Caudell looked from the plums to the distant battery. The Federal artillerymen were busy at their pieces, working together with drilled precision. “Even that’s long range,” he said dubiously.
“I know it is,” Lewis said. “I wouldn’t send you out there if we still carried our old muzzle-loaders. But these repeaters let us send enough bullets their way that some are likely to hit.”
“All right, sir.” Caudell rounded up four men who’d been on the skirmish line with him. They got their extra ammunition and made for the plums. One was wounded before he got there. He staggered back to the rebel line. Caudell and the other three reached the little grove.
Up ahead, the artillerymen were still at their trade. One soldier Set ball and powder inside a Napoleon’s muzzle. Another rammed them down to the bottom of the barrel. A third jabbed a wire pick through the vent to pierce the bag that contained the powder. Still another attached primer and lanyard. That same man yanked on the lanyard and fired the piece. The fellow with the rammer swabbed it down. Back at the limber that held the ammunition chest, two more soldiers handed another bag of powder and a ball to a third, who carried them at a run to the man who loaded them into the smoothbore. The process began again.
Caudell and his comrades began to interrupt them and the other five gun crews that made up the battery. “Take your best shots,” he told the skirmishers. He and they stood behind stout tree trunks, not so much for protection as to give themselves cover. “We aren’t going to hit all the time, but we’ll do them some harm.”
A gunner went down, then another. Caudell kept firing steadily. Still another man reeled away from his cannon. A few seconds later, a rammer was hit as he ran up to the muzzle of his piece with a soaked sponge. Replacements took over for men wounded or killed. They began to fall, too.
Although the Confederates were shooting from cover, the muzzle flashes of their rifles quickly gave them away. Someone pointed toward the plums. Artillerymen leaped to a Napoleon’s handspike, began swinging the twelve-pounder toward the stand of trees. Even from half a mile, the gun’s bore, though only a bit more than four and a half inches wide, seemed a huge and deadly cavern to Caudell.
“Take out that crew!” he shouted—needlessly, for the skirmishers had already started shooting at the gunners. The corporal or sergeant who stood behind the Napoleon to gauge the range clapped a hand to his face and toppled. A rammer fell, grabbing at his leg. Another man snatched up the swab-ended. pole and carried on.
The brass cannon belched flame and a great cloud of thick white smoke. A round shot smashed a tree not twenty feet from Caudell with a noise like a giant clapping hands. The artillerymen began their drill once more. Two more of them went down before they could fire again. This time they chose a bursting shell. “My arm!” a skirmisher wailed. The Federal artillerymen stolidly resumed their appointed tasks. When yet another man was hurt, one of the drivers from the limber crew replaced him.
Another shell exploded in the grove. Fragments thumped against the trunk which sheltered Caudell. He fed bullets into a banana clip and hoped the next shell would be a dud. Federal gunners, unfortunately, used better fuses than their Southern counterparts.
But the next shell did not come. The depleted gun crews fired a last couple of shots, then rushed to attach their cannons to the limbers. Some of them snatched out pistols and began to fire them. The drivers urged teams into motion.
Four of the guns in the battery made good their escape. Caudell shouted with delight as rebels advancing from the southeast swarmed over the other two. One of those was the Napoleon that had been trying to blast his comrades and him out of the grove. “We did something worthwhile, boys!” he yelled to the other skirmishers. “We kept ‘em too busy to run till it was too late for ‘em anyhow.”
The Yankee infantry was pulling back too, north and east along the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. The black foot soldiers did not run like a frightened mob, but they did not show the same extraordinary stubbornness they had displayed earlier in the day, either; against the Confederates’ repeaters, that had only gotten more of them killed.
Caudell sent a fatigue party out to a stream not far away. He waited to eat until they came back; he wanted to boil water for a desiccated meal. Most of the Castalia Invincibles did not bother to wait. After plundering the haversacks of the black troops they’d fought, they had plenty of hardtack and salt pork. The rich smell of brewing coffee soon filled the night air around the campfires. More than a few Confederates sported new blue trousers or new shoes—more spoil from the battlefield.
“They sent them niggers out carrying’ everything but bake ovens on their backs,” Rufus Daniel said. He had a new pair of pants himself.
“Niggers.” Otis Massey spat as he said the word. “Niggers with guns. That’s what the Yankees want to do with us—goddam niggers with guns, allover the South.”
A general mutter of agreement rose from the soldiers who heard him. Dempsey Eure said, “Heard tell the Yankees’d given ‘em guns. But you give a man a gun, that don’t mean he can fight with it. Never reckoned in all my born days that if you give a nigger a gun, he’d fight the way them fellers did.”
“They’s too stupid to know they’s get tin’ whipped,” said a private named William Winstead.
More people nodded at that, but Caudell said, “You weren’t with us at Gettysburg, Bill. They’d seen what we did to their skirmish line, so they had to know they were going into the meat grinder. But they kept coming, the same way we did then. Anybody here going to tell me they didn’t fight like soldiers?”
“Only thing niggers is good for is slaves,” Winstead said positively. Again, a good many soldiers nodded along with him.
Caudell wanted to argue more. Despite questions about Georgie Ballentine, he’d always thought pretty much as Winstead did. So did most people in the South; so, for that matter, did most people in the North. But as a teacher, he’d urged his students—especially the bright ones—to test what people said about the world against the world itself. Here, what they said and what he’d seen didn’t add up the same way. The Negroes had fought as well as anyone could expect.
One of the other things he’d seen in the world, though, was that most people didn’t really want to look at it straight on. Going with what they said—whoever they were—was easier and more comfortable than trying to figure out how things truly worked.
So instead of directly challenging Winstead, Caudell shifted the argument: “I saw Billy Beddingfield kill a couple of niggers who’d surrendered. I didn’t reckon that was right—I sure as hell wouldn’t want them to kill us if we had to give up to them.”
“Any nigger comes at me with a gun, that’s a dead nigger,” Winstead said. “An’ I wouldn’t surrender to ‘em anyways, no matter what, on account of what they’d do to me if I done it.”
“Some truth in that,” Caudell had to admit. “But if they can learn to fight like soldiers, they might be able to learn to act like soldiers other ways.”
“They better,” Dempsey Eure added. “Otherwise this here war’s gonna turn even uglier’n it is already.”
“You’ve got that right, Dempsey,” Caudell said. This time, nobody disagreed. Who could deny that black men and what to do about them lay at the heart of the war between the states? The North was convinced it had the right to dictate to the South how to treat them; the South was equally convinced it already knew. Caudell wanted no part of having someone hundreds of miles away telling him what he could or couldn’t do. On the other hand, if Negroes really could fight like “white men, the South’s answers didn’t look so good, either.