Valley of the Shadow: A Novel Read Online Free

Leading twenty-three hundred green volunteers, many of them mere hundred-day men, militia and convalescents wearing the grandiose designation “VIII Corps,” he faced an approaching Rebel force reported to be between twenty thousand and thirty thousand in battle strength. Allowing for the exaggerations of excited informants, that still meant fifteen thousand to twenty thousand Confederates on the march. And Wallace intended to fight them, well aware that he must be badly defeated. He meant to fight to delay them as long as he could. And Halleck would have a real defeat to pin on him.
    The situation was so dire that he had been made happier by the chance to commandeer Clendenin’s two hundred veteran horsemen than by anything since his wife accepted his marriage proposal. As for the rest of his scraped-up command, all he could do was to use the river and the good terrain along its southern bank to make a stand and count minutes earned with blood. Wallace had never favored mathematics in school, but twenty-three hundred raw recruits divided by a front greater than three miles provided a sorry answer.
    He asked himself if he was merely playing with other men’s lives, still a prisoner of The Scottish Chiefs and the other heroic romances of his childhood … yet he saw no choice but to do what little he could. To allow Early and his paladins to stroll into the nation’s capital without making the least effort to delay them … better to fight and lose miserably, even if he robbed them of only an hour.
    He didn’t believe that Early and his army were headed for Baltimore, although he could not be certain and had to cover the upriver bridge as well. All logic told him the Rebels aimed at Washington, hoping to shock the North and unseat Lincoln in the autumn election, and to encourage English and French intercession on the part of the South, even at this late hour.
    To prevent all that, he had one six-gun battery of three-inch rifles and an unwieldy twenty-four-pounder. Against the battalions of cannon that Early would bring to bear. Well, he thought with a bittersweet smile, his boyhood hero, William Wallace, would not have been daunted.
    As a lad, he had dreamed of military glory, inspired by his father’s brief army career and subsequent leadership of the local militia. And despite his disappointments and travails in Mexico, this war had seemed to grant it to him, only to steal it away again, as fickle as the Greek gods. It wasn’t about glory now, though. There would be no glory here. Only time gripped like a miser’s gold and the prospect of the Capitol in flames.
    The far mouth of the covered bridge gobbled the courier. Invisible hooves slammed planks. Anxious of heart but strict of feature, Wallace watched as the rider reappeared and reined up, calling out to the nearby guards, doubtless asking where the devil that fool general was.
    The man begged directions a second time before whipping his horse up the slope. The beast looked ready to drop. Celtic complexion further reddened by his exertions, the cavalryman saluted and fixed his eyes on Wallace, drawing a folded paper from his blouse and extending it without dismounting. Wallace stepped forward and took the missive. It was damp with the fellow’s sweat.
    Before unfolding the paper, Wallace asked, “How is it with Colonel Clendenin?”
    Interrupted while reaching for his canteen, the man gasped, “Oh … he’s giving them the right devil. That he is, sir. Cut from the proper mold, that boyo. But there’s Rebs enough, a great and terrible lot of them.”
    “Does he still hold the pass?”
    The soldier guzzled from his canteen. Water ran down through his whiskers.
    “He did, sir, but he don’t. We was all set to pull back, when I rode off. The Rebs, sir, they’d gone to flanking us every which way. They’ve infantry and guns up with their cavalry now, and they’re terrible out of temper with the colonel, for he’s giving them the loveliest bit of