Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  Colonel Lassan suddenly frowned. “Was that a train whistle?” he asked Captain Starbuck.

  “I’m sure I couldn’t say, sir,” James said.

  “Did you hear a train whistle?” the Frenchman asked his companions, who shook their heads.

  “Is it important, sir?” James asked.

  Lassan shrugged. “General Johnston’s forces from the Shenandoah Army, surely, would travel here by train, would they not?”

  James assured Colonel Lassan that the rebel troops in the Shenandoah Valley were fully occupied by a contingent of northern soldiers and could not possibly have arrived at Manassas Junction.

  “But suppose General Johnston has given your covering forces the slip?” Colonel Lassan spoke excellent English in a British accent which James, whose indigestion had not improved with the passing hours, found rather irritating. “You are naturally communicating with your troops in the Shenandoah by telegraph?” Colonel Lassan continued with his needling enquiries.

  “We know General Johnston was fully engaged by our forces two days ago,” James assured Colonel Lassan.

  “But two days is more than sufficient time to sidestep a covering force and ride the trains to Manassas, is it not?” the Frenchman asked.

  “I think it most unlikely.” James tried to sound coolly dismissive.

  “You will recall,” Colonel Lassan persisted, “that our great victory over Franz Joseph at Solferino was caused by the speed with which our emperor moved the army by train?”

  James, who did not know where Solferino was and knew nothing of any battle there and had never heard of the French emperor’s railroad achievements, nodded wisely, but then gallantly suggested that the rebel forces of the Confederacy were hardly capable of imitating the achievements of the French army.

  “You had better hope not,” Lassan said grimly, then trained his field glasses on a far hill where a rebel telegraphist was sending a message. “You are confident, Captain, that your flanking force will be on time?” Lassan asked.

  “They should be arriving at any moment, sir.” James’s confidence was belied by the lack of any evidence that fighting had indeed broken out in the rebel rear, though he consoled himself that the intervening distance would surely prevent any such evidence being visible. That proof would come when the Confederate forces defending the stone bridge began their panicked flight. “I’ve no doubt our flanking force is attacking at this very moment, sir,” James said with as much certainty as he could muster, then, because he was so proud of Yankee efficiency, he could not resist adding two words, “as planned.”

  “Ah! Planned! I see, I see,” Colonel Lassan responded gnomically, then shot a sympathetic glance at James. “My father was a very great soldier, Captain, but he always liked to say that the practice of war is much like making love to a woman—an activity full of delights, but none of them predictable and the best of them capable of inflicting grievous injury on a man.”

  “Oh, I like that!” The Chicago newspaperman scribbled in his notebook.

  James was so offended by the tastelessness of the remark that he just stared speechless into the distance. Colonel Lassan, oblivious of the offense he had given, hummed a tune, while the newspapermen scribbled down their first impressions of the war which, so far, were disappointing. War was nothing but noise and smoke, though, unlike the journalists, the skirmishers on both banks of the Bull Run were learning just what that noise and smoke meant. Bullets whickered across the stream as rebel and federal sharpshooters sniped from the trees and edged the watercourse with a wispy lacework of powder smoke that was twitched aside by the screaming passage of the heavy shells that crashed into the timber to explode in gouts of sulfurous black smoke and whistling iron fragments. A branch was struck by a shell, cracked, and splintered down to break a horse’s back. The beast screamed terribly while a drummer boy cried for his mother and feebly attempted to stop his guts spilling from the ragged shrapnel gash in his belly. An officer stared in disbelief at the spreading blood that filled his lap from the bullet wound in his groin. A bearded sergeant gripped the ragged stump of his left wrist and wondered how in God’s name he was ever to plough a straight furrow again. A corporal vomited blood, then slowly crumpled onto the ground. Gunsmoke sifted among the branches. The cannon were firing more quickly now to make a gigantic drumroll that rose to drown the music of the regimental bands, which still played their jaunting tunes behind the battle lines.

  And farther behind the rebel battle line still, back at Manassas Junction, a plume of blue-white wood smoke streamed back from a locomotive’s blackened stack. The first of General Joseph Johnston’s men had come from the Shenandoah. They had escaped the northern troops, and eight thousand more rebels had thus begun to reinforce the eighteen thousand that Beauregard had already assembled beside the Run. The armies had gathered, the guns were heating up, and a Sabbath Day’s slaughter could begin.

  SO YOU’RE OUR DAMNED SPY, ARE YOU?” COLONEL NATHAN EVANS greeted Nathaniel Starbuck who, still mounted on Pocahontas, had his hands tied behind his back and was under the guard of two Louisiana cavalrymen who while scouting the country toward Sudley Church had found and pursued Starbuck, then captured and pinioned him, and now had fetched him back to their commanding officer, who was standing with his brigade staff a short distance behind the stone bridge. “Get the bugger off his horse!” Evans snapped.

  Someone took hold of Starbuck’s right arm and pulled him unceremoniously out of the saddle so that the northerner fell heavily at Evans’s feet. “I’m not a spy,” he managed to say. “I’m one of Faulconer’s men.”

  “Faulconer?” Evans barked a brief, humorless noise that might have been laughter or was maybe a growl. “You mean that bastard who thinks he’s too good to fight with my brigade? Faulconer doesn’t have men, boy, he has white-livered fairies. Milksops. Mudsills. Black-assed, shad-bellied, shit-faced, pussy-hearted trash. And you’re one of that scum, are you?”

  Starbuck recoiled from the stream of insult, but somehow managed to persevere with his explanation. “I found northern troops in the woods beyond the Sudley Fords. A lot of them, and coming this way. I was on my way back to warn you.”

  “Bastard’s lying like a rug, Colonel,” one of the two Louisianan cavalrymen interjected. They were whip-lean, rough-bearded horsemen with weather-darkened faces and wild scary eyes, reminding Starbuck of Sergeant Truslow. They were outrageously armed; each man carrying a carbine, two pistols, a saber and a bowie knife. One of the two cavalrymen had a bleeding cut of freshly slaughtered pork hanging from his saddle bow, while the other, who had efficiently relieved Starbuck of his three dollars and sixteen cents, had two unplucked chickens hanging from his crupper strap by their broken necks. That man had also found the letter from Starbuck’s father and his brother’s laissez-passer, but, being illiterate, he had taken no interest in the papers which he had carelessly shoved back into Starbuck’s shirt pocket. “He weren’t weaponed,” the laconic cavalryman continued, “and he didn’t have no uniform on him. I reckons he’s a spy, Colonel, sir. Just listen to the sumbitch’s voice. He ain’t no southron.”

  A shell thumped into the meadow a dozen paces in front of the small group. It exploded, jarring a seismic thump through the soil and rooting up chunks of red dirt. The sound, even muffled by the earth, was a violent, scary crack that made Starbuck wince with shock. A scrap of stone or metal whistled close to Evans’s shabby brown hat, but the colonel did not even flinch. He just glanced at one of his orderlies who was mounted on a piebald horse. “Intact, Otto?”

  “Ja, Colonel, intact.”

  Evans looked back to Starbuck, who had struggled to his feet. “So where did you see these federal troops?”

  “Maybe a half mile beyond the Sudley Fords, sir, on a road that leads east.”

  “In the woods, you say?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Evans picked with an opened penknife at his teeth, which were dark and rotten from chewing tobacco. His sceptical eyes looked up
and down Starbuck, and did not seem to like what they saw. “So how many federal troops did you see, cuffee?”

  “I don’t know, sir. A lot. And they’ve got cannon with them.”

  “Cannon, eh? I am frightened! Shitting in my pants, I am,” Evans sniggered and the men around him laughed. The colonel was famous for the filth of his language, the depth of his thirst and the ferocity of his temper. He had graduated from West Point in 1848, though barely, and now ridiculed the academy’s curriculum by claiming that what made a soldier was the talent to fight like a wildcat, not some prinking ability to speak French or to solve fancy problems in trigonometry or to master the complexities of natural philosophy, whatever the hell that was. “You saw the cannon, did you?” he now demanded fiercely.

  “Yes, sir.” In truth Starbuck had seen no northern guns, but he had watched the federal troops dismantling the barricade and he reasoned they would surely not waste their time clearing the road for infantry. An infantry column could have skirted the felled trees, but guns would need an unobstructed passage, which surely suggested that the concealed flank attack was bringing artillery.

  Nathan Evans cut a new slice of tobacco that he plugged into one of his cheeks. “And just what in the name of God were you doing in the woods beyond Sudley Fords?”

  Starbuck paused and another shell cracked apart in black smoke and a stab of red flame. The intensity of the explosion was extraordinary to Starbuck, who again flinched as the percussive clap shivered the air, though Colonel Nathan Evans appeared entirely unworried by the sound apart from another enquiry of his mounted orderly that all was still well.

  “Ja, Colonel. All is vell. Don’t vorry yourself.” The German orderly was a huge man with a woeful face and a curious stoneware barrel that was strapped like a rucksack on his broad back. His master, Colonel Evans, whom Starbuck had gathered from his captors was nicknamed “Shanks,” did not look any more prepossessing by daylight than he had in the small hours of the morning; indeed, to Starbuck’s jaundiced eye, Evans most resembled one of the bent-backed Boston coal heavers who scuttled with hundredweight sacks of fuel from the street to the kitchen cellars, and it was hardly surprising, Starbuck thought, that the fastidious Washington Faulconer had refused to put himself under the South Carolinian’s command.

  “Well? You ain’t answered my question, boy.” Evans glared at Starbuck. “What were you doing on the far side of the Run, eh?”

  “Colonel Faulconer sent me,” Starbuck said defiantly.

  “Sent you? Why?”

  Starbuck wanted to salve his pride and say that he had been sent to reconnoiter the woods beyond Bull Run, but he sensed the lie would never hold, and so he settled for the ignominious truth. “He didn’t want me in his regiment, sir. He was sending me back to my people.”

  Evans turned to stare intently at the trees edging the Bull Run stream where his half-brigade was defending the stone bridge carrying the turnpike west from Washington. If the northerners did attack this section of the Run then Evans’s defense would be desperate, for his brigade consisted only of a handful of light cavalry, four obsolete smoothbore cannon, an understrength infantry regiment from South Carolina and another, equally undermanned, from Louisiana. Beauregard had left the brigade thus thinly defended because he was certain that the battle would be fought far out on the Confederate right wing. So far, and fortunately for Evans, the northern assault on the brigade had been restricted to harassing rifle and artillery fire, though one of the enemy’s cannon delivered a shell so monstrous that the sky seemed to tremble each time one passed overhead.

  Evans watched the trees with his head cocked to one side as though he was judging the course of the fighting by the noise of battle. To Starbuck the rifle and musket fire sounded oddly like the fierce crackling of burning dry undergrowth, while above it boomed the artillery fire. The flight of the shells made a noise like ripping cloth, or perhaps bacon frying, except that every now and then the sizzling would swell into a sudden ear-hurting crash as a missile exploded. A few rifle bullets snickered close by Evans’s small group, some of them making an eerie whistling. It was all very odd to Starbuck, who was aware of his heart thumping in his chest, yet, in all truth, he was not so frightened of the shells and bullets as he was of the fierce, bow-legged Shanks Evans, who now turned back to the prisoner. “Goddamn Faulconer was sending you to your people?” Evans asked. “What the hell do you mean?”

  “My family, sir. In Boston.”

  “Oh, Boston!” Evans guffawed the name gleefully, inviting his staff to join his mockery. “A shit hole. A piss hole. A city of puling crap. Christ, but I hate Boston. A city of black-assed Republican trash. A city of interfering, hymn-singing, lickbelly women who are no damned good for anything.” Evans spat a lavish gob of tobacco-laced spittle onto Starbuck’s shoes. “So Faulconer was sending you back to Boston, was he, boy? Why?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “‘Don’t know, sir,’” Evans mimicked Starbuck, “or perhaps you’re telling me lies, you miserable twist of shit. Maybe you’re trying to drag my men away from the bridge, is that it, you shit-belly?” The Colonel’s vehemence was terrifying, overwhelming, blistering, forcing Starbuck to take an involuntary backward step as the Colonel’s harangue spattered him with spittle. “You’re trying to sell me down the river, you cuffee bastard. You want me to open the pike so the northern bastards can swarm over the bridge and then we’ll all be hanging from the trees come nightfall. Ain’t that right, you son of a no-good bitch?” There was a few seconds’ silence, then Evans repeated his question in a voice that was a high-pitched scream. “Ain’t that right, you son of a cuffee bitch?”

  “There’s a column of northern troops in the woods beyond the Sudley Fords.” Starbuck somehow managed to keep his voice calm. He gave his hands a futile jerk, trying to point to the north, but the pinion at his wrists was far too secure. “They’re marching this way, sir, and they’ll be here in another hour or so.”

  Another shell crashed into the pasture beyond the turnpike where Evans’s two reserve artillery pieces stood waiting in the uncut grass. The resting gunners did not even look up, not even when one of the giant shells fell shorter than usual and tore a branch from a nearby tree before exploding forty yards away in a turmoil of dirt, leaves, iron fragments and hot smoke.

  “How’s my barrelito, Otto?” Evans shouted.

  “No harm, Colonel. Don’t you vorry.” The German sounded impassive.

  “I vorry,” Evans growled, “I vorry about lunkhead pieces of shit from Boston. What’s your name, boy?”

  “Nathaniel, sir. Nathaniel Starbuck.”

  “If you’re lying to me, Nathaniel Shitface, I’ll take you to the woodshed and cut your balls off. If you’ve got any balls. Have you got balls, Nathaniel?” Starbuck said nothing. He was feeling relieved that this furious, foul-tongued man had not connected his surname to the Reverend Elial. Two more shells screamed overhead and an overshot rifle bullet made its odd whistling noise as it flicked past. “So if I move my men to face your column, fairy-shit”—Evans thrust his face so close to Starbuck that the Bostonian could smell the mephitic mix of whiskey and tobacco on the South Carolinian’s breath—“I’ll be letting the enemy across the bridge here, won’t I, and then there’ll be no Confederacy anymore, will there? And then the emancipating shit-heads from Boston will come down to rape our women, if that’s what the hymn singers from Boston do. Maybe they’d prefer to rape our men? Is that your taste, cuffee-boy? You’d like to rape me, would you?”

  Again Starbuck said nothing. Evans spat derision of Starbuck’s silence, then turned to see a gray-coated infantryman limping back along the turnpike. “Where in hell are you going?” Evans exploded in sudden fury at the soldier, who just stared back in blank astonishment. “You can still shoot a rifle, can’t you?” Evans screamed. “So get back! Unless you want those black-assed Republicans fathering your wife’s next bastards? Get back!” The man turned and limped painfully back toward the bridg
e, using his rifle-musket as a crutch.

  A solid shot slapped dust from the turnpike, then ricocheted on without hitting anyone in Evans’s headquarter’s group, but the wind of the shot’s passing seemed to stagger the injured infantryman who swayed on his makeshift crutch, then collapsed at the roadside close by the two reserve six-pounder guns. Evans’s other two guns were closer to the Bull Run, returning the enemy’s fire with shrapnel shells that burst in the distant air like sudden small gray clouds from which fizzing white smoke trails spiraled crazily earthward. Whether the shells were finding their targets no one knew, but in truth Evans was merely firing to keep up his men’s morale.

  The reserve gunners bided their time. Most lay on their backs, apparently dozing. Two men tossed a ball back and forth while an officer, spectacles perched low on his nose, leaned on a bronze barrel and turned the pages of a book. A shirt-sleeved gunner with bright red suspenders sat with his back against the gun’s offside wheel. He was writing, dipping his pen into an ink bottle that rested in the grass by his side. The men’s insouciance did not seem out of place for, though the fighting was generating a carapace of noise and smoke, there was no great sense of urgency. Starbuck had expected battle to be more vigorous, like the newspaper accounts of the Mexican War that had told of General Scott’s brave troops carrying the American flag through shot and screaming shell into the Halls of Montezuma, but there was almost an abstracted air about this morning’s events. The gunner officer slowly turned a page, the letter writer carefully drained ink from his pen’s nib before lifting it to the page, while one of the ball players missed a catch and laughed lazily. The wounded infantryman lay in the ditch, hardly moving.