A line of men, sweat beading their faces, hurled themselves forward aiming bayonets and muskets. The roar of a passing train couldn’t have been any louder than the rumbling artillery caissons. She inhaled fetid air seething with minié balls and screeching shells. Barefoot and blood-soaked soldiers fell thick and fast amid the reek of loose bowels and searing flesh.
This wasn’t a reenactment. This was a damnable real battle. How had this happened? Paralyzing fear rose from her gut, burned her throat, and a vile taste exploded in her mouth. Her feet became leaden as if ancient roots had erupted from the ground and entangled her feet. She couldn’t move, but she had to get to safety. How she came to be here wasn’t as important as surviving it.
She tucked the brooch into her pocket and snagged the arm of a soldier dressed in gray with blood dripping down the side of his face. “Where’s the field hospital?”
He shook off her hand. “’Bout half mile ahead.”
If the Confederate Army was running toward the field hospital, it meant they were retreating. Hundreds of soldiers ran past her, through the smoky blur of gunfire, bleeding from open wounds on their heads, arms, and legs, and leaving a trail of blood in their wake.
She edged her way over to the tree line, tasting the gunpowder-laden smoke. Soldiers trying to dodge the main rush of men crashed through the bushes. Battle conditions altered how things looked, but how could this possibly be worse? Dead and dying were lying in the shifting shadows of the maple trees. She was a doctor, and the wounded needed attention. There was no one else around to do it. If she ran for safety, these men would die. They needed her. Now.
The first soldier she reached was dead. The next had been shot in the arm, which hung limply at his side. A look of desperation clouded his eyes. She ripped off the bottom part of his shirtsleeve and fashioned a pressure dressing to stanch the bleeding.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Make your way to the field hospital.”
“Can they save my arm?”
“Maybe,” she said before triaging the next wounded man, doing what she could do without medical supplies. She moved quickly from one to the other.
A field dressing team finally arrived. “You’re needed at the field hospital, sir.”
“Where is it?” she asked.
A private pointed. “Through those trees.”
A bullet whizzed over her head. She ducked, her legs nearly buckling. She wrapped her arm around the trunk of a small tree and dug her fingernails into the bark. The wind set the branches to chattering exactly as fear had done to her teeth.
She had to get out of there. But where was she, besides stuck in the middle of a battle? She glanced around, looking for a recognizable landmark, something identifiable. Then she gasped, hardly able to catch her breath, not believing her eyes. “On my God.”
Belle Grove Plantation sat several hundred yards behind her. Not only had she suddenly appeared in a Civil War battle, but she had landed in the middle of the Battle of Cedar Creek.
She pulled the brooch from her inside jacket pocket. Minutes ago, when she had clenched it in her hand, she had inadvertently closed it. Now she tried to open it but couldn’t. Not without tweezers. She patted down her body, hoping they had survived the fog. They hadn’t, and without them, she couldn’t pinch the clasp. Her heart sank with a hollow thud, and fear rose, hot and heavy.
She sat back on her heels and pinned the brooch inside her waistband. Until she found a tool to help her open it, she was stuck. She had to find a place to hide. But what good would hiding do? None. She would be much better off if she located the field hospital where she could borrow tweezers. But if the army was retreating, the field hospitals might already be relocating. If she knew what time it was, she’d know the locations of the armies.
She looked up to study the position of the sun. Using the plantation as a marker, she could gauge the time. She knew the house faced southwest. If she turned her back to the house, due west would be over her right shoulder. Assuming the sun would be straight up at noon, and would set at six o’clock, her best guess was it was now around five o’clock. She couldn’t schedule surgeries telling time this way, but for what she needed at the moment, it would do.
According to the battle timeline, General Early had already overrun the nerve center of the Union Army. If the Confederates were now running in the opposite direction, it meant General Sherman had rallied his troops and launched the Union counterattack. About now Custer and Ramseur would be meeting at the final Confederate battle line on Miller’s Lane. General Ramseur was probably already wounded. If she could get to him, she could help him, maybe.
If she was going to try, she had to head toward Strasburg. The retreating forces and his staff would take him south of the plantation at the North Fork of the Shenandoah River, about four miles away. All she had to do was follow the Valley Pike south.
She double-checked her bearings as she ran, while bullets whizzed overhead. She had no helmet, flak jacket, or steel-toed boots, none of the protective gear she’d worn in Afghanistan during a six-week medical mission. She might as well be running unprotected through a minefield. She hunched over and ran faster.
An explosion fifty yards to her right filled the air with debris, and the ground vibration knocked her off her feet. She rolled to her knees, shaking, and crawled until her jelly legs worked again. As more explosions lit up the sky and shook the earth she increased her stride and pumped her arms.
The sun was setting by the time she reached Strasburg, where ragged and exhausted retreating Confederate soldiers, along with wagons
