McClellan could and should have come over the Antietam last night and at least flanked, if not surrounded Lee’s minute force. Searcy remembered how Secretary Stanton once murmured: ‘The trouble with McClellan is if he had a million men he’d swear the enemy had two million, and then he’d sit down in the mud and scream for three.’
‘I estimate,’ Searcy went on writing, ‘that here, around Sharpsburg and along the ridge, Lee has some fourteen brigades. The remaining 25 are still off in the Harpers Ferry area. It means that until Jackson and the others return, Lee and Longstreet have some 11,000 men to hold this line. McClellan, I would guess, has some 40,000 troops in reach of Sharpsburg this very morning.’
What was it about the bugger that he couldn’t roll on and on? Why was he the sort of general whose favourite exercise was to make camp and set sentries?
Still none of this bitterness entered his notes. ‘Lee will hold on here because he is here – he is in the North, he is on the flank of Washington. If he can stay here and put McClellan into disorder, he has won the whole game …’
As well as his general chagrin against McClellan, there was a sort of secondary pique working in Searcy – this one against the Union Intelligence Service. Intelligence Service? Colonel Allan Pinkerton led it, the renowned sleuth of railroad robberies. Obviously he didn’t know enough about military work to go through the pockets of dead generals returned to you by the other side. If he had, Mac couldn’t hold off like this, not even him. He’d know how short of men Lee was, he would have no excuse but to swamp him.
Searcy, thinking these savage, frightened thoughts, didn’t notice the two Confederate officers who were approaching him along a deep-set country lane. One of these approaching officers was a man of about forty. The other was a lieutenant in his early twenties. Their faces were in set lines; that Southern affability wasn’t there.
‘Mr Searcy,’ the older one said, ‘General Lee wants us to escort you to your horse.’
Searcy didn’t know what that meant, but he knew it must mean something worse than it said. He knew it by the lines on the faces of these men.
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand you, sir,’ he said, as haughty as he could manage.
Searcy recognised the younger man. A boy from Fredericksburg. No fool either. His hand was on his revolver. ‘We are authorised to take you at gunpoint,’ he said. ‘It would be better if things weren’t done that way, sir. If there’s a fracas and rumours get around about your activities, then we couldn’t protect you from the wrath of the troops.’
Searcy’s hand, the one holding the pencil, began to tremble. He stopped it by fixing his mind on it. ‘Let me put my things away,’ he said. He packed his papers and writing gear in his satchel and stood up and managed to stare full face at the officers. ‘Of course,’ he said, very cold now, ‘I will demand in the most strict terms an explanation of all this.’
The elder officer just nodded downhill. Go that way, the nod said.
‘I realise I am a guest,’ said Searcy, balking. ‘I realise I am here on sufferance. But I will not be ordered around at gunpoint or under any other conditions without being told why. Tidewater gentlemen are not the only people on this continent with rights.’
He was surprised how firm that sounded, whereas what he very nearly wanted to do was sit down on the grass and weep and confess, and find out if they meant to execute him or had other torments in mind.
‘All right, Mr Searcy,’ the elder officer said. ‘Shall I say this? Certain notes were found in the pockets of a dead Union officer who was being sent North for burial. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you, sir, to find out whose they were – we looked at the handwriting of many officers. It didn’t come to anyone till later, sir, to take a look at yours. We’ve done that now. The writing on the notes that were taken out of the dead general’s pocket was your writing, Mr Searcy. We didn’t find that out soon enough to stop you taking your little ride with Mr Angus.’
‘Listen to me!’ Searcy said, choosing to snarl a little. ‘I am a neutral and a representative of the press and my belongings are immune from search …’
The older officer wasn’t very impressed with that sort of thing. ‘Our colleague Angus,’ he said, ‘was tossed from his horse and we all thought, sir, it was after he’d delivered his papers to Dan Hill. You were damn lucky we went on thinking it, Searcy, ole boy. You see Colonel Chilton sent a copy of 191 to Dan Hill and another one to Tom Jackson. But ole Tom wrote out a copy for Dan, because Dan was under his orders and he didn’t know Dan was meant to get one anyhow from headquarters. So Dan Hill did get a copy of 191 and didn’t have to complain to General Lee that he didn’t know what to do next – which would have made General Lee pretty damn suspicious, sir, pretty damn reasonable suspicious indeed.’
‘What a tale of fiction,’ said Searcy, though his hands had started trembling again.
The older officer narrowed his eyes. ‘I think,’ he said in a quiet voice, ‘the gods or the fates, or whoever looks after people like you, have done a good job of it so far, have gone, sir, to a lot more damn trouble than they ought.’
Searcy pursued the haughty act. He felt it was all he could do. ‘We are all under the same rules of fate and destiny,’ he said loftily.
The young officer said: ‘We got a letter from Angus this morning, sir. From Waterford in Virginia. Marked Urgent. It seems Angus’s head is clear now and he knows for certain he didn’t deliver any message. He’s distressed as well as that, on account of his horse has shown signs of blood poisoning, and he wonders could it be anything connected with a small wound that’s been noticed on his horse’s hip and has now ballooned up into quite a tumour. This morning, my friend and I have been through your saddlebags, Mr Searcy, the ones you left in the encampment. That’s something we don’t usually like doing to any Christian. We find, sir, a hatpin.’ The young man was really outraged now, at the idea of such malice against good horseflesh. ‘March, sir, I warn you.’
So Searcy did, still managing to look like an aristocrat on his way to an unjust execution, but wondering fretfully all the time if they were really taking him off for just that purpose – to put a bullet in his head in some clearing in the woods. His palms were sweating. If I am shot, it will surely create an incident. It will put a headstone on any British urge to recognise the Confederacy. Therefore I’ll come to be considered a martyr. Mrs Whipple will be reverent when she speaks my name. None of this comforted Searcy as they hustled him on down towards the Hagerstown-Sharpsburg Road.
He felt it was below his dignity to threaten them but when they led him into woods, he couldn’t help himself. ‘I take it you realise that if any harm came to me,’ he said in an uninterested sort of voice, ‘Britain would demand a heavy price. I hope you understand how heavy.’
The younger officer, the lawyer, hissed through his lips, almost like the start of a laugh. It was as if he admired Searcy’s sass.
They came through the woods and out into the broad day again and Searcy felt better. A Confederate sergeant was standing by his, Searcy’s horse just there at the edge of the little town. The horse was facing south. Its saddlebags were in place and the sergeant held it as if he were holding it for an important man who had a journey to make.
The elder officer said: ‘We’ve taken nothing but your weapons. The Colt pistol and the Derringer. We’ve left you your knife. A week from tomorrow a vessel called the Calliope leaves Hampton Roads for Cork. Here is a letter of introduction to the captain.’ The officer handed him an envelope. ‘If you do not sail on it, peace-officers and provost-marshals throughout the Confederacy will be warned to apprehend you, dead or alive. A reward will be posted.’
‘And if I insist on staying on?’ asked Searcy.
‘You’ll get a military trial, sir,’ said the elder.
‘Your humble servant will be the prosecutor,’ the young lawyer said. ‘I shall demand the noose for you.’
The elder officer patted the saddle of Searcy’s horse. ‘I sugge
st you cross the Potomac just over here and make for Centerville,’ he said. ‘Then you’ve got railroad all your benighted way.’
Searcy climbed on to his horse.
‘I shall make my complaints to the Secretary of State, Mr Benjamin, in Richmond.’
The two officers looked at each other and shook their heads. ‘Don’t visit Benjamin, Mr Searcy.’
‘And why not?’
‘You’ll only make a fool of yourself.’ The two officers consulted each other again before the young one went on. Just for one thing, ‘Mrs Whipple, an associate of yours, has been charged with treason by a military court in Orange.’
Searcy’s belly seemed to shrink to berry-size and he thought, from the tingling in his hands and feet, he might faint.
The older officer said, ‘She’s been sentenced to die by hanging come Tuesday. Allowing a week for any appeals to be made. Or maybe even a pardon to come through.’
‘You are lying, sir,’ Searcy yelled.
‘I would not lie about the life of a lady,’ the officer yelled back. Then, in a softer voice: ‘Mrs Whipple did not have the protection that comes with being British and belonging to the press …’
Searcy said: ‘That’s right, sir, the greatest newspaper in the world. If this is true, I shall condemn you all so roundly in The Times that no one will touch your godless cause, gentlemen, no one will dare. The Sultan of Turkey won’t give you the damned time of day.’
‘You do that, Mr Searcy,’ said the young officer. ‘And bring the Sultan greetings from all those boys who’ll perish by Thursday.’
He gave Searcy’s horse such a swat across the tail that the thing behaved almost as madly as Angus’s had the night Searcy drove the hatpin into it. The journalist kept his saddle, though, as the creature galloped south, and after half a mile he eased back to a canter, and took thought. If you have eighty miles to travel, it’s quicker to canter. The worst thing is to work a horse so hard its heart bursts between towns and you have to carry a saddle for miles. It was therefore not fruitful to think of poor Mrs Whipple’s panic of soul as she sat in detention. Maybe she suffered no panic of soul. Maybe her friend – the wife of the Secretary of War and all those others – were visiting her or working for her pardon.
Confederate soldiers in the fields watched him with dull eyes. Tears for them and for Mrs Whipple and for his own escape ran down his face, his hands on the reins began their trembling again. Only two miles to Shepherdstown, Virginia, and in Shepherdstown he could ask about the best roads, and that act of asking would settle him down.
He wasn’t going to travel by Centerville, as the older officer suggested. He could get to Orange and still make it to that ship – the Calliope? – in time. He would board the Calliope with a sweet travelling companion!
Drying his face, he saw Dunker people, Sharpsburg families, up ahead on the road, making for Shepherdstown too, escaping the battle which could not now be begged off.
3
Those Dunker families Searcy had seen came from farms round about. That morning they’d decided it was time to take shelter at last.
The Dunkers were a German church keen on all the Ten Commandments and especially the one about brotherly love and honouring the lives of other humans. Their religion did not even allow them to take differences to court. In this reign of Christ, they thought, there shouldn’t be need of courts. It was savage and strange therefore that the Confederates were making a line amongst the fields and behind the fences of peace-lovers like the Dunkers.
Up till last Sunday the war had kept a fit distance from them. They’d heard the sound of cannon from the direction of South Mountain, but they’d still read their Sunday services. Their little church stood on a small rise close up by the Hagerstown pike. Since they didn’t believe in vanities it was a simple building. No steeple on it. After the service the Millers and the Poffenbergers and the others had all gone to supper at the Mummas’ house and the noise from the east began to die as dark came. Though they couldn’t know it, it had already become certain, even while they ate their sabbath meal, that their meadows would be the battleground.
The Dunker farms were mainly on the north side of Sharpsburg. Until Monday morning the Confederates of Lee and Longstreet seemed to be strung out towards the south side of the little town. But by mid-afternoon cavalry began to turn up all round the little white church and cannon appeared on a hill called Nicodemus Heights on Johannus Hoffman’s farm. An infantry brigade stacked rifles by Miller’s big cornfield and sent off a line of skirmishers towards the north. There were Confederate infantry and guns at Mumma’s farm and on the other side of the pike, all round Poffenberger’s place. Overnight other Confederates arrived and by morning the Dunkers knew the war was taking their fields away from them and would use their farms for its abominable rites.
So they closed the doors of their farmhouses – there were no locks since they considered that locking things up was an insult to humankind – and packed up their waggons. Along the Potomac were caves they could shelter in till the godlessness passed. They shared the road to the river with many of the townsfolk of Sharpsburg. A shopkeeper and his wife and daughters crept along in their good surrey behind Poffenberger’s waggon. The shopkeeper called: ‘Sharpsburg’s a hundred years old, Brother Poffenberger, and ain’t this the very first time any Christian has been forced to leave it!’
Farmer Miller had his eye on the detachments of young boys straggling up the road towards the town he himself was leaving. They would get over to the side, these young men, to let the waggons of the Brotherhood past. Some of them would call. ‘Goin’ to market, daddy?’ and such, but they were mostly quiet. He felt right sad for them.
He was sad too about his thirty acres of corn in that big field by the Hagerstown pike. He guessed it would be trampled or stolen by one army or another or crudely harvested by cannon before he could ever get back to it. He’d felt since the sabbath that that crop was doomed but it was too late by Monday morning to start getting it in. Newspapers said generals were meant to pay for corn they consumed or trod down, but Miller – though he read newspapers – knew it was against God’s law to take money off a general, especially if young men had suffered amongst the corn. As angry and sharp as he felt about his thirty acres of corn, he felt worse about the cropping of the young men that would happen. Of the young Georgians who’d camped by his corn on Sunday evening and had told him: ‘Yessiree, we mean to stand, Mr Miller. Did you think we was going back to Virginia without getting a better look at that-there McClellan …?’
The Shenandoah Volunteers, limping into Sharpsburg towards noon, saw these men in their black coats and wide, round-crown hats sitting up on the boards of their drays. Saw the wives and daughters with their hands in their laps and their faces hidden deep in wide-brimmed bonnets. And the young Dunker boys looking at the soldiers with that horror and that interest a country boy always has, be he one of the Brethren or not, when he sees soldiers marching.
Stubble-chinned Ash Judd called out some of the normal teasing remarks: ‘Going back to join the quartermaster corps, are you then, Mr Dunker?’ For Judd was in good heart. While they marched back towards Maryland, he’d got his usual sight of the old man on a fence in a village called Leetown. The old man, as he often did, had a clay pipe in his mouth, and his eyes had that usual look, as if they were just about to wink at Ash, but that the old man didn’t want to give the secret away to that extent.
Usaph didn’t feel near as genial as Ash did. He had the usual bellyaches from eating two days’ rations cooked in too much bacon grease. To add to his grief, he was carrying Cate’s musket as well. Goddam Cate had kept slithering and shivering along with the regiment, keeping up somehow, and first a conscript had offered to take the goddam thing for Cate, and Usaph felt bound somehow to rest the conscript now and then. Deep in his belly, it made him itch and squirm for being so stupid. That feeling didn’t help the pains he had already.
But the Shenandoah Volunteers, with pop-eyed C
olonel Wheat at its head mounted on his mare, with Captain Hanks and Lieutenant Taber striding behind, and Daniel Blalock, schoolmaster of the Valley, carrying the flag with the insignia of Virginia on it, and with all the scrawny boys in its poor-formed ranks, now numbered just 83 souls. Amongst so few, Cate, a lean streak of misery, chattering and shivering in a blanket, stood out and couldn’t be turned away from. That was how it seemed to Usaph, anyhow.
In spite of feeling foolish, Usaph and everyone else had this feeling as well that things were getting close to their end. Wheat had said at breakfast that morning, while they were resting at Shepherdstown: ‘It seems to me that we’ve whipped Pope and now our indicated task is to whip McClellan. And when that is done, then there’s no one else on God’s sweet earth left for us to whip.’ And then Danny Blalock had spoken up in that sort of quiet excitement that was in everyone and said something they just about all believed. ‘They won’t fight the way they did round Groveton and Manassas. Why, they spent all their courage there. You can’t tell me they’ve got any more to spend.’
So this noon, even Gus was humming now and then. A straight-out tune, ‘Mister, Here’s Your Mule’, he was humming away at, just for the straight enjoyment of it.
And Usaph had said: ‘Gus, damn me if you ain’t singin a straight-out tune.’
And Gus had grinned. ‘Damn me if you ain’t carrying Cate’s Springfield.’
‘No town to pay much mind to,’ said Ash Judd as they went through Sharpsburg. Main Street lacked shops and was all quiet shuttered houses. An officer at the corner of Main and Jefferson pointed them north up the Hagerstown Pike. In the churchyard of the white Dunker church they fell out. The Stonewall Brigade. 300 boys. They stacked their arms. Usaph added Cate’s to the stack. The church was closed up, its blinds drawn, just as if the Lord Christ was sleeping. Usaph fell on the ground without spreading his blanket and slept for a while in the September sun. He had a dream in which he was in an office. Jesus Christ sat behind the desk and he and Ephie stood before it. Ephie wept, and the Lord tried to explain something to Usaph on her behalf, something she had done that Jesus had forgiven but which Usaph felt offended by. In his sleep, Usaph knew what that something was. But when he woke there was nothing left of it except the flavour of grief.
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