When the drums woke him the next morning, he was convinced he could not march a step. His legs were one vast ache, his feet two sharper pains. The whole regiment moved like so many old men with rheumatism.
“Sign me up for the Invalid Corps,” Dempsey Eure groaned. That corps took its members from men too badly wounded to stay in the regular army but still able to hold down a prison guard slot or other duty that required little in the way of activity.
“I can’t move fast enough to get into the Invalid Corps,” Edwin Powell said, neatly topping his fellow sergeant.
For all their complaints, the men moved out while the dew was still wet on the grass and the sun just coming up to shine in their faces. Caudell’s feet still hurt, but before long he warmed up and limbered up and no longer felt elderly, just worn. When, Lieutenant Winborne started singing “Maryland, My Maryland,” he even joined in.
The 47th North Carolina led General Hill’s corps past Verdiersville and New Verdiersville just south and east of it. About an hour after the soldiers passed New Verdiersville, they came to the massive earthworks Lee and Meade had dug by Mine Run the November before, each hoping the other would attack him. They were both disappointed, and the campaign had been a fizzle.
As he came up to the works, Caudell wondered if the army would be ordered into them. He could think of nowhere better to stand on the defensive. But Colonel Faribault rode up to the head of the column and shouted, “Forward!” They marched on, into the Wilderness.
“We’re going to have ourselves a big fight today,” Caudell said.
Nobody argued with him. Mollie Bean said, “Wonder where the Yankees are in there.”
Caudell peered down the Orange Plank Road. Grant’s whole army could have been within a quarter mile. As long as they kept quiet, the Confederates would never know until they stumbled over them. Trees and underbrush grew right up to the edge of the road, their branches interlacing overhead. The Wilderness was second-growth country, gullied and full of scrubby chinkapin and blackjack oaks, scraggy pines, hazel, and every kind of thorn- and bramble-bearing bush known to man. Get off the road and you were lost, maybe for good.
The occasional clearing seemed like a lamp going on in a gloomy room. Caudell blinked in the sudden strong sunlight as he marched past New Hope Church on the south side of the road. “Place like this, ‘No Hope Church’ would be a better name for it,” Dempsey Eure remarked.
Colonel Faribault rode up again. He had his sword out, which meant he thought action was near. No sooner had the thought run through Caudell’s mind than the colonel said, “Skirmishers forward! We may come upon them any time now.”
The picked men trotted east, their repeaters at the ready. Some hurried down the road; others crashed through the tangled undergrowth and headed into the woods. Caudell could trace their progress for a while by the way they swore when thorns and stickers gouged their flesh. But the skirmishers soon fell silent. Today, the Wilderness held more dangerous things than thorn bushes.
It was still midmorning when a brisk crackle of rifle fire started up, ahead of the main body of the regiment. The men looked at one another. Caudell saw pale, tense faces all around. He suspected his own was no ruddier, no calmer. However little they spoke of it, few men went into battle without fear. But the best way to overcome it, to avoid deserving comrades’ scorn, was to pretend it did not exist. Without being ordered, the soldiers stepped up their pace.
A skirmisher, his tunic ripped, came pelting back. He gasped, “Bluebellies up ahead, cavalry fightin’ on foot”‘
“Company, load your rifles!” Captain Lewis ordered.
Caudell unslung his repeater, pulled back the charging handle. “Two clicks on your change levers, mind,” he called. “Don’t go shooting off all your rounds without good targets.”
“Two clicks,” the other sergeants echoed.
The regiment drew closer to the firing. Another skirmisher came back, this one staggering and cursing and dripping blood from his left forearm. “Where’s Fowler?” he said. Several men pointed the way to the assistant surgeon’s wagon. Still cursing, the wounded man went on toward the rear. Caudell’s gut knotted. How many more would face chloroform and the knife—or the bone saw—before this day’s work was through? And would he be one of them?
Then two more skirmishers appeared. They weren’t hurt; they were grinning from ear to ear and prodding along a glum-looking Yankee whose buff chevrons said he was a cavalry corporal. Colonel Faribault came up to him, on foot now. “What’s your unit?” he asked.
“Fifth New York Cavalry,” the prisoner answered, readily enough. His voice held more than a bit of a brogue. He looked from his captors to the rest of the 47th North Carolina. “Faith, do the lot of yez have these funny-looking guns? I thought it was half a brigade we’d run into, not a wee skirmish line.”
The Carolina men howled like wolves to hear that. “Take him back to General Heth for more questions,” Faribault told the men who had captured the New Yorker. They led him away. The colonel went on, “Company I, forward to support the skirmishers. Other companies, form line of battle.”
Behind their banner, the men of Company I hurried down the Orange Plank Road toward the fighting. Company by company, the rest of the regiment moved off the road into the Wilderness. The Castalia Invincibles were close to the center of the line, and so still close to the roadway. All the same, Caudell discovered at once that this was no place for fancy parade-ground maneuvering. Even keeping the line straight was next to impossible. “Forward!” he called to the handful of men he could see.
Forward meant vines wrapping around his ankles like snakes and branches hitting him in the face and pulling at his arms. He fell three times before he’d made a hundred yards, Then a bullet cracked past his head and slapped against a tree trunk not five feet away. He threw himself flat and crawled through the bushes on his belly.
Another shot rang out, and another. Bullets probed the underbrush, looking for him. The Federal cavalrymen had repeaters of their own. They might not have been AK-47s, but they were bad enough. Caudell peered through a screen of leaves, tried to spy the Yankee who was trying to kill him.
He saw no trace of uniform—the fellow was hidden as well as a red Indian. But he could not hide the black-powder smoke that rose every time he fired. It drifted up from behind a clump of blackberry bushes. Carefully, so as not to give away his own position, Caudell brought the rifle to his shoulder, squeezed off two rounds, one after the other.
He’d flushed his bird. The blackberry bushes stirred as the Federal trooper scrambled toward what he hoped was better cover. Just for a second, Caudell caught a glimpse of blue. He fired. The Yankee screamed. Caudell fired again. The scream stopped, as abruptly as if it had been cut off by a knife. Caudell dashed forward, past the bushes where the dead Yankee had been hiding.
The crash of gunfire resounded all around, louder by the minute as more and more Confederates got into the woods and collided with the Federals already there. As was their way, the dismounted cavalry had firepower out of proportion to their numbers, thanks to the seven-shot Spencer carbines they carried. But now the men of the 47th North Carolina could match them and more. It was a heady feeling. So was pushing the Yankees back.
They went unwillingly. In the tangled badlands of the Wilderness, a few determined men behind a log or hiding in a dry wash could knock a big piece of an assault back on its heels.
Caudell discovered “one such knot of resistance by tripping over the corpse of a skirmisher who had been shot through the head. “Gitdown, dammit,” a live Confederate growled at him. “They ain’t playin’ games up ahead there.” He pointed over to a clump of oak saplings. “There’s at least three of the bastards in there, and they won It move for hell.”