Redcoat

by Bernard Cornwell

  Jonathon waited. His awe of Weller had increased in the last few days. The Colonel was a huge man, bigger even than Woollard, with a battered face and a grating voice, and a mischievous temper that could also make men cringe in fear of his displeasure. Gossip said that Weller had been a wastrel and a gambler before the rebellion had found a use for his restless energy. Today Weller wore a brown leather jerkin with the red sash of his rank about his waist. His hard-planed face was shadowed by a brimmed hat which bore the scrap of white paper which, in the confusion of uniforms and homespun, was the Patriots’ mark for the day. He finished scribbling and held the paper out to Jonathon. “If Forrest can’t read, tell him to advance anyway. Straight up the draw, then slant towards the village. Tell him, then come back here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Johnny ….”

  “Sir?”

  “I want you by my side today. A good man beside me makes me feel better.”

  Jonathon, whose face had been drawn with worry all morning, suddenly laughed. “Yes, sir!”

  He wheeled the roan mare and trotted to the west. Somewhere behind him a rebel band of flutes struck up the Jacobite “White Cockade” as a taunt to the enemy’s Hanoverian monarch. Then, with a shout, and beneath their great flag, the Virginians went forward and Jonathon, riding in the fog, was determined that on this day of battle he would become a man worthy of the girl who waited for his return. He would fight, he would conquer his fear, and he would strike a blow for the cause; not with the point, but with the edge. For this day, with God’s blessing and in defence of a God-given liberty, Jonathon would become a soldier.

  Twelve

  Just as Sam thought that his battalion was doomed to wait forever in the white, dispiriting fog, Colonel Elliott turned in his saddle and signalled with his sword arm to Captain Kelly. The Captain’s sabre rasped out of its scabbard. “Light Company! Skirmish order! One hundred paces only!”

  Sam was in the Light Company; the skirmishers who had the honour of first meeting the enemy. Their job was to act as a screen for the remaining nine companies; a screen which tried to unsettle an advancing enemy with aimed musket fire. The enemy would try to defeat the skirmishers with light troops of their own, but, as Sam and Nate went forward together, no enemy was visible in the fog.

  “Far enough!” Captain Kelly had ridden forward with the company. Ensign Trumbull, on foot, repeated the command to halt in his breaking and squeaky voice.

  Sam knelt. Ten paces either side of him were other men, while, staggered back between the front men were their partners. Nate, Sam’s partner, would advance after Sam had fired. Nate’s loaded musket would offer protection as Sam reloaded. And so they would fire, turn and turn about. The other nine companies, waiting invisible in the fog behind, would never spread out like this, but would stay in their three tightly locked ranks to pour out massed volleys of musketry.

  Captain Kelly walked his horse along the skirmish line. He grinned at Sam. “Awful morning for a battle, Sam.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They talked horses for a moment, chatting as calmly as though this were the English countryside and they were waiting for the hounds to start a cub from a covert. Nothing stirred the mist before the skirmish line. “Well, look after yourself.” Kelly nodded at Sam, then turned his mare towards the west from whence the battle sounds still came.

  “We’re in the wrong bleedin’ place,” Liam Shaughnessy, the advance man of the pair to Sam’s left, grumbled.

  “Keep your eyes skinned and your tongues still!” Sergeant Scammell shouted.

  Ensign Trumbull, strolling in front of the line and cutting at poison ivy with his sword, stopped close to Sam. “It’s Gilpin, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Sam said.

  “Very good, very good.” Trumbull said pointlessly, then walked on towards the right flank where the ground dropped away to a wooded valley that was merely a vague shadowy blur in the fog. The ensign’s uniform was too big for him, bulky and tight-belted. He looked like a child in his elder brother’s clothes.

  “We’re in the wrong bleedin’ place,” Liam said again. “We should be over there, killing the bastards.” He gestured towards his left, where the village and the source of the musketry were both hidden by the fog.

  “We should be at home,” Nate said. “When did you last drink a drop of decent ale? Spruce beer’s like horse piss.”

  “You’d know, Nate, wouldn’t you now?” Shaughnessy laughed.

  Sam stared into the gentle, white fog. He put the brass butt of his musket on the ground and leaned on its barrel like a shepherd resting on a crook. He felt for his sheathed bayonet, found it in place, then fingered the lump of his lucky musket ball in his top pocket. The ball, spent by its long passage, had struck his crossbelt on Long Island and thumped harmlessly to earth. He had picked it up and kept it close to his heart ever since. He recalled that battle, then thought of Brandywine; both had been fought in full light, not in this clinging fog that was more like the fumbling darkness about Paoli’s Tavern. He suddenly wished there was artillery close to the battalion. He remembered how the British cannons had flayed the enemy lines at Brandywine.

  “You all right, Sam?” Nate asked.

  “You’re still here, then?” Sam grinned at his brother.

  “For the moment.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Nate. I’ll miss you.”

  “Then come with me.”

  Ensign Trumbull was idling away his time, slashing at the ivy and dreaming a boy’s dreams of military glory. He hoped he looked suitably fearsome in his over-large uniform, but he felt very puny compared to the massively impressive Sergeant Scammell. Trumbull hacked at another ivy leaf and stared towards the underbrush in the small wooded valley where he saw, among the wet leaves, men in brown uniforms who carried bayonet-tipped muskets. There were white scraps in their hats. Trumbull could only stare at them for a moment in shocked disbelief, wondering if he was dreaming. “Sir?” His voice came out as a childish croak. He turned towards Major Kelly who was an indistinct shape in the fog. “Sir?”

  No one in the Light Company heard him. The men stared to their front while, from their right flank, brown-clothed men with white papers in their caps broke into a charge.

  “Sir!” Trumbull’s third effort came out as a despairing screech.

  “Right flank, incline! Close!” Scammell’s shout pumped warm panic in Sam’s chest as he glimpsed the enemy coming so sudden from the misted valley.

  “Fire!” Scammell’s shout twisted Sam half right. He raised the musket, pointed it, and pulled the trigger so that the brass butt gave its mule kick to his shoulder and the flaming scraps of powder burnt his cheeks.

  “Close on me!” Scammell, as ever, was superbly calm in battle. The skirmishers had been surprised and outflanked, but Scammell was coping as though the attack were merely an inconvenience.

  Ensign Trumbull flicked up his sword, it was hammered aside, and a tall man skewered the boy with a bayonet. The ensign screamed, then another bayonet was rammed into his throat and the Americans seemed to flood over his body in their eagerness to attack the company’s exposed flank.

  “Rejoin! Rejoin!” Captain Kelly galloped towards the danger, pointing back towards the main battalion that would greet this attack with a numbing volley. “Go! Go! Go!” His bugler, left alone in the mist, sounded the retreat.

  A musket ball hit Cleo. The mare screamed, blood frothed at her lips, and the Captain kicked his feet from the stirrups as the horse reared, twisted, and fell.

  Nate grabbed Sam and pulled him back. “Run, Sam!”

  “Move!” Scammell, still calm in the panic, was shouting at the Light Company, but the shouts of the rebels were closer. They seemed to Sam to be screaming like fiends. He ran, worrying that his musket was still unloaded, but suddenly the fog ahead of him, in which the battalion appeared like a dull red wall, blazed with a flickering of myriad flames, tongues of fire, and the musket volley crashed around Sam’s
ears and the sound of the volley was like a beat of thunder in his skull.

  “Jesus!” Nate, unscathed by the volley, sheered away. There were American light troops between the skirmishers and the battalion now and Sam, suddenly confused, ran away from both. He thought he heard Scammell shout at him, but all Sam’s confidence had evaporated in the sudden mêlée. He could hear the rattle of ramrods in barrels, he could hear screams of wounded men, and he heard an American officer shout that these men wore the red plumes. Sam, driven away from his battalion by the suddenness of the rebel attack, ran blindly in search of any shelter.

  Another crashing volley behind, more flames, then Sam saw a rail fence and he dived for its scanty cover and began reloading his musket. More of the Light Company, shorn away from their comrades, took refuge by the fence. Liam Shaughnessy was there, swearing and spitting blood. Nate grinned nervously while Sergeant Derrick, panting from his exertions, cursed the confusion.

  Corporal Dale led another half-dozen men to the fence. “Kelly’s dead. They got him with bayonets.”

  “We’ll all be dead if you don’t get your head down.” Derrick snapped.

  Sam spat a bullet into his musket and rammed the charge down the barrel. He skinned his fingers on the pan as he primed it, then cocked the gun. He could hear the volleys crashing between the two bodies of troops, and he could hear the screaming, the terrible screaming of wounded men.

  It had all happened so suddenly. Sam had imagined seeing the first figures in the fog, then fighting as he had been trained before the bugle ordered him back to the waiting battalion which would blast the enemy away with its practised volleys. Instead, in a sudden paroxysm of violence, the Yankees had hooked in from the fog and now Sam was bereft, isolated, and lost in a frightened huddle on a strange battlefield. Captain Kelly’s horse, that Sam had tended so lovingly, was beating its hooves on the ground as it lay dying. Men, bleeding and dying, lay crying in the fog.

  “Right mess, innit, Sam?” Sergeant Derrick, his breath back, was wild-eyed and scared.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Take those hackles off, that’s what we do.” Derrick pulled off his hat and ripped the red wool away. “All of you! I’m not going to be slaughtered for a scrap of bleeding wool! Get ’em off!”

  The men, crouching frightened by the fence, obeyed. Sam ripped off the red wool, the sign of his pride, and hurled it into the pastureland. “Right, lads!” Sergeant Derrick seemed calmer now that the distinctive marks were gone. “We wait for those Yankee bastards to move, then we go round the right flank to find the battalion.”

  “Behind! Behind!” Corporal Dale, voice rising in panic, twisted to face north.

  Sam writhed round, the fear sudden at his chest, and saw more brown-clothed men in the fog. It was a new enemy skirmish line that advanced on the right flank of the first attack. He put the musket to his shoulder, then heard hooves to his right and saw the shapes of mounted men hammering in a sudden gallop.

  “Run!” Sergeant Derrick bellowed in panic.

  “Fire!” Sam shouted the word. “Fire, fire, fire!”

  Perhaps six men instinctively obeyed Sam. They made a rough line, they shouldered their muskets, and they pulled their triggers. The brass bruised Sam’s shoulder and the lock spat burning powder into his right eye. Smoke blossomed, stinking like filth, and through its screen, and through the wet fog, Sam saw a horseman throw up an arm, slump, then fall sideways from the saddle. A trumpet was screaming in the morning, hooves were like drumbeats from hell, and the bright surprise of drawn sabres sliced into the Redcoats.

  “Run!” Shaughnessy was ten yards ahead, sprinting, as Sam seized Nate’s arm and dragged him to the right. The horses crashed past. There was only a handful of horsemen, but they split the panicked skirmishers apart like wolves snarling into a flock.

  Sam twisted away from the crashing hooves. He stumbled, and the fall saved his life. A sabre hissed by his head, missing by a handsbreadth, he rolled, and heard the horrid, terrible, meaty-wet chop of a blade striking home.

  “Nate!”

  “I’m here!” Nate was flat on his face, cowering from the drumming hooves.

  “Mother!” The word, pathetic and awful, came from Sergeant Derrick, falling, blood sudden from a savage wound in his shoulder; his despairing cry turned to a scream as another sabre whipped its razor edge across his big belly.

  The volleys still crashed in the fog behind, the horsemen wheeled from their threat, and now, from the north, the second battalion of rebel troops marched from the fog. Men ran from its ranks with bayonets raised.

  “Don’t!” Nate screamed it, holding up a hand to ward off the threatened killing blow.

  “Get up!” the rebel snarled. The American had a thin, tanned face which seemed to Sam as hard as dried leather.

  Sam and Nate stood. Other survivors of the Light Company were also taken prisoner and, like Sam, they were being stripped of weapons, ammunition, food; of anything that might be useful to the rebels.

  “Move!” The leather-faced rebel jabbed his bayonet into Sam’s ribs. “Move, you bastard!”

  Sam stumbled over the pasture. Behind him there was a rebel cheer that melded into a sudden, stunning volley and Sam heard a Yankee officer with a voice like the avenging angel order the charge. But Sam could do nothing. Sam was a prisoner. He was shaking. The rebels were nervous, their fingers tight on triggers, and Sam hurried to obey their orders. Sergeant Derrick lay lifeless, his guts spilt blue on the field and his torso sheeted with bright blood. Liam Shaughnessy was bleeding from the belly, gasping, dying. The smell of blood was thick as smoke.

  “Sit, you bastards!”

  There were ten prisoners from the Light Company. They sat. The firefight in the fog blazed for a few moments, then suddenly died. There was shouting, the screams of the wounded, and the barking of commands. One man was screaming for Jesus over and over until his voice was suddenly chopped short and, afterwards, it seemed very silent in the pasture. Then, out of the fog, shambling in a dispirited and defeated mass, more captured Redcoats were pushed towards Sam’s group.

  “Jesus!” Nate, appalled that so many should be taken, stared at them. The newcomers told of the battalion fighting the first enemy, then being surprised by the second attack from the left flank. Most of the battalion, behind its volleys, had fallen back before the rebel charge, but a good sixty prisoners had been taken. They were stripped of their weapons and ammunition, then ordered to take off their boots.

  A dozen Americans were ordered to stay with the prisoners. The guards were grinning and confident men who chewed tobacco as they ordered the Redcoats to collect the wounded and drag the dead into a heap. Sergeant Derrick’s guts were scooped on to a red coat and dragged away. Liam Shaughnessy suddenly jerked like a hooked fish, and died.

  A dismounted American horseman, perhaps an officer if the red sash about his waist indicated anything, prowled around the prisoners. He carried a drawn sabre, and he was staring at each captured man as if seeking a face he would recognize. His own face looked as hard as weathered wood. He stopped by Sam and Nate. “You two! Put some boots on and come here.”

  The brothers, apparently chosen at random, were taken fifty yards up the road to where the Americans had gathered their own wounded by the roadside. One man was breathing bubbles of blood and would die soon. Another, with a bullet in his groin, rocked to and fro on his haunches and wept silently. A third, wearing riding boots and with an empty sabre scabbard at his hip, lay white-faced on the grass. His breath was coming in short, moaning gasps. His right thigh was a mess of blood that had been staunched by a twist of rope tightened about his leg at the groin.

  “Look after them,” the American officer said. “If that leg starts to bleed again, tighten the rope.”

  “Yes, sir.” For a moment Sam had thought the American was planning to execute him and Nate with the drawn sabre.

  “Keep him warm. If he wants water, give it to him.” The officer dropped a canteen
on to the grass, then untethered a horse he had tied to the rail fence behind the wounded men. He swung himself easily into the saddle. “I’ll be back. You keep him alive, you bastards, or I’ll crucify you both! You hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sam said. Then, as the officer spurred his horse into a gallop, Sam turned to the American who, he saw, could be no older than himself. The wounded man had a thin, pale, handsome face and long black hair. He was trying to sit up and the pain was making him cry out.

  “It’s all right,” Sam said. “It’s all right. Calm now.” Sam had always been a genius with sick horses, and now he found he had the same ability with this wounded boy who, eyes flickering, looked first with alarm at his red-jacketed comforter, and then seemed to relax.

  “Here,” Sam said, “I’ll pull you up. Slow now.” He eased the boy up and propped him against a fence post. One of the American guards wandered close, saw nothing to trouble himself, and turned to watch the larger mass of prisoners.

  Sam wet his right hand with water and rubbed it over the wounded boy’s face. It did not seem at all odd to be giving help to an enemy. “You’re going to be good as new,” Sam said. “It’s only a bullet hole!”

  The American gave a weak smile. “My first.”

  “I’ve never had a bullet in me,” Sam said. “Like as not never will now.”

  “Battle,” the American said. “My first battle.”

  The man who bubbled as he breathed suddenly hiccuped, gagged, then his face rolled to one side and an obscene eruption of blood spilt from his mouth. He was dead. The second man was unconscious now, moaning, while Sam’s American had tears of pain on his cheeks.

  “Come on now.” Sam wiped the tears away. “You don’t want to cry in front of an Englishman!”

  “Lobsters,” the boy said.

  “Lobsters?”

  “That’s what they call you. We call you.” The American boy’s breathing was easier now, much easier. Sam saw how good the boy’s clothes were: a coat of the finest wool weave, a linen shirt, and a thick, leather sword belt.