The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04

by Bernard Cornwell

  Instead, an hour after dawn, a man rode across the field with a white flag and sought permission from the rebels to rescue the Federal wounded, who lay crying in the bloody fields. Men who had cursed and killed the day before now joined together to disentangle the dead from the dying. Yankee and rebel worked together, filling the ambulances with broken men. The first shallow graves were dug, though it seemed that all the digging in the world would prove unequal to the task of burying the dead.

  Captain Truslow decided to doctor Starbuck. There were no surgeons to spare for lightly wounded men, so Truslow used a rusty pair of long-nosed pliers to take out the scraps of tooth and bone. He lay Starbuck flat and stooped over the mangled mouth. "God in his heaven," he complained when Starbuck flinched at the pain. "Worse than a girl, you are. Just lie still, for Christ's sake. Water!"

  Captain Potter poured water from a bucket to swill the blood from Starbuck's open mouth. Truslow probed again, swilled out the blood once more, then kept digging and tugging until he was sure every loose scrap of bone and tooth was free. He put three crude stitches into Starbuck's cheek. "This'll take the gloss off your good looks," Truslow said happily, knotting the cotton thread.

  "Women like a scar," Potter said.

  "He did enough caterwauling without a scar," Truslow growled, "so God help the ladies now." He had found a small bottle of brandy on a dead Yankee and he poured the raw spirit into Starbuck's bloody mouth. "Swill it out," he said, then gave Starbuck a pad made from a folded strip torn from the bottom of a dead man's shirt. "Bite on that till it stops bleeding," he ordered.

  "Yes, doctor," Starbuck mumbled.

  In the afternoon Starbuck dug Lucifer's grave beneath an elm tree while Potter carved the words "A brave sol' dier" into the elm's trunk. Potter went to remove the revolver from Lucifer's body before they put it in the shallow grave, but Starbuck stopped him. "Leave it with him," he said. "God knows he might need it where he's going." Potter nodded, but unbuckled the pouch to take out the remaining cartridges. Inside the pouch he found a carefully wrapped oilcloth package that he took out and showed to Starbuck. Starbuck took it, untied the string, and found the piece of paper that Caton Rothwell had shown him on the night after the fight with Case. He read the signature aloud. "Billy Blythe," he mumbled. "Son of a bitch."

  "Who?"

  Starbuck showed him the paper. "That was Tumlin's revolver," he said, pointing to the gun that Potter had placed in Lucifer's right hand, "and this paper belonged to Sergeant Rothwell. Jesus." He stopped, realizing that Tumlin must have killed Rothwell. "Now why the hell would Tumlin take it off Rothwell’s body?"

  "God knows," Potter said.

  "I'd like to meet Mister Tumlin again," Starbuck said. He spat blood. "God," he went on vengefully, "but I would like that." He put the paper in his pocket, then helped lift Lucifer into his grave. They covered him with soil.

  "You want to say a prayer?" Potter asked.

  "I already have." Starbuck picked up Imp's lead and led the dog to the wood's edge. He bit down on the pad, almost relishing the pain as he stared at the field, which was thronged with soldiers of both sides. They were exchanging stories and swapping Northern newspapers for Southern journals. Some had cloths tied about their faces to keep away the stink of the dead.

  Potter came and stood beside Starbuck. "I never did get my whiskey," he said wistfully.

  Starbuck took the bloody pad from his mouth. "When we're back south," he promised, "you and I will get drunk together."

  "I guess we are going back south," Potter said.

  "I guess," Starbuck said, then spat a dribble of bloody spittle. Lee's army was in no state to stay, no state to fight. It had taken one hell of a beating and, though it had given one as well, it had no choice but to retreat.

  Gunners limbered up the cannon that Starbuck's men had captured and towed it away toward Sharpsburg. Swynyard had insisted that the legend Potter had begun carving on the trail be finished so that the gunners would know that the despised Yellowlegs had captured the gun, and so Truslow had burned the words into the wood with the red-hot tip of a bayonet. Swynyard now crossed to Starbuck. "How's the mouth?"

  "Painful, sir."

  Swynyard drew Starbuck out of Potter's earshot. "Mister Maitland," the Colonel said, "confessed to me that he can't abide the sight of blood."

  Starbuck, despite the pain in his jaw, smiled. "He said as much to me," he said.

  "He's squeamish." Swynyard shrugged. "Told me he once fainted when one of his slaves had a nosebleed. I guess he wanted a chance to overcome the fear, but it didn't work. He agrees with me that Richmond might be a more suitable place for him to work." The Colonel's ravaged face split in a smile. "So the Legion's yours, Nate. What's left of it. Them and the Yellowlegs."

  "Thank you, sir."

  Swynyard paused, staring across the field where the living moved so slowly among the dead. "I've got some other news."

  "Good, I hope."

  Swynyard nodded.

  "Jackson just promoted me. I'm a Brigadier General."

  Starbuck smiled again, tearing at the stitches in his cheek. He ignored the pain and held out his hand. "Congratulations, General."

  Swynyard had tears in his eyes. "God has been good to me, Nate, so very good. Why did I wait so long to find Him?" Starbuck made no answer and the General smiled. "I'm having a prayer meeting at sundown," he said, "but I don't suppose you'll come?"

  "I don't suppose I will, General," Starbuck said.

  "And after prayers," General Swynyard said, "we march."

  "Home?" Starbuck asked.

  "Home," Swynyard said.

  Because the invasion was over.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM (Sharpsburg, to southerners) is famous for being the bloodiest day in all America's history. Close to 23,000 men died in that one day. It was, in the proper sense of the word, a shambles.

  Lee was a gambler, and his decision to fight in the fields about Sharpsburg was one of his biggest wagers. He feared the political consequences of a retreat without a battle, and hoped that his opponent's natural caution would make McClellan fumble and yield the outnumbered rebels a famous victory. The gamble failed. Lee's pride demanded that his army stay in place on the day after the battle, for that, by the soldiers' terms of honor, denoted that the battle was not lost, but the campaign was nevertheless a failure. The North was spared a prolonged invasion and no European country was encouraged to join the South. By keeping his army on the field Lee could claim a technical victory, but on the Thursday night the rebel army slipped away, and by Friday evening there were no rebel soldiers left in the United States other than the dead and the prisoners.

  Lee's invasion failed, but it was hardly because of George McClellan, who was presented with a marvelous chance to end the war at Antietam. If he had attacked twenty-four hours earlier, he would undoubtedly have destroyed Lee's army, which was smaller than it ever would be again until the war's very end. Yet McClellan was racked by doubts and waited while Lee was reinforced. And if, when he did at last summon the courage to attack, McClellan had coordinated his assaults, he would have routed Lee, but instead the Northern attacks came one at a time, and Lee was able to move his shrinking forces to meet each new assault. McClellan's plan of attack had been to engage Lee's flanks, then send the killing blow through the center when the rebel reserves had been depleted, but the fight never remotely resembled that plan. Instead the battle degenerated into a series of bloody encounters over which neither side had full control. It has been called a soldier's battle, for it was the common soldier who fought it, and fought it with an extraordinary bravery. McClellan could have resumed the fight on Thursday and, with his huge reserve, which had not fired a shot, he would surely have finished the business quickly enough, but he was too frightened to try. He claimed his soldiers were tired, and Lee's army was allowed to slip away to fight again. Lee's army had suffered grievously and all it had to show for its efforts were the captured guns and
supplies from Harper's Ferry.

  Antietam was McClellan's last battlefield command. He himself believed he had displayed the highest military artistry, but President Lincoln had taken enough of the Young Napoleon's timidity and new generals would now take over the North's army. McClellan went on to make himself a political nuisance. He ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 1864, but, fortunately for the Union, he failed to unseat Lincoln. To his dying day the Young Napoleon would defend his appalling leadership, but the truth is that with McClellan's dismissal the rebels lost one of their strongest military assets.

  The story of the Lost Order is famous. No one knows how the copy was lost, and after the war, when survivors conducted endless autopsies on their campaigns, everyone involved denied any knowledge of the order. All that we know is that the two soldiers from the 27th Indiana regiment found the order wrapped around three- cigars and its discovery was enough to prod McClellan out of his customary caution. If the order had not been found, Lee would probably have reached the Susquehanna as he planned, but once his strategy had been revealed the invasion was doomed. The two soldiers who found the order, Bloss and Mitchell, were both wounded in the cornfield.

  The fight in the cornfield and the battle for the sunken lane were the two bloodiest episodes in the battle, with the struggle for the Rohrbach Bridge (now named the Burnside Bridge) coming close behind. To walk the terrain today is to marvel at the bravery of men who could attack across such open country in the face of terrible fire. The battlefield is well preserved, though the East and West Woods are much shrunken from their former sizes. A road, heavily lined with regimental memorials, now runs south of the cornfield while an observation tower stands at the dogleg corner of the sunken lane. Anyone wanting to know more about the campaign and battle should read Stephen Sears's Landscape Turned Red, a book that was constantly by my side during the writing of The Bloody Ground and, to my mind, is the finest book on a single Civil War battle, maybe on any nineteenth-century battle, ever written.

  Antietam was indeed a ghastly affair. The North was badly led and its men's bravest efforts were wasted, but the rebel retreat afforded President Lincoln the opportunity to proclaim a victory and, in its wake, to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. The war, which had been ostensibly about states' rights, was now firmly a moral campaign to

  abolish slavery. But to proclaim the slaves free was one thing, to liberate them was another, and the road to Richmond would prove to be hard and long. Lee had been rebuffed at Antietam, but he was far from beaten. Starbuck will march again.

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