Then Caudell stood on the south side of the barricade, another Confederate beside him. One of them turned east, the other west. They both shot rapidly down the crumbling Yankee line—repeaters were made for enfilade fire; Federals went down one after another. More and more men in gray reached the breastwork.
Caudell suddenly realized the AK-47 wasn’t kicking against his shoulder. He threw himself flat while he clicked in a fresh clip. With his old Enfield, loading while prone had been next to impossible, leaving a man not only without a bullet but a perfect target for any foe who had one. Still prone, Caudell started firing again.
A few Yankees kept shooting back at the rebels. More fled into the woods, some with their rifles, some throwing them away to run the faster. More yet threw down Springfields but did not flee. They threw their hands into the air and shouted, “Don’t kill us, Johnny! We give up!”
Captain Thorp sent the bluecoats who had surrendered north over the barricade and into captivity.” Just keep your hands high, and you’ll be all right till someone takes charge of you,” he told them before giving his attention back to his own men. “Come on! We’ve broken them. One more good push and they’ll fall to bits.”
South and south again—Caudell’s clothes were tatters by afternoon, but he did not care. Thorp had been right: once the Yankees’ field fortifications cracked, some of the dogged fight went out of them at last. When repeater fire broke out near them, they started to yield instead. of shooting back. Or some of them did; here and there, stubborn bands of bluecoats gave no quarter and asked for none.
A bullet hissed malignantly past Caudell. He dove for cover. Bullets whistled through the brush where he lay. He rolled frantically. The fusillade continued. Either that was a couple of squads of Yankees up ahead or—”Lee!” he shouted. “Hurrah for General Lee!”
The shooting stopped. “Who are y’all?” a suspicious voice called.
“Forty-Seventh North Carolina, Hill’s corps,” he answered. “Who are you?”
“Third Arkansas, Longstreet’s corps,” the unseen stranger answered. “What kind of rifle you carryin’ there, No’th Carolina?”
No Yankee was likely to know the right answer to that yet. “An AK-47,” Caudell said.
By way of answer, the fellow who’d shot at him let loose with an unmistakable rebel yell. Caudell cautiously stood. Another man in gray came out of the thicket ahead. They clasped hands, pounded each other on the back. The soldier from Arkansas said, “Goddam good to see you, No’th Carolina.”
“You, too,” Caudell said. More than half to himself, he added wonderingly, “We really have broken them.” He still had trouble believing it, but if he and his comrades coming down from the north were meeting Longstreet’s men coming up from the south, the Federals caught between them had to be in a bad way.
The private from the 3d Arkansas might have picked the thought right out of his mind. “Damn straight we’ve broke ‘em,” he said happily. “Now we pick up the pieces.”
* VI *
General Lee sat easily on Traveller, watching his soldiers splash up out of the Rapidan at Raccoon Ford. Once on the north side of the river, the men paused to put their trousers back on before they formed ranks again. Many of them had no drawers. That bothered Lee more than it seemed to bother them. They grinned and cheered and waved their hats as they marched past.
Lee waved back every so often, letting the men know he saw them and was pleased with them. He turned to Walter Taylor. “Tell me the truth, Major: did you ever expect to see us moving to the attack again?”
“Of course I did, sir,” his aide answered stoutly. Startlement filled his eyes as the possible import of the question sank in. “Didn’t you?”
“I always had the hope of it,” Lee said, and let it go at that. A new regiment was fording the river, its battle flag fluttering proudly as the color-bearer carried it in front of the troops. Lee had trouble reading a printed page without his spectacles, but he easily made out the unit name on the flag forty feet away. He called, “You fought splendidly in the Wilderness, 47th North Carolina.”
The soldiers he’d praised cheered wildly. “You’ve made them proud, sir,” Walter Taylor said.
“They make me proud; any officer would reckon his career made to command such men;” Lee said. “How can I help but admire their steadfastness, their constancy and devotion? I stand in awe of them.”
“Yes, sir.” Taylor looked back over the Rapidan, toward the winter encampments of General Ewell’s corps. “Only a few regiments still waiting on the road. Then all of General Hill’s corps will have crossed, along with Ewell’s.”
“I wish Longstreet’s men could be with us as well, but for the time being I must leave them behind to guard the fords further east, lest General Grant, rather than shifting in response to my movement, should try to cross the Rapidan again and march on Richmond. I think that unlikely, but neglecting the possibility would be ill-advised.”
“Strange to think of one corps, and that made up of but two divisions, holding back the whole Army of the Potomac,” Taylor observed.
“Even with our repeaters, I am uncertain whether Longstreet could do that, Major. But he can certainly delay those people and give us the chance to return and perhaps pitch into their flanks.” Just for a moment, Lee’s smile turned savage. “And let me remind you, the whole Army of the Potomac no longer exists, at least not as it did before the fighting in the Wilderness began. Hancock’s corps is for all intents and purposes hors de combat, and the rest of the Federal force received rough handling as well. I doubt anything less than that would have persuaded General Grant to retreat.”
“He had little choice, unless he aimed to stay where he was and have his whole army chewed up,” Taylor said. “Another day of fighting at close quarters and he’d not have had left an army with which to retreat.”
“The maneuver was well executed; Grant made skillful use of his superiority in cannon to hold off our infantry while he pulled back his own.” Lee stroked his beard as he thought. “He handles his men better than any previous commander of the Army of the Potomac, save perhaps General Meade, I believe, and he is more aggressive than Meade by far.”
Taylor grinned. “One of the prisoners we took said he had the air of a man who had made up his mind to ram his head through a stone wall. He ran up against one in the Wilderness, but he didn’t go through.”
“No, but now we shall have to go through him, and that after he has made the acquaintance of our repeaters. Any man may be taken by surprise once, but only a fool will be surprised twice, and General Grant, I fear, is not a fool.”
“What then, sir? Shall we try to outmarch him and approach Washington from the north and west, as we did last year?”
“I have been considering precisely that.” Lee said no more. His mind was not fully made up, and might change again. But if he moved straight up the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad toward Washington, Grant would have to try to block his path. Without the new repeaters, assaulting a bigger army that stood on the defensive would have been suicidally foolhardy. Lee had made it work even so, against Hooker at Chancellorsville. But the Wilderness had shown him Grant was no Hooker. Grant could be beaten; he could not be made to paralyze himself.