Copperhead

“The newspaper reports that it floats still, but so does their monstrous metal ship. Our queen is now matched by their queen, and so we have stalemate. Hurry up, Lieutenant!” This injunction was to Moxey, who was using a blunt knife to cut through the hemp rope of a well bucket.

Starbuck’s spirits sank. It was bad enough that the army was yielding Manassas Junction to the Yankees, but everyone had been cheered by the sudden news that a southern secret weapon, an iron-sided ship impervious to cannon fire, had sailed into the Hampton Roads and decimated the northern blockading squadron of wooden warships. The U.S. Navy’s ships had turned and fled, some going aground, others sinking, and the rest simply making what desperate speed they could to escape the clanking, smoke-dark, plodding, but vengeful Virginia, the ironclad fashioned from the hulk of an abandoned U.S. Navy ship, the Merrimack. The victory had seemed compensation for Manassas’s abandonment and promised to destroy the strangulation of the U.S. Navy’s blockade, but now it seemed that the North had a similar beast which had succeeded in fighting the CSS Virginia to a standstill.

“Never mind, Nate. We’ll just have to settle the war on land,” Bird said, then clapped his hands to encourage the last of the men to leave the burning railyard and form up on the road leading south.

“But how in God’s name did they know we had an iron ship?” Starbuck asked.

“Because they have spies, of course. Probably hundreds of them. You think everyone south of Washington suddenly changed their patriotism overnight?” Bird asked. “Of course they didn’t. And some folks undoubtedly believe that any accommodation with the Yankees is better than this misery.” He gestured toward another group of pitiful refugees and was suddenly assailed by an image of his own dear wife being forced from her home by the invading Yankees. That was hardly a likely fate, for Faulconer County lay deep in the heart of Virginia, yet Bird still touched the pocket in which Priscilla’s portrait was carefully wrapped against the rain and damp. He tried to imagine their small house with its untidy piles of music and its scatter of violins and flutes being burned by jeering Yankee troops.

“Are you all right?” Starbuck had seen the sudden grimace on Bird’s face.

“Enemy horse! Look lively!” Sergeant Truslow shouted at his company, but he also intended the sudden bellow to startle Major Bird out of his reverie. “Yankees, sir.” Truslow pointed north to where a group of horsemen was silhouetted against the pale trunks of a far wood.

“March on!” Bird shouted toward the head of the Legion’s column, then he turned back to Starbuck. “I was thinking of Priscilla.”

“How is she?” Starbuck asked.

“She says she’s very well, but she wouldn’t say anything else, would she? The dear girl isn’t one to worry me with complaints.” Bird had married a girl half his age and, in the manner of a confirmed bachelor falling at last to the enemy, regarded his new bride with an adoration that verged on worship. “She says she’s planted onions. Is it too early to plant onions? Or maybe she means she planted them last year? I don’t know, but I am so impressed that the dear thing knows about onions. I don’t. Lord knows when I’ll see her again.” He sniffed, then turned to look at the distant horsemen who seemed very wary of the lavish display of wooden guns that threatened their approach. “Onward, Nate, or backward rather. Let us yield this field of ashes to the enemy.”

The Legion marched past the burning storehouses, then through the small town. A few of the houses were empty, but most of the inhabitants were staying behind. “Hide your flag, man!” Bird called to a carpenter who was defiantly flying the new Confederate battle flag above his shop. “Fold it away! Hide it! We’ll be back!”

“Is anyone behind you, Colonel?” The carpenter inadvertently gave Bird a promotion.

“Just some cavalry. After that it’s all Yankees!”

“Give them bastards a good whipping, Colonel!” the carpenter said as he reached for his flag.

“We’ll do our best. Good luck to you!”

The Legion left the small town behind and marched stolidly along a wet and muddy road that had been torn apart by the passage of refugee wagons. The road led to Fredericksburg, where the Legion would cross the river, then destroy the bridge before joining the bulk of the southern army. Most of that army was retreating on a road farther west which went direct to Culpeper Court House where General Johnston had his new headquarters. Johnston was assuming that the Yankees would swing wide in an attempt to turn the river line and that a great battle would therefore need to be fought in Culpeper County; it would be a battle, Bird observed to Starbuck, which would make the fight at Manassas look like a skirmish.

The Legion’s retreat took them through that old battlefield. To their right was the long hill down which they had fled in disorder after stalling the Yankees’ surprise attack, and to their left was the steeper hill where Stonewall Jackson had finally held, turned, and repelled the northern army. That battle was eight months in the past, yet still the steep hill showed the scars of artillery strikes. Close by the road was a stone house where Starbuck had watched the surgeons slash and saw at wounded flesh, and in the yard of the house was a shallow grave trench that had been washed thin by the winter’s rain so that the knobbly-headed stumps of bones showed white above the red soil. There was a well in the yard where Starbuck remembered slaking his thirst during the day’s terrible, powder-exacerbated heat. A group of stragglers, sullen and defiant, now squatted beside the well.

The stragglers, all of them from regiments that were marching ahead of the Legion, annoyed Truslow. “They’re supposed to be men, ain’t they? Not women.” The Legion passed more and more such laggards. A few were sick and could not help themselves, but most were simply tired or suffering from blistered feet. Truslow snarled at them, but even Truslow’s savage scorn could not persuade the stragglers to ignore the blood filling their boots and to keep on marching. Soon some of the men from the Legion’s leading companies began dropping back. “It ain’t right,” Truslow complained to Starbuck. “Go on like this and we’ll lose half the army.” He saw three men from the Legion’s A Company and he stormed over to them, bellowing at the chickenhearted bastards to keep walking. The three men ignored him, so Truslow punched the tallest of the three, dropping him to the ground. “Get up, you son of a bitch!” Truslow shouted. The man shook his head, then squirmed in the mud as Truslow kicked him in the guts. “Get up, you slime-bellied bastard! Up!”

“I can’t!”

“Stop it!” Starbuck called the order to Truslow, who turned in astonishment at receiving a direct reprimand from his officer.

“I ain’t letting these sons of bitches lose the war because they’re gutless weaklings,” Truslow protested.

“I don’t intend to allow that to happen either,” Starbuck said. He walked over to the man from A Company, watched by a score of other stragglers who wanted to see just how the tall, dark-haired officer could succeed where the squat, fierce sergeant had failed.

Truslow spat into the mud as Starbuck approached. “You plan on talking reason to the sumbitch?”

“Yes,” Starbuck said, “I do.” He stood above the fallen man, watched by the whole of K Company, who had paused to enjoy the confrontation. “What’s your name?” Starbuck asked the straggler.

“Ives,” the man said warily.

“And you can’t keep up, Ives?”

“Reckon I can’t.”

“He always was a useless sumbitch,” Truslow said. “Just like his pa. I tell you, if the Ives family were mules you’d have shot the whole damn lot at birth.”

“All right, Sergeant!” Starbuck said reprovingly, then smiled down at the wet, miserable Ives. “You know who’s following us?” he asked.

“Some of our cavalry,” Ives said.

“And behind the cavalry?” Starbuck asked gently.

“Yankees.”

“Just hit the no-good bastard,” Truslow growled.

“You leave me alone!” Ives shouted at the Sergeant. Ives had been emboldened by Starbuck’s gentle and considerate manner and by the support of the other stragglers, who murmured their resentment of Truslow’s brutality and their appreciation of Starbuck’s reasonable tone.

“And do you know what the Yankees will do to you?” Starbuck asked Ives.

“Reckon it can’t be worse than this, Captain,” Ives said.

Starbuck nodded. “So you can’t go on?”

“Reckon I can’t.”

The other stragglers murmured their agreement. They were all too tired, too pained, too wet, too desperate, and too unhappy even to think of continuing the march. All they wanted was to collapse beside the road, and beyond that thought of immediate rest they had no cares or fears.