The Last Retreat

Leaving Petersburg

April 2, 1865, night

Tonight the line finally tore.

We lived in them works so long they were like a second skin, and then all at once the orders came like a shout in the dark: pull back, pull out, move. Fires glowing behind us and the sky over the city a sickly red. They say Richmond is being given up too.

Our brigade fought ’em at the railroad west of town to hold the road open as long as we could. Twenty of our boys were taken. Then we fell in with the rest heading west.

The road is crowded with men that don’t look like soldiers no more, just thin faces and brogans worn to the last stitch. But when somebody says “General Lee,” you can still see backs straighten, like the name’s what’s holding us together.

On the road west

April 5, 1865

We marched and marched, mud and rain and mud again. The rations that was supposed to meet us at Amelia Court House wasn’t there. A man can live on pride a while, but pride don’t fill a belly. Whole files of men has drifted out of line, not from hating the cause but from weakness. I saw good soldiers set down by the road like old men and stare at their hands.

Yankee horsemen are at our flanks and our rear, snapping at the column like dogs at a wagon. Today there was shooting near the head of the brigade and a few more of ours went down.

My side is on fire. I tell myself: Stay with the 27th. Just stay with ’em to the end.

Under guard, near Farmville

April 7, 1865

It happened yesterday, and I am writing this a prisoner.

The column strung out thin as a thread in the night march, and the weak fell behind. I fell behind with ’em. The rupture was tearing at me so I couldn’t keep the pace no matter how I cussed my own legs. All day there was firing off toward a creek the men called Sailor’s, the kind of roar that means a whole piece of the army is being swallowed up.

A Yankee patrol came up on us quick, rifles ready, voices sharp, no room for arguing. We were too few and too worn out and too late to fight our way loose. They took our names and what guns we still had and drove us back down the road like cattle.

I don’t feel hate. I feel empty, like a door has shut behind me. Four years, and I’ve ended my war in a Yankee pen, cut off from the boys I swore I’d stand with.

Maps from the printed book