Battle Flag

“We’ll meet him there,” Banks said again, ramming his finger onto the sweat-stained map, “and beat him there.”

At Cedar Mountain.

The Legion did not march far on the day they crossed the Rapidan. There was a curious lack of urgency about the expedition, almost as though they were merely changing base rather than advancing on the Northerners who had invaded Virginia. And next morning, though they were woken long before dawn and were ready to march even before the sun had risen above the tall eastern trees, they still waited three hours while a succession of other regiments trailed slowly by on the dusty road. A battery of small six-pounders and short-barreled howitzers was dragged past, followed by a column of Virginia infantry, who good-naturedly jeered the Faulconer Legion for its pretentious name. The day was hot and promised to get hotter still, yet still they waited as the sun climbed higher. More troops passed until, just short of midday, the Legion at last led the Faulconer Brigade out onto the dusty road.

Just moments later the guns started to sound. The noise came from far ahead, a grumble that could have been mistaken for thunder if the sky had not been cloudless. The air was sullen, moist, and windless, and the faces of Starbuck’s men were pale with road dust through which their sweat ran in dark lines. Soon, Starbuck thought, some of those rivulets would be blood red, fly-coated, and twitching, and that premonition of battle turned his belly sour and caused the muscles in his right thigh to tremble. He tried to anticipate the sound of bullets as he coached himself to display courage and not the fear that was liquefying his bowels, and all the while the distant cannons hammered their flat, soulless noise across the land. “Goddamned artillery,” Truslow said in a sour tone. “Some poor bastards are catching hell.”

Lieutenant Coffman seemed about to say something, then decided to keep quiet. One of the conscripts broke ranks to pull down his pants and squat beside the road. Normally he would have been good-naturedly jeered, but the muffled thump of the guns made every man nervous.

In the early afternoon the Legion halted in a shallow valley. The road ahead was blocked by a Georgia battalion beyond which lay a ridgeline crested by dark trees beneath a sky whitened by gunsmoke. Some of the Georgians lay asleep on the road, looking like corpses. Others were penciling their names and hometowns on scraps of paper that they either pinned to their coats or stuck into buttonholes so that, should they die, their bodies would be recognized and their families informed. Some of Starbuck’s men began to take the same gloomy precaution, using the blank end pages of Bibles as their labels.

“Culpeper Court House,” George Finney announced suddenly.

Starbuck, sitting beside the road, glanced at him, waiting.

“Billy Sutton says this is the road to Culpeper Court House,” George Finney explained. “Says his daddy brought him on this road two years back.”

“We came to bury my grandmother, Captain,” Billy Sutton intervened. Sutton was a corporal in G Company. He had once been in J Company, but a year of battles had shrunk the Faulconer Legion from ten to eight companies, and even those companies were now understrength. At the war’s beginning the Legion had marched to battle as one of the biggest regiments in the rebel army, but after a year of battle it would scarcely have filled the pews of a backcountry church.

Three horsemen galloped southward through the brittle stubble of a harvested cornfield, their horses’ hooves kicking up puffs of dust from the parched dirt. Starbuck guessed they were staff officers bringing orders. Truslow glanced at the three men, then shook his head. “Goddam Yankees in Culpeper Court House,” Truslow said, affronted. “Got no damned business in Culpeper Court House.”

“If it is Culpeper Court House,” Starbuck said dubiously. Culpeper County had to be at least sixty miles from the Legion’s home in Faulconer County, and few of the men in the Legion had traveled more than twenty miles from home in all their lives. Or not until this war had marched them up to Manassas and across to Richmond to kill Yankees. They had become good at that. They had become good at dying, too.

The gunfire suddenly swelled into one of those frenetic passages when, for no apparent reason, every cannon on a battlefield spoke at once. Starbuck cocked an ear, listening for the slighter crackle of musketry, but he could hear nothing except the unending thunder of artillery. “Poor bastards,” he said.

“Our turn soon,” Truslow answered unhelpfully.

“This rate they’ll run out of ammunition,” Starbuck said hopefully.

Truslow spat in comment on his Captain’s optimism, then turned as hoofbeats sounded. “God damn Swynyard,” he said tonelessly.

Every man in the company now either feigned sleep or kept his eyes fixed on the dusty road. Colonel Griffin Swynyard was a professional soldier whose talents had long been dissolved by alcohol but whose career had been rescued by General Washington Faulconer. Swynyard’s cousin edited Richmond’s most influential newspaper, and Washington Faulconer, well aware that reputation was more easily bought than won, was paying for the support of the Richmond Examiner by employing Swynyard. For a second Starbuck wondered if Swynyard was coming to see him, but the Colonel, closely followed by Captain Moxey, galloped past H Company and on up the slope toward the sound of battle. Starbuck’s heart gave an acid beat as he guessed Swynyard was going to mark the place where the Legion would deploy, which meant that at any second the orders would come to advance into the guns.

Ahead, where the road vanished across the shallow ridge, the Georgian troops were already struggling to their feet and pulling on bedrolls and weapons. The cannon fire had momentarily abated, but the snapping sound of rifle cartridges now crackled across the dry landscape. The sound increased Starbuck’s nervousness. It had been a month since the Legion last fought, but a single month was not nearly long enough to allay the terrors of the battlefield. Starbuck had been secretly hoping that the Legion might sit this skirmish out, but the Georgia battalion was already trudging north to leave a haze of dust over the road.

“Up, Nate!” Captain Murphy relayed Bird’s orders to Starbuck.

Truslow bellowed at H Company to stand up. The men hitched their bedrolls over their shoulders and dusted off their rifles. Behind H Company the men of Captain Medlicott’s G Company stood slowly, their lapels and belt loops dotted with the scraps of white paper on which they had written their names.

“Look for Swynyard on the road,” Captain Murphy told Starbuck.

Starbuck wondered where Washington Faulconer was, then assumed the General would be leading his Brigade from behind. Swynyard, whatever his other faults, was no coward. “Forward!” Starbuck shouted; then, rifle and bedroll slung, he took his place at the head of the column. Dust thrown up by the boots of the Georgians stung his throat and eyes. The road was daubed with dark stains of tobacco juice that looked uncannily like blood spattered from wounds. The sound of rifle fire was more intense.

That sound swelled even further as Starbuck led the Legion through the woods at the crest of the ridge that had served to disguise and diminish the sound of fighting, which now spread across Starbuck’s front in a furious cacophony. For a mile beyond the trees there was nothing but gunsmoke, flame, and chaos. The fields to the left of the road were filled with wounded men and surgeons hacking at broken flesh, to the right was a hill rimmed with artillery smoke, while ahead lay a second belt of woodland that concealed the actual fighting but could not hide the pall of smoke that boiled up either side of the road nor disguise the sound of the guns.

“By golly,” Coffman said. He was excited and nervous.

“Stay near Truslow,” Starbuck warned the young Lieutenant.

“I’ll be all right, sir.”

“Every damned man who’s died in this war said that, Coffman,” Starbuck reacted angrily, “and I want you to shave before you’re shot. So stay close to Truslow.”

“Yes, sir,” Coffman said meekly.

An artillery bolt smacked through pine tops to the right of the road, leaving the branches whipping back and forth above the spray of needles that sifted down to the dust. Wounded men, all rebels, were lying on both verges. Some had already died. A man staggered back from the fighting. He was bare-chested and his suspenders were hanging loose beside his legs. He was clutching his belly, trying to keep his guts from spilling into the dust. His forearms were soaked in blood. “Oh, golly,” Coffman said again and went pale. The blood on the dusty road looked blacker than the tobacco stains. The sound of rifle fire was splintering the afternoon that smelt of pine resin, sulfur, and blood. The shadows were long, long enough to give Starbuck an instant’s wild hope that night might fall before he needed to fight.

Starbuck led the company on across the open land and into the cover of the second belt of timber. The leaves here flicked with the strike of bullets, and fresh scars of yellow wood showed where artillery bolts had sheared limbs off trees. An ammunition wagon with one wheel smashed was canted at the side of the road. A black teamster with a bloody scalp sat leaning against the abandoned wagon and watched Starbuck’s men pass.

The trees ended not far ahead, and beyond, in the smoky open, Starbuck knew the battle was waiting for him. Common sense told him to slow down and thus delay his entry onto that bullet-riven stage, but pride made him hurry. He could see the gunsmoke sifting through the last green branches like a spring fog blowing out of Boston Harbor. He could smell the smoke’s foul stench, and he knew it was almost time for the Legion to deploy. His mouth was powder dry, his heart erratic, and his bladder full. He passed a man whose body lay splayed open from the strike of an artillery shell. He heard Coffman retch dryly. Flies buzzed in the close air. One of his men laughed at the eviscerated corpse. Starbuck unslung his rifle and felt with a finger to check that the percussion cap was in place. He was a captain, but he bore no signs of rank and carried a rifle just like his men, and now, like them, he pulled his cartridge box around to the front of his rope belt, where it would be handy for reloading. His broken right boot almost tripped him as he left the shadow of the trees to see ahead a shallow valley scarred and littered by battle. The low land was rifted with smoke and loud with gunfire. Beside the road a horse lay dead in a dry ditch. Coffman was white-faced but trying hard to look unconcerned and not to duck whenever a missile howled or whipped overhead. Bullets were whickering through the humid air. There was no sign of any enemy—indeed, hardly any men were in view except for some rebel gunners and Colonel Swynyard, who, with Moxey beside him, was sitting his horse in a field to the left of the road.

“Starbuck!” Colonel Swynyard shouted. “Over here!” Starbuck led the company across the brittle corn stubble. “Form there!” Swynyard called, pointing to a spot close behind his horse; then he turned in his saddle to stare northward through a pair of binoculars. Captain Moxey was fussily ordering H Company to align themselves on his marker, so Starbuck left him to it and walked forward to join Swynyard. The Colonel lowered his glasses to watch the battery of rebel six-pounders that was deployed just a hundred yards ahead. The smoke from the small guns was obscuring the fighting beyond, but every now and then a Yankee shell would explode near the battery, making Swynyard grin in appreciation. “Oh, well done! Good shooting!” Swynyard called aloud when an enemy shell eviscerated a team horse picketed fifty paces behind the guns. The horse screamed as it flailed bloodily on the ground, panicking the other tethered horses, which reared frantically as they tried to drag their iron picket stakes out of the ground. “Chaos!” Swynyard said happily, then glanced down at Starbuck. “Yankees are damned lively this afternoon.”

“Guess they were waiting for us,” Starbuck said. “Knew we were coming.”

“Guess someone told on us. A traitor, eh?” Swynyard offered the suggestion slyly. The Colonel was a man of startling ugliness, much of it the result of wounds honorably taken in the service of the old United States, but some of it caused by the whiskey that generally left him comatose by early evening. He had a coarse black beard streaked with gray and crusted with dried tobacco juice, sunken eyes, and a tic in his scarred right cheek. His left hand was missing three fingers, and his mouth was filled with rotting, stinking teeth. “Maybe the traitor was a Northerner, eh?” Swynyard hinted clumsily.

Starbuck smiled. “More likely to be some poor drunken son of a bitch needing cash for his whiskey…”—he paused—“Colonel.”

Swynyard’s only response was his cackling laugh, which hinted at madness. Remarkably, despite the lateness of the day, he was still sober, either because Washington Faulconer had hidden his whiskey or else because Swynyard’s small remaining shred of self-protection had convinced him that he had to function efficiently on a day of battle or else lose his job altogether. Swynyard glanced up at the gunsmoke, then looked back to the notebook in which he was writing. On his right sleeve he wore a square patch of white cloth embroidered with a red crescent. The symbol was from Washington Faulconer’s coat of arms, and the General had dreamed up the happy idea of issuing the badges to every man in his Brigade, though the idea had not been wholly successful. Some men refused to wear the patch, and generally it was possible to tell Faulconer’s supporters from his detractors by the badge’s presence or absence. Starbuck, naturally, had never worn the crescent badge, though some of his men had patched their pants’ seats with the convenient square of cloth.

Swynyard tore the page out of his notebook, put the book itself away, and then drew out his revolver. He began slipping percussion caps over the firing nipples of the loaded chambers. The barrel of the gun was pointed directly at Starbuck’s chest. “I could have an accident,” Swynyard said slyly. “No one could blame me. I’m three fingers short of a hand so no wonder I fumble sometimes. One shot, Starbuck, and you’d be buzzard meat on the grass. I reckon General Faulconer would like that.” Swynyard began to thumb the hammer back.

Then a click sounded behind Starbuck, and the Colonel’s thumb relaxed. Sergeant Truslow lowered the hammer of his rifle. “I can have an accident, too,” Truslow said.

Swynyard said nothing but just grinned and turned away. The nearby battery had ceased firing, and the gunners were hitching their weapons to limbers. The smoke of the battery dissipated slowly in the still air. The rebel guns had been fighting a duel with a Northern battery, a duel that the Northerners had won. “The Yankees will be raising their sights,” Swynyard remarked, staring through his glasses. “They’ve got four-and-a-half-inch rifles. Can’t fight four-and-a-half-inch rifles with six-pounder guns. We might as well throw rocks at the bastards.”

Starbuck watched the Southern guns wheel fast away to the rear and wondered if he was now supposed to fight four-and-a-half-inch rifled cannon with rifles. His heart seemed to be beating too loudly, filling his chest with its drumbeats. He tried to lick his lips, but his mouth was too dry.

The sound of musketry slackened, to be replaced by Northern cheers. Yankee cheering was much deeper in tone than the blood-chilling yelp of attacking rebels. The cannon smoke had thinned sufficiently to let Starbuck see a belt of woodland a half-mile ahead, and then to see a sight he had never dreamed of witnessing on one of Thomas Jackson’s battlefields.

He saw panic.

Ahead and to the left of Starbuck a horde of Southern soldiers were pouring out of the woodland and fleeing southward across the shallow valley. All discipline was gone. Shells exploded among the gray-jacketed soldiers, adding to their desperation. A rebel flag went down, was snatched up again, then disappeared in another flame-filled burst of shell smoke. Horsemen were galloping through the fleeing mass in an attempt to turn the men around, and here and there among the panic a few men did try to form a line, but such small groups stood no chance against the flood of fear that swept the majority away.

Swynyard might be a drunkard and a foul-tempered brute, but he had been a professional soldier long enough to recognize disaster. He turned to see that Captain Medlicott’s G Company had formed alongside Starbuck’s men. “Medlicott!” Swynyard shouted. “Take these two companies forward! You’re in charge!” Medlicott, though much older than Starbuck, had less seniority as a captain, but Swynyard had given him the command of the two companies as a way of insulting Starbuck. “See that broken limber?” The Colonel pointed toward a shattered vehicle that lay two hundred paces ahead, where a strip of grass marked a divide between a patch of harvested corn and a wider field of wheat. “Form your skirmish line there! I’ll bring the Legion up in support.” Swynyard turned back to Starbuck. “Take this,” he said and leaned down from the saddle to hold out a folded scrap of paper.

Starbuck snatched the piece of paper, then shouted at his men to advance alongside G Company. A shell screamed overhead. It was odd, Starbuck thought, how the debilitating nervousness that afflicted a man before battle could be banished by the proximity of danger. Even the day’s stifling heat seemed bearable now that he was under fire. He licked his lips, then unfolded the scrap of paper that Swynyard had given him. He had supposed it would be written orders, but instead he saw it was a label for a dead man. Starbuck, the paper read, Boston, Massachusetts. Starbuck threw it angrily away. Behind, where the rest of the Legion hurried into ranks, Swynyard saw the gesture and cackled.

“This is madness!” Truslow protested to Starbuck. Two companies of skirmishers could not stand against the tide of fear that was retreating from the Yankee guns.

“The rest of the Legion will help,” Starbuck said.

“They’d better,” Truslow said, “or we’re vulture meat.”

Company G was advancing to Starbuck’s right. Medlicott seemed unworried by the odds, but just stumped ahead of his men with a rifle in his hands. Or maybe, Starbuck thought, the miller just did not display his fear. “Keep the ranks straight!” Starbuck called to Coffman. “I want them steady.” He felt in his pocket and found the stub of a cigar he had been saving for battle. He borrowed a lit cigar from a man in the ranks, lit his own, and drew the bitter smoke deep into his lungs.

Lieutenant Coffman had drawn ahead of H Company and was holding a brass-handled bayonet like a sword.