Hell or Richmond Read Free

sir.”
    “Warren up to a fight?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Grant flipped the stub of his cigar onto the planks and crushed it with a boot heel: a raw man of the West, another breed. His lips suggested a smile, but none appeared. “Fine work at Gettysburg. Been waiting a while to tell you that. Ignore the committee. And the newspapers. Only difference between a reporter and a fifty-cent prostitute is that the latter has to be moderately presentable.”
    “Your Vicksburg campaign was remarkable, sir.”
    Accepting the tribute as fair, Grant nodded again. He rummaged deep in his overcoat and produced a leather wallet of fresh cigars. Meade had allowed the first smoke to go out. He declined the offer of a second.
    “Be the death of me, these things,” Grant said, lighting up anew. “Couldn’t afford ’em back before the war. Now they send them to me by the crate.” He took his time with the match, letting the flame approach his fingertips, seeking an even burn on the cigar. “Folks in Washington tell me Lee isn’t much more than a reputation nowadays, that he has no spunk left.”
    Meade’s hands balled into fists. “I know what’s said. I’ve heard every word and whisper. But let me tell you something outright, General Grant: You’re going to find Lee a formidable opponent. And his soldiers are tough nuts. Don’t underestimate them.”
    “Tougher than ours?” Grant asked sharply.
    Meade caught the testing tone. “No. Different. Wilder. They don’t quit when you expect them to. We’re better-drilled, better-equipped, morale’s far better than Mr. Greeley would have it … but Lee’s men keep coming at you like Florida cottonmouths.” He gestured southward, across the Rapidan. “Of course, they’re fighting for their homes. But it’s more than that. They like to fight.”
    “We don’t?”
    “We fight … from a sense of duty. Oh, some men revel in it. Hancock. Barlow, this Harvard buck. Gibbon, Carroll. Young Upton. But you understand me, I think.”
    “You don’t think Lee can be beaten?”
    Meade stood up. Affronted. He had not said any such thing. It was suddenly a struggle to master his temper.
    “Certainly, he can be beaten. He has been beaten. But this army needs to be allowed to fight him, and to fight him with every man and gun it has. It can’t defeat him decisively if entire corps are stripped away in mid-campaign because some congressman heard a noise in his back garden. This army … you have no idea of the restrictions under which I’ve had to act. It’s … it’s…” The foulest language he knew almost escaped him. “Criminal.”
    Grant shrugged, a gesture tamed by the bulk of his overcoat. But he smiled truly at last. With brown teeth.
    “You’re lucky you didn’t have to answer to Old Brains. Way I did before he came east. Told me everything but how to saddle my horse, and he was getting around to that.” Grant, too, rose to his feet, compact and uninterested in the impression he made. “Talk me through those maps. Tell me what you’d do, if you had the run of things, with no interference.”
    The smoke in the tent burned Meade’s lungs and throat, and he fought back another cough. But he was on firmer ground now. He knew the land, knew how to fight on it.
    They labored at the maps for over an hour, talking of roads and fords, of rail lines and the supplies required by an army on the move, of food and fodder, artillery trains and the army’s real strength available for duty. They spoke of officers who could be depended upon to fight, and of those who wanted watching or replacement. For a time, all other concerns receded as their profession gripped two old soldiers.
    At last, Grant asked: “And your preferred course of action? When the roads dry out?”
    “If Richmond’s our objective—”
    “Richmond won’t be the objective,” Grant cut him off. “Lee will be. I mean to break his army by this summer.”
    The man’s confidence stopped Meade’s breath.