now, including his army?
Fifteenth of September. No danger waiting at Harpers Ferry. Instead, they found singing, cheering, feasting. Old Jack had gotten unconditional surrender.
The victors smashed the doors of magazines and granaries. There were thirteen thousand small arms and federal fodder for the starved horses. Eleven thousand men taken, two hundred serviceable wagons, cannon numbering seventy or more. And ammunition in plenty, some for Charles's Colt.
A curious thing happened when Old Jack went abroad late in the day. He wore his dirtiest, seediest coat and filthy old wool hat. He didn't smile. He looked like some ignorant, smelly, mad-eyed Presbyterian deacon from the hills of western Virginia as he rode by. His men saw him and threw their hats in the air and cheered. The captured Yankees cheered him, too. Red-faced, they cheered him. Uttering yells as wild as any reb's, they cheered him. Sitting on Sport, hunched and dizzy-tired, Charles could only shake his head as one boy whooped it up in the improvised prison pen, screaming, 'By damn, good for you, Jack! You're something. If we had you, we could whip you boys for sure.'
As night came on, Charles tied Sport to his wrist and sat down against the wall of the arsenal and slept. After half an hour Ab woke him.
'I think they're gettin' ready to go at it some place north of here. Jack's ordered rations cooked for two days.'
A calm descended with the dark. The peculiar peace of those hours when battle became a certainty. Awaiting orders, Charles went here and there and saw bits of it. Some butternut boys — literally that; eighteen, seventeen — broiling meat and joking and chattering and nudging one another in the cook-smoke. Charles knew they had not seen the elephant before. Troops who had were quieter. They dozed while they had a chance. Wrote letters. The devout Christians meditated, reading little Testaments, readying for a possible journey up the bright stairs to their certain heaven.
Around eleven, the issuing of ammunition began, done late to keep the powder as dry as possible. Fifty rounds of powder and ball per man, someone told Charles, though whether that was true he couldn't say. But the drums would sound the long roll for immediate assembly soon, that he could tell as he continued to walk here and there; now Ab was napping with both horses tied to his wrist.
At huge fires built beside the bubbling rivers, colonels were following the custom of addressing the veterans and the untried alike.
'Remember, men, it is better to wound than to slay, since it takes time to carry an injured man to the rear and sometimes requires two of the enemy rather than one.'
In the dark, Charles walked on.
'— and when we are deployed upon the field of Mars, we shall achieve decisive victory and conquer the egalitarian mercenaries dedicated to despoiling your liberties, your property, and your honor. Do not forget for one moment that the eyes and hopes of eight millions and more rest upon you. Show yourselves worthy of your race and your lineage. Of your wives, of your mothers, of your sisters, of your sweethearts — of all Southern womanhood, which is dependent upon you for protection. With such incentive and firm trust in your leaders and in God the most high, you shall succeed. You cannot fail.'
In the dark, Charles walked on. Waiting.
Sixteenth of September. Jackson sounded the drums and marched at one in the morning.
Up in the saddle went Charles and the others. Brigadier Hampton looked fresh and fiery-eyed as he organized his regiments for deployment behind the main column. How did he do it at his age, Charles wondered, feeling Sport friskier again, fed and rested.
'Where we goin', Charlie?'
'Tagging after Old Jack. Protecting his backside again.'
'I know that. Where's he goin'?'
'Frank Hampton told me Sharpsburg. Little town fifteen, sixteen miles up the road When Old Jack won, I guess Old Bob decided to dig in and fight.'
'Way we was all divvied up, 'twas either that or be buried, strikes me.' Charles agreed. After a pause, Ab said, 'The foot cavalry looks wore out.'
'The foot cavalry has plenty of company.'
Sharpsburg proved a small, green village in pleasant countryside with a few hills but none of the peaks found along the Potomac. Lee's headquarters was Oak Grove, a short distance southwest of town. His main line, nearly three miles long and attenuated, ran north from the center of Sharpsburg, roughly following the Hagerstown Pike. Stuart's cavalry shifted all the way up to the extreme left, Nicodemus Hill, near a bight of the river. John Hood had two brigades and Harvey Hill five, digging in and peering eastward through high corn in a forty-acre field to the hilly land along Antietam Creek, which, like the pike, ran roughly north and south, though on a course much less straight. From the east Little Mac would come with his seventy-five thousand. Little Mac had stragglers, too, but he was the player with the most chips; he could throw them away by the handful and still dominate the table.
While Old Jack placed his troops to brace the northern sector of the line, Charles was kept busy bearing orders to Stuart and other orders for outposts along Antietam Creek above and below the place where the pike to Boonsboro crossed it. He saw dust in the autumn sky eastward. The outposts pulled back, and Hunt's blue batteries began shelling, answered by those of Pendleton and Stuart, from his relatively higher ground. Booming fieldpieces flashed red light into the darkening day.
Returning to headquarters, southbound on the pike at a gallop, Charles saw pickets slipping forward through the field of corn. When he next encountered Ab, outside headquarters an hour later, the other scout told him, 'They say the pickets is so close to each other out there that when one side breaks wind the other side feels it.'
There had been sporadic skirmishing, which Charles had heard but not seen, and heavy bombardment throughout most of the twilight hours. At dark Lee's army lay quietly along the Sharpsburg Ridge, with McClellan's off by Antietam Creek and who knew where else; some woods at the left of the line had looked especially ominous to Charles in the daylight. They were thick, dark woods, fine for hiding preparations for an advance.
Things settled down to an occasional shout or bang of a musket. In the small hours of the night it started to drizzle. When daylight broke, the hell began.
Seventeenth of September. The blue waves appeared early, rolling from those suspicious woods Charles had spied. Shoulder weapons showing in the gray mist, banners unfurling, they trotted forward, double line of skirmishers first, then the main force, firing and loading, firing and loading — coming on. A Southern soldier cried, 'Joe Hooker!'
Joe Hooker, handsome and a hell of a fighter, raised a hammer of two Union corps and let it fall on the Confederate left flank. Charles was dispatched up through Hood's position, west of the pike in some trees around a small white Dunker church, carrying instructions for the Nicodemus Hill gunners. The Union troops coming out of the woods opened fire on Hood, and Yankee artillery out of sight beyond those same woods let loose, shot coming in, and shell, and the Yankee foot pushed through the corn with heads down or turned aside as if to avoid a rain shower.
The fighting began at six, and by nine the sides had thrown each other back and forth across the cornfield several times. The waving cross of St. Andrew, the Souths battle ensign, had gone down in the noise and smoke and been raised several times. The battle was so huge and swiftly shifting that Charles saw only threads, never the pattern.
Coming back from Nicodemus Hill, head down, revolver in hand, he was caught in a driving charge of federals against Old Jack's men, who lay waiting amid trees on rocky ridges. A colonel who had lost several officers ordered Charles off Sport at gunpoint and screamed, 'Hold this position at all hazards.'
So he fought in the woods with two squads of the foot cavalry for fifteen incredible minutes, shooting at Yankees who came running over the, pike, bayonets gleaming steadily brighter as the sun burned off the mist and hot, cheerful light broke over the battle. In the midst of Old Jack's men, Charles fired, reloaded, shouted, encouraged — helped repulse the charge that cost the Yankees almost five thousand men in under half an hour. When the jubilant foot cavalry went hollering and countercharging toward the cornfield, Charles, feeling that his duty to the anonymous colonel had been discharged, ran back, untied Sport, and went on his way, shaking from
