Читать книгу Pale Blue Light - Skip Tucker - Страница 13

“It is a feint,” said the professor yet again. “There,” he said urgently, “is the real attack.” Through his telescope lens, at the top of his field of vision, Canon saw a mass of blue troops burst from the woods toward the left flank of the gray line.

“The flank will never hold,” said the professor, reining his little sorrel away and spurring back toward the line of woods. With mounting fear, then horror, Canon saw the Confederate left flank stand, waver, then break before the onrushing Union troops.

Canon knew enough military strategy and tactics to know the Union was “rolling up” the Confederate line. It was disaster. If the attack continued unchecked, the Northern newspapers would be proved right. The war would likely be over this day, the South defeated.

For weeks, since the Confederate Army occupied this land near a vital Northern railroad link, both President Lincoln and the Northern press had called for action. Pro-Union editorial writers promised the rag-tag Southern army would melt under Union attack like ice melts under a summer sun. It became clear that a battle loomed. When commanding Union general Irwin McDowell finally marched to the attack, there was little secrecy involved.

McDowell left Washington with bands playing and forty-two thousand Union soldiers under his command. He knew that twenty-eight thousand Southern troops, under feisty General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, were entrenched behind a little creek called Bull Run. Facing an entrenched army, McDowell counted on superior numbers to overcome the Rebel tactical advantage.

But it took the untrained Union Army four days to march the fifty miles from Washington. McDowell fumed as the blue column straggled and stretched out along the way. Union commanders cursed as raw recruits fell out of formation to pick blackberries and search for water. When he finally reached Bull Run, McDowell had to delay another precious day to get his army together.

Those few days provided time enough for word to reach Richmond that Beauregard was badly outnumbered. And for Confederate general Joe Johnston, who was guarding an important gap with ten thousand men, to reach and reinforce Beauregard. The gap became unimportant now that the Confederacy knew where the main attack was to be launched.

But the reinforcements were of little use in the face of McDowell’s successful maneuver. When a forest fire rages out of control, it does not matter how many trees are to burn. And the Union attack was raging out of Confederate control.

Canon swung Scratch around and rode after the professor. Hammer was Canon’s traveling horse, the black Arabian his war horse. Robert E. Lee had attached the Black Horse to the professor’s Virginia brigade that morning, following the skirmish. With the professor directing artillery fire from the hill, and Canon assigned to a scouting role, it appeared that any real action would bypass them. When he reached the woodsline, Canon found the professor calling together the Virginians and the dismounted Black Horse. The professor’s pale blue eyes were strikingly vivid. His jaw was set as he paced through the Virginia troops, rallying men who had yet to see a shot fired in anger.

At the crest of the hill, Confederate soldiers were falling back as their comrades wilted before the growing Union momentum. Scarcely three hours had passed since the Union flank attack began, but an increasing stream of gray clad men flowed up the hill.

General Bernard Bee of South Carolina, who had been placed in charge of Alabama troops, had seen his men fight bravely for a while and then join the retreat. It was turning into a rout.

So convinced was Irwin McDowell that he had won a great victory, if not the war, he had already telegraphed Lincoln that the day was his.

General Bee, too, saw defeat looming. Riding up to the professor, Bee said, “I am afraid they are beating us back.”

“Then, sir,” replied the aroused professor, “we will give them the bayonet.”

Turning to the Virginians, the professor cried in a shrill voice, “Men of Virginia, the South is losing the war right here, right now. It is up to us, and only us, to act. If you love your home and your land, you must decide right here, right now that you will die for them. But not until you kill the enemy. If you are willing, we will hold this hill for the South until we lie dead on it, or have whipped the enemy.”

With a shout, the Virginians rose and fixed bayonets. Just over the rise, Rebel soldiers were running toward them. Some stopped to fire, but many had thrown down their guns and were fleeing fast as they could fly. Then the blue wave topped the hill, sweeping all before it. General Bee rode back and forth among the retreating Rebels, trying to regroup them.

Canon saw the professor draw his sword. “For Virginia and the South,” yelled the professor, and he pointed his sword for the charge.

Canon, now on foot, called for the dismounted Black Horse and they grouped to him. Canon knew there was no time to waste on preliminaries. With a wild scream he scarce identified as his own, Canon took his men into battle.

The charging blue line smashed into the Virginians. Each side reeled from the shock, then closed once more. Fighting was hand-to-hand. Inexorably, the victorious Union troops pressed harder. But they had fought uphill for more than a mile. Many were exhausted. Some were discouraged at running into more fresh troops.

The Northern charge slowed, stopped as men in blue and gray were engulfed in wild melee. Horses and men screamed in anger, fear and pain. Smoke and the crackle of musket fire filled the air.

Confederate units to each side of the Virginians continued to fall back past them, but more slowly. Bee, still trying to stop the retreat, saw the Virginians hold their ground. He saw the professor, atop Little Sorrel, hold the horse steady as the battle surged around him.

Pointing at him, Bee shouted, “See! There is Jackson, standing like a stone wall. Rally, men! Rally to the Virginians.”

Bee, having bestowed one of the great noms de guerre in military history, took a mortal wound moments later. But the backbone had been removed from the Union attack. Having stalled, it wavered and wavering, broke.

Two Union batteries had gained the hill and began pouring a deadly fire into the Confederate position. But after firing only a couple of rounds, the guns fell suddenly quiet. Then they reopened fire, but this time the heavy shot slashed into Union troops, already beginning to fall back. When the grape shot ripped into them, the blue troops turned to run.

A mounted Union lieutenant who had taken part in the charge up the hill rode furiously to the gun emplacement. “You fools,” he yelled as he dismounted and grabbed the extraordinarily tall gunner, “this is a Union cannon and those are Union troops you’re firing into.”

“Actually,” replied Canon with a grim smile, “I’m a Confederate Canon.” He pulled back the blue coat he had taken from a captured Yankee to reveal his own gray uniform underneath. Then Canon produced quite the largest pistol the lieutenant was sure he had ever seen. When the lieutenant was directed to sit, he complied.

“These boys,” Canon pointed to a half-dozen similarly blue coated members of the Black Horse, “tried to tell me that anything that has a mouth big as the one on this gun had to be Yankee.”

Then he pointed to a stack of cannonballs. “But I convinced them that anything with balls this big needed to be Confederate.”

Canon had been fighting near Jackson when he saw the two Union batteries rolling into place. As the Union attack crumpled against the Virginians, the lead Northern units surrendered. Canon stripped a few Yankees of their coats and, gathering several of his men, took them through the woods as they donned the blue coats.

Emerging from the woods no more than fifty yards from the big guns, they looked like reinforcing infantry to the Yankee gunners. The Yankee gun crew was happy to see them until a volley from the disguised Rebels drove them away.

The crumpling Union charge collapsed in the face of point blank artillery fire from Canon’s men. Blue troops getting ready to charge the hill looked up in surprise to see their comrades suddenly run back toward them.

At the worst possible moment for the Union and the best possible for the Confederacy, some of Joe Johnston’s fresh Rebel troops arrived on top of the hill after a march through the woods. With a yell, they joined in the assault on the reeling Yankees.

McDowell saw the fortunes of war undergo a sudden change. He felt dismay but was far from disheartened. He had still won a great victory. All he had to do was reorganize his disordered troops, halt the retreat, reform his lines. He would fight again tomorrow.

This plan would have worked had not so many Washington civilians believed the opinion of the Northern press that the battle would be a quick and decisive rout of the Southern troops by the Union. Much of the pro-Northern gentry in Washington turned out for the battle as if it were an attraction staged for their benefit. It was a soft July Sunday. And soft July Sundays were days for picnics and rides through the country in fancy carriages.

They turned out to witness the battle. They were dressed in finery, in fine carriages, with picnic baskets and bottles of champagne.

Canon had seen through his field glasses the festive way with which the onlookers viewed the battle. He realized these feckless fools had little idea of the horrors they witnessed with aplomb from afar. They saw men jump and fall as bullets struck, and lie where they had fallen, but the watchers could not smell the gore or the foul odors from dying men. They could not hear the groans. The watchers thought it clean and amusing. Canon thought them ghouls, as they enjoyed delicacies and sweetmeats while good men on each side lay screaming out their dying breaths on the horrible field.

As the tide of battle turned, Canon sent word to Jackson—replacement crews were needed for the captured Yankee artillery. The Black Horse would be ready when called for. As he and his men stripped off the borrowed blue coats, he sent word for the horses to be brought up and for the bugler to blow the signal for the cavalry to mount.

Canon knew what Jackson would want, that being what Napoleon would have wanted. The professor carried a volume of Napoleon’s maxims in his saddlebags, and one maxim to which Jackson strongly adhered was that cavalry should always be sent to scourge a fleeing enemy.

The horses were standing by and the brigade bugler was blowing cavalry call when Jackson rode up to the gun emplacement. His left hand was loosely wrapped with a bloody handkerchief. A bullet had clipped the top off his left index finger. It was on the hand Jackson habitually held high to “help keep his body in better balance.” Neither man mentioned the wound.

“My compliments, Captain,” said Jackson in the ritual military manner of greeting on the field. “Are you ready to ride?”

“On your order, sir,” replied Canon.

“They have hit us their best blow, I believe,” said Jackson, “and we have withstood it. Now it is our turn. Ride after them, chase them back to Washington.”

“It will be my pleasure.”

Calling his leaders around him, Canon said, “Pass the word. We will pursue the enemy, paroling those who surrender, shooting those who do not. We may encounter unarmed citizens along the way. We are not here to make war on civilians. Do not harm them. But if the opportunity presents itself, you have permission to scare the hell out of them.”

Swinging into the saddle, Canon looked over to the artillery crew which had taken over the captured Yankee gun emplacement. “Corporal,” he called to a baby-faced teenager who proudly carried two chevrons on his sleeve, “try to put a shell on that stone bridge for me.” The young man saluted as he nodded, then turned back to the gun. Canon rode to the front of his troop, drew his saber, and turned to the bugler. “Sound the charge,” he called.

At the bridge, civilian party-goers began to notice more and more Union soldiers stream past on their way to the rear. Many picnickers still lolled about, unaware of any change in fortune, but the more perceptive realized something had gone horribly wrong. Among these, thoughts of holiday vanished like wisps of battlesmoke.

Thrumming conversation lessened, palled. Gaily bedecked bonnets, which had been nodding in time with animated discourse, turned south and grew still. Some spectators had field glasses. One man in a carriage, wearing a black stovepipe hat after the fashion of Mr. Lincoln, suddenly leaned forward, peering intently through his lens.

“My God,” he muttered to himself, “it is the Black Horse.”

Practically all the spectators had read highly fictionalized accounts in the Northern press of depredations and cruelty by the now infamous southern Black Horse cavalry. They believed every word. Another man, standing near the first, overheard.

“The Black Horse? Where?” he said, and brought his own glass to his eye. Then, “My God.”

Canon, swinging Old Scratch down the steep hill, deplored coquetry and false modesty with equal intensity. He would have been gratified by the honesty of the first man’s lady friend.

Fairly ripping the field glasses from his eyes, she said, “Get me the hell out of here, right this damned second,” and essayed a quick glance through the glass as she climbed in the carriage.

It was nearing three P.M. when McDowell gave the general order to retire from the field. His young soldiers were falling back in disarray, but a semblance of order remained. There was confusion and dismay, but no panic. Retreating men were crossing Stone Bridge with purpose but without flight.

As word swept through the Union forces that the dread Black Horse was coming, the retreat became boisterous and unruly. Yankee soldiers, too, had believed the Northern press.

Then the young gunner to whom Canon had spoken loosed the finest artillery shot of the day. Stone Bridge over Cub Run represented the only quick, convenient and dry method of crossing the stream. The corporal’s third round exploded in the middle of the bridge, killing several horses and overturning a huge supply wagon. It blocked the way just when an open way was what the retreating army needed most.

Consternation grew as soldiers and civilians tried to force their way through. Then someone looked back and screamed. An account of the battle read: “In the midst of the turmoil, there were shouts that the dreaded Confederate ‘Black Horse Cavalry’ was riding down on the mob. Newspapers and magazines had carried many stories about the horsemen, and now their name was enough to stir up fear. The raw recruits, who had fought so well, dropped their guns and ran. The army fell apart.”

Those who witnessed the charge of the Black Horse did not wonder that the army fell apart. For those who had read the inflammatory stories, seeing the charge thundering down on them must have seemed something from their worst nightmare.

Through clearing coils and ropes of black gunpowder smoke, three hundred glossy steeds of the same intense hue came galloping. They moved as one, veering left or right like an ebony arrow. At the forefront rode a huge figure wielding a sword as long as a small man’s body. Soldiers and civilians abandoned the bridge and dove into the water.

Though cleared of people, the bridge was still blocked by the overturned wagon. Without hesitation, Canon took Scratch onto the bridge and effortlessly over the wagon. The Black Horse followed without question or pause.

Those who witnessed it remembered it as one of the most spectacular sights of the Civil War. All three hundred horses cleared the wagon, often three abreast. Men who thought themselves safe on the other side of the bridge were stunned by the display. As these men watched the black horses fly over the wagon, they felt panic descending on them. In mindless terror, soldiers ripped the reins of horses and carriages from their civilian owners. Rushing pell-mell down the road to Washington, they scattered and dismayed other soldiers, still marching in good order, with shouts for them to run for their lives.

It had taken McDowell’s army four days to make the fifty miles from Washington. It made the return trip in forty-eight hours.

Night had fallen by the time Canon returned to Jackson’s field headquarters on Henry House Hill. Approaching darkness and the delaying necessity of rounding up prisoners had finally ended the Black Horse pursuit.

Canon found the South’s new hero in a humor black as the moonless night. “I fear that our army is making a terrible mistake,” Jackson said. Although Jackson maintained a controlled tone, Canon could see how affected he was. Eyes glittering, voice straining with emotion, Jackson continued, “General Beauregard has convinced General Lee and President Davis that our army is too tired and scattered to march on to Washington tonight. “If it were up to me, I would take the city before daylight if it killed me and half our army, but I cannot convince them.”

Canon knew the words passing between them were from friend to friend and that Jackson would never refer to the matter again. Even now, the man’s tone was one of disconsolation and disappointment, not bitterness.

They talked until midnight about the events of the day. Jackson was proud of the way his Virginians had stopped the brunt of the Union attack, but he doubted his brigade would receive the credit it was due. As the evening waned, Canon began to believe that in this, Jackson was mistaken. For, as the victorious Rebels celebrated around the camp, Canon began to hear a chant that would sweep the South.

“Stonewall . . . Stonewall . . . Stonewall!”

When Canon finally left to seek his own tent, Jackson had reconciled his mind to the failure to follow-up the day’s victory.

“Perhaps it will serve to bring the leaders of the Union to listen to reason,” he said. But he added, “I wish I could believe it.”

Many times Canon would think back on that humid July night when the Confederate Army stood at the door of unprotected Washington. But he never heard Jackson mention it again.

The battle of Bull Run/Manassas became little more than a skirmish in retrospect. A total of seventy thousand men had fought for a day; each side lost about two thousand men. Coming battles would see armies of fifty to seventy-five thousand on each side battle for days. Casualties in these conflicts would often reach twenty percent of each army.

After the first battle, many Southerners thought the war was finished and simply left for home without word to anyone. The Union rallied like an eagle whose young are threatened. Washington became a fortress. Mountains of food and material began to rise in warehouses. A call for volunteers went out. Within two months of Bull Run, Union muster lists swelled to one hundred and sixty-eight thousand names.

Out of crisis, the real American Army was born.