“Eager, sir, eager.” Major Bird, panting and hot after the fast pace of the advance, took off his hat and pushed a hand through his long, thinning hair. Behind him the thirsty men of the Legion were draining their canteens.
“We’ll give the shit-eating bastards hell, so we will,” Evans said, looking northward again, though nothing moved in that empty landscape, not even a wind to stir the far trees where the road to the fords vanished under the thick canopy of leaves. A small group of men, women and children were standing by the Sudley Church on the hill to the left of the road, and Evans guessed they must be worshipers come to the church only to discover that God’s service had been overtaken by war. Behind Evans, dulled by distance now, the sound of the northern cannonade thundered softly in the hot still air. Evans had left just four understrength companies at the stone bridge, a tiny force to hold off any determined Yankee attack down the turnpike, and he suddenly felt a terrible fear that he had been deceived and that this rumored flank attack was a feint, a cheat, a deception to strip the stone bridge of its defenders so that the damned Yankees could end the war in one maneuver. And where the hell was Beauregard? Or General Johnston’s men, who were rumored to be arriving from the Shenandoah Valley? Christ on his cross, Evans thought, but this was agony. Evans had fought the Comanches in his years of soldiering, but he had never been forced into making a decision as momentous as the one he had just made, a decision that had left the northern flank of the Confederate army stripped perilously thin. Would history mock him as the fool whose stupidity had handed an easy victory to the northerners? “Boston!” Evans twitched round in his saddle to glare at Starbuck.
“Sir.”
“You didn’t lie to me, boy, did you?” Evans remembered the wig-wagger’s message and tried to convince himself he had done the right thing, but God in his heaven, just what had he done? Far behind him, out of sight beyond the trees and the turnpike, the shells rumbled and crashed on the empty land he had left virtually unguarded. “Did you lie to me, boy?” he shouted at Starbuck. “Did you lie?”
But Starbuck did not answer. Starbuck was not even looking at the fierce-eyed Colonel. Instead Starbuck was staring down the long pale slope to where, out of the distant trees, the northerners were at last appearing. Rank upon rank of men with the sunlight glinting from their belt buckles and cap badges and rifle butts and saber scabbards and from the polished muzzles of their artillery to make the mirrored lights of a righteous army come to remake God’s country.
For the northern trap was sprung. Four full brigades of infantry bolstered by the finest field artillery in North America had hooked into the rebellion’s ragged rear to where a scratch southern force led by a whiskey-sucking foulmouth was the only obstacle left to victory. Now all the day needed was one overwhelming charge and the slaveholders’ rebellion would become a mere footnote to history, a thing forgotten, a passing summer’s madness that would be gone and ended and vanished like smoke in a sudden wind. “God bless you, Boston,” Evans said, for Starbuck had not lied after all, and there was going to be a fight.
THE YANKEES CAME ON QUICK. THEIR PREDAWN FLANKING MARCH had taken hours longer than their commanders had expected, and now their task was to thrust hard and fast into the rebel rear before the southerners had time to understand just what was happening.
Drums beat the pace as the first northern regiments spread into their attack lines and as cannon unlimbered at the attackers’ flanks. Some guns were deployed on the dirt road, others in the farm at the foot of the slope from where they sent the first shells screaming up toward the wooded ridge where the thin line of Confederate forces waited. The advancing Yankees were confident. They had expected the Sudley Fords would be defended, then had half-feared that the southerners might have fortified an unfinished railway embankment just beyond the fords, but instead they had encountered no resistance as they had steadily advanced into the rebel rear. The surprise of their attack seemed to be total, the ineptness of the southern commanders complete, and all that now stood between the federal forces and victory was this contemptible line of rebel farmboys who edged a wood at the long hill’s crest. “On to Richmond, boys!” an officer shouted as the attack started up the gentle slope, and behind the blue-coated infantry a regimental band swung into the tune “John Brown’s Body,” as though the ghost of that irascible old martyr was personally present to see the two leading regiments, both from Rhode Island, crack the rebel line apart.
More northern troops emerged from the woods behind the advancing Rhode Islanders. Men from New York and New Hampshire joined the attack as the flanking guns jetted clouds of gray-white smoke. Swift fan-shaped patterns of compressed gases rippled the long grass under the guns’ smoke as the shells seared up the slope. The explosions were mighty, ear splitting, terrible. Some shells, fired too high, crashed through the branches above the Confederate line, scaring birds out of the trees and showering twigs and leaves down onto the bandsmen and chaplains and servants and medical orderlies who crouched in the rear. A regiment of regular U.S. Army troops marched out from the trees, deployed from column into line, fixed their bayonets, and advanced uphill with the New Yorkers and New Englanders.
Colonel Evans had galloped back to his line’s center where Colonel Sloan’s South Carolinians were crouching at the wood’s edge to make themselves into a difficult target for the enemy artillery. A few rebel skirmishers had advanced beyond the fence and were firing rifles at the advancing Yankees, but Starbuck, watching from horseback at the trees’ edge, could see no sign that the rifle fire was causing any casualties. The enemy came steadily on, driven by the music of the distant northern bands and by the beat of the drummers advancing with the companies and by the proximity of glorious victory that waited for the attackers at the hill’s crest where the first of Nathan Evans’s two ancient cannon had arrived. The gun was hurriedly unlimbered, turned, then fired a roundshot down the slope. The ball bounced on the turf, soared over the Rhode Islanders and plunged harmlessly into the trees beyond. A northern shell exploded short. The sound of the airburst was appalling, as though part of the fabric of the universe itself had been suddenly cracked in two. The air became crazy with smoke and sizzling fragments. Starbuck shuddered. The artillery fire by the stone bridge had been scary, but this was much worse. These gunners were aiming directly at the Legion and their shells screeched like demons as they flashed overhead.
“Skirmishers!” Major Bird called in a cracked voice. He tried again, this time achieving a firmer tone. “Skirmishers! Advance!”
A and K companies, the Legion’s two flanking companies, clambered awkwardly over the fence rails and ran into the pastureland. The men were encumbered by their rifles, their sheathed bayonets, their bowie knives and haversacks, and by the canteens, pouches and cap boxes that hung from their belts. They made a loose formation a hundred paces ahead of the Legion. Their task was first to deter the enemy skirmishers, then to snipe at the main line of attackers. The riflemen opened fire, enveloping each kneeling marksman in a small cloud of smoke. Sergeant Truslow walked from man to man, while Captain Roswell Jenkins, still on horseback, fired his revolver at the distant northerners.
“Make sure your weapons are loaded!” Major Bird called to the remaining eight companies. It seemed slightly late to remember such advice, but nothing seemed real this morning. Thaddeus Bird, schoolmaster, was commanding a regiment in battle? He giggled at the thought and earned a disapproving look from Sergeant Major Proctor. The Yankees were still five hundred paces away, but coming on at a smart pace now. The northern officers carried drawn swords. Some carried the blades upright in a stiff attempt at formal dignity, while others slashed at dandelions and thistles as though they were out on a Sunday afternoon stroll. A few were mounted on nervous horses. One horse, scared by the gunfire, had gone out of control and was bolting with its rider across the face of the northern attack.
Starbuck, dry mouthed and apprehensive, remembered that his Savage pistol, which he had earlier returned to Colo
nel Faulconer and only just retrieved, was still unloaded. He pulled the heavy gun from its long clumsy holster, then released the cylinder lock to expose the empty chambers. He took six paper-wrapped cartridges from the pouch on his belt. Each cartridge contained a conical bullet and its powder charge. He bit the bullet off the first cartridge, tasting the bitter salty gunpowder on his tongue, then carefully poured the powder into one of the cylinder’s chambers. Pocahontas, bitten by a horsefly, suddenly whinnied and shifted sideways, causing Starbuck to spill some of the powder onto his saddle.
He swore at the horse, which meant that the bullet in his lips slipped free, bounced on the saddle pommel and fell into the grass. He swore again, tipped the powder from the chamber, and bit off a fresh bullet. This time, as he began to pour the charge, he found his hand was shaking and there seemed to be two chambers under the lip of the torn paper instead of one. His sight was blurred, then he realized his hand was shaking uncontrollably.
He looked up at the advancing enemy. Above them, oddly clear in his otherwise smeared eyesight, was the Stars and Stripes, his own flag, and suddenly Starbuck knew that there were no easy decisions, no turnings in life that could be taken flippantly. He gazed at the distant flag and knew he could not fire on it. His great-grandfather MacPhail had lost an eye on Breed’s Hill and later, fighting under Paul Revere at Penobscot Bay, had lost his right hand in the defense of that good flag, and suddenly Starbuck felt a catch in his throat. God, he thought, but I should not be here! None of us should be here! He suddenly understood all Adam’s objections to the war, all Adam’s unhappiness that this glorious country should find itself riven by battle, and he gazed longingly at the distant flag and was unaware of the first Yankee skirmishers’ bullets whipping hard overhead, or of the shell that exploded just short of the fence, or of the hoarse shouts as the Rhode Island sergeants shouted at their men to keep their lines straight as they advanced. Starbuck was oblivious to it all as he sat in the saddle, shaken, his trembling hand dribbling gunpowder down his thigh.
“Are you all right?” Adam joined him.
“Not really.”
“Now you understand, do you?” Adam asked grimly.
“Yes.” Starbuck’s hands trembled as he closed up the still-unloaded revolver. His whole life suddenly seemed trivial, wasted, gone to hell. He had thought this morning that war would prove a fine adventure, a defiance to toss into his father’s face and an adventure story to describe to Sally, but instead it was proving to be something much more terrible and unexpected, as though a curtain in a frippery theater had lifted to reveal a glimpse of hell’s horrors seething with twisted flames. My God, he thought, but I could die here. I could be buried at this wood’s edge. “It was a girl,” he blurted out.
“Girl?” Adam frowned with incomprehension.
“In Richmond.”
“Oh.” Adam was embarrassed by Starbuck’s admission, but also troubled by it. “Father guessed as much,” he said, “but I don’t understand why you risk everything for…” He stopped, maybe because he could not find the right words, or perhaps because a shell had smashed into a tree trunk and ripped a chunk of bright timber clean out of the wood and filled the shadows with its filthy sulfur-laden smoke. Adam licked his lips. “I’m thirsty.”
“And me.” Starbuck wondered why he had blurted out his confession. The Yankees were coming stolidly on. In minutes, he thought, just minutes, we have to fight. All the posturing and defiance has come to this warm meadow. He watched a northern officer stumble, drop his sword and fall to his knees in the grass. An enemy skirmisher ran forward five paces, knelt to take aim, then realized he had left his ramrod behind and went back to find it in the long grass. A riderless horse cantered across the slope. The drummers’ rhythm was more ragged, but still the northerners came on. A bullet whistled close by Starbuck’s head. One of the northern bands was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the music prickled at Starbuck’s eyes and conscience. “Do you not think about girls?” he asked Adam.
“No.” Adam seemed not to be concentrating on the conversation but was staring down the slope. “Never.” His fingers were twitching on the reins.
“Are you certain you two should be on horseback?” Major Bird strode over to join Adam and Starbuck. “I’d hate to lose you. You heard that young Sparrow died?” He asked this question of Starbuck.
“I saw his body, yes.”
“He should have stayed at home with his mother,” Major Bird said. His right hand was clawing at his beard, betraying his nerves. “Blanche was ridiculously overprotective of that boy, as I discovered when I insisted he was ready to imbibe logarithms. Oh, Christ!” Major Bird’s imprecation was caused by a sudden volley loosed by the neighboring South Carolinians who were firing over the heads of their own skirmishers. “Actually he mastered logs very quickly,” Bird went on, “and he was by far my best pupil for construing Greek. A clever boy, but prone to tears. Highly strung, you see? A waste though, a terrible waste. Why doesn’t war take the illiterates first?”
A fresh artillery battery on the enemy’s right wing had opened fire and one of its shells struck the slope a hundred paces in front of the Legion and ricocheted up into the trees. Starbuck heard the missile rip through the branches overhead. A second shell plunged into the ground close to the skirmish line and there exploded underground to heave the red soil up in a sudden eruption of brown smoke. Some of the skirmishers edged backward.
“Stand still!” Truslow bellowed, and not only the skirmishers, but the Legion’s other eight companies froze like rabbits faced by a wildcat. The eight companies at the trees’ edge were in two ranks, the formation suggested by the drill books that Major Pelham and Colonel Faulconer had used in the Legion’s training. The books were American translations of French infantry manuals and recommended that riflemen open fire at long range, then sprint forward to finish off the enemy with bayonet thrusts. Major Bird, who had assiduously studied the manuals, believed they were nonsense. In practice the Legion had never proved accurate when firing their rifles at more than one hundred paces, and Bird did not understand how they were supposed to shake an enemy’s composure with ill-aimed fire at twice that distance followed by a clumsy charge into the teeth of hostile artillery and rifle fire. The Colonel’s airy answer had always been that the men’s natural belligerence would overcome the tactical difficulties, but to Major Bird that seemed a problematical and overoptimistic solution.
“Permission to open fire?” Captain Murphy shouted from Company D.
“Hold your fire!” Bird had his own opinions about infantry fire. He was convinced that the first volley was the most destructive and should be saved until the enemy was close at hand. He accepted that he had no experience to bolster that opinion, which clashed with the professional doctrine that was taught at West Point and that had been tested in the war against Mexico, but Major Bird refused to believe that soldiering demanded that he entirely suspend the exercise of his intelligence, and so he looked forward to this morning’s test of his theory. Indeed, as he watched the blue-coated ranks advance toward him through the patches of gunsmoke that hung above the meadow, he found himself hoping that Colonel Faulconer did not suddenly reappear to take back the Legion’s command. Major Thaddeus Bird, against all his expectations, was beginning to enjoy himself.
“Time to open fire, Uncle?” Adam suggested.
“I’d like to wait, in fact I will wait.”
The Yankees’ attacking line was losing its order as the attackers paused to fire and reload, then hurried on again. The minié bullets from the southern skirmishers were causing casualties, and the small roundshots of the two southern guns were slapping horribly through the attackers’ files to slash quick bloody swathes on the grass and leave wounded men screaming and writhing in agony. The Yankee skirmishers were snipping at their Confederate opposites, but the battle of skirmishers was a sideshow, a mere sop to military theory that insisted that light infantry range ahead of an attack to weaken the defenders with a
galling fire. The main northern attack was coming on too fast and in too much force to need the help of a skirmish line.
Much of the northern artillery had become unsighted by their own men and had fallen silent, though their howitzers, which fired their missiles high into the air, still lobbed shells over the attackers’ files. Evans’s two guns carried on firing, but Starbuck noted a change in the sound the guns were making and realized they must have changed their ammunition to canister. Canister was a cylindrical tin crammed with musket bullets that burst open at the cannon’s muzzle to hurl a spreading cone of bullets at the enemy, and Starbuck could see the effect of the tin cans by the groups of wounded and dead men snatched backward onto the turf from the attackers’ lines. Drummers were still beating the attack onward and the northerners were cheering as they advanced, their voices enthusiastic, almost cheerful, as if this whole performance were a sporting contest. The closest American flag was lavishly fringed with gold tassels and so heavy that the standard-bearer seemed to wade forward as though he walked in water. The regiment of regular soldiers had caught up with the attack’s front line and now hurried forward with fixed bayonets for the honor of being the first federal soldiers to break into the rebel defense.
“Fire!” a South Carolinian officer called, and the gray-coated infantry fired a second volley. A ramrod wheeled through the air as the dirty bank of smoke rolled away from the muskets. The Faulconer Legion’s skirmishers were falling back to the regiment’s flanks. The Rhode Islanders’ bayonets looked wickedly long in the smoke-torn sunlight.
“Take aim!” Major Bird shouted, and the Legion’s rifles went into their shoulders.