He paused. 'Or, of course, he may well end up more concerned about his heavenly reward than any he might gain upon this earth. A lot of good men must have fallen for a lieutenant to assume regimental command. If afterwards he ordered an attack, he would hardly be removing himself from danger.'
'That's true, General.' Jackson studied the telegram, trying to divine more from it than the operator's bald statement had given him. Then, suddenly, his tangled eyebrows rose. 'Second Lieutenant Stuart-that's S-T-U-A-R-T, General Alexander. Is our colleague's son not of that rank, and in this army?'
'Jeb, Jr.?' Alexander's eyebrows went up, too. 'I believe he is, sir. Of course, even with that spelling, it's far from the least common of names. Would you answer his request any differently if you knew he was, or, for that matter, if you knew he wasn't?'
'In the midst of battle? Don't be absurd.' Jackson tossed his head. As he did so, he remembered Robert E. Lee's habitual gesture of annoyance-Lee would jerk his head up and to one side, as if trying to take a bite out of his own earlobe. It was, in Jackson 's view, ridiculous. Raising his arm over his head again, he concentrated on the map. 'The Fourth Virginia, the Third Tennessee, and the Second Confederate States are ordered to support the attack of the Third Virginia, if their commanders shall not have already moved to do so of their own initiative.'
'Yes, sir.' The telegrapher's key clicked and clicked, almost as fast as the castanets of the Mexican senoritas whose sinuous grace and flashing eyes Jackson had admired during his long-ago service in the U.S. Artillery.
No sooner had he thought of artillery in one way than General Alexander did in another, saying, 'We have three batteries by the village of West Buechel, sir, that could lend the infantry useful assistance.'
'Let it be so,' Jackson agreed, and the telegrapher's key clicked anew.
More and more wires began coming in to headquarters from that part of the field. Second Lieutenant Stuart, from whom nothing further was heard, had been right in reporting that U.S. troops were there in great force. They had been driving forward, too. They no longer seemed to be doing so; Stuart's attack had done what he'd hoped, rocking them back on their heels. They must have thought that, if the Confederates were numerous enough to assault them, they were also numerous enough to beat back an assault.
Jackson knew perfectly well that they had not been so at the time when Second Lieutenant Stuart ordered the attack. (Was it Jeb, Jr.? Hadn't Jeb, Jr., been born day before yesterday, or last week at the outside? Hadn't he just the other day graduated from a little boy's flowing dress into trousers? Intellectually, Jackson knew better. Every so often, though, the passing years up and ambushed him. They had more skill at it than any Yankees. One day, they would shoot him down from ambush, too.)
Even had it not been so then, it was rapidly becoming so now. He who hesitates is lost was nowhere more true than on the battlefield. The brief halt Stuart had imposed on the enemy let Jackson bring forces up to yet another of the lines he had had the conscripted Negro slaves of the vicinity build. (He had every intention of sending President Longstreet an exquisitely detailed memorandum relating everything the slaves' labours meant to his forces. Longstreet, no doubt, would consign it to oblivion. That was his affair. Jackson would not keep silent to appease him.)
By midafternoon, the line had stabilized. Jackson called off the counterattack, which, he knew, must have cost him dear in terms of men. Though his instinct was always to strike at the enemy, he had come to see a certain virtue in the defensive, in making U.S. forces rise from concealment to attack his men while the soldiers in butternut and gray waited in trenches and behind breastworks. (Unlike his thoughts on slave labour, he did not plan on confiding that one to James Longstreet.)
When the crisis was past, he told the telegrapher, 'Order Second Lieutenant Stuart to report to his headquarters immediately.' As the soldier tapped out the message, Jackson sent a silent prayer heavenward that the lieutenant would be able to obey the command.
He caught E. Porter Alexander looking at him. His chief artillerist crossed his fingers. Jackson nodded. Alexander had been thinking along with him in more than matters strictly military, then.
When Lieutenant Stuart did not report as soon as Jackson thought he should, the Confederate general-in- chief began to fear the officer was now obeying the orders of a higher commander. But then, to his glad surprise, a sentry poked his head into the headquarters tent to announce that Stuart had arrived after all. 'Let him come in; by all means let him come in,' Jackson exclaimed.
He and E. Porter Alexander both exclaimed then, for it was Jeb Stuart's son. 'How the devil old are you?' Alexander demanded.
'Sir, I'm seventeen,' Jeb Stuart, Jr., answered. He looked like his father, though instead of that famous shaggy beard he had only a peach-fuzz mustache. But for that, though, he looked older than his years, as any man will coming straight out of battle. With his face dark from black-powder smoke, he had the aspect of a minstrel- show performer freshly escaped from hell.
'How did you become senior officer in your regiment, Lieutenant?' Jackson inquired. How young Stuart had become a lieutenant at his age was another question, but one with an obvious answer-his father must have pulled wires for him.
'Sir, I wasn't,' Stuart answered. 'Captain Sheckard sent me back to Colonel Tinker with word that the Yankees were pressing my company hard.'
'I see.' Jackson wasn't sure he did, not altogether, but he didn't press it. Had Sheckard decided to get his important subordinate out of harm's way, or had he chosen him because he was worth less on the fighting line than an ordinary private? No way to tell, not from here. 'Go on.'
'There I was, sir, and a Yankee shell came down, and, next thing I knew, Colonel Tinker was dead and Lieutenant-Colonel Steinfeldt had his head blown off and Major Overall'-Stuart gulped-'the surgeons took that leg off him, I heard later. And the Yankees were coming at us every which way, and everybody was yelling, 'What do we do? What do we do?' ' He looked a little green around the gills, remembering. 'Nobody else said anything, so I started giving orders. I don't know whether the captains knew they were coming from me, but they took 'em, and we threw the Yankees back.'
Jackson glanced at Alexander. Alexander was already looking at him. They both nodded and turned back to Jeb Stuart, Jr. Alexander spoke first: 'Congratulations, son. Like it or not, you're a hero.'
That summed it up better than Jackson could have done. He did find one thing to add: 'Your father will be very proud of you.'
'Thank you, sir.' Stuart was less in awe of Jackson than most young officers would have been, having known him all his life. But the wobble in his voice had only a little to do with his youth. More came from the question he asked: 'Sir, what would have happened if it hadn't worked out?'
Jackson was not good at diplomatic responses. He managed to come up with one now: 'You probably would not be here to wonder about that.'
The young officer needed a moment to see what he meant. Jackson was unsurprised; at that age, he'd thought he was immortal, too. Stuart licked his lips. He understood what might have happened, once Jackson pointed it out. He said, 'I meant, sir, if I'd failed but lived.'
'Best to draw a merciful veil of silence over that,' E. Porter Alexander said.
Beneath his coating of smoke and soot, Jeb Stuart, Jr., turned red. 'Er, yes, sir,' he said, and turned back to Jackson. 'Sir, will we hold the Yankees from our flank?'
'That still hangs in the balance,' Jackson replied. 'I will say, however, that we have a better chance of doing so thanks to your action, Lieutenant Stuart.' He inclined his head to his old comrade's son. 'You will be changing the ornaments on your collar in short order.'
Jeb Stuart, Jr., understood that right away. He raised a hand to brush one of the single collar bars marking him as a second lieutenant. His grin lit up the inside of the headquarters tent, brighter than all the kerosene lamps hung there.
Orion Clemens rolled a hard rubber ball through a couple of squads of gray-painted lead soldiers. 'Take that, you dirty Rebs!' he shouted as several of them toppled. Sutro ran barking after the ball and through the soldiers, completing the Confederates' overthrow. With a cry of fierce glee, Orion sent blue-painted lead figures swarming forward. 'They're on the run now!'
His father looked up from Les Miserables. 'If only it were that easy, for our side or theirs,' Sam Clemens remarked to his wife. 'The war would be over in a fortnight, one way or the other, and we could slide back to our comfortable daily business of killing one another by ones and twos-retail, you might say-instead of in great wholesale lots.'
