"Battle Flag" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cornwell Bernard)

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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 yard 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.

"What do you mean?" Medlicott demanded. He turned away from Starbuck and aimed his rifle at the Yankees running past fifty paces away.

Starbuck slapped the rifle down. "Where were you?" "The Yankees pushed us back," Medlicott said, his tone daring Starbuck to contradict him. "We tried to rejoin."

Starbuck knew the man was lying. He could see from the state of Medlicott's soldiers that none of them had been fighting. Their eyes were not reddened by smoke, their lips were not blackened by powder, and their faces did not have the feral, half-scared, half-savage look of men pushed to the edge of endurance. All still wore the red crescent badge denoting their loyalty to Washington Faulconer, and all of them, Starbuck was sure, had skulked for the best part of the day. Yet he could prove nothing, and so he settled for a feeble acceptance of Medlicott's lie. "Keep fighting," he said. He knew he had handled the confrontation badly, a suspicion confirmed when Moxey laughed aloud. The laughter was drowned by a sudden ear-hurting roar as a flight of shells crashed into the killing patch beyond the railbed. The rebel artillery, which had been preoccupied these last long minutes with Yankee attackers further south, had switched their fire back to the ground opposite Swynyard's brigade, and the effect of the shrieking, bursting, smoke-riven shells was to drive the enemy's howitzers away from the tree line and the retreating Yankees into the shelter of the railbed cutting.

"You've got to get them out of there, Starbuck!" Swynyard immediately shouted from the hillside.

The Yankees had suddenly learned the value of the railbed and were using its protection to start a galling rifle fire on the Legion. The men returned the fire, but the rebels were getting by far the worst of it. Starbuck, still standing beside the recalcitrant right-hand companies, cupped his hands. "Fix bayonets!" He watched as his men crouched behind the thin cover of the fire-blasted saplings and slotted long blades onto the black, hot muzzles of their rifles. He turned and saw Moxey's resentful men doing the same. Moxey was wearing one of the frilled shirts he had looted at Manassas Junction, and somehow the finery made Starbuck hate the man even more. He pushed that hatred out of his mind as he capped the five chambers of his new Adams revolver. "Ready?" he called to Medlicott's men. One or two nodded, but most ignored him. He looked to his left and saw the strained, anxious faces of the other companies. "Charge!" he shouted. "Charge!"

The Legion rose from its crouch like men snapping from nightmare. The Yankees in the railbed responded with a volley that billowed smoke along the lip of their makeshift parapet. A shell cracked overhead to make an instant black cloud. Men were falling, bleeding, calling in pain, but most of the Legion were still running through the blackened scrub and reeking smoke. They screamed their war scream. The smoke of the Yankee volley cleared, and the Northerners, armed now with unloaded rifles, saw a glitter of bayonets fast approaching, and so they scrambled hurriedly out the railbed's far side.

Just as a salvo of rebel-fired shells crashed into the dirt and exploded shrapnel into their faces. Most of the Northerners instinctively shied away from that high-explosive death just as the rebel line leaped into the trench.

"Kill them!" Truslow shouted and rammed forward with a bayonet that he abandoned in his first victim so that he could unsheath his bowie knife. Most of the Yankees decided that fleeing through the shells offered a better chance of survival than being disemboweled in a blood-sodden trench, and so a horde of Northerners scrambled out of the railbed and ran across the open ground. Others stayed and surrendered. A handful tried to fight the rebel counterattack and were killed. Starbuck saw Peter Waggoner leading a squad of men against a stubborn group of Northerners; there was a volley, a scream, then Waggoner swung his rifle by the muzzle to smash its stock against a man's head, and the other Northerners began to shout their surrender. Out in the open ground another salvo of shells ripped smoke, flame, and metal shards through the fugitives. Starbuck, a smoking revolver in his hand, saw a man's head bowling along the ground like a spent cannonball. He gaped at it, not sure that his eyes were really seeing what his brain was registering.

"No, no, no, no, please!" A Northerner was staring up at Starbuck with horror on his face. The man's hands were raised. He was shaking in terror, thinking that he was about to be executed by the tall Southern officer with the bitter eyes and smoking gun.

"You're safe," Starbuck told the man, then turned to see that neither Medlicott's men nor Moxey's company had charged with the Legion. Instead they were in the spoil pit, where they were attempting to look busy by rounding up prisoners. There was unfinished business there, and business that had to be settled soon or else there would be no Legion left to command. "Major Medlicott?" he shouted across to the spoil pit.

"Yes?" Medlicott's tone was cautious.

"I want the Legion's ammunition pooled, then redistributed. And search the dead for cartridges." He looked up at the sky. It would be dark soon. "Your men have first picket duty. And keep a careful watch."

"They always do," Medlicott said defiantly. He had been half expecting a reprimand for disobeying the order to charge the railbed, and his tone suggested the scorn in which he now held Starbuck for not daring to impose discipline.

Starbuck ignored him. He had other things to do. He had the dead to count, the wounded to rescue, and ammunition to find. So he could be ready to fight again. Tomorrow.

"A good day's work, gentlemen, an excellent day's work." John Pope was ebullient about his army's achievement as he strode into the farm that was his field headquarters. A dozen men awaited his arrival, and so infectious was the General's pleasure that they actually burst into applause as he came through the door. Most of those who had been waiting for Pope were general officers, but there was also a congressman from Washington and the Reverend Elial Starbuck from Boston carrying, inevitably, the bundled rebel flag that was his precious trophy and souvenir. The Reverend Starbuck had spent the day on the field and was as dusty, dirty, and tired as any of the soldiers, though Pope himself looked very fresh as he lifted the lid of one of the supper tureens on the long dining table. He sniffed its contents appreciatively. "Venison steak? Good! Good! I hope there's some cranberry jelly to go with it?"

"Alas, sir," one of the aides murmured.

"Never mind." Pope was in a forgiving mood. The railroad bridge at Bristoe had been repaired, so that trains could now run the length of the Orange and Alexandria, which meant that the last regiments being carried north from Warrenton could be transported all the way into the smoking ruins of Manassas Junction, from where it was a short step to tomorrow's battlefield. Or rather to tomorrow's victory, for John Pope was now convinced that he was on the brink of a historic triumph.

General McDowell, who had lost the first battle fought at Manassas but who now led Pope's Third Corps, was similarly confident of victory, especially as more troops were arriving hourly. Those reinforcements were coming not just from Pope's own Army of Virginia but also from McClellan's Army of the Potomac. "Though I doubt we'll see the young Napoleon here tomorrow," McDowell said heavily.

"I doubt it, too," Pope said, sitting at the table and helping himself to a piece of venison. "George won't want to witness another man winning a victory. That would take far too much shine off his buttons, eh?" He laughed, inviting the table to laugh with him. "Whereas I don't mind who gets the credit so long as the U.S.A. gets the victory, ain't that a fact?" Pope threw this outrageous statement at one of his aides, who blandly confirmed its truth. "You know what George wants me to do?" Pope went on as he helped himself to buttered beans. "George wants me to pull the army back to Centreville and wait there! Here we are with Stonewall Jackson skewered to the wall, and I'm supposed to walk away to Centreville! And why? So the young Napoleon can take command!"

"He doesn't want you to win the victory he couldn't win," McDowell suggested loyally.

"And I've no doubt that if I did pull back to Centreville," Pope went on without actually disagreeing with McDowell's statement, "then the very first thing our young Napoleon would do is hold a parade. I hear George is uncommon fond of parades."

"Very fond," the visiting congressman said, "and why not? Parades are very good for the public's confidence."

"A victory might be better for their confidence," McDowell suggested. The Third Corps's commander had piled his plate with venison steaks and sweet potatoes.

"Well, damn George's parades," Pope said, wondering like everyone else about the table whether McDowell could possibly add another spoonful of supper to his heaped plate. "I shall not retreat to Centreville. I shall win a victory instead. That'll astonish Washington, isn't that so, Congressman? You're not used to generals who fight and win!" Pope laughed, and his laughter was echoed about the supper table, though the General noticed that the famous Boston preacher alone seemed unamused. "You look tired, Doctor Starbuck," the General observed genially.

"A day in the saddle, General," the preacher said. "I'm most unaccustomed to such exertions."

"No doubt I'd be weary if I spent a day in your pulpit," Pope responded gallantly, but the preacher did not even smile at the response. Instead he put a notebook on the table, pulled a candle close to its open pages, and expressed a polite puzzlement at some of the events he had witnessed that day. "Such as what?" John Pope asked.

"Men attacking, other men doing nothing to help them," the preacher said succinctly. It seemed to the Reverend Starbuck that the Federal attacks had come so close to success, yet the survivors complained that the reinforcements who might have guaranteed Northern victory had never stirred from their bivouacs.

John Pope felt an impulse of anger. He had no need to explain himself to meddlesome priests, yet Pope knew that he possessed few allies in the army's highest reaches, and fewer still in Washington. John Pope was an abolitionist, while most of his rivals, like McClellan, were fighting not for the slaves but for the Union, and John Pope knew that he needed public opinion to be on his side if he was to prevail against his many political enemies. The Reverend Starbuck was a powerful persuader of the Northern public, and so the General subdued his irritation and patiently explained his day's achievements. He spoke between mouthfuls, gesturing with a fork. What the Army of Virginia had done, he said, was to pen Stonewall Jackson up against the western hills and woods. Pope glanced at the congressman to make sure that he was listening, then went on to explain how Jackson had wanted to escape down the Warrenton Turnpike but had instead been corralled.

The preacher nodded impatiently. He understood all this. "But why do we need wait till tomorrow to kill the snake? We had him trapped today, surely?"

Pope, mindful of what the pencil in the preacher's hand could achieve, smiled. "We've pinned Jackson into some rough country, Doctor, but we haven't quite cut off all his escape routes. What you were witnessing today was a gallant fight to keep Jackson staring in this direction while our other fellows curled around his flanks." The General demonstrated the strategy by surrounding a gravy boat with cruets. "And tomorrow, Doctor, we can attack again with the absolute assurance that this time the wretches have no escape." He dropped a salt cellar into the gravy, splashing the tablecloth. "No escape at all!"

"Amen!" McDowell said through a mouthful of venison and butter beans.

"You only saw a small part of a greater design," Pope explained to the preacher. "Does not the good book have something to say about there being more things in heaven and earth than we can dream of?"

"Shakespeare said it," the preacher remarked stiffly, still penciling his notes. " 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' Hamlet, Act One, Scene Five." He closed the book and slipped it into his pocket. "So tomorrow, General, we might expect a victory to rank with Cannae? Or with Yorktown?"

Pope hesitated to claim ground quite that high, especially in front of a congressman, yet he had raised the expectation himself. "So long as McClellan's men fight as they should," he answered, neatly shifting the responsibility onto his rival. No one responded. Indeed, no one liked to stir that can of worms. McClellan's men were famously loyal to their general, and many of them resented being under the orders of John Pope, and there was a fear that resentment might be translated into a reluctance to fight.

"I wonder what Lee's doing?" an artillery officer at the table's far end asked.

"Robert Lee is doing what Robert Lee always does best," Pope declared, "which is sitting on his hands and letting someone else do the scrapping. Lee's waiting south of the Rappahannock, digging in. He sent Jackson to disrupt our preparations, but he reckoned without the swiftness of our response. He underestimated us, gentlemen, and that will be his undoing. Is that a plate of pears? Might I trouble you for a serving? Thank you." An orderly brought a jug of lemonade for the teetotalers and a decanter of wine for the others. Beyond the farm windows there was a pretty sprinkling of firelight where the nearest battalions were bivouacking on a hillside. A band was playing in the distance, the music sweet and plangent in the warm summer darkness.

"Did anyone discover what those rebel troops were doing beyond Groveton?" one of McDowell's officers asked as he spooned thick cream onto his pears. There had been a handful of reports about rebel troops arriving on the open western flank of Pope's army.

"Alarmist rumors," Pope said confidently. "All they saw were enemy cavalry scouts. The last throes of a dying army, gentlemen, are always the sight of its cavalry scouts looking for a way out. But not tomorrow, not anymore. From now on this army marches forward. To Richmond!"

"To Richmond," the assembled officers murmured, "and to victory."

"To Richmond," the congressman said, "and reelection."

"To Richmond," the Reverend Starbuck said, "and emancipation."

All in the morning.

During the night Hudson's North Carolinians made a new abatis in front of the railbed, where neither the cutting nor its adjacent embankment offered a real obstacle to the Yankee attackers. "I should have thought of it before," Hudson admitted.

"So should I," Starbuck said. He paused. "Except I thought Lee was coming. I never reckoned we'd have to fight alone all day."

"I told you," Hudson said in a kindly voice, "always to expect the worst."

"But where is Lee?" Starbuck insisted on the question despite the older man's advice.

"The Lord only knows," Hudson said softly, "and I guess we'll just have to go on fighting till the good Lord lets us into the secret."

"I guess so, too," Starbuck said bleakly. He was morose, aware that his first day in command of a fighting regiment had not been a success. The Legion had twice been driven from its position, and though it had twice regained the railbed, it had suffered cruelly in the process. Worse, two whole companies of the regiment were in virtual mutiny. Starbuck remembered Moxey's laughter, and he knew as certainly as he knew anything in all his life that the mocking laughter had been his opportunity to crush the defiant right-hand companies once and for all. Starbuck knew he should have pulled out his revolver and put a bullet smack between Moxey's eyes, but instead he had pretended not to hear, and so had given his enemies a victory.

The construction of the new abatis was harassed by Yankee sharpshooters, whose fire did not end at nightfall. In the dark the sharpshooters fired wherever they saw movement beside a distant fire, and that constant danger drove men to take cover in the railbed or else to seek the safety of the hill's rearward slope, where the Brigade's surgeons worked by candlelight. The Brigade's own sharpshooters replied to the Yankee fire, the flames of their heavy-barreled rifles spitting long and whip-thin in the darkness. The marksmen held their fire only when a shout requested that they respect the movements of a stretcher party, but whenever the stretcher bearers had finished their task and had called their thanks for the enemy's courtesy, the firing would begin again.

The only good news of the night was the arrival of a mailbag that had been brought from Gordonsville with Lee's advancing troops. Sergeant Tyndale distributed the letters and parcels, making a sad pile of mail addressed to dead men. One of the parcels had come from the Richmond Arsenal and was addressed to the officer commanding the Faulconer Legion. The big package proved to contain a standard-issue battle flag: a four-foot-square banner woven from common cloth that was intended to replace the captured silk standard. There was no flagstaff, so Starbuck sent Lucifer to cut down a straight, ten-foot sapling.

Then, in the light of a campfire at the rear of the hill, he opened his two letters. The first came from Thaddeus Bird, who reported that he was recovering remarkably well and hoped to return to the Legion very soon. "Priscilla does not share this hope and constantly discovers new symptoms that might require a further period of convalescence, yet I feel my absence from the Legion keenly." The letter went on to say that Anthony Murphy had safely reached Faulconer Court House and was also recuperating, though he was not expected to be on his feet for a week or two yet. "Is it true," Bird then asked, "that Swynyard has seen the divine light? If so then it proves Christianity must be of some use in this world, but I confess I find it hard to comprehend such a conversion. Does the dragon purr? Does he pray before he beats his slaves, or after? You must write to me with all the malicious details." The letter finished with the news that Washington Faulconer had not been seen in Faulconer Court House but was rumored to be stirring up political trouble in Richmond.

Starbuck's second letter had come from the Confederate capital. To his surprise and pleasure the letter was from Julia Gordon, Adam's erstwhile fiancйe, who now regarded Starbuck as her friend. She wrote with good news. "My mother has yielded to my wish and allowed me to become a nurse in Chimborazo Hospital. She did not yield graciously, but under the pressure of poverty and to the hospital's solemn undertaking to pay me a wage, though I have yet to see that promise fulfilled. I am being tutored, they say, and so must abjure all hopes of payment until I can distinguish a bandage from a bottle of calomel. I learn, I learn, and at night I weep for the poor boys here, but doubtless I shall learn not to do so." She made no mention of Adam, nor was there anything personal in the letter; it was simply the words of a friend seeking a sympathetic ear. "You would not recognize the hospital now," Julia concluded. "It daily spreads fresh buildings across the park, and each new ward is filled with wounded before the builders' sawhorses are even moved out. I pray daily that you will be spared seeing it from one of the cots."

Starbuck stared at the letter and tried to recall Julia's face, but somehow the picture would not form in his head. Dark hair and good bones, he remembered, and a quick intelligence in the eyes, but still he could not see her image in his mind's eye. "You're looking homesick," Colonel Swynyard interrupted Starbuck's thoughts.

"Letter from a friend," Starbuck explained.

"A girl?" Swynyard asked as he sat opposite Starbuck.

"Yes," Starbuck said, then, after a pause, "a Christian girl, Colonel. A good, virtuous, and Christian girl."

Swynyard laughed. "How you do yearn for respectable citizenship in the Kingdom of God, Starbuck. Maybe you should repent now? Maybe this is the hour for you to put your trust in Him?"

"You're trying to convert me, Colonel." Starbuck made the accusation sourly.

"What greater favor could I do you?"

Starbuck stared into the fire. "Maybe," he said slowly, "you could replace me as commander of the Legion?"

Swynyard chuckled. "Suppose, Starbuck, that after one day of abandoning alcohol I had told you I was finding the whole thing too hard. Would you have approved?"

Starbuck managed a rueful grin. "Back then, Colonel, I'd have told you to wait a day, then go back to the bottle. That way I might have won the bet I had on you."

Swynyard was not altogether pleased with the reply, but he managed a smile. "So I'll give you the same advice. Wait a day, see how you feel tomorrow."

Starbuck shrugged. "I didn't do well today. I panicked. I was shouting and running around like a scalded cat."

Swynyard smiled. "None of us did well today. I'm not real sure Jackson did well today, and the good Lord alone knows what happened to Lee, but the enemy didn't do well either. We're still here, Starbuck, and they ain't beat us yet. See how you feel tomorrow." The Colonel stood up. Sparks whirled past his lean face. "Maybe you should turn your companies around tomorrow?" he suggested. "Put Truslow on the right and Medlicott on the left?"

"I did think about doing just that," Starbuck admitted.

"And?"

Starbuck plucked a burning brand from the fire and used it to light a cigar. "I think I've got a better idea, Colonel." He tossed the brand back onto the flames and looked up at Swynyard. "You remember what you said about Old Mad Jack? That it didn't matter how eccentric a man was, so long as he won?"

"I remember. So?"

Starbuck grinned. "So you won't approve of what I'm going to do. Which means I won't tell you what it is, but it'll work."

Swynyard thought about that answer. "So you didn't really want to be replaced?"

"I'll let you know tomorrow, Colonel."

Starbuck spent the night in the railbed, where he slept for a few precious moments, but it seemed he was woken every time a sharpshooter let a bullet fly across the ground separating the armies. In the morning, before the mist lifted to make him into an easy target, he climbed the hill to watch the land emerge from the vapor. In the distance, beyond the trees, a swarm of smoke tendrils marked the enemy's cooking fires, while off to the left, and much closer than he had expected, a bright gleam between two stands of trees briefly showed beneath the shifting skeins of mist. He borrowed a rifle from one of Haxall's sharpshooters and used its telescopic sight to inspect the gleam. "I guess that's the Bull Run," he said to the sharpshooter.

The man shrugged. "Can't think there's another river that big 'round here. Sure ain't the Big Muddy though."

Nearer at hand Starbuck could see a stretch of road running between two pastures. He suspected it was the Sudley road, which meant the Legion was less than half a mile from the twin fords across the Catharpin and Bull runs. He had crossed those fords a year before on the day that Washington Faulconer had tried to eject him from the Legion, and if that far gleam was indeed the run and the road really was the highway leading from Manassas to Sudley, then it meant that the Legion was close, tantalizingly close, to the Galloway farm.

With nothing but an army between the Legion and its vengeance.

Starbuck handed the sharpshooter's rifle back, then went downhill to where the surgeons still worked on the previous day's wounded. He talked with the Legion's casualties, and then, with a dead man's rifle on his shoulder and a handful of salvaged cartridges in his haversack, he ran back to the railbed. A sharpshooter tried to kill him as he crossed the scrubland, but the Yankee's bullet whipped a foot wide to thump into a bloated corpse and startle a swarm of flies into the warm morning air. Then Starbuck leaped the parapet and slid down into the railbed's cutting to begin his new day's work.