Recalled to himself, Lee started slightly. His fist came down on Traveller’s saddle, hard enough that the horse let out a startled snort. His eyes were still on Arlington. “Too bad,” he said. “Too bad! Oh, too bad!”
He climbed aboard Traveller and rode away. He supposed his staff officers followed, for they were there when he needed them again. But he did not look back.
The train puffed into Manassas Junction, jerked to a noisy stop. The thick black smoke that blew back into every car smelled strange, wrong to Nate Caudelclass="underline" the engine was a big, coal-burning brute, newly captured from the Yankees, not wood-fueled like the locomotives the Confederacy had been using.
“All out, boys,” Captain Lewis called. “We’ve got more marching to do.” The men of Company D rose, and part of Company E with them. After the fighting from the Wilderness to Washington City, a single passenger coach was more than enough to hold a company.
As she stepped down from the train, Mollie Bean said, “Smoothest railroading trip I ever took.”
“No wonder,” Caudell said, crunching down onto gravel beside her. “This stretch of the Orange and Alexandria stayed in Federal hands up till the very end of the war. They didn’t have to make their trains run on patches and prayers the way we did.” He stretched till something crackled in his back. His seat had been too hard and too upright: He supposed he should count himself lucky all the same. Some Confederates were coming south on freight cars.
“Don’t just stand there,” Captain Lewis said sharply. “Form by squads. I want you to look smart.”
The company lined up behind the Castalia Invincibles banner, which now more nearly resembled a lace doily than a proper flag, so many bullets and shell fragments having pierced it in the late campaign. Its polished mahogany staff was new, however, as was the gilded eagle atop that staff. The men had clubbed together to buy them in Washington. A Minié ball had snapped the old staff in the fighting near Fort Stevens.
Two squad leaders were also new. Edwin Powell had taken a fourth wound outside Washington City. From this one, unlike the others, he would not rejoin Confederate service; it cost him his left arm. And Otis Massey went into the trenches around the Federal capital, but he never came out again. Two veteran privates, Bill Griffin and Burton Winstead, took their places. For that matter, Captain Thorp of the Chicora Guards headed the regiment; a leg wound had laid up Colonel Faribault.
Bill Smith and Marcellus Joyner, the surviving regimental musicians, got the 47th North Carolina moving. Some people cheered as they marched through Manassas Junction. Some just stood and watched, their faces expressionless. The Yankees had held the town for most of the war; by the look of them, a good many local shopkeepers hadn’t let that stop them from getting fat. Almost everyone seemed better fed than the victorious soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia.
The men tramped southwest down the line of the railroad. They’d gone less than a mile before Caudell whistled softly. “When the Yankees set out to tear up a train track, they didn’t fool around, did they?” he said softly.
“Nope,” Dempsey Eure agreed, surveying the line with a critical eye. “That there’s what I call wreckin’ with a vengeance.”
Railroads were prime targets for soldiers North and South all through the war. Locomotives hauled more men and supplies faster than they could move any other way. Wrecking the enemy’s tracks was one of the best ways to keep him from doing what he wanted to do. Here the Federals had torn up a ten-mile stretch of their own track to keep the Confederates from using the line against them after the battle of Bealeton.
Burning ties, uprooting rails, heating them in the flames, and then bending them—that was all part of the game. But the Yankees had gone a step farther. Somehow they’d not just bent the rails they’d taken up, but twisted them into corkscrews that lay in the tall grass and shrubs as if discarded there by giants.
When Caudell spoke that conceit aloud, Dempsey Eure said, “Wish I had me the bottle them giants was openin’ with corkscrews that size. Reckon I could put walls inside an’ live like it was a plantation house. There’d be room and to spare, that’s certain.”
“I just wonder how long it’ll be till this stretch gets rebuilt,” Caudell said. “But for Tredegar Iron Works, the South doesn’t have any place that rolls track, and a godawful lot of it’s been ruined.”
Dempsey Eure worried less over the state of the Confederacy’s railroads than that Caudell hadn’t cared for his joke. Snapping his fingers in annoyance, he said, “Your fret tin’ over things bigger’n you ain’t gonna change ‘em none.”
Since that was true, Caudell didn’t answer. Neither did he stop worrying. Night was falling by the time the 47th North Carolina reached Catlett’s Station, where the railroad became functional once more. The regiment camped outside. the little town.
Not everything flammable had been burned. A tumbledown barn furnished wood for campfires. Caudell reflected that one day soon the army would have to give over its free and easy ways of destruction; that barn had undoubtedly belonged to a citizen of Virginia. Caudell hoped he was a Union man, but whether or no, his property was going up in flames.
Soldiers gathered round the fires, boiling coffee, toasting hardtacks, cooking up stews with salt pork and desiccated vegetables. Caudell ate till he was full, filled his tin coffee cup three times. He’d started getting used to a full belly again, after so long living on less. He suspected the vast supply dumps in and around Washington City could have fed the entire Confederate nation, not just the Army of Northern Virginia. The soldiers were still enjoying captured Yankee rations.
He stuck a twig into the flames, used its lighted end to get a cigar going. He held the flavorful smoke in his mouth a long time, savoring it; it went so well with real coffee. He tried to blow a smoke ring when he let it out, but it emerged in a ragged cloud. He lay back on his elbows with a smile. Failing usually annoyed him, but not tonight.
“Get you somethin’ more to eat, Nate?” Mollie Bean said, standing. “I could use a bit more myself.”
“No thanks…Melvin. I’ve had plenty. There was so much of everything up in Washington that I sometimes wonder why the North ever wanted us back. Seems they had a-plenty just by themselves.”
That drew mutters of agreement from everyone who heard it. Allison High said, “Without our new rifles, reckon the Yankees might’ve wore us down in the end. Like Nate says, they had them a heap more of everything else.”
“You always were a gloomy cuss, Allison,” William Winstead said. “We’d’ve licked ‘em no matter what kind of guns we was totin’. We’s tougher’n they are.”
“They were plenty tough enough, Bill,” Caudell put in, and again no one said no.” And there were always an awful lot more of them than there were of us. I’m just awfully happy I had myself a repeater.”
“That’s so, Nate; can’t argue it,” Winstead said. “I’m going to see if I can’t sneak mine back with me down to the farm. It’d make a better huntin’ gun than the one I got, so long as I can keep it in cartridges.”
“You got that straight, Bill,” said Kennel Tant, another farmer. “Ain’t lookin’ forward to a one-shot muzzle-loader again, no indeed.”
“The guns and cartridges come out of Rivington, for heaven’s sake,” Caudell said. “That’s not a long trip for any of us. I expect we’ll be able to buy more ammunition there.”
“That’ll take gettin’ used to, havin’ to buy cartridges again,” Allison High said. He paused, his long, gloomy features visibly souring further. “Wonder what them Rivington men’ll charge for ‘em.”