The Bloody Ground

by Bernard Cornwell

  Truslow gave a short efficient opinion of all doctors, then fired before dropping down behind a corpse that offered some cover as he reloaded. The corpse twitched as a bullet struck home with the meaty sound of an ax blow. Starbuck had reloaded his revolver during the pause between attacks and now fired all its chambers at the nearest group of Yankees. Truslow was right, he thought. They should retreat, but a retreat would become a rout. Better, perhaps, to lie here and let the victorious Yankees roll right over the line. He rammed his last cartridge into his rifle and peered across a corpse to find a final useful target. "Sons of bitches," he said vengefully.

  Then, suddenly, there was a screaming sound, an exultant sound, a high-pitched wailing terror of a sound, and he looked to his left and saw a new rebel unit streaming across the pasture. Some of the newcomers were in gray, some in butternut, but most wore the remnants of the gaudy zouave uniforms with which they had begun the war. It was the Louisiana Tigers, a fearful regiment of scoundrels from New Orleans, and it charged right past the rebel line, with bayonets fixed and with their battle flag streaming in the smoke. A sudden salvo of shells burst among the regiment, but the ranks closed up and screamed relentlessly on.

  "Forward!" Truslow shouted. "Come on, you bastards!"

  Astonishingly, the frail rebel line rose from among the dead. The Yankees, taken by surprise, seemed to pause in sheer disbelief. It was their turn to see the dead come to savage life. "Come on!" Truslow shouted. He was limping, but nothing would stop him.

  "Bayonets!" Starbuck shouted.

  It seemed a terrible madness had cloaked the rebel line. It was on the verge of rout, but, spurred by the Louisiana Tigers, it charged forward instead of running back. Men were screaming the rebel yell as they ran. The Yankees in the cornfield offered one scattered volley, then began to retreat. Some, unwilling to abandon their victory, shouted at their comrades to stay in the cornfield and those men formed small groups to resist the broken rebel charge.

  The rebel yell was the song of those men's death. For a few brief seconds the two sides clashed in the corn. Bayonets parried bayonets, but the rebels outnumbered the Northerners who had stayed to fight. Starbuck, unaware that he was screaming like a maniac, banged a rifle and bayonet to one side, then lunged his own blade into a face. He kicked the man as he fell, reversed his rifle, and hammered the bullet-splintered stock down into the bloody face.

  A volley sounded. The Yankees had reformed north of the cornfield and were pouring volley fire at the Louisianans. More fire came from the woods on either side of the cornfield. There were Yankees in both.

  "Back! Back!" someone shouted, and the rebels ran back through the cornfield to their old position. Starbuck paused long enough to loot the cartridges from the man he had wounded, then ran after his men. Bullets whip-sawed from either side. He was aware of bodies everywhere: sprawling, broken, explosive-torn, mangled, dismembered bodies—white bones and brain, blue intestines, sheets of blood. Some men lay on their own, but most were in groups where they had been cut down by canister and some, horrifically, moved slowly beneath their carapaces of fly-crawling blood. A man moaned, another called on God, a third coughed feebly. Starbuck crouched as he ran, then at last he was out of the cornfield and back in the rebel line. Potter had been wounded. A bayonet had slashed off half his left ear, which now dangled amid a blood-soaked hank of hair. "Just a scratch," he insisted, "just a scratch. The whiskey's safe."

  The rebel line lay down again. Men shared canteens and doled out cartridges they found in dead men's pouches. The Yankees had regrouped, but they seemed unwilling to go back into the cornfield that had become a slaughter-yard for both sides. Instead they crouched while the rebel canister whipped the air overhead and their own guns returned the fire. The lone gun on the slight knoll in the field had been abandoned, but there were other Yankee guns close behind it and those guns were firing away. Starbuck aimed at one of the gunners, then decided to save his ammunition.

  He stood. The blood in the small of his back had crusted his shirt and now that crust pulled painfully away to wash a gush of warm liquid down his buttocks. His throat was parched, his eyes raw with smoke, and his bones aching with weariness. He found the Irishman who had been telling his beads before the battle and sent him back to the springhouse with a dozen canteens. "Go easy now," he told him. "Give the trees a wide berth." The Yankee sharpshooters were back at the edge of the East Woods, though the smoke that lingered in the windless air was spoiling their aim, and their fire, which would have been terrifying in another circumstance, seemed puny after the tempest of rifle fire that had preceded the Louisianan charge.

  Colonel Maitland was lying face down close to the Smoketown Road. Starbuck did not recognize the man until he crouched beside him and tugged at Maitland's pouch in hopes of finding some pistol cartridges. "I'm not dead," Maitland's muffled voice protested, "I'm praying."

  Starbuck touched the canteen at Maitland's belt. "You got water?"

  "It is not water, Starbuck," Maitland said reprovingly, "it is cordial. Help yourself."

  It was neat rum. Starbuck coughed as the raw liquor hit his powder-abraded throat, then spat the rest onto the grass.

  Maitland rolled over and retrieved the canteen. "Good things are wasted on you, Starbuck," he said reprovingly. The Colonel, having confiscated the Legion's liquor, must have drunk most of it, for he was helplessly drunk. A bullet hit a nearby gun barrel with a great clang like a cracked bell struck. The gunners spiked their piece around and gave the Yankees in the East Woods a dose of canister. Maitland lay back on the grass and stared at the gunsmoke churning in the blue sky. "When you were a child," he said dreamily, "did you find summer endless?"

  "And winter," Starbuck said, sitting beside the Colonel.

  "Of course. You're a Yankee. Sleighbells and snow. I once rode in a sleigh. I was only a child, but I remember the snow was like a cloud around us. But our winter is slush and impassable roads." Maitland fell silent for a moment. "I'm not sure I can stand," he finally said in a pathetic voice.

  "No need at the moment."

  "I have been sick," Maitland said solemnly.

  "No one knows," Starbuck said, though in fact the front of the Colonel's elegant uniform was thick with vomit. It had caked in the yellow braid and lodged behind the glittering buttons.

  "The truth is," Maitland said very solemnly, "that I cannot abide the sight of blood."

  "Kind of a drawback for a soldier," Starbuck said mildly.

  Maitland closed his eyes for a moment. "So what's happening?"

  "We drove the bastards off again."

  "They'll come back," Maitland said darkly.

  "They'll come back." Starbuck stood and took the canteen out of the Colonel's nerveless fingers and emptied the rum onto the ground. "I'll get you some water, Colonel."

  "I'm very much obliged to you," Maitland said, still staring at the sky.

  Starbuck walked back to the ravaged battle line. Swynyard was staring across the cornfield with vacant eyes. His right cheek was twitching as it had done when he had been a drunkard. He looked up at Starbuck and it took him a moment to recognize the younger man. "Can't do that again," he said grimly. "One more attack and we're done, Nate."

  "I know, sir."

  Swynyard took out his revolver and tried to reload it, but his right hand was shaking too much. He gave the gun to Starbuck. "Would you mind, Nate?"

  "Are you hit, sir?"

  Swynyard shook his head. "Just dazed." He stood up slowly. "I stood too close to a shell burst, Nate, but God spared me. I wasn't touched, just dizzied." He shook his head as if to clear his thoughts. "I've sent for cartridges," he said carefully, "and water's coming. There are no more men. Haxall's hurt bad. Got a lump of iron in his belly. He won't last. I'm sorry about Haxall. I like him."

  "Me, too."

  "I haven't seen Maitland," Swynyard said. "Thank you, Nate," this was for loading the revolver that the Colonel now returned to its holster.

  "Maitland's s
till here," Starbuck said.

  "So he didn't run away? Good for him." The Colonel glanced up and down his line. On paper he commanded a brigade, but the men left in the firing line would hardly have constituted a regiment in the prewar army and the brigade's various battalions had become inextricably mixed as Swynyard had fed men into the battle, so that now men simply clung to their friends or nearest neighbors while officers and sergeants looked after whoever was within sight. "The textbook," Swynyard said, "would probably suggest we disentangle ourselves and get back into our proper battalions, but I think we'll forget the textbook. They'll fight just as well as they are." He meant, Starbuck suspected, that they would die just as well, and indeed, at that moment, it seemed impossible that they should do anything but die. The Yankees were quiet, but that lull would not last, for Starbuck could see more blue coats showing beyond the jagged wreckage of the cornfield. The enemy had attacked twice, and twice they had been thrown back, but now the Yankees gathered their forces for the next advance.

  Starbuck sent Lucifer to Maitland with a canteen of water. The boy came back grinning. "One happy man, the Colonel," he said.

  "He's not the first to get drunk on a battlefield," Starbuck said.

  "Mister Tumlin," Lucifer happily reported more news, "is wearing a new coat. All bloody."

  Starbuck no longer cared about Tumlin, nor Dennison. He would deal with them after the battle, if there was anything left to deal with. Now, back among the dead who sheltered the living in the shell-blackened pasture, he waited for the Yankees.

  Whose drums began to sound again. Whose guns opened fire again.

  For the third attack was coming.

  Two miles to the south, where the Antietam Creek turned sharply westward as it ran down to the Potomac, a whole corps of the United States army waited in hiding on the creek's eastern bank. Twenty-nine battalions of hardened troops, backed by guns, were ready to cross the river and slash north toward the road that ran west from Sharpsburg. Once that road was captured then all Lee's troops north of the town would be cut off from their retreat, and this corps was the lower jaws of that terrible trap.

  Some of the troops were sleeping. Others cooked breakfast. The rebels knew they were there, for the rebel artillery across the creek kept up a harassing fire, but the Northern troops were concealed by woods and reverse slopes and the rebel shells whirred overhead to explode harmlessly in woods or pastures.

  No orders came to cross the creek, and for that the commanders of the battalions closest to the water were grateful. The stone bridge that crossed the creek was narrow, and the far bank was precipitous and crowded with rebel infantry who had dug rifle pits into the slope so that any attack down the road and onto the bridge would be a bloody affair.

  Still farther south a group of officers worked their way through thick brush and timber to where they could see a ford. The ford offered a way of outflanking the rebels defending the stone bridge, but when the officers came in sight of the creek their hopes fell. The far bank was just as steep as the slope that lay beyond the bridge, and the ford, far from being unguarded, had a picket line of gray infantry dug into its sharp slope.

  "Whose idea was this?" one man, a general, asked.

  "Some damned engineer colonel," an aide answered. "Thorne, he's called."

  "The bastard can cross first," the General said as he peered through field glasses at the far bank. The sound of the battle in the north filled the sky, but above its din he could just hear the sound of voices coming from over the water. The rebels here seemed light-hearted, as if they knew that on this terrible day of slaughter they had drawn a long straw.

  A trampling of feet in the woods made the General draw back from the trees' edge. Two of his aides were approaching with a farmer dressed in a thick wool coat and a shovel hat. Cow dung was plastered on the man's pants.

  "Mister Kroeger," one of the aides introduced the farmer, who still retained enough Old World servility to pull off his hat when he was named to the General. "Mister Kroeger," the aide explained, "says this isn't Snaveley's Ford."

  "Not Snaveley's," Kroeger agreed in a German accent. "Snaveley's down there," he pointed downstream.

  The General cursed. He had fetched seven battalions and half a dozen guns to the wrong place. "How far?" he asked.

  "Long ways," Kroeger said. "I use it for the cows, yes? Too steep here for cattle." He motioned with his hand to demonstrate how steep the far bank was.

  The General swore again. If he had been given cavalry, he told himself, he would have scouted these lower banks of the creek, but McClellan had insisted on the army's cavalry staying close to the Pry farm. God alone knew what good they were doing there, unless McClellan fancied that they would protect him during a fighting retreat.

  "Is there a road to Snaveley's Ford?" he asked.

  "Just pastures," Kroeger answered.

  The General cursed a third time, prompting the farmer to frown in disapproval. The General slapped at a horsefly. "Send a reconnaissance party downstream, John," he told an aide. "Perhaps Mister Kroeger will guide them?"

  "You want the troops in march order, sir?" the aide asked.

  "No, no. Let them have their coffee," the General frowned in thought. If this dung-encrusted farmer was right and the ford was a good long way downstream, then maybe it was too far away to let his men outflank the defenders at the bridge. "I need to talk to Burnside," he said. "There's no great hurry," he added. It was, after all, still early. Most of America would not have had their breakfasts yet, certainly not the respectable part, and McClellan had sent no orders for the lower jaw of the trap to swing shut. Indeed, McClellan had sent no orders at all, which suggested there was plenty of time for coffee.

  The officers walked away from the creek, leaving the woods there in peace. North of Sharpsburg the armies fought, but in the south they brewed their coffee, read the latest letters from home, slept, and waited.

  The third Union attack was not centered on the cornfield, but rather drove down the turnpike toward the West Woods. Starbuck could see its progress by the thick cloud of smoke churned up by the rebel shells that tore into the leading blue ranks, then by the ripping sound of rifle fire exploding from the northern edge of the West Woods. The sound of the battle rose to a frenzy that matched the two previous fights at the cornfield's edge, but for the moment this was someone else's fight and Starbuck rested. His eyes were smarting and his throat, despite the mouth' fills of water he had gulped down, was still dry, but his pouch was half full of cartridges again; some were gleaned from the dead and the others from the brigade's last reserves that had been fetched up from the graveyard. The Yankee gunners had manned the cannon in the cornfield again, but its canister was being soaked up by the make-shift barricades of the dead, who protected the living riflemen in the gray line. The worst threat to his men came from the big federal guns on the Antietam's far banks, but those gunners were concentrating the worst of their fire on the rebel batteries that lay close to the Dunker church.

  Potter scuttled across to Starbuck and offered him a canteen. "Your man Truslow's back in the woods."

  "He ain't my man. His own, maybe. Yankees are gone?"

  "They're still there," Potter said, jerking his head toward the northern part of the East Woods, "but not those bastards with the Sharps rifles. They've gone." Potter lay down, sharing the corpse that protected Starbuck from the canister. Potter's ear was crudely bandaged, but blood had seeped through the knotted length of rag to crust on his coat and shirt collars. "You want my men back in the woods?" he asked.

  Starbuck glanced toward the woods and was rewarded by a flash of bright blue feathers. "Bluebird," he said, pointing.

  "That ain't a bluebird. That's a bunting. Bluebirds have got reddish chests," Potter said. "So do we stay here?"

  "Stay here," Starbuck said. "I hear Colonel Maitland is stewed?" "He ain't too sprightly," Starbuck admitted. "This is my first stone-cold sober battle," Potter said proudly.

  "You've still got t
he whiskey?"

  "Safe in its stone bottle, wrapped in two shirts, a piece of canvas, and an unbound copy of Macaulay's Essays. It isn't a complete volume. I found it dangling in a Harper's Ferry privy and the first thirty pages had already been consumed for hygienic purposes."

  "Wouldn't you rather have found his poetry?" Starbuck asked.

  "In a privy? No, I think not. Besides, I already have swathes of Macaulay in my head, or what remains of my head," Potter said, touching the bloody bandage over his left ear. "To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late, And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds.'" Potter shook his head at the appropriateness of the words. "Too good for a privy, Starbuck. My father hung the works of Roman Catholic theologians in our outhouse. It was, he said, the only thing they were fit for, but the insult misfired. I damn nearly converted to popery after reading Newman's lectures. Father thought I was constipated till he found out what I was doing, and after that we used newspapers like every other Christian, but Father always made sure that any verses of scripture were cut out before the sheets were threaded on the string."

  Starbuck laughed, then a warning cry from the mix of Georgians and Louisianans who lay to his left made him peer over the corpse, on which the flies were already crawling and laying their eggs. The Yankees were in the cornfield again. He could not see them yet, but he could see a trio of banners showing over the shattered field and it would only be a few seconds before the Northern skirmishers came into sight. He pulled back his rifle's hammer and waited. The flags, two Stars and Stripes and a regimental color, were well to his left, suggesting that these attackers were staying close to the turnpike rather than spreading across the whole cornfield. Still no skirmishers appeared. He could hear a band playing somewhere in the Yankee lines, its melody diluted to a delicate threnody by the insistent percussion of shells, canister, and rifle fire. Where the hell were the Yankee skirmishers? The heads of the leading rank of attackers were in view now and Starbuck suddenly realized that there were no skirmishers coming, just a column of formed troops advancing carelessly in the open. Maybe they believed the real battle was being fought in the West Woods where the cacophony of shell fire and rifles was loudest, but they were about to discover that the battered line of rebels in the pasture was not all dead men.