Here and there along the line, men in butternut were moving back, not forward. Flesh and blood could bear only so much. As the Confederate troops retreated, they entered the zone the U.S. artillery was pounding behind the line. They took casualties there. “Serves you right, you bastards,” Featherston growled. But the disorder and fear spreading through the retreating soldiers also infected the reserves who had been going forward. Whatever chance there might have been for a counterattack dissolved.
In growing horror and fury, Jake realized the front was not going to hold. The Army of Northern Virginia wouldn’t lose a few hundred yards of ground, to be regained later with bayonet and grenade. This was going to be a bad defeat, so bad, probably, that the battery would not be able to stay on Round Hill.
He went over to the two guns that were out of action and removed their sights and breech blocks, which he threw into the limber for his own gun. The Yanks would get no use from the weapons they captured. Then he checked the horses that would have to pull away the four surviving cannon. They’d come through everything better than he’d dared hope. If they’d gone down, he would have had to disable all six field guns in the battery before withdrawing.
Up Round Hill came the Confederates who’d run farthest and fastest. Most of those faces, close enough now for him to see the fright on them, were black. Behind the shield of the gas helmet, his own face twisted into a savage grin. “Canister!” he shouted.
Scott loaded the round into the gun. Jake twisted the elevation screw to lower the piece as far as it would go. He peered over open sights at the men in butternut heading his way.
“What are you doing, Sarge?” Scott asked.
“Fire!” Featherston screamed, and the loader obediently yanked the lanyard. Jake whooped to watch the colored cowards blown to bits. “Another round of the same!” he cried, and then, “Fire!” He shook his fist at the black soldiers still on their feet in front of him. “You won’t fight the damnyankees, you shitty coons, you got to deal with me!”
He brought out the four surviving guns from the battery, brought them out and brought them back to the new line the Army of Northern Virginia was piecing together behind Round Hill. As the day ended, he shelled the first Yankees coming over the hill. He set two barrels on fire. The U.S. infantry drew back. When fighting ebbed with the light, he sat by a little fire, too keyed up to sleep, writing and writing in the Gray Eagle notebook.
Lieutenant General George Custer stood at the top of the ridge in front of White House, Tennessee, the ridge the Confederates had defended so long and so tenaciously. Back in the distant days of peace, the ridge had been wooded. Now…now God might have intended it as a toothpick and splinter farm. Custer struck dramatic poses as automatically as his heart beat. He struck one now, for the benefit of the military correspondents who hovered close to hear what pearls of wisdom might drop from his lips.
“From here, gentlemen, I can see the waters of the Cumberland, and Nashville across the river from them,” he declared bombastically. “From here, gentlemen, I can see-victory.”
The correspondents scribbled like men possessed. Major Abner Dowling turned away so no one would have to see his face. From here, gentlemen, he thought, I can see a fat, pompous old fraud who’s ever so much luckier than he deserves and who hasn’t the faintest inkling how lucky he is.
He turned back toward the general commanding First Army. He still felt little but scorn for Custer’s generalship, but he was having a certain amount of trouble holding on to that scorn. For the sake of his own peace of mind, he worked at it, but it wasn’t easy.
Truth was, Custer had gone far out on a limb-and taken Dowling with him-backing a doctrine directly contrary to the one coming out of the War Department. Truth was, he had won a sizable victory here by going his own way. Truth was, he could see Nashville from where he stood, and the guns of First Army could hit Nashville from near where he stood. Truth was, the CSA had left on this side of the Cumberland only battered units falling back toward their crossings.
Truth was, Custer, as he had done in the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War, had somehow managed to make himself into a hero.
“General, we’ve been using barrels for a year now,” a reporter said. “Why haven’t they done so well for us up till this latest battle?”
“They are a new thing in the world,” Custer answered. “As with any new thing, figuring out how best to employ them took a bit of doing.” He strutted and preened, like a rooster displaying before hens. “I came up with the notion of using them as a mass rather than in driblets, tried it out, and the results were as you have seen.”
Dowling turned away again. The really infuriating thing was that, in boasting thus, Custer was for once telling the exact and literal truth. From the minute he’d first set eyes on barrels, he’d wanted to line them up in a great column and send them plowing straight into the enemy. Everyone had told him he couldn’t do that-doctrine forbade it. He’d gone ahead and done it anyhow-and he’d forced a breakthrough where there had been no such creature in going on three years of war.
There would be considerable wailing and gnashing of teeth in Philadelphia on account of what he’d done. There already had been, in fact. Custer had rubbed the War Department’s nose in the fact that it hadn’t had the faintest idea what to do with barrels once it got them. The only way a man got away with committing such a sin was to be proved extravagantly right. Custer had done that, too.
Another reporter spoke up: “Having beaten the Rebels once in this way, General, can we lick them again?”
“We are licking them,” Custer said. “Not only did First Army smash them here in Tennessee, but I understand the fighting also goes well in Virginia, and that our forces may soon regain our nation’s capital from the enemy’s hands.” He struck another pose. “This was a Remembrance Day we and our enemies shall long remember.”
Dowling listened to that in something close to amazement. Custer must indeed have had a surfeit of glory if he was willing to share some with generals operating on other fronts. He was, in his own way, a patriot. Maybe that accounted for it. Dowling couldn’t think of anything else that would.
“Not quite what I meant, sir,” the reporter said. “Can we here in western Tennessee strike the Confederates another blow as strong as the one we just dealt them?”
“Well, why the devil not?” Custer said grandly. The correspondents laughed and clapped their hands.
Without trying hard, Dowling could come up with half a dozen reasons why the devil not, starting with the need to refit and reinforce the barrels and ending with the geography. Breaking through on the other side of the Cumberland would be anything but easy. It wasn’t so great a river as the St. Lawrence, which had bedeviled U.S. strategy throughout the war, but it was by no means inconsiderable, either. Dowling wished Custer wouldn’t be so damned blithe and breezy. Custer’s adjutant wished any number of things about him, none of which looked like coming true.
With a sigh, Dowling turned away from Custer. In doing so, he bumped into a U.S. officer of less exalted rank. “Beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “Didn’t see you were there till too late.”
“No damage done, Major,” Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell said. Dowling nodded his thanks. Having led the column of barrels that made the breakthrough, Morrell was in very good odor at First Army headquarters. “I’m glad I found you,” he went on now. “I have an idea I want to put to you.”
“Yes, sir. I’m listening,” Dowling said. Even though Morrell stood perfectly still before him, the man seemed to quiver slightly, as if he were a telegraph wire with a great many messages speeding back and forth on it. Dowling suspected he didn’t have an idea-odds were he had a whole great flock of them, each struggling against the others to be born.