“Come on, you Invincibles!” First Lieutenant Willie Blount shouted. “Keep it moving! Plenty more behind us, by God.”
Caudell and the other sergeants echoed the command. They and their men crossed the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal—which ran parallel to the Potomac—on a makeshift bridge the army engineers had thrown across at a lock. A cavalryman sat his horse at a crossroads not far past the canal. Rain dripped from his horse’s mane and tail, from the brim of his hat, from the end of his nose. He used his saber to wave everyone south.
After a couple of miles, the road branched again. This time, several horsemen waited at the fork. “Whose division?” one of them called.
“General Heth’s,” Caudell answered, along with several other men.
The rider held out a gloved hand to shield a list from the downpour. After he checked it, he pointed southeast rather than due south. “y’all are on the road to Rockville—fifteen miles, maybe a tad more. Give it all you can. You’re supposed to be there by sundown.”
The fellow was too obviously an officer to make laughing in his face a good idea, but Caudell felt like it. Nor was he the only one; snorts and half-stifled guffaws rose from the throats of a good many safely anonymous privates trudging along in line. The 47th North Carolina had crossed the Potomac a little before noon; it had to be after that hour now. Fifteen miles by sunset was forced-march speed, but might have been possible on a dry road. In mud, it was not going to happen.
“We’ll do our best,” Caudell said. The horseman waved an acknowledgment. He didn’t repeat the order, so he probably knew it couldn’t be carried out.
Caudell marched on. While Maryland was not flowing with milk and honey, it also hadn’t been a continual battleground. The foraging looked good. General Lee’s orders required any requisitioned goods to be paid for with Confederate money. With the Confederate dollar worth only a few cents in gold, Caudell did not mind throwing away some paper if that meant he could take what he needed.
The regiment did not make Rockville by the time darkness fell. Instead of marching on through the night, Colonel Faribault pulled his men off the road to camp in a wheat field. “I’ll be glad for a little sleep,” Caudell said, relief in his voice, as he struggled to get a campfire going with damp fuel, and water still drizzling down from the sky. “Fancy-pants officers with their suede gloves can order you to march to hell and gone, but they don’t know anything about what it’s like to fight once you’ve got there.”
“Y’all got that one right, Nate,” Allison High said. “Here, you want to take a burnin’ branch from me? I got this here fire goin’ pretty good, even if it is smoky enough for a smudge.”
“Thanks, Allison.” With the help of the branch, Caudell’s fire finally caught. It too put out a great cloud of greasy black smoke. “If this were daylight, I reckon the Yankees in Washington City would figure we were burning Rockville, from all the smoke we’re making.”
“Hell with Rockville.” Tall and lean, the firelight reflecting redly from his eyes, High resembled nothing so much as a leading wolf in a pack closing in on prey. “If I’m to do some burnin’, let me do it in Washington City. That’d be a burnin’ to remember, an’ a foragin’ we’d never forget. What do you want to bet Marse Robert’s right now cypherin’ out how to do it?”
“No bet, Allison. He can’t be doing anything else, not with us in Maryland.” The mere thought of foraging in the vast Federal supply depots by Washington made Caudell breathe hard. But taking the Northern capital would mean more than that. “If we take Washington, the war’s as good as won.”
“Wouldn’t that be somethin’?” Allison High said dreamily. He looked south and east, as if he could pierce rain and night and close to twenty miles’ distance to see the White House and Abraham Lincoln cowering inside it.
Caudell feared that Lincoln wasn’t cowering. “There’s forts all around the place, they say.” Attacking the field works on Cemetery Ridge left him leery of moving against positions prepared years in advance and filled with guns bigger than any that could keep up with an army on the move.
But High, so often gloomy like the current weather, was for once nothing but sunshine. “Yeah, there’s forts, but where’s old Abe gonna find the men to put in ‘em? Only Federals in the whole world can fight a little bit is in the Army of the Potomac, an’ that’s on account of they learned from us. Longstreet’s givin’ Grant hell down the other side of the Potomac, an’ we’ll surely whip any greenhorns the Yankees stick in those works o’ theirs.”
“Hope you’re right, Allison.” Caudell glanced fondly at his AK-47. Without the repeaters, how could Lee have dared to attack Grant’s whole army with one ‘undersized corps? Even with them, the first sergeant could not imagine Longstreet defeating the immense Army of the Potomac. But if he could keep the Federals in play, offer threat enough to prevent them from filling the trenches in front of Lee’s men elbow to elbow with men in blue coats…if he could do that, Nate Caudell had some hope of going home to Nash County once the war ended. If Longstreet failed, Caudell would be lucky if his name was written in pencil on a piece of board above the shallow grave that would hold him.
He wrapped his rubber blanket around himself to hold mud and rain at bay. His worries were not enough to keep him awake, not after the marching and fighting he’d been through. He slept like a stone.
When he awoke before dawn the next morning, shots were coming from Rockville, the thunder of field artillery every so often braying through crackling rifle fire. He gnawed on corn bread. A weevil crunched between his teeth. He ignored it and finished the small square loaf. He was still chewing when the 47th North Carolina moved out.
As he drew closer to the fighting, he recognized the reports of the Federal rifles ahead; he’d heard their like in the first hours of fighting in the Wilderness. “Sounds like dismounted Yankee cavalry with those seven-shot Spencers of theirs,” he said. “That could be trouble. Those are about the best rifles they have.”
“There ain’t enough dismounted cavalry in the whole goddam United States Army to slow us down,” Rufus Daniel said, “not with these here guns in our hands.”
He was right. The Federals fought briskly, but by the time the 47th North Carolina came up to Rockville, they had already been driven out of town. Confederate cannon had knocked down some of the houses; a couple of them were burning as Caudell marched past. A dead bluecoat lay in the street. Another one hung limply from a window of the Hungerford Tavern. His blood ran down the wall, collected in a puddle under him. Not far away sprawled a rebel in butternut, equally dead.
Yankee field artillery was still in business south of Rockville, throwing shells into the town to slow the Confederate advance. Caudell ducked involuntarily as a projectile screamed by overhead and landed with a crash behind him. A moment later, human screams joined the shell’s mindless shrieks; that one had struck home.
But the Federal field guns could not hold their positions, not after the dismounted cavalrymen who protected them had been driven out of Rockville. They limbered up and rolled off. As Caudell watched, two horses in one team went down. The drivers cut them out of harness. The bronze Napoleon limped away, hauled by the four animals left to the team.
The dismounted Federals kept up a stubborn rearguard action, fighting from behind boulders, apple trees, and farmhouses to let the cannon make good their escape. Nor were the guns alone in their flight from the Army of Northern Virginia. Wagons and carriages of every description filled the road that led to Washington.