ho stumbled into the room, lurched against the rude wooden
table, almost rebounding from it to fall. He was nearly out on his feet,
feet where broken boots were mired within inches of their tops. Drew put
down his cup and jumped up to steady the man.

"General Forrest's compliments, suh. Will you bring up the division to
join General Chalmers? The battle's on at Nashville, and it may be
necessary to form a rear guard for a retreat--" He got the message out
mechanically in a croak.

So they went to start the first move in a vast job of salvage. Buford's
men marched fast to come between a broken army and the full force of
enemy pursuit. For Franklin, having bled the Army of the Tennessee of
its strength, was only the beginning of chaos. Nashville crushed the
remains, and the remnants fled, a crippled despairing flight of the
defeated. The big gamble was totally lost.

It was Forrest who commanded that hastily formed rear guard. Its stiff
spine was his cavalry, with the addition of two brigades of
infantry--Alabama and Georgia troops. Snapping at them was Union
cavalry in full force. Not snapping at their heels, for it was fang to
fang; the Confederates only gave ground fighting. Day darkened on the
field and they were in hand-to-hand assault. A man marked musket or
carbine flash to sight on the enemy.

And as time became a nightmare of almost continuous battle, the rain
lashed at the struggling men with a whip of icy water. Fighters crouched
behind rail fences while the Union cavalry charged across black fields,
hoofs drumming on the ground, and the sputtering fire of carbines making
an uneven kind of lightning along the improvised wood barricades. Black
tree trunks gleamed greasily in the wet; and here and there, out of
defiance, the war whoop of the Yell cut eerily through the melee.

After evacuating Columbia, they closed ranks and stiffened again,
knowing that they must be the wall between the disorganized rabble of
the army and the thrust of the Yankee forces coming confidently to
finish them off. Cavalry, volunteers from the infantry, fragments of
commands all, but still with enough cohesion behind a commander they
trusted to fall back in fighting order ... and fighting--even to
countercharge when the need and the occasion offered.

Drew, Kirby, Croff, and Webb circled around a wagon, bringing the driver
to a halt, his mule team standing with drooping heads, blowing and
puffing so that their ribs showed as bon