Читать книгу Copperhead - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 10

MAJOR ADAM FAULCONER ARRIVED AT THE FAULCONER Legion a few moments after midday. “There are Yankees on the turnpike. They gave me a chase!” He looked happy, as though the hard riding of the last few minutes had been a cross-country romp rather than a desperate flight from a determined enemy. His horse, a fine roan stallion from the Faulconer Stud, was flecked with white foam, its ears were pricked nervously back, and it kept taking small nervous sidesteps that Adam instinctively corrected. “Uncle!” he greeted Major Bird cheerfully, then turned immediately back to Starbuck. They had been friends for three years, but it had been weeks since they had met, and Adam’s pleasure at their reunion was heartfelt. “You look as if you were fast asleep, Nate.”

“He was at a prayer meeting late last night,” Sergeant Truslow interjected in a voice that was deliberately sour so that no one but he and Starbuck would know he made a joke, “praying till three in the morning.”

“Good for you, Nate,” Adam said warmly, then turned his horse back toward Thaddeus Bird. “Did you hear what I said, Uncle? There are Yankees on the turnpike!”

“We heard they were there,” Bird said casually, as though errant Yankees were as predictable a feature of the fall landscape as migrating wild fowl.

“The wretches fired at me.” Adam sounded astonished that such a discourtesy might occur in wartime. “But we outran them, didn’t we, boy?” He patted the neck of his sweating horse, then swung down from the saddle and tossed the reins to Robert Decker, who was one of Starbuck’s company. “Walk him for a while, will you, Robert?”

“Pleased to, Mr. Adam.”

“And don’t let him drink yet. Not till he’s cooled,” Adam instructed Decker, then he explained to his uncle that he had ridden from Centreville at dawn, expecting to encounter the Legion on the road. “I couldn’t find you, so I just kept going,” Adam said cheerfully. He walked with a very slight limp, the result of a bullet he had taken at the battle at Manassas, but the wound was well-healed and the limp hardly noticeable. Adam, unlike his father, Washington Faulconer, had been in the very thick of the Manassas fight even though, for weeks before, he had been assailed by equivocation about the war’s morality and had even doubted whether he could take part in the hostilities at all. After the battle, while he was convalescing in Richmond, Adam had been promoted to major and given a post on General Joseph Johnston’s staff. The General was one of the many Confederates who was under the misapprehension that Washington Faulconer had helped stem the surprise northern attack at Manassas, and the son’s promotion and staff appointment had been intended as a mark of gratitude to the father.

“You’ve brought us orders?” Bird now asked Adam.

“Just my good self, Uncle. It seemed too perfect a day to be stuck with Johnston’s paperwork, so I came for a ride. Though I hardly expected this.” Adam turned and listened to the sound of rifle fire that came from the far woods. The gunfire was fairly constant now, but it was nothing like the splintering crackle of battle. Instead it was a methodical, workmanlike sound that suggested the two sides were merely trading ammunition because it was expected of them rather than trying to inflict slaughter upon each other. “What’s happening?” Adam demanded.

Major Thaddeus Bird explained that two groups of Yankees had crossed the river. Adam had already encountered one of the invading parties, while the other was up on the high ground by Harrison’s Island. No one was quite sure what the Yankees intended by the double incursion. Early on it had seemed they were trying to capture Leesburg, but a single company of Mississippi men had turned back the Federal advance. “A man called Duff,” Bird told Adam, “stopped the rascals cold. Lined his fellows up in the stark middle of a field and traded them shot for shot, and damn me if they didn’t go scuttling back uphill like a flock of frightened sheep!” The story of Duff’s defiance had spread through Evans’s brigade to fill the men with pride in southern invincibility. The remainder of Duff’s battalion was in place now, keeping the Yankees pinned among the trees at the bluffs summit. “You should tell Johnston about Duff,” Bird told Adam.

But Adam did not seem interested in the Mississippian’s heroism. “And you, Uncle, what are you doing?” he asked instead.

“Waiting for orders, of course. I guess Evans doesn’t know where to send us, so he’s waiting to see which pack of Yankees is the more dangerous. Once that’s determined, we’ll go and knock some heads bloody.”

Adam flinched at his uncle’s tone. Before he had joined the Legion and unexpectedly became its senior officer, Thaddeus Bird had been a schoolmaster who had professed a sardonic mockery of both soldiering and warfare, but one battle and a few months of command had turned Adam’s uncle into an altogether grimmer man. He retained his wit, but now it had a harsher edge, a symptom, Adam thought, of how war changed everything for the worse, though Adam sometimes wondered if he alone was aware of just how the war was coarsening and degrading all it touched. His fellow aides at the army headquarters reveled in the conflict, seeing it as a sporting rivalry that would award victory to the most enthusiastic players. Adam listened to such bombast and held his peace, knowing that any expression of his real views would be met with scorn at best and charges of chickenhearted cowardice at worst. Yet Adam was no coward. He simply believed the war was a tragedy born from pride and stupidity, and so he did his duty, hid his true feelings, and yearned for peace, though how long he could sustain either the pretense or the duplicity, he did not know. “Let’s hope no one’s head needs to be bloodied today,” he told his uncle. “It’s much too fine a day for killing.” He turned as K Company’s cooks lifted a pot off the flames. “Is that dinner?”

The midday dinner was cush: a stew of beef, bacon fat, and cornbread that was accompanied by a mash of boiled apples and potatoes. Food was plentiful here in Loudoun County where the farmland was rich and Confederate troops few. In Centreville and Manassas, Adam said, supplies were much more difficult. “They even ran out of coffee last month! I thought there’d be a mutiny.” He then listened with pretended amusement as Robert Decker and Amos Tunney told of Captain Starbuck’s great coffee raid. They had crossed the river by night and marched five miles through woods and farmland to raid a sutler’s stores on the outskirts of a northern camp. Eight men had gone with Starbuck and eight had come back, and the only northerner to detect them had been the sutler himself, a merchant whose living came from selling luxuries to troops. The sutler, sleeping among his stores, had shouted the alarm and pulled a revolver.

“Poor man,” Adam said.

“Poor man?” Starbuck protested his friend’s display of pity. “He was trying to shoot us!”

“So what did you do?”

“Cut his throat,” Starbuck said. “Didn’t want to alert the camp, you see, by firing a shot.”

Adam shuddered. “You killed a man for some coffee beans?”

“And some whiskey and dried peaches,” Robert Decker put in enthusiastically. “The newspapers over there reckoned it was secesh sympathizers. Bushwhackers, they called us. Bushwhackers! Us!”

“And next day we sold ten pounds of the coffee back to some Yankee pickets across the river!” Amos Tunney added proudly.

Adam smiled thinly, then refused the offer of a mug of coffee, pleading that he preferred plain water. He was sitting on the ground and winced slightly as he shifted his weight onto his wounded leg. He had his father’s broad face, squarecut fair beard, and blue eyes. It was a face, Starbuck had always thought, of uncomplicated honesty, though these days it seemed Adam had lost his old humor and replaced it with a perpetual care for the world’s problems.

After the meal the two friends walked eastward along the edge of the meadow. The Legion’s wood and sod shelters were still in place, looking like grass-covered pigpens. Starbuck, pretending to listen to his friend’s tales of headquarters life, was actually thinking how much he had enjoyed living in his turf-covered shelter. Once abed he felt like a beast in a burrow: safe, hidden, and secret. His old bedroom in Boston with its oak paneling and wide pine boards and gas mantels and solemn bookshelves seemed like a dream now, something from a different life. “It’s odd how I like being uncomfortable,” he said lightly.

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” Adam demanded.

“Sorry, dreaming.”

“I was talking about McClellan,” Adam said. “Everyone agrees he’s a genius. Even Johnston says McClellan was quite the cleverest man in all the old U.S. Army.” Adam spoke enthusiastically, as though McClellan were the new southern commander and not the leader of the north’s Army of the Potomac. Adam glanced to his right, disturbed by a sudden crescendo in the sound of musketry coming from the woods above the distant river. The firing had been desultory in the last hour, but now it rose to a sustained crackle that sounded like dry tinder burning fierce. It raged for a half minute or so, then fell back to a steady and almost monotonous mutter. “They must cross back to Maryland soon!” Adam said angrily, as though he were offended by the stubbornness of the Yankees in staying on this side of the river.

“So tell me more about McClellan,” Starbuck said.

“He’s the coming man,” Adam said in a spirited voice. “It happens in war, you know. The old fellows begin the fight, then they get winnowed out by the young ones with new ideas. They say McClellan’s the new Napoleon, Nate, a stickler for order and discipline!” Adam paused, evidently worried that he maybe sounded too enamored of the enemy’s new general. “Did you really cut a man’s throat for coffee?” he asked awkwardly.

“It wasn’t quite as cold-blooded as Decker makes it sound,” Starbuck said. “I tried to keep the man quiet without hurting him. I didn’t want to kill him.” In truth he had been scared to death of the moment, shaking and panicked, but he had known that the safety of his men had depended on keeping the sutler silent.

Adam grimaced. “I can’t imagine killing a man with a knife.”

“It’s not something I ever imagined myself doing,” Starbuck confessed, “but Truslow made me practice on some ration hogs, and it isn’t as hard as you’d think.”

“Good God,” Adam said faintly. “Hogs?”

“Only young ones,” Starbuck said. “Incredibly hard to kill, even so. Truslow makes it look easy, but then he makes everything look easy.”

Adam pondered the idea of practicing the skills of killing as though they were the rudiments of a trade. It seemed tragic. “Couldn’t you have just stunned the poor man?” He asked.

Starbuck laughed at the question. “I had to make sure of the fellow, didn’t I? Of course I had to! My men’s lives depended on his silence, and you look after your men. That’s the first rule of soldiering.”

“Did Truslow teach you that too?” Adam asked.

“No.” Starbuck sounded surprised at the question. “That’s an obvious rule, isn’t it?”

Adam said nothing. Instead he was thinking, not for the first time, just how unlike each other he and Starbuck were. They had met at Harvard, where they had seemed to recognize in each other the qualities each knew he lacked in himself. Starbuck was impetuous and mercurial, while Adam was thoughtful and painstaking; Starbuck was a slave to his feelings, while Adam tried desperately hard to obey the harsh dictates of a rigorous conscience. Yet out of those dissimilarities had grown a friendship that had endured even the strains that had followed the battle at Manassas. Adam’s father had turned against Starbuck at Manassas, and Starbuck now raised that delicate subject by asking whether Adam thought his father would be given command of a brigade.

“Joe would like him to get a brigade,” Adam said dubiously. “Joe” was Joseph Johnston, the commander of the Confederate armies in Virginia. “But the President doesn’t listen to Joe much.” Adam went on, “He likes Granny Lee’s opinion better.” General Robert Lee had started the war with an inflated reputation, but had earned the nickname “Granny” after an unsuccessful minor campaign in western Virginia.

“And Lee doesn’t want your father promoted?” Starbuck asked.

“So I’m told,” Adam said. “Lee evidently believes Father should go as a commissioner to England”—Adam smiled at the notion—“which Mother thinks is a dandy idea. I think even her illnesses would disappear if she could take tea with the Queen.”

“But your father wants his brigade?”

Adam nodded. “And he wants the Legion back,” he said, knowing exactly why his friend had raised the subject. “And if he gets it, Nate, then he’ll demand your resignation. I guess he’s still convinced you shot Ethan.” Adam was referring to the death of the man who would have married Adam’s sister.

“Ethan was killed by a shell,” Starbuck insisted.

“Father won’t believe that,” Adam said sadly, “and he won’t be persuaded of it either.”

“Then I’d better hope your father goes to England and takes tea with the Queen,” Starbuck said carelessly.

“Because you’re really going to stay with the Legion?” Adam asked, sounding surprised.

“I like it here. They like me.” Starbuck spoke lightly, disguising the fervid nature of his attachment to the Legion.

Adam walked a few paces in silence while the gunfire splintered remote, and distant like a skirmish in someone else’s war. “Your brother,” Adam said suddenly, then paused as though he suspected he was trespassing on a difficult area. “Your brother,” he started again, “is still hoping you’ll go back north.”

“My brother?” Starbuck could not hide his surprise. His elder brother, James, had been captured at Manassas and was now a prisoner in Richmond. Starbuck had sent James gifts of books, but he had not asked for any furlough to visit his brother. He would have found any confrontation with his family too difficult. “You’ve seen him?”

“Only as part of my duties,” Adam said, and explained that one of his responsibilities was to match lists of captured officers who were to be exchanged between the North and the South. “I sometimes visit the prison in Richmond,” Adam went on, “and saw James there last week.”

“How is he?”

“Thin, very pale, but hoping to be released on exchange.”

“Poor James.” Starbuck could not imagine his worried and pedantic brother as a soldier. James was a very good lawyer, but had always hated uncertainty and adventure, which were the very things that compensated for the dangerous discomforts of soldiering.

“He worries about you,” Adam said.

“I worry about him,” Starbuck said lightly, hoping to deflect what he suspected was an imminent sermon from his friend.

“He’ll certainly be pleased to hear you’re attending prayer meetings,” Adam said fervently. “He worries for your faith. Do you go to church every week?”

“Whenever I can,” Starbuck said, then decided this was a subject best changed. “And you?” he asked Adam. “How are you?”

Adam smiled, but did not answer at once. Instead he blushed, then laughed. He was clearly full of some piece of news that he was too embarrassed to tell outright, but nevertheless wanted prised out of him. “I’m really fine,” he said, leaving the opening dangling.

Starbuck caught the inflection exactly. “You’re in love.”

Adam nodded. “I really think I might be, yes.” He sounded surprised at himself. “Yes. Really.”

Adam’s coyness filled Starbuck with affectionate amusement. “You’re getting married?”

“I think so, yes. We think so, indeed, but not yet. We thought we should wait for the war’s end.” Adam still blushed, but suddenly he laughed, hugely pleased with himself, and unbuttoned a tunic pocket as though to take out a picture of his beloved. “You haven’t even asked what her name is.”

“Tell me her name,” Starbuck demanded dutifully, then turned away because the sound of rifle fire had swollen again to a frantic intensity. A slight haze of powder smoke was showing above the trees now, a gauzy flag of battle that would thicken into a dense fog if the guns kept up their present rate of fire.

“She’s called…” Adam began, then checked because hooves thumped loud on the turf behind him.

“Sir! Mr. Starbuck, sir!” a voice hailed, and Starbuck turned to see young Robert Decker galloping across the field on the back of Adam’s stallion. “Sir!” He was waving excitedly to Starbuck. “We’ve got orders, sir! We’ve got orders! We’re to go and fight them, sir!”

“Thank God,” Starbuck said, and started running back to his company.

“Her name’s Julia,” Adam said to no one, frowning at his friend’s back. “Her name’s Julia.”

“Sir?” Robert Decker asked, puzzled. He had slid out of the saddle and now offered the stallion’s reins to Adam.

“Nothing, Robert.” Adam took the reins. “Nothing at all. Go and join the company.” He watched Nate shouting at K Company, seeing the excitement of men stirred from repose by the prospect of killing. Then he buttoned his pocket to secure the leather-cased photograph of his girl before climbing into the saddle and riding to join his father’s Legion. Which was about to fight its second battle.

On the quiet banks of the Potomac.

The two Yankee river crossings were five miles apart and General Nathan Evans had been trying to decide which offered his brigade the greater danger. The crossing to the east had cut the turnpike and so appeared to be the bigger tactical threat because it severed his communications with Johnston’s headquarters at Centreville, but the Yankees were not reinforcing the handful of men and guns they had thrown over the river there, while more and more reports spoke of infantry reinforcements crossing the river at Harrison’s Island and then climbing the precipitous slope to the wooded summit of Ball’s Bluff. It was there, Evans decided, that the enemy was concentrating its threat, and it was there that he now sent the rest of his Mississippians and his two Virginia regiments. He sent the 8th Virginians to the near side of Ball’s Bluff, but ordered Bird to make for the farther western flank. “Go through the town,” Evans told Bird, “and come up on the left of the Mississippi boys. Then get rid of the Yankee bastards.”

“With pleasure, sir.” Bird turned away and shouted his orders. The men’s packs and blanket rolls were to be left with a small baggage guard, while every one else in the Legion was to march west with a rifle, sixty rounds of ammunition, and whatever other weapons they chose to carry. In the summer, when they had first marched to war, the men had been weighed down with knapsacks and haversacks, canteens and cartridge boxes, blankets and groundsheets, bowie knives and revolvers, bayonets and rifles, plus whatever other accoutrements a man’s family might have sent to keep him safe, warm, or dry. Some men had carried buffalo robes, while one or two had even worn metal breastplates designed to protect them from Yankee bullets, but now few men carried anything more than a rifle and bayonet, a canteen, a haversack, and a groundsheet and blanket rolled into a tube that was worn slantwise around their chests. Everything else was just impediment. Most had discarded their pasteboard-stiffened caps, preferring slouch hats that protected the backs of their necks from the sun. Their tall stiff boots had been cut down into shoes, the fine twin rows of brass buttons on their long jackets had been chopped away and used as payment for apple juice or sweet milk from the farms of Loudoun County, while many of the skirts of the long coats had been cut away to provide material to patch breeches or elbows. Back in June, when the Legion had trained at Faulconer Court House, the regiment had looked as smart and well-equipped as any soldiers in the world, but now, after just one battle and three months picket duty along the frontier, they looked like ragamuffins, but they were all far better soldiers. They were lean, tanned, fit, and very dangerous. “They still have their illusions, you see,” Thaddeus Bird explained to his nephew. Adam was riding his fine roan horse while Major Bird, as ever, walked.

“Illusions?”

“We think we’re invincible because we’re young. Not me, you understand, but the boys. I used to make it my business to educate the more stupid fallacies out of youth; now I try to preserve their nonsense.” Bird raised his voice so that the nearest company could hear him. “You’ll live forever, you rogues, as long as you remember one thing! Which is?”

There was a pause, then a handful of men returned a ragged answer. “Aim low.”

“Louder!”

“Aim low!” This time the whole company roared back the answer, then began laughing, and Bird beamed on them like a schoolmaster proud of his pupils’ achievements.

The Legion marched through the dusty main street of Leesburg where one small crowd of men was gathered outside the Loudoun County Court House and another, slightly larger, outside Makepeace’s Tavern across the street. “Give us guns!” one man shouted. It appeared they were the county militia and had neither weapons nor ammunition, though a handful of men, privately equipped, had gone to the battlefield anyway. Some of the men fell in with the Legion, hoping to find a discarded weapon on the field. “What’s happening, Colonel?” they asked Adam, mistaking the scarlet trim and gold stars on his fine uniform as evidence that he commanded the regiment.

“It’s nothing to be excited about,” Adam insisted. “Nothing but a few stray northerners.”

“Making enough noise, ain’t they?” a woman called, and the Yankees were indeed much noisier now that Senator Baker had succeeded in getting his three guns across the river and up the steep, slippery path to the bluffs peak, where the gunners had cleared their weapons’ throats with three blasts of canister that had rattled into the trees to shred the leaves.

Baker, taking command of the battle, had found his troops sadly scattered. The 20th Massachusetts was posted in the woods at the summit while the 15th had pushed across the ragged meadow, through the far woods and into the open slopes overlooking Leesburg. Baker called the 15th back, insisting that they form a battle line on the left of the 20th. “We’ll form up here,” he announced, “while New York and California join us!” He drew his sword and whipped the engraved blade to slash off a nettle’s head. The rebel bullets slashed overhead, occasionally clipping off shreds of leaf that fluttered down in the warm, balmy air. The bullets seemed to whistle in the woods, and somehow that odd noise took away their danger. The Senator, who had fought as a volunteer in the Mexican War, felt no apprehension; indeed he felt the exhilaration of a man touched by the opportunity for greatness. This would be his day! He turned as Colonel Milton Cogswell, commander of the Tammany Regiment, panted up to the bluff’s summit. “‘One blast upon your bugle horn is worth a thousand men!’” Baker greeted the sweating Colonel with a jocular quotation.

“I’ll take the goddamn men, sir, begging your pardon,” Cogswell said sourly, then flinched as a pair of bullets slapped through the leaves above his head. “What are our intentions, sir?”

“Our intentions, Milton? Our intentions are victory, fame, glory, peace, forgiveness of our enemies, reconciliation, magnanimity, prosperity, happiness, and the assured promise of heaven’s reward.”

“Then might I suggest, sir,” Cogswell said, trying to sober the ebullient Senator, “that we advance and occupy that stand of trees?” He gestured at the woods beyond the patch of ragged meadowland. By pulling the 20th Massachusetts out of those woods Baker had effectively yielded the trees to the rebels, and already the first gray-coated infantry were well-established among the undergrowth.

“Those rogues won’t bother us,” Baker said dismissively. “Our artillerymen will soon scour them loose. We’ll only be here a moment or two, just long enough to assemble, and then we’ll advance. On to glory!”

A bullet whipsawed close above both men, causing Cogswell to curse in angry astonishment. His anger arose not from the near miss, but because the shot had come from a high knoll on the eastern end of the bluffs. The knoll was the highest part of the bluff and dominated the trees where the northern troops were gathering. “Aren’t we occupying that height?” Cogswell asked Baker in horror.

“No need! No need! We’ll be advancing soon! On to victory!” Baker strolled away, blithe in his self-assurance. Tucked inside the sweatband of his hat, where he had once stuffed his legal notes before going into court, he had pushed the orders he had received from General Stone. “Colonel,” the order read in a hurried scribble, “in case of heavy firing in front of Harrison’s Island, you will advance the California regiment of your brigade or retire the regiments under Colonels Lee and Devens upon the Virginia side of the river, at your discretion, assuming command on arrival.” All of which, in Baker’s view, meant very little, except that he was in command, the day was sunny, the enemy lay before him, and martial fame was in his grasp. “‘One blast upon your bugle horn,’” the Senator chanted the lines from Sir Walter Scott as he marched through the northern troops gathering under the trees, “‘were worth a thousand men!’ Fire back, lads! Let the rascals know we’re here! Fire away, boys! Give them fire! Let them know the North is here to fight!”

Lieutenant Wendell Holmes took off his gray greatcoat, folded it carefully, then placed it beneath a tree. He drew his revolver, checked that its percussion caps were properly in place over the cones, then fired at the far, shadowy shapes of the rebels. The Senator’s fine voice still echoed through the woods, punctuated by the crack and cough of Holmes’s revolver. “‘Hail to the chief,’” Holmes quietly spoke the line from the same poem Baker was declaiming, “‘who in triumph advances.’”

Senator Baker pulled out an expensive watch that had been a gift from his associates and friends of the California bar on the occasion of his appointment to the U.S. Senate. The day was hurrying by, and if he wanted to capture and consolidate Leesburg before nightfall he would need to hurry. “Forward now!” Baker pushed the watch back into his fob pocket. “All of you! All of you! On, my fine boys, on! On to Richmond! On to glory! All for the union, boys, all for the union!”

The colors were lifted, the glorious Stars and Stripes, and beside them the white silk colors of Massachusetts with the arms of the Commonwealth embroidered on one flank and the motto Fide et Constantia stitched bright on the other. The silk streamed in the sunlight as the men cheered, broke cover, and charged.

To die.

“Fire!” Two whole regiments of Mississippi men were in the trees now, and their rifles whipped flames across the clearing to where the northerners had suddenly appeared. Bullets splintered the locust trees and shredded the bright yellow leaves of the maples. A dozen northerners went down in the volley. One, a man who had never sworn in his life, began cursing. A Boston furniture maker stared astonished at the blood spreading on his uniform, then called for his mother as he tried to crawl back to cover.

“Fire!” Colonel Eps of the 8th Virginia had the high ground that dominated the Yankees’ eastern flank and his riflemen poured a slaughtering fusillade down onto the northerners. So many bullets whined and sang off the bronze barrels of the Yankee howitzers that the gunners fled down the precipice of the bluff to where they were safe from the hornets’ whine and hissing slash of the rebel bullets.

“Fire!” More Mississippians opened fire. They lay flat among the trees, or knelt behind trunks and peered through the powder smoke to see that their volleys had sent the northern attack reeling back. Scattered among the Mississippians were men from Leesburg and from the surrounding farms who fired fowling pieces and shotguns at the faltering Yankees. A New York sergeant cursed at his men in Gaelic, but the curses did no good and a bullet shattered his elbow. The northerners were retreating back into the trees, seeking shelter behind trunks and fallen logs where they reloaded their muskets and rifles. Two of the Massachusetts companies had been recruited from German immigrants, and their officers shouted in that language, exhorting them to show the world how Germans could fight. Other northern officers feigned indifference to the storm of bullets that whipped and hissed across the bluffs crest. They strolled among the trees, knowing that a display of insouciant bravery was the quality necessary for rank. They paid for the display with blood. Many of the men from the 20th Massachusetts had hung their fine new scarlet-lined coats from branches and the garments twitched as the bullets plucked and tore at the rich gray cloth. The sound of the battle was constant now, like calico tearing or a canebreak burning, but under that splintering crackle came the sobbing of wounded men and the screams of hurt men and the rattle of dying men.

Senator Baker shouted at his staff officers to man one of the abandoned howitzers, but none of them knew how to prime a vent and the hail of Virginia bullets drove the officers back into the shadows. They left a major dead and a lieutenant coughing up blood as he staggered back from the gun. A bullet slashed a shard of wood from a howitzer’s wheel spoke, another smacked on the muzzle’s face, and a third punctured the water bucket.

A group of Mississippi men, enraged because their Colonel had been shot, tried to charge across the patch of rough meadowland, but as soon as they showed themselves at the tree line the frustrated northerners poured fire at them. It was the rebels’ turn to pull back, leaving three men dead and two wounded. At the right flank of the Massachusetts line the fourteen-pound cannon was still firing, but the Rhode Island gunners had used up their small stock of canister and now had nothing to fire but solid iron bolts. The canister, tearing itself apart at the cannon’s muzzle to scatter a lethal spray of musket balls into the enemy ranks, was ideal for close-range killing work, but the solid bolts were intended for long-range accurate fire and were no good for scouring infantry out of woodland. The bolts, which were elongated iron cannonballs, screamed across the clearing and either vanished into the distance or else struck slivers of freshly splintered timber from tree trunks. The smoke from the cannon pumped its foul-smelling cloud twenty yards in front of the muzzle, forging a smokescreen that hid the right flank companies of the 20th Massachusetts. “Come on, Harvard!” an officer shouted. At least two-thirds of the regiment’s officers had come from Harvard, as had six of its sergeants and dozens of its men. “Come on, Harvard!” the officer shouted again and he stepped forward to lead his men by example, but a bullet took him under the chin and jerked his head sharply back. Blood misted around his face as he slowly crumpled to the ground.

Wendell Holmes, dry-mouthed, watched the stricken officer kneel and then slump forward. Holmes ran forward to help the man, but two other soldiers were closer and dragged the body back into the trees. The officer was unconscious, his bloodied head twitching, then he made a harsh rattling sound and blood bubbled at his throat. “He’s dead,” one of the men who had pulled the body back to cover said. Holmes stared at the dead man and felt a sour surge of vomit rise in his throat. Somehow he kept the vomit down as he turned away and forced himself to stroll with apparent carelessness among his company. He really wanted to lie down, but he knew he needed to show his men that he was unafraid and so he paced among them, his sword drawn, offering what help he could. “Aim low, now. Aim carefully! Don’t waste your shots. Look for them now!” His men bit cartridges, souring their mouths with the salty taste of the gunpowder. Their faces were blackened with the powder, their eyes red-rimmed. Holmes, pausing in a patch of sunlight, suddenly caught the sound of rebel voices calling the exact same advice. “Aim low!” a Confederate officer called. “Aim for the officers!” Holmes hurried on, resisting the temptation to linger behind the bullet-scarred trunks of the trees.

“Wendell!” Colonel Lee called.

Lieutenant Holmes turned to his commanding officer. “Sir?”

“Look to our right, Wendell! Maybe we can outflank these rogues.” Lee pointed to the woods beyond the field gun. “Find out how far the rebel line extends. Hurry now!”

Holmes, thus given permission to abandon his studied and casual air, ran through the trees toward the open right flank of the northern line. To his right, below him and through the trees, he glimpsed the bright, cool surprise of the river, and the sight of the water was oddly comforting. He passed his gray greatcoat folded so neatly at the foot of a maple tree, ran behind the Rhode Islanders manning their cannon and on toward the flank, and there, just as he emerged from the smoke and could see that the far woods were indeed empty of rebel enemy and thus offered a way for Colonel Lee to hook around the Confederate left flank, a bullet struck his chest.

He shuddered, his whole frame shaken by the bullet’s whipsaw strike. The breath was knocked hard out of him, leaving him momentarily unable to breathe, yet even so he felt oddly cool and detached, so that he was able to register just what he was experiencing. The bullet, he was sure it was a bullet, had struck him with the impact he imagined equal to the kick of a horse. It had left him seemingly paralyzed, but when he tried to take a breath he was pleasantly surprised to discover his lungs were working after all, and he realized it was not true paralysis, but rather an interruption of his mind’s control over physical motion. He also realized that his father, Professor of Medicine at Harvard, would want to know of these perceptions, and so he moved his hand toward the pocket where he kept his memorandum book and pencil, but then, helpless to stop himself, he began to topple forward. He tried to call for assistance, but no sound would come, and then he tried to raise his hands to break his fall, but his arms seemed suddenly enfeebled. His sword, which he had been carrying unsheathed, fell to the ground, and he saw a drop of blood splash on the mirror-bright blade and then he fell full-length across the steel and there was a terrible pain inside his chest so that he cried aloud in pity and agony. He had a vision of his family in Boston and he wanted to weep.

“Lieutenant Holmes is down!” a man shouted.

“Fetch him now! Take him back!” Colonel Lee ordered, then went to see how badly wounded Holmes was. He was delayed a few seconds by the Rhode Island artillerymen who shouted for the infantry to stand clear as they fired. Their cannon crashed back on its trail, jetting smoke and flame far out into the sunlit clearing. Each time the gun fired it recoiled a few feet farther back so that its trail left a crudely plowed furrow in the leaf-covered dirt. The gun’s crew was too busy to haul the weapon forward again and each shot was fired a few feet farther back than the one before.

Colonel Lee reached Holmes just as the Lieutenant was being lifted onto a stretcher. “I’m sorry, sir,” Holmes managed to say.

“Be quiet, Wendell.”

“I’m sorry,” Holmes said again. Lee stopped to retrieve the Lieutenant’s sword and wondered why so many men assumed that being wounded was their own fault.

“You’ve done well, Wendell,” Lee said fervently, then a burst of rebel cheering turned him around to see a rush of new rebel troops arriving in the woods opposite, and he knew he had no chance now of hooking around the enemy’s open flank. Indeed, it looked as if the enemy might hook around his. He swore softly, then laid Holmes’s sword beside the wounded Lieutenant. “Take him down gently,” Lee said, then flinched as a corporal began screaming because a bullet had plowed into his bowels. Another man reeled back with an eye filled with blood, and Lee wondered why in God’s name Baker had not ordered a retreat. It was time to get back across the river before they all died.

On the far side of the clearing the rebels had begun making the demonic sound that northern veterans of Bull Run claimed had presaged the onset of disaster. It was a weird, ulullating, inhuman noise that sent shivers of pure terror up Colonel Lee’s spine. It was a prolonged yelp like a beast’s cry of triumph, and it was the sound, Lee feared, of northern defeat. He shuddered, gripped his sword a little tighter, and went to find the Senator.

The Faulconer Legion climbed the long slope toward battle. It had taken longer than anyone expected to march through the town and find the right track toward the river, and now it was late afternoon and some of the more confident men were complaining that the Yankees would all be dead and looted before the Faulconer Legion could get its share of the spoils, while the timid noted that the battle still crackled on unabated. The Legion was close enough to smell the bitter stench of gunpowder carried on the small north wind that sifted the gunsmoke through the green leaves like a winter fog shifting through branches. At home, Starbuck thought, the leaves would all have changed color, turning the hills around Boston into a glorious surprise of gold, scarlet, flaming yellow, and rich brown, but here, on the northern edge of the southern Confederacy, only the maples had turned gold and the other trees were still heavy with green leaves, though their greenness was being plucked and twitched by the storm of bullets being fired from somewhere deep inside the woods.

The Legion marched across the leprous scatter of scorched stubble that showed where Duff’s company of Pike and Chickasaw County men had fought the advancing Yankees to a standstill. The burning wads of their rifles, coughed out with the bullets, had started the small fires that had burned and died away to leave ashy scars in the field. There were a couple of patches of blood too, but the Legion was too distracted by the fight at the hilltop to worry about those signs of earlier battle.

More detritus of battle showed at the woodland’s edge. A dozen officers’ horses were picketed there, and a score of wounded men were being tended by doctors. A mule loaded with fresh ammunition was led into the trees while another, its panniers empty, was brought out. A slave, come to the battle as his master’s servant, ran uphill with canteens he had refilled at the wellhead in the nearest farm. At least a score of children had come from Leesburg to watch the battle and a Mississippi sergeant was attempting to chase them out of range of the northern bullets. One small boy had fetched his father’s huge shotgun to the field and was pleading to be allowed to kill one Yankee before bedtime. The boy did not even flinch as a fourteen-pound solid bolt streaked out from the trees and slapped close overhead. The shot appeared to fly halfway to the Catoctin Mountain before it fell with a mighty splash into a stream just beyond the Licksville Road. The Legion had now come to within sixty yards of the trees, and those officers who still rode horses dismounted and hammered iron picket pins into the turf while Captain Hinton, the Legion’s second-in-command, ran ahead to establish exactly where the left flank of the Mississippi boys lay.

Most of Starbuck’s men were excited. Their relief at surviving Manassas had turned to boredom in the long weeks guarding the Potomac. Those weeks had hardly seemed like war, but instead had been a summer idyll beside cool water. Every now and then a man on one or other riverbank would take a potshot across the water and for a day or two thereafter the pickets would skulk in the shadows, but mostly the two sides had lived and let live. Men had gone swimming under the gunsights of their enemies, they had washed their clothes and watered their horses, and inevitably they had struck up acquaintances with the other side’s sentries and discovered shallow places where they could meet in midstream to exchange newspapers or swap southern tobacco for northern coffee. Now, though, in their eagerness to prove themselves the best soldiers in all the world, the Legion forgot the summer’s friendliness and swore instead to teach the lying, thieving, bastard Yankees to come across the river without first asking for rebel permission.

Captain Hinton reappeared at the edge of the trees and cupped his hands. “A Company, to me!”

“Form on A Company’s left!” Bird shouted to the rest of the Legion. “Color party to me!”

One of the cannon bolts slashed through the trees, showering the advancing men with leaves and splinters. Starbuck could see where an earlier shot had ripped a branch from a trunk, leaving a shocking scar of fresh clean timber. The sight gave him a sudden catch in the throat, a pulse of fear that was the same as excitement.

“Color party to me!” Bird shouted again and the standard-bearers raised their flags into the sunlight and ran to join the Major. The Legion’s own color was based on the Faulconer family’s coat-of-arms and showed three red crescents on a white silken field above the family motto “Forever Ardent.” The second color was the national flag of the Confederacy, two red horizontal stripes either side of a white stripe, while the upper quadrant next to the staff showed a blue field on which was sewn a circle of seven white stars. After Manassas there had been complaints that the flag was too similar to the northern flag and that troops had fired on friendly units believing them to be Yankees, and rumor had it that a new design was being made in Richmond, but for today the Legion would fight beneath the bullet-torn silk of its old Confederate color.

“Dear sweet Jesus save me, dear sweet Jesus save me,” Joseph May, one of Starbuck’s men, prayed breathlessly as he hurried behind Sergeant Truslow. “Save me, O Lord, save me.”

“Save your breath, May!” Truslow growled.

The Legion had been advancing in columns of companies and now it peeled leftward as it turned itself from a column of march into a line of battle. A Company was first into the trees and Starbuck’s K Company would be the last. Adam Faulconer rode with Starbuck. “Get off that horse, Adam!” Starbuck shouted up to his friend. “You’ll be killed!” He needed to shout for the crackle of musketry was loud, but the sound was filling Starbuck with a curious elation. He knew as well as Adam that war was wrong. It was like sin, it was terrible, but just like sin it had a terrible allure. Survive this, Starbuck felt, and a man could take anything that the world might hurl at him. This was a game of unimaginably high stakes, but also a game where privilege conferred no advantages except the chance to avoid the game altogether, and whoever used privilege to avoid this game was no man at all, but a lickspittle coward. Here, where the air was foul with smoke and death whipped among green leaves, existence was simplified to absurdity. Starbuck whooped suddenly, filled with the sheer joy of the moment. Behind him, their rifles loaded, K Company spread among the green leaves. They heard their Captain’s whoop of joy and they heard the rebel yell sounding from the troops on the right, and so they began to make the same demonic wailing screech that spoke of southern rights and southern pride and southern boys come to make a killing.

“Give them hell, boys!” Bird shouted. “Give them hell!”

And the Legion obeyed.

Baker died.

The Senator had been trying to steady his men whose nerves were being abraded by the whooping, vengeful, southern fiends. Baker had made three attempts to break out of the woods, but each northern advance had been beaten bloodily back to leave another tide mark of dead men on the small meadow that lay like a smoke-palled slaughter field between the two forces. Some of Baker’s men were abandoning the fight; hiding themselves on the steep escarpment that dropped down to the riverbank or sheltering blindly behind tree trunks and outcrops of rock on the bluffs summit. Baker and his aides rousted such timid men out from their refuges and sent them back to where the brave still attempted to keep the rebels at bay, but the timid crept back to their shelters just as soon as the officers were gone.

The Senator was bereft of ideas. All his cleverness, his oratory, and his passion had been condensed into a small tight ball of panic-stricken helplessness. Not that he showed any fear. Instead he strolled with drawn sword in front of his men and called on them to aim low and keep their spirits high. “There are reinforcements coming!” he said to the powder-stained men of the 15th Massachusetts. “Not much longer, boys!” he encouraged his own men of the 1st Californian. “Hot work now, lads, but they’ll tire of it first!” he promised the men of New York Tammanys. “If I had one more regiment like you,” he told the Harvards, “we’d all be feasting in Richmond tonight!”

Colonel Lee tried to persuade the Senator to retreat across the river, but Baker seemed not to hear the request and when Lee shouted it, insisting on being heard, Baker merely offered the Colonel a sad smile. “I’m not sure we have enough boats for a retreat, William. I think we must stand and win here, don’t you?” A bullet spat inches above the Senator’s head, but he did not flinch. “They’re only a pack of rebels. We won’t be beaten by such wretches. The world is watching and we have to show our superiority!”

Which was probably what an ancestor of Baker’s had said at Yorktown, Lee reflected, but wisely did not say aloud. The Senator might have been born in England, but there was no more patriotic American. “You’re sending the wounded off?” Lee asked the Senator instead.

“I’m sure we are!” Baker said firmly, though he was sure of no such thing, but he could not worry about the wounded now. Instead he needed to fill his men with a righteous fervor for the beloved union. An aide brought him news that the 19th Massachusetts had arrived on the river’s far bank and he was thinking that if he could just bring that fresh regiment across the Potomac he would have enough men to throw an attack against the knoll from which the rebels were decimating his left flank and preventing his howitzers from doing their slaughtering work. The idea gave the Senator instant hope and fresh enthusiasm. “That’s what we’ll do!” he shouted to one of his aides.

“We’ll do what, sir?”

“Come on! We have work!” The Senator needed to get back to his left flank and the quickest route lay in the open where the gunsmoke offered a fogbank in which to hide. “Come on,” he shouted again, then hurried down the front of his line, calling to the riflemen to hold their fire until he had passed. “We’re being reinforced, boys,” he shouted. “Not long now! Victory’s coming. Hold on there, hold on!”

A group of rebels saw the Senator and his aides hurrying in the shifting smoke, and though they did not know Baker was the northern commander, they knew that only a senior officer would carry a tasseled sword and wear a uniform so tricked out with braid and glitter. A gold watch chain hung with seals was looped on the Senator’s coat and caught the slanting sun. “There’s their gang boss! Gang boss!” a tall, stringy, redheaded Mississippian called aloud, pointing to the striding figure who marched so confidently across the battle’s front. “He’s mine!” the big man shouted as he ran forward. A dozen of his companions scrambled after him in their eagerness to plunder the bodies of the rich northern officers.

“Sir!” one of Baker’s aides called in warning.

The Senator turned, raising his sword. He should have retreated into the trees, but he had not crossed a river to flee a rabble of seceshers. “Come on then, you damn rebel!” he shouted, and he held the sword out as though ready to fight a duel.

But the red-haired man used a revolver and his four bullets thudded into the Senator’s chest like axe blows hitting softwood. The Senator was thrown back, coughing and grasping at his chest. His sword and hat fell as he tried to stay on his feet. Another bullet ripped his throat open and blood spilt in a scarlet wash down the brass-buttoned tunic of his double-breasted coat and clogged in the links of the gold watch chain. Baker was trying to breathe and was shaking his head as though he could not believe what was happening to him. He looked up at the lanky killer with a puzzled expression, then collapsed onto the grass. The red-haired rebel ran to claim his body.

A rifle shot spun the red-haired man around, then another bullet put him down. A volley drove the other Mississippians back as two of the Senator’s aides dragged their dead master back into the trees. One of the men retrieved the Senator’s hat and took out the sweaty, folded message that had launched this madness across a river.

The sun was low in the west. The leaves might not have turned, but the nights were drawing on and the sun would be quite gone by half past five, but darkness could not save the Yankees now. They needed boats, but there were only five small craft, and some of the wounded had already drowned as they tried to swim back to Harrison’s Island. More wounded were climbing clumsily down the bluff to where the northern casualties already filled the small area of flat-land that lay between the base of the steep hill and the riverbank. Two aides carried the Senator’s body through the press of moaning men to one of the boats and ordered a space cleared for the corpse. The Senator’s expensive watch fell from his pocket as his carcass was manhandled down the bank. The watch swung on its bloody chain, first dragging in the mud, then striking hard against the boat’s timbers. The blow broke the watch’s crystal and scattered small sharp scraps of glass into the bilges. The Senator’s bloody corpse was rolled on top of the glass. “Take him back!” an aide ordered.

“We’re all going to die!” a man screamed on the hilltop, and a Massachusetts sergeant told him to shut his damn noise and die like a man. A group of rebels tried to cross the clearing and were hurled back by a crescendo of musket fire that twisted them around and plucked scraps of wood from the trees behind them. A Massachusetts color bearer was hit and his great, beautiful, bullet-beaten silk flag fluttered down toward the dirt, but another man seized its tasseled fringe and lifted the stars back toward the sun before the stripes had touched the ground.

“What we’ll do,” said Colonel Cogswell, who had finally established that he was the senior officer alive and thus had command of the four Yankee regiments stranded on the Virginia shore, “is fight our way downstream to the ferry.” He wanted to take his men out of the murderous shadows and into the open fields where their enemies would no longer be able to hide behind trees. “We’ll march fast. It means we’ll have to abandon the guns and the wounded.”

No one liked that decision, but no one had a better idea, and so the order was relayed back to the 20th Massachusetts, who lay at the right-hand flank of the Yankee line. The fourteen-pounder James rifle would have to be abandoned anyway for it had recoiled so far that at last it had toppled back over the bluff. As it had fired its final shot a gunner had shouted in alarm, then the whole heavy cannon had tilted over the escarpment’s crest and crashed sickeningly down the steep slope until it smashed against a tree. Now the gunners gave up their attempts to haul the gun back to the crest and listened instead as Colonel Lee explained to his officers what the regiment was about to do. They were to leave their wounded to the mercy of the rebels and gather at the left-hand flank of the northern line. There they would make a mass charge through the rebel forces and so down to the water meadows which led to where the second Yankee force had crossed the river to cut the turnpike. That second force was covered by artillery on the Maryland bank of the river. “We can’t cross back into Maryland here,” Lee told his officers, “because we don’t have enough boats, so we’ll have to march the five miles downstream and fight the rebels off all the way.” He looked at his watch. “We’ll move in five minutes.”

Lee knew it would take that long for the orders to reach all his companies and for the casualties to be gathered under a flag of truce. He hated leaving his wounded, but he knew none of his regiment would reach Maryland this night if he did not abandon the casualties. “Hurry now,” he told his officers and tried to sound confident, but the strain was telling now and his sanguine appearance was fraying under the constant whip and whistle of the rebel bullets. “Hurry now!” he called again, then he heard a terrible screaming noise from his open right flank and he turned, alarmed, and suddenly knew that no amount of hurrying could help him now.

It seemed the Harvards would have to fight where they were. Lee drew his sword, licked dry lips, then committed his soul to God and his beloved regiment to its desperate end.