The next afternoon, Charles fought dismounted from behind hastily built earthworks on one side of the Virginia Central tracks. He and Jim were back with Butler's troopers. Across the tracks, Sheridan's cavalry formed and advanced on foot while brass instruments dinned "Garryowen."
"D'ja ever hear such noise?" Jim shouted, ducking at the whiz of a Minié ball not far above him. He wasn't referring to the gunfire.
"Little Phil always orders up plenty of music," Charles replied, emptying his revolver at the enemy, then crouching down to reload. "They say he does it to drown out the rebel yells."
Flinging himself up to the fence rails topping the earthworks, he steadied his revolver with both hands, aimed, and slowly squeezed off two shots. A boy in blue crumpled on the tracks.
With a grunt expressing satisfaction, Charles hunted his next target.
"This here's got to be the most tuneful war anybody ever fought," Jim observed. "One thing — it sure ain't the kind of war I expected."
Beyond his gunsight, Charles saw a spectral springtime road where natty gentlemen soldiers trotted their matched bays in smart formation. "It isn't what anybody expected," he said, and blew a hole in another youngster's leg. He found he shot with greater accuracy if he considered the Yanks just so many animated clay targets in a gallery.
On they came, gamely firing carbines braced against their hips. The last assault took place near sunset. When it was repulsed, Sheridan withdrew his men from battle. They began slipping away toward the North Anna during the night. Charles and the other scouts were in the van of the pursuit. Thus they were the ones who discovered the scene of horror.
Jim came upon it first, near an abandoned federal campsite. He galloped to find Charles, told him what he had found. Then, before he could lean out far enough, he threw up all over his own shotgun, saddle, and surprised horse.
Charles rode into the sunny pasture, smelling the slaughter before he saw it. He heard it, too — carrion birds flapping in the weeds, an orchestra of thousands of flies. A couple of minutes later, his mouth set, he turned Sport's head and trotted the starved-looking gray toward the general's temporary headquarters.
Hampton, ever the gentleman, broke that characteristic attitude as he rode bareheaded to the site. The breeze lifted his beard while he stared at the fantastic sculptures of fly-covered horses heaped upon one another.
"Have you counted?" he whispered.
"There are so many of them, so close together, it's hard, General. I figure eighty or ninety, minimum. Jim found as many or more over there near those trees. I searched for wounds — other than those made by the bullets that killed them, I mean — for as long as I could stomach it. I didn't find any. The Yanks must have decided a horse herd would slow down the retreat."
"I've shot injured horses but never foundering ones. To kill fine animals wantonly is even worse. It's a sin."
And no sin to chain a nigra? Aloud, his response was, "Yes, sir."
"Goddamn them," Hampton said.
But as Charles gazed at what men had done and considered what he had become, he felt the general was a mite late with his request. God had already done a pretty good job on most of the population.
Cold Harbor rattled the windowpanes of Richmond again. At night Orry and Madeline lay with their arms around each other, unable to sleep because of the guns.
They had heard them earlier, in May, when Butler pushed up the James to within seven miles of the city. They heard them again on the stifling June nights in the wake of Cold Harbor. Now the fighting raged at Petersburg. After four fruitless days of trying to overcome the fortifications on the old Dimmock Line around the town, the Army of the Potomac halted its attack and settled down to besiege Petersburg instead.
"Lee always said that once the siege starts, we're finished," Orry told Madeline. "If they want, the Federals can keep bringing men and supplies through the river base at City Point till the end of the century. We'll have to capitulate."
"A long time ago, Cooper said it was inevitable, didn't he?"
"Cooper was right," he murmured, and kissed her.
Everywhere, Orry saw signs of the tide flowing the wrong way. Sheridan's horse had ridden almost to the city's north edge, and Butler's infantry had nearly reached the southern one. Joe Johnston — Retreating Joe, people called him hatefully — was withdrawing toward Atlanta in response to Sherman's inexorable advance. Another Union general, Sigel, was loose in the valley.
Few blockade runners got into Wilmington anymore. The nation's money supply was rapidly becoming so much worthless paper. Cold Harbor had brought déjà vu — scenes of panic like those of the Peninsula campaign. But this time there was little heart or martial courage to sustain the resistance. The mighty generals had fallen: Orry's classmate Old Jack; Stuart, the singing cavalier. And the greatest of them all, Marse Bob, couldn't win.
One morning after Cold Harbor, Pickett appeared at the War Department. Dull-eyed and wasted, he resembled a walking casualty. He still wore his scented hair in shoulder-length ringlets, but a great many tiny coils of white showed now. Orry felt sorry for George, who was gamely trying to maintain an air of youth and jauntiness when every jot of both had been beaten out of him.
In the hot, dusty silence, Orry shared his personal discontentments with his friend. In reply, Pickett said, "There will always be a place on my divisional staff should the time come when a field command suits you." A certain dark undertone in his voice hinted that Orry might think twice about such a decision. Was he remembering the charge at Gettysburg that had failed and aged him in a single day?
"I find myself wanting something like that lately, George. I haven't discussed it with Madeline, but I'll keep the offer in mind. I genuinely appreciate it."
Pickett didn't speak, merely lifted his hand and let it fall. He shambled away through slanting bars of sunshine.
There had been an official inquiry into the escape of a Union prisoner from Libby, abetted by a Confederate officer no one could identify except to say that he was exceptionally tall and heavily bearded, a description that fit several thousand men still in the army. The military threat to Richmond helped reduce the importance of the escape and, slowly, the inquiry. Orry only hoped Billy Hazard had reached and regained the Union lines without harm.
Mallory paid a call, stiffly informing him that Cooper had resigned after declaring his intention to leave Charleston and return to Mont Royal. Orry heard the alarming story of Cooper's attack on the Union prisoner.
"He's undergone a drastic change," Mallory said. "An abrupt and, in my opinion, reprehensible shift to favoring peace at any price."
Irked by the criticism, Orry said, "It was the shift to favoring war that was abrupt and reprehensible, Mr. Mallory. Maybe the brother I used to know has come back."
The secretary didn't like that and promptly left. Orry wrote a letter to Cooper in care of the plantation, posting it with little hope that it would be delivered. He was glad Cooper had gone home. Yet the possible significance of his brother's action depressed him for the same reason he was bothered by an incident the next morning.
"Who is that woman who just applied for a pass?" He asked a departmental clerk.
"Mrs. Manville. Came here from Baltimore in '61 to open a sporting house. She just closed it down."