Free Hell or Richmond by Ralph Peters Page A

could not afford to match Meade and Grant in losses, not in soldiers on the firing line or in the generals who led them.
    Thankfully, his Old War Horse was back, the best of the generals left to him now. But chastened by disappointments in the west, Longstreet ached to redeem his reputation, and that worried Lee. He wanted Longstreet to be aggressive, but not to risk his person out of vanity. He had too many generals obsessed with their reputations, from Stuart to Hill, and he worried that, on a fateful day, one of them would behave foolishly. He needed them in command, not in their coffins. Bravery took many forms, and leaders had to have the strength within to choose the right one.
    He could not afford to lose Longstreet, for all the man’s testy squabbling with his subordinates. Longstreet was the only man he had left fit for corps command, who could think beyond the battlefield in front of him. Had he had good replacements for them, Lee would have removed Hill and Ewell, the first a man not meant to command more than a division, the second an erratic leader who, on his bad days, seemed spent. But there were no replacements. The casualties of the past year had been appalling, the loss of Jackson above all. Each day, Lee felt the absence of the one man who could wield independent command.
    How he missed Tom Jackson!
    It was an odd thing, Lee mused. When Jackson had been at his side, he had never called him “Thomas,” and certainly not “Tom.” Yet, that was how he thought of Jackson now, as if they had been boyhood friends.
    Grim 1863 had been disastrous, with even the early victory of Chancellorsville blighted by Jackson’s wounding and death. Then came Gettysburg and Vicksburg. After a glimmer of hope at Chickamauga, Chattanooga had become another debacle. And after that, Knoxville. The best he himself had been able to do was to dig Meade to a standstill at Mine Run.
    A recent remark of Longstreet’s troubled him as deeply as the sight of those columns hurrying across the Rapidan. At the sparse repast to honor his review of Longstreet’s corps, Lee had said, “When those people cross the river, we will have to strike them very hard, to drive them back and gain a month or two.”
    Longstreet’s good humor—so rare a thing these days—had fled the tent, leaving the corps commander almost funereal.
    “Grant won’t go back,” Longstreet told him. “I know him. Once he gets his teeth into our leg, he’ll never let go.”
    What if Longstreet was right? How could they endure?
    The best hope, Lee believed, was to prove his senior corps commander wrong, to thrash Grant and Meade so severely that they saw no choice but withdrawal, as stunned as Joseph Hooker had been at Chancellorsville.
    But what if neither man proved to be a Hooker? Meade was not one to panic, that much he knew. Had he been, he would have ordered his men from the field that first evening at Gettysburg. As for Grant, it was said he was given to drink. But the men who held forth on his vice seemed not to have met Grant. Longstreet knew him. And Longstreet did not count the bottle their ally.
    How much, in the end, could be known of any man?
    A courier rode up in a plume of dust. Lieutenant Colonel Marshall intercepted the man and took his dispatch. The military secretary scanned the note to ensure its contents merited troubling Lee. They did. Features drumhead tight, Marshall approached him.
    “From General Ewell, sir.” Marshall held out the paper, in case Lee wished to review it personally, but summarized its contents: “He sends his compliments and requests permission to call up Gordon’s Brigade.”
    So many decisions seemed difficult now. Age? The weariness of the spirit that no mortal sleep could cure? The only time when decisions came easily anymore was on the battlefield, amid the cacophonous butchery and terrible thrill of war. Then he could make decisions in an instant, possessed by a greater spirit, perhaps by grace.
    “General