Battle Flag

by Bernard Cornwell

  "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. Sergeant Phillips was more generous. "We have all been sinners, Colonel," the Sergeant said, "and fallen short of the glory of God."

  "I more than most." Swynyard, it seemed, was determined to make a public confession of his sins and of his rediscov­ered faith. He was blinking back tears and fidgeting with the hat so frenetically that it fell from his hands. He let it lie. "I was raised a Christian by my dear mother," he said, "and I received the Lord into my heart at a camp meeting when I was a youth, but I have been a sinner ever since. A great sinner."

  "We've all sinned," Sergeant Phillips averred again. "But yesterday," Swynyard said, "I came to my senses. I was near killed, and I felt the very wings of the angel of death beat about me. I could smell the sulfur of the bottomless pit and I could feel the heat of its flames, and I knew, as I lay on the field, that I deserved nothing less than that terrible punishment." He paused, almost overcome by the memory. "But then, praise Him, I was pulled back from the pit and drawn into the light."

  A chorus of amens and hallelujahs sounded among the circle of men. They were all sincere Christians, and though they might have hated this man with an intense hatred, the more honest among them had also prayed for the Colonel's soul, and now that their prayers were being answered, they were willing to give thanks to God for His mercies to a sinner.

  Swynyard had tears on his cheeks now. "I also know, Sergeant, that in the past I have been unfair in my dealings with many men here. To those men I offer my regrets and seek their forgiveness." The apology was handsomely spoken, and the men in the group took it just as handsomely. Then Swynyard turned away from the circle and looked among the shelters for Starbuck. "I owe another man an even greater apology," the Colonel said.

  "Oh, Jesus," Starbuck swore and wriggled back into the shadow of his shelter.

  "Bastard's touched in the head," Truslow said. "He'll be foaming at the mouth next and pissing himself. We'll have to take him away and put him out of his misery."

  "We should have shot the bastard when we had the chance," Starbuck said, then fell silent because Swynyard had left the Bible circle and was walking toward his shelter.

  "Captain Starbuck?" Swynyard said.

  Starbuck looked up into his enemy's face. "I can hear you, Colonel," Starbuck said flatly. He could see now that the Colonel had made an attempt to improve his appearance. His beard was washed, his hair combed, and his uniform brushed. The tic in his cheek still quivered, and his hands shook, but he was plainly making a great effort to hold him­self straight and steady.

  "Can I talk with you, Starbuck," the Colonel asked, then, after a moment's silence, "please?"

  "Are you drunk?" Starbuck asked brutally. Swynyard offered his rotting, yellow-toothed smile. "Only on God's grace, Starbuck, only on His divine grace. And with His help I shall never touch ardent spirits again." Truslow spat to show his disbelief. Swynyard ignored the insult, gesturing instead to indicate that he would like to take a walk with Starbuck.

  Starbuck climbed reluctantly out of his turf shelter, shouldered his rifle, and followed the Colonel. Starbuck was wearing new boots that he had taken from a dead Pennsylvanian. The boots were new and stiff, but Starbuck was convinced they would wear in well enough after a day or two. Now, though, he felt the makings of a blister as he walked self-consciously beside Swynyard. News of the Colonel's conversion had spread through the Brigade, and men were drifting toward the picket line to see the proof for themselves. Some evidently believed that the Colonel's reli­gious experience was just another inebriated escapade, and they grinned in anticipation of a display of drunken idiocy, but Swynyard seemed oblivious to the attention he was receiving. "You know why I sent your company forward yesterday?" he asked Starbuck.

  "Uriah the Hittite," Starbuck said shortly. Swynyard thought for a second; then the story of David and Bathsheba came back from his dusty memories of child­hood Sunday schools. "Yes," he said. "And I intended for you to be killed. I am sorry, truly."

  Starbuck wondered how long Swynyard's manifestation of honesty would last and reckoned that it would be only until the Colonel's thirst overcame his piety, but he kept that skepticism to himself. "I guess you were just obeying someone else's orders," he said instead.

  "It was still a sinful action," Swynyard said very earnestly, thus obliquely confirming that it had indeed been Washington Faulconer who had ordered Starbuck's com­pany into the place of danger, "and I ask your forgiveness." Swynyard concluded his confession by holding out his hand.

  Starbuck, excruciated with embarrassment, shook the offered hand. "Say no more about it, Colonel," he said.

  "You're a good soldier, Starbuck, a good soldier, and I haven't made life easy for you. Not for anyone, really." Swynyard made the admission in a gruff voice. The Colonel had been weeping when he gave his halting testimony at the prayer meeting, but now he seemed in a more rueful mood. He turned and gazed north to where groups of Yankees could be seen in the far fields beyond the nearer stands of trees. No man on either side seemed inclined to belligerence this day; even the sharpshooters who delighted to kill at long range were keeping their rifle barrels cold. "Do you have a Bible?" Swynyard asked Starbuck suddenly.

  "Sure I do." Starbuck felt in his breast pocket where he kept the small Bible that his brother had sent him. James had intended the Bible to spark Starbuck into a repentance like the one that was transforming Swynyard, but Starbuck had kept the scriptures out of habit rather than need. "You want it?" he asked, offering the book to the Colonel.

  "I shall find another," Swynyard said. "I just wanted to be certain you have a Bible because I'm sure you're going to need one." Swynyard smiled at the suspicious look on Starbuck's face. The Colonel doubtless intended the smile to be friendly, but the resulting foul-toothed leer uncomfort­ably recalled the Colonel's usual malevolence. "I wish I could describe what happened to me last night and this morning," he now told Starbuck. "It was as though I was struck by a great light. There was no pain. There's still no pain." He touched the livid bruise on his right temple. "I remember lying on the earth and hearing voices. I couldn't move, couldn't speak. The voices were debating my death, and I knew I had come to the judgment seat and I felt a fear, a most terrible fear, that I was being consigned to hell. I wanted to weep, Starbuck, and in my terror I called out to the Lord. I remembered my mother's teaching, my child­hood lessons, and I called on the Lord and He heard me."

  Starbuck had heard too many testimonies of repentant sinners to be either moved or even convinced by the Colonel's change of heart. Doubtless Swynyard had received a shock, and doubtless he intended to reform his life, but Starbuck was equally convinced that Swynyard's conversion would prove soluble in alcohol before t
he sun went down. "I wish you well," he muttered grudgingly.

  "No, no, you don't understand." Swynyard spoke with some of his old savage force and laid his maimed left hand on Starbuck's elbow to prevent the younger man from turn­ing away. "When I recovered my senses, Starbuck, I found my sword stuck into the turf beside my head and there was a message impaled on the sword. This message." The Colonel took from his pocket a crumpled and torn pamphlet, which he pushed into Starbuck's hand.

  Starbuck smoothed the tract to see that it was called Freeing the Oppressed and had been printed in Anne Street, Boston

  . The cover showed a picture of a half-naked black man springing free from broken manacles toward a cross that was infused with a heavenly light. The shattered manacles were attached to great iron weights labeled "Slavocracy," "Ignorance," and "Wickedness," and beneath those iron weights was written the name of the pamphlet's author: the Reverend Doctor Elial Starbuck. Starbuck felt his usual tremor of distaste at any reminder of his father's existence, then handed the tract back to the Colonel. "So what was your message?" he asked sourly. "That slavery is a sin against God? That America's blacks have to be returned to Africa? Is that what you're going to do with your pair? Set them free?" And never, Starbuck reflected, had two slaves more deserved freedom.

  Swynyard shook his head to show that Starbuck was still misunderstanding him. "I don't know what to believe about slavery. Dear God, Starbuck, but everything in my life has to be changed, can't you understand that? Slavery, too, but that wasn't the reason God left the tract beside me last night. Don't you see? He left it there to give me a task!" "No," Starbuck said, "I don't see."

  "My dear Starbuck," Swynyard said very earnestly. "I have been brought back from the path of sin at the very last moment. At that very instant when I was poised on the edge of hell's fire, I was saved. The road to hell is a terrible path, Starbuck, yet at its beginning the journey was enjoyable. Do you understand now what I'm saying?"

  "No," Starbuck said, who feared that he understood exactly what the Colonel was saying.

  "I think you do," Swynyard said fervently. "Because I think that you are on the first easy steps of that downward path. I look at you, Starbuck, and I see myself thirty years ago, which is why God sent me a pamphlet with your name on it. It's a sign telling me to save you from sin and from the agonies of eternal punishment. I'm going to do that, Starbuck. Instead of killing you as Faulconer wanted I am going to bring you to eternal life."

  Starbuck paused to light a cigar he had plundered from the white-haired Pennsylvanian officer who had tried so hard to protect his flags. Then he sighed as he blew smoke past Swynyard's bruised face. "You know, Colonel? I think I really preferred you as a sinner."

  Swynyard grimaced. "How long have I known you?"

  Starbuck shrugged. "Six months."

  "And in all that time, Captain Starbuck, have you ever called me 'sir'?"

  Starbuck looked into the Colonel's eyes. "No, and I don't intend to either."

  Swynyard smiled. "You will, Starbuck, you will. We're going to be friends, you and I, and I shall draw you back from the paths of sin."

  Starbuck blew another plume of smoke into the damp wind. "I never did understand, Colonel, just why some son of a bitch can have a lifetime of sin and then, the moment he gets scared, turn around and try to stop other folks from enjoying themselves."

  "Are you telling me the path of righteousness is not enjoyable?"

  "I'm telling you I've got to get back to my company," Starbuck said. "I'll see you, Colonel." He touched his hat with a deliberate air of insolence, then walked back to his men.

  "So?" Sergeant Truslow greeted Starbuck, the inflection of the word inviting news of the Colonel.

  "You were right," Starbuck said. "He's gibbering mad."

  "So what's changed?"

  "He's got drunk on God," Starbuck said, "that's what's changed." He was trying to sound dismissive of Swynyard, but a part of him was sensing the same fires of hell that had brought the Colonel to God. "But I'll give him till sun­down," he went on. "Then he'll be tight on whiskey instead."

  "Whiskey works faster than God," Truslow said, but he heard something wistful in his Captain's voice, and so he thrust a pewter flask at him. "Drink some of this," the Sergeant ordered.

  "What is it?"

  "The best spill-skull. Five cents a quart. Tom Canby made it two weeks back."

  Starbuck took the flask. "Don't you know it's against army regulations to drink homemade whiskey?"

  "It's probably against army regulations to go caterwauling with the wives of serving officers," Truslow said, "but that ain't ever stopped you yet."

  "Too true, Sergeant, too true," Starbuck said. He drank, and the fierce liquor momentarily doused the fear of hellfire, and then, beneath a lowering sky, he slept.

  The federal government's bureaucrats might have been reluctant to fund Major Galloway's Horse, but General Pope immediately saw the value of having Southern horse­men scouting behind Southern lines, and so he gave the Major such a slew of tasks that a cavalry force ten times larger would have been hard-pressed to fulfill them inside a month, let alone the one week that General Pope offered Galloway.

  The chief task was to determine whether General Robert Lee was moving his troops from Richmond. The Northern headquarters in Washington had ordered Lee's opponent, McClellan, to withdraw his army from its camps close to the rebel capital, and Pope feared that Lee, hearing of that order, might already be marching north to reinforce Jackson. He also feared that the rebels could be building up troops in the Shenandoah Valley and had asked Galloway to make a reconnaissance across the Blue Ridge Mountains. And, as if those two tasks were not sufficient, Pope also wanted to know more about Jackson's dispositions, and so Galloway found himself under pressure to send horsemen south, east, and west. He compromised as best he could, taking his own troop south toward Richmond while Billy Blythe was ordered to cross the Blue Ridge Mountains and sniff out the rebel dispositions in the valley of the Shenandoah.

  Adam, meanwhile, needed to replace the horses Blythe had wished on him. Major Galloway tried to reassure Adam that Blythe had meant no harm in buying such spavined hacks. "I'm sure he did his best," the Major said, trying to knit the unity of his squadron.

  "I'm sure he did, too," Adam agreed, "and that's what worries me." But Adam at least knew where his troop could acquire more horses, and Galloway had given Adam permis­sion to make his raid on condition that on Adam's way back he reconnoitred the western flank of Jackson's army. Adam left to perform both tasks three days after the far-off sound of the battle at Cedar Mountain had bruised the summer's heavy air.

  Two miles beyond the Manassas farmhouse that was Galloway's headquarters Adam found Billy Blythe's troop waiting. "Thought we'd ride with you, Faulconer," Blythe said, "seeing as how you and I are going in the same direc­tion."

  "Are we?" Adam asked coldly. "Hell, why not?" Blythe said.

  "The Shenandoah Valley's that way," Adam said, point­ing west, "while we're going south."

  "Well now," Blythe said with his lazy smile, "where I come from a gentleman doesn't go around teaching other gentlemen how to suck a tit. I'll choose my own route to the valley, if that's all right with you."

  Adam had little choice but to accept Blythe's company. Sergeant Huxtable whispered his suspicion that Blythe merely wanted to follow Adam and take whatever horses Adam found for his own profit, but Adam could hardly stop his fellow cavalry officer from riding in convoy. Nor, on his dreadful horses, could Adam outrun Blythe, and so, for two days, the forty cavalrymen crept slowly southward. Blythe showed no sense of urgency and no desire to turn toward one of the high passes that led through the Blue Ridge Mountains. He ignored the Chester Gap, then Thornton's Gap, and finally Powell's Gap, hinting all the while that he knew of a better route across the mountains further south. "You're a fool if you use Rockfish Gap," Adam said. "I know for a fact the rebels will guard that pass."

  Blythe smiled. "Maybe I won't use
any gap at all." "You won't get horses over the mountains otherwise." "Maybe I don't need to cross the mountains." "You'd disobey Galloway's orders?" Adam asked. Blythe frowned as though he was disappointed in Adam's obtuseness. "I reckon our first duty, Faulconer, is to look after our men, specially when you reckon that the Southern army ain't going to take too kindly to Southern boys riding in Yankee blue, so it ain't my aim to take any real bad risks. That's why Abe Lincoln's got all those boys from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania; if anyone's going to beat ten types of hell out of the Confederates, it'll be them, not us. The important thing for us to do, Faulconer, is just sur­vive the war intact." Blythe paused in this long peroration to light a cigar. Ahead of the cavalrymen was a gentle valley crossed by snake fences and with a prosperous-looking farm at the southern end. "What Joe Galloway ordered me to do, Faulconer," Blythe went on, "is discover how many rebels are skulking in the Shenandoah Valley, and I reckon I can do that well enough without crossing any damned mountain. I can do it by stopping a train coming out of the Rockfish Gap and questioning the passengers. Ain't that right?" "Suppose the passengers lie?" Adam asked. "Hell, there ain't a woman alive who'd tell me lies," Blythe said with a smile. He chuckled, then turned in his saddle. "Seth?"

  "Billy?" Sergeant Seth Kelley answered.

  "Reckon we should make sure no rebel vermin are hang­ing around that farmhouse. Take a couple of men. Go look."

  Seth Kelley shouted at two Marylanders to follow him, then led them south through the trees that bordered the valley. "Reckon we'll just wait here," Blythe said to the other men. "Make yourselves at home now."

  "You say our most important duty is to survive the war?" Adam asked Blythe when the troopers had made themselves comfortable in the shade of the broad-leaved trees.

  "Because I reckon that the war's ending is when our proper work begins, Faulconer," Blythe said happily. "I even reckon that surviving the war is our Christian duty. The North's going to win. That's plain as the nose on a pelican's face. Hell, the North's got the men, the guns, the ships, the factories, the railroads, and the money, while all the South's got is a heap of cotton, a pile of rice, a stack of tobacco, and more damn lazy niggers than half Africa. The North's got a whole heap of stuff and the South ain't got a besotted hope! So sooner or later, Faulconer, we're going to have an ass-whipped South and a mighty pleased North, and when that day comes we want to make sure that we loyal Southerners get our just rewards. We are going to be the good Southerners, Faulconer, and we'll be the ones who take over down south. We are going to be hogs in clover. Rolling in milk and honey, and getting the pick of the girls and making dollars like a dog makes spit." Blythe turned to stare at the farm. "Now you don't want to risk all that by getting a bullet in your belly, do you?"