Mollie pointed east.” Some of’ em’s over in the thickets yonder, maybe half a mile. I was with ‘em for a while. Then I heard all the shootin’ over here and figgered I’d come lend a hand.”
“Things are dying down for the night, seems like,” Caudell said. “Let’s see if we can’t bed down with our regiment.” She nodded, and followed him as he headed into the undergrowth. Pushing through the rank second growth of the Wilderness was even worse in the evening twilight than it had been during the day. A red Indian would have laughed himself sick at Caudell’s noisy, stumbling fight with thorn bushes and cedar saplings.
“Who’s there?” a nervous voice called from up ahead.
“Two men from the 47th North Carolina,” Caudell answered quickly, before the nervous owner of that nervous voice started shooting. Behind him, Mollie Bean chuckled softly. He ignored her; he had to think of her as a soldier now, not a woman. He called back, “Who are you?”
“Fifteenth North Carolina—Cooke’s brigade,” the still invisible fellow answered. He sounded less nervous now. “Y’all are out o’ Kirkland’s brigade, right?”
“That’s us,” Caudell agreed gratefully. At least he was talking with someone from his own division.
“Keep goin’ east. You’ll find ‘em.”
Caudell kept going east. He never did see the man who’d given him directions. He and Mollie were challenged twice more in short order. He also challenged a couple of small groups of men himself: soldiers heading west, looking for their regiments. He was certain what they were before he opened his mouth. He challenged anyhow. In the Wilderness, certainty meant little.
That half mile took close to half an hour to cover. Then, to his disgust, Caudell learned he’d somehow gone right past his regiment and had to double back. Had Mollie scolded him for that, he would have sworn at her. But she said only, “The goin’s rough hereabouts, Nate.” Nodding a grateful nod she probably couldn’t see, he pushed on.
He stumbled into a tiny clearing. Some soldiers were sitting around a campfire. One of them looked up. It was Dempsey Eure. “I will be damned,” he said. “We reckoned you was buzzards’ meat, Nate.”
“I thought so myself, a couple of times.” Caudell sank to the ground, footsore and weary. “You even managed to hang on to your plumed hat, Dempsey. I lost mine straight off.”
“Wouldn’t lose this beauty, Nate.” Eure doffed it to Mollie. “Glad we didn’t lose that there little beauty, either.”
“You shut up, Dempsey, you hear?” she said. “Don’t want no officers catchin’ the wind from your big flappin’ mouth.”
“Sorry, uh, Melvin,” Eure said contritely.
“Any water close by?” Caudell asked, shaking his empty canteen. “I’m bone dry.”
Eure jerked his thumb to the north. “There’s a little creek down that way, couple minutes’ walk.”
Hoping the couple of minutes would not stretch as the trip to find his regiment had, Caudell went off to look for the creek and to answer a call of nature which Mollie Bean’s presence had forced him to suppress until now. Such modesty was a foolish thing, but it was his own; he sighed with relief as he unbuttoned his trousers.
He found the water by stepping into it. He took off his shoes and bathed his tired feet before he filled the canteen. Once he’d drunk, he felt better. He knew his comrades were only a few yards away, knew tens of thousands of Federals and Confederates were within a few miles, but for all he could see of them, he might as well have been alone in the Wilderness.
His ears told him otherwise. In spite of full darkness, firing went on between rival pickets. But the cries of the wounded were worse. In the tangle through which both armies had pushed their lines, a hurt man had a hard time getting to the rear, nor could his mates easily rescue him—or sometimes even find him. Wails, shrieks, moans turned the thickets to the haunt of tormented ghosts. Most of the sounds of pain came from the south, which meant they rose from Yankee throats. But Confederates also shouted out their hurt to the world.
Caudell shivered as he made his way back to the clearing, though the night was warm. What, save luck, had kept his tender flesh, rather than someone else’s, from pouring out its blood in the unwelcome track of a bullet? Nothing of which he was aware. He patted himself, as if to prove he was still whole and unholed. How marvelous that each hand grasped, that each foot moved confidently in front of the other!
Once sitting again by the fire, he shared some of his food and the spoil from captured Yankee war bags with men who’d already gobbled the rations they were supposed to carry. A couple of soldiers went to sleep, their hats either over their eyes or under their heads as pillows. More, though, stayed up awhile to smoke and to hash over the battle and try to draw a bigger picture from the tiny pieces they’d seen.
Plainly, Lee had trapped a big chunk of the Federal army between Hill’s corps and Longstreet’s.’ Mollie Bean said, “Reckon we’ll go on and try poundin ‘em to pieces come mornin’.”
“That’s clear enough,” Otis Massey agreed. The corporal patted the AK-47 that lay on the ground beside him. “With these repeaters, might could be we’ll even do it, too. Be a nasty butcher’s bill to pay for certain if we was usin’ muzzle-loaders instead.”
“You’ve got that right, Otis,” Caudell said as a general murmur of agreement rose from the soldiers.” A Yankee said we weren’t fighting fair.”
Dempsey Eure spat into the fire. “Fair didn’t stop their cavalry from usin’ their repeaters against single-shot muskets. Now they see what the shoe’s like on t’other foot.”
Talk about repeaters reminded Caudell he hadn’t yet cleaned his. With more fighting ahead tomorrow, he wanted the rifle as ready as he could make it. He stripped the AK-47 and dug out a rag and the gun oil that had come with the weapon. The little black oil bottle said Break Free CLP. The sweet, almost fruity, smell of the oil mixed with the odors of coffee, food, and woodsmoke.
He was in the middle of putting the repeater back together when someone came crashing through the brush toward the clearing. Mollie Bean and a couple of other privates reached for their rifles, in case it was a Yankee who needed capturing. But it wasn’t a Yankee—it was Colonel Faribault.
“Turn those aside, boys, if you please,” he said when he saw he was looking down the barrels of several repeaters. “However much I admire Stonewall Jackson’s memory, I have no desire to share his fate.” The rifles were hastily lowered. But for accidents like that which had befallen Jackson, only a bad officer risked bullets from his own men. Faribault was a good one.
“What’s the word, Colonel?” Caudell asked.
“Tomorrow morning, five o’clock, we go after Winfield Scott Hancock again,” Faribault said. “God willing, we may put an end to the whole Federal II Corps. General Heth told General Lee we are driving them beautifully; I heard him say it myself.”
The men round the campfire grinned and nodded to one another, pleased at the news and, as common soldiers have a way of being, proud they’d already figured out what their officers had planned for them. Caudell said; “How are we doing up by the Orange Turnpike?”
“We pushed them hard there, too, all the way back to the Germanna Ford Road—they don’t care for our repeaters, not a bit of it,” Faribault answered, and a couple of soldiers yowled with glee. But the colonel held up a hand. “I think the Yankees have all the artillery in the world set up in the clearing around Wilderness Tavern. General Ewell tried mounting an assault on it, but the Federal guns knocked his men back into the woods.”
Soldiers’ talk is sometimes curiously bloodless. Caudell did not need any sanguinary speech to picture the storm of shells and cannon balls, case shot and grapeshot, that must have greeted the onrushing Confederates—or the torn and broken bodies that bombardment must have produced. He’d heard the big guns start to roar late in the afternoon. Now he knew why.