“They will follow him anywhere,” a sardonic voice spoke softly from just behind Starbuck. “Unfortunately he never wants to lead them anywhere.”
Starbuck turned to see that the speaker was the savage-looking French military attache, Colonel Lassan, whose ruined eye was covered with a mildewed patch. The Frenchman’s uniform was one of faded glory, the metallic thread of his tunic tarnished and his epaulettes ragged. He wore a massive, steel-hilted, straight-bladed sword, and had two revolvers holstered on his saddle. He lit a cigar and offered it to Starbuck. The gesture allowed the other staff officers to ride on by, which was evidently what the Frenchman desired. “A hundred and fifty thousand men?” Lassan asked skeptically.
“Maybe more.” Starbuck had taken the cigar. “Thank you.”
“Seventy thousand?” The Frenchman lit a cigar for himself, then clicked his tongue to make his horse walk obediently on.
“Sir?”
“I’m guessing, monsieur, that General Johnston has seventy thousand men. At the most, and that your mission is to deceive General McClellan.” He smiled at Starbuck.
“The suggestion, sir, is outrageous,” Starbuck protested hotly.
“Of course it’s outrageous,” Lassan said in an amused tone, “but also true, yes?” Ahead of them, dimly visible through a squall of rain that was sweeping toward the party of horsemen, the bulbous yellow shape of one of Professor Lowe’s balloons swayed in the gray sky. “Let me tell you my position, Mr. Starbuck,” Lassan continued suavely. “I am an observer, sent by my government to watch the war and to report to Paris what techniques and weapons might be useful to our own army. I am not here to take sides. I am not like the Count of Paris or the Prince de Joinville”—he gestured at two elegant French staff officers who rode close behind the General—“who have come here to fight for the North. I frankly do not care which side wins. It is not my business to care, only to observe and to write reports, and it seems to me that perhaps it is time I watched the fighting from the southern side.”
Starbuck shrugged, as if to suggest that Lassan’s decisions were none of his business.
“Because I would very much like to see how seventy thousand men plan to outwit a hundred and twenty thousand,” Lassan said.
“The rebels’ one hundred and fifty thousand men,” Starbuck said doggedly, “will dig in and see the northerners off with cannon fire.”
“Not so,” Lassan said. “You can’t afford to have so many Yankees sitting on your doorstep, nor can you afford to match McClellan at siege warfare. The man may be a bombast, but he knows his engineering. No, you rebels have to outmaneuver him and the battle will be fascinating. My problem, of course, is that I am not allowed to cross the lines. My choices are either to sail to Bermuda and pay a blockade runner to smuggle me into one of the Confederacy’s ports, or else to go west and work my way back overland through Missouri. Either way I shall miss this spring’s fighting. Unless, that is, you will consent to allow me to accompany you when you go back to the rebel side?”
“If I go back to the rebel side,” Starbuck said with as much haughtiness as he could muster, “I shall do so as a servant of the United States.”
“Nonsense!” Lassan said equably. “You’re a rogue, Mr. Starbuck, and one rogue can always recognize another. And you’re an inventive liar. The 2nd Florida Brigade! Very good, Mr. Starbuck, very good. Yet surely there are not enough white men living in Florida to make one brigade, let alone two! Do you know why General McClellan believes you?”
“Because I’m speaking the truth.”
“Because he wants to believe you. He desperately needs to be outnumbered. That way, you see, no disgrace attaches to his defeat. So when will you be going back?”
“I cannot say.”
“Then let me know when you can say,” Lassan said. Somewhere ahead of the horsemen there sounded the bark of artillery fire, the noise dimmed by the damp air. The sound seemed to be coming from the left-hand side of the road beyond a distant belt of trees. “Watch now,” Lassan said to Starbuck. “We shall stop our advance at any moment. You see if I’m not right.”
The guns cracked again, and suddenly General McClellan raised a hand. “We might pause here,” the General announced, “just to rest the horses.”
Lassan offered Starbuck an amused look. “Are you a betting man?”
“I’ve played some poker,” Starbuck said.
“So do you think the rebels’ pair of deuces will beat the Young Napoleon’s royal flush?”
“Nothing can beat a royal flush,” Starbuck said.
“It depends on who is holding it, Mr. Starbuck, and whether they dare play it. Maybe the General doesn’t want to get his nice new cards dirty?” The Frenchman smiled. “What are they saying in Richmond? That the war is lost?”
“Some are,” Starbuck said, and felt himself coloring. He had said that himself, and had tried to persuade Sally of it.
“It isn’t,” Lassan said, “not as long as the Young Napoleon is the South’s enemy. He’s frightened of shadows, Mr. Starbuck, and I suspect your job is to make him see shadows where there are none. You’re one of the reasons why seventy thousand men might well beat a hundred and twenty.”
“I’m just a northerner who has come to his senses,” Starbuck retorted.
“And I, monsieur, am the King of Timbuctoo,” Lassan said. “Let me know when you want to ride home.” He touched his hat and spurred on, and Starbuck, watching the Frenchman ride toward the sound of the guns, suddenly knew he was wrong and Sally was right. The hog was still squealing, and the war was not lost.
“You think the war’s lost, you bastard?” Sergeant Truslow grabbed hold of Izard Cobb’s ear, ignoring the man’s yelp of pain. “If I tell you to hurry, you towheaded piece of shit, you hurry. Now hurry!” He kicked Cobb in the rear. A bullet whistled overhead, making Cobb duck. “And hurry upright!” Truslow shouted, “you goddamn son of a pregnant bitch!”
A burst of smoke showed as a cannon fired from the far tree line. The fuse smoke of the shell traced a tiny gray streak in the air, visible only to the men almost directly in line with the missile’s trajectory. Sergeant Truslow, seeing the shell coming, knew there was no time to take cover and so pretended insouciance. The missile slammed into the railroad embankment behind him just a heartbeat before the cannon’s noise cracked over the river and marshes.
“Corporal Bailey!” Truslow shouted almost as soon as the dirt thrown up by the striking shell had subsided.
“Sergeant!”
“Dig that shell out!” The shell had failed to explode, which meant there could be a perfectly usable missile buried in the soft dirt of the embankment. If there had been a Confederate artillery battery nearby Truslow would have offered the gunners the salvaged shell to be returned to its senders, but lacking any gunners who might appreciate the gift, he reckoned he would rig it as a land torpedo.
The Legion was on the southern bank of the Chickahominy River, hard by the trestles of the Richmond and York Railroad bridge. The last Confederate locomotive to cross the bridge had steamed by three hours before, dragging behind it all the rolling stock from the depot at White House and the sidings of Tunstall’s Station. The engineers had then set charges to the bridge, lit the fuses, and watched as nothing happened. The Faulconer Legion, the nearest infantry unit to the bridge, had then been ordered to hold off the enemy’s skirmishers while the engineers determined just what had gone wrong with their explosives.
The bridge was no great piece of engineering. It did not have to fly across a cavernous gorge or carry the rails between two mighty hills; instead it was little more than a low trestled pier that plodded through the marshes, splashed across the river, then went stolidly on for another wet quarter mile until the rails again reached solid ground on the Chickahominy’s far bank. It was on that solid ground that the Yankees had unlimbered two field guns beside a dense grove of moss-hung trees, and now the northern artillery fire was crashing across the grassy marsh with its stagnant p
ools, stunted bushes, and reed beds. Some dismounted northern cavalrymen were also on the far ground, adding their carbine fire to the cannonade, while yet another group of dismounted cavalrymen was advancing along the trestle bridge in the hope of driving the southern engineers away.
“Sergeant Hutton!” Truslow shouted. “Bring your squad! Hurry now!”
Carter Hutton shouted at his men to close on the embankment where Truslow formed them in two ranks. For a few seconds they made a tempting target for the gunners, but Truslow had been timing the cannon fire and knew he had a half minute while the artillerymen reloaded. “Aim at those bastards! Straight down the rails! Sights at three hundred yards.” He glanced at the advancing cavalrymen who had not recognized the danger and still advanced along the dry rails instead of using the marshy ground on either side of the trestles. “Fire!” Truslow shouted. “Now get down, off the rails, hurry!”
Five seconds later a shell screamed just above the place where Truslow’s twin files had been standing and exploded harmlessly in the trees behind the Legion’s position. The smoke from Truslow’s volley cleared to show that the advancing cavalrymen had scattered into the rain-filled pools on either side of the bridge. “Keep their heads down!” Truslow shouted, then turned as Andrew Bailey walked up with the excavated shell cradled in his arms. It was a ten-pound shell, just under three inches across, with a zinc plug in its nose. Truslow placed the shell on a rail tie and used the back blade of his bowie knife to unscrew the plug. Two men crouching nearby edged fearfully away, earning a look of scorn from Truslow.
The zinc plug had sealed the shaft sunk into the shell. In the shaft was a sliding plunger tipped with a brass percussion cap that should have been thrown forward by the shell’s impact to explode on the underside of the plug. The sliding plunger was held in place by two thin and brittle metal projections that were designed to stop the detonator slipping forward and exploding when the shell was being transported or manhandled. Only the violent impact of a landing shell should have sufficient force to snap the metal projections, but this shell, landing in the soft earth of the embankment, had stayed intact.
Truslow used the knife blade to break the twin projections, then turned the shell upside down to shake the plunger loose. The plunger, topped with its percussion cap, had a narrow hole drilled down its center and filled with explosive. That powder was supposed to carry the fire down to the main charge that was protected from damp by a paper diaphragm. Truslow used a stick to pierce the diaphragm, then half filled the shell’s empty fuse shaft with gunpowder taken from rifle cartridges. Lastly he put the plunger back into its tube, but now, instead of dropping to the bottom of the shaft, the plunger protruded an inch above the shell’s nosecone. If anyone were to strike the exposed plunger the fire would lance down into the shell, explode the gunpowder Truslow had put in the shaft, and so ignite the main charge.
Now he needed to place the shell. Once the last train had passed the engineers had pulled up the steel rails and loaded them on the train’s wagons for transport to Richmond, but they had left the wet wooden ties sunk in the ground. Truslow had two men dig up one of the ties, then excavate a hole in the coffin-shaped space the tie had left imprinted in the railbed. He placed the shell in the hole, its point uppermost, then put a stone next to it and carefully balanced the rail tie on the stone. He very gently rocked the tie, moving it an inch up and down, then stepped back to admire his work. The tie seemed to be raised an inch or so from its position, but with any luck the Yankees would not notice and a man would step on the tie and so bang the wood down onto the percussion cap.
“Enjoying yourself, Sergeant?” Major Bird had walked forward from the tree line where most of the Legion waited.
“Pity to waste a good shell,” Truslow said, detecting a slight note of disapproval in Bird’s otherwise innocent question.
Bird was not certain that land torpedoes were an entirely sporting method of waging war, yet he also knew that to wage a war on sporting lines was a ridiculous notion, the sort of notion his brother-in-law would entertain. War was about killing, not about obeying arcane rules of chivalry. “A letter’s just arrived for you,” he told Truslow.
“For me?” Truslow asked, astonished.
“Here.” Bird took the letter from his pocket and handed it over, then used his half binocular to see how the engineers were progressing. “What’s taking all the time?”
“Damp fuses,” Truslow said, then brushed his hands against his coat before opening the delicate pink envelope and taking out the single pink sheet that must have come from a prewar stock of gilded and deckled paper. Truslow peered at the signature first. “It’s from my Sally!” He sounded surprised. A bullet whistled past his ear and a shell tumbled overhead, making an eerie wail as it passed.
“Oh good,” Major Bird said, not at Truslow’s news, but because the engineers were at last scrambling back toward the southern bank.
“Give them cover!” Truslow shouted, and the skirmishers’ rifles snapped angrily across the river. “I didn’t know my Sally could even write.”
Judging from the envelope, Bird thought, she could not. It was a miracle the letter had arrived at all, except the army was good at trying to work that particular miracle. Few things benefited morale as much as letters from home. “What does she say?” Bird asked.
“Can’t rightly tell,” Truslow growled.
Bird gave the Sergeant a shrewd glance. Truslow was, without doubt, the toughest man in the Legion, indeed he was probably the toughest man Bird had ever met, yet there was a look of embarrassed shame in Truslow’s eyes now. “Can I help?” Bird asked casually.
“It’s the girl’s writing,” Truslow said. “I can make out her name, just about, but not much else.”
“Let me,” Bird said, who knew full well that Truslow was no great reader. He took the letter, then looked up as the engineers ran past him. “Fall back!” Bird shouted at the men of K Company, then he looked down at the letter again. “My God,” Bird exclaimed. The handwriting was truly appalling.
“Is she all right?” Truslow immediately asked, his voice full of anxiety.
“It’s just her handwriting, Sergeant, nothing else. Let me see now. You’ll be surprised to hear from her, she says, but she is indeed well and she reckons that she ought to have written a long time ago, but says she’s just as stubborn as you are which is why she didn’t write,” Bird paraphrased. He and Truslow, left alone on the embankment, were suddenly the target for a flurry of carbine shots. An engineer shouted at the two men to get back before the fuse was lit and so they began walking slowly toward the safety of the trees. “She says she’s sorry for what happened,” Bird went on reading the letter as the cavalry bullets whistled around them, “but she’s not sorry for what she did. Does that make sense?”
“Never could make hide or hair out of what that girl said,” Truslow commented gruffly. In truth he missed Sally. She was a stubborn little bitch, but the only kin he had.
Bird hurried on, not wanting to embarrass Truslow by noticing the Sergeant’s tears. “She says that she saw Nate Starbuck! This is interesting. He came to her when they let him out of prison and he asked her to write to you and promise that he’ll be coming back to the Legion. So that’s why she’s writing. I must say,” Bird said, “that Starbuck has a curious way of announcing his return.”
“So where is he?” Truslow demanded.
“She doesn’t say.” Bird turned the letter over. The engineers had lit the fuse and the spark-spitting trail hissed unnoticed past the two men. Bird frowned as he tried to decipher the second page. “She said that’s why she wrote, because Nate asked, but she’s glad he asked because it’s time you and she became friends. And she also says she has a new job, one you’d approve of, but she doesn’t say what it is. There, that’s it.” Bird handed the letter back to Truslow. “I’m sure you can make it out for yourself now that I’ve described it.”
“Reckon I can,” Truslow said, then sniffed again. “So Mr. Sta
rbuck’s coming back!”
“According to your daughter, yes.” Bird sounded dubious.
“So you won’t need to appoint an officer to K Company?”
“I wasn’t going to,” Bird said.
“Good,” Truslow said. “After all, we elected Starbuck, didn’t we?”
“I’m afraid you did.” And much against General Faulconer’s will, Bird reflected happily. Over seven hundred men had placed votes in the election of field officers and Starbuck’s name had been written onto more than five hundred of the slips.
“And if elections mean anything,” Truslow said, “then Starbuck should be here, shouldn’t he now?”
“I suppose he should,” Bird said, “but I confess I can’t see General Faulconer allowing it. Or Colonel Swynyard.” Not that Swynyard was much in evidence these days. So far as Bird could determine the brigade’s second-in-command was lost in a perpetual stupor brought on by an unending supply of four-dollar-a-gallon skull-rot whiskey.
“A dollar of my money says that Starbuck can whip the General,” Truslow said. “He’s a smart one, Starbuck.”
“A dollar?” Bird asked. “Done.” He shook Truslow’s grimy hand just as the bridge exploded behind them. Three hundred pounds of gunpowder shattered the stilts and sent the old timbers spinning into the air. Smoke and noise boiled across the marshes, startling a hundred fowl up from the reed beds. The river water seemed to recoil from the explosions, then washed back with a great rush to send a plume of steam billowing after the smoke. Where there had been a bridge there was now just a line of rotted, blackened stumps in the churning water, while up and downstream the debris splashed into the Chickahominy or else slapped down into the stagnant marsh pools where the cottonmouths and moccasins squirmed away.
One piece of wood flew high into the air and then tumbled down with an unerring aim to smack direct onto the tie that Truslow had balanced with such care on the stone. The impact of the wood banged the tie onto the percussion cap and the shell beneath exploded, biting a small crater into the rain-weakened embankment. “Son of a bitch,” Truslow said, evidently speaking of the wasted effort he had expended on the land torpedo, but Major Bird saw that the Sergeant was smiling anyway. Such happiness, he decided, was something to be prized in wartime. Today might be filled with laughter, yet tomorrow could bring what the preachers called the long dark home in the dirt. And the thought of such graves filled Bird with a sudden terror. Suppose Truslow did not live to see his Sally again? Or suppose his own dear Priscilla were widowed? That thought filled Thaddeus Bird with the dread that he was not tough enough to be a soldier. Because war, to Bird, was a game, despite all his caustic preaching to the contrary. War, to Bird, was a game of wits in which the unregarded school-teacher would prove he was wittier and cleverer and faster and better than all the rest. Yet when the wax-skinned dead were lined in sepulchral judgment, and their bruised, dirt-clotted eyes asked clever Bird to explain why they had died, he had no answer.