Battle Flag

Five hundred rifles slashed flame in the dusk. Horses screamed, fell, died.

“Reload!”

Ramrods rattled and scraped in hot rifle barrels. Unhorsed men staggered away from the carnage on the turnpike. Not one single trooper in the front rank had stayed in his saddle, and not one horse was still on its legs. The second line had been hit hard, too, but enough men survived to gallop on, mouths open and sabers bright as they galloped toward the remnants of the first rank, where horses screamed, hooves thrashed, and viscous blood sprayed from the twitching, dying beasts. A horseman of the second line leaped a bloody mound of writhing bodies only to be hit by two bullets. The rebels were screaming their own challenge now as they edged forward, loading and firing. An unhorsed cavalryman ran back a few paces, then doubled over to vomit blood. Horses screamed pathetically, their blood trickling in black rivulets to make thick puddles on the dusty road.

The third line checked behind the milling remnants of the second line. Some cavalrymen fired revolvers over the gory barricade, which was all that remained of their leading ranks, but then another volley flamed and smoked from the advancing rebel ranks, and the surviving horsemen pulled their reins hard around and so turned away. Their retreat brought jeers from their enemy. More rifles cracked and more saddles were emptied. A horse limped away, another fell among the wheat stooks, while a third raced riderless toward the west. The surviving troopers galloped north in the wake of the rescued guns that were being whipped back toward Culpeper Court House.

A hundred and sixty-four troopers had charged an army. Seventy returned.

And now, at last, under a warm wind reeking of blood, night fell.

In the fields at the foot of Cedar Mountain the battleground lay dark beneath the banded layers of smoke that shrouded the sky. High clouds had spread to hide the moon, though still a great wash of eyebright stars arced across the northern portion of the sky.

The wounded cried and called for water. Some of the battle’s survivors searched the woods and cornfields for injured men and gave them what help they could while other men looted the dead and robbed the wounded. Raccoons foraged among the bodies, and a skunk, disturbed by a wounded horse blundering through the woods, released its stench to add to the already reeking battlefield.

The new rebel front line was where the Yankees had started the day, while the Yankees themselves had withdrawn northward and made a new defensive line across the road to Culpeper Court House. Messengers brought General Banks news of more Northern troops hurrying south from Manassas in case the rebel attack presaged a full-scale thrust northward. Culpeper Court House must be held, General Pope ordered, though that command did not stop some panicked Yankees loading wagons with plunder taken from abandoned houses and starting northward in case the feared rebel cavalry was already sweeping east and west of the town to cut off General Banks’s army.

Other wagons brought the first wounded from the battlefield. The town’s courthouse, a fine arcaded building with a belfry and steeple, was turned into a hospital, where the surgeons worked all night by the smoky light of candles and oil lamps. They knew the morning light would bring them far more broken bodies, and maybe it would bring vengeful rebels, too. The sound of bone saws rasped in the darkness, where men gasped and sobbed and prayed.

General Banks wrote his dispatch in a commandeered farmhouse that had been looted by Northern soldiers who had taken General Pope’s orders to live off the land as permission to plunder all Southern homes. Banks sat on an empty powder barrel and used two more such barrels as his table. He dipped his steel nib into ink and wrote that he had won a victory. It was not, he allowed privately, the great victory that he had hoped for, but it was a victory nonetheless, and his words described how his small force had faced and fought and checked a mighty rebel thrust northward. Like a good politician he wrote with one eye on history, making of his battle a tale of stubborn defiance fit to stand alongside the Spartans who had defended Greece against the Persian hordes.

Six miles to the south his opponent also claimed victory. The battle had decided nothing, but Jackson had been left master of the field, and so the General knelt in prayer to give thanks to Almighty God for this new evidence of His mercies. When the General’s prayers were finished, he gave curt orders for the morning: The wounded must be collected, the dead buried, and the battleground searched for weapons that would help the Confederate cause. And then, wrapped in a threadbare blanket, Jackson slept on the ground beneath the thinning smoke.

Nervous sentries disturbed the sleep of both armies with sporadic outbreaks of rifle fire, while every now and then an apprehensive Northern gunner sent a shell spinning south toward the smear of fires that marked where the Southerners tried to rest amidst the horrors of a field after battle. Campfires flickered red, dying as the night wore on until at last an uneasy peace fell across the wounded fields.

And in that fretful dark a patrol of soldiers moved quietly.

The patrol was composed of four men, each wearing a white cloth patch embroidered with a red crescent. The patrol’s leader was Captain Moxey, Faulconer’s favorite aide, while the men themselves came from Captain Medlicott’s company, the one most loyal to Faulconer. Medlicott had gladly loaned the three men, though he had not sought the permission of Major Paul Hinton, who had taken command of the Legion from the wounded Thaddeus Bird. Hinton, like Moxey and Medlicott, wore the red crescent badge, but he was so ambivalent about his loyalty that he had deliberately dirtied and frayed his patch until it could hardly be recognized as the Faulconer crest, and had Hinton known of Moxey’s mission, he would undoubtedly have stopped the nonsense before it began.

The four men carried rifles, none of them loaded. The three privates had each been promised a reward of five dollars, in coins rather than bills, if their mission was successful. “You might have to break a few heads,” Faulconer had warned Moxey, “but I don’t want any bloodshed. I don’t want any courts-martial, you understand?”

“Of course, sir.”

Yet, as it turned out, the whole mission was ridiculously easy. The patrol crept through the Legion’s lines well inside the ring of sentries whose job was to look outward, not inward. Moxey led the way between sleeping bodies, skirting the dying fires, going to where Starbuck’s Company H slept beneath the stars. Coming close, and wary lest one of the company’s dogs should wake and start barking, Moxey held up his hand.

The problem that had made this mission necessary had begun earlier in the evening when the men of Faulconer’s Brigade were making what supper they could from the scraps of food they had either plundered or discovered in their knapsacks. Captain Pryor, General Washington Faulconer’s new aide, had come to Starbuck and requested that the captured Pennsylvanian flag be handed over.

“Why?” Starbuck had asked.

“The General wants it,” Pryor answered innocently. Thomas Pryor was far too new to the Brigade to comprehend the full enmity that existed between Starbuck and Faulconer. “I’m to take it to him.”

“You mean Faulconer wants to claim that he captured it?” Starbuck demanded.

Pryor colored at such an ignoble accusation. “I’m sure the General would do no such thing,” he said.

Starbuck laughed at the aide’s naïveté. “Go and tell General Faulconer, with my compliments, that he can come here and ask for the flag himself.”

Pryor had wanted to insist, but he found Nathaniel Starbuck a somewhat daunting figure, even a frightening figure, and so he had carried the unhelpful message back to the General who, surprisingly, showed no indignation at Starbuck’s insolence. Pryor ascribed the General’s reaction to magnanimity, but in truth Washington Faulconer was furious and merely hiding that fury. He wanted the flag, and even felt entitled to the flag, for had it not been captured by men under his command? He thus considered the flag to be his property, and he planned to hang the trophy in the hallway of his house just outside Faulconer Court House, which was why, at quarter past three in the morning, Captain Moxey and three men were poised just outside the area where Starbuck’s men slept.

“There,” one of Moxey’s men whispered and pointed to where Lieutenant Coffman lay curled under a blanket.

“Are you sure he’s got it?” Moxey whispered back.

“Certain.”

“Stay here,” Moxey said, then tiptoed across the dry grass until he reached the sleeping Lieutenant and could see the rolled-up flag lying half concealed beneath Coffman’s blanket. Moxey stooped and put a hand on Coffman’s throat. The grip woke the boy. “One word,” Moxey hissed, “and I’ll cut your damned throat.”

Coffman started up, but was thrust down hard by Moxey’s left hand. Moxey seized the flag in his other hand and started to edge it free. “Keep quiet,” he hissed at Coffman, “or I’ll have your sisters given the pox.”

“Moxey?” Coffman had grown up in the same town as Moxey. “Is that you?”

“Shut up, boy,” Moxey said. The flag was at last free, and he backed away, half regretting his failure to give a sleeping Starbuck a beating, but also relieved that he would not have to risk waking the Northerner. Starbuck had a belligerent reputation, just like his company, which was considered the most reckless in the Legion, but the men of Company H had all slept through Moxey’s raid. “Let’s go!” Moxey told his own men, and so they slipped safely away, the trophy captured.

Coffman shivered in the dark. He wondered if he should wake Starbuck or Truslow, but he was scared. He did not understand why Moxey should need to steal the flag, and he could not bear the thought of having let Starbuck down. It had been Captain Starbuck who had shamed General Washington Faulconer into paying his salary, and Coffman was terrified that Starbuck would now be angry with him, and so he just lay motionless and frightened as he listened to the far-off whimpers and cries that came from the taper-lit tents where the tired doctors sawed at limbs and prised misshapen bullets from bruised and bloodied flesh. Thaddeus Bird was in one of Doctor Danson’s tents, still breathing, but with a face as pale as the canvas under which he slept.

The plight of the men still on the battlefield was far worse. They drifted in and out of their painful sleep, sometimes waking to the voices of other men calling feebly for help or to the sound of wounded horses spending a long night dying. The night’s small wind blew north to where the frightened Yankees waited for another rebel attack. Every now and then a nervous artilleryman fired a shell from the Yankee lines, and the round would thump into the trampled corn and explode. Clods of earth would patter down, and a small thick cloud of bitter smoke would drift north as a chorus of frightened voices momentarily sounded loud before fading again. Here and there a lantern showed where men looked for friends or tried to rescue the wounded, but there were too many men lying in blood and not enough men to help, and so the abandoned men suffered and died in the small wicked hours.

Colonel Griffin Swynyard neither died nor called for help. Instead the Colonel lay sleeping, and in the dawn, when the sun’s first rays lanced over the crest of Cedar Mountain to gild the field where the dead lay rotting and the wounded lay whimpering, he opened his eyes to brightness.

Thirty miles north, where train after train steamed into Manassas Junction to fill the night with the clash of cars, the hiss of valves, and the stench of smoke, Adam Faulconer watched the horses purchased with the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s money come down from the boxcars. The beasts were frightened by the noises and the pungent smells of this strange place, and so they pricked their ears, rolled their eyes white, and whinnied pitifully as they were driven between two lines of men into a makeshift corral formed from empty army wagons. Captain Billy Blythe, who had purchased the horses and shipped them to Manassas, sat long-legged on a wagon driver’s high box and watched to see how Adam liked his animals. “Real special horses, Faulconer,” Blythe called. “Picked ’em myself. I know they don’t look much, but there ain’t nothing wrong that a few days in a feedlot won’t set straight.” Blythe lit a cigar and waited for Adam’s judgment.

Adam hardly dared say a word in case that word provoked a fight with Blythe. The horses were dreadful beasts. Adam had seen better animals penned at slaughter yards.

Tom Huxtable was Adam’s troop sergeant. He came from Louisiana but had chosen to fight for the North rather than strain the loyalty of his New York wife. Huxtable spat in derision of the newly arrived horses. “These ain’t horses, sir,” he said to Adam. “Hell, these ain’t no horses. Broken-down mules is all they is.” He spat again. “Swaybacked, spavined, and wormy. I reckon Blythe just pocketed half the money.”

“You say something, Tom Huxtable?” a grinning Billy Blythe called from his perch.

For answer Sergeant Huxtable just spat again. Adam curbed his own anger as he inspected the twenty frightened horses and tried to find some redeeming feature among them, but in the lanterns’ meager light the animals did indeed look a sorry bunch. They had capped hocks and sloping pasterns, swaybacks and, most troubling of all, too many running noses. A horse with bad lungs was a horse that needed to be butchered, yet these were the horses being given to the men under Adam’s command. Adam cursed himself for not buying the horses himself, but Major Galloway had insisted that Blythe’s experience in horse dealing was one of the regiment’s valuable assets.

“So what do you think, Faulconer?” Blythe asked mockingly.

“What did you pay for them?”

Blythe waved the cigar insouciantly. “I paid plenty, boy, just plenty.”

“Then you were cheated.” Adam could not hide his bitterness.

“There just ain’t that many horses available, boy,” Blythe deliberately taunted Adam with the word “boy” in hopes of provoking a show of temper. Blythe had been content to be Galloway’s second-in-command and saw no need for the Major to have fetched a third officer into the regiment. “The army’s already bought all the decent horses, so we latecomers have to make do with the leavings. Are you telling me you can’t manage with those there horses?”

“I reckon this gray has distemper,” Corporal Kemp said. Harlan Kemp, like Adam, was a Virginian who could not shake his loyalty to the United States. He and his whole family had abandoned their farm to come north.

“Better shoot the beast, then,” Blythe said happily.

“Not with one of your guns,” Adam snapped back. “Not if they’re as good as your horses.”

Blythe laughed, pleased at having goaded the display of temper out of Adam. “I got you some right proper guns, Faulconer. Colt repeaters, brand-new, still in their Connecticut packing cases.” The Colt repeater was little more than a revolver elongated into a long-arm, but its revolving cylinder gave a man the chance to fire six shots in the same time an enemy rifleman needed to fire just one. The weapon was not famed for its accuracy, but Major Galloway reckoned a small group of horsemen needed volume of fire rather than accuracy and claimed that forty horsemen firing six shots were worth over two hundred men with single-shot rifles.

“It ain’t a reliable gun,” Sergeant Huxtable murmured to Adam. “I’ve seen the whole cylinder explode and take off a man’s hand.”