Battle Flag

“Get back, Mr. Coffman!” Starbuck called.

“But, sir—”

“Your place is behind the company, Lieutenant! Go there! And throw away that toy sword!”

The first Northern soldiers suddenly appeared at the tree line on the valley’s far crest, which blossomed with the small puffs of white rifle smoke. A shell exploded ahead of Starbuck, and pieces of its casing whipped past him. To his left the field had been partly harvested, so that some of the wheat was standing but most was drying in stooks. Small fires flickered where the shell fire had set the dry crops alight. There were patches of corn stubble among the wheat and two rows of standing corn, where a group of rebel soldiers had taken cover. The tasseled corn shivered whenever a bullet or shell whipped through the stalks. A Northern flag appeared at the far trees. The standard-bearer was waving it to and fro, making the stripes flutter brightly. A bugle was sounding, and off to the west the rebel infantry was still running. Rebel officers still galloped among the fugitives, trying to stem their flight and turn them round. General Jackson was among them, flailing with his scabbarded saber at the panicked men. More Northerners were at the tree line, some of them directly ahead of Starbuck now.

Another shell landed close to Company H, and Starbuck wondered why Medlicott did not order the two companies into skirmish order. Then he decided to hell with military etiquette and shouted the order himself. Medlicott echoed the order, thus shaking the two companies into a loose and scattered formation. Their job now was to fight the enemy skirmishers who would be advancing ahead of the main Yankee attack. “Make sure you’re loaded!” Starbuck called. The Northern line had halted momentarily, perhaps to align itself after advancing through the trees. The Southern fugitives had disappeared behind Starbuck’s left flank, and it suddenly seemed very quiet and lonely on the battlefield.

It also seemed very dangerous. Captain Medlicott crossed to Starbuck. “Is this right, do you think?” he asked, gesturing at the scatter of isolated skirmishers who were alone in the wide field. Medlicott had never liked Starbuck, and the red crescent patch on the shoulder of his uniform coat marked him for a loyal supporter of General Faulconer, but nervousness now made Medlicott seek reassurance from Faulconer’s bitterest enemy. Close to, Starbuck could see that Medlicott was not hiding his fear at all; one cheek was quivering uncontrollably, and the sweat was pouring off his face and dripping from his beard. He took off his brimmed hat to fan his face, and Starbuck saw that even the miller’s smooth, bald, chalk white pate was beaded with sweat. “We shouldn’t be here!” Medlicott exclaimed petulantly.

“God knows what’s happening,” Starbuck said. A Northern battery had appeared where the road vanished among the farther trees. Starbuck saw the guns slew round in a shower of dirt. In a moment, he thought, that artillery will have us in their open sights. Dear God, he thought, but let it be a clean death, quick as a thought, with no agonized lingering under a surgeon’s knife or dying of the sweated fever in some rat-infested hospital. He turned to look behind and saw the Faulconer Brigade streaming off the road and forming into ranks. “Swynyard’s coming soon,” he tried to reassure Medlicott.

The Northern infantry started forward again. A half-dozen flags showed above the dark ranks. Three of the flags were Old Glories, the others were regimental flags carrying state badges or martial insignias. Six flags translated into three regiments that were now attacking two light companies. Captain Medlicott went back to his own men, and Sergeant Truslow joined Starbuck. “Just us and them?” he asked, nodding at the Yankees.

“Swynyard’s bringing the rest of the Brigade forward,” Starbuck said. Shells from the newly deployed battery screeched overhead, aimed at the Faulconer Brigade. “Better them than us, eh?” Starbuck said with the callous indifference of a man spared the gunners’ attentions. He saw George Finney aim his rifle. “Hold your fire, George! Wait till the bastards are in range.”

The Northern skirmishers ran ahead of the attacking line. Their job was to brush Starbuck’s men aside, but soon, Starbuck thought, the rest of the Faulconer Brigade’s skirmishers would advance to reinforce him. Another salvo of shells thundered above him, the cracks of their explosions sounding a second after the percussive thump of the guns themselves. Starbuck began looking for enemy officers among the approaching skirmishers. Yankee officers seemed more reluctant than Southerners to abandon their swords and glinting rank badges and bright epaulettes.

A second Northern battery on the crest opened fire. A shell screamed just inches over Starbuck’s head. For what we are about to receive, he thought, may the Lord make us truly thankful. He could hear the beat of drums sounding from the Yankee infantry. Was this to be the breakthrough battle for the North? Were they at last to batter the Confederacy into surrender? Most of the rebel forces in Virginia were seventy miles away on the far side of Richmond with Robert Lee, but it was here that the Northerners were attacking, and if they broke through here, then what was to stop them marching south, ever south, until Richmond was cut off and the whole upper South split from the Confederacy? “Hold still now!” Starbuck called to his men as he walked slowly along his scattered skirmish line. Another minute, he thought, and the Yankee skirmishers would be in range. “You see that red-haired son of a bitch with the hooked sword, Will?” Starbuck called to Tolby, one of the Legion’s finest marksmen. “He’s yours. Kill the bastard.”

“I’ll take care of him, Captain!” Tolby eased back the hammer of his rifle.

Starbuck saw the enemy cannons disappear behind a blossom of gray-white smoke, and he anticipated another flight of shells overhead, but instead the missiles slammed into the field all around Starbuck’s men. One of Medlicott’s sergeants was flung backward, his blood momentarily misting the hot air. A shell splinter whipped into the broken limber, which carried a stenciled legend announcing that the vehicle belonged to the 4th U.S. Artillery, evidence that the rebels had pushed the Yankees back across the valley before being routed in the far woods. Or perhaps, Starbuck thought, the limber had been captured earlier in the war, for it seemed that at least half of the rebels’ equipment was of Northern origin. A solid shot landed close beside Starbuck, then ricocheted up and back. The nearness of the shot made him wonder why the Yankee gunners were aiming at a scattered skirmish line when they could be firing at the massed ranks of the Faulconer Brigade, and that curiosity made him turn to look for Swynyard’s promised reinforcements.

But Swynyard had vanished, and with him the whole Faulconer Brigade, leaving Starbuck and Medlicott alone in the field. Starbuck turned back. The Northern skirmishers were close now, close enough for Starbuck to see that their uniforms were smart, not patched brown and gray like the rebels’. The Northerners were advancing in good style, the sun reflecting off their belt buckles and brass buttons. Behind the skirmish line a battalion trampled down a row of standing corn. There were a half-dozen mounted officers at the rear of the Yankee formation, evidence that at least one of the attacking regiments was new to the war. Experienced officers did not invite the attention of sharpshooters by riding high in saddles. But nor did two companies of skirmishers stand to fight against a whole Yankee brigade.

“Fire!” Truslow shouted, and the Legion’s skirmishers began their battle. The men were in pairs. One man would fire, then reload while his companion looked for danger. The red-haired Yankee was already down, clutching his chest.

Truslow ran across to Starbuck. “I was never a religious man,” the Sergeant said as he rammed a bullet down his rifle’s barrel, “but ain’t there a story in the Bible about some son of a bitch king sending a man to die in battle just so he could riddle the man’s wife?”

Starbuck peered through the veil of rifle smoke, saw a Yankee go onto one knee to take aim, and fired at the man. A Northern bullet whipsawed the air a few inches to his left. Behind their skirmish line the Northern brigade advanced stolidly beneath their bright flags. He could hear their boots crushing cornstalks, and he knew that as soon as the marching line reached the further edge of the wheat field, they would stop to take aim, and then a killing volley would scream over the field, with every bullet aimed at the two stranded companies of the Legion. There was nothing to check the Yankees out here in the open. No rebel guns were firing, there were no bursting shells or clawing sprays of canister to fleck the wheat field red. Tom Petty, an eighteen-year-old in Starbuck’s company, turned round with his mouth open and his eyes wide. He shook his head in disbelief, then sank to his knees. He saw Starbuck’s eyes on him and forced a brave smile. “I’m all right, sir! Just bruised!” He managed to stand and face the enemy.

“King David,” Starbuck said aloud. King David had sent Uriah the Hittite into the front line of the battle so that Bathsheba would become a widow. “Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle”—the verse came back to Starbuck—“and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.” Well, damn Faulconer, who had made Swynyard set Starbuck in the forefront of the hottest battle that he might be smitten and die. “We’re getting out of here!” Starbuck shouted across to Captain Medlicott.

Medlicott, though officially in command, was grateful for the younger man’s leadership. “Back!” he shouted at G Company.

The Yankees cheered and jeered as they saw the handful of skirmishers retreat. “Enjoying your licking, boys!” one Northerner shouted. “Keep on running! We’ll be right after you!” called another, while a third shouted to give his respects to Stonewall Jackson, “And tell him we’ll hang him real gentle now!”

“Steady now!” Starbuck called to his men. He kept his back to the enemy, concentrating on his company. “Back to the trees! Steady, don’t run!” No one else from the Brigade was in sight. Swynyard or Faulconer must have taken the whole Brigade back into the woods, abandoning Starbuck and Medlicott to the enemy. But why had Bird not protested? A shell landed just behind Starbuck, buffeting him with its hot punch of air. He turned and saw the Yankee skirmishers running toward him. “Double back to the woods!” he shouted, so releasing his men from their slow, steady withdrawal. “Muster them by the road, Sergeant!” he called to Truslow.

More Northern jeers and a handful of bullets followed the skirmishers’ hurried retreat. The Yankees were in high spirits. They had waited a long time to give Stonewall Jackson a whipping, and now they were laying the lash on thick and hard. Back among the trees beside the turnpike Starbuck’s men panted as they crouched and looked nervously at their officer, who, in turn, was watching the shadows lengthen across the wheat field. He was also watching the far tree line, where still more guns and infantry had appeared. The Yankees were triumphant and the rebels beaten. “If we stay here”—Medlicott had joined Starbuck again—“we’ll like as not be prisoners.”

“Swynyard put you in command,” Starbuck said pointedly.

Medlicott hesitated, unhappy to take responsibility, then diffidently suggested that the two companies should retreat further through the trees. To the east of the turnpike a furious artillery battle was deafening the evening air. Smoke poured off the hillside where rebel guns were emplaced, but those cannon were of no use to the beaten men west of the turnpike, where the Yankee line had crushed the standing corn to drive Jackson’s infantry back into the timber on the valley’s southern crest. The Northern guns had the range of those trees now, and the green summer woods were filled with the whistling menace of shrapnel. Starbuck wondered where the Georgia regiment had gone and where the rest of the Brigade was hidden.

“I can’t see the Brigade!” Medlicott said despairingly. A salvo of shells cracked ahead of the skirmishers, filling the trees with whistling shards of hot metal. The men leading the retreat had followed the twisting path into a small hollow, and now they instinctively crouched rather than leave their scanty cover to walk into that zone of fire. The perplexed and frightened Captain Medlicott seemed content to let them rest. “Maybe we should send a patrol to look for the Brigade?” he suggested to Starbuck.

“While the rest of us wait here to be captured?” Starbuck asked sarcastically.

“I don’t know,” Medlicott said. The miller was suddenly bereft of confidence and initiative. His doughy face looked hurt, like that of a child struck for an offense it had not committed.

“Yankees!” Truslow called warningly, pointing west to where blue uniforms had appeared in the woods.

“Stay still!” Medlicott shouted in sudden panic. “Get down!”

Starbuck would have gone on retreating, hoping to join up with the rebel reserve, but Medlicott had been panicked into making a decision, and the men crouched gratefully in the shadows. Two of Starbuck’s company lowered a body they had been carrying. “Shall we bury him?” one of the two men asked Starbuck.

“Who is it?” It was dark under the trees, and the evening was drawing in.

“Tom Petty.”

“Oh, dear God,” Starbuck said. He had seen Petty wounded but had thought he would live, and surely Petty had deserved to live, for he had been a boy, not a man. He had used to shave each morning, but the blade had made no difference to his cheeks. He had only used the razor to explain his lack of beard, but he had been a good soldier, cheerful and willing. Starbuck had planned to make him up to corporal, but now it would have to be Mellors, who was not nearly so quick on the uptake. “Scratch him a grave,” he said, “and get Corporal Waggoner to say a prayer for him.”

All around them the shouts of the Yankees grew louder. The woodland was filled with screaming shells, so many that at times the torn leaves looked like a green snow drifting through the warm evening air. The trees echoed with the pathetic cries of dying men. Lieutenant Coffman hunkered down beside Starbuck, his small face showing bewilderment because his beloved Southerners were being whipped, because the North was winning, and because nothing in his world made sense.

The Reverend Elial Starbuck shared in the joy as the realization of victory dawned on the Yankee headquarters. And what a victory it was proving! Prisoners had confirmed that the enemy commander was indeed the notorious Stonewall Jackson. “The wretch won’t be fetching his supper from my supply wagons tonight!” General Banks exulted. It was true that the enemy was still holding firm on the slopes of Cedar Mountain, but Banks’s staff brought message after message that told how the Federal right wing under General Crawford was driving the rebels clean across the valley and into the woods beyond. “Now we’ll turn their flank!” Banks exclaimed, gesturing extravagantly to show how he meant to hook the right wing of his army around the backside of Cedar Mountain and thus surround the remnants of the Confederate army. “Maybe we’ll have Jackson as our supper guest tonight!”

“I doubt he’ll have much appetite after this drubbing,” an artillery major observed.

“Fellow’s reputed to eat damned strangely anyway,” an aide responded, then blushed for having sworn in front of the Reverend Starbuck. “Nothing but stale bread and chopped cabbage, I hear.”

“You and I could chop the rogue some cabbage, eh, Starbuck?” General Banks thus drew his distinguished guest into the jubilant conversation.

“I would make him eat what the slaves eat!” the Reverend Starbuck said.

“I think he eats worse than any slave!” Banks jested. “Force a slave to eat what Jackson dines on and the whole world would revile our inhumanity. Maybe we should punish the man by giving him a proper meal? Oysters and pheasant, you think?”

Banks’s aides laughed, and their master turned his gaze back to the battle smoke that was already touched with a faint pink tinge of evening sunlight. In the slanting light Banks looked quite superb: straight-backed, stern-faced, the very image of a soldier, and suddenly, after months of disappointment, the politician did at last feel like a soldier. He had, Banks modestly admitted to himself, grown into the job and was now ready for the battles to come. For despite this day’s splendid victory, there would be more battles. With Stonewall Jackson defeated, General Robert Lee, who was protecting Richmond from McClellan’s army, would be forced north even if such a move did open the rebel capital to McClellan’s forces. McClellan would dutifully overwhelm the Richmond defenses, Pope would crush Lee, and then, bar some mopping up on the Mississippi and skull-breaking in the deep South, the war would be over. Better, it would be won. All that remained was a few battles, a rebel surrender, a Federal victory parade, and most important of all, the absolute necessity for President Lincoln and the dunderheads in the United States Congress to realize that it had been Nathaniel Prentiss Banks who had precipitated the whole process. My God, Banks thought, but others would try to steal his glory now! John Pope would doubtless make the attempt, and George McClellan would certainly write to every newspaper editor in creation, which made it all the more important for this night’s victory dispatch to be written firmly and clearly. Tonight’s dispatch, Banks knew, would fashion history books for years to come, but more important, the words he wrote tonight would garner votes for the remainder of his career.

Federal officers gathered round to offer the General their congratulations. The commander of Banks’s bodyguard, a tall Pennsylvanian Zouave, handed the General a silver stirrup cup of brandy. “A toast to your triumph, sir,” the Zouave proclaimed. A ragged line of disconsolate prisoners trudged past the group of horsemen. One or two of the captured seceshers glanced sullenly at the Northern General, and one rogue spat in his direction, but tonight, Banks thought, he would have the most valuable prisoner as his dinner guest. He would treat General Jackson with courtesy, as a gallant soldier should, and the world would wonder at the victor’s modesty. Then Banks imagined himself at another dinner table, a much grander table in Washington that would gleam with massive presidential silver, and in his mind’s eye he saw the foreign diplomats and their admiring bejeweled wives bend forward to catch his words. President Banks! And why not? George Washington might have made this country, but it had needed Nathaniel Prentiss Banks to save it.

A mile south of Banks, in a belt of woodland where fires started by shell fire tortured the wounded, men screamed and fought and died. The Yankee counterattack was being slowed by the undergrowth and by the stubborn defiance of Southern riflemen, whose muzzle flames stabbed bright in the smoky shadows. Shells slashed through the treetops, thrashing the branches and hammering the sky with their explosions. Blood and smoke reeked, a man called for his mother in the voice of a child, another cursed God, but still the North pushed on, yard by hard yard, going through hell in search of peace.

“Nothing is served,” General Washington Faulconer said icily, “by breaking the Brigade into small detachments. We shall go into battle united.”

“If there’s any battle left,” Swynyard said with a manic glee. He seemed to be enjoying the panic that had infected the western side of Jackson’s battle.

“Watch your tongue, Colonel,” Faulconer snapped. He was more than usually displeased with his second-in-command, who had already lost a quarter of the Legion instead of just Starbuck’s company, and what was left of the Brigade must be husbanded, not frittered away by being committed to the battle in dribs and drabs. Faulconer edged his horse away from Swynyard and gazed at the woods, which were filled with smoke and thrashing from the passage of Northern shells and bolts. God only knew what had happened in the wide valley beyond those woods, but even here, far behind where the fighting had taken place, the evidence of impending disaster was awesome and obvious. Wounded men staggered back from the trees; some of the injured were being helped by friends, others crawled or limped painfully back to where the surgeons hacked and sawed and probed. Many of the fugitives were not wounded at all but were merely frightened men who were trying to escape the Yankee advance.

Faulconer had no intention of allowing that advance to enmesh his Brigade. “I want the 65th on the right,” Faulconer called to Swynyard, referring to the 65th Virginia, which was the second largest regiment after the Legion in Faulconer’s Brigade, “the Arkansas men in the center, and the 12th Florida on the left. Everyone else in reserve two hundred paces behind.” That meant that the remaining six companies of the Legion, who were presently the foremost battalion in the Brigade, would now become Faulconer’s rearmost line. The redeployment was hardly necessary, but moving the front line to the rear killed some precious moments while Faulconer tried to determine just what disasters were happening beyond the woods. “And, Colonel!” Faulconer called after Swynyard, “send Bird to reconnoiter the ground. Tell him to report to me within a half hour!”

“Colonel Bird’s already gone,” Swynyard said. “Went to fetch his skirmishers back.”

“Without orders?” Faulconer asked angrily. “Then tell him to explain himself to me the instant he returns. Now go!”

“Sir?” Captain Thomas Pryor, one of Washington Faulconer’s new aides, interjected nervously.