Battle Flag

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“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.

SATURDAY MORNING, THE DAY AFTER BATTLE, AGAIN dawned hot and humid. Leaden clouds covered the sky and added to the air’s oppression, which was made even fouler by a miasmic smell that clung to the folds of the battlefield like the morning mist. At first light, when the troops were stirring reluctantly from their makeshift beds, Major Hinton sought out Starbuck. “I’m sorry about last night, Nate,” Hinton said.

Starbuck offered the Legion’s new commanding officer a curt and dismissive judgment of Washington Faulconer’s raid to snatch the captured flag. The Bostonian was stripped to the waist and had his chin and cheeks lathered with shaving soap plundered from a captured artillery limber. Starbuck stropped his razor on his belt, leaned close to his scrap of mirror, then stroked the long blade down his cheek.

“So what will you do?” Hinton asked, plainly nervous that Starbuck would be provoked into some rash act.

“The bastard can keep the rag,” Starbuck said. He had not really known what to do with the captured standard; he had thought that perhaps he might give it to Thaddeus Bird or else send it to Sally Truslow in Richmond. “What I really wanted was the Stars and Stripes,” he confessed to Hinton, “and that eagle flag was only ever second-best, so I reckon that son of a bitch Faulconer can keep it.”

“It was a stupid thing for Moxey to do, all the same,” Hinton said, unable to conceal his relief that Starbuck did not intend to inflate the night’s stupidity into an excuse for revenge. He watched as Starbuck squinted into a broken fragment of shaving mirror. “Why don’t you grow a beard?” he asked.

“Because everyone else does,” Starbuck said, although in truth it was because a girl had once told him he looked better clean-shaven. He scraped at his upper lip. “I’m going to murder goddamn Medlicott.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Slowly. So it hurts.”

Major Hinton sighed. “He panicked, Nate. It can happen to anyone. Next time it might be me.”

“Son of a bitch damn nearly had me killed by panicking.”

Major Hinton picked up the plundered jar of Roussel’s Shaving Cream, fidgeted with its lid, then watched Starbuck clean the razor blade. “For my sake,” he finally pleaded, “will you just forget about it? The boys are unhappy enough because of Pecker and they don’t need their captains fighting among themselves. Please, Nate? For me?”

Starbuck mopped his face clean on a strip of sacking. “Give me a cigar, Paul, and I’ll forget that bald-headed lily-livered gutless shad-belly bastard even exists.”

Hinton surrendered the cigar. “Pecker’s doing well,” he said, his tone brightening as he changed the subject, “or as well as can be expected. Doc Billy even reckons he might survive a wagon ride to the rail depot.” Hinton was deeply worried about replacing the popular Colonel even though he was a popular enough officer himself. He was an easygoing, heavyset man who had been a farmer by trade, a churchman by conviction, and a soldier by accident of history. Hinton had hoped to live out his years in the easy, rich countryside of Faulconer County, enjoying his family, his acres, and his fox-hunting, but the war had threatened Virginia, and so Paul Hinton had shouldered his weapons out of patriotic duty. Yet he did not much enjoy soldiering and reckoned his main duty was to bring safely home as many of the Faulconer Legion as he possibly could, and the men in the Legion recognized that ambition and liked Hinton for it. “We’re to stay where we are today,” Hinton now told Starbuck. “I’ve got to detach a company to collect small arms off the battlefield and another to bring in the wounded. And talking of the wounded,” he added after a second’s hesitation, “did you see Swynyard yesterday? He’s missing.”

Starbuck also hesitated, then told the truth. “Truslow and I saw him last night.” He gestured with the cigar toward the woods where his company had fought against the Pennsylvanians. “He was lying just this side of the trees. Truslow and I didn’t reckon there was anything to be done for him, so we just left him.”

Hinton was shrewd enough to guess that Starbuck had abandoned Swynyard to die. “I’ll send someone to look for him,” he said. “He ought to be given a burial.”

“Why?” Starbuck demanded belligerently.

“To cheer the Brigade up, of course,” Hinton said, then blushed for having uttered such a thing. He turned to look at the great smear of smoke that rose from the Northern cooking fires beyond the woods. “Keep a good eye on the Yankees, Nate. They ain’t beaten yet.”

But the Yankees made little hostile movement that morning. Their pickets probed forward but stopped obediently when the rebel outposts opened fire, and so the two armies settled into an uneasy proximity. Then it began to rain, slowly at first, but with an increasing vehemence after midday. Starbuck’s company made shelters at the edge of the woods with frameworks of branches covered in sod. Then they lay under cover and just watched the gray, rain-lashed landscape.

In midafternoon, when the rain eased to a drizzle, Corporal Waggoner sought Hinton’s permission for a prayer meeting. There had been no chance for such a service since the battle’s ending, and many soldiers in the Legion wanted to give thanks. Hinton gladly gave his permission, and fifty or more Legionnaires gathered beneath some gun-battered cedars. Other men from the Brigade soon joined them, so that by the time the drizzle stopped, there were almost a hundred men sitting beneath the trees and listening as Corporal Waggoner read from the Book of Job. Waggoner’s twin brother had died in the battles on the far side of Richmond, and ever since that death Peter Waggoner had become more and more fatalistic. Starbuck was not sure that Waggoner’s gloomy piety was good for the Legion’s morale, but many of the men seemed to like the Corporal’s spontaneous sessions of prayer and Bible study. Starbuck did not join the circle, but rested nearby, watching northward to where the Yankee defense line showed between the distant woodlands as a newly dug strip of earthworks broken by hastily erected cannon emplacements. Starbuck would have been hard put to admit it, but the familiar sounds of prayer and Bible reading were oddly comforting.

That comfort was broken by a blasphemous oath from Sergeant Truslow. “Christ Almighty!” the Sergeant swore.

“What is it?” Starbuck asked. He had been half dozing but now sat up fully awake. Then he saw what had provoked Truslow to blasphemy. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, and spat.

For Colonel Swynyard was not dead. Indeed, the Colonel hardly appeared to be wounded. His face was bruised, but the bruise was covered and shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat that Swynyard must have plucked from among the battlefield litter, and now the Colonel was walking through the Brigade’s lines with his familiar wolfish smile. “He’s drunk,” Truslow said. “We should have shot the bastard yesterday.”

Peter Waggoner’s voice faltered as the Colonel walked up to the makeshift prayer meeting. Swynyard stopped at the edge of the meeting, saying nothing, just staring at the men with their open Bibles and bare heads, and every single man seemed cowed by the baleful eyes. The Colonel had always been a mocker of these homespun devotions, though until now he had kept his scorn at a distance. Now his malevolence killed the prayerful atmosphere stone dead. Waggoner made one or two brave efforts to keep reading, but then stopped altogether.

“Go on,” Swynyard said in his hoarse voice.

Waggoner closed his Bible instead. Sergeant Phillips, who was one of Major Haxall’s shrinking Arkansas battalion, stood to head off any trouble. “Maybe you’d like to join us at prayer, Colonel?” the Sergeant suggested nervously.

The tic in Swynyard’s cheek twitched as he considered his answer. Sergeant Phillips licked his lips while others of the men closed their eyes in silent prayer. Then, to the amazement of everyone who watched, Colonel Swynyard pulled off his hat and nodded to Phillips. “I would like that, Sergeant, I would indeed.” Sergeant Phillips was so taken aback by the Colonel’s agreement that he said nothing. A murmur went through the Bible study group, but no one spoke aloud. Swynyard, the bruise on his face visible now, was embarrassed by the silence. “If you’ll have me, that is,” he added in an unnaturally humble voice.

“Anyone is welcome,” Sergeant Phillips managed to say. One or two of the officers in the group muttered their agreement, but no one looked happy at welcoming Swynyard. Everyone in the prayer group believed the Colonel was playing a subtle game of mockery, but they did not understand his game, nor did anyone know how to stop it, and so they offered him a reluctant welcome instead.

“Maybe you’ll let me say a word or two?” Swynyard suggested to Phillips, who seemed to have assumed leadership of the prayer meeting. Phillips nodded, and the Colonel fidgeted with the hat in his hands as he looked around the frightened gathering. The Colonel tried to speak, but the words would not come. He cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and tried again. “I have seen the light,” he explained.

Another murmur went through the circle of seated men. “Amen,” Phillips said.

Swynyard twisted the hat in his nervous hands. “I have been a great sinner, Sergeant,” he said, then stopped. He still wore the same hated smile, but some of the men nearer to Swynyard could sense that it was now a smile of embarrassment rather than sarcasm. The same men could even see tears in the Colonel’s eyes.

“Drunk as a bitch on the Fourth of July,” Truslow said in a tone of wonder.

“I’m not sure,” Starbuck said. “I think he might be sober.”

“Then he’s lost his damn wits,” Truslow opined.