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“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.”
