The Bloody Ground

SEVENTY-NINE MEN, SIR,” STARBUCK REPORTED TO

TWO NAPOLEONS WERE FETCHED TO THE SUMMIT OF

HISTORICAL NOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHER BOOKS BY BERNARD CORNWELL

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

MAP

PART ONE

I TRAINED. IT HAD RAINED ALL DAY. AT FIRST IT HAD BEEN a quick, warm rain gusted by fitful southern winds, but in the late afternoon the wind had turned east and the rain became malevolent. It pelted down; a stinging, slashing, heavy rain fit to float an ark. It drummed on the armies’ inadequate tents; it flooded the abandoned Yankee earthworks at Centreville; and it washed the shallow dirt off the grave mounds beside the Bull Run so that an army of fish-white corpses, scarcely a day or two buried, surfaced like the dead on Judgment Day. The Virginia dirt was red, and the water that poured in ever-widening muddy streams toward the Chesapeake Bay took on the color of the soil so that it seemed as if the whole tidewater was being drenched in blood. It was the first day of September 1862. The sun would not set on Washington till thirty-four minutes after six, yet by half past three the gas mantles had been lit in the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue was a foot deep in mud, and the open sewers of Swampoodle were overflowing. In the capitol the rain slashed through the beams and scaffolding of the half-finished dome to pour onto the newly arrived wounded from the North’s defeat at Manassas, who lay in misery on the rotunda’s marble floor.

Twenty miles west of Washington more fugitives from John Pope’s beaten army trudged toward the safety of the capital. Rebels tried to bar their road, but rain turned the confrontation into confusion. Infantrymen huddled for shelter under soaking trees, artillerymen cursed their rain-soaked powder charges, cavalrymen tried to calm horses terrified by the bolts of lightning that raked from the heavy clouds. Major Nathaniel Starbuck, commander of the Faulconer Legion of Swynyard’s Brigade of Jackson’s Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, was trying to keep a cartridge dry as he poured its powder into his rifle. He tried to protect the cartridge with his hat, but the hat was drenched and the powder that he shook from the wax paper was suspiciously lumpy. He shoved the crumpled paper onto the powder, spat the bullet into the rifle’s muzzle, then rammed the charge hard down. He pulled back the hammer, fished a percussion cap from the box at his belt and fitted it onto the rifle’s cone, then took aim through the silver sheeting of the rain. His regiment was at the edge of a dripping wood, facing north across a rain-beaten cornfield toward another stand of trees where the Yankees sheltered. There was no target in Starbuck’s sights, but he pulled the trigger anyway. The hammer thumped onto the percussion cap that exploded to puff its little wisp of smoke, but the powder in the rifle’s breech obstinately refused to catch the fire. Starbuck swore. He eased back the hammer, prised the shattered percussion cap off the cone, and put another in its place. He tried again, but still the rifle would not fire. “Might as well throw rocks at the bastards,” he said to no one in particular. A rifle fired from the far trees, but the bullet’s passage through the leaves over Starbuck’s head was drowned by the thrashing rain. Starbuck crouched with his useless rifle and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do now.

What he was supposed to do now was cross the cornfield and drive the Yankees out of the farther trees, but the Yankees had at least one regiment and a pair of field guns in that far wood and Starbuck’s combat-shrunken regiment had already been bloodied by those two guns. At first, as the Legion had waded into the tangle of rain-drenched corn stalks, Starbuck had thought the guns’ noise was merely thunder; then he had seen that his left-hand companies were being shredded and broken and he had noticed the Yankee gunners handspiking their weapons about to take the rest of the Legion in the flank. He had ordered his men to fire on the guns, but only a handful of rifles had powder dry enough to fire, and so he had yelled at the survivors to go back before the artillery fired again and then he had listened to the Northerners jeering at his defeated men. Now, twenty minutes later, he was still trying to find a way across or around the cornfield, but the ground to the left was an open space commanded by the enemy guns while the woods to the right were filled with still more Yankees.

The Legion plainly did not care if the Yankees stayed or went, for rain was their enemy now, not the North. Starbuck, as he walked toward the left-hand end of his line, noticed how the men took care not to catch his eye. They were praying he would not order another attack, for none of them wanted to stir out of the trees and go back into the water-logged corn. All they wanted was for the rain to stop and for a chance to make fires and a time to sleep. Above all to sleep. In the last month they had marched the length and breadth of Virginia’s northern countries; they had fought; they had beaten the enemy; they had marched and fought again; and now they were weary with marching and fighting. Their uniforms were rags, their boots were in tatters, their rations were moudly, and they were bone tired, and so far as Starbuck’s men were concerned the Yankees could keep the rain-soaked wood beyond the cornfield. They just wanted to rest. Some of them were sleeping now, despite the rain. They lay like the dead at the wood’s edge, their mouths open to the rain, and their beards and moustaches lank and dripping. Other men, truly dead, lay as though asleep in the bloodied corn.

“I thought we were winning this damned war,” Captain Ethan Davies greeted Starbuck.

“If it doesn’t stop raining,” Starbuck said, “we’ll let the damned navy come and win it for us. Can you see the guns?”

“They’re still there.” Davies jerked his head toward the dark wood.

“Bastards,” Starbuck said. He was angry with himself for not having seen the guns before ordering the first attack. The two cannon had been concealed behind a breastwork of branches, but he still cursed himself for not having suspected the ambush. The small Yankee victory galled him and the gall was worsened by an uncertainty whether the attack had really been necessary, for no one else seemed to be fighting. An occasional gun sounded somewhere in the bleak, wet gloom, and sometimes a rattle of musketry sounded over the crashing rain, but those sounds had nothing to do with Starbuck and he had received no further orders from Colonel Swynyard since the first urgent command to cross the cornfield. Perhaps, Starbuck hoped, the whole battle had been soaked into stalemate. Perhaps no one cared anymore. The enemy had been going back to Washington anyway so why not just let them go? “How do you know the guns haven’t gone?” he asked Davies.

“They tell us from time to time,” Davies answered laconically.

“Maybe they have gone,” Starbuck said, but no sooner had he spoken than one of the Yankee field guns fired. It had been loaded with canister, a tin cylinder crammed with musket balls that shredded apart at the gun’s muzzle to scatter its missiles like a giant charge of buckshot, and the balls ripped through the trees above Starbuck. The gun had been aimed fractionally too high and its fire wounded no one, but the blast of metal cascaded a deluge of water and leaves onto Starbuck’s miserable infantrymen. Starbuck, crouching low beside Davies, shivered from the unwanted shower. “Bastards,” he said again, but the useless curse was drowned by a crack of thunder that split the sky and rumbled into silence. “There was a time,” Starbuck said sourly, “when I thought guns sounded like thunder. Now I think thunder sounds like guns.” He considered that thought for a second. “How often did you ever hear a cannon in peacetime?”

“Never,” Davies said. His spectacles were mottled with rainwater. “Except maybe on the Fourth.”

“The Fourth and Evacuation Day,” Starbuck said.

“Evacuation Day?” Davies asked, never having heard of it.

“March seventeenth,” Starbuck said. “It’s the day we kicked the English out of Boston. There are cannon and fireworks in Boston Garden.” Starbuck was a Bostonian, a northerner who fought for the rebel South against his own kind. He did not fight out of political conviction, but rather because the accidents of youth had stranded him in the South when the war began and now, a year and a half later, he was a major in the Confederate army. He was barely older than most of the boys he led, and younger than many, but a year and a half of battles had put a grim maturity into his lean, dark face. By rights, he sometimes reflected wonderingly, he should still be studying for the ministry at Yale’s Divinity School, but instead he was crouched in a soaking wet uniform beside a soaking wet cornfield plotting how to kill some soaking wet Yankees who had managed to kill some of his men. “How many dry charges can you muster?” he asked Davies.

“A dozen,” Davies answered dubiously, “maybe.”

“Load ’em up and wait here. When I give the order I want you to kill those damn gunners. I’ll fetch you some help.” He slapped Davies’s back and ran back into the trees, then worked his way further west until he reached A Company and Captain Truslow, a short, thick-set, and indefatigable man whom Starbuck had promoted from sergeant to captain just weeks before. “Any dry cartridges?” Starbuck asked as he dropped beside the captain.

“Plenty.” Truslow spat tobacco juice into a puddle. “Been holding out fire till you needed it.”

“Full of tricks, aren’t you?” Starbuck said, pleased.

“Full of sense,” Truslow said dourly.

“I want one volley into the gunners. You and Davies kill the gunners and I’ll take the rest of the Legion over the field.”

Truslow nodded. He was a taciturn man, a widower, and as hard as the hill farm he had left to fight against the Northern invaders.

“Wait for my order,” Starbuck added, then backed into the trees again, though there was small respite from the rain under the thick leaf cover that had long before been soaked by the downpour. It seemed impossible for rain to go on this venomously for this long, but there seemed to be no diminution to the cloudburst that beat on the trees with its sustained and demonic force. Lightning flickered to the south, then a crash of thunder sounded so loud overhead that Starbuck flinched from the noise. A slash of pain whipped across his face and he staggered back, dropped to his knees, and clapped a hand to his left cheek. When he took his hand away he saw that his palm was covered in blood. For a moment he just stared helplessly at the blood being diluted and washed off his hand, then, when he tried to stand, he discovered that he was too weak. He was shaking and he thought he was going to vomit, then he feared his bowels would empty. He was making a pathetic mewing noise, like a wounded kitten. One part of his mind knew that he was not in any trouble, that the wound was slight, that he could see and think and breathe, but still he could not control the shaking, though he did manage to stop the stupid kitten noise and take in a deep breath of humid air. He took another breath, wiped more blood from his cheek, and forced himself to stand. The thunder, he realized, had not been thunder at all, but a blast of canister from the second Yankee gun, and one of the canister’s musket balls had driven a splinter from a tree trunk that had razored his face to the cheekbone. An inch higher and he would have lost an eye, but instead the wound was clean and trivial, though it had still left Starbuck quivering and frightened. Alone in the trees he leaned for an instant on the scarred trunk and closed his eyes. Get me out of here alive, he prayed, do that and I’ll never sin again.

He felt ashamed of himself. He had reacted to the scratch as though it had been a mortal wound, but still he felt bowel-threatening spasms of fear as he walked east toward his right-hand companies. Those companies were the least loyal, the companies that resented being commanded by a renegade Yankee, and those were the companies he would have to provoke out of their miserable shelters into the open cornfield. Their reluctance to attack was not just a question of loyalty, but also the natural instinct of wet, tired, and miserable men to crouch motionless rather than offer themselves to enemy rifles. “Bayonets!” Starbuck shouted as he passed behind the line of men. “Fix bayonets!” He was warning them that they would have to advance again and he heard grumbling coming from some of the soldiers, but he ignored their sullen defiance, for he did not know if he was in a fit state to confront it. He feared his voice would crack like a child’s if he turned on them. He wondered what in God’s name was happening to him. One small scratch and he was reduced to shivering helplessness! He told himself it was just the rain that had soaked his tiredness into pure misery. Like his men he needed a rest, just as he needed time to reshape the Legion and to scatter the troublemakers into different companies, but the speed of the campaign in northern Virginia was denying Lee’s army the luxury of time.

The campaign had started when the North’s John Pope had begun a ponderous advance on Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. That advance had been checked, then destroyed at the second battle to be fought on the banks of the Bull Run, and now Lee’s army was pushing the remaining Yankees back toward the Potomac River. With any luck, Starbuck thought, the Yankees would cross into Maryland and the Confederate army would be given the days it so desperately needed to draw breath and to find boots and coats for men who looked more like a rabble of vagabond tramps than an army. Yet the vagabonds had done all that their country had demanded of them. They had blunted and destroyed the Yankees’ latest attempt to capture Richmond and now they were driving the larger Northern army out of the Confederacy altogether.

He found Lieutenant Waggoner at the right-hand end of the line. Peter Waggoner was a good man, a pious soldier who lived with a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other, and if any of his company showed cowardice they would be hit by one of those two formidable weapons. Lieutenant Coffman, a mere boy, was crouching beside Waggoner and Starbuck sent him to fetch the captains of the other right-flank companies. Waggoner frowned at Starbuck. “Are you all right, sir?”

“A scratch, just a scratch,” Starbuck said. He licked his cheek, tasting salty blood.

“You’re awful pale,” Waggoner said.

“This rain’s the first decent wash I’ve had in two weeks,” Starbuck said. The shaking had stopped, but he nevertheless felt like an actor as he grinned at Waggoner. He was pretending not to be frightened and pretending that all was well, but his mind was as skittish as an unbroken colt. He turned away from the Lieutenant and peered into the eastern trees, searching for the rest of Swynyard’s Brigade. “Is anyone still there?” he asked Waggoner.

“Haxall’s men. They ain’t doing nothing.”

“Keeping dry, eh?”

“Never known rain like it,” Waggoner grumbled. “It never rains when you want it. Never in spring. Always rains just before harvest or when you’re cutting hay.” A rifle fired from the Yankee wood and the bullet thudded into a maple behind Waggoner. The big man frowned resentfully toward the Yankees almost as though he felt the bullet was a discourtesy. “You got any idea where we are?” he asked Starbuck.

“Somewhere near the Flatlick,” Starbuck said, “wherever the hell that is.” He only knew that the Flatlick ran somewhere in Northern Virginia. They had pitched the Yankees out of their entrenchments in Centreville and were now trying to capture a ford the Northerners were using for their retreat, though Starbuck had seen neither stream nor road all day. Colonel Swynyard had told him that the stream was called the Flatlick Branch, though the Colonel had not been really sure of that. “You ever heard of the Flatlick?” Starbuck now asked Waggoner.

“Never heard of it,” Waggoner said. Waggoner, like most of the Legion, came from the middle part of Virginia and had no knowledge of these approaches to Washington.

It took Starbuck a half hour to arrange the attack. It should have taken only minutes, but the rain made everyone slow and Captain Moxey inevitably argued that the attack was a waste of time because it was bound to fail like the first. Moxey was a young, bitter man who resented Starbuck’s promotion. He was unpopular with most of the Legion, but on this rainy afternoon he was only saying what most of the men believed. They did not want to fight. They were too wet and cold and tired to fight, and even Starbuck was tempted to give in to the lethargy, but he sensed, despite his fear, that if a man yielded to terror once then he would yield again and again until he had no courage left. Soldiering, Starbuck had learned, was not about being comfortable, and commanding a regiment was not about giving men what they wanted, but about forcing them to do what they had never believed possible. Soldiering was about winning, and no victory every came from sheltering at a wood’s edge in the slathering rain. “We’re going,” he told Moxey flatly. “Those are our orders, and we’re damned well going.” Moxey shrugged as if to suggest that Starbuck was being a fool.

It took still more time for the four right-flank companies to ready themselves. They fixed bayonets, then shuffled to the corn’s edge, where a vast puddle was churning with water flooding from between the furrows. The Yankee guns had fired sporadically during the long moments when Starbuck had been preparing the Legion, each shot sending a blistering cloud of canister into the Southern-held trees as a means of dissuading the Confederates from any thoughts of hostility. The cannon fire left a sulphurous cloud of gunsmoke that drifted in the rain like mist. It was getting darker and darker, an unnaturally early twilight brought on by the sodden gray clouds. Starbuck positioned himself at the left-hand side of the attackers, closest to the Yankee guns, drew his bayonet, and slotted it onto his rifle’s muzzle. He wore no sword and carried no badges of rank, while his revolver, which might betray him to the Yankees as a Confederate officer, was holstered at his back where the enemy could not see it. He made sure the bayonet was firm on the rifle, then cupped his hands. “Davies! Truslow!” he shouted, wondering how any voice could cut through the pelting rain and gusting wind.

“Hear you!” Truslow called back.

Starbuck hesitated. Once he shouted the next command he committed himself to battle and he was suddenly assailed with another racking bout of shivering. The fear was sapping him, but he forced himself to draw breath and shout the order. “Fire!”

The volley sounded feeble, a mere crackle of rifles like the snapping of cornstalks, but Starbuck, to his surprise, found himself on his feet and shoving forward into the corn. “Come on!” he shouted at the men nearest him as he struggled through the stiff, tangling stalks. “Come on!” He knew he had to lead this attack and he could only hope that the Legion was following him. He heard some men crashing through the crop near him and Peter Waggoner was roaring encouragement from the right flank, but Starbuck could also hear the sergeants shouting at the laggards to get up and go forward. Those shouts told him that some men were still cowering in the shelter of the trees, but he dared not turn round to see how many were following him in case those followers should think that he was giving up the advance. The attack was ragged, but it was launched now and Starbuck forced himself blindly on, expecting a bullet at any second. One of his men raised a feeble rebel yell, but no one else took it up. They were all too tired and wet to shrill the defiant call.

A bullet flickered through the bent corn tops, shedding water from the drooping cobs as it whipped across the field. The cannon were silent and Starbuck had a terror that the two guns were being slewed round to enfilade his attack. He shouted again, urging his men on, but the attack could only go at a slow walking pace, for the field was too muddy and the corn too entangling to let the men run. Other than the one rifle shot, the Yankees were silent and Starbuck knew they must be holding their fire until the ragged gray attackers were at point-blank range. He wanted to cringe from that expected volley, he wanted to drop into the wet stalks and hug the earth and wait for the war to pass. He was too terrified to shout or think or do anything except plunge blindly on toward the dark trees that were now just thirty paces away. It seemed stupid to die for a ford across the Flatlick, but the stupidity of the endeavor did not explain his fear. Instead it was something deeper, something he tried not to admit to himself because he suspected it was pure unalloyed cowardice, but the thought of how his enemies in the Legion would laugh at him if they saw his fear kept him going forward.

He slipped in a puddle, flailed for balance, and thrust on. Waggoner was still roaring defiance to his right, but the other men were just trudging through the soaking stalks. Starbuck’s uniform was as wet as if he had just waded through a river. He felt he would never be dry or warm again. The drenched heavy clothes made each pace an effort. He tried to shout a battle cry, but the challenge emerged like a strangulated sob. If it had not been raining he would have suspected he was weeping, and still the Yankees did not fire and now the enemy wood was close, very close, and the terror of the last few yards gave him a maniacal energy that hurled him through the last clinging stalks, through another vast puddle and right into the trees.

Where he found that the enemy was gone. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Starbuck exclaimed, not sure if it was a profanity or a prayer. “Jesus Christ,” he said again, staring in sheer relief at the empty wood. He stopped, panting, and stared about him, but the wood really was empty. The enemy had vanished, leaving nothing behind except a few scraps of damp cartridge paper and two sets of deep wheel ruts showing where they had pushed their two guns back out of the trees.

Starbuck called his remaining companies across the cornfield, then walked gingerly through the timber until he reached the far side and could stare over a wide stretch of rain-swept pastureland to where a stream was flooding its banks. There was no enemy in sight, only a big house half obscured by trees on a far rise of land. A fork of lightning whipped down to silhouette the house, then a surge of rain blotted the building like a sea fog. The house had looked like a mansion to Starbuck, a mocking reminder of the comfortable life that a man might expect if his country was not riven by war.