“That’s excellent news, sir!” Charles Marshall said. “Perhaps the tide has turned at last.”
“Perhaps it has,” Lee said. The words seemed to hang in the air, as if only now, when he spoke them aloud, did he acknowledge their truth in his heart. He’d grown so accustomed to fighting at long odds that the edge the Rivington men’s repeaters gave remained difficult to believe in completely. He read on in the dispatch: “General McCausland reports that a prisoner declared the fire from our repeaters made the battlefield appear one living, flashing sheet of flame.”
“The Daily Dispatch certainly thinks the war as good as won.” Charles Venable began to read from the newspaper he’d brought: “ ‘Our information is such as to give encouragement to the hope that the sacred soil of Virginia will soon be rescued from the hands, and divested of the polluting tread, of the Yankee invader. The great battles of the week just past, fought in the Wilderness and in and around the hamlet of Bealeton, resulted in the overthrow of the army of the Federal Government, with a loss that is perhaps unequalled in the annals of the present war. General Lee has utterly routed the force under Meade and Grant. There are no grounds upon which to question the glorious success of our arms.”
“Were wars fought in the newspapers, they would be won by both sides in the first days after they were declared,” Lee observed. “In one way, that would be as well, for it would spare a great part of the effusion of blood which accompanies warfare as it actually is. In another sense, though, newspaper chatter can be dangerous. If those responsible for actually prosecuting a war take seriously the contempt for the foe which is typical newspaper fare, they leave themselves open to a defeat for which they would have only themselves to blame.”
“But we actually do have the Federals on the run,” Venable protested.
“No one could be gladder than Ito see those people in retreat, Major,” Lee said. “But if we only drive them into the fortifications across the Potomac from Washington City, then we have gained nothing but time, and these people can make better use of time than we. They have come back from too many defeats. I want to give them a lesson sharp enough to impress itself upon even the most stolid and stubborn of their leaders.”
“What do you intend, sir?” Charles Marshall asked.
Slamming his way straight up the line of the Orange and Alexandria no longer seemed as attractive to Lee as it had before. He traced on the map the plan that had come to slow fruition in his mind. “This will require General Stuart’s cavalry to more effectively screen our forces from the enemy than was achieved in last year’s campaign, but I trust and believe he has learned that lesson by heart—and once more, the repeaters his troopers carry will aid their efforts. As for General Longstreet’s part in keeping the enemy off balance, no one, I think, could play it better; Major Marshall, if you would be so kind—?”
Marshall took out the pad on which he had drafted Lee’s general order. The leader of the Army of Northern Virginia began to frame the specific commands that would set his men in motion once more.
Andries Rhoodie’s horse came trotting up to Lee as he rode alongside the head of a long column of gray-clad troops. The Rivington man politely stayed a few feet outside the group of generals and officers with Lee and waited to be recognized. “Good morning, Mr. Rhoodie,” Lee said. He studied the way Rhoodie handled his bay gelding. “Your horsemanship has improved, sir, since I first had the pleasure of your acquaintance.”
“I’ve had a good deal of practice since then, General Lee,” Rhoodie answered. “Before I came to join your army, I’d spent little time on horseback.”
The officers with Lee concealed scornful expressions, some well, some not so well, A man who habitually rode in a buggy was hardly a man at all—and what other reason could there be for eschewing horses? Lee thought he knew the answer to that question, which to the others must have been purely rhetoricaclass="underline" by the distant year 2014, men must have discovered better means of transport than either horses or buggies. Lee wondered whether railroads ran down the center of every street in every city in the almost unimaginable time from which the Rivington man had sprung.
One day, he might ask Rhoodie about such things. The priceless knowledge that man had to hold in his head! No time now, though; no time, all too likely, until the war was done. No time for anything save the immediate till the war was done. To the immediate, then: “How may I help you today, Mr. Rhoodie?”
“I’d like to speak with you in private, General Lee, if I could,” Rhoodie said.
“Wait until I finish my business with these gentlemen, sir; then I am at your disposal,” Lee said. The staff officers took his ready acquiescence without blinking, but some of his commanders raised eyebrows. Rhoodie wore no uniform save the mottled clothing the Rivington men habitually used—who was he to deserve their chief’s sole attention? Lee gave them no chance to dwell on it: “Now, gentlemen, let’s make certain of our dispositions as we approach Middleburg…”
The division commanders and brigadiers rode off to make sure their forces conformed to the line of march Lee had spelled out. He glanced at his aides. They fell back fifteen or twenty yards. Lee nodded to Andries Rhoodie. He brought his bay up shoulder to shoulder with Traveller.
“And what can I do for you, sir?” Lee asked.
Rhoodie’s answer took him by surprise: “You can rescind your general order for treating captured kaffirs—niggers—like white prisoners of war. Not only that, General Lee, you can do it immediately.”
“I shall not, nor, let me remind you, have you the right to take a tone of command to me, sir,” Lee said coldly. “Common humanity forbids it, not only in regard to our treatment of the Federals’ colored troops, but also in that the Federals have promised to mistreat the prisoners they hold to the same degree to which we maliciously harm their men.”
“You go about giving the nigger equality in anyone way, General Lee, and you set foot on the path to making him equal in all ways.” Rhoodie sounded less peremptory than he had a moment before, but no less serious. “That is not what America Will Break stands for, General. If you don’t care to bear that in mind, we don’t care to keep providing you with ammunition.”
Lee swung his head around to stare at the Rivington man. Rhoodie’s smile was less than pleasant. Lee nodded slowly. Having wondered if this moment would ever come, he was the more ready for it now that it was here. He said, “If President Davis ordered me to do such a thing, sir, I should present him with my resignation on the spot. To you, I shall merely repeat what I said a moment before: no.” He urged Traveller up to a trot to leave Rhoodie behind.
Rhoodie stayed with him; he was a better rider than he had been. He said, “Think carefully about your decision, General. Remember what will happen to the Confederacy without our repeaters.”
“I remember what you said,” Lee answered with a shrug. “I have no way of verifying it for myself, save by living up to the days I bid you remember that, if our cause should fail, yours fails as well. You must act as your conscience dictates, Mr. Rhoodie, as shall I.”
Now it was Rhoodie’s turn to stare at Lee. “You would sacrifice your precious Virginia for the sake of kaffirs who were doing their best to kill your own men?”