Battle Flag tnsc-3

by Bernard Cornwell

  Lucifer did return. He returned with a leather grip that had been put in store by a Northern officer but that now held Starbuck's new possessions. "Every damn thing you wanted," Lucifer said proudly, "and a silver hairbrush, too. See? Make you look real good. And I got you cigars. Good ones." Lucifer had also discarded his flamboyant clothes and replaced them with a Northern cavalryman's pants over which he was wearing a gray jacket, a leather belt, and a button-flapped holster, yet somehow his natural elegance imbued even that humdrum uniform with flair.

  "Is there anything in that holster?" Starbuck demanded.

  "I got myself a cooking implement," Lucifer said, "made by Mr. Colt of Hartford in Connecticut."

  "You mean you've got a gun," Starbuck said flatly.

  "It is not a gun," Lucifer protested. "It is a utensil for killing the food you want me to cook for you, and if I can't have a utensil I can't get meat, and I can't cook the meat I can't get, and you can't eat the meat I can't cook, and then you'll starve and I'll be so hungry I won't even have the strength left to bury you."

  Starbuck sighed. "If you're caught with a gun, Lucifer, then someone will take the skin off your back."

  "If I have got myself a Colt cooking utensil, Major, then there ain't no son of a stinking bitch alive who can take the skin off any one little part of me."

  Starbuck gave in. He sent the boy to find some food but warned him to be ready to leave at any minute. The daylight was fading, its twilight obscured by the myriad of fires that burned among the wagons and boxcars, and Starbuck expected imminent orders to move away from the fiery smoke pillars that were surely serving as beacons to draw every Northern soldier within twenty miles. Not that the rebel army was in a fit state to move; some men snored in alcoholic stupors, while others, gorged with rich food, slept, oblivious of the incendiary parties who went from warehouse to warehouse burning what could not be carried away.

  In the last of the light Starbuck shaved himself, using a new mirror and razor that Lucifer had found; then he feasted on pickled oysters and fresh bread and butter. Dark came and there were still no orders to move. Starbuck assumed Jackson had decided to run the risk of spending the night in the captured, burning depot, and so he made himself a bed from a pile of brand-new Northern overcoats, but the softness of the makeshift mattress was disconcertingly comfortable, and so he rolled off the pile onto the familiar dirt. And there slept well.

  And woke to inferno.

  He opened his eyes to see a sky lancing with red fire and to hear a thunderous roll of monstrous noise filling the night. He started up, reaching for his rifle, while all around him the men of the Legion woke to the same terrifying cacophony. A burning fragment fell from the sky to thump into the dirt beside Starbuck. "What the hell's happening?" Starbuck asked of no one in particular.

  Then he realized that the North's great supply of ammunition was being destroyed. Boxcar after boxcar of cartridges, percussion caps, shells, and artillery propellant was being torched. The explosions thumped across the depot, each one flashing a bright illumination that pulsed its brilliance high into the sky. Monstrous flames boiled hundreds of feet into the air, where hissing missiles spat through churning smoke. "Oh, my God," a man said after one particularly sharp and bright explosion, "just lay me down." The phrase, which was spreading throughout Jackson's army, prompted an immediate burst of laughter.

  "Major Starbuck! Major Starbuck!" Captain Pryor, now Swynyard's aide, searched among the startled men.

  "I'm here!"

  "We're to march now."

  "What time is it?"

  "Midnight, sir. A little after."

  Starbuck shouted for Sergeant Major Tolliver. A warehouse crammed with shrapnel disintegrated in flame to make the night momentarily as bright and red as hell's deep at noon. The explosion was followed by a tantalizing smell as barrels of cured bacon caught the flames and fried. A loose horse galloped in terror past a gang of sweating demons who were destroying the last locomotives in the depot by stuffing their fireboxes with gunpowder and mangling the condenser tubes with bullets.

  "Ready?" Colonel Swynyard shouted. He was already on horseback, and his gelding's eyes reflected the night's fires like some mythical beast. "March!"

  They went north, blindly following the brigade in front and leaving behind a writhing pit of red horror. Explosion after explosion ripped through the burning depot as flames climbed yet higher into the night. The North had labored mightily to amass the supplies necessary to subdue the South, and now all that labor was evaporating into flame, smoke, and ash.

  Starbuck's men trudged wearily, burdened by their plunder and hardly refreshed by the few hours of sleep they had snatched at the day's end. Some of the men's heaviest loot was abandoned early, joining the other trophies thrown aside by tired soldiers. In the flickering, unnatural light Starbuck saw a discarded snare drum beside the road, then two swords with chased gilt handles, a pair of post office scales, and a fine saddle. There were piles of food, candlesticks, greatcoats—whatever treasures a man had fancied, taken, then abandoned as his muscles cramped again.

  No one knew where they were going, or why. Their progress was slow, and never slower than when it was discovered that the column was on the wrong road and local guides had to be stirred from their beds to guide the heavily laden soldiers across the country toward dark woods. The gun teams were whipped bloody as they hauled their heavy cannon through entangling hedges and across fields of growing wheat.

  Lieutenant Coffman, still swathed in his handsome cloak, fell in beside Starbuck. "I found out what you wanted, sir," he said.

  Starbuck could not even remember what he had asked Coffman to discover. "So?" he asked.

  "It's just off the Sudley road, sir. There's a farm track near the fords and you go north a quarter-mile and there it is. There's meant to be a lime-washed pillar at the gate of the track, though the fellow I spoke to says it needs repainting."

  Starbuck frowned down at the young Lieutenant. "What in hell's name are you talking about?"

  "The Galloway farm, sir." Coffman sounded aggrieved.

  "Yes, of course. Sorry." Yet now the information seemed very trivial. Starbuck would dearly have liked to visit the Galloway farm, but he realized the wish was quixotic in this night of fire and tumult. Jackson was withdrawing from Manassas, so the Legion's revenge on Galloway must wait. "Thank you, Coffman," he said, "and well done," he added, trying to soothe the young man's ruffled feathers.

  Just before dawn the Legion stumbled across a road, climbed a hill, and so came to a stretch of deep woods. Behind the soldiers, beyond a fold of night-black land, the depot's fires roared like the stokehold of hell. The glow of the destruction was furnace fierce, and the smoke a gigantic pyre, so that to Starbuck, standing at the wood's edge and looking back, it seemed as though a great section of the earth itself was burning. The fires had been set four hours before, yet still the bright explosions pulsed the night and churned their smoke skyward. Beyond the fire, and dimmed by its brightness, the world's edge just showed the first cold silver line of dawn.

  "Back now, back now." A mounted staff officer was pushing men away from the open meadow and into the cover of the woods. "And no fires! No fires!"

  "What's happening?" Starbuck asked.

  "Get some rest," the man said, "and stay hidden. And no one's to light a fire unless they want to be burned alive by Old Jack himself."

  "We're not marching any further?" Captain Davies asked the staff officer.

  "Not for the moment. Just stay in hiding. Get some rest. And no fires!" The staff officer rode on, repeating his message.

  Starbuck pulled his men back into the wood. Jackson had come to Manassas, turned the place to hell, and gone to ground.

  The Reverend Elial Starbuck hardly slept that night. At times his eyes closed out of sheer weariness, and he would lean his aquiline head against the chair's high back and begin to snore gently, but almost immediately another great explosion would rattle the windows of Major Gallo
way's parlor, and the preacher would wake with a start to see yet another ball of fire climbing up from the incandescent glow that marked where the great depot was now a furnace. The devil was at his work, the preacher thought grimly, then tried to sleep again. He had decided against using one of the bedrooms in case he needed to make a quick escape from marauding rebels, and so he spent the night in the half-furnished library parlor with his stick, his heavy bag, and his precious flag beside him. The only weapon to hand was Major Galloway's decorative guidon on its lance-tipped staff that the preacher leaned against the chair in the fond hope that its spear point might be useful to skewer a godless rebel. He had spent the whole of the previous day in the same parlor. His frustrations had twice driven him from the house in search of an escape from the rebel forces, but each time he had glimpsed gray-clad horsemen in the distance and so had scurried back to the dubious safety of the farm. Before the preacher's arrival there had been a guard of four cavalry troopers in residence, their job to protect Galloway's depot against the depredations of the Major's sullen Southern neighbors, but the men had fled when Jackson's troops had arrived. The farm's three black servants had stayed, and they had fed the preacher and prayed with him, but none of the servants was convinced by the Reverend Starbuck's optimism that John Pope would surely come to punish the men who had dared put Manassas to the torch.

  The preacher did manage to sleep a little toward dawn. He lay slumped in the wing chair with the rebel banner clasped to his lean belly until a final massive explosion woke him to the wan light of early morning. He felt stiff and cold and tired as he climbed to his feet. From the parlor window he could see an enormous pillar of smoke climbing heavenward, but he could see no enemy cavalrymen in rat gray coats disturbing the landscape.

  It seemed too early to expect breakfast, and so, leaving his luggage in the house and taking only his cane and the precious flag, he ventured timidly into the morning. There was dew on the grass and mist in the folds of land. Two white-tailed deer bounded away from him and crashed through a thicket. Just to the north he could see the glint of the Bull Run through a gap between trees, but he could still see no soldiers. He walked past the servants' cabins to the end of Galloway's yard and searched for enemies, but all that moved in the pearl gray landscape was the pillar of smoke churning from the depot. There was a sense of lonely desolation in the landscape, almost as though the preacher was the last man left on earth. He walked slowly up the farm path, ever watchful, but he saw nothing that threatened him, and when he reached the road, he turned to his left and climbed to the crest of the gentle rise so he could see across the long valley that lay to the east. There was Still no enemy in sight. The fields were stripped of livestock, the farms seemed deserted, and the land lay barren.

  He walked on. He kept meaning to turn back to the farm and roust the servants to their morning duties in the kitchen, yet curiosity kept him walking just a few paces more, and every few paces he would determine to go just a little bit further still, until at last he decided he would explore as far as the crest at the valley's far side, and if he had still seen no sign of the enemy, then he would return to the farm, take his breakfast, and carry his luggage northward. So resolved, he walked doggedly on, following the pillar of smoke as Moses had followed the pillar of cloud across the wilderness. He climbed the valley's eastern side, following, though he did not know it, the course of the first Northern attack in the battle that had opened the fighting in Virginia and passing, though he would not have wanted to know it, the place where his son had first stood in the rebel battle line. This was the ground where the North's first invasion of the South had been turned back, and the fields on either side of the road still showed white where fragments of bones had been unearthed from shallow graves by scavenging animals. Someone had placed a skull atop a tree stump at the entrance to a farm road, and the macabre face grinned yellow teeth at the preacher as he passed by.

  He reached the wooded crest. He had now walked a mile from Galloway's farm, and in front of him he could see the Warrenton Turnpike running empty through a valley, while, on the valley's far side, at the crest of a steep green hill, the ruins of a burned-out house stood gaunt and black against the great smear of dirty smoke that hideously obscured the dawn. The house had been destroyed in the battle fought across these Manassas fields a year before, but the preacher assumed the dwelling had been burned by the rebels on the previous day. It did not occur to him that a Southern army would hardly torch a Virginia farm; he simply saw new evidence of the devil's work and knew it had to be the responsibility of the forces of Slavocracy. "Barbarians!" he said aloud into the empty country. "Barbarians!"

  Something thumped on the road behind, and the preacher turned to see the grinning skull had been tipped from its tree stump and was now rolling across the road. Beyond the skull was a horseman holding a rifle that was aimed straight at the Reverend Starbuck. To his surprise the preacher discovered he was not really frightened at thus facing one of the devils who had scourged this land. "Barbarian!" the preacher shouted angrily, waving his stick at the horseman. "Heathen!"

  "Doctor Starbuck?" the horseman responded politely. "Is it you, sir?"

  The preacher gaped at the cavalryman. "Major Galloway?"

  "You're hardly the person I expected to meet here, sir," Major Galloway said as he spurred toward the preacher. A whole troop of horsemen followed the Major from the trees as Galloway explained to the Reverend Starbuck how he and his men had taken a train north to Bristoe during the previous night and were now trying to establish the whereabouts of Stonewall Jackson's army.

  "I haven't seen any rebels this morning," the preacher said, and he told how he had spent the night at Galloway's farm. He confirmed that the property was unscathed and reported that although he had seen a handful of Southern horsemen the day before, he had seen none in this dawn. "They appear to have vanished," the Reverend Starbuck said darkly, as though the rebels possessed satanic powers.

  "So has Captain Blythe," Galloway said, "unless, perhaps, he's at the farm?"

  "Alas, no."

  "I'm sure he'll turn up in his own good time," Galloway said wanly, then turned in his saddle and called on Adam to bring one of the spare horses for the preacher's convenience. "We were on our way to the farm," Galloway told the Reverend, "and after that we're ordered to search the country north of the Bull Run."

  "I was hoping to go north," the preacher announced. "I have to reach Washington."

  "I'm not sure you've much hope of doing that today, sir," Galloway said respectfully. "There's some evidence that Jackson took his troops north. Maybe they're planning to attack the Centreville defenses? He might have vanished, but he's certainly not far away." The Major peered round the empty landscape as though he half expected the rebels to appear like stage villains springing from a trapdoor.

  "I can't tarry here!" the preacher protested vigorously. "I have a church to administer, responsibilities I cannot escape!"

  "You'll certainly be safer here, sir," Galloway suggested calmly, "seeing as how General Pope's here now and the rest of his army is on its way." He leaned out of his saddle to hold the spare horse while the preacher clambered into its saddle. The rebel flag almost fell from the Reverend Starbuck's grip, but he managed to hold on to the bundled silk as he settled himself on the horse's back. A trooper handed up the preacher's stick, then gave him the reins. "In fact if you do stay here, sir," Major Galloway went on, "I reckon you might even see a scrap of history being made."

  "History! I have been promised nothing but history all month, Major! I was promised a pulpit in Richmond, but for all those fine promises I might just as well have planned on preaching God's word in Japan!"

  "But the rebels have blundered now, sir," Galloway explained patiently, "leastwise, General Pope reckons they have. Jackson's stranded here, sir, miles from his own lines, and General Pope plans to cut him off and destroy him. That's why Pope's here, sir. We're going to finish Jackson once and for all."

  "You r
eally think Pope can do that, Major?" The preacher's question was caustic.

  Galloway's reply was emollient. "I reckon General Pope means to try, sir, and none of us really know just what the General can do in battle. I mean he was pretty successful in the west, sir, but he ain't fought here, and that was why he was brought to Virginia, so I guess he might astonish us all yet. Yes, sir, I reckon we might see a fair battle before the day's out, and I even reckon we might win it, too."

  The prospect tempted the Reverend Starbuck. He had come to Virginia with such high hopes and had seen those hopes crumble to nothing, but now it seemed there was a chance of victory after all. Besides, it was now Thursday morning, and he knew he could never reach Boston in time for Sunday worship, which meant he might just as well stay here and see the North's nemesis beaten in battle. And what a fine subject for a sermon that would make, he thought. Like Satan plunging into the abyss, Jackson would be brought low, and the Reverend Starbuck would be a witness to the demon's shattering fall. He nodded assent. He would stay and fight.

  All day long Jackson's troops waited in the woods. Most slept like the dead, so that Starbuck, setting his sentries just inside the tree line, could hear the murmur of the sleeping army like a swarm of bees. Twenty-four thousand rebel soldiers were snoring not six miles from Manassas, yet the Northern army was oblivious of their presence.

  Lucifer brought Starbuck an early dinner of cold pork, apples, and walnuts. "Still eating off the Yankees," he explained the luxury foodstuffs; then he squatted beside Starbuck and stared down the hill toward the empty turnpike in search of Yankees. There were none in sight. "So where are the black folks' friends?" Lucifer asked.

  "God knows. Let's hope they don't find us." The sun was low in the sky, and with any luck night would fall before the enemy found Jackson's hiding place.

  "You don't want to fight?" Lucifer asked sarcastically.