Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  Senator Baker shouted at his staff officers to man one of the abandoned howitzers, but none of them knew how to prime a vent and the hail of Virginia bullets drove the officers back into the shadows. They left a major dead and a lieutenant coughing up blood as he staggered back from the gun. A bullet slashed a shard of wood from a howitzer’s wheel spoke, another smacked on the muzzle’s face, and a third punctured the water bucket.

  A group of Mississippi men, enraged because their Colonel had been shot, tried to charge across the patch of rough meadowland, but as soon as they showed themselves at the tree line the frustrated northerners poured fire at them. It was the rebels’ turn to pull back, leaving three men dead and two wounded. At the right flank of the Massachusetts line the fourteen-pound cannon was still firing, but the Rhode Island gunners had used up their small stock of canister and now had nothing to fire but solid iron bolts. The canister, tearing itself apart at the cannon’s muzzle to scatter a lethal spray of musket balls into the enemy ranks, was ideal for close-range killing work, but the solid bolts were intended for long-range accurate fire and were no good for scouring infantry out of woodland. The bolts, which were elongated iron cannonballs, screamed across the clearing and either vanished into the distance or else struck slivers of freshly splintered timber from tree trunks. The smoke from the cannon pumped its foul-smelling cloud twenty yards in front of the muzzle, forging a smokescreen that hid the right flank companies of the 20th Massachusetts. “Come on, Harvard!” an officer shouted. At least two-thirds of the regiment’s officers had come from Harvard, as had six of its sergeants and dozens of its men. “Come on, Harvard!” the officer shouted again and he stepped forward to lead his men by example, but a bullet took him under the chin and jerked his head sharply back. Blood misted around his face as he slowly crumpled to the ground.

  Wendell Holmes, dry-mouthed, watched the stricken officer kneel and then slump forward. Holmes ran forward to help the man, but two other soldiers were closer and dragged the body back into the trees. The officer was unconscious, his bloodied head twitching, then he made a harsh rattling sound and blood bubbled at his throat. “He’s dead,” one of the men who had pulled the body back to cover said. Holmes stared at the dead man and felt a sour surge of vomit rise in his throat. Somehow he kept the vomit down as he turned away and forced himself to stroll with apparent carelessness among his company. He really wanted to lie down, but he knew he needed to show his men that he was unafraid and so he paced among them, his sword drawn, offering what help he could. “Aim low, now. Aim carefully! Don’t waste your shots. Look for them now!” His men bit cartridges, souring their mouths with the salty taste of the gunpowder. Their faces were blackened with the powder, their eyes red-rimmed. Holmes, pausing in a patch of sunlight, suddenly caught the sound of rebel voices calling the exact same advice. “Aim low!” a Confederate officer called. “Aim for the officers!” Holmes hurried on, resisting the temptation to linger behind the bullet-scarred trunks of the trees.

  “Wendell!” Colonel Lee called.

  Lieutenant Holmes turned to his commanding officer. “Sir?”

  “Look to our right, Wendell! Maybe we can outflank these rogues.” Lee pointed to the woods beyond the field gun. “Find out how far the rebel line extends. Hurry now!”

  Holmes, thus given permission to abandon his studied and casual air, ran through the trees toward the open right flank of the northern line. To his right, below him and through the trees, he glimpsed the bright, cool surprise of the river, and the sight of the water was oddly comforting. He passed his gray greatcoat folded so neatly at the foot of a maple tree, ran behind the Rhode Islanders manning their cannon and on toward the flank, and there, just as he emerged from the smoke and could see that the far woods were indeed empty of rebel enemy and thus offered a way for Colonel Lee to hook around the Confederate left flank, a bullet struck his chest.

  He shuddered, his whole frame shaken by the bullet’s whipsaw strike. The breath was knocked hard out of him, leaving him momentarily unable to breathe, yet even so he felt oddly cool and detached, so that he was able to register just what he was experiencing. The bullet, he was sure it was a bullet, had struck him with the impact he imagined equal to the kick of a horse. It had left him seemingly paralyzed, but when he tried to take a breath he was pleasantly surprised to discover his lungs were working after all, and he realized it was not true paralysis, but rather an interruption of his mind’s control over physical motion. He also realized that his father, Professor of Medicine at Harvard, would want to know of these perceptions, and so he moved his hand toward the pocket where he kept his memorandum book and pencil, but then, helpless to stop himself, he began to topple forward. He tried to call for assistance, but no sound would come, and then he tried to raise his hands to break his fall, but his arms seemed suddenly enfeebled. His sword, which he had been carrying unsheathed, fell to the ground, and he saw a drop of blood splash on the mirror-bright blade and then he fell full-length across the steel and there was a terrible pain inside his chest so that he cried aloud in pity and agony. He had a vision of his family in Boston and he wanted to weep.

  “Lieutenant Holmes is down!” a man shouted.

  “Fetch him now! Take him back!” Colonel Lee ordered, then went to see how badly wounded Holmes was. He was delayed a few seconds by the Rhode Island artillerymen who shouted for the infantry to stand clear as they fired. Their cannon crashed back on its trail, jetting smoke and flame far out into the sunlit clearing. Each time the gun fired it recoiled a few feet farther back so that its trail left a crudely plowed furrow in the leaf-covered dirt. The gun’s crew was too busy to haul the weapon forward again and each shot was fired a few feet farther back than the one before.

  Colonel Lee reached Holmes just as the Lieutenant was being lifted onto a stretcher. “I’m sorry, sir,” Holmes managed to say.

  “Be quiet, Wendell.”

  “I’m sorry,” Holmes said again. Lee stopped to retrieve the Lieutenant’s sword and wondered why so many men assumed that being wounded was their own fault.

  “You’ve done well, Wendell,” Lee said fervently, then a burst of rebel cheering turned him around to see a rush of new rebel troops arriving in the woods opposite, and he knew he had no chance now of hooking around the enemy’s open flank. Indeed, it looked as if the enemy might hook around his. He swore softly, then laid Holmes’s sword beside the wounded Lieutenant. “Take him down gently,” Lee said, then flinched as a corporal began screaming because a bullet had plowed into his bowels. Another man reeled back with an eye filled with blood, and Lee wondered why in God’s name Baker had not ordered a retreat. It was time to get back across the river before they all died.

  On the far side of the clearing the rebels had begun making the demonic sound that northern veterans of Bull Run claimed had presaged the onset of disaster. It was a weird, ulullating, inhuman noise that sent shivers of pure terror up Colonel Lee’s spine. It was a prolonged yelp like a beast’s cry of triumph, and it was the sound, Lee feared, of northern defeat. He shuddered, gripped his sword a little tighter, and went to find the Senator.

  The Faulconer Legion climbed the long slope toward battle. It had taken longer than anyone expected to march through the town and find the right track toward the river, and now it was late afternoon and some of the more confident men were complaining that the Yankees would all be dead and looted before the Faulconer Legion could get its share of the spoils, while the timid noted that the battle still crackled on unabated. The Legion was close enough to smell the bitter stench of gunpowder carried on the small north wind that sifted the gunsmoke through the green leaves like a winter fog shifting through branches. At home, Starbuck thought, the leaves would all have changed color, turning the hills around Boston into a glorious surprise of gold, scarlet, flaming yellow, and rich brown, but here, on the northern edge of the southern Confederacy, only the maples had turned gold and the other trees were still heavy with green leaves, though their greenness was bei
ng plucked and twitched by the storm of bullets being fired from somewhere deep inside the woods.

  The Legion marched across the leprous scatter of scorched stubble that showed where Duff’s company of Pike and Chickasaw County men had fought the advancing Yankees to a standstill. The burning wads of their rifles, coughed out with the bullets, had started the small fires that had burned and died away to leave ashy scars in the field. There were a couple of patches of blood too, but the Legion was too distracted by the fight at the hilltop to worry about those signs of earlier battle.

  More detritus of battle showed at the woodland’s edge. A dozen officers’ horses were picketed there, and a score of wounded men were being tended by doctors. A mule loaded with fresh ammunition was led into the trees while another, its panniers empty, was brought out. A slave, come to the battle as his master’s servant, ran uphill with canteens he had refilled at the wellhead in the nearest farm. At least a score of children had come from Leesburg to watch the battle and a Mississippi sergeant was attempting to chase them out of range of the northern bullets. One small boy had fetched his father’s huge shotgun to the field and was pleading to be allowed to kill one Yankee before bedtime. The boy did not even flinch as a fourteen-pound solid bolt streaked out from the trees and slapped close overhead. The shot appeared to fly halfway to the Catoctin Mountain before it fell with a mighty splash into a stream just beyond the Licksville Road. The Legion had now come to within sixty yards of the trees, and those officers who still rode horses dismounted and hammered iron picket pins into the turf while Captain Hinton, the Legion’s second-in-command, ran ahead to establish exactly where the left flank of the Mississippi boys lay.

  Most of Starbuck’s men were excited. Their relief at surviving Manassas had turned to boredom in the long weeks guarding the Potomac. Those weeks had hardly seemed like war, but instead had been a summer idyll beside cool water. Every now and then a man on one or other riverbank would take a potshot across the water and for a day or two thereafter the pickets would skulk in the shadows, but mostly the two sides had lived and let live. Men had gone swimming under the gunsights of their enemies, they had washed their clothes and watered their horses, and inevitably they had struck up acquaintances with the other side’s sentries and discovered shallow places where they could meet in midstream to exchange newspapers or swap southern tobacco for northern coffee. Now, though, in their eagerness to prove themselves the best soldiers in all the world, the Legion forgot the summer’s friendliness and swore instead to teach the lying, thieving, bastard Yankees to come across the river without first asking for rebel permission.

  Captain Hinton reappeared at the edge of the trees and cupped his hands. “A Company, to me!”

  “Form on A Company’s left!” Bird shouted to the rest of the Legion. “Color party to me!”

  One of the cannon bolts slashed through the trees, showering the advancing men with leaves and splinters. Starbuck could see where an earlier shot had ripped a branch from a trunk, leaving a shocking scar of fresh clean timber. The sight gave him a sudden catch in the throat, a pulse of fear that was the same as excitement.

  “Color party to me!” Bird shouted again and the standard-bearers raised their flags into the sunlight and ran to join the Major. The Legion’s own color was based on the Faulconer family’s coat-of-arms and showed three red crescents on a white silken field above the family motto “Forever Ardent.” The second color was the national flag of the Confederacy, two red horizontal stripes either side of a white stripe, while the upper quadrant next to the staff showed a blue field on which was sewn a circle of seven white stars. After Manassas there had been complaints that the flag was too similar to the northern flag and that troops had fired on friendly units believing them to be Yankees, and rumor had it that a new design was being made in Richmond, but for today the Legion would fight beneath the bullet-torn silk of its old Confederate color.

  “Dear sweet Jesus save me, dear sweet Jesus save me,” Joseph May, one of Starbuck’s men, prayed breathlessly as he hurried behind Sergeant Truslow. “Save me, O Lord, save me.”

  “Save your breath, May!” Truslow growled.

  The Legion had been advancing in columns of companies and now it peeled leftward as it turned itself from a column of march into a line of battle. A Company was first into the trees and Starbuck’s K Company would be the last. Adam Faulconer rode with Starbuck. “Get off that horse, Adam!” Starbuck shouted up to his friend. “You’ll be killed!” He needed to shout for the crackle of musketry was loud, but the sound was filling Starbuck with a curious elation. He knew as well as Adam that war was wrong. It was like sin, it was terrible, but just like sin it had a terrible allure. Survive this, Starbuck felt, and a man could take anything that the world might hurl at him. This was a game of unimaginably high stakes, but also a game where privilege conferred no advantages except the chance to avoid the game altogether, and whoever used privilege to avoid this game was no man at all, but a lickspittle coward. Here, where the air was foul with smoke and death whipped among green leaves, existence was simplified to absurdity. Starbuck whooped suddenly, filled with the sheer joy of the moment. Behind him, their rifles loaded, K Company spread among the green leaves. They heard their Captain’s whoop of joy and they heard the rebel yell sounding from the troops on the right, and so they began to make the same demonic wailing screech that spoke of southern rights and southern pride and southern boys come to make a killing.

  “Give them hell, boys!” Bird shouted. “Give them hell!”

  And the Legion obeyed.

  Baker died.

  The Senator had been trying to steady his men whose nerves were being abraded by the whooping, vengeful, southern fiends. Baker had made three attempts to break out of the woods, but each northern advance had been beaten bloodily back to leave another tide mark of dead men on the small meadow that lay like a smoke-palled slaughter field between the two forces. Some of Baker’s men were abandoning the fight; hiding themselves on the steep escarpment that dropped down to the riverbank or sheltering blindly behind tree trunks and outcrops of rock on the bluffs summit. Baker and his aides rousted such timid men out from their refuges and sent them back to where the brave still attempted to keep the rebels at bay, but the timid crept back to their shelters just as soon as the officers were gone.

  The Senator was bereft of ideas. All his cleverness, his oratory, and his passion had been condensed into a small tight ball of panic-stricken helplessness. Not that he showed any fear. Instead he strolled with drawn sword in front of his men and called on them to aim low and keep their spirits high. “There are reinforcements coming!” he said to the powder-stained men of the 15th Massachusetts. “Not much longer, boys!” he encouraged his own men of the 1st Californian. “Hot work now, lads, but they’ll tire of it first!” he promised the men of New York Tammanys. “If I had one more regiment like you,” he told the Harvards, “we’d all be feasting in Richmond tonight!”

  Colonel Lee tried to persuade the Senator to retreat across the river, but Baker seemed not to hear the request and when Lee shouted it, insisting on being heard, Baker merely offered the Colonel a sad smile. “I’m not sure we have enough boats for a retreat, William. I think we must stand and win here, don’t you?” A bullet spat inches above the Senator’s head, but he did not flinch. “They’re only a pack of rebels. We won’t be beaten by such wretches. The world is watching and we have to show our superiority!”

  Which was probably what an ancestor of Baker’s had said at Yorktown, Lee reflected, but wisely did not say aloud. The Senator might have been born in England, but there was no more patriotic American. “You’re sending the wounded off?” Lee asked the Senator instead.

  “I’m sure we are!” Baker said firmly, though he was sure of no such thing, but he could not worry about the wounded now. Instead he needed to fill his men with a righteous fervor for the beloved union. An aide brought him news that the 19th Massachusetts had arrived on the river’s far bank and he
was thinking that if he could just bring that fresh regiment across the Potomac he would have enough men to throw an attack against the knoll from which the rebels were decimating his left flank and preventing his howitzers from doing their slaughtering work. The idea gave the Senator instant hope and fresh enthusiasm. “That’s what we’ll do!” he shouted to one of his aides.

  “We’ll do what, sir?”

  “Come on! We have work!” The Senator needed to get back to his left flank and the quickest route lay in the open where the gunsmoke offered a fogbank in which to hide. “Come on,” he shouted again, then hurried down the front of his line, calling to the riflemen to hold their fire until he had passed. “We’re being reinforced, boys,” he shouted. “Not long now! Victory’s coming. Hold on there, hold on!”

  A group of rebels saw the Senator and his aides hurrying in the shifting smoke, and though they did not know Baker was the northern commander, they knew that only a senior officer would carry a tasseled sword and wear a uniform so tricked out with braid and glitter. A gold watch chain hung with seals was looped on the Senator’s coat and caught the slanting sun. “There’s their gang boss! Gang boss!” a tall, stringy, redheaded Mississippian called aloud, pointing to the striding figure who marched so confidently across the battle’s front. “He’s mine!” the big man shouted as he ran forward. A dozen of his companions scrambled after him in their eagerness to plunder the bodies of the rich northern officers.