Bayonets rasped against each other. Rocks rained down on advancing Yankees. Again, Canon ran to the melee. The Federal soldiers finally withdrew, but gaps were torn in the Rebel line. There were no longer enough men to fill them. Frantically, Canon called for the troops to shorten the line, fill the deadly gaps.
We can take one more assault, thought Canon, but not two. The Federal soldiers knew it as well as Canon knew it. They bunched. And here it came, blue men screaming in rage and victory. The Rebel line braced. But the attack never reached it.
From no more than two hundred yards away, Longstreet’s hidden artillery opened on the Federal troops. The cannons were loaded with canister, and the iron balls ripped into the charging Union soldiers with horrible effect. Canon could actually see trails and swaths cut through the blue troops.
Atop the ridge, Pope and McClellan watched in shock as the counterattack shook the Federal onslaught like a rag doll. There were no Union troops left to deal with it. Thirty thousand fresh Confederates crashed into the Union flank and decimated it. When the Federal commanders turned to meet the assault, the Stonewall Army, finally reinforced, charged out of the railroad cut howling for revenge.
Calling for the horses to be brought up, Canon began to gather his cavalry. Just as he was about to mount Scratch, Jackson rode up. “My compliments, Colonel,” said Jackson, saluting him. “The men who held this ravine are heroes, and you may be assured that Richmond will know it. You’re ready to chase the enemy, then? Excellent. Ride on. But tell me, first, how close did they get to the breach?”
“They came within a stone’s throw, sir,” said Canon, with a straight face.
“Yes,” said Jackson. “I see. Very good, Colonel. Very good. Ride on. Ride on.”
It was past four P.M. when Longstreet broke the Union attack. But Southern hopes of destroying the Federal Army of the Potomac were shattered against the Union’s Iron Brigade, which set up, ironically, on Henry House Hill and refused to be dislodged. It was much the same stand that Jackson had made the previous summer, but it failed to turn to the tide of battle as did Jackson. It did serve to save the Army of the Potomac.
The second battle of Manassas/Bull Run was another great victory for Jackson and Lee. When it was over, the North had lost sixteen thousand men, almost twice the number of the South. And the mere mention of Stonewall Jackson’s name made John Pope color with conflicting feelings of envy, rage, dread and shame.
7
Hubert Hillary despised himself. In this, he shared the sole opinion he held in common with everyone who ever knew him. Hillary despised practically everything and everyone.
His parents had displayed what he considered the decency and good sense to die from smallpox when he was away at boarding school. More importantly, they left him sufficient means for a thorough business education at a small but social college. Hillary was diminutive, plump, clean shaven and myopic. His lank brown hair, which had begun seriously to thin during his final year at school, was now but a fringe.
It was in that final year of college that Hillary’s true character began to manifest itself. He despised his college nickname, Mole, which came to him only partly because of an unfortunate resemblance to the creature, incredibly enhanced by the thick glasses he had to wear.
The name had fallen to him also because he burrowed tirelessly into schoolbooks. He enjoyed obtuse cryptograms, statistics, logistics. A long list of numbers which set his schoolmates (whom he despised) groaning would set off rare feelings of real delight in Hillary.
Last and most, the nickname was derived from Hillary’s nocturnal ramblings, the nature of which were suspected but never proven. They were thought to include an unusual interest in whips and prostitutes. But so circumspect was Hillary that no proof was ever evidenced.
Now in his thirtieth year, Hillary was set in character. He was petty, petulant, arrogant, silly and morose by turns. He was sly, shallow, vain, vengeful, dishonorable and dishonest. He took snuff up the nose. He connived, intrigued, backstabbed, mongered rumors and young whores. He dilettanted.
And he could lie, artfully and comfortably, like an expensive rug. He possessed a flawed but massive intellect. Cancer was no more malignant than he. In short, Hubert Hillary was a very dangerous little flower. He ruined people for fun, people he didn’t even know, if saw no possibility of getting caught. It was his hobby.
Hillary was also the Confederate Assistant Undersecretary of War. And he harbored a great secret hate for Stonewall Jackson. Hatred was something in which Hillary gloried. Aside from fear, hatred was the only genuine emotion with which Hillary had experience.
Hillary rarely allowed himself this luxury but when he did, he took it to his breast and nurtured it as a loving mother suckles her first born babe. To protect his hate for Jackson, he cloaked it under a guise of ardent admiration. He had met Jackson but once. He would never forget it.
Though he despised everyone in the war department, Hillary was considered to be one of the few people who were practically indispensable. Because of his genius at logistics and handling the supplies remaining to the South, Hillary held almost autonomous power where such things were concerned. He was privy to every scrap of information related to his bailiwick.
The captured stores at Manassas was the muddy point over which he ran afoul of Jackson. Hillary cared not a fig for Jackson’s lightning march from Cedar Mountain to Manassas, didn’t care that Jackson had astounded the world with the victory there. Hubert Hillary didn’t give a damn who won the war, except that he intended to have plenty of power and money. Being firmly imbedded in the Southern bureaucracy, it would serve him best for the South to win. Although he secretly despised Southern aristocracy for not letting him run amok in it.
But no matter to him, really, who won. His secret bank account in France grew a little each month or two. After all, he dealt with the black market and the blockade runners, and he picked a tiny plum or crumb here and there. Nothing big, though he did not lack greed. He was greedy as a pig. But he was also smart. And scared.
A small skimming off a big shipment could double his account. And there had been too few of those lately. When word came that the Federal supply dump in Manassas was taken, Hillary developed a tiny erection which later that evening translated itself into some cane marks on himself and a mulatto girl at a special house ten miles out of town.
When he learned next day that Jackson had not only burned most of the stores, but was keeping the rest for his own use, Hillary lost control and fell into a general keening fit at his office in Richmond. Truth to tell, Hillary had immediately come up with a plan that would not have hampered Jackson to any degree and would have secured much of the needed supplies Jackson destroyed. But Hillary had not been consulted. Not only his bank account, but his very authority had been undermined by the mad Jackson. In a snit which completely compromised his common sense, Hillary on his own authority whipped off a telegram ordering Jackson from now on to put captured supplies under the care and maintenance of himself, Hubert Hillary.
So thoroughly did Hillary inveigh against Jackson that he was taken along, again against his better judgment, to a meeting in the Shenandoah Valley of Davis, Lee and Jackson. Jackson believed Lee’s only fault as a commander was that he paid too much attention to politics and orders from Richmond, even if Davis and commanding General Braxton Bragg were graduates of West Point. Since taking over the Shenandoah and recording his great successes there, Jackson had been alert to any attempts at political intervention. It would compromise his effectiveness. For as much as Jackson demanded strict obedience from his own men, he brooked no interference from those in authority over him. He trusted only Robert E. Lee, of whom Jackson said that here was the only man he would follow blindfold.
By the time Davis and Hillary reached Jackson’s camp, Jackson’s friends in Richmond had seen to it that Southern newspapers somehow received copies of Hillary’s telegram. Hard on its heels, they had also received copies of an even more powerful document. Jackson had tendered his resignation, “regretfully,”