he pulled off his boots, knelt beside his iron-framed cot for the day's last petition to the Lord, then lay down and fell asleep almost at once.
Whenever he was in the field, he had himself roused with the first twilight at latest. He'd just sat up in bed after the orderly woke him when a great thundering rose from the north. None of the artillery duels his forces and General Willcox's had fought were anything close to this. 'It begins!' he exclaimed. As usual, all he needed to put on were his boots and his hat. That done, he rushed out of the tent.
He almost collided with E. Porter Alexander, who emerged from under canvas as fast as he did. Alexander had shed his tunic for the night and was wearing only shirt and trousers, which made him look more like a Yankee labourer on a hot afternoon than a Confederate general before sunup.
'Now we shall see what we shall see,' Alexander said, for all the world like a chemistry professor about to drop a bit of sodium into water for the sake of the flame and smoke. 'Artillery can do so much more than it could during the last war, but we knew much more about sheltering from it, too.'
'A lesson learned from painful experience,' Jackson said. Now, all at once, he wished he'd encamped in the open. The leafy canopy overhead kept him from having any better notion of what was going on than his ears could bring him, and all he could learn from them was that both U.S. and Confederate guns were in action, every one of them sounding as if it was pounding away as hard as it could.
An orderly led up Jackson 's horse. At the same time, another man dashed up to the general-in-chief with a telegram clutched in his fist. 'This just in from General Turney, sir,' he said. 'It cuts off halfway- don't know if a shell broke the wire or his operator got hit.'
'Give it to me.' Jackson put on his glasses, then took the wire. It was hard to read in the still-dim light. A soldier brought over a candle. By the flickering light, Jackson read, U.S. FORCES ON THE RIVER IN LARGE NUMBERS: RESISTING: WITH: ARTILLERY: AND: RIFLE: FIRE:. NEED:
As the private from the signals office had said, it ended there.
Deducing what General Turney required, though, required no great generalship: a schoolchild could have done it. Jackson shouted for a messenger. When one appeared, he said, 'The two brigades quartered near the Gait House are ordered to the waterfront to resist the invaders if their commanders have not sent them forward on their own initiative.' The messenger saluted and dashed off, shouting for a horse. Jackson gave the identical order to the soldier who'd passed him the telegram. 'With the U.S. bombardment, I do not know if a wire can get through, but make the effort.'
Not far away, E. Porter Alexander was also giving orders, in a calm, unhurried voice: 'Until we know different, we'll go on the notion that the Yankees are doing what we expect. That means Fire Plan One, with guns ranged in on the river and on the Indiana docks to stick to their assigned targets. Any changes from the plan are to be reported to me at once.'
When he was done, he turned to Jackson with a smile on his face. 'A pity, isn't it, General, that battles have grown too large to be commanded from the front? If messengers and telegrams don't constantly tell us what's happening across the field, how can we direct the fighting?'
'In a fight this size, we can't, and I hate that,' Jackson said. 'Leading a brigade against Winchester made me feel a young man again. I tell you this, though, General: I am going to see the fighting for myself, even if only from a distance.' He mounted the horse the orderly had brought, and rode out from under the spreading branches of the oaks toward a nearby hilltop.
Sunrise was near. The eastern horizon glowed with pink and gold light, the spark that was Venus gleaming through it. Only the brightest stars still shone in the darker sky farther west. But the northern quadrant was ablaze with bursting shells; Jackson might have been watching a Fourth of July fireworks display from some distant house.
By where the smoke was thickest, he could tell that the U.S. gunners were giving the wharves of the waterfront a fearful pounding. Had he led the Yankees, he would have ordered the same, to make the Confederate infantrymen keep their heads down and prevent them from bringing too heavy a fire to bear against the invasion boats. The smoke kept him from discerning much more than that. And, with every passing minute, though the light got stronger, the smoke got worse: smoke from the Yankees' guns on the other side of the Ohio, smoke from bursting shells, and smoke from the C.S. cannon responding to the enemy's fire.
Jackson 's frown was venomous. He wanted nothing so much as to grab a Tredegar and go where the fighting was hottest. But Major General Alexander had the right of it: if he did that, he could not at the same time command. More men were capable of fighting the damnyankees than of leading the entire army against them. And, had he snatched up a rifle and run off to pretend he was a private soldier, he would have been able to see even less of the battlefield than he could from his present vantage point.
He'd already been too long away from his electric eyes and ears. And messengers would be getting back to headquarters from the fighting by now, too. Regretfully, he used feet and reins to start his horse back toward the tent among the trees.
No sooner had he dismounted than the first messenger arrived, dirty-faced, with a torn and filthy uniform, eyes wide and staring from what was surely his first taste of combat. He stared at Jackson, too. Was that because he was meeting a man legendary in the CSA or simply because he was too battered to recall the message he was supposed to deliver?
Then, very visibly, his wits began to turn, as if they were a steamboat's paddlewheel. 'General Jackson, sir!' he exclaimed. 'The damnyankees have men ashore on our side of the river.' He gulped. 'Lots of 'em, sir.'
Even in the predawn stillness, southern Indiana remained sultry, sticky. Frederick Douglass stood in a field just outside the city limits of New Albany. Every couple of minutes, he would slap at himself as a mosquito bit him. 'I'm an old man,' he said sadly. 'I remember being able to hear the mosquitoes buzzing around, so that sometimes 1 could get them before they got me. No more, not for years. Now they take me by surprise.'
That amused the U.S. artillerymen standing by their pieces awaiting the word to commence. 'It ain't no big loss, Pop,' one of them said. 'That goddamn buzzing drives me crazy, nothin' else but.' A couple of his comrades spoke up in agreement.
'Better to know the enemy than to let him take you by surprise,' Douglass insisted, which drew another chuckle from the Massachusetts volunteers. In the couple of days he'd been with them, they'd treated him well: General Willcox had made a good choice in assigning him to their battery when he'd asked to watch the bombardment of Louisville from among the guns.
A rider came trotting down the road. He halted when he saw the guns: big, dark shapes in what was otherwise an empty field. 'Open fire at four A.M. sharp,' he called, and rode on to give the next battery the word.
Someone struck a match, first stepping well away from the guns and limbers to do so. The brief flare of light showed the boyish features of Captain Joseph Little, the battery commander. 'Fifteen minutes,' he said after checking his pocket watch. 'Men, we'll load our pieces now, so as to get the first shots off precisely on the mark.'
In darkness just this side of perfect, the gun crews handled unscrewing the breech blocks, loading in shells and bags of powder after them, and sealing the guns once more as smoothly as they might have done at high noon. Douglass had already seen that the artillery volunteers, most of whom were militiamen of long standing, were trained to a standard close to that of their Regular Army counterparts, which could not have been said about the volunteer infantry.
Captain Little spoke up again: 'Mr. Douglass, you'll want to make certain'-his Bay State accent made the word come out as suht'n, almost as if he were a Rebel-'you're not standing right behind a gun. When they go off, the recoil will send them rolling backwards at a pretty clip.'
Douglass made sure he would be out of harm's way. The quarter of an hour seemed to take forever. Douglass was beginning to think it would never end when, off to the east toward Jeffersonville, several cannon roared all at once.
'Well! I like that,' Captain Little said indignantly. 'Still lacks two minutes of the hour by my watch.' He must have been staring at it in the faintest early twilight. 'Some people think they have to come to the party early. If we can't be the first, we shan't be the last, either.' More guns were going off, some of them much closer than the earliest ones had been. Little raised his voice: 'Battery B… Fire!'
All six guns bellowed at essentially the same instant. The noise was a cataclysmic blow against Douglass'
