Love and War

pouring over their rail fences and trampling their fields.

Whatever the answer, they had finished their mission. After leaving Frederick and stopping at the stable, they had slept in a secluded grove, halter tie-ropes fastened to their wrists and shot­guns laid across their bellies.

Now Ab said, 'Ask you somethin', Charlie?'

'Go ahead.'

'You got a girl? Been curious about it because you never say.'

He thought of Private Gervais and Miss Sally Mills. 'This is the wrong time and place for a man to have a girl.'

The other scout laughed. 'That's sure-God true, but it don't answer my question. You got one?'

Charles tugged his dirty felt hat down over his forehead, watching the road. 'No.'

It was an honest answer. He didn't have a girl except in his imagination. If you had a girl, she wrote to you. Gus had kissed him, but how much did that mean? A lot of females gave away their kisses as if they were no more special than pieces of home­made pie.

The terrain changed rapidly. The hills were higher, steeper. There were no cottages or shanties in the few clearings and level places because there was no way to subsist on the land. Charles suspected they were close to the river and soon heard distant sounds to confirm it — the noise of the army of fifty-five thousand men leaving Virginia by way of the ford.

He saw insects in a shaft of sun and then Gus Barclay's face. Oughtn't to be muddling your head that way. He blinked; the insects returned. The noise grew louder. When Little Mac got word of the invasion, the Yanks would come out from Washington and fight. Scouting for the cavalry on the peninsula, Charles had done his share of fighting and had had two close scrapes, but he would never grow accustomed to it or regard it lightly.

They reached the river in time to watch the coming of the cavalry — five thousand horse, Ab claimed, including new brigades that contained old comrades. His old friend Beauty Stuart, the golden-spurred, plume-hatted, was major general of the division — and not yet thirty. Hampton was his senior brigadier, Fitz Lee his junior. Charles's old friend had risen rapidly; from lieutenant to general in fifteen months.

Stuart's innovative flying artillery batteries went rolling and crashing through the water. Then Ab let out a shout, spying Hampton's men on the Virginia side. The brigade included the newly formed Second South Carolina Cavalry, put together around the nucleus of the four original troops of the legion.

Calbraith Butler was colonel of the regiment. He saw the two scouts hunched on their horses in the shallows and greeted them with a wave of his silver-chased whip. With Butler rode his sec­ond-in-command, Hampton's younger brother Frank.

Charles felt like the schoolroom dunce. He was still a captain, and this was one of the occasions when it hurt. On the other hand, he couldn't deny that he had come to prefer the dangerous but more independent life of a scout.

He reminded Ab that they should find Stuart's headquarters and report. Suddenly spurring into the Potomac from the Virginia shore, came Hampton. He spied the scouts and rode toward them, scattering sunlit water. He took their salutes with a warm smile and shook each man's hand.

Hampton's color was good. He was a massive, martial figure on his prancing horse, even if his uniform did look shabby, like everyone else's. Charles noticed three stars on his collar — the same insignia Stuart wore. You couldn't tell one kind of Confederate general from another.

'I hear you like what you're doing, Captain Main.'

'I'm better at it than I was at leading a troop, General. I like it very much.'

'Happy to hear it.'

'You look fit, sir. I'm pleased you've made such a fine recovery.' Commanding infantry at Seven Pines, Hampton had been on horseback when an enemy ball struck his foot. Fearing he would be unable to remount if he climbed down for treatment, he remained in the saddle while a surgeon yanked off his boot, probed and cut until the lump of lead was found and removed. With the wound bandaged, the boot shoved back on, and the bullet hole plugged, he stayed with his men until dark ended the fight and he could be lifted down. His boot was full of blood, which ran out over the top.

'I'm glad to run into you this way,' the general said to him, 'because it allows me to bring you two bits of news you may regard as vindications.' Puzzled, Charles waited for him to continue. 'In attempting to drill his men recently, Captain von Helm fell off his horse and cracked his neck. He was intoxicated at the time. He died within the hour. Further, your favorite, Private Cramm, has disappeared without leave.'

'He's probably twenty miles behind with a few hundred others.'

'Cramm is not a straggler. He deserted. He left a note informing us he had enlisted to defend Southern soil, not to campaign in the North.'

'God above. I'm surprised he didn't hire a lawyer to write up his explanation.' Charles stifled laughter. So did Ab.

'I thought the news would be of some comfort.'

'Shouldn't admit it, General, but it surely is.'

'Don't be ashamed. The shame was that a leader as good as you lost that election. If we had only Cramms and von Helms, we'd be finished. Godspeed, Captain. I'm sure I'll be calling for your services and Lieutenant Woolner's quite soon.' He galloped off to rejoin his staff.

After presenting their report, Charles and Ab spent the evening awaiting new orders. They didn't get any. They ate, tended their horses, tried to sleep, and in the morning went down to watch Old Jack lead his men into Maryland.

In the mind of Charles Main and many others, Stonewall Jackson had undergone a transformation during the past year. His fame was so enormous, his feats so Olympian, that you tended to think more and more of Jackson as merely a name — a legend that couldn't possibly be connected with a real human being, especially not one like the shy bumpkin Cousin Orry had befriended in his plebe year. But Jack was real, all right, smartly sitting his cream- colored mount as he crossed over the river to the trees while a band blared 'Maryland, My Maryland' to welcome him.

Ab gave Jackson some attention, but was more interested in the long column of infantry following him. Jackson's men looked as if they had marched and fought and slept in their clothes for years without washing them. They carried weapons but little else. Gone were the bulging knapsacks and haversacks of '61.

These were the fabled soldiers known as Jackson's foot cavalry because they could march sixty miles in two days, and had. Charles stared in amazement at rank on rank of wild beards, crazy glinting eyes, cheeks and foreheads burned raw by exposure to sun.

'My God, Ab, a lot of them don't have shoes.'

It was true. Whatever footwear he saw was torn or in separate pieces kept together by snippets of twine. Watching the column pass, Charles estimated that fifty percent of Jackson's men marched on bare feet that were cut, bruised, stained with old blood, stippled with scabs, covered with dirt. A man might learn to tolerate such misery in warm weather, but when winter came —?

Studying one wrinkled, mean-faced private sloshing through the shallows, Charles presumed the soldier was forty, then saw he was wrong. 'They look like old men.'

'So do we,' Ab said, hunching over Cyclone's neck. 'Taken notice of the gray in your beard lately? They say Bob Lee's is almost white. A powerful lot of things have changed in a year, Charlie. And it ain't the end.'

Unexpectedly, Charles shivered. He watched the dirty feet marching into Maryland and wondered how many would march back.

57

Ninth of September. Hot light of late summer hazing the rolling country. The green yellowing now, drying and withering. The time of gathering a harvest.