Battle Flag tnsc-3

by Bernard Cornwell

  "Then shake Blythe's hand and admit you were wrong," the Reverend Starbuck said.

  "Me? That I was wrong?" Adam could not help asking the astonished question aloud.

  "He admits you might be right, and that perhaps there were women there, so can you not do the same and admit that he would have behaved differently had he known?"

  Adam's head was awhirl. Somehow, he was not sure how, he had been maneuvered into the wrong. He was also painfully aware that he was in the preacher's debt, and so, though it cut hard against a stubborn grain, he nodded his head. "If you insist, sir," he said unhappily.

  "It's your conscience that should insist, but I am glad all the same. Come!" And the Reverend Starbuck thumped his horse's flanks to lead Adam across to where the grinning Billy Blythe waited. "Mr. Faulconer has something to say to you, Captain," the Reverend Starbuck announced.

  Adam made his admission that he might have misjudged Captain Blythe, then apologized for that misjudgment. He hated himself for making the apology, but he nevertheless tried to make it sound heartfelt. He even held out his hand afterward.

  Blythe shook the offered hand. "I guess we Southern gentlemen are just too hotheaded, ain't that right, Faulconer? So we'll say no more about it."

  Adam felt demeaned and belittled. He put a brave face on the defeat, but it was still a defeat and it hurt. Major Galloway, though, was touchingly pleased by the apparent reconciliation. "We should be friends," Galloway said. "We have enemies enough without making them from our own side."

  "Amen to that," Blythe said, "amen to that."

  "Amen indeed," the Reverend Starbuck echoed, "and hallelujah."

  Adam said nothing but just stared at the woods where the smoke rose from the guns.

  While to the south, unseen by any Northern troops, regiment after regiment of rebel infantry was marching on a country road that led to the open flank of John Pope's army. Lee's reinforcements were arriving just as the Yankees' last great charge of the day was hurled against the railbed in the woods.

  Above the Blue Ridge Mountains the sun sank slowly into a summer's evening. The Reverend Starbuck saw the imminence of nightfall and clenched his fists as he prayed that God would grant John Pope the same miracle that He had granted unto Joshua when He had made the sun stand still above Gibeon so that the armies of Israel would have the time to strike down the Amorites. The preacher prayed, bugles sounded in the woods, a loud cheer echoed among the trees, and the last great onslaught of the day charged on.

  ***

  THE LAST NORTHERN ATTACK of the day was by far the strongest and most dangerous, for instead of being launched in line it came in an old-fashioned column that struck like a hammer blow at the shallowest section of the railbed. It also struck at the vulnerable junction between Starbuck's men and Elijah Hudson's North Carolinians, and Starbuck, watching from the lip of the spoil pit at the back of the rail-bed, instinctively understood that his men would never stand against this tidal wave that streamed from the woods. The attacking battalions were so close together that their flags made a bright phalanx above the dark ranks. The flags showed the crests and badges of New York and Indiana, of Pennsylvania, Maine, and of Michigan, and beneath the flags the shouts of the attackers drowned the snapping sound of the Legion's rifles.

  "Ten paces back!" Starbuck shouted. He would not wait to be overrun. He heard Hudson shouting a similar command; then all sound from the rebel side was momentarily obliterated by the vast Northern cheer that greeted the retreat of the defenders. "Back," Starbuck shouted again when the Northern cheer faded. "Back! Keep in line! Keep in line!" He strode along the Legion's ranks, watching his men rather than looking at the surging enemy. "Backwards! Steady now! Steady!" He was suddenly so proud of the Legion. They were watching blue-coated death come at them in a massive rush, yet they retreated in good steady order as he took them back another ten paces into the thin woodland behind the railbed. He halted them among the saplings. "Reload!" he shouted. "Reload!"

  Men bit cartridges, poured powder, and spat bullets. They rammed the charges hard down, then upended the rifles and pressed percussion caps onto fire-blackened cones.

  "Aim!" Starbuck shouted. "But wait! Wait for my order!" All along the Legion's line the heavy rifle hammers clicked into place. "Wait for my order and aim low!" Starbuck called. He turned to watch the charge just as the Northerners reached the railbed's cutting. The triumphant Yankee troops poured down the trench's sloping outer wall and then, still cheering, swarmed up its rearward slope straight into the sights of the waiting Legion. "Fire!" Starbuck shouted.

  The volley exploded along the line, hurling Northerners back into the trench. At twenty paces such a volley was mere slaughter work, but it did no more than check the onrushing attack for the few seconds necessary for the unwounded attackers to push aside their encumbering dead and dying. Then, urged on by officers and inflamed with the prospect of victory, the Yankees came forward for their revenge.

  But Starbuck had already taken his men back to the hill, where Haxall's Arkansas battalion waited in support. The Legion's retreat had again opened a gap in front of the spoil pit, and again that gap enticed the Yankee attackers. It was the place of least resistance, and so the attacking column poured into the inviting open space. A few of the Northerners found themselves among the stinking bodies in the spoil pit, but most ran around the pit's rim and then charged on toward the open country beyond. They left behind a litter of wounded men, a trail of crushed saplings, and Starbuck's forlorn, captured howitzer, which had been thrown off its carriage.

  Haxall's men helped seal the gap by firing one blistering volley, and by the time the smoke of that volley had cleared, the Legion's rifles were loaded again. "Fire!" Starbuck shouted and heard the command echoed toward the regiment's left flank. The Northern attack was slowing, not because it was being outfought, but simply because too many Yankees were trying to push through the narrow gaps either side of the spoil pit and were meeting a stiffening resistance as Starbuck's right flank and Hudson's left closed on each other. Haxall's men extended Starbuck's line and, when at last the gap was closed, turned back to hunt down the Yankees who had broken through. The junction of Starbuck's Virginians and Hudson's North Carolinians was now some fifty paces behind the spoil pit, and it was there that the line steadied and began a murderous fight with the Yankees who had not succeeded in breaking through Jackson's line.

  The fight started with the two sides just thirty paces apart; close enough for men to see their enemies' faces, close enough to hear an enemy's voice, close enough for a bullet to mangle a man's flesh with undiminished horror. This was an infantry fight, rifle against rifle, the ordeal for which both sides had trained incessantly. Starbuck had to forget those Yankees who had broken through and were now loose at his rear; his sole duty was to stand and fight and trust someone else to worry about the Yankees who had breached the line, just as someone else must worry about the possibility of more Yankees crossing the railbed to join this duel of rifles. If those enemy reinforcements arrived, Starbuck knew, then the Legion must be overwhelmed, but for the moment the Northerners were being held. They were being held by men who knew their survival depended on being able to load their rifles faster than the enemy. There was no need for any officers or sergeants to give commands. The men knew what to do. They did it.

  Lieutenant Patterson was dead, killed by his red sash that had attracted too many Yankee bullets. It was a miracle to Starbuck that any man survived the maelstrom of close-range rifle fire, but the sulfurous powder smoke served as a screen, and the Yankee fire slackened as the Northerners edged back toward the railbed. No regiment, however brave, could long survive a rifle duel at close range, and the instinct for both sides was to retreat, but Starbuck's men were standing hard against the hill's base, and the slope inhibited their natural instinct to shuffle a few inches backward every time they reloaded their rifles, but the open land behind the Yankee line tempted the Northerners to yield their ground inch by bloody inch, then yar
d by smoldering yard.

  Starbuck lost count of the bullets he fired. His rifle was now so fouled with powder that it was painful to ram each new bullet down the barrel. He fired and fired again, his shoulder bruising from the recoil, his eyes smarting from the smoke, and his voice hoarse from the day's shouting. He heard the distinctive meat-ax sound as bullets struck men around him and was dimly conscious of bodies falling backward from the line. He was also conscious that rank gave him the freedom to leave the battle line, except that the responsibility of command perversely decreed that he could not take that voluntary backward step.

  And so he fought. Sometimes he shouted at the line to close up, but mostly he just rammed and fired, rammed and fired, consumed by the conviction shared by every man in the line that his were the bullets that were pushing the enemy back. He flinched each time the heavy gun slammed back into his shoulder, and he choked each time he bit open a cartridge and so tasted the acrid, salt-rich, mouth-drying gunpowder. Sweat stung his eyes. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the terror of being injured, but he was too busy loading and firing to let that terror overwhelm him. An occasional bullet slicing close by left him momentarily shaking, but then he would ram another round into the recalcitrant rifle and crash another shoulder-bruising shot toward the Yankees and fish for another cartridge in his haversack as he let the rifle's heavy stock fall to the ground. Once, pouring powder into the barrel, the new charge caught fire and exploded a bright gash of flame into his face. He recoiled from the pain, his eyeballs seared raw, then angrily rammed the embers dead in the barrel with his ramrod. Minutes later another sharp pain shot hard through his right arm, and he almost dropped the rifle from the sudden agony; then he saw he had been struck not by a bullet but only by a sharp-tipped splinter of bone that had been ripped from his neighbor's ribcage by a Yankee bullet. The man was on the ground, twitching as the blood flooded from his shattered chest. He looked up at Starbuck, tried so hard to speak, then choked on blood and died.

  Starbuck stooped to feel in the man's haversack for more cartridges and found just two. He was down to the bottom layer of his own rounds now. "Close up!" he shouted. "Close up!" And a momentary lull in the fighting gave him an opportunity to back out of the line, where men were asking friends and neighbors for any extra ammunition. Starbuck handed out what few rounds he had left and then climbed the steep hill in search of the Legion's spare ammunition supply. A score of wounded men had taken refuge on the hill. One of Haxall's Arkansas men, his left arm hanging bloody, tried to load his rifle one-handed. "Goddamned sons of bitches," the man muttered over and over, "Goddamned sons of Yankee bitches." A shell burst overhead to slap hot scraps of smoking metal into the hill.

  "Yankees have brought up two more howitzers!" Colonel Swynyard was seated halfway up the hill, field glasses in hand. He sounded very calm.

  "We need ammunition!" Starbuck said, trying to sound as collected as the Colonel but unable to keep a note of panic out of his voice.

  "None left!" The Colonel shrugged helplessly. "I have to apologize to you, Starbuck."

  "Me?"

  "I swore at you earlier. I apologize."

  "You did? Christ!" Starbuck spat out the blasphemy as another shell screamed low overhead to ricochet up from the slope and explode somewhere beyond the summit. Had Swynyard sworn at him? Starbuck did not remember, nor did he much care. He was suddenly worrying far more about what had happened to the mass of Yankees who had streamed through the gap into the army's rear and there disappeared. Suppose those men were about to counterattack? "We must have ammunition!" he shouted to Swynyard.

  "Used it all. Long day's fighting." The Colonel seemed remarkably calm as he aimed his revolver at the Northern battle line and methodically pulled the trigger. "They're slackening! When they're gone we'll pillage the dead for ammunition."

  Starbuck ran downhill and pulled two of Captain Davies's men out of the ranks. "You're to search the dead and wounded," he told them, "and find ammunition. Hand it out! Hurry!" He sent one man to the left, the other to the right, then took their place in the ranks and drew his revolver.

  Starbuck found himself standing alongside the bespectacled Captain Ethan Davies, who was fighting with a rifle. "They're from Indiana," Davies said, as though Starbuck would be interested in the news.

  "What? Who?" Starbuck had not been listening. Instead he had been searching the smoke-smeared enemy line for any sign of a man giving commands.

  "These fellows." Davies indicated the nearest Yankees with a jerk of his chin. "They're from Indiana." "How do you know?"

  "I asked them, of course. Shouted at them." He fired, flinching from the painful impact of the rifle's heavy recoil against his bruised shoulder. "I almost married a girl from Indiana once," Davies added as he dropped the rifle's butt onto the ground and pulled out a paper-wrapped cartridge.

  "What stopped you?" Starbuck was priming his revolver with percussion caps.

  "She was Catholic and my parents disapproved." Davies spoke mildly. He bit off a bullet, poured the gritty powder down the hot barrel, then spat the bullet into the muzzle with powder-blackened lips. His spectacles were smeared into opaqueness with dust and sweat. "I often think of her," he said wistfully, then rammed the bullet down hard, swung the rifle up, capped it, and pulled the trigger. "She came from Terre Haute. Don't you think that's a wonderful name for a town?"

  Starbuck cocked his revolver. "How did a Virginian happen to meet a Catholic girl from Terre Haute?" He had to shout the question over the splintering noise of gunfire.

  "She's some kind of distant cousin. I met her when she came to Faulconer Court House for a family funeral." Davies cursed, not because of the memory of his lost love, but because the cone of his rifle had become brittle from the heat and shattered. He threw the gun down and took another from a dead man. Somewhere in the battle smoke a young man screamed horribly. The scream went on and on, punctuated by short gasps of breath. Davies shuddered at the awful sound. "Oh, my God," he said callously when the screaming ended suddenly, "just lay me down."

  "I wish people would stop saying that," Starbuck said, "it's getting on my nerves."

  "You'd prefer biblical quotes?" Davies asked. "Lambs to the slaughter," he offered, misquoting Isaiah.

  "'The sword of the Lord is filled with blood.'" Starbuck offered another quotation from the same prophet as he fired two rounds of the revolver. " 'It is made fat with fatness and with the blood of lambs.'"

  Davies shuddered at the sentiment. "I keep forgetting you were a theology student."

  "There's nothing like a course of Old Testament studies to make a soldier ready for battle," Starbuck said with relish. He lowered his revolver and listened to the sound of the fighting. The Yankee fire was definitely slackening. "They won't last long now," he said. His mouth was so dry that talking was difficult. He had replaced his shattered canteen with another but had long drained its tepid contents. Now he stooped and unlooped a dead man's canteen.

  "Her name was Louisa," Davies said.

  "Who?" Starbuck said. He tipped the canteen to his mouth and was rewarded by a trickle of lukewarm water. "Who?" he asked again.

  "My distant Catholic relative from Indiana," Davies said as he primed his new rifle, "and two years ago she married a corn chandler."

  "With any luck you're about to kill the bastard," Starbuck said, "and that'll make the lovely Louisa into a respectable young widow and you can marry her when the war's over." He emptied the rest of his revolver's chambers into the smoke. "Keep firing!" he shouted at the company, then slapped Davies on the shoulder as he left the company to walk back along the Legion's rear. "Bastards are giving way, boys! Keep firing! Keep firing!" He reloaded his revolver as he walked, doing the job without needing to look down at the weapon. Starbuck remembered his first day of battle, not a mile or two from this very spot, when he had been unable to load his revolver because his hands had been trembling and his vision blurred, while now he did it without thinking or looking.

 
The Legion kept firing but were taking very little return fire except for an occasional shell lobbed by the small howitzers at the edge of the trees, and those shells were mostly fused too long and so exploded harmlessly among the shattered saplings behind the battle line. The Yankee line, splintered into groups by the steady rebel firing, was stumbling back across their own dead toward the railbed. There was a danger they might go to ground there, and Starbuck reckoned his dazed and bloodied men would have to charge with fixed bayonets to keep the Northern retreat moving, but just a second before he shouted the order, so a great backwash of attackers surged from the west.

  The Northerners who had passed clean through the rebel line into the open land beyond were now streaming back. They had been harried by Haxall's Arkansas battalion, then intercepted by a brigade sent by Lee to reinforce Jackson's hard-pressed men, and now the Northerners were in full retreat. "Let 'em through?" Hudson shouted at Starbuck. The choice was either to open ranks and let the Northerners go back beyond the railbed or else to turn and fight, but Hudson's implied choice was to give the enemy a free pass home. There were simply too many Yankees for the battle-weary rebel line to take on, especially as there were still plenty of Northerners firing from the railbed. A decision to fight would have meant firing both east and west, so Starbuck gratefully shouted his assent to Hudson and then pulled the Legion's right wing clear of the retreating Yankees. The fleeing enemy surged past the spoil pit.

  Starbuck watched the disorganized enemy run past; then another flicker of movement closer to the hill made him look right to see a small group of gray-clad men running parallel with the enemy but keeping well away from danger. Major Medlicott and Captain Moxey were in the lead of a score of men who now tried to rejoin the Legion's ranks without their arrival being noted. Starbuck ran toward the fugitives. "Where were you?" he asked Medlicott.