The first shell landed short. A moment later, another one screamed overhead, to detonate about fifty yards beyond the barricade. Caudell’s belly turned to ice. Split the difference between the two of them and…He’d been shelled at Gettysburg. He knew only too well what came after “and.” The Federals started their hurrah again.
But the third shell was also safely long. If the Yankees had set up two guns in the roadway, perhaps the first one’s crew had overcorrected. That kind of luck, though, could not last long.
It did not have to. Off to the left rose a great racket of AK-47 fire and rebel yells. The Northern hurrahs turned to shouts of dismay. Yankees began bursting out of the bushes and dashing across the Brock Road from west to east. For a moment, Caudell was too bemused even to shoot at them.
The first lieutenant, who still seemed to be the ranking officer at the crossroads, let out a whoop. “Here comes the rest of the corps, by God!”
Caudell whooped, too. If the Federals had formed their line in the woods to try to force the Confederates off the Orange Plank Road, then the rebels advancing from the west toward the junction with the Brock Road would have been ideally placed to take them in flank and roll them up—and, incidentally, to reach the Brock Road and drive away those field guns or put their crews out of action. Caudell had no idea which had happened. He did know no more shells landed close by, for which he was heartily glad.
Not all the Yankees had been smashed; firing continued in the woods as knots of soldiers refused to give ground. On a more open battlefield, that would have been impossible; in the Wilderness’s thickets and tangles and clumps of bushes, men could find places to make a stand even after their comrades had given way. But the Confederates had gained a long stretch of the Brock Road.
Caudell sniffed. Along with the familiar tang of black-powder smoke and the sharper, thinner odor of the nonsmoking powder in AK-47 cartridges, he smelled burning weeds. All that shooting in the undergrowth had set the Wilderness ablaze. He shuddered at the thought of wounded and helpless men in there, watching the little flames lick closer…
The jingle of horses’ trappings released him from his unpleasant reverie. He glanced back over his shoulder. Where the lowly lieutenant had led the Confederates through the heavy fighting at the crossroads, now Generals Kirkland and Heth were here to see how things stood. That was the way the world worked, Caudell thought.
“How clean the men look,” William Kirkland said, a remark seldom made about the Army of Northern Virginia, especially after some hours of combat.
Henry Heth, quicker on the uptake, figured out why: “They haven’t been biting cartridges all day, not with these new brass ones, so they’ve no need to look as though they were in a blackface minstrel show.”
“That’s true, by God,” Kirkland said. “I hadn’t thought about it.” Caudell hadn’t thought about it, either. After his struggle through the forest, he suspected he was quite grimy enough for any ordinary purpose.
He used the lull in the fighting to take some cartridges out of his pockets and refill the banana clips he’d emptied. Another horse came clopping down the Orange Plank Road, a dark-maned gray—Where Caudell had sat and tended to his business in the presence of his brigade and division commanders, he scrambled to his feet for General Lee. So did most of the other soldiers close by.
“As you were, gentlemen, please.” Lee peered north up the Brock Road toward the blue-clad bodies that corduroyed it like so many planks. “Those people are paying dearly for every acre of Wilderness they hold,” he remarked as he turned to look south. “Henry, push such forces as you can spare down along this road, if you please. General Hancock will be along shortly, unless I miss my guess.”
“Yes, General Lee,” Heth said. “We might have been in a bad way if he’d hit us from the south at the same time as Getty was coming down from the north.”
“So we might have,” Lee said, “but however brave its men may be, coordination of attacks has never been the Army of the Potomac’s strong suit.”
A good thing, too, Caudell thought. A dispatch rider galloped up to Lee. He held reins in one hand, an AK-47 in the other, and his message between his teeth. Lee read it, nodded, and rode off with him.
After reloading, Caudell lit up a cigar. He’d only taken a couple of drags on it when General Heth said, “I expect you heard what General Lee wants, boys. The sooner we get moving, the farther south we’ll get, and the better the works we’ll be able to set up before Hancock’s men hit us.”
The Confederates at the crossroads would have obeyed some commanders only slowly and reluctantly; they’d already seen their share and more of hard fighting for the day. But Heth and Kirkland and their staff officers rode down the road in front of the infantry, as if the idea that danger might lie ahead had never entered their minds. With that example before them, the foot soldiers followed readily enough. Fresh troops coming up the Orange Plank Road took their places at the breastwork they’d built.
A little more than a quarter of a mile south of the crossroads, the Brock Road narrowed and bent slightly to the east. Heth reined in. “This looks to be a good spot, boys,” he said. “We’ll stop ‘em right here.”
The soldiers attacked the timber on either side of the road for the field fortifications, mixed earth and stones in with the logs. Off in the woods, Caudell heard men making even ruder works to protect themselves from Yankee bullets.
Just as the skirmishers Heth had pushed out south of his main line began to fire, a couple of ammunition wagons brought fresh cartridges down the road. “Better not be them goddam Minié balls,” several soldiers growled, using almost identical words. This time, they weren’t. Caudell filled his pockets again, crouched behind the breastwork, and waited.
More and more single shots from Yankee Springfields mingled with the bark of the skirmishers’ repeaters. The skirmishers crashed back through the undergrowth to Heth’s main line. “We stung ‘em,” one called, off in the woods.
Federal skirmishers came first, trotting up the Brock Road to learn what lay ahead for their comrades. They stopped short when they spied the rebel breastwork that barred their path. One of the bluecoats raised his rifle musket to his shoulder, fired. The bullet kicked up dust a few yards short of the barricade. The Yankee dove into the bushes to reload. His companions turned and ran south to report what they’d seen.
A minute or so later, the head of the main Federal line came into view. Caudell’s stomach churned. Lee might remark that the Yankees had trouble putting their attacks together, but every one they made was fierce. “Fire at will!” a Confederate officer shouted.
“Which one’s Will?” some army wit shouted back. That stupid joke got made on every firing line, Yankee or rebel. Somehow it helped Caudell relax.
The front rank of Federals suddenly dropped to one knee. The second rank took aim over their heads. A couple of Yankees fell over or reeled back out of line—the Confederates had already begun to shoot: But then the Northerners’ muskets, all in a row, belched flame and great curls of greasy black smoke.
Caudell thought the rebel beside him at the breastwork had tapped him on the left shoulder. He automatically glanced down. Neat as a tailor’s scissors, a bullet had clipped his uniform without touching him. He shuddered. He could not help it. Lower by only a couple of fingers’ breadth, and his precious arm would have ended up on the slaughterhouse pile outside a surgeon’s tent…if he’d managed to make it back to a surgeon’s tent at all.
The fellow beside him, who he thought had tapped him, would never need a surgeon again. A Minié ball had clipped him, and clipped off the top of his head. Blood and shattered brains poured from the wound as he slowly toppled over backwards.