Battle Flag tnsc-3

by Bernard Cornwell

  "And died? Don't be a fool. If you'd have opened fire they'd have hunted you down and killed you like a dog."

  Davies shook at the memory. He was a tall, thin, bespectacled man, three years older than Starbuck and with a perpetually worried expression. He had been reading law in his uncle's office before the war began and had often confided in Starbuck his fears that he might never master the intricacies of that profession. "They knew there were women in the house," he now said to Starbuck.

  "I know. You've told me." Starbucks tone was callous and peremptory. In his view there was little point in endlessly discussing the night's tragedy in the vain hope of finding some consolation. The mess had to be cleaned up, avenged, and forgotten, which was why he was employing his company in retrieving the bodies from the burned-out tavern. Davies had come to watch the salvage, perhaps to remind himself how narrowly he had escaped being one of the shrunken, charred bodies.

  "Murphy told them there were women inside," Davies said indignantly. "I heard him!"

  "It doesn't matter," Starbuck said. He was watching the Cobb twins, who were rummaging among the ashes in the center of the burned building. Izard Cobb had found some coins and an ivory cribbage board that had somehow survived the fire undamaged. "Those go to Sergeant Waggoner!" Starbuck called across the ruins. The newly promoted Waggoner had been charged with collecting what few pitiable valuables might be rescued from the burned tavern.

  "But it does matter!" Davies protested. "They killed women!"

  "For Christ's sake"—Starbuck turned on the pale, bespectacled Davies—"you're about to get a captaincy, which means your men don't want to hear what went wrong last night. They want to hear how you intend to find the son of a damned bitch who did it to us and how you're going to kill him."

  Davies looked shocked. "Captaincy?"

  "I guess," Starbuck said. The night's disasters had virtually beheaded the Faulconer Legion, which meant there would either have to be wholesale promotions or else new people drafted in from other regiments.

  "Maybe Pecker will come back?" Davies said wistfully, as though Colonel Bird could make everything in the Legion better.

  "Pecker'll be back when he's mended," Starbuck said, "and that won't be for a few weeks yet." He suddenly whipped around to look at the wreckage again. "Cobb! If you've pocketed that silver I'll hang you!"

  "I ain't pocketed nothing! You want to search me?" "I'll search your brother," Starbuck said, and saw his suspicion that Izard Cobb would palm the coins to his brother Ethan had been plumb right. "Give the money to Sergeant Waggoner," he told Ethan Cobb, then watched as his orders were obeyed. "Now pick up that body." He pointed to the blackened figure of one of McComb's cooks.

  Izard Cobb made a great display of horror. "She's a nigger, Captain!" he protested.

  "If she was alive you'd have been happy enough to bed her, so now you can carry her to the grave. And do it respectfully!" Starbuck waited until the Cobb brothers had stooped to their work, then turned back to Davies. "They're lazy sons of bitches."

  "All the Cobbs are lazy," Davies said, "always were. The family ruined some prime bottom land off Hankey's Run, just let it go to rack and ruin. A shame." His knowledge of such matters was a reminder that the Legion was still largely composed of men who came from within a day's walk of the town of Faulconer Court House; men who knew each other and each other's families and each other's business. Men like Starbuck, an outsider, were the exception. It was that close-knit family feeling that had added to the regiment's pain; when Major Hinton was killed, the Legion lost not just a commanding officer but a friend, a sidesman of the church, a brother-in-law, a creditor, a hunting companion, and above all, a neighbor, and if Murphy died they would lose another. "Still," Davies said, "Dan Medlicott is a decent man."

  Starbuck believed Daniel Medlicott was a sly, ponderous, and cowardly tool, but he also knew better than to criticize one local man to another. Instead he turned away to watch as hard and Ethan Cobb carried the distorted body free of the ashes. Truslow's inquisition of the captured cavalryman had revealed that it was not Adam who had been responsible for this massacre but a man called Blythe, yet Starbuck still felt an extraordinary bitterness toward his erstwhile friend. Adam had ridden the high moral horse for so long, preaching about the sanctity of the North's cause, and now he rode with men who slaughtered women.

  "Starbuck!" Colonel Swynyard called from the road beside the burned wagon park.

  Starbuck shouted at Truslow to take charge, then went to join Swynyard. "Five dead women." Starbuck delivered the final tally in a harsh voice. "Two cooks, McComb's wife, and the upstairs girls." "The whores?" "They were decent enough girls," Starbuck said. "One of them, anyway."

  "I thought the tavern was out of bounds?" "It was," Starbuck said. "And I didn't think you had any money?" "I don't, but she was a sweet girl."

  "Sweet on you, you mean," Swynyard said tartly, then sighed. "I do pray for you, Starbuck, I do indeed."

  "Fitzgerald, her name was," Starbuck said, "from Ireland. Her husband ran off and left her with a pile of debts, and she was just trying to pay them off." He stopped, suddenly overwhelmed with the misery of such a life and death. "Poor Kath," he said. He had been hoping Sally Truslow might help the girl, maybe by finding her a more lucrative job in Richmond, but now Kath Fitzgerald was a shrunken corpse waiting for a shallow grave. "I need a goddamned drink," Starbuck said bitterly.

  "No, you don't," Swynyard said, "because you and I are summoned to headquarters. To see Jackson, and he's not a man to visit if you're stinking with whiskey."

  "Oh, Christ," Starbuck blasphemed. He had hoped that the night's raid would have finished his troubles, but now it seemed Jackson himself had taken an interest in his derelictions. "What does Mad Jack want?"

  "How would I know?" Swynyard said. He scuffed a foot in the road, which was still imprinted with the hoofmarks of the night's raiders. "He's seeing Faulconer now." "Who'll be bitching about us."

  "But we were right about Dead Mary's Ford," Swynyard said in a hopeful voice. "Maybe Jackson will acknowledge that?"

  "Maybe," Starbuck said, but without any real hope that justice might be done. General Washington Faulconer would doubtless have his wrist slapped, but colonels and captains, especially poverty-stricken colonels and captains, made far more convenient scapegoats for disasters. Last night, when he had captured the prisoner at the ford, Starbuck had been sure that he could defeat Faulconer's malevolence, but in his interview with Major Hotchkiss, Jackson's aide, Starbuck had not felt a flicker of understanding or sympathy, just a dry disapproval. Justice, he reckoned, was a rare commodity. He swore at life's unfairness, then changed the subject by fishing a scrap of paper from his pocket. "Did you ever hear of a fellow named Joe Galloway?" he asked the Colonel.

  Swynyard thought for a second, then nodded. "Cavalryman. Regular army. Never met him, but I've heard the name. Why?"

  "He led last night's raid." Starbuck described what he had learned about Galloway's Horse; how it was composed of renegade Southerners who could ride the paths of Dixie with the same familiarity as rebel horsemen, and how a Captain Billy Blythe had led the detachment that had surrounded and savaged the tavern with their repeating rifles.

  "How did you find all this out?" Swynyard asked.

  "Prisoner talked," Starbuck said.

  "I'm surprised he told you so much," Swynyard said, staring disconsolate at the scorched field where the remnants of the burned-out ammunition wagons stood.

  "He struck up a kind of rapport with Truslow," Starbuck said. "It seems Galloway has a farm near Manassas that he's using as his depot, and I was kind of hoping we might get back there one day."

  "To do what?"

  "That," Starbuck said, pointing to the ruins of the tavern.

  Swynyard shrugged. "I doubt we'll get the chance. Young Moxey says we're both to be posted to coastal defenses in the Carolinas."

  "Moxey's a poxed piece of ratshit," Starbuck said.

  "No doubt you
once said that about me," the Colonel said.

  "Oh no, sir," Starbuck grinned, "I was never that complimentary about you."

  Swynyard smiled, then shook his head ruefully. "Be ready to leave in an hour, Starbuck. I'll arrange a horse for you. And stay sober, you hear me? That's an order."

  "I'll stay sober, sir, I promise," for he had a whore to bury and a general to see.

  Major Galloway's raiders did not survive entirely unscathed. The unfortunate Sparrow was captured, a Marylander was missing, while Corporal Harlan Kemp, the Virginian whose local knowledge had led the raiders to Dead Mary's Ford, had been shot in the belly. All those casualties had been caused during the brief and unexpected fight at the river, which had left Kemp in terrible pain. He spent the homeward journey drifting in and out of consciousness, and every few minutes he would beg one of the men supporting him in his saddle to do him the same favor they would render to a badly wounded horse. "Just shoot me, for the love of Christ, please shoot me."

  Adam carried Kemp's rifle and one of the captured flags. He was continually looking for any sign of pursuit, but no rebel pursuers appeared as the raiders crossed the Robertson River, then the Hazel and the Aestham, each waterway more swollen with storm water than the last, until just after midday they came to the flooded Rappahannock and were forced to ride six miles upstream to find a passable ford. Then, safe at last on the northern bank, they rode east toward the rail depot at Bealeton.

  Two miles outside the town a shell screamed overhead to explode in a gout of mud and smoke just a hundred paces behind the horsemen. Galloway ordered the Stars and Stripes unfurled. A second shell howled past to smash into a pine tree, splitting the wood with a smoky crack that startled the tired horses, so that the troopers had to struggle with their reins and slash back with spurs. They could see the roofs of Bealeton beyond the trees and see the smoke of the artillery edging one of those patches of woodland. More smoke, this time from a locomotive, plumed up from the town itself. "The rebels can't have captured the place!" Galloway said and told the standard-bearer to wave the flag more vigorously.

  The field gun did not fire again. Instead an apologetic Northern artillery officer rode out to investigate the horsemen and to explain that General Pope was nervous of rebel cavalry who might be probing the Federal army's new positions on the Rappahannock's north bank. "We've seen no secesh horse," Galloway told the artilleryman, then spurred on into a town crammed with confused soldiery. Troops that had embarked in Alexandria and Manassas expecting to arrive in Culpeper Court House now waited for new orders, and meanwhile the rails south of Bealeton were being torn up and carried north for safekeeping, and the trains employed on that task were blocked by the stalled troop trains that had been heading south, so that now there were no fewer than eight trains marooned at the depot. The town's roads were equally clogged. There were men who had lost their regiments, regiments that had lost their brigades, and brigades that had lost their divisions. Staff officers sweated and shouted contradictory orders, while the townspeople, most of whom were rebel sympathizers, watched with amusement. Galloway and Adam added to the noise as they demanded a doctor for Corporal Kemp, while every few moments a nervous Northern gunner on the outskirts of the town would contribute to the chaos by loosing a shell into the steaming heat of the countryside in an attempt to see off some nonexistent Southern horsemen. "Makes you proud to be a Yankee, don't it?" Galloway said sourly as he forced a path through the chaos. "I thought these boys were supposed to be marching down Richmond's Main Street, not running away?"

  A doctor was found, and Harlan Kemp could at last be lifted from his horse. His pants were stuck to the saddle's leather by a mass of dried blood and had to be cut away before the moaning man could be carried into the Presbyterian church lecture hall that was serving as a hospital. A doctor gave the Corporal ether, then extracted the bullet from his guts, but claimed there was little more that could be done for him in Bealeton. "There's a hospital car on one of the trains," the harried doctor said, "and the sooner he's back in Washington the better." He did not sound hopeful.

  Adam helped carry Kemp on a stretcher to the depot, where nurses of the Christian Sanitary Commission took the sweating and shivering Corporal under their care. The hospital car was a sleeping car requisitioned from the New York Central and still possessed its peacetime cuspidors, fringed curtains, and engraved lamp shades, though now the luxurious bunks were attended by four nurses and two army doctors, who were protected by a pair of faded red flags that hung at either end of the car's roof to proclaim that the vehicle was a hospital. Perforated zinc screens in the car's roof were supposed to provide ventilation, but there was no wind, and so the car stank of castor oil, urine, blood, and excreta. Major Galloway attached a label to Kemp's collar that gave his name, rank, and unit, put a few coins into a pocket of the Corporal's uniform coat, then he and Adam climbed down from the pustulant car to walk slowly past a heap of coffins carrying stenciled labels directing their contents homeward. There were corpses going to Pottstown, Pennsylvania; Goshen, Connecticut; Watervliet, New York; Biddeford, Maine; Three Lakes, Wisconsin; Springfield, Massachusetts; Allentown, Pennsylvania; Lima, Ohio; and Adam, reading the roll call of town names and knowing that each represented a family distraught and a town in mourning, winced.

  "Faulconer! Major Galloway!" An imperious voice broke into Adam's reflections. At first neither he nor Major Galloway could see who had summoned them; then they saw a white-haired man waving vigorously from a window further up the train. "Wait there!" the man shouted. "Wait there!"

  It was the Reverend Elial Starbuck, who, in deference to the oppressive heat, was wearing a linen jacket over his shirt and Geneva bands. Having attracted their attention, he worked his way out of the crowded passenger car and jumped down to the trackside, where he pulled on a ragged straw hat that had replaced his lost top hat. "You have news?" he demanded. "Good news, I trust? We need good news. You observe we are retreating again?" The preacher made this speech as he plunged toward the two cavalrymen, dividing the crowds with the aid of his ebony cane. "I fail to understand these things, I truly do. We have raised an army, the largest that God has seen fit to put upon the face of the earth, yet whenever a rebel scowls at us we scuttle backward like trespassing children fleeing a householder." The Reverend Elial Starbuck made this trenchant criticism despite the presence of a number of senior Federal officers who scowled at his words, but there was an authority in the Reverend Starbuck's presence that subdued any attempt to contradict his opinions. "No one is sure, anymore, if they can capture Richmond or whether they will simply defend the Rappahannock. There is confusion." The Reverend Starbuck made the accusation darkly. "If I administered a church the way this government runs an army, then I daresay Satan would turn Boston into an outpost of hell without so much as a bleat of opposition. It's too bad, too bad! I had hoped to return home with better news than this."

  "To Boston? You're returning so soon?" Major Galloway asked politely.

  "I undertook to be back in my pulpit by month's end. If I believed the capture of Richmond was imminent, then I would beg my congregation's indulgence and stay with the army, but I can no longer believe any such thing. I had hoped your horsemen might inspire the army. I recall some talk of making raids on Richmond?" This accusation was accompanied by a scowl from the preacher. "We shillyshally, Major. We linger. We tremble at the slightest sign of the enemy. We leave the Lord's work undone, preferring timidity to boldness. It grieves me, Major, it truly grieves me. But I am making notes, and I shall report my findings to the Northern people!"

  Major Galloway tried to reassure the preacher that Pope's retreat was merely a temporary precaution intended to give the North time to build its army into an irresistible force, but the Reverend Starbuck would have none of such reasoning. He had learned from one of Pope's aides that the retreat behind the Rappahannock had been calculated to take advantage of the defensive capability of the river's steep northern bank. "We have gone on the defensive!"
the Reverend Starbuck exclaimed in a disgusted voice. "Would there have been an Israel if Joshua had merely defended the river Jordan? Or a United States if George Washington had done nothing but dig ditches behind the Delaware? The Lord's work, Major, is not done by digging and tarrying, but by smiting the enemy! 'And it shall be, when thou shalt hear a sound of going in the tops of the mulberry trees, then shalt thou go out to battle: for God is gone forth before thee to smite the host of the Philistines.' Does not the First Book of Chronicles promise us as much? Then why are we not hearkening to the mulberries and going forth!" The Reverend Starbuck asked the question magisterially.

  "I'm certain we shall be advancing soon," Galloway said, wondering what mulberries had to do with the prosecution of war.

  "Then, alas, I must read about your advance in the Journal rather than witness it for myself. If, indeed, I ever reach Boston again." This last sentence was uttered in savage reproof of the chaos in Bealeton's small depot. The Reverend Starbuck had been waiting a full day to leave for Manassas Junction, but his train was trapped in the town by three supply trains that were being unloaded. No one knew how long that unloading would take, nor even if the offloaded supplies might not need to be reloaded in preparation for a further retreat. "Still, we are not without our comforts," the preacher said sarcastically, "so follow me," and he led the two cavalrymen to the end of the depot, where volunteer ladies from the Christian Sanitary Commission were serving reconstituted lemonade, buckwheat bread, and ginger cakes. The Reverend Starbuck wiped the sweat from his face with an enormous handkerchief, then used his cane to force a way to the trestle table, where he demanded three servings of the refreshments. One of the ladies timidly pointed to a hand-lettered sign proclaiming that the comestibles were for the consumption of uniformed men only, but one ferocious glance from the preacher quelled her small protest.