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“Captain?” Faulconer acknowledged.
“General Jackson’s orders were explicit, sir. We should advance quick, sir, with whatever units are available. Into the trees, sir.” Pryor gestured nervously toward the woods.
But Faulconer had no wish to advance quick. The woods seemed to be alive with smoke and flame, almost as though the earth itself was heaving in the throes of some mythic struggle. Rifle fire cracked, men screamed, and cannons pumped their percussive explosions through the humid air, and Faulconer had no desire to plunge into that maelstrom. He wanted order and sense, and a measure of safety. “General Jackson,” he told Pryor, “is panicking. We serve no purpose by committing ourselves piecemeal. We shall advance in good order or not at all.” He turned away from the battle and rode back to where his second line would be formed. That reserve line consisted of the six remaining companies of the Legion and the whole of the 13th Florida, two regiments that Faulconer had every intention of holding back until his first line was fully committed to the fight. Only if the first line broke and ran would the second line fight, and then merely to serve as a rear guard for the fugitive first line. Washington Faulconer told himself he was being prudent, and that such prudence might well save a defeat from being a rout.
He wondered where Starbuck was and felt the familiar flare of hatred. Faulconer blamed Starbuck for all his ills. It was Starbuck who had humiliated him at Manassas, Starbuck who had suborned Adam, and Starbuck who had defied him by remaining in the Legion. Faulconer was convinced that if he could just rid himself of Starbuck, then he could make the Brigade into the most efficient unit of the Confederate army, which was why he had ordered Swynyard to place a company of skirmishers far ahead of the Brigade’s position. He had trusted Swynyard to know precisely which company of skirmishers was to be thus sacrificed, but he had hardly expected the drunken fool to throw away both companies. Yet even that loss might be worthwhile, Faulconer reflected, if Starbuck was among the casualties.
On Faulconer’s left a column of rebel troops advanced at the double, while another, marching just as quickly, headed for the woods to the right of his Brigade. Reinforcements were clearly reaching the fighting, which meant, Faulconer decided, that he had no need to hurl his own men forward in a desperate panic. Slow and steady would win this fight, and that natural caution was reinforced by the sight of a riderless horse, its flank a sheet of crimson, limping southward down the turnpike with its reins trailing in the dust and its stirrups dripping with blood.
The Faulconer Brigade laboriously formed its new battle lines. In the first rank were the 65th Virginia, Haxall’s men from Arkansas, and the 12th Florida. The three regiments raised their dusty flags, the banners’ bright colors already faded from too much sun and shredded by too many bullets. The standards hung limp in the windless air. Colonel Swynyard gave his horse to one of his two cowed slaves, then took his place at the center of the forward line, where lust at last overcame caution and made him take a flask from a pouch on his belt. “I see our gallant Colonel is inoculating himself against the risks of battle,” General Faulconer remarked sardonically to Captain Pryor.
“By drinking water, sir?” Pryor asked in puzzlement. Thomas Pryor was new to the Brigade. He was the younger son of a Richmond banker who did much business with Washington Faulconer, and the banker had pleaded with Faulconer to take on his son. “Thomas is a good-natured fellow,” the banker had written, “too good, probably, so maybe a season of war will teach him that mankind is not inherently honest?”
A second’s silence greeted Pryor’s naive assumption that Swynyard was drinking water, then a gale of laughter swept the Brigade headquarters. “Swynyard’s water,” Faulconer informed Pryor, “is the kind that provides the Dutch with courage, puts men to sleep, and wakes them sore-headed.” The General smiled at his own wit, then turned indignantly as a mounted man galloped toward him from the turnpike.
“You’re to advance, sir!” the officer shouted. The man had a drawn sword in his right hand.
Faulconer did not move. Instead he waited as the officer curbed his horse. The beast tossed its head and stamped nervously. It was flecked with sweat and rolling its eyes white. “You have orders for me?” Faulconer asked the excited officer.
“From General Jackson, sir. You’re to advance with the other brigades, sir.” The aide gestured toward the woods, but Faulconer still made no move other than to hold out a hand. The aide gaped at him. No one else on this field had demanded written orders, for surely no one could doubt the urgency of the cause. If the Yankees won here, then there was nothing to stop them crossing the Rapidan and breaking Richmond’s rail links with the Shenandoah Valley, and nothing, indeed, to stop them advancing on the rebel capital. This was not a time for written orders but for Southern men to fight like heroes to protect their country. “General Jackson’s compliments, sir,” the aide said in a tone that barely managed to stay on the civil side of insolence, “and his regrets that he has no time to put his orders into writing, but he would be most obliged if you were to advance your Brigade into the trees and help dislodge the enemy.”
Faulconer looked at the woods. Fugitives still emerged from the shadows, but most were now men wounded by the fighting rather than frightened men seeking safety. Nearer to the Brigade two small guns were being unlimbered by the road, but the cannons looked a pitiable force to withstand the noisy Northern onslaught that churned among the shadowed woods. Those shadows were long, cast by a sun that reddened in the west. Flames started by shell fire flickered deep among the trees where rifles snapped angrily. “Am I to tell General Jackson that you won’t advance, sir?” the mounted officer asked in a voice cracked with near despair. He had not given his name nor announced his authority, but the urgency in his tone and the drawn sword in his hand were all the authority he needed.
Faulconer drew his sword. He did not want to advance, but he knew there was no choice now. Reputation and honor depended on going into the awful woods. “Colonel Swynyard!” he called, and the words were hardly more than a croak. “Colonel!” he shouted again, louder this time.
“Sir!” Swynyard pushed the flask of whiskey back into his pouch.
“Advance the Brigade!” Faulconer called.
Swynyard drew his own sword, the blade scraping into the day’s dying light. Ahead of him fires burned in the wood, their flames bright in the dark shadows where men fought and died. “Forward!” Swynyard shouted.
Forward into the maelstrom where the woods burned.
Into battle.
IT’S GOD’S WILL, BANKS! GOD’S WILL!” THE REVEREND Elial Starbuck was beside himself with joy. The smell of battle was in his nostrils and inflaming him like an infusion of the Holy Spirit. The preacher was fifty-two years old and had never known an exultation quite like this thrill of victory. He was witnessing God’s hand at work and seeing the triumph of righteousness over the Slavocracy. “On, on!” he shouted encouragingly to a fresh battery of Northern artillery that traveled toward the smoke of battle. The Reverend Starbuck had come to Culpeper Court House to preach to the troops, but instead found himself cheering them on to glory.
The Reverend Elial Starbuck’s jubilation matched General Banks’s excitement. The politician turned general was realizing he had won! He was actually trouncing the wretched and infamous Jackson who had given him such misery earlier in the year. The bells of Boston would ring for this success of a native son, and suddenly the realization of the Governor’s most daring ambitions seemed so dazzlingly close. Nathaniel Prentiss Banks, seventeenth President of the United States of America. He said the phrase under his breath, relishing it, but then the glory of that triumph dizzied Banks in his saddle, and to steady himself he turned back to the Reverend Starbuck. “How’s that son of yours, Starbuck?” Banks asked, trying to give the impression of a man humble and confident enough to make small talk at the moment of glory.
“James is well, thank you, Governor,” the preacher responded. “He’s with McClellan’s forces in front of Richmond. He suffered a touch of fever a month ago, but writes to say he is fully recovered.”
“I meant the young man you named after me,” Banks said. “How is he?”
“Nathaniel’s well, so far as I know,” the Reverend Starbuck said curtly, then was saved from any further queries about his traitor son by the arrival of an aide on a horse that had a mane paled by dust and flanks foaming with sweat. The aide gave Banks a swift salute and a note from Brigadier General Crawford. The note had been hastily scribbled in the saddle, and Banks found it hard to decipher the penciled letters.
“News of victory, I hope?” Banks suggested to the newly arrived aide.
“The General’s requesting reinforcements, sir,” the aide said respectfully. His horse trembled as a rebel shell wailed overhead.
“Reinforcements?” Banks asked. In the pause after his question the rebel shell exploded harmlessly behind, scattering dirt across the road. “Reinforcements?” Banks said again, frowning as though he found the word incomprehensible. Then he straightened his already immaculate uniform. “Reinforcements?” he asked a third time. “But I thought he was driving the enemy from the field?”
“We need to break them, sir.” The aide sounded enthusiastic. “One more brigade will rout them utterly.”
“I hoped they were finished already,” Banks said, crumpling Crawford’s message in his hand.
“They’re skulking in some woods, sir. Our fellows are pressing hard, but they’ll need help.”
“There isn’t any help!” Banks said indignantly, as though the aide were spoiling his moment of glory. “I sent him Gordon’s brigade; isn’t that enough?”
The aide glanced at the gaudily uniformed Pennsylvania Zouaves who formed General Banks’s personal bodyguard. “Maybe we should send every man available, sir, to destroy them before they’re saved by nightfall?” He spoke very respectfully, as befitted a captain offering tactical advice to a major general.
“We have no reserves, Captain,” Banks said in a peevish voice. “We are fully committed! So press on. Press hard. Tell Crawford it’s his responsibility now. I won’t have men calling for help, not when we’re on the verge of victory. Go back and tell him to push on hard, you hear me? Push on hard and no stopping till nightfall.” The long speech had restored Banks’s confidence. He was winning; it was God’s will that the vaunted Stonewall Jackson should be humbled. “It’s nervousness, plain nervousness,” Banks explained General Crawford’s request to the men who surrounded him. “A fellow finds himself on the winning side and can’t believe his luck so he asks for help at the last moment!”
“I hope you’ll be kind to Crawford in your memoirs, sir,” the Zouave commander observed.
“To be sure, to be sure,” Banks said, who had not considered his memoirs till this moment, but now found himself dreaming of a three-volume work, provisionally entitled Banks’s War. He decided he would depict his early defeats as necessary deceptions that had lured the cabbage-eating Jackson on to destruction at Cedar Mountain. “I might have been reviled”—the General rehearsed a sentence in his head—“but I was playing a longer hand than my critics knew, especially those journalistic curs who dared to offer me advice even though not one of them could tell a Parrott gun from a bird’s beak.”
The Reverend Elial Starbuck broke this pleasant reverie by begging Banks’s permission to ride forward so he could observe the pursuit and final humiliation of the enemy. “Your triumph is an answer to my prayers, Governor,” the preacher said, “and I would dearly like to witness its full fruits.”
“My dear Starbuck, of course you must ride forward. Captain Hetherington?” Banks summoned one of his junior aides to accompany the preacher, though he also cautioned the aide not to expose the Reverend Starbuck to any danger. The caution was given to make certain that the Reverend Starbuck survived to preach Banks’s fame from his influential pulpit. “A wounded cur can still bite,” Banks warned the preacher, “so you must stay well clear of the dying beast’s jaws.”
“God will preserve me, Governor,” the Reverend Starbuck averred. “He is my strong shield and protector.”
Thus guarded, the Reverend Starbuck set off across the fields with Hetherington, first threading a path between rows of army wagons with white canvas hoods, then passing a field hospital where the Reverend Starbuck paused to inspect the faces of the wounded Southern prisoners who lay after surgery on the grass outside the tents. Some were still comatose from the effects of chloroform, a few slept from sheer weariness, but the majority lay pale and frightened. A few crudely bandaged casualties lay waiting for the surgeons’ knives, and to anyone unaccustomed to battle the sight of such grievously hurt men might have proved more than the strongest stomach could abide, but the Reverend Starbuck seemed positively enlivened by the horrid spectacle. Indeed, he leaned out of his saddle for a closer look at one man’s mangled limbs and bloodied scalp. “You note the low cranial gap and the pronounced teeth?” he observed to Hetherington.
“Sir?” Hetherington asked in puzzlement.
“Look at his face, man! Look at any of their faces! Can’t you see the pronounced difference between them and the Northern visage?”
Captain Hetherington thought that the Southerners did not look very much different from Northerners, except that they were generally thinner and a good deal more raggedly uniformed, but he did not want to contradict the eminent preacher, and so he agreed that the captured rebels did indeed display low foreheads and feral teeth.
“Such features are the classic symptoms of feeblemindedness and moral degradation,” the Reverend Starbuck announced happily, then remembered the Christian duty that was owed even to such fallen souls as these rebel prisoners. “Though your sins be as scarlet,” he called down to them, “yet you may be washed whiter than snow. You must repent! You must repent!” He had come equipped with copies of his tract, Freeing the Oppressed, which explained why Christian men should be prepared to die for the sacred cause of abolishing slavery, and now the Reverend Starbuck dropped a few copies among the wounded men. “Something to read during your imprisonment,” he told them, “something to explain your errors.” He spurred on, cheered by this chance to have spread the good word. “We have been remiss, Captain,” the preacher declared to Hetherington as the two men left the hospital behind, “in restricting our mission work to heathen lands and Southern slaves. We should have sent more good men into the rebellious states to tussle with the demons that dwell in the white man’s soul.”
“There are plenty of churches, are there not, in the secessionist states?” Captain Hetherington inquired respectfully after leading the preacher around a tangle of telegraph wire that had been dumped beside a ditch.
“There are indeed churches in the South,” the Reverend Starbuck said in a tone of distaste, “and pastors, too, I dare say, yet their existence should not deceive us. The scriptures warn us against those false prophets who shall inhabit the latter days. And such prophets have no difficulty in persuading the feebleminded to adopt the devil’s ways. But the Second Epistle of Peter promises us that the false prophets shall bring upon themselves a swift destruction. I think we are witnessing the beginnings of that providence. For this is the Lord’s doing,” the Reverend Doctor Starbuck declaimed happily, gesturing toward two dogs that fought over a dead man’s intestines close to a smoking shell crater, “and we should rejoice and be glad in it!” A less pious impulse made the Reverend wonder whether the money he had just expended on Galloway’s Horse was going to be wasted. Maybe the war would be won without Galloway’s men? Then he thrust that concern away and let this day’s good news fill him with joy instead.
Captain Hetherington wanted to drive the two dogs away from their offal, but the Reverend Starbuck was spurring ahead, and the aide’s duty was to stay with the preacher, so he galloped to catch up. “Are you saying, sir,” Hetherington asked respectfully, “that none of the rebels are Christians?”
“How can they be?” the Boston preacher responded. “Our faith has never preached rebellion against the lawful and godly authority of the state, so at best the South is in grievous error and thus in desperate need of repentance and forgiveness. And at worst?” The Reverend Starbuck shook his head rather than even consider such a question, yet the very asking of it made him think of his second son and how Nate was even now irretrievably committed to the fires of hell. Nate would burn in everlasting flames, tormented through all eternity by agonies unimaginable. “And he deserves it!” the Reverend Starbuck protested aloud.
“I’m sorry, sir?” Hetherington asked, thinking he had misheard a comment addressed to him.
“Nothing, Captain, nothing. You are saved yourself?”
“Indeed, sir. I came to Christ three years ago, and have praised God for His mercies ever since.”
“Praise Him indeed,” the Reverend Starbuck responded, though in truth he was secretly disappointed that his escort should thus prove to be a born-again Christian, for there were few things Elial Starbuck enjoyed so much as having what he called a tussle with a sinner. He could boast of having left many a strong man in tears after an hour’s good argument.
The two men arrived at a Northern battery of twelve-pounder Napoleons. The four guns were silent, their shirtsleeved gunners leaning on their weapons’ wheels and staring across the valley to where a long-shadowed stand of trees was crowned with gunsmoke. “No targets, sir,” the battery commander answered when the Reverend Starbuck asked why he was not firing. “Our fellows are inside those woods, sir, or maybe a half-mile beyond, which means our job’s done for the day.” He took a pull of his flask, which contained brandy. “Those shell bursts are rebel guns firing long, sir,” he added, gesturing at the white explosions that blossomed intermittently on the far crest. The sound of each explosion followed a few seconds later like a small rumble of thunder. “Just their rear guard,” the artilleryman said confidently, “and we can leave the peasantry to look after them.”
“The peasantry?” the Reverend Starbuck inquired.
“The infantry, sir. Lowest of the low, see what I mean, sir?”
The Reverend Starbuck did not see at all, but decided not to make an issue of his puzzlement. “And the rebels?” he asked instead. “Where are they?”
The gunner Major took note of the older man’s Geneva bands and straightened himself respectfully. “You can see some of the dead ones, sir, excuse my callousness, and the rest are probably halfway to Richmond by now. I’ve waited over a year to see the rascals skedaddle, sir, and it’s a fine sight. Our young ladies saw them off in fine style.” The Major slapped the still warm barrel of the closest gun, which, like the rest of the Napoleons in the battery, had a girl’s name painted on its trail. This gun was Maud, while its companions were named Eliza, Louise, and Anna.
“It is the Lord’s doing, the Lord’s doing!” the Reverend Starbuck murmured happily.
“The seceshers are still lively over there.” Captain Hetherington gestured to far-off Cedar Mountain, where gunsmoke still jetted from the rebel batteries.
“But not for long.” The artillery Major spoke confidently. “We’ll hook behind their rear and take every man jack of them prisoner. As long as nightfall doesn’t come first,” he added. The sun was very low and the light reddening.
The Reverend Starbuck took a small telescope from his pocket and trained it on the woods ahead. He could see very little except for smoke, leaves, and burning shell craters, though in the nearer open land he could make out the humped shapes of the dead lying in the remnants of the wheat field. “We shall go to the woods,” he announced to his companion.
“I’m not sure we should, sir,” Captain Hetherington demurred politely. “There are still shells falling.”
“We shall come to no harm, Captain. Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we shall fear no evil. Come!” In truth the Reverend Starbuck wanted to ride closer to those bursting shells. He had decided that his exhilaration was symptomatic of a natural taste for battle, that maybe he was discovering a God-given talent for warfare, and it was suddenly no wonder to him that the Lord of Hosts had so frequently exhorted Israel to the fight. This blood and slaughter was the way to see God’s work accomplished! Sermonizing and mission work were all very well, and doubtless God listened to the prayers of all those wilting women with faded silk bookmarks in their well-thumbed Bibles, but this hammer of battle was a more certain method of bringing about His kingdom. The sinners were being scourged by the holy flail of sword, steel, and gunpowder, and the Reverend Doctor Starbuck exulted in the process. “Onwards, Captain,” he encouraged Hetherington. “The enemy is beaten, there’s nothing to fear!”
Hetherington paused, but the artillery Major was in full agreement with the preacher. “They’re well beaten, sir, and amen,” the Major declared, and that encouragement was enough to make the Reverend Starbuck hand down some copies of Freeing the Oppressed for the weary gunners. Then, spirits soaring, he spurred his horse past the quartet of fan-shaped swathes of scorched stubble that marked where Eliza, Louise, Maud, and Anna had belched flame and smoke at the enemy.
Captain Hetherington followed unhappily. “We don’t know that the rebels are yet cleared from the woods, sir.”
“Then we shall find out, Captain!” the Reverend Starbuck said happily. He trotted past the remains of a Northerner who had been blown apart by the direct hit of a rebel shell, and who was now nothing but a fly-crawling mess of jagged-ended bones, blue guts, torn flesh, and uniform scraps. The Reverend felt no anguish at the sight, merely the satisfaction that the dead man was a hero who had gone to his Maker by virtue of having died for a cause as noble as any that had ever driven man onto the battlefield. A few paces beyond the dead Federal was the corpse of a Southerner, his throat cut to the bone by a fragment of shell casing. The wretch was dressed in gaping shoes, torn pants, and a threadbare coat of pale gray patched with brown, but the corpse’s most repellent aspect was the grasping look on his face. The preacher reckoned he saw that same depraved physiognomy on most of the rebel dead and on the faces of the rebel wounded who cried for help as the two horsemen rode by. These rebels, the Reverend Starbuck decided, were demonstrably feebleminded and doubtless morally infantile. The doctors in Boston were convinced that such mental weaknesses were inherited traits, and the more the Reverend Elial Starbuck saw of these Southerners, the more persuaded he was of that medical truth. Had there been miscegenation? Had the white race so disgraced itself with its own slaves that it was now paying the hereditary price? That thought so disgusted the Reverend that he flinched, but then an even more terrible thought occurred to him. Was his son Nathaniel’s moral degradation inherited? The Reverend Starbuck cast that suspicion out. Nathaniel was a backslider and so doubly guilty. Nathaniel’s sins could not be laid at his parents’ door, but only at his own wicked feet.
The Reverend Elial Starbuck thus ruminated about heredity, slavery, and feeblemindedness as he rode across the hot battlefield, yet he did not entirely ignore the cries that came from the parched, hurting men left helpless by the fighting. The wounded rebels were pleading for water, for a doctor, or for help in reaching the field hospitals, and the Reverend Starbuck offered them what comfort was in his power by assuring them that salvation could be theirs after a true repentance. One dark-bearded man, sheltering under a bullet-scarred tree and with his leg half severed and a rifle sling serving as a tourniquet about his thigh, cursed the preacher and demanded brandy instead of a sermon, but the Reverend Starbuck merely let a tract fall toward the man and then spurred sadly on. “Once this rebellion is ended, Captain,” he observed, “we shall be faced with a mighty task in the South. We shall needs preach the pure gospel to a people led into error by false teachers.”
Hetherington was about to agree with that pious observation but was checked from speaking by a sudden sound coming from the west. To the Reverend Starbuck, unused to the noise of battle, the sound was exactly like gigantic sheets of stiff canvas being ripped across, or perhaps like the noise caused by the wretched urchins who liked to run down Beacon Hill dragging sticks along the iron palings. The noise was so sudden and intrusive that he instinctively checked his horse, but then, assuming that the weird sound presaged the end of rebellion, he urged the beast on again and muttered a prayer of thanks for God’s providence in giving the North victory. Captain Hetherington, less sanguine, checked the preacher’s horse. “I didn’t think the rebs were that far west,” he said, apparently speaking to himself.
“West?” the preacher asked, confused.
“Rifle volleys, sir,” Hetherington answered, explaining the strange noise. The Captain stared toward the dying sun, where a trembling veil of smoke was starting to show above the trees.
“That noise!” the Reverend Starbuck exclaimed. “Listen! You hear that noise? What is it?” His excitement was caused by a new sound that was suddenly added to the rifle volleys. It was a high-pitched noise infused with a yelping triumph and thrilled through with a ululating and gleeful quality that suggested that the creatures who made such a sound were come willingly and even gladly to this field of slaughter. “You know what you’re hearing?” The Reverend Starbuck asked the question with enthusiasm. “It’s the paean! I never thought I should live to hear it!”
Hetherington glanced at the preacher. “The peon, sir?” he asked, puzzled.
“You’ve read Aristophanes, surely?” the preacher demanded impatiently. “You remember how he describes the war cry of the Greek infantry? The paean?” Maybe, the preacher thought, some classically minded officer from Yale or Harvard had fostered the pleasant fancy of teaching his Northern soldiers that ancient war cry. “Listen, man,” he said excitedly, “it’s the sound of the phalanx! The sound of the Spartans! The sound of Homer’s heroes!”
Captain Hetherington could hear the sound only too clearly. “That’s not the paean, sir. It’s the rebel yell.”
“You mean…” the Reverend Starbuck began, then fell abruptly silent. He had read about the rebel yell in the Boston newspapers, but now he was hearing it for himself, and the sound of it suddenly seemed anything but classical. Instead it was infused with the purest evil; a noise to chill the blood like a scrabble of wild beasts howling or like the baying of a horde of demons begging to be released from the smoking gates of hell. “Why are they yelling?” the preacher asked.
“Because they’re not beaten, sir, that’s why,” Hetherington said, and he reached for the preacher’s reins and pulled his horse around. The Reverend Starbuck protested the about turn, for he was already very close to the woods and he wanted to see what lay beyond the trees, but the Captain could not be persuaded to continue. “The battle’s not won, sir,” he said quietly, “it might even be lost.”
For a rebel yell meant only one thing: a rebel attack.
Because the wretches weren’t beaten at all.
Captain Nathaniel Starbuck, crouched in the woods close by the turnpike, heard the screaming of a rebel counterattack. “About goddamned time,” he murmured to no one in particular. The gunfire in the trees had been sporadic for the last few minutes, and Starbuck had begun to fear that the Legion’s stranded skirmishers would be trapped far behind a victorious Northern army. So far the only resistance to the Northern attack had seemed haphazard and futile, but now the rifle fire swelled into the full intensity of battle, to which the screams of the attacking Southerners added an unearthly descant. The battle was all sound to Starbuck, for he could see nothing through the smoky, deep-shadowed undergrowth, but the sounds indicated that the attacking Northerners were being checked and even counterattacked. “I reckon we should join in,” Starbuck said to Captain Medlicott.
“No,” Medlicott said. “Absolutely not!” The reply was too vehement, betraying Medlicott’s fear. The miller turned soldier was as white-faced as though he had just come from a hard shift at his old grindstones. Sweat dripped and glistened in his beard, while his eyes flicked nervously around the sanctuary his men had fortuitously discovered among the trees. The sanctuary was a shallow scrape that would have been flooded by the smallest fall of rain, yet was so surrounded by undergrowth that an army could have marched on the road behind and not seen the men hidden just paces away. “We’ll just wait here till things calm down,” Medlicott insisted.
Starbuck did not like the thought of skulking in the shadows. So far the two companies had avoided any Northerners, but that luck might not last, yet Medlicott would not listen to the younger man’s ideas. Medlicott had been happy enough to accept Starbuck’s guidance when they were exposed to the enemy’s fire, but now that he was in a seemingly safe refuge, Medlicott was rediscovering the authority that Colonel Swynyard had conferred on him. “We stay here,” he insisted again, “and that’s an order, Starbuck.”
Starbuck went back to his company. He stretched himself at the edge of the shallow hollow and stared through the foliage toward the sounds of battle. The branches of the wood made a dark lacework against an evening sky that was layered with red-tinted bands of gunsmoke. The rebel yell swelled and faded, hinting at surges as regiments advanced and went to ground before advancing again. Volleys crashed among the trees, then footsteps trampled the undergrowth close by, but the leaves grew so thick that Starbuck could see no one. Nevertheless he feared the sudden irruption of a company of nervous Yankees, and so he twisted around and hissed at his men to fix their bayonets. If the Yankees did come, then Starbuck would be ready for them.
He pulled out his own blade and slotted it into place. Squirrels chattered unhappily in the branches overhead, and a flash of red feathers showed where a cardinal flew among the trunks. Behind Starbuck, beyond the deserted turnpike, gunsmoke lay like layers of mist above a patchwork of wheat and cornfields. There was no infantry visible there. It was almost as if the road divided the battlefield into two discrete halves, the one filled with cannon smoke and the other with struggling men.
Truslow, his rifle tipped with steel, dropped beside Starbuck. “What’s wrong with Medlicott?”
“Frightened.”
“Never was any damned good. His father was the same.” Truslow spat a viscous gob of tobacco juice into the leaf mould. “I once saw old John Medlicott run from a pair of horse thieves who weren’t a day over fifteen.”
“Were you one of them?” Starbuck asked shrewdly.
Truslow grinned, but before he could answer there was a sudden panicked rush of feet, and a single Northern soldier burst through the bushes ahead. The Yankee was oblivious of the two rebel companies until he was just paces away, then his eyes widened and he slid to a panicked halt. His mouth dropped open. He turned, seemingly to shout a warning to his comrades, but Starbuck had climbed to his feet and now hammered the side of the Northerner’s skull with the brass butt of his rifle just a split second before Truslow pulled the man’s feet out from beneath him. The Yankee fell like a poleaxed steer. Truslow and Starbuck dragged him back to the company and disarmed him. “Shut your goddamned mouth,” Starbuck hissed at the man, who had begun to stir.
“I’m not…”
“The officer told you to shut the hell up, you son of a whore, so shut the hell up or I’ll rip your damned tongue out,” Truslow growled, and the Northerner went utterly quiet. The buckle on his leather belt showed he was a Pennsylvanian. A trickle of blood showed among the roots of his fair hair above his ear. “You’ll have a peach of a bruise there, you bastard,” Truslow said happily. He was rifling the man’s pockets and pouches. He tossed the Pennsylvanian’s rifle cartridges back among the company, then found a pale brown package marked with the trademark of John Anderson’s Honeydew Fine-Cut Tobacco of New York. “It ain’t Virginia, but someone will smoke it,” Truslow said, pushing it into his pouch.
“Leave me some,” the Pennsylvanian pleaded. “I ain’t had a smoke in hours.”
“Then you should have stayed in Pennsylvania, you son of a whore, instead of trampling our corn. You’re not wanted here. If you got what you deserved you’d be breathing through a hole in your ribs by now.” Truslow eased a wad of folded Northern dollar bills from the man’s top pocket. “Lucky at cards, are you?”
“And with women.” The Pennsylvanian had a snub-nosed and cheeky charm.
“Lie still and be quiet, boy, or your luck will end here.” Truslow unlooped the boy’s canteen and found it still held a half-inch of water, which he offered to Starbuck. Starbuck, despite his thirst, refused, so Truslow drained the canteen himself.
Starbuck stood to give himself a view over the surrounding brush. Captain Medlicott hissed at him to get his head down, but Starbuck ignored the miller. Another burst of screaming announced a renewed rebel charge, and this time a group of some two dozen Yankees appeared just twenty paces beyond Starbuck’s hiding place. A handful of the Northerners knelt and fired into the trees before retreating again. Two of the Yankees fell as they went back, driven down by rebel bullets, and the rest of the men would doubtless have kept on running had not the color party come through the trees to rally them. A tall, white-haired officer waved a sword toward the rebels. “Vorwarts! Vorwarts!” the officer cried, and the retreating men turned, cheered, and delivered a splintering volley toward their pursuers. The two flags were bright squares of silk in the smoke-riven shadows. One was Old Glory, battle-torn and stained, while the second was a purple flag embroidered with an eagle and a legend Starbuck could not decipher. “Vorwarts!” the white-haired officer called again.
“Are they goddamned Germans?” Truslow asked. The Sergeant had an irrational dislike of German immigrants, blaming them for many of the rules and regulations that had begun to infest his former country. “Americans used to be free men,” he often declared. “Then the damned Prussians came to organize us.”
“We’re Pennsylvania Deutsch,” the prisoner answered.
“Then you’re godforsaken son of a bitch bastards,” Truslow said. Starbuck could read the Gothic-lettered legend on the second flag now: “Gott und die Vereinigten Staaten,” it said, and it struck Starbuck that such a flag would make a handsome trophy.
“Feuer!” the white-haired officer shouted, and another Northern volley ripped into the attacking rebels. The Germans cheered, sensing that their sudden resistance had taken the attackers by surprise.
“We can take those bastards,” Starbuck said to Truslow.
The Sergeant glanced toward Captain Medlicott. “Not with that yellow bastard’s help.”
“Then we’ll do it without the yellow bastard’s help,” Starbuck said. He felt the elation of a soldier given the inestimable advantage of surprise; this was a fight he could not lose, and so he cocked his rifle and twisted around to look at his company. “We’re going to put one volley into those German sons of bitches and then run them off our land. Hard and fast, boys, scare the daylights out of the sumbitches. Ready?” The men grinned at him, letting him know that they were good and ready. Starbuck grinned back. There were times when he wondered if anything ever again in all eternity would ever taste as good as these moments in battle. The nervousness of anticipation was utterly gone, replaced by a feral excitement. He glanced at the prisoner. “You stay here, Yankee.”
