Traveller

Also by Richard Adams

Watership Down

Shardik

The Plague Dogs

The Girl in a Swing

The Iron Wolf and Other Stories

Maia

TRAVEL

Voyage Through the Antarctic (with R. M. Lockley)

PICTURE BOOKS IN VERSE

The Tyger Voyage

The Ship's Cat

NATURE

Nature Through the Seasons

Nature Day and Night

(both with Max Hooper)

a novel by
Richard Adams

© 2014 Richard Adams

Richard Adams has asserted his rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Published by Watership Down Enterprises

First published and printed in 1988

First published in eBook format in 2014

ISBN: 978-1-78301-582-5

(Printed edition ISBN 0-394-57055-3)

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.

All names, characters, places, organisations, businesses and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

eBook Conversion by
www.ebookpartnership.com

Summary: Examines the events of the Civil War through the eyes of General Robert E. Lee's closest companion and devoted horse, Traveller.

1. Traveller (Horse)—Fiction. 2. United States-History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Fiction. 3. Lee, Robert E. (Robert Edward), 1807-1870—Fiction.

[1. Traveller (Horse)—Fiction. 2. Horses__Fiction. 3. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Fiction. 4. Lee, Robert E. (Robert Edward), 1807-1870—Fiction] I. Title. PR6051.D345T7 1988 823'.914 [Fic] 87-46187

To my friends
Donald and Judy Lineback

[
This Bucephalus had, in the past, shared many a hardship and many a danger with Alexander, and had never been mounted by anyone else—for he scorned all other riders; he was great in size and noble in spirit
.]

I dreamt last night that there was wind and rain.

I got up and looked out, but all was strange;

A muddy track across a wooded plain;

A distant tumult; angry cries, exchange

Of fire. And then, out of that dreadful night,

Appeared a scarecrow army, staggering,

Defiant, famished. In the quenched starlight

They marched on to their bitter reckoning.

Their sleepless, bloodshot eyes were turned to me.

Their flags hung black against the pelting sky.

Their jests and curses echoed whisperingly,

As though from long-lost years of sorrow—
Why,

You're weeping! What, then? What more did you see?

A gray man on a gray horse rode by.

Notes and Acknowledgments

Preface

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

Tom the Nipper and Baxter, the domestic cats of this story, were regarded as belonging to Mildred, Lee's youngest daughter, known in the family circle as “Life.” Lee's son, Captain Robert E. Lee, Jr., in his
Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee
, quotes a letter of the General to Mildred, dated December 21, 1866, in which he says, “Our feline companions are flourishing. Young Baxter… gives catlike evidence of future worth… and is strictly aristocratic in appearance and conduct. Tom, surnamed ‘the Nipper,' from the manner in which he slaughters our enemies, the rats and the mice, is admired for his gravity and sobriety, as well as for his strict attention to the pursuits of his race.” Captain Lee goes on to relate the story of the cat attracting attention by miaowing outside the house during a stormy night and then climbing up the crutch that the General held out of the window.

Traveller's evening chats with Tom Nipper are imagined as beginning in April, 1866, and continuing intermittently until October, 1870. In the story, most of these can be more or less dated from the daily events to which he refers. For example, we know that the mare Lucy Long was restored to the Lee ménage on December 21, 1866. Lee's riding holiday with Mildred, Traveller and Lucy Long (when the ferryman refused Lee's money) took place in late June, 1867; the whistling-back incident at the canal-boat landing happened in July of the same year, and so on.

Accounts of the injury to Lee's hands on August 31, 1862, vary in detail, but I have relied on that of Colonel Walter H. Taylor, an eyewitness, in Chapter 8 of his
General Lee, 1861-1865
.

Anecdotes of Lee and Traveller are, of course, innumerable. The books I have most enjoyed are Douglas Southall Freeman's
R-E. Lee
, the above-mentioned book by Captain R. E. Lee, Jr., and Charles Bracelen Flood's
Lee: The Last Years
. Also of value are J. William Jones's
Personal Reminiscences
, Lee's own Life and Letters and Colonel A. L. Long's Memoirs.

In particular, I acknowledge with admiration and gratitude the invaluable instruction I have received from Lucy Rees's book
The Horse's Mind
and also from her personal advice on equine matters.

On Richmond's illness I had excellent guidance from Mr. G. H. Gilbert, M.R.C.V.S.

The authenticity of Traveller's Virginian idiom I owe almost entirely to Dr. Donald J. Lineback and to Dr. William L. Tazewell.

Friends who have given encouraging support and help include particularly my editor, Bob Gottlieb; and Barrett Clark, who found me scarce source books that I could not otherwise have obtained.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to my secretary, Mrs. Elizabeth Aydon, who not only typed the manuscript most accurately but corrected and checked it in detail with admirable perception and discernment.

by Lucy Rees, author of
The Horse's Mind

Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865. On September 18th of that year, Lee, riding his horse Traveller, arrived in Lexington, Virginia, to take up the appointment of President of Washington College, which he had accepted at the invitation of the rector and trustees. From that time until Lee's death, in October, 1870, master and horse, living at Lexington, continued and, if anything, deepened the affectionate relationship they had developed during the war. Traveller died in June, 1871.

That the relationship between Lee and his horse was one of exceptional mutual trust and confidence is well documented. Lee himself wrote: “A poet… could… depict his worth and describe his endurance of toil, hunger, thirst, heat and cold, and the dangers and sufferings through which he passed. He could dilate upon his sagacity and affection and his invariable response to every wish of his rider. He might even imagine his thoughts through the long night-marches and days of battle through which he has passed.”

What Traveller felt has not been chronicled before. How legitimate is the attempt to do so? Though his experiences were extraordinary and his stamina and intelligence well above average, Traveller must have shared the basic psychology common to all horses. His fears and pleasures, his eternal hopefulness, his striving to interpret events beyond his comprehension and his convinced misunderstandings will be as be as familiar as the smell of a horse to any rider. His peculiarly equine point of view, so accurately portrayed here, is as well supported by hard fact as the historical events that surrounded it.

What may not be so familiar is the complete faith that Traveller showed in Lee, and his ability, again well documented, to interpret Lee's slightest wishes without any apparent command or coercion. Traveller's descriptions of how it felt to him and of his lack of confidence in less sensitive hands are also deeply convincing.

T
RAVELLER

Early spring, 1866. Lexington, Virginia: a small town in a rocky upland valley below the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is a lonely, remote place, difficult of access, the choice lying between a twenty-three-mile journey on a bad road from the railroad station at Goshen, and twelve hours by boat from Lynchburg along the James River and Kanawha Canal. A somewhat austere society—Presbyterian for the most part—its well-scrubbed, sober character reflected in the blue limestone streets running between red-brick houses with stone facings, plain pillars and trim cedar hedges bordering brick-paved pathways. Although it is night now, the half-moonlight is enough to reveal the indigent and dilapidated appearance of the place - chipped paintwork, ill-pointed walls, sagging gates and broken fences. The town has no bank and hardly needs one. On the ridge above it rise the smashed and grimy walls of the Virginia Military Institute, raided by the Federals two years before
.

The Washington College campus shares this general look of wear and tear. The violets are in bloom, certainly, and the leaves are already burgeoning on the trees—acacia, sweet maple, chestnut and sycamore. But there is an untended look to the lawns, the shrubs and the railings, suggesting not so much neglect as sheer shortage of money and hence of tools and human hands, black or white. The President's house, a handsome, two-storied building with sash windows and a flight of eight steps rising to a columned portico, is dark now—not a light showing—for the President encourages early nights and himself habitually goes to bed at ten. Here and there, a few students are crossing the campus on their way back to their rooms. Several look curiously mature for students; and so they are, being demobilized soldiers and, for lack of other clothes, still wearing patched and mended gray uniforms from which the insignia and badges of rank have been removed
.

A black stableman, clapping his arms for warmth—for the air is somewhat chilly—makes his way across the yard behind the big house and, his day's chores done, enters his lamplit cabin and shuts the door for the night. A slim, quick-trotting young cat, intent upon rats, slinks along a wall and into the stable by way of a drain-hole. The stable is sound and snug—one of the best-repaired buildings on the place—and not a draft disturbs the straw-bedded stall where a powerful, nine-year-old gray gelding, of superb if veteran appearance, lies sleeping. He stirs
.

The Blue men! The Blue men! They've got round behind us, they're in among those thick trees! The guns—the guns—I shall go mad! The ground's shaking! Run! Run! A horse that's afeared has to run, what else?

Pressure of Marse Robert's knees; steady hand smoothing my neck. “Easy, Traveller, easy! So, Colonel, what ought we to do?”