Notes

"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." Silence-unhappy silencereigned
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 Eurc 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
facade 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."
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"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 wild-flowers 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 all over 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.
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"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
Ma-nassas 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 snared the pot for winning. An extra ten
dollars Confederate didn't hurt, though he would sooner have had a twodollar
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 Alice's Station, a few miles north of
the Confederate capital. Captain Lewis announced, "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. Shouting officers in impossibly clean
uniforms did their best to maintain order as the troops disembarked at the
wooden shed which served as the Virginia Central depot. They pointed
northwest up Broad Street: Page 146
"Go on, go on! No, not you, sir! Wait your turn, if you please. Now go!"
"Come on, boys," Captain Lewis yelled. "Just like we were back at old
Camp Mangum-let's show these Richmond ladies how we can march."
There was a stratagem nicely calculated to get the best from the Castalia
Invincibles, Caudell thought-but then, Lewis had always had that knack.
Bands blared as the assembled soldiers marched up Broad Street, blasting
out tunes like "The Battle Cry of Freedom," "When Johnny Comes
Marching Home," and "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp! The Boys Are Marching."
The sidewalks were packed with people wearing their holiday best, ladies in
hoop skirts and bonnets and lace, men with stovepipe hats that interfered
with the view of those behind them. Some waved small flags: the Stainless
Banner, the earlier Stars and Bars, and Confederate battle flags of every
description. Red, white, and blue bunting decorated every building, as did
garlands of bright summer flowers.
The railroad tracks that ran down the center of Broad Street made Caudell
careful about where he put his feet; the last thing he wanted was to stumble
in front of such an enormous audience. A man who fell here might not live
it down for the rest of his life, not with so many witnesses from his own
county to keep bringing it up and reminding him about it.
Because he worried more about his marching than where he was, Caudell
hardly looked up for the first several blocks of the grand review. When he
did, the 47th North Carolina was tramping past the First African Baptist
Church, at the northeast corner of Broad and College. The large, sprawling
building had a slate roof, no spire, and a low iron fence and gate all around
it.
Despite the church's name, Caudell saw no Africans in front of it. The
thought made him pay more attention to the crowd. Richmond had a goodsized
Negro population, most slave, a few free, but he spied hardly any
colored faces. A few grinning pickaninnies gaped at the parade; that was
all. The black folk of Richmond, he suspected, would sooner have come out
for a parade of bluecoats through their city's streets.
Across the street from the African Baptist Church was the Old Monumental
Church, a two-story building in the classic style, surmounted by a low dome
and fenced with stone below and iron bars above. Streamers ran from tree
to tree in front of the fence; small boys perched in the trees and cheered the
passing soldiers. Caudell reached up to wave his hat to them, then jerked
down his hand, feeling foolish-he still hadn't replaced that old felt he'd lost
in the Wilderness. Capitol Square was just a short block south of Broad
Street, but the bulk first of the Powhatan Hotel and then of Richmond's city
hall kept Caudell from seeing as much of it as he would have liked. Across
the street from the hotel stood the almost equally massive Greek Revival
pile of the First Baptist Church.
"Eyes-left!" Captain Lewis said. Caudell's head twisted as if on clockwork.
Just past the city hall-a building as severely Hellenic as the church-was a
reviewing stand. On it stood President Davis, tall and supremely erect.
Beside him, in a coat much too large for his slim frame, was his Vice
President, Alexander Stephens. Stephens, hardly bigger than a boy of
fourteen, looked pale and unhealthy, and seemed to be holding himself
upright by main force of will.
Other civilian dignitaries-congressmen, judges, Cabinet members, what
have you-crowded the reviewing stand, but Caudell had eyes only for two
gray suits in the midst of the black. Just below Jefferson Davis stood
General Lee, his hat off in salute to the soldiers marching past. Another,
older man in fancy uniform, a man with a high forehead, rather foxy
features, side whiskers, and an elegant imperial of mixed brown and gray,
was a couple of people away from Lee.
Page 147
"That's Joe Johnston," Caudell exclaimed, pointing.
"By God, you're right," Rufus Daniel said. "Is the Army of Tennessee here,
too, then?"
"Damned if I know," Caudell answered. "There was so much confusion at
the train station that the Army of the Potomac might be marching along
behind us, and we'd never know it." All he could see of the parade was the
couple of companies ahead of the Castalia Invincibles and, twisting his
neck, the company right behind.
Rufus Daniel barked out a couple of syllables of laughter. "Reckon we'd
find out right quick if there was bluebellies back there." Just for a moment,
his left hand slid to the sling of his AK-47. Caudell grinned and nodded. He
was home from Washington City; the only Federal soldiers to have reached
Richmond arrived as prisoners of war.
The 47th North Carolina passed the reviewing stand and the Broad Street
Methodist Church with its immensely tall spire. On down Broad Street they
marched. As Captain Lewis had asked of them, they did the memory of
their Camp Mangum days proud, keeping their alignment and distance from
one another with an ease that bespoke their two years of practice in the
field. Their step was smooth and elastic, the swinging of their arms as
steady as the beat of a pendulum.
A middle-aged woman threw a bunch of purple daisies. Caudell caught it
out of the air. If he'd had a hat, he would have put it in the band; Dempsey
Eure wore bright buttercups along with his turkey feather. Since he was
bareheaded, Caudell reached over his shoulder and stuck the stems into the
barrel of his rifle. The woman clapped her hands.
Thus ornamented, Caudell made his way past the depot of the Richmond,
Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad and, a block farther on, the new and
impressive Richmond Theater, with its pilasters reaching from the second
floor almost to the top of the building. The railroad tracks continued down
the middle of the street for close to another twenty blocks before they
swung north toward the destinations the train line's name promised.
The crowds began to thin out by the time the tracks left Broad Street: that
was at the very edge of town. Provost marshals waved the men on. "Out to
Camp Lee!" they shouted, pointing north and west. Caudell marched with a
fresh will: where better to end the grand review than a camp named for the
South's grandest soldier?
The broad green expanse of Camp Lee lay about a mile beyond the point
where Richmond's buildings stopped. Another tall reviewing stand, its
boards still white and new, stood at the western edge of the lawn. A big
Confederate flag on an even taller pole flew beside it. In front of it were
other banners mostly of red, white, and blue: captured Federal battle flags.
Caudell puffed up with pride when he saw how many there were.
"Hill's corps, Heth's division?" a provost marshal said. " Y'all go this way."
Along with the other units in Henry Heth's division, the 47th North
Carolina went this way. Caudell found himself off to the left of the
reviewing stand, but close enough to the front that he might be able to hear
at least some of what a speaker on that stand had to say.
Before any speaker spoke, though, the grounds had to fill. Turning his head
this way and that, Caudell saw the whole Army of Northern Virginia
arrayed to the left of the reviewing stand, Hill's corps, Ewell's, and
Longstreet's, too. Then a provost marshal bellowed, "Bishop Folk's corps?
Over here." Sure Page 148
enough, the Army of Tennessee had also come to Richmond to join the
review.
"Who cares?" Allison High said. "Just means we have to stand here twice as
long while they get wherever they're supposed to go."
It wasn't quite twice as long, for only part of the Army of Tennessee seemed
to be here after all. The rest of it, Caudell supposed, was likely to be in
Tennessee, reclaiming land that had been under the Federal thumb for most
of the war. Even so, the sun had sunk low in the northwest-and, from where
Caudell stood, almost directly behind the reviewing stand-when Jefferson
Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Joe Johnston rode down the aisle between the
Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee. The two armies
shouted themselves hoarse, each trying to outcheer the other. The Army of
Northern Virginia outnumbered its rival and so had the better of that
contest. The President and his generals waved from horseback,
acknowledging the salute. The three men ascended the reviewing stand
together. Quiet came slowly and incompletely. The lean, hard soldiers who
had done so much, endured so much behind their tattered battle flags, were
not the sort from whom to expect perfect discipline or perfect courtesy. Lee
and Johnston understood that. They had stopped a couple of steps below
President Davis. Now they bowed, first to each other and then up to him.
His answering bow, deeper than theirs, went not to them, but straight out to
the soldiers they had led. The men raised another cheer. Their high, shrill
war cries split the air.
"We shall hear the rebel yell no more," Davis said, which brought fresh
outcries and shouts of No! He held up a hand. "We shall hear the rebel yell
no more, for we are not rebels, nor have we ever been. We are free and
independent Southern men, with our native Southern yell-" The President
could not go on after that for some time. Caudell yelled at the top of his
lungs but could not hear his own shout, for the cries of the two great
Confederate armies rolled through his head, loud as the noise of the
battlefield. His ears rang when the cheering finally faded away, and fresh
yips and yowls kept breaking out somewhere in the assembled hosts every
few minutes.
As a result, he heard Davis's speech not as a complete and polished oration,
but as a series of disjointed phrases, a sentence here, a paragraph there: "We
showed ourselves worthy of the inheritance bequeathed us by the patriots of
the Revolution; we emulated that heroic devotion which made reverse to
them but the crucible in which their patriotism was refined." "-our highspirited
and gallant soldiers-" "I congratulate you on the series of brilliant
victories which, under the favor of Divine Providence, you have won, and,
as the President of the Confederate States, do heartily tender to you the
thanks of the country whose just cause you have so skillfully and heroically
served." "-driven the invader from your soil and wrung from an
unscrupulous foe the recognition of your birthright, community
independence. You have given assurance to the friends of constitutional
liberty of our final triumph in the struggle against despotic usurpation."
Repeated cheers rose as long as President Davis praised the soldiers before
him. He did not content himself with that, however, but went on to speak of
the Confederacy in the abstract: "After the war of the Revolution, the
several states were each by name recognized to be independent. But the
North willfully broke the compact between the independent states and
claimed its government to be, not such a compact, but set up over and
above the states, perverting it into a machine for their control in domestic
affairs. The creature was exalted above its creators, the principals made
subordinate to the agent appointed by themselves. Thus our states dissolved
their connections with the others, and thus our glorious Confederacy was
born."