Battle Flag tnsc-3

by Bernard Cornwell

The cane struck again, scattering the new heap of paper and instantly extinguishing the small flame. "You have broken your mother's heart," the preacher said, "and brought shame on my house. You lied to your brother, you have cheated, you have stolen!" The catalog of sins was so great that the Reverend Starbuck was momentarily overcome and he was forced to hold his breath and shake his head.

  "The son of a bitch drinks whiskey, too." Truslow used the silence to add his contribution from the doorway.

  "Yet!" The preacher shouted the word, the shout intended to govern his temper. "And yet," he said, blinking back tears, "your Lord and Savior will forgive you, Nate. All He asks is that you go to Him on bended knee with a confession of faith. All our sins can be forgiven! All!" Tears ran down the preacher's cheeks. "Please?" he said. "I cannot bear to think that in heaven we must look down on your eternal torment."

  Starbuck felt another great tidal surge of emotion. He might have rejected his father's house and his father's stem religion, but he could not deny that it had been a good house and an honest religion, nor could he claim that he did not fear the flames of eternal damnation. He felt the tears pricking at his own eyes. He stopped tearing paper and tried to summon up the anger that would let him face his father again, but instead he seemed to tremble on the brink of total surrender.

  "Think of your younger brothers. Think of your sisters. They love you!" The Reverend Starbuck had found his theme now and pressed it hard. He had so often sworn to disown this child, to cast Nathaniel out from the fellowship of Christ as well as from the Starbuck family, but now the preacher saw what a victory over the devil his son's repentance and return would make. He imagined Nathaniel making a confession of his sins in the church, he saw himself as the father of the prodigal son, and he anticipated the joy in heaven at the repentance of this one sinner. Yet there was more than a spiritual victory at stake. The preacher's anger had flared just like his son's, but the father was also discovering that a year of angry denial had been destroyed by a moment's proximity. This son, after all, was the one most like himself, which was why, he supposed, this was always the son with whom he had fought the hardest. Now he had to win this son back, not just for Christ, but for the Starbuck family. "Think of Martha!" he urged Starbuck, naming Starbuck's favorite sister. "Think of Frederick and how he's always admired you!"

  The preacher might have won the battle had he not spread his arms as he mentioned his son Frederick. He had intended the gesture as a reminder that Frederick, five years Starbuck's junior, had been born with a withered arm, but the gesture also released the battle flag that had been clasped under the preacher's left arm. The flag fell to the floor, where it sagged out of its fraying, abused string binding. Starbuck, glad not to have to meet his father's gaze, looked at the flag.

  He saw the silk, the lavish fringe, and he looked up at his father's face and for an instant all memories of Martha and Frederick vanished. He looked back to the flag.

  Truslow had also noticed the richness of the flag's material. "Is that a battle flag, preacher?" he asked.

  The Reverend Starbuck stooped to snatch up the flag, but the violence of the motion only destroyed what was left of the string so that the banner spilt richly into the evening light. "It's none of your business," the preacher said to Truslow defiantly.

  "That's our flag, goddamn it!" Truslow said.

  "It's the devil's rag!" the preacher snapped back, bundling the silk into his arms. He had dropped the cane to make the task easier.

  "I'll take the flag, mister," Truslow said grimly, stepping forward with an outstretched hand.

  "You want this flag," the Reverend Starbuck said, "then you'll have to strike me down!"

  "Hell if I care," Truslow said and reached for the banner. The preacher kicked at him, but Elial Starbuck was no match for Thomas Truslow. The soldier hit the preacher's arm once, but hard, then took the flag from the suddenly nerveless grip.

  "You would let your father be hit?" The preacher turned to Starbuck.

  But the moment when Starbuck's surrender was just a tremble of remembered emotion away had passed. He scraped another lucifer alight and put it to a page torn from an account book. "You said you weren't my father," he said brutally, then ripped more pages and piled them onto the tiny fire. He sprinkled the flames with powder from a revolver cartridge that he tore apart, so that the small fire flared violently. His father snatched up his cane and tried to sweep the burning papers off the table again, but this time Starbuck stood in his way. For a second the two stood face-to-face; then a voice called from the yard.

  "Johnnies!" It was Sergeant Decker.

  Truslow ran to the door. "Yankees," he confirmed.

  Starbuck joined Truslow on the veranda. A quarter-mile to the east was a ragged band of men who were watching the house. They wore blue, and some were on horseback and some on foot. They had the look, Starbuck decided, of a cavalry troop that had been put through hell. One of the men had golden hair and a short square beard. "Is that Adam?" he asked Truslow.

  "I guess."

  Starbuck turned to see that his father was obliterating the last vestiges of his fire. "Truslow," he said, "burn this damn house down while I go and tell those Yankees to get the hell out of Virginia. And I'll take the flag."

  There was a spear-tipped lance pole in a corner of the room. Starbuck took the lance, stripped it of its spearhead and swallow-tailed cavalry guidon, then slotted the silk flag onto the staff. Then, ignoring his father's angry voice, he jumped down into the yard and called for a man to bring his horse.

  He rode eastward, carrying the flag.

  Adam rode to meet him, and the two erstwhile friends met in the middle of the pasture next to the farmhouse. Adam looked ruefully at the flag. "So you got it back."

  "Where's the other one?"

  "I'm keeping it."

  "We always used to share," Starbuck said.

  Adam smiled at the remark. "How are you, Nate?"

  "Alive. Just," Starbuck said.

  "Me too," Adam id. He looked tired and sad, like a man whose hopes have taken a beating. He gestured at the ragged band of men and horses behind. "We got ambushed in some woods. Not many of us left."

  "Good." Starbuck turned in the saddle to see a wisp of smoke showing at a window of the house. "I know it wasn't your fault, Adam, but some of us took badly to women being burned alive. So we thought we'd do the same to Galloway's house."

  Adam nodded dully, as though he did not really care about the destruction of the farmhouse. "The Major's dead," he said.

  Starbuck grimaced, for it seemed that he was burning the house for nothing. "And the son of a bitch who killed the women? Blythe?"

  "God knows," Adam said. "Billy Blythe disappeared. Billy Blythe has a way of making himself scarce when there's trouble about." Adam leaned on his saddle's pommel and stared toward Galloway's farm, where more smoke was showing at a half-dozen windows. "I can't imagine Pecker giving you permission to do this," he said with an obvious distaste for the destruction.

  Adam clearly had not heard about Bird's wound, nor any of the Legion's other news. "Pecker's back home wounded," Starbuck told him, "and I'm the new colonel."

  Adam stared at his friend. "You?"

  "Your father was thrown out."

  Adam shook his head in apparent disbelief, or maybe denial. "You have the Legion?" he asked.

  Starbuck twitched the reins to turn his horse. "So the next time you want to play games with a regiment, don't choose mine, Adam. I'll goddamn kill you next time."

  Adam shook his head. "What's happening to us, Nate?"

  Starbuck laughed at the question. "We're at war. And your side says that houses have to be burned and goods taken from civilians. I guess we're matching you stride for stride."

  Adam did not even try to argue the point. He stared at the farmhouse, which was now gushing thick smoke from several windows. Truslow had clearly set about his incendiarism with an expertise that quite outstripped Starbuck's feeble efforts. "Is that your f
ather?" Adam had seen the black-dressed figure come from the burning house.

  "Send him safe home, will you?"

  "Surely."

  Starbuck clumsily turned his horse away. "Look after yourself now. And don't interfere with us. We'll be gone in five minutes."

  Adam nodded his agreement; then, just as Starbuck was urging his horse forward, he spoke again. "Have you heard from Julia?"

  Starbuck twisted in his saddle. "She's well. She's a nurse in Chimborazo."

  "Remember me to her," Adam said, but his onetime friend had already ridden away.

  Starbuck rode back to the house, where his old company had gathered outside the yard fence to watch the flames. His father shouted something at Starbuck, but the words were lost in the roar of the fire. "Let's go!" Starbuck called and turned away from the burning house. He did not say farewell to his father but just rode up the hill. He thought how close he had come to a tearful reconciliation, then tried to convince himself that there were some roads that could never be revisited, no matter what lay at their ends. He stopped at the wooded ridge and looked back. A roof beam collapsed into the fire, spewing a fountain of sparks into the evening air. "Come on!" he called to the company. They caught up with the Brigade a mile to the east. Swynyard was resting the men and waiting for orders. There were rain clouds in the south and a fresh wind gusting, but to the west, above the Blue Ridge Mountains, the sun flared bright as it dipped behind America's rim. In the North an army was in full retreat, while to the east and south, wherever a man looked, there were only rebel banners advancing in victory. And now a brighter banner joined the triumph as Starbuck kicked back his heels and let his borrowed horse run free, so that the shining colors of the recaptured flag streamed and rippled in the breeze. He rode in a curve, bringing the flag back to its Legion, and as he turned the horse toward their ranks, he raised the flag higher still, standing in the stirrups with his right arm braced aloft so that the battle flag's white stars and blue cross and crimson silk were made livid and brilliant by the last long rays of daylight. He was bringing the bright flag home, and in the sudden cheer that filled the sky Starbuck knew that he had made the Legion his. It was Starbuck's Legion.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ALL THE BATTLES AND SKIRMISHES in the novel are based on real actions that were fought in the summer of 1862, a campaign that ended Northern hopes for a swift victory in the east that year. McClellan had failed in his ambitious amphibious attack; now John Pope had been beaten back overland.

  I simplified some of the events that took place in between Cedar Mountain and Jackson's epic march around the Northern flank. There was an extra week of fighting in between those two events, but it was very confused fighting, and so I took a fiction writer's liberty and simply pretended it never happened. Readers who would like to know the true story of the confrontation across the Rapidan and Rappahannock should read John Hennessy's splendid account of the campaign, Return to Bull Run, a book that was constantly at my elbow as I wrote Battle Flag.

  Washington Faulconer's stupidity at Dead Mary's Ford is based on an exactly similar event at Raccoon Ford, when Robert Toombs, a Georgia politician turned soldier, stripped the ford of its guard on the grounds that he had not ordered the guard set and therefore the guard should not exist, and on that very night the ford was crossed by a force of Federal cavalry that raided the Confederate lines and very nearly succeeded in capturing Jeb Stuart. They had to settle for the famous man's hat instead. Stuart vowed to repay the insult, which he did by capturing John Pope's best uniform coat at Catlett's Station. Stuart offered to exchange the hat for the coat, but Pope, a humorless man, refused the offer. The unfortunate Toombs, meanwhile, was placed under arrest.

  Pope's notorious General Orders numbers Five and Seven were issued and, unsurprisingly, were regarded by many Northern soldiers as licenses to steal. They also offended Robert Lee grievously, which is why he was so intent on destroying Pope. He did. After the second battle of Manassas (Bull Run to Northerners) Pope was never to hold high command again.

  The battle is not as well known as it deserves to be. Jackson's flank march was a fine achievement, and Lee's strategy thoroughly confused a pedantic Northern command. The train crashes at Bristoe Station and the sack of the Federal depot at Manassas all happened, and the wounded civilian's weary judgment on the improbable Jackson ("Oh, my God, lay me down") did become a catch-phrase in Jackson's army. Lee's victory might have been more complete had Longstreet attacked on the day he arrived on Pope's unguarded flank rather than waiting a full twenty-four hours, but the battle was still a notable Southern victory and marked by at least one gruesome record. The casualty rate in the 5th New York Zouaves was the greatest in a single regiment on a single day in the whole war: 490 men entered the fight, 223 were wounded, and 124 killed, a casualty rate of 70 percent. The Reverend Doctor Winslow and his son both survived. Lee's overall casualty rate was 17 percent, which, to a country short of manpower, was an ominous loss.

  The battlefield is well preserved and a short drive from Washington, D.C. Much of the ground is shared with the field of First Manassas, and the two share an informative visitor center, where a pamphlet outlining a driving tour of the second battle is available.

  One reason why Second Manassas is not as well known as it might be is that it is inevitably overshadowed by the events that followed. The North has just seen its latest invasion of the Confederate States of America trounced, and now Lee will try to exploit that victory by leading the first Confederate invasion of the United States of America. His army will march to the banks of the Antietam Creek in Maryland, and there, not three weeks after fighting each other on the Bull Run, the two armies will contest the bloodiest day in all American history. It seems that Starbuck and his men must march again.

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