★ CHAPTER 1 ★
Robert E. Lee tried to rub the exhaustion from his eyes but failed. It was difficult for him to focus his vision. He felt like he was about to slip from his horse. That would never do, he chided himself as he patted the large and faithful grey horse, Traveler. He was almost as well known as Lee himself.
What was confounding his plans was the fact that the waters of the Potomac were rain-swollen and high and moving quickly to the sea. But not quickly enough, he thought bitterly. One pontoon bridge had already been swept away and there were serious doubts as to whether others would hold. His soldiers were entrenching, building defenses in anticipation of an attack by a Union army that greatly outnumbered them. If he could not get his men across the Potomac, this could easily spell the end of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate States of America. If his army was destroyed, there would be nothing between Meade’s Army of the Potomac and Richmond.
Many weeks earlier, he had said that Meade would make no mistakes, and the Union general hadn’t. Meade had skillfully defended the hills near Gettysburg. And now he was chasing Lee and would soon catch him. Lee almost smiled. He thought he had the measure of the man. Defense was what Meade did best, and now he was on the offensive with an army that had just suffered somewhere around twenty thousand casualties. So too had Lee’s smaller Confederate army, and the loss of all those fine young men deeply saddened him. But while Lincoln could replace his losses, Lee could not. Jefferson Davis would try to get more troops and supplies to him, but it wouldn’t matter worth a damn if Lee couldn’t get his army back across the Potomac and into Virginia.
Now Lee did smile. He knew exactly what he had to do.
“Captain Thorne—you wouldn’t happen to have any fresh food or clean water or maybe some good southern tobacco on you, would you? I wouldn’t mind a chance to change my underwear or possibly converse with a good-looking woman, either.”
Steven Thorne was so tired it took almost all of his strength to smile and respond to his good friend Archie Willis. “Since I have no idea or memory of what any of those things are, I cannot answer you, Captain.”
“But sir, are you not the acting commander of this regiment? And as such, aren’t you supposed to know everything?”
“As I am now your commanding officer, if I told you to go to hell, would you comply?”
Willis laughed, but it quickly became a cough. The roads from the killing fields of Gettysburg were alternatively chokingly dusty and muddy. Today, each step taken by man or horse raised a cloud of dust to clog the air and make breathing difficult. The men were cold, tired, hungry, and emotionally whipped. Everyone said they had won the battle, and that might be true as far as it went. But at what cost?
“Well then, Steven, do you think we will catch Bobby Lee?”
“I think it’s entirely possible, but what happens then? Did you ever see a dog chase a carriage? And what does the dog do when the carriage halts and the dog thinks he has caught it? Most of the time the dog has no idea what to do with his prize and I wonder if General Meade knows what to do if and when he catches Lee. I for one do not look forward to any such development.”
Both men, along with the two hundred soldiers who comprised the rest of their regiment, needed at least a month’s rest. They had won a gigantic battle but would have nightmares for the rest of their lives. At least the air was cleaner. Gone was the stench of thousands of obscenely bloated bodies rotting in the blazing sun, and gone too were the screams of the wounded as they lay in endless rows waiting for someone, anyone, to help them. Or maybe to put them out of their misery with a prayer to God to forgive them for doing so. Unfortunately, God was conspicuously absent from the battlefields around the previously unknown town of Gettysburg.
The two men were riding side by side. The rest of the mounted infantry rode behind them. Several dozen walked, having lost their horses in the battle. Reporters would say they were “marching”, but they were in truth walking, and barely walking at that. Shuffling might be a better word. Their bodies pleaded for rest.
“Just think, Archie. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had two weeks more time in grade as a captain than you, the regiment would be yours.”
“And an empty honor it is.”
They stopped and looked at each other. Units everywhere were doing the same thing. Thorne’s regiment, the Sixth Indiana Mounted Infantry, was near the front of the long, winding Union column, but far enough back so that they could not see the head of the snake. It did not escape them that their unit was mixed up with others. They knew they weren’t supposed to be in this position, but just where the hell was the rest of the division, the corps?
Suddenly, they heard gunfire. The rumble and crackle were in the distance and were not an immediate threat, but one thing had just become abundantly clear. They had found Robert E. Lee.
“General Lee, sir, would you mind telling me just why the hell are we standing here staring at this sorry little creek?”
Lee smiled. General James Longstreet had arrived and perhaps the rift that had come between them could be closed, or at least eased. Hindsight had shown that Longstreet’s plans for the battle at Gettysburg had been correct. A frontal assault, carried out by Pickett or anyone else, had been doomed to bloody failure. The Army of Northern Virginia should have either tried to turn the Union flanks or simply called it a day and withdrawn. From a different position, perhaps, he could have taunted Meade into attacking him on ground favorable to his army. Likely not, he thought. Meade was a defender, not an attacker.
Lee had assumed too much and the burden of failure was on him. He had to redeem himself and the Army of Northern Virginia or the Confederacy was a lost cause.
“General Longstreet,” he said genially, “I’ll have you know that this is a most important river. It separates us from our homes and will be our downfall if we do not find a way to resolve the problem of crossing it. While it is certainly not as wide as the Tennessee or as lovely as the Seine is reputed to be, right now it is the most important river in the world to us. If we cannot solve the issue before us, we might be destroyed.”
“May I assume you have a plan,” said Longstreet.
Lee turned and acknowledged the presence of his commanders. Along with Longstreet were generals Ewell and Anderson. He longed to see truculent but trustworthy Stonewall Jackson in the group, but that good man had been killed at Chancellorsville and no one of his caliber had been found to replace him. Longstreet tried, and he was good, but he wasn’t Stonewall. The others, Richard Ewell and Richard Anderson, had performed spottily at Gettysburg. Perhaps, he thought, he wasn’t specific enough or demanding enough in the way he gave his orders. He understood that they weren’t used to his methods and it was something he would have to correct. Maybe they just weren’t used to each other at all just yet.
Jeb Stuart was not present either. His cavalrymen were harrying the Union advance and sending frequent reports. This is what they should have been during the great battle, instead of dancing across the Union rear in a quest for glory. He’d chided Stuart for his failure and demanded that it never happen again. Apparently, it would not happen again. Lee was getting inundated with reports.
Lee continued. “Gentlemen, as you know, we are between Hagerstown and the river and, barring a miracle, a vastly larger Union army will soon be descending upon us. Therefore, we must make some very painful decisions.”
Lee looked at their faces. Only Longstreet seemed confident as he continued. “Have you ever seen a small animal trapped by a larger predator? There are only two things the smaller prey can do. First, and I find this truly amazing, an animal will sometimes curl up and await death, allowing the predator to chew on him while he yet breathes. Second, there are other small animals who will fight and claw for their very existence, and sometimes will win their way free by virtue of their ferocity.”
Longstreet nodded solemnly and said, “I recall getting bit by an angry rabbit once.”
“And what did you do, Pete?” asked Ewell, laughing. Even though Longstreet’s first name was James, he was commonly called Pete.
Longstreet grinned at the memory. “Since I was but a little one, I ran home to Momma. General Lee, do you think we can get General Meade to run home to Momma, or, in this case, Uncle Abraham?”
Lee nodded. It was time to get serious. “I don’t know, but we can certainly try. Meade expects us to sit here in our trenches and wait for his artillery to pound us to pieces so that his infantry can storm over us. I do not wish to be that prey that simply waits to die. I wish to cast the dice and launch one ferocious attack against an enemy that is as exhausted as we are, disorganized, and strung out in long columns. We may not win the war, but we might just give us time for the river to go down and for us to cross it in safety.”
“When do you wish this to happen?” asked Ewell.
Lee looked skyward at the position of the sun. “There is still plenty of daylight and our cavalry has provided us with an effective screen. They must know we are out here, but they do not know in what numbers or precisely where, while we know a good deal about them. In two hours, they will be close enough for us to fall on them. In two hours, we will attack.”
The first indication Thorne had that something was terribly wrong was when the Rebel cavalry chased in their pickets. The enemy horsemen had been especially aggressive and Thorne had put it down to their trying to protect the carcass of their army. He hadn’t given the Confederates much thought—he was too tired for that. What Lee did was out of his control. Instead, he concentrated on organizing what was left of the Sixth Indiana into something that made sense and doing so while on the march. He decided on two small battalions of about a hundred men each divided into three companies in each. He didn’t have enough officers left to cover that so he gave command of several companies to NCOs. It might not be what their lordships in Washington thought was correct, but they could all go to hell. They weren’t at the front, and the Sixth Indiana was.
Then they heard it. That screech that made the hair on the back of their necks stand up. The Rebel yell, howling defiance from thousands of throats. The Rebels were attacking.
Guns weren’t just popping and crackling. Now the sound of fighting became a roar as cannon joined in. A low hill hid what was happening from Thorne. He wanted to put his men somewhere, but he couldn’t form a coherent line. He satisfied himself by placing one of the two small battalions on either side of the dirt path that somebody called a road. He had them dismount and told them to await orders.
A few moments later, they didn’t have to wait for anything. A host of fear-crazed Union soldiers was running towards them, ignoring their officers and throwing away their equipment. To Thorne’s horror, many were surrendering, just standing awaiting the enemy with their arms in the air. A wave of Rebels crested the hill and headed towards his position. There seemed to be thousands of them. He had but two hundred men.
“Fall back and maintain your formation,” he ordered, praying silently. A retreat under fire was difficult under any circumstances and his truncated regiment hadn’t yet worked together as a new unit.
The Rebels were close enough to open fire on them. Bullets began striking his men. The retreating Union soldiers hit his line, running and clawing their way to the rear.
Then it was over. His men broke and joined the mob. Some got their horses while others ran after them. “Son of a bitch,” Thorne shouted. A terrified young private handed him the reins to his horse and ran away. Thorne mounted and joined the race to the rear. He saw Willis trying to stop some men from fleeing and being knocked to the ground for his troubles. Getting up, Willis saw Thorne, waved, and mounted. Then he too ran away.
“Do you surrender?”
Thorne was shocked. A Rebel soldier was only a few yards away and had a musket pointed at him. He was about to say he did surrender when the Rebel’s head disappeared in a cloud of red mist and bone. Someone was still fighting and had just saved him. Before he could move, he felt a bullet whiz by him. He pulled his Colt and fired at the Rebel who’d shot at him. The man screamed and spun, clutching his shoulder.
Rebel soldiers were all around him. He spurred his horse and drove it mercilessly. He didn’t want to die and he didn’t want to be made prisoner, which would likely result in death if the tales of life in Confederate prisons were even half true. He was only twenty-six years old and had a life ahead of him. All he had to do was survive this damn war, a task which had suddenly gotten very difficult.
He rode to the top of a hill and, sensing a lack of pressure, paused and looked behind him. Confederate units were advancing in fairly good order while huge groups of Union soldiers were being swept up and captured.
Incredibly, Archie Willis found him. “I’m headed to New York, how about you?”
“Where’s the regiment?”
“What regiment? You and I may be the whole damn thing. At least the Rebels won’t be advancing much farther.”
Thorne agreed. In the distance, the Rebel advance had just about stopped, possibly from exhaustion. There seemed to be as many prisoners as there were Rebel soldiers, all being sorted and led off in columns.
“I’ve been in the Army of the Potomac for a year,” Thorne said, “and I’ve never seen it break and run. I’ve known it to be defeated too many times, but nothing like this.”
Willis grabbed his arm and shook it to get Thorne’s attention. “Unless you want to wait here until Jeb Stuart’s cavalry show up again, I suggest we do our own breaking and running. If you haven’t noticed, we’re just about alone out here.”
Thorne looked around. Willis was right. The two of them were the rear guard of the Army of the Potomac. They spurred their mounts and rode north through the shocked population of Hagerstown.