Savage Cry Read Online Free PDF Page B

imperative to keep the army on the move in hopes of joining with General Johnston’s Army of Tennessee near the Roanoke River. General Lee waited for his troops from Richmond for an extra day. While they waited, he sent wagons out to scour the countryside in search of food, but there was little to be had. It had been three days since Clay had eaten anything beyond a little parched corn he and Wes had hoarded from the last of the supplies at Petersburg.
    On the march again the following day, the ragged troops left Amelia Court House with Union troops close behind. The day’s delay had cost them, however. With only a few miles covered, they encountered Union troops firmly entrenched squarely across their line of march. In no condition to fight, Lee ordered a change in direction to the west in hopes of marching around the ambush, and maybe to supply his troops at Farmville. It was the worst time in young Clay Culver’s life. He was tired and hungry, hungry enough to eat anything that even resembled food. Gone were the romantic illusions of glory he had sought when he had left his father’s farm near Fredericksburg.
    Like his friend Wes, and so many other young men, Clay had lost his enthusiasm and eagerness to fight after his first major skirmish as a foot soldier. Advancing toward a suspected Union position on a thickly forested hillside, he got his second close look at man’s fragile mortality. Caught in the open while crossing a small road at the foot of the hill, Clay’s regiment was suddenly cut down by a blistering barrage from the trees above them. Men on either side of him cried out in pain, dropping in their tracks as they tried to scramble for cover behind a shallow bank. Clay hadburrowed as far as he could into the scant protection the bank offered, and laid there for three hours while the rattle of cannon and the hiss of miniballs pinned the regiment down until reinforcements arrived.
    Now, on this rather ordinary day in early April, there was no energy available to waste on thoughts of victory. Weary and hungry, most of Clay’s comrades in arms harbored thoughts only of survival. Still there were some, Sergeant Ivers among them, who urged the men to maintain their spirit. “Supplies are waiting in Farmville,” he promised. “We’ll play a different tune for them Yankees then. General Lee’s always got something up his sleeve.”
    Clay did his best to maintain his faith in the Confederate army’s ability to regroup and take the fight once again to Grant’s troops. But with more and more men breaking ranks in desperate attempts to find food while others simply dropped beside the road, unable to take another step, there were soon great gaps in the line of march. Taking advantage of these gaping holes in the Confederate line, Union cavalry dashed in upon the Confederate wagons, destroying a great number of them and killing hundreds of Clay’s comrades.
    Clay and Wes, their luck still holding, found themselves among the weary troops that staggered into Farmville on the seventh of April. As Sergeant Ivers had promised, desperately needed rations awaited them. But Union forces were so close behind that Confederate cavalry had to make a stand in the streets of Farmville while the rest of their army escaped. With no chance for rest, the ragged troops continued to march westward, their only hope to reach Appomattox Station before Grant’s forces cut them off. It was not to be.
    Appomattox was where it all ended, that chillyApril morning near the little town of Appomattox Court House. Of all the many days of fighting—the long exhausting marches, the frequent nights with nothing to eat, the magnificent charges, the demoralizing retreats—that one day at Appomattox stood out as a day he would relive over and over in his mind.
    The approaching dawn had seemed to herald a morning of dark defeat. Bleak and chilly, the first light of day had spread reluctantly upon the Confederate battle line, stretched out on the