Read Online Hell or Richmond by Ralph Peters - Free Book Online Page B

nothing would come of it. If the Yankees held off a few days, perhaps one of the local families would ask the brigade’s field officers in for a dinner. He could tolerate that nicely about now.
    They were being held in reserve, well south of Ewell’s Corps and Hill’s men. That meant hard, fast marching to get to the battle, when it came. For now, though, there was no danger and the sentries ahead stood slackly. He decided not to upbraid them, but recalled another concern.
    “Billy, I hear two Texas boys got smallpox, they put ’em in one of the pesthouses back of town. You make sure nobody goes wandering off where they don’t need to be. Yankees are bad enough.”
    Belatedly spying Oates, the pickets straightened. As he stepped close, arms were presented and proper salutes rendered. The men had come a long way back from the despondency he had found them in at Bull’s Gap.
    Parting, Oates told Strickland, “You go on now and look in on Morgan and Ball. If Jimmy’s come to, you let him know how goddamned close he came to losing those stripes.” Oates winked at the captain, a man who had been but a boy when the war began.
    Strickland saluted and started to turn away.
    A rider burst from the stand of trees where the road ran. Galloping from the town toward the encampment. Waving his cap and hollering, he was still too far off for his words to make any sense.
    “Now what the Hell?” Oates asked the air.
    The regiments closer to Gordonsville came to urgent life as the rider passed. Refusing to gentle his hip, Oates stepped off sharply to intercept the horseman. Soon enough, he made out the rider’s words.
    “The Yankees are moving!” the man cried. “Git ready to march!”
    Midday
Clark’s Mountain
    Lee thanked the Lord that his soldiers could not see the Rapidan Valley from the signal station. He had ridden up to the mountain to observe the Union movement with his own eyes, to measure its scope and intent. And what he saw was daunting: Bereft of crops this year, the landscape had grown an army of fearsome size.
    Across the river, long blue columns wound along the roads amid billows of dust, their seeming slowness a trick of the distance as they advanced southeastward. Lee could tell those men were marching hard. Dark blurs in the dirtied air, battalions of guns pursued the brigades and divisions they would support. Behind the marching men and jouncing cannon, the white ribbons of supply trains stretched for miles, their bounty immense. Lee knew he was outnumbered two to one.
    The commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia lowered his field glasses, careful not to let his expression reveal his dismay to the members of his staff. Before detouring to the summit on his way forward, he had set Ewell and Hill in motion on parallel roads to the east, but had hesitated to summon Longstreet’s reserve corps and had ordered Hill to leave a division behind, in case the Federal movement was a ruse to cover a thrust down from the west. But the spectacle before him made his opponents’ intent plain. Within minutes of his arrival on the mountain, he had ordered Longstreet to come up as swiftly as possible on the army’s right. There was no mistaking it: Meade and Grant were moving the entire army south by way of Germanna Ford and Ely’s Ford. They had stolen a march on him.
    He needed to make up in resolve the time he had spent on caution. But he could not be as daring as he would have liked, not with such legions against him. Nor was it only the numbers. This blue-clad army gleamed, supplied and supported with all the wealth of the North, while his own men covered taut bellies in rags.
    Oh, after he had gone begging— begging —time and again to Richmond, the authorities had grudgingly issued uniforms and shoes. But they never sent enough. The government he served was parsimonious with goods, but spendthrift with men’s lives, and his interviews in the capital demanded an increasing level of self-control. More