The Titans Read online

  The Warriors

  The Kent Family Chronicles (Book Six)

  John Jakes

  For my mother

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Enjoying the Sweep of History

  The Kent Family

  Prologue at Chancellorsville The Fallen Sword

  Book One: In Destruction’s Path

  Chapter I Soldier Alone

  Chapter II “Sixty Thousand Strong”

  Chapter III The Slave

  Chapter IV Rosewood

  Chapter V The Women

  Chapter VI Shadow of the Enemy

  Chapter VII Warnings

  Chapter VIII With Serena

  Chapter IX Red Sky

  Chapter X The Prisoner

  Book Two: War like a Thunderbolt

  Chapter I Enemy at the Gate

  Chapter II Invasion

  Chapter III The Bummers

  Chapter IV Serena’s Plan

  Chapter V Night of Ruin

  Chapter VI Day of Death

  Chapter VII “Let ‘Em Up Easy”

  Book Three: The Fire Road

  Chapter I Escape to the West

  Chapter II The Railhead

  Chapter III The Captain

  Chapter IV “A March as Glorious as Sherman’s”

  Chapter V Rage

  Chapter VI Jephtha’s Decision

  Chapter VII Dorn’s Daughter

  Chapter VIII The Bible and the Knife

  Chapter IX At Lance Point

  Chapter X Hunter’s Blood

  Book Four: Hell-on-Wheels

  Chapter I The Cheyenne

  Chapter II Armed Camp

  Chapter III The Race

  Chapter IV Slaughter

  Chapter V “To Every Purpose Under Heaven”

  Chapter VI The Coming of the Godless

  Chapter VII The Vow

  Chapter VIII Meridian 100

  Chapter IX Kingston

  Chapter X A Matter of Truth

  Chapter XI A Matter of Faith

  Book Five: The Scarlet Woman

  Chapter I Meeting with a Mountebank

  Chapter II The Tame Dog

  Chapter III The Portrait

  Chapter IV The Man in the Burned Shawl

  Chapter V The Family

  Chapter VI The Accident

  Chapter VII Call to War

  Chapter VIII At the Universal

  Chapter IX “I’m on Top, Ain’t I?”

  Chapter X Casualty of War

  Epilogue at Kentland The Lifted Sword

  A Biography of John Jakes

  Introduction:

  Enjoying the Sweep of History

  IT CAN BE TEDIOUS to hear an author cite his reasons for liking this or that book he produced, yet in the case of The Warriors, I find it hard to keep from it. The sixth novel of The Kent Family Chronicles covers a short span of years, yet encompasses some of the most significant, exciting, not to say epic events of our history.

  In my introduction to the preceding volume, The Titans, I noted that the Civil War is a subject continually eliciting worldwide interest. Professor James M. McPherson in his prizewinning one-volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom, says that the Civil War has produced more books by a factor of ten or more than any other era in America’s past. Further, the war brought about the greatest redirection of national life, in the shortest time, that we’ve ever experienced.

  Lagging not far behind the Civil War in terms of universal appeal, however, is the opening of the American West. I expect that’s why I favor The Warriors: it rolls up a lot of our most dramatic moments in a single volume.

  Consider that the book opens with the harrowing battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia as the war grinds to its agonizing close. It cuts away for a glimpse of the ravaging of Southern plantations by Union troops, especially their less-than-attractive foragers, commonly called bummers.

  Then we travel West, to watch the building of the transcontinental railroad. The conclusion draws us into the era of the robber barons, a subject more fully explored in the next volume, appropriately titled The Lawless. Any wonder that I enjoyed writing the book despite the frantic pressures to get it out faster, ever faster?

  When I lecture or speak to writers’ groups, during the Q&A, someone inevitably asks, “Do you do all of your own research?” The answer is yes.

  And, yes, it’s a formidable workload, nearly doubling the time required to produce a novel, yet I’ve never been willing to surrender the responsibility. Preparing to write a new book is like enrolling in a new graduate program—digging into a new era, mining it for everything I didn’t know before (which is always “plenty”). In the case of The Warriors, I was able to delve into three broad subjects at once. I wouldn’t give up the pleasure.

  Now that my friends at New American Library have returned The Warriors to readers in this handsome new edition, I hope that you, too, will find not only entertainment in the story, but the sweep of our history during a few short years that were long on events of major importance.

  —John Jakes

  Hilton Head Island

  South Carolina

  And I saw askant the armies,

  I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,

  Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d

  with missiles I saw them …

  I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,

  And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,

  I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,

  But I saw they were not as was thought,

  They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,

  The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,

  And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,

  And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

  1865:

  Walt Whitman,

  in the

  Sequel to “Drum-Taps,”

  written in the summer

  and published in the autumn

  following Lincoln’s death.

  Prologue at Chancellorsville

  The Fallen Sword

  i

  MAJOR GIDEON KENT WAS worn-out. Worn-out and plagued by a familiar edginess he only permitted himself to call fear in the silence of his mind. The feeling always came on him during a battle.

  About six o’clock that afternoon, he’d witnessed more than the beginning of a battle. He’d seen the start of a slaughter. Thousands upon thousands of his Confederate comrades had gone charging out of the second-growth timber called the Wilderness, bugles blaring, bayonets shining.

  Noisy blizzards of wild turkeys fled before the howling men and their streaming battle flags. The surprise attack had caught the Dutchmen—the German regiments in Von Gilsa’s brigade—taking their evening meal in Dowdall’s Clearing, most of their arms stacked.

  The Germans were manning the end of General Howard’s exposed flank. The Southerners tore into them. Stabbing. Screaming. Blowing heads and limbs away at point-blank range. On horseback, the commander of the II Corps, Army of Northern Virginia, had closely followed his charging lines, his eyes blazing with an almost religious light. Now and then the commander’s hands rose to the thickening smoke in the gold sky as though thanking his God for the carnage.

  The general’s outrageously risky attack had succeeded. That much had been evident while Gideon observed the first few minutes of the engagement. Then he was summoned away. His own commander, the restless Beauty Stuart, saw that the terrain and the element of surprise made cavalry not only unnecessary but useless. So he requested permission to take a regiment and a battery up to Ely’s Ford on the Rapidan River, where some worthwhile damage might be done to a Union wagon park. Gideon,
assigned to General Stuart’s staff, had gone along.

  Around eight o’clock Stuart had sent him back to deliver a report to the general commanding II Corps. Some Union horses had been discovered—part of Stoneman’s elusive force. Stuart’s message said he was preparing to attack, though he stood ready to swing about if the commander of II Corps needed him.

  That the commander needed no one had become clear to Gideon as he’d maneuvered his way south again through almost impenetrable woodland to reach the Fredericksburg Turnpike, where he was now riding, armed with saber and revolver.

  The surprise attack had rolled the enemy back for a good two or three miles. Gideon could dimly see the evidence: hundreds and hundreds of blue-uniformed dead sprawled in the lowering dark. To the east, the battle was still raging. Artillery had joined the combat, and shot and shell had ignited stands of timber along the fringes of the Wilderness.

  By now the sun had set—it was Saturday, the second day of May 1863—and Gideon was moving toward the center of the fighting. He had begun to wonder if he’d been given the right directions by some officers he’d met a ways back. Was II Corps’ commander really somewhere ahead? Impossible to tell on this increasingly black road flanked by stunted trees and thick underbrush.

  His little stallion, Sport, had trouble keeping his footing on the rock-studded highway. The wiry long-tailed Canadian horse—Canucks, the Yank cavalrymen called them—had fallen into Gideon’s hands after Fredericksburg. It was a short-legged shaggy prize, coveted and cared for almost as attentively as Gideon looked after himself.

  But the damp, hard winter at Camp No-Camp—the name was another of Jeb Stuart’s whimsies—had taken its toll. A week ago, despite Gideon’s best efforts to keep the captured horse on firm, dry footing whenever possible, he’d discovered the telltale signs of greased heel. Sport’s front hoofs had suffered too much mud. They were rotting.

  Still, the animal was game, moving steadily if not rapidly through the tunnel of trees. Somewhere not far ahead lay that white-columned farmer’s manse at the crossroads dignified with the name Chancellorsville.

  The road had grown dark as the devil. But above, there was an eerie light compounded of the glow of the rising full moon, the pulsing glare of the Federal cannon to the east, and the sullen red of burning woodlands around the horizon.

  Gideon speculated about whether the fighting might go on throughout the night. Perhaps not. For some reason unknown to him—but evidently clear to the generals—the Yanks commanded by Fighting Joe Hooker had failed to commit their admittedly superior numbers to the battle. Old Marse Robert’s mad double gamble seemed to be on the point of succeeding.

  Gideon started. On his left—to the north, where smoke drifted through the gargoyle tangle of tree trunks—he thought he heard infantrymen moving.

  He reined Sport to a walk. Whose troops were those?

  He immediately decided he’d go only another quarter mile or so in his search for the leader of II Corps. The lines were obviously still shifting. And he couldn’t be positive the information given earlier was correct—that the general and a small party of officers, couriers, and Signal Corps sergeants had ridden east on this same turnpike to scout ahead of the re-forming lines. If he didn’t soon locate the man his father had known in Lexington before the war, he’d turn about and seek better guidance. Beauty Stuart didn’t like officers on his staff to be tardy delivering reports on the cavalry’s position.

  He started and gasped as an artillery barrage exploded a half mile to his right. He heard the crash of falling branches. That patch of sky was now something out of an artist’s conception of hell. It flickered and shifted through every shade of red. It seemed the whole Virginia countryside below the Rappahannock was afire.

  Again he heard screams—distant but unnerving. In the dark to his right, beyond the road’s south shoulder, he sensed more men moving.

  Were they Yanks caught behind the forward sweep of the Confederate ranks? Or were they friendly reinforcements being brought up, responding to the general’s favorite command—“Press on! Press on!” The general drove his men so hard and fast they were sometimes called the foot cavalry.

  Gideon didn’t like not knowing who was out there. His hand dropped to the butt of the Le Mat revolver tucked in his sash as he nudged Sport forward with his knees. He began to be quite concerned that the general might have advanced well beyond the point of safety.

  All day an unconfirmed story had circulated among Stuart’s staff members. The story ran that the commander of II Corps had risen after a bad sleep and sipped some cold coffee before starting his men on the audacious flank march that culminated in the charge at Dowdall’s Clearing. While the general drank the coffee in the cold dawn air, his scab-barded sword had been standing against a nearby tree. And then, with no one touching it—no one even near it—the sword had suddenly clattered to the ground.

  Gideon didn’t count himself especially superstitious. Yet that story bothered him more than he liked.

  And there was reason for worry. He’d ridden quite a way down the Fredericksburg Turnpike.

  Why hadn’t he found General Stonewall Jackson?

  ii

  He tried to push the worry out of his mind. In a moment it became easy. Another shell arched overhead. Gideon ducked as it blew up trees about half a mile behind.

  He wished to God he could see more clearly. Even if there were men on the road ahead it would be almost impossible to detect them from a distance. Pressing his threadbare gray trousers against Sport to urge him on, he strained to see through shadows and drifting smoke now tinged red by the fire glare, now yellow by the full moon.

  To counter his weariness and fear, he again reminded himself that the battle seemed to be going favorably. By all logic it shouldn’t have been going that way at all.

  Estimates said Hooker had brought down between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and fifty thousand men—including Stoneman’s cavalry, which had disappeared somewhere further south. The Union commander was desperate to give Lincoln a decisive victory after the debacles of McClellan, the political general who’d dawdled and ultimately failed on the Peninsula, and Burnside, of the formidable side whiskers, who’d been routed at Fredericksburg.

  Fighting Joe’s gigantic Union force was faced by less than half as many Confederates. And few of those were in good shape after a winter of privation in the camps around Fredericksburg. Gideon remembered all too well the pathetic sights of the cold season: young boys, most of them barely fifteen, their uniforms in tatters, their mouths scurvy-rotted, grubbing in the forests for wild onions—

  Feet wrapped in scraps of blanket leaving scarlet tracks in the mud as men filed out of the religious services held to keep their spirits up—

  The round, alarmed eyes that first glimpsed the curious bulblike bags carrying men in big baskets and bobbing on anchor ropes in the blowing mists north of the river—

  Gideon himself had been one of those startled and worried watchers. He had never before laid eyes on an observation balloon, but he’d heard about them. The balloons were a disheartening sight. They were more evidence of the superior resources and ingenuity of the industrial North. Against it the South could only muster dogged courage and the spirit epitomized by Jeb Stuart’s baritone voice bellowing “Jine the Cavalry” as he led his brigades into a firefight.

  Finally Hooker’s onslaught had come. He’d hurled his columns over the Rappahannock on pontoon bridges. General Lee had then done the unthinkable—split the outnumbered Army of Northern Virginia into even smaller components. First he’d left ten thousand under Early at Fredericksburg. Then he’d sent twenty-six thousand with Jackson. That left fourteen thousand Confederates to confront the Union center, which consisted of three entire corps, something like seventy thousand men.

  Lee’s division of his strength was deliberate. By taking a supreme risk, he hoped for a supreme triumph. Stuart’s riders had spotted a weakness in the Union plan. Hooker’s right wing straggled out
southward, unprotected.

  Only last night, Major Hotchkiss, an engineer, and Reverend Lacy, both of whom knew the countryside well, had located a route through the tangled woods along which Jackson might march down, around, and behind the exposed Union right. And so, after his sword had fallen, Stonewall had buckled it on, and with Lee’s approval, started at seven this very morning, urging his twenty-six thousand men to “Press on!”

  Toward the close of the day, the stern, curious soldier who resembled some Old Testament prophet, had ripped into Howard’s encamped Germans, the surprise march a complete success.

  Gideon, a tall, strong-shouldered young man who would be twenty next month, took a fierce pride in that kind of daring. He found it in Jackson, in Marse Robert, and in his immediate superior, General Stuart, to whose staff he’d been assigned just after the Fredericksburg triumph. Again outnumbered at Chancellorsville, the Southern commanders had had to strike more boldly, gamble everything. Only a general whose military skills approached genius would have agreed to dividing inferior manpower not once but twice, in the faint hope of turning what appeared to be almost certain defeat into possible victory. Only other generals of equally incredible vision and audacity could have executed such a plan.

  Moonlight through a break in the trees lit Gideon’s tawny hair for an instant. He’d lost his campaign hat around six o’clock when a Yank ball had blown it off. As he thought of brave, imaginative Lee and the hard-driving Jackson, he barely heard another rattle of brush on his left.

  Vaguely he realized the turnpike was dipping downward. The soft chock of Sport’s rotting hoofs changed to a mushy sound. There was swampy ground at the foot of the little hill. But Gideon paid only marginal attention to the terrain. He was happily bemused by the real possibility of a victory.

  With a few more decisive routs of Lincoln’s procession of inept or hesitant generals, the Confederacy might be able to negotiate a peace. Then he could go back to Richmond. Back to his wife and their infant daughter. It was time. Of late he’d been bothered by a feeling that his luck was playing out.