“That’s a hard question to answer, young fellow. You were Over There?” Thorpe asked. The man nodded. Thorpe watched his eyes go distant and watchful; yes, he’d seen the elephant. The Confederate veteran said, “We weren’t up against the big cannon and the machine guns and the gas, as you boys were, but we didn’t have your supply train or your doctors, either. War’s hard any which way, I expect.”
“True enough.” The Great War soldier nodded again. ‘‘Thank you, General.”
Thorpe stayed away from the next day’s business meetings at the Mosque. Talking with the assembled veterans at the Soldiers’ Home was more enjoyable. When he let out that he’d been a captain, a lot of them gave him a hard time; most, in those days, had been youths with no rank to their name.
At one point that afternoon he asked Jed Ledbetter to move so he could get past him and go to the bathroom. Ledbetter sprang to his feet with alarming spryness. “Yes, sir, Captain, sir!” he cried, coming to a brace surely stiffer than any he’d used back in his soldier days.
Thorpe looked around at the grinning veterans. “If it’s all the same to you gents, I think I’d sooner be demoted back to General so I can be like everybody else,” he said. Amid raucous laughter, the rest of the Confederate soldiers gave him his wish.
Around four, Ledbetter got up and left the talk of old battles won and old battles lost. “I’m gonna take me a nap,” he announced when a couple of eyebrows went up. “I wanna be at my best fo’ the ball tonight, do some fancy steppin’ with the pretty young things.”
Thorpe looked forward to the dance, too, but the talk was even better, with names that echoed across the decades like far-off musketry. Some he’d been through: Gettysburg and the Wilderness, Cold Harbor and Appomattox. Some were from before the days when the Forty-seventh North Carolina had joined Lee’s army: Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. And some came from the west: Shiloh, Stone’s Mountain, Vicksburg.
One white-haired Texan had fought at Palmito Ranch more than a month after the surrender at Appomattox. “Yeah, we whupped the Yankees,” he said, “but if we’dve knowed y’all had done give up, we wouldn’tve bothered.”
Jed Ledbetter came back to the dining hall in time for supper. He made a point of sitting by Thorpe for the trip to the ball at the Grays’ Armory. As the bus rattled down the street, they exchanged addresses. “Sure I’ll write to you, John,” Ledbetter said. “What the hell else I got to do all day?” He cackled with laughter.
A flask came by. Thorpe sipped from it, passed it to his new friend. He said, “We can put all we’ve got into the dance tonight, seeing as we’ll be in cars for the grand parade tomorrow.”
“I heard tell about that,” Ledbetter said, nodding. “Don’t know as I like it much. I marched in plenty o’ these down through the years.” He paused and loosed that cackle of his again. “ ‘Course, I was younger then.”
The ballroom swept Thorpe back to the days when he’d been younger, much younger. Had the girls been in crinolines and hoop skirts that swept the floor, had the gallants been without gray beards and canes, the scene might have been one from his first stay in Richmond all those years before.
The moment the music started, he even forgot his comrades’ age. Most of them forgot it, too, swinging their partners through the Grand March as if they were going off to battle in the morning. Several of the young ladies exclaimed in pleasure; they might not have expected the old soldiers to have so much vim left.
No sooner had that idea crossed Thorpe’s mind than a girl behind him let out an indignant squeak and exclaimed, “Why, General, you forget yourself!”
“No, miss-I remember, by God!” the veteran retorted.
Fiddlers played tunes that went back to the War Between the States. Thorpe discovered his feet still knew how to jig. He was out of breath and his heart pounded heavily in his chest when the music stopped, but the applause from his partner, a very pretty little strawberry blonde about the age of his oldest great-granddaughter, resolved him to dance all night.
The American Legion band played square dance music. Thorpe felt lighter on his feet than he had in thirty years, maybe more. He knew he was cutting a sprightly figure. Some of the veterans wilted as the evening went on and retired to the sidelines, but he stayed out on the floor, just as he’d told himself he would.
“General, shouldn’t you take a rest?” asked the blond girl. (her name, he’d learned, was Marjorie).
He shook his head. “Miss, I haven’t so many nights of dancing left in me that I can afford to waste even part of one.”
Marjorie’s laugh displayed small, even white teeth. “All right, General, since you put it that way, let’s cut us a rag!”
Thorpe was one of the last veterans still dancing when the band played “Dixie.” The armory echoed with shouts and cheers and old men’s voices cracking as they tried to turn loose Rebel yells. Thorpe yelled with the best of them, pumping his fist in the air.
Marjorie stared, wide-eyed, not just at him but at all the old soldiers; maybe, just for a moment, she too saw them as they’d been so long ago. Emboldened by that thought, Thorpe leaned forward and pecked her on the cheek. She smiled and squeezed his hands between hers. “Thank you, General,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed this evening much more than I thought I would.”
“So have I, Miss Marjorie,” he said. “Oh, I’m tired, I’ll not deny, but I don’t grudge a minute of it.”
But when, a little past midnight, he got into a nightshirt and pulled back the covers on his steel cot, he felt a dull pain in the left side of his ribcage. He curled his lip in mild scorn at the weakness of his flesh. Though he hadn’t done so much in years, he was sure he’d be fine come morning. He lay down, prayed briefly, and fell asleep.
He awoke in darkness, amid old men’s snores. The pain was back, and suddenly seemed big as the world. He sat up, started to get out of bed…
Thorpe looked down at the cuff of his gray coat. It bore the double twist of braid that showed captain’s rank. He looked at the hand protruding from the cuff. The flesh was smooth and unspotted, the tendons no longer upraised like old tree roots pushing through thin soil.
He had no time for surprise. He and the rest of the men in gray and butternut and occasional looted Yankee blue hurried through the cover afforded by a stand of old pine woods. The trees thinned ahead. He could see the line of the Weldon Railroad, the burned ruins of what had been Reams Station south of Petersburg, the low parapet the Federals had thrown up twenty or thirty yards east of the train tracks.
“Keep your ranks, boys,” he called to the men of Company A. The troopers of the Chicora Guards just grinned and nodded. They’d been through enough fights to know what to do without being told.
The Federals held their fire, no doubt waiting for their foes to reach a point from which they would be unable to get away cheaply. Suddenly, from not far behind Thorpe, Brigadier General William McRae shouted, “Don’t fire a gun now, but dash for the enemy.”
The soldiers in gray traded grim looks. If McRae’s ploy failed, they were the ones who would pay the butcher’s bill. No choice, though, but to obey. Drawing his Army Colt, Thorpe cried “Forward!” and ran to the attack at the head of his company.
The Rebels burst out of the pine woods yelling like fiends. The Northern soldiers yelled, too, in surprise and alarm. Muzzle flashes stabbed outward from the parapet; thick clouds of black-powder smoke rose above it.
A Mini? ball cracked past Thorpe’s head. Confederate soldiers fell, screaming and writhing in pain. But the charge was across only a couple of hundred yards of ground. Since the Rebels did not pause to fire and reload their rifle muskets- always deadly dangerous out in the open-they drew near the parapet before too many of them fell.