Silence—unhappy silence—reigned around the campfire. Prices all through the Confederacy had spiraled dizzily high. In the army, that did not matter so much: food, a little; shelter, of a sort; and clothing, sometimes, were provided. But when a man had to pay for them again…Caudell thought about laying down fifty or seventy-five dollars for a hat, when that was several months’ pay for a teacher. The farmers who made up the vast majority of the Castalia Invincibles were lucky. At least they would be able to feed themselves once they got home. He wondered how he would manage.
Someone else was thinking along with him: Dempsey Eure said, “Might could be I’ll stay in the army.”
“I only hope they’ll want to keep you,” Caudell said. That brought on another break in the talk. With peace at hand, the army would shrink drastically. Still, he doubted it would shrink to the tiny force the United States had had before the war—how could it, with such a long border to defend against those same United States? Men without prospects, men without families would want to stay in, and some might be able to.
“Wouldn’t mind another stretch myself,” Mollie Bean said. “Still and all, wouldn’t be so easy—” She let her voice trail away. Caudell understood her hesitation. Soldiering now would be garrison duty, most of it, and how could she hope to keep up her masquerade under such circumstances? On the other hand, having known the true comradeship of men, how could she go back to serving as a mere receptacle for their lusts? If she couldn’t stand that any longer, though, what could she do? All good questions, and he had answers for none of them.
Or was that so? “You know, Melvin,” he said, careful to respect her public façade of masculinity, “the better you read and cipher, the more choices you have with your life, the more different things you could do if you wanted to.”
“That’s so,” Alsie Hopkins said. “Me, I don’t know my letters from next week, so I can’t do much but farm. ‘Course, I never wanted to do much but farm, neither.”
Mollie looked thoughtful. “You’ve taught me some, Nate. I reckon I could do with more. You still carry a primer in your knapsack?”
“Two of ‘em, and a Testament, too,” he answered.
“Whip ‘em out,” she told him. Caudell dug in his knapsack, came out with a good Confederate primer: “If one Southern man can lick seven Yankees, how many Yankees can three Southern men lick?” was one of its arithmetic lessons.
“What’d she ask him to whip out?” Dempsey Eure asked. But he spoke softly, so Mollie would not hear and be hurt. Everyone in the Castalia Invincibles was fond of her. She walked over, sat down beside Caudell, and bent her head to the book.
The Orange and Alexandria Railroad was broken again north of Bealeton; the regiment had to detrain and march over the recent field of battle. The furrows plowed by shell and solid shot still tore the ground, though sprouting grass and wildflowers were beginning to repair those gashes on the green body of the earth.
“It’s like a different place now,” Rufus Daniel said. “A sight more peaceful without Yankees allover it, too.”
So many Yankees and Confederates would never leave Bealeton again. Humped-up dirt marked shallow common graves. Some of them had been dug too shallow; from one a fleshless arm protruded, the clawlike hand at the end of it reaching toward the sky. Dempsey Eure pointed. “Look at the old soldier, beggin’ for his pay!”
Caudell snorted. “And you want to stay in the army, Dempsey, so you can end up just like him?”
“We’ll all end up like him sooner or later, Nate,” Eure answered, unwontedly sober.
“There you are right, Sergeant,” Chaplain William Lacy said. “The questions that remain are the path one takes to reach that end and one’s fate thereafter.”
Eure could not stay serious long. “Preacher, if it’s all the same to you—I’d sooner take the railroad.”
A lot of chaplains would have swelled up in righteous wrath and thundered damnation at him for his flippancy. Lacy made as if to grab the AK-47 off a nearby soldier’s back and aim it at the sergeant. Laughing, Caudell said, “Go easy there, Chaplain, you’re a noncombatant.”
“A good thing you reminded me.” But Lacy was laughing, too. Laughing came easy on a bright summer’s day with the war well and truly won. No one had laughed around Bealeton back in May, no one at all.
The regiment boarded another train south of the little town. The wheezing locomotive that pulled it had served all through the war without much in the way of servicing. Nor had the rails seen enough repairs. Before the train got to Orange Court House, it went off those rails twice, dumping soldiers in wild confusion. In the second spill, one man broke an arm, another an ankle. “Hell of a thing, takin’ casualties after the fightin’s over,” Allison High said glumly.
“Could have been worse, as rickety as this line’s gotten,” Caudell answered. Both men were panting. Along with everyone else, they had shoved their car back onto the tracks by main force. Caudell contrasted this stretch of the Orange and Alexandria to the formerly Federal track and engine north of Manassas Junction. He shook his head: just another sign of the abundance of Northern resources. He wondered how long the Confederacy would need to rebuild and recover after three years of hard fighting.
The train rattled past Orange Court House, then past the 47th North Carolina’s winter quarters. Some of the huts had been burned; most of the others were torn down for their timber. Caudell watched the camp disappear behind him without regret. That had been the hungriest winter of his life.
At Gordonsville, the train swung onto the Virginia Central line for the trip down to Richmond. The roadbed was so rough that here and there Caudell’s teeth would click together as if winter’s cold had suddenly returned. “Anybody want to put some money down on how often we derail before we finally get there?” Rufus Daniel asked. The pool drew some lively action. Caudell bet on three times, and shared the pot for winning. An extra ten dollars Confederate didn’t hurt, though he would sooner have had a two-dollar Yankee greenback or, better still, two dollars in silver. He hadn’t heard the sweet jingle of coins in his pocket for a long time.
The train stopped for the night just past Atlee’s Station, a few miles north of the Confederate capital. Captain Lewis announce’d, “We’ll lay over for a day here, to let the whole Army of Northern Virginia gather. Before all the regiments head for their home states again, they’ll hold a grand review—we’ll all march through the streets and let the people cheer us.”
“I like that,” Allison High said. “Let ‘em have a good long look at the poor skinny devils who did the fightin’ for ‘em. Give ‘em somethin’ to remember, not that they will.”
Caudell waved his hand. “They may not remember us, but I expect they’ll remember our campfires glowing against the sky.” As far as the eye could see, fires flickered every few feet, thousands of fires. Caudell blinked, a bit bemused. Artists would paint this moment one day: the last bivouac of the Army of Northern Virginia.
“They should just be glad it’s our fires they’re seeing, ‘stead of the Yankees’,” Rufus Daniel said. Derisively, he hummed a few bars from the Northern “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—”I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps.” Daniel spat into the campfire. “And that for John Brown’s goddamned body, too.”
Again, the talk ran far into the night. The officers did not try to make the men go to bed. They were going home soon, too, and instead of captains and lieutenants would soon become farmers and clerks, friends and neighbors once more. No more battles lay ahead, only a triumphal parade. The discipline of the field was fading fast.
The next morning, the army woke, not to the bugle’s blare or the rattle of the snare, but to the wild bellow of steam whistles, calling the soldiers to their trains. Company by company, regiment ‘by regiment, they filed aboard. One by one, the trains puffed off toward Richmond. The one in which 47th North Carolina rode made the trip without incident, which cost Caudell the banknote he had won the day before.