He stopped at the Rosskill post office and sent the letter, then rode on to the depot, where the manager was a plump, sweating man named Reynolds. “There are no trains,” Reynolds greeted Starbuck in his small office next to the telegraph room.
“But Mister Faulconer, Colonel Faulconer, specifically requested two sets of cars, both with locomotives—”
“I don’t care if God Almighty ordered the cars!” Reynolds was a plump man, sweating in his woolen railroad uniform, who was clearly tired of the exigencies that wartime had imposed upon his careful timetable. “The whole railroad’s only got sixteen locomotives and ten of those have gone north to move troops. We’re supposed to do things railroad fashion, but how can I keep order if everyone wants locomotives? I can’t help you! I don’t care if Mister Faulconer is a director, I don’t care if all the directors were here begging for cars, I can’t do anything!”
“You have to help,” Starbuck said.
“I can’t make cars, laddie! I can’t make locomotives!” Reynolds leaned across his table, sweat dripping down his face into his ginger beard and mustaches. “I am not a miracle worker!”
“But I am,” Starbuck said, and he took out the big Savage revolver from the holster at his waist, pointed it just to one side of Reynolds and pulled the trigger. Smoke and noise filled the room as the heavy bullet smashed through the timber wall to leave a ragged, splintered hole. Starbuck holstered the smoking gun. “I am not a laddie, Mister Reynolds,” he calmly told the gaping, astonished manager, “but an officer in the army of the Confederate States of America and if you insult me once again I shall put you against that wall and shoot you.”
For a second Starbuck thought that Reynolds was going to follow Major Pelham into an early grave. “You’re mad!” the railroad man finally said.
“I think that’s probably true,” Starbuck agreed placidly, “but I shoot better when I am mad than when I am sane, so let us now decide how you and I are going to move the Faulconer Legion north to Manassas Junction, shall we?” He smiled. It was Sally, he decided, who had released this confidence in him. He was actually enjoying himself. Goddamn it, he thought, but he was going to be a good soldier.
Yet Reynolds suspected there were no available passenger cars within fifty miles. All he had in the depot were seventeen old house cars. “What are house cars?” Starbuck asked politely, and the frightened manager pointed through his window at a boxcar.
“We call them house cars,” he said in the same nervous voice that he had used to reassure the telegraph operator and two assistants who had run to his office to enquire about the shooting.
“How many men can we fit into a house car?” Starbuck asked.
“Fifty? Sixty, maybe?”
“Then we have just enough.” The Legion had not reached Faulconer’s target of one thousand men, but over nine hundred had volunteered, making it into a formidable regiment. “What other cars do you have?” Starbuck asked.
There were just two gondola cars, which were simple open wagons, and that was all. One of the gondola cars and eight of the boxcars were in desperate need of repair, though Reynolds thought they could be used, but only at the slowest possible speed. There were, he said, no locomotives available, though when Starbuck put a hand toward the big Savage revolver, Reynolds hastily remembered that a locomotive was expected to pass through the depot on its way to Lynchburg, where it was going to collect a train of platform cars loaded with cut timber that was being carried to the coast to build artillery revetments.
“Good!” Starbuck said. “You’ll stop the locomotive and turn it round.”
“We don’t have a roundhouse here.”
“The engine can travel backward?”
Reynolds nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“And how far is it to Manassas?”
“A hundred miles, sir.”
“Then we shall go to war backward,” Starbuck said happily.
Washington Faulconer, when he led the Legion’s cavalry unit into the depot at midday, was furious. He had expected two trains to be waiting, one of them with the director’s private car attached, but instead there was just a mutinous engineer with a single backward-facing locomotive and tender that was attached to seventeen boxcars and two gondola cars, while the telegraph operator was attempting to explain to Lynchburg why the locomotive would not be arriving, and Reynolds was trying to clear the track northward past Charlottesville. “For God’s sake, Nate!” the Colonel exploded, “why is everything such a mess?”
“Wartime, sir?”
“Damn it! I gave you simple enough orders! Can’t you do the simplest thing?” He spurred off to abuse the grumbling engineer.
Adam looked at Starbuck and shrugged. “Sorry. Father’s not happy.”
“How was Miss Pelham?”
“Awful. Just awful.” Adam shook his head. “And soon, Nate, there’ll be scores of women getting that same news. Hundreds.” Adam turned to look down Rosskill’s Depot Street where the first of the Legion’s infantrymen had come into sight. The marching column was flanked by twin ragged processions of wives, mothers and children, some of whom were carrying knapsacks to relieve their men of their equipment’s weight. “Dear God, this is chaos,” Adam said. “We were supposed to have left three hours ago!”
“I’m told that in war nothing ever goes to plan,” Starbuck said happily, “and that if it does, you’re probably being whipped. We have to get used to chaos, and learn to make the best of it.”
“Father’s not good at that,” Adam confessed.
“Then it’s a good job he’s got me.” Starbuck smiled benignly at Ethan Ridley, who had ridden in with the approaching Legion. Starbuck had decided he would be very pleasant to Ridley from now until the end of Ridley’s life. Ridley ignored him.
The Colonel had originally supposed that the Legion would be entrained in comfort by ten that morning, yet it was not till five in the evening that the single train limped slowly north. There was enough room for the infantrymen, three days’ supply of food and all the Legion’s ammunition, but precious little else. The officers’ horses and servants were put into the two gondola cars. The Colonel would travel in the caboose, which had arrived with the locomotive, while the men were given the boxcars. The Colonel, mindful of his duties as a director of the line, gave strict orders that the cars were to arrive at Manassas Junction undamaged, but no sooner had he spoken than Sergeant Truslow found an axe and smashed a hole in the side of a boxcar. “A man needs light and air,” he growled at the Colonel, then swung the axe again. The Colonel turned away and pretended not to notice the orgy of destruction as the Legion began its enthusiastic ventilation of the wooden boxes.
There was no room on the train for the Legion’s cavalry, which had to be left behind, along with the two six-pounder guns, their caissons and limbers, the cast-iron camp stoves and all the wagons. The Legion’s tents were slung into the boxcars at the last moment and Bandmaster Little took his instruments, claiming they were medical supplies. The Legion’s colors were almost left behind in the confusion, but Adam saw the twin leather flag cases abandoned on a gun caisson and stowed them in the caboose. The depot was chaotic as women and children sought to say good-bye to their men, and as the men, exhausting the water in their canteens, tried to fill the small round bottles from the outflow of the depot’s stilt-legged water tank. Faulconer was shouting last-minute instructions for the cavalry, artillery and wagon train, which would now travel north by road. He reckoned they should take three days to make the journey while the train, even with its damaged axle boxes, should make it in one. “We’ll see you in Manassas,” the Colonel told Lieutenant Davies, who was to be in charge of the convoy, “or maybe in Washington!”
Anna Faulconer, driving her small cart, had arrived from Faulconer Court House and insisted on handing out small Confederate flags that she and the servants at Seven Springs had embroidered. Her father, impatient at the delay, ordered the engineer to sound the whistle to summon the men back to the boxcars, b
ut the sound of the shrieking steam frightened some of the horses in the gondola cars and one Negro servant had his leg broken when Captain Hinton’s mare kicked back. The servant was carried off the train and, in the delay, two men from E Company decided they did not want to fight and deserted, but three other men insisted on being allowed to join the Legion there and then and so climbed aboard.
Finally, at five o’clock, the train began its journey. It could go no faster than ten miles an hour because of the broken axle boxes and so it limped north, its wheels clanking across the rail joints and its bell clanging a mournful sound over the water meadows and green fields. The Colonel was still furious at the day’s delays, but the men were in high spirits and sang cheerfully as their slow train chugged away from the hills, its smoke drifting among trees. They left the convoy of wagons, guns and cavalry behind and steamed slowly into the night.
The train journey took almost two days. The crowded cars spent twelve hours waiting at the Gordonsville Junction, another three at Warrenton, and endless other minutes waiting while the tender was fueled with cordwood or its water tank charged, but at last, on a hot Saturday afternoon, they reached Manassas Junction where the Army of Northern Virginia had its headquarters. No one in Manassas knew the Legion was coming or what to do with them, but finally a staff officer led the Legion north and east from the small town along a country road that wound through small steep hills. There were other troops camped in meadows, and artillery pieces parked in farm gates, and the sight of those other troops gave the Legion an apprehensive feeling that they had joined some massive undertaking that none of them truly understood. Till now they had been the Faulconer Legion, safe in Faulconer Court House and led by Colonel Faulconer, but the train had abruptly brought them to a strange place where they were lost in an incomprehensible and uncontrollable process.
It was almost dark when the staff Captain pointed to a farmhouse that lay to the right of the road on a wide, bare plateau. “The farm’s still occupied,” he told Faulconer, “but those pastures look empty, so make yourselves at home.”
“I need to see Beauregard.” Faulconer sounded irritable, made so by the evening’s uncertainty. He wanted to know where exactly he was, and the staff officer did not know, and he wanted to know precisely what was expected of his Legion, but the staff officer could not tell him that either. There were no maps, no orders, no sense of direction at all. “I should see Beauregard tonight,” Faulconer insisted.
“I guess the general will be real pleased to see you, Colonel,” the staff officer said tactfully, “but I reckon you’d best still wait for morning now. Say at six o’clock?”
“Are we expecting action?” Faulconer asked pompously.
“Sometime tomorrow, I guess.” The staff officer’s cigar glowed briefly. “The Yankees are up thataway,” he gestured vaguely eastward with his lit cigar, “and I guess we’ll be crossing the river to give them a howdy, but the general won’t be giving his orders till morning. I’ll tell you how to find him, and you be there at six, Colonel. That’ll give you boys time to have yourselves a prayer service first.”
“A prayer service?” Faulconer’s tone suggested the staff officer was touched in the head.
“Tomorrow’s the Lord’s Day, Colonel,” the captain said reproachfully, and so it would be, for the next day would be Sunday, July 21, 1861.
And America would be broken by battle.
By two o’clock on Sunday morning the air was already stifling hot and breathlessly calm. The sun would not rise for another two and a half hours yet, and the sky was still star bright, cloudless and brilliant. Most of the men, even though they had lugged their tents the long five miles from the rail junction to the farm, slept in the open air. Starbuck woke to see the heavens like a brilliant scatter of cold white light, more beautiful than anything found on earth.
“Time to get up,” Adam said beside him.
Men were waking all around the hilltop. They were coughing and cursing, their voices made loud by nervousness. Somewhere in the dark valley a set of harness chains jangled and a horse whinnied, and a trumpet called reveille from a far encampment, its sound echoing back from a distant dark slope. A cockerel crowed from the farmhouse on the hill where dim lights showed behind curtained windows. Dogs barked and the cooks banged skillets and kettles.
“‘The armorers’”—Starbuck still lay on his back, staring up at the sharp-edged stars—“‘accomplishing the knights, with busy hammers closing rivets up, give dreadful note of preparation.’”
Adam would normally have taken pleasure in capping the quotation, but he was in a silent, subdued mood and so said nothing. All along the Legion’s lines the smoky fires were being coddled into life to throw a garish light on shirt-sleeved men, stands of rifles and the white conical tents. The thickening smoke shimmered the stars.
Starbuck still gazed upward. “‘The cripple tardy-gaited night,’” he quoted again, “‘who like a foul witch doth limp so tediously away.’” He was delivering the quotations to disguise his nervousness. Today, he was thinking, I shall see the elephant.
Adam said nothing. He felt that he had come to the brink of a terrible chaos, like the abyss across which Satan had flown in Paradise Lost, and that was exactly what this war meant for America, Adam thought sadly—the loss of innocence, the loss of sweet perfection. He had joined the Legion to please his father, now he might have to pay the price of that compromise.
“Coffee, Massa?” Nelson, Faulconer’s servant, brought two tin mugs of coffee from the fire he had tended all night behind the Colonel’s tent.
“You’re a great and good man, Nelson.” Starbuck sat up and reached for the coffee.
Sergeant Truslow was shouting at Company K, where someone had complained that there was no bucket with which to fetch water and Truslow was bellowing at the man to stop complaining and go steal a damned bucket.
“You don’t seem nervous.” Adam sipped the coffee, then grimaced at its harsh taste.
“Of course I’m nervous,” Starbuck said. In fact the apprehension was writhing in his belly like snakes boiling in a pit. “But I have an idea that I might be a good soldier.” Was that true, he wondered, or was he just saying it because he wanted it to be true? Or because he had boasted of it to Sally? And was that all it had been? A boast to impress a girl?
“I shouldn’t even be here,” Adam said.
“Nonsense,” Starbuck said briskly. “Survive one day, Adam, just one day, then help make peace.”
A few minutes past three o’clock two horsemen appeared in the regiment’s lines. One man was carrying a lantern with which he had lit his way across the hilltop. “Who are you?” the second man shouted.
“The Faulconer Legion!” Adam called back the answer.
“The Faulconer Legion? Jesus wept! We’ve got a Legion on our goddamned side now? The damned Yankees might as well give up.” The speaker was a short balding man with intense, button-black eyes that scowled from an unwashed face above a dirty black mustache and a ragged spade beard. He slid out of his saddle and paced into the firelight to reveal skeletally thin legs bowed like razor clam shells that looked entirely inadequate to support the weight of his big belly and broad, muscled torso. “So who’s in command here?” the strange man demanded.
“My father,” Adam said, “Colonel Faulconer.” He gestured at his father’s tent.
“Faulconer!” The stranger turned toward the tent. He was wearing a shabby Confederate uniform and was clutching a brown felt hat so battered and filthy that it might have been spurned by a sharecropper.
“Here!” The Colonel’s tent was lit within by lanterns that cast grotesque shadows every time he moved in front of their flames. “Who is it?”
“Evans. Colonel Nathan Evans.” Evans did not wait for an invitation but pushed through Faulconer’s tent flap. “I heard troops arrived here last night and I thought I’d say howdy. I’ve got half a brigade up by the stone bridge and if the bastard Yankees decide to use the Warrenton Pike t
hen you and I are all that stands between Abe Lincoln and the whores in New Orleans. Is that coffee, Faulconer, or whiskey?”
“Coffee.” Faulconer’s voice was distant, suggesting he did not like Evans’s brusque familiarity.
“I’ve my own whiskey, but I’ll have a coffee first and thank you kindly, Colonel.” Starbuck watched as Evans’s shadow drank the Colonel’s coffee. “What I want you to do, Faulconer,” Evans demanded when the coffee was drained, “is move your boys down to the road, then on up to a wooden bridge here.” He had evidently opened a map that he spread on Faulconer’s bed. “There’s a deal of timber around the bridge and I guess if you keep your boys hidden then the sons of bitch Yankees won’t know you’re there. Of course we may all end up being about as much use as a pair of balls on a shad-bellied priest, but on the other hand we may not.”
Evans’s staff officer lit a cigar and gave Adam and Starbuck a desultory glance. Thaddeus Bird, Ethan Ridley and at least a score of other men were openly listening to the conversation inside the tent.
“I don’t understand,” Faulconer said.
“It ain’t difficult.” Evans paused and there was a scratching sound as he struck a match to light a cigar. “Yankees are over the stream. They want to keep advancing on Manassas Junction. Capture that and they’ve cut us from the valley army. Beauregard’s facing them, but he ain’t the kind to wait to get hit, so he plans to attack on their left, our right.” Evans was demonstrating the moves on his map. “So Beauregard’s got most of our army out on the right. Way over eastward, two miles away at least, and if he can get his pants buttoned before noon he’ll probably attack later today. He’ll hook round the back of the bastards and kill as many as he can. Which is dandy, Faulconer, but suppose the sons of bitches decide to attack us first? And suppose they ain’t as dumb as northerners usually are and instead of marching straight into our faces suppose they try to hook around our left? We’re the only troops to stop them. In fact there’s nothing between us and Mexico, Faulconer, so what if the pox-ridden bastards do decide to have a go at this flank?” Evans chuckled. “That’s why I’m right glad you’re here, Colonel.”