At last they came to the dry, brown dirt road down which Jackson was leading his men, three regiments of Virginians, the 2nd, 27th, and 33rd. The boys hurried on in pursuit. The dust from the tramping brigade hung in the air, rising up above the men like their own personal dust storm, and the Paine boys felt it stick to their faces and clog noses and chafe throats as they pressed on. They had come about a mile, and had three more to go to get where the fighting was.
Along the route of the march they encountered men who had fallen out, some from Jackson ’s brigade and others from the 2nd and 3rd Brigades of the Army of the Shenandoah, which had come before. Some sat and some lay passed out, perhaps dead, from the heat. Some leaned on their guns and watched with no interest as the boys hurried past. Occasionally one would call out to them for water, but they had no water to spare, and even if they had, they would not have shared it. They had no interest in beats who had dropped out of the fight when they were so eager to get into it.
They marched on in silence for as long as they could, and then, by tacit consent, stopped and had a drink of hot, silty water.
“Reckon we’re catching them up,” Nathaniel huffed. His face was a worrisome shade of red, his hair plastered to his forehead, wet as if he had just come from a swim.
Jonathan just nodded, not ready to speak. He looked up the road. The tail end of the brigade did appear closer. Hard and conditioned as Jackson’s troops might have been, a brigade on the march could not move as fast as two motivated and well-rested young men.
“It would be an unhappy irony,” Jonathan gasped at last, “if we was to die of the heat just before we get to tangle with them bluebellies.”
Nathaniel nodded. With his mouth hanging open and his eyes glazed he looked remarkably like a dead fish. “Let’s move it out,” he said, and the boys shouldered their rifles and headed off again on the double quick.
They could not see the fighting, but still they were in no doubt that the battle was joined, and the fighting was hot and intense. Beyond the low, rolling hills, the lines of forest that ended abruptly where the farmers’ fields began, they could hear the gunfire. It was not the burst of fire, followed by quiet, that they had heard the day before, as skirmishers and pickets felt each other out. This was a blanket of noise, a mosaic of noise, a single whole made up of thousands and thousands of tiny parts.
And through the wall of sound, the big guns blasted away like kettledrums punctuating the lighter melody. The clouds of smoke rose in the still air, great banks of gray, roiling smoke, rising up from behind the patchwork hill and settling in a thick layer.
On the road ahead of them was a house, a big, imposing affair with massive brick chimneys on either side. But Jackson’s brigade had turned off the road and was now making its way across open fields and up the slope of a hill—what appeared to be the final hill—between them and the great battle of the war.
“I swear…” Nathaniel said, “I swear, I expect to see them Yankees come swarming up over that crest, any second now.”
“Well, we still got the Virginians between us and them, if they do.”
They tramped on, heads down, through a patch of piney wood. The shade of the trees was a relief from the sun. And then they broke out and Jonathan said, “Lookee here, brother.” Jackson’s brigade had nearly reached the crest of a hill and stopped. Mounted officers were riding in the front of the battalion, spreading the men out into a line of battle, until the serpentine mass of troops, marching toward the fight, was now a wall of men, poised just below the high ground, ready to sweep forward.
“Come on!” Nathaniel said, quickening his pace, and Jonathan did likewise. Jackson’s men were spread along the rise, the far end disappearing into a tangle of scrub and trees. If 1st Brigade was going forward, the boys did not want to miss it. They were no more than a couple hundred feet behind the line when Jackson’s men did the one thing they would not have expected. They lay down.
“Now what in hell? They having a little nooning?” Jonathan huffed.
“Beats me.”
The two boys quickly covered the distance, came up with the troops near the crest of the hill, spread out over a thousand feet of hilltop and packed tight. They found a gap in the line into which they stepped and fell to the ground with the others. For some time they did nothing, just lay there and gulped air, grateful to be done with marching.
Overhead, the shells screamed by, nearly deafening as they passed, the bullets whipped by with a wild buzzing sound, so it seemed as if there was a great current of flying metal just feet above them, as if, were they to stand, they would instantly be caught in the maelstrom and hurled clear down the hill, carried away on the riptide of artillery and rifle fire.
At last Jonathan rolled over, propped himself up on his elbows, turned to the soldier on his right-hand side. “Say, pard, what’s going on here? What’re y’all doin?”
The soldier looked at Jonathan, said nothing, just chewed a stalk of grass he held in his teeth. He did not look like the men of the 18th Mississippi looked. He looked more like what a soldier should look like, by Jonathan’s lights. He was lean to the point of looking unwell, but there was a hardness in his gaunt face, an unhurried professionalism in his demeanor. His uniform, such that it was, was torn in some places and patched in others. His kepi had a dark and permanent sweat stain an inch high all around. The butt of his gun was chipped and the finish nearly worn off, but the metal gleamed in a way that spoke of the care the weapon received.
At last the soldier spoke, as unhurried as if he was leaning on a rail fence, talking with his neighbor of a summer evening. “We’re layin down,” he said.
Jonathan nodded. “Why are we laying down? Isn’t there a battle going on over there?” Jonathan nodded toward the crest of the hill.
The soldier considered him for a minute more. His eyes wandered over Jonathan’s uniform. “Where the hell you come from?”
“Eighteenth Mississippi. We were down at McLean’s Ford.”
The soldier sat up on his elbow, looked back down the hill, toward the woods. He looked back at Jonathan. “Where’s the rest of your regiment?”
“Back at McLean’s Ford, I reckon. My brother and I, we didn’t want to miss the fight.”
The soldier nodded. “Y’all ain’t seen the elephant yet?”
“No. And now we’re just laying down. What does a fella have to do to kill a few Yankees around here?”
The soldier smiled at some private joke. “Don’t you worry, young Mississippi. You want fighting, you come to the right goddamned place.” Then his expression seemed to soften a bit, and he said, “Say, you got any water in that canteen?”
“Some.” Jonathan struggled out of the strap, handed the canteen over. “It’s half mud.”
“No matter. Hour ago I was drinking out of a hoofprint, and glad for it.” The soldier took a couple of swallows, with evident pleasure, and handed the rest back.
Jonathan looked to his left. Nathaniel was lying on his back, looking up at the artillery screaming overhead. Somewhere down the line to their right, a Confederate battery was returning fire. They could feel the concussion of the heavy guns going off, feel the rumble in the ground.
“I sure as hell would like to know what was going on in the front there,” Nathaniel said.
Jonathan looked up at the crest of the hill, twenty feet away. He could see nothing but blue sky through the tall, coarse brown grass, and the black streaks of shells screaming past.
Let’s go have us a look. He thought the words, almost spoke them, but checked himself. He was having doubts about this whole thing, now. It was bad enough that he might have made a grand mistake with his own skin, but he had got Nathaniel in on this as well. He felt a flush of guilt for having once again lured his brother into some mischief.