Battle Flag
Battle Flag
Bernard Cornwell
The third volume in the Starbuck Chronicles. The battle for control of Richmond, the Confederate capital, continues through the hot summer of 1862.Captain Nate Starbuck, yankee fighting for the Southern cause, has to survive and win with his ragged Company in the bitter struggle not only against the formidable Northern army but equally in opposition to his own superiors who would like nothing better than to see Nate Starbuck dead and dishonoured.Starbuck’s courage is tested to the limit in his desperate manoeuvres to retrieve his own and the Legion’s honour in this the thrid narrative of Bernard Cornwell’s sweeping epic of the American Civil War.
Bernard Cornwell
BATTLE FLAG
THE NATHANIEL STARBUCK CHRONICLES
BOOK THREE
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The right of Bernard Cornwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
BATTLE FLAG. Copyright © 2006 by Bernard Cornwell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007339495
06 07 08 09 10
Version: 2017-05-08
Praise for Bernard Cornwell’s THE NATHANIEL STARBUCK CHRONICLES
“The most entertaining military historical novels…. Always based on fact, always interesting…always entertaining.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[A] wonderful series…believable, three-dimensional characters…. A rollicking treat for Cornwell’s many fans.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Highly successful.”
—The Times (London)
“Fast-paced and exciting…. Cornwell—and Starbuck—don’t disappoint.”
—Birmingham News
“A top-class read by a master of historical drama. Nate Starbuck is on the march, and on his way to fame.”
—Irish Press
Battle Flag is for my father, with love
CONTENTS
COVER PAGE (#uf5151e1e-a4a4-5d7c-b4b4-7d5cf63de607)
TITLE PAGE (#u22ad9930-6c91-51e5-a5e8-e016c2593b95)
COPYRIGHT
PRAISE
DEDICATION (#u92d524f4-1650-57c1-bd1f-193ebd8408d4)
MAP
PART ONE
CAPTAIN NATHANIEL STARBUCK FIRST SAW HIS NEW (#u0d3ed58f-dfee-5446-aef2-bc97fbad5d80)
THE YANKEE CAVALRY PATROL REACHED GENERAL (#u650c8d97-ffcf-5b08-97f0-d20036894878)
IT’S GOD’S WILL, BANKS! GOD’S WILL!” THE REVEREND (#u57a52692-33af-54a3-86ce-6a7f4b3a0887)
SATURDAY MORNING, THE DAY AFTER BATTLE, AGAIN (#u54cabbd8-ea13-5c26-8704-b56211c9e4a8)
PART TWO
JACKSON, LIKE A SNAKE THAT HAD STRUCK, HURT, BUT (#litres_trial_promo)
THERE WERE TIMES WHEN GENERAL WASHINGTON (#litres_trial_promo)
THE YANKEES’ SPRING OFFENSIVE MIGHT HAVE FAILED, (#litres_trial_promo)
GENERAL STUART’S AIDE REACHED LEE’S HEADQUARTERS (#litres_trial_promo)
THEY MARCHED LIKE THEY HAD NEVER MARCHED IN (#litres_trial_promo)
THE LEGION MARCHED INTO BRISTOE JUST AS THE TRAIN (#litres_trial_promo)
ALL DAY THE YANKEES TRIED TO MAKE SENSE OF (#litres_trial_promo)
AT MANASSAS, ON FRIDAY AUGUST 29, 1862, THE (#litres_trial_promo)
THE LAST NORTHERN ATTACK OF THE DAY WAS BY FAR
THE FIRST ATTACK OF THE SATURDAY MORNING WAS AN
HISTORICAL NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOKS BY BERNARD CORNWELL
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Map
PART ONE
CAPTAIN NATHANIEL STARBUCK FIRST SAW HIS NEW commanding general when the Faulconer Legion forded the Rapidan. Thomas Jackson was on the river’s northern bank, where he appeared to be in a trance, for he was motionless in his saddle with his left hand held high in the air while his eyes, blue and resentful, stared into the river’s vacant and murky depths. His glum stillness was so uncanny that the marching column edged to the far margin of the ford rather than pass near a man whose stance so presaged death. The General’s physical appearance was equally disturbing. Jackson had a ragged beard, a plain coat, and a dirty cap, while his horse looked as if it should have been taken to a slaughterhouse long before. It was hard to credit that this was the South’s most controversial general, the man who gave the North sleepless nights and nervous days, but Lieutenant Franklin Coffman, sixteen years old and newly arrived in the Faulconer Legion, asserted that the odd-looking figure was indeed the famous Stonewall Jackson. Coffman had once been taught by Professor Thomas Jackson. “Mind you,” Lieutenant Coffman confided in Starbuck, “I don’t believe generals make any real difference to battles.”
“Such wisdom in one so young,” said Starbuck, who was twenty-two years old.
“It’s the men who win battles, not generals,” Coffman said, ignoring his Captain’s sarcasm. Lieutenant Coffman had received one year’s schooling at the Virginia Military Institute, where Thomas Jackson had ineffectively lectured him in artillery drill and Natural Philosophy. Now Coffman looked at the rigid figure sitting motionless in the shabby saddle. “I can’t imagine old Square Box as a general,” Coffman said scornfully. “He couldn’t keep a schoolroom in order, let alone an army.”
“Square Box?” Starbuck asked. General Jackson had many nicknames. The newspapers called him Stonewall, his soldiers called him Old Jack or even Old Mad Jack, while many of Old Jack’s former students liked to refer to him as Tom Fool Jack, but Square Box was a name new to Starbuck.
“He’s got the biggest feet in the world,” Coffman explained. “Really huge! And the only shoes that ever fitted him were like boxes.”
“What a fount of useful information you are, Lieutenant,” Starbuck said casually. The Legion was still too far from the river for Starbuck to see the General’s feet, but he made a mental note to look at these prodigies when he did finally reach the Rapidan. The Legion was presently not moving at all, its progress halted by the reluctance of the men ahead to march straight through the ford without first removing their tattered boots. Mad Jack Stonewall Square Box Jackson was reputed to detest such delays, but he seemed oblivious to this holdup. Instead he just sat, hand in the air and eyes on the river, while right in front of him the column bunched and halted. The men behind the obstruction were grateful for the enforced halt, for the day was blistering hot, the air motionless, and the heat as damp as steam. “You were remarking, Coffman, on the ineffectiveness of generals?” Starbuck prompted his new junior officer.
“If you think about it, sir,” Coffman said with a youthful passion, “we haven’t got any real generals, not like the Yankees, but we still win battles. I reckon that’s because the Southerner is unbeatable.”
“What about Robert Lee?” Starbuck asked. “Isn’t he a real general?”
“Lee’s old! He’s antediluvian!” Coffman said, shocked that Starbuck should even have suggested the name of the new commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. “He must be fifty-five, at least!”
“Jackson’s not old,” Starbuck pointed out. “He isn’t even forty yet.”
“But he’s mad, sir. Honest! We used to call him Tom Fool.”
“He must be mad then,” Starbuck teased Coffman. “So why do we win battles despite having mad generals, ancient generals, or no generals at all?”
“Because fighting is in the Southern blood, sir. It really is.” Coffman was an eager young man who was determined to be a hero. His father had died of consumption, leaving his mother with four young sons and two small daughters. His father’s death had forced Coffman to leave the Virginia Military Institute after his first year, but that one year’s military schooling had equipped him with a wealth of martial theories. “Northerners,” he now explained to Starbuck, “have diluted blood. There are too many immigrants in the North, sir. But the South has pure blood, sir. Real American blood.”
“You mean the Yankees are an inferior race?”
“It’s an acknowledged fact, sir. They’ve lost the thoroughbred strain, sir.”
“You do know I’m a Yankee, Coffman, don’t you?” Starbuck asked.
Coffman immediately looked confused, though before he could frame any response he was interrupted by Colonel Thaddeus Bird, the Faulconer Legion’s commanding officer, who came striding long-legged from the rear of the stalled column. “Is that really Jackson?” Bird asked, gazing across the river.
“Lieutenant Coffman informs me that the General’s real name is Old Mad Tom Fool Square Box Jackson, and that is indeed the man himself,” Starbuck answered.
“Ah, Coffman,” Bird said, peering down at the small Lieutenant as though Coffman was some curious specimen of scientific interest, “I remember when you were nothing but a chirruping infant imbibing the lesser jewels of my glittering wisdom.” Bird, before he became a soldier, had been the schoolmaster in Faulconer Court House, where Coffman’s family lived.
“Lieutenant Coffman has not ceased to imbibe wisdom,” Starbuck solemnly informed Colonel Bird, “nor indeed to impart it, for he has just informed me that we Yankees are an inferior breed, our blood being soured, tainted, and thinned by the immigrant strain.”
“Quite right, too!” Bird said energetically; then the Colonel draped a thin arm around the diminutive Coffman’s shoulders. “I could a tale unfold, young Coffman, whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, and make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.” He spoke even more closely into the ear of the astonished Lieutenant. “Did you know, Coffman, that the very moment an immigrant boat docks in Boston all the Beacon Hill families send their wives down to the harbor to be impregnated? Is that not the undeniable truth, Starbuck?”
“Indeed it is, sir, and they send their daughters as well if the boat arrives on the Sabbath.”
“Boston is a libidinous town, Coffman,” Bird said very sternly as he stepped away from the wide-eyed Lieutenant, “and if I am to give you just one piece of advice in this sad bad world, then let it be to avoid the place. Shun it, Coffman! Regard Boston as you might regard Sodom or Gomorrah. Remove it from your catalog of destinations. Do you understand me, Coffman?”
“Yes, sir,” Coffman said very seriously.
Starbuck laughed at the look on his Lieutenant’s face. Coffman had arrived the day before with a draft of conscripted men to replace the casualties of Gaines’ Mill and Malvern Hill. The conscripts had mostly been culled from the alleys of Richmond and, to Starbuck, appeared to be a scrawny, unhealthy, and shifty-looking crew of dubious reliability, but Franklin Coffman, like the original members of the Legion, was a volunteer from Faulconer County and full of enthusiasm for the Southern cause.
Colonel Bird now abandoned his teasing of the Lieutenant and plucked at Starbuck’s sleeve. “Nate,” he said, “a word.” The two men walked away from the road, crossing a shallow ditch into a meadow that was wan and brown from the summer’s heat wave. Starbuck limped, not because he was wounded, but because the sole of his right boot was becoming detached from its uppers. “Is it me?” Bird asked as the two men paced across the dry grass. “Am I getting wiser or is it that the young are becoming progressively more stupid? And young Coffman, believe it if you will, was brighter than most of the infants it was my misfortune to teach. I remember he mastered the theory of gerunds in a single morning!”
“I’m not sure I ever mastered gerunds,” Starbuck said.
“Hardly difficult,” Bird said, “so long as you remember that they are nouns which provide—”
“And I’m not sure I ever want to master the damn things,” Starbuck interrupted.
“Wallow in your ignorance, then,” Bird said grandly. “But you’re also to look after young Coffman. I couldn’t bear to write to his mother and tell her he’s dead, and I have a horrid feeling that he’s likely to prove stupidly brave. He’s like a puppy. Tail up, nose wet, and can’t wait to play battles with Yankees.”
“I’ll look after him, Pecker.”
“But you’re also to look after yourself,” Bird said meaningfully. He stopped and looked into Starbuck’s eyes. “There’s a rumor, only a rumor, and God knows I do not like passing on rumors, but this one has an unpleasant ring to it. Swynyard was heard to say that you won’t survive the next battle.”
Starbuck dismissed the prediction with a grin. “Swynyard’s a drunk, not a prophet.” Nevertheless he felt a shudder of fear. He had been a soldier long enough to become inordinately superstitious, and no man liked to hear a presentiment of his own death.
“Suppose,” Bird said, taking two cigars from inside his hatband, “that Swynyard has decided to arrange it?”
Starbuck stared incredulously at his Colonel. “Arrange my death?” he finally asked.
Bird scratched a lucifer match alight and stooped over its flame. “Colonel Swynyard,” he announced dramatically when his cigar was drawing properly, “is a drunken swine, a beast, a cream-faced loon, a slave of nature, and a son of hell, but he is also, Nate, a most cunning rogue, and when he is not in his cups he must realize that he is losing the confidence of our great and revered leader. Which is why he must now try to do something which will please our esteemed lord and master. Get rid of you.” The last four words were delivered brutally.
Starbuck laughed them off. “You think Swynyard will shoot me in the back?”
Bird gave Starbuck the lit cigar. “I don’t know how he’ll kill you. All I know is that he’d like to kill you, and that Faulconer would like him to kill you, and for all I know our esteemed General is prepared to award Swynyard a healthy cash bonus if he succeeds in killing you. So be careful, Nate, or else join another regiment.”
“No,” Starbuck said immediately. The Faulconer Legion was his home. He was a Bostonian, a Northerner, a stranger in a strange land who had found in the Legion a refuge from his exile. The Legion provided Starbuck with casual kindnesses and a hive of friends, and those bonds of affection were far stronger than the distant enmity of Washington Faulconer. That enmity had grown worse when Faulconer’s son Adam had deserted from the Southern army to fight for the Yankees, a defection for which Brigadier General Faulconer blamed Captain Starbuck, but not even the disparity in their ranks could persuade Starbuck to abandon his fight against the man who had founded the Legion and who now commanded the five regiments, including the Legion, that made up the Faulconer Brigade. “I’ve got no need to run away,” he now told Bird. “Faulconer won’t last any longer than Swynyard. Faulconer’s a coward and Swynyard’s a drunk, and before this summer’s out, Pecker, you’ll be Brigade commander and I’ll be in command of the Legion.”
Bird hooted with delight. “You are incorrigibly conceited, Nate. You! Commanding the Legion? I imagine Major Hinton and the dozen other men senior to you might have a different opinion.”
“They might be senior, but I’m the best.”
“Ah, you still suffer from the delusion that merit is rewarded in this world? I suppose you contracted that opinion with all the other nonsense they crammed into you when Yale was failing to give you mastery of the gerund?” Bird, achieving this lick at Starbuck’s alma mater, laughed gleefully. His head jerked back and forth as he laughed, the odd jerking motion explaining his nickname: Pecker. Starbuck joined in the laughter, for he, like just about everyone else in the Legion, liked Bird enormously. The schoolmaster was eccentric, opinionated, contrary, and one of the kindest men alive. He had also proved to possess an unexpected talent for soldiering. “We move at last,” Bird now said, gesturing at the stalled column that had begun edging toward the ford where the solitary, strange figure of Jackson waited motionless on his mangy horse. “You owe me two dollars,” Bird suddenly remarked as he led Starbuck back to the road.
“Two dollars!”
“Major Hinton’s fiftieth birthday approaches. Lieutenant Pine assures me he can procure a ham, and I shall prevail on our beloved leader for some wine. We are paying for a feast.”
“Is Hinton really that old?” Starbuck asked.
“He is indeed, and if you live that long we shall doubtless give you a drunken dinner as a reward. Have you got two bucks?”
“I haven’t got two cents,” Starbuck said. He had some money in Richmond, but that money represented his cushion against disaster and was not for frittering away on ham and wine.
“I shall lend you the money,” Bird said with a rather despairing sigh. Most of the Legion’s officers had private means, but Colonel Bird, like Starbuck, was forced to live on the small wages of a Confederate officer.
The men of Company H stood as Starbuck and Bird approached the road, though one of the newly arrived conscripts stayed prone on the grass verge and complained he could not march another step. His reward was a kick in the ribs from Sergeant Truslow. “You can’t do that to me!” the man protested, scrabbling sideways to escape the Sergeant.
Truslow grabbed the man’s jacket and pulled his face close in to his own. “Listen, you son of a poxed bitch, I can slit your slumbelly guts wide open and sell them to the Yankees for hog food if I want, and not because I’m a sergeant and you’re a private, but because I’m a mean son of a bitch and you’re a lily-livered louse. Now get the hell up and march.”
“What comfortable words the good Sergeant speaks,” Bird said as he jumped back across the dry ditch. He drew on his cigar. “So I can’t persuade you to join another regiment, Nate?”
“No, sir.”
Pecker Bird shook his head ruefully. “I think you’re a fool, Nate, but for God’s sake be a careful fool. For some odd reason I’d be sorry to lose you.”
“Fall in!” Truslow shouted.
“I’ll take care,” Starbuck promised as he rejoined his company. His thirty-six veterans were lean, tanned, and ragged. Their boots were falling to pieces, their gray jackets were patched with common brown cloth, and their worldly possessions were reduced to what a man could carry suspended from his rope belt or sling in a rolled blanket across his shoulder. The twenty conscripts made an awkward contrast in their new uniforms, clumsy leather brogans, and stiff knapsacks. Their faces were pale and their rifle muzzles unblackened by firing. They knew this northward march through the central counties of Virginia probably meant an imminent battle, but what that battle would bring was a mystery, while the veterans knew only too well that a fight would mean screaming and blood and hurt and pain and thirst, but maybe, too, a cache of plundered Yankee dollars or a bag of real coffee taken from a festering, maggot-riddled Northern corpse. “March on!” Starbuck shouted, and fell in beside Lieutenant Franklin Coffman at the head of the company.
“You see if I’m not right, sir,” Coffman said. “Old Mad Jack’s got feet bigger than a plowhorse.”
As Starbuck marched into the ford, he looked at the General’s feet. They were indeed enormous. So were Jackson’s hands. But what was most extraordinary of all was why the General still held his left hand in midair like a child begging permission to leave a schoolroom. Starbuck was about to ask Coffman for an explanation when, astonishingly, the General stirred. He looked up from the water, and his gaze focused on Starbuck’s company. “Coffman!” he called in an abrupt, high-pitched voice. “Come here, boy.”
Coffman stumbled out of the ford and half ran to the General’s side. “Sir?”
The ragged-bearded Jackson frowned down from his saddle. “Do you remember me, Coffman?”
“Yes, sir, of course I do, sir.”
Jackson lowered his left hand very gently, as though he feared he might damage the arm if he moved it fast. “I was sorry you had to leave the Institute early, Coffman. It was after your plebe year, was it not?”
“Yes, sir. It was, sir.”
“Because your father died?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And your mother, Coffman? She’s well?”
“Indeed, sir. Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”
“Bereavement is a terrible affliction, Coffman,” the General observed, then slowly unbent his rigid posture to lean toward the slim, fair-haired Lieutenant, “especially for those who are not in a state of grace. Are you in a state of grace, Coffman?”
Coffman blushed, frowned, then managed to nod. “Yes, sir. I think I am, sir.”
Jackson straightened again into his poker-backed stance and, as slowly as he had lowered his left hand, raised it once more into midair. He lifted his eyes from Coffman to stare into the heat-hazed distance. “You will find it a very hard thing to meet your Maker if you are unsure of His grace,” the General said in a kindly voice, “so study your scriptures and recite your prayers, boy.”
“Yes, sir, I will, sir,” Coffman said. He stood awkward and uncertain, waiting for the General to speak further, but Jackson seemed in his trance once again, and so the Lieutenant turned and walked back to Starbuck’s side. The Legion marched on, and the Lieutenant remained silent as the road climbed between small pastures and straggling woods and beside modest farms. It was a good two miles before Coffman at last broke his silence. “He’s a great man,” the Lieutenant said, “isn’t he, sir? Isn’t he a great man?”
“Tom Fool?” Starbuck teased Coffman.
“A great man, sir,” Coffman chided Starbuck.
“If you say so,” Starbuck said, though all he knew about Jackson was that Old Mad Jack had a great reputation for marching, and that when Old Mad Jack went marching, men died. And they were marching now, marching north, and going north meant one thing only: Yankees ahead. Which meant there would be a battle soon, and a field of graves after the battle, and this time, if Pecker was right, Starbuck’s enemies would not just be in front of him but behind as well. Starbuck marched on. A fool going to battle.
The midday train stopped at Manassas Junction amidst a clash of cars, the hissing of steam, and the clangor of the locomotive’s bell. Sergeants’ voices rose over the mechanical din, urging troops out of the cars and onto the strip of dirt that lay between the rails and the warehouses. The soldiers jumped down, glad to be free of the cramped cars and excited to be in Virginia. Manassas Junction might not be the fighting front, but it was still a part of a rebel state, and so they peered about themselves as though the landscape was as wondrous and strange as the misty hills of mysterious Japan or far Cathay.
The arriving troops were mostly seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys come from New Jersey and Wisconsin, from Maine and Illinois, from Rhode Island and Vermont. They were volunteers, newly uniformed and eager to join this latest assault on the Confederacy. They boasted of hanging Jeff Davis from an apple tree, and bragged of how they would march through Richmond and roust the rebels out of their nests like rats from a granary. They were young and indestructible, full of confidence, but also awed by the savagery of this strange destination.
For Manassas Junction was not an inviting place. It had been sacked once by Northern troops, destroyed again by retreating Confederates, then hastily rebuilt by Northern contractors, so that now there were acres of gaunt, raw-timbered warehouses standing between rail sidings and weed-filled meadows that were crammed with guns and limbers and caissons and portable forges and ambulances and wagons. More stores and weapons arrived every hour, for this was the supply depot that would fuel the summer campaign of 1862 that would end the rebellion and so restore a United States of America. The great spread of buildings was shadowed by an ever-present pall of greasy smoke that came from blacksmiths’ shops and locomotive repair sheds and the fireboxes of the locomotives that dragged in their goods wagons and passenger cars.
Two cavalry officers waited at the depot. They had clearly gone to some considerable effort to make themselves presentable, for their uniform coats were brushed spotless, their spurred boots were shining, and their leather belts polished. The older man was middle-aged and balding, with a pleasant face and thick muttonchop whiskers. His name was Major Joseph Galloway, and he clutched a plumed hat in his nervous hands. His companion was a much younger man, handsome and fair-haired, with a square beard and wide shoulders and an open face that inspired trust. His coat showed a captain’s bars.
Both men were Virginians, yet both fought for the North. Joseph Galloway owned property just outside Manassas itself, and that farm was now the depot for a regiment of Northern cavalry exclusively recruited from Southerners loyal to the government in Washington. Most of the troopers for Galloway’s Horse were volunteers from the border states, the disputed lands of Maryland, and the western counties of Virginia, but a good number were refugees from the Confederate States themselves. Galloway had no doubt that some of his men were fugitives from Southern justice, but the majority were idealists who fought to preserve the Union, and it had been Major Galloway’s notion to recruit such men for reconnaissance work deep behind the rebel lines. Northern horsemen were solid and brave, but they rode the Virginian countryside as strangers, and in consequence they were timid compared to the rakehell Southerners who knew that every Virginian village and hamlet contained sympathizers prepared to hide and feed them. It had been Galloway’s inspiration to raise a regiment that could ride the rebel states like native Southerners, yet the idea had received only lukewarm support from Washington. Raise the regiment, the government’s bureaucrats had told Major Galloway, and we might deign to employ it, but only if it came properly equipped with weapons, horses, and uniforms.
Which was why Major Galloway and Captain Adam Faulconer now waited for a passenger who was supposed to have arrived on the midday train that had just steamed into Manassas. The two cavalry officers worked their way against the flood of excited soldiers toward the train’s last car, which had been reserved for passengers more exalted than mere cannon fodder. A porter lowered the carriage steps, and two ladies, their hooped skirts scarce able to squeeze through the car’s narrow doorway, were handed down. After the ladies came a group of senior officers, their mustaches trimmed, their uniforms brushed, and their faces flush from the day’s heat and from their consumption of the railroad’s whiskey. One officer, younger than the rest, broke away and shouted at some orderlies to bring horses. “Chop, chop now! Horses for the General!” the aide shouted. The ladies’ twin parasols bobbed white and lacy through the mist of tobacco smoke and the crush of dark military hats.
The last man to alight from the passenger car was a thin, tall, and elderly civilian with white hair and beard, fierce eyes, and a gaunt, stern face. He had sunken cheeks, a Roman nose as imperious as his gaze, a black frock coat, a top hat, and despite the heat, a high-buttoned vest over which a pair of starched Geneva bands hung white. He carried a dark maroon carpetbag and an ebony stick that he used to push aside a black servant who was lifting the ladies’ cabin trunks onto a handcart. The gesture was peremptory and unthinking, the act of a man accustomed to authority.
“That’s him,” Adam said, recognizing the minister whom he had heard preach in Boston just before the war began.
Major Galloway pushed through the crowd toward the white-haired man. “Sir?” he called to the newly arrived preacher. “Doctor Starbuck, sir?”
The Reverend Elial Joseph Starbuck, Doctor of Divinity, pamphleteer, and the most famous of all the North’s abolitionist preachers, scowled at his welcomers. “You must be Galloway. And you’re Faulconer? Good! My bag.” He thrust the carpetbag into Adam’s hand, which had been stretched out for a handshake.
“You had a pleasant journey, I trust, sir?” Major Galloway inquired as he ushered his guest toward the roadway.
“It became successively less pleasant, Galloway, as I journeyed south. I am forced to conclude that engineering has reached its apotheosis in New England and that the further one journeys from Boston the less comfortable the conveyance.” The Reverend Starbuck delivered these judgments in a voice trained to reach the deepest recesses of the largest churches and lecture halls in America. “The Southern rails, I must say, are distinctly lumpy. The degraded product, no doubt, of a Slavocracy. Am I expected to walk to my destination?” the Reverend Starbuck demanded, suddenly stopping dead in his tracks.
“No, sir. I have a buggy.” Galloway was about to request that Adam go fetch the carriage, then realized Adam was too encumbered with the preacher’s heavy carpetbag. “I’ll fetch it directly, sir. It isn’t far.”
The Reverend Starbuck waved Galloway on his way, then peered with a fierce inquisitiveness at a group of civilians waiting for the mail to be unloaded from the newly arrived caboose. “Have you read Spurzheim on phrenology?” he demanded of Adam.
“No, sir,” Adam responded, surprised by the fiercely abrupt question.
“Science has much to teach us,” the Reverend Doctor Starbuck declaimed, “so long as we remember that its conclusions are ever subject to the approval and emendations of Almighty God, but I am interested to observe these proofs of Spurzheim’s treatise.” He waved his stick toward the waiting civilians. “The New Englander generally possesses a noble brow shape. He displays cranial contours that denote intelligence, benevolence, wisdom, and adhesiveness, but even in these upper regions of the South I notice how the shape of men’s skulls betrays depravity, combativeness, destructiveness, and a distinct tendency toward cretinism.”
Adam’s torturing conscience, like his ingrained patriotism, might have driven him to fight against his father’s land, yet he was still a native son of Virginia, and the Northern preacher’s criticism made him bridle. “Was not George Washington a Southerner, sir?” he demanded stiffly.
But the Reverend Starbuck was too old a controversialist to be trapped into recantation. “George Washington, young man, like yourself, was a product of the gentry. My observations are confined solely to the common ruck of people. The general there, you see him?” The peremptory stick, narrowly missing an artillery sergeant, pointed at a plump officer who had shared the passenger car with the Reverend Starbuck.
“I see him, sir,” Adam said, wondering what characteristics the general’s skull shape revealed.
But the Reverend Starbuck had abandoned the subject of phrenology. “That is Pope,” the preacher announced. “He was good enough to pay me his respects during the journey. A fine-looking man, indeed.”
Adam looked with interest at this new commander of the North’s Army of Virginia. General John Pope was a high-colored and confident-looking man with intelligent eyes and a bushy beard. If phrenology did provide an accurate guide to a man’s character, then Pope’s broad forehead and solid, square appearance suggested that he might indeed be the savior that the North had been seeking ever since the war’s sad beginning. John Pope had distinguished himself in the fighting on the Mississippi and had now been brought east to work his magic in the intransigent Virginian countryside where Northern general after Northern general had first been bamboozled and then beaten by the ragged rebel armies.
“Pope has the right ideas,” the Reverend Starbuck went on enthusiastically. “It’s no good being kind to rebels. Disobedience calls for punishment, and defiance demands retribution. The Slavocracy must be smitten, Faulconer, and its lands laid waste. Pope won’t stay his hand, he assures me of that. He is a man for the Lord’s work.” And indeed, General Pope, almost as soon as he had been appointed commander of the Army of Virginia, had declared that the old policy of treating Southern civilians with respect was finished. Northern soldiers would henceforth take what they needed from the Southern population, and any Southerner who resisted such depredations would be punished. The Reverend Elial Starbuck applauded Pope’s zeal. “The Southerner,” the preacher now lectured Adam, “understands only one language. Brute force. It is the language he has used to oppress the Negro, and it is the language that must now be used to oppress him. You agree?”
“I think, sir,” Adam said tactfully, “that the North must gain victory very soon.”
“Quite so, quite so,” the Reverend Starbuck said, not certain whether he had received agreement or not. He certainly deserved agreement, for it was upon the Reverend Starbuck’s generosity that both the future of Adam and of Galloway’s Horse depended. Adam had been penniless when he deserted the South, but it had been his good fortune to know Major James Starbuck, the preacher’s eldest son, and it had been James who had informed Adam about Galloway’s Horse and who had suggested that his famous father might be able to provide Adam with the necessary funds to join the regiment.
The Reverend Doctor Starbuck had proved more than willing to advance the money. Too old to fight, yet too passionate to abstain from fighting, he had watched, impotent, as the North suffered defeat after defeat in Virginia. The defeats had stirred the Reverend Starbuck into contributing his own and his church’s money to the raising and equipping of Massachusetts regiments, only to see those regiments led to disaster. Other men, lesser men, might have abandoned their efforts, but the disasters only fed the preacher’s zeal, which was why, given the chance to contribute to the establishment of Galloway’s Horse, the Reverend Starbuck had been quick to agree. He was not only supporting Adam but donating fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of weaponry and ammunition to Galloway’s regiment. The money was not the Reverend Starbuck’s own but had been raised by God-fearing New England abolitionists. “In the past,” he told Galloway and Adam as they journeyed westward from Manassas in the buggy, “we used such charitable donations for our work in the South: distributing tracts, establishing Sabbath schools for blacks, and, of course, conducting investigations into the evils of the Slavocracy, but now, cut off from those activities, our charities need other outlets for their expenditure.”
“There’s surely much to be spent on the welfare of escaped slaves?” Adam asked, hoping at the same time that he was not talking Galloway and himself out of their funding.
“The contrabands are amply provided for. Amply!” The Reverend Starbuck’s disapproving tone suggested that those slaves who had managed to escape to the North were living in pampered luxury rather than struggling for insanitary survival in makeshift camps. “We need to strike a blow at the root of slavery, not pluck a few diseased leaves from its topmost branches.” Adam, hearing the anger behind the preacher’s words, suspected that the Reverend Elial Starbuck was much keener to punish the slaveholders than actually free the slaves.
The buggy climbed the shallow hill from New Market, passed between deep woods, then plunged downhill toward the Warrenton Turnpike. As Major Galloway drove, he pointed out landmarks made famous in the battle that had been fought the previous summer across this same ground. There were the ruins of the house where Surgeon Henry’s widow had died in the shell fire, and there the Matthews house, which had been used as a hospital. As the buggy rattled down the Sudley road north of the turnpike, Galloway pointed to where the Northern flank attack had come from the river’s far side, but as he talked he became aware that the Boston preacher was hardly enthusiastic in his responses. The Reverend Doctor Starbuck did not want a guided tour of the place where the North had met its first defeat; he only wanted to hear promises of victory, and so the conversation died away as Galloway steered the buggy onto the track leading to the farm he had inherited from his father.
Major Galloway, a kindly man, was nervous around the famous abolitionist and relieved when the Reverend Starbuck announced that he had no intention of staying overnight at the comfortable farm, but instead intended to take the evening train south to Culpeper Court House. “My friend Banks did the courtesy of inviting me,” the preacher said, referring to General Nathaniel Banks, who had once been Governor of Massachusetts and was now a Union general who believed that a visit from his old friend would serve to encourage his troops’ flagging spirits. The invitation had certainly done wonders for the preacher’s spirits. He had been chafing in Boston, taking his war news from newspapers and letters, but now he could learn for himself exactly what was happening in Virginia, to which end he had arranged to be absent from his pulpit for the whole month of August. He was fervently praying that a month would be long enough to allow him to be the first Northern minister to preach the gospel from a Richmond pulpit.
But before joining Banks the preacher had agreed to this meeting with Major Galloway and his men. He spoke to Galloway’s regiment in the meadow behind the house, where he encouraged them to fight the good fight, but his brusque manner made it plain that he was in a hurry to conclude the day’s business and continue his journey. Major Galloway tactfully abandoned the planned display of saber fighting and instead conducted his guest toward the farmhouse, which was an impressive building shaded by great oaks and lapped by wide lawns. “My father prospered in the law,” Galloway said, explaining the luxurious house.
“A slave owner, too?” the preacher demanded fiercely, pointing with his ebony cane at the small cabins that lay to the north of the house.
“I freed all the people,” Galloway said hastily. “If I’d sold them, sir,” he went on, “I wouldn’t be needing to beg money for the regiment. I mortgaged the farm to raise funds, sir, and used all the money to buy the horses and weapons you’ve just seen, but frankly, sir, I’ve no resources left. I’ve made myself penniless in the cause of liberty.”
“In which cause we must all be prepared to suffer, Galloway,” the Reverend Starbuck exclaimed as he followed the Major up the veranda steps and into the hallway. The house echoed like an empty building, which it very nearly was, for with the exception of a few essential pieces of furniture Galloway had sent all his books and pictures and drapes and ornaments north into storage so that his rebellious neighbors could not take revenge on his allegiance by stealing his valuables. And if his neighbors did not steal the goods, he explained, his own brother would. “My brother fights for the South, alas,” Major Galloway told the preacher, “and he’d like nothing more than to take the house and its contents from me.” He paused for an instant. “There’s nothing sadder, sir, is there, than family members fighting on opposite sides?” The Reverend Starbuck offered a belligerent grunt as answer, and that ill-tempered noise should have warned Major Galloway against proceeding further with the conversation, but the Major was a guileless man. “Am I right, sir,” Galloway asked, “in believing you have a son who fights with the rebels?”
“I know of no such person,” the preacher said, stiffening perceptibly.
“But Nate, surely—” Adam began, only to be fiercely interrupted.
“I have no son called Nathaniel,” the preacher snapped. “I recognize no person called Nathaniel Starbuck. He is doomed, he is cast out, not only from my family, but also from the loving congregation of Christ! He is a reprobate!” This last condemnation was trumpeted in a voice that might have carried a half-mile into a mighty wind.
Galloway realized he had been tactless and so hurried on, talking inconsequentially about the house and its amenities until he reached the doors of the library, where a tall, heavyset Captain waited. The Captain had a ready smile and a quick, friendly manner. “May I introduce my second-in-command?” Galloway said to the preacher. “Captain William Blythe.”
“Sure glad to meet you, Reverend.” Blythe extended a hand.
“Captain Blythe was a horse trader before the war,” Galloway said.
“You should never have told the minister that, Joe!” Blythe said with a smile. “Everyone knows that us horse traders are the crookedest folks this side of tarnation, but God bless me, sir”—he had turned back to the preacher—“I tried to be as honest a trader as a Christian man could.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” the Reverend Starbuck said stiffly.
“A hundred cents to an honest dollar, sir, that was always my way,” Blythe said cheerfully, “and if I ever rooked a man, sir, why it was never on purpose. And I’ll tell you another thing, sir.” Blythe dropped his voice confidingly. “If ever a man of the cloth wanted a horse, why sir, I swallowed the profit and sometimes a good bit more besides. I confess I was never a churchgoing man myself, sir, to my regret, but my pa always contended that a bucketful of prayer never hurt no one and my dear ma, God bless her dear soul, fair wore out her knees on the church planking. And she sure would have liked to hear you speaking, sir, for they all say you do a mighty sermon!”
The Reverend Starbuck seemed pleased by Blythe’s forthright and friendly manner, so pleased that he did not even show a sign of distaste when the tall Captain draped an arm around his shoulders to conduct him into the bare-shelved library. “You say you’re not a churchgoing man,” the preacher inquired, “but I trust you are saved, Captain?”
Blythe released his grip so that he could turn an astonished face to the Reverend Starbuck. “Washed white in the blood of the lamb, Reverend,” Blythe said in a voice that suggested shock that anyone might have taken him for a heathen. “In fact I’m fair swilled in that precious blood, sir. My dear ma made sure of that before she died, praise the Lord and God rest her dear soul.”
“And your mother, Captain, would approve of your allegiance in this war?” the Reverend Starbuck asked.
Captain William Blythe frowned to show his sincerity. “My dear mother, God bless her simple soul, sir, always said that in the eyes of God a nigra’s soul was the same as any white man’s. So long as that nigra’s a Christian, of course. Then come heaven time, she said, we’d all be white as snow, even the blackest nigra, praise the Lord for His goodness.” Blythe raised his eyes to the ceiling, then, over the unsuspecting preacher’s head, offered Major Galloway an outrageous wink.
Galloway cut short his second-in-command’s blarney by seating his guest at the library’s large table, which was heaped with account books. Galloway, Adam, and Blythe sat opposite the preacher, and the Major described his ambitions for his regiment of cavalry; how they would ride the Southern paths with a confidence and local knowledge that no Northern horseman could hope to match. The Major spoke modestly, stressing the army’s need for good reconnaissance and his own ambitions for a tightly disciplined regiment of horsemen, yet his words were plainly disappointing the Boston preacher. The Reverend Starbuck wanted swift results and dramatic victories, and it was the bombastic William Blythe who first sensed that desire. Blythe intervened with a chuckle. “You have to forgive the Major, Reverend,” he said, “for not talking us up overmuch, but the real truth is we’re going to twist Jeff Davis’s tail, then we’re going to scald the skin straight off that tail, and dang me if we won’t then cut the thing clean off! I promise you, Reverend, that we’re going to make the rebels squeal, and you’ll hear that squeal all the way to Boston Common. Ain’t that so, Major?”
Galloway merely looked surprised, while Adam stared at the table’s scarred top, but the Reverend Starbuck was delighted by the implications of Blythe’s promise. “You have specific plans?” he asked eagerly.
Blythe looked momentarily shocked. “We couldn’t say a danged thing about specifics, sir, it would be downright unsoldierlike of us, but I do promise you, Reverend, that in the weeks to come it won’t be Jeb Stuart you’ll be reading about in the Boston newspapers, no sir, it’ll be Major Joseph Galloway and his gallant regiment of troopers! Ain’t that a fact, Joe?”
Galloway, taken aback, nodded. “We shall do our best, certainly.”
“But there ain’t nothing we can do, sir”—Blythe leaned forward with an earnest expression—“if we don’t have the guns, the sabers, and the horses. As my sainted mother always said, sir, promises fill no bellies. You have to add a lick of hard work and a peck of money if you want to fill a Southern boy’s belly, and sir, believe me, sir, it hurts me, it hurts me hard, to see these fine Southern patriots standing idle for want of a dollar or two.”
“But what will you do with the money?” the Reverend Starbuck asked.
“What can’t we do?” Blythe demanded. “With God on our side, Reverend, we can turn the South upside down and inside out. Why, sir, I shouldn’t say it to you, but I guess you’re a closemouthed man so I’ll take the risk, but there’s a map of Richmond up in my sleeping room, and why would a man like me need a map of Richmond? Well, I ain’t going to tell you, sir, only because it would be downright unsoldierly of me to tell you, but I guess a clever man like you can work out which end of a snake has the bite.”
Adam looked up astonished at this implication that the regiment was planning to raid the rebel capital, and Galloway seemed about to make a firm demurral, but the Reverend Starbuck was gripped by Blythe’s promised coup. “You’ll go to Richmond?” he asked Blythe.
“The very city, sir. That den of evil and lair of the serpent. I wish I could tell you how I loathe the place, sir, but with God’s help we’ll scour it and burn it and cleanse it anew!”
The horse trader was now speaking a language the Reverend Starbuck longed to hear. The Boston preacher wanted promises of rebel humiliation and of dazzling Union victories, of exploits to rival the insolent achievements of the rebel Jeb Stuart. He did not want to hear of patient reconnaissance duties faithfully performed, but wild promises of Northern victories, and no amount of caution from Major Galloway would convince the preacher that Blythe’s promises were exaggerated. The Reverend Starbuck heard what he longed to hear, and to make it a reality he drew from his frock coat’s inner pocket a check. He borrowed a pen and an inkwell from the Major and then signed the check with a due solemnity.
“Praise the Lord,” William Blythe said when the check was signed.
“Praise Him indeed,” the preacher echoed piously, thrusting the check across the table toward Galloway. “That money comes, Major, from a consortium of New England abolitionist churches. It represents the hard-earned dollars of simple honest working folk, given gladly in a sacred cause. Use it well.”
“We shall do our utmost, sir,” Galloway said, then fell momentarily silent as he saw the check was not for the fifteen thousand dollars he had expected, but for twenty thousand. Blythe’s oratory had worked a small miracle. “And thank you, sir,” Galloway managed to say.
“And I ask only one thing in return,” the preacher said.
“Anything, sir!” Blythe said, spreading his big hands as though to encompass the whole wide world. “Anything at all!”
The preacher glanced at the wall over the wide garden doors, where a polished staff tipped with a lance head and a faded cavalry guidon was the room’s sole remaining decoration. “A flag,” the preacher said, “is important to a soldier, is it not?”
“It is, sir,” Galloway answered. The small guidon over the door had been the banner he had carried in the Mexican war.
“Sacred, you might say,” Blythe added.
“Then I should esteem it an honor if you would provide me with a rebel banner,” the preacher said, “that I can display in Boston as proof that our donations are doing God’s work.”
“You shall have your flag, sir!” Blythe promised swiftly. “I’ll make it my business to see you have one. When are you returning to Boston, sir?”
“At month’s end, Captain.”
“You’ll not go empty-handed, sir, not if my name’s Billy Blythe. I promise you, on my dear mother’s grave, sir, that you’ll have your rebel battle flag.”
Galloway shook his head, but the preacher did not see the gesture. He only saw a hated enemy battle flag hanging in the chancel of his church as an object of derision. The Reverend Starbuck pushed back his chair and consulted his fob watch. “I must be returning to the depot,” he said.
“Adam will drive you, sir,” Major Galloway said. The Major waited until the preacher was gone, then shook his head sadly. “You made a deal of promises, Billy.”
“And there was a deal of money at stake,” Blythe said carelessly, “and hell, I never did mind making promises.”
Galloway crossed to the open garden door, where he stared out at the sun-bleached lawn. “I don’t mind a man making promises, Billy, but I sure mind that he keeps them.”
“I always keep my promises, sure I do. I keep ’em in mind while I’m working out how to break them.” Blythe laughed. “Now are you going to give me aggravation for having fetched you your money? Hell, Joe, I get enough piety from young Faulconer.”
“Adam’s a good man.”
“I never said he weren’t a good man. I just said he’s a pious son of a righteous bitch and God only knows why you appointed him Captain.”
“Because he’s a good man,” Galloway said firmly, “and because his family is famous in Virginia, and because I like him. And I like you too, Billy, but not if you’re going to argue with Adam all the time. Now why don’t you go and get busy? You’ve got a flag to capture.”
Blythe scorned such a duty. “Have I? Hell! There’s plenty enough red, white, and blue cloth about, so we’ll just have your house niggers run up a quick rebel flag.”
Galloway sighed. “They’re my servants, Billy, servants.”
“Still niggers, ain’t they? And the girl can use a needle, can’t she? And the Reverend’ll never know the difference. She can make us a flag and I’ll tear it and dirty it a bit and that old fool will think we snatched it clean out of Jeff Davis’s own hands.” Blythe grinned at the idea, then picked up the check. He whistled appreciatively. “Reckon I talked us into a tidy profit, Joe.”
“I reckon you did too. So now you’ll go and spend it, Billy.” Galloway needed to equip Adam’s troop with horses and most of his men with sabers and firearms, but now, thanks to the generosity of the Reverend Starbuck’s abolitionists, the Galloway Horse would be as well equipped and mounted as any other cavalry regiment in the Northern army. “Spend half on horses and half on weapons and saddlery,” Galloway suggested.
“Horses are expensive, Joe,” Blythe warned. “The war’s made them scarce.”
“You’re a horse dealer, Billy, so go and work some horse-dealing magic. Unless you’d rather I let Adam go? He wants to buy his own horses.”
“Never let a boy do a man’s work, Joe,” Blythe said. He touched the preacher’s cheek to his lips and gave it an exaggerated kiss. “Praise the Lord,” Billy Blythe said, “just praise His holy name, amen.”
The Faulconer Legion made camp just a few miles north of the river where they had first glimpsed the baleful figure of their new commanding general. No one in the Legion knew where they were or where they were going or why they were marching there, but a passing artillery major who was a veteran of Jackson’s campaigns said that was the usual way of Old Jack. “You’ll know you’ve arrived just as soon as the enemy does and no sooner,” the Major said, then begged a bucket of water for his horse.
The Brigade headquarters erected tents, but none of the regiments bothered with such luxuries. The Faulconer Legion had started the war with three wagonloads of tents but now had only two tents left, both reserved for Doctor Danson. The men had become adept at manufacturing shelters from branches and sod, though on this warm evening no one needed protection from the weather. Work parties fetched wood for campfires while others carried water from a stream a mile away. Some of the men sat with their bare feet dangling in the stream, trying to wash away the blisters and blood of the day’s march. The four men on the Legion’s punishment detail watered the draft horses that hauled the ammunition wagons, then paraded round the campsite with newly felled logs on their shoulders. The men staggered under the weight as they made the ten circuits of the Legion’s lines that constituted their nightly punishment. “What have they done?” Lieutenant Coffman asked Starbuck.
Starbuck glanced up at the miserable procession. “Lem Pierce got drunk. Matthews sold cartridges for a pint of whiskey, and Evans threatened to hit Captain Medlicott.”
“Pity he didn’t,” Sergeant Truslow interjected. Daniel Medlicott had been the miller at Faulconer Court House, where he had earned a reputation as a hard man with money, though in the spring elections for field officers he had distributed enough promises and whiskey to have himself promoted from sergeant to captain.
“And I don’t know what Trent did,” Starbuck finished.
“Abram Trent’s just a poxed son of a whore,” Truslow said to Coffman. “He stole some food from Sergeant Major Tolliver, but that ain’t why he’s being punished. He’s being punished, lad, because he got caught.”
“You are listening to the gospel according to Sergeant Thomas Truslow,” Starbuck told the Lieutenant. “Thou shalt steal all thou can, but thou shalt not get caught.” Starbuck grinned, then hissed with pain as he jabbed his thumb with a needle. He was struggling to sew the sole of his right boot back onto its uppers, for which task he had borrowed one of the three precious needles possessed by the company.
Sergeant Truslow, sitting on the far side of the fire from the two officers, mocked his Captain’s efforts. “You’re a lousy cobbler.”
“I never pretended to be otherwise.”
“You’ll break the goddamn needle, pushing like that.”
“You want to do it?” Starbuck asked, offering the half-finished work to the Sergeant.
“Hell no, I ain’t paid to patch your boots.”
“Then shut the hell up,” Starbuck said, trying to work the needle through one of the old stitching holes in the sole.
“It’ll only break first thing in the morning,” Truslow said after a moment’s silence.
“Not if I do it properly.”
“No chance of that,” Truslow said. He broke off a piece of tobacco and put it in his cheek. “You’ve got to protect the thread, see? So it don’t chafe on the road.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“No, you ain’t. You’re just lashing the boot together. There are blind men without fingers who could make a better job than you.”
Lieutenant Coffman listened nervously to the conversation. He had been told that the Captain and Sergeant were friends—indeed, that they had been friends ever since the Yankee Starbuck had been sent to persuade the Yankee-hating Truslow to leave his high-mountain farm and join Faulconer’s Legion—but to Coffman it seemed an odd sort of friendship if it was expressed with such mutual scorn. Now the intimidating Sergeant turned to the nervous Lieutenant. “A proper officer,” Truslow confided to Coffman, “would have a darkie to do his sewing.”
“A proper officer,” Starbuck said, “would kick your rotten teeth down your gullet.”
“Anytime, Captain,” Truslow said, laughing.
Starbuck tied off the thread and peered critically at his handiwork. “It ain’t perfect,” he allowed, “but it’ll do.”
“It’ll do,” Truslow agreed, “so long as you don’t walk on it.”
Starbuck laughed. “Hell, we’ll be fighting a battle in a day or two, then I’ll get myself a pair of brand-new Yankee boots.” He gingerly pulled the repaired boot onto his foot and was pleasantly surprised that the sole did not immediately peel away. “Good as new,” he said, then flinched, not because of the boot, but because a sudden scream sounded across the campsite. The scream was cut abruptly short; there was a pause, then a sad wailing sound sobbed briefly.
Coffman looked aghast, for the noise had sounded like it came from a creature being tortured, which indeed it had. “Colonel Swynyard,” Sergeant Truslow explained to the new lieutenant, “is beating one of his niggers.”
“The Colonel drinks,” Starbuck added.
“The Colonel is a drunk,” Truslow amended.
“And it’s anyone’s guess whether the liquor will kill him before one of his slaves does,” Starbuck said, “or one of us, for that matter.” He spat into the fire. “I’d kill the bastard willingly enough.”
“Welcome to the Faulconer Brigade,” Truslow said to Coffman.
The Lieutenant did not know how to respond to such cynicism, so he just sat looking troubled and nervous, then flinched as a thought crossed his mind. “Will we really be fighting in a day or two?” he asked.
“Probably tomorrow.” Truslow jerked his head toward the northern sky, which was being reddened by the reflected glow of an army’s fires. “It’s what you’re paid to do, son,” Truslow added when he saw Coffman’s nervousness.
“I’m not paid,” Coffman said and immediately blushed for the admission.
Truslow and Starbuck were both silent for a few seconds; then Starbuck frowned. “What the hell do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, I do get paid,” Coffman said, “but I don’t get the money, see?”
“No, I don’t see.”
The Lieutenant was embarrassed. “It’s my mother.”
“She gets the money, you mean?” Starbuck asked.
“She owes General Faulconer money,” Coffman explained, “because we rent one of his houses on the Rosskill road and Mother fell behind with the rent, so Faulconer keeps my salary.”
There was another long pause. “Christ on his cross.” Truslow’s blasphemy broke the silence. “You mean that miserable rich bastard is taking your three lousy bucks a week for his own?”
“It’s only fair, isn’t it?” Coffman asked.
“No, it damn well ain’t,” Starbuck said. “If you want to send your mother the money, that’s fair, but it ain’t fair for you to fight for nothing! Shit!” He swore angrily.
“I don’t really need any money.” Coffman nervously defended the arrangement.
“’Course you do, boy,” Truslow said. “How else are you going to buy whores and whiskey?”
“Have you talked to Pecker about this?” Starbuck demanded.
Coffman shook his head. “No.”
“Hell, then I will,” Starbuck said. “Ain’t going to have you being shot at for free.” He climbed to his feet. “I’ll be back in a half hour. Oh, shit!” This last imprecation was not in anger for Washington Faulconer’s greed but because his right sole had come loose on his first proper step. “Goddamn shit!” he said angrily, then stalked off to find Colonel Bird.
Truslow grinned at Starbuck’s inept cobbling, then spat tobacco juice into the fire’s margin. “He’ll get your cash, son,” he said.
“He will?”
“Faulconer’s scared of Starbuck.”
“Scared? The General’s scared of the Captain?” Coffman found that hard to believe.
“Starbuck’s a proper soldier. He’s a fighter while Faulconer’s just a pretty uniform on an expensive horse. In the long run, son, the fighter will always win.” Truslow picked a shred of tobacco from between his teeth. “Unless he’s killed, of course.”
“Killed?”
“You’re going to meet the Yankees tomorrow, son,” Truslow said, “and some of us are going to get killed, but I’ll do my best to keep you from getting slaughtered. Starting now.” He leaned over and ripped the bars off the Lieutenant’s collar, then tossed the cloth scraps into the fire. “Sharpshooters put telescopes on their rifles, son, just looking for officers to kill, and the Yankees don’t care that you’re not full-grown. See a pair of bars like that, they shoot, and you’re two feet underground with a shovelful of dirt in your eyes.” Truslow spat more tobacco juice. “Or worse,” he added darkly.
“Worse?” Coffman asked nervously.
“You could be wounded, boy, and screaming like a stuck pig while a half-drunken doctor rummages through your innards. Or sobbing like a baby while you lie out in the field with your guts being eaten by rodents and no one knowing where the hell you are. It ain’t pretty, and there’s only one way to keep it from being even uglier and that’s to hurt the bastards before they hurt you.” He looked at Coffman, recognizing how the boy was trying to hide his fear. “You’ll be all right,” Truslow said. “The worst bit is the waiting. Now sleep, boy. You’ve got a man’s job to do tomorrow.”
High overhead a shooting star whipped white fire across the darkening sky. Somewhere a man sang of a love left behind while another played a sad tune on a violin. Colonel Swynyard’s flogged slave tried to keep from whimpering, Truslow snored, and Coffman shivered, thinking of the morrow.
THE YANKEE CAVALRY PATROL REACHED GENERAL Banks’s headquarters late at night. The patrol had come under fire at the Rapidan River, and the loss of one of their horses had slowed their journey back to Culpeper Court House, as had the necessity to look after two wounded men. A New Hampshire corporal had been struck by a bullet in his lower belly and would surely die, while the patrol’s commander, a captain, had suffered a glancing hit on the ribs. The Captain’s wound was hardly serious, but he had scratched and prodded at the graze until a satisfactory amount of blood heroically stained his shirt.
Major General Nathaniel Banks, commander of General Pope’s Second Corps, was smoking a last cigar on the veranda of his commandeered house when he heard that the patrol had returned with ominous news of enemy forces crossing the Rapidan. “Let’s have the man here! Let’s hear him. Lively now!” Banks was a fussy man who, despite all the contrary evidence, was convinced of his own military genius. He certainly looked the part of a successful soldier, for there were few men who wore the uniform of the United States with more assurance. He was trim, brusque, and confident, yet until the war began he had never been a soldier, merely a politician. He had risen to be Speaker of the House of Representatives, though it had taken 133 ballots to achieve that honor, and afterward Governor of Massachusetts, a state so rich in men willing to be taxed that the federal government had deemed it necessary to offer its governor the chance of immortal martial glory as a token of its thanks. Governor Banks, who was as passionate in his love for his country as in his hatred of the slave trade, had leaped at the chance.
Now he waited, ramrod straight, as the cavalry Captain, wearing his jacket like a cloak so that his bloody shirt showed clearly, climbed the veranda steps and offered a salute, which he dramatically cut short with a wince as though the pain in his chest had suddenly struck hard.
“Your name?” Banks demanded peremptorily.
“Thompson, General. John Hannibal Thompson. From Ithaca, New York. Reckon you might have met my uncle, Michael Fane Thompson, when you were a congressman. He sat for New York back in—”
“You found the enemy, Thompson?” Banks asked in a very icy voice.
Thompson, offended at being so rudely cut off, shrugged. “We sure found someone hostile, General.”
“Who?”
“Damned if I know. We got shot at.” Thompson touched the crusted blood on his shirt, which looked brown rather than red in the lamplight.
“You shot back?” Banks asked.
“Hell, General, no one shoots at me without getting retaliation, and I reckon me and my boys laid a few of the bastards low.”
“Where was this?” the aide accompanying General Banks asked.
Captain Thompson crossed to a wicker table on which the aide had spread a map of northern Virginia illuminated by two flickering candle-lanterns. Moths beat frantically around the three men’s heads as they leaned over the map. Thompson used one of the lanterns to light himself a cigar, then tapped a finger on the map. “It was a ford just around there, General.” He had tapped the map well west of the main road that led due south from Culpeper Court House to Gordonsville.
“You crossed to the south bank of the river?” Banks asked.
“Couldn’t rightly do that, General, on account of there being a pack of rebs already occupying the ford.”
“There’s no ford marked there,” the aide interjected. Sweat dripped from his face to stain the Blue Ridge Mountains, which lay well to the west of the rivers. The night had brought no relief from the sweltering heat.
“A local nigger guided us,” Thompson explained. “He said the ford weren’t well known, being nothing but a summer back road to a gristmill, and some of us reckoned he just might be lying to us, but there sure was a ford after all. Seems the nigger was truthful.”
“The word, Thompson, is Negro,” Banks said very coldly, then looked down at the map again. Other patrols had spoken of rebel infantry marching north on the Gordonsville road, and this new report suggested that the Confederates were advancing on a broad front and in considerable strength. What were they doing? A reconnaissance in force, or a full-scale attack aimed at destroying his corps?
“So how many men fired at you?” Banks resumed his questioning of the flippant Thompson.
“Wasn’t exactly counting the minny balls, General, on account of being too busy firing back. But I reckon there was at least one regiment north of the river and more of the devils coming on.”
Banks stared at the cavalryman, wondering just why responsibility always seemed to devolve onto fools. “Did you try to take a prisoner?”
“I guess I was too busy making sure I didn’t end up six feet underground, General.” Thompson laughed. “Hell, there were only a dozen of us and more than a thousand of them. Maybe two thousand.”
“Did you ascertain the identity of the regiment which fired on you?” Banks asked with an icy pedantry.
“I sure ascertained that it was a rebel regiment, General,” Thompson answered. “They were carrying that new flag, the one with the cross on it.”
Banks shuddered at the man’s obtuse stupidity and wondered why the North’s horsemen were so inept at gathering intelligence. Probably, he thought, because they had none themselves. So who were these rebels marching north? There was a rumor that Stonewall Jackson had come to Gordonsville, and Banks winced at the thought of that bearded, ragged man whose troops marched at the speed of wildfire and fought like fiends.
Banks dismissed the cavalryman. “Useless,” he said as the man paced off down Culpeper Court House’s main street, where sentries stood guard on the taverns. In the town’s small wooden houses yellow lights burned behind the muslin curtains used as insect screens. An undertaker’s wagon, its shafts tilted up to the sky, stood outside a church where, Banks remembered, the famous Boston preacher Elial Starbuck was due to speak on Sunday morning. The town’s population was not anticipating the abolitionist’s sermon with any pleasure, but Banks, an old friend of the preacher, was looking forward to Starbuck’s peroration and had demanded that as many of his officers as possible should be present. Nathaniel Banks had a noble vision of God and country marching hand in hand to victory.
Now, with a frown on his face, Banks looked back to the map, on which his sweat dripped monotonously. Suppose the enemy move was a bluff? Suppose that a handful of rebels were merely trying to frighten him? The rebels had surely guessed that he had his eyes on Gordonsville, because if he captured that town, then he would cut the railroad that connected Richmond with the rich farmland in the Shenandoah Valley. Sever those rails, and the enemy’s armies would starve, and that thought reignited the glimmer of promised martial glory in Nathaniel Banks’s mind. He saw a statue in Boston, envisaged streets and towns all across New England named after him, and even dreamed that a whole new state might be fashioned from the savage western territories and given his name. Banks Street, Banksville, the state of Banks.
Those inspired visions were fed by more than mere ambition. They were fed by a burning need for revenge. Earlier in the year Nathaniel Banks had led a fine army down the Shenandoah Valley, where he had been tricked and trounced by Thomas Jackson. Even the Northern newspaper had admitted that Jackson had cut Banks to pieces—indeed, the rebels had taken so many guns and supplies from Banks that they had nicknamed him “Commissary Banks.” They had mocked him, ridiculed him, and their scorn still hurt Nathaniel Banks. He wanted revenge.
“The prudent course, sir, would be a withdrawal behind the Rappahannock,” the aide murmured. The aide was a graduate of West Point and supposed to provide the politician-general with sound military advice.
“It may be nothing but a reconnaissance,” Banks said, thinking of vengeance.
“Maybe so, sir,” the aide said suavely, “but what do we gain by fighting? Why hold ground we can easily retake in a week’s time? Why not just let the enemy wear himself out by marching?”
Banks brushed cigar ash off the map. Retreat now? In a week when Boston’s most famous preacher was coming to visit the army? What would Massachusetts say if they heard that Commissary Banks had run away from a few rebels? “We stay,” Banks said. He stabbed his finger down at the contours of a ridge that barred the road just south of Culpeper Court House. If Jackson was marching north in the hope of resupplying his army at the expense of Commissary Banks, then he would have to cross that ridge that lay behind the small protection of a stream. The stream was called Cedar Run, and it lay at the foot of Cedar Mountain. “We’ll meet him there,” Banks said, “and beat him there.”
The aide said nothing. He was a handsome, clever young man who thought he deserved better than to be harnessed to this stubborn bantam-cock. The aide was trying to frame a response, some persuasive words that would deflect Banks from rashness, but the words would not come. Instead, from the lamplit street, there sounded men’s voices singing about loved ones left behind, of sweethearts waiting, of home.
“We’ll meet him there,” Banks said again, ramming his finger onto the sweat-stained map, “and beat him there.”
At Cedar Mountain.
The Legion did not march far on the day they crossed the Rapidan. There was a curious lack of urgency about the expedition, almost as though they were merely changing base rather than advancing on the Northerners who had invaded Virginia. And next morning, though they were woken long before dawn and were ready to march even before the sun had risen above the tall eastern trees, they still waited three hours while a succession of other regiments trailed slowly by on the dusty road. A battery of small six-pounders and short-barreled howitzers was dragged past, followed by a column of Virginia infantry, who good-naturedly jeered the Faulconer Legion for its pretentious name. The day was hot and promised to get hotter still, yet still they waited as the sun climbed higher. More troops passed until, just short of midday, the Legion at last led the Faulconer Brigade out onto the dusty road.
Just moments later the guns started to sound. The noise came from far ahead, a grumble that could have been mistaken for thunder if the sky had not been cloudless. The air was sullen, moist, and windless, and the faces of Starbuck’s men were pale with road dust through which their sweat ran in dark lines. Soon, Starbuck thought, some of those rivulets would be blood red, fly-coated, and twitching, and that premonition of battle turned his belly sour and caused the muscles in his right thigh to tremble. He tried to anticipate the sound of bullets as he coached himself to display courage and not the fear that was liquefying his bowels, and all the while the distant cannons hammered their flat, soulless noise across the land. “Goddamned artillery,” Truslow said in a sour tone. “Some poor bastards are catching hell.”
Lieutenant Coffman seemed about to say something, then decided to keep quiet. One of the conscripts broke ranks to pull down his pants and squat beside the road. Normally he would have been good-naturedly jeered, but the muffled thump of the guns made every man nervous.
In the early afternoon the Legion halted in a shallow valley. The road ahead was blocked by a Georgia battalion beyond which lay a ridgeline crested by dark trees beneath a sky whitened by gunsmoke. Some of the Georgians lay asleep on the road, looking like corpses. Others were penciling their names and hometowns on scraps of paper that they either pinned to their coats or stuck into buttonholes so that, should they die, their bodies would be recognized and their families informed. Some of Starbuck’s men began to take the same gloomy precaution, using the blank end pages of Bibles as their labels.
“Culpeper Court House,” George Finney announced suddenly.
Starbuck, sitting beside the road, glanced at him, waiting.
“Billy Sutton says this is the road to Culpeper Court House,” George Finney explained. “Says his daddy brought him on this road two years back.”
“We came to bury my grandmother, Captain,” Billy Sutton intervened. Sutton was a corporal in G Company. He had once been in J Company, but a year of battles had shrunk the Faulconer Legion from ten to eight companies, and even those companies were now understrength. At the war’s beginning the Legion had marched to battle as one of the biggest regiments in the rebel army, but after a year of battle it would scarcely have filled the pews of a backcountry church.
Three horsemen galloped southward through the brittle stubble of a harvested cornfield, their horses’ hooves kicking up puffs of dust from the parched dirt. Starbuck guessed they were staff officers bringing orders. Truslow glanced at the three men, then shook his head. “Goddam Yankees in Culpeper Court House,” Truslow said, affronted. “Got no damned business in Culpeper Court House.”
“If it is Culpeper Court House,” Starbuck said dubiously. Culpeper County had to be at least sixty miles from the Legion’s home in Faulconer County, and few of the men in the Legion had traveled more than twenty miles from home in all their lives. Or not until this war had marched them up to Manassas and across to Richmond to kill Yankees. They had become good at that. They had become good at dying, too.
The gunfire suddenly swelled into one of those frenetic passages when, for no apparent reason, every cannon on a battlefield spoke at once. Starbuck cocked an ear, listening for the slighter crackle of musketry, but he could hear nothing except the unending thunder of artillery. “Poor bastards,” he said.
“Our turn soon,” Truslow answered unhelpfully.
“This rate they’ll run out of ammunition,” Starbuck said hopefully.
Truslow spat in comment on his Captain’s optimism, then turned as hoofbeats sounded. “God damn Swynyard,” he said tonelessly.
Every man in the company now either feigned sleep or kept his eyes fixed on the dusty road. Colonel Griffin Swynyard was a professional soldier whose talents had long been dissolved by alcohol but whose career had been rescued by General Washington Faulconer. Swynyard’s cousin edited Richmond’s most influential newspaper, and Washington Faulconer, well aware that reputation was more easily bought than won, was paying for the support of the Richmond Examiner by employing Swynyard. For a second Starbuck wondered if Swynyard was coming to see him, but the Colonel, closely followed by Captain Moxey, galloped past H Company and on up the slope toward the sound of battle. Starbuck’s heart gave an acid beat as he guessed Swynyard was going to mark the place where the Legion would deploy, which meant that at any second the orders would come to advance into the guns.
Ahead, where the road vanished across the shallow ridge, the Georgian troops were already struggling to their feet and pulling on bedrolls and weapons. The cannon fire had momentarily abated, but the snapping sound of rifle cartridges now crackled across the dry landscape. The sound increased Starbuck’s nervousness. It had been a month since the Legion last fought, but a single month was not nearly long enough to allay the terrors of the battlefield. Starbuck had been secretly hoping that the Legion might sit this skirmish out, but the Georgia battalion was already trudging north to leave a haze of dust over the road.
“Up, Nate!” Captain Murphy relayed Bird’s orders to Starbuck.
Truslow bellowed at H Company to stand up. The men hitched their bedrolls over their shoulders and dusted off their rifles. Behind H Company the men of Captain Medlicott’s G Company stood slowly, their lapels and belt loops dotted with the scraps of white paper on which they had written their names.
“Look for Swynyard on the road,” Captain Murphy told Starbuck.
Starbuck wondered where Washington Faulconer was, then assumed the General would be leading his Brigade from behind. Swynyard, whatever his other faults, was no coward. “Forward!” Starbuck shouted; then, rifle and bedroll slung, he took his place at the head of the column. Dust thrown up by the boots of the Georgians stung his throat and eyes. The road was daubed with dark stains of tobacco juice that looked uncannily like blood spattered from wounds. The sound of rifle fire was more intense.
That sound swelled even further as Starbuck led the Legion through the woods at the crest of the ridge that had served to disguise and diminish the sound of fighting, which now spread across Starbuck’s front in a furious cacophony. For a mile beyond the trees there was nothing but gunsmoke, flame, and chaos. The fields to the left of the road were filled with wounded men and surgeons hacking at broken flesh, to the right was a hill rimmed with artillery smoke, while ahead lay a second belt of woodland that concealed the actual fighting but could not hide the pall of smoke that boiled up either side of the road nor disguise the sound of the guns.
“By golly,” Coffman said. He was excited and nervous.
“Stay near Truslow,” Starbuck warned the young Lieutenant.
“I’ll be all right, sir.”
“Every damned man who’s died in this war said that, Coffman,” Starbuck reacted angrily, “and I want you to shave before you’re shot. So stay close to Truslow.”
“Yes, sir,” Coffman said meekly.
An artillery bolt smacked through pine tops to the right of the road, leaving the branches whipping back and forth above the spray of needles that sifted down to the dust. Wounded men, all rebels, were lying on both verges. Some had already died. A man staggered back from the fighting. He was bare-chested and his suspenders were hanging loose beside his legs. He was clutching his belly, trying to keep his guts from spilling into the dust. His forearms were soaked in blood. “Oh, golly,” Coffman said again and went pale. The blood on the dusty road looked blacker than the tobacco stains. The sound of rifle fire was splintering the afternoon that smelt of pine resin, sulfur, and blood. The shadows were long, long enough to give Starbuck an instant’s wild hope that night might fall before he needed to fight.
Starbuck led the company on across the open land and into the cover of the second belt of timber. The leaves here flicked with the strike of bullets, and fresh scars of yellow wood showed where artillery bolts had sheared limbs off trees. An ammunition wagon with one wheel smashed was canted at the side of the road. A black teamster with a bloody scalp sat leaning against the abandoned wagon and watched Starbuck’s men pass.
The trees ended not far ahead, and beyond, in the smoky open, Starbuck knew the battle was waiting for him. Common sense told him to slow down and thus delay his entry onto that bullet-riven stage, but pride made him hurry. He could see the gunsmoke sifting through the last green branches like a spring fog blowing out of Boston Harbor. He could smell the smoke’s foul stench, and he knew it was almost time for the Legion to deploy. His mouth was powder dry, his heart erratic, and his bladder full. He passed a man whose body lay splayed open from the strike of an artillery shell. He heard Coffman retch dryly. Flies buzzed in the close air. One of his men laughed at the eviscerated corpse. Starbuck unslung his rifle and felt with a finger to check that the percussion cap was in place. He was a captain, but he bore no signs of rank and carried a rifle just like his men, and now, like them, he pulled his cartridge box around to the front of his rope belt, where it would be handy for reloading. His broken right boot almost tripped him as he left the shadow of the trees to see ahead a shallow valley scarred and littered by battle. The low land was rifted with smoke and loud with gunfire. Beside the road a horse lay dead in a dry ditch. Coffman was white-faced but trying hard to look unconcerned and not to duck whenever a missile howled or whipped overhead. Bullets were whickering through the humid air. There was no sign of any enemy—indeed, hardly any men were in view except for some rebel gunners and Colonel Swynyard, who, with Moxey beside him, was sitting his horse in a field to the left of the road.
“Starbuck!” Colonel Swynyard shouted. “Over here!” Starbuck led the company across the brittle corn stubble. “Form there!” Swynyard called, pointing to a spot close behind his horse; then he turned in his saddle to stare northward through a pair of binoculars. Captain Moxey was fussily ordering H Company to align themselves on his marker, so Starbuck left him to it and walked forward to join Swynyard. The Colonel lowered his glasses to watch the battery of rebel six-pounders that was deployed just a hundred yards ahead. The smoke from the small guns was obscuring the fighting beyond, but every now and then a Yankee shell would explode near the battery, making Swynyard grin in appreciation. “Oh, well done! Good shooting!” Swynyard called aloud when an enemy shell eviscerated a team horse picketed fifty paces behind the guns. The horse screamed as it flailed bloodily on the ground, panicking the other tethered horses, which reared frantically as they tried to drag their iron picket stakes out of the ground. “Chaos!” Swynyard said happily, then glanced down at Starbuck. “Yankees are damned lively this afternoon.”
“Guess they were waiting for us,” Starbuck said. “Knew we were coming.”
“Guess someone told on us. A traitor, eh?” Swynyard offered the suggestion slyly. The Colonel was a man of startling ugliness, much of it the result of wounds honorably taken in the service of the old United States, but some of it caused by the whiskey that generally left him comatose by early evening. He had a coarse black beard streaked with gray and crusted with dried tobacco juice, sunken eyes, and a tic in his scarred right cheek. His left hand was missing three fingers, and his mouth was filled with rotting, stinking teeth. “Maybe the traitor was a Northerner, eh?” Swynyard hinted clumsily.
Starbuck smiled. “More likely to be some poor drunken son of a bitch needing cash for his whiskey…”—he paused—“Colonel.”
Swynyard’s only response was his cackling laugh, which hinted at madness. Remarkably, despite the lateness of the day, he was still sober, either because Washington Faulconer had hidden his whiskey or else because Swynyard’s small remaining shred of self-protection had convinced him that he had to function efficiently on a day of battle or else lose his job altogether. Swynyard glanced up at the gunsmoke, then looked back to the notebook in which he was writing. On his right sleeve he wore a square patch of white cloth embroidered with a red crescent. The symbol was from Washington Faulconer’s coat of arms, and the General had dreamed up the happy idea of issuing the badges to every man in his Brigade, though the idea had not been wholly successful. Some men refused to wear the patch, and generally it was possible to tell Faulconer’s supporters from his detractors by the badge’s presence or absence. Starbuck, naturally, had never worn the crescent badge, though some of his men had patched their pants’ seats with the convenient square of cloth.
Swynyard tore the page out of his notebook, put the book itself away, and then drew out his revolver. He began slipping percussion caps over the firing nipples of the loaded chambers. The barrel of the gun was pointed directly at Starbuck’s chest. “I could have an accident,” Swynyard said slyly. “No one could blame me. I’m three fingers short of a hand so no wonder I fumble sometimes. One shot, Starbuck, and you’d be buzzard meat on the grass. I reckon General Faulconer would like that.” Swynyard began to thumb the hammer back.
Then a click sounded behind Starbuck, and the Colonel’s thumb relaxed. Sergeant Truslow lowered the hammer of his rifle. “I can have an accident, too,” Truslow said.
Swynyard said nothing but just grinned and turned away. The nearby battery had ceased firing, and the gunners were hitching their weapons to limbers. The smoke of the battery dissipated slowly in the still air. The rebel guns had been fighting a duel with a Northern battery, a duel that the Northerners had won. “The Yankees will be raising their sights,” Swynyard remarked, staring through his glasses. “They’ve got four-and-a-half-inch rifles. Can’t fight four-and-a-half-inch rifles with six-pounder guns. We might as well throw rocks at the bastards.”
Starbuck watched the Southern guns wheel fast away to the rear and wondered if he was now supposed to fight four-and-a-half-inch rifled cannon with rifles. His heart seemed to be beating too loudly, filling his chest with its drumbeats. He tried to lick his lips, but his mouth was too dry.
The sound of musketry slackened, to be replaced by Northern cheers. Yankee cheering was much deeper in tone than the blood-chilling yelp of attacking rebels. The cannon smoke had thinned sufficiently to let Starbuck see a belt of woodland a half-mile ahead, and then to see a sight he had never dreamed of witnessing on one of Thomas Jackson’s battlefields.
He saw panic.
Ahead and to the left of Starbuck a horde of Southern soldiers were pouring out of the woodland and fleeing southward across the shallow valley. All discipline was gone. Shells exploded among the gray-jacketed soldiers, adding to their desperation. A rebel flag went down, was snatched up again, then disappeared in another flame-filled burst of shell smoke. Horsemen were galloping through the fleeing mass in an attempt to turn the men around, and here and there among the panic a few men did try to form a line, but such small groups stood no chance against the flood of fear that swept the majority away.
Swynyard might be a drunkard and a foul-tempered brute, but he had been a professional soldier long enough to recognize disaster. He turned to see that Captain Medlicott’s G Company had formed alongside Starbuck’s men. “Medlicott!” Swynyard shouted. “Take these two companies forward! You’re in charge!” Medlicott, though much older than Starbuck, had less seniority as a captain, but Swynyard had given him the command of the two companies as a way of insulting Starbuck. “See that broken limber?” The Colonel pointed toward a shattered vehicle that lay two hundred paces ahead, where a strip of grass marked a divide between a patch of harvested corn and a wider field of wheat. “Form your skirmish line there! I’ll bring the Legion up in support.” Swynyard turned back to Starbuck. “Take this,” he said and leaned down from the saddle to hold out a folded scrap of paper.
Starbuck snatched the piece of paper, then shouted at his men to advance alongside G Company. A shell screamed overhead. It was odd, Starbuck thought, how the debilitating nervousness that afflicted a man before battle could be banished by the proximity of danger. Even the day’s stifling heat seemed bearable now that he was under fire. He licked his lips, then unfolded the scrap of paper that Swynyard had given him. He had supposed it would be written orders, but instead he saw it was a label for a dead man. Starbuck, the paper read, Boston, Massachusetts. Starbuck threw it angrily away. Behind, where the rest of the Legion hurried into ranks, Swynyard saw the gesture and cackled.
“This is madness!” Truslow protested to Starbuck. Two companies of skirmishers could not stand against the tide of fear that was retreating from the Yankee guns.
“The rest of the Legion will help,” Starbuck said.
“They’d better,” Truslow said, “or we’re vulture meat.”
Company G was advancing to Starbuck’s right. Medlicott seemed unworried by the odds, but just stumped ahead of his men with a rifle in his hands. Or maybe, Starbuck thought, the miller just did not display his fear. “Keep the ranks straight!” Starbuck called to Coffman. “I want them steady.” He felt in his pocket and found the stub of a cigar he had been saving for battle. He borrowed a lit cigar from a man in the ranks, lit his own, and drew the bitter smoke deep into his lungs.
Lieutenant Coffman had drawn ahead of H Company and was holding a brass-handled bayonet like a sword.
“Get back, Mr. Coffman!” Starbuck called.
“But, sir—”
“Your place is behind the company, Lieutenant! Go there! And throw away that toy sword!”
The first Northern soldiers suddenly appeared at the tree line on the valley’s far crest, which blossomed with the small puffs of white rifle smoke. A shell exploded ahead of Starbuck, and pieces of its casing whipped past him. To his left the field had been partly harvested, so that some of the wheat was standing but most was drying in stooks. Small fires flickered where the shell fire had set the dry crops alight. There were patches of corn stubble among the wheat and two rows of standing corn, where a group of rebel soldiers had taken cover. The tasseled corn shivered whenever a bullet or shell whipped through the stalks. A Northern flag appeared at the far trees. The standard-bearer was waving it to and fro, making the stripes flutter brightly. A bugle was sounding, and off to the west the rebel infantry was still running. Rebel officers still galloped among the fugitives, trying to stem their flight and turn them round. General Jackson was among them, flailing with his scabbarded saber at the panicked men. More Northerners were at the tree line, some of them directly ahead of Starbuck now.
Another shell landed close to Company H, and Starbuck wondered why Medlicott did not order the two companies into skirmish order. Then he decided to hell with military etiquette and shouted the order himself. Medlicott echoed the order, thus shaking the two companies into a loose and scattered formation. Their job now was to fight the enemy skirmishers who would be advancing ahead of the main Yankee attack. “Make sure you’re loaded!” Starbuck called. The Northern line had halted momentarily, perhaps to align itself after advancing through the trees. The Southern fugitives had disappeared behind Starbuck’s left flank, and it suddenly seemed very quiet and lonely on the battlefield.
It also seemed very dangerous. Captain Medlicott crossed to Starbuck. “Is this right, do you think?” he asked, gesturing at the scatter of isolated skirmishers who were alone in the wide field. Medlicott had never liked Starbuck, and the red crescent patch on the shoulder of his uniform coat marked him for a loyal supporter of General Faulconer, but nervousness now made Medlicott seek reassurance from Faulconer’s bitterest enemy. Close to, Starbuck could see that Medlicott was not hiding his fear at all; one cheek was quivering uncontrollably, and the sweat was pouring off his face and dripping from his beard. He took off his brimmed hat to fan his face, and Starbuck saw that even the miller’s smooth, bald, chalk white pate was beaded with sweat. “We shouldn’t be here!” Medlicott exclaimed petulantly.
“God knows what’s happening,” Starbuck said. A Northern battery had appeared where the road vanished among the farther trees. Starbuck saw the guns slew round in a shower of dirt. In a moment, he thought, that artillery will have us in their open sights. Dear God, he thought, but let it be a clean death, quick as a thought, with no agonized lingering under a surgeon’s knife or dying of the sweated fever in some rat-infested hospital. He turned to look behind and saw the Faulconer Brigade streaming off the road and forming into ranks. “Swynyard’s coming soon,” he tried to reassure Medlicott.
The Northern infantry started forward again. A half-dozen flags showed above the dark ranks. Three of the flags were Old Glories, the others were regimental flags carrying state badges or martial insignias. Six flags translated into three regiments that were now attacking two light companies. Captain Medlicott went back to his own men, and Sergeant Truslow joined Starbuck. “Just us and them?” he asked, nodding at the Yankees.
“Swynyard’s bringing the rest of the Brigade forward,” Starbuck said. Shells from the newly deployed battery screeched overhead, aimed at the Faulconer Brigade. “Better them than us, eh?” Starbuck said with the callous indifference of a man spared the gunners’ attentions. He saw George Finney aim his rifle. “Hold your fire, George! Wait till the bastards are in range.”
The Northern skirmishers ran ahead of the attacking line. Their job was to brush Starbuck’s men aside, but soon, Starbuck thought, the rest of the Faulconer Brigade’s skirmishers would advance to reinforce him. Another salvo of shells thundered above him, the cracks of their explosions sounding a second after the percussive thump of the guns themselves. Starbuck began looking for enemy officers among the approaching skirmishers. Yankee officers seemed more reluctant than Southerners to abandon their swords and glinting rank badges and bright epaulettes.
A second Northern battery on the crest opened fire. A shell screamed just inches over Starbuck’s head. For what we are about to receive, he thought, may the Lord make us truly thankful. He could hear the beat of drums sounding from the Yankee infantry. Was this to be the breakthrough battle for the North? Were they at last to batter the Confederacy into surrender? Most of the rebel forces in Virginia were seventy miles away on the far side of Richmond with Robert Lee, but it was here that the Northerners were attacking, and if they broke through here, then what was to stop them marching south, ever south, until Richmond was cut off and the whole upper South split from the Confederacy? “Hold still now!” Starbuck called to his men as he walked slowly along his scattered skirmish line. Another minute, he thought, and the Yankee skirmishers would be in range. “You see that red-haired son of a bitch with the hooked sword, Will?” Starbuck called to Tolby, one of the Legion’s finest marksmen. “He’s yours. Kill the bastard.”
“I’ll take care of him, Captain!” Tolby eased back the hammer of his rifle.
Starbuck saw the enemy cannons disappear behind a blossom of gray-white smoke, and he anticipated another flight of shells overhead, but instead the missiles slammed into the field all around Starbuck’s men. One of Medlicott’s sergeants was flung backward, his blood momentarily misting the hot air. A shell splinter whipped into the broken limber, which carried a stenciled legend announcing that the vehicle belonged to the 4th U.S. Artillery, evidence that the rebels had pushed the Yankees back across the valley before being routed in the far woods. Or perhaps, Starbuck thought, the limber had been captured earlier in the war, for it seemed that at least half of the rebels’ equipment was of Northern origin. A solid shot landed close beside Starbuck, then ricocheted up and back. The nearness of the shot made him wonder why the Yankee gunners were aiming at a scattered skirmish line when they could be firing at the massed ranks of the Faulconer Brigade, and that curiosity made him turn to look for Swynyard’s promised reinforcements.
But Swynyard had vanished, and with him the whole Faulconer Brigade, leaving Starbuck and Medlicott alone in the field. Starbuck turned back. The Northern skirmishers were close now, close enough for Starbuck to see that their uniforms were smart, not patched brown and gray like the rebels’. The Northerners were advancing in good style, the sun reflecting off their belt buckles and brass buttons. Behind the skirmish line a battalion trampled down a row of standing corn. There were a half-dozen mounted officers at the rear of the Yankee formation, evidence that at least one of the attacking regiments was new to the war. Experienced officers did not invite the attention of sharpshooters by riding high in saddles. But nor did two companies of skirmishers stand to fight against a whole Yankee brigade.
“Fire!” Truslow shouted, and the Legion’s skirmishers began their battle. The men were in pairs. One man would fire, then reload while his companion looked for danger. The red-haired Yankee was already down, clutching his chest.
Truslow ran across to Starbuck. “I was never a religious man,” the Sergeant said as he rammed a bullet down his rifle’s barrel, “but ain’t there a story in the Bible about some son of a bitch king sending a man to die in battle just so he could riddle the man’s wife?”
Starbuck peered through the veil of rifle smoke, saw a Yankee go onto one knee to take aim, and fired at the man. A Northern bullet whipsawed the air a few inches to his left. Behind their skirmish line the Northern brigade advanced stolidly beneath their bright flags. He could hear their boots crushing cornstalks, and he knew that as soon as the marching line reached the further edge of the wheat field, they would stop to take aim, and then a killing volley would scream over the field, with every bullet aimed at the two stranded companies of the Legion. There was nothing to check the Yankees out here in the open. No rebel guns were firing, there were no bursting shells or clawing sprays of canister to fleck the wheat field red. Tom Petty, an eighteen-year-old in Starbuck’s company, turned round with his mouth open and his eyes wide. He shook his head in disbelief, then sank to his knees. He saw Starbuck’s eyes on him and forced a brave smile. “I’m all right, sir! Just bruised!” He managed to stand and face the enemy.
“King David,” Starbuck said aloud. King David had sent Uriah the Hittite into the front line of the battle so that Bathsheba would become a widow. “Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle”—the verse came back to Starbuck—“and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.” Well, damn Faulconer, who had made Swynyard set Starbuck in the forefront of the hottest battle that he might be smitten and die. “We’re getting out of here!” Starbuck shouted across to Captain Medlicott.
Medlicott, though officially in command, was grateful for the younger man’s leadership. “Back!” he shouted at G Company.
The Yankees cheered and jeered as they saw the handful of skirmishers retreat. “Enjoying your licking, boys!” one Northerner shouted. “Keep on running! We’ll be right after you!” called another, while a third shouted to give his respects to Stonewall Jackson, “And tell him we’ll hang him real gentle now!”
“Steady now!” Starbuck called to his men. He kept his back to the enemy, concentrating on his company. “Back to the trees! Steady, don’t run!” No one else from the Brigade was in sight. Swynyard or Faulconer must have taken the whole Brigade back into the woods, abandoning Starbuck and Medlicott to the enemy. But why had Bird not protested? A shell landed just behind Starbuck, buffeting him with its hot punch of air. He turned and saw the Yankee skirmishers running toward him. “Double back to the woods!” he shouted, so releasing his men from their slow, steady withdrawal. “Muster them by the road, Sergeant!” he called to Truslow.
More Northern jeers and a handful of bullets followed the skirmishers’ hurried retreat. The Yankees were in high spirits. They had waited a long time to give Stonewall Jackson a whipping, and now they were laying the lash on thick and hard. Back among the trees beside the turnpike Starbuck’s men panted as they crouched and looked nervously at their officer, who, in turn, was watching the shadows lengthen across the wheat field. He was also watching the far tree line, where still more guns and infantry had appeared. The Yankees were triumphant and the rebels beaten. “If we stay here”—Medlicott had joined Starbuck again—“we’ll like as not be prisoners.”
“Swynyard put you in command,” Starbuck said pointedly.
Medlicott hesitated, unhappy to take responsibility, then diffidently suggested that the two companies should retreat further through the trees. To the east of the turnpike a furious artillery battle was deafening the evening air. Smoke poured off the hillside where rebel guns were emplaced, but those cannon were of no use to the beaten men west of the turnpike, where the Yankee line had crushed the standing corn to drive Jackson’s infantry back into the timber on the valley’s southern crest. The Northern guns had the range of those trees now, and the green summer woods were filled with the whistling menace of shrapnel. Starbuck wondered where the Georgia regiment had gone and where the rest of the Brigade was hidden.
“I can’t see the Brigade!” Medlicott said despairingly. A salvo of shells cracked ahead of the skirmishers, filling the trees with whistling shards of hot metal. The men leading the retreat had followed the twisting path into a small hollow, and now they instinctively crouched rather than leave their scanty cover to walk into that zone of fire. The perplexed and frightened Captain Medlicott seemed content to let them rest. “Maybe we should send a patrol to look for the Brigade?” he suggested to Starbuck.
“While the rest of us wait here to be captured?” Starbuck asked sarcastically.
“I don’t know,” Medlicott said. The miller was suddenly bereft of confidence and initiative. His doughy face looked hurt, like that of a child struck for an offense it had not committed.
“Yankees!” Truslow called warningly, pointing west to where blue uniforms had appeared in the woods.
“Stay still!” Medlicott shouted in sudden panic. “Get down!”
Starbuck would have gone on retreating, hoping to join up with the rebel reserve, but Medlicott had been panicked into making a decision, and the men crouched gratefully in the shadows. Two of Starbuck’s company lowered a body they had been carrying. “Shall we bury him?” one of the two men asked Starbuck.
“Who is it?” It was dark under the trees, and the evening was drawing in.
“Tom Petty.”
“Oh, dear God,” Starbuck said. He had seen Petty wounded but had thought he would live, and surely Petty had deserved to live, for he had been a boy, not a man. He had used to shave each morning, but the blade had made no difference to his cheeks. He had only used the razor to explain his lack of beard, but he had been a good soldier, cheerful and willing. Starbuck had planned to make him up to corporal, but now it would have to be Mellors, who was not nearly so quick on the uptake. “Scratch him a grave,” he said, “and get Corporal Waggoner to say a prayer for him.”
All around them the shouts of the Yankees grew louder. The woodland was filled with screaming shells, so many that at times the torn leaves looked like a green snow drifting through the warm evening air. The trees echoed with the pathetic cries of dying men. Lieutenant Coffman hunkered down beside Starbuck, his small face showing bewilderment because his beloved Southerners were being whipped, because the North was winning, and because nothing in his world made sense.
The Reverend Elial Starbuck shared in the joy as the realization of victory dawned on the Yankee headquarters. And what a victory it was proving! Prisoners had confirmed that the enemy commander was indeed the notorious Stonewall Jackson. “The wretch won’t be fetching his supper from my supply wagons tonight!” General Banks exulted. It was true that the enemy was still holding firm on the slopes of Cedar Mountain, but Banks’s staff brought message after message that told how the Federal right wing under General Crawford was driving the rebels clean across the valley and into the woods beyond. “Now we’ll turn their flank!” Banks exclaimed, gesturing extravagantly to show how he meant to hook the right wing of his army around the backside of Cedar Mountain and thus surround the remnants of the Confederate army. “Maybe we’ll have Jackson as our supper guest tonight!”
“I doubt he’ll have much appetite after this drubbing,” an artillery major observed.
“Fellow’s reputed to eat damned strangely anyway,” an aide responded, then blushed for having sworn in front of the Reverend Starbuck. “Nothing but stale bread and chopped cabbage, I hear.”
“You and I could chop the rogue some cabbage, eh, Starbuck?” General Banks thus drew his distinguished guest into the jubilant conversation.
“I would make him eat what the slaves eat!” the Reverend Starbuck said.
“I think he eats worse than any slave!” Banks jested. “Force a slave to eat what Jackson dines on and the whole world would revile our inhumanity. Maybe we should punish the man by giving him a proper meal? Oysters and pheasant, you think?”
Banks’s aides laughed, and their master turned his gaze back to the battle smoke that was already touched with a faint pink tinge of evening sunlight. In the slanting light Banks looked quite superb: straight-backed, stern-faced, the very image of a soldier, and suddenly, after months of disappointment, the politician did at last feel like a soldier. He had, Banks modestly admitted to himself, grown into the job and was now ready for the battles to come. For despite this day’s splendid victory, there would be more battles. With Stonewall Jackson defeated, General Robert Lee, who was protecting Richmond from McClellan’s army, would be forced north even if such a move did open the rebel capital to McClellan’s forces. McClellan would dutifully overwhelm the Richmond defenses, Pope would crush Lee, and then, bar some mopping up on the Mississippi and skull-breaking in the deep South, the war would be over. Better, it would be won. All that remained was a few battles, a rebel surrender, a Federal victory parade, and most important of all, the absolute necessity for President Lincoln and the dunderheads in the United States Congress to realize that it had been Nathaniel Prentiss Banks who had precipitated the whole process. My God, Banks thought, but others would try to steal his glory now! John Pope would doubtless make the attempt, and George McClellan would certainly write to every newspaper editor in creation, which made it all the more important for this night’s victory dispatch to be written firmly and clearly. Tonight’s dispatch, Banks knew, would fashion history books for years to come, but more important, the words he wrote tonight would garner votes for the remainder of his career.
Federal officers gathered round to offer the General their congratulations. The commander of Banks’s bodyguard, a tall Pennsylvanian Zouave, handed the General a silver stirrup cup of brandy. “A toast to your triumph, sir,” the Zouave proclaimed. A ragged line of disconsolate prisoners trudged past the group of horsemen. One or two of the captured seceshers glanced sullenly at the Northern General, and one rogue spat in his direction, but tonight, Banks thought, he would have the most valuable prisoner as his dinner guest. He would treat General Jackson with courtesy, as a gallant soldier should, and the world would wonder at the victor’s modesty. Then Banks imagined himself at another dinner table, a much grander table in Washington that would gleam with massive presidential silver, and in his mind’s eye he saw the foreign diplomats and their admiring bejeweled wives bend forward to catch his words. President Banks! And why not? George Washington might have made this country, but it had needed Nathaniel Prentiss Banks to save it.
A mile south of Banks, in a belt of woodland where fires started by shell fire tortured the wounded, men screamed and fought and died. The Yankee counterattack was being slowed by the undergrowth and by the stubborn defiance of Southern riflemen, whose muzzle flames stabbed bright in the smoky shadows. Shells slashed through the treetops, thrashing the branches and hammering the sky with their explosions. Blood and smoke reeked, a man called for his mother in the voice of a child, another cursed God, but still the North pushed on, yard by hard yard, going through hell in search of peace.
“Nothing is served,” General Washington Faulconer said icily, “by breaking the Brigade into small detachments. We shall go into battle united.”
“If there’s any battle left,” Swynyard said with a manic glee. He seemed to be enjoying the panic that had infected the western side of Jackson’s battle.
“Watch your tongue, Colonel,” Faulconer snapped. He was more than usually displeased with his second-in-command, who had already lost a quarter of the Legion instead of just Starbuck’s company, and what was left of the Brigade must be husbanded, not frittered away by being committed to the battle in dribs and drabs. Faulconer edged his horse away from Swynyard and gazed at the woods, which were filled with smoke and thrashing from the passage of Northern shells and bolts. God only knew what had happened in the wide valley beyond those woods, but even here, far behind where the fighting had taken place, the evidence of impending disaster was awesome and obvious. Wounded men staggered back from the trees; some of the injured were being helped by friends, others crawled or limped painfully back to where the surgeons hacked and sawed and probed. Many of the fugitives were not wounded at all but were merely frightened men who were trying to escape the Yankee advance.
Faulconer had no intention of allowing that advance to enmesh his Brigade. “I want the 65th on the right,” Faulconer called to Swynyard, referring to the 65th Virginia, which was the second largest regiment after the Legion in Faulconer’s Brigade, “the Arkansas men in the center, and the 12th Florida on the left. Everyone else in reserve two hundred paces behind.” That meant that the remaining six companies of the Legion, who were presently the foremost battalion in the Brigade, would now become Faulconer’s rearmost line. The redeployment was hardly necessary, but moving the front line to the rear killed some precious moments while Faulconer tried to determine just what disasters were happening beyond the woods. “And, Colonel!” Faulconer called after Swynyard, “send Bird to reconnoiter the ground. Tell him to report to me within a half hour!”
“Colonel Bird’s already gone,” Swynyard said. “Went to fetch his skirmishers back.”
“Without orders?” Faulconer asked angrily. “Then tell him to explain himself to me the instant he returns. Now go!”
“Sir?” Captain Thomas Pryor, one of Washington Faulconer’s new aides, interjected nervously.
“Captain?” Faulconer acknowledged.
“General Jackson’s orders were explicit, sir. We should advance quick, sir, with whatever units are available. Into the trees, sir.” Pryor gestured nervously toward the woods.
But Faulconer had no wish to advance quick. The woods seemed to be alive with smoke and flame, almost as though the earth itself was heaving in the throes of some mythic struggle. Rifle fire cracked, men screamed, and cannons pumped their percussive explosions through the humid air, and Faulconer had no desire to plunge into that maelstrom. He wanted order and sense, and a measure of safety. “General Jackson,” he told Pryor, “is panicking. We serve no purpose by committing ourselves piecemeal. We shall advance in good order or not at all.” He turned away from the battle and rode back to where his second line would be formed. That reserve line consisted of the six remaining companies of the Legion and the whole of the 13th Florida, two regiments that Faulconer had every intention of holding back until his first line was fully committed to the fight. Only if the first line broke and ran would the second line fight, and then merely to serve as a rear guard for the fugitive first line. Washington Faulconer told himself he was being prudent, and that such prudence might well save a defeat from being a rout.
He wondered where Starbuck was and felt the familiar flare of hatred. Faulconer blamed Starbuck for all his ills. It was Starbuck who had humiliated him at Manassas, Starbuck who had suborned Adam, and Starbuck who had defied him by remaining in the Legion. Faulconer was convinced that if he could just rid himself of Starbuck, then he could make the Brigade into the most efficient unit of the Confederate army, which was why he had ordered Swynyard to place a company of skirmishers far ahead of the Brigade’s position. He had trusted Swynyard to know precisely which company of skirmishers was to be thus sacrificed, but he had hardly expected the drunken fool to throw away both companies. Yet even that loss might be worthwhile, Faulconer reflected, if Starbuck was among the casualties.
On Faulconer’s left a column of rebel troops advanced at the double, while another, marching just as quickly, headed for the woods to the right of his Brigade. Reinforcements were clearly reaching the fighting, which meant, Faulconer decided, that he had no need to hurl his own men forward in a desperate panic. Slow and steady would win this fight, and that natural caution was reinforced by the sight of a riderless horse, its flank a sheet of crimson, limping southward down the turnpike with its reins trailing in the dust and its stirrups dripping with blood.
The Faulconer Brigade laboriously formed its new battle lines. In the first rank were the 65th Virginia, Haxall’s men from Arkansas, and the 12th Florida. The three regiments raised their dusty flags, the banners’ bright colors already faded from too much sun and shredded by too many bullets. The standards hung limp in the windless air. Colonel Swynyard gave his horse to one of his two cowed slaves, then took his place at the center of the forward line, where lust at last overcame caution and made him take a flask from a pouch on his belt. “I see our gallant Colonel is inoculating himself against the risks of battle,” General Faulconer remarked sardonically to Captain Pryor.
“By drinking water, sir?” Pryor asked in puzzlement. Thomas Pryor was new to the Brigade. He was the younger son of a Richmond banker who did much business with Washington Faulconer, and the banker had pleaded with Faulconer to take on his son. “Thomas is a good-natured fellow,” the banker had written, “too good, probably, so maybe a season of war will teach him that mankind is not inherently honest?”
A second’s silence greeted Pryor’s naive assumption that Swynyard was drinking water, then a gale of laughter swept the Brigade headquarters. “Swynyard’s water,” Faulconer informed Pryor, “is the kind that provides the Dutch with courage, puts men to sleep, and wakes them sore-headed.” The General smiled at his own wit, then turned indignantly as a mounted man galloped toward him from the turnpike.
“You’re to advance, sir!” the officer shouted. The man had a drawn sword in his right hand.
Faulconer did not move. Instead he waited as the officer curbed his horse. The beast tossed its head and stamped nervously. It was flecked with sweat and rolling its eyes white. “You have orders for me?” Faulconer asked the excited officer.
“From General Jackson, sir. You’re to advance with the other brigades, sir.” The aide gestured toward the woods, but Faulconer still made no move other than to hold out a hand. The aide gaped at him. No one else on this field had demanded written orders, for surely no one could doubt the urgency of the cause. If the Yankees won here, then there was nothing to stop them crossing the Rapidan and breaking Richmond’s rail links with the Shenandoah Valley, and nothing, indeed, to stop them advancing on the rebel capital. This was not a time for written orders but for Southern men to fight like heroes to protect their country. “General Jackson’s compliments, sir,” the aide said in a tone that barely managed to stay on the civil side of insolence, “and his regrets that he has no time to put his orders into writing, but he would be most obliged if you were to advance your Brigade into the trees and help dislodge the enemy.”
Faulconer looked at the woods. Fugitives still emerged from the shadows, but most were now men wounded by the fighting rather than frightened men seeking safety. Nearer to the Brigade two small guns were being unlimbered by the road, but the cannons looked a pitiable force to withstand the noisy Northern onslaught that churned among the shadowed woods. Those shadows were long, cast by a sun that reddened in the west. Flames started by shell fire flickered deep among the trees where rifles snapped angrily. “Am I to tell General Jackson that you won’t advance, sir?” the mounted officer asked in a voice cracked with near despair. He had not given his name nor announced his authority, but the urgency in his tone and the drawn sword in his hand were all the authority he needed.
Faulconer drew his sword. He did not want to advance, but he knew there was no choice now. Reputation and honor depended on going into the awful woods. “Colonel Swynyard!” he called, and the words were hardly more than a croak. “Colonel!” he shouted again, louder this time.
“Sir!” Swynyard pushed the flask of whiskey back into his pouch.
“Advance the Brigade!” Faulconer called.
Swynyard drew his own sword, the blade scraping into the day’s dying light. Ahead of him fires burned in the wood, their flames bright in the dark shadows where men fought and died. “Forward!” Swynyard shouted.
Forward into the maelstrom where the woods burned.
Into battle.
IT’S GOD’S WILL, BANKS! GOD’S WILL!” THE REVEREND Elial Starbuck was beside himself with joy. The smell of battle was in his nostrils and inflaming him like an infusion of the Holy Spirit. The preacher was fifty-two years old and had never known an exultation quite like this thrill of victory. He was witnessing God’s hand at work and seeing the triumph of righteousness over the Slavocracy. “On, on!” he shouted encouragingly to a fresh battery of Northern artillery that traveled toward the smoke of battle. The Reverend Starbuck had come to Culpeper Court House to preach to the troops, but instead found himself cheering them on to glory.
The Reverend Elial Starbuck’s jubilation matched General Banks’s excitement. The politician turned general was realizing he had won! He was actually trouncing the wretched and infamous Jackson who had given him such misery earlier in the year. The bells of Boston would ring for this success of a native son, and suddenly the realization of the Governor’s most daring ambitions seemed so dazzlingly close. Nathaniel Prentiss Banks, seventeenth President of the United States of America. He said the phrase under his breath, relishing it, but then the glory of that triumph dizzied Banks in his saddle, and to steady himself he turned back to the Reverend Starbuck. “How’s that son of yours, Starbuck?” Banks asked, trying to give the impression of a man humble and confident enough to make small talk at the moment of glory.
“James is well, thank you, Governor,” the preacher responded. “He’s with McClellan’s forces in front of Richmond. He suffered a touch of fever a month ago, but writes to say he is fully recovered.”
“I meant the young man you named after me,” Banks said. “How is he?”
“Nathaniel’s well, so far as I know,” the Reverend Starbuck said curtly, then was saved from any further queries about his traitor son by the arrival of an aide on a horse that had a mane paled by dust and flanks foaming with sweat. The aide gave Banks a swift salute and a note from Brigadier General Crawford. The note had been hastily scribbled in the saddle, and Banks found it hard to decipher the penciled letters.
“News of victory, I hope?” Banks suggested to the newly arrived aide.
“The General’s requesting reinforcements, sir,” the aide said respectfully. His horse trembled as a rebel shell wailed overhead.
“Reinforcements?” Banks asked. In the pause after his question the rebel shell exploded harmlessly behind, scattering dirt across the road. “Reinforcements?” Banks said again, frowning as though he found the word incomprehensible. Then he straightened his already immaculate uniform. “Reinforcements?” he asked a third time. “But I thought he was driving the enemy from the field?”
“We need to break them, sir.” The aide sounded enthusiastic. “One more brigade will rout them utterly.”
“I hoped they were finished already,” Banks said, crumpling Crawford’s message in his hand.
“They’re skulking in some woods, sir. Our fellows are pressing hard, but they’ll need help.”
“There isn’t any help!” Banks said indignantly, as though the aide were spoiling his moment of glory. “I sent him Gordon’s brigade; isn’t that enough?”
The aide glanced at the gaudily uniformed Pennsylvania Zouaves who formed General Banks’s personal bodyguard. “Maybe we should send every man available, sir, to destroy them before they’re saved by nightfall?” He spoke very respectfully, as befitted a captain offering tactical advice to a major general.
“We have no reserves, Captain,” Banks said in a peevish voice. “We are fully committed! So press on. Press hard. Tell Crawford it’s his responsibility now. I won’t have men calling for help, not when we’re on the verge of victory. Go back and tell him to push on hard, you hear me? Push on hard and no stopping till nightfall.” The long speech had restored Banks’s confidence. He was winning; it was God’s will that the vaunted Stonewall Jackson should be humbled. “It’s nervousness, plain nervousness,” Banks explained General Crawford’s request to the men who surrounded him. “A fellow finds himself on the winning side and can’t believe his luck so he asks for help at the last moment!”
“I hope you’ll be kind to Crawford in your memoirs, sir,” the Zouave commander observed.
“To be sure, to be sure,” Banks said, who had not considered his memoirs till this moment, but now found himself dreaming of a three-volume work, provisionally entitled Banks’s War. He decided he would depict his early defeats as necessary deceptions that had lured the cabbage-eating Jackson on to destruction at Cedar Mountain. “I might have been reviled”—the General rehearsed a sentence in his head—“but I was playing a longer hand than my critics knew, especially those journalistic curs who dared to offer me advice even though not one of them could tell a Parrott gun from a bird’s beak.”
The Reverend Elial Starbuck broke this pleasant reverie by begging Banks’s permission to ride forward so he could observe the pursuit and final humiliation of the enemy. “Your triumph is an answer to my prayers, Governor,” the preacher said, “and I would dearly like to witness its full fruits.”
“My dear Starbuck, of course you must ride forward. Captain Hetherington?” Banks summoned one of his junior aides to accompany the preacher, though he also cautioned the aide not to expose the Reverend Starbuck to any danger. The caution was given to make certain that the Reverend Starbuck survived to preach Banks’s fame from his influential pulpit. “A wounded cur can still bite,” Banks warned the preacher, “so you must stay well clear of the dying beast’s jaws.”
“God will preserve me, Governor,” the Reverend Starbuck averred. “He is my strong shield and protector.”
Thus guarded, the Reverend Starbuck set off across the fields with Hetherington, first threading a path between rows of army wagons with white canvas hoods, then passing a field hospital where the Reverend Starbuck paused to inspect the faces of the wounded Southern prisoners who lay after surgery on the grass outside the tents. Some were still comatose from the effects of chloroform, a few slept from sheer weariness, but the majority lay pale and frightened. A few crudely bandaged casualties lay waiting for the surgeons’ knives, and to anyone unaccustomed to battle the sight of such grievously hurt men might have proved more than the strongest stomach could abide, but the Reverend Starbuck seemed positively enlivened by the horrid spectacle. Indeed, he leaned out of his saddle for a closer look at one man’s mangled limbs and bloodied scalp. “You note the low cranial gap and the pronounced teeth?” he observed to Hetherington.
“Sir?” Hetherington asked in puzzlement.
“Look at his face, man! Look at any of their faces! Can’t you see the pronounced difference between them and the Northern visage?”
Captain Hetherington thought that the Southerners did not look very much different from Northerners, except that they were generally thinner and a good deal more raggedly uniformed, but he did not want to contradict the eminent preacher, and so he agreed that the captured rebels did indeed display low foreheads and feral teeth.
“Such features are the classic symptoms of feeblemindedness and moral degradation,” the Reverend Starbuck announced happily, then remembered the Christian duty that was owed even to such fallen souls as these rebel prisoners. “Though your sins be as scarlet,” he called down to them, “yet you may be washed whiter than snow. You must repent! You must repent!” He had come equipped with copies of his tract, Freeing the Oppressed, which explained why Christian men should be prepared to die for the sacred cause of abolishing slavery, and now the Reverend Starbuck dropped a few copies among the wounded men. “Something to read during your imprisonment,” he told them, “something to explain your errors.” He spurred on, cheered by this chance to have spread the good word. “We have been remiss, Captain,” the preacher declared to Hetherington as the two men left the hospital behind, “in restricting our mission work to heathen lands and Southern slaves. We should have sent more good men into the rebellious states to tussle with the demons that dwell in the white man’s soul.”
“There are plenty of churches, are there not, in the secessionist states?” Captain Hetherington inquired respectfully after leading the preacher around a tangle of telegraph wire that had been dumped beside a ditch.
“There are indeed churches in the South,” the Reverend Starbuck said in a tone of distaste, “and pastors, too, I dare say, yet their existence should not deceive us. The scriptures warn us against those false prophets who shall inhabit the latter days. And such prophets have no difficulty in persuading the feebleminded to adopt the devil’s ways. But the Second Epistle of Peter promises us that the false prophets shall bring upon themselves a swift destruction. I think we are witnessing the beginnings of that providence. For this is the Lord’s doing,” the Reverend Doctor Starbuck declaimed happily, gesturing toward two dogs that fought over a dead man’s intestines close to a smoking shell crater, “and we should rejoice and be glad in it!” A less pious impulse made the Reverend wonder whether the money he had just expended on Galloway’s Horse was going to be wasted. Maybe the war would be won without Galloway’s men? Then he thrust that concern away and let this day’s good news fill him with joy instead.
Captain Hetherington wanted to drive the two dogs away from their offal, but the Reverend Starbuck was spurring ahead, and the aide’s duty was to stay with the preacher, so he galloped to catch up. “Are you saying, sir,” Hetherington asked respectfully, “that none of the rebels are Christians?”
“How can they be?” the Boston preacher responded. “Our faith has never preached rebellion against the lawful and godly authority of the state, so at best the South is in grievous error and thus in desperate need of repentance and forgiveness. And at worst?” The Reverend Starbuck shook his head rather than even consider such a question, yet the very asking of it made him think of his second son and how Nate was even now irretrievably committed to the fires of hell. Nate would burn in everlasting flames, tormented through all eternity by agonies unimaginable. “And he deserves it!” the Reverend Starbuck protested aloud.
“I’m sorry, sir?” Hetherington asked, thinking he had misheard a comment addressed to him.
“Nothing, Captain, nothing. You are saved yourself?”
“Indeed, sir. I came to Christ three years ago, and have praised God for His mercies ever since.”
“Praise Him indeed,” the Reverend Starbuck responded, though in truth he was secretly disappointed that his escort should thus prove to be a born-again Christian, for there were few things Elial Starbuck enjoyed so much as having what he called a tussle with a sinner. He could boast of having left many a strong man in tears after an hour’s good argument.
The two men arrived at a Northern battery of twelve-pounder Napoleons. The four guns were silent, their shirtsleeved gunners leaning on their weapons’ wheels and staring across the valley to where a long-shadowed stand of trees was crowned with gunsmoke. “No targets, sir,” the battery commander answered when the Reverend Starbuck asked why he was not firing. “Our fellows are inside those woods, sir, or maybe a half-mile beyond, which means our job’s done for the day.” He took a pull of his flask, which contained brandy. “Those shell bursts are rebel guns firing long, sir,” he added, gesturing at the white explosions that blossomed intermittently on the far crest. The sound of each explosion followed a few seconds later like a small rumble of thunder. “Just their rear guard,” the artilleryman said confidently, “and we can leave the peasantry to look after them.”
“The peasantry?” the Reverend Starbuck inquired.
“The infantry, sir. Lowest of the low, see what I mean, sir?”
The Reverend Starbuck did not see at all, but decided not to make an issue of his puzzlement. “And the rebels?” he asked instead. “Where are they?”
The gunner Major took note of the older man’s Geneva bands and straightened himself respectfully. “You can see some of the dead ones, sir, excuse my callousness, and the rest are probably halfway to Richmond by now. I’ve waited over a year to see the rascals skedaddle, sir, and it’s a fine sight. Our young ladies saw them off in fine style.” The Major slapped the still warm barrel of the closest gun, which, like the rest of the Napoleons in the battery, had a girl’s name painted on its trail. This gun was Maud, while its companions were named Eliza, Louise, and Anna.
“It is the Lord’s doing, the Lord’s doing!” the Reverend Starbuck murmured happily.
“The seceshers are still lively over there.” Captain Hetherington gestured to far-off Cedar Mountain, where gunsmoke still jetted from the rebel batteries.
“But not for long.” The artillery Major spoke confidently. “We’ll hook behind their rear and take every man jack of them prisoner. As long as nightfall doesn’t come first,” he added. The sun was very low and the light reddening.
The Reverend Starbuck took a small telescope from his pocket and trained it on the woods ahead. He could see very little except for smoke, leaves, and burning shell craters, though in the nearer open land he could make out the humped shapes of the dead lying in the remnants of the wheat field. “We shall go to the woods,” he announced to his companion.
“I’m not sure we should, sir,” Captain Hetherington demurred politely. “There are still shells falling.”
“We shall come to no harm, Captain. Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we shall fear no evil. Come!” In truth the Reverend Starbuck wanted to ride closer to those bursting shells. He had decided that his exhilaration was symptomatic of a natural taste for battle, that maybe he was discovering a God-given talent for warfare, and it was suddenly no wonder to him that the Lord of Hosts had so frequently exhorted Israel to the fight. This blood and slaughter was the way to see God’s work accomplished! Sermonizing and mission work were all very well, and doubtless God listened to the prayers of all those wilting women with faded silk bookmarks in their well-thumbed Bibles, but this hammer of battle was a more certain method of bringing about His kingdom. The sinners were being scourged by the holy flail of sword, steel, and gunpowder, and the Reverend Doctor Starbuck exulted in the process. “Onwards, Captain,” he encouraged Hetherington. “The enemy is beaten, there’s nothing to fear!”
Hetherington paused, but the artillery Major was in full agreement with the preacher. “They’re well beaten, sir, and amen,” the Major declared, and that encouragement was enough to make the Reverend Starbuck hand down some copies of Freeing the Oppressed for the weary gunners. Then, spirits soaring, he spurred his horse past the quartet of fan-shaped swathes of scorched stubble that marked where Eliza, Louise, Maud, and Anna had belched flame and smoke at the enemy.
Captain Hetherington followed unhappily. “We don’t know that the rebels are yet cleared from the woods, sir.”
“Then we shall find out, Captain!” the Reverend Starbuck said happily. He trotted past the remains of a Northerner who had been blown apart by the direct hit of a rebel shell, and who was now nothing but a fly-crawling mess of jagged-ended bones, blue guts, torn flesh, and uniform scraps. The Reverend felt no anguish at the sight, merely the satisfaction that the dead man was a hero who had gone to his Maker by virtue of having died for a cause as noble as any that had ever driven man onto the battlefield. A few paces beyond the dead Federal was the corpse of a Southerner, his throat cut to the bone by a fragment of shell casing. The wretch was dressed in gaping shoes, torn pants, and a threadbare coat of pale gray patched with brown, but the corpse’s most repellent aspect was the grasping look on his face. The preacher reckoned he saw that same depraved physiognomy on most of the rebel dead and on the faces of the rebel wounded who cried for help as the two horsemen rode by. These rebels, the Reverend Starbuck decided, were demonstrably feebleminded and doubtless morally infantile. The doctors in Boston were convinced that such mental weaknesses were inherited traits, and the more the Reverend Elial Starbuck saw of these Southerners, the more persuaded he was of that medical truth. Had there been miscegenation? Had the white race so disgraced itself with its own slaves that it was now paying the hereditary price? That thought so disgusted the Reverend that he flinched, but then an even more terrible thought occurred to him. Was his son Nathaniel’s moral degradation inherited? The Reverend Starbuck cast that suspicion out. Nathaniel was a backslider and so doubly guilty. Nathaniel’s sins could not be laid at his parents’ door, but only at his own wicked feet.
The Reverend Elial Starbuck thus ruminated about heredity, slavery, and feeblemindedness as he rode across the hot battlefield, yet he did not entirely ignore the cries that came from the parched, hurting men left helpless by the fighting. The wounded rebels were pleading for water, for a doctor, or for help in reaching the field hospitals, and the Reverend Starbuck offered them what comfort was in his power by assuring them that salvation could be theirs after a true repentance. One dark-bearded man, sheltering under a bullet-scarred tree and with his leg half severed and a rifle sling serving as a tourniquet about his thigh, cursed the preacher and demanded brandy instead of a sermon, but the Reverend Starbuck merely let a tract fall toward the man and then spurred sadly on. “Once this rebellion is ended, Captain,” he observed, “we shall be faced with a mighty task in the South. We shall needs preach the pure gospel to a people led into error by false teachers.”
Hetherington was about to agree with that pious observation but was checked from speaking by a sudden sound coming from the west. To the Reverend Starbuck, unused to the noise of battle, the sound was exactly like gigantic sheets of stiff canvas being ripped across, or perhaps like the noise caused by the wretched urchins who liked to run down Beacon Hill dragging sticks along the iron palings. The noise was so sudden and intrusive that he instinctively checked his horse, but then, assuming that the weird sound presaged the end of rebellion, he urged the beast on again and muttered a prayer of thanks for God’s providence in giving the North victory. Captain Hetherington, less sanguine, checked the preacher’s horse. “I didn’t think the rebs were that far west,” he said, apparently speaking to himself.
“West?” the preacher asked, confused.
“Rifle volleys, sir,” Hetherington answered, explaining the strange noise. The Captain stared toward the dying sun, where a trembling veil of smoke was starting to show above the trees.
“That noise!” the Reverend Starbuck exclaimed. “Listen! You hear that noise? What is it?” His excitement was caused by a new sound that was suddenly added to the rifle volleys. It was a high-pitched noise infused with a yelping triumph and thrilled through with a ululating and gleeful quality that suggested that the creatures who made such a sound were come willingly and even gladly to this field of slaughter. “You know what you’re hearing?” The Reverend Starbuck asked the question with enthusiasm. “It’s the paean! I never thought I should live to hear it!”
Hetherington glanced at the preacher. “The peon, sir?” he asked, puzzled.
“You’ve read Aristophanes, surely?” the preacher demanded impatiently. “You remember how he describes the war cry of the Greek infantry? The paean?” Maybe, the preacher thought, some classically minded officer from Yale or Harvard had fostered the pleasant fancy of teaching his Northern soldiers that ancient war cry. “Listen, man,” he said excitedly, “it’s the sound of the phalanx! The sound of the Spartans! The sound of Homer’s heroes!”
Captain Hetherington could hear the sound only too clearly. “That’s not the paean, sir. It’s the rebel yell.”
“You mean…” the Reverend Starbuck began, then fell abruptly silent. He had read about the rebel yell in the Boston newspapers, but now he was hearing it for himself, and the sound of it suddenly seemed anything but classical. Instead it was infused with the purest evil; a noise to chill the blood like a scrabble of wild beasts howling or like the baying of a horde of demons begging to be released from the smoking gates of hell. “Why are they yelling?” the preacher asked.
“Because they’re not beaten, sir, that’s why,” Hetherington said, and he reached for the preacher’s reins and pulled his horse around. The Reverend Starbuck protested the about turn, for he was already very close to the woods and he wanted to see what lay beyond the trees, but the Captain could not be persuaded to continue. “The battle’s not won, sir,” he said quietly, “it might even be lost.”
For a rebel yell meant only one thing: a rebel attack.
Because the wretches weren’t beaten at all.
Captain Nathaniel Starbuck, crouched in the woods close by the turnpike, heard the screaming of a rebel counterattack. “About goddamned time,” he murmured to no one in particular. The gunfire in the trees had been sporadic for the last few minutes, and Starbuck had begun to fear that the Legion’s stranded skirmishers would be trapped far behind a victorious Northern army. So far the only resistance to the Northern attack had seemed haphazard and futile, but now the rifle fire swelled into the full intensity of battle, to which the screams of the attacking Southerners added an unearthly descant. The battle was all sound to Starbuck, for he could see nothing through the smoky, deep-shadowed undergrowth, but the sounds indicated that the attacking Northerners were being checked and even counterattacked. “I reckon we should join in,” Starbuck said to Captain Medlicott.
“No,” Medlicott said. “Absolutely not!” The reply was too vehement, betraying Medlicott’s fear. The miller turned soldier was as white-faced as though he had just come from a hard shift at his old grindstones. Sweat dripped and glistened in his beard, while his eyes flicked nervously around the sanctuary his men had fortuitously discovered among the trees. The sanctuary was a shallow scrape that would have been flooded by the smallest fall of rain, yet was so surrounded by undergrowth that an army could have marched on the road behind and not seen the men hidden just paces away. “We’ll just wait here till things calm down,” Medlicott insisted.
Starbuck did not like the thought of skulking in the shadows. So far the two companies had avoided any Northerners, but that luck might not last, yet Medlicott would not listen to the younger man’s ideas. Medlicott had been happy enough to accept Starbuck’s guidance when they were exposed to the enemy’s fire, but now that he was in a seemingly safe refuge, Medlicott was rediscovering the authority that Colonel Swynyard had conferred on him. “We stay here,” he insisted again, “and that’s an order, Starbuck.”
Starbuck went back to his company. He stretched himself at the edge of the shallow hollow and stared through the foliage toward the sounds of battle. The branches of the wood made a dark lacework against an evening sky that was layered with red-tinted bands of gunsmoke. The rebel yell swelled and faded, hinting at surges as regiments advanced and went to ground before advancing again. Volleys crashed among the trees, then footsteps trampled the undergrowth close by, but the leaves grew so thick that Starbuck could see no one. Nevertheless he feared the sudden irruption of a company of nervous Yankees, and so he twisted around and hissed at his men to fix their bayonets. If the Yankees did come, then Starbuck would be ready for them.
He pulled out his own blade and slotted it into place. Squirrels chattered unhappily in the branches overhead, and a flash of red feathers showed where a cardinal flew among the trunks. Behind Starbuck, beyond the deserted turnpike, gunsmoke lay like layers of mist above a patchwork of wheat and cornfields. There was no infantry visible there. It was almost as if the road divided the battlefield into two discrete halves, the one filled with cannon smoke and the other with struggling men.
Truslow, his rifle tipped with steel, dropped beside Starbuck. “What’s wrong with Medlicott?”
“Frightened.”
“Never was any damned good. His father was the same.” Truslow spat a viscous gob of tobacco juice into the leaf mould. “I once saw old John Medlicott run from a pair of horse thieves who weren’t a day over fifteen.”
“Were you one of them?” Starbuck asked shrewdly.
Truslow grinned, but before he could answer there was a sudden panicked rush of feet, and a single Northern soldier burst through the bushes ahead. The Yankee was oblivious of the two rebel companies until he was just paces away, then his eyes widened and he slid to a panicked halt. His mouth dropped open. He turned, seemingly to shout a warning to his comrades, but Starbuck had climbed to his feet and now hammered the side of the Northerner’s skull with the brass butt of his rifle just a split second before Truslow pulled the man’s feet out from beneath him. The Yankee fell like a poleaxed steer. Truslow and Starbuck dragged him back to the company and disarmed him. “Shut your goddamned mouth,” Starbuck hissed at the man, who had begun to stir.
“I’m not…”
“The officer told you to shut the hell up, you son of a whore, so shut the hell up or I’ll rip your damned tongue out,” Truslow growled, and the Northerner went utterly quiet. The buckle on his leather belt showed he was a Pennsylvanian. A trickle of blood showed among the roots of his fair hair above his ear. “You’ll have a peach of a bruise there, you bastard,” Truslow said happily. He was rifling the man’s pockets and pouches. He tossed the Pennsylvanian’s rifle cartridges back among the company, then found a pale brown package marked with the trademark of John Anderson’s Honeydew Fine-Cut Tobacco of New York. “It ain’t Virginia, but someone will smoke it,” Truslow said, pushing it into his pouch.
“Leave me some,” the Pennsylvanian pleaded. “I ain’t had a smoke in hours.”
“Then you should have stayed in Pennsylvania, you son of a whore, instead of trampling our corn. You’re not wanted here. If you got what you deserved you’d be breathing through a hole in your ribs by now.” Truslow eased a wad of folded Northern dollar bills from the man’s top pocket. “Lucky at cards, are you?”
“And with women.” The Pennsylvanian had a snub-nosed and cheeky charm.
“Lie still and be quiet, boy, or your luck will end here.” Truslow unlooped the boy’s canteen and found it still held a half-inch of water, which he offered to Starbuck. Starbuck, despite his thirst, refused, so Truslow drained the canteen himself.
Starbuck stood to give himself a view over the surrounding brush. Captain Medlicott hissed at him to get his head down, but Starbuck ignored the miller. Another burst of screaming announced a renewed rebel charge, and this time a group of some two dozen Yankees appeared just twenty paces beyond Starbuck’s hiding place. A handful of the Northerners knelt and fired into the trees before retreating again. Two of the Yankees fell as they went back, driven down by rebel bullets, and the rest of the men would doubtless have kept on running had not the color party come through the trees to rally them. A tall, white-haired officer waved a sword toward the rebels. “Vorwarts! Vorwarts!” the officer cried, and the retreating men turned, cheered, and delivered a splintering volley toward their pursuers. The two flags were bright squares of silk in the smoke-riven shadows. One was Old Glory, battle-torn and stained, while the second was a purple flag embroidered with an eagle and a legend Starbuck could not decipher. “Vorwarts!” the white-haired officer called again.
“Are they goddamned Germans?” Truslow asked. The Sergeant had an irrational dislike of German immigrants, blaming them for many of the rules and regulations that had begun to infest his former country. “Americans used to be free men,” he often declared. “Then the damned Prussians came to organize us.”
“We’re Pennsylvania Deutsch,” the prisoner answered.
“Then you’re godforsaken son of a bitch bastards,” Truslow said. Starbuck could read the Gothic-lettered legend on the second flag now: “Gott und die Vereinigten Staaten,” it said, and it struck Starbuck that such a flag would make a handsome trophy.
“Feuer!” the white-haired officer shouted, and another Northern volley ripped into the attacking rebels. The Germans cheered, sensing that their sudden resistance had taken the attackers by surprise.
“We can take those bastards,” Starbuck said to Truslow.
The Sergeant glanced toward Captain Medlicott. “Not with that yellow bastard’s help.”
“Then we’ll do it without the yellow bastard’s help,” Starbuck said. He felt the elation of a soldier given the inestimable advantage of surprise; this was a fight he could not lose, and so he cocked his rifle and twisted around to look at his company. “We’re going to put one volley into those German sons of bitches and then run them off our land. Hard and fast, boys, scare the daylights out of the sumbitches. Ready?” The men grinned at him, letting him know that they were good and ready. Starbuck grinned back. There were times when he wondered if anything ever again in all eternity would ever taste as good as these moments in battle. The nervousness of anticipation was utterly gone, replaced by a feral excitement. He glanced at the prisoner. “You stay here, Yankee.”
“I won’t move an inch!” the prisoner promised, though in truth he intended to run just as soon as he was left unattended.
“Stand!” Starbuck shouted. The heady mix of fear and excitement swirled through him. He understood the temptation of following Medlicott’s lead and staying hidden and safe, yet he also wanted to humiliate Medlicott. Starbuck wanted to show that he was the best man on a battlefield, and no one demonstrated such arrogance by cowering in the bushes. “Take aim!” he called, and a handful of the rallying Yankees heard the shouted order and looked around fearfully, but they were already too late. Starbuck’s men were on their feet, rifles at their shoulders.
Then it began to go wrong.
“Stop!” Medlicott shouted. “Get down! I order you! Down!” The miller had panicked. He was running up the shallow scrape and shouting at Starbuck’s men, even thrusting some of them back down to the ground. Other men crouched, and all were confused.
“Fire!” Starbuck shouted, and a puny scatter of rifle flames studded the shadows.
“Down!” Medlicott waved a hand frantically.
“Get up and fire!” Starbuck’s yell was ferocious. “Up! Fire!” The men stood again and pulled their triggers, so that a stuttering mistimed volley flamed in the dusk. “Charge!” Starbuck shouted, drawing the word out like a war cry.
The white-haired officer had turned the Pennsylvanians to face the unexpected threat to their flank. Medlicott’s interference had brought the Yankees a few seconds of precious time, long enough for a half-company to form a ragged firing line at right angles to the rest of their battalion. That half-company now faced Starbuck’s confused assault, and as he watched the Yankees lift their rifles to their shoulders, he sensed the disaster that was about to strike. Even a half-company volley at such short distance would tear the heart from his assault. Panic whipped through him. He felt the temptation to break right and dive into the underbrush for cover, indeed a temptation to just run away, but then salvation arrived as the rebel regiment that was assaulting the Pennsylvanians from the south fired an overwhelming volley. The hastily formed Northern line crumpled. The fusillade that should have destroyed Starbuck was never fired. Instead the two Union flags faltered and fell as the overpowered Yankees began to retreat.
Sheer relief made Starbuck’s war cry into a chilling and incoherent screech as he led his men into the clearing. A blue-coated soldier swung a rifle butt at him, but Starbuck easily parried the wild blow and used his own rifle’s stock to hammer the man down to the leaf mould. A rifle shot half deafened him; the Northerner who had fired it was retreating backward and tripped on a fallen branch. Robert Decker jumped on the man, screaming as loudly as his terrified victim. Truslow alone advanced without screaming; instead, he was watching for places where the enemy might recover the initiative. He saw one of the Legion’s new conscripts, Isaiah Clarke, being beaten to the ground by a huge Pennsylvanian. Truslow had his bowie knife drawn. He slashed it twice, then kicked the dying Pennsylvanian so that his body would not fall across Clarke. “Get up, boy,” he told Clarke. “You ain’t hurt bad. Nothing that a swallow of whiskey won’t cure.”
The Pennsylvanians were running now. The stripes of Old Glory had disappeared northward to safety, but the blue eagle flag with its ornate German legend was being carried by a limping sergeant. Starbuck ran for the man, shouting at him to surrender. A Yankee corporal saw Starbuck and leveled a revolver that he had plucked from the body of a fallen rebel officer, but the chambers were not primed, and the revolver just clicked in his hand. The corporal swore in German and tried to duck aside, but Starbuck’s bayonet took him in the belly; then Esau Washbrook’s rifle butt slammed onto his skull and the man went down. A great tide of screaming rebels was coming from the south. The white-haired officer snatched the blue eagle flag from the limping sergeant and swung its staff like a clumsy poleax. The sergeant fell and covered his head with his hands, and the officer, shouting defiance in German, tripped over the man’s prostrate body. The fallen officer fumbled at his waist for a holstered revolver, but Starbuck was astride him now and ramming his bayonet down into the man’s ribs. Starbuck screamed, and his scream, half relief and half visceral, drowned the cry of the dying Pennsylvanian. Starbuck forced the blade down until the steel would go no farther, then rested on the gun’s stock as Truslow pulled the eagle flag away from the hooked, scrabbling, and suddenly enfeebled hands of the dying man whose long white hair was now blood red in the day’s last light.
Starbuck, his instincts as primitive as any savage, took the flag from Truslow and shook it in the air, spraying drops of blood from its fringe. “We did it!” he said to Truslow. “We did it!”
“Just us,” Truslow said meaningfully, turning to where Medlicott was still hidden.
“I’m going to kick the belly out of that bastard,” Starbuck said. He rolled the bloodied flag around its varnished pole. “Coffman!” he shouted, wanting the Lieutenant to take charge of the captured flag. “Coffman! Where the hell are you, Coffman?”
“Here, sir.” The Lieutenant’s voice sounded weakly from behind a fallen tree.
“Oh, Christ!” Starbuck blasphemed. Coffman’s voice had been feeble, like that of a man clinging to consciousness. Starbuck ran over the clearing, jumped the tree, and found the young Lieutenant kneeling wide-eyed and pale-faced, but it was not Coffman who was wounded. Coffman was fine, just shocked. Instead it was Thaddeus Bird, kind Colonel Bird, who lay death white and bleeding beside the fallen trunk.
“Oh, God, Nate, it hurts.” Bird spoke with difficulty. “I came to fetch you home, but they shot me. Took my revolver, too.” He tried to smile. “Wasn’t even loaded, Nate. I keep forgetting to load it.”
“Not you, sir, not you!” Starbuck dropped to his knees, the captured flag and Medlicott’s cowardice both forgotten as his eyes suddenly blurred. “Not you, Pecker, not you!”
Because the best man in the Brigade was down.
All across the field, from the slopes of Cedar Mountain to the ragged corn patches west of the turnpike, the rebels were advancing by the light of a sinking sun that was now a swollen ball of fading red fire suspended in a skein of shifting cannon smoke. A small evening wind had at last sprung up to drift the gunsmoke above the wounded and the dead.
The four guns named Eliza, Louise, Maud, and Anna suddenly found employment again as gray infantry appeared like wolf packs at the timberline. The gunners fired over the heads of their own retreating infantry, lobbing shells that cracked pale smoke against the dark-shadowed woods. “Bring up the limbers! Jump to it!” The Major, who a moment before had been tilting the pages of the battery’s much-thumbed copy of Reveries of a Bachelor to the last rays of sunlight, saw that he would have to move his guns smartly northward if the battery were not to be captured. “Bring my horse!” he shouted.
The four guns went on firing while the teams were fetched. A lieutenant, fresh from West Point, noticed a group of mounted rebel officers at the wood’s margin. “Slew left!” he called, and his team levered with a handspike to turn Eliza’s white-oak trail. “Hold there! Elevate her a turn. Load shell!” The powder bag was thrust down the swabbed-out barrel, and the gunner sergeant rammed a spike down the touchhole to pierce the canvas bag.
“No shell left, sir!” one of the artillerymen called from the pile of ready ammunition.
“Load solid shot. Load anything, but for Christ’s sake, hurry!” The Lieutenant still watched the tempting target.
A round of solid shot was rammed down onto the canvas bag. The Sergeant pushed his friction primer into the touchhole, then stood aside with the lanyard in his hand. “Gun ready,” he shouted.
Eliza’s limber, drawn by six horses, galloped up behind to take the gun away. “Fire!” the Lieutenant shouted.
The Sergeant whipped the lanyard toward him, thus scraping the friction rod across the primer-filled tube. The fire leaped down to the canvas bag, the powder exploded, and the four-and-a-half-inch iron ball screamed away across the smoke-layered field. The gun itself recoiled with the force of a runaway locomotive, jarring backward a full ten paces to mangle the legs of the two leading horses of the limber team. Those lead horses went down, screaming. The other horses reared and kicked in terror. One horse shattered a splinter bar, another broke a leg on the limber, and suddenly the battery’s well-ordered retreat had turned into a horror of screaming, panicked horses.
A gunner tried to cut the unwounded horses free, but could not get close because the injured horses were thrashing in agony. “Shoot them, for Christ’s sake!” the Major shouted from his saddle. A rifle bullet whistled overhead. The rebel yell sounded unearthly in the lurid evening light. The gunner trying to disentangle the horses was kicked in the thigh. He screamed and fell, his leg broken. Then a rebel artillery shell thumped into the dirt a few paces away, and the broken fragments of its casing whistled into the screaming, terror-stricken mass of men and horses. The other three guns had already been attached to their limbers.
“Go!” the Major said, “go, go, go!” and the black-muzzled Louise, Maud, and Anna were dragged quickly away, their crews hanging for dear life to the metal handles of the limbers while the drivers cracked whips over the frightened horses. The gun called Eliza stood smoking and abandoned as a second rebel shell landed plum in the mess of blood, broken harness, and struggling horses. Eliza’s lieutenant vomited at the sudden eruption of blood that gushed outward, then began limping north.
Captain Hetherington led the Reverend Doctor Starbuck past the abandoned gun and the bloody twitching mess that remained of its team. The preacher had lost his top hat and was constantly turning in the saddle to watch the dark gray line of men who advanced beneath their foul banners. One of the advancing rebels was wearing the Bostonian’s top hat, but it was not that insult that caused the preacher to frown but rather the conundrum of why God had allowed this latest defeat. Why was a righteous cause, fought by God’s chosen nation, attended by such constant disaster? Surely, if God favored the United States, then the country must prosper, yet it was palpably not prospering, which could only mean that the country’s cause, however good, was not good enough. The nation’s leaders might be committed to the political cause of preserving the Union, but they were lukewarm about emancipating the slaves, and until that step was taken, God would surely punish the nation. The cause of abolition was thus made more explicit and urgent than ever. Thus reassured about the nobility of his mission, the Reverend Starbuck, his white hair streaming, galloped to safety.
A mile behind the Reverend Elial Starbuck, at the wooded ridge where the North’s attack had surged, crested, and then been repulsed, General Washington Faulconer and his staff sat on their horses and surveyed the battlefield. Two brigades of Yankee infantry were retreating across the wide wheat field, their progress hastened by some newly arrived rebel cannon that fired shell and shot into the hurrying ranks. Only one Northern battery was replying to the gunfire. “No point in making ourselves targets,” Faulconer announced to his aides, then trotted back into the trees to hide from the gunners.
Swynyard alone remained in the open. He was on foot, ready to lead the Brigade’s first line down the long slope. Other rebel troops were already a quarter-mile beyond the woods, but the Faulconer Brigade had started its advance late and had yet to clear the trees. Swynyard saw that Faulconer had disappeared into the trees, so he pulled out his flask of whiskey and tipped it to his mouth. He finished the flask, then turned to shout at the advancing line to hurry up, but just as he turned so a blow like the beat of a might rushing wind bellowed about him. The air was sucked clean from his chest. He tried to call out, but he could not speak, let alone cry. The whiskey was suddenly sour in his throat as his legs gave way. He collapsed a second before something cracked like the awesome clangor of the gates of hell behind him, and then it seemed to Swynyard that a bright light, brighter than a dozen noonday suns, was filling and suffusing and drowning his vision. He lay on his back, unable to move, scarce able to breathe, and the brilliant light flickered around his vision for a few golden seconds before, blessedly, his drink-befuddled brain gave up its attempts to understand what had happened.
He fell into insensibility, and his sword slipped from his nerveless hand. The solid shot that had been fired from the doomed Eliza had missed his skull by inches and cracked into a live oak growing just behind. The tree’s trunk had been riven by the cannonball, splaying outward like a letter Y with its inner faces cut as clean and bright as fresh-minted gold.
The Faulconer Brigade advanced past the prostrate Colonel. No one paused to help him, no one even stooped to see if the Colonel lived or was dead. A few men spat at him, and some would have tried to rifle his pockets, but the officers kept the lines moving, and so the Brigade marched on through the wheat field in laggard pursuit of the retreating enemy.
It was Captain Starbuck and Sergeant Truslow who eventually found Colonel Swynyard. They had carried Colonel Bird to Doctor Danson’s aid post, where they had pretended to believe Doc Billy’s reassurance that the Colonel’s chest wound might not prove fatal. “I’ve seen others live with worse,” Danson said, bending in his blood-stiffened apron over the pale, shallow-breathing Bird. “And Pecker’s a tough old fowl,” Danson insisted, “so he stands a good chance.” For a time Starbuck and Truslow had waited while Danson probed the wound, but then, realizing there was no help they could offer and that waiting only made their suspense worse, they had walked away to follow the footsteps of the advancing Brigade. Thus they came upon the prostrate Swynyard. The sun had gone down, and the whole battlefield was suffused by a pearly evening light dissipated by the smoke that was still sun-tinged on its upper edges. Carrion birds, ragged-winged and stark black, flapped down to the dirt, where they ripped at the dead with sharp-hooked beaks.
“The bastard’s dead,” Truslow said, looking down at Swynyard.
“Or drunk,” Starbuck said. “I think he’s drunk.”
“Someone sure gave the bastard a hell of a good kicking,” Truslow observed, pointing to a bruise that swelled yellow and brown across the side of the Colonel’s skull. “Are you sure he ain’t dead?”
Starbuck crouched. “Bastard’s breathing.”
Truslow stared out across the field, which was pitted with shell craters and littered with the black-humped shapes of the dead. “So what are you going to do with him?” he asked. “The son of a bitch tried to have us all killed,” he added, just in case Starbuck might be moved toward a gesture of mercy.
Starbuck straightened. Swynyard lay helpless, his head back and his beard jutting skyward. The beard was crusted with dried tobacco juice and streams of spittle. The Colonel was breathing slow, a slight rattle sounding in his throat with every indrawn sigh. Starbuck picked up Swynyard’s fallen sword and held its slender tip beneath Swynyard’s beard as though he was about to plunge the steel into the Colonel’s scrawny throat. Swynyard did not stir at the steel’s touch. Starbuck felt the temptation to thrust home; then he flicked the sword blade aside. “He’s not worth killing,” he said, and then he rammed the sword down to skewer a pamphlet that had been blown by the small new wind to lodge against the Colonel’s bruised skull. “Let the bastard suffer his headache,” he said, and the two men walked away.
Back on the turnpike the Federals made one final effort to save the lost day. The retreating infantry were trading volleys with the advancing rebels, who were also under the fire of one last stubborn Yankee artillery battery that had stayed to cover the North’s retreat. Now it seemed that the guns of that last battery must be captured, for the gunners were almost in range of the Southern rifles that threatened to kill the team horses before they could be harnessed to the cannons.
So, to save the guns, the 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry was ordered forward. The men rode fresh corn-fed horses in three lines, fifty troopers to a line. A bugle sounded the advance, and the horses dipped their heads so that their manes tossed in the evening light as the first rank of horsemen trotted out past the guns.
The second line advanced, then the third, each leaving a sufficient space between themselves and the line ahead so that the troopers could swerve around a dead or dying horse. Sabers scraped out of scabbards and glittered in the blood red light of dying day. Some men left their sabers sheathed and carried revolvers instead. A swallow-tailed guidon, blue and white, was carried on a lance head in the front rank.
The cannon were hitched to limbers, and the gunners’ paraphernalia was stowed in boxes or hung from the trail hooks. The gunners hurried, knowing that the cavalry was buying them a few precious moments in which to escape. The cavalry horses were going at a fast trot now, leaving tiny spurts of dust behind their hooves. The three lines stretched onto the fields either side of the turnpike, which here ran between open fields that had been harvested of wheat and corn. Curb chains and scabbard links jingled as the horsemen advanced.
Ahead of the horsemen the Confederate infantry halted. There was a metallic rattle as ramrods thrust bullets hard down onto powder charges. Fingers stained black with gunpowder pushed brass percussion caps onto fire-darkened cones. “Wait till they’re close, boys! Wait! Wait!” an officer shouted.
“Aim for the horses, lads!” a sergeant called.
“Wait!” the officer shouted. Men shuffled into line, and more men ran to join the rebel ranks.
The Northern bugle called again, this time raggedly, and the horses were spurred into a canter. The guidon was lowered so that the lance point was aimed straight at the waiting infantry, who looked like a ragged gray-black line stretched across the turnpike. Fires burned on the far ridge, their smoke rising slow to make grim palls in the darkening sky, where the evening star was already a cold and brilliant point of light above the smoke-clad slopes of Cedar Mountain. A waxing moon, bright and sharp as a blade, rose beyond those smoky southern woods. More infantry hurried toward the turnpike to add their fire to the volley that threatened the approaching horsemen.
The bugle called a last defiant time. “Charge!” an officer shouted, and the troopers screamed their challenge and slashed back their spurs to drive their big horses into a full gallop. They were farm boys, come from the good lands of Pennsylvania. Their ancestors had ridden horses in the wars of old Europe and in the wars to free America, and now their descendants lowered their sabers so that the blade points would rip like spears into the ribcages of the rebel line. The dry fields on either flank of the turnpike shuddered to the thunder of the pounding hooves. “Charge!” the cavalry officer shouted again, drawing out the word like a war cry into the night.
“Fire!” the rebel cry answered.
Five hundred rifles slashed flame in the dusk. Horses screamed, fell, died.
“Reload!”
Ramrods rattled and scraped in hot rifle barrels. Unhorsed men staggered away from the carnage on the turnpike. Not one single trooper in the front rank had stayed in his saddle, and not one horse was still on its legs. The second line had been hit hard, too, but enough men survived to gallop on, mouths open and sabers bright as they galloped toward the remnants of the first rank, where horses screamed, hooves thrashed, and viscous blood sprayed from the twitching, dying beasts. A horseman of the second line leaped a bloody mound of writhing bodies only to be hit by two bullets. The rebels were screaming their own challenge now as they edged forward, loading and firing. An unhorsed cavalryman ran back a few paces, then doubled over to vomit blood. Horses screamed pathetically, their blood trickling in black rivulets to make thick puddles on the dusty road.
The third line checked behind the milling remnants of the second line. Some cavalrymen fired revolvers over the gory barricade, which was all that remained of their leading ranks, but then another volley flamed and smoked from the advancing rebel ranks, and the surviving horsemen pulled their reins hard around and so turned away. Their retreat brought jeers from their enemy. More rifles cracked and more saddles were emptied. A horse limped away, another fell among the wheat stooks, while a third raced riderless toward the west. The surviving troopers galloped north in the wake of the rescued guns that were being whipped back toward Culpeper Court House.
A hundred and sixty-four troopers had charged an army. Seventy returned.
And now, at last, under a warm wind reeking of blood, night fell.
In the fields at the foot of Cedar Mountain the battleground lay dark beneath the banded layers of smoke that shrouded the sky. High clouds had spread to hide the moon, though still a great wash of eyebright stars arced across the northern portion of the sky.
The wounded cried and called for water. Some of the battle’s survivors searched the woods and cornfields for injured men and gave them what help they could while other men looted the dead and robbed the wounded. Raccoons foraged among the bodies, and a skunk, disturbed by a wounded horse blundering through the woods, released its stench to add to the already reeking battlefield.
The new rebel front line was where the Yankees had started the day, while the Yankees themselves had withdrawn northward and made a new defensive line across the road to Culpeper Court House. Messengers brought General Banks news of more Northern troops hurrying south from Manassas in case the rebel attack presaged a full-scale thrust northward. Culpeper Court House must be held, General Pope ordered, though that command did not stop some panicked Yankees loading wagons with plunder taken from abandoned houses and starting northward in case the feared rebel cavalry was already sweeping east and west of the town to cut off General Banks’s army.
Other wagons brought the first wounded from the battlefield. The town’s courthouse, a fine arcaded building with a belfry and steeple, was turned into a hospital, where the surgeons worked all night by the smoky light of candles and oil lamps. They knew the morning light would bring them far more broken bodies, and maybe it would bring vengeful rebels, too. The sound of bone saws rasped in the darkness, where men gasped and sobbed and prayed.
General Banks wrote his dispatch in a commandeered farmhouse that had been looted by Northern soldiers who had taken General Pope’s orders to live off the land as permission to plunder all Southern homes. Banks sat on an empty powder barrel and used two more such barrels as his table. He dipped his steel nib into ink and wrote that he had won a victory. It was not, he allowed privately, the great victory that he had hoped for, but it was a victory nonetheless, and his words described how his small force had faced and fought and checked a mighty rebel thrust northward. Like a good politician he wrote with one eye on history, making of his battle a tale of stubborn defiance fit to stand alongside the Spartans who had defended Greece against the Persian hordes.
Six miles to the south his opponent also claimed victory. The battle had decided nothing, but Jackson had been left master of the field, and so the General knelt in prayer to give thanks to Almighty God for this new evidence of His mercies. When the General’s prayers were finished, he gave curt orders for the morning: The wounded must be collected, the dead buried, and the battleground searched for weapons that would help the Confederate cause. And then, wrapped in a threadbare blanket, Jackson slept on the ground beneath the thinning smoke.
Nervous sentries disturbed the sleep of both armies with sporadic outbreaks of rifle fire, while every now and then an apprehensive Northern gunner sent a shell spinning south toward the smear of fires that marked where the Southerners tried to rest amidst the horrors of a field after battle. Campfires flickered red, dying as the night wore on until at last an uneasy peace fell across the wounded fields.
And in that fretful dark a patrol of soldiers moved quietly.
The patrol was composed of four men, each wearing a white cloth patch embroidered with a red crescent. The patrol’s leader was Captain Moxey, Faulconer’s favorite aide, while the men themselves came from Captain Medlicott’s company, the one most loyal to Faulconer. Medlicott had gladly loaned the three men, though he had not sought the permission of Major Paul Hinton, who had taken command of the Legion from the wounded Thaddeus Bird. Hinton, like Moxey and Medlicott, wore the red crescent badge, but he was so ambivalent about his loyalty that he had deliberately dirtied and frayed his patch until it could hardly be recognized as the Faulconer crest, and had Hinton known of Moxey’s mission, he would undoubtedly have stopped the nonsense before it began.
The four men carried rifles, none of them loaded. The three privates had each been promised a reward of five dollars, in coins rather than bills, if their mission was successful. “You might have to break a few heads,” Faulconer had warned Moxey, “but I don’t want any bloodshed. I don’t want any courts-martial, you understand?”
“Of course, sir.”
Yet, as it turned out, the whole mission was ridiculously easy. The patrol crept through the Legion’s lines well inside the ring of sentries whose job was to look outward, not inward. Moxey led the way between sleeping bodies, skirting the dying fires, going to where Starbuck’s Company H slept beneath the stars. Coming close, and wary lest one of the company’s dogs should wake and start barking, Moxey held up his hand.
The problem that had made this mission necessary had begun earlier in the evening when the men of Faulconer’s Brigade were making what supper they could from the scraps of food they had either plundered or discovered in their knapsacks. Captain Pryor, General Washington Faulconer’s new aide, had come to Starbuck and requested that the captured Pennsylvanian flag be handed over.
“Why?” Starbuck had asked.
“The General wants it,” Pryor answered innocently. Thomas Pryor was far too new to the Brigade to comprehend the full enmity that existed between Starbuck and Faulconer. “I’m to take it to him.”
“You mean Faulconer wants to claim that he captured it?” Starbuck demanded.
Pryor colored at such an ignoble accusation. “I’m sure the General would do no such thing,” he said.
Starbuck laughed at the aide’s naïveté. “Go and tell General Faulconer, with my compliments, that he can come here and ask for the flag himself.”
Pryor had wanted to insist, but he found Nathaniel Starbuck a somewhat daunting figure, even a frightening figure, and so he had carried the unhelpful message back to the General who, surprisingly, showed no indignation at Starbuck’s insolence. Pryor ascribed the General’s reaction to magnanimity, but in truth Washington Faulconer was furious and merely hiding that fury. He wanted the flag, and even felt entitled to the flag, for had it not been captured by men under his command? He thus considered the flag to be his property, and he planned to hang the trophy in the hallway of his house just outside Faulconer Court House, which was why, at quarter past three in the morning, Captain Moxey and three men were poised just outside the area where Starbuck’s men slept.
“There,” one of Moxey’s men whispered and pointed to where Lieutenant Coffman lay curled under a blanket.
“Are you sure he’s got it?” Moxey whispered back.
“Certain.”
“Stay here,” Moxey said, then tiptoed across the dry grass until he reached the sleeping Lieutenant and could see the rolled-up flag lying half concealed beneath Coffman’s blanket. Moxey stooped and put a hand on Coffman’s throat. The grip woke the boy. “One word,” Moxey hissed, “and I’ll cut your damned throat.”
Coffman started up, but was thrust down hard by Moxey’s left hand. Moxey seized the flag in his other hand and started to edge it free. “Keep quiet,” he hissed at Coffman, “or I’ll have your sisters given the pox.”
“Moxey?” Coffman had grown up in the same town as Moxey. “Is that you?”
“Shut up, boy,” Moxey said. The flag was at last free, and he backed away, half regretting his failure to give a sleeping Starbuck a beating, but also relieved that he would not have to risk waking the Northerner. Starbuck had a belligerent reputation, just like his company, which was considered the most reckless in the Legion, but the men of Company H had all slept through Moxey’s raid. “Let’s go!” Moxey told his own men, and so they slipped safely away, the trophy captured.
Coffman shivered in the dark. He wondered if he should wake Starbuck or Truslow, but he was scared. He did not understand why Moxey should need to steal the flag, and he could not bear the thought of having let Starbuck down. It had been Captain Starbuck who had shamed General Washington Faulconer into paying his salary, and Coffman was terrified that Starbuck would now be angry with him, and so he just lay motionless and frightened as he listened to the far-off whimpers and cries that came from the taper-lit tents where the tired doctors sawed at limbs and prised misshapen bullets from bruised and bloodied flesh. Thaddeus Bird was in one of Doctor Danson’s tents, still breathing, but with a face as pale as the canvas under which he slept.
The plight of the men still on the battlefield was far worse. They drifted in and out of their painful sleep, sometimes waking to the voices of other men calling feebly for help or to the sound of wounded horses spending a long night dying. The night’s small wind blew north to where the frightened Yankees waited for another rebel attack. Every now and then a nervous artilleryman fired a shell from the Yankee lines, and the round would thump into the trampled corn and explode. Clods of earth would patter down, and a small thick cloud of bitter smoke would drift north as a chorus of frightened voices momentarily sounded loud before fading again. Here and there a lantern showed where men looked for friends or tried to rescue the wounded, but there were too many men lying in blood and not enough men to help, and so the abandoned men suffered and died in the small wicked hours.
Colonel Griffin Swynyard neither died nor called for help. Instead the Colonel lay sleeping, and in the dawn, when the sun’s first rays lanced over the crest of Cedar Mountain to gild the field where the dead lay rotting and the wounded lay whimpering, he opened his eyes to brightness.
Thirty miles north, where train after train steamed into Manassas Junction to fill the night with the clash of cars, the hiss of valves, and the stench of smoke, Adam Faulconer watched the horses purchased with the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s money come down from the boxcars. The beasts were frightened by the noises and the pungent smells of this strange place, and so they pricked their ears, rolled their eyes white, and whinnied pitifully as they were driven between two lines of men into a makeshift corral formed from empty army wagons. Captain Billy Blythe, who had purchased the horses and shipped them to Manassas, sat long-legged on a wagon driver’s high box and watched to see how Adam liked his animals. “Real special horses, Faulconer,” Blythe called. “Picked ’em myself. I know they don’t look much, but there ain’t nothing wrong that a few days in a feedlot won’t set straight.” Blythe lit a cigar and waited for Adam’s judgment.
Adam hardly dared say a word in case that word provoked a fight with Blythe. The horses were dreadful beasts. Adam had seen better animals penned at slaughter yards.
Tom Huxtable was Adam’s troop sergeant. He came from Louisiana but had chosen to fight for the North rather than strain the loyalty of his New York wife. Huxtable spat in derision of the newly arrived horses. “These ain’t horses, sir,” he said to Adam. “Hell, these ain’t no horses. Broken-down mules is all they is.” He spat again. “Swaybacked, spavined, and wormy. I reckon Blythe just pocketed half the money.”
“You say something, Tom Huxtable?” a grinning Billy Blythe called from his perch.
For answer Sergeant Huxtable just spat again. Adam curbed his own anger as he inspected the twenty frightened horses and tried to find some redeeming feature among them, but in the lanterns’ meager light the animals did indeed look a sorry bunch. They had capped hocks and sloping pasterns, swaybacks and, most troubling of all, too many running noses. A horse with bad lungs was a horse that needed to be butchered, yet these were the horses being given to the men under Adam’s command. Adam cursed himself for not buying the horses himself, but Major Galloway had insisted that Blythe’s experience in horse dealing was one of the regiment’s valuable assets.
“So what do you think, Faulconer?” Blythe asked mockingly.
“What did you pay for them?”
Blythe waved the cigar insouciantly. “I paid plenty, boy, just plenty.”
“Then you were cheated.” Adam could not hide his bitterness.
“There just ain’t that many horses available, boy,” Blythe deliberately taunted Adam with the word “boy” in hopes of provoking a show of temper. Blythe had been content to be Galloway’s second-in-command and saw no need for the Major to have fetched a third officer into the regiment. “The army’s already bought all the decent horses, so we latecomers have to make do with the leavings. Are you telling me you can’t manage with those there horses?”
“I reckon this gray has distemper,” Corporal Kemp said. Harlan Kemp, like Adam, was a Virginian who could not shake his loyalty to the United States. He and his whole family had abandoned their farm to come north.
“Better shoot the beast, then,” Blythe said happily.
“Not with one of your guns,” Adam snapped back. “Not if they’re as good as your horses.”
Blythe laughed, pleased at having goaded the display of temper out of Adam. “I got you some right proper guns, Faulconer. Colt repeaters, brand-new, still in their Connecticut packing cases.” The Colt repeater was little more than a revolver elongated into a long-arm, but its revolving cylinder gave a man the chance to fire six shots in the same time an enemy rifleman needed to fire just one. The weapon was not famed for its accuracy, but Major Galloway reckoned a small group of horsemen needed volume of fire rather than accuracy and claimed that forty horsemen firing six shots were worth over two hundred men with single-shot rifles.
“It ain’t a reliable gun,” Sergeant Huxtable murmured to Adam. “I’ve seen the whole cylinder explode and take off a man’s hand.”
“And it’s too long in the barrel,” Harlan Kemp added. “Real hard to carry on horseback.”
“You spoke, Harlan Kemp?” Blythe challenged.
“I’m saying the Colt ain’t a horse soldier’s weapon,” Kemp responded. “We should have carbines.”
Blythe chuckled. “You’re lucky to have any guns at all. So far as guns and horses go, we’re on the hindmost teat. So you’ll just have to clamp down and suck hard.”
Huxtable ignored Blythe’s crudity. “What do you reckon, sir?” he asked Adam. “These horses can’t be ridden. They ain’t nothing but worm meat.” Adam did not answer, and Tom Huxtable shook his head. “Major Galloway won’t let us ride on nags like these, sir.”
“I guess not,” Adam said. Tonight Major Galloway was fetching orders from General Pope, and those orders were supposed to initiate the first offensive patrols of Galloway’s Horse, but Adam knew he could do nothing on these broken-backed animals.
“So what will we do?” Harlan Kemp asked, and the other men of Adam’s troop gathered round to hear their Captain’s answer.
Adam looked at the sorry, shivering, diseased horses. Their ribs showed and their pelts were mangy. For a moment he felt a temptation to give way to despair, and he wondered why every human endeavor had to be soured by jealousy and spite, but then he glanced up into Billy Blythe’s grinning face, and Adam’s incipient despair was overtaken by a surge of resolution. “We’ll exchange the horses,” Adam told his anxious men. “We’ll take these nags south and we’ll exchange them for the best horses in Virginia. We’ll change them for horses swift as the wind and strong as the hills.” He laughed as he saw the incomprehension on Blythe’s face. Adam would not be beaten, for he knew just where to find those horses, the best horses, and once he had found his horses, he would sow havoc among his enemies. Billy Blythe or no, Adam Faulconer would fight.
SATURDAY MORNING, THE DAY AFTER BATTLE, AGAIN dawned hot and humid. Leaden clouds covered the sky and added to the air’s oppression, which was made even fouler by a miasmic smell that clung to the folds of the battlefield like the morning mist. At first light, when the troops were stirring reluctantly from their makeshift beds, Major Hinton sought out Starbuck. “I’m sorry about last night, Nate,” Hinton said.
Starbuck offered the Legion’s new commanding officer a curt and dismissive judgment of Washington Faulconer’s raid to snatch the captured flag. The Bostonian was stripped to the waist and had his chin and cheeks lathered with shaving soap plundered from a captured artillery limber. Starbuck stropped his razor on his belt, leaned close to his scrap of mirror, then stroked the long blade down his cheek.
“So what will you do?” Hinton asked, plainly nervous that Starbuck would be provoked into some rash act.
“The bastard can keep the rag,” Starbuck said. He had not really known what to do with the captured standard; he had thought that perhaps he might give it to Thaddeus Bird or else send it to Sally Truslow in Richmond. “What I really wanted was the Stars and Stripes,” he confessed to Hinton, “and that eagle flag was only ever second-best, so I reckon that son of a bitch Faulconer can keep it.”
“It was a stupid thing for Moxey to do, all the same,” Hinton said, unable to conceal his relief that Starbuck did not intend to inflate the night’s stupidity into an excuse for revenge. He watched as Starbuck squinted into a broken fragment of shaving mirror. “Why don’t you grow a beard?” he asked.
“Because everyone else does,” Starbuck said, although in truth it was because a girl had once told him he looked better clean-shaven. He scraped at his upper lip. “I’m going to murder goddamn Medlicott.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Slowly. So it hurts.”
Major Hinton sighed. “He panicked, Nate. It can happen to anyone. Next time it might be me.”
“Son of a bitch damn nearly had me killed by panicking.”
Major Hinton picked up the plundered jar of Roussel’s Shaving Cream, fidgeted with its lid, then watched Starbuck clean the razor blade. “For my sake,” he finally pleaded, “will you just forget about it? The boys are unhappy enough because of Pecker and they don’t need their captains fighting among themselves. Please, Nate? For me?”
Starbuck mopped his face clean on a strip of sacking. “Give me a cigar, Paul, and I’ll forget that bald-headed lily-livered gutless shad-belly bastard even exists.”
Hinton surrendered the cigar. “Pecker’s doing well,” he said, his tone brightening as he changed the subject, “or as well as can be expected. Doc Billy even reckons he might survive a wagon ride to the rail depot.” Hinton was deeply worried about replacing the popular Colonel even though he was a popular enough officer himself. He was an easygoing, heavyset man who had been a farmer by trade, a churchman by conviction, and a soldier by accident of history. Hinton had hoped to live out his years in the easy, rich countryside of Faulconer County, enjoying his family, his acres, and his fox-hunting, but the war had threatened Virginia, and so Paul Hinton had shouldered his weapons out of patriotic duty. Yet he did not much enjoy soldiering and reckoned his main duty was to bring safely home as many of the Faulconer Legion as he possibly could, and the men in the Legion recognized that ambition and liked Hinton for it. “We’re to stay where we are today,” Hinton now told Starbuck. “I’ve got to detach a company to collect small arms off the battlefield and another to bring in the wounded. And talking of the wounded,” he added after a second’s hesitation, “did you see Swynyard yesterday? He’s missing.”
Starbuck also hesitated, then told the truth. “Truslow and I saw him last night.” He gestured with the cigar toward the woods where his company had fought against the Pennsylvanians. “He was lying just this side of the trees. Truslow and I didn’t reckon there was anything to be done for him, so we just left him.”
Hinton was shrewd enough to guess that Starbuck had abandoned Swynyard to die. “I’ll send someone to look for him,” he said. “He ought to be given a burial.”
“Why?” Starbuck demanded belligerently.
“To cheer the Brigade up, of course,” Hinton said, then blushed for having uttered such a thing. He turned to look at the great smear of smoke that rose from the Northern cooking fires beyond the woods. “Keep a good eye on the Yankees, Nate. They ain’t beaten yet.”
But the Yankees made little hostile movement that morning. Their pickets probed forward but stopped obediently when the rebel outposts opened fire, and so the two armies settled into an uneasy proximity. Then it began to rain, slowly at first, but with an increasing vehemence after midday. Starbuck’s company made shelters at the edge of the woods with frameworks of branches covered in sod. Then they lay under cover and just watched the gray, rain-lashed landscape.
In midafternoon, when the rain eased to a drizzle, Corporal Waggoner sought Hinton’s permission for a prayer meeting. There had been no chance for such a service since the battle’s ending, and many soldiers in the Legion wanted to give thanks. Hinton gladly gave his permission, and fifty or more Legionnaires gathered beneath some gun-battered cedars. Other men from the Brigade soon joined them, so that by the time the drizzle stopped, there were almost a hundred men sitting beneath the trees and listening as Corporal Waggoner read from the Book of Job. Waggoner’s twin brother had died in the battles on the far side of Richmond, and ever since that death Peter Waggoner had become more and more fatalistic. Starbuck was not sure that Waggoner’s gloomy piety was good for the Legion’s morale, but many of the men seemed to like the Corporal’s spontaneous sessions of prayer and Bible study. Starbuck did not join the circle, but rested nearby, watching northward to where the Yankee defense line showed between the distant woodlands as a newly dug strip of earthworks broken by hastily erected cannon emplacements. Starbuck would have been hard put to admit it, but the familiar sounds of prayer and Bible reading were oddly comforting.
That comfort was broken by a blasphemous oath from Sergeant Truslow. “Christ Almighty!” the Sergeant swore.
“What is it?” Starbuck asked. He had been half dozing but now sat up fully awake. Then he saw what had provoked Truslow to blasphemy. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, and spat.
For Colonel Swynyard was not dead. Indeed, the Colonel hardly appeared to be wounded. His face was bruised, but the bruise was covered and shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat that Swynyard must have plucked from among the battlefield litter, and now the Colonel was walking through the Brigade’s lines with his familiar wolfish smile. “He’s drunk,” Truslow said. “We should have shot the bastard yesterday.”
Peter Waggoner’s voice faltered as the Colonel walked up to the makeshift prayer meeting. Swynyard stopped at the edge of the meeting, saying nothing, just staring at the men with their open Bibles and bare heads, and every single man seemed cowed by the baleful eyes. The Colonel had always been a mocker of these homespun devotions, though until now he had kept his scorn at a distance. Now his malevolence killed the prayerful atmosphere stone dead. Waggoner made one or two brave efforts to keep reading, but then stopped altogether.
“Go on,” Swynyard said in his hoarse voice.
Waggoner closed his Bible instead. Sergeant Phillips, who was one of Major Haxall’s shrinking Arkansas battalion, stood to head off any trouble. “Maybe you’d like to join us at prayer, Colonel?” the Sergeant suggested nervously.
The tic in Swynyard’s cheek twitched as he considered his answer. Sergeant Phillips licked his lips while others of the men closed their eyes in silent prayer. Then, to the amazement of everyone who watched, Colonel Swynyard pulled off his hat and nodded to Phillips. “I would like that, Sergeant, I would indeed.” Sergeant Phillips was so taken aback by the Colonel’s agreement that he said nothing. A murmur went through the Bible study group, but no one spoke aloud. Swynyard, the bruise on his face visible now, was embarrassed by the silence. “If you’ll have me, that is,” he added in an unnaturally humble voice.
“Anyone is welcome,” Sergeant Phillips managed to say. One or two of the officers in the group muttered their agreement, but no one looked happy at welcoming Swynyard. Everyone in the prayer group believed the Colonel was playing a subtle game of mockery, but they did not understand his game, nor did anyone know how to stop it, and so they offered him a reluctant welcome instead.
“Maybe you’ll let me say a word or two?” Swynyard suggested to Phillips, who seemed to have assumed leadership of the prayer meeting. Phillips nodded, and the Colonel fidgeted with the hat in his hands as he looked around the frightened gathering. The Colonel tried to speak, but the words would not come. He cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and tried again. “I have seen the light,” he explained.
Another murmur went through the circle of seated men. “Amen,” Phillips said.
Swynyard twisted the hat in his nervous hands. “I have been a great sinner, Sergeant,” he said, then stopped. He still wore the same hated smile, but some of the men nearer to Swynyard could sense that it was now a smile of embarrassment rather than sarcasm. The same men could even see tears in the Colonel’s eyes.
“Drunk as a bitch on the Fourth of July,” Truslow said in a tone of wonder.
“I’m not sure,” Starbuck said. “I think he might be sober.”
“Then he’s lost his damn wits,” Truslow opined.
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Bernard Cornwell
The third volume in the Starbuck Chronicles. The battle for control of Richmond, the Confederate capital, continues through the hot summer of 1862.Captain Nate Starbuck, yankee fighting for the Southern cause, has to survive and win with his ragged Company in the bitter struggle not only against the formidable Northern army but equally in opposition to his own superiors who would like nothing better than to see Nate Starbuck dead and dishonoured.Starbuck’s courage is tested to the limit in his desperate manoeuvres to retrieve his own and the Legion’s honour in this the thrid narrative of Bernard Cornwell’s sweeping epic of the American Civil War.
Bernard Cornwell
BATTLE FLAG
THE NATHANIEL STARBUCK CHRONICLES
BOOK THREE
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The right of Bernard Cornwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
BATTLE FLAG. Copyright © 2006 by Bernard Cornwell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007339495
06 07 08 09 10
Version: 2017-05-08
Praise for Bernard Cornwell’s THE NATHANIEL STARBUCK CHRONICLES
“The most entertaining military historical novels…. Always based on fact, always interesting…always entertaining.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[A] wonderful series…believable, three-dimensional characters…. A rollicking treat for Cornwell’s many fans.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Highly successful.”
—The Times (London)
“Fast-paced and exciting…. Cornwell—and Starbuck—don’t disappoint.”
—Birmingham News
“A top-class read by a master of historical drama. Nate Starbuck is on the march, and on his way to fame.”
—Irish Press
Battle Flag is for my father, with love
CONTENTS
COVER PAGE (#uf5151e1e-a4a4-5d7c-b4b4-7d5cf63de607)
TITLE PAGE (#u22ad9930-6c91-51e5-a5e8-e016c2593b95)
COPYRIGHT
PRAISE
DEDICATION (#u92d524f4-1650-57c1-bd1f-193ebd8408d4)
MAP
PART ONE
CAPTAIN NATHANIEL STARBUCK FIRST SAW HIS NEW (#u0d3ed58f-dfee-5446-aef2-bc97fbad5d80)
THE YANKEE CAVALRY PATROL REACHED GENERAL (#u650c8d97-ffcf-5b08-97f0-d20036894878)
IT’S GOD’S WILL, BANKS! GOD’S WILL!” THE REVEREND (#u57a52692-33af-54a3-86ce-6a7f4b3a0887)
SATURDAY MORNING, THE DAY AFTER BATTLE, AGAIN (#u54cabbd8-ea13-5c26-8704-b56211c9e4a8)
PART TWO
JACKSON, LIKE A SNAKE THAT HAD STRUCK, HURT, BUT (#litres_trial_promo)
THERE WERE TIMES WHEN GENERAL WASHINGTON (#litres_trial_promo)
THE YANKEES’ SPRING OFFENSIVE MIGHT HAVE FAILED, (#litres_trial_promo)
GENERAL STUART’S AIDE REACHED LEE’S HEADQUARTERS (#litres_trial_promo)
THEY MARCHED LIKE THEY HAD NEVER MARCHED IN (#litres_trial_promo)
THE LEGION MARCHED INTO BRISTOE JUST AS THE TRAIN (#litres_trial_promo)
ALL DAY THE YANKEES TRIED TO MAKE SENSE OF (#litres_trial_promo)
AT MANASSAS, ON FRIDAY AUGUST 29, 1862, THE (#litres_trial_promo)
THE LAST NORTHERN ATTACK OF THE DAY WAS BY FAR
THE FIRST ATTACK OF THE SATURDAY MORNING WAS AN
HISTORICAL NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOKS BY BERNARD CORNWELL
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Map
PART ONE
CAPTAIN NATHANIEL STARBUCK FIRST SAW HIS NEW commanding general when the Faulconer Legion forded the Rapidan. Thomas Jackson was on the river’s northern bank, where he appeared to be in a trance, for he was motionless in his saddle with his left hand held high in the air while his eyes, blue and resentful, stared into the river’s vacant and murky depths. His glum stillness was so uncanny that the marching column edged to the far margin of the ford rather than pass near a man whose stance so presaged death. The General’s physical appearance was equally disturbing. Jackson had a ragged beard, a plain coat, and a dirty cap, while his horse looked as if it should have been taken to a slaughterhouse long before. It was hard to credit that this was the South’s most controversial general, the man who gave the North sleepless nights and nervous days, but Lieutenant Franklin Coffman, sixteen years old and newly arrived in the Faulconer Legion, asserted that the odd-looking figure was indeed the famous Stonewall Jackson. Coffman had once been taught by Professor Thomas Jackson. “Mind you,” Lieutenant Coffman confided in Starbuck, “I don’t believe generals make any real difference to battles.”
“Such wisdom in one so young,” said Starbuck, who was twenty-two years old.
“It’s the men who win battles, not generals,” Coffman said, ignoring his Captain’s sarcasm. Lieutenant Coffman had received one year’s schooling at the Virginia Military Institute, where Thomas Jackson had ineffectively lectured him in artillery drill and Natural Philosophy. Now Coffman looked at the rigid figure sitting motionless in the shabby saddle. “I can’t imagine old Square Box as a general,” Coffman said scornfully. “He couldn’t keep a schoolroom in order, let alone an army.”
“Square Box?” Starbuck asked. General Jackson had many nicknames. The newspapers called him Stonewall, his soldiers called him Old Jack or even Old Mad Jack, while many of Old Jack’s former students liked to refer to him as Tom Fool Jack, but Square Box was a name new to Starbuck.
“He’s got the biggest feet in the world,” Coffman explained. “Really huge! And the only shoes that ever fitted him were like boxes.”
“What a fount of useful information you are, Lieutenant,” Starbuck said casually. The Legion was still too far from the river for Starbuck to see the General’s feet, but he made a mental note to look at these prodigies when he did finally reach the Rapidan. The Legion was presently not moving at all, its progress halted by the reluctance of the men ahead to march straight through the ford without first removing their tattered boots. Mad Jack Stonewall Square Box Jackson was reputed to detest such delays, but he seemed oblivious to this holdup. Instead he just sat, hand in the air and eyes on the river, while right in front of him the column bunched and halted. The men behind the obstruction were grateful for the enforced halt, for the day was blistering hot, the air motionless, and the heat as damp as steam. “You were remarking, Coffman, on the ineffectiveness of generals?” Starbuck prompted his new junior officer.
“If you think about it, sir,” Coffman said with a youthful passion, “we haven’t got any real generals, not like the Yankees, but we still win battles. I reckon that’s because the Southerner is unbeatable.”
“What about Robert Lee?” Starbuck asked. “Isn’t he a real general?”
“Lee’s old! He’s antediluvian!” Coffman said, shocked that Starbuck should even have suggested the name of the new commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. “He must be fifty-five, at least!”
“Jackson’s not old,” Starbuck pointed out. “He isn’t even forty yet.”
“But he’s mad, sir. Honest! We used to call him Tom Fool.”
“He must be mad then,” Starbuck teased Coffman. “So why do we win battles despite having mad generals, ancient generals, or no generals at all?”
“Because fighting is in the Southern blood, sir. It really is.” Coffman was an eager young man who was determined to be a hero. His father had died of consumption, leaving his mother with four young sons and two small daughters. His father’s death had forced Coffman to leave the Virginia Military Institute after his first year, but that one year’s military schooling had equipped him with a wealth of martial theories. “Northerners,” he now explained to Starbuck, “have diluted blood. There are too many immigrants in the North, sir. But the South has pure blood, sir. Real American blood.”
“You mean the Yankees are an inferior race?”
“It’s an acknowledged fact, sir. They’ve lost the thoroughbred strain, sir.”
“You do know I’m a Yankee, Coffman, don’t you?” Starbuck asked.
Coffman immediately looked confused, though before he could frame any response he was interrupted by Colonel Thaddeus Bird, the Faulconer Legion’s commanding officer, who came striding long-legged from the rear of the stalled column. “Is that really Jackson?” Bird asked, gazing across the river.
“Lieutenant Coffman informs me that the General’s real name is Old Mad Tom Fool Square Box Jackson, and that is indeed the man himself,” Starbuck answered.
“Ah, Coffman,” Bird said, peering down at the small Lieutenant as though Coffman was some curious specimen of scientific interest, “I remember when you were nothing but a chirruping infant imbibing the lesser jewels of my glittering wisdom.” Bird, before he became a soldier, had been the schoolmaster in Faulconer Court House, where Coffman’s family lived.
“Lieutenant Coffman has not ceased to imbibe wisdom,” Starbuck solemnly informed Colonel Bird, “nor indeed to impart it, for he has just informed me that we Yankees are an inferior breed, our blood being soured, tainted, and thinned by the immigrant strain.”
“Quite right, too!” Bird said energetically; then the Colonel draped a thin arm around the diminutive Coffman’s shoulders. “I could a tale unfold, young Coffman, whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, and make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.” He spoke even more closely into the ear of the astonished Lieutenant. “Did you know, Coffman, that the very moment an immigrant boat docks in Boston all the Beacon Hill families send their wives down to the harbor to be impregnated? Is that not the undeniable truth, Starbuck?”
“Indeed it is, sir, and they send their daughters as well if the boat arrives on the Sabbath.”
“Boston is a libidinous town, Coffman,” Bird said very sternly as he stepped away from the wide-eyed Lieutenant, “and if I am to give you just one piece of advice in this sad bad world, then let it be to avoid the place. Shun it, Coffman! Regard Boston as you might regard Sodom or Gomorrah. Remove it from your catalog of destinations. Do you understand me, Coffman?”
“Yes, sir,” Coffman said very seriously.
Starbuck laughed at the look on his Lieutenant’s face. Coffman had arrived the day before with a draft of conscripted men to replace the casualties of Gaines’ Mill and Malvern Hill. The conscripts had mostly been culled from the alleys of Richmond and, to Starbuck, appeared to be a scrawny, unhealthy, and shifty-looking crew of dubious reliability, but Franklin Coffman, like the original members of the Legion, was a volunteer from Faulconer County and full of enthusiasm for the Southern cause.
Colonel Bird now abandoned his teasing of the Lieutenant and plucked at Starbuck’s sleeve. “Nate,” he said, “a word.” The two men walked away from the road, crossing a shallow ditch into a meadow that was wan and brown from the summer’s heat wave. Starbuck limped, not because he was wounded, but because the sole of his right boot was becoming detached from its uppers. “Is it me?” Bird asked as the two men paced across the dry grass. “Am I getting wiser or is it that the young are becoming progressively more stupid? And young Coffman, believe it if you will, was brighter than most of the infants it was my misfortune to teach. I remember he mastered the theory of gerunds in a single morning!”
“I’m not sure I ever mastered gerunds,” Starbuck said.
“Hardly difficult,” Bird said, “so long as you remember that they are nouns which provide—”
“And I’m not sure I ever want to master the damn things,” Starbuck interrupted.
“Wallow in your ignorance, then,” Bird said grandly. “But you’re also to look after young Coffman. I couldn’t bear to write to his mother and tell her he’s dead, and I have a horrid feeling that he’s likely to prove stupidly brave. He’s like a puppy. Tail up, nose wet, and can’t wait to play battles with Yankees.”
“I’ll look after him, Pecker.”
“But you’re also to look after yourself,” Bird said meaningfully. He stopped and looked into Starbuck’s eyes. “There’s a rumor, only a rumor, and God knows I do not like passing on rumors, but this one has an unpleasant ring to it. Swynyard was heard to say that you won’t survive the next battle.”
Starbuck dismissed the prediction with a grin. “Swynyard’s a drunk, not a prophet.” Nevertheless he felt a shudder of fear. He had been a soldier long enough to become inordinately superstitious, and no man liked to hear a presentiment of his own death.
“Suppose,” Bird said, taking two cigars from inside his hatband, “that Swynyard has decided to arrange it?”
Starbuck stared incredulously at his Colonel. “Arrange my death?” he finally asked.
Bird scratched a lucifer match alight and stooped over its flame. “Colonel Swynyard,” he announced dramatically when his cigar was drawing properly, “is a drunken swine, a beast, a cream-faced loon, a slave of nature, and a son of hell, but he is also, Nate, a most cunning rogue, and when he is not in his cups he must realize that he is losing the confidence of our great and revered leader. Which is why he must now try to do something which will please our esteemed lord and master. Get rid of you.” The last four words were delivered brutally.
Starbuck laughed them off. “You think Swynyard will shoot me in the back?”
Bird gave Starbuck the lit cigar. “I don’t know how he’ll kill you. All I know is that he’d like to kill you, and that Faulconer would like him to kill you, and for all I know our esteemed General is prepared to award Swynyard a healthy cash bonus if he succeeds in killing you. So be careful, Nate, or else join another regiment.”
“No,” Starbuck said immediately. The Faulconer Legion was his home. He was a Bostonian, a Northerner, a stranger in a strange land who had found in the Legion a refuge from his exile. The Legion provided Starbuck with casual kindnesses and a hive of friends, and those bonds of affection were far stronger than the distant enmity of Washington Faulconer. That enmity had grown worse when Faulconer’s son Adam had deserted from the Southern army to fight for the Yankees, a defection for which Brigadier General Faulconer blamed Captain Starbuck, but not even the disparity in their ranks could persuade Starbuck to abandon his fight against the man who had founded the Legion and who now commanded the five regiments, including the Legion, that made up the Faulconer Brigade. “I’ve got no need to run away,” he now told Bird. “Faulconer won’t last any longer than Swynyard. Faulconer’s a coward and Swynyard’s a drunk, and before this summer’s out, Pecker, you’ll be Brigade commander and I’ll be in command of the Legion.”
Bird hooted with delight. “You are incorrigibly conceited, Nate. You! Commanding the Legion? I imagine Major Hinton and the dozen other men senior to you might have a different opinion.”
“They might be senior, but I’m the best.”
“Ah, you still suffer from the delusion that merit is rewarded in this world? I suppose you contracted that opinion with all the other nonsense they crammed into you when Yale was failing to give you mastery of the gerund?” Bird, achieving this lick at Starbuck’s alma mater, laughed gleefully. His head jerked back and forth as he laughed, the odd jerking motion explaining his nickname: Pecker. Starbuck joined in the laughter, for he, like just about everyone else in the Legion, liked Bird enormously. The schoolmaster was eccentric, opinionated, contrary, and one of the kindest men alive. He had also proved to possess an unexpected talent for soldiering. “We move at last,” Bird now said, gesturing at the stalled column that had begun edging toward the ford where the solitary, strange figure of Jackson waited motionless on his mangy horse. “You owe me two dollars,” Bird suddenly remarked as he led Starbuck back to the road.
“Two dollars!”
“Major Hinton’s fiftieth birthday approaches. Lieutenant Pine assures me he can procure a ham, and I shall prevail on our beloved leader for some wine. We are paying for a feast.”
“Is Hinton really that old?” Starbuck asked.
“He is indeed, and if you live that long we shall doubtless give you a drunken dinner as a reward. Have you got two bucks?”
“I haven’t got two cents,” Starbuck said. He had some money in Richmond, but that money represented his cushion against disaster and was not for frittering away on ham and wine.
“I shall lend you the money,” Bird said with a rather despairing sigh. Most of the Legion’s officers had private means, but Colonel Bird, like Starbuck, was forced to live on the small wages of a Confederate officer.
The men of Company H stood as Starbuck and Bird approached the road, though one of the newly arrived conscripts stayed prone on the grass verge and complained he could not march another step. His reward was a kick in the ribs from Sergeant Truslow. “You can’t do that to me!” the man protested, scrabbling sideways to escape the Sergeant.
Truslow grabbed the man’s jacket and pulled his face close in to his own. “Listen, you son of a poxed bitch, I can slit your slumbelly guts wide open and sell them to the Yankees for hog food if I want, and not because I’m a sergeant and you’re a private, but because I’m a mean son of a bitch and you’re a lily-livered louse. Now get the hell up and march.”
“What comfortable words the good Sergeant speaks,” Bird said as he jumped back across the dry ditch. He drew on his cigar. “So I can’t persuade you to join another regiment, Nate?”
“No, sir.”
Pecker Bird shook his head ruefully. “I think you’re a fool, Nate, but for God’s sake be a careful fool. For some odd reason I’d be sorry to lose you.”
“Fall in!” Truslow shouted.
“I’ll take care,” Starbuck promised as he rejoined his company. His thirty-six veterans were lean, tanned, and ragged. Their boots were falling to pieces, their gray jackets were patched with common brown cloth, and their worldly possessions were reduced to what a man could carry suspended from his rope belt or sling in a rolled blanket across his shoulder. The twenty conscripts made an awkward contrast in their new uniforms, clumsy leather brogans, and stiff knapsacks. Their faces were pale and their rifle muzzles unblackened by firing. They knew this northward march through the central counties of Virginia probably meant an imminent battle, but what that battle would bring was a mystery, while the veterans knew only too well that a fight would mean screaming and blood and hurt and pain and thirst, but maybe, too, a cache of plundered Yankee dollars or a bag of real coffee taken from a festering, maggot-riddled Northern corpse. “March on!” Starbuck shouted, and fell in beside Lieutenant Franklin Coffman at the head of the company.
“You see if I’m not right, sir,” Coffman said. “Old Mad Jack’s got feet bigger than a plowhorse.”
As Starbuck marched into the ford, he looked at the General’s feet. They were indeed enormous. So were Jackson’s hands. But what was most extraordinary of all was why the General still held his left hand in midair like a child begging permission to leave a schoolroom. Starbuck was about to ask Coffman for an explanation when, astonishingly, the General stirred. He looked up from the water, and his gaze focused on Starbuck’s company. “Coffman!” he called in an abrupt, high-pitched voice. “Come here, boy.”
Coffman stumbled out of the ford and half ran to the General’s side. “Sir?”
The ragged-bearded Jackson frowned down from his saddle. “Do you remember me, Coffman?”
“Yes, sir, of course I do, sir.”
Jackson lowered his left hand very gently, as though he feared he might damage the arm if he moved it fast. “I was sorry you had to leave the Institute early, Coffman. It was after your plebe year, was it not?”
“Yes, sir. It was, sir.”
“Because your father died?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And your mother, Coffman? She’s well?”
“Indeed, sir. Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”
“Bereavement is a terrible affliction, Coffman,” the General observed, then slowly unbent his rigid posture to lean toward the slim, fair-haired Lieutenant, “especially for those who are not in a state of grace. Are you in a state of grace, Coffman?”
Coffman blushed, frowned, then managed to nod. “Yes, sir. I think I am, sir.”
Jackson straightened again into his poker-backed stance and, as slowly as he had lowered his left hand, raised it once more into midair. He lifted his eyes from Coffman to stare into the heat-hazed distance. “You will find it a very hard thing to meet your Maker if you are unsure of His grace,” the General said in a kindly voice, “so study your scriptures and recite your prayers, boy.”
“Yes, sir, I will, sir,” Coffman said. He stood awkward and uncertain, waiting for the General to speak further, but Jackson seemed in his trance once again, and so the Lieutenant turned and walked back to Starbuck’s side. The Legion marched on, and the Lieutenant remained silent as the road climbed between small pastures and straggling woods and beside modest farms. It was a good two miles before Coffman at last broke his silence. “He’s a great man,” the Lieutenant said, “isn’t he, sir? Isn’t he a great man?”
“Tom Fool?” Starbuck teased Coffman.
“A great man, sir,” Coffman chided Starbuck.
“If you say so,” Starbuck said, though all he knew about Jackson was that Old Mad Jack had a great reputation for marching, and that when Old Mad Jack went marching, men died. And they were marching now, marching north, and going north meant one thing only: Yankees ahead. Which meant there would be a battle soon, and a field of graves after the battle, and this time, if Pecker was right, Starbuck’s enemies would not just be in front of him but behind as well. Starbuck marched on. A fool going to battle.
The midday train stopped at Manassas Junction amidst a clash of cars, the hissing of steam, and the clangor of the locomotive’s bell. Sergeants’ voices rose over the mechanical din, urging troops out of the cars and onto the strip of dirt that lay between the rails and the warehouses. The soldiers jumped down, glad to be free of the cramped cars and excited to be in Virginia. Manassas Junction might not be the fighting front, but it was still a part of a rebel state, and so they peered about themselves as though the landscape was as wondrous and strange as the misty hills of mysterious Japan or far Cathay.
The arriving troops were mostly seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys come from New Jersey and Wisconsin, from Maine and Illinois, from Rhode Island and Vermont. They were volunteers, newly uniformed and eager to join this latest assault on the Confederacy. They boasted of hanging Jeff Davis from an apple tree, and bragged of how they would march through Richmond and roust the rebels out of their nests like rats from a granary. They were young and indestructible, full of confidence, but also awed by the savagery of this strange destination.
For Manassas Junction was not an inviting place. It had been sacked once by Northern troops, destroyed again by retreating Confederates, then hastily rebuilt by Northern contractors, so that now there were acres of gaunt, raw-timbered warehouses standing between rail sidings and weed-filled meadows that were crammed with guns and limbers and caissons and portable forges and ambulances and wagons. More stores and weapons arrived every hour, for this was the supply depot that would fuel the summer campaign of 1862 that would end the rebellion and so restore a United States of America. The great spread of buildings was shadowed by an ever-present pall of greasy smoke that came from blacksmiths’ shops and locomotive repair sheds and the fireboxes of the locomotives that dragged in their goods wagons and passenger cars.
Two cavalry officers waited at the depot. They had clearly gone to some considerable effort to make themselves presentable, for their uniform coats were brushed spotless, their spurred boots were shining, and their leather belts polished. The older man was middle-aged and balding, with a pleasant face and thick muttonchop whiskers. His name was Major Joseph Galloway, and he clutched a plumed hat in his nervous hands. His companion was a much younger man, handsome and fair-haired, with a square beard and wide shoulders and an open face that inspired trust. His coat showed a captain’s bars.
Both men were Virginians, yet both fought for the North. Joseph Galloway owned property just outside Manassas itself, and that farm was now the depot for a regiment of Northern cavalry exclusively recruited from Southerners loyal to the government in Washington. Most of the troopers for Galloway’s Horse were volunteers from the border states, the disputed lands of Maryland, and the western counties of Virginia, but a good number were refugees from the Confederate States themselves. Galloway had no doubt that some of his men were fugitives from Southern justice, but the majority were idealists who fought to preserve the Union, and it had been Major Galloway’s notion to recruit such men for reconnaissance work deep behind the rebel lines. Northern horsemen were solid and brave, but they rode the Virginian countryside as strangers, and in consequence they were timid compared to the rakehell Southerners who knew that every Virginian village and hamlet contained sympathizers prepared to hide and feed them. It had been Galloway’s inspiration to raise a regiment that could ride the rebel states like native Southerners, yet the idea had received only lukewarm support from Washington. Raise the regiment, the government’s bureaucrats had told Major Galloway, and we might deign to employ it, but only if it came properly equipped with weapons, horses, and uniforms.
Which was why Major Galloway and Captain Adam Faulconer now waited for a passenger who was supposed to have arrived on the midday train that had just steamed into Manassas. The two cavalry officers worked their way against the flood of excited soldiers toward the train’s last car, which had been reserved for passengers more exalted than mere cannon fodder. A porter lowered the carriage steps, and two ladies, their hooped skirts scarce able to squeeze through the car’s narrow doorway, were handed down. After the ladies came a group of senior officers, their mustaches trimmed, their uniforms brushed, and their faces flush from the day’s heat and from their consumption of the railroad’s whiskey. One officer, younger than the rest, broke away and shouted at some orderlies to bring horses. “Chop, chop now! Horses for the General!” the aide shouted. The ladies’ twin parasols bobbed white and lacy through the mist of tobacco smoke and the crush of dark military hats.
The last man to alight from the passenger car was a thin, tall, and elderly civilian with white hair and beard, fierce eyes, and a gaunt, stern face. He had sunken cheeks, a Roman nose as imperious as his gaze, a black frock coat, a top hat, and despite the heat, a high-buttoned vest over which a pair of starched Geneva bands hung white. He carried a dark maroon carpetbag and an ebony stick that he used to push aside a black servant who was lifting the ladies’ cabin trunks onto a handcart. The gesture was peremptory and unthinking, the act of a man accustomed to authority.
“That’s him,” Adam said, recognizing the minister whom he had heard preach in Boston just before the war began.
Major Galloway pushed through the crowd toward the white-haired man. “Sir?” he called to the newly arrived preacher. “Doctor Starbuck, sir?”
The Reverend Elial Joseph Starbuck, Doctor of Divinity, pamphleteer, and the most famous of all the North’s abolitionist preachers, scowled at his welcomers. “You must be Galloway. And you’re Faulconer? Good! My bag.” He thrust the carpetbag into Adam’s hand, which had been stretched out for a handshake.
“You had a pleasant journey, I trust, sir?” Major Galloway inquired as he ushered his guest toward the roadway.
“It became successively less pleasant, Galloway, as I journeyed south. I am forced to conclude that engineering has reached its apotheosis in New England and that the further one journeys from Boston the less comfortable the conveyance.” The Reverend Starbuck delivered these judgments in a voice trained to reach the deepest recesses of the largest churches and lecture halls in America. “The Southern rails, I must say, are distinctly lumpy. The degraded product, no doubt, of a Slavocracy. Am I expected to walk to my destination?” the Reverend Starbuck demanded, suddenly stopping dead in his tracks.
“No, sir. I have a buggy.” Galloway was about to request that Adam go fetch the carriage, then realized Adam was too encumbered with the preacher’s heavy carpetbag. “I’ll fetch it directly, sir. It isn’t far.”
The Reverend Starbuck waved Galloway on his way, then peered with a fierce inquisitiveness at a group of civilians waiting for the mail to be unloaded from the newly arrived caboose. “Have you read Spurzheim on phrenology?” he demanded of Adam.
“No, sir,” Adam responded, surprised by the fiercely abrupt question.
“Science has much to teach us,” the Reverend Doctor Starbuck declaimed, “so long as we remember that its conclusions are ever subject to the approval and emendations of Almighty God, but I am interested to observe these proofs of Spurzheim’s treatise.” He waved his stick toward the waiting civilians. “The New Englander generally possesses a noble brow shape. He displays cranial contours that denote intelligence, benevolence, wisdom, and adhesiveness, but even in these upper regions of the South I notice how the shape of men’s skulls betrays depravity, combativeness, destructiveness, and a distinct tendency toward cretinism.”
Adam’s torturing conscience, like his ingrained patriotism, might have driven him to fight against his father’s land, yet he was still a native son of Virginia, and the Northern preacher’s criticism made him bridle. “Was not George Washington a Southerner, sir?” he demanded stiffly.
But the Reverend Starbuck was too old a controversialist to be trapped into recantation. “George Washington, young man, like yourself, was a product of the gentry. My observations are confined solely to the common ruck of people. The general there, you see him?” The peremptory stick, narrowly missing an artillery sergeant, pointed at a plump officer who had shared the passenger car with the Reverend Starbuck.
“I see him, sir,” Adam said, wondering what characteristics the general’s skull shape revealed.
But the Reverend Starbuck had abandoned the subject of phrenology. “That is Pope,” the preacher announced. “He was good enough to pay me his respects during the journey. A fine-looking man, indeed.”
Adam looked with interest at this new commander of the North’s Army of Virginia. General John Pope was a high-colored and confident-looking man with intelligent eyes and a bushy beard. If phrenology did provide an accurate guide to a man’s character, then Pope’s broad forehead and solid, square appearance suggested that he might indeed be the savior that the North had been seeking ever since the war’s sad beginning. John Pope had distinguished himself in the fighting on the Mississippi and had now been brought east to work his magic in the intransigent Virginian countryside where Northern general after Northern general had first been bamboozled and then beaten by the ragged rebel armies.
“Pope has the right ideas,” the Reverend Starbuck went on enthusiastically. “It’s no good being kind to rebels. Disobedience calls for punishment, and defiance demands retribution. The Slavocracy must be smitten, Faulconer, and its lands laid waste. Pope won’t stay his hand, he assures me of that. He is a man for the Lord’s work.” And indeed, General Pope, almost as soon as he had been appointed commander of the Army of Virginia, had declared that the old policy of treating Southern civilians with respect was finished. Northern soldiers would henceforth take what they needed from the Southern population, and any Southerner who resisted such depredations would be punished. The Reverend Elial Starbuck applauded Pope’s zeal. “The Southerner,” the preacher now lectured Adam, “understands only one language. Brute force. It is the language he has used to oppress the Negro, and it is the language that must now be used to oppress him. You agree?”
“I think, sir,” Adam said tactfully, “that the North must gain victory very soon.”
“Quite so, quite so,” the Reverend Starbuck said, not certain whether he had received agreement or not. He certainly deserved agreement, for it was upon the Reverend Starbuck’s generosity that both the future of Adam and of Galloway’s Horse depended. Adam had been penniless when he deserted the South, but it had been his good fortune to know Major James Starbuck, the preacher’s eldest son, and it had been James who had informed Adam about Galloway’s Horse and who had suggested that his famous father might be able to provide Adam with the necessary funds to join the regiment.
The Reverend Doctor Starbuck had proved more than willing to advance the money. Too old to fight, yet too passionate to abstain from fighting, he had watched, impotent, as the North suffered defeat after defeat in Virginia. The defeats had stirred the Reverend Starbuck into contributing his own and his church’s money to the raising and equipping of Massachusetts regiments, only to see those regiments led to disaster. Other men, lesser men, might have abandoned their efforts, but the disasters only fed the preacher’s zeal, which was why, given the chance to contribute to the establishment of Galloway’s Horse, the Reverend Starbuck had been quick to agree. He was not only supporting Adam but donating fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of weaponry and ammunition to Galloway’s regiment. The money was not the Reverend Starbuck’s own but had been raised by God-fearing New England abolitionists. “In the past,” he told Galloway and Adam as they journeyed westward from Manassas in the buggy, “we used such charitable donations for our work in the South: distributing tracts, establishing Sabbath schools for blacks, and, of course, conducting investigations into the evils of the Slavocracy, but now, cut off from those activities, our charities need other outlets for their expenditure.”
“There’s surely much to be spent on the welfare of escaped slaves?” Adam asked, hoping at the same time that he was not talking Galloway and himself out of their funding.
“The contrabands are amply provided for. Amply!” The Reverend Starbuck’s disapproving tone suggested that those slaves who had managed to escape to the North were living in pampered luxury rather than struggling for insanitary survival in makeshift camps. “We need to strike a blow at the root of slavery, not pluck a few diseased leaves from its topmost branches.” Adam, hearing the anger behind the preacher’s words, suspected that the Reverend Elial Starbuck was much keener to punish the slaveholders than actually free the slaves.
The buggy climbed the shallow hill from New Market, passed between deep woods, then plunged downhill toward the Warrenton Turnpike. As Major Galloway drove, he pointed out landmarks made famous in the battle that had been fought the previous summer across this same ground. There were the ruins of the house where Surgeon Henry’s widow had died in the shell fire, and there the Matthews house, which had been used as a hospital. As the buggy rattled down the Sudley road north of the turnpike, Galloway pointed to where the Northern flank attack had come from the river’s far side, but as he talked he became aware that the Boston preacher was hardly enthusiastic in his responses. The Reverend Doctor Starbuck did not want a guided tour of the place where the North had met its first defeat; he only wanted to hear promises of victory, and so the conversation died away as Galloway steered the buggy onto the track leading to the farm he had inherited from his father.
Major Galloway, a kindly man, was nervous around the famous abolitionist and relieved when the Reverend Starbuck announced that he had no intention of staying overnight at the comfortable farm, but instead intended to take the evening train south to Culpeper Court House. “My friend Banks did the courtesy of inviting me,” the preacher said, referring to General Nathaniel Banks, who had once been Governor of Massachusetts and was now a Union general who believed that a visit from his old friend would serve to encourage his troops’ flagging spirits. The invitation had certainly done wonders for the preacher’s spirits. He had been chafing in Boston, taking his war news from newspapers and letters, but now he could learn for himself exactly what was happening in Virginia, to which end he had arranged to be absent from his pulpit for the whole month of August. He was fervently praying that a month would be long enough to allow him to be the first Northern minister to preach the gospel from a Richmond pulpit.
But before joining Banks the preacher had agreed to this meeting with Major Galloway and his men. He spoke to Galloway’s regiment in the meadow behind the house, where he encouraged them to fight the good fight, but his brusque manner made it plain that he was in a hurry to conclude the day’s business and continue his journey. Major Galloway tactfully abandoned the planned display of saber fighting and instead conducted his guest toward the farmhouse, which was an impressive building shaded by great oaks and lapped by wide lawns. “My father prospered in the law,” Galloway said, explaining the luxurious house.
“A slave owner, too?” the preacher demanded fiercely, pointing with his ebony cane at the small cabins that lay to the north of the house.
“I freed all the people,” Galloway said hastily. “If I’d sold them, sir,” he went on, “I wouldn’t be needing to beg money for the regiment. I mortgaged the farm to raise funds, sir, and used all the money to buy the horses and weapons you’ve just seen, but frankly, sir, I’ve no resources left. I’ve made myself penniless in the cause of liberty.”
“In which cause we must all be prepared to suffer, Galloway,” the Reverend Starbuck exclaimed as he followed the Major up the veranda steps and into the hallway. The house echoed like an empty building, which it very nearly was, for with the exception of a few essential pieces of furniture Galloway had sent all his books and pictures and drapes and ornaments north into storage so that his rebellious neighbors could not take revenge on his allegiance by stealing his valuables. And if his neighbors did not steal the goods, he explained, his own brother would. “My brother fights for the South, alas,” Major Galloway told the preacher, “and he’d like nothing more than to take the house and its contents from me.” He paused for an instant. “There’s nothing sadder, sir, is there, than family members fighting on opposite sides?” The Reverend Starbuck offered a belligerent grunt as answer, and that ill-tempered noise should have warned Major Galloway against proceeding further with the conversation, but the Major was a guileless man. “Am I right, sir,” Galloway asked, “in believing you have a son who fights with the rebels?”
“I know of no such person,” the preacher said, stiffening perceptibly.
“But Nate, surely—” Adam began, only to be fiercely interrupted.
“I have no son called Nathaniel,” the preacher snapped. “I recognize no person called Nathaniel Starbuck. He is doomed, he is cast out, not only from my family, but also from the loving congregation of Christ! He is a reprobate!” This last condemnation was trumpeted in a voice that might have carried a half-mile into a mighty wind.
Galloway realized he had been tactless and so hurried on, talking inconsequentially about the house and its amenities until he reached the doors of the library, where a tall, heavyset Captain waited. The Captain had a ready smile and a quick, friendly manner. “May I introduce my second-in-command?” Galloway said to the preacher. “Captain William Blythe.”
“Sure glad to meet you, Reverend.” Blythe extended a hand.
“Captain Blythe was a horse trader before the war,” Galloway said.
“You should never have told the minister that, Joe!” Blythe said with a smile. “Everyone knows that us horse traders are the crookedest folks this side of tarnation, but God bless me, sir”—he had turned back to the preacher—“I tried to be as honest a trader as a Christian man could.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” the Reverend Starbuck said stiffly.
“A hundred cents to an honest dollar, sir, that was always my way,” Blythe said cheerfully, “and if I ever rooked a man, sir, why it was never on purpose. And I’ll tell you another thing, sir.” Blythe dropped his voice confidingly. “If ever a man of the cloth wanted a horse, why sir, I swallowed the profit and sometimes a good bit more besides. I confess I was never a churchgoing man myself, sir, to my regret, but my pa always contended that a bucketful of prayer never hurt no one and my dear ma, God bless her dear soul, fair wore out her knees on the church planking. And she sure would have liked to hear you speaking, sir, for they all say you do a mighty sermon!”
The Reverend Starbuck seemed pleased by Blythe’s forthright and friendly manner, so pleased that he did not even show a sign of distaste when the tall Captain draped an arm around his shoulders to conduct him into the bare-shelved library. “You say you’re not a churchgoing man,” the preacher inquired, “but I trust you are saved, Captain?”
Blythe released his grip so that he could turn an astonished face to the Reverend Starbuck. “Washed white in the blood of the lamb, Reverend,” Blythe said in a voice that suggested shock that anyone might have taken him for a heathen. “In fact I’m fair swilled in that precious blood, sir. My dear ma made sure of that before she died, praise the Lord and God rest her dear soul.”
“And your mother, Captain, would approve of your allegiance in this war?” the Reverend Starbuck asked.
Captain William Blythe frowned to show his sincerity. “My dear mother, God bless her simple soul, sir, always said that in the eyes of God a nigra’s soul was the same as any white man’s. So long as that nigra’s a Christian, of course. Then come heaven time, she said, we’d all be white as snow, even the blackest nigra, praise the Lord for His goodness.” Blythe raised his eyes to the ceiling, then, over the unsuspecting preacher’s head, offered Major Galloway an outrageous wink.
Galloway cut short his second-in-command’s blarney by seating his guest at the library’s large table, which was heaped with account books. Galloway, Adam, and Blythe sat opposite the preacher, and the Major described his ambitions for his regiment of cavalry; how they would ride the Southern paths with a confidence and local knowledge that no Northern horseman could hope to match. The Major spoke modestly, stressing the army’s need for good reconnaissance and his own ambitions for a tightly disciplined regiment of horsemen, yet his words were plainly disappointing the Boston preacher. The Reverend Starbuck wanted swift results and dramatic victories, and it was the bombastic William Blythe who first sensed that desire. Blythe intervened with a chuckle. “You have to forgive the Major, Reverend,” he said, “for not talking us up overmuch, but the real truth is we’re going to twist Jeff Davis’s tail, then we’re going to scald the skin straight off that tail, and dang me if we won’t then cut the thing clean off! I promise you, Reverend, that we’re going to make the rebels squeal, and you’ll hear that squeal all the way to Boston Common. Ain’t that so, Major?”
Galloway merely looked surprised, while Adam stared at the table’s scarred top, but the Reverend Starbuck was delighted by the implications of Blythe’s promise. “You have specific plans?” he asked eagerly.
Blythe looked momentarily shocked. “We couldn’t say a danged thing about specifics, sir, it would be downright unsoldierlike of us, but I do promise you, Reverend, that in the weeks to come it won’t be Jeb Stuart you’ll be reading about in the Boston newspapers, no sir, it’ll be Major Joseph Galloway and his gallant regiment of troopers! Ain’t that a fact, Joe?”
Galloway, taken aback, nodded. “We shall do our best, certainly.”
“But there ain’t nothing we can do, sir”—Blythe leaned forward with an earnest expression—“if we don’t have the guns, the sabers, and the horses. As my sainted mother always said, sir, promises fill no bellies. You have to add a lick of hard work and a peck of money if you want to fill a Southern boy’s belly, and sir, believe me, sir, it hurts me, it hurts me hard, to see these fine Southern patriots standing idle for want of a dollar or two.”
“But what will you do with the money?” the Reverend Starbuck asked.
“What can’t we do?” Blythe demanded. “With God on our side, Reverend, we can turn the South upside down and inside out. Why, sir, I shouldn’t say it to you, but I guess you’re a closemouthed man so I’ll take the risk, but there’s a map of Richmond up in my sleeping room, and why would a man like me need a map of Richmond? Well, I ain’t going to tell you, sir, only because it would be downright unsoldierly of me to tell you, but I guess a clever man like you can work out which end of a snake has the bite.”
Adam looked up astonished at this implication that the regiment was planning to raid the rebel capital, and Galloway seemed about to make a firm demurral, but the Reverend Starbuck was gripped by Blythe’s promised coup. “You’ll go to Richmond?” he asked Blythe.
“The very city, sir. That den of evil and lair of the serpent. I wish I could tell you how I loathe the place, sir, but with God’s help we’ll scour it and burn it and cleanse it anew!”
The horse trader was now speaking a language the Reverend Starbuck longed to hear. The Boston preacher wanted promises of rebel humiliation and of dazzling Union victories, of exploits to rival the insolent achievements of the rebel Jeb Stuart. He did not want to hear of patient reconnaissance duties faithfully performed, but wild promises of Northern victories, and no amount of caution from Major Galloway would convince the preacher that Blythe’s promises were exaggerated. The Reverend Starbuck heard what he longed to hear, and to make it a reality he drew from his frock coat’s inner pocket a check. He borrowed a pen and an inkwell from the Major and then signed the check with a due solemnity.
“Praise the Lord,” William Blythe said when the check was signed.
“Praise Him indeed,” the preacher echoed piously, thrusting the check across the table toward Galloway. “That money comes, Major, from a consortium of New England abolitionist churches. It represents the hard-earned dollars of simple honest working folk, given gladly in a sacred cause. Use it well.”
“We shall do our utmost, sir,” Galloway said, then fell momentarily silent as he saw the check was not for the fifteen thousand dollars he had expected, but for twenty thousand. Blythe’s oratory had worked a small miracle. “And thank you, sir,” Galloway managed to say.
“And I ask only one thing in return,” the preacher said.
“Anything, sir!” Blythe said, spreading his big hands as though to encompass the whole wide world. “Anything at all!”
The preacher glanced at the wall over the wide garden doors, where a polished staff tipped with a lance head and a faded cavalry guidon was the room’s sole remaining decoration. “A flag,” the preacher said, “is important to a soldier, is it not?”
“It is, sir,” Galloway answered. The small guidon over the door had been the banner he had carried in the Mexican war.
“Sacred, you might say,” Blythe added.
“Then I should esteem it an honor if you would provide me with a rebel banner,” the preacher said, “that I can display in Boston as proof that our donations are doing God’s work.”
“You shall have your flag, sir!” Blythe promised swiftly. “I’ll make it my business to see you have one. When are you returning to Boston, sir?”
“At month’s end, Captain.”
“You’ll not go empty-handed, sir, not if my name’s Billy Blythe. I promise you, on my dear mother’s grave, sir, that you’ll have your rebel battle flag.”
Galloway shook his head, but the preacher did not see the gesture. He only saw a hated enemy battle flag hanging in the chancel of his church as an object of derision. The Reverend Starbuck pushed back his chair and consulted his fob watch. “I must be returning to the depot,” he said.
“Adam will drive you, sir,” Major Galloway said. The Major waited until the preacher was gone, then shook his head sadly. “You made a deal of promises, Billy.”
“And there was a deal of money at stake,” Blythe said carelessly, “and hell, I never did mind making promises.”
Galloway crossed to the open garden door, where he stared out at the sun-bleached lawn. “I don’t mind a man making promises, Billy, but I sure mind that he keeps them.”
“I always keep my promises, sure I do. I keep ’em in mind while I’m working out how to break them.” Blythe laughed. “Now are you going to give me aggravation for having fetched you your money? Hell, Joe, I get enough piety from young Faulconer.”
“Adam’s a good man.”
“I never said he weren’t a good man. I just said he’s a pious son of a righteous bitch and God only knows why you appointed him Captain.”
“Because he’s a good man,” Galloway said firmly, “and because his family is famous in Virginia, and because I like him. And I like you too, Billy, but not if you’re going to argue with Adam all the time. Now why don’t you go and get busy? You’ve got a flag to capture.”
Blythe scorned such a duty. “Have I? Hell! There’s plenty enough red, white, and blue cloth about, so we’ll just have your house niggers run up a quick rebel flag.”
Galloway sighed. “They’re my servants, Billy, servants.”
“Still niggers, ain’t they? And the girl can use a needle, can’t she? And the Reverend’ll never know the difference. She can make us a flag and I’ll tear it and dirty it a bit and that old fool will think we snatched it clean out of Jeff Davis’s own hands.” Blythe grinned at the idea, then picked up the check. He whistled appreciatively. “Reckon I talked us into a tidy profit, Joe.”
“I reckon you did too. So now you’ll go and spend it, Billy.” Galloway needed to equip Adam’s troop with horses and most of his men with sabers and firearms, but now, thanks to the generosity of the Reverend Starbuck’s abolitionists, the Galloway Horse would be as well equipped and mounted as any other cavalry regiment in the Northern army. “Spend half on horses and half on weapons and saddlery,” Galloway suggested.
“Horses are expensive, Joe,” Blythe warned. “The war’s made them scarce.”
“You’re a horse dealer, Billy, so go and work some horse-dealing magic. Unless you’d rather I let Adam go? He wants to buy his own horses.”
“Never let a boy do a man’s work, Joe,” Blythe said. He touched the preacher’s cheek to his lips and gave it an exaggerated kiss. “Praise the Lord,” Billy Blythe said, “just praise His holy name, amen.”
The Faulconer Legion made camp just a few miles north of the river where they had first glimpsed the baleful figure of their new commanding general. No one in the Legion knew where they were or where they were going or why they were marching there, but a passing artillery major who was a veteran of Jackson’s campaigns said that was the usual way of Old Jack. “You’ll know you’ve arrived just as soon as the enemy does and no sooner,” the Major said, then begged a bucket of water for his horse.
The Brigade headquarters erected tents, but none of the regiments bothered with such luxuries. The Faulconer Legion had started the war with three wagonloads of tents but now had only two tents left, both reserved for Doctor Danson. The men had become adept at manufacturing shelters from branches and sod, though on this warm evening no one needed protection from the weather. Work parties fetched wood for campfires while others carried water from a stream a mile away. Some of the men sat with their bare feet dangling in the stream, trying to wash away the blisters and blood of the day’s march. The four men on the Legion’s punishment detail watered the draft horses that hauled the ammunition wagons, then paraded round the campsite with newly felled logs on their shoulders. The men staggered under the weight as they made the ten circuits of the Legion’s lines that constituted their nightly punishment. “What have they done?” Lieutenant Coffman asked Starbuck.
Starbuck glanced up at the miserable procession. “Lem Pierce got drunk. Matthews sold cartridges for a pint of whiskey, and Evans threatened to hit Captain Medlicott.”
“Pity he didn’t,” Sergeant Truslow interjected. Daniel Medlicott had been the miller at Faulconer Court House, where he had earned a reputation as a hard man with money, though in the spring elections for field officers he had distributed enough promises and whiskey to have himself promoted from sergeant to captain.
“And I don’t know what Trent did,” Starbuck finished.
“Abram Trent’s just a poxed son of a whore,” Truslow said to Coffman. “He stole some food from Sergeant Major Tolliver, but that ain’t why he’s being punished. He’s being punished, lad, because he got caught.”
“You are listening to the gospel according to Sergeant Thomas Truslow,” Starbuck told the Lieutenant. “Thou shalt steal all thou can, but thou shalt not get caught.” Starbuck grinned, then hissed with pain as he jabbed his thumb with a needle. He was struggling to sew the sole of his right boot back onto its uppers, for which task he had borrowed one of the three precious needles possessed by the company.
Sergeant Truslow, sitting on the far side of the fire from the two officers, mocked his Captain’s efforts. “You’re a lousy cobbler.”
“I never pretended to be otherwise.”
“You’ll break the goddamn needle, pushing like that.”
“You want to do it?” Starbuck asked, offering the half-finished work to the Sergeant.
“Hell no, I ain’t paid to patch your boots.”
“Then shut the hell up,” Starbuck said, trying to work the needle through one of the old stitching holes in the sole.
“It’ll only break first thing in the morning,” Truslow said after a moment’s silence.
“Not if I do it properly.”
“No chance of that,” Truslow said. He broke off a piece of tobacco and put it in his cheek. “You’ve got to protect the thread, see? So it don’t chafe on the road.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“No, you ain’t. You’re just lashing the boot together. There are blind men without fingers who could make a better job than you.”
Lieutenant Coffman listened nervously to the conversation. He had been told that the Captain and Sergeant were friends—indeed, that they had been friends ever since the Yankee Starbuck had been sent to persuade the Yankee-hating Truslow to leave his high-mountain farm and join Faulconer’s Legion—but to Coffman it seemed an odd sort of friendship if it was expressed with such mutual scorn. Now the intimidating Sergeant turned to the nervous Lieutenant. “A proper officer,” Truslow confided to Coffman, “would have a darkie to do his sewing.”
“A proper officer,” Starbuck said, “would kick your rotten teeth down your gullet.”
“Anytime, Captain,” Truslow said, laughing.
Starbuck tied off the thread and peered critically at his handiwork. “It ain’t perfect,” he allowed, “but it’ll do.”
“It’ll do,” Truslow agreed, “so long as you don’t walk on it.”
Starbuck laughed. “Hell, we’ll be fighting a battle in a day or two, then I’ll get myself a pair of brand-new Yankee boots.” He gingerly pulled the repaired boot onto his foot and was pleasantly surprised that the sole did not immediately peel away. “Good as new,” he said, then flinched, not because of the boot, but because a sudden scream sounded across the campsite. The scream was cut abruptly short; there was a pause, then a sad wailing sound sobbed briefly.
Coffman looked aghast, for the noise had sounded like it came from a creature being tortured, which indeed it had. “Colonel Swynyard,” Sergeant Truslow explained to the new lieutenant, “is beating one of his niggers.”
“The Colonel drinks,” Starbuck added.
“The Colonel is a drunk,” Truslow amended.
“And it’s anyone’s guess whether the liquor will kill him before one of his slaves does,” Starbuck said, “or one of us, for that matter.” He spat into the fire. “I’d kill the bastard willingly enough.”
“Welcome to the Faulconer Brigade,” Truslow said to Coffman.
The Lieutenant did not know how to respond to such cynicism, so he just sat looking troubled and nervous, then flinched as a thought crossed his mind. “Will we really be fighting in a day or two?” he asked.
“Probably tomorrow.” Truslow jerked his head toward the northern sky, which was being reddened by the reflected glow of an army’s fires. “It’s what you’re paid to do, son,” Truslow added when he saw Coffman’s nervousness.
“I’m not paid,” Coffman said and immediately blushed for the admission.
Truslow and Starbuck were both silent for a few seconds; then Starbuck frowned. “What the hell do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, I do get paid,” Coffman said, “but I don’t get the money, see?”
“No, I don’t see.”
The Lieutenant was embarrassed. “It’s my mother.”
“She gets the money, you mean?” Starbuck asked.
“She owes General Faulconer money,” Coffman explained, “because we rent one of his houses on the Rosskill road and Mother fell behind with the rent, so Faulconer keeps my salary.”
There was another long pause. “Christ on his cross.” Truslow’s blasphemy broke the silence. “You mean that miserable rich bastard is taking your three lousy bucks a week for his own?”
“It’s only fair, isn’t it?” Coffman asked.
“No, it damn well ain’t,” Starbuck said. “If you want to send your mother the money, that’s fair, but it ain’t fair for you to fight for nothing! Shit!” He swore angrily.
“I don’t really need any money.” Coffman nervously defended the arrangement.
“’Course you do, boy,” Truslow said. “How else are you going to buy whores and whiskey?”
“Have you talked to Pecker about this?” Starbuck demanded.
Coffman shook his head. “No.”
“Hell, then I will,” Starbuck said. “Ain’t going to have you being shot at for free.” He climbed to his feet. “I’ll be back in a half hour. Oh, shit!” This last imprecation was not in anger for Washington Faulconer’s greed but because his right sole had come loose on his first proper step. “Goddamn shit!” he said angrily, then stalked off to find Colonel Bird.
Truslow grinned at Starbuck’s inept cobbling, then spat tobacco juice into the fire’s margin. “He’ll get your cash, son,” he said.
“He will?”
“Faulconer’s scared of Starbuck.”
“Scared? The General’s scared of the Captain?” Coffman found that hard to believe.
“Starbuck’s a proper soldier. He’s a fighter while Faulconer’s just a pretty uniform on an expensive horse. In the long run, son, the fighter will always win.” Truslow picked a shred of tobacco from between his teeth. “Unless he’s killed, of course.”
“Killed?”
“You’re going to meet the Yankees tomorrow, son,” Truslow said, “and some of us are going to get killed, but I’ll do my best to keep you from getting slaughtered. Starting now.” He leaned over and ripped the bars off the Lieutenant’s collar, then tossed the cloth scraps into the fire. “Sharpshooters put telescopes on their rifles, son, just looking for officers to kill, and the Yankees don’t care that you’re not full-grown. See a pair of bars like that, they shoot, and you’re two feet underground with a shovelful of dirt in your eyes.” Truslow spat more tobacco juice. “Or worse,” he added darkly.
“Worse?” Coffman asked nervously.
“You could be wounded, boy, and screaming like a stuck pig while a half-drunken doctor rummages through your innards. Or sobbing like a baby while you lie out in the field with your guts being eaten by rodents and no one knowing where the hell you are. It ain’t pretty, and there’s only one way to keep it from being even uglier and that’s to hurt the bastards before they hurt you.” He looked at Coffman, recognizing how the boy was trying to hide his fear. “You’ll be all right,” Truslow said. “The worst bit is the waiting. Now sleep, boy. You’ve got a man’s job to do tomorrow.”
High overhead a shooting star whipped white fire across the darkening sky. Somewhere a man sang of a love left behind while another played a sad tune on a violin. Colonel Swynyard’s flogged slave tried to keep from whimpering, Truslow snored, and Coffman shivered, thinking of the morrow.
THE YANKEE CAVALRY PATROL REACHED GENERAL Banks’s headquarters late at night. The patrol had come under fire at the Rapidan River, and the loss of one of their horses had slowed their journey back to Culpeper Court House, as had the necessity to look after two wounded men. A New Hampshire corporal had been struck by a bullet in his lower belly and would surely die, while the patrol’s commander, a captain, had suffered a glancing hit on the ribs. The Captain’s wound was hardly serious, but he had scratched and prodded at the graze until a satisfactory amount of blood heroically stained his shirt.
Major General Nathaniel Banks, commander of General Pope’s Second Corps, was smoking a last cigar on the veranda of his commandeered house when he heard that the patrol had returned with ominous news of enemy forces crossing the Rapidan. “Let’s have the man here! Let’s hear him. Lively now!” Banks was a fussy man who, despite all the contrary evidence, was convinced of his own military genius. He certainly looked the part of a successful soldier, for there were few men who wore the uniform of the United States with more assurance. He was trim, brusque, and confident, yet until the war began he had never been a soldier, merely a politician. He had risen to be Speaker of the House of Representatives, though it had taken 133 ballots to achieve that honor, and afterward Governor of Massachusetts, a state so rich in men willing to be taxed that the federal government had deemed it necessary to offer its governor the chance of immortal martial glory as a token of its thanks. Governor Banks, who was as passionate in his love for his country as in his hatred of the slave trade, had leaped at the chance.
Now he waited, ramrod straight, as the cavalry Captain, wearing his jacket like a cloak so that his bloody shirt showed clearly, climbed the veranda steps and offered a salute, which he dramatically cut short with a wince as though the pain in his chest had suddenly struck hard.
“Your name?” Banks demanded peremptorily.
“Thompson, General. John Hannibal Thompson. From Ithaca, New York. Reckon you might have met my uncle, Michael Fane Thompson, when you were a congressman. He sat for New York back in—”
“You found the enemy, Thompson?” Banks asked in a very icy voice.
Thompson, offended at being so rudely cut off, shrugged. “We sure found someone hostile, General.”
“Who?”
“Damned if I know. We got shot at.” Thompson touched the crusted blood on his shirt, which looked brown rather than red in the lamplight.
“You shot back?” Banks asked.
“Hell, General, no one shoots at me without getting retaliation, and I reckon me and my boys laid a few of the bastards low.”
“Where was this?” the aide accompanying General Banks asked.
Captain Thompson crossed to a wicker table on which the aide had spread a map of northern Virginia illuminated by two flickering candle-lanterns. Moths beat frantically around the three men’s heads as they leaned over the map. Thompson used one of the lanterns to light himself a cigar, then tapped a finger on the map. “It was a ford just around there, General.” He had tapped the map well west of the main road that led due south from Culpeper Court House to Gordonsville.
“You crossed to the south bank of the river?” Banks asked.
“Couldn’t rightly do that, General, on account of there being a pack of rebs already occupying the ford.”
“There’s no ford marked there,” the aide interjected. Sweat dripped from his face to stain the Blue Ridge Mountains, which lay well to the west of the rivers. The night had brought no relief from the sweltering heat.
“A local nigger guided us,” Thompson explained. “He said the ford weren’t well known, being nothing but a summer back road to a gristmill, and some of us reckoned he just might be lying to us, but there sure was a ford after all. Seems the nigger was truthful.”
“The word, Thompson, is Negro,” Banks said very coldly, then looked down at the map again. Other patrols had spoken of rebel infantry marching north on the Gordonsville road, and this new report suggested that the Confederates were advancing on a broad front and in considerable strength. What were they doing? A reconnaissance in force, or a full-scale attack aimed at destroying his corps?
“So how many men fired at you?” Banks resumed his questioning of the flippant Thompson.
“Wasn’t exactly counting the minny balls, General, on account of being too busy firing back. But I reckon there was at least one regiment north of the river and more of the devils coming on.”
Banks stared at the cavalryman, wondering just why responsibility always seemed to devolve onto fools. “Did you try to take a prisoner?”
“I guess I was too busy making sure I didn’t end up six feet underground, General.” Thompson laughed. “Hell, there were only a dozen of us and more than a thousand of them. Maybe two thousand.”
“Did you ascertain the identity of the regiment which fired on you?” Banks asked with an icy pedantry.
“I sure ascertained that it was a rebel regiment, General,” Thompson answered. “They were carrying that new flag, the one with the cross on it.”
Banks shuddered at the man’s obtuse stupidity and wondered why the North’s horsemen were so inept at gathering intelligence. Probably, he thought, because they had none themselves. So who were these rebels marching north? There was a rumor that Stonewall Jackson had come to Gordonsville, and Banks winced at the thought of that bearded, ragged man whose troops marched at the speed of wildfire and fought like fiends.
Banks dismissed the cavalryman. “Useless,” he said as the man paced off down Culpeper Court House’s main street, where sentries stood guard on the taverns. In the town’s small wooden houses yellow lights burned behind the muslin curtains used as insect screens. An undertaker’s wagon, its shafts tilted up to the sky, stood outside a church where, Banks remembered, the famous Boston preacher Elial Starbuck was due to speak on Sunday morning. The town’s population was not anticipating the abolitionist’s sermon with any pleasure, but Banks, an old friend of the preacher, was looking forward to Starbuck’s peroration and had demanded that as many of his officers as possible should be present. Nathaniel Banks had a noble vision of God and country marching hand in hand to victory.
Now, with a frown on his face, Banks looked back to the map, on which his sweat dripped monotonously. Suppose the enemy move was a bluff? Suppose that a handful of rebels were merely trying to frighten him? The rebels had surely guessed that he had his eyes on Gordonsville, because if he captured that town, then he would cut the railroad that connected Richmond with the rich farmland in the Shenandoah Valley. Sever those rails, and the enemy’s armies would starve, and that thought reignited the glimmer of promised martial glory in Nathaniel Banks’s mind. He saw a statue in Boston, envisaged streets and towns all across New England named after him, and even dreamed that a whole new state might be fashioned from the savage western territories and given his name. Banks Street, Banksville, the state of Banks.
Those inspired visions were fed by more than mere ambition. They were fed by a burning need for revenge. Earlier in the year Nathaniel Banks had led a fine army down the Shenandoah Valley, where he had been tricked and trounced by Thomas Jackson. Even the Northern newspaper had admitted that Jackson had cut Banks to pieces—indeed, the rebels had taken so many guns and supplies from Banks that they had nicknamed him “Commissary Banks.” They had mocked him, ridiculed him, and their scorn still hurt Nathaniel Banks. He wanted revenge.
“The prudent course, sir, would be a withdrawal behind the Rappahannock,” the aide murmured. The aide was a graduate of West Point and supposed to provide the politician-general with sound military advice.
“It may be nothing but a reconnaissance,” Banks said, thinking of vengeance.
“Maybe so, sir,” the aide said suavely, “but what do we gain by fighting? Why hold ground we can easily retake in a week’s time? Why not just let the enemy wear himself out by marching?”
Banks brushed cigar ash off the map. Retreat now? In a week when Boston’s most famous preacher was coming to visit the army? What would Massachusetts say if they heard that Commissary Banks had run away from a few rebels? “We stay,” Banks said. He stabbed his finger down at the contours of a ridge that barred the road just south of Culpeper Court House. If Jackson was marching north in the hope of resupplying his army at the expense of Commissary Banks, then he would have to cross that ridge that lay behind the small protection of a stream. The stream was called Cedar Run, and it lay at the foot of Cedar Mountain. “We’ll meet him there,” Banks said, “and beat him there.”
The aide said nothing. He was a handsome, clever young man who thought he deserved better than to be harnessed to this stubborn bantam-cock. The aide was trying to frame a response, some persuasive words that would deflect Banks from rashness, but the words would not come. Instead, from the lamplit street, there sounded men’s voices singing about loved ones left behind, of sweethearts waiting, of home.
“We’ll meet him there,” Banks said again, ramming his finger onto the sweat-stained map, “and beat him there.”
At Cedar Mountain.
The Legion did not march far on the day they crossed the Rapidan. There was a curious lack of urgency about the expedition, almost as though they were merely changing base rather than advancing on the Northerners who had invaded Virginia. And next morning, though they were woken long before dawn and were ready to march even before the sun had risen above the tall eastern trees, they still waited three hours while a succession of other regiments trailed slowly by on the dusty road. A battery of small six-pounders and short-barreled howitzers was dragged past, followed by a column of Virginia infantry, who good-naturedly jeered the Faulconer Legion for its pretentious name. The day was hot and promised to get hotter still, yet still they waited as the sun climbed higher. More troops passed until, just short of midday, the Legion at last led the Faulconer Brigade out onto the dusty road.
Just moments later the guns started to sound. The noise came from far ahead, a grumble that could have been mistaken for thunder if the sky had not been cloudless. The air was sullen, moist, and windless, and the faces of Starbuck’s men were pale with road dust through which their sweat ran in dark lines. Soon, Starbuck thought, some of those rivulets would be blood red, fly-coated, and twitching, and that premonition of battle turned his belly sour and caused the muscles in his right thigh to tremble. He tried to anticipate the sound of bullets as he coached himself to display courage and not the fear that was liquefying his bowels, and all the while the distant cannons hammered their flat, soulless noise across the land. “Goddamned artillery,” Truslow said in a sour tone. “Some poor bastards are catching hell.”
Lieutenant Coffman seemed about to say something, then decided to keep quiet. One of the conscripts broke ranks to pull down his pants and squat beside the road. Normally he would have been good-naturedly jeered, but the muffled thump of the guns made every man nervous.
In the early afternoon the Legion halted in a shallow valley. The road ahead was blocked by a Georgia battalion beyond which lay a ridgeline crested by dark trees beneath a sky whitened by gunsmoke. Some of the Georgians lay asleep on the road, looking like corpses. Others were penciling their names and hometowns on scraps of paper that they either pinned to their coats or stuck into buttonholes so that, should they die, their bodies would be recognized and their families informed. Some of Starbuck’s men began to take the same gloomy precaution, using the blank end pages of Bibles as their labels.
“Culpeper Court House,” George Finney announced suddenly.
Starbuck, sitting beside the road, glanced at him, waiting.
“Billy Sutton says this is the road to Culpeper Court House,” George Finney explained. “Says his daddy brought him on this road two years back.”
“We came to bury my grandmother, Captain,” Billy Sutton intervened. Sutton was a corporal in G Company. He had once been in J Company, but a year of battles had shrunk the Faulconer Legion from ten to eight companies, and even those companies were now understrength. At the war’s beginning the Legion had marched to battle as one of the biggest regiments in the rebel army, but after a year of battle it would scarcely have filled the pews of a backcountry church.
Three horsemen galloped southward through the brittle stubble of a harvested cornfield, their horses’ hooves kicking up puffs of dust from the parched dirt. Starbuck guessed they were staff officers bringing orders. Truslow glanced at the three men, then shook his head. “Goddam Yankees in Culpeper Court House,” Truslow said, affronted. “Got no damned business in Culpeper Court House.”
“If it is Culpeper Court House,” Starbuck said dubiously. Culpeper County had to be at least sixty miles from the Legion’s home in Faulconer County, and few of the men in the Legion had traveled more than twenty miles from home in all their lives. Or not until this war had marched them up to Manassas and across to Richmond to kill Yankees. They had become good at that. They had become good at dying, too.
The gunfire suddenly swelled into one of those frenetic passages when, for no apparent reason, every cannon on a battlefield spoke at once. Starbuck cocked an ear, listening for the slighter crackle of musketry, but he could hear nothing except the unending thunder of artillery. “Poor bastards,” he said.
“Our turn soon,” Truslow answered unhelpfully.
“This rate they’ll run out of ammunition,” Starbuck said hopefully.
Truslow spat in comment on his Captain’s optimism, then turned as hoofbeats sounded. “God damn Swynyard,” he said tonelessly.
Every man in the company now either feigned sleep or kept his eyes fixed on the dusty road. Colonel Griffin Swynyard was a professional soldier whose talents had long been dissolved by alcohol but whose career had been rescued by General Washington Faulconer. Swynyard’s cousin edited Richmond’s most influential newspaper, and Washington Faulconer, well aware that reputation was more easily bought than won, was paying for the support of the Richmond Examiner by employing Swynyard. For a second Starbuck wondered if Swynyard was coming to see him, but the Colonel, closely followed by Captain Moxey, galloped past H Company and on up the slope toward the sound of battle. Starbuck’s heart gave an acid beat as he guessed Swynyard was going to mark the place where the Legion would deploy, which meant that at any second the orders would come to advance into the guns.
Ahead, where the road vanished across the shallow ridge, the Georgian troops were already struggling to their feet and pulling on bedrolls and weapons. The cannon fire had momentarily abated, but the snapping sound of rifle cartridges now crackled across the dry landscape. The sound increased Starbuck’s nervousness. It had been a month since the Legion last fought, but a single month was not nearly long enough to allay the terrors of the battlefield. Starbuck had been secretly hoping that the Legion might sit this skirmish out, but the Georgia battalion was already trudging north to leave a haze of dust over the road.
“Up, Nate!” Captain Murphy relayed Bird’s orders to Starbuck.
Truslow bellowed at H Company to stand up. The men hitched their bedrolls over their shoulders and dusted off their rifles. Behind H Company the men of Captain Medlicott’s G Company stood slowly, their lapels and belt loops dotted with the scraps of white paper on which they had written their names.
“Look for Swynyard on the road,” Captain Murphy told Starbuck.
Starbuck wondered where Washington Faulconer was, then assumed the General would be leading his Brigade from behind. Swynyard, whatever his other faults, was no coward. “Forward!” Starbuck shouted; then, rifle and bedroll slung, he took his place at the head of the column. Dust thrown up by the boots of the Georgians stung his throat and eyes. The road was daubed with dark stains of tobacco juice that looked uncannily like blood spattered from wounds. The sound of rifle fire was more intense.
That sound swelled even further as Starbuck led the Legion through the woods at the crest of the ridge that had served to disguise and diminish the sound of fighting, which now spread across Starbuck’s front in a furious cacophony. For a mile beyond the trees there was nothing but gunsmoke, flame, and chaos. The fields to the left of the road were filled with wounded men and surgeons hacking at broken flesh, to the right was a hill rimmed with artillery smoke, while ahead lay a second belt of woodland that concealed the actual fighting but could not hide the pall of smoke that boiled up either side of the road nor disguise the sound of the guns.
“By golly,” Coffman said. He was excited and nervous.
“Stay near Truslow,” Starbuck warned the young Lieutenant.
“I’ll be all right, sir.”
“Every damned man who’s died in this war said that, Coffman,” Starbuck reacted angrily, “and I want you to shave before you’re shot. So stay close to Truslow.”
“Yes, sir,” Coffman said meekly.
An artillery bolt smacked through pine tops to the right of the road, leaving the branches whipping back and forth above the spray of needles that sifted down to the dust. Wounded men, all rebels, were lying on both verges. Some had already died. A man staggered back from the fighting. He was bare-chested and his suspenders were hanging loose beside his legs. He was clutching his belly, trying to keep his guts from spilling into the dust. His forearms were soaked in blood. “Oh, golly,” Coffman said again and went pale. The blood on the dusty road looked blacker than the tobacco stains. The sound of rifle fire was splintering the afternoon that smelt of pine resin, sulfur, and blood. The shadows were long, long enough to give Starbuck an instant’s wild hope that night might fall before he needed to fight.
Starbuck led the company on across the open land and into the cover of the second belt of timber. The leaves here flicked with the strike of bullets, and fresh scars of yellow wood showed where artillery bolts had sheared limbs off trees. An ammunition wagon with one wheel smashed was canted at the side of the road. A black teamster with a bloody scalp sat leaning against the abandoned wagon and watched Starbuck’s men pass.
The trees ended not far ahead, and beyond, in the smoky open, Starbuck knew the battle was waiting for him. Common sense told him to slow down and thus delay his entry onto that bullet-riven stage, but pride made him hurry. He could see the gunsmoke sifting through the last green branches like a spring fog blowing out of Boston Harbor. He could smell the smoke’s foul stench, and he knew it was almost time for the Legion to deploy. His mouth was powder dry, his heart erratic, and his bladder full. He passed a man whose body lay splayed open from the strike of an artillery shell. He heard Coffman retch dryly. Flies buzzed in the close air. One of his men laughed at the eviscerated corpse. Starbuck unslung his rifle and felt with a finger to check that the percussion cap was in place. He was a captain, but he bore no signs of rank and carried a rifle just like his men, and now, like them, he pulled his cartridge box around to the front of his rope belt, where it would be handy for reloading. His broken right boot almost tripped him as he left the shadow of the trees to see ahead a shallow valley scarred and littered by battle. The low land was rifted with smoke and loud with gunfire. Beside the road a horse lay dead in a dry ditch. Coffman was white-faced but trying hard to look unconcerned and not to duck whenever a missile howled or whipped overhead. Bullets were whickering through the humid air. There was no sign of any enemy—indeed, hardly any men were in view except for some rebel gunners and Colonel Swynyard, who, with Moxey beside him, was sitting his horse in a field to the left of the road.
“Starbuck!” Colonel Swynyard shouted. “Over here!” Starbuck led the company across the brittle corn stubble. “Form there!” Swynyard called, pointing to a spot close behind his horse; then he turned in his saddle to stare northward through a pair of binoculars. Captain Moxey was fussily ordering H Company to align themselves on his marker, so Starbuck left him to it and walked forward to join Swynyard. The Colonel lowered his glasses to watch the battery of rebel six-pounders that was deployed just a hundred yards ahead. The smoke from the small guns was obscuring the fighting beyond, but every now and then a Yankee shell would explode near the battery, making Swynyard grin in appreciation. “Oh, well done! Good shooting!” Swynyard called aloud when an enemy shell eviscerated a team horse picketed fifty paces behind the guns. The horse screamed as it flailed bloodily on the ground, panicking the other tethered horses, which reared frantically as they tried to drag their iron picket stakes out of the ground. “Chaos!” Swynyard said happily, then glanced down at Starbuck. “Yankees are damned lively this afternoon.”
“Guess they were waiting for us,” Starbuck said. “Knew we were coming.”
“Guess someone told on us. A traitor, eh?” Swynyard offered the suggestion slyly. The Colonel was a man of startling ugliness, much of it the result of wounds honorably taken in the service of the old United States, but some of it caused by the whiskey that generally left him comatose by early evening. He had a coarse black beard streaked with gray and crusted with dried tobacco juice, sunken eyes, and a tic in his scarred right cheek. His left hand was missing three fingers, and his mouth was filled with rotting, stinking teeth. “Maybe the traitor was a Northerner, eh?” Swynyard hinted clumsily.
Starbuck smiled. “More likely to be some poor drunken son of a bitch needing cash for his whiskey…”—he paused—“Colonel.”
Swynyard’s only response was his cackling laugh, which hinted at madness. Remarkably, despite the lateness of the day, he was still sober, either because Washington Faulconer had hidden his whiskey or else because Swynyard’s small remaining shred of self-protection had convinced him that he had to function efficiently on a day of battle or else lose his job altogether. Swynyard glanced up at the gunsmoke, then looked back to the notebook in which he was writing. On his right sleeve he wore a square patch of white cloth embroidered with a red crescent. The symbol was from Washington Faulconer’s coat of arms, and the General had dreamed up the happy idea of issuing the badges to every man in his Brigade, though the idea had not been wholly successful. Some men refused to wear the patch, and generally it was possible to tell Faulconer’s supporters from his detractors by the badge’s presence or absence. Starbuck, naturally, had never worn the crescent badge, though some of his men had patched their pants’ seats with the convenient square of cloth.
Swynyard tore the page out of his notebook, put the book itself away, and then drew out his revolver. He began slipping percussion caps over the firing nipples of the loaded chambers. The barrel of the gun was pointed directly at Starbuck’s chest. “I could have an accident,” Swynyard said slyly. “No one could blame me. I’m three fingers short of a hand so no wonder I fumble sometimes. One shot, Starbuck, and you’d be buzzard meat on the grass. I reckon General Faulconer would like that.” Swynyard began to thumb the hammer back.
Then a click sounded behind Starbuck, and the Colonel’s thumb relaxed. Sergeant Truslow lowered the hammer of his rifle. “I can have an accident, too,” Truslow said.
Swynyard said nothing but just grinned and turned away. The nearby battery had ceased firing, and the gunners were hitching their weapons to limbers. The smoke of the battery dissipated slowly in the still air. The rebel guns had been fighting a duel with a Northern battery, a duel that the Northerners had won. “The Yankees will be raising their sights,” Swynyard remarked, staring through his glasses. “They’ve got four-and-a-half-inch rifles. Can’t fight four-and-a-half-inch rifles with six-pounder guns. We might as well throw rocks at the bastards.”
Starbuck watched the Southern guns wheel fast away to the rear and wondered if he was now supposed to fight four-and-a-half-inch rifled cannon with rifles. His heart seemed to be beating too loudly, filling his chest with its drumbeats. He tried to lick his lips, but his mouth was too dry.
The sound of musketry slackened, to be replaced by Northern cheers. Yankee cheering was much deeper in tone than the blood-chilling yelp of attacking rebels. The cannon smoke had thinned sufficiently to let Starbuck see a belt of woodland a half-mile ahead, and then to see a sight he had never dreamed of witnessing on one of Thomas Jackson’s battlefields.
He saw panic.
Ahead and to the left of Starbuck a horde of Southern soldiers were pouring out of the woodland and fleeing southward across the shallow valley. All discipline was gone. Shells exploded among the gray-jacketed soldiers, adding to their desperation. A rebel flag went down, was snatched up again, then disappeared in another flame-filled burst of shell smoke. Horsemen were galloping through the fleeing mass in an attempt to turn the men around, and here and there among the panic a few men did try to form a line, but such small groups stood no chance against the flood of fear that swept the majority away.
Swynyard might be a drunkard and a foul-tempered brute, but he had been a professional soldier long enough to recognize disaster. He turned to see that Captain Medlicott’s G Company had formed alongside Starbuck’s men. “Medlicott!” Swynyard shouted. “Take these two companies forward! You’re in charge!” Medlicott, though much older than Starbuck, had less seniority as a captain, but Swynyard had given him the command of the two companies as a way of insulting Starbuck. “See that broken limber?” The Colonel pointed toward a shattered vehicle that lay two hundred paces ahead, where a strip of grass marked a divide between a patch of harvested corn and a wider field of wheat. “Form your skirmish line there! I’ll bring the Legion up in support.” Swynyard turned back to Starbuck. “Take this,” he said and leaned down from the saddle to hold out a folded scrap of paper.
Starbuck snatched the piece of paper, then shouted at his men to advance alongside G Company. A shell screamed overhead. It was odd, Starbuck thought, how the debilitating nervousness that afflicted a man before battle could be banished by the proximity of danger. Even the day’s stifling heat seemed bearable now that he was under fire. He licked his lips, then unfolded the scrap of paper that Swynyard had given him. He had supposed it would be written orders, but instead he saw it was a label for a dead man. Starbuck, the paper read, Boston, Massachusetts. Starbuck threw it angrily away. Behind, where the rest of the Legion hurried into ranks, Swynyard saw the gesture and cackled.
“This is madness!” Truslow protested to Starbuck. Two companies of skirmishers could not stand against the tide of fear that was retreating from the Yankee guns.
“The rest of the Legion will help,” Starbuck said.
“They’d better,” Truslow said, “or we’re vulture meat.”
Company G was advancing to Starbuck’s right. Medlicott seemed unworried by the odds, but just stumped ahead of his men with a rifle in his hands. Or maybe, Starbuck thought, the miller just did not display his fear. “Keep the ranks straight!” Starbuck called to Coffman. “I want them steady.” He felt in his pocket and found the stub of a cigar he had been saving for battle. He borrowed a lit cigar from a man in the ranks, lit his own, and drew the bitter smoke deep into his lungs.
Lieutenant Coffman had drawn ahead of H Company and was holding a brass-handled bayonet like a sword.
“Get back, Mr. Coffman!” Starbuck called.
“But, sir—”
“Your place is behind the company, Lieutenant! Go there! And throw away that toy sword!”
The first Northern soldiers suddenly appeared at the tree line on the valley’s far crest, which blossomed with the small puffs of white rifle smoke. A shell exploded ahead of Starbuck, and pieces of its casing whipped past him. To his left the field had been partly harvested, so that some of the wheat was standing but most was drying in stooks. Small fires flickered where the shell fire had set the dry crops alight. There were patches of corn stubble among the wheat and two rows of standing corn, where a group of rebel soldiers had taken cover. The tasseled corn shivered whenever a bullet or shell whipped through the stalks. A Northern flag appeared at the far trees. The standard-bearer was waving it to and fro, making the stripes flutter brightly. A bugle was sounding, and off to the west the rebel infantry was still running. Rebel officers still galloped among the fugitives, trying to stem their flight and turn them round. General Jackson was among them, flailing with his scabbarded saber at the panicked men. More Northerners were at the tree line, some of them directly ahead of Starbuck now.
Another shell landed close to Company H, and Starbuck wondered why Medlicott did not order the two companies into skirmish order. Then he decided to hell with military etiquette and shouted the order himself. Medlicott echoed the order, thus shaking the two companies into a loose and scattered formation. Their job now was to fight the enemy skirmishers who would be advancing ahead of the main Yankee attack. “Make sure you’re loaded!” Starbuck called. The Northern line had halted momentarily, perhaps to align itself after advancing through the trees. The Southern fugitives had disappeared behind Starbuck’s left flank, and it suddenly seemed very quiet and lonely on the battlefield.
It also seemed very dangerous. Captain Medlicott crossed to Starbuck. “Is this right, do you think?” he asked, gesturing at the scatter of isolated skirmishers who were alone in the wide field. Medlicott had never liked Starbuck, and the red crescent patch on the shoulder of his uniform coat marked him for a loyal supporter of General Faulconer, but nervousness now made Medlicott seek reassurance from Faulconer’s bitterest enemy. Close to, Starbuck could see that Medlicott was not hiding his fear at all; one cheek was quivering uncontrollably, and the sweat was pouring off his face and dripping from his beard. He took off his brimmed hat to fan his face, and Starbuck saw that even the miller’s smooth, bald, chalk white pate was beaded with sweat. “We shouldn’t be here!” Medlicott exclaimed petulantly.
“God knows what’s happening,” Starbuck said. A Northern battery had appeared where the road vanished among the farther trees. Starbuck saw the guns slew round in a shower of dirt. In a moment, he thought, that artillery will have us in their open sights. Dear God, he thought, but let it be a clean death, quick as a thought, with no agonized lingering under a surgeon’s knife or dying of the sweated fever in some rat-infested hospital. He turned to look behind and saw the Faulconer Brigade streaming off the road and forming into ranks. “Swynyard’s coming soon,” he tried to reassure Medlicott.
The Northern infantry started forward again. A half-dozen flags showed above the dark ranks. Three of the flags were Old Glories, the others were regimental flags carrying state badges or martial insignias. Six flags translated into three regiments that were now attacking two light companies. Captain Medlicott went back to his own men, and Sergeant Truslow joined Starbuck. “Just us and them?” he asked, nodding at the Yankees.
“Swynyard’s bringing the rest of the Brigade forward,” Starbuck said. Shells from the newly deployed battery screeched overhead, aimed at the Faulconer Brigade. “Better them than us, eh?” Starbuck said with the callous indifference of a man spared the gunners’ attentions. He saw George Finney aim his rifle. “Hold your fire, George! Wait till the bastards are in range.”
The Northern skirmishers ran ahead of the attacking line. Their job was to brush Starbuck’s men aside, but soon, Starbuck thought, the rest of the Faulconer Brigade’s skirmishers would advance to reinforce him. Another salvo of shells thundered above him, the cracks of their explosions sounding a second after the percussive thump of the guns themselves. Starbuck began looking for enemy officers among the approaching skirmishers. Yankee officers seemed more reluctant than Southerners to abandon their swords and glinting rank badges and bright epaulettes.
A second Northern battery on the crest opened fire. A shell screamed just inches over Starbuck’s head. For what we are about to receive, he thought, may the Lord make us truly thankful. He could hear the beat of drums sounding from the Yankee infantry. Was this to be the breakthrough battle for the North? Were they at last to batter the Confederacy into surrender? Most of the rebel forces in Virginia were seventy miles away on the far side of Richmond with Robert Lee, but it was here that the Northerners were attacking, and if they broke through here, then what was to stop them marching south, ever south, until Richmond was cut off and the whole upper South split from the Confederacy? “Hold still now!” Starbuck called to his men as he walked slowly along his scattered skirmish line. Another minute, he thought, and the Yankee skirmishers would be in range. “You see that red-haired son of a bitch with the hooked sword, Will?” Starbuck called to Tolby, one of the Legion’s finest marksmen. “He’s yours. Kill the bastard.”
“I’ll take care of him, Captain!” Tolby eased back the hammer of his rifle.
Starbuck saw the enemy cannons disappear behind a blossom of gray-white smoke, and he anticipated another flight of shells overhead, but instead the missiles slammed into the field all around Starbuck’s men. One of Medlicott’s sergeants was flung backward, his blood momentarily misting the hot air. A shell splinter whipped into the broken limber, which carried a stenciled legend announcing that the vehicle belonged to the 4th U.S. Artillery, evidence that the rebels had pushed the Yankees back across the valley before being routed in the far woods. Or perhaps, Starbuck thought, the limber had been captured earlier in the war, for it seemed that at least half of the rebels’ equipment was of Northern origin. A solid shot landed close beside Starbuck, then ricocheted up and back. The nearness of the shot made him wonder why the Yankee gunners were aiming at a scattered skirmish line when they could be firing at the massed ranks of the Faulconer Brigade, and that curiosity made him turn to look for Swynyard’s promised reinforcements.
But Swynyard had vanished, and with him the whole Faulconer Brigade, leaving Starbuck and Medlicott alone in the field. Starbuck turned back. The Northern skirmishers were close now, close enough for Starbuck to see that their uniforms were smart, not patched brown and gray like the rebels’. The Northerners were advancing in good style, the sun reflecting off their belt buckles and brass buttons. Behind the skirmish line a battalion trampled down a row of standing corn. There were a half-dozen mounted officers at the rear of the Yankee formation, evidence that at least one of the attacking regiments was new to the war. Experienced officers did not invite the attention of sharpshooters by riding high in saddles. But nor did two companies of skirmishers stand to fight against a whole Yankee brigade.
“Fire!” Truslow shouted, and the Legion’s skirmishers began their battle. The men were in pairs. One man would fire, then reload while his companion looked for danger. The red-haired Yankee was already down, clutching his chest.
Truslow ran across to Starbuck. “I was never a religious man,” the Sergeant said as he rammed a bullet down his rifle’s barrel, “but ain’t there a story in the Bible about some son of a bitch king sending a man to die in battle just so he could riddle the man’s wife?”
Starbuck peered through the veil of rifle smoke, saw a Yankee go onto one knee to take aim, and fired at the man. A Northern bullet whipsawed the air a few inches to his left. Behind their skirmish line the Northern brigade advanced stolidly beneath their bright flags. He could hear their boots crushing cornstalks, and he knew that as soon as the marching line reached the further edge of the wheat field, they would stop to take aim, and then a killing volley would scream over the field, with every bullet aimed at the two stranded companies of the Legion. There was nothing to check the Yankees out here in the open. No rebel guns were firing, there were no bursting shells or clawing sprays of canister to fleck the wheat field red. Tom Petty, an eighteen-year-old in Starbuck’s company, turned round with his mouth open and his eyes wide. He shook his head in disbelief, then sank to his knees. He saw Starbuck’s eyes on him and forced a brave smile. “I’m all right, sir! Just bruised!” He managed to stand and face the enemy.
“King David,” Starbuck said aloud. King David had sent Uriah the Hittite into the front line of the battle so that Bathsheba would become a widow. “Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle”—the verse came back to Starbuck—“and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.” Well, damn Faulconer, who had made Swynyard set Starbuck in the forefront of the hottest battle that he might be smitten and die. “We’re getting out of here!” Starbuck shouted across to Captain Medlicott.
Medlicott, though officially in command, was grateful for the younger man’s leadership. “Back!” he shouted at G Company.
The Yankees cheered and jeered as they saw the handful of skirmishers retreat. “Enjoying your licking, boys!” one Northerner shouted. “Keep on running! We’ll be right after you!” called another, while a third shouted to give his respects to Stonewall Jackson, “And tell him we’ll hang him real gentle now!”
“Steady now!” Starbuck called to his men. He kept his back to the enemy, concentrating on his company. “Back to the trees! Steady, don’t run!” No one else from the Brigade was in sight. Swynyard or Faulconer must have taken the whole Brigade back into the woods, abandoning Starbuck and Medlicott to the enemy. But why had Bird not protested? A shell landed just behind Starbuck, buffeting him with its hot punch of air. He turned and saw the Yankee skirmishers running toward him. “Double back to the woods!” he shouted, so releasing his men from their slow, steady withdrawal. “Muster them by the road, Sergeant!” he called to Truslow.
More Northern jeers and a handful of bullets followed the skirmishers’ hurried retreat. The Yankees were in high spirits. They had waited a long time to give Stonewall Jackson a whipping, and now they were laying the lash on thick and hard. Back among the trees beside the turnpike Starbuck’s men panted as they crouched and looked nervously at their officer, who, in turn, was watching the shadows lengthen across the wheat field. He was also watching the far tree line, where still more guns and infantry had appeared. The Yankees were triumphant and the rebels beaten. “If we stay here”—Medlicott had joined Starbuck again—“we’ll like as not be prisoners.”
“Swynyard put you in command,” Starbuck said pointedly.
Medlicott hesitated, unhappy to take responsibility, then diffidently suggested that the two companies should retreat further through the trees. To the east of the turnpike a furious artillery battle was deafening the evening air. Smoke poured off the hillside where rebel guns were emplaced, but those cannon were of no use to the beaten men west of the turnpike, where the Yankee line had crushed the standing corn to drive Jackson’s infantry back into the timber on the valley’s southern crest. The Northern guns had the range of those trees now, and the green summer woods were filled with the whistling menace of shrapnel. Starbuck wondered where the Georgia regiment had gone and where the rest of the Brigade was hidden.
“I can’t see the Brigade!” Medlicott said despairingly. A salvo of shells cracked ahead of the skirmishers, filling the trees with whistling shards of hot metal. The men leading the retreat had followed the twisting path into a small hollow, and now they instinctively crouched rather than leave their scanty cover to walk into that zone of fire. The perplexed and frightened Captain Medlicott seemed content to let them rest. “Maybe we should send a patrol to look for the Brigade?” he suggested to Starbuck.
“While the rest of us wait here to be captured?” Starbuck asked sarcastically.
“I don’t know,” Medlicott said. The miller was suddenly bereft of confidence and initiative. His doughy face looked hurt, like that of a child struck for an offense it had not committed.
“Yankees!” Truslow called warningly, pointing west to where blue uniforms had appeared in the woods.
“Stay still!” Medlicott shouted in sudden panic. “Get down!”
Starbuck would have gone on retreating, hoping to join up with the rebel reserve, but Medlicott had been panicked into making a decision, and the men crouched gratefully in the shadows. Two of Starbuck’s company lowered a body they had been carrying. “Shall we bury him?” one of the two men asked Starbuck.
“Who is it?” It was dark under the trees, and the evening was drawing in.
“Tom Petty.”
“Oh, dear God,” Starbuck said. He had seen Petty wounded but had thought he would live, and surely Petty had deserved to live, for he had been a boy, not a man. He had used to shave each morning, but the blade had made no difference to his cheeks. He had only used the razor to explain his lack of beard, but he had been a good soldier, cheerful and willing. Starbuck had planned to make him up to corporal, but now it would have to be Mellors, who was not nearly so quick on the uptake. “Scratch him a grave,” he said, “and get Corporal Waggoner to say a prayer for him.”
All around them the shouts of the Yankees grew louder. The woodland was filled with screaming shells, so many that at times the torn leaves looked like a green snow drifting through the warm evening air. The trees echoed with the pathetic cries of dying men. Lieutenant Coffman hunkered down beside Starbuck, his small face showing bewilderment because his beloved Southerners were being whipped, because the North was winning, and because nothing in his world made sense.
The Reverend Elial Starbuck shared in the joy as the realization of victory dawned on the Yankee headquarters. And what a victory it was proving! Prisoners had confirmed that the enemy commander was indeed the notorious Stonewall Jackson. “The wretch won’t be fetching his supper from my supply wagons tonight!” General Banks exulted. It was true that the enemy was still holding firm on the slopes of Cedar Mountain, but Banks’s staff brought message after message that told how the Federal right wing under General Crawford was driving the rebels clean across the valley and into the woods beyond. “Now we’ll turn their flank!” Banks exclaimed, gesturing extravagantly to show how he meant to hook the right wing of his army around the backside of Cedar Mountain and thus surround the remnants of the Confederate army. “Maybe we’ll have Jackson as our supper guest tonight!”
“I doubt he’ll have much appetite after this drubbing,” an artillery major observed.
“Fellow’s reputed to eat damned strangely anyway,” an aide responded, then blushed for having sworn in front of the Reverend Starbuck. “Nothing but stale bread and chopped cabbage, I hear.”
“You and I could chop the rogue some cabbage, eh, Starbuck?” General Banks thus drew his distinguished guest into the jubilant conversation.
“I would make him eat what the slaves eat!” the Reverend Starbuck said.
“I think he eats worse than any slave!” Banks jested. “Force a slave to eat what Jackson dines on and the whole world would revile our inhumanity. Maybe we should punish the man by giving him a proper meal? Oysters and pheasant, you think?”
Banks’s aides laughed, and their master turned his gaze back to the battle smoke that was already touched with a faint pink tinge of evening sunlight. In the slanting light Banks looked quite superb: straight-backed, stern-faced, the very image of a soldier, and suddenly, after months of disappointment, the politician did at last feel like a soldier. He had, Banks modestly admitted to himself, grown into the job and was now ready for the battles to come. For despite this day’s splendid victory, there would be more battles. With Stonewall Jackson defeated, General Robert Lee, who was protecting Richmond from McClellan’s army, would be forced north even if such a move did open the rebel capital to McClellan’s forces. McClellan would dutifully overwhelm the Richmond defenses, Pope would crush Lee, and then, bar some mopping up on the Mississippi and skull-breaking in the deep South, the war would be over. Better, it would be won. All that remained was a few battles, a rebel surrender, a Federal victory parade, and most important of all, the absolute necessity for President Lincoln and the dunderheads in the United States Congress to realize that it had been Nathaniel Prentiss Banks who had precipitated the whole process. My God, Banks thought, but others would try to steal his glory now! John Pope would doubtless make the attempt, and George McClellan would certainly write to every newspaper editor in creation, which made it all the more important for this night’s victory dispatch to be written firmly and clearly. Tonight’s dispatch, Banks knew, would fashion history books for years to come, but more important, the words he wrote tonight would garner votes for the remainder of his career.
Federal officers gathered round to offer the General their congratulations. The commander of Banks’s bodyguard, a tall Pennsylvanian Zouave, handed the General a silver stirrup cup of brandy. “A toast to your triumph, sir,” the Zouave proclaimed. A ragged line of disconsolate prisoners trudged past the group of horsemen. One or two of the captured seceshers glanced sullenly at the Northern General, and one rogue spat in his direction, but tonight, Banks thought, he would have the most valuable prisoner as his dinner guest. He would treat General Jackson with courtesy, as a gallant soldier should, and the world would wonder at the victor’s modesty. Then Banks imagined himself at another dinner table, a much grander table in Washington that would gleam with massive presidential silver, and in his mind’s eye he saw the foreign diplomats and their admiring bejeweled wives bend forward to catch his words. President Banks! And why not? George Washington might have made this country, but it had needed Nathaniel Prentiss Banks to save it.
A mile south of Banks, in a belt of woodland where fires started by shell fire tortured the wounded, men screamed and fought and died. The Yankee counterattack was being slowed by the undergrowth and by the stubborn defiance of Southern riflemen, whose muzzle flames stabbed bright in the smoky shadows. Shells slashed through the treetops, thrashing the branches and hammering the sky with their explosions. Blood and smoke reeked, a man called for his mother in the voice of a child, another cursed God, but still the North pushed on, yard by hard yard, going through hell in search of peace.
“Nothing is served,” General Washington Faulconer said icily, “by breaking the Brigade into small detachments. We shall go into battle united.”
“If there’s any battle left,” Swynyard said with a manic glee. He seemed to be enjoying the panic that had infected the western side of Jackson’s battle.
“Watch your tongue, Colonel,” Faulconer snapped. He was more than usually displeased with his second-in-command, who had already lost a quarter of the Legion instead of just Starbuck’s company, and what was left of the Brigade must be husbanded, not frittered away by being committed to the battle in dribs and drabs. Faulconer edged his horse away from Swynyard and gazed at the woods, which were filled with smoke and thrashing from the passage of Northern shells and bolts. God only knew what had happened in the wide valley beyond those woods, but even here, far behind where the fighting had taken place, the evidence of impending disaster was awesome and obvious. Wounded men staggered back from the trees; some of the injured were being helped by friends, others crawled or limped painfully back to where the surgeons hacked and sawed and probed. Many of the fugitives were not wounded at all but were merely frightened men who were trying to escape the Yankee advance.
Faulconer had no intention of allowing that advance to enmesh his Brigade. “I want the 65th on the right,” Faulconer called to Swynyard, referring to the 65th Virginia, which was the second largest regiment after the Legion in Faulconer’s Brigade, “the Arkansas men in the center, and the 12th Florida on the left. Everyone else in reserve two hundred paces behind.” That meant that the remaining six companies of the Legion, who were presently the foremost battalion in the Brigade, would now become Faulconer’s rearmost line. The redeployment was hardly necessary, but moving the front line to the rear killed some precious moments while Faulconer tried to determine just what disasters were happening beyond the woods. “And, Colonel!” Faulconer called after Swynyard, “send Bird to reconnoiter the ground. Tell him to report to me within a half hour!”
“Colonel Bird’s already gone,” Swynyard said. “Went to fetch his skirmishers back.”
“Without orders?” Faulconer asked angrily. “Then tell him to explain himself to me the instant he returns. Now go!”
“Sir?” Captain Thomas Pryor, one of Washington Faulconer’s new aides, interjected nervously.
“Captain?” Faulconer acknowledged.
“General Jackson’s orders were explicit, sir. We should advance quick, sir, with whatever units are available. Into the trees, sir.” Pryor gestured nervously toward the woods.
But Faulconer had no wish to advance quick. The woods seemed to be alive with smoke and flame, almost as though the earth itself was heaving in the throes of some mythic struggle. Rifle fire cracked, men screamed, and cannons pumped their percussive explosions through the humid air, and Faulconer had no desire to plunge into that maelstrom. He wanted order and sense, and a measure of safety. “General Jackson,” he told Pryor, “is panicking. We serve no purpose by committing ourselves piecemeal. We shall advance in good order or not at all.” He turned away from the battle and rode back to where his second line would be formed. That reserve line consisted of the six remaining companies of the Legion and the whole of the 13th Florida, two regiments that Faulconer had every intention of holding back until his first line was fully committed to the fight. Only if the first line broke and ran would the second line fight, and then merely to serve as a rear guard for the fugitive first line. Washington Faulconer told himself he was being prudent, and that such prudence might well save a defeat from being a rout.
He wondered where Starbuck was and felt the familiar flare of hatred. Faulconer blamed Starbuck for all his ills. It was Starbuck who had humiliated him at Manassas, Starbuck who had suborned Adam, and Starbuck who had defied him by remaining in the Legion. Faulconer was convinced that if he could just rid himself of Starbuck, then he could make the Brigade into the most efficient unit of the Confederate army, which was why he had ordered Swynyard to place a company of skirmishers far ahead of the Brigade’s position. He had trusted Swynyard to know precisely which company of skirmishers was to be thus sacrificed, but he had hardly expected the drunken fool to throw away both companies. Yet even that loss might be worthwhile, Faulconer reflected, if Starbuck was among the casualties.
On Faulconer’s left a column of rebel troops advanced at the double, while another, marching just as quickly, headed for the woods to the right of his Brigade. Reinforcements were clearly reaching the fighting, which meant, Faulconer decided, that he had no need to hurl his own men forward in a desperate panic. Slow and steady would win this fight, and that natural caution was reinforced by the sight of a riderless horse, its flank a sheet of crimson, limping southward down the turnpike with its reins trailing in the dust and its stirrups dripping with blood.
The Faulconer Brigade laboriously formed its new battle lines. In the first rank were the 65th Virginia, Haxall’s men from Arkansas, and the 12th Florida. The three regiments raised their dusty flags, the banners’ bright colors already faded from too much sun and shredded by too many bullets. The standards hung limp in the windless air. Colonel Swynyard gave his horse to one of his two cowed slaves, then took his place at the center of the forward line, where lust at last overcame caution and made him take a flask from a pouch on his belt. “I see our gallant Colonel is inoculating himself against the risks of battle,” General Faulconer remarked sardonically to Captain Pryor.
“By drinking water, sir?” Pryor asked in puzzlement. Thomas Pryor was new to the Brigade. He was the younger son of a Richmond banker who did much business with Washington Faulconer, and the banker had pleaded with Faulconer to take on his son. “Thomas is a good-natured fellow,” the banker had written, “too good, probably, so maybe a season of war will teach him that mankind is not inherently honest?”
A second’s silence greeted Pryor’s naive assumption that Swynyard was drinking water, then a gale of laughter swept the Brigade headquarters. “Swynyard’s water,” Faulconer informed Pryor, “is the kind that provides the Dutch with courage, puts men to sleep, and wakes them sore-headed.” The General smiled at his own wit, then turned indignantly as a mounted man galloped toward him from the turnpike.
“You’re to advance, sir!” the officer shouted. The man had a drawn sword in his right hand.
Faulconer did not move. Instead he waited as the officer curbed his horse. The beast tossed its head and stamped nervously. It was flecked with sweat and rolling its eyes white. “You have orders for me?” Faulconer asked the excited officer.
“From General Jackson, sir. You’re to advance with the other brigades, sir.” The aide gestured toward the woods, but Faulconer still made no move other than to hold out a hand. The aide gaped at him. No one else on this field had demanded written orders, for surely no one could doubt the urgency of the cause. If the Yankees won here, then there was nothing to stop them crossing the Rapidan and breaking Richmond’s rail links with the Shenandoah Valley, and nothing, indeed, to stop them advancing on the rebel capital. This was not a time for written orders but for Southern men to fight like heroes to protect their country. “General Jackson’s compliments, sir,” the aide said in a tone that barely managed to stay on the civil side of insolence, “and his regrets that he has no time to put his orders into writing, but he would be most obliged if you were to advance your Brigade into the trees and help dislodge the enemy.”
Faulconer looked at the woods. Fugitives still emerged from the shadows, but most were now men wounded by the fighting rather than frightened men seeking safety. Nearer to the Brigade two small guns were being unlimbered by the road, but the cannons looked a pitiable force to withstand the noisy Northern onslaught that churned among the shadowed woods. Those shadows were long, cast by a sun that reddened in the west. Flames started by shell fire flickered deep among the trees where rifles snapped angrily. “Am I to tell General Jackson that you won’t advance, sir?” the mounted officer asked in a voice cracked with near despair. He had not given his name nor announced his authority, but the urgency in his tone and the drawn sword in his hand were all the authority he needed.
Faulconer drew his sword. He did not want to advance, but he knew there was no choice now. Reputation and honor depended on going into the awful woods. “Colonel Swynyard!” he called, and the words were hardly more than a croak. “Colonel!” he shouted again, louder this time.
“Sir!” Swynyard pushed the flask of whiskey back into his pouch.
“Advance the Brigade!” Faulconer called.
Swynyard drew his own sword, the blade scraping into the day’s dying light. Ahead of him fires burned in the wood, their flames bright in the dark shadows where men fought and died. “Forward!” Swynyard shouted.
Forward into the maelstrom where the woods burned.
Into battle.
IT’S GOD’S WILL, BANKS! GOD’S WILL!” THE REVEREND Elial Starbuck was beside himself with joy. The smell of battle was in his nostrils and inflaming him like an infusion of the Holy Spirit. The preacher was fifty-two years old and had never known an exultation quite like this thrill of victory. He was witnessing God’s hand at work and seeing the triumph of righteousness over the Slavocracy. “On, on!” he shouted encouragingly to a fresh battery of Northern artillery that traveled toward the smoke of battle. The Reverend Starbuck had come to Culpeper Court House to preach to the troops, but instead found himself cheering them on to glory.
The Reverend Elial Starbuck’s jubilation matched General Banks’s excitement. The politician turned general was realizing he had won! He was actually trouncing the wretched and infamous Jackson who had given him such misery earlier in the year. The bells of Boston would ring for this success of a native son, and suddenly the realization of the Governor’s most daring ambitions seemed so dazzlingly close. Nathaniel Prentiss Banks, seventeenth President of the United States of America. He said the phrase under his breath, relishing it, but then the glory of that triumph dizzied Banks in his saddle, and to steady himself he turned back to the Reverend Starbuck. “How’s that son of yours, Starbuck?” Banks asked, trying to give the impression of a man humble and confident enough to make small talk at the moment of glory.
“James is well, thank you, Governor,” the preacher responded. “He’s with McClellan’s forces in front of Richmond. He suffered a touch of fever a month ago, but writes to say he is fully recovered.”
“I meant the young man you named after me,” Banks said. “How is he?”
“Nathaniel’s well, so far as I know,” the Reverend Starbuck said curtly, then was saved from any further queries about his traitor son by the arrival of an aide on a horse that had a mane paled by dust and flanks foaming with sweat. The aide gave Banks a swift salute and a note from Brigadier General Crawford. The note had been hastily scribbled in the saddle, and Banks found it hard to decipher the penciled letters.
“News of victory, I hope?” Banks suggested to the newly arrived aide.
“The General’s requesting reinforcements, sir,” the aide said respectfully. His horse trembled as a rebel shell wailed overhead.
“Reinforcements?” Banks asked. In the pause after his question the rebel shell exploded harmlessly behind, scattering dirt across the road. “Reinforcements?” Banks said again, frowning as though he found the word incomprehensible. Then he straightened his already immaculate uniform. “Reinforcements?” he asked a third time. “But I thought he was driving the enemy from the field?”
“We need to break them, sir.” The aide sounded enthusiastic. “One more brigade will rout them utterly.”
“I hoped they were finished already,” Banks said, crumpling Crawford’s message in his hand.
“They’re skulking in some woods, sir. Our fellows are pressing hard, but they’ll need help.”
“There isn’t any help!” Banks said indignantly, as though the aide were spoiling his moment of glory. “I sent him Gordon’s brigade; isn’t that enough?”
The aide glanced at the gaudily uniformed Pennsylvania Zouaves who formed General Banks’s personal bodyguard. “Maybe we should send every man available, sir, to destroy them before they’re saved by nightfall?” He spoke very respectfully, as befitted a captain offering tactical advice to a major general.
“We have no reserves, Captain,” Banks said in a peevish voice. “We are fully committed! So press on. Press hard. Tell Crawford it’s his responsibility now. I won’t have men calling for help, not when we’re on the verge of victory. Go back and tell him to push on hard, you hear me? Push on hard and no stopping till nightfall.” The long speech had restored Banks’s confidence. He was winning; it was God’s will that the vaunted Stonewall Jackson should be humbled. “It’s nervousness, plain nervousness,” Banks explained General Crawford’s request to the men who surrounded him. “A fellow finds himself on the winning side and can’t believe his luck so he asks for help at the last moment!”
“I hope you’ll be kind to Crawford in your memoirs, sir,” the Zouave commander observed.
“To be sure, to be sure,” Banks said, who had not considered his memoirs till this moment, but now found himself dreaming of a three-volume work, provisionally entitled Banks’s War. He decided he would depict his early defeats as necessary deceptions that had lured the cabbage-eating Jackson on to destruction at Cedar Mountain. “I might have been reviled”—the General rehearsed a sentence in his head—“but I was playing a longer hand than my critics knew, especially those journalistic curs who dared to offer me advice even though not one of them could tell a Parrott gun from a bird’s beak.”
The Reverend Elial Starbuck broke this pleasant reverie by begging Banks’s permission to ride forward so he could observe the pursuit and final humiliation of the enemy. “Your triumph is an answer to my prayers, Governor,” the preacher said, “and I would dearly like to witness its full fruits.”
“My dear Starbuck, of course you must ride forward. Captain Hetherington?” Banks summoned one of his junior aides to accompany the preacher, though he also cautioned the aide not to expose the Reverend Starbuck to any danger. The caution was given to make certain that the Reverend Starbuck survived to preach Banks’s fame from his influential pulpit. “A wounded cur can still bite,” Banks warned the preacher, “so you must stay well clear of the dying beast’s jaws.”
“God will preserve me, Governor,” the Reverend Starbuck averred. “He is my strong shield and protector.”
Thus guarded, the Reverend Starbuck set off across the fields with Hetherington, first threading a path between rows of army wagons with white canvas hoods, then passing a field hospital where the Reverend Starbuck paused to inspect the faces of the wounded Southern prisoners who lay after surgery on the grass outside the tents. Some were still comatose from the effects of chloroform, a few slept from sheer weariness, but the majority lay pale and frightened. A few crudely bandaged casualties lay waiting for the surgeons’ knives, and to anyone unaccustomed to battle the sight of such grievously hurt men might have proved more than the strongest stomach could abide, but the Reverend Starbuck seemed positively enlivened by the horrid spectacle. Indeed, he leaned out of his saddle for a closer look at one man’s mangled limbs and bloodied scalp. “You note the low cranial gap and the pronounced teeth?” he observed to Hetherington.
“Sir?” Hetherington asked in puzzlement.
“Look at his face, man! Look at any of their faces! Can’t you see the pronounced difference between them and the Northern visage?”
Captain Hetherington thought that the Southerners did not look very much different from Northerners, except that they were generally thinner and a good deal more raggedly uniformed, but he did not want to contradict the eminent preacher, and so he agreed that the captured rebels did indeed display low foreheads and feral teeth.
“Such features are the classic symptoms of feeblemindedness and moral degradation,” the Reverend Starbuck announced happily, then remembered the Christian duty that was owed even to such fallen souls as these rebel prisoners. “Though your sins be as scarlet,” he called down to them, “yet you may be washed whiter than snow. You must repent! You must repent!” He had come equipped with copies of his tract, Freeing the Oppressed, which explained why Christian men should be prepared to die for the sacred cause of abolishing slavery, and now the Reverend Starbuck dropped a few copies among the wounded men. “Something to read during your imprisonment,” he told them, “something to explain your errors.” He spurred on, cheered by this chance to have spread the good word. “We have been remiss, Captain,” the preacher declared to Hetherington as the two men left the hospital behind, “in restricting our mission work to heathen lands and Southern slaves. We should have sent more good men into the rebellious states to tussle with the demons that dwell in the white man’s soul.”
“There are plenty of churches, are there not, in the secessionist states?” Captain Hetherington inquired respectfully after leading the preacher around a tangle of telegraph wire that had been dumped beside a ditch.
“There are indeed churches in the South,” the Reverend Starbuck said in a tone of distaste, “and pastors, too, I dare say, yet their existence should not deceive us. The scriptures warn us against those false prophets who shall inhabit the latter days. And such prophets have no difficulty in persuading the feebleminded to adopt the devil’s ways. But the Second Epistle of Peter promises us that the false prophets shall bring upon themselves a swift destruction. I think we are witnessing the beginnings of that providence. For this is the Lord’s doing,” the Reverend Doctor Starbuck declaimed happily, gesturing toward two dogs that fought over a dead man’s intestines close to a smoking shell crater, “and we should rejoice and be glad in it!” A less pious impulse made the Reverend wonder whether the money he had just expended on Galloway’s Horse was going to be wasted. Maybe the war would be won without Galloway’s men? Then he thrust that concern away and let this day’s good news fill him with joy instead.
Captain Hetherington wanted to drive the two dogs away from their offal, but the Reverend Starbuck was spurring ahead, and the aide’s duty was to stay with the preacher, so he galloped to catch up. “Are you saying, sir,” Hetherington asked respectfully, “that none of the rebels are Christians?”
“How can they be?” the Boston preacher responded. “Our faith has never preached rebellion against the lawful and godly authority of the state, so at best the South is in grievous error and thus in desperate need of repentance and forgiveness. And at worst?” The Reverend Starbuck shook his head rather than even consider such a question, yet the very asking of it made him think of his second son and how Nate was even now irretrievably committed to the fires of hell. Nate would burn in everlasting flames, tormented through all eternity by agonies unimaginable. “And he deserves it!” the Reverend Starbuck protested aloud.
“I’m sorry, sir?” Hetherington asked, thinking he had misheard a comment addressed to him.
“Nothing, Captain, nothing. You are saved yourself?”
“Indeed, sir. I came to Christ three years ago, and have praised God for His mercies ever since.”
“Praise Him indeed,” the Reverend Starbuck responded, though in truth he was secretly disappointed that his escort should thus prove to be a born-again Christian, for there were few things Elial Starbuck enjoyed so much as having what he called a tussle with a sinner. He could boast of having left many a strong man in tears after an hour’s good argument.
The two men arrived at a Northern battery of twelve-pounder Napoleons. The four guns were silent, their shirtsleeved gunners leaning on their weapons’ wheels and staring across the valley to where a long-shadowed stand of trees was crowned with gunsmoke. “No targets, sir,” the battery commander answered when the Reverend Starbuck asked why he was not firing. “Our fellows are inside those woods, sir, or maybe a half-mile beyond, which means our job’s done for the day.” He took a pull of his flask, which contained brandy. “Those shell bursts are rebel guns firing long, sir,” he added, gesturing at the white explosions that blossomed intermittently on the far crest. The sound of each explosion followed a few seconds later like a small rumble of thunder. “Just their rear guard,” the artilleryman said confidently, “and we can leave the peasantry to look after them.”
“The peasantry?” the Reverend Starbuck inquired.
“The infantry, sir. Lowest of the low, see what I mean, sir?”
The Reverend Starbuck did not see at all, but decided not to make an issue of his puzzlement. “And the rebels?” he asked instead. “Where are they?”
The gunner Major took note of the older man’s Geneva bands and straightened himself respectfully. “You can see some of the dead ones, sir, excuse my callousness, and the rest are probably halfway to Richmond by now. I’ve waited over a year to see the rascals skedaddle, sir, and it’s a fine sight. Our young ladies saw them off in fine style.” The Major slapped the still warm barrel of the closest gun, which, like the rest of the Napoleons in the battery, had a girl’s name painted on its trail. This gun was Maud, while its companions were named Eliza, Louise, and Anna.
“It is the Lord’s doing, the Lord’s doing!” the Reverend Starbuck murmured happily.
“The seceshers are still lively over there.” Captain Hetherington gestured to far-off Cedar Mountain, where gunsmoke still jetted from the rebel batteries.
“But not for long.” The artillery Major spoke confidently. “We’ll hook behind their rear and take every man jack of them prisoner. As long as nightfall doesn’t come first,” he added. The sun was very low and the light reddening.
The Reverend Starbuck took a small telescope from his pocket and trained it on the woods ahead. He could see very little except for smoke, leaves, and burning shell craters, though in the nearer open land he could make out the humped shapes of the dead lying in the remnants of the wheat field. “We shall go to the woods,” he announced to his companion.
“I’m not sure we should, sir,” Captain Hetherington demurred politely. “There are still shells falling.”
“We shall come to no harm, Captain. Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we shall fear no evil. Come!” In truth the Reverend Starbuck wanted to ride closer to those bursting shells. He had decided that his exhilaration was symptomatic of a natural taste for battle, that maybe he was discovering a God-given talent for warfare, and it was suddenly no wonder to him that the Lord of Hosts had so frequently exhorted Israel to the fight. This blood and slaughter was the way to see God’s work accomplished! Sermonizing and mission work were all very well, and doubtless God listened to the prayers of all those wilting women with faded silk bookmarks in their well-thumbed Bibles, but this hammer of battle was a more certain method of bringing about His kingdom. The sinners were being scourged by the holy flail of sword, steel, and gunpowder, and the Reverend Doctor Starbuck exulted in the process. “Onwards, Captain,” he encouraged Hetherington. “The enemy is beaten, there’s nothing to fear!”
Hetherington paused, but the artillery Major was in full agreement with the preacher. “They’re well beaten, sir, and amen,” the Major declared, and that encouragement was enough to make the Reverend Starbuck hand down some copies of Freeing the Oppressed for the weary gunners. Then, spirits soaring, he spurred his horse past the quartet of fan-shaped swathes of scorched stubble that marked where Eliza, Louise, Maud, and Anna had belched flame and smoke at the enemy.
Captain Hetherington followed unhappily. “We don’t know that the rebels are yet cleared from the woods, sir.”
“Then we shall find out, Captain!” the Reverend Starbuck said happily. He trotted past the remains of a Northerner who had been blown apart by the direct hit of a rebel shell, and who was now nothing but a fly-crawling mess of jagged-ended bones, blue guts, torn flesh, and uniform scraps. The Reverend felt no anguish at the sight, merely the satisfaction that the dead man was a hero who had gone to his Maker by virtue of having died for a cause as noble as any that had ever driven man onto the battlefield. A few paces beyond the dead Federal was the corpse of a Southerner, his throat cut to the bone by a fragment of shell casing. The wretch was dressed in gaping shoes, torn pants, and a threadbare coat of pale gray patched with brown, but the corpse’s most repellent aspect was the grasping look on his face. The preacher reckoned he saw that same depraved physiognomy on most of the rebel dead and on the faces of the rebel wounded who cried for help as the two horsemen rode by. These rebels, the Reverend Starbuck decided, were demonstrably feebleminded and doubtless morally infantile. The doctors in Boston were convinced that such mental weaknesses were inherited traits, and the more the Reverend Elial Starbuck saw of these Southerners, the more persuaded he was of that medical truth. Had there been miscegenation? Had the white race so disgraced itself with its own slaves that it was now paying the hereditary price? That thought so disgusted the Reverend that he flinched, but then an even more terrible thought occurred to him. Was his son Nathaniel’s moral degradation inherited? The Reverend Starbuck cast that suspicion out. Nathaniel was a backslider and so doubly guilty. Nathaniel’s sins could not be laid at his parents’ door, but only at his own wicked feet.
The Reverend Elial Starbuck thus ruminated about heredity, slavery, and feeblemindedness as he rode across the hot battlefield, yet he did not entirely ignore the cries that came from the parched, hurting men left helpless by the fighting. The wounded rebels were pleading for water, for a doctor, or for help in reaching the field hospitals, and the Reverend Starbuck offered them what comfort was in his power by assuring them that salvation could be theirs after a true repentance. One dark-bearded man, sheltering under a bullet-scarred tree and with his leg half severed and a rifle sling serving as a tourniquet about his thigh, cursed the preacher and demanded brandy instead of a sermon, but the Reverend Starbuck merely let a tract fall toward the man and then spurred sadly on. “Once this rebellion is ended, Captain,” he observed, “we shall be faced with a mighty task in the South. We shall needs preach the pure gospel to a people led into error by false teachers.”
Hetherington was about to agree with that pious observation but was checked from speaking by a sudden sound coming from the west. To the Reverend Starbuck, unused to the noise of battle, the sound was exactly like gigantic sheets of stiff canvas being ripped across, or perhaps like the noise caused by the wretched urchins who liked to run down Beacon Hill dragging sticks along the iron palings. The noise was so sudden and intrusive that he instinctively checked his horse, but then, assuming that the weird sound presaged the end of rebellion, he urged the beast on again and muttered a prayer of thanks for God’s providence in giving the North victory. Captain Hetherington, less sanguine, checked the preacher’s horse. “I didn’t think the rebs were that far west,” he said, apparently speaking to himself.
“West?” the preacher asked, confused.
“Rifle volleys, sir,” Hetherington answered, explaining the strange noise. The Captain stared toward the dying sun, where a trembling veil of smoke was starting to show above the trees.
“That noise!” the Reverend Starbuck exclaimed. “Listen! You hear that noise? What is it?” His excitement was caused by a new sound that was suddenly added to the rifle volleys. It was a high-pitched noise infused with a yelping triumph and thrilled through with a ululating and gleeful quality that suggested that the creatures who made such a sound were come willingly and even gladly to this field of slaughter. “You know what you’re hearing?” The Reverend Starbuck asked the question with enthusiasm. “It’s the paean! I never thought I should live to hear it!”
Hetherington glanced at the preacher. “The peon, sir?” he asked, puzzled.
“You’ve read Aristophanes, surely?” the preacher demanded impatiently. “You remember how he describes the war cry of the Greek infantry? The paean?” Maybe, the preacher thought, some classically minded officer from Yale or Harvard had fostered the pleasant fancy of teaching his Northern soldiers that ancient war cry. “Listen, man,” he said excitedly, “it’s the sound of the phalanx! The sound of the Spartans! The sound of Homer’s heroes!”
Captain Hetherington could hear the sound only too clearly. “That’s not the paean, sir. It’s the rebel yell.”
“You mean…” the Reverend Starbuck began, then fell abruptly silent. He had read about the rebel yell in the Boston newspapers, but now he was hearing it for himself, and the sound of it suddenly seemed anything but classical. Instead it was infused with the purest evil; a noise to chill the blood like a scrabble of wild beasts howling or like the baying of a horde of demons begging to be released from the smoking gates of hell. “Why are they yelling?” the preacher asked.
“Because they’re not beaten, sir, that’s why,” Hetherington said, and he reached for the preacher’s reins and pulled his horse around. The Reverend Starbuck protested the about turn, for he was already very close to the woods and he wanted to see what lay beyond the trees, but the Captain could not be persuaded to continue. “The battle’s not won, sir,” he said quietly, “it might even be lost.”
For a rebel yell meant only one thing: a rebel attack.
Because the wretches weren’t beaten at all.
Captain Nathaniel Starbuck, crouched in the woods close by the turnpike, heard the screaming of a rebel counterattack. “About goddamned time,” he murmured to no one in particular. The gunfire in the trees had been sporadic for the last few minutes, and Starbuck had begun to fear that the Legion’s stranded skirmishers would be trapped far behind a victorious Northern army. So far the only resistance to the Northern attack had seemed haphazard and futile, but now the rifle fire swelled into the full intensity of battle, to which the screams of the attacking Southerners added an unearthly descant. The battle was all sound to Starbuck, for he could see nothing through the smoky, deep-shadowed undergrowth, but the sounds indicated that the attacking Northerners were being checked and even counterattacked. “I reckon we should join in,” Starbuck said to Captain Medlicott.
“No,” Medlicott said. “Absolutely not!” The reply was too vehement, betraying Medlicott’s fear. The miller turned soldier was as white-faced as though he had just come from a hard shift at his old grindstones. Sweat dripped and glistened in his beard, while his eyes flicked nervously around the sanctuary his men had fortuitously discovered among the trees. The sanctuary was a shallow scrape that would have been flooded by the smallest fall of rain, yet was so surrounded by undergrowth that an army could have marched on the road behind and not seen the men hidden just paces away. “We’ll just wait here till things calm down,” Medlicott insisted.
Starbuck did not like the thought of skulking in the shadows. So far the two companies had avoided any Northerners, but that luck might not last, yet Medlicott would not listen to the younger man’s ideas. Medlicott had been happy enough to accept Starbuck’s guidance when they were exposed to the enemy’s fire, but now that he was in a seemingly safe refuge, Medlicott was rediscovering the authority that Colonel Swynyard had conferred on him. “We stay here,” he insisted again, “and that’s an order, Starbuck.”
Starbuck went back to his company. He stretched himself at the edge of the shallow hollow and stared through the foliage toward the sounds of battle. The branches of the wood made a dark lacework against an evening sky that was layered with red-tinted bands of gunsmoke. The rebel yell swelled and faded, hinting at surges as regiments advanced and went to ground before advancing again. Volleys crashed among the trees, then footsteps trampled the undergrowth close by, but the leaves grew so thick that Starbuck could see no one. Nevertheless he feared the sudden irruption of a company of nervous Yankees, and so he twisted around and hissed at his men to fix their bayonets. If the Yankees did come, then Starbuck would be ready for them.
He pulled out his own blade and slotted it into place. Squirrels chattered unhappily in the branches overhead, and a flash of red feathers showed where a cardinal flew among the trunks. Behind Starbuck, beyond the deserted turnpike, gunsmoke lay like layers of mist above a patchwork of wheat and cornfields. There was no infantry visible there. It was almost as if the road divided the battlefield into two discrete halves, the one filled with cannon smoke and the other with struggling men.
Truslow, his rifle tipped with steel, dropped beside Starbuck. “What’s wrong with Medlicott?”
“Frightened.”
“Never was any damned good. His father was the same.” Truslow spat a viscous gob of tobacco juice into the leaf mould. “I once saw old John Medlicott run from a pair of horse thieves who weren’t a day over fifteen.”
“Were you one of them?” Starbuck asked shrewdly.
Truslow grinned, but before he could answer there was a sudden panicked rush of feet, and a single Northern soldier burst through the bushes ahead. The Yankee was oblivious of the two rebel companies until he was just paces away, then his eyes widened and he slid to a panicked halt. His mouth dropped open. He turned, seemingly to shout a warning to his comrades, but Starbuck had climbed to his feet and now hammered the side of the Northerner’s skull with the brass butt of his rifle just a split second before Truslow pulled the man’s feet out from beneath him. The Yankee fell like a poleaxed steer. Truslow and Starbuck dragged him back to the company and disarmed him. “Shut your goddamned mouth,” Starbuck hissed at the man, who had begun to stir.
“I’m not…”
“The officer told you to shut the hell up, you son of a whore, so shut the hell up or I’ll rip your damned tongue out,” Truslow growled, and the Northerner went utterly quiet. The buckle on his leather belt showed he was a Pennsylvanian. A trickle of blood showed among the roots of his fair hair above his ear. “You’ll have a peach of a bruise there, you bastard,” Truslow said happily. He was rifling the man’s pockets and pouches. He tossed the Pennsylvanian’s rifle cartridges back among the company, then found a pale brown package marked with the trademark of John Anderson’s Honeydew Fine-Cut Tobacco of New York. “It ain’t Virginia, but someone will smoke it,” Truslow said, pushing it into his pouch.
“Leave me some,” the Pennsylvanian pleaded. “I ain’t had a smoke in hours.”
“Then you should have stayed in Pennsylvania, you son of a whore, instead of trampling our corn. You’re not wanted here. If you got what you deserved you’d be breathing through a hole in your ribs by now.” Truslow eased a wad of folded Northern dollar bills from the man’s top pocket. “Lucky at cards, are you?”
“And with women.” The Pennsylvanian had a snub-nosed and cheeky charm.
“Lie still and be quiet, boy, or your luck will end here.” Truslow unlooped the boy’s canteen and found it still held a half-inch of water, which he offered to Starbuck. Starbuck, despite his thirst, refused, so Truslow drained the canteen himself.
Starbuck stood to give himself a view over the surrounding brush. Captain Medlicott hissed at him to get his head down, but Starbuck ignored the miller. Another burst of screaming announced a renewed rebel charge, and this time a group of some two dozen Yankees appeared just twenty paces beyond Starbuck’s hiding place. A handful of the Northerners knelt and fired into the trees before retreating again. Two of the Yankees fell as they went back, driven down by rebel bullets, and the rest of the men would doubtless have kept on running had not the color party come through the trees to rally them. A tall, white-haired officer waved a sword toward the rebels. “Vorwarts! Vorwarts!” the officer cried, and the retreating men turned, cheered, and delivered a splintering volley toward their pursuers. The two flags were bright squares of silk in the smoke-riven shadows. One was Old Glory, battle-torn and stained, while the second was a purple flag embroidered with an eagle and a legend Starbuck could not decipher. “Vorwarts!” the white-haired officer called again.
“Are they goddamned Germans?” Truslow asked. The Sergeant had an irrational dislike of German immigrants, blaming them for many of the rules and regulations that had begun to infest his former country. “Americans used to be free men,” he often declared. “Then the damned Prussians came to organize us.”
“We’re Pennsylvania Deutsch,” the prisoner answered.
“Then you’re godforsaken son of a bitch bastards,” Truslow said. Starbuck could read the Gothic-lettered legend on the second flag now: “Gott und die Vereinigten Staaten,” it said, and it struck Starbuck that such a flag would make a handsome trophy.
“Feuer!” the white-haired officer shouted, and another Northern volley ripped into the attacking rebels. The Germans cheered, sensing that their sudden resistance had taken the attackers by surprise.
“We can take those bastards,” Starbuck said to Truslow.
The Sergeant glanced toward Captain Medlicott. “Not with that yellow bastard’s help.”
“Then we’ll do it without the yellow bastard’s help,” Starbuck said. He felt the elation of a soldier given the inestimable advantage of surprise; this was a fight he could not lose, and so he cocked his rifle and twisted around to look at his company. “We’re going to put one volley into those German sons of bitches and then run them off our land. Hard and fast, boys, scare the daylights out of the sumbitches. Ready?” The men grinned at him, letting him know that they were good and ready. Starbuck grinned back. There were times when he wondered if anything ever again in all eternity would ever taste as good as these moments in battle. The nervousness of anticipation was utterly gone, replaced by a feral excitement. He glanced at the prisoner. “You stay here, Yankee.”
“I won’t move an inch!” the prisoner promised, though in truth he intended to run just as soon as he was left unattended.
“Stand!” Starbuck shouted. The heady mix of fear and excitement swirled through him. He understood the temptation of following Medlicott’s lead and staying hidden and safe, yet he also wanted to humiliate Medlicott. Starbuck wanted to show that he was the best man on a battlefield, and no one demonstrated such arrogance by cowering in the bushes. “Take aim!” he called, and a handful of the rallying Yankees heard the shouted order and looked around fearfully, but they were already too late. Starbuck’s men were on their feet, rifles at their shoulders.
Then it began to go wrong.
“Stop!” Medlicott shouted. “Get down! I order you! Down!” The miller had panicked. He was running up the shallow scrape and shouting at Starbuck’s men, even thrusting some of them back down to the ground. Other men crouched, and all were confused.
“Fire!” Starbuck shouted, and a puny scatter of rifle flames studded the shadows.
“Down!” Medlicott waved a hand frantically.
“Get up and fire!” Starbuck’s yell was ferocious. “Up! Fire!” The men stood again and pulled their triggers, so that a stuttering mistimed volley flamed in the dusk. “Charge!” Starbuck shouted, drawing the word out like a war cry.
The white-haired officer had turned the Pennsylvanians to face the unexpected threat to their flank. Medlicott’s interference had brought the Yankees a few seconds of precious time, long enough for a half-company to form a ragged firing line at right angles to the rest of their battalion. That half-company now faced Starbuck’s confused assault, and as he watched the Yankees lift their rifles to their shoulders, he sensed the disaster that was about to strike. Even a half-company volley at such short distance would tear the heart from his assault. Panic whipped through him. He felt the temptation to break right and dive into the underbrush for cover, indeed a temptation to just run away, but then salvation arrived as the rebel regiment that was assaulting the Pennsylvanians from the south fired an overwhelming volley. The hastily formed Northern line crumpled. The fusillade that should have destroyed Starbuck was never fired. Instead the two Union flags faltered and fell as the overpowered Yankees began to retreat.
Sheer relief made Starbuck’s war cry into a chilling and incoherent screech as he led his men into the clearing. A blue-coated soldier swung a rifle butt at him, but Starbuck easily parried the wild blow and used his own rifle’s stock to hammer the man down to the leaf mould. A rifle shot half deafened him; the Northerner who had fired it was retreating backward and tripped on a fallen branch. Robert Decker jumped on the man, screaming as loudly as his terrified victim. Truslow alone advanced without screaming; instead, he was watching for places where the enemy might recover the initiative. He saw one of the Legion’s new conscripts, Isaiah Clarke, being beaten to the ground by a huge Pennsylvanian. Truslow had his bowie knife drawn. He slashed it twice, then kicked the dying Pennsylvanian so that his body would not fall across Clarke. “Get up, boy,” he told Clarke. “You ain’t hurt bad. Nothing that a swallow of whiskey won’t cure.”
The Pennsylvanians were running now. The stripes of Old Glory had disappeared northward to safety, but the blue eagle flag with its ornate German legend was being carried by a limping sergeant. Starbuck ran for the man, shouting at him to surrender. A Yankee corporal saw Starbuck and leveled a revolver that he had plucked from the body of a fallen rebel officer, but the chambers were not primed, and the revolver just clicked in his hand. The corporal swore in German and tried to duck aside, but Starbuck’s bayonet took him in the belly; then Esau Washbrook’s rifle butt slammed onto his skull and the man went down. A great tide of screaming rebels was coming from the south. The white-haired officer snatched the blue eagle flag from the limping sergeant and swung its staff like a clumsy poleax. The sergeant fell and covered his head with his hands, and the officer, shouting defiance in German, tripped over the man’s prostrate body. The fallen officer fumbled at his waist for a holstered revolver, but Starbuck was astride him now and ramming his bayonet down into the man’s ribs. Starbuck screamed, and his scream, half relief and half visceral, drowned the cry of the dying Pennsylvanian. Starbuck forced the blade down until the steel would go no farther, then rested on the gun’s stock as Truslow pulled the eagle flag away from the hooked, scrabbling, and suddenly enfeebled hands of the dying man whose long white hair was now blood red in the day’s last light.
Starbuck, his instincts as primitive as any savage, took the flag from Truslow and shook it in the air, spraying drops of blood from its fringe. “We did it!” he said to Truslow. “We did it!”
“Just us,” Truslow said meaningfully, turning to where Medlicott was still hidden.
“I’m going to kick the belly out of that bastard,” Starbuck said. He rolled the bloodied flag around its varnished pole. “Coffman!” he shouted, wanting the Lieutenant to take charge of the captured flag. “Coffman! Where the hell are you, Coffman?”
“Here, sir.” The Lieutenant’s voice sounded weakly from behind a fallen tree.
“Oh, Christ!” Starbuck blasphemed. Coffman’s voice had been feeble, like that of a man clinging to consciousness. Starbuck ran over the clearing, jumped the tree, and found the young Lieutenant kneeling wide-eyed and pale-faced, but it was not Coffman who was wounded. Coffman was fine, just shocked. Instead it was Thaddeus Bird, kind Colonel Bird, who lay death white and bleeding beside the fallen trunk.
“Oh, God, Nate, it hurts.” Bird spoke with difficulty. “I came to fetch you home, but they shot me. Took my revolver, too.” He tried to smile. “Wasn’t even loaded, Nate. I keep forgetting to load it.”
“Not you, sir, not you!” Starbuck dropped to his knees, the captured flag and Medlicott’s cowardice both forgotten as his eyes suddenly blurred. “Not you, Pecker, not you!”
Because the best man in the Brigade was down.
All across the field, from the slopes of Cedar Mountain to the ragged corn patches west of the turnpike, the rebels were advancing by the light of a sinking sun that was now a swollen ball of fading red fire suspended in a skein of shifting cannon smoke. A small evening wind had at last sprung up to drift the gunsmoke above the wounded and the dead.
The four guns named Eliza, Louise, Maud, and Anna suddenly found employment again as gray infantry appeared like wolf packs at the timberline. The gunners fired over the heads of their own retreating infantry, lobbing shells that cracked pale smoke against the dark-shadowed woods. “Bring up the limbers! Jump to it!” The Major, who a moment before had been tilting the pages of the battery’s much-thumbed copy of Reveries of a Bachelor to the last rays of sunlight, saw that he would have to move his guns smartly northward if the battery were not to be captured. “Bring my horse!” he shouted.
The four guns went on firing while the teams were fetched. A lieutenant, fresh from West Point, noticed a group of mounted rebel officers at the wood’s margin. “Slew left!” he called, and his team levered with a handspike to turn Eliza’s white-oak trail. “Hold there! Elevate her a turn. Load shell!” The powder bag was thrust down the swabbed-out barrel, and the gunner sergeant rammed a spike down the touchhole to pierce the canvas bag.
“No shell left, sir!” one of the artillerymen called from the pile of ready ammunition.
“Load solid shot. Load anything, but for Christ’s sake, hurry!” The Lieutenant still watched the tempting target.
A round of solid shot was rammed down onto the canvas bag. The Sergeant pushed his friction primer into the touchhole, then stood aside with the lanyard in his hand. “Gun ready,” he shouted.
Eliza’s limber, drawn by six horses, galloped up behind to take the gun away. “Fire!” the Lieutenant shouted.
The Sergeant whipped the lanyard toward him, thus scraping the friction rod across the primer-filled tube. The fire leaped down to the canvas bag, the powder exploded, and the four-and-a-half-inch iron ball screamed away across the smoke-layered field. The gun itself recoiled with the force of a runaway locomotive, jarring backward a full ten paces to mangle the legs of the two leading horses of the limber team. Those lead horses went down, screaming. The other horses reared and kicked in terror. One horse shattered a splinter bar, another broke a leg on the limber, and suddenly the battery’s well-ordered retreat had turned into a horror of screaming, panicked horses.
A gunner tried to cut the unwounded horses free, but could not get close because the injured horses were thrashing in agony. “Shoot them, for Christ’s sake!” the Major shouted from his saddle. A rifle bullet whistled overhead. The rebel yell sounded unearthly in the lurid evening light. The gunner trying to disentangle the horses was kicked in the thigh. He screamed and fell, his leg broken. Then a rebel artillery shell thumped into the dirt a few paces away, and the broken fragments of its casing whistled into the screaming, terror-stricken mass of men and horses. The other three guns had already been attached to their limbers.
“Go!” the Major said, “go, go, go!” and the black-muzzled Louise, Maud, and Anna were dragged quickly away, their crews hanging for dear life to the metal handles of the limbers while the drivers cracked whips over the frightened horses. The gun called Eliza stood smoking and abandoned as a second rebel shell landed plum in the mess of blood, broken harness, and struggling horses. Eliza’s lieutenant vomited at the sudden eruption of blood that gushed outward, then began limping north.
Captain Hetherington led the Reverend Doctor Starbuck past the abandoned gun and the bloody twitching mess that remained of its team. The preacher had lost his top hat and was constantly turning in the saddle to watch the dark gray line of men who advanced beneath their foul banners. One of the advancing rebels was wearing the Bostonian’s top hat, but it was not that insult that caused the preacher to frown but rather the conundrum of why God had allowed this latest defeat. Why was a righteous cause, fought by God’s chosen nation, attended by such constant disaster? Surely, if God favored the United States, then the country must prosper, yet it was palpably not prospering, which could only mean that the country’s cause, however good, was not good enough. The nation’s leaders might be committed to the political cause of preserving the Union, but they were lukewarm about emancipating the slaves, and until that step was taken, God would surely punish the nation. The cause of abolition was thus made more explicit and urgent than ever. Thus reassured about the nobility of his mission, the Reverend Starbuck, his white hair streaming, galloped to safety.
A mile behind the Reverend Elial Starbuck, at the wooded ridge where the North’s attack had surged, crested, and then been repulsed, General Washington Faulconer and his staff sat on their horses and surveyed the battlefield. Two brigades of Yankee infantry were retreating across the wide wheat field, their progress hastened by some newly arrived rebel cannon that fired shell and shot into the hurrying ranks. Only one Northern battery was replying to the gunfire. “No point in making ourselves targets,” Faulconer announced to his aides, then trotted back into the trees to hide from the gunners.
Swynyard alone remained in the open. He was on foot, ready to lead the Brigade’s first line down the long slope. Other rebel troops were already a quarter-mile beyond the woods, but the Faulconer Brigade had started its advance late and had yet to clear the trees. Swynyard saw that Faulconer had disappeared into the trees, so he pulled out his flask of whiskey and tipped it to his mouth. He finished the flask, then turned to shout at the advancing line to hurry up, but just as he turned so a blow like the beat of a might rushing wind bellowed about him. The air was sucked clean from his chest. He tried to call out, but he could not speak, let alone cry. The whiskey was suddenly sour in his throat as his legs gave way. He collapsed a second before something cracked like the awesome clangor of the gates of hell behind him, and then it seemed to Swynyard that a bright light, brighter than a dozen noonday suns, was filling and suffusing and drowning his vision. He lay on his back, unable to move, scarce able to breathe, and the brilliant light flickered around his vision for a few golden seconds before, blessedly, his drink-befuddled brain gave up its attempts to understand what had happened.
He fell into insensibility, and his sword slipped from his nerveless hand. The solid shot that had been fired from the doomed Eliza had missed his skull by inches and cracked into a live oak growing just behind. The tree’s trunk had been riven by the cannonball, splaying outward like a letter Y with its inner faces cut as clean and bright as fresh-minted gold.
The Faulconer Brigade advanced past the prostrate Colonel. No one paused to help him, no one even stooped to see if the Colonel lived or was dead. A few men spat at him, and some would have tried to rifle his pockets, but the officers kept the lines moving, and so the Brigade marched on through the wheat field in laggard pursuit of the retreating enemy.
It was Captain Starbuck and Sergeant Truslow who eventually found Colonel Swynyard. They had carried Colonel Bird to Doctor Danson’s aid post, where they had pretended to believe Doc Billy’s reassurance that the Colonel’s chest wound might not prove fatal. “I’ve seen others live with worse,” Danson said, bending in his blood-stiffened apron over the pale, shallow-breathing Bird. “And Pecker’s a tough old fowl,” Danson insisted, “so he stands a good chance.” For a time Starbuck and Truslow had waited while Danson probed the wound, but then, realizing there was no help they could offer and that waiting only made their suspense worse, they had walked away to follow the footsteps of the advancing Brigade. Thus they came upon the prostrate Swynyard. The sun had gone down, and the whole battlefield was suffused by a pearly evening light dissipated by the smoke that was still sun-tinged on its upper edges. Carrion birds, ragged-winged and stark black, flapped down to the dirt, where they ripped at the dead with sharp-hooked beaks.
“The bastard’s dead,” Truslow said, looking down at Swynyard.
“Or drunk,” Starbuck said. “I think he’s drunk.”
“Someone sure gave the bastard a hell of a good kicking,” Truslow observed, pointing to a bruise that swelled yellow and brown across the side of the Colonel’s skull. “Are you sure he ain’t dead?”
Starbuck crouched. “Bastard’s breathing.”
Truslow stared out across the field, which was pitted with shell craters and littered with the black-humped shapes of the dead. “So what are you going to do with him?” he asked. “The son of a bitch tried to have us all killed,” he added, just in case Starbuck might be moved toward a gesture of mercy.
Starbuck straightened. Swynyard lay helpless, his head back and his beard jutting skyward. The beard was crusted with dried tobacco juice and streams of spittle. The Colonel was breathing slow, a slight rattle sounding in his throat with every indrawn sigh. Starbuck picked up Swynyard’s fallen sword and held its slender tip beneath Swynyard’s beard as though he was about to plunge the steel into the Colonel’s scrawny throat. Swynyard did not stir at the steel’s touch. Starbuck felt the temptation to thrust home; then he flicked the sword blade aside. “He’s not worth killing,” he said, and then he rammed the sword down to skewer a pamphlet that had been blown by the small new wind to lodge against the Colonel’s bruised skull. “Let the bastard suffer his headache,” he said, and the two men walked away.
Back on the turnpike the Federals made one final effort to save the lost day. The retreating infantry were trading volleys with the advancing rebels, who were also under the fire of one last stubborn Yankee artillery battery that had stayed to cover the North’s retreat. Now it seemed that the guns of that last battery must be captured, for the gunners were almost in range of the Southern rifles that threatened to kill the team horses before they could be harnessed to the cannons.
So, to save the guns, the 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry was ordered forward. The men rode fresh corn-fed horses in three lines, fifty troopers to a line. A bugle sounded the advance, and the horses dipped their heads so that their manes tossed in the evening light as the first rank of horsemen trotted out past the guns.
The second line advanced, then the third, each leaving a sufficient space between themselves and the line ahead so that the troopers could swerve around a dead or dying horse. Sabers scraped out of scabbards and glittered in the blood red light of dying day. Some men left their sabers sheathed and carried revolvers instead. A swallow-tailed guidon, blue and white, was carried on a lance head in the front rank.
The cannon were hitched to limbers, and the gunners’ paraphernalia was stowed in boxes or hung from the trail hooks. The gunners hurried, knowing that the cavalry was buying them a few precious moments in which to escape. The cavalry horses were going at a fast trot now, leaving tiny spurts of dust behind their hooves. The three lines stretched onto the fields either side of the turnpike, which here ran between open fields that had been harvested of wheat and corn. Curb chains and scabbard links jingled as the horsemen advanced.
Ahead of the horsemen the Confederate infantry halted. There was a metallic rattle as ramrods thrust bullets hard down onto powder charges. Fingers stained black with gunpowder pushed brass percussion caps onto fire-darkened cones. “Wait till they’re close, boys! Wait! Wait!” an officer shouted.
“Aim for the horses, lads!” a sergeant called.
“Wait!” the officer shouted. Men shuffled into line, and more men ran to join the rebel ranks.
The Northern bugle called again, this time raggedly, and the horses were spurred into a canter. The guidon was lowered so that the lance point was aimed straight at the waiting infantry, who looked like a ragged gray-black line stretched across the turnpike. Fires burned on the far ridge, their smoke rising slow to make grim palls in the darkening sky, where the evening star was already a cold and brilliant point of light above the smoke-clad slopes of Cedar Mountain. A waxing moon, bright and sharp as a blade, rose beyond those smoky southern woods. More infantry hurried toward the turnpike to add their fire to the volley that threatened the approaching horsemen.
The bugle called a last defiant time. “Charge!” an officer shouted, and the troopers screamed their challenge and slashed back their spurs to drive their big horses into a full gallop. They were farm boys, come from the good lands of Pennsylvania. Their ancestors had ridden horses in the wars of old Europe and in the wars to free America, and now their descendants lowered their sabers so that the blade points would rip like spears into the ribcages of the rebel line. The dry fields on either flank of the turnpike shuddered to the thunder of the pounding hooves. “Charge!” the cavalry officer shouted again, drawing out the word like a war cry into the night.
“Fire!” the rebel cry answered.
Five hundred rifles slashed flame in the dusk. Horses screamed, fell, died.
“Reload!”
Ramrods rattled and scraped in hot rifle barrels. Unhorsed men staggered away from the carnage on the turnpike. Not one single trooper in the front rank had stayed in his saddle, and not one horse was still on its legs. The second line had been hit hard, too, but enough men survived to gallop on, mouths open and sabers bright as they galloped toward the remnants of the first rank, where horses screamed, hooves thrashed, and viscous blood sprayed from the twitching, dying beasts. A horseman of the second line leaped a bloody mound of writhing bodies only to be hit by two bullets. The rebels were screaming their own challenge now as they edged forward, loading and firing. An unhorsed cavalryman ran back a few paces, then doubled over to vomit blood. Horses screamed pathetically, their blood trickling in black rivulets to make thick puddles on the dusty road.
The third line checked behind the milling remnants of the second line. Some cavalrymen fired revolvers over the gory barricade, which was all that remained of their leading ranks, but then another volley flamed and smoked from the advancing rebel ranks, and the surviving horsemen pulled their reins hard around and so turned away. Their retreat brought jeers from their enemy. More rifles cracked and more saddles were emptied. A horse limped away, another fell among the wheat stooks, while a third raced riderless toward the west. The surviving troopers galloped north in the wake of the rescued guns that were being whipped back toward Culpeper Court House.
A hundred and sixty-four troopers had charged an army. Seventy returned.
And now, at last, under a warm wind reeking of blood, night fell.
In the fields at the foot of Cedar Mountain the battleground lay dark beneath the banded layers of smoke that shrouded the sky. High clouds had spread to hide the moon, though still a great wash of eyebright stars arced across the northern portion of the sky.
The wounded cried and called for water. Some of the battle’s survivors searched the woods and cornfields for injured men and gave them what help they could while other men looted the dead and robbed the wounded. Raccoons foraged among the bodies, and a skunk, disturbed by a wounded horse blundering through the woods, released its stench to add to the already reeking battlefield.
The new rebel front line was where the Yankees had started the day, while the Yankees themselves had withdrawn northward and made a new defensive line across the road to Culpeper Court House. Messengers brought General Banks news of more Northern troops hurrying south from Manassas in case the rebel attack presaged a full-scale thrust northward. Culpeper Court House must be held, General Pope ordered, though that command did not stop some panicked Yankees loading wagons with plunder taken from abandoned houses and starting northward in case the feared rebel cavalry was already sweeping east and west of the town to cut off General Banks’s army.
Other wagons brought the first wounded from the battlefield. The town’s courthouse, a fine arcaded building with a belfry and steeple, was turned into a hospital, where the surgeons worked all night by the smoky light of candles and oil lamps. They knew the morning light would bring them far more broken bodies, and maybe it would bring vengeful rebels, too. The sound of bone saws rasped in the darkness, where men gasped and sobbed and prayed.
General Banks wrote his dispatch in a commandeered farmhouse that had been looted by Northern soldiers who had taken General Pope’s orders to live off the land as permission to plunder all Southern homes. Banks sat on an empty powder barrel and used two more such barrels as his table. He dipped his steel nib into ink and wrote that he had won a victory. It was not, he allowed privately, the great victory that he had hoped for, but it was a victory nonetheless, and his words described how his small force had faced and fought and checked a mighty rebel thrust northward. Like a good politician he wrote with one eye on history, making of his battle a tale of stubborn defiance fit to stand alongside the Spartans who had defended Greece against the Persian hordes.
Six miles to the south his opponent also claimed victory. The battle had decided nothing, but Jackson had been left master of the field, and so the General knelt in prayer to give thanks to Almighty God for this new evidence of His mercies. When the General’s prayers were finished, he gave curt orders for the morning: The wounded must be collected, the dead buried, and the battleground searched for weapons that would help the Confederate cause. And then, wrapped in a threadbare blanket, Jackson slept on the ground beneath the thinning smoke.
Nervous sentries disturbed the sleep of both armies with sporadic outbreaks of rifle fire, while every now and then an apprehensive Northern gunner sent a shell spinning south toward the smear of fires that marked where the Southerners tried to rest amidst the horrors of a field after battle. Campfires flickered red, dying as the night wore on until at last an uneasy peace fell across the wounded fields.
And in that fretful dark a patrol of soldiers moved quietly.
The patrol was composed of four men, each wearing a white cloth patch embroidered with a red crescent. The patrol’s leader was Captain Moxey, Faulconer’s favorite aide, while the men themselves came from Captain Medlicott’s company, the one most loyal to Faulconer. Medlicott had gladly loaned the three men, though he had not sought the permission of Major Paul Hinton, who had taken command of the Legion from the wounded Thaddeus Bird. Hinton, like Moxey and Medlicott, wore the red crescent badge, but he was so ambivalent about his loyalty that he had deliberately dirtied and frayed his patch until it could hardly be recognized as the Faulconer crest, and had Hinton known of Moxey’s mission, he would undoubtedly have stopped the nonsense before it began.
The four men carried rifles, none of them loaded. The three privates had each been promised a reward of five dollars, in coins rather than bills, if their mission was successful. “You might have to break a few heads,” Faulconer had warned Moxey, “but I don’t want any bloodshed. I don’t want any courts-martial, you understand?”
“Of course, sir.”
Yet, as it turned out, the whole mission was ridiculously easy. The patrol crept through the Legion’s lines well inside the ring of sentries whose job was to look outward, not inward. Moxey led the way between sleeping bodies, skirting the dying fires, going to where Starbuck’s Company H slept beneath the stars. Coming close, and wary lest one of the company’s dogs should wake and start barking, Moxey held up his hand.
The problem that had made this mission necessary had begun earlier in the evening when the men of Faulconer’s Brigade were making what supper they could from the scraps of food they had either plundered or discovered in their knapsacks. Captain Pryor, General Washington Faulconer’s new aide, had come to Starbuck and requested that the captured Pennsylvanian flag be handed over.
“Why?” Starbuck had asked.
“The General wants it,” Pryor answered innocently. Thomas Pryor was far too new to the Brigade to comprehend the full enmity that existed between Starbuck and Faulconer. “I’m to take it to him.”
“You mean Faulconer wants to claim that he captured it?” Starbuck demanded.
Pryor colored at such an ignoble accusation. “I’m sure the General would do no such thing,” he said.
Starbuck laughed at the aide’s naïveté. “Go and tell General Faulconer, with my compliments, that he can come here and ask for the flag himself.”
Pryor had wanted to insist, but he found Nathaniel Starbuck a somewhat daunting figure, even a frightening figure, and so he had carried the unhelpful message back to the General who, surprisingly, showed no indignation at Starbuck’s insolence. Pryor ascribed the General’s reaction to magnanimity, but in truth Washington Faulconer was furious and merely hiding that fury. He wanted the flag, and even felt entitled to the flag, for had it not been captured by men under his command? He thus considered the flag to be his property, and he planned to hang the trophy in the hallway of his house just outside Faulconer Court House, which was why, at quarter past three in the morning, Captain Moxey and three men were poised just outside the area where Starbuck’s men slept.
“There,” one of Moxey’s men whispered and pointed to where Lieutenant Coffman lay curled under a blanket.
“Are you sure he’s got it?” Moxey whispered back.
“Certain.”
“Stay here,” Moxey said, then tiptoed across the dry grass until he reached the sleeping Lieutenant and could see the rolled-up flag lying half concealed beneath Coffman’s blanket. Moxey stooped and put a hand on Coffman’s throat. The grip woke the boy. “One word,” Moxey hissed, “and I’ll cut your damned throat.”
Coffman started up, but was thrust down hard by Moxey’s left hand. Moxey seized the flag in his other hand and started to edge it free. “Keep quiet,” he hissed at Coffman, “or I’ll have your sisters given the pox.”
“Moxey?” Coffman had grown up in the same town as Moxey. “Is that you?”
“Shut up, boy,” Moxey said. The flag was at last free, and he backed away, half regretting his failure to give a sleeping Starbuck a beating, but also relieved that he would not have to risk waking the Northerner. Starbuck had a belligerent reputation, just like his company, which was considered the most reckless in the Legion, but the men of Company H had all slept through Moxey’s raid. “Let’s go!” Moxey told his own men, and so they slipped safely away, the trophy captured.
Coffman shivered in the dark. He wondered if he should wake Starbuck or Truslow, but he was scared. He did not understand why Moxey should need to steal the flag, and he could not bear the thought of having let Starbuck down. It had been Captain Starbuck who had shamed General Washington Faulconer into paying his salary, and Coffman was terrified that Starbuck would now be angry with him, and so he just lay motionless and frightened as he listened to the far-off whimpers and cries that came from the taper-lit tents where the tired doctors sawed at limbs and prised misshapen bullets from bruised and bloodied flesh. Thaddeus Bird was in one of Doctor Danson’s tents, still breathing, but with a face as pale as the canvas under which he slept.
The plight of the men still on the battlefield was far worse. They drifted in and out of their painful sleep, sometimes waking to the voices of other men calling feebly for help or to the sound of wounded horses spending a long night dying. The night’s small wind blew north to where the frightened Yankees waited for another rebel attack. Every now and then a nervous artilleryman fired a shell from the Yankee lines, and the round would thump into the trampled corn and explode. Clods of earth would patter down, and a small thick cloud of bitter smoke would drift north as a chorus of frightened voices momentarily sounded loud before fading again. Here and there a lantern showed where men looked for friends or tried to rescue the wounded, but there were too many men lying in blood and not enough men to help, and so the abandoned men suffered and died in the small wicked hours.
Colonel Griffin Swynyard neither died nor called for help. Instead the Colonel lay sleeping, and in the dawn, when the sun’s first rays lanced over the crest of Cedar Mountain to gild the field where the dead lay rotting and the wounded lay whimpering, he opened his eyes to brightness.
Thirty miles north, where train after train steamed into Manassas Junction to fill the night with the clash of cars, the hiss of valves, and the stench of smoke, Adam Faulconer watched the horses purchased with the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s money come down from the boxcars. The beasts were frightened by the noises and the pungent smells of this strange place, and so they pricked their ears, rolled their eyes white, and whinnied pitifully as they were driven between two lines of men into a makeshift corral formed from empty army wagons. Captain Billy Blythe, who had purchased the horses and shipped them to Manassas, sat long-legged on a wagon driver’s high box and watched to see how Adam liked his animals. “Real special horses, Faulconer,” Blythe called. “Picked ’em myself. I know they don’t look much, but there ain’t nothing wrong that a few days in a feedlot won’t set straight.” Blythe lit a cigar and waited for Adam’s judgment.
Adam hardly dared say a word in case that word provoked a fight with Blythe. The horses were dreadful beasts. Adam had seen better animals penned at slaughter yards.
Tom Huxtable was Adam’s troop sergeant. He came from Louisiana but had chosen to fight for the North rather than strain the loyalty of his New York wife. Huxtable spat in derision of the newly arrived horses. “These ain’t horses, sir,” he said to Adam. “Hell, these ain’t no horses. Broken-down mules is all they is.” He spat again. “Swaybacked, spavined, and wormy. I reckon Blythe just pocketed half the money.”
“You say something, Tom Huxtable?” a grinning Billy Blythe called from his perch.
For answer Sergeant Huxtable just spat again. Adam curbed his own anger as he inspected the twenty frightened horses and tried to find some redeeming feature among them, but in the lanterns’ meager light the animals did indeed look a sorry bunch. They had capped hocks and sloping pasterns, swaybacks and, most troubling of all, too many running noses. A horse with bad lungs was a horse that needed to be butchered, yet these were the horses being given to the men under Adam’s command. Adam cursed himself for not buying the horses himself, but Major Galloway had insisted that Blythe’s experience in horse dealing was one of the regiment’s valuable assets.
“So what do you think, Faulconer?” Blythe asked mockingly.
“What did you pay for them?”
Blythe waved the cigar insouciantly. “I paid plenty, boy, just plenty.”
“Then you were cheated.” Adam could not hide his bitterness.
“There just ain’t that many horses available, boy,” Blythe deliberately taunted Adam with the word “boy” in hopes of provoking a show of temper. Blythe had been content to be Galloway’s second-in-command and saw no need for the Major to have fetched a third officer into the regiment. “The army’s already bought all the decent horses, so we latecomers have to make do with the leavings. Are you telling me you can’t manage with those there horses?”
“I reckon this gray has distemper,” Corporal Kemp said. Harlan Kemp, like Adam, was a Virginian who could not shake his loyalty to the United States. He and his whole family had abandoned their farm to come north.
“Better shoot the beast, then,” Blythe said happily.
“Not with one of your guns,” Adam snapped back. “Not if they’re as good as your horses.”
Blythe laughed, pleased at having goaded the display of temper out of Adam. “I got you some right proper guns, Faulconer. Colt repeaters, brand-new, still in their Connecticut packing cases.” The Colt repeater was little more than a revolver elongated into a long-arm, but its revolving cylinder gave a man the chance to fire six shots in the same time an enemy rifleman needed to fire just one. The weapon was not famed for its accuracy, but Major Galloway reckoned a small group of horsemen needed volume of fire rather than accuracy and claimed that forty horsemen firing six shots were worth over two hundred men with single-shot rifles.
“It ain’t a reliable gun,” Sergeant Huxtable murmured to Adam. “I’ve seen the whole cylinder explode and take off a man’s hand.”
“And it’s too long in the barrel,” Harlan Kemp added. “Real hard to carry on horseback.”
“You spoke, Harlan Kemp?” Blythe challenged.
“I’m saying the Colt ain’t a horse soldier’s weapon,” Kemp responded. “We should have carbines.”
Blythe chuckled. “You’re lucky to have any guns at all. So far as guns and horses go, we’re on the hindmost teat. So you’ll just have to clamp down and suck hard.”
Huxtable ignored Blythe’s crudity. “What do you reckon, sir?” he asked Adam. “These horses can’t be ridden. They ain’t nothing but worm meat.” Adam did not answer, and Tom Huxtable shook his head. “Major Galloway won’t let us ride on nags like these, sir.”
“I guess not,” Adam said. Tonight Major Galloway was fetching orders from General Pope, and those orders were supposed to initiate the first offensive patrols of Galloway’s Horse, but Adam knew he could do nothing on these broken-backed animals.
“So what will we do?” Harlan Kemp asked, and the other men of Adam’s troop gathered round to hear their Captain’s answer.
Adam looked at the sorry, shivering, diseased horses. Their ribs showed and their pelts were mangy. For a moment he felt a temptation to give way to despair, and he wondered why every human endeavor had to be soured by jealousy and spite, but then he glanced up into Billy Blythe’s grinning face, and Adam’s incipient despair was overtaken by a surge of resolution. “We’ll exchange the horses,” Adam told his anxious men. “We’ll take these nags south and we’ll exchange them for the best horses in Virginia. We’ll change them for horses swift as the wind and strong as the hills.” He laughed as he saw the incomprehension on Blythe’s face. Adam would not be beaten, for he knew just where to find those horses, the best horses, and once he had found his horses, he would sow havoc among his enemies. Billy Blythe or no, Adam Faulconer would fight.
SATURDAY MORNING, THE DAY AFTER BATTLE, AGAIN dawned hot and humid. Leaden clouds covered the sky and added to the air’s oppression, which was made even fouler by a miasmic smell that clung to the folds of the battlefield like the morning mist. At first light, when the troops were stirring reluctantly from their makeshift beds, Major Hinton sought out Starbuck. “I’m sorry about last night, Nate,” Hinton said.
Starbuck offered the Legion’s new commanding officer a curt and dismissive judgment of Washington Faulconer’s raid to snatch the captured flag. The Bostonian was stripped to the waist and had his chin and cheeks lathered with shaving soap plundered from a captured artillery limber. Starbuck stropped his razor on his belt, leaned close to his scrap of mirror, then stroked the long blade down his cheek.
“So what will you do?” Hinton asked, plainly nervous that Starbuck would be provoked into some rash act.
“The bastard can keep the rag,” Starbuck said. He had not really known what to do with the captured standard; he had thought that perhaps he might give it to Thaddeus Bird or else send it to Sally Truslow in Richmond. “What I really wanted was the Stars and Stripes,” he confessed to Hinton, “and that eagle flag was only ever second-best, so I reckon that son of a bitch Faulconer can keep it.”
“It was a stupid thing for Moxey to do, all the same,” Hinton said, unable to conceal his relief that Starbuck did not intend to inflate the night’s stupidity into an excuse for revenge. He watched as Starbuck squinted into a broken fragment of shaving mirror. “Why don’t you grow a beard?” he asked.
“Because everyone else does,” Starbuck said, although in truth it was because a girl had once told him he looked better clean-shaven. He scraped at his upper lip. “I’m going to murder goddamn Medlicott.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Slowly. So it hurts.”
Major Hinton sighed. “He panicked, Nate. It can happen to anyone. Next time it might be me.”
“Son of a bitch damn nearly had me killed by panicking.”
Major Hinton picked up the plundered jar of Roussel’s Shaving Cream, fidgeted with its lid, then watched Starbuck clean the razor blade. “For my sake,” he finally pleaded, “will you just forget about it? The boys are unhappy enough because of Pecker and they don’t need their captains fighting among themselves. Please, Nate? For me?”
Starbuck mopped his face clean on a strip of sacking. “Give me a cigar, Paul, and I’ll forget that bald-headed lily-livered gutless shad-belly bastard even exists.”
Hinton surrendered the cigar. “Pecker’s doing well,” he said, his tone brightening as he changed the subject, “or as well as can be expected. Doc Billy even reckons he might survive a wagon ride to the rail depot.” Hinton was deeply worried about replacing the popular Colonel even though he was a popular enough officer himself. He was an easygoing, heavyset man who had been a farmer by trade, a churchman by conviction, and a soldier by accident of history. Hinton had hoped to live out his years in the easy, rich countryside of Faulconer County, enjoying his family, his acres, and his fox-hunting, but the war had threatened Virginia, and so Paul Hinton had shouldered his weapons out of patriotic duty. Yet he did not much enjoy soldiering and reckoned his main duty was to bring safely home as many of the Faulconer Legion as he possibly could, and the men in the Legion recognized that ambition and liked Hinton for it. “We’re to stay where we are today,” Hinton now told Starbuck. “I’ve got to detach a company to collect small arms off the battlefield and another to bring in the wounded. And talking of the wounded,” he added after a second’s hesitation, “did you see Swynyard yesterday? He’s missing.”
Starbuck also hesitated, then told the truth. “Truslow and I saw him last night.” He gestured with the cigar toward the woods where his company had fought against the Pennsylvanians. “He was lying just this side of the trees. Truslow and I didn’t reckon there was anything to be done for him, so we just left him.”
Hinton was shrewd enough to guess that Starbuck had abandoned Swynyard to die. “I’ll send someone to look for him,” he said. “He ought to be given a burial.”
“Why?” Starbuck demanded belligerently.
“To cheer the Brigade up, of course,” Hinton said, then blushed for having uttered such a thing. He turned to look at the great smear of smoke that rose from the Northern cooking fires beyond the woods. “Keep a good eye on the Yankees, Nate. They ain’t beaten yet.”
But the Yankees made little hostile movement that morning. Their pickets probed forward but stopped obediently when the rebel outposts opened fire, and so the two armies settled into an uneasy proximity. Then it began to rain, slowly at first, but with an increasing vehemence after midday. Starbuck’s company made shelters at the edge of the woods with frameworks of branches covered in sod. Then they lay under cover and just watched the gray, rain-lashed landscape.
In midafternoon, when the rain eased to a drizzle, Corporal Waggoner sought Hinton’s permission for a prayer meeting. There had been no chance for such a service since the battle’s ending, and many soldiers in the Legion wanted to give thanks. Hinton gladly gave his permission, and fifty or more Legionnaires gathered beneath some gun-battered cedars. Other men from the Brigade soon joined them, so that by the time the drizzle stopped, there were almost a hundred men sitting beneath the trees and listening as Corporal Waggoner read from the Book of Job. Waggoner’s twin brother had died in the battles on the far side of Richmond, and ever since that death Peter Waggoner had become more and more fatalistic. Starbuck was not sure that Waggoner’s gloomy piety was good for the Legion’s morale, but many of the men seemed to like the Corporal’s spontaneous sessions of prayer and Bible study. Starbuck did not join the circle, but rested nearby, watching northward to where the Yankee defense line showed between the distant woodlands as a newly dug strip of earthworks broken by hastily erected cannon emplacements. Starbuck would have been hard put to admit it, but the familiar sounds of prayer and Bible reading were oddly comforting.
That comfort was broken by a blasphemous oath from Sergeant Truslow. “Christ Almighty!” the Sergeant swore.
“What is it?” Starbuck asked. He had been half dozing but now sat up fully awake. Then he saw what had provoked Truslow to blasphemy. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, and spat.
For Colonel Swynyard was not dead. Indeed, the Colonel hardly appeared to be wounded. His face was bruised, but the bruise was covered and shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat that Swynyard must have plucked from among the battlefield litter, and now the Colonel was walking through the Brigade’s lines with his familiar wolfish smile. “He’s drunk,” Truslow said. “We should have shot the bastard yesterday.”
Peter Waggoner’s voice faltered as the Colonel walked up to the makeshift prayer meeting. Swynyard stopped at the edge of the meeting, saying nothing, just staring at the men with their open Bibles and bare heads, and every single man seemed cowed by the baleful eyes. The Colonel had always been a mocker of these homespun devotions, though until now he had kept his scorn at a distance. Now his malevolence killed the prayerful atmosphere stone dead. Waggoner made one or two brave efforts to keep reading, but then stopped altogether.
“Go on,” Swynyard said in his hoarse voice.
Waggoner closed his Bible instead. Sergeant Phillips, who was one of Major Haxall’s shrinking Arkansas battalion, stood to head off any trouble. “Maybe you’d like to join us at prayer, Colonel?” the Sergeant suggested nervously.
The tic in Swynyard’s cheek twitched as he considered his answer. Sergeant Phillips licked his lips while others of the men closed their eyes in silent prayer. Then, to the amazement of everyone who watched, Colonel Swynyard pulled off his hat and nodded to Phillips. “I would like that, Sergeant, I would indeed.” Sergeant Phillips was so taken aback by the Colonel’s agreement that he said nothing. A murmur went through the Bible study group, but no one spoke aloud. Swynyard, the bruise on his face visible now, was embarrassed by the silence. “If you’ll have me, that is,” he added in an unnaturally humble voice.
“Anyone is welcome,” Sergeant Phillips managed to say. One or two of the officers in the group muttered their agreement, but no one looked happy at welcoming Swynyard. Everyone in the prayer group believed the Colonel was playing a subtle game of mockery, but they did not understand his game, nor did anyone know how to stop it, and so they offered him a reluctant welcome instead.
“Maybe you’ll let me say a word or two?” Swynyard suggested to Phillips, who seemed to have assumed leadership of the prayer meeting. Phillips nodded, and the Colonel fidgeted with the hat in his hands as he looked around the frightened gathering. The Colonel tried to speak, but the words would not come. He cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and tried again. “I have seen the light,” he explained.
Another murmur went through the circle of seated men. “Amen,” Phillips said.
Swynyard twisted the hat in his nervous hands. “I have been a great sinner, Sergeant,” he said, then stopped. He still wore the same hated smile, but some of the men nearer to Swynyard could sense that it was now a smile of embarrassment rather than sarcasm. The same men could even see tears in the Colonel’s eyes.
“Drunk as a bitch on the Fourth of July,” Truslow said in a tone of wonder.
“I’m not sure,” Starbuck said. “I think he might be sober.”
“Then he’s lost his damn wits,” Truslow opined.
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Bernard Cornwell
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The third volume in the Starbuck Chronicles. The battle for control of Richmond, the Confederate capital, continues through the hot summer of 1862.Captain Nate Starbuck, yankee fighting for the Southern cause, has to survive and win with his ragged Company in the bitter struggle not only against the formidable Northern army but equally in opposition to his own superiors who would like nothing better than to see Nate Starbuck dead and dishonoured.Starbuck’s courage is tested to the limit in his desperate manoeuvres to retrieve his own and the Legion’s honour in this the thrid narrative of Bernard Cornwell’s sweeping epic of the American Civil War.