Also, at last, even the white Confederate soldiers seemed to have despaired of the fight. Instead of battling in the trenches with bayonet and sharpened spade, more and more of them threw down their rifles and threw up their hands and went into captivity pleased with themselves for having outlasted the war. Here and there, in the trenches and behind them, diehards still fought till they were killed in place, but the tide of war flowed past them and over them and washed them away.
Now, finally, everything was going as the generals and politicians had predicted it would go back in 1914. Martin passed through the little town of Stafford-a few homes and shops clustered around a brick courthouse-hardly noticing it till it was behind him. U.S. artillery had reduced most of the buildings to rubble. The Confederates no longer defended every hamlet as if it were land on which Jesus had walked.
“Come on!” he shouted to the men who advanced with him. “Eight miles to the Rappahannock! If we push these bastards, we’ll be there by sundown.” And if, on the Roanoke front in 1915, he’d heard himself say anything like that, he’d have known he was either shellshocked or just plain crazy.
But only a few Rebs contested the way south of Stafford. Save for those rear guards, most of the Confederates seemed intent on getting to the southern bank of the river, perhaps to make a stand there, perhaps simply to escape. A couple of miles north of the Rappahannock, shells from the far side of the river began landing uncomfortably close to Martin and his men.
Then the shells stopped falling. The rifle and machine-gun fire from the few men in butternut still north of the Rappahannock died away. A Confederate soldier-an officer-came out from behind a ruined building. He was carrying a white flag. “Hold your fire!” Chester Martin shouted to his men. The hair at the back of his neck and on his arms tried to stand on end.
“It’s over,” the Confederate officer shouted. “It’s done. You sons of bitches licked us.” Standing there defeated before the soldiers of the United States, he burst into tears.
Jake Featherston had the surviving guns of his battery in the best position he’d found for them since the war began. Back of Fredericksburg, Virginia, up in Marye’s Heights, a stone wall protected a sunken road. If the Yankees swung down along the curve of the Rappahannock and tried to force a crossing at Fredericksburg, he could look down on them and slaughter them for as long as his ammunition held out. They would be able to hit him only by luck-by luck or by aeroplane. He kept a wary eye turned toward the sky.
At the moment, he had the guns turned toward the north rather than the east, though-the U.S. soldiers seemed to be heading straight for Falmouth instead of Fredericksburg. That was what he gathered from the beaten men in butternut streaming past, anyhow. He’d given up shooting at Confederate soldiers fleeing the enemy. He couldn’t kill them all. He couldn’t even make them stop their retreat. And the more rounds he wasted on them, the fewer he’d be able to shoot at the damnyankees.
He climbed up on top of the stone wall and peered north through field glasses. Sure as hell, here came the U.S. soldiers, trailing the barrels that smashed flat or blasted out of existence any strongpoints in their path. U.S. fighting scouts swooped low over the front, further harrying the men of the Army of Northern Virginia.
“Come on, boys,” Jake said. “They’re inside seven thousand yards. Let’s remind ’em they have to pay for their tickets to get in. God damn me to hell and fry me for bacon if anybody else is going to do the job. Infantrymen? Christ on His cross, all the good infantry we used to have’s been dead the last two years.”
The four guns that remained of his battery of the First Richmond Howitzers desperately needed new barrels. They’d sent too many rounds through these; the rifling grooves were worn away to next to nothing. Featherston knew the guns weren’t going to get what they needed. Fat cats in Richmond get what they need, he thought. All I’m doing is defending my country. Does that count? Not likely. What do fellows like me get? Hind tit, that’s what.
When the guns began to roar, though, he whooped to see the shells falling among the leading damnyankees. He’d spent the whole war doing his best to hurt them. Even if the guns weren’t so accurate as they should have been, he could still do that. He could still enjoy it, too.
An improbably young lieutenant in an improbably clean uniform came up to him and demanded, “Who commands this battery, Sergeant?”
Jake drew himself up with touchy pride, and took pleasure in noting that he was a couple of inches taller than this baby officer. “I do,” he growled, “sir.”
“Oh.” The lieutenant looked as if he were tasting milk that had gone sour. “Very well, Sergeant. I am to inform you that, as of five o’clock P.M., which is to say, about an hour from now, an armistice will go into effect along our entire fighting front with the United States.”
Jake had been braced for the news, or thought he had, for the past couple of weeks. Getting it was like a boot in the belly just the same. “We’ve lost, then,” he said slowly. “We’re giving up.”
“We’re whipped,” the officer said. Featherston looked at the men who served the guns. Perhaps for the first time, he let himself see how worn they were. Their heads bobbed agreement with the shavetail’s words-they were whipped. The lieutenant went on, “We’ve done everything we could do. It wasn’t enough.”
“What the hell did you do?” Jake asked. The lieutenant stared at him, disbelieving his ears-how could an enlisted man presume to question him? Jake shook his own head. Strangling the pipsqueak would be fun, but what was the use? The CSA grew his sort in carload lots. Ask a question with an answer worth knowing, then: “What are we supposed to do with the guns after five o’clock?”
“Leave them,” the young lieutenant said, as if they were unimportant. They were-to him. He went on, “The Yankees will take them as spoils of war, I reckon.” That didn’t seem important to him, either. Off he went, to give the word to the next battery he found.
“Spoils of war?” Featherston muttered. “Hell they will.” He looked at his watch. “We got most of an hour, boys, till the war’s over. Let’s make those shitheels wish it never got started.”
Plainly, his soldiers would just as soon have let the fighting peter out. He didn’t shame them into keeping on-he frightened them into it. That he could still frighten them with everything they’d known crashing into ruin around them said a lot about the sort of man he was.
At five o’clock, he himself pulled the lanyard to his field gun one last time. Then he undid the breech block, carried it over to Hazel Run-a couple of hundred yards-and threw it in the water. He did the same with the breech blocks from all the other guns. “Now the damnyankees are welcome to ’em,” he said. “Fat lot of good they’ll get from ’em, though.”
His words seemed to echo and reecho. As the armistice took hold, silence flowed over the countryside. It seemed unnatural, like machine-gun fire on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of Richmond. When the gun crew talked, they talked too loud. For one thing, they were used to shouting over the roar of the three-inchers. For another, they were all a little deaf. Jake suspected he was more than a little deaf. He’d been at the guns longer than any of his men.
Before the sun set, Major Clarence Potter made his way to the battery. Featherston nodded to him as to an old friend; in the Army, Potter was about as close to an old friend as he had. The intelligence officer looked at the field guns, then at Jake. “You’re not going to let them have anything they can use, eh?” he said.
Jake spent some little while describing in great detail the uses the damnyankees could make of his guns. Major Potter listened, appreciating his imagination. Finally, Featherston said, “Goddammit, sir, sure as hell we’re going to fight those bastards another round one of these days before too long. Why give ’em anything they can take advantage of?”