Hell or Richmond (52 page)

Goodman wrapped the looted canvas more tightly over his shoulders. Wasn’t no ways cold, but he felt a chill. Would’ve given an acre of good land, and maybe two, for a warm, dry place to rest his bones for an hour.

“Zeke?” Cy Benway asked. “You hear something?”

“Been hearing things all night.”

“Something different.”

Goodman listened. He was so tired even listening was an effort.

“Like leaves rustling,” Cyrus added.

“Plenty of trees yonder.”

“But the wind’s down.”

Goodman peered into the mist, which had grown paler by a shade.

“I don’t—”

Then he heard it, too. Sudden, huge, and close. Like the rustling of leaves on every tree in Rockbridge County at once.

He opened his mouth to holler, “They’re coming,” but the sight before him stunned him into silence: Bursting out of the fog, an apple-toss off, the entire Yankee army had appeared.

Just like that.

“They’re coming!” he shouted. Or thought he did, hoped he did. His mouth was dry as ashes.

He raised his rifle as Cyrus raised his own.

“Christ almighty!”

Goodman took quick aim. The Yankees were almost on top of them, bayonets leveled. He pulled the trigger.

The rifle misfired.

In the second it took to decide to run or surrender, the Yankees swept over the rifle pit. With vengeance in their hearts.

Four forty-five a.m.

Captain William Carter led his number one piece forward until entrenchments blocked the horses. Helped by soldiers recently awakened, his boys manhandled the gun toward the nearest emplacement, careful of men asleep in the traverses, while others scrambled to haul up the ammunition chest.

Men slipped and fell. A chest tumbled. The gun’s wheels grew stubborn.

“Keep that swab out of the mud!” the first sergeant called.

A lieutenant yelled that a caisson was stuck and blocking the way for the column.

Leaving the lead section to the first sergeant, Carter remounted to hurry the trailing guns along and direct them into position. Around him, conditions seemed queer as all get-out, with some soldiers up and looking to their breakfasts, while others slept the sleep of the just or the dead. He had to wonder whether the alarm that had called out his battery had been a fuss over nothing. They’d lost their first chance at real sleep in a week.

Here and there, dutiful officers barked orders, but the overall feel was of lethargy and the stone-heavy drowse that had gripped the entire army. Carter felt as though his gunners were the only fully alert men in the works.

Time, they just needed time, another few minutes.…

As he pointed the way forward for his second section of guns, the captain heard shots.

Four forty-five a.m.

Through a pearly haze, Barlow watched his skirmish line sweep over the rifle pits. The discipline of his men regarding noise was remarkable, each man aware that his life truly did depend on it. A few of the Johnnies got off shots, but his men went through them with bayonets and clubbed muskets. Serpents of mist wound over the earth, clinging to it, and watching the brief struggle at the rifle pits was like spying on ghosts at war.

Riding in the interval between his two leading brigades, he saw his ranks growing ragged, with the packed-together men sacrificing order to move more swiftly than a regular quickstep. With their rifles still at right-should-shift, the brigades followed hard on their skirmishers, who had gained a low ridge topped with a fringe of trees. His skirmishers were mere silhouettes in the gray glow.

Some of the men in the front ranks broke into a double-quick. New men, Barlow realized, imagining that the low ridge would be where the Rebels waited. Veterans called them to order, calling as softly as they could, and most of the befuddled soldiers took their places again.

The man-shadows of the skirmish line disappeared down the far slope, eaten by mist.

His soldiers in their thousands made a peculiar rustle, almost like the sea heard from a shuttered room. The first few prisoners, astonished men, passed by, herded to the rear. On the right, more shots snapped off from Birney’s front, but a grove blocked Barlow’s sight of the action. His men hastened up the final steps of the slope, churning a derelict meadow to mud underfoot.

It was just light enough to begin to see the patterns on their flags.

Atop the gentle ridge, the view was horrid. The mist had thinned, and the last true fog had retreated to a ravine to the front. Every man in the first few ranks saw the raw-dirt line of Confederate entrenchments, barely two hundred yards away, glowering above the sinking fog. Abatis bristled and, here and there, the crossed stakes of
chevaux-de-frise
doubled the obstacles.

In an unspoken compact, his men paused to straighten their ranks, as if good order guaranteed protection. Against the inevitable firestorm about to start.

But to Barlow’s astonishment, the Rebel guns didn’t open.

It was sheer folly. The time for the batteries to do their work was
now
.

Unless they had a surprise waiting.…

He waved his saber and the officers who saw him called, quietly, for the advance to resume. After the shock of seeing the Reb entrenchments, the men quickened their pace again, burgeoning forward, the front ranks dropping toward the fogbound ravine.

Hopefully, it’s not a thousand feet deep, he told himself, still not free of the long night’s doubts and acrimony.

Why didn’t the Johnnies fire?
Surely, they must have seen his men by now? You couldn’t mistake the advance of an entire corps.

As his skirmishers emerged from the fog on the far side of the ravine, his lead regiments dipped into the earthbound cloud.

A Confederate gun fired. The ball soared overhead. The cannon had not been properly laid. It made no sense.

Or was it merely a signal? The beginning of the slaughter?

It was certainly a signal to his men. They dropped their rifles from their shoulders to the charge alignment and began to run. Forward.

And they cheered. Barlow had ordered them to wait until they reached the line of works, but it no longer mattered. They were too close for even strong volleys to stop them.

Their ranks disordered, a thick wave of his men rushed up the far slope, howling spooks still gripped by shreds of fog.

Why didn’t the Rebs open up? It was the perfect moment to let go a battalion’s worth of canister.

He kicked his horse forward, feeling his staff close around him.

“Why the Hell aren’t they shooting?” a lieutenant asked. “Are they gone?”

No man had an answer.

Just short of the ravine and barely a hundred yards from the Rebel works, Barlow held up his party. He didn’t want to lose control, had to see how things developed. But he longed to spur right into the fight, to leap the abatis and go in with his saber.

And behave like an ass, he mocked himself.

Was
there a chance that the Rebs had abandoned the line? If so, they’d left a large rear guard: He could see heads bobbing behind the defensive berm. And rifles. Yet, his soldiers were already climbing over the stakes, tugging at them and hammering them down, unmolested by Johnnies ten yards away. The obstacle was no obstacle at all.

Rifles cracked and a few men tumbled. But the firing summed to nothing, when it should have caused sheer butchery.

More Johnnies crowded the line, rushing up, leveling their rifles to no effect.

Barlow began to laugh.

“Their powder,” he said to the staff men at his side. “Their powder’s wet. The sorry bastards. They’re all misfiring, the lot of them.”

His soldiers went over the dirt wall in a blue mass, bayonets thrusting and rifle butts swinging. The report of shots and points of light in the haze announced that his men had kept their powder dry.

The slope was a disordered mass of frenzied men in blue. Shouting. All of them anxious to get in on the kill.

To the right, he could see Birney’s men again. Swarming forward as well. Racing his men into the salient.

“I’ll be damned,” Barlow said.

Four fifty-five a.m.

“Damn them all,” Alleghany Johnson bellowed. “Shoot, goddamn it, fire!” He waved his cane as he walked behind the trenches, uninterested in safety, concerned only with stopping the waves of blue from swamping his line.

How had it happened? He’d sent out circulars, warning his brigades to be prepared.

Now this.

There were no Rebel yells now, only curses.

“Well, shoot ’em, goddamn it!” he ordered a line of his men working their rifles.

“Powder’s wet. Won’t fire.”

“Try new caps, damn it.”

“Done tried.”

Only seconds left to save the position. He could even make out the badges on the attackers’ caps: Hancock’s boys. Win, his old friend. His mortal enemy.

“Fix bayonets!” he shouted, waving his cane at the swelling blue tide, as if he meant to thrash it back across the Rappahannock.

But his men had rushed up to the line, and many had not bothered to grab their bayonets.

Screaming in a fury that chilled even Johnson, the Yankees flowed over the wall of dirt, leaping down into the trench bayonets first. Some of the blue-bellies impaled themselves on Confederate rifle barrels, no need of bayonets, while others landed atop one another. But his men were under them all, literally crushed by the attack’s weight.

His men swung their rifles at heads or pounded the butts into blue-clad chests and bellies, desperate as men attacked by rabid animals. Some Yankees paused at the lip of the trench to fire down into it. A boy in a ragged calico shirt leapt up on the wall, waving the flag of a Virginia regiment. The Yankees skewered him. And took the flag.

The Yankees were all around them now, and some of his men were running. A Yankee came at Johnson, bayonet lowered, demanding that he surrender.

Johnson swept his cane across the man’s face, then seized his rifle and shot the Yankee dead, muzzle to gut. The man’s blouse caught fire where the round went in.

Cane in one hand, rifle in the other, the general fell back. The survivors of his staff had rallied to him now.

Mortified, he saw dozens of his men raise their hands in surrender.

His staff fought through the melee as far as they could, with the general shouting commands and sending runners off with desperate orders, men unlikely to reach their destinations.

A pocket of fog saved him for a time. He saw twinkles of light on every side, and bullets scorched by like wasps from a bothered nest. Phantasms dashed through clouds of mist and gunsmoke.

He turned to his adjutant.

“Bob, you get on back to Ewell. Any way you can, boy. Tell him we need every man this damned army can spare, hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

They parted in the muck of a patch used as a field latrine. Eyes connecting a last time, unwilling for that last second to go their separate ways, the grip of the moment broken only when Johnson tapped the major—a mite hard—with his cane.

“Git!”

Johnson hoped Hunter would live to a ripe old age. But, right now, he wasn’t sure his division would survive. Or the rest of the army.

Blundering out of the curtain of mist, he found himself in the midst of a blue horde. In their thousands, the Yankees were rushing deep into the salient, the only Confederates in evidence a swarm of disarmed men being herded rearward. The firing had all but stopped as resistance collapsed.

“Oh, Hell,” the general said.

Alleghany Johnson raised his cane, ready to lead the remnants of his staff in a final charge, but dozens of Yankees deigned to pause and lower their muzzles and bayonets in the direction of his little band. And they took special note of Johnson.

When he turned, he found Yankees crowding behind him, too.

Nervous as a fifteen-year-old bride, a pimple-plagued lieutenant stepped from the blue ranks. He attempted a strut, but only made a goose of himself.

A goose with a hundred bayonets to back him.

“Sir,” the lieutenant cried in a too-loud, cracking voice, “I am prepared to accept your surrender.”

The boy was so earnest, Johnson almost laughed. Not that there was a great deal else to laugh about.

Instead of laughter, tears betrayed him. Mutinous, uncontrollable, shameful tears.

He lowered his cane.

“Oh, Hell,” he said.

Four fifty-five a.m.

“Stop firing that gun, or we’ll kill every goddamned one of you,” the Yankee sergeant yelled.

Their own infantry had disappeared. Federals were all around them. And streaming past in multitudes.

“Stand down!” Captain Carter shouted. “Get away from the gun!”

The Yankees closed tighter around them, rifles still leveled to fire. Rare was the blue-belly who didn’t wear a murderer’s look.

Carter had gotten his number one piece into action. Just long enough to fire a single round and reload. His other guns were short of their emplacements or mired on the trail. It was the worst day of his life, and he feared it would be his last.

As swiftly as he could, Carter scanned the Yankees for an officer. Settling for the sergeant with blue stripes, he said, “Don’t shoot my men. We surrender. We all surrender.”

“Goddamned right you do,” the sergeant said. He detailed a few soldiers to push his prisoners toward the Yankee lines. First, though, the sergeant helped himself to Carter’s artillery sword and pistol belt, tossing them to a private with the admonition, “You see that these don’t go astray, or I’ll beat you like a whore in the street, Mehaffey.”

Driven over the wall, away from their lost guns, Carter and his men met a spectacle even more humiliating. Between drifts of white mist and gray smoke, many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of disarmed Confederates swarmed northward, cursed to damnation and prodded to run by their captors. So many had been taken prisoner that they disrupted the advancing Union formations.

“I’m just glad Jackson ain’t here to see this day,” a sergeant said.

Five a.m.

Barlow had done his duty by Hancock, sending off a scrawled dispatch so the corps commander could do his duty in turn and send a telegraphic message to the army’s headquarters.