Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  EPILOGUE

  K COMPANY BEGAN ITS DYING THREE WEEKS LATER. Joseph May was the first. He was fetching water when a stray shell landed by the brook. His new spectacles were blown off his face, one lens was shattered, and the other so evenly coated in blood that it looked just like ruby-colored glass.

  All that day the Legion waited while a battle hammered just to its north. The guns sounded from dawn to dusk, but the smoke plume never shifted, evidence that for all the rebel attacks the Yankees would not be moved back. Yet that night, after the fighting died, the northern army slipped away to new positions farther east and in the dawn they could be heard digging and the rebels knew there would be hard work ahead if the blue-bellies were to be pushed farther away from Richmond. James Bleasdale died that morning. He climbed a tree to get eggs from a nest and a Yankee sniper got him in the neck. He was dead before he hit the ground. Starbuck wrote to his mother, a widow, and tried to find words that might imply that her son had not died in vain. “He will be sorely missed,” Starbuck wrote, but it was not really true. No one had particularly liked Bleasdale, or disliked him either for that matter. A flurry of shots announced that Sergeant Truslow’s expedition had located the Yankee sharpshooter, but Truslow came back disconsolate. “Son of a bitch skedaddled,” the Sergeant said, then turned to stare at Major Bird. “He’s gone mad.”

  Major Bird was indeed behaving more oddly than usual. He was progressing through the encampment with a curious, crablike motion, sometimes darting forward a few steps, then stopping with his feet together and one arm extended before suddenly turning completely around and beginning the strange sequence all over again. Every now and then he interrupted the strange capering to inform a group of men that they should be ready to march in half an hour’s time. “He’s gone mad,” Truslow said again, after a further examination of the Major’s strange gait.

  “I am learning to dance,” Bird announced to Starbuck and made a complete revolution with an imaginary partner in his ragged arms.

  “Why?” Starbuck asked.

  “Because dancing is a graceful accomplishment to high office. My brother-in-law has just made me a lieutenant colonel.”

  “Congratulations, Pecker.” Starbuck was genuinely pleased.

  “It seems he has small choice now that Adam has resigned from the fray.” Pecker Bird, despite his avowed contempt for the formal military hierarchy, could not hide his pleasure.

  “He had even less choice after everyone voted for you,” Truslow growled.

  “Voted! You think I owe my high military status to mere democracy? To mobocracy? I am a genius, Sergeant, rising like a comet through oceans of mediocrity. I mix metaphors too.” Bird peered at the paper on Starbuck’s lap. “Are you writing metaphors to Mother Bleasdale, Nate?”

  “Just the usual lies, Pecker.”

  “Tell her some unusual ones, then. Say that her dull son is promoted to glory, that he has been loosed from his earthly bonds and now trills in the choir eternal. Say that he frolics in Abram’s bosom. Sarah Bleasdale will like that, she was ever a fool. Half an hour, Starbuck, then we march.” Bird danced away, whirling an invisible partner over the cow pats in the field where the Legion had slept under the stars.

  General Lee was beside the road as the Legion marched out of its encampment. He sat straight-backed on a gray horse, surrounded by his staff and touching his hat to each company in turn. “We must drive them away,” he said to each company in a conversational tone, and in between made awkward small talk with Washington Faulconer. “Drive them away, boys, drive them away,” Lee said again, this time to the company marching immediately ahead of Starbuck’s, and when the General turned to Faulconer once again he found that the brigadier had inexplicably moved away. “Push them hard, Faulconer!” Lee called after him, puzzled by Faulconer’s sudden departure.

  Faulconer’s abrupt leaving was no mystery to the Legion, who had noticed how their general assiduously avoided K Company. He had dined with the officers from each of his brigade’s other regiments, but he ignored the Legion in case he was forced to acknowledge Starbuck’s presence. Faulconer told Swynyard he wanted to avoid the appearance of showing favoritism to the regiment that bore his name, and for that same reason he claimed to have decided not to appoint his son to command the Faulconer Legion, but no one believed the tale. Adam, it was said, was sick in his father’s country house, though some, like Bird and Truslow, suspected the sickness was connected with Starbuck’s return. Starbuck himself refused to speak of the matter.

  “Drive them away, boys, drive them away,” Lee said to K Company, touching a hand to his hat. Behind the general a stretch of woodland was splintered and charred from the previous day’s fighting. A party of Negroes was collecting corpses, dragging them to a newly dug grave. Just around the corner another black man was hanging dead from a tree with a misspelled placard pinned to his chest. “This nigger was a gide to the yankees,” the placard read. Lee, following K Company down the road, angrily ordered the corpse taken down.

  Lee separated from the Legion at a crossroads where a tavern offered a night’s lodging for five cents. A group of disconsolate northern prisoners was sitting on the tavern’s steps under the guard of a pair of Georgia soldiers who looked scarcely a day over fourteen. A shell exploded in midair a half mile away, the smoke sudden and silent in the pearly sky. The sound followed an instant later, then a crackle of musketry ripped through the morning to scare a flock of birds up from the trees. A battery of Confederate cannon unlimbered in a field to the right of the road. Shirtsleeved men led the team horses back from the guns while other gunners filled sponge buckets with ditch water. They all had the efficient, unhurried look of workmen moving about their daily preparations.

  “Colonel Bird! Colonel Bird!” Captain Moxey cantered down the Legion’s line of march. “Where’s Colonel Bird?”

  “In the woods,” Sergeant Hutton called back.

  “What’s he doing in the woods?”

  “What do you think?”

  Moxey turned his horse. “He’s to report to General Faulconer. There’s a mill down there.” He pointed to a side road. “He’s to go there. It’s called Gaines’ Mill.”

  “We’ll tell him,” Truslow said.

  Moxey inadvertently caught Starbuck’s eye and immediately slashed his spurs back to make his horse leap ahead. “We won’t see him near the bullets today,” Truslow commented drily.

  The Legion waited beside the road while Bird learned their fate. The Yankees were clearly not far away, for rebel shells were exploding over some nearby woods. Rifle fire sounded in sudden bursts, as though the skirmishers of either side were probing forward to make contact. The Legion waited as the sun rose higher and higher. Somewhere ahead of them a great veil of dust hung in the air, evidence that wheeled traffic was busy on a road, but whether it was the Yankees retreating or the rebels advancing, no one could tell. The morning passed and the Legion made a cold dinner from hardtack, rough rice, and water.

  Bird returned just after midday and called his officers together. A half mile ahead of the Legion, he said, was a belt of woodland. The trees concealed a steep valley through which a stream ran through marshland toward the Chickahominy. The Yankees were dug in on the far bank of the stream and the Legion’s job was to drive the sons of bitches away. “We’re the front line,” Bird told his company officers. “The Arkansas boys will be on our left, the rest of the brigade will be behind us.”

  “And the brigadier behind them,” Captain Murphy said in his soft Irish accent.

  Bird pretended not to have heard the jibe. “The river’s not far beyond the Yankees,” he said, “and Jackson’s marching to cut them off, so maybe today we can break them forever.” Stonewall Jackson had brought his army to the peninsula after driving the Yankees out of the Shenandoah Valley. The northern troops in the Shenandoah had outnumbered Jackson, but he had first marched rings around them, then whipped them bloody, and now his troops were under Lee’s orders and facing McClellan’
s lumbering and hesitant army. That army, after the fight around the seven pines at the crossroads, had neither advanced nor retreated, but had instead busied itself with making a new supply base on the James River. Jeb Stuart had scornfully led twelve hundred rebel cavalrymen in a ride clean around the whole northern army, mocking McClellan’s impotence and giving every southern patriot a new hero. Colonel Lassan had ridden with Stuart and brought news of the ride to Starbuck. “It was magnificent!” Lassan had enthused. “Worthy of the French cavalry!” He had brought three bottles of looted Yankee brandy that he shared with the Legion’s officers while he filled an evening with tales of battles far away.

  Yet McClellan would not be defeated by horsemen, however brilliant, but by infantrymen like those Bird now led toward the woods above the stream. The day was sweltering. Spring had turned into summer, the blossoms were gone, and the peninsula’s muddy roads had dried to a cracked crust that scuffed into thick dust wherever men or horses passed.

  Bird deployed eight companies of the Legion into a line of two ranks. The small Arkansas battalion formed on the left of the Legion beside Starbuck’s men. They raised their colors. One was an old-fashioned three-striped Confederate flag while the other was a black banner with a crudely depicted white snake coiled at its center. “Ain’t really our flag,” the Arkansas Major confided to Starbuck, “but we kind of liked it and so we just took it. Bunch of boys from New Jersey had it first.” He spat a viscous stream of tobacco juice, then told Starbuck how he and his men had arrived as volunteers in Richmond at the very beginning of the war. “Some of the boys wanted to go home to Arkansas after Manassas, and I could understand that, but I kept telling them there were more live Yankees here than there were back home and so I guess we just stayed on to do a bit of killing.” His name was Haxall and his battalion numbered just over two hundred men, all of them as lean and ill-kempt as Haxall himself. “Luck to you, Captain,” he said to Starbuck, then slouched back to his small battalion just as Colonel Swynyard gave the order to advance. It was past midday so Swynyard was already hard put to stay in his saddle; by evening he would be incoherent and by midnight insensible. “Forward!” Swynyard shouted again, and the Legion trudged toward the shadowed woods.

  “Does anyone know where we are?” Sergeant Hutton asked K Company.

  No one did. It was just another piece of swampy woodland over which the shells began to burst. Starbuck could hear the missiles ripping through the trees, and every now and then a thrashing of leaves would show where a shell was passing through the upper branches. Some missiles exploded among the trees, others screamed over the Legion toward the Confederate battery in the field behind. The rebel guns answered, filling the sky with the thunderous wail of an artillery duel. “Skirmishers!” Major Hinton called. “Off you go, Nate!” he added more casually and Starbuck’s company obediently broke ranks and trotted ahead to form a scattered line fifty paces ahead of the other companies. Starbuck’s company formed teams of four men, though Starbuck, as an officer, was on his own and he suddenly felt very visible. He carried nothing that would denote to an enemy that he was an officer; no sword, no glint of braid, no metal bar on his collar, but his very solitariness suddenly seemed to make him a target. He watched the tree line, wondering whether northern skirmishers waited there or, worse, whether the green shadows hid a scatter of lethal sharpshooters with their telescopic sights and deadly rifles. He could feel his own heart beating and each step needed a deliberate effort. He instinctively kept his rifle’s wooden stock over his crotch. A shell exploded just a few yards ahead and a scrap of shrapnel whipped past his shoulder. “Glad you came back?” Truslow called to him.

  “This is how I always dreamed of spending my Friday afternoons, Sergeant,” Starbuck said, astonished that his voice sounded so careless. He glanced around to make sure his men were not lagging behind and was astonished to see that the Legion was merely one small part of an immense line of gray-clad infantry that stretched away to his left for a half mile or more. He even forgot his fear for a few seconds as he gazed at the thousands of men in their wavering attack line who walked forward under their bright flags.

  A shell exploded ahead of Starbuck, turning his attention back to the trees. He hurried past a scorched patch of turf where a fragment of shell smoked in the dirt. Another explosion sounded, this one from behind Starbuck and so huge that it seemed to punch a wave of hot air across the summer landscape. Starbuck turned to see that a Yankee shell had hit an artillery limber loaded with ammunition. Smoke boiled up from the shattered vehicle and a riderless horse limped away from the flames. A nearby gun fired, jetting a twenty-yard cloud of smoke behind its shell. The grass rippled outward in a shock wave from the gun’s muzzle. The Faulconer Brigade’s second line of men was deploying and somewhere a band was playing the popular Richmond song “God Will Defend the Right.” Starbuck wished the musicians had chosen something more tuneful, then he forgot the music as he plunged into the trees where the day’s harsh light was filtered green by the leaves. A squirrel ran ahead through the leaf mold. “When did we last eat squirrel?” he asked Truslow.

  “We had plenty while you were away,” the Sergeant said.

  “I fancy some fried squirrel,” Starbuck said. One year ago he would have gagged at the very idea of eating squirrels, whereas now he had a soldier’s fastidious preference for young squirrels fried. The older animals were much tougher and were better stewed.

  “Tonight we’ll eat Yankee rations,” Truslow said.

  “That’s true,” Starbuck said. Where the hell were the enemy skirmishers? Where were their marksmen? A shell ripped through the treetops, provoking a clatter of pigeon wings. Where, for that matter, was the stream and the marshland? Then he saw the lip of a valley ahead, and beyond it the tall trees of the far slope, and under the trees there was a glimpse of freshly turned earth, and he understood that the Yankees were dug in on that far slope that would serve them like a giant earthwork. “Run!” he shouted. “Run!” He knew instinctively what was about to happen. “Charge!” he shouted,

  And the world exploded.

  The whole far side of the valley seemed to smother itself in a sudden, self-engendered fogbank. One moment the valley’s far side was leaves and brush, then it was a layer of white smoke. The sound came a heartbeat later, and with the sound came a storm of bullets that ripped and shredded through the green woods. Men on the far slope were shouting and whooping; men on Starbuck’s side of the valley were dying.

  “Sergeant Carter’s hit!” a man shouted.

  “Keep running!” Starbuck bellowed. There was no point in lingering on the valley’s lip to be the Yankees’ victims. The gunsmoke was shredding and he could see a mass of blue-coated infantry among the far trees while, on the crest above, a line of cannon was emplaced behind newly dug ramparts. Rifle flames stabbed that blue line, then the cannon fired to roll a cloud of gray-white smoke among the trees. A man screamed as a canister ball disemboweled him, another crawled bleeding toward the bulk of the Legion that advanced into the wood behind the skirmishers. The trees above Starbuck sounded as if a sudden gale had snatched at their boughs. More cannon fired, and suddenly the whole wood was filled with the shriek and bellow of canister. Rifle bullets whistled and cracked. Fear was like vomit in Starbuck’s craw, but survival lay in charging ahead and down into the green void of the valley. He leaped over the crest and half slid and half ran down the precipitous slope. The Arkansas men were giving the rebel yell. One of them was tumbling down the hill, blood smearing the dead leaves behind him. The Yankee gunfire was a constant splintering sound, a sustained, mind-numbing crackle as hundreds of rifles fired across the small valley. Amos Parks was hit in the belly, plucked backward with the force of a mule kick. More canister smashed overhead, bringing down a blizzard of leaf scraps and torn twigs. The Legion’s only hope now was to keep running and so overwhelm the enemy with speed.

  “Fix bayonets!” Haxall cried to Starbuck’s left.

  “Keep running!” Star
buck shouted to his men. He did not want his men slowing down to fix their clumsy bayonets. Better to keep moving into the morass at the valley’s bottom where a stretch of black, stagnant water was broken by splintered trees, fallen logs, and marshy banks. The stream doubtless ran somewhere in the middle of the morass, but Starbuck could not see it. He reached the foot of the slope and leaped for a fallen log, then jumped again onto a bank of rich grass. A bullet churned water up ahead of him, another splintered a rotten length of wet timber from a log. He splashed through a stretch of water, then slipped as he tried to scramble up a short, slick bank of mud. He fell forward into grass, protected from the Yankees ahead and above by a huge, black, half-rotted tree trunk. He felt the temptation to stay behind the sheltering trunk, but knew his job was to keep his men moving. “Come on!” he shouted, and wondered why no one was using the rebel yell any longer, but just as he tried to stand up a hand banged him in the small of the back and drove him down.

  It was Sergeant Truslow who had pushed him. “Forget it!” Truslow said. The whole company had gone to ground. Not just the company, but the whole Legion. Indeed the whole rebel attack had taken cover because the entire valley was whipsawed with Yankee bullets, filled with the shriek and scream of canister and thick with powder smoke. Starbuck raised his head and saw the far rim of the valley wreathed in smoke above which the red and white stripes of the Yankee banners floated. A bullet smacked the log just inches from his face, driving a splinter into his cheek. “Keep your head down,” Truslow growled. Starbuck twisted round. The only men in clear sight were the dead. Everyone else was crouching behind trees or sheltering in undergrowth. The bulk of the Legion was still at the top of the slope, gone to ground in the main stretch of woodland. Only the skirmishers had reached the valley’s floor, and not all the skirmishers had made it safely. “Carter Hutton’s dead,” Truslow said, “so God knows how his wife will manage.”