The Bloody Ground

Maitland glanced at Starbuck before answering and Starbuck, puzzled by the conversation, caught a look of guilt in Maitland’s eye. “I’ve seen battle,” Maitland insisted to Swynyard.

“From a staff officer’s horse,” Swynyard said caustically. “It ain’t the same, Colonel.” He sounded sad as he spoke, then he leaned forward and plucked the sealed papers off the crate and tossed them onto Starbuck’s lap. “If I weren’t a saved man,” he said, “if I hadn’t been washed in the redeeming blood of Christ, I’d be tempted to swear right now. And I do believe God would forgive me if I did. I’m sorry, Nate, more sorry than I can tell you.”

Starbuck tore open the seal and unfolded the papers. The first sheet was a pass authorizing him to travel to Richmond. The second was an order requiring him to report to a Colonel Holborrow at Richmond’s Camp Lee, where Major Starbuck was to take over the command of the 2nd Special Battalion. “Son of a bitch,” Starbuck said softly.

Swynyard took Nate’s orders, read them quickly, then handed them back. “They’re taking you away, Nate, and giving the Legion to Mister Maitland.” He pronounced the newcomer’s name bitterly.

Maitland ignored Swynyard’s tone. Instead he took out a silver case and selected a cigar that he lit with a lucifer before staring serenely into the wet trees where the men of Swynyard’s Brigade were coaxing fires and hacking at hardtack with blunt bayonets. “I doubt we’ll get more rain,” he said airily.

Starbuck read the orders again. He had commanded the Legion for just a few weeks and had been given that command by Major General Thomas Jackson himself, but now he was ordered to hand his men over to this popinjay from Richmond and take over an unknown battalion instead. “Why?” he asked, but no one answered. “Jesus!” he swore.

“It ain’t right!” Swynyard added his protest. “A regiment is a delicate thing, Colonel,” he explained to Maitland. “It ain’t just the Yankees who can tear a regiment to bits, but the regiment’s own officers. The Legion’s had a bad stretch, but Nate here was turning it into a decent unit again. It don’t make sense to change commanders now.”

Maitland just shrugged. He was a handsome man who carried his privilege with a calm self-confidence. If he felt any sympathy for Starbuck, he did not betray it, but just let the protests flow past him.

“It weakens my brigade!” Swynyard said angrily. “Why?”

Maitland offered an airy gesture with his cigar. “I’m just the messenger, Colonel, just the messenger.”

For a second it looked as though Swynyard would swear at Maitland, then he conquered the impulse and shook his head instead. “Why?” he asked again. “This brigade fought magnificently! Doesn’t anyone care what we did last week?”

It seemed no one did, or no one for whom Maitland spoke. Swynyard momentarily closed his eyes, then looked at Starbuck. “I’m sorry, Nate, real sorry.”

“Son of a bitch,” Starbuck said of no one in particular. The gall of the moment was particularly bitter, for he was a northerner who fought for the South and the Faulconer Legion was his home and his refuge. He looked down at the orders. “What’s the Second Special Battalion?” he asked Maitland.

For a second it looked as though Maitland would not answer, then the elegant Colonel gave Starbuck a half smile. “I believe they’re more commonly known as the Yellowlegs,” he said with his irritating tone of private amusement.

Starbuck swore and raised his eyes to the clouded heavens. The Yellowlegs had gained their nickname and lost their reputation during the week of springtime battles in which Lee had finally turned McClellan’s Northern army away from Richmond. Jackson’s men had come from the Shenandoah Valley to help Lee and among them were the 66th Virginia, a newly raised regiment that saw its first and, so far, last action near Malvern Hill. They had run away, not from a hard fight, but from the very first shells that fell near them. Their nickname, the Yellowlegs, supposedly described the state of their pants after they pissed themselves in fright. “Pissed in unison,” Truslow had told Starbuck on hearing the story, “and made a whole new swamp.” Later it was determined that the regiment had been too hastily raised, too skimpily trained, and too badly officered, and so its rifles had been given to men willing to fight and its men taken away to be retrained. “So who’s this Colonel Holborrow?” Swynyard asked Maitland.

“He’s in charge of training the punishment battalions,” Maitland answered airily. “Wasn’t there one at the battle last week?”

“Hell, yes,” Starbuck answered. “And it was no damn good.” The punishment battalion at the previous week’s battle had been a makeshift collection of defaulters, stragglers, and shirkers, and it had collapsed within minutes. “Hell!” Starbuck said. Now, it seemed, the 66th Virginia had been renamed as a punishment battalion, which suggested its morale was no higher than when it had first earned its nickname and, if the performance of the 1st Punishment Battalion was anything to go by, no better trained either.

Lucifer put two mugs of coffee on the makeshift table and then, after a glance at Starbuck’s distraught face, backed far enough away so that the three officers would think he was out of earshot.

“This is madness!” Swynyard had found a new energy to protest. “Who sent the order?”

“The War Department,” Maitland answered, “of course.”

“Who in the War Department?” Swynyard insisted.

“You can read the signature, can’t you, Colonel?”

The name on the order meant nothing to either Starbuck or to Swynyard, but Griffin Swynyard had a shrewd idea where the papers might have come from. “Is General Faulconer posted to the War Department?” he asked Maitland.

Maitland took the cigar from his mouth, spat a speck of leaf from his lips, then shrugged as if the question were irrelevant. “General Faulconer’s been made Deputy Secretary of War, yes,” he answered. “Can’t let a good man idle away just because Tom Jackson took a dislike to him.”

“And General Faulconer made you the Legion’s commanding officer,” Swynyard said.

“I guess the general put in a good word for me,” Maitland said. “The Legion’s a Virginia regiment, Colonel, and the general reckoned it ought to be led by a Virginian. So here I am.” He smiled at Swynyard.

“Son of a bitch,” Starbuck said. “Faulconer. I should have known.” General Washington Faulconer had been the Legion’s founder and the brigade’s commander until Jackson had dismissed him for incompetence. Faulconer had fled the army convinced that Starbuck and Swynyard had been responsible for his disgrace, but instead of retreating to his country house and nursing his hurt, he had gone to Richmond and used his connection and wealth to gain a government appointment. Now, safe in the Confederate capital, Faulconer was reaching out to take his revenge on the two men he saw as his bitterest enemies. To Swynyard he had bequeathed a man of equal rank who would doubtless be an irritant, but Faulconer was trying to destroy Starbuck altogether.

“He’d have doubtless liked to get rid of me too,” Swynyard said. He had led Starbuck away from the tent and was walking him up and down out of Maitland’s hearing. “But Faulconer knows who my cousin is.” Swynyard’s cousin was the editor of Richmond’s Examiner, the most powerful of the five daily papers published in the Confederate capital, and that relationship had doubtless kept Washington Faulconer from trying to take an overt revenge on Swynyard, but Starbuck was much easier meat. “But there’s something else, Nate,” the colonel went on, “another reason why Maitland took your job.”

“Because he’s a Virginian,” Starbuck said bitterly.

Swynyard shook his heard. “I guess Maitland shook your hand, yes?”

“Yes. So?”

“He was trying to see if you’re a Freemason, Nate. And you’re not.”

“What the hell difference does that make?”

“A lot,” Swynyard said bluntly. “There are a lot of Masons in this army, and in the Yankee army too, and Masons look after each other. Faulconer’s a Mason, so’s Maitland, and so am I, for that matter. The Masons have served me well enough, but they’ve done for you, Nate. The Yellowlegs!” The colonel shook his head at the awful prospect.

“I ain’t good for much else, Colonel,” Starbuck admitted.

“What does that mean?” Swynyard demanded.

Starbuck hesitated, ashamed to admit a truth, but needing to tell someone about his fears. “I reckon I’m turning into a coward. It was all I could do to cross that cornfield yesterday and I’m not sure I could do it again. I guess I’ve used up what courage I ever had. Maybe a battalion of cowards deserve a coward as their commander.”

Swynyard shook his head. “Courage isn’t like a bottle of whiskey, Nate. You don’t empty it once and for all. You’re just learning your trade. The first time in battle a boy reckons he can beat anything, but after a while he learns that battle is bigger than all of us. Being brave isn’t ignorance, it’s overcoming knowledge, Nate. You’ll be all right the next time. And remember, the enemy’s in just the same funk that you are. It’s only in the newspapers that we’re all heroes. In truth we’re most of us frightened witless.” He paused and stirred the damp leaves with the toe of a boot from which the sole was gaping. “And the Yellowlegs ain’t cowards,” he went on. “Something went wrong with them, that’s for sure, but there’ll be as many brave men there as in any other battalion. I reckon they just need good leadership.”

Starbuck grimaced, hoping Swynyard told the truth, but still unwilling to leave the Legion. “Maybe I should go and see Jackson?” he suggested.

“To get those orders reversed?” Swynyard asked, then shook his head in answer. “Old Jack don’t take kindly to men questioning orders. Nate, not unless the orders are plumb crazy, and that order ain’t plumb crazy. It’s perverse, that’s all. Besides,” he smiled, trying to cheer Starbuck, “you’ll be back. Maitland won’t survive.”

“If he wears all that gold into battle,” Starbuck said vengefully, “the Yankees will pick him off in a second.”

“He won’t be that foolish,” Swynyard said, “but he won’t stay long. I know the Maitlands, and they were always high kind of folk. Kept carriages, big houses, and acres of good land. They breed pretty daughters, haughty men, and fine horses, that’s the Maitlands. Not unlike the Faulconers. And Mister Maitland hasn’t come to us because he wants to command the Legion, Nate, he’s come here because he has to tuck one proper battlefield command under his belt before he can become a general. Mister Maitland has his eye on his career, and he knows he has to spend a month with muddy boots if he’s ever going to rise high. He’ll go soon enough and you can come back.”

“Not if Faulconer has anything to do with it.”

“So prove him wrong,” Swynyard said energetically. “Make the Yellowlegs into a fine regiment, Nate. If anyone can do it, you can.”

“I sometimes wonder why I fight for this damn country,” Starbuck said bitterly.

Swynyard smiled. “Nothing to stop you going back North, Nate, nothing at all. Just keep walking north and you’ll get home. Is that what you want?”

“Hell, no.”

“So prove Faulconer wrong. He reckons that a punishment battalion will be the end of you, so prove him wrong.”

“Damn his bastard soul,” Starbuck said.

“That’s God’s work, Nate. Your’s is to fight. So do it well. And I’ll put in a request that your men are sent to my brigade.”