ONE
July 6, 1864
Maryland Heights
Them shoes. Hard as skillet iron, as like to bust a man's foot as cozy it going. Sturdy, though. Say that, and tell the truth. Better than none, and welcome. Call them "good."
Nichols wished he could fix on that-he tried, he tried-the hard leather waiting to challenge flesh and bone, the side of fatback misery that attended every goodness in this life. But the frightful ache in his thigh had taken him captive, threatening him with unwanted, unmanly tears.
Which would not do none. Small he might be, but he would not be mocked by his fellow soldiers.
Around him, grease-faced men cleaned rifles.
He laid his hand gently atop the welt, as he might have soothed an ailing horse back on his father's farm. He knew he had been lucky, but knowing didn't ease the ache one mite. That pain was a brimstone torment, a tribulation. Still, he would not ride an ambulance wagon. Not that.
New shoes tucked beside him, he sat stripped bare but for a shirt that covered all such a meager garment might. Again, he touched the purple welt with its sickly yellow edges, swelling from his thigh, a thing unholy. He'd thought in that first instant that his leg must surely be shattered and torn right off, when whatever it was that hit him knocked him back, over, and down. Rolling in the summer wheat, he had grasped his wound with both hands to choke the pain. Only to find that his trouser leg-its wool worn thin as finery-had not even been rent. No blood smeared his hands, no poke of bone emerged. Helped to the rear, he had been further astonished to find he could almost walk.
But, oh, it hurt like Satan's own revenge.
And now he sat, petting the monstrous bump in half-dazed wonder, surrounded by ramrod clank and joshing men complaining gaily about their just-got shoes. Each man was pleased enough to get them, even those who had come to prefer going barefoot, but soldiers always complained. More than just a let-out of a man's feelings, it was a duty.
Sinful late, neglectful, ashamed, he thanked the Lord for his preservation. How could a man slight God at such a time?
Man, in his pride and selfishness, was a wicked beast. Ungrateful in the hour of his deliverance.
They'd harried the Yankees back into their trenches up on the Heights, work as hot as a midsummer harvest and this here batch of blue-bellies stubborn as mules put into a strange harness. But General Gordon, a righteous man in the eyes of the Lord God, was wise in the ways of war, in ways concealed to lesser men. And Gordon, or maybe even Old Jubilee himself-chaw of tobacco a cow's cud in his mouth and juice gleaming in his beard, General Early a spitting, crook-back man and harsh-mouthed as a heathen-such high men knew when it made no sense to chase after Yankees who weren't going to be no bother. Truth be told, the fighting had not raised half the ruckus, not a quarter, of the arrival of the supply wagons beforehand, bringing shoes that had been promised since Staunton.
As soon as he fitted his feet to the brute leather, Nichols had grasped that he'd have to cut the toes free or suffer the pains of a blasphemer gone over Jordan, and he'd left the shoes behind during the attack. It was as if he'd had the gift of the sight, since the shoes, at least one, must have been lost when that spent piece of shell or whatever it was knocked him down. And the shoes had been there waiting for him, faithfully, betrothed, when Lem Davis eased him to the ground in the shade they'd left to go fuss with the Yankees.
Sturdy shoes, they'd do. Nichols tried to look on the good side of things. Perfection was the dominion of the Lord, not Man the Fallen. And that was just how it was, always: a plump sergeant perched on a wagon, throwing something or other at you, hitting you smack in the chest, and your business was to be grateful. For shoes hard as the blades of a plow or for powder poorly stored, for provender lively with vermin-although he'd heard tell that a right wealth of Yankee rations had been captured at Charles Town and might be shared out soon.
The shoes would take softening and molding to the foot, the seasoning of sweat and the grumpy baptism of creek crossings-although a man had to be watchful of the foot rot marching wet. At least he had two feet attached to two legs still attached to his mortal flesh, a wondrous thing. Was that the sort of miracle of which the Good Book spoke?
He touched his curious wound again, unable to resist, and winced at its worsening.
"You just count your blessings, Georgie," Lem Davis said with a kindly twist of smile.
Nichols mumbled and nodded, pulling another tick off his calf, crushing it. Ticks seemed as bad in Maryland as in Virginia, and rolling around in the grass had not been helpful. But he was grateful for Lem's brotherly tone, for all of his fine brethren, the men of Company D and the rest of the 61st Georgia, no regiment in the whole great army none better, these hard-worn fellows grouped in the shade about him now, complaining not of the short, sharp fight behind them, but pleasurably of the shoes for which they had yearned on the withering marches down the Valley Pike.
Every man in the infantry hated that thoroughfare. Topped with rough Mack Adam and rendered not fit for foot of man or hoof of beast, a plain misery, it was a boon to the wagon wheel and artillery, whose cannoneers never had to march one step but rode about like princes. "Progress," that was the word the Pike called up, the rich man's delight in newfangledness. Such progress was just for the purse-proud man with the golden pocket watch, for the man from the bank holding papers that made no sense. It was not the wonderful sort in Pilgrim's Progress, his father's great, green book-tattered, treasured-second only to the Good Book itself in its worth to a man's soul. He wished he could read it now, that book, right here in the shade that shielded a man from the sun's direct attack, but not from the flanking movements of the heat in this no-place place, here on the brim of Yankee-land, no cooler than scorched Virginia, where it had not rained, he believed, since the scrap on the North Anna, where Joe Cruce fell. And on their long, unshod, hot, northerly marches, his warrior brethren, not unwilling but unable, had fallen before they heard a single shot, collapsing, gone down into delirium, clammy and startlingly cold to the touch, fish caught from a fast stream with bare hands. Dying far from the battlefield. Or merely squatting distempered by the roadside.
Skirmishers pecked the afternoon. Would they be ordered in again? Against those fortified Heights? Was there anything up there worth men's blood? General Gordon was a pondering man, erect in body and spirit, but with General Early a fellow never quite knew. Humped over and given to temper-every man in the army had witnessed at least one memorable outburst-Old Jube had a touch of the cottonmouth's meanness about him. And Nichols had heard that General Breckinridge, a high politician fellow, had been stirred into the batter, in between Gordon and Early. Some said Old Jube was slapping Gordon's face, doing him down, although Nichols preferred not to think that. There wasn't a man who didn't admire John Gordon, commander of their brigade and now their division. He seemed an honest Christian, which might not be the case with General Early.
Nichols probed his thigh again and soon jerked back his hand, as if he had grasped hot iron from a forge. Would he be able to march, when the march resumed? He would not shirk, nor be eyed as a malingerer. He had come too far and endured too much to be mocked as a "hospital hero" once again.
He shut his eyes hard, not at the leg pain this time, nor at the face-pestering flies, but at the recollection of almost dying in the Danville hospital, in that filthy pesthouse of Damnation, the worst of those through which he had been passed like a thing unwanted, a boy not yet tested by battle and sickened unto death by the bloody trots. At one point, his weight had been shy of ninety pounds.
Compared with those hospital wards, war was a pleasure. And this hard jaunt into Maryland, perhaps even farther on into the North, was a downright joy compared to the soul-busting misery of the fighting from the Wilderness through Cold Harbor. He hoped never to see the like of the Mule Shoe's mud and savagery again. Then the plague had been of rain, not drought, and the queer thing was that two of his friends, Joe Cruce and Bill Kicklighter, had been killed not amid the horror of the Wilderness or the confusion of Spotsylvania, but along the North Anna, in the least of the fighting.
It had been a relief to march away from all that, to cross the high green mountains into the Valley. Even the dust through which they had marched seemed fresh compared to what they left behind. That man Grant. A murderer, surely. Moloch.
At Spotsylvania, the Seventh Seal had been opened. He had put a bayonet into another man's belly. Once, then-meanly-again. The bewildered look on the fellow's face, the amazement and disbelief, had made Nichols want to grin and vomit at once. The chaplain's words thereafter held no comfort.
He didn't want to burn in Hell for eternity. But he wasn't going to kneel to Yankees, either.
Skin hot and tight to bursting over his welt, he thought again of the Valley Pike, of its meanness to rag-wrapped feet, but beloved of the generals for its directness, an arrow pointed north. Where were they going this time? No one told them, ever. Not General Evans, Christian though he was. And not General Gordon, who could make the poorest soldier feel exalted. And surely not General Early, a profane man, spitting his sour tobacco juice and judging the world in words that befouled the air, a hard man he. They said Old Jube had not wished to leave the Union, but now hated Yankees like farmers hated blight. Who knew the workings of another's heart? Jesus, only.
Squatting by a got-up coffee fire, Dan Frawley rasped, "If they done went to all this bother to bring shoes up from Virginny, all that way ... tells me we're meant to do a sight more marching." He shook his head gravely. "Nothing but trouble ahead, boys, take your pleasures now."
In response: dry-throated acknowledgment that fell well short of laughter.
"Could use a tad more water in the pot," Frawley added, pushing clotted red hair behind an ear. "Starting to think Corporal Holloway skedaddled with those canteens."
Holloway, Tom Boyet, and the rest of the water detail were overdue, and every man sprawled in the shade was thirst-caught, beat-down, and still, dirty men with gleaming rifles, as always. Would they take another crack at those Yankees in their high trenches, waiting like rattlesnakes up there in fortifications they'd had years to prepare? Or would the generals decide to move along? Deeper into the rich realm of the Philistines? And let this particular nest of serpents be? The logic of generals passed all understanding.
"I do believe we're going to Pennsylvania," Lem Davis said, Lem of the Patriarch's beard and gentle heart, young wife dead of childbirth in his absence. "Dan, you cook up coffee slower than any man alive."
"Didn't see you rush to cook none. I figure on Pennsylvania myself. And that don't ever like to turn out well. I'd as soon stay southwards of the Potomac. Nothing good comes of crossing it, you ask me."
Sergeant Alderman had been listening. On his feet, arms folded, on the alert for officers, Alderman was a man who had earned his promotion. He took off his hat, wiped his forehead, and said, "My bet's we're headed to Washington, boys. I think we're out to give 'em a good scare. And let folks in the Valley get a harvest in."
"Heard something, Sergeant?" Lem asked.
Alderman shrugged. "Just front-porch talk. What I can't figure is why there aren't more Yankees getting themselves in our way. You'd think they'd be coming at us from every direction." He turned. "You going to be able to march on that leg, Georgie?"
"Like to see Old Abe's face, General Early showed up on his doorstep," Frawley put in before Nichols could answer.
"Have to wonder if Old Jube even knows where we're a-going," Ive Summerlin said, following the words with a yard cat's yawn. Ive's tone had taken on a harder edge since his brother disappeared along the march. "Might have the Yankees confused because he's confused himself." He spit dry. "Sometimes I think he's just looking for any old fight."
"Like Old Jack."
"That man ain't no Jackson."
"Well, thank God and Jesus Christ almighty for it. My back hooves are sore enough." Shifting the coffee can, Frawley turned to Nichols. "What do you think, Georgie? You're quiet as the preacher hid bare-ass under the bed when Farmer John come back early for dinner."
"You wouldn't talk rough if Elder Woodfin was here."
The others laughed, accustomed to Nichols' pleasant fear of the Lord and the regiment's chaplain. Their teasing had settled into a friendly routine and, nowadays, was more apt to remark on his struggling beard than on his love for Jesus.
"Might be something to Little Georgie's devotions," Frawley offered. More sweat had turned his red hair maroon. "Got through all that fighting back in Virginny, not a scratch on him."
"Must have skipped his prayers last night," Ive Summerlin noted. "Only man in the company hit today."
"Well now," Frawley told him, "I'd call that more lucky than not. Everybody has to get hit sometime. And Little Georgie's sitting there with nary a piece missing, praise the Lord." He smiled an older-brother smile and pulled the coffee off the fire before it cooked any sharper. Saved up, the grains had been boiled over too often. He glanced at Nichols. "Reckon it's a discomfort, though."
"Can you get your drawers back on?" Sergeant Alderman asked Nichols. He glanced back over his shoulder. "Something's doing."
Responding to authority as always, Nichols reached for his rags, but found his leg stiff as a cannon barrel. He meant to march, he was determined. Just not yet, Lord, he prayed. Don't let them give us marching orders yet. Amen.
In the wake of a pair of caissons, Corporal Holloway and his detail emerged from the dust. The men took their fine time coming on, laden with canteens, burdened with the good weight of fresh water.
Frawley turned to Nichols again. "Never did get me an answer. If you were a high general, where would you lead us, Georgie? New York City?"
"Home."
As soon as the word escaped his mouth, Nichols regretted it. He sounded weak, cowardly, girlish. As if he wanted to flee to his mother's embrace.
His mother, a woman as good as Ruth in the Bible. Her chore-strong arms had held him fast, unwilling to give him up to godless war.
His lone word silenced everybody, just locked them all right up. Nichols was about to insist that he didn't really mean it, that he thought going to Washington or maybe Baltimore or even Philadelphia would suit him fine, come what may. But Sergeant Alderman spoke first, laughing through his words:
"I swear to God ... there's an honest man amongst us."
July 7, noon
Monocacy Junction
Rivers coursed through his life. First the Wabash, rich with fish and the promise of adventure, sun-dappled and seductive, had made of him a truant from the schoolhouse and its regimen of multiplication tables. Then the Rio Grande had shaped a man from a dreaming boy, as the men of his volunteer regiment perished on its sickness-ridden banks, going to graves in multiples day after day, until no wood remained for coffins and corpses were buried in undergarments, only to be uncovered again by the winds from the Gulf of Mexico. Not one of his Indiana comrades, left at a forlorn post by General Taylor, had heard a hostile shot before dying in vomit. Then, in another war, this war, he had saved Grant's freezing army on the Cumberland, only to be scapegoated for Grant's near disaster on the Tennessee. Now this river, slight and brown, had summoned him to a questionable destiny.
His staff, a meager collection, had gathered about him, all of them staring across the Monocacy, past fields gilt with wheat and Frederick's spires, northwest to the heat-softened mountains and the war that hastened toward them. There was nothing to be seen, not yet, only the sometimes thump of a distant cannon, but they all stared nonetheless, as if the Confederates might appear the moment they looked away, those lean men clad in gray and brown and patched-up rags of every harlequin color, who were bound soon enough to come pouring down the road from Frederick City toward this prize of bridges and main-traveled roads, where the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the highway to Baltimore, and the Pike to Washington converged.
Another invisible gun reported, a dull thud in heat as heavy as winter draperies, and Major General Lew Wallace felt the assorted lieutenant colonels and captains grouped around him tense. The first message from Clendenin, brought by a courier on a punished horse, had informed him that the cavalryman and his handful of troopers from the 8th Illinois had driven the enemy's advance guard back toward Middletown, only to be driven in turn as reinforcements bolstered the Confederates. Clendenin had been obliged to withdraw to Catoctin Pass, and Wallace knew it was but a matter of time before Reb numbers would tell again and Clendenin-a quick, earnest man-would be forced to abandon the pass and descend into the rich fields leading to Frederick. And Frederick was but three miles from this junction, which of a sudden had become the most important point in the entire Union.
The unconcern in Washington had beggared belief, even as ever more reports warned of Confederates in a host. Halleck, Wallace's nemesis since Shiloh-even before-had dismissed his initial concerns, agreeing with Grant's conclusion that Early and his corps remained in the defensive works at Petersburg and could not possibly be invading Maryland. It had only been thanks to Garrett, the railroad man, that Wallace himself was alerted to the crisis. The government had known nothing and cared less.
Only now, so very late, had the grand Mamelukes of Washington begun to believe in the deadly ghosts they'd all dismissed with scorn. But would there be time enough to hurry troops back from Virginia to save Washington, a city whose defenses Grant had stripped to make good his terrible losses? Wallace's mind was all too alive with images of the capital ablaze, the grand government buildings and the immense military stores, the Navy Yard and the Treasury's wealth of bonds, all consigned to the torch by vengeful traitors. It was all about time now, and Wallace intended to fight for every hour.
Another courier appeared on the road from Frederick, a dark speck chased by grand billows of dust. The weather was ripe and beautiful, but dry near unto drought and killing hot, and Wallace felt for the men who must march through it. Even if they were his enemies.
"What do you think's happening, sir?" Captain Woodhull, his junior aide-de-camp, asked. Woodhull's voice was eager and still pitched high with youth.
"Clendenin's giving them a fight," Wallace answered. "If he wasn't, there'd be more than one horseman chasing down that road."
But his spirits were not as confident as his voice. On his own initiative, he had gathered every soldier he could scavenge from his department, an administrative post meant to console him and his political friends, a return to the war in form, but not in fact. Until this day, the major achievement of his Baltimore headquarters had been to finesse the recent Maryland elections, ensuring that the right candidates were favored. His handling of the matter had pleased Stanton and Lincoln himself, but he still had not been offered a fighting command.
And he knew why: Halleck. Halleck, with his limitless vitriol, was a figure too high to dismiss without embarrassment, but too lacking in judgment to command in the field, so he sat enthroned in Washington, dispensing orders and venom with equal glee. "Old Brains" had maintained from the first that only his fellow West Pointers were fit for command and that amateurs such as Wallace would butcher their soldiers. He stopped just short of labeling volunteer officers as criminals. Yet at Donelson, Wallace had disobeyed orders shaped by West Point educations to save the Union right wing from collapse. And when, at Shiloh, he had obeyed his orders to the letter, only to arrive too late to join the first day's fight, he had been made the villain of the piece, although it was Grant and Sherman who had let down their guards and nearly lost an army. With all the spite of which the old vulture was capable, Halleck had stripped him of command and driven him into obscurity, letting him rot in Indiana while the war dragged on. Even when he saved Cincinnati, Ohio, from a Rebel incursion, it had made no difference. A man who held a grudge in perpetuity, Halleck had even argued against the Middle Department posting, determined to deny Wallace not only the battlefield, but even Baltimore.
So he had not informed Halleck at first when he left his headquarters for the railroad junction, which lay across the river from his department's western boundary. He was violating orders again, but Wallace saw no choice: Someone had to stand between these Confederates and Washington, even if the stand was doomed from the start.
Wallace could foresee his fate, whether he did good service or failed completely. Leading twenty-three hundred green volunteers, many of them mere hundred-day men, militia and convalescents wearing the grandiose designation "VIII Corps," he faced an approaching Rebel force reported to be between twenty thousand and thirty thousand in battle strength. Allowing for the exaggerations of excited informants, that still meant fifteen thousand to twenty thousand Confederates on the march. And Wallace intended to fight them, well aware that he must be badly defeated. He meant to fight to delay them as long as he could. And Halleck would have a real defeat to pin on him.
The situation was so dire that he had been made happier by the chance to commandeer Clendenin's two hundred veteran horsemen than by anything since his wife accepted his marriage proposal. As for the rest of his scraped-up command, all he could do was to use the river and the good terrain along its southern bank to make a stand and count minutes earned with blood. Wallace had never favored mathematics in school, but twenty-three hundred raw recruits divided by a front greater than three miles provided a sorry answer.
He asked himself if he was merely playing with other men's lives, still a prisoner of The Scottish Chiefs and the other heroic romances of his childhood ... yet he saw no choice but to do what little he could. To allow Early and his paladins to stroll into the nation's capital without making the least effort to delay them ... better to fight and lose miserably, even if he robbed them of only an hour.
He didn't believe that Early and his army were headed for Baltimore, although he could not be certain and had to cover the upriver bridge as well. All logic told him the Rebels aimed at Washington, hoping to shock the North and unseat Lincoln in the autumn election, and to encourage English and French intercession on the part of the South, even at this late hour.
To prevent all that, he had one six-gun battery of three-inch rifles and an unwieldy twenty-four-pounder. Against the battalions of cannon that Early would bring to bear. Well, he thought with a bittersweet smile, his boyhood hero, William Wallace, would not have been daunted.
As a lad, he had dreamed of military glory, inspired by his father's brief army career and subsequent leadership of the local militia. And despite his disappointments and travails in Mexico, this war had seemed to grant it to him, only to steal it away again, as fickle as the Greek gods. It wasn't about glory now, though. There would be no glory here. Only time gripped like a miser's gold and the prospect of the Capitol in flames.
The far mouth of the covered bridge gobbled the courier. Invisible hooves slammed planks. Anxious of heart but strict of feature, Wallace watched as the rider reappeared and reined up, calling out to the nearby guards, doubtless asking where the devil that fool general was.
The man begged directions a second time before whipping his horse up the slope. The beast looked ready to drop. Celtic complexion further reddened by his exertions, the cavalryman saluted and fixed his eyes on Wallace, drawing a folded paper from his blouse and extending it without dismounting. Wallace stepped forward and took the missive. It was damp with the fellow's sweat.
Before unfolding the paper, Wallace asked, "How is it with Colonel Clendenin?"
Interrupted while reaching for his canteen, the man gasped, "Oh ... he's giving them the right devil. That he is, sir. Cut from the proper mold, that boyo. But there's Rebs enough, a great and terrible lot of them."
"Does he still hold the pass?"
The soldier guzzled from his canteen. Water ran down through his whiskers.
"He did, sir, but he don't. We was all set to pull back, when I rode off. The Rebs, sir, they'd gone to flanking us every which way. They've infantry and guns up with their cavalry now, and they're terrible out of temper with the colonel, for he's giving them the loveliest bit of frustration."
Opening the scrawled report, Wallace thought: The poor bugger put it better than I could myself. We need to give them "the loveliest bit of frustration."
"Rest your horse, man," Wallace told the courier. "You're apt to need him over the next few days."
"Yes, sir, and that I will, sir. But if I may..."
"What?"
"Well, the good colonel up there, he's feeling a touch of the lonesome. If O'Malley's a judge of the weather."
"We all are," Wallace told him.
July 7, 3:00 p.m.
Sharpsburg, Maryland
Too damned hot for biscuits. The butter had separated on the plate, leaving pools for drowning flies, and the stink was downright grisly. Lemonade was fine, though.
Early waved Sandie Pendleton back up onto the porch, interrupting the boy's conversation with Ramseur's quartermaster.
Ascending in an aura of dust and spur clank, Pendleton called, "Yes, sir?" The boy had a narrow face and a wide writ. Twenty-three-year-old chief of staff. Damnedest thing. Inherited from Jackson and Ewell, no less. Tom Jackson must have lifted him out of the cradle.
"Here, now," Early said. "Eat up these biscuits. Before that woman comes back out on the porch. Be quick now."
Accustomed to Early's ways, the young lieutenant colonel made no protest, but tucked in with all the appetite of youth.
Between swallows, Pendleton asked, "Take one down for-"
"No. You eat 'em. Then you fetch me up that message from Bobby Lee again."
"About Point Lookout?" Pendleton brushed a crumb and a streak of butter from his chin.
"That's right. The one from Robert E. Lee's book of fairy tales for good Confederates. Have to read it a second time to believe it." Early drew a twist of tobacco from his pocket and tore off a chaw. "Take yourself some of that lemonade now. Not all of it. And get along."
He did appreciate that lemonade, had to admit. Woman of the house meant well. They always did. Most always. But the utility of womanhood was limited.
Sharpsburg. No good memories. That hateful hour in the cornfield, that bloody, wretched day. McClellan should have et them alive, but Little Mac's appetite failed him. Man afraid of his own shadow, of spooks and hants in gray. Jubal Early had never seen a battle waged with such determination at the front and such blissful incompetence in the rear. Yankees had almost done it, though, almost wiped Lee's army off the map. Old Marse Robert letting himself get pinned against the river like that. And Hill off gallivanting.
He figured he had seen worse since that day nearly two years before-at Spotsylvania, certainly-but nothing had marked him deeper than the slaughter amid those cornstalks. Remarkable business, what canister could do to men unprepared and utterly unsuspecting. One blunder after another. On both sides.
Ramseur himself now. At the end of the street, waving his troops on. Bully lad, that one. But there were times when gallantry had to give way to judgment. Ramseur needed to keep himself out of the sun, he was obviously still weak from his latest-third-wound. Tried to hide it, but Early could tell. Another man-child. Major general commanding a division, and just turned twenty-seven in the distinctly unmerry month of May 1864. That's what the army had come to now: scarecrows led by children barely got into long pants. And the cavalry ... he didn't want to think about those sonsofbitches and spoil the afternoon.
Ramseur would do. Fighting man, North Carolina boy. He'd do. If he didn't fall over with sunstroke.
Pendleton, Ramseur ... it was enough to make a man in his prime, a seasoned forty-seven, feel old as Methuselah. He spit tobacco juice from the high porch, careful to keep it short of the marching men.
Pendleton returned with the dispatch. It had been carried from Petersburg by Lee's youngest son, as if the kinship might lend the foolishness gravity. Sheer, damned foolishness. Here he was, up in Maryland, with fewer than eighteen thousand men and more peeling off each day, and no, it wasn't enough for Lee that he might get to Washington and turn Abe Lincoln out of house and home, making a great damned rumpus they might hear in London and Paris, no, that was not enough. Lee was still on the rocking horse of his cockamamie scheme for freeing the thousands of prisoners at Point Lookout. As if wishing would make it so.
Pendleton stood by, awaiting instructions.
"Well, sit down, son. You're not on dress parade. Take me a minute or two to digest all this here strategic wisdom." He spit again.
Rereading the message left him just as incredulous, if not more. He'd figured that Lee had been just flirting with the notion when the Old Man first raised it. But Lee was serious as a deacon, believing that Early could cross Maryland, march on Washington, and, just for a side bet, send part of his force to the farthest tip of Maryland, where those angels of deliverance would free twenty thousand Confederate prisoners, load a goodly portion into boats that would appear like spooks at a table-rapping, just blithely sailing through the Northern blockade, while the rest of the men newly freed would join Early's army armed with weapons taken from their guards, instantly organizing themselves into regiments and brigades. And since the guards were thought to be colored troops, there would be little resistance when a mob of Southern gentlemen reared right up before them.
One look at the map revealed the absolute madness of the scheme. Any force that reached the camp would be trapped on that peninsula. Even if the Yankees didn't seem to have figured out what he was up to yet, they'd surely know by the time he got to Washington. He'd be sending thousands of soldiers into a trap, sending them not to free those prisoners, but to become captives themselves. And not one boat was going to appear off the Maryland shore to rescue anybody. His men wouldn't have the prospects of a corncob in a shithouse.
It wasn't that Lee was mad, he understood. The old man was just desperate. He needed those men, any men. Never came up against a bastard like Grant before. Fought like a crazy drunk, too fool to go down. Just came back swinging again, crimson from crown to gizzard. The losses of May and June had been horrendous, on both sides. But the North could replace them, and the South could not.
He had not wanted this damned-fool war. But Jubal Early surely meant to finish it.
"What do you plan to do, sir?"
Early grunted.
"It's not specifically an order," Pendleton went on. "It says-"
"I can read, boy. Oh, hell. Send Johnson off, once we're past Frederick. He's a Marylander, he knows the lay of the land. See if he can do something. Cavalry's worthless, anyway. Bundles of rags on broken nags, and that's putting it sweet. Damned banditti, all of them. Can't be either trusted or relied upon." He snorted and took the last swig of lemonade. "Jackson and his damned lemons. I always think about that when confronted with this beverage. Old Jack knew what he was about, give him that. Put his faith in the infantry and artillery, arms you can count on." Early rose, straightening his back as best his arthritis permitted. Even standing was an effort in the sickening heat.
He took up his hat, pressing a thumb into the side he kept turned up toward the crown. "Draw up orders for Johnson. Give him some latitude, don't want him humbugging that we forced him to make mistakes he can make just fine on his own. And don't send them yet, let me read them first." About to descend from the porch, he turned again. "He still fussing with those Yanks on the Frederick road?"
"He was pushing them back through the pass. According to his last dispatch."
Early drew out his pocket watch and grimaced. The timepiece rarely gave him cause to smile. "Don't even report regularly. Scouting's all this cavalry's good for, and I can't count on Johnson or McCausland or any of them to do even that much proper."
Pendleton didn't offer a comment. Early knew that his chief of staff thought him too hard on the cavalry. But Early could not help himself. He hated the sight of a soldier on a horse-unless it was an officer leading his regiment or a battery commander keeping the saddle for the elevated view.
Jubal Early understood that he was not considered a fair man. But he differed with common opinion, preferring to view himself as merely honest. He did not exactly revel in making enemies, but found it an inevitable part of war, if a man put winning above parlor politesse. Goddamn South was too goddamned polite for its own goddamned good, that was the thing. Lose the war while stepping aside to let a petticoat pass. No, Jubal Early did not seek popularity, and he distrusted those who courted favor.
Take Gordon, now. Prancing damned prince, that one. Always so damned sure that he was right. Let Breckinridge enjoy the constant stream of wisdom from John Gordon for a while: Gordon always posing for his men, declaiming like a parson set to pass the plate. Early never could understand why the men did not see through it. Instead, they adored the high-flown sonofabitch and hung on his fancied-up talk.
The fact that Gordon had been right too often of late didn't help matters, either. Just puffed him up the more.
Early strode up the street, heat on his back like a nigger's bundle, aiming for Ramseur, who knew how to hold his tongue. But his mind was on Gordon now.
Gordon didn't understand that soldiers had limits. Push 'em, yes. But don't kill them for your highfalutin vanity. Gordon was just a damned know-it-all who'd had a streak of luck.
He rearranged his chaw with a thick forefinger. Near time to spit it on out.
Ramseur's last brigade plodded up the incline of the street at Early's side. The men were too worn down to cheer or jeer, their only noise the tin-cup clank of laden troops and the slap of footsteps. They looked as though they'd been rolled in dirty flour, carrying the dust of a dry month with them.
Ahead, an aide touched Ramseur on the arm, alerting him to his commander's approach. The young general saluted.
"Dod," Early said, touching his hat.
"Last of my regiments are closing, sir. Many a straggler, surely, but they'll be along."
Early nodded. "And you figure it helps somehow, you standing out in the sun, dumb as a coon?"
"I'm fine, sir. The men need to see their officers."
"Won't see much of you, once you're down with the heatstroke. God almighty, boy, show a lick of sense."
"I'm fine, sir. Truly." Ramseur's eyes lost their steadiness for a moment, as if he were searching his surroundings for reassuring words to speak to Early. He said, "No place on earth I'd rather be than right here."
"Not with that new bride of yours?" Early hacked out a single-syllable laugh. Women had spoiled many a fine officer. Poor, old Ewell. Even Pendleton had grown inclined to reveries.
"A man ... may disassociate certain matters...," Ramseur tried. "The public and the personal, I mean. They run on different tracks. My place is here."
"Maryland, maybe. Not in this damned street. One of your factotums can see to these here boys. You take yourself off now. I'll be calling for you soon enough." He looked past Ramseur, who was steady of eye again, to the division commander's bevy of aides and staff men. "Y'all get those soldiers fixed up proper, water 'em up. Like to be marching again in the early hours."
A chorus of yes-sirs. Early spit his done chaw in the dust.
There were times when he didn't know how his men did it, marching through such misery. Early didn't believe he could bear up under it himself, if he had to go afoot. Of course, he'd done his share of traveling hard when he was younger. War was for the young, Lee was right about that. Just needed a few old soldiers around to jerk the brakes on the limbers before the entire battery rolled off the cliff.
He stomped back up the stairs, single spur chinking, and pushed into the house he had taken as his temporary headquarters.
The stale heat and crowding in the parlor drove him back onto the porch. Through the opened door, he barked, "Hotchkiss! Captain Hotchkiss! Moore, you go find Jed."
Then he sat down in the shade to wait. In the few minutes he had been gone, a new layer of dust had settled over things. Nor had the lemonade glass been filled again. The heat just pinned a man down. Below, a wagon that still bore U.S. markings rattled up the street, driven by a teamster who-rare in this show-your-ribs army-had a belly on him. Only when the wagon passed could Early see it was filled with collapsed soldiers.
And Gordon wanted to march them harder still, afeared they wouldn't make it to Washington before the Yankees caught their scent and loosed the hounds. That primping Georgian, in all his shimmering vanity, would get himself to Washington, all right. With three men and a dog, not a goddamned army. And still the fool men loved him.
Early knew that few men and fewer women would love him. He consoled himself that he had accepted the bargain. But Gordon was a man he was born to resent. Not least after Gordon had been right that second dawn in the Wilderness. And after the Georgian made himself the hero of the Mule Shoe at Spotsylvania. Hero, my rump.
Bugger fought, though. Only reason Early saw for keeping Gordon on. He fought. And he could make other men fight.
That pestering wife of his, though. Following the army like a ... like a ...
He found he could not mouth the word that had risen to his tongue. The image of Fanny Gordon was so palpable that he blushed, as if he had spoken crudely in her presence. He despised and deplored the business of wives in the camps, but Mrs. Gordon commanded a certain respect even from him. A formidable woman, Early considered her. Formidable. How the Frenchies said it. And handsome enough to turn a younger man's head. At least Gordon had possessed the sense to leave her behind in Winchester this time.
Jed Hotchkiss came out on the porch, the army's wizard mapmaker and a queer young man, splay-bearded, who never quite joined up and held no formal commission, but had been adjudged a captain by common consent, doing better work than a dozen colonels.
"Well?"
"Maps haven't changed, General."
"And?"
"Tell you the same thing I told you yesterday morning: If you want to take this army to Washington, the best way's through Frederick City and down across the Monocacy. Best room for maneuver to right or left, come what may. Keeps the Federals guessing, too. Until you tip your hand, you could be headed for Washington or Baltimore, either one." Hotchkiss stood clutching his treasures, awaiting an order to spread them out in the dust. The man guarded his maps the way a sultan guarded his harem.
No. Those maps were worth a damned sight more than a coop of Turkish harlots.
"Well, sit down, Hotchkiss. Tired of telling you. Never been one to stand on ceremony."
The mapmaker smiled. "You have your moments, General." He sat down. Dust puffed from the parlor chair that had been set on the porch.
"Do I?" Early asked. "Suppose I do, at that. What do you reckon? How many marches to get this army to Washington? Frederick way?"
"Three hard marches and a rush."
Early nodded. "Put us in sight of the Capitol July tenth." He snorted. "Shame we missed the Fourth." He calculated for a moment. "Cavalry could get there night of the ninth. For what those brigands are worth."
"If all goes well, sir."
Early leaned back, smiling. "Wonder how John Breckinridge will feel? Walking the halls of Congress? Not every former vice president returns a conqueror."
"No, sir. Sure enough not."
"Madcap world, Captain Hotchkiss, a madcap world. I do have days when I believe I should have stayed home in Rocky Mount with a barrel of good whiskey." He turned his head toward the house, feeling the stiffness of age. He shouted: "Colonel Pendleton? Any damned body?"
In moments, Sandie Pendleton appeared. He, too, had recently married, despite Early's remonstrance. His bride was a woman of irksome vivacity, pregnant as a sow.
Early fished in his pocket for another chaw. "Orders for General Breckinridge. Get him started toward Frederick. His division and Gordon's, his whole wing. After dark, when it's cool."
"It's hardly cool even then, sir. But I take your point."
"Then get orders out to everybody else. This army converges on Frederick. Sweep away any damned militia, I've had enough of Johnson's pussyfooting. And let me read those orders for his pony-boys."
"Yes, sir. Anything else?"
Down in the street, a last, lone soldier limped along, more dust than man, rifle athwart his shoulders. He showed no interest in the occupants of the high porch, his only concern putting one foot down, then the other.
"Anything else, sir?" Pendleton repeated.
"See if there's any more of that lemonade."
July 7, 3:45 p.m.
Monocacy Junction
Lew Wallace watched as his men worked the ropes to lower the big brass gun into position. The twenty-four-pounder was the only powerful piece of artillery he had, and he'd ordered the construction of a demi-lunette, all done by the book, that would let it range the far fields across the river. Red-faced, with gritted teeth, the artillerymen did the work of a half dozen mules, yet beyond the normal condemnations of various deities, ancestors, and hypothetical females, the men seemed willing enough. He only hoped they would be as willing once the shooting began.
Watching his soldiers strain, Wallace felt a democratic, midwestern urge to strip off his blouse and help them. But generals had to remain aloof, he had learned, so the men would not realize how mortal and slight they were.
He listened for a renewal of the fighting west of Frederick, along the Hagerstown road. But the skirmishing and occasional clashes had calmed around noon and the fields remained still across the heavy hours. It had given him time to push support to Clendenin, whose men had fired up their carbine ammunition, and he had dispatched Ras Tyler to take overall command and to get what service he could out of his Potomac Home Brigade's Sunday-soldiers. It was a patchwork force, at best, but they might hold, if the Rebs didn't press too hard. Wallace purposed to keep the Confederates out of Frederick City through the night, then to read the situation again in the morning. Every delay was of inestimable value. But the real fight would be here, on the river line; that wouldn't change. Tomorrow or the next day would bring the bloodletting.
Below the grunting soldiers on the ropes-barked at by a sergeant with an impressive command of metaphor-the station telegrapher stumped his way up the side of the bluff. The fellow was as important as any colonel now, maintaining Wallace's lifeline to the world, a single wire. Odd for him to stray out in the heat, though. Corpulent, the telegrapher had not been subsisting on military rations. This had to be something important, Wallace realized.
One hoped it was not more bad news.
"Max," Wallace said to his aide, "see what that poor devil's got for us, before he collapses and we're all in the sink."
Captain Woodhull hastened down the slope, breaking into a trot, only to slow again where the bluff dropped off. Dry grass remained bowed where the captain passed.
The gun settled into place with a thud. The men sighed and loosed the ropes, although the sergeant's profanities continued.
Wallace turned back to the lesser spectacle of his aide and the heaving telegrapher. Woodhull was reading the message the man had carried.
Alerting like a bird dog, the aide looked up toward him. The captain began to run back up the slope, but Wallace gestured for him to approach calmly. Good or bad, news had to be handled with care. He didn't want to spook the men nearby: Rumors spread faster than cholera in an orphanage.
Woodhull continued running.
When he put the message into Wallace's hands, the general understood why. It was from the railroad's president, in Baltimore:
A large force of veterans arrived by water, and will be sent immediately. Our arrangements are made to forward them with the greatest possible dispatch.
J. W. Garrett
Across the fields, past Frederick, the cannon opened again.
June 7, 9:00 p.m.
Camden Station, Baltimore
Headquarters of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
John W. Garrett sat at his desk, scratching his nose. He did not keep liquors in his office, but would have been tempted to have a drink had a bottle put in an unexpected appearance. Having whipped off his subordinates to their myriad tasks, he still feared that some crucial matter had been overlooked, some vital word not passed. An immense amount of work had to be done, a daunting amount, but it could be brought off. If he kept his sanity. This night, and for as many nights to come as the purpose required, those trains would be loaded and moved, and he'd teach those military pups a lesson or two about getting things done.
Garrett prided himself on commanding-for that was the word he used to himself these days-the best-run railroad in the entire Union.
Surprising himself, he brought his fist down hard on the top of his desk, creating an earthquake among the pens and adornments. It was as if he had observed a stranger doing the hammering. Master of himself again, he lowered the paw a second time, but gently. Self-control, in all things, marked the man.
Garrett abhorred inefficiency and could not imagine an organization worse run or more contentedly inept than the Federal Government. War had made a great, blind, lumbering beast of a creature clumsy enough before the first shot discharged. On the twenty-ninth of June, he personally had telegraphed the secretary of war, alerting Stanton-whom Garrett had regarded as rather a friend-to the reports from B&O station agents that Confederate forces were marching northward in dangerous numbers. Since then, he had not stopped forwarding the messages that started as a trickle and became a deluge. Yet Washington had done nothing at all for an entire week, dismissing his reports as impossibilities.
It was a damnable absurdity that the president of a railroad was better informed than the president of these United States. What was the purpose of taxation and fees? Merely to bloat the spoils system?
Stanton was normally a sensible man. But even the secretary of war had been confounded by the insistence of his generals that Early and his corps could not have reinforced the Rebels in the Valley and that any Confederate activity was no more than a raid or a diversion.
One hell of a raid, then, and one hot diversion, with Early rampaging through Maryland, tearing up tracks and burning bridges, and having a splendid time of it. Good God, he longed for just one sensible interlocutor in that foul-smelling city on the Potomac.
Oh, they were excited enough tonight, suddenly convinced that not only the Confederates but the Great Cham and Grand Turk were descending on Washington. Yet even now, with the crisis upon them, one department failed to speak with the other, and one command issued one set of orders, only to see contradictory orders issued by a rival.
This day had been exasperating above all others in Garrett's experience. He was used to getting things done-by blunt force, if necessary-but the tortured acrobatics he had needed to perform to get the fools in Washington to apply a single ounce of common sense had been infuriating. He had kept his temper with Stanton, of course, thanks not least to the orderly tick of the telegraph, but had been a tyrant otherwise. Refined manners had their place, and their place was in good society. Not in a railroad office during a war.
He sat back in his splendid chair, but found its embrace too tender for his mood. Planting his elbows on his desk, he let his fingers wrestle until the knuckles whitened. Good Christ, for a dash of old Peabody's aplomb! The English had that knack of remaining, or at least feigning, calm when faced with extremity.
A hand tapped his door. Not boldly.
"Come in." He almost added, "Dammit," but swallowed the words: A railway man had to be hard, but needn't be vulgar.
Moder stalled in the doorway. Afraid to proceed.
"Well, what is it?"
"They're disembarking from the ships, sir. I thought you'd want to know."
"Well, hallelujah! Somebody in Washington has an interest in saving the blasted Union. Secretary Stanton?"
"Yes, sir. We copied the message."
"Anything more?"
"Yes, sir. I mean ... only that we have the extra repair crews and telegraph people ready."
"How many?"
"One hundred and twenty. Last count."
"Get more. Kidnap them from the Reading, if you have to."
"Yes, sir."
"And Moder ... you make sure that every man in this company knows that trains carrying troops or military supplies-I don't care if they're hoop skirts and monkey jackets-will have absolute priority. And I'll not only dismiss the man who causes the least obstruction, but do my best to put the swine in jail."
"Yes, sir. Anything else for General Wallace, sir?"
"No."
Wallace. Poor devil. The only man in uniform who had taken his reports seriously. Initially, he'd thought Wallace a bag full of nothing, given the taint of failure and then his wife's all-too-loud whispers at Mrs. Hopkins' reception about her husband having written a novel. As if that might impress Baltimore society! A novel! About Spaniards in Mexico, or something of that ilk. Romantic, no doubt. Unpublished, of course.
Garrett could not imagine an endeavor less befitting a soldier or, for that matter, any man than scribbling out novels for women sprawled on daybeds. He had maintained cordial relations with the new department commander after learning of his literary bent, but had written Wallace off as better suited to the Baltimore Club than to battlefield gore.
Then the fellow had taken himself off to Monocacy Junction with a tatterdemalion collection of the lame and left-over in uniforms smelling of camphor, not blown powder, determined to fight the Rebels and damn the risk and sheer impossibility. A slender David with a Frenchman's beard and pomaded hair, Wallace had proven the only true man among the bloody, blue lot of them.
Which did not portend the defeat of the gray Goliath.
He had hesitated to send any further messages to Wallace after his excited report that veteran troops had arrived in transports off Locust Point. That message had been premature, to put it mildly. Oh, the veterans were there, all right, riding at anchor, regiments of the Third Division of the Sixth Corps, among the best in all the Union's armies. But they'd been sent with orders not to disembark until their division commander arrived and sniffed around. And when Garrett, frenzied, had gotten Stanton to intervene himself to bring them ashore, that horse's ass Halleck had ordered the troops to reinforce Maryland Heights-which would take them far from the impending battle.
Even now, Garrett was not certain which orders had prevailed or who truly was in charge of the wretched mess ... but he was ready to take charge, if no one else would. He was going to get those disembarking regiments packed into train cars and sent off to Wallace, if he had to do it at gunpoint. Once the troops got to the junction, Wallace could handle the Maryland Heights tomfoolery.
Good Christ, though ...
When the war began, Garrett's personal sympathies had leaned southward: He had viewed the B&O as a Southron line. But he had not needed long to figure out who could pay and who couldn't-and shortly thereafter the Rebels had taken to ripping up his track and burning his rolling stock, stations, and warehouses. John W. Garrett became the staunchest of staunch Union men.
And he had learned to profit amid war, despite the repeated destruction, turning the B&O into the Union's backbone in the East. If the government stationed its poorest troops and shabbiest officers to protect the line, the protection still had worth-and cost the line nothing. But there were limits to all things, and, as he had told Wallace in clarion terms, he would not see the new iron bridge over the Monocacy damaged or destroyed.
John W. Garrett hoped to save the nation's capital. But he was damned well determined to save his bridge.
July 8, dawn
Rohrersville road, Maryland
Brigadier General Clem Evans rode back along his ranks, encouraging men where he could and wondering whether Joshua's soldiers ever had been as weary as his brigade. John Brown Gordon was a splendid man and tolerably Christian, the finest leader Evans had ever known. But Gordon did like to march men hard and go at the enemy harder.
Times it paid, as it had that first afternoon in the Wilderness, when Gordon had ordered the brigade to attack in two directions while fighting in a third, defying military logic and whipping the devil out of the bewildered Yankees.
But Evans also remembered the Mule Shoe slaughter, when Gordon had been willing to sacrifice every man he led to hold the line, even as Evans had tried to reason with him. Gordon had been right, of course. But it had gone down hard: the merciless orders and that imperious look on Gordon's face, the expression of an intelligent beast in ecstasy.
It wasn't that Gordon didn't care for the men. He surely did. But he cared for winning more than anything else this side of Paradise. Evans liked Gordon, liked him well enough ... loved him, maybe ... but, while he did not wish to blaspheme, there was something demonic about John Gordon, a devil revealed in his nakedness on the battlefield.
Even Gordon's younger brother, Eugene, a captain and Evans' aide, felt an awe of his older brother that was edged with fear. Love, yes. But fear, too.
Evans didn't want to make too much of things, though, or to be unjust to any man-least of all John Gordon. After Fredericksburg, in the wake of that horror, he had pledged himself to the Methodist ministry, if the Lord saw fit to let him survive this war. There would be no more lawyering and politics hereafter, a decision in which his beloved Allie concurred with all her heart. Nor would he preach the anger of the Prophets, only the perfect love of Jesus Christ.
"Just a little more walking now, soldier," Evans told a laggard shadow. "Rest those hind paws soon enough." He knew the names of almost all his men, took pains to know them, as a minister must know his congregants, but the lingering dark and the fog of dust blurred this fellow's features.
The soldier did not reply, but shuffled along.
Likely didn't even know I was talking to him, Evans figured.
The latest order he had received from Gordon called for a halt of two hours at Rohrersville, then for the march to resume. It wasn't enough time for the men to recover. And they'd be marching into the heat of the day. Evans understood the need to make haste, if they intended to reach the Yankee capital, that Gomorrah. But the soldiers had to be fit for a scrap when they got there.
Blame the devil, where were the Yankees, anyway? Nothing but militia in the towns, running high-tail, and Sigel's fellows huddled up back on the Heights. Didn't they have an inkling what was passing?
Let the Lord be praised.
And God bless Allie and the children, the living and those who had gone to eternal life straight from the cradle. He allowed himself to think of little Ida, the apple of his eye, and her trouble learning geography, then of tiny Lawton, a merry hellion, a year and a half old. He thought, too, of the dreadful loss of Charlie, of other losses ... but at the end of all sorrows, Allie waited, her smile as full of grace as Heaven must be. They had wed when he was twenty and she fifteen-he could not wait longer, nor did she desire delay-and for eleven years she had been the finest wife to him that any man could want, a woman of sweet ardor. He longed for her every night.
At least their home was south of Sherman's path. He wondered again if Allie had settled last winter's debts, incurred when he-a cautious man with money-had upended the family's finances, borrowing to come home and see his family on a month's leave. The cost of all things, from railway travel to biscuit flour, had soared, but pay had not kept pace as the currency withered. Last month, he, a brigadier general, had strained to settle his commissary bill.
"When this cruel war is over," he muttered.
Too dry to sing anything, even a hymn, let alone a soldier song, he tempered his stallion's pace to a meeker mildness, unwilling to stir up dust to afflict his men.
Brilliant slants of light purpled the ridges. Evans tugged back the reins.
"Who's that walking peg-a-leg there? George Nichols, that you, boy?"
Nichols limped from the column, nodding a salute. Two of his comrades moved to the roadside with him, one on each flank.
"What's the matter, son? New shoes a trial?"
The soldier seemed hardly more than a child between his broad-shouldered friends.
"No, sir. Nothing wrong a-tall."
Evans recognized Lem Davis as the man who spoke up next. "Spent shell casing got him back at the Heights, Genr'l. Fool won't take to a wagon, show some sense. That leg's swelled to busting."
Evans turned to his aide, performing as General Gordon might have done in similar circumstances, saying, pulpit-loud, "Hear that now, Captain Gordon? That's the kind of men we grow in Georgia." Then he bent from the saddle toward the boy. "You've shown a fine side, Nichols. But wait on the wagons now and take your ease. Hear?"
The lad stepped forward again. On that bad leg.
"If'n that's an order, sir, I'm set to obey it. But I'd as lief walk."
Evans told himself that, yes, it was an order. For the boy's own good. But he also knew that the ways of the heart were many and the needs of the soul were legion.
"Son ... you do what you want," Evans told him. "Just remember that pride comes before a fall."
"I ain't going to fall none. Leg'll carry me."
In the shadows below a shimmering sky, Evans smiled.
"Well, then ... y'all get along and catch up to your company."
The men saluted, each in his odd manner, just as none of their uniforms were uniform. Evans rode on.
Behind the last mob that passed for a march formation, he entered the domain of limping forms and quitters. That eager boy, Nichols, was made of rock-hard stuff, even if he looked barely fit for man-britches.
Turning his mount in the richer-each-moment light, Evans thought: Lord, isn't that just us, though? All of us? From that young private to General Robert E. Lee, we're so doggone stubborn we just don't know what's good for us.
Copyright © 2015 by Ralph Peters
