While he worked, Caudell kept an ear cocked to try to gauge how the rest of the battle was going. To the north, Federals and rebels still went at it hammer and tongs; by the sound of things, the line hadn’t moved there, which was all to the good as far as he was concerned. The Yankees also kept trying to break through east of the Brock Road. A sudden flurry of hurrahs said they were close to doing it, too. Rebel yells and the wild snarl of AK-47s fired on full automatic answered them. The hurrahs ebbed.
“Knocked ‘em back,” Caudell guessed.
“They just keep comin’,” a soldier said. “Dang fools don’t know when they’s licked.” Remembering Pickett’s charge, Caudell thought that a failing of which both sides were guilty. Just then, the soldier dropped the fence rail he was carrying and snatched up his repeater. “Oh, sweet Jesus, here they is again.”
The new Federal attacking column marched up the Brock Road in perfect order, fining the roadway from edge to edge, each bluecoat a regulation thirteen inches from the man on either side of him. The Yankees hesitated when they saw ahead of them the ruins of the two regiments that had gone in before them; a few men in the first ranks took half steps instead of fun marching paces. But shouts and curses from officers and sergeants quickly got their lines dressed once more, and they bore down on the breastwork with a hurrah.
The Confederates broke them. Mollie Bean had the right of it, Caudell thought as he fired again and again—using repeaters against such a bunched target was murder. But he had been right, too, for it was necessary murder if he was to live himself. The Northerners went down like ninepins. But more and more pushed forward to take their places until, at last, they would advance into the face of death no more, but turned and ran for the rear.
Caudell and his companions on the firing line raised a tired cheer to see them go. Dead and wounded men were thick on the ground behind the barricade, too, even if the Yankees had never come close to reaching it. The soldiers gave what rough first aid they could, and sent to the rear men who could walk. Hospital stewards, some wearing green sashes as their Federal counterparts did, came forward to haul off on stretchers men too badly hurt to travel on their own.
A small brushfire reached the roadway a couple of hundred yards south of the breastwork. It caught in the clothes of a Federal lying there. A few seconds later, his cartridges began exploding, pop-pop-pop, almost as if they were kernels from an ear of popping corn. Wounded men writhed frantically, trying to escape the flames.
Several Confederates started to scramble over their piled logs and rails and stones to go to rescue the Yankees from the fire. But they scrambled back a moment later, for yet another regiment of Federals appeared, battle flags flying, to hurl their bodies at the barricade.
Caudell’s repeater was hot in his hands. He’d been shooting at bluecoats the whole day long—forever, it seemed. He glanced through leaves and drifting smoke at the sun. It was getting low in the west. Before too long, night would halt combat if nothing else did.
After three regiments had tried the barricade and failed, the Brock Road in front of it was clogged with bodies. More than one shot had come from behind them, as lightly wounded men used their comrades’ corpses as barricades of their own. Now dead and wounded alike broke up the neat ranks of the oncoming Federals. They came on all the same. Caudell and his fellows began the grisly task of educating them about what repeaters could do.
The Federals had sufficient horrid examples right before their eyes. They did not rush with the same élan their predecessors had shown. When men at the head of the column began dropping, the bluecoats behind them hesitated. Through the cries of the wounded, Caudell heard officers screaming at their men, trying to get them to advance in spite of the scourging fire that lay ahead.
Then, drowning cries and screams alike, a great new eruption of gunfire broke out to the south. The Federals on the Brock Road looked back over their shoulders in surprise and alarm. Even their officers stopped urging them forward for a moment.
Caudell frowned. As he tiredly wondered what the new fighting was about, Mollie Bean pounded him on the shoulder and yelled, “Longstreet!”
“Longstreet.” He said the name once with no particular feeling. Then the lightning flashed inside his head. He yelled too; “Longstreet!” If Lee’s war horse had pitched into this Federal corps from —the south while A.P. Hill kept it from going north, the Yankees hereabouts were in more trouble than you could shake a stick at.
They knew it, too. They milled about, just out of good shooting range. But then they came on once more. Now the officers had no trouble with balky men. They knew they had to break through if their corps was to survive.
“Fire low!” Caudell shouted as the blue wave again surged toward the breastwork that dammed its progress. As the Confederates had three times before, they shredded the charge. No Yankee could come within fifty yards of that rude wall and live. The captains and lieutenants who headed the rush fell bravely, leading their men. Like most troops on both sides in the war, the common soldiers took heart from the example their officers set. Without that example, most of those who could made for the rear and at least temporary safety.
A couple of bluecoats stood where they were, their empty hands high in the air. “Don’t shoot, you rebs!” one of them shouted, his northern accent sharp in Caudell’s ears. “You done caught us.”
Caudell looked around. “Where’s that lieutenant?” he asked, seeing no one of higher rank than himself.
“He got shot,” Mollie Bean answered laconically.
“Oh.” Without showing more of himself than his head, Caudell called to the Federals, “Come ahead, Yanks. Make it pert, though—if we have to start shooting again, you all will be right in the middle.”
The Northern men sprinted toward the barricade. More shouted directions from Caudell took them out of the roadway and through the edge of the Wilderness. Caudell listened to them scrabbling over the lower fieldworks there; they disappeared from sight until they came back out onto the Brock Road. The Confederates promptly relieved them of their haversacks and whatever money they had on them. “Shoes, too, Yanks,” a barefoot private said. “One of you might could be my size, and if you ain’t, I’ll wear one pair anyways and pass the other on to somebody else.”
The prisoners did not protest.” You just take what you want, rebs,” one of them said as he pulled off his stout marching shoes. “I’m so glad you’re not shooting at me anymore, I don’t care about anything else. The way the bullets came at us, I figured you had a million men back here, maybe two.”
The Confederates grinned at that. Caudell sent the two Federals to the rear. He stayed by the barricade, waiting to see if the Union men would mount yet another attack. The firing to the south was coming closer—that had to mean Longstreet was doing well. The firing to the north grew louder, too, or rather deeper; more artillery was mixing with the rifles there.
The sun sank, a blood-red ball looking down on blood through tangled branches and curls of smoke from gunpowder and brushfires. The fifth Yankee attack had not come. As darkness gathered, the sound of fighting to north and south began to slacken. It also eased in the woods east of the Brock Road, though it never died away altogether, and would flare up every so often in a brief spasm of ferocity.
Caudell looked up and down the breastwork. But for Mollie Bean, he saw no one he recognized. Any battle was liable to tear up a neat line of march; battle in country like the Wilderness made such disorder a sure thing. He asked, “Melvin, do you know where the rest of the boys from the 47th are?”