Battle Flag

by Bernard Cornwell

  The dying captain was jerked back from the saddle to be dragged along the ground by a foot trapped in a stirrup. He cried pathetically; then a great rush of blood silenced him forever. The chaplain began shouting encouragement to the dazed Zouaves, who seemed to shrink back from the welter­ing rifle fire. The Reverend Starbucks horse bolted from the unending splintering crack of rifles that outflanked the two New York regiments. The horse ran north, fleeing the attack, and it was not till he reached the edge of the hill that the preacher was able to curb the scared animal and turn it just in time to see a line of rebel regiments appear from the far trees. These were Lee's men, who had marched one day after Stonewall Jackson and who were now being unleashed from the valleys and woods where they had hidden overnight. They all made their devilish, ululating scream as they attacked, and the preacher's blood ran chill as the terrible sound washed across the hilltop.

  The Reverend Starbuck dragged his revolver out of its saddle holster but made no effort to fire it. He was faced by a nightmare. He was watching the death of two regiments.

  The New Yorkers tried to fight. They stood in line and returned the rebel fire, but the gray lines overlapped and decimated the Zouave ranks with an overwhelming volume of rifle fire. Brightly uniformed men were plucked back from the New York ranks, and though the sergeants and corporals tried to close the gaps, the gaps kept coming faster than they could be filled. Men slipped away, running north and east. The Reverend Starbuck shouted at the fugitives to hold their ground, but they ignored his ravings and ran downhill toward the stream. The furniture maker's regiment was reduced to three groups of men who tried to hold off the overpowering assault, but three times their number could not have stopped this rebel surge.

  The New Yorkers died. There was a spatter of final shots, a scream of defiance, then the flags toppled as the last stub­born defenders were overrun. The hill was suddenly swarm­ing with rebel rat gray coats, and the preacher, startled from his shocked immobility, kicked his horse and let it run downhill among the scattered fugitives. The first rebels were already firing after the running men, and the Reverend Starbuck heard the bullets whiplash about him, but the preacher's horse kept running. It splashed through the stream and so up into the safety of the trees on the far side. The scream of the obscene rebel yell soured the preacher's ears as he slowed the sweating horse. All around him now he could hear that terrible scream, the noise of the devil on the march, and he sensed, even if he did not understand, that another Northern army was being ignominiously beaten. Tears ran down his cheeks as he tried to understand the unfathomable ways of God.

  He crossed the turnpike, going back to where he had spent so long waiting to begin the pursuit of the beaten rebels, but there was no sign of Galloway's men there, nor, thank God, any rebels either. The preacher cuffed the tears from his cheeks as he rested his horse. To his right, where the smoke from the burning depot still made a brown smear in the sky, there was only a tangle of woods and steep val­leys, and it was through that broken ground, he suspected, that the rebel advance was being made. To his left, across the wider fields, lay the woods where one Northern attack after another had been launched toward the railbed, but none of those attacks had succeeded, which surely meant that the rebels still lurked among those woods, while behind him the devil's troops had just made carrion out of Winslow's Zouaves on a Virginia hilltop, which left the preacher just one place to go.

  He rode northeast, his grief turning into a rage fit to fill all heaven. What dolts led the armies of the North! What strutting turkey-cock fools! The preacher felt a duty being laid upon him, the duty to awaken the North to the poltroons who were leading its sons into one defeat after another. He would go to Galloway's house, fetch his luggage, then have one of the Major's servants show him an escape route north across the Bull Run. It was time to return to the sanity of Boston, where he would begin his campaign that would wake a nation to its sins.

  Cannons fired in the hills, their sound echoing confus­edly around the sky. Rifles cracked, the gunsmoke showing in rills above trees and streams. Robert Lee had brought twenty-five thousand men and placed them at right angles to Jackson's beleaguered line, and not one Yankee had known the rebels were there until the starry banners came forward above the gray lines. Now the rebels' flank attack advanced like a door swinging shut on John Pope's glory. And the Reverend Elial Starbuck carried his righteous anger back toward home.

  The sun sank slow toward the western hills. Nothing stirred in the woods to the east. The noise of battle rolled like dis­tant thunder, but what the noise meant or where the Yankees were no one knew. A patrol from Truslow's Company H was the first to cross the shell-scorched strip of land into the trees, but they found no Yankees there. The sharpshooters had gone, and the woods were empty except for the litter of the abandoned Northern bivouacs.

  Ammunition arrived and was handed out among the weary men. Some troops slept, indistinguishable in their exhaustion from the dead around them. Starbuck tried to compile a list of the dead and the wounded, but the work was slow.

  An hour before sundown Colonel Swynyard rode his horse up to the railbed. He was leading another horse by the reins. "It belonged to Major Medlicott," he told Starbuck. "I hear he died?"

  "Shot by a Yankee, I hear," Starbuck said straight-faced.

  Swynyard's mouth flickered in what might have been a smile. "We're ordered to advance, and I thought you might appreciate a horse."

  Starbuck's initial reaction was to refuse, for he took pride in marching like his men, but then he remembered the house with the lime-washed stone pillar at its lane gate and thanked Swynyard for bringing him the animal. He pulled himself into the saddle just as the Legion was stirred from its rest. The tired men grumbled at being disturbed but shoul­dered their rifles and climbed from the railbed. The wounded, the surgeons, the servants, and a sergeant's guard stayed behind while the rest of the Legion formed ranks around the color guard, where Lieutenant Coffman carried the replacement battle flag on its sapling staff. Starbuck took his place at the head of the regiment on Medlicott's horse. "Forward!" he called.

  Hudson's North Carolinians advanced to the Legion's right. Colonel Hudson was mounted on an expensive black mare and was now accoutred with a sword in a gold-mounted scabbard. Hudson waved in friendly greeting as the two regiments advanced in line, but once among the trees Starbuck deliberately led the Legion to the left and so opened a gap between himself and the Carolinians.

  He crossed the small pasture where they had checked their pursuit of the first Yankee attack the day before. There were still unburied dead in the field. Beyond the pasture was a strip of woods, then a wider stretch of open farmland that was bisected by a road climbing to a far crest. Starbuck rode to the left of his line. "Remember this place?" Starbuck asked Truslow. "Should I?"

  "We fought our first battle here." Starbuck pointed to his left. "The Yankees came out of those trees and we waited up there"—he pointed right to the ridge—"and I was scareder than hell and you behaved like it had all happened before." "It had. I was in Mexico, remember?" Starbuck let the horse walk at its own pace across the old battlefield. There were yellowing bone fragments in the fur­rows, and he wondered for how many years the farmers would plow up men's bones and the bullets that put them there.

  "So what happened with Medlicott?" Truslow asked. The two men were thirty paces ahead of the ranks. "What do your men say happened?" "That you picked a fight with him, then shot the son of a bitch."

  Starbuck thought about it, then nodded. "Just about. Do they mind?"

  Truslow twisted a piece of tobacco from a plug and put it in his mouth. "Some of them feel sorry for Edna." "His wife?"

  "She has children to feed. But hell, no, they don't mind about the miller. He was a mean son of a bitch."

  "He's a hero now," Starbuck said. "He's going to get his name on a statue in Faulconer Court House. Dan Medlicott, hero of our War of Independence." He crossed the road, remembering when he had watched a Northern army a
ttack across these fields. They were not much changed; the snake fences were long gone, burned to boil the coffeepots of soldiers, and flecks of bone disfigured the dirt, but otherwise it was just as Starbuck remembered. He led the Legion on across the farmland, angling still more to his left until, rather than heading toward the eastern ridge with the rest of the Brigade, he was heading toward a stand of timber that topped a small ridge that lay to the north.

  Swynyard galloped up to Starbuck. "Wrong way! Up there!" He pointed eastward up the road.

  Starbuck reined in. "There's a place I want to visit, Colonel, just over the hill. Not more than a quarter-mile now."

  Swynyard frowned. "What place?"

  "The house of the man who took our flags, Colonel, and the house of the man whose troops burned women in a tavern."

  Swynyard's initial reaction was to shake his head; then he had second thoughts and looked at Truslow's company before turning back to the two officers. "What can you achieve?"

  "I don't know. But then we didn't know what we were going to achieve when we ran to Dead Mary's Ford in the middle of the night." Starbuck deliberately reminded Swynyard of that night and the implicit favor that the Colonel owed him as a result.

  The Colonel smiled. "You've got one hour. We'll be going up the road," he said, pointing to the right, "and I guess it would only be prudent for someone to take a patrol north, just in case any of the rascals are lurking. Do you think one company will be enough?"

  "Plenty, sir," Starbuck said and touched the brim of his hat to the Colonel. "Company!" he called to his old com­pany. "Follow me!"

  He borrowed a lit cigar from John Bailey and lit one of his own with its glowing tip. He walked the horse slowly, pacing the beast beside Truslow. The rest of the Legion climbed the gentle eastern slope toward the sound of battle that now seemed very far away—so far that none of the advancing battalions seemed in any hurry to join that distant fighting. Starbuck looked to his left and saw the white-painted pillar on the road at the end of the stand of trees. "Not far now," he told Truslow. "Through these woods and in the next fields."

  "What happens if the place is full of Yankees?" Truslow asked.

  "Then we'll go back," Starbuck said, but when the com­pany emerged from the trees on the ridge, they saw that the place was not full of Yankees. Instead the Galloway homestead seemed deserted as the rebel soldiers walked slowly down the long slope toward the farm buildings that were set among a grove of leafy, mature trees. It looked a handsome house, Starbuck thought, a place where a man could settle and live a good life. It seemed to have good watered land, well-drained fields, and plenty of timber.

  A black man met them at the yard gate. "There's no one here, massa," the man said nervously.

  "Whose house is it?" Starbuck asked.

  The man did not answer.

  "You heard the officer!" Truslow growled.

  The black man glanced at the approaching company, then licked his lips. "Belongs to a gentleman called Galloway, massa, but he's not here."

  "He's with the army, is he?" Starbuck asked.

  "Yes, massa." The man smiled ingratiatingly. "He's with the army."

  Starbuck returned the smile. "But which army?"

  The black man's smile vanished instantly. He said nothing, and Starbuck kicked his heels to ride past him. "Any slaves in the house?" he called over his shoulder to the black man.

  "Three of us, massa, and we're not slaves. We're ser­vants."

  "You live in the house?"

  "In the cabins, massa." The servant was running after Starbuck, while Truslow brought the company on behind.

  "So the house is empty?" Starbuck asked.

  The man paused, then nodded as Starbuck looked back at him. "It's empty, massa."

  "What's your name?"

  "Joseph, massa."

  "Then listen, Joseph, if you've got any belongings in the house, get them out now, because I'm about to burn this goddamned house to the ground, and if your master wants to know why, tell him it's with the compliments of the whores he burned alive at McComb's Tavern. You got that message, Joseph?" Starbuck curbed the horse and swung himself out of the saddle. He jumped down, spurting dust from beneath his boots. "Did you hear me, Joseph?"

  The black servant gazed in horror at Starbuck. "You can't burn it, sir!"

  "Tell your master that he killed women. Tell him my name is Starbuck, you hear that? Let me hear you say it."

  "Starbuck, sir."

  "And don't you forget it, Joseph. I am Starbuck, avenger of whores!" Starbuck declaimed that final sentence as he climbed the veranda steps and threw open the house's front door.

  To see his father.

  Clouds heaped in the south, darkening a day already declin­ing toward dusk. In the steep hills and valleys where the rebel flank attack surged forward, the fading light made the rifle flames stab brighter and the smoke look grayer. There was a sense that the weather must break soon, and indeed, far to the south, on the empty earthworks that the Yankees had abandoned by the Rappahannock River, the first drops of rain splashed heavy. Lightning flickered in the clouds.

  At Manassas the rebel flank attack grew ragged. It had been launched across broken country, and the advancing brigades soon lost touch with each other as they detoured about thorn-choked gullies or around thick groves of trees. Some regiments forged ahead while others met Yankee troops, who put up unexpectedly stubborn resistance. Cannons cracked from hilltops, canister fire shredded wood­lands, and rifle fire stuttered along a crooked three-mile front.

  Behind the Yankees was the Bull Run, a stream deep and wide enough to be a river in any country other than America, and a stream deep and wide enough to drown a man encumbered with a pack, haversack, cartridge box, and boots, and if the rebels could just break the Yankees and hurl them back in panic, then eighty thousand men might be struggling to cross that killing stream, which boasted only one small bridge. The beaten army could drown in its thousands.

  Except the Yankees did not panic. They streamed back across the bridge, and some men did drown as they tried to swim the run, but other men stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the hill where once a man called Thomas Jackson had earned the name of Stonewall. They stood and met the oncoming rebel troops with a cannonade that lit the hill's forward slope red with the flash of its gun flames and made the valley beyond crackle with the echo of rifle volleys; volley after killing volley, a stinging flail of lead that ripped the gray ranks apart and held the land west of the bridge long enough to let the bulk of John Pope's army escape. Only then did the stoic blue ranks yield Stonewall Jackson's hill to Stonewall Jackson's countrymen. It was a Northern defeat, but the Northerners had not been routed. Lines of blue-uniformed men trudged away from a battlefield where they had been promised victory but had been led to defeat, and where the victorious rebels began to count the captured weapons and captured men.

  And at Joseph Galloway's farm, on the southern bank of the Bull Run, the Reverend Starbuck stared at his son, and his son stared back.

  "Father?" Starbuck broke the silence.

  For a second, a heartbeat, Starbuck thought his father would relent. For that one second he thought his father was about to hold out his arms in welcome, and there was indeed a sudden expression of pain and longing on the older man's face, and for that one second all the plans Starbuck had ever made for defying his father should they ever meet again van­ished into thin air as he felt a swamping wave of guilt and love sweep through him, but then the vulnerable expression vanished from the preacher's face. "What are you doing here?" the Reverend Starbuck demanded gruffly.

  "I've business here."

  "What business?" The Reverend Starbuck barred the hallway. He was carrying his ebony stick, which he held out like a sword to prevent his son from stepping further into the house. "And don't you dare smoke in my presence!" he snapped, then tried to swat the cigar out of his son's hand with his ebony cane.

  Starbuck easily evaded the blow. "Father," he said, trying to appeal to old
ties of stern affection, but he was brusquely interrupted.

  "I am not your father!"

  "Then what kind of a son of a bitch are you to tell me not to smoke?" Starbucks temper flared high and fierce. He wel­comed the anger, knowing it was probably his best weapon in this confrontation, for the instant that he had seen his fathers stern face a lifetime of filial obedience had made him cringe inside. At that moment when the door had swung open, he had suddenly felt eight years old again and utterly helpless in the face of his father's unforgiving certainty.

  "Don't you swear at me, Nathaniel," the preacher said.

  "I'll goddamn swear where I damn well want. Now move!" Starbuck's anger burned bright. He pushed past his father. "You want to pick a quarrel with me," he shouted over his shoulder, "then make up your mind whether it's a family quarrel or a fight between strangers. And get yourself out of this house, I'm burning the damn place down." Starbuck shouted these last words from the library. The shelves were empty, though a handful of account books were piled on a table.

  "You propose to do what?" The Reverend Starbuck had followed his son into the big room.

  "You heard me." Starbuck began tearing the account books into scraps that would burn easily. He piled the scraps at the edge of the table, where their flames would work on the empty shelving above.

  The Reverend Starbuck's face showed a glimmer of pain. "You have become a whoremonger, a thief, a traitor, and now you will burn a good man's house?"

  "Because he burned a tavern"—Starbuck started tearing apart another book—"and killed women. They pleaded with his soldiers to stop firing, but they wouldn't. They went on shooting and they burned the women alive."

  The Reverend Starbuck swept the pile of paper scraps off the table with his cane. "They didn't know there were women in the tavern."

  "They knew," Starbuck said, starting to make another pile of torn paper.

  "You're a liar!" The Reverend Starbuck raised his cane and would have slashed it down on his son's hands had not a shot been fired inside the room. The sound of it echoed ter­ribly inside the four walls, while the bullet ripped a scar into the empty shelves opposite the door.