Читать книгу Battle Flag - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 11

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.