“You presume the Colonel is making a reconnaissance?” Major Bird scoffed at the supposition. “Faulconer’s lollygagging, that’s what he’s doing. My brother-in-law lives under the misapprehension that soldiering is a sporting occupation, like hunting or steeplechasing, but it is mere butchery, Ethan, mere butchery. Our responsibility is to make ourselves into efficient butchers. I had a great-uncle who was a pork butcher in Baltimore, so I feel that soldiering might well be in my blood. Do you have any such fortunate ancestry, Ethan?”
Ridley sensibly made no answer. He was sitting on his horse beside Bird who, as ever, was on foot, while the Legion was lounging on the grass watching the night shadows shrink and fade in the far countryside and wondering what this day would bring. Most of the men were confused. They knew they had spent two days traveling, but where they had come to, or what they were expected to do now that they had arrived, they did not know. Ethan Ridley, seeking answers to the same troubling questions, had sought enlightenment from Thaddeus Bird.
“I doubt anyone knows what will happen today,” Thaddeus Bird answered. “History is not marshaled by reason, Ethan, but by the idiocies of lethal fools.”
Ethan struggled to elicit a sensible answer. “They reckon we’ve got twenty thousand men, is that right?”
“Who are ‘they’?” Major Bird asked serenely, intentionally infuriating Ridley.
“How many troops do we have, then?” Ridley tried again.
“I have not counted them,” Bird said. The rumors at Manassas Junction said that Beauregard’s Army of Northern Virginia numbered slightly less than twenty thousand men, but no one could be sure.
“And the enemy?” Ethan asked.
“Who knows? Twenty thousand? Thirty? As the sands of the sea, maybe? A mighty host, perhaps? Shall I guess twenty thousand, will that make you happy?” Again, no one knew how many northern troops had crossed the Potomac into Virginia. Rumor put the number as high as fifty thousand, but no American had ever led an army even half that size so Thaddeus Bird distrusted the rumor.
“And we are attacking on the right? Is that what you hear?” Ridley would normally have avoided Thaddeus Bird altogether, for he found the pedantry of the ragged-bearded schoolteacher annoying in the extreme, but the nervousness that accompanied the anticipation of battle had made even Bird’s company acceptable.
“That is the prevailing rumor, yes, indeed.” Bird was not inclined to make life easy for Ridley, whom he considered a dangerous fool, so he did not add that the rumor made a good deal of sense. The Confederate right wing, which was the bulk of Beauregard’s army, guarded the direct road from Washington to Manassas Junction. If the federal army captured the rail junction then all of Northern Virginia was lost, so common sense suggested that General Beauregard’s best hopes of victory lay in forcing the enemy away from the vulnerable railroads, just as the enemy’s best hopes of a swift triumph would seem to be a quick capture of the vital junction. Neither eventuality precluded something cleverer, like a flank attack, but Bird, out on the flank, could see no evidence that either army was risking anything as sophisticated as an attempt to encircle the other, and so he assumed both armies planned to attack in the same place. He jerked his head back and forth at the pleasing notion of two armies mounting simultaneous assaults and of the northern left wing blundering into the advancing rebel right wing.
“But if there is a battle,” Ridley said, struggling manfully to keep the discussion within the bounds of sanity, “then our present position is a long way from where it will be fought?”
Bird nodded vigorous assent. “God, if there is such a being, has been merciful to us in that regard. Indeed we are about as far from the army’s right wing as it is possible for a regiment to be and still be a part of the army, if indeed we are a part of the army, which we don’t seem to be, not unless my brother-in-law receives orders more to his liking than those brought to him by the noxious Evans.”
“The Colonel just wants us to take part in the battle.” Ethan defended his future father-in-law.
Bird looked up at the mounted Ridley. “I often wondered whether it was possible for my sister to marry beneath herself intellectually, and astonishingly she succeeded.” Bird was enjoying himself. “If you want the truth, Ethan, I do not think the Colonel himself knows what he is doing. My own belief is that we should have embraced Evans’s orders on the grounds that by staying here on the left we are less likely to risk an heroic death on the right flank. But what does my opinion count? I am merely a humble schoolteacher and a notional second in command.” He sniffed.
“You don’t want to fight?” Ridley asked with what he hoped was utter scorn.
“Of course I don’t want to fight! I shall fight if I have to, and I trust I shall fight intelligently, but the most intelligent desire, surely, is to avoid a fight altogether? Why would any sane man want to fight?”
“Because we don’t want the Yankees to win today.”
“Nor do we, but neither do I wish to die today, and if I am presented with a choice of becoming worm fodder or else of being governed by Lincoln’s Republicans, why then I do believe I would choose to live!” Bird laughed, jerking his head backward and forward. Then, spotting movement in the valley, he abruptly checked the idiosyncratic motion. “Has the great Achilles returned to us?”
Two horsemen had appeared on the Warrenton Turnpike. The sun had not risen high enough to slant its light into the valley and so the two riders were still in shadow, but Ridley, whose eyes were younger and sharper than Bird’s, recognized the Faulconers. “That’s the Colonel and Adam.”
“But where is Starbuck, eh? Do you think he has become a casualty of a reconnaissance, Ethan? You’d like it if young Starbuck was a casualty, wouldn’t you? What is it about Starbuck that you dislike so? His good looks? His wits?”
Ethan refused to dignify the cackling questions with any reply, instead he just watched as father and son held a moment’s conversation at the crossroads, then parted company. The Colonel ignored his men on the hilltop and rode south, while Adam trotted his horse uphill. “Father’s gone to find Beauregard,” Adam explained when he reached the plateau where the Legion waited. His horse shivered then nuzzled the nose of Ridley’s mare.
“And before that?” Bird enquired. “Ethan claims you were making a reconnaissance, but I decided you were merely lollygagging.”
“Father wanted to see whether there were any northerners on the Sudley Road,” Adam explained awkwardly.
“And are there?” Bird asked in mock solicitude.
“No, Uncle.”
“The saints be praised. We may breathe free again. Sweet land of liberty!” Bird raised a hand toward heaven.
“And Father wants you to discharge Nate,” Adam continued in his stilted tone. He was carrying Starbuck’s sword, pistol and uniform jacket.
“Your father wishes me to do what?” Bird demanded.
“To discharge Nate,” Adam insisted. “From the books.”
“I understand what the verb ‘to discharge’ means, Adam. And I will happily scratch Starbuck from the Legion’s books if your father so insists, but you must tell me why. Is he dead? Am I to inscribe the name of Starbuck in the honored rolls of southern heroes? Do I enter him as a deserter? Has he expired of a sudden conniption? The demands of accurate bookkeeping require an explanation, Adam.” Major Bird peered up at his nephew as he spoke this nonsense.
“He is discharged, Uncle! That’s all! And Father would like his name taken off the Legion’s books.”
Major Bird blinked rapidly, rocked back and forward, then clawed his dirty fingernails through his long, straggly beard. “Why do you discharge a man on the verge of battle? I ask merely so that I might understand the subtleties of soldiering?”
“Father decided the matter.” Adam wondered why his uncle had to make such a fuss of everything. “He believed Nate should go home.”
“Now? Today? At this very instant? Home to Boston?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“But why?” Bird insisted.
Ridley laughed. “Why not?”
“A perfectly good question,” Bird mocked, “but twice as complicated as mine. Why?” he demanded again of Adam.
Adam said nothing, but just sat with Nate’s erstwhile coat and weapons held awkwardly on his saddle’s pommel, and so Ethan Ridley chose to fill the silence with a mocking answer. “Because you can’t trust a northerner in these days.”
“Of course Nate could be trusted,” Adam said irritably.
“You are so very loyal,” Ridley said with a barely disguised sneer, but added nothing more.
Bird and Adam both waited for Ridley to clarify his sneer. “Beyond complimenting my nephew,” Bird finally spoke with heavy sarcasm, “can you elucidate why we should not trust Starbuck? Is it merely the accident of his birth?”
“For the Lord’s sake!” Ridley said as though the answer was so obvious that he demeaned himself by even bothering to mention it, let alone explain it.
“For my sake, then?” Bird persisted.
“He arrives in Richmond just as Fort Sumter falls. Does that not indicate something? And he uses your friendship, Adam, to gain the Colonel’s trust, but why? Why should a son of that son of a bitch Elial Starbuck come south at this time? Are we really expected to swallow the idea that a goddamn Starbuck would fight for the South? That’s like John Brown’s family turning against emancipation or Harriet Bitch Stowe attacking her precious niggers!” Ridley, having made what he believed to be an incontrovertible argument, paused to light a cigar. “Starbuck was sent to spy on us,” he said, summarizing his case, “and your father’s done a kind act in sending him home. If he hadn’t, Adam, then we’d have doubtless been forced to shoot Starbuck as a traitor.”
“That would have alleviated the boredom of camp life,” Bird observed brightly. “We haven’t had an execution yet, and doubtless the ranks would enjoy one.”
“Uncle!” Adam frowned disapprovingly.
“Besides, Starbuck has nigger blood,” Ridley said. He was not entirely sure this was true, but his group of cronies had developed the idea as yet another stick with which to beat the despised Starbuck.
“Nigger blood! Oh well! That’s different! Thank God he’s gone.” Major Bird laughed at the absurdity of the charge.
“Don’t be a fool, Ethan,” Adam said. “And don’t be offensive,” he added.
“Damned nigger blood!” Ridley’s temper drove him on. “Look at his skin. It’s dark.”
“Like General Beauregard’s skin? Like mine? Like yours even?” Major Bird asked happily.
“Beauregard’s French,” Ridley persisted, “and you can’t deny that Starbuck’s father is a notorious nigger lover!”
Major Bird’s frenetic rocking back and forth indicated the unseemly joy he was deriving from the conversation. “Are you suggesting that Starbuck’s mother takes her husband’s sermons only too literally, Ethan? That she plays the double-backed beast with contraband slaves in her husband’s vestry?”
“Oh, Uncle, please,” Adam protested in a pained voice.
“Well, Ethan? Is that indeed what you are suggesting?” Major Bird ignored Adam.
“I’m saying we’re well rid of Starbuck, that’s what I’m saying.” Ridley retreated from his allegations of miscegenation to attempt another attack on Starbuck. “Though I just hope he ain’t telling the Yankees all about our battle plans.”
“I doubt that Starbuck or anyone else knows about our battle plans,” Thaddeus Bird observed dryly. “The plans of this day’s battle will be decided in the memoirs of the winning general when the fighting’s long over.” He cackled at his own wit, then pulled one of his thin dark cigars from a pouch at his belt. “If your father insists that I discharge young Starbuck, Adam, then so I will, but I think it’s a mistake.”
Adam frowned. “You liked Nate, Uncle, is that it?”
“Did I mention my tastes? Or affections? You never did listen, Adam. I was commenting on your friend’s ability. He can think, and that is a distressingly rare talent among young men. Most of you believe that it is sufficient to merely agree with the prevailing sentiment which is, of course, what dogs and churchgoers do, but Starbuck has a mind. Of sorts.”
“Well, he’s taken his mind north.” Adam curtly tried to end the conversation.
“And his cruelty,” Major Bird said musingly. “We shall miss that.”
“Cruelty!” Adam, who felt he had been insufficiently loyal to his friend all morning, now saw a chance to defend Nate. “He isn’t cruel!”
“Anyone raised in the more zealous parts of your church has probably imbibed a godlike indifference to life and death, and that will endow young Starbuck with a talent for cruelty. And in these ridiculous times, Adam, we are going to need all the cruelty we can muster. Wars are not won by gallantry, but by assiduously applied butchery.”
Adam, who feared exactly that truth, tried to check his uncle’s obvious glee. “So you have frequently told me, Uncle.”
Major Bird scratched a match to light his cigar. “Fools usually need repetition to understand even the simplest of ideas.”
Adam gazed over the heads of the silent troops to where his father’s servants tended a cooking fire. “I shall fetch some coffee,” he announced loftily.
“You won’t fetch anything without my permission,” Major Bird said slyly, “or had you failed to note that in your father’s absence I am the regiment’s senior officer?”
Adam looked down from his saddle. “Don’t be absurd, Uncle. Now, shall I tell Nelson to bring you some coffee?”
“Not unless he serves the men first. Officers are not members of a privileged class, Adam, but merely officials encumbered with greater responsibilities.”
Uncle Thaddeus, Adam thought, could twist and convolute the simplest matter into a tangle of difficulties. Adam found himself wondering just why his mother had insisted on making her brother a soldier, then realized that of course it was to annoy his father. He sighed at the thought, then gathered his reins. “Good-bye, Uncle.” Adam turned his horse away and, without seeking permission to leave and with Ridley for company, he raked his spurs back.
The sunlight was at last reaching down the hill’s western slope to cast long shadows aslant on the grass. Major Bird unbuttoned his uniform jacket’s breast pocket and took out a linen-wrapped carte de visite on which was mounted a photograph of Priscilla. Vanity had caused her to take off her spectacles to have the picture made and she consequently looked rather myopic and uncertain, but to Bird she was a paragon of beauty. He touched the stiff pasteboard with its awkward daguerreotype image to his lips, then very reverently wrapped the card in its scrap of linen and placed it back in his breast pocket.
A half mile behind Bird, on a flimsy tower made of lashed branches up which a precarious ladder climbed to a platform thirty feet high, two wig-waggers prepared for their duty. The wig-waggers were signalers who talked to one another with semaphore flags. Four such wig-wagging towers had been constructed so that General Beauregard could stay in touch with the wide-flung wings of his army. One of the wig-waggers, a corporal, uncapped the heavy, tripod-mounted telescope that was used to read the flags from the neighboring towers, adjusted the instrument’s focus, then swept it toward the leafy hills that lay northward of the rebel lines. He could see the sun bright on the shingles of the pitched church roof on Sudley Hill and, just beyond it, an empty meadow with a flash of silver showing where the Bull Run stream ran between lush pastures. Nothing moved in that landscape, except for the small figure of a woman who appeared at the church door to shake a mat free of dust. The wig-wagger turned the glass back east to where the sun blazed low over a horizon hazed by the dying smoke of myriad cooking fires. He was about to turn the glass on toward the next signal tower when he saw some men appear on the summit of a bare knoll that lay about a mile beyond the Run on the enemy’s side of the stream. “You want to see some damn Yankees?” the corporal asked his companion.
“Not now, not ever,” the second signaler answered.
“I’m looking at the bastards.” The corporal sounded excited. “Goddamn! So they are there after all!”
And ready to fight.
The group of men, some on foot, some on horseback, some civilian and some military, stopped on the summit of the bare knoll. The rising sun marvelously illuminated the landscape before them, showing the wooded valleys, fenced pastures and bright glimpses of the stream beyond which the Confederate Army waited for its defeat.
Captain James Elial MacPhail Starbuck was at the center of the small group. The young Boston lawyer sat his horse like a man more accustomed to a leather padded chair than to a saddle, and indeed, if James had to pick the one aspect of soldiering that he most disliked it would be the ubiquitous presence of horses, which he considered to be large, hot, smelly, fly-ridden beasts with yellow teeth, scary eyes and hooves like ungoverned hammers. Yet if riding a horse were necessary to end the slaveholders’ revolt, then James would willingly straddle every horse in America for, though he might lack his father’s eloquence, he was just as fervent in his belief that the rebellion was more than a blight on America’s reputation, but an offense against God himself. America, James believed, was a divinely inspired nation, uniquely blessed by the Almighty, and to rebel against such a chosen people was to do the devil’s work. So on this Christian Sabbath, in these green fields, the forces of righteousness would advance against a satanic rabble, and surely, James believed, God would not permit the northern army to be defeated? He prayed silently, beseeching God for victory.
“You reckon we can walk down to the battery, Cap’n?” One of the civilians interrupted James’s reverie, gesturing at the same time to an artillery battery that was arranging its complicated affairs in a field that lay beside the Warrenton Turnpike at the foot of the knoll.
Rebel Page 29
