Battle Flag tnsc-3

by Bernard Cornwell

  "Back!" Colonel Swynyard had advanced with the Legion. "Back to the railbed, lads! Well done!"

  "Lieutenant Howes?" Starbuck shouted. "A party to collect guns and ammunition!"

  "We've got some prisoners here, sir," Howes called back.

  Starbuck had not been aware of any prisoners being taken, but sure enough there was a disconsolate group of a dozen men under a corporal's guard who had to be escorted back to the Brigade headquarters. Howe's men found a score of usable rifles and several hundred cartridges that they carried back through the woods.

  "A nice beginning," Colonel Swynyard said to Starbuck when the Legion was back in its cutting.

  "Easy pickings." Starbuck was dismissive. He could not recall a single bullet coming near him. He knew the Legion had not needed to be involved in the fight, but he was glad that his regiment had been given such a swift and simple victory. It was, as Swynyard had told him, a good beginning.

  "But your man Meddlesome didn't move." Lucifer waited till Swynyard was gone before talking to Starbuck. "I watched him. He took his men into the woods and stopped there. You went on, he stayed back."

  Starbuck grunted, not wanting to encourage Lucifer's indiscretion. "How old are you?" he asked the runaway slave instead.

  Lucifer blinked with surprise at the unexpected question. "Seventeen," he said after a while. "Why?"

  Starbuck suspected Lucifer had added at least a year to his age. "Because you're too young to die, that's why, so take yourself back to the wagon park."

  "I ain't going to die. I'm charmed!" Lucifer said.

  "Charmed?" Starbuck asked. "How?" He was remembering the crushed bird bones.

  "Just charmed," Lucifer said. "Like I never got caught as a thief. Till your men trapped me, and there you were!" He grinned. "See? Charmed."

  "But you were a thief," Starbuck said, not with disapproval, but simply to pin down the first piece of information about his past that Lucifer had so far offered.

  "You think I'd wear those pants with long pockets otherwise? Mick gave them to me."

  "Mick?"

  "Mr. Micklewhite," Lucifer said. "He owns the big tavern at Manassas Junction and I worked for him."

  "You were his slave?"

  "I was his thief," Lucifer said. "But he wanted me to do other things. Because he said I'm young and good-looking." He laughed in self-mockery, but Starbuck detected an anxiety behind the words.

  "What sort of things?" Starbuck asked.

  "You need to be told? You don't know about appetite?"

  "Appetite?"

  But before Lucifer could answer there was a loud snap of a breaking twig in the woods beyond the killing patch. The Legion went still, fingers poised on triggers, but nothing more sounded from the trees. Off to the right the firing began again, but that far-off battle belonged to someone else. Starbuck looked for his servant again, but Lucifer had vanished, taking his past with him. Ahead of Starbuck the green woods were silent. Somewhere beyond the silence eighty thousand Yankees gathered, but here, for the moment, there was peace.

  Starbuck had chosen not to put skirmishers into the woods. The killing patch between the railbed's cutting and the tree line was too wide, so that by the time his own skirmishers would have returned to the Legion's lines the pursuing Yankees would already have been halfway across the open space. The North Carolinians on the Legion's right, however, were faced by an ever-narrowing strip of open land and had taken the precaution of putting a skirmish line among the trees, and it was those men who alerted Starbuck to the day's second Yankee attack, an assault much better organized than the North's first motley advance.

  The battle between the skirmishers did not take long. The Yankees were advancing in too much force, and the woods were no place for scattered men to fight against a horde. Hudson's skirmishers fired a single round each, then ran for their lives, yet that scattered volley was sufficient to warn the Legion that the attack was coming.

  Starbuck was in the cutting with Company C, which was now commanded by the excitable, quick-tempered William Patterson, who was a stonemason and thus the unwilling butt of too many jokes about gravestones. Patterson had pretensions of gentility and had greeted his unexpected promotion by adorning himself with a red waist sash, a plumed hat, and a sword. He had discarded the sword and plumed hat for this day's fight, but the sash still marked him as an officer. "Ready, boys, ready!" he shouted, and his men licked dry lips and watched the trees anxiously. "They're coming, boys, they're coming!" Patterson called, yet still the green woods were empty, the trees dappled by sunlight alone and the humid air unsullied by powder smoke.

  Then, suddenly, the Northerners were in sight. A mass of men ran soundlessly into view. Flags and bayonets were bright. For a second, a split heartbeat, Starbuck watched the rare sight of a whole army attacking straight into his face, then bellowed the order to open fire.

  "Fire!" Patterson echoed the shout, and his company's front vanished in a cloud of powder smoke.

  "Fire!" Moxey screamed at the company next door. Patterson's men were spitting bullets into rifles, shoving ramrods down barrels, and scrabbling for percussion caps in the upturned hats placed conveniently beside the firestep.

  "Fire!" Company D's Captain Pine shouted.

  "Fire!" Lieutenant Howes called from Company E. The Yankee attack was oblique, emerging from the trees first to the south, then to the north.

  And suddenly, like a great tide bursting on a beach, the sound of the attack overwhelmed Starbuck. It was the sound of a great infantry charge: the noise of cheering, screaming, swearing men, and the noise of drums and bugles behind them, and the noise of his own men's bullets whacking into rifle stocks, and the noise of miniй bullets thumping into flesh, and the noise of the first wounded men screaming and gasping, and the noise of ramrods rattling metallic in rifles, and the whistling whip-quick noise of hollow-tailed miniй bullets, and the noise of thousands of heavy boots, and the noise of screaming orders, and the noise of men cursing their clumsiness as they fumbled to tear open cartridges.

  It was an unending crescendo of noise, a tumult of battering sound waves that obliterated senses already swamped by powder smoke. All a man could do now was fight, and fighting meant pouring lead into the gunsmoke to drive away the pounding, cursing enemy. And the enemy still came forward, rank after rank of blue-coated men beneath their high striped banners. "Fire!" a Yankee shouted.

  "Fire!" Truslow's voice answered from the Legion's left flank.

  "They're firing high," Private Matthews exulted just five paces from Starbuck, then Matthews was flicked backward by a bullet to the head that took away a saucer-sized piece of his skull and spattered his neighbor with blood and brains. Lieutenant Patterson stood transfixed as Matthews's body slid to a halt at his feet. The body twitched, blood pouring from the shattered cranium.

  "Fire!" Starbuck shouted. He saw a boy pull the trigger; nothing happened, yet the boy started to ram another charge down a barrel probably stuffed with unfired charges. Starbuck picked up Matthews's blood-sticky rifle and ran to the boy. "Fire the damn thing before you load it!" he snapped, handing the frightened lad the new gun. Starbuck took the boy's rifle and tossed it back out of the cutting. He fired his own rifle into the gray mist of smoke, then ran along the cutting past Moxey's company to where Medlicott guarded the vulnerable right flank. The miller was fighting well enough, firing his revolver into the smoke that was now being fed by the volleys of both sides to create a single filthy-smelling leprous yellow cloudbank. The Yankee charge seemed to have stalled, though it had not been defeated. Instead the Northerners were holding their ground in the killing patch and trying to overwhelm the rebel line with volley fire.

  "We're still here, Starbuck, still here!" The speaker was the genial Colonel Hudson, who had come to his own left flank on an errand not dissimilar to Starbuck's own. "Mr. Lincoln's Republican party is noisy today, is it not?" the Colonel said, gesturing toward the Yankees with a switch of hazel that was apparently his weapon of ch
oice. A bullet slapped past Hudson's long hair. "Rotten shot," the Colonel lamented, "terrible shooting! They really should look to their musket training."

  Then a second great cheer sounded from beyond the smoke, and there was a resurgence of that first terrible sound that had swollen to burst against the rebels' defenses. "Dear Lord," Hudson said, "I do believe a second line is coming. Hold hard, boys! Hold hard!" He strode back along his line.

  "Oh, Christ, oh, Christ!" Major Medlicott was fumbling percussion caps onto his revolver. "Oh, Christ!" He raised the gun, only half primed, and shot blindly into the smoke. Beyond that smoke the Yankee fire had slackened as the first wave of attackers made way for the second. The rebels fired on into the gloom, seeing their targets only as dark shadows in the luminous smoke cloud; then a screaming mass of men with fixed bayonets materialized in that fogbank.

  "Back!" Medlicott shouted, and his men scrambled away from the shallow cutting.

  "Stay and fight, damn it!" Starbuck bellowed, but the panic was infectious, and the company streamed past him. For a second Starbuck was alone in the wide ditch; then he saw the open mouths of Yankee attackers not ten paces away, and he ran for his life. He expected a bullet in the back at any second as he scrambled up the western bank and followed Medlicott's company into the tangle of saplings and bushes.

  The Yankees scented victory. They cheered as they jumped down into the cutting and as they scrambled up its further bank. Their flags streamed forward. A gap had opened between the Legion and Hudson's North Carolinians, and the Northern infantry poured into the gap, where they discovered the unguarded spoil pit. Like a wave of water released by a broken dam they swarmed into the hollow, only to surge up against the abatis. They recoiled for a second as the tangle of branches checked their headlong charge; then they flowed around the barrier's flanks to swarm up to the spoil pit's edge.

  "Fire!" Colonel Swynyard had brought Haxall's Arkansas battalion down the hill to meet the Yankee charge where it tried to climb out of the spoil pit. Rifles slashed fire into the pit. The rebels could not miss, for the Yankees were crammed tighter than rats in a terrier pit. "Fire!" Major Haxall called, and a second volley whipped down and the Yankee mass seemed to quiver like a great wounded beast.

  "Get your men formed, and fight!" Swynyard shouted angrily at Starbuck. "Goddamn it, fight!"

  "Damn!" Starbuck was lost, confused. The attackers in the pit were being slaughtered, but more Yankees had crossed the ditch and were charging through the scrub, where handfuls of dogged rebels resisted them. Starbuck blundered through the trees, seeking men, any men, finding nothing but chaos, and then he saw Peter Waggoner, the giant, Bible-thumping Sergeant from Company D. Sweet Jesus, Starbuck thought, but if Company D had been thrown out of the railbed, then the Legion must be unraveling all along its length. "Waggoner!"

  "Sir?"

  "Where's your company?"

  "Here, sir! Here!" And there, crouching frightened behind the big Sergeant, was most of Company D. Captain Pine was pushing men into line, screaming at them to stand and fight.

  "Fix bayonets," Starbuck called, "and follow me! And scream! For God's sake, scream!"

  The ululating, blood-chilling sound of the rebel yell whipsawed in the air as the company followed Starbuck back toward the railbed. Goddamn it, but he would not be beaten! A Yankee appeared in front of Starbuck, and he fired his revolver straight into the man's face, which seemed to vanish in a spray of red as the shock of the gun's recoil jarred up to Starbuck's shoulder. He half slipped in a slick of blood, then fired into a mass of blue uniforms in front. "Charge!" he screamed. "Charge!" And Waggoner's men came with him, screaming like devils released to mischief, and the disordered Yankees went backward. The desperate charge through the brush had collected more groups of scattered Legionnaires, so that Starbuck was now leading almost a third of his regiment in a blood-crazed, desperate, vicious counterattack. The Northerners had been on the brink of victory but were suddenly confused by this unexpected opposition. The Yankees retreated.

  Starbuck leaped back into the railbed. A Northerner slipped on the far bank, turned, and swung his rifle. Starbuck fired at the man, heard him scream, then jumped over the falling body to sprawl and trip at the top of the embankment. A rifle shot cracked over his head, then a wave of his own men went past him and a giant hand plucked him onto his feet. "Come on, sir!" It was Sergeant Peter Waggoner. A cannon fired somewhere, adding its new noise to the din of battle. Behind Starbuck, at the rim of the spoil pit, the rifle volleys still flailed down to turn the hollow into a charnel house. The Yankees were retreating, stunned by the violence of the rebel backlash. Starbuck ran past the heap of bodies killed in the rifle duel that had preceded the second Yankee surge forward. He knew he had lost command of his men and that now they were fighting from instinct and without proper guidance, and so he sprinted forward to try and get ahead of them and somehow bring them under control.

  The Yankees had brought a small cannon forward to the edge of the trees. The gun was scarcely four feet high and had a short, wide-muzzled barrel. They had managed to fire one shot with the gun, and now its four-man crew was desperately trying to haul the weapon back through the trees to save it from being captured by the screaming, battle-maddened gray wave. In their haste the gunners rammed one of the gun-wheels into a tree and thus stalled their retreat. "The gun!" Starbuck shouted. "The gun!" If he could concentrate his men at the gun, then he had a chance of regaining control of the Legion. "Go for the gun!" he shouted and ran toward the cannon himself. Something hit him hard on the left thigh, spinning him and almost knocking him down. He limped for a pace, waiting for the delayed agony to sear through his body. He took a breath ready to scream and almost sobbed instead as he felt wetness spill down his leg, then realized the enemy bullet had merely smashed his canteen. It was not blood, but water. His hip was bruised, but he was unwounded, and his self-pitying scream turned into a defiant yelp of relief. All around him the rebel yell filled the air. One of the Yankee gunners, knowing that the trapped weapon was lost, leaned across a wheel to tug the lanyard of the cannon's primer, and Starbuck, realizing with horror that the cannon was still loaded and that a storm of canister was about to be unleashed on his men, fired the last shots of his revolver. He saw a slash of bright metal show on the cannon's barrel as a round ricocheted off the bronze; then his last bullet whipped the enemy gunner backward onto the ground.

  "Legion!" Starbuck screamed. "To me!" He was among the trees now, just yards from the gun. The Yankees had fled into the broken, smoking wood, where the trunks were bitten by rifle fire. "Legion! Legion! Legion!" Starbuck shouted. He reached the cannon and put a proprietorial hand on its bullet-flecked barrel. "Legion! Form line! Form line! Fire! Legion! Legion!" He was screaming like a mad thing, as though he could impose his will on the excited men by sheer force of mind and voice. "Form!" He shouted the word desperately.

  And men at last heard him and at last obeyed him. Companies were mixed together, officers were missing, sergeants and corporals were dead, but the maddened charge somehow shook itself into a crude firing line that slammed a volley into the wood. The volley was matched by one from the enemy. The Yankees, retreating into the trees, had turned and formed their own battle line. One of Starbuck's men screamed as he was hit in the leg, another staggered back into the smoky sunlight with blood seeping between fingers that were clutched to his belly. A bullet smacked hollowly into one of the captured cannon's ammunition chests. Somewhere a man gasped the name Jesus over and over.

  God Almighty, Starbuck thought, but somehow they had survived. He felt sick to his stomach. He felt ashamed, and his hands were shaking as he reloaded his revolver. He had failed. He had felt the Legion disintegrate around him like a crumbling dam, and there had been nothing he could do. There were tears on his face, tears of shame at having failed. He pressed the percussion caps onto the revolver's cones and fired it into the shadowed smoke beneath the trees.

  "Sir!" Captain Pine of D Company, his lip
s blackened by powder and his eyes red from the smoke, appeared beside him. "Do we take the gun, sir?" He gestured at the captured cannon.

  "Yes!" Starbuck said, then forced himself to calm down, to think. "Keep firing!" he shouted at the Legion's ragged line; then he looked more carefully at the gun. A dead horse lay nearby, just one horse, and there was no limber, but only wooden chests of ammunition, and Starbuck remembered Swynyard telling him about the mountain howitzers of the old U.S. Army, and he realized that this twelve-pounder cannon was one of those old rough-country guns that were transported on the backs of single packhorses. This captured howitzer was not a heavy gun, but even so it would need a half-dozen men to drag it through the trees and back to the railbed, and Starbuck knew that the absence of even a half-dozen men would weaken his line enough to let the Yankees surge back. Maybe, he thought, he should just spike the gun and abandon it; then he saw a mass of blue uniforms behind his fragile line and panic soared in him.

  He was about to scream at his men to turn and drive this new enemy away, then realized that the blue coats belonged to prisoners. They were Yankees who had survived the horror in the spoil pit and who had now climbed out into the open ground. "Get some of those Yankees," Starbuck said to Pine, "and have them drag the gun back. And be careful, it's loaded!"

  "Use prisoners, sir?" Pine asked, apparently shocked at the idea.

  "Do it!" Starbuck turned back to the east to see that his men were doggedly firing and loading, firing and loading. Most were sheltering behind trees, just as the Yankees were, which meant that the firefight was settling into a stalemate, but soon the Legion must withdraw to its railbed trench, and Starbuck was determined that the retreat should be made in good order. He would not lose control as he had before.