy was.

A well-liked young soldier called Private Barton W. Mitchell went behind a tree to make water and saw the fat envelope and picked it up. Inside were the cigars and Bart thought them quite a prize. They were the sort you bought in the best hotels. He rushed out in his generous way and showed them to his friend, First Sergeant John McKnight Bloss. Bloss was a generous enough man and said Bart should have two out of the three found cigars. But Bart solved it by cutting the third clean in two.

They did not light them at once, for they did not know what fatigues they might be ordered to do this afternoon that would spoil the savour of the cigars. They decided to leave them till evening, to smoke by their fires in front of other boys who'd be jealous as hell and think they were real worldlings.

After he'd put away his one and a half fine cigars, Barton Mitchell began reading the papers inside the envelope. He thought someone was joking. The first page said: ‘To Major General D. H. Hill, Commanding Division. Special Orders No. 191. From Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia near Frederick, Maryland.' Bart Mitchell turned the page and read the signature. ‘R. H. Chilton, Ass. Adj-General.'

‘What's that-there, Barton?' asked Sergeant Bloss.

‘Just some stuff,' Barton Mitchell told him, reading away. The pages said stuff such as that Jackson's wing was to move beyond Middletown, cross the Potomac and ‘by Friday evening the 12th take possession of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, capture such of them as may be at Martinsburg, Virginia, and intercept such as may try to escape from Harpers Ferry'. It didn't say who the ‘them' was, but that was clear enough.

The pages said in addition that John G. Walker's division of Longstreet's wing was to come down on Harpers Ferry from the other direction. It said that General McLaws with two divisions was to close in the same unfortunate town from the Maryland side. It said too that Longstreet was to clear out of Frederick and stick at Boonsboro and that D. H. Hill was to stay behind and form a rearguard.

Well, Bart Mitchell was a literate soldier. The armies of North and South in the failing summer of 1862 knew more of generalship than did the poor peasant privates of the armies of Prussia or Austria or England. Bart could readily understand that if these pages were anyway correct, then Lee's army was going to go four or five ways at once, and that if you wanted to beat them, you should do it while they were all split up. Except all this read more like a Northern pipedream than like something that was likely to happen.

‘Jest look at this here, Johnny,' he told Bloss, and handed the pages to him.

Bloss had this natty self-importance a sergeant should maybe have. He read the pages and said: ‘Come on, Bart.' He carried them, as if he'd done all the finding of them, to Captain Kopp of Company E. Kopp read them, looked at the two soldiers, dismissed the private and kept the sergeant with him, and went to show them to Colonel Colgrove.

Colgrove, willing to be thought a fool, took them along the road to the farmhouse where General Alpheus Williams had made his headquarters. It happened that the adjutant in General Williams's front office was Colonel S. E. Pittman, an old West Point friend of Colonel Chilton in whose firm handwriting
Special Orders No. 191
were written. So a despatch rider took the pages straight to McClellan's headquarters, further still up the road. It wasn't a bad performance by the standards of the Army of the Potomac. In an hour from the time Private Bart Mitchell found the envelope behind the tree, George B. McClellan was reading the Confederate document.

McClellan called a meeting of his staff and some of his generals and marched into the drawing room of the big house on the Liberty Town Road where it was held waving the papers at the gathering of gold-braided men. ‘Here's a paper,' he told them, ‘which if I can't whip Bobby Lee with it, I'll willingly go home. Tomorrow we'll pitch into his centre, and if you folk will only do two good hard days' marching, I'll have Lee in a position he'll find it hard to get out of.'

When some of the gentlemen there knew what was in the orders, they thought McClellan shouldn't propose to pitch into Lee's centre tomorrow, he should start off to do it right now, this Saturday afternoon.

George McClellan rode to Frederick then and met businessmen at the Liberty House. He began by making arrangements with them about supplying the army with farm produce and flour. Then, even though he didn't know what their policies were, he thanked them for staying loyal to the Union while the Confederates were in town. At the end of the meeting, two or three came up to talk to him and he started to get garrulous, with them, as was his way. After a while he told them he had Lee sorted out and by the ears, that he had Lee's inside orders and that he knew Lee's army was in fragments.

One of the three he spoke to was Confederate by sympathy and left town that afternoon and rode for hours up over the low spine of the Catoctin Mountains, through Middletown until, late at night, he ran into Jeb Stuart's Confederate pickets.

Just before dawn on Sunday Lee, sleeping fitfully in the bedroom of a good house a little north of Boonsboro, was woken by Colonel Chilton. Lee levered himself crookedly up in the bed, for his hands and wrists were still paining and he could not put weight on them.

Chilton said: ‘There's a corn merchant from Frederick out there who says McClellan's got a copy of your orders.'

‘That's easy for a corn merchant to say,' said Robert E. Lee. ‘How would he know what that general has and hasn't?'

‘McClellan told a bunch of Frederick merchants. According to this corn-dealer, ole Mac waved a copy of your orders and said “I've got these orders written in Lee's own hand” …'

‘But they were in your hand, Chilton.'

‘Exactly, sir.' Chilton winced. ‘I don't think we can afford to ignore the idea that they
were
an original copy, sir. In my hand. And ole Mac said they were in your hand just to make a splash.'

‘That man is, I think I can safely say,' said Lee, ‘a fool. He could have had any old document in his hand, he could have been lying.'

‘I wish I could believe it, sir. You see this corn-jobber says further that McClellan called out, “I got 'em, gentlemen. They've sent Jackson off to the Ferry and Longstreet over to Boonsboro. And all I've got to do to get right in between them is knock Dan Hill out of the way.”'

‘No one,' Lee murmured after a silence, ‘could speak like that. Unless they had some idea of what was in 191.'

Most men would have panicked now, in that instant, but the commander-in-chief just sat there staring at the plaster on his right hand and yawning a little.

‘Do you want to speak to this corn-jobber?'

‘Indeed.' He tried to pick up a watch with the hand in which the bones were broken.

‘It's 4.30, sir.'

‘I'll be with him in five minutes.'

‘Yessir.'

‘And, Chilton … are you satisfied this man is not a Union plant?'

‘I'm watching him close. But he does have two boys in Early's brigade.'

‘I want you to start making enquiries then. About 191, I mean. Did you get all the envelopes back?'

‘I did, general.' Chilton seemed a little hurt by the suggestion.

‘Begin by questioning your staff. And the staff couriers.'

‘Yessir. As bad luck would have it, one of them's gone back to Virginia with a nasty broken wrist.'

Lee said: ‘Do what you can.'

‘Of course,' said Chilton, ‘I can't make enquiries with the various generals until the army reassembles again. But I'm sure they treated 191 with care. Jimmie Longstreet, I believe, chewed his copy up and swallowed it.'

This tickled Lee. ‘Did it help with his diarrhoea?' he asked.

Chilton left and Lee sat on his bed, considering whether his army should go home to Virginia before the fragments were gobbled in five easy pieces.

BOOK FOUR

1

High up above the steep-streeted town of Harpers Ferry, Usaph lay at dawn in a misty forest. At his side, Gus stirred and sat. Cate and Judd and Daniel Blalock, schoolmaster, were stirring too. The frosty vapours of this mountain place hung between the pine trees with that sort of false stillness things and people can have when you feel that until the second you looked at them they were moving about and working on some plot against you, and that as soon as you look away, they'll start again.

The bladder can be a stronger influence than that kind of mad suspicion and Usaph got up, went through the trees across somewhat slanting ground and urinated near the place where Brynam's black guns stood, their barrels darkened with moisture this morning. The battery was only four guns these days. Their gun-crews had sighted them the afternoon before, when the town and the Union defence lines down below had stood so sharp-defined in the sabbath light. So they could fire blind if they had to, sending cannister and grape and case shell down through the cloud.

They had wanted to start firing the afternoon before, but the rumour was Stonewall was giving the Union general a chance to move the folk of Harpers Ferry out of town. There was the rumour too that the idea was to offer the Yankees the chance of giving in. Others said that Stonewall, being a good Presbyterian, hated to call a battle on a Sunday, seeing that he'd done just that so often in the past.

Usaph had this terrible hunger for a good farm breakfast; he could taste the eggs that were not to be had here on this mountain. That phantom flavour of breakfast eggs wasn't half so sharp though as his puzzlement over Colonel Wheat. He found he'd forgiven Wheat because Wheat, though a colonel and a member of the Virginia Bar, was so anxious to be forgiven. He had forgiven the adulterer! It was a dangerous thing to do; it raised questions, he didn't like it. But it had just happened. He hoped it wouldn't happen with goddam Cate.

Boys got their wet and smouldery fires going on the site of last night's fires and heated up their handful of cornmush and their coffee. Even Wheat had little more than that to eat this morning, and the starey-eyed crazes seemed to be on him, so he began telling tales once again of his gran'daddy Wheat, as if that would stem his hunger. ‘Breakfast awaits you down in Harpers Ferry, sir,' boys told each other, trying to sound like British butlers they'd seen in plays performed by touring companies. For they thought they'd be in Harpers Ferry in time for a fair breakfast.

Cate? Cate had ague. The shivers. He sat up in his wet blanket as he'd sat up all night, hard for breath and quivering away. He had no friends of the sort to bring him coffee even if they'd had plenty. All the conscript friends he'd had were killed or ill or deserted. Earlier on in his military career, someone like Judd might have become his friend through getting all dazzled by his line of talk. But Cate didn't have much of a line of talk any more. Since crossing the Potomac into Maryland he'd got sullen. He'd got sullener still after that incident when Usaph grabbed his ankle while he straddled the fence beyond which lay those whores from the town of Frederick. And when Stonewall led the Shenandoah Volunteers back over the Potomac at Williamsport last Thursday, back into Virginia itself with the bands playing ‘Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny' as lusty as a week before they'd played ‘Maryland, My Maryland', Cate hadn't made a whisper of a speech about it all being comic or ironic or any of that stuff.

While eating a gritty ball of cornmeal, Usaph watched Cate. Hans Strahl vanishing in the air worried Usaph, but it worried him too that Cate stuck on. It was almost as if the painter was dragging along just to get a word from him, from Usaph Bumpass. Amongst all the noise of the march and the bivouac, the silence between them was stretched now thin as a spiderweb. Usaph's detestation of the man had waxed sharper than ever since Cate delivered him from those Union bayonets.

The place where they sat this morning eating their mush and their ashy little balls of cornmeal was called Bolivar Heights. Way below, beyond the town, the grand Shenandoah, daughter of a thousand mountain streams, ran boiling up across heaps of shingle against its equal partner the Potomac. Even up here you could hear, though you couldn't see, the boiling business of the two rivers. And as Usaph lolled there, frowning and hearing Wheat's ancestral story, he kept watching Cate and feeling a little panic. If I don't give him a kindly word to break his fever, he thought, who will? Yet I'm damned if I will. I forgave goddam Wheat, and that's enough.

Wheat's story that morning threw light on the whole business of how the Wheats came to this sweet land in the first instance. It also had a more moral ring than the tale about Mrs China. Gran'daddy Wheat, in his young days a sugar refiner in the English town of Bristol, had got into cash problems and so had forged a bill for £1500, in the name of someone else, against Lubbock's Bank in London. Gran'daddy Wheat got to London with his young wife, cashed the bill for somewhat less than its nominal price, and bought a ticket to Norfolk, Virginia, on a ship called the
Wellesley
. Then he'd said goodbye to his wife, and boarded his ship. The young Mrs Wheat headed back for Somerset and, on the Bristol Road, met a constable and gran'daddy Wheat's partner galloping towards London to catch the forger. Since she was sure the ship was already out in the Channel going westwards for Virginia, she told them all the details of gran'daddy Wheat's escape. Her husband, she said, would send for her later. She crowed at them a treat.