The column went on, marching by the little dark and silent house, on up the pike, beneath the stars, toward Woodstock, and some pause perhaps beyond. It moved so near that Steve heard at times what the soldiers said. He gathered that Fisher’s Hill was a word of gloom and would remain so. On it went, on it went, until from van to rear ten thousand men had passed. And then, as the sound of the sea was lessening, a knot of officers drew up almost beneath the window. They spoke in slow, tired, dragging voices. “Orders are no halt until we’ve passed Woodstock.—Six miles yet. Where then? I do not know.—Fight again? Yes, of course—fight to the bitter end! I don’t suppose it’s far off.—Here’s Berkeley. Well, what’s the news, Captain?”
“Sheridan’s after us, sir.... Listen!”
They listened. “Yes.... Coming up the pike.... I should say he has thirty thousand infantry and as many horse as we have of all three arms. Well! let the curtain ring down. We’ve made good drama.”
When they were gone, Steve rose and leaned cautiously out of the window. Yes, he could hear the Yankees, he could hear them coming. They were far off, but they were coming, coming.—A light burst forth in the night, in the north, then another and another. “They’re firin’ barns and houses as they pass.”—Below him rose a final clatter of horses’ hoofs, voices, curt orders, oaths—the grey rear guard drawing off, following the main body. Steve ran downstairs and out into the road. He stopped a horseman. “For Gawd’s sake, comrade, take me on behind you! I marched with the boys till I just dropped, ’n’ I said, ‘Go on, ’n’ maybe a horse or a wagon’ll be good to me.’—I got a sore hurt in the leg—”
“All right,” said the horseman. “Get up!” and they went on up the pike with the sky red behind them, and night before. “It’s most the end, I reckon.”
Woodstock—and a halt below at Narrow Passage—then on a windy, dusty day to New Market, while Sheridan paused and finally went into camp at Mount Jackson—then aside from the Valley Pike, eastward by the Port Republic road—then into the great shady amphitheatre of Brown’s Gap—and here quiet at last, quiet and rest. Again it was an old, old camping-ground. The Second Corps stared, sombre-eyed, with faces that worked. “Old Jube is all right—but, O God, for Stonewall Jackson!”
Weeks went by. The woods changed, indeed. The leaves brightened and brightened, and now they began to fall in every wind. To and fro, forth from the gaps of the Blue Ridge and back to their shelter, moved the Army of the Valley, to and fro—to and fro. In these days came Kershaw, sent by Lee—twenty-seven hundred infantry and Cutshaw’s battery. The Second Corps welcomed South Carolina. “You’re the fiery boys! ‘Come, give us a song to cheer!’—Never have forgotten how you taught us to cook rice!—in the first century, along about First Manassas. Never have forgotten, but the commissary’s out of rice.”
In these days Sheridan, keeping his main force between New Market and Woodstock, began with that great force of Torbert’s cavalry to harry the Valley as it had not yet been harried. He wrecked the Central Railroad and burned bridges and sent the Confederate stores at Staunton up in flames. That was all right; that was understood—but Sheridan stopped there as little as would Attila have done. Before winter came, he swept the Valley bare as Famine’s hand; he made it so bare that he said himself, “A crow, flying over the Valley of Virginia, would have had to take his rations with him.”
A little past the middle of October Early determined to attack. With Kershaw and with Rosser’s small reinforcement of cavalry, he could bring into the field a force little more than a third the size of the blue army now lined up behind Cedar Creek. But forage and supplies were gone; it was risk all or lose all. “‘Beggars must not be choosers,’” said Early, and the Second Corps went back to the Valley Pike and marched toward Fisher’s Hill. It marched through a country where all was burned,—houses, mills, barns, wheat and straw and hay, wagons and farm implements, smithies, country stores and hostelries,—all, all charred and desolate. It saw women and children, crouching for warmth against blackened chimney-stacks.
It marched hungry itself and now with tattered clothing—all the small divisions, the small brigades, the small regiments—all the defenders of the Valley, taking now so little room on the Valley Pike. It marched with a fringe of stragglers, with a body of the sick and straggling bringing up the rear. Nowadays men straggled who had never done that before; nowadays men deserted who were not deserters by nature. And mostly these deserted because a cry, insistent and wild, reached them from home. “Starving! We are starving and homeless. I, your mother, am crying for bread!—I, your wife, am crying for bread!—We, your children, are crying for bread! We are sick—we are dying—we will never see you again—”