Battle Flag

The two men arrived at a Northern battery of twelve-pounder Napoleons. The four guns were silent, their shirtsleeved gunners leaning on their weapons’ wheels and staring across the valley to where a long-shadowed stand of trees was crowned with gunsmoke. “No targets, sir,” the battery commander answered when the Reverend Starbuck asked why he was not firing. “Our fellows are inside those woods, sir, or maybe a half-mile beyond, which means our job’s done for the day.” He took a pull of his flask, which contained brandy. “Those shell bursts are rebel guns firing long, sir,” he added, gesturing at the white explosions that blossomed intermittently on the far crest. The sound of each explosion followed a few seconds later like a small rumble of thunder. “Just their rear guard,” the artilleryman said confidently, “and we can leave the peasantry to look after them.”

“The peasantry?” the Reverend Starbuck inquired.

“The infantry, sir. Lowest of the low, see what I mean, sir?”

The Reverend Starbuck did not see at all, but decided not to make an issue of his puzzlement. “And the rebels?” he asked instead. “Where are they?”

The gunner Major took note of the older man’s Geneva bands and straightened himself respectfully. “You can see some of the dead ones, sir, excuse my callousness, and the rest are probably halfway to Richmond by now. I’ve waited over a year to see the rascals skedaddle, sir, and it’s a fine sight. Our young ladies saw them off in fine style.” The Major slapped the still warm barrel of the closest gun, which, like the rest of the Napoleons in the battery, had a girl’s name painted on its trail. This gun was Maud, while its companions were named Eliza, Louise, and Anna.

“It is the Lord’s doing, the Lord’s doing!” the Reverend Starbuck murmured happily.

“The seceshers are still lively over there.” Captain Hetherington gestured to far-off Cedar Mountain, where gunsmoke still jetted from the rebel batteries.

“But not for long.” The artillery Major spoke confidently. “We’ll hook behind their rear and take every man jack of them prisoner. As long as nightfall doesn’t come first,” he added. The sun was very low and the light reddening.

The Reverend Starbuck took a small telescope from his pocket and trained it on the woods ahead. He could see very little except for smoke, leaves, and burning shell craters, though in the nearer open land he could make out the humped shapes of the dead lying in the remnants of the wheat field. “We shall go to the woods,” he announced to his companion.

“I’m not sure we should, sir,” Captain Hetherington demurred politely. “There are still shells falling.”

“We shall come to no harm, Captain. Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we shall fear no evil. Come!” In truth the Reverend Starbuck wanted to ride closer to those bursting shells. He had decided that his exhilaration was symptomatic of a natural taste for battle, that maybe he was discovering a God-given talent for warfare, and it was suddenly no wonder to him that the Lord of Hosts had so frequently exhorted Israel to the fight. This blood and slaughter was the way to see God’s work accomplished! Sermonizing and mission work were all very well, and doubtless God listened to the prayers of all those wilting women with faded silk bookmarks in their well-thumbed Bibles, but this hammer of battle was a more certain method of bringing about His kingdom. The sinners were being scourged by the holy flail of sword, steel, and gunpowder, and the Reverend Doctor Starbuck exulted in the process. “Onwards, Captain,” he encouraged Hetherington. “The enemy is beaten, there’s nothing to fear!”

Hetherington paused, but the artillery Major was in full agreement with the preacher. “They’re well beaten, sir, and amen,” the Major declared, and that encouragement was enough to make the Reverend Starbuck hand down some copies of Freeing the Oppressed for the weary gunners. Then, spirits soaring, he spurred his horse past the quartet of fan-shaped swathes of scorched stubble that marked where Eliza, Louise, Maud, and Anna had belched flame and smoke at the enemy.

Captain Hetherington followed unhappily. “We don’t know that the rebels are yet cleared from the woods, sir.”

“Then we shall find out, Captain!” the Reverend Starbuck said happily. He trotted past the remains of a Northerner who had been blown apart by the direct hit of a rebel shell, and who was now nothing but a fly-crawling mess of jagged-ended bones, blue guts, torn flesh, and uniform scraps. The Reverend felt no anguish at the sight, merely the satisfaction that the dead man was a hero who had gone to his Maker by virtue of having died for a cause as noble as any that had ever driven man onto the battlefield. A few paces beyond the dead Federal was the corpse of a Southerner, his throat cut to the bone by a fragment of shell casing. The wretch was dressed in gaping shoes, torn pants, and a threadbare coat of pale gray patched with brown, but the corpse’s most repellent aspect was the grasping look on his face. The preacher reckoned he saw that same depraved physiognomy on most of the rebel dead and on the faces of the rebel wounded who cried for help as the two horsemen rode by. These rebels, the Reverend Starbuck decided, were demonstrably feebleminded and doubtless morally infantile. The doctors in Boston were convinced that such mental weaknesses were inherited traits, and the more the Reverend Elial Starbuck saw of these Southerners, the more persuaded he was of that medical truth. Had there been miscegenation? Had the white race so disgraced itself with its own slaves that it was now paying the hereditary price? That thought so disgusted the Reverend that he flinched, but then an even more terrible thought occurred to him. Was his son Nathaniel’s moral degradation inherited? The Reverend Starbuck cast that suspicion out. Nathaniel was a backslider and so doubly guilty. Nathaniel’s sins could not be laid at his parents’ door, but only at his own wicked feet.

The Reverend Elial Starbuck thus ruminated about heredity, slavery, and feeblemindedness as he rode across the hot battlefield, yet he did not entirely ignore the cries that came from the parched, hurting men left helpless by the fighting. The wounded rebels were pleading for water, for a doctor, or for help in reaching the field hospitals, and the Reverend Starbuck offered them what comfort was in his power by assuring them that salvation could be theirs after a true repentance. One dark-bearded man, sheltering under a bullet-scarred tree and with his leg half severed and a rifle sling serving as a tourniquet about his thigh, cursed the preacher and demanded brandy instead of a sermon, but the Reverend Starbuck merely let a tract fall toward the man and then spurred sadly on. “Once this rebellion is ended, Captain,” he observed, “we shall be faced with a mighty task in the South. We shall needs preach the pure gospel to a people led into error by false teachers.”

Hetherington was about to agree with that pious observation but was checked from speaking by a sudden sound coming from the west. To the Reverend Starbuck, unused to the noise of battle, the sound was exactly like gigantic sheets of stiff canvas being ripped across, or perhaps like the noise caused by the wretched urchins who liked to run down Beacon Hill dragging sticks along the iron palings. The noise was so sudden and intrusive that he instinctively checked his horse, but then, assuming that the weird sound presaged the end of rebellion, he urged the beast on again and muttered a prayer of thanks for God’s providence in giving the North victory. Captain Hetherington, less sanguine, checked the preacher’s horse. “I didn’t think the rebs were that far west,” he said, apparently speaking to himself.

“West?” the preacher asked, confused.

“Rifle volleys, sir,” Hetherington answered, explaining the strange noise. The Captain stared toward the dying sun, where a trembling veil of smoke was starting to show above the trees.

“That noise!” the Reverend Starbuck exclaimed. “Listen! You hear that noise? What is it?” His excitement was caused by a new sound that was suddenly added to the rifle volleys. It was a high-pitched noise infused with a yelping triumph and thrilled through with a ululating and gleeful quality that suggested that the creatures who made such a sound were come willingly and even gladly to this field of slaughter. “You know what you’re hearing?” The Reverend Starbuck asked the question with enthusiasm. “It’s the paean! I never thought I should live to hear it!”

Hetherington glanced at the preacher. “The peon, sir?” he asked, puzzled.

“You’ve read Aristophanes, surely?” the preacher demanded impatiently. “You remember how he describes the war cry of the Greek infantry? The paean?” Maybe, the preacher thought, some classically minded officer from Yale or Harvard had fostered the pleasant fancy of teaching his Northern soldiers that ancient war cry. “Listen, man,” he said excitedly, “it’s the sound of the phalanx! The sound of the Spartans! The sound of Homer’s heroes!”

Captain Hetherington could hear the sound only too clearly. “That’s not the paean, sir. It’s the rebel yell.”

“You mean…” the Reverend Starbuck began, then fell abruptly silent. He had read about the rebel yell in the Boston newspapers, but now he was hearing it for himself, and the sound of it suddenly seemed anything but classical. Instead it was infused with the purest evil; a noise to chill the blood like a scrabble of wild beasts howling or like the baying of a horde of demons begging to be released from the smoking gates of hell. “Why are they yelling?” the preacher asked.

“Because they’re not beaten, sir, that’s why,” Hetherington said, and he reached for the preacher’s reins and pulled his horse around. The Reverend Starbuck protested the about turn, for he was already very close to the woods and he wanted to see what lay beyond the trees, but the Captain could not be persuaded to continue. “The battle’s not won, sir,” he said quietly, “it might even be lost.”

For a rebel yell meant only one thing: a rebel attack.

Because the wretches weren’t beaten at all.

Captain Nathaniel Starbuck, crouched in the woods close by the turnpike, heard the screaming of a rebel counterattack. “About goddamned time,” he murmured to no one in particular. The gunfire in the trees had been sporadic for the last few minutes, and Starbuck had begun to fear that the Legion’s stranded skirmishers would be trapped far behind a victorious Northern army. So far the only resistance to the Northern attack had seemed haphazard and futile, but now the rifle fire swelled into the full intensity of battle, to which the screams of the attacking Southerners added an unearthly descant. The battle was all sound to Starbuck, for he could see nothing through the smoky, deep-shadowed undergrowth, but the sounds indicated that the attacking Northerners were being checked and even counterattacked. “I reckon we should join in,” Starbuck said to Captain Medlicott.

“No,” Medlicott said. “Absolutely not!” The reply was too vehement, betraying Medlicott’s fear. The miller turned soldier was as white-faced as though he had just come from a hard shift at his old grindstones. Sweat dripped and glistened in his beard, while his eyes flicked nervously around the sanctuary his men had fortuitously discovered among the trees. The sanctuary was a shallow scrape that would have been flooded by the smallest fall of rain, yet was so surrounded by undergrowth that an army could have marched on the road behind and not seen the men hidden just paces away. “We’ll just wait here till things calm down,” Medlicott insisted.

Starbuck did not like the thought of skulking in the shadows. So far the two companies had avoided any Northerners, but that luck might not last, yet Medlicott would not listen to the younger man’s ideas. Medlicott had been happy enough to accept Starbuck’s guidance when they were exposed to the enemy’s fire, but now that he was in a seemingly safe refuge, Medlicott was rediscovering the authority that Colonel Swynyard had conferred on him. “We stay here,” he insisted again, “and that’s an order, Starbuck.”

Starbuck went back to his company. He stretched himself at the edge of the shallow hollow and stared through the foliage toward the sounds of battle. The branches of the wood made a dark lacework against an evening sky that was layered with red-tinted bands of gunsmoke. The rebel yell swelled and faded, hinting at surges as regiments advanced and went to ground before advancing again. Volleys crashed among the trees, then footsteps trampled the undergrowth close by, but the leaves grew so thick that Starbuck could see no one. Nevertheless he feared the sudden irruption of a company of nervous Yankees, and so he twisted around and hissed at his men to fix their bayonets. If the Yankees did come, then Starbuck would be ready for them.

He pulled out his own blade and slotted it into place. Squirrels chattered unhappily in the branches overhead, and a flash of red feathers showed where a cardinal flew among the trunks. Behind Starbuck, beyond the deserted turnpike, gunsmoke lay like layers of mist above a patchwork of wheat and cornfields. There was no infantry visible there. It was almost as if the road divided the battlefield into two discrete halves, the one filled with cannon smoke and the other with struggling men.

Truslow, his rifle tipped with steel, dropped beside Starbuck. “What’s wrong with Medlicott?”

“Frightened.”

“Never was any damned good. His father was the same.” Truslow spat a viscous gob of tobacco juice into the leaf mould. “I once saw old John Medlicott run from a pair of horse thieves who weren’t a day over fifteen.”

“Were you one of them?” Starbuck asked shrewdly.

Truslow grinned, but before he could answer there was a sudden panicked rush of feet, and a single Northern soldier burst through the bushes ahead. The Yankee was oblivious of the two rebel companies until he was just paces away, then his eyes widened and he slid to a panicked halt. His mouth dropped open. He turned, seemingly to shout a warning to his comrades, but Starbuck had climbed to his feet and now hammered the side of the Northerner’s skull with the brass butt of his rifle just a split second before Truslow pulled the man’s feet out from beneath him. The Yankee fell like a poleaxed steer. Truslow and Starbuck dragged him back to the company and disarmed him. “Shut your goddamned mouth,” Starbuck hissed at the man, who had begun to stir.

“I’m not…”

“The officer told you to shut the hell up, you son of a whore, so shut the hell up or I’ll rip your damned tongue out,” Truslow growled, and the Northerner went utterly quiet. The buckle on his leather belt showed he was a Pennsylvanian. A trickle of blood showed among the roots of his fair hair above his ear. “You’ll have a peach of a bruise there, you bastard,” Truslow said happily. He was rifling the man’s pockets and pouches. He tossed the Pennsylvanian’s rifle cartridges back among the company, then found a pale brown package marked with the trademark of John Anderson’s Honeydew Fine-Cut Tobacco of New York. “It ain’t Virginia, but someone will smoke it,” Truslow said, pushing it into his pouch.

“Leave me some,” the Pennsylvanian pleaded. “I ain’t had a smoke in hours.”

“Then you should have stayed in Pennsylvania, you son of a whore, instead of trampling our corn. You’re not wanted here. If you got what you deserved you’d be breathing through a hole in your ribs by now.” Truslow eased a wad of folded Northern dollar bills from the man’s top pocket. “Lucky at cards, are you?”

“And with women.” The Pennsylvanian had a snub-nosed and cheeky charm.

“Lie still and be quiet, boy, or your luck will end here.” Truslow unlooped the boy’s canteen and found it still held a half-inch of water, which he offered to Starbuck. Starbuck, despite his thirst, refused, so Truslow drained the canteen himself.

Starbuck stood to give himself a view over the surrounding brush. Captain Medlicott hissed at him to get his head down, but Starbuck ignored the miller. Another burst of screaming announced a renewed rebel charge, and this time a group of some two dozen Yankees appeared just twenty paces beyond Starbuck’s hiding place. A handful of the Northerners knelt and fired into the trees before retreating again. Two of the Yankees fell as they went back, driven down by rebel bullets, and the rest of the men would doubtless have kept on running had not the color party come through the trees to rally them. A tall, white-haired officer waved a sword toward the rebels. “Vorwarts! Vorwarts!” the officer cried, and the retreating men turned, cheered, and delivered a splintering volley toward their pursuers. The two flags were bright squares of silk in the smoke-riven shadows. One was Old Glory, battle-torn and stained, while the second was a purple flag embroidered with an eagle and a legend Starbuck could not decipher. “Vorwarts!” the white-haired officer called again.

“Are they goddamned Germans?” Truslow asked. The Sergeant had an irrational dislike of German immigrants, blaming them for many of the rules and regulations that had begun to infest his former country. “Americans used to be free men,” he often declared. “Then the damned Prussians came to organize us.”

“We’re Pennsylvania Deutsch,” the prisoner answered.

“Then you’re godforsaken son of a bitch bastards,” Truslow said. Starbuck could read the Gothic-lettered legend on the second flag now: “Gott und die Vereinigten Staaten,” it said, and it struck Starbuck that such a flag would make a handsome trophy.

“Feuer!” the white-haired officer shouted, and another Northern volley ripped into the attacking rebels. The Germans cheered, sensing that their sudden resistance had taken the attackers by surprise.

“We can take those bastards,” Starbuck said to Truslow.

The Sergeant glanced toward Captain Medlicott. “Not with that yellow bastard’s help.”

“Then we’ll do it without the yellow bastard’s help,” Starbuck said. He felt the elation of a soldier given the inestimable advantage of surprise; this was a fight he could not lose, and so he cocked his rifle and twisted around to look at his company. “We’re going to put one volley into those German sons of bitches and then run them off our land. Hard and fast, boys, scare the daylights out of the sumbitches. Ready?” The men grinned at him, letting him know that they were good and ready. Starbuck grinned back. There were times when he wondered if anything ever again in all eternity would ever taste as good as these moments in battle. The nervousness of anticipation was utterly gone, replaced by a feral excitement. He glanced at the prisoner. “You stay here, Yankee.”