Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (56 page)

“I reckon these will do,” Tom Boyet said, trying on a pair of shoes left in a half-down tent. The Yankee camps were realms of treasure, and once it was clear that the fighting was over, Nichols had followed the lead of his brethren and drifted back to the nearest Yankee tentage. Even picked over by many an earlier scavenger, the abandoned Yankee lines held such wealth that it was a trial to choose what to carry off.

And as they searched through tents and rucksacks and commissary chests, every man ate his fill. Nichols had gobbled a can of sardines in oil, unsure if he liked the taste but unable to stop stuffing them in his mouth. He drank the oil.

The Yankees were so rich. Why couldn’t they just leave the South alone? Did they love niggers that much? Or were they just wicked?

Perhaps, as Elder Woodfin put it, they were Moabites and Jebusites, sent as a trial for Israel, God’s handiwork, God’s test.

Well, the Lord had been good that morning: Not one of his war-kin had been killed or even muchly scratched. Just chilled by that river, a baptism Nichols did not wish to repeat.

As his friends and many a stranger from other divisions harvested the crop of Yankee abundance, a lieutenant rode up wearing trouble on his face. Nichols didn’t recognize the man, but took him for a staff officer, since only staff lieutenants rode these days. The real lieutenants walked, just like the men.

The lieutenant halted before Lem Davis and Dan Frawley. Dan was wrestling with a pair of trousers too small for his bulk, even with Dan starved down.

“You men!” the lieutenant called. Seen close, he had that my-kin-got-money-and-land-and-yours-ain’t look Nichols never cottoned to. The sneering boy drew his revolver. “You’re no better than deserters, you’re endangering the army. Rejoin your regiments. Immediately.”

When no one seemed willing to turn from all the abundance, the lieutenant repeated, “This is no better than desertion, what you’re doing. And desertion’s a capital offense. Return to your ranks, every one of you.”

To Nichols’ surprise, Sergeant Alderman stepped forward. Alderman was a good man, decent and brave, and a capable sergeant. But he never had been one to contest authority.

“Lieutenant,” Alderman said, “these boys just fought, they took all this. Knocked those Yankees back a goodly sight, and not a man here broke ranks till ordered to halt. Now they’re just trying to feed themselves up and gather some winter duds.”

“There’s no excuse for disorder. If you all remained in your ranks, rations would be delivered.”

The nearby soldiers guffawed.

“Why, I guess Bobby Lee’ll drive ’em up in a wagon hisself,” a soldier mocked. “Beefsteak and fried ’taters, coffee and pie.”

The lieutenant whipped around in the saddle, set to point his pistol.

“Don’t
any
of you, don’t any man, say a word against General Lee.”

“No man said a word against General Lee,” Alderman assured him.

“Well, all of you get back to your regiments now. Before I have to take action.” He hefted the revolver, a captured Yankee Colt, but didn’t lower the barrel toward the men.

Again, the soldiers laughed. But the laughter this time had a meaner edge.

“Just what action you going to take now, sonny?” the jokester asked.

“This is mutiny!” the lieutenant declared.

Alderman stepped closer to him and his horse. The lieutenant recoiled slightly.

In a voice kept low, but barely controlled, Sergeant Alderman said, “Lieutenant, that’s a fine horse. And that’s a mighty fine uniform you’re wearing. I’m sure you’re a mighty fine officer. But these men are hungry, and they’re going to eat. They’re barefoot, and, by God, they’re leaving here shod. Courtesy of General Philip Sheridan. And when they’re fed and shod, they’ll rejoin their regiments. And they’ll do service as good as they’ve ever done.” Alderman glared up at the boy, face as hard as Nichols had ever seen it. “Now, you can put that iron back in its holster and ride on, or if you mean to shoot down your own kind, you can start with me.”

“Who’s your commanding officer?”

“Captain Kennedy. Sixty-first Georgia. Evans’ Brigade, Gordon’s Division. And, though you haven’t bothered to ask, my name’s Alderman. Sergeant J. W. Alderman, CSA.”

Stymied to quivering, the lieutenant showed white spittle at his mouth’s edges, like an old man nodding away on a store’s front porch.

“You won’t be a sergeant for long,” the boy declared. He gee-upped his mount and rode off.

“I did like that horse of his’n,” a stranger commented.

But as the men rallied to congratulate Alderman, he repelled them, barking, “The lieutenant’s right, you all just hurry up. Ten more minutes, and you’re back in ranks. Y’all get moving.”

When Private George W. Nichols rejoined his company, he was laden with two unsullied tent flies, two good blankets, a rubber ground cloth, two handsome overshirts, and, best of all, two hardly worn pairs of shoes that cuddled his feet like a softhearted gal might apply herself to a man.

It was, by far, his best day of the war.

NINETEEN

October 19, 9:15 a.m.

Valley Pike, south of Winchester

Sheridan reached the crest and beheld disaster. Another train of supply wagons had stopped in confusion, blocking the Pike. This time it wasn’t rumors that had brought them to a halt. Nor was it the sound of cannon echoing from the south. Hundreds of soldiers fled northward, choking the roadway and spilling into the fields. In the clearing day, some appeared to be wounded. Most did not.

“Good God,” Sheridan muttered.

Pierced by the scene, he reminded himself that even great armies looked rotten in the rear, that realm of skulkers and clerks. But less welcome thoughts flooded over him: He remembered that peculiar signal about Longstreet’s arrival and Stanton’s threats couched as praise; he rued his dismissal of the first reports of firing from the officer of the day and drowsing on at Winchester; and it sickened him that he’d bothered with breakfast at all, even if eaten standing and in gulps.

Yes, he had heard it, sensed it, known it, before he saw it. The sound of the guns had been moving northward as he and his escort rode southward: a fighting withdrawal, if not an outright defeat.

Now this. As he spurred Rienzi forward, maintaining a moderate pace to show no fear, the number of men running from the fight increased, clotting the fields and overwhelming the wagons pointed south. At the head of the train, an ambulance contested the right-of-way. Teamsters waved their arms and shouted, their words smothered by the din.

If it
was
a defeat … if Longstreet … if …

He’d have to establish a new defensive line closer to Winchester. Along Mill Creek? And try to hold.

Miserably, he grasped how much he’d enjoyed his newfound fame, his mantle of glory. He always loved the fighting itself, but had found the applause far sweeter than expected.

Would Grant relieve him?

Grim and glowering, he led his aides and escort through the first knots of frightened men. He felt the unease of the officers riding behind him, sensed Forsyth forming a question, choosing his words.

Don’t show fear,
Sheridan cautioned himself again.

And he
wasn’t
afraid. Not of wounds or death.

But shame was another matter. Failure and shame.

Poisonous Stanton, a viper behind a desk. Halleck, blustering and unforgiving. Then the way newspapermen turned on a man …

A horseman galloping northward abandoned the Pike to skirt the wagon train. As the fellow raced through a field, dodging broken soldiers, Sheridan recognized his chief of commissary.

The colonel waved to Sheridan, coming on hard, horse shimmering with sweat.

Sheridan reined up. “What the devil, Brown?”

Panting as though he might burst out of his uniform, the colonel declared, “It’s all lost, General. All gone. They’ve captured your headquarters, the army’s broken, dispersed…”

Looking at the man, listening to him, witnessing the fear disgracing another, changed Sheridan utterly. In the time it took to flick away a fly, he brushed off his worries: He would
not
retreat to Winchester.

Damn it, he wasn’t going to retreat at all.

Leaning toward the commissary officer, he said, hard-voiced but low, “Brown, get a grip on yourself. Don’t let the men see you like this.”

He turned to Forsyth, his favorite aide. “You and O’Keefe will come with me. Cut out fifty of the best riders from the escort.” He gave the rest of his staff a get-ready look. “The rest of you, stop these men. Turn them around. Alexander, ride back to Winchester, have the garrison deploy across the Pike. No man retreats from here. Have the rest of the escort set up a cordon.” He glared. “
Do
it, goddamn it!”

He turned Rienzi southward again, followed only by his flag-bearer and O’Keefe, confident that Forsyth would overtake them. The Pike was clogged and useless, so he leapt a ditch and a stone wall to ride through the fields, increasing his pace to a canter.

His army would
not
be defeated.

What the buggering hell had Wright let happen?

As he rode along, men stopped. Dumbfounded. A few cheered.

He waved his cap. Even that had gone wrong: In his belated haste to get out of Winchester, he’d been unable to find his favorite hat and had to settle for a kepi an orderly produced. He needed the men to recognize him from a distance this blasted day. And they knew that old hat of his.

Hat or no hat, there was work to be done.

Far more of the men shambling northward were unwounded than were casualties. Some had run bare-handed and only half-dressed, but most carried their rifles. When more of them cheered him from the dust of the Pike, he turned and bellowed:

“I’m with you now, boys! If I’d been with you this morning, we wouldn’t be in the shit. Face the other way now, turn around! We’re going back to our camps.…”

The men howled. But not all heeded his call.

Some did, though. Some did.

He passed hundreds of soldiers, then met thousands. At times, he could ride the Pike for a stretch only to be forced to take to the fields again. But he made damned sure that every officer he encountered understood that he was to rally his men and rejoin the army.

If army there still was.…

Deeming the distance between themselves and the Rebs sufficient for safety, gaggles of soldiers had paused by the side of the Pike to brew up coffee.

“Drink up and follow me,” Sheridan hollered, a grin masking his fury. “We’re going back to whip those sonsofbitches. We’ll make our coffee from Cedar Creek water tonight!”

The cheers grew in conviction.

By the time he reached the outskirts of Newtown, though, the demoralization facing him was appalling. Hard to believe that this was the army he’d led, his victorious army. Intact batteries inched northward amid throngs of disorderly soldiers. Wagons, sutlers’ carts, officers lacking troops, and sheeplike troops without officers all had bottled themselves in the little town, struggling to get through the streets, like a fat woman wiggling into a young girl’s corset.

And Newtown was a Reb nest, body and soul. The inhabitants were surely in their glory.

When he’d ridden out of Winchester that morning, Confederate-minded women had stepped out onto their porches to shake their aprons and skirts as he passed by, an insult peculiar to their stubborn world. Somehow, they’d known … it was the strangest thing.…

“You’re headed the wrong way, boys,” he called, forcing a smile. “I’m heading south myself, you come along now. We’re going to smash those no-good sonsofbitches.”

Again the men cheered. And more of them turned to follow.

Avoiding the stoppered-up streets, he veered back into the fields and met Captain McKinley, one of Crook’s aides. To his credit, the boy was rounding up troops with a passion, although with mixed success.

Sheridan pulled up. McKinley saluted. Red-faced. And grinning like a moron. McKinley was one of those eternal smilers.

“General, sir, I sure am—”

“Glad to see me. McKinley, you ride through this traveling circus and tell every bastard you see that Sheridan’s back. I’m going to drive those Rebs till they shit blood.”

Blood was the truth of war. Just south of Newtown, by the side of the Pike, a field hospital might as well have been a slaughterhouse. Every man passing saw the mounds of limbs, heard the groans and occasional screams, registered the bodies laid in a row. The surgeons’ aprons were red as a harlot’s dress.

Sam Grant had it right: You couldn’t fix on the casualties, you could not let yourself do that. You had to think about winning and nothing else.

He rode on, galloping hard now, pushing Rienzi over the last miles. Stabbing his boots into the stirrup hoods hiding his tiny feet, he let the great black horse have its head and charge. All he could do was to shout a few raw words and stay in the saddle as the marvelous beast pounded over harvested fields, leaping any fences that had not already done their duty as firewood. His escort trailed by hundreds of yards, and only his flag-bearer kept up, maintaining the perfect distance behind his spur, a small man, hardly more in size than a boy, on a horse that seemed but a pony beside Rienzi.