The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04

by Bernard Cornwell

  The postmaster hesitated, then decided there was little point in being obstructive. He opened a drawer and handed Delaney an envelope. Delaney, making no attempt to hide what he did, took the copy of Special Order 191 from his pocket and slipped it inside the envelope, then folded the flap inside. "May I?" he asked and reached over the desk for the postmaster's pen. He dipped it in the inkwell, drained the excess ink from the nib, then wrote Captain Adam Faulconer, US Army, Gen. McClellan's Hdqtrs., in block letters. "It's nothing that needs bother Captain Gage or Major Pearce," he said to the postmaster, then borrowed a pencil and, very carefully, copied Gage's initials. "There," he said, the job done. "I suppose you'll charge me for a stamp now?"

  The postmaster looked at the addressee's name, then at the forged initials, and finally up into Delaney's face. He said nothing.

  "He's an old friend," Delaney explained airily, "and this might be my last chance to write to him." There was a risk that the postmaster was not a Northern supporter at all, but that was a risk Delaney had to run, just as he had to risk that the provosts did not check the basket of mail a third time.

  "You're all leaving then?" the postmaster asked.

  "By tomorrow," Delaney said, "the army will be gone."

  "Where?"

  "Over the hills and far away," Delaney said lightly. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. "But I imagine," he went on, "that the Federals will be here soon?"

  "Like as not," the postmaster said with a shrug. He weighed the letter in his hand, then ostentatiously put it in the drawer rather than with the other mail from the Confederate army. "It'll be delivered," he promised, "but I don't know when."

  "I'm obliged to you," Delaney said.

  Once outside the Post Office Delaney had to lean against the wall. He was shaking like a man with the fever. Dear God, he thought, but he had no stomach for this kind of thing. He felt a sudden need to vomit, but managed to hold it back. Sweat poured off him. He had been a fool! He had been unable to resist flamboyance. He had deliberately tried to impress a man he thought was a Northern sympathizer, but he knew the risk had been stupid and the thought of the hangman's noose made him gag again.

  "Are you unwell, Major?"

  Delaney looked up and saw an elderly minister in Geneva bands watching him with a sympathetic, but wary, look. Doubtless he feared Delaney was drunk. "It's the heat," Delaney said, "nothing but the heat."

  "It is warm," the minister agreed, sounding relieved that it was not liquor that had caused Delaney's distress. "Do you need help? A cup of water, maybe?"

  "No, thank you. I shall manage just fine." Delaney suddenly looked up as a rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. There were no threatening clouds in sight, but the sound of the far-off storm was unmistakable. "Maybe the rain will break the heat," he said to the minister.

  "Rain?" The minister frowned. "That isn't thunder," he said, realizing what Delaney had meant. "Those are guns, Major, those are guns." He stared west down main street to where the green fields and heavy trees and lines of rebel tents showed. "Harper's Ferry," the minister said, "it must be Harper's Ferry. God help all those poor men."

  "Amen," Delaney said, "amen." For the fighting had begun.

  The guns slammed back on their trails, spewing smoke sixty feet ahead of their muzzles and scattering flaming scraps of wadding onto the grass where small fires flickered from the previous shots. The sound of the guns was huge, so huge that it was more than just a sound, but a physical sensation as though the very earth was being buffeted in space. The shells screamed across the valley to leave little smoke trails from their burning fuses, then exploded in gouts of dirty gray-white smoke above the farther ridge. The smoke trails twisted in the wind, became feathery and tenuous, then another battery fired and the grass in front of the muzzles flicked flat again as another set of smoke trails whipped across the sky. Cannon barrels hissed as the wet swabs were thrust down the muzzles. On the far ridge a Yankee- battery returned the fire, but the

  Northern guns were outnumbered and the rebel guns were well laid and their fuses well timed, and so the Northern gunners died man by man as the shell fragments hissed among them.

  The Northern guns pulled back across the ridge, leaving its defense to infantry alone. The Southern cannon changed their aim, scattering shells among the trees, bushes, and rocks of the ridge. Some cannon were firing percussion-fused shells that plunged into the ground to gout wagonloads of dirt and leaves, others used case shot that banged apart in the air to spit musket bullets down on the Yankee defenders.

  "Skirmishers?" Lieutenant Colonel Griffin Swynyard galloped his horse toward Starbuck. "Skirmishers?" he called again.

  "They're out there, Colonel," Starbuck said. The Yellowlegs were on the far right-hand flank of Swynyard's Brigade, and immediately to the left of the Legion, and Starbuck had taken good care that his skirmishing company had gone forward before Maitland threw the Legion's skirmishers down onto the valley floor. Starbuck had picked his skirmishers carefully, drawing them from the men who had held up best on the marches north from the railhead. Most of his men had taken those marches hard, limping slower and slower on bloody, blistered feet as the battalion crawled painfully to reach this valley north of Charlestown just as the first of Jackson's infantry swung in from their long march that had taken them west from Frederick City to loop clean about Harper's Ferry to this ground that lay south of the besieged Federal garrison.

  That garrison was attempting to defend the high ground about the river town, but so far their defense was half-hearted. The Yankee cannon had given up the fight quickly; now it was the infantry's turn to be tested.

  Starbuck's detached company of skirmishers was already in action, the smoke of their rifles blowing in small gray puffs across the valley floor. The answering puffs were well up the further slope, and Starbuck was mentally urging Potter to press harder, though in fairness his skirmishers were doing well. They were far ahead of the Legion's skirmishers. The sound of that skirmishers' battle came as a series of intermittent cracks that were only audible in the intervals between the cannon fire. Swynyard was using field glasses to watch the rebel shells fall on the far ridge. All Starbuck could see there was an erratic and broken cordon of blue-coated infantry beneath their bright flags. The line was not continuous. It was interrupted by the gaps between regiments or where bushes or rocky outcrops interfered with the line's alignment, and sometimes the defending line vanished altogether where the Yankees sheltered in dips of the ground or behind boulders. "I don't see any rifle pits, Nate," Swynyard said.

  "For small mercies, God, thank you," Starbuck answered.

  Swynyard grimaced, but did not protest Starbuck's blasphemy. Instead he pointed to the left-hand end of the Yankee line. "Reckon you could take that ground?" he asked. "Say everything from the end of the crest to where the guns were?"

  "I guess," Starbuck answered. In truth he had no idea how the Yellowlegs would behave in battle. Nor did he know how he would behave in this first battle since the terror had overwhelmed him in the rainswept fight near the mansion of Chantilly. He could feel that terror hovering near again. It gave him a curiously disembodied sensation, as though his spirit were merely watching his body and marveling that it could react so calmly to Swynyard's orders.

  "Wait for the line to advance," Swynyard said, then he turned his horse and rode toward Lieutenant Colonel Maitland, who was mounted behind the Legion's center company.

  Starbuck walked to the center of his own line where Captain Billy Tumlin stood with the color party. The color was a four-foot-square flag issued from the State Armory and it looked a sorry thing compared with the thirty-six-square feet of colored silk that flew above the Legion. Starbuck told Tumlin what the orders were, then walked out ahead of the battalion.

  Starbuck's job was to reassure his men. They had been dubbed failures by the army, then issued with antique guns, and now he had to persuade them to be winners. "They ain't got cannon!" he shouted, "just muskets." Almost certainly the Yank
ees were all armed with rifles, but this was no time for literal truths. "They're frightened as hell," he went on. "They'll probably break just as soon as you get within shouting distance, but if you hesitate, they'll rally. Not one of you will be killed crossing the valley. Remember that! They don't have cannon! We're going to walk across and when I give the order you charge the bastards! Hold your fire until then. No point in wasting a musket shot at long range. Hold your fire, wait for the order to charge, then scream at them! The faster they run, the more equipment they'll leave behind, and the more you kill, the more boots we get. Now fix bayonets!"

  He turned to stare across the ground over which they would advance. The land dropped steeply away to the left where a small stream tumbled toward the Potomac. Harper's Ferry lay where that river was joined by the smaller Shenandoah, and the confluence was surrounded by three high spurs of land that overlooked the small town. Jackson's troops now commanded the approaches to all three spurs, and all three were under pressure. Push the Yankees off the high ground and the garrison in the town, which had been swollen by other Northern troops driven to shelter by Jackson's advance, would be dominated by rebel artillery. Local people had slipped through the Northern lines to tell the rebels that close to twenty thousand Yankees were trapped there, and even allowing for exaggeration, that meant that the town must be crammed with food, weapons, and supplies; all the things the Special Battalion lacked.

  Starbuck turned back to look at the battalion that now stood with fixed bayonets. It was a tiny battalion, but no smaller than many others that had been shrunken by war. The Legion was larger, but still Starbuck reckoned that the Legion was down to half the number of men who had marched to Manassas for the war's first battle. Captain Truslow strolled out from the Legion with a rifle on his shoulder, which, like Starbuck's, carried no badges of rank. "Your boys, eh?" Truslow said, nodding at the battalion.

  "My boys," Starbuck agreed.

  "Any good?"

  "About to find out."

  "Maitland's no damned use," Truslow said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice, "and he don't like me neither." "Can't think why."

  Truslow grinned. "He reckons I ain't born to it. How was Richmond?"

  "Hot," Starbuck said, knowing that was not the answer Truslow wanted. "And I did see Sally," he added.

  "Reckoned you might. How is she?" The question was gruff.

  "Living in luxury. Making money, learning to speak French, winding the world round her little finger." Truslow grimaced. "Never did understand her. Always reckoned I should have had a son, not a daughter."

  "She ain't that much different from you," Starbuck said, "just one hell of a lot prettier. She sends her love."

  Truslow grunted, then glanced at Starbuck's left ear. "Someone thump you?"

  "Tall man, third from the right, rear rank," Starbuck said, jerking his head toward Captain Dennison's Company A, which lay at the right of his line. "He reckoned he ought to run the battalion instead of me."

  Truslow grinned. "You put him down?"

  "I thought of what you would do to him, then did it."

  "The hell you did. He's still alive, ain't he?"

  Starbuck laughed. "And probably praying for a chance to put a bullet in my back."

  "Captain Truslow!" Colonel Maitland, mounted on his horse and with a drawn sword resting on his shoulder, trotted out from the Legion's ranks. "To your company, if you please."

  Truslow spat. "Never reckoned I'd say it to you," he said to Starbuck, "but you'd sure be welcome if you come back."

  "I'm working on it," Starbuck said.

  Truslow shambled back toward the Legion, ignoring Maitland, who trotted past him to raise a hand in greeting to Starbuck. "So you got them here?" Maitland said, gesturing at the Special Battalion.

  "You ever thought I wouldn't?"

  Maitland ignored the question. Instead he turned and watched the skirmishers at work. "No problems here?" he asked.

  The question had been asked lightly, but Starbuck sensed the nervousness behind the elegant Colonel's words. This was Maitland's first proper battle, though it hardly counted as a battle to Starbuck. The enemy guns were gone, the waiting Yankee infantry was probably taut as a cocked revolver's leaf spring, and all this action promised to be was a simple advance with a few casualties as the price of the ground gained. What lay beyond the crest was another matter, but there should be no problems here. "Should be easy," Starbuck said. A bullet whistled overhead and Maitland gave an involuntary wince that he hoped Starbuck had not noticed. "You know what he was aiming at, Colonel?" Starbuck asked. "Us, I assume."

  "You," Starbuck said. "Man on a horse with a sword. There's a bastard up on that ridge with a long-barreled sharpshooting rifle. Right now he's pushing the loader back onto the muzzle and reckoning he'll do better next time."

  Maitland gave a wan smile, but did not move. Instead he glanced at Billy Tumlin, then back to Starbuck. "I'm glad you got Tumlin."

  "You know him?"

  "My lads rescued him. I'd have liked to keep him for the Legion, but Swynyard insisted we do things by the book."

  "I like him well enough," Starbuck said, "and my need of good officers is greater than yours, Colonel."

  "You really think so?" Maitland asked pointedly.

  "That sharpshooter, Colonel," Starbuck said, "is tapping the bullet through the loader now. Got a breech charged with real good powder, a nice measured amount, and he's reckoning on giving you four feet of correction for the wind and to fire a wee bit lower than last time. So tell me, do you want to be buried here or is there a Maitland family plot?"

  "I think Hollywood Cemetery would be more appropriate," Maitland said lightly, though he looked uncomfortable. "Discretion, you're advising, is the better part of valor?" he asked.

  "Seems to work that way."

  "Then I'll bid you good day, Starbuck," the Colonel touched his hat, "don't want to expose you to sharpshooters!" He turned his horse away.

  Starbuck unhitched his own rifle, from which he had finally blown out the damp powder by dint of working a wire through the nipple and trickling a tiny amount of dry powder into the clotted charge that had finally, reluctantly, exploded when he fired the gun. He loaded it, then pushed a percussion cap onto the cone, hoping it was not one of the bad caps that had suddenly started emerging from the Richmond factories. Rumor said that the Negro workers were deliberately sabotaging the army, and certainly there had been a spate of bad caps filled with anything except fulminate of mercury. He lowered the hammer onto the cap, slung the rifle again, and walked back toward the battalion.

  Lieutenant Coffman, who had been appointed as an aide to Swynyard, ran down the back of the brigade's line. His pouches and scabbard flapped as he ran, while he held his hat on with one hand and carried a rifle in the other. "We're to advance!" he shouted at Colonel Maitland, then ran on toward Starbuck.

  Starbuck waved to show that he had heard. "Battalion! Forward! Get them moving!" he shouted. With the Legion he would probably have gone ahead of the companies, but today he planned to follow his men into the fight, not out of fear, but simply to make certain they did advance. "Forward!" he shouted again, and he heard Dennison, Peel, and Cartwright echo the call. Billy Tumlin, revolver drawn, walked behind the right-hand companies. Tumlin had no company of his own, but Starbuck had given him supervision of those two right-hand companies, as well as asking him to look after the adjutant's responsibilities, for which Potter was signally inept. "Drive 'em on, Billy!" Starbuck shouted, then moved to his own place behind Lippincott's and Peel's companies. "Forward now! Smartly!"

  The four-line companies walked forward willingly enough. The rebel artillery fired over their heads, the shells sounding like great barrels rolling across the sky. Some of the men were made nervous by that sound and by the percussive blasts of the guns themselves, but Starbuck shouted at them to hurry as they instinctively crouched beneath the huge noise. "They're on your side!" he shouted, "now keep going! Sergeants! Look to the line! Lo
ok to the line!" Some men were hurrying, either out of eagerness or else a desire to get the advance over, and their haste was making the battalion ragged.

  The Legion had not started forward yet, or rather some companies had advanced when Starbuck's men began walking, but Maitland had called them back into alignment and now he fussily dressed the ranks while on either side of his regiment the other battalions of Swynyard's Brigade advanced down the gentle slope. The battle flags lifted in the small breeze. The day was ragged with explosions, punctured by the hammer of cannons, splintered by rifles, and filled now by the sound of hundreds of feet swishing through the grass. A skirmisher limped back toward the Special Battalion, another lay dead with a bullet in his brain and with his arms outflung like a man crucified. Someone, probably one of the skirmishers armed with an old Richmond Musket, had already taken the man's rifle.

  The Legion started forward at last. Starbuck's righthand company, under Dennison, was lagging, maybe in the hope that the Legion would catch up and support them. "Keep 'em up, Billy!" Starbuck shouted, "chivvy them!"

  Billy Blythe lumbered over to Dennison's company and waved his arms impressively. This morning's action was not to Blythe's liking. He was happy enough to shelter in the Special Battalion until the tide of war took him close enough to the Yankee lines, but he had no wish to fight, and no wish whatsoever to fight as an infantryman, but he knew he would have to keep up the pretense for a good while yet. There was no point in jumping over to these Yankees in Harper's Ferry for they were surrounded and doomed. He must wait till the battalion was across the river and so nearer to McClellan's main force. Until then he had decided he would do as much as was needed and no more. "Keep them moving, Tom!" he called to Dennison, but did not push the men himself.