Never Call Retreat - Civil War 03 (30 page)

McDougal was off, shouting for some of his men to warm up one of the three remaining engines, several of them laughing when McDougal called out the number.

"I could pull more with me own hands," a derisive reply came back.

"Just do it, damn ya," McDougal shouted.

The staffer finished writing out the dispatch, Cruickshank cringing a bit as he read it, with all its misspellings, but the content was correct and he signed it.

Cruickshank walked over to McDougal's side.

"Not much to do here, General, until the engines start coming back. If they come back. Why don't you go sleep."

"I think I should stay," Cruickshank replied.

"Don't trust me?"

"No, I don't."

"General, darlin', would any of my lads be so stupid as to get themselves shot now? You have guards all over this place watching their every move. Go back to the company office and get some sleep."

Cruickshank reluct
antl
y nodded in agreement.

"One question first," Cruickshank said.

"And what might that be, General, and if you are asking me if I am sabotaging your plans, of course, the answer is no."

"No, it's about one particular train."

"Which one?"

"This morning, the one for Miss Hoffman. Even though it was pulling troops, you had an extra car on it within minutes, had a good crew on board. It left here without a hitch except for the traffic farther up the line."

McDougal fell silent. After another sip from his bottle he handed it to Cruickshank.

"Wouldn't you have done the same?"

Cruickshank finished the bottle and threw the empty on the tracks, the glass shattering.

He looked at McDougal, nodded, and then went off to find a place to sleep.

Hauling Ferry on the Potom
ac Riv
er Twenty Miles South of Frederick

6:00 PM.

T
he sharp crackle of carbine fire rippled along the road leading down to the ferry. Winfield Scott Hancock had worried deeply about this moment, for two reasons. First, would they arrive here ahead of any strong Confederate detachments or would they have to fight for possession of the crossing?

It looked to be no more than a company of Confederate cavalry which were already drawing back as his cavalry regiment, escorting the lead boats, had pushed ahead. They had been ordered to try to drive all the rebels off before the first barge arrived, to keep concealed what was going on, but Winfield knew that was an impossible hope.

By midday, on the other side of the Potomac, they had been steadily trailed by Confederate scouts, most likely Mosby's men, who had laid down an occasional harassing fire. For a while they had simply taken to firing on the barges, the men aboard them delighted with the challenge and giving back entire volleys, dropping several of the raiders.

Then Mosby's men had switched tactics, firing on the draft horses pulling the barges, killing or wounding several, which had really set tempers aflare among his men, who thought this was unfair and downright cruel.

Strange how war is,
he thought
.
Killing men is part of the game, but to deliberately shoot horses, except in the heat of battle, is thought unfair and draws howls of protest.

Mosby's men had pushed ahead, crossed the river at Edwards Ferry, and just above it tried to destroy one of the locks, which would have tangled the entire operation. Fortunately, the cavalry escort on his side had second-guessed them and raced ahead, stopping them just in time.

So to think that word had not gone ahead and up to Lee regarding their move was now senseless.

What had worried him more, though, was his own reaction to fire. He had seen it with more than one officer or soldier. A man of courage, or the sublime few, were as calm under fire as they were at a church service, until finally they were hit. They lost a limb, took a bad wound, and something within died, never to return. When again under fire the calm was gone, some broken completely, to be relieved of command or sent back to the rear, old comrades watching their departure with pity and, yes, also a touch of disdain.

His own experience, he knew, would haunt him the rest of his life. It was not the pain at the moment of being wounded. Surprisingly, there had only been numbed shock and deep rage that fate had pulled him out of the fight at Union Mills just when he was needed the most. No, it was what had happened afterward.

The doctor had withdrawn the bullet from his inner thigh just below his crotch and stanched the bleeding that, at first, he thought might kill him. It was later, in Philadelphia, when the wound festered, his leg swelled to twice its normal size, and the heat, the terrible heat.

At that moment he knew he was dying, in fact, inwardly he begged for it to end the agony. The mere touch of a sheet on his leg sending shock waves through him, the morphine dulling the pain, but still it was there. Doctor after doctor would come in and stick probes into the wound to keep searching for something, anything, and the room would spin in circles, and he would break, whimpering for more morphine. He lived for the next injection and prayed for death in between.

Then one doctor struck upon a plan, and when he was told of it, he begged to just be left alone to die, not to be moved, not to endure what was proposed but then relented when his wife asked him to try for life, to stay with her and the children.

They then brought a saddle into the room, set it up on sawhorses. lifted him naked from his bed and had him sit on the saddle, feet in the stirrups. The doctor then marked where the entry wound touched against the saddle, crawled under the sawhorse, and carefully drilled a hole through the saddle. He was matching up the trajectory of the bullet with how it struck him while he was upright, astride a horse. All the other doctors had probed his wound with him flat on his back, legs spread wide. This one doctor had figured they should put him back into the position he was in at the moment he was struck and perhaps in so doing a probe could find whatever it was that was now killing him. He reasoned that the bullet which had struck him had not creased up the side of the horse, but instead had gone straight through his mount's neck, then into the saddle and finally lodged in his upper thigh.

Several assistants now braced him as he sat in the saddle, feet forced into the stirrups, the mere act of bending his swollen leg a living, burning hell. The doctor was on the floor under him and took a long hooked probe out of his medical bag.

"Be brave, General," the doctor said, and then he slipped the probe through the hole in the saddle and into Hancock's body. Groaning, sweat pouring from his face in the ninety-degree heat, he hung on, gripping the hands of an orderly, struggling not to scream.

"Got it!" the doctor cried, and he pulled the probe out, its hooked blade snagged onto a tenpenny nail, bits of uniform, saddle, and rotting horsehair and flesh.

The wound exploded, decaying flesh and pus cascading out onto the floor, now that the plug within had been removed.

He fainted.

When he awoke the fever was abating, the wound still draining
...
and he was alive.

And since that moment the fear had eaten at his heart.
Can I
stand battle again ? Will terror of facing such an ordeal again unman me? Can I still command?

And there was the other aspect of it. He had ordered the morphine to be stopped the day after the ordeal, but the wound was not healed, perhaps never would be, leaving a suppurating hole in his leg. His doctor had raged with protest when Winfield had told him he had orders to report to Washington.

'Three months from now, maybe," was the reply, "but for God's sake, General, you did your duty. I didn't put you through that agony and save your life just to see you throw it away. Let someone else carry the burden now. You have a loving wife and family to think of."

"Doctor, thank you for my life, but you are talking about what is now my duty, my country's call." With a smile he limped out of the doctor's office.

What he had not told the doctor was the wish that he could somehow take a supply of morphine with him. Its memory haunted him, its soothing call, the strange dreams, the easing of pain.

All that was set aside at this moment. A minie ball snicked past him. He did not flinch, though several of his staff did. It was a test, and he had passed it.

He looked around at his staff and grinned with delight.

"I don't think they've made another ball to hit me just yet."

"Maybe not you, sir," one of his men replied, "but maybe there's one out there for us."

The group chuckled at the gallows humor.

I
nfantrymen converted from soldiers of a Maine heavy artillery regiment were jumping off the lead barges, deploying into skirmish line, double-timing up the road to fall in with the cavalry skirmishers driving back the few rebs contesting the position.

Hancock waited for a landing plank to be laid to his barge before he stepped off, leaning heavily on his cane for support.

He looked around. A typical river crossing for the Potomac. He remembered it from an earlier campaign when he had crossed here on a pontoon bridge. The ferry was a standard affair, cable strung across the river as towropes, but the boat was gone, the position abandoned after the war swept through back in June.

With even a modest pontoon bridge it'd be an excellent crossing point, a clear but narrow road straight up to Frederick to the north and Leesburg, Virginia, a dozen miles to the south.

The low river-bottom ground quickly gave way to a rising slope which even now his skirmishers were taking.

He set off at a slow walk, heading up the slope. Pausing for a breath, he looked back. A bridge on the road from the ferry crossing rose up over the canal, and the barge crews were now using it to run
their
horses across, and with practiced skill the first barge was already being pulled back toward Washington, narrowly passing those barges still coming up.

Just ahead was what was considered to be one of the engineering marvels of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the viaduct over Monocacy Creek.

It was a stone arched bridge, carrying not a railroad track but the water of the canal, flat and level from one side of the Monocacy to the other, well over thirty feet above the river's flood plain. The towpaths on either side were excellent crossing points for infantry and it was essential to hold this position.

He was surprised that neither side, at some point during this war, had not decided to blow this viaduct; it would have shut the canal down for months.

Looking back down the canal, toward Washington, he could see a long procession, boats riding low in the water, the men in high spirits. They'd been garrison troops for far too long, enduring the endless gibes and often scuffles with the men of his beloved and now gone Army of the Potomac.

He had felt a bit of the same disdain for them once. While his boys were up at the fron
t, battl
ing it out with the Army of Northern Virginia, the Washington garrison had sat out two years of the war, in heated barracks, with cookhouses, fresh rations, and even beds to sleep in. They had, however, won their honor with the holding of the city in July. Reinforced now by tough veterans from the South Carolina campaign, they were out of the city that many themselves had come to hate, were in the field on a new adventure, and had not seen so much action that they dreaded the next shock. In a way they reminded him of how he and his men had once looked, long ago, in the early spring of 1862, when McClellan had led them forth to the Peninsula, fresh, eager, neat, and ready for a fight.

He worried some about how they would react when they were hit by the hardened combat veterans Bobbie Lee would throw at them. He knew that in an open running fight he would bet on the veterans of field combat over heavy artillerymen converted into infantry. However, dug in, with a defensive role of stopping the rebs and not maneuvering against them, he thought his Washington garrison troops might just do the job. He was certainly going to do everything he could to stiffen their resolve and get them ready before Lee got to them.

He gained the top of the slope. The view was magnificent, the Potomac River coiling behind him, the canal with its boats, the sun low over the Catoctin Mountains to the west.

The last of the skirmishing ahead was dying- down. No casualties to either side, the rebel patrol far back now on the road, a mile or more away.

His staff was coming up around him, several of them survivors of the Second Corps who had escaped the debacles at Union Mills and Gunpowder River and who he had requested to join him now.

"Right here, gentlemen," Hancock announced. "I want a good survey done right now along this rise. We dig in close to the river."

"This close?" a major asked.

It was Jeremiah Siemens, his old topographical engineer when he commanded a division at Chancellorsville. Jeremiah had missed Union Mills, having been wounded at Chancellorsville, his empty left sleeve rolled up.

"Yes, here."

"No room for withdrawal, sir, if things go against us."

He knew Jeremiah well enough to know that the question was not so much for himself, but as an answer to those gathering round.

"There will be no withdrawal, gentlemen," Hancock announced. "Our orders are to secure every potential crossing spot between here and Point of Rocks." He pointed toward the Catoctins, ten miles to the northwest.

"That's here, Nolands Ferry just on the other side of the viaduct, then Point of Rocks. We leave five thousand men back at Edwards Ferry across from Leesburg, but the rest come up here."

The group, now including several officers from his First Division, were silent.

"If Lee should come on us with everything he has," one of them finally ventured, "we have to defend four crossings, and picket in between. He can focus on one point and outnumber us there five, maybe even six or seven, to one."

"That's why we dig in," Hancock replied sharply. "Jeremiah, I want surveys completed here and at Nolands before dark. Then up to Point of Rocks by dawn, but defending that position will be easy, it's a narrow squeeze down to the crossing and three thousand men there would be like the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae. Remember, we don't have to defeat Lee by ourselves. We simply have to stop him long enough for Grant to catch up and hit him from the rear. If we do our job, Grant will do his. Somewhere along here Lee is going to try to get home to Virginia. We are the cork in the bottle to stop him."

Hancock looked upriver and then downriver. He made a summary judgment of what he saw and what he remembered from the maps of the region.