Battle Flag

“I won’t move an inch!” the prisoner promised, though in truth he intended to run just as soon as he was left unattended.

“Stand!” Starbuck shouted. The heady mix of fear and excitement swirled through him. He understood the temptation of following Medlicott’s lead and staying hidden and safe, yet he also wanted to humiliate Medlicott. Starbuck wanted to show that he was the best man on a battlefield, and no one demonstrated such arrogance by cowering in the bushes. “Take aim!” he called, and a handful of the rallying Yankees heard the shouted order and looked around fearfully, but they were already too late. Starbuck’s men were on their feet, rifles at their shoulders.

Then it began to go wrong.

“Stop!” Medlicott shouted. “Get down! I order you! Down!” The miller had panicked. He was running up the shallow scrape and shouting at Starbuck’s men, even thrusting some of them back down to the ground. Other men crouched, and all were confused.

“Fire!” Starbuck shouted, and a puny scatter of rifle flames studded the shadows.

“Down!” Medlicott waved a hand frantically.

“Get up and fire!” Starbuck’s yell was ferocious. “Up! Fire!” The men stood again and pulled their triggers, so that a stuttering mistimed volley flamed in the dusk. “Charge!” Starbuck shouted, drawing the word out like a war cry.

The white-haired officer had turned the Pennsylvanians to face the unexpected threat to their flank. Medlicott’s interference had brought the Yankees a few seconds of precious time, long enough for a half-company to form a ragged firing line at right angles to the rest of their battalion. That half-company now faced Starbuck’s confused assault, and as he watched the Yankees lift their rifles to their shoulders, he sensed the disaster that was about to strike. Even a half-company volley at such short distance would tear the heart from his assault. Panic whipped through him. He felt the temptation to break right and dive into the underbrush for cover, indeed a temptation to just run away, but then salvation arrived as the rebel regiment that was assaulting the Pennsylvanians from the south fired an overwhelming volley. The hastily formed Northern line crumpled. The fusillade that should have destroyed Starbuck was never fired. Instead the two Union flags faltered and fell as the overpowered Yankees began to retreat.

Sheer relief made Starbuck’s war cry into a chilling and incoherent screech as he led his men into the clearing. A blue-coated soldier swung a rifle butt at him, but Starbuck easily parried the wild blow and used his own rifle’s stock to hammer the man down to the leaf mould. A rifle shot half deafened him; the Northerner who had fired it was retreating backward and tripped on a fallen branch. Robert Decker jumped on the man, screaming as loudly as his terrified victim. Truslow alone advanced without screaming; instead, he was watching for places where the enemy might recover the initiative. He saw one of the Legion’s new conscripts, Isaiah Clarke, being beaten to the ground by a huge Pennsylvanian. Truslow had his bowie knife drawn. He slashed it twice, then kicked the dying Pennsylvanian so that his body would not fall across Clarke. “Get up, boy,” he told Clarke. “You ain’t hurt bad. Nothing that a swallow of whiskey won’t cure.”

The Pennsylvanians were running now. The stripes of Old Glory had disappeared northward to safety, but the blue eagle flag with its ornate German legend was being carried by a limping sergeant. Starbuck ran for the man, shouting at him to surrender. A Yankee corporal saw Starbuck and leveled a revolver that he had plucked from the body of a fallen rebel officer, but the chambers were not primed, and the revolver just clicked in his hand. The corporal swore in German and tried to duck aside, but Starbuck’s bayonet took him in the belly; then Esau Washbrook’s rifle butt slammed onto his skull and the man went down. A great tide of screaming rebels was coming from the south. The white-haired officer snatched the blue eagle flag from the limping sergeant and swung its staff like a clumsy poleax. The sergeant fell and covered his head with his hands, and the officer, shouting defiance in German, tripped over the man’s prostrate body. The fallen officer fumbled at his waist for a holstered revolver, but Starbuck was astride him now and ramming his bayonet down into the man’s ribs. Starbuck screamed, and his scream, half relief and half visceral, drowned the cry of the dying Pennsylvanian. Starbuck forced the blade down until the steel would go no farther, then rested on the gun’s stock as Truslow pulled the eagle flag away from the hooked, scrabbling, and suddenly enfeebled hands of the dying man whose long white hair was now blood red in the day’s last light.

Starbuck, his instincts as primitive as any savage, took the flag from Truslow and shook it in the air, spraying drops of blood from its fringe. “We did it!” he said to Truslow. “We did it!”

“Just us,” Truslow said meaningfully, turning to where Medlicott was still hidden.

“I’m going to kick the belly out of that bastard,” Starbuck said. He rolled the bloodied flag around its varnished pole. “Coffman!” he shouted, wanting the Lieutenant to take charge of the captured flag. “Coffman! Where the hell are you, Coffman?”

“Here, sir.” The Lieutenant’s voice sounded weakly from behind a fallen tree.

“Oh, Christ!” Starbuck blasphemed. Coffman’s voice had been feeble, like that of a man clinging to consciousness. Starbuck ran over the clearing, jumped the tree, and found the young Lieutenant kneeling wide-eyed and pale-faced, but it was not Coffman who was wounded. Coffman was fine, just shocked. Instead it was Thaddeus Bird, kind Colonel Bird, who lay death white and bleeding beside the fallen trunk.

“Oh, God, Nate, it hurts.” Bird spoke with difficulty. “I came to fetch you home, but they shot me. Took my revolver, too.” He tried to smile. “Wasn’t even loaded, Nate. I keep forgetting to load it.”

“Not you, sir, not you!” Starbuck dropped to his knees, the captured flag and Medlicott’s cowardice both forgotten as his eyes suddenly blurred. “Not you, Pecker, not you!”

Because the best man in the Brigade was down.

All across the field, from the slopes of Cedar Mountain to the ragged corn patches west of the turnpike, the rebels were advancing by the light of a sinking sun that was now a swollen ball of fading red fire suspended in a skein of shifting cannon smoke. A small evening wind had at last sprung up to drift the gunsmoke above the wounded and the dead.

The four guns named Eliza, Louise, Maud, and Anna suddenly found employment again as gray infantry appeared like wolf packs at the timberline. The gunners fired over the heads of their own retreating infantry, lobbing shells that cracked pale smoke against the dark-shadowed woods. “Bring up the limbers! Jump to it!” The Major, who a moment before had been tilting the pages of the battery’s much-thumbed copy of Reveries of a Bachelor to the last rays of sunlight, saw that he would have to move his guns smartly northward if the battery were not to be captured. “Bring my horse!” he shouted.

The four guns went on firing while the teams were fetched. A lieutenant, fresh from West Point, noticed a group of mounted rebel officers at the wood’s margin. “Slew left!” he called, and his team levered with a handspike to turn Eliza’s white-oak trail. “Hold there! Elevate her a turn. Load shell!” The powder bag was thrust down the swabbed-out barrel, and the gunner sergeant rammed a spike down the touchhole to pierce the canvas bag.

“No shell left, sir!” one of the artillerymen called from the pile of ready ammunition.

“Load solid shot. Load anything, but for Christ’s sake, hurry!” The Lieutenant still watched the tempting target.

A round of solid shot was rammed down onto the canvas bag. The Sergeant pushed his friction primer into the touchhole, then stood aside with the lanyard in his hand. “Gun ready,” he shouted.

Eliza’s limber, drawn by six horses, galloped up behind to take the gun away. “Fire!” the Lieutenant shouted.

The Sergeant whipped the lanyard toward him, thus scraping the friction rod across the primer-filled tube. The fire leaped down to the canvas bag, the powder exploded, and the four-and-a-half-inch iron ball screamed away across the smoke-layered field. The gun itself recoiled with the force of a runaway locomotive, jarring backward a full ten paces to mangle the legs of the two leading horses of the limber team. Those lead horses went down, screaming. The other horses reared and kicked in terror. One horse shattered a splinter bar, another broke a leg on the limber, and suddenly the battery’s well-ordered retreat had turned into a horror of screaming, panicked horses.

A gunner tried to cut the unwounded horses free, but could not get close because the injured horses were thrashing in agony. “Shoot them, for Christ’s sake!” the Major shouted from his saddle. A rifle bullet whistled overhead. The rebel yell sounded unearthly in the lurid evening light. The gunner trying to disentangle the horses was kicked in the thigh. He screamed and fell, his leg broken. Then a rebel artillery shell thumped into the dirt a few paces away, and the broken fragments of its casing whistled into the screaming, terror-stricken mass of men and horses. The other three guns had already been attached to their limbers.

“Go!” the Major said, “go, go, go!” and the black-muzzled Louise, Maud, and Anna were dragged quickly away, their crews hanging for dear life to the metal handles of the limbers while the drivers cracked whips over the frightened horses. The gun called Eliza stood smoking and abandoned as a second rebel shell landed plum in the mess of blood, broken harness, and struggling horses. Eliza’s lieutenant vomited at the sudden eruption of blood that gushed outward, then began limping north.

Captain Hetherington led the Reverend Doctor Starbuck past the abandoned gun and the bloody twitching mess that remained of its team. The preacher had lost his top hat and was constantly turning in the saddle to watch the dark gray line of men who advanced beneath their foul banners. One of the advancing rebels was wearing the Bostonian’s top hat, but it was not that insult that caused the preacher to frown but rather the conundrum of why God had allowed this latest defeat. Why was a righteous cause, fought by God’s chosen nation, attended by such constant disaster? Surely, if God favored the United States, then the country must prosper, yet it was palpably not prospering, which could only mean that the country’s cause, however good, was not good enough. The nation’s leaders might be committed to the political cause of preserving the Union, but they were lukewarm about emancipating the slaves, and until that step was taken, God would surely punish the nation. The cause of abolition was thus made more explicit and urgent than ever. Thus reassured about the nobility of his mission, the Reverend Starbuck, his white hair streaming, galloped to safety.

A mile behind the Reverend Elial Starbuck, at the wooded ridge where the North’s attack had surged, crested, and then been repulsed, General Washington Faulconer and his staff sat on their horses and surveyed the battlefield. Two brigades of Yankee infantry were retreating across the wide wheat field, their progress hastened by some newly arrived rebel cannon that fired shell and shot into the hurrying ranks. Only one Northern battery was replying to the gunfire. “No point in making ourselves targets,” Faulconer announced to his aides, then trotted back into the trees to hide from the gunners.

Swynyard alone remained in the open. He was on foot, ready to lead the Brigade’s first line down the long slope. Other rebel troops were already a quarter-mile beyond the woods, but the Faulconer Brigade had started its advance late and had yet to clear the trees. Swynyard saw that Faulconer had disappeared into the trees, so he pulled out his flask of whiskey and tipped it to his mouth. He finished the flask, then turned to shout at the advancing line to hurry up, but just as he turned so a blow like the beat of a might rushing wind bellowed about him. The air was sucked clean from his chest. He tried to call out, but he could not speak, let alone cry. The whiskey was suddenly sour in his throat as his legs gave way. He collapsed a second before something cracked like the awesome clangor of the gates of hell behind him, and then it seemed to Swynyard that a bright light, brighter than a dozen noonday suns, was filling and suffusing and drowning his vision. He lay on his back, unable to move, scarce able to breathe, and the brilliant light flickered around his vision for a few golden seconds before, blessedly, his drink-befuddled brain gave up its attempts to understand what had happened.

He fell into insensibility, and his sword slipped from his nerveless hand. The solid shot that had been fired from the doomed Eliza had missed his skull by inches and cracked into a live oak growing just behind. The tree’s trunk had been riven by the cannonball, splaying outward like a letter Y with its inner faces cut as clean and bright as fresh-minted gold.

The Faulconer Brigade advanced past the prostrate Colonel. No one paused to help him, no one even stooped to see if the Colonel lived or was dead. A few men spat at him, and some would have tried to rifle his pockets, but the officers kept the lines moving, and so the Brigade marched on through the wheat field in laggard pursuit of the retreating enemy.

It was Captain Starbuck and Sergeant Truslow who eventually found Colonel Swynyard. They had carried Colonel Bird to Doctor Danson’s aid post, where they had pretended to believe Doc Billy’s reassurance that the Colonel’s chest wound might not prove fatal. “I’ve seen others live with worse,” Danson said, bending in his blood-stiffened apron over the pale, shallow-breathing Bird. “And Pecker’s a tough old fowl,” Danson insisted, “so he stands a good chance.” For a time Starbuck and Truslow had waited while Danson probed the wound, but then, realizing there was no help they could offer and that waiting only made their suspense worse, they had walked away to follow the footsteps of the advancing Brigade. Thus they came upon the prostrate Swynyard. The sun had gone down, and the whole battlefield was suffused by a pearly evening light dissipated by the smoke that was still sun-tinged on its upper edges. Carrion birds, ragged-winged and stark black, flapped down to the dirt, where they ripped at the dead with sharp-hooked beaks.

“The bastard’s dead,” Truslow said, looking down at Swynyard.

“Or drunk,” Starbuck said. “I think he’s drunk.”

“Someone sure gave the bastard a hell of a good kicking,” Truslow observed, pointing to a bruise that swelled yellow and brown across the side of the Colonel’s skull. “Are you sure he ain’t dead?”

Starbuck crouched. “Bastard’s breathing.”

Truslow stared out across the field, which was pitted with shell craters and littered with the black-humped shapes of the dead. “So what are you going to do with him?” he asked. “The son of a bitch tried to have us all killed,” he added, just in case Starbuck might be moved toward a gesture of mercy.

Starbuck straightened. Swynyard lay helpless, his head back and his beard jutting skyward. The beard was crusted with dried tobacco juice and streams of spittle. The Colonel was breathing slow, a slight rattle sounding in his throat with every indrawn sigh. Starbuck picked up Swynyard’s fallen sword and held its slender tip beneath Swynyard’s beard as though he was about to plunge the steel into the Colonel’s scrawny throat. Swynyard did not stir at the steel’s touch. Starbuck felt the temptation to thrust home; then he flicked the sword blade aside. “He’s not worth killing,” he said, and then he rammed the sword down to skewer a pamphlet that had been blown by the small new wind to lodge against the Colonel’s bruised skull. “Let the bastard suffer his headache,” he said, and the two men walked away.

Back on the turnpike the Federals made one final effort to save the lost day. The retreating infantry were trading volleys with the advancing rebels, who were also under the fire of one last stubborn Yankee artillery battery that had stayed to cover the North’s retreat. Now it seemed that the guns of that last battery must be captured, for the gunners were almost in range of the Southern rifles that threatened to kill the team horses before they could be harnessed to the cannons.

So, to save the guns, the 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry was ordered forward. The men rode fresh corn-fed horses in three lines, fifty troopers to a line. A bugle sounded the advance, and the horses dipped their heads so that their manes tossed in the evening light as the first rank of horsemen trotted out past the guns.

The second line advanced, then the third, each leaving a sufficient space between themselves and the line ahead so that the troopers could swerve around a dead or dying horse. Sabers scraped out of scabbards and glittered in the blood red light of dying day. Some men left their sabers sheathed and carried revolvers instead. A swallow-tailed guidon, blue and white, was carried on a lance head in the front rank.

The cannon were hitched to limbers, and the gunners’ paraphernalia was stowed in boxes or hung from the trail hooks. The gunners hurried, knowing that the cavalry was buying them a few precious moments in which to escape. The cavalry horses were going at a fast trot now, leaving tiny spurts of dust behind their hooves. The three lines stretched onto the fields either side of the turnpike, which here ran between open fields that had been harvested of wheat and corn. Curb chains and scabbard links jingled as the horsemen advanced.

Ahead of the horsemen the Confederate infantry halted. There was a metallic rattle as ramrods thrust bullets hard down onto powder charges. Fingers stained black with gunpowder pushed brass percussion caps onto fire-darkened cones. “Wait till they’re close, boys! Wait! Wait!” an officer shouted.

“Aim for the horses, lads!” a sergeant called.

“Wait!” the officer shouted. Men shuffled into line, and more men ran to join the rebel ranks.

The Northern bugle called again, this time raggedly, and the horses were spurred into a canter. The guidon was lowered so that the lance point was aimed straight at the waiting infantry, who looked like a ragged gray-black line stretched across the turnpike. Fires burned on the far ridge, their smoke rising slow to make grim palls in the darkening sky, where the evening star was already a cold and brilliant point of light above the smoke-clad slopes of Cedar Mountain. A waxing moon, bright and sharp as a blade, rose beyond those smoky southern woods. More infantry hurried toward the turnpike to add their fire to the volley that threatened the approaching horsemen.

The bugle called a last defiant time. “Charge!” an officer shouted, and the troopers screamed their challenge and slashed back their spurs to drive their big horses into a full gallop. They were farm boys, come from the good lands of Pennsylvania. Their ancestors had ridden horses in the wars of old Europe and in the wars to free America, and now their descendants lowered their sabers so that the blade points would rip like spears into the ribcages of the rebel line. The dry fields on either flank of the turnpike shuddered to the thunder of the pounding hooves. “Charge!” the cavalry officer shouted again, drawing out the word like a war cry into the night.

“Fire!” the rebel cry answered.