Read Valley of the Shadow: A Novel Online
Authors: Ralph Peters
For all that, he knew that he would not leave the side of a man whom he counted just short of a brother.
As they lugged him along, Pendleton gasped again and again. Each suck of breath was as dreadful as a shriek.
Poor Sandie. He had to be in agony. How could a man live on with a wound like that? Would he want to?
“How bad is it, Hennie? How badly am I hit?” Pendleton asked, as if his mind had cleared, the pain abated.
“Bad enough for a pleasant leave back home. Let Kate nurse you up, impose on the family. Let them spoil you.”
“Home,” Pendleton mouthed. His mind strayed again, returning by another door. “
Must
hold them. Give the army time. Must…”
“Keep him up off the ground!” Douglas barked. He imagined Pendleton’s mutilated parts dragging in the mud.
They stumbled about, half-lost, and Pendleton swooned, either from resurgent pain or loss of blood. Douglas wanted his friend to live but wasn’t sure the sentiment was sound. Of all the wounds he had witnessed in the war, no other had shocked him so.
At last, they found the ambulance, tucked behind a shanty. The orderly and driver had disappeared, but a pair of darkies lurked, as if raising the courage to steal the mule.
Douglas stiffened his back and made the Negroes do what they did not want to do: help arrange the wounded man on one of the mounted litters and belt him down.
As they gentled Pendleton’s limbs, he cried,
“They’re running! Tell General Jackson!”
“That man shot right through,” a darkey commented.
“Shut your mouth,” Douglas told him. “Either of you know how to drive a wagon, drive it right? Run reins on a mule?”
“Sho’. But I can’t go. I belongs to Cap’n Carpenter, he’d take it harsh.”
“How about you?”
“Yassuh. I can drive a mule jus’ fine.”
“Here. Start by tying this horse to the back of the wagon.”
He turned to the soldier who had done most of the speaking. “What’s your name?”
“Grimshaw.”
“Rank?”
“Private. Nowadays. I been this and that.”
“Where’s your rifle?”
“Couldn’t carry no rifle and him, too.”
Reluctantly, Douglas drew out his revolver, a new Colt he had taken from a Yankee. “Here. That nigger tries to run away, you shoot him. Shoot anybody else who gets in your way. I’ll catch up as soon as I fetch my horse. If I don’t, you keep on straight to Woodstock or till you come up on a field surgery.” He looked at the others in the hard-washed night. “Rest of you men can walk, and count your blessings.”
September 23, 1:00 a.m.
Woodstock, the Murphy home
“No need to lie to me, Dr. Maguire,” Pendleton said. “I know I’m dying. It’s God’s will, I’m satisfied.”
“Yes,” Maguire said, “that’s about the truth of it, I can’t lie. I’ll stay with you, though. I can do that, at least. We do go back.”
“Old Jack,” Pendleton murmured. After the nightmare journey in the ambulance, he had grown lucid in this soft, warm bed. And if he held perfectly still, the pain was bearable.
“Old Jack,” the doctor echoed.
“I do believe I’ll see him. Soon.” Fighting down a spasm, he tried to joke. “I’ll give him your compliments, tell him you’ll be along. In your good time, of course.”
“You do that.”
“Doc?”
“Yes?”
“There’s one thing you can do.”
“Surely.”
“Leave, go. The army needs you. I don’t.” He attempted a smile. “Not anymore.”
He did not choose to think about his wound. But he thought about it.
“I’d prefer to stay,” his old comrade said.
Pendleton groaned. He would have jackknifed up to clutch the pain, but lacked the strength to move.
“No. You go. Please. Do that for me.”
“Sandie…”
“Don’t want the Yankees capturing Old Jack’s surgeon on my account. Probably parade you around in a medicine show.”
“You rest now. I’ll be right here.”
“Tell me you’ll go.”
“Sure you won’t take whiskey? Help the pain?”
Pendleton tried to shake his head. “Promised Kate.”
“Anything I can tell her for you? Shall I take down a letter?”
Pendleton fought to master himself, to rally his spirit. The pain was so severe, it squeezed out tears. But his confusion was past, for that he was grateful.
“Tell her … tell her it’s better so. I’ve been chosen early for that finer world, tell her we’ll meet again—”
Abruptly, he lost consciousness and disorderly visions plagued him. He was back in the ambulance, jolted and suffering pain he had never imagined, wet as a babe in diapers, but with blood. The ambulance was taking him to Chancellorsville, but it wasn’t Chancellorsville, it was Kate’s family home, beautiful in the daylight, as she was beautiful beyond measure in the daylight.
It was still raining when next he woke, still night. Candles, no oil for the lamps. Yankees starving the South of every last thing. Someone was in the room, a woman. He tried to call out to his wife but faded again.
What was the name of that yellow dog the Salters kept tied in the yard? He always had yearned to untie it, let it loose. Was this Kate’s bed, their bed? Would it ever be
their
bed? Someone had to bring up ammunition, Jackson was furious … that yellow dog …
He sensed, vaguely, that Dr. Maguire had honored his wish and gone back to the army, but the world had lost its sharpness, its boundaries, and he couldn’t be certain. Only the pain was distinct.
Dawn found Sandie Pendleton still with the living. His last hour, far beyond suffering, was spent in the company of Yankee surgeons and officers.
“The pain…,” he muttered as he woke one last time.
“Shall I give him some more, do you think?” a Northern voice asked.
“… pain’s gone,” Pendleton finished.
“More might kill him. Colonel Pendleton? Can you understand me? Is there anything at all that we can do for you?”
“My wife,” he said.
“Yes, your wife. I understand. Is she nearby? Shall we bring her to you?”
“Child.”
“Something about a child. I can’t make it out.”
He tried to lift his hand and could not.
“Colonel Pendleton, what do you want to say to this child? Or to your wife?”
“Love.”
“What are you trying to say, son? We can’t understand you.”
“Better so.”
October 3, 1864, 9:00 p.m.
Petersburg, Virginia
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Marshall rose and extended the letter.
“From Governor Smith,” the military secretary said.
“Again?”
“I’m afraid so, sir.”
“The same matter?”
“Yes, sir.”
Robert E. Lee paused short of Marshall’s desk, exasperation poisoning his eyes. Six months back, the older man would have concealed his ire.
Lips tightened, Lee took the letter. He did not sit to read it, but steered to a table lamp and drew out his spectacles. The eyeglasses, too, had appeared only of late.
Masking his glances, Marshall considered the general. It had been yet another hard, bad day, with all of Grant’s armies whittling away at the South, a wasting disease in blue. Lee’s digestion and angina had improved since the awful spring and desolate summer, but his arthritis had worsened. Lee hid his discomfort from the men, maintaining a flawless posture in the saddle, but among his closest aides his crispness wilted.
Lee muttered to himself, another new habit.
The week before, Marshall had been struck by a revelation. Riding past soldiers gaunt as the victims of famine, Lee had been received not as a general, but as a wondrous father, even a savior. That was hardly new, but amid the cheers raised from jutting Adam’s apples and starved throats, Marshall had realized that he himself no longer served out of loyalty to the Confederacy, but out of devotion to Lee. He suspected that Taylor and Venable, the other two members of the staff’s triumvirate, felt just as he did.
It was not a matter gentlemen discussed. It smacked of treason.
Yet, it was true. Experiencing Richmond’s haughty self-regard from nearby Petersburg was enough to dishearten any man. And were that squalid vanity insufficient, the way officials treated not only the hungry army but Lee himself was mortifying.
As he finished reading the letter, Lee’s hand trembled. But the general composed himself and handed back the paper, revealing a frayed sleeve, a sight once unthinkable.
“Do you wish to reply, sir?”
Lee shook his head. “Not tonight, not tonight.”
“Yes, sir.”
The older man looked drained of all vitality.
“Any other matters, Colonel Marshall?”
“Nothing pressing, sir.” There were, of course, countless matters that wanted attention, but Marshall preferred to handle them himself and let Lee rest.
The general nodded. Marshall expected Lee to leave the room, to retire to his bed in this once fine house, perhaps to ponder private woes in turn. His wife’s condition had worsened again, and Custis, his son, remained ill. On top of that, his nephew had been severely wounded at Winchester. And after contemplating his private sorrows, Lee would pray, ravaged knees on bare planks. Marshall knew him better than Lee imagined, well enough to break a decent heart.
Instead of leaving the room, Lee took a chair. His flesh seemed to sigh.
“What does the man expect me to do? Who do I have to replace Early? Who could I send?”
Governor “Extra Billy” Smith’s letter had been drafted with crimson claws.
“The governor’s faction favors General Breckinridge,” Marshall reminded him. “The soldiers are said to want Gordon.”
“Not Gordon, not yet. Too soon. As for General Breckinridge…”
Marshall knew Lee well enough not to expect the completion of the sentence. Lee did not think Breckinridge had the gift of commanding armies, not even depleted ones.
“I feel…,” Lee went on, in one of his franker moods, “I feel that Governor Smith is behaving ignobly. Command appointments cannot be undone based on our antipathies. As for factions, Colonel Marshall, ‘faction’ will be the death of this Confederacy, should the Lord ever see fit to withdraw his favor.”
“Hasn’t come to that, sir,” Marshall said. “Thanks be.”
Not listening, Lee resumed speaking: “They don’t understand Early, they refuse to see him entire. If my ‘bad old man’ is flawed, so are we all, Colonel Marshall, so are we all. Early’s done his best, I cannot doubt that. Nor am I convinced that any of our generals would have proved abler. The newspaper people do him an injustice. And the Richmond papers…”
Marshall understood what went unsaid: The newssheets were despicable and none more so than Richmond’s, accusing Early of everything from incompetence to drunkenness on the battlefield, charges against which even Breckinridge defended his sometime friend and erstwhile tormentor. Everyone assumed that Virginia’s governor lurked behind the press as well. There was a torrent of bad blood between Old Jubilee and Extra Billy.
Lee had not finished. “What angers me, Colonel Marshall, what I find unacceptable—ungentlemanly—are these anonymous allegations, these unnamed sources of information Governor Smith proclaims he’s sworn to protect. Think of it, think of it! What cowardice for a man to blacken another’s reputation, yet lack the decency to sign his name. Anonymous attacks lack even the brute assassin’s measure of courage. No man, Colonel … no man should ever malign another anonymously, the practice is contemptible.”
Marshall knew that Lee also found Virginia’s governor contemptible. And Marshall, who shared a Warrenton tie with Smith, agreed in full: Extra Billy had been a wretched officer and proved no better as an elected official. The governor was a man of endless schemes and few achievements. Lee, of course, would never voice such views, but Marshall could read his thoughts from a lifted eyebrow: Lee despised Smith. But Lee would never say as much to any man.
For his part, Marshall wished the general would confront Richmond’s iniquities and handle President Davis with less deference. Lee’s rigorous—almost ostentatious—subordination to civil authority, his unwillingness to chide even villains like Smith, threatened to lead the army into tragedy.
Lee was the last man trusted by all, yet he restricted himself to tactical questions. Marshall had begun to think it was possible to be too much of a gentleman.
“If I
had
another man, I
would
replace General Early,” Lee said abruptly. “For his own sake, to spare him all this. But not because he was gainsaid a victory, not when I have fallen short myself.” He pawed the air for invisible support. “This expectation of miracles, this pharisaic demand for impossible wonders, is as unjust as it is irreligious. General Early may be abrasive when out of temper—I grant you, I grant you—but no man has a higher sense of duty.” Lee met his assistant’s eyes. “Others talk, he fights.”
Marshall agreed with much of what Lee had to say. But he also knew it wasn’t only Smith who’d lost faith in Early. Accustomed as all were to victories in the Valley, two sharp defeats shocked soldiers and civilians, high and low. When misfortune struck, men didn’t want explanations. They wanted someone to blame.
But Lee had chosen to send Early reinforcements, all the men possible, returning Kershaw’s Division to the Valley, then dispatching Rosser and a cavalry brigade, stripping the Petersburg defenses to a dangerous degree. Even so, the reinforcements were paltry compared to Sheridan’s newly reported strength.
Lee rose, not without effort. “I will
not
blame General Early. But I do blame General Sheridan for this … this general alarm. His conduct, these … these atrocities … have no place in the affairs of civilized nations.”
Reports claimed that a man perched atop the Blue Ridge would see more fires blazing than he could count. Sheridan wasn’t making war on Early now, but on the entire Shenandoah Valley, on the people.