Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (53 page)

You were mighty, an ancient Israelite victorious. Leaping over flattened tents, over bodies and past captives, proud at the sight of captured flags and cannon, yelling your head off.

Saved.

6:00 a.m.

Camp of Hayes’ Division

Rud Hayes watched his division dissolve. What little he could see of it, anyway. He had just assured Kitching, an insolent young colonel newly attached, that his men would hold against any Reb assault, when thousands of screaming Johnnies burst from the fog behind his left flank. Stunned, the one brigade he had managed to get into line buckled, then broke and disintegrated. Now he rode among swirls of air made visible, alternately ordering and begging his men to rally. Of all the brave soldiers he had led through three years of battles, few heeded him now.

Those who did not run walked crisply rearward, avoiding his eyes. With those Rebel wails of damned souls resounding from every side, the successes he had in halting men were brief. Even his favorite horse became unmanageable.

Guided by echoes in the murk, Hayes rode toward the grumble of a battery, chiding any soldiers he encountered, but warned by a half-crazed captain with a pistol belt over his nightshirt that all was hopeless and he should save himself.

The busy guns belonged to Henry du Pont, his Ohio Lights. Firing blindly into the opacity, doing what little they could.

Reb howls erupted behind him.

How had they done it? Where had they all come from?

His horse shied from a private’s shoeless body. The Johnnies hadn’t wasted time with that one.

“Henry!” Hayes shouted.

The captain couldn’t hear him. Du Pont was spun of pure gold, though. Seen through a rip in the fog, the artilleryman sat his horse calmly amid the storm, mouthing orders Hayes could not hear, steady as if merely drilling his men.

The guns topped a low ridge that dropped off sharply behind.

Hayes reached du Pont’s side and called over the din: “Henry, hold as long as you can.” Hayes caught himself and corrected his words. “I don’t need to tell you that, I didn’t mean that. But you’re all that’s left. I’ve been trying to rally the men, but I can’t stop them.”

“Lost my Pennsylvanians,” du Pont shouted back.

“And the Regulars?”

Du Pont shrugged. “Don’t know. Been busy here.”

Although his manners were flawless, the captain was transparently impatient. Hayes grasped that he was only interfering: Du Pont knew exactly what he needed to do. And how to do it. His efforts were better spent on his unnerved men.

“All right,” Hayes yelled over another cannon blast. The air moved and the gun recoiled toward them. “I’ll do what I can to support you.”

He rode back into the veil of fog and smoke, guessing at his direction, riding past strays in ones and twos, then, to his shocked alarm, right through a pack of Johnnies. As soon as he found himself among his own kind again, he tugged his horse about and shouted orders, but all flares of courage were fragile. The men no longer seemed to be madly panicked, but they stubbornly refused to defend this ground. As if to punish their officers for having let them down, for permitting this to happen.

To his delight, Hayes found, at last, a rough line of his men—West Virginians—waiting for the enemy.

“Just stay where you are,” Hayes told their lieutenant. “Hold your position. Gather in stragglers.”

That too-familiar
thwack
struck horribly close. His horse reared, then dropped on its forelegs. It all went too fast and Hayes flew off, going black the moment he thumped the earth.

Perhaps the racket woke him. He sensed that he had not been unconscious long. He tried to gain his feet, only to collapse, hands grabbing his ankle before his brain had classified the pain.

Broken? Please, no. He tested the lower shinbone, down to the working bones and ligaments, that hard knuckle. He could have used Doc Joe, but had not seen him since the fighting began.

Quickly, Hayes fought his way to his feet, growling down his pain. His soldiers were gone. Had they thought him dead? He made an agonized effort to follow after them.

“You halt right there and surrender, you sonofabitch,” a Southern voice called.

Killing close?

Hayes ran. Hobbled and ablaze with pain, he cast himself into a gnarl of trees, ignoring the penny-nail thorns. Every other step sent a shock through his body.

Bullets sought him.

In another of the morning’s maddened turns, he found himself in a throng of milling soldiers, his own men.

“Boys! Come on, boys! We’ll stand, we’ll hold them here,” he shouted, limping and hoping.

Something slammed into the back of his head, knocking him to the ground and leaving him dizzied but conscious. He understood that he had been shot and urgently thrust a paw back over his skull.

No blood. Wonderfully, amazingly. Only a stunned feeling that his head was ten times its size, plus a wild ringing and a terrible moment’s loss of vision. Either the bullet had been utterly spent or its velocity had been slowed by a passage through other flesh.

During the moments required to make sense of his situation, his soldiers had fled again: A fallen commander hardly inspired courage.

An aide appeared, miraculously, from the mist, clomping forward on a roan as bullets wasped the air. He spotted Hayes and dismounted.

“You all right, sir?”

“That … would be an exaggeration. Good enough, though.”

“They told me you were dead. I thought I should—”

“I’m not. No thanks to the Johnnies.”

The aide helped him to his feet. Hayes winced and buckled. “Ankle.”

“Take my horse, sir. You’re more of a prize than I am.”

Briefly, Hayes considered turning him down: the old notions of honor, of Walter Scott gallantry. But he saw quickly enough that rallying what remained of his division and buying time for the army to deploy—playing his assigned part—mattered far more than storybook chivalry.

“Help me up.”

Hayes rode rearward, leaving the aide behind. With his head throbbing, the ankle pain sharp as a toothache when he pressed the stirrup, and visibility still a matter of yards, he did his best to gain the Valley Pike, certain that would be the line where the resolute men rallied, a marker on the landscape that made sense and promised order. And that was where the generals would be, organizing the defense and bringing up the Sixth Corps. That was where the Rebels could be stopped.

As he reckoned his way northwestward—wishing that he’d pocketed his compass—he managed to gather a few small clusters of men from his division, captains leading companies the size of water details and sergeants too ill-tempered to give up, all of them ready to follow him as long as he was heading away from the Rebels. By the time his new mount’s hooves struck the hardened Pike, Hayes had rallied sixty of the fourteen hundred men who had been present for duty an hour before.

His head throbbed, leaving his vision blurred at the edges.

He worked his way up the grade of the Pike between overturned wagons and inexplicable wreckage, calling to the hundreds of soldiers drifting rearward, attempting to graft strays from other divisions to his command, to build a useful force, but the plodding soldiers ignored him.

At least he seemed to have gained some ground on the Rebs: Their racket lagged back a ways.

He found Generals Crook and Wright by the lane to Belle Grove. Crook appeared grim, and Wright’s lower face was crusted with blood and dripping. They hadn’t much to tell him: only that Ricketts was bringing up the Sixth Corps and that Hayes’ fellow division commander Joe Thoburn was dead.

The Rebel yell crested waves of rifle fire. His head pulsed monstrously.

Appraising the shameful shred of Hayes’ Division left by the roadside, Crook said, “Form your men, Rud. This fight isn’t over.”

7:30 a.m.

The fields of Belle Grove

Jim Ricketts coughed, spit, and said, “That goddamned Wheaton.”

He knew he was being unfair. New to division command, Frank Wheaton was doing his best. They all were. Himself, he was struggling to direct a corps for the first time. But battle allowed no excuses, and in the little time Ricketts had been seeing to his own division—fighting under Warren Keifer this day—Wheaton had fed his brigades into the butcher’s grinder piecemeal.

The damned Johnnies seemed to be everywhere. It was worse, far worse, than Monocacy. There you could at least see what was coming toward you.

Wright had ordered him to align the corps on the Pike, facing east and southeast, while staff officers and hangers-on hastened to pack up the headquarters at Belle Grove. At first, the danger had seemed to come from the left. Then Wheaton had his right turned, driving him back across a ravine and costing him a brigade. That tore a gap in the center of the corps. Keifer, too, was barely holding on and worried about being flanked himself.

Ricketts rode carelessly through pale fog, letting his horse sense the ground as best it could. It was not an hour for caution. Behind him, aides and orderlies, flag-bearers and a bugler, strove to keep up while avoiding the retreating men dashing here and there.

He had half a mind to ride a few down on purpose. It was the most shameful debacle since Bull Run. Of which he did not have the best of memories: Left for dead was not a pleasant condition, and thank God for Frances.

No, let the provost marshal see to cowards. Holding the Sixth Corps together amid this onslaught of chaos trumped all else.

Where had Early gotten so many men? His strength seemed to have doubled, at the very least. Had Longstreet really come, had that signal been true?

In the past, he had longed for a corps command, but granted it temporarily while encamped, he had not expected to lead it into battle. They all had agreed that Early was finished off.

Now here they were.

He yanked back on the reins so hard, his horse reared. Johnnies. Straight ahead. He’d almost galloped straight into their flank, headed directly toward that ragged red flag.

His escort cascaded to a stop around him. One man exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!”

If the Rebs were here, where the devil was Wheaton?

Correcting his course westward, he topped a crest and let his mount judge its way down a slope he half recognized. Infernal mess, all of it. Lucky if he wasn’t shot down by his own men in this confusion. A guesswork battle.

Rebs had guessed better.

He jumped a narrow streambed, reading the battle by sound. He hoped Keifer had the sense to refuse his left flank now. Did he even know Wheaton had pulled back? Where the devil was he?

The only man on whom he truly could count was old George Getty. Two of a kind they were, old Regulars, unfit for parlors but steady in a fight. Getty held the high ground on the Pike just this side of Middletown, holding open the army’s line of retreat.

Retreat.
A damned disgrace. Conquered by scarecrows.

Too weak now to grip a hillside, the fog thinned up ahead. Ricketts saw uneven blue lines top a crest.

“There!” he shouted, pointing.

But if he could see his own men now—those had to be Wheaton’s boys—he couldn’t see the Johnnies, only hear their keening howls, hair-raising in the fog.

As his horse climbed the slope, the men in blue decided they shouldn’t shoot him, but it looked a near thing. Even veterans kept fingers taut on their triggers. Earlier, he’d mentally chastised Wright for leading two regiments into a breach himself. The situation had been desperate—and still was—but an army’s commander, temporary or not, shouldn’t gad about leading tactical charges. Now here
he
was, blundering into Rebs as he searched for his lines, hardly a clever turn for a corps commander.

A drift of fog enshrouded the ridge anew.

“Where’s General Wheaton? Damn it, where’s General Wheaton?”

Nobody knew. But the men looked at him expectantly: He was a general, a father in uniform, supposed to be wiser than his powder-blotched sons, expected to wield secrets.

“Here they come!” somebody cried. The fellow had sharper eyes than Ricketts possessed.

Sure enough, that
kee-yip
wail rose from the streambed below, sepulchral and horrible.

Frank Wheaton materialized. “General Ricketts?”

“Frank, do you know where you are?”

“I think so.”

“Smarter man than me, then. Look, you have to hold. Until Wright can rally the army.” He paused. “Or bring it off.”

“That bad?” Wheaton asked.

“What do you think?”

“I’ve lost a brigade. They broke, I’m sorry.”

“I know. Don’t lose another.”

“It’s goddamned contagious. The fear.”

“So is courage.”

A friendly volley punished their ears. The Rebel shrieking collapsed, but soon renewed itself. Closer now. A soldier turned to run and Wheaton shot him.

“No man runs,” the Rhode Islander barked.

Ricketts grimaced but nodded. It was that bad.

“All right, Frank,” he said. “Do all you can. The army’s counting on us.”

An uproar arose on Wheaton’s right. As if, God forbid, the Rebs had flanked them again.

“I’d best see to that,” Wheaton said.

“Get your flanks tied in. I’m heading back to Keifer.” Before turning his horse, Ricketts added, “This is when we earn our pittance, Frank.”

Scanning his shrunken escort, Ricketts called, “Owens, can you lead us back to Belle Grove?”

A former Regular with service on the Plains, the cavalryman rode up, saluted, and said, “Right to the house, sir.
If
the Rebs ain’t already visiting.”

“Keifer should hold them.”

“Like you say, sir.” The old scout led them off.

How long could the fog persist? It thinned only to thicken again, tore open to reseal itself as tight as a cholera coffin. Ricketts had never seen anything quite like it, not on a battlefield. Even at Spotsylvania the mists had cleared as the morning grew, leaving men face-to-face, clubbing each other’s brains out in the rain.

More cannon now. Rebs must have brought up theirs. The roar of battle menaced from three sides.