And then, Lee thought, he would let Old Mad Jack off his leash.
And God help John Pope then.
It was not convenient for Major General Thomas Jackson to call on General Robert Lee. It would be convenient soon, but not yet, for General Jackson had two urgent duties to perform. They were not pleasant duties—indeed, lesser men might have shrunk from them altogether—but Thomas Jackson considered them simple responsibilities, and so he performed them with his customary dogged diligence.
Men had to be shot. Southern men. Except to the General they were not men, but curs and trash who had deserted their duties and thus placed themselves beneath contempt. Their commanding officers had pleaded for the condemned men's lives, but Jackson had answered that men who desert their comrades deserve to be shot and officers who pleaded for such men deserved to be hung, and after that curt response there had been no more pleas for clemency. Now, beneath a clearing sky and on a meadow still damp from the previous day's rains, Jackson had assembled his whole corps. Three divisions of soldiers, twenty-four thousand men, were paraded in rank after shabby gray rank to form three sides of an open square. The morning was hot and the air stifling.
Drums beat slow as a band played a ragged funeral dirge. The band was paraded a few paces behind Jackson, who sat on his small, rawboned horse and stared morosely at three wooden stakes that had been plunged into the dirt beside three rough-sawn pine coffins and three freshly dug graves. Behind him his staff sat silent in their saddles, some of them more nervous of this morning's killings than they had ever been of battle. Captain Hudson, Lee's aide, who was waiting to escort General Jackson back to meet the army's commander in Gordonsville, watched the gaunt, famous figure and wondered if ever, in all the history of warfare, any commander had appeared so unprepossessing. The General's beard was unkempt, and his clothes looked in worse condition than any of his soldiers' uniforms. He had an old blue coat that was vaguely military in cut but threadbare and faded, while for a hat Jackson favored a shabby cadet's cap with a creased brim that was pulled low over his eyes. His horse was a big-headed, knock-kneed, clumsy beast with a patchy chestnut pelt, while the General's enormous boots were thrust into rusted stirrups that hung from mended leather straps. The most impressive military aspect of the General, apart from his reputation, was his rigid pose, for he sat his horse straight-backed and with his head held high, but then, as if to spoil that martial stance, he slowly and inexplicably raised his left hand until it was poised higher than his scruffy, creased cap. He then held the hand motionless, as though he was beseeching the Almighty for blessing.
The three doomed men were marched onto the field, each man escorted by his own company. The General had insisted that the criminals must be shot by their own comrades, for those comrades were the men most immediately betrayed by each deserter. An army chaplain waited for the condemned men, who, on reaching the stakes, were ordered onto their knees. The chaplain stepped forward and began to pray.
A small wind stirred the sullen air. To the west a sifting plume of smoke showed where the Yankee raiders had struck in the night, and Jackson, reminded of that impudent raid, looked toward the Faulconer Brigade to see the regiment that paraded without its colors. They had lost their colors, just as they had lost most of their officers, and Jackson, brooding on the Yankee coup, felt a spasm of anger.
The prayer seemed unending. The chaplain's eyes were screwed tight shut, and his hands clenched hard about a battered Bible as he commended the three sinners' souls to the God they were about to meet. The chaplain reminded God of the two thieves who had shared His Son's death on Calvary and implored the Almighty to look as charitably upon these three sinners as Christ had looked upon the repentant thief. One of the three men was unable to check his tears. He was a beardless youth who had deserted because his sixteen-year-old wife had run away with his uncle, and now he was to die in a green field because he had loved her so much. He looked up at his Captain and tried to make a last-minute plea, but the chaplain simply raised his voice– so that the useless request could not be heard. The other two men showed no emotion, not even when the band finished its funereal music and went suddenly silent after a last uneven flurry on the drums.
The chaplain also finished. He stumbled as he stepped backward from the victims. A staff officer took the chaplain's place and in a loud, slow voice that almost carried to the rearmost ranks of the twenty-four thousand witnesses, read aloud the charges against the three men and the verdicts of their courts-martial. The bleak sentences finished, he stepped back and looked at the three company officers. "Carry on."
"No, for the love of God, no! Please, no!" The young man tried to resist, but two of his comrades dragged him to the stake and there pinioned him with rope. The three men wore shirts, pants, and ragged boots. A sergeant blindfolded the weeping youth and told him to stop his noise and die like a man. The other two deserters refused their blindfolds. "Ready!" the staff officer shouted, and over a hundred rifles were raised to the firing position. Some men aimed wide, some blatantly had their rifles uncocked, but most of the men obeyed the order.
"Aim!" the staff officer called, and two nervous men pulled their triggers instead. Both bullets flew wide.
"Wait for it!" a sergeant snarled. A company officer had his eyes closed, and his lips were moving in silent prayer as he waited for the order to fire. One of the doomed men spat onto the grass. To Lee's aide, who had not expected to witness death this morning, it seemed as though three whole divisions of troops were holding their collective breath, while Jackson, his left hand held high, seemed carved from stone.
"No, please! No!" the young man called. His blindfolded head was thrashing from side to side. "Nancy!" he shouted desperately, "my Nancy!"
The staff officer took a deep breath. "Fire!" The smoke jetted suddenly. The volley's huge sound rolled across the fields to explode birds from far-off trees.
The three men jerked in sudden spasms as their shirts erupted with blood. The companies' commanding officers walked to the three stakes with their revolvers drawn, but only one of the men was still alive. The man's breath bubbled in the wreckage of his ribs, and his bearded head twitched. His company officer cocked his revolver, held his breath, and tried to stop his hand shaking. For a second or two it looked as though he would be unable to give the coup de grace; then he managed to pull the trigger, and the living man's head was shattered by the bullet. The Captain turned away and vomited into the open grave as the band jerked into the tune of "Old Dan Tucker." Lee's aide let out a long slow breath.
"Put 'em in their boxes!" a sergeant called, and men ran forward to cut the dead men away from their stakes and lift them into the open-topped coffins, which were then ramped up on the red earth mounds so that a passer-by could see the corpses clearly. "Take the wrap off the young lad," the sergeant ordered and waited as the cuckolded youth's blindfold was removed.
Then, one by one the regiments were marched past the dead. Men from Virginia and Georgia, from the Carolinas and Tennessee, from Alabama and Louisiana, were all shown the three corpses, and after the infantry came the artillery and the engineers, all made to look into the eyes of the fly-infested dead, so that they would understand what fate awaited a deserter. General Jackson had been the first man to inspect the three corpses, and he had stared intently into the faces as though trying to understand the impulse that could drive a man to the unforgivable sin of desertion. As a Christian the General had to believe that such sinners could be redeemed, but as a soldier he could not imagine any of the three men knowing a moment's peace throughout eternity, and his face showed nothing but disgust as he twitched his horse's reins and headed toward the farm that served as his headquarters.