Never Call Retreat - Civil War 03 Read Online Free PDF Page B

Virginia, rode in silence. The road before him was packed with troops, men marching at a vigorous pace. He trotted past the troops, edging along fencerows, cutting out into pastures and orchards to make speed.
    The men were moving, maintaining a grueling pace of three miles an hour, hunched over, rifles balanced on shoulders or slung inverted, hats pulled down over brows to shield eyes from the noonday glare, faces sweat-streaked, dust kicking up in swirling, choking clouds. Some saw him and gave a salute or shout as he cantered along; others, sunk into the hypnotic rhythm of the march, were unaware of his presence.
    These men had marched over a hundred miles in the past week and fought a brutal three-day running battle in killing heat, and it showed. The usual banter of a victorious army on the march was gone; the high spirits that should have echoed after their overwhelming victories over the Army of the Potomac were not showing this day. Exhaustion had overwhelmed exhilaration.
    He rode in silence, lost in thought. Walter Taylor, his aide-de-camp, the staff, even the secretary of state, Judah Benjamin, sensing he wished to ride alone to think, trailed a respectful distance behind him.
    After the smashing defeat of Sickles he expected Grant to wait, or perhaps even to start transferring his army by train and boat down to Washington, there to assume a defensive posture through the fall and winter.
    But to take an aggressive path? To cross the river and move south, perhaps straight at him. No, he had not expected that. After every defeat dealt the Union Army over the last year, his opponents had always retreated, regrouped, and waited several months before venturing another blow.
    It was like facing an opponent in chess. The traditional opening of a king or queen's pawn is expected, but then, instead, the man across the table puts his knight out first. That was usually the move of a fool ... or could it be that of a master or someone who sensed or planned something Lee could not yet ascertain.
    Who was Grant? In that tight-knit cadre of old comrades from West Point, the old professional army of the frontier, of Mexico, or garrison duty in East Coast fortifications, Grant was one man he could not remember. He knew the man had served in Mexico and gained distinction there for personal bravery and leadership, but as an army commander? He had beaten Beauregard at Shiloh, captured an entire army at Fort Donelson and Vicksburg. He was used to victory ... perhaps that could be turned against him.
    There were the rumors as well about the man's drinking, but then again, the army had always been a hard-drinking lot. In the case of Grant, the few who knew him said it had been brought on by a fit of melancholia when stationed out on the West Coast, separated from his wife and children.
    Longstreet, who did know him, dismissed the drinking, saying that it was a demon his old friend would have overcome, especially when he had returned to the army and given the responsibility of command.
    All the others he had faced so far, McClellan, the fool
    Pope, the slow-moving Burn side, the hard-driving but morally weak Hooker, even Meade and Sickles, he could read them, and he could read as well the thinking, the rhythm, the mentality of the Army of the Potomac ... reft by internal dissent and political maneuverings, hampered by even more political maneuverings in Washington.
    But he was no longer facing the Army of the Potomac, and even in Washington he sensed a change. Halleck was out, and just this morning Judah Benjamin had suggested that perhaps Stanton's days were numbered as well. A staff officer of Sickles's, a prisoner, had bitterly complained that his general had moved without coordination with Grant, and everyone at Sickles's headquarters knew that Stanton had sent out contradictory orders for which "someone would pay."
    And Grant's corps commanders—Ord, McPherson, Banks, Burnside . He knew the mettle of Burnside, knew the fumbling