Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Come back, sir, please! Come back!” Starbuck pulled at Major Bird’s sleeve, and this time the major began to withdraw. Bullets screamed in the air as Bird and Starbuck stumbled back, preserved from the northern marksmen by the fog of battle smoke that obscured proper aiming.

  Only Adam would not retreat. He was shouting at his men to join him, that there was no danger, that all they had to do was push on to the far side of the meadow, but E Company had seen the retreat of the whole Confederate line, and so they edged backward themselves. Adam stopped and turned toward them, shouting at them to advance, but then he staggered and almost dropped his revolver. He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. He somehow managed to hold his balance as, very slowly and very carefully, like a drunken man pretending to be sober, he pushed the revolver into its holster. Then, with an oddly puzzled look on his face, he fell onto his knees.

  “You stupid bastard.” Sergeant Truslow had seen Adam fall and now ran across the face of advancing northerners. The rest of the Legion was hurrying back toward the safety of the trees. The whole southern charge had failed utterly and the northerners were in full cry.

  “It’s my leg, Truslow,” Adam said in a puzzled voice.

  “Should have been your goddamn brain. Give me your arm.” Truslow, even when rescuing Adam, sounded grimly hostile. “Come on, boy. Hurry!”

  Adam had been struck in his left thigh. The bullet had hit like a hammer blow, but had not hurt much at the time. Now suddenly there was pain searing white hot from his groin down to his toes. He hissed with the agony and could not resist a half-scream. “Leave me here!” he gasped to Truslow.

  “Shut your bleating, for Christ’s sake.” Truslow half-dragged and half-carried Adam back toward the trees.

  Neither Major Bird nor Starbuck had seen Adam’s plight. They were hurrying back toward the wood, or rather Starbuck was hurrying and Thaddeus Bird was strolling calmly. “Do you notice?” Bird asked yet again, “just how many bullets go high?”

  “Yes.” Starbuck was trying to run and crouch at the same time.

  “We should do something about that,” Bird remarked purposefully. “Because we must have been firing high too, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes.” Starbuck would have agreed with whatever propositions Bird wanted so long as the Major hurried.

  “I mean how many hundreds of bullets have been fired on this pasture this morning,” Bird went on, suddenly enthused by his new proposition, “and how many casualties have they caused? Remarkably few, really.” He waved with his unblooded sword at the grass where maybe three score of bodies lay where the Legion’s charge had failed. “We should look at the tree trunks to see where the bullet scars are, and I’ll wager you, Starbuck, that most will be at least eight or ten feet above the ground.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised, sir. I really shouldn’t.” Starbuck could see the fence rails ahead now. Just another few paces and they would be among the trees. Most of the Legion was already safe in the woodland, or as safe as any men could be who were crouching among trees that were being shelled by a dozen federal howitzers.

  “There, look! You see? Twelve feet up, fifteen. There’s another, ten feet high if it’s an inch. See?” Major Bird had now stopped altogether and was pointing with his sword at the interesting phenomenon of how high the bullet marks on the trees were. “That one’s a little lower, I admit, but look, see? There, on that hickory, Starbuck? Not one bullet strike below ten feet and how many can you see above that height? Four, five, six, and that’s just one trunk!”

  “Sir!” Starbuck shoved Bird onward.

  “Steady!” Bird protested, but did start walking again so that, at last, Starbuck could take shelter under the trees. He saw that most of the men had retreated farther among the trunks, instinctively seeking safety, though a few, the brave few, lingered at the trees’ edge to keep steadily firing on the advancing Yankees.

  “Go back, lads!” Major Bird realized the southern stand was beaten. “God knows where,” he muttered under his breath. “Sergeant Major Proctor?”

  “Sir!”

  “Make sure the colors are safe!” How ridiculous, Bird thought, that he should think of such things, for what were the colors but two gaudy flags, stitched together from scraps of silk in his sister’s bedroom? The northern bullets were ripping and tearing through the leaves. “Starbuck?”

  “Sir?”

  “Would you mind warning Doc Billy? Tell him we’re retreating. He must rescue what wounded he can, and leave the rest. I guess the Yankees will treat them right?”

  “I’m sure they will, sir.”

  “Be off with you, then.”

  Starbuck ran back through the woods. A shell cracked off to his left and a heavy branch splintered and tore down through the surrounding trees. Groups of men were flitting back through the trees, not waiting for orders, but just making off toward safety. They were abandoning bowie knives, blankets, haversacks, almost anything that might delay their flight. Starbuck found a chaotic press of men about the picketed horses and a corporal trying to lead Pocahontas free of the panicked rabble. “That’s mine!” Starbuck shouted, and snatched the reins.

  For a second the corporal looked as though he would contest the issue, then he saw Starbuck’s grim face and fled. Captain Hinton ran past, shouting for his horse, followed by Lieutenant Moxey, whose left hand was dripping blood. Starbuck hauled himself onto Pocahontas’s back and turned her toward the clearing where he had last seen Doctor Danson. Another rush of men ran past, shouting unintelligibly. A crackle of rifle fire sounded from the edge of the trees. Starbuck kicked Pocahontas’s flanks. Her ears were pricked back, showing she was nervous. Starbuck ducked under a branch, then almost lost his seat as the mare leaped a fallen trunk. He galloped into the road, planning to turn south toward the casualty station, but suddenly a bullet slashed past his head and he saw a puff of flame-streaked smoke and a blur of blue uniforms in the opposite woods. A man shouted at him to surrender.

  Starbuck wrenched the reins, half-falling off the horse. The mare turned, protesting, and Starbuck kicked his heels back. “Come on!” he shouted at her, then cringed as another bullet whipcracked past his head. He still held his heavy pistol and he used its barrel to hit Pocahontas’s flank and suddenly the horse jerked forward, almost throwing Starbuck off, but he somehow held on with his left hand as she bolted back into the woods. Starbuck turned her back toward the hillcrest. There seemed no sense in trying to organize an orderly withdrawal of the wounded; instead he needed to find Bird and tell him that the Legion had been deeply outflanked. “Major Bird!” he shouted. “Major Bird!”

  Thaddeus Bird had found Sergeant Truslow and was now helping carry Adam back to safety. The three men were with the color party and were the very last of the Legion left in the upper wood. Sergeant Major Proctor was carrying one color, a corporal from Company C had the other, but the heavy flags on their unwieldy staffs were difficult objects to carry through the tangle of thorns and undergrowth. The rest of the Legion, indeed the rest of Nathan Evans’s brigade, seemed to have fled, and Bird supposed that this battle was lost. He wondered how the historians would describe the southern revolt. A summer’s madness? An aberration of American history to set alongside the Whiskey Rebellion that George Washington had put down so savagely? A shell cracked through the upper trees, showering the color party with leaves.

  “Major Bird!” Starbuck shouted. He was galloping madly, blindly through the trees. Fugitives were shouting all around him, but Starbuck’s world was a blur of sunlight and green shadow, of a panicked horse running, of sweat and thirst. He could hear a Yankee band off in the meadows and he turned the horse away from the sound. He shouted for Major Bird again, but the only reply was a spatter of shots somewhere to his left. Bullets whistled and slapped close to him, but the northerners were firing in close woodland and could not aim properly. A shell crashed smoke and sizzling fragments off to the right, then Starbuck was in a clearing and he saw the flash of red
and white that was the Faulconer Legion colors at the far end of the open space and he turned his horse toward it. He thought he saw Thaddeus Bird with about a dozen other men. “Major Bird!”

  But Bird had disappeared into the farther trees. Starbuck hurried after the color party, bursting through a skein of smoke that hung over the clearing. Shots sounded in the woods, a bugle called, and still the Yankee band was playing behind. Starbuck crashed into the trees at the far end of the clearing and ripped through a tangle of low branches that slashed painfully across his face. “Major Bird!”

  Bird at last turned, and Starbuck saw Adam was there, dark blood on his thigh. Starbuck was about to shout that there were Yankees on the right flank, but he was too late. A squad of blue-coated men was already running through the trees, coming from the dirt road, and it seemed inevitable that the Legion’s colors would fall and that Bird, Adam, Truslow and the other men around the two flags would be captured. “Look out!” Starbuck shouted, pointing.

  The color party was running through the trees, desperate to get away, but Bird and Truslow were hampered by Adam. The northerners were shouting at them to stop and put their hands up, while Major Bird was shouting at Sergeant Major Proctor to run. Adam, his leg jolted as he was dragged through the trees, screamed.

  Starbuck heard the scream and kicked back. The northerners were whooping and hollering like boys playing games. A rifle fired, the bullet slapping off into the leaves. Major Bird and Sergeant Truslow were staggering under Adam’s weight. The northerners shouted again for their surrender and Truslow turned, ready to fight, then saw the bayonets coming straight for him.

  And Starbuck struck. He had galloped the mare directly at the pursuing Yankees and now he screamed at them to back away, to leave Adam alone. The northerners swung their bayonet-weighted rifles toward him, but Starbuck was riding too fast. He was screaming at them, all self-control gone, his decision to fight at last made. The Yankees were not backing off but trying to aim their guns as Starbuck straightened his right arm and pulled the Savage’s lower trigger, then the upper one, and the gun jarred hard back to his shoulder, smothering him with an instant of smoke that was there and gone. He whooped with joy as though, by firing the gun, he had released his soul to a dark desire. He heard a rifle fire, but no bullet struck him and he screamed defiance.

  There were six Yankees in the squad. Five of the six scattered from Starbuck’s crazy charge, but the last bravely tried to lunge with his bayonet at the maddened horseman. Starbuck pulled the revolver’s lower trigger, revolving the cylinder, then thrust the gun’s barrel hard down at the man who was challenging him. He had a glimpse of bushy black side-whiskers and tobacco-blackened teeth, then he pulled the trigger and the man’s face vanished in a spray of blood-streaked smoke, chips of bone and scarlet drops. Starbuck was keening a terrible sound, a scream of victory and a howl of fury as another Yankee was trampled down by Pocahontas’s heavy hooves. A gun crashed terribly loud by his right ear and suddenly the mare was screaming and rearing, but Starbuck kept his balance and urged her on. He tried to fire at a blue-coated man, but the revolver jammed because he pulled both triggers simultaneously, but it did not matter. Major Bird, Adam and Truslow had escaped, the colors had gone safe into the green wood’s shelter, and Starbuck was suddenly riding free and clear into a leaf-filled silence.

  He was laughing. It seemed that he was filled with a most miraculous happiness, that he had experienced the second most exciting, wonderful moment of his life. He wanted to scream his joy at the heavens as he remembered the Yankee’s face exploding away from the gun’s muzzle. My God, but he had shown that bastard! He laughed aloud.

  While in faraway Boston the dust motes danced and shifted in the shafts of sunlight that streamed down from the high church windows onto the Reverend Elial Starbuck who, his eyes closed and his strong face contorted with the agony of passion, beseeched Almighty God to protect and succor the righteous forces of the United States, to give them the spirit to endure all hardships and the strength to overcome the foul forces of unspeakable evil that had been spewed from the southern states. “And if the cause should come to battle, O Lord, then let thy will be done, and thy victory be gained, and let the blood of thine enemies soak the land and let their pride be trampled beneath the hoofbeats of the righteous!” His appeal was intense, his prayer echoing, his voice as hard as the New Hampshire granite from which the church was built. Elial let the echo of the prayer fade as he opened his eyes, but the congregation, somehow aware that their pastor’s angry gray gaze was searching the pews for any evidence of faithlessness, kept their eyes tight shut and their fans quite still. Not one person moved, indeed they hardly dared breathe. Elial lowered his hands to grip the lectern. “In thy holy name we beseech it. Amen.”

  “Amen,” the congregation echoed. Timid eyes opened, hymnals rustled, and Mrs. Sifflard pumped some humid air into the harmonium’s bowels. “Hymn number two hundred and sixty-six.” The Reverend Elial sounded like a man spent of sudden force, righteously weary. “‘There is a fountain filled with blood, Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins; And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains.’”

  A loose horse galloped out of the brush and through a row of wounded southern soldiers who had been left to the mercy of the advancing Yankees. One man screamed and convulsed as a hoof struck his thigh. Another man was weeping, calling for his mother. A third man had lost his eyes to a shell’s splinters and could not weep. Two of the injured men were already dead, their beards jutting skyward and their skins crawling with flies. The woods slowly filled with northern troops who stopped to rifle the pockets and pouches of the dead. The shellfire had finally stopped, though the fierce fires started by the explosions still burned and crackled in the undergrowth.

  To the east of the woods the gray-clad 2nd Wisconsin Regiment, advancing on the Georgia regiment that now formed the right flank of the broken Confederate defense line, was mistaken for southern reinforcements. The northern flag, hanging limp in the windless air, looked very like the Confederate banner, and the Georgians allowed the Wisconsin men to come so close that every southern officer was killed or wounded by the Yankees’ opening volley. The surviving Georgians stood for a desperate moment, then broke and fled, and so the last of the makeshift line that Nathan Evans had scraped together was finally vanquished. Yet the line had done its work. It had held an overwhelming attack long enough for a new defense line to be cobbled together on the flat wide summit of the hill where the Faulconer Legion had begun their day.

  A battery of Virginian guns commanded by a lawyer turned gunner waited at the plateau’s northern crest. The guns looked out across the valley where the men of Evans’s shattered brigade now streamed back from the victorious Yankees. Behind the lawyer’s guns was a Virginian brigade that had come from the Shenandoah Valley and was led by a Godly man of eccentric views and grim demeanor. Thomas Jackson had been an unpopular lecturer at Virginia’s Military Institute and afterward an unpopular commander of a militia brigade that he had trained and drilled, drilled and trained until the farmboys in his ranks were sick to the belly of his training and drilling, but now Thomas Jackson’s farmboys were on a wide plateau waiting for a victorious Yankee army to attack them, and they were drilled, trained and ready to fight. They were eager for it too.

  A second Confederate artillery battery came to the hilltop and deployed its weapons close to where the Faulconer Legion’s baggage was piled. The battery commander was an Episcopal minister who ordered his second in command to check and recheck the battery’s wormscrews, sponge covers, scrapers, handspikes and rammers, while he himself prayed aloud that God would have mercy on the Yankees’ guilty souls that he intended to send to a better world with his four big guns that he had named for the four evangelists. Thomas Jackson, expecting an enemy cannonade at any moment, ordered his men to lie flat so as not to make themselves a target for the enemy gunners, then he calmly sat in his saddle reading his Bible. He worried that his men might get c
onfused in the smoke of battle, and so all his Virginians had strips of white cloth tied to their arms or tucked into their hatbands, and were under orders to shout a watchword as they fought. “Our Homes!” was their cry, and Jackson expected them to strike their breasts with their left hands as they shouted it. Captain Imboden, the lawyer turned gunner, had long decided that Jackson was mad as a March hare, but he was somehow glad that he was on Jackson’s side and not having to face the madman in battle.

  A mile to Imboden’s right, at the stone bridge where more and more northern troops crossed the Bull Run to continue the crushing attack that had at last begun to roll the rebel army into chaos, General Irvin McDowell sat on his horse beside the turnpike and cheered on his men. “Victory, boys!” he called again and again. “Victory! On to Richmond! Well done, boys, well done!” McDowell was jubilant, ecstatic, so happy that he could forget the dyspepsia that had plagued him ever since his injudiciously large helpings of beef pie at supper the previous night. What did indigestion matter? He had won! He had led the largest army in the history of American warfare to a brilliant victory, and just as soon as the chore of cleaning up the rebel army was completed he would send a sheaf of captured colors back to Washington to be laid as trophies at the president’s feet. Not that he had seen any captured colors yet, but he was certain they would soon come in abundance. “Starbuck!” He spotted his sous-adjutant surrounded by foreign attachés in their gaudy uniforms. McDowell had gone to college in France and was used to European military fashions, but now, seeing the bright uniforms amid the plain honest coats of his own army, he thought how ridiculously ornate the foreigners appeared. “Captain Starbuck!” he called again.

  “Sir?” Captain James Starbuck had been happily beating time to the music of a regimental band that was playing opera selections to the advancing troops. Now he urged his horse closer to the victorious general.