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Updated: June 17, 2025
A nod from Rodes was a sufficient order to Blackford, and the woods rang with the notes of a single bugle. Back came the responses from bugles to right and left, and the skirmishers, dashing through the wild undergrowth, sprang eagerly to their work, followed by the quick rush of the lines of battle.
At this juncture one of the men spoke up, and said, "General, can't we tell them that we whipped them yesterday?" Rodes replied, laughing: "Yes, yes! you can tell them that." Immediately another man spoke up: "General, can't we tell them that we can whip them tomorrow and the day after?" Rodes again laughed, and sent those incorrigible jokers off with: "Yes, yes! go on, go on!
He spoke of General Rodes, and alluded in high terms to his splendid behaviour in the attack on Howard. He hoped he would be promoted, and he said that promotion should be made at once, upon the field, so as to act as an incentive to gallantry in others.
Rodes, the head of Ewell's corps, formed line and threw himself into the action. Early came up on the left; Rodes charged and broke through the Federal centre. Gordon, commanding a brigade then, closed in on their right flank, and the battle was decided. The great blue crescent was shattered, and gave way. The Confederates pressed on, and the Federal army became a rabble.
The Confederate loss in killed, wounded, and prisoners about equaled mine, General Rodes being of the killed, while Generals Fitzhugh Lee and York were severely wounded. We captured five pieces of artillery and nine battle-flags.
As the line pressed forward, Ricketts observed this widening interval and endeavored to fill it with the small brigade of Colonel Keifer, but at this juncture both Gordon and Rodes struck the weak spot where the right of the Sixth Corps and the left of the Nineteenth should have been in conjunction, and succeeded in checking my advance by driving back a part of Ricketts's division, and the most of Grover's.
Following the example of greater men than himself when aspiring to public office, Mr. Rodes called a meeting of his party friends in his precinct, to the end that his modest "boom" might be successfully launched. After the accustomed organization had been effected, a committee of five, of which our aspirant was chairman, was duly appointed to prepare and present appropriate resolutions.
The trains, parked in open fields to the rear, were to move to Todd's Tavern, and thence westward by interior roads; the Second Army Corps was to march in one column, Rodes' division in front, and A.P. Hill's in rear; the First Virginia Cavalry, with whom was Fitzhugh Lee, covered the front; squadrons of the 2nd, the 3rd, and the 5th were on the right; Hotchkiss, accompanied by a squad of couriers, was to send back constant reports to General Lee; the commanding officers were impressed with the importance of celerity and secrecy; the ranks were to be kept well closed up, and all stragglers were to be bayoneted.
"A splendid chance to attack them!" he all at once exclaimed. And tearing a leaf out of his dispatch-book, he wrote a hasty note to General Lee. I afterward knew what it contained. Stuart described his situation, and proposed that Rodes, then near Warrenton, should attack at dawn when he would open with his artillery, charge with his horsemen, and cut his way out.
Had the waters once risen, even for a day, so high as to reach the level of the base of one of these cones had there been a single flood 50 or 60 feet in height since the last eruption occurred, a great part of these volcanoes must inevitably have been swept away as readily as all traces of the layer of cinders; and the accompanying bones would have been obliterated by the Rodes near Aurignac, had it risen, since the days of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and cave-bear, 50 feet above its present level.
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