The Warriors
Authors: John Jakes
The Kent Family Chronicles (Book Six)
John Jakes
For my mother
Introduction: Enjoying the Sweep of History
Prologue at Chancellorsville The Fallen Sword
Book One: In Destruction’s Path
Chapter II “Sixty Thousand Strong”
Chapter VI Shadow of the Enemy
Book Two: War like a Thunderbolt
Chapter IV “A March as Glorious as Sherman’s”
Chapter VIII The Bible and the Knife
Chapter V “To Every Purpose Under Heaven”
Chapter VI The Coming of the Godless
Chapter I Meeting with a Mountebank
Chapter IV The Man in the Burned Shawl
Chapter IX “I’m on Top, Ain’t I?”
Epilogue at Kentland The Lifted Sword
Enjoying the Sweep of History
I
T CAN BE TEDIOUS
to hear an author cite his reasons for liking this or that book he produced, yet in the case of
The Warriors,
I find it hard to keep from it. The sixth novel of
The Kent Family Chronicles
covers a short span of years, yet encompasses some of the most significant, exciting, not to say epic events of our history.
In my introduction to the preceding volume,
The Titans,
I noted that the Civil War is a subject continually eliciting worldwide interest. Professor James M. McPherson in his prizewinning one-volume history of the war,
Battle Cry of Freedom,
says that the Civil War has produced more books by a factor of ten or more than any other era in America’s past. Further, the war brought about the greatest redirection of national life, in the shortest time, that we’ve ever experienced.
Lagging not far behind the Civil War in terms of universal appeal, however, is the opening of the American West. I expect that’s why I favor
The Warriors:
it rolls up a lot of our most dramatic moments in a single volume.
Consider that the book opens with the harrowing battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia as the war grinds to its agonizing close. It cuts away for a glimpse of the ravaging of Southern plantations by Union troops, especially their less-than-attractive foragers, commonly called bummers.
Then we travel West, to watch the building of the transcontinental railroad. The conclusion draws us into the era of the robber barons, a subject more fully explored in the next volume, appropriately titled
The Lawless.
Any wonder that I enjoyed writing the book despite the frantic pressures to get it out faster, ever faster?
When I lecture or speak to writers’ groups, during the Q&A, someone inevitably asks, “Do you do all of your own research?” The answer is yes.
And, yes, it’s a formidable workload, nearly doubling the time required to produce a novel, yet I’ve never been willing to surrender the responsibility. Preparing to write a new book is like enrolling in a new graduate program—digging into a new era, mining it for everything I didn’t know before (which is always “plenty”). In the case of
The Warriors,
I was able to delve into three broad subjects at once. I wouldn’t give up the pleasure.
Now that my friends at New American Library have returned
The Warriors
to readers in this handsome new edition, I hope that you, too, will find not only entertainment in the story, but the sweep of our history during a few short years that were long on events of major importance.
—John Jakes
Hilton Head Island
South Carolina
And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d
with missiles I saw them …
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade
s
uffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
1865:
Walt Whitman,
in the
Sequel to “Drum-Taps,”
written in the summer
and published in the autumn
following Lincoln’s death.
The Fallen Sword
i
M
AJOR GIDEON KENT WAS
worn-out. Worn-out and plagued by a familiar edginess he only permitted himself to call fear in the silence of his mind. The feeling always came on him during a battle.
About six o’clock that afternoon, he’d witnessed more than the beginning of a battle. He’d seen the start of a slaughter. Thousands upon thousands of his Confederate comrades had gone charging out of the second-growth timber called the Wilderness, bugles blaring, bayonets shining.
Noisy blizzards of wild turkeys fled before the howling men and their streaming battle flags. The surprise attack had caught the Dutchmen—the German regiments in Von Gilsa’s brigade—taking their evening meal in Dowdall’s Clearing, most of their arms stacked.
The Germans were manning the end of General Howard’s exposed flank. The Southerners tore into them. Stabbing. Screaming. Blowing heads and limbs away at point-blank range. On horseback, the commander of the II Corps, Army of Northern Virginia, had closely followed his charging lines, his eyes blazing with an almost religious light. Now and then the commander’s hands rose to the thickening smoke in the gold sky as though thanking his God for the carnage.
The general’s outrageously risky attack had succeeded. That much had been evident while Gideon observed the first few minutes of the engagement. Then he was summoned away. His own commander, the restless Beauty Stuart, saw that the terrain and the element of surprise made cavalry not only unnecessary but useless. So he requested permission to take a regiment and a battery up to Ely’s Ford on the Rapidan River, where some worthwhile damage might be done to a Union wagon park. Gideon, assigned to General Stuart’s staff, had gone along.
Around eight o’clock Stuart had sent him back to deliver a report to the general commanding II Corps. Some Union horses had been discovered—part of Stoneman’s elusive force. Stuart’s message said he was preparing to attack, though he stood ready to swing about if the commander of II Corps needed him.
That the commander needed no one had become clear to Gideon as he’d maneuvered his way south again through almost impenetrable woodland to reach the Fredericksburg Turnpike, where he was now riding, armed with saber and revolver.
The surprise attack had rolled the enemy back for a good two or three miles. Gideon could dimly see the evidence: hundreds and hundreds of blue-uniformed dead sprawled in the lowering dark. To the east, the battle was still raging. Artillery had joined the combat, and shot and shell had ignited stands of timber along the fringes of the Wilderness.
By now the sun had set—it was Saturday, the second day of May 1863—and Gideon was moving toward the center of the fighting. He had begun to wonder if he’d been given the right directions by some officers he’d met a ways back. Was II Corps’ commander really somewhere ahead? Impossible to tell on this increasingly black road flanked by stunted trees and thick underbrush.
His little stallion, Sport, had trouble keeping his footing on the rock-studded highway. The wiry long-tailed Canadian horse—Canucks, the Yank cavalrymen called them—had fallen into Gideon’s hands after Fredericksburg. It was a short-legged shaggy prize, coveted and cared for almost as attentively as Gideon looked after himself.
But the damp, hard winter at Camp No-Camp—the name was another of Jeb Stuart’s whimsies—had taken its toll. A week ago, despite Gideon’s best efforts to keep the captured horse on firm, dry footing whenever possible, he’d discovered the telltale signs of greased heel. Sport’s front hoofs had suffered too much mud. They were rotting.
Still, the animal was game, moving steadily if not rapidly through the tunnel of trees. Somewhere not far ahead lay that white-columned farmer’s manse at the crossroads dignified with the name Chancellorsville.